Black And White Contrast Quotes

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The wish of death had been palpably hanging over this otherwise idyllic paradise for a good many years. All business and politics is personal in the Philippines. If it wasn't for the cheap beer and lovely girls one of us would spend an hour in this dump. They [Jehovah's Witnesses] get some kind of frequent flyer points for each person who signs on. I'm not lazy. I'm just motivationally challenged. I'm not fat. I just have lots of stored energy. You don't get it do you? What people think of you matters more than the reality. Marilyn. Despite standing firm at the final hurdle Marilyn was always ready to run the race. After answering the question the woman bent down behind the stand out of sight of all, and crossed herself. It is amazing what you can learn in prison. Merely through casual conversation Rick had acquired the fundamentals of embezzlement, fraud and armed hold up. He wondered at the price of honesty in a grey world whose half tones changed faster than the weather. The banality of truth somehow always surprises the news media before they tart it up. You've ridden jeepneys in peak hour. Where else can you feel up a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl without even trying? [Ralph Winton on the Philippines finer points] Life has no bottom. No matter how bad things are or how far one has sunk things can always get worse. You could call the Oval Office an information rain shadow. In the Philippines, a whole layer of criminals exists who consider that it is their right to rob you unhindered. If you thwart their wicked desires, to their way of thinking you have stolen from them and are evil. There's honest and dishonest corruption in this country. Don't enjoy it too much for it's what we love that usually kills us. The good guys don't always win wars but the winners always make sure that they go down in history as the good guys. The Philippines is like a woman. You love her and hate her at the same time. I never believed in all my born days that ideas of truth and justice were only pretty words to brighten a much darker and more ubiquitous reality. The girl was experiencing the first flushes of love while Rick was at least feeling the methadone equivalent. Although selfishness and greed are more ephemeral than the real values of life their effects on the world often outlive their origins. Miriam's a meteor job. Somewhere out there in space there must be a meteor with her name on it. Tsismis or rumours grow in this land like tropical weeds. Surprises are so common here that nothing is surprising. A crooked leader who can lead is better than a crooked one who can't. Although I always followed the politics of Hitler I emulate the drinking habits of Churchill. It [Australia] is the country that does the least with the most. Rereading the brief lines that told the story in the manner of Fox News reporting the death of a leftist Rick's dark imagination took hold. Didn't your mother ever tell you never to trust a man who doesn't drink? She must have been around twenty years old, was tall for a Filipina and possessed long black hair framing her smooth olive face. This specter of loveliness walked with the assurance of the knowingly beautiful. Her crisp and starched white uniform dazzled in the late-afternoon light and highlighted the natural tan of her skin. Everything about her was in perfect order. In short, she was dressed up like a pox doctor’s clerk. Suddenly, she stopped, turned her head to one side and spat comprehensively into the street. The tiny putrescent puddle contrasted strongly with the studied aplomb of its all-too-recent owner, suggesting all manner of disease and decay.
John Richard Spencer
With few exceptions, black men, Middle Eastern men, and Hispanic men are not called to a wild, militant masculinity. Their aggression, by contrast, is seen as dangerous, a threat to the stability of home and nation.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation)
The floor of ice cream parlor bothered me. It was black-and-white checkboard tile, bigger than supermarket checkboard. If I looked only at a white square, I would be all right, but it was hard to ignore the black squares that surrounded the white ones. The contrast got under my skin. The floor meant yes, no, this, that, up, down, day, night -all the indecisions and opposites that were bad enough in life without having them spelled out for you on the floor.
Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted)
When I got to college, the fake ID thing wasn't that important, since pretty much everyone could get away with drinking in New Orleans. But the drugs, well, that was a different story altogether, because drugs are every bit as illegal in New Orleans as anywhere else--at least, if you're black and poor, and have the misfortune of doing your drugs somewhere other than the dorms at Tulane University. But if you are lucky enough to be living at Tulane, which is a pretty white place, especially contrasted with the city where it's located, which is 65 percent black, then you are absolutely set.
Tim Wise (White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son)
Often black people, especially non-gay folk, become enraged when they hear a white person who is gay suggest homosexuality is synonymous with the suffering people experience as a consequence of racial exploitation and oppression. The need to make gay experience and black experience of oppression synonymous seems to be one that surfaces much more in the minds of white people. Too often it is a way of minimizing or diminishing the particular problems people of color face in a white supremacist society, especially the problems ones encounter because they do not have white skin. Many of us have been in discussions where a non-white person – a black person – struggles to explain to white folks that while we can acknowledge that gay people of all colors are harassed and suffer exploitation and domination, we also recognize that there is a significant difference that arises because of the visibility of dark skin. Often homophobic attacks on gay people of all occur in situations where knowledge of sexual preference is established – outside of gay bars, for example. While it in no way lessens the severity of such suffering for gay people, or the fear that it causes, it does mean that in a given situation the apparatus of protection and survival may be simply not identifying as gay. In contrast, most people of color have no choice. No one can hide, change or mask dark skin color. White people, gay and straight, could show greater understanding of the impact of racial oppression on people of color by not attempting to make these oppressions synonymous, but rather by showing the ways they are linked and yet differ. Concurrently, the attempt by white people to make synonymous experience of homophobic aggression with racial oppression deflects attention away from the particular dual dilemma that non-white gay people face, as individuals who confront both racism and homophobia.
bell hooks (Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black)
By noon, in a gray February world, we had come down through snow flurries to land at Albany, and had taken off again. When the snow ended the sky was a luminous gray. I looked down at the winter calligraphy of upstate New York, white fields marked off by the black woodlots, an etching without color, superbly restful in contrast to the smoky, guttering, grinding stink of the airplane clattering across the sky like an old commuter bus.
John D. MacDonald (The Quick Red Fox (Travis McGee #4))
The rooms hidden behind the multitude of tents in Le Cirque des Rêves are a stark contrast to the black and white of the circus. Alive with color. Warm with glowing amber lamps. The space kept by the Murray twins is particularly vivid. A kaleidoscope of color, blazing with carmine and coral and canary, so much so that the entire room often appears to be on fire, dotted with fluffy kittens dark as soot and bright as sparks.
Erin Morgenstern (The Night Circus)
We sealed my father's grave on a day of stark contrasts, of black against white, and it was the last time I'd ever find myself in a place of such extremes. Because in the months after the dirt fell on the coffin, my life began to shift to shades of gray, almost like the universe had taken a big stick and stirred up the whole scene at that cemetery, mixing up everything and repainting my world.
Beth Fantaskey (Jekel Loves Hyde)
Life is full of dualities: night and day, black and white, yin and yang, good and evil, birth and death, love and fear. You can't have one without the other. It takes two to create the magnetic pull to generate energy in the first place. This is the natural order: that everything, in contrast, hangs in perfect balance.
RuPaul (The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir)
He sat on his horse unmoving, a somber black figure in startling contrast to the vivid colors about him, the sun dazzling on his white gold hair. Unlike the duke and his bastard, there was no laughter in his face, and his eyes were not searching the housefronts for diversion-instead, he was staring intently straight up at my window.
Teresa Denys (The Silver Devil)
Kate stared at the paven in the hall outside the door.He was incredibly tall and broad like Nicholas,but that's where the comparison ended.His jaw-length white hair was a stark contrast to his piercing light brown eyes and black lashes.And though he was alarmingly,almost shockingly good-looking,everything about him,every intake of breath,every movement of his gaze,his chin,his mouth fairly screamed hostility.Like an animal who'd been tortured over and over and knew only biting as a response to anyting.
Laura Wright (Eternal Kiss (Mark of the Vampire, #2))
The claustrophobia of the forest. The first few trees visible before her, monochrome contrasts of black shadow and white moonlight, and beyond that an entire continent, wilderness uninterrupted from ocean to ocean with so few people left between the shores.
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
White liberals, instead of comparing what has happened to the black family since the liberal welfare state policies of the 1960s were put into practice, compare black families to white families and conclude that the higher rates of broken homes and unwed motherhood among blacks are due to “a legacy of slavery.” But why the large-scale disintegration of the black family should have begun a hundred years after slavery is left unexplained. Whatever the situation of the black family relative to the white family, in the past or the present, it is clear that broken homes were far more common among blacks at the end of the twentieth century than they were in the middle of that century or at the beginning of that century —even though blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century were just one generation out of slavery. The widespread and casual abandonment of their children, and of the women who bore them, by black fathers in the ghettos of the late twentieth century was in fact a painfully ironic contrast with what had happened in the immediate aftermath of slavery a hundred years earlier, when observers in the South reported desperate efforts of freed blacks to find family members who had been separated from them during the era of slavery.
Thomas Sowell (Black Rednecks and White Liberals)
Every disorder is either too much or too little. But. Often we are unable to see when an ocean is just a glass.
Monaristw
Her eyes bothered him most.  Unlike the Kai, hers were layers of opaque white, blue ringed in gray and black pinpoint centers that expanded or contracted with the light.  The first time he’d witnessed that reaction in a human, all the hairs on his nape stood straight up.  That, and the way the contrasting colors made it easy to see the eyes move in their sockets gave the impression they weren’t body parts but entities unto themselves living as parasites inside their hosts’ skulls. He was used to seeing the frantic eye-rolling in a frightened horse but not a person.  If the parasite impression didn’t repulse him so much, he’d think humans lived in a constant state of hysterical terror.
Grace Draven (Radiance (Wraith Kings, #1))
Coral, my love, you are too pure, too innocent, too alive for me,” he said slowly, almost carefully. “My world is like a drawing in black and white on a gray canvas, without a single note of color to bring it to life. And now, on this pale and melancholic picture, a red flower has fallen, a warm and scented flower.” He sighed. “It’s a wonderful contrast, but too vivid…
Hannah Fielding (Burning Embers)
The model minority myth is often used to separate Asian Americans from other people of color by using their perceived socioeconomic and academic success and docile nature to compare and contrast with black Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans. This divide-and-conquer technique serves to redirect struggle against oppressive White Supremacy to competition between Asian Americans and other people of color. The real animosity between some Asian Americans and other people of color that has been manufactured by the model minority myth prevents Asian Americans and non-Asian people of color from recognizing and organizing around shared experiences of labor exploitation, lack of government representation, lack of pop culture representation, cultural appropriation, and much more.
Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race)
If you tell Google that you would like to see images of ‘Black men’ the images that come up are all portrait photos of black men. Indeed, it takes more than a dozen rows of images before anybody who isn’t black comes up in the images. By contrast a search for ‘White men’ first throws up an image of David Beckham – who is white – but then the second is of a black model. From there every line of five images has either one or two black men in the line-up. Many of the images of white men are of people convicted of crimes with taglines such as ‘Beware of the average white man’ and ‘White men are bad’.
Douglas Murray (The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity)
Spring had come early that year, with warm quick rains and sudden frothing of pink peach blossoms and dogwood dappling with white stars the dark river swamp and far-off hills. Already the plowing was nearly finished, and the bloody glory of the sunset colored the fresh-cut furrows of red Georgia clay to even redder hues. The moist hungry earth, waiting upturned for the cotton seeds, showed pinkish on the sandy tops of furrows, vermilion and scarlet and maroon where shadows lay along the sides of the trenches. The whitewashed brick plantation house seemed an island set in a wild red sea, a sea of spiraling, curving, crescent billows petrified suddenly at the moment when the pink-tipped waves were breaking into surf. For here were no long, straight furrows, such as could be seen in the yellow clay fields of the flat middle Georgia country or in the lush black earth of the coastal plantations. The rolling foothill country of north Georgia was plowed in a million curves to keep the rich earth from washing down into the river bottoms. It was a savagely red land, blood-colored after rains, brick dust in droughts, the best cotton land in the world. It was a pleasant land of white houses, peaceful plowed fields and sluggish yellow rivers, but a land of contrasts, of brightest sun glare and densest shade. The plantation clearings and miles of cotton fields smiled up to a warm sun, placid, complacent. At their edges rose the virgin forests, dark and cool even in the hottest noons, mysterious, a little sinister, the soughing pines seeming to wait with an age-old patience, to threaten with soft sighs: "Be careful! Be careful! We had you once. We can take you back again.
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
A survey was conducted in 1995 asking the following question: “Would you close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me?” The startling results were published in the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education. Ninety-five percent of respondents pictured a black drug user, while only 5 percent imagined other racial groups.39 These results contrast sharply with the reality of drug crime in America. African Americans constituted only 15 percent of current drug users in 1995, and they constitute roughly the same percentage today. Whites constituted the vast majority of drug users then (and now), but almost no one pictured a white person when asked to imagine what a drug user looks like. The same group of respondents also perceived the typical drug trafficker as black.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
A hallmark of contemporary Christian theology is its view that the fundamental sin of humanity is pride, that is, preoccupation with the self. In contrast, love, particularly Christian love, is assumed to be entirely self-giving and devoid of concern about the self. These teachings, however, bear a particular danger—that of martyrdom—for African-American women who are socialized to live, love, and labor under the weight of atoning for the “sins” of the race as imagined by White patriarchal racism.
Chanequa Walker-Barnes (Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength)
The court ordered a White man in 1630 “to be soundly whipt before an assembly of negroes & others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and the shame of Christianity by defiling his body in lying with a negro.” The court contrasted the polluted Black woman and the pure White woman, with whom he could lie without defiling his body. It was the first recorded instance of gender racism in America, of considering the body of the Black woman to be a tainted object that could defile a White man upon contact.
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
It was the eyes, the cold black eyes with layers of black wrinkles around them. Great eyes. Unforgettable eyes. His hair was white and thin on top with thickets around the ears, and the whiteness contrasted sharply with the rest of his face. When he spoke, the eyes narrowed and the black pupils glowed fiercely. Sinister eyes. Knowing eyes.
John Grisham (The Firm)
The blackness of typescript doesn't mean that the letters are actually black; they merely appear black in contrast to a white sheet of paper.
Kenya Hara (White)
Evelyn is a drawing in sharp black and white, and I'm - I'm just a subdued pastel.
Georgette Heyer (Pastel)
Minstrelsy's grotesquerie deluded white audiences into feeling better about themselves. It induced a bearable cognitive dissonance that outlasted enslavement. The caricatures of Black people as extravagantly lazy, licentious, vulgar, disheveled, and abject always drew a comforting contrast with a white person's sense of honor and civility, with a white person's simply being white.
Wesley Morris (The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story)
Finally, for the same criminal conviction, the more stereotypically Af-rican a black individual’s facial features, the longer the sentence.15 In contrast, juries view black (but not white) male defendants more favorably if they’re wearing big, clunky glasses; some defense attorneys even exploit this “nerd defense” by accessorizing their clients with fake glasses, and prosecuting attorneys ask whether those dorky glasses are real. In other words, when blind, impartial justice is supposedly being administered, jurors are unconsciously biased by racial stereotypes of someone’s face.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
There was a time in my life when I did a fair bit of work for the tempestuous Lucretia Stewart, then editor of the American Express travel magazine, Departures. Together, we evolved a harmless satire of the slightly driveling style employed by the journalists of tourism. 'Land of Contrasts' was our shorthand for it. ('Jerusalem: an enthralling blend of old and new.' 'South Africa: a harmony in black and white.' 'Belfast, where ancient meets modern.') It was as you can see, no difficult task. I began to notice a few weeks ago that my enemies in the 'peace' movement had decided to borrow from this tattered style book. The mantra, especially in the letters to this newspaper, was: 'Afghanistan, where the world's richest country rains bombs on the world's poorest country.' Poor fools. They should never have tried to beat me at this game. What about, 'Afghanistan, where the world's most open society confronts the world's most closed one'? 'Where American women pilots kill the men who enslave women.' 'Where the world's most indiscriminate bombers are bombed by the world's most accurate ones.' 'Where the largest number of poor people applaud the bombing of their own regime.' I could go on. (I think number four may need a little work.) But there are some suggested contrasts for the 'doves' to paste into their scrapbook. Incidentally, when they look at their scrapbooks they will be able to re-read themselves saying things like, 'The bombing of Kosovo is driving the Serbs into the arms of Milosevic.
Christopher Hitchens (Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left)
I had myself been to Seville when I was twenty-three and I, too, had liked it. I liked its white, tortuous streets, its cathedral, and the wide-spreading plain of the Guadalquivir; but I liked also those Andalusian girls with their grace and their gaiety, with their dark shining eyes, the carnations in their hair stressing its blackness and by the contrast itself more vivid; I liked the rich color of their skins and the inviting sensuality of their lips.
W. Somerset Maugham (The Razor’s Edge)
His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!--Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein)
It was in the making of the New World that Europeans became white, Africans black, and everyone else yellow, red, or brown. It was in the making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like, identified solely in contrast to one another, and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race. It was in the process of ranking that we were all cast into assigned roles to meet the needs of the larger production. None of us are ourselves.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
Black and white images often benefit from higher levels of contrast than the same image in colour. Our brains tend to perceive contrast between colours as well as differences in light and dark tones. When we remove the colour from an image we can also inadvertently reduce the perceived contrast.
Robin Whalley (Dramatic Black & White Photography Using Nik Silver Efex Pro 2)
And what was she like?” “Tall, fine bust, sloping shoulders; long, graceful neck: olive complexion, dark and clear; noble features; eyes rather like Mr. Rochester’s: large and black, and as brilliant as her jewels.  And then she had such a fine head of hair; raven-black and so becomingly arranged: a crown of thick plaits behind, and in front the longest, the glossiest curls I ever saw.  She was dressed in pure white; an amber-coloured scarf was passed over her shoulder and across her breast, tied at the side, and descending in long, fringed ends below her knee.  She wore an amber-coloured flower, too, in her hair: it contrasted well with the jetty mass of her curls.
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
It was in the making of the New World that Europeans became white, Africans black, and everyone else yellow, red, or brown. It was in the making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like, identified solely in contrast to one another, and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
For while white conservatives use government assistance copiously--whether it be Social Security, or mortgage tax relief, low-interest federal college loans or Medicare--in their political discussions they tend to define their benefits as not being "welfare," in contrast to the somehow less noble assistance provided to their black and brown neighbors.
Sasha Abramsky
I concentrate on the picturesque sight of the beach, whose light sand offers a fascinating contrast to the rugged black rocks. The rolling waves with their white crests add even more sparkling nuances to the countless shades of blue and white of the sky with the low-hanging fog. And the Golden Gate Bridge towers majestically above it all. It’s overwhelming.
Jutta Swietlinski (Returning Home to Her)
Those studies showed that White Americans consistently received more help than Black Americans. The only harm done to Black Americans in those studies was the consequence of inaction—the absence of helping. This left them without advantages that were received by the White Americans who were, by contrast, helped. We can call this hidden discrimination, in the same way that the discrimination displayed in the story of Carla’s hand surgery is hidden. Discrimination is hard to perceive because it does not present itself in obvious comparisons, where we must decide in a single moment whether to help one or the other. These behaviors happen in sequence, allowing the fact that one was helped and the other not to remain in our blindspot.
Mahzarin R. Banaji (Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People)
I love the curve of Miu's rear end. The exquisite contrast between her jet-black pubic hair and snow-white hair, the nicely shaped arse, clad in tiny black panties. Talk about sexy. Inside her black panties, her T-shaped pubic hair, every bit as black. I've got to stop thinking about that. Switch off the circuit of pointless sexual fantasies (click) and concentrate on writing - Sumire, p.150.
Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)
White people today, particularly outside the South, often distance themselves from slavery and Jim Crow by insisting that their immigrant ancestors had nothing to do with these atrocities and, in fact, themselves faced discrimination but were able to overcome it. (In fact, this popular belief is one of the core ideas contributing to white racial resentment against Black people and newer immigrants of color.) But the Irish, Germans, Poles, Slavs, Russians, Italians, and other Europeans who came to the United States underwent a process of attaining whiteness, an identity created in contrast to the Blackness of unfree and degraded labor. As immigrants, these groups had an opportunity to ally themselves with abolition and, later, equal rights and to fight for better social and economic conditions for all workers. They chose instead, with few exceptions, the wages of whiteness.
Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World Essentials))
Every square inch of the wood-paneled walls is covered with photographs of cops, some black-and-white, some in color. Red-and-white Ws and America's Dairyland, old flaking signs for Lake Monona, Lake Mendota, and the U.P. Posters, with all kinds of beer, half-nude women holding giant mugs of it. All the color, words, images, the vibrant clutter of them, such a stark contrast to the spare tans, beiges, and wood of our home, our church, the school. My life.
C.J. Leede (American Rapture)
When the full moon was out the other night, it created one of the most spectacular scenes that I have seen in the Alps. The high glaciers of the Mont Blanc range were glowing an eerie bright blue-white, and they looked like huge ghost ships in the dark ocean of sky, sailing amongst black mountain valleys. There were no clouds, and the moon was a huge and perfect disc tracking across the sky, shining on different parts of the glaciers through the night. Looking up, I saw the black silhouette of the mid-altitude mountains below the ethereal shining high-mountain terrain, which created a weird vision: the ghostly glaciers floating, and appearing separate, contrasting sharply with the dark valleys beneath. The Aiguille Verte especially, being so steep and isolated, seemed almost like a holographic mast with sails, plowing into the rolling waves, chasing after the Mont Blanc summit with its billowing spinnaker...
Steve Baldwin
Finally, for the same criminal conviction, the more stereotypically African a black individual’s facial features, the longer the sentence.15 In contrast, juries view black (but not white) male defendants more favorably if they’re wearing big, clunky glasses; some defense attorneys even exploit this “nerd defense” by accessorizing their clients with fake glasses, and prosecuting attorneys ask whether those dorky glasses are real. In other words, when blind, impartial justice is supposedly being administered, jurors are unconsciously biased by racial stereotypes of someone’s face.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
And by virtue of this relation, the concrete quality seems to represent a negation as well as realization of the universal. Snow is white but not "whiteness"; a girl may be beautiful, even a beauty, but not "beauty"; a country may be free (in comparison with others) because its people have certain liberties, but it is not the very embodiment of freedom. Moreover, the concepts are meaningful only in experienced contrast with their opposites: white with not white, beautiful with not beautiful. Negative statements can sometimes be translated into positive ones: "black" or "grey" for "not white," "ugly" for "not beautiful.
Herbert Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society)
The Sun burned down in a warm contrasting world of white and black, of white Sun against black sky and white rolling ground mottled with black shadow. The bright sweet smell of the Sun on every exposed square centimeter of metal contrasting with the creeping death-of-aroma on the other side. He lifted his hand and stared at it, counting the fingers. Hot-hot-hot-turning, putting each finger, one by one, into the shadow of the others and the hot slowly dying in a change in tactility that made him feel the clean, comfortable vacuum. Yet not entirely vacuum. He straightened and lifted both arms over his head, stretching them out, and the sensitive spots on either wrist felt the vapors- the thin, faint touch of tin and lead rolling through the cloy of mercury. The thicker taste rose from his feet; the silicates of each variety, marked by the clear separate-and-together touch and tang of each metal ion. He moved one foot slowly through the crunchy, caked dust, and felt the changes like a soft, not quite random symphony. And over all the Sun. He looked up at it, large and fat and bright and hot, and heard its joy. He watched the slow rise of prominences around its rim and listened to the crackling sound of each; and to the other happy noises over the broad face. When he dimmed the background light, the red of the rising wisps of hydrogen showed in bursts of mellow contralto, and the deep bass of the spots amid the muted whistling of the wispy, moving faculae, and the occasional thin keening of a flare, the ping-pong ticking of gamma rays and cosmic particles, and over all in every direction the soft, fainting, and ever-renewed sigh of the Sun's substance rising and retreating forever in a cosmic wind which reached out and bathed him in glory. He jumped, and rose slowly in the air with a freedom he had never felt, and jumped again when he landed, and ran, and jumped, and ran again, with a body that responded perfectly to this glorious world, this paradise in which he found himself.
Isaac Asimov (The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories)
In Old Europe and other traditional cultures, white, the color of bone, was the color of death, whereas black, the color of earth and the womb, signified transformation and rebirth. The symbolism was reversed by Indo-Europeans. It is likely that the Indo-Europeans used the symbolism of light to justify their conquest of 'darker' peoples. And, as we have seen, one of the foundations of dualistic thinking is the notion that the 'light' of reason enables 'men' to transcend the 'dark' earth. The contrast between Old European thinking and modern western thinking is sharply drawn when we understand the positive valuation of blackness as one of the primary symbols of the Goddess.
Carol P. Christ (Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality)
But none of them compared to the dangerous stranger in her room. While the men she was used to were hotter than hell, what they lacked was the fierce aura of power that emanated from this man and his stern, steely features. It was as if he were the deadliest of predators. Feral. That was the only word to do him justice. Surely there wasn’t another soldier in the entire universe who could match him in terms of raw beauty or lethal demeanor. His blond hair was snow white and his features sharp and icy. He wore a pair of black shades that annoyed her since she couldn’t see the upper part of his face or the color of his eyes. Not that it mattered. She saw enough to know that in the land of gorgeous men, he had no competition. As a stark contrast to his white hair, his clothes were a black so deep they seemed to absorb all light, and they were trimmed in silver … No, not silver. Those were weapons tucked into the sleeves and lapels of his ankle-length coat. The left side of it was pulled back, exposing a holstered blaster that was strapped to his left hip. The tall flight boots had silver buckles going up the sides that were fashioned into the image of skulls. At least that’s what she saw at first glance, but as he moved closer she realized those could come off and double as weapons, too. Wow, he was either extremely paranoid or more lethal than a team of League assassins. And that said something.
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Born of Night (The League, #1))
The arguments we hear today for the drug war are that we must protect teenagers from drugs, and prevent addiction in general. We assume, looking back, that these were the reasons this war was launched in the first place. But they were not. They crop up only occasionally, as asides. The main reason given for banning drugs184—the reason obsessing the men who launched this war—was that the blacks, Mexicans, and Chinese were using these chemicals, forgetting their place, and menacing white people. It took me a while to see that the contrast between the racism directed at Billie and the compassion offered to addicted white stars like Judy Garland was not some weird misfiring of the drug war—it was part of the point.
Anonymous
Some series teach us that ethnic features must be "fixed," by drastic means if necessary. Plastic surgeons with questionable ethics give insecure women of all ethnicities boob jobs, liposuction, and face-lifts on shows such as Extreme Makeover, The Swan, and Dr. 90210, ignoring medical risks and reinforcing problematic ideas about women's worth. Yet they don't make white surgical candidates feel like their cultural identity should also be on the chopping blocking - or that they'd be so much more attractive and fulfilled if only they didn't look so... Caucasian. In contrast, TV docs' scalpels reduce or remove racial markers on patients of colour. Black women's noses and lips are made smaller. In an increasingly common procedure targeting Asian women, creases are added to Asian women's eyelids.
Jennifer L. Pozner (Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV)
Daley didn’t demand or enforce segregated schools in Chicago. He didn’t have to. The schools were segregated because the city’s neighborhoods were segregated. People called it de facto segregation, meaning that it was a fact, a given, a natural outcome of private individuals’ choices, in contrast to de jure segregation, which was required by law. But the distinction was misleading. Segregation in the North was both de jure and de facto; it was a function of law, public policy, and discriminatory business practices, for starters. Chicagoans commuting to and from work on the new Dan Ryan Expressway saw it for themselves. The original design for the highway had been shifted several blocks to create a firewall of sorts between Black and white neighborhoods. There was nothing accidental or natural about it.
Jonathan Eig (King: A Life)
Temperance Dews stood with quiet confidence, a respectable women who lived in the sewer that was St. Giles. Her eyes had widened at the sight of Lazarus, but she made no move to flee. Indeed, finding a strange man in her pathetic sitting room seemed not to frighten her at all. Interesting. “I am Lazarus Huntington, Lord Caire,” he said. “I know. What are you doing here?” He tilted his head, studying her. She knew him, yet did not recoil in horror? Yes, she’d do quite well. “I’ve come to make a proposition to you, Mrs. Dews.” Still no sign of fear, though she eyed the doorway. “You’ve chosen the wrong woman, my lord. The night is late. Please leave my house.” No fear and no deference to his rank. An interesting woman indeed. “My proposition is not, er, illicit in nature,” he drawled. “In fact, it’s quite respectable. Or nearly so.” She sighed, looked down at her tray, and then back up at him. “Would you like a cup of tea?” He almost smiled. Tea? When had he last been offered something so very prosaic by a woman? He couldn’t remember. But he replied gravely enough. “Thank you, no.” She nodded. “Then if you don’t mind?” He waved a hand to indicate permission. She set the tea tray on the wretched little table and sat on the padded footstool to pour herself a cup. He watched her. She was a monochromatic study. Her dress, bodice, hose, and shoes were all flat black. A fichu tucked in at her severe neckline, an apron, and cap—no lace or ruffles—were all white. No color marred her aspect, making the lush red of her full lips all the more startling. She wore the clothes of a nun, yet had the mouth of a sybarite. The contrast was fascinating—and arousing. “You’re a Puritan?” he asked. Her beautiful mouth compressed. “No.
Elizabeth Hoyt (Wicked Intentions (Maiden Lane, #1))
The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship's stokers. With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.
Herman Melville (Moby Dick: or, the White Whale)
William Stead recognized the power of the fair immediately. The vision of the White City and its profound contrast to the Black City drove him to write If Christ Came to Chicago, a book often credited with launching the City Beautiful movement, which sought to elevate American cities to the level of the great cities of Europe. Like Stead, civic authorities throughout the world saw the fair as a model of what to strive for. They asked Burnham to apply the same citywide thinking that had gone into the White City to their own cities. He became a pioneer in modern urban planning. He created citywide plans for Cleveland, San Francisco, and Manila and led the turn-of-the-century effort to resuscitate and expand L’Enfant’s vision of Washington, D.C. In each case he worked without a fee. While helping design the new Washington plan, Burnham persuaded the head of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Alexander Cassatt, to remove his freight tracks and depot from the center of the federal mall, thus creating the unobstructed green that extends today from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. Other cities came to Daniel Burnham for citywide plans, among them Fort Worth, Atlantic City, and St. Louis, but he turned them down to concentrate on his last plan, for the city of Chicago. Over the years many aspects of his Chicago plan were adopted, among them the creation of the city’s lovely ribbon of lakefront parks and Michigan Avenue’s “Miracle Mile.” One portion of the lakefront, named Burnham Park in his honor, contains Soldier Field and the Field Museum, which he designed. The park runs south in a narrow green border along the lakeshore all the way to Jackson Park, where the fair’s Palace of Fine Arts, transformed into a permanent structure, now houses the Museum of Science and Industry. It looks out over the lagoons and the Wooded Island, now a wild and tangled place that perhaps would make Olmsted smile—though no doubt he would find features to criticize.
Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City)
Women’s anger, publicly and loudly expressed, is all of that: unnatural, chaotic, upsetting to how power is supposed to work. Women’s determination to voice that fury toward men in 2017 and 2018 had led those men to feel some fraction of the anxiety that nonwhite non-men feel daily. That these men experience any anxiety or discomfort is intolerable enough that in 2018, a Canadian clinical psychologist named Jordan Peterson became a mega-bestselling author of a kind of men’s manifesto, called 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. “Order is where the people around you act according to well-understood social norms. . . . Chaos, by contrast, is where—or when—something unexpected happens.” And just in case it wasn’t clear, Peterson sexes both sides of the paradigm; according to Taoist symbolism, he claims, “Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart.” Chaos is the thing that Peterson and his devout readers were searching for an antidote to in their struggle to reimpose . . . order.
Rebecca Traister (Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger)
In one instance, the Times made a very big deal of the fact that in 2009 blacks were 23 percent of the city’s population but 55 percent of those stopped by the police. By contrast, whites were 35 percent of the population but accounted for only 10 percent of stops. What the story left out, noted Mac Donald, is that blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009 (though they were only 55 percent of all stops and only 23 percent of the city’s population). Blacks committed 80 percent of all shootings in the first half of 2009. Together, blacks and Hispanics committed 98 percent of all shootings. Blacks committed nearly 70 percent of all robberies. Whites, by contrast, committed 5 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009, thought they are 35 percent of the city’s population (and were 10 percent of all stops). They committed 1.8 percent of all shootings and less than 5 percent of all robberies. The face of violent crime in New York, in other words, like in every other large American city, is almost exclusively black and brown.16
Jason L. Riley (Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed)
Cassidy had been created by Clarence Mulford, writer of formula western novels and pulpy short stories. In the stories, Cassidy was a snorting, drinking, chewing relic of the Old West. Harry Sherman changed all that when he bought the character for the movies. Sherman hired Boyd, a veteran of the silent screen whose star had faded, to play a badman in the original film. But Boyd seemed more heroic, and Sherman switched the parts before the filming began. As Cassidy, Boyd became a knight of the range, a man of morals who helped ladies cross the street but never stooped to kiss the heroine. He was literally black and white, his silver hair a vivid contrast to his black getup. He did not smoke, believed absolutely in justice, honor, and fair play, and refused to touch liquor. Boyd’s personal life was not so noble. Born in Ohio in 1898, he had arrived in Hollywood for the first golden age, working with Cecil B. DeMille in a succession of early silents. By the mid-1920s he was a major star. Wine, women, and money were his: he drank and gambled, owned estates, married five times. But it all ended when another actor named William Boyd was arrested for possession of whiskey and gambling equipment.
John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
Jay's downstairs waiting." With her father on one side, and the handrail on the other, Violet descended the stairs as if she were floating. Jay stood at the bottom, watching her, frozen in place like a statue. His black suit looked as if it had been tailored just for him. His jacket fell across his strong shoulders in a perfect line, tapering at his narrow waist. The crisp white linen shirt beneath stood out in contrast against the dark, finely woven wool. He smiled appreciatively as he watched her approach, and Violet felt her breath catch in her throat at the striking image of flawlessness that he presented. "You...are so beautiful," he whispered fervently as he strode toward her, taking her dad's place at her arm. She smiled sheepishly up at him. "So are you." Her mom insisted on taking no fewer than a hundred pictures of the two of them, both alone and together, until Violet felt like her eyes had been permanently damaged by the blinding flash. Finally her father called off her mom, dragging her away into the kitchen so that Violet and Jay could have a moment alone together. "I meant it," he said. "You look amazing." She shook her head, not sure what to say, a little embarrassed by the compliment. "I got you something," he said to her as he reached inside his jacket. "I hope you don't mind, it's not a corsage." Violet couldn't have cared less about having flowers to pin on her dress, but she was curious about what he had brought for her. She watched as he dragged out the moment longer than he needed to, taking his time to reveal his surprise. "I got you this instead." He pulled out a black velvet box, the kind that holds fine jewelry. It was long and narrow. She gasped as she watched him lift the lid. Inside was a delicate silver chain, and on it was the polished outline of a floating silver heart that drifted over the chain that held it. Violet reached out to touch it with her fingertip. "It's beautiful," she sighed. He lifted the necklace from the box and held it out to her. "May I?" he asked. She nodded, her eyes bright with excitement as he clasped the silver chain around her bare throat. "Thank you," she breathed, interlacing her hand into his and squeezing it meaningfully. She reluctantly used the crutches to get out to the car, since there were no handrails for her to hold on to. She left like they ruined the overall effect she was going for. Jay's car was as nice on the inside as it was outside. The interior was rich, smoky gray leather that felt like soft butter as he helped her inside. Aside from a few minor flaws, it could have passed for brand-new. The engine purred to life when he turned the key in the ignition, something that her car had never done. Roar, maybe-purr, never. She was relieved that her uncle hadn't ordered a police escort for the two of them to the dance. She had half expected to see a procession of marked police cars, lights swirling and sirens blaring, in the wake of Jay's sleek black Acura. Despite sitting behind the wheel of his shiny new car, Jay could scarcely take his eyes off her. His admiring gaze found her over and over again, while he barely concentrated on the road ahead of him. Fortunately they didn't have far to go.
Kimberly Derting (The Body Finder (The Body Finder, #1))
The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship’s stokers. With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.
Herman Melville
Overall look: Soft and delicate   Hair: Most often blonde or golden grey   Skintone: Light, ivory to soft beige, peachy tones. Very little contrast between hair and skin   Eyes: Blue, blue-green, aqua, light green IF you are a Light Spring you should avoid dark and dusty colors, which would make you look pale, tired and even pathetic. Spring women who need to look strong, for example chairing a meeting, can do so by wearing mid-tone grey or light navy, not deeper shades. If you are a Light Spring and you wear too much contrast, say a light blouse and dark jacket, or a dress with lots of bold colors against a white background, you ‘disappear’ because our eye is drawn to the colors you are wearing. See your Light Spring palette opposite. Your neutrals can be worn singly or mixed with others in a print or weave. The ivory, camel and blue-greys are good investment shades that will work with any others in your palette. Your best pinks will be warm—see the peaches, corals and apricots—but also rose pink. Never go as far as fuchsia, which is too strong and would drain all the life from your skin. Periwinkle blue toned with a light blue blouse is a smart, striking alternative to navy and white for work. Why wear black in the evening when you will sparkle in violet (also, warm pink and emerald turquoise will turn heads)? For leisure wear, team camel with clear bright red or khaki with salmon.   Make-Up Tips Foundation: Ivory, porcelain Lipstick: Peach, salmon, coral, clear red Blush: Salmon, peach Eyeshadow for blue eyes: Highlighter Champagne, melon, apricot, soft pink Contour Soft grey, violet, teal blue, soft blues, cocoa Eyeshadow for blue-green and aqua eyes: Highlighter Apricot, lemon, champagne Contour Cocoa or honey brown, spruce or moss green, teal blue Eyeshadow for green eyes: Highlighter Pale aqua, apricot, champagne Contour Cocoa or honey brown, teal blue, violet, spruce.
Mary Spillane (Color Me Beautiful's Looking Your Best: Color, Makeup and Style)
One of the best means of preserving the balance of political community and promoting the necessary social and political changes is by keeping the dialogue open with all the political actors who accept the basic rules of the game and are committed to preserving the basic values of the society. This ... explains why many of the thinkers studied in this book, from [Raymond] Aron and [Norberto] Bobbio to [Adam] Michnik, successfully practiced the art of dialogue across the aisle and refused to see the world in black-and-white contrasts. If they adopted the role of committed or engaged spectators, they also maintained a certain degree of detachment and skepticism in their attitudes and political judgments. Their invitation to dialogue and their willingness to speak to their critics illustrated their courage and determination not to look for 'safe spaces' and lukewarm solutions. Instead, they saw themselves as mediators whose duty was to open a line of communication with their opponents who disagreed with them. The dialogue they staged was at times difficult and frustrating, and their belief in the (real or symbolic) power of discussion was an open act of defiance against the crusading spirit of their age, marked by political sectarianism, monologue, and ideological intransigence. Aron and the other moderates studied here were convinced that we can improve ourselves not so much by seeking a fictitious harmony with our critics as by engaging in an open debate with them, as long as we all remain committed to civility and rational critique. In this regard, they all acted as true disciples of Montaigne, who once acknowledged that 'no premise shocks me, no belief hurts me, no matter how opposite they may be. ... When I am contradicted it arouses my attention not my wrath.' This is exactly how Aron and other moderates felt and behaved. They were open to being challenged and did not shy away from correcting others when they thought fit. Yet, in so doing, they did not simply seek to refute or defeat their opponents' arguments, being aware that the truth is almost never the monopoly of a single camp or group.
Aurelian Craiutu (Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes (Haney Foundation Series))
Raphael pulled out a paperback and handed it to me. The cover, done back in the time when computer-aided imagine manipulation had risen to the level of art, featured an impossibly handsome man, leaning forward, one foot in a huge black boot resting on the carcass of some monstrous sea creature. His hair flowed down to his shoulders in a mane of white gold, in stark contrast to his tanned skin and the rakish black patch hiding his left eye. His white, translucent shirt hung open, revealing abs of steel and a massive, perfectly carved chest graced by erect nipples. His muscled thighs strained the fabric of his pants, which were unbuttoned and sat loosely on his narrow hips, a touch of a strategically positioned shadow hinting at the world’s biggest boner. The cover proclaimed in loud golden letters: The Privateer’s Virgin Mistress, by Lorna Sterling. “Novel number four for Andrea’s collection?” I guessed. Raphael nodded and took the book from my hands. “I’ve got the other one Andrea wanted, too. Can you explain something to me?” Oh boy. “I can try.” He tapped the book on his leather-covered knee. “The pirate actually holds this chick’s brother for ransom, so she’ll sleep with him. These men, they aren’t real men. They’re pseudo-bad guys just waiting for the love of a ‘good’ woman.” “You actually read the books?” He gave me a chiding glance. “Of course I read the books. It’s all pirates and the women they steal, apparently so they can enjoy lots of sex and have somebody to run their lives.” Wow. He must’ve had to hide under his blanket with a flashlight so nobody would question his manliness. Either he really was in love with Andrea or he had a terminal case of lust. “These guys, they’re all bad and aggressive as shit, and everybody wets themselves when they walk by, and then they meet some girl and suddenly they’re not uber-alphas; they are just misunderstood little boys who want to talk about their feelings.” “Is there a point to this dissertation?” He faced me. “I can’t be that. If that’s what she wants, then I shouldn’t even bother.” I sighed. “Do you have a costume kink? French maid, nurse . . .” “Catholic school girl.” Bingo. “You wouldn’t mind Andrea wearing a Catholic school uniform, would you?” “No, I wouldn’t.” His eyes glazed over and he slipped off to some faraway place. I snapped my fingers. “Raphael! Focus.” He blinked at me. “I’m guessing—and this is just a wild stab in the dark—that Andrea might not mind if once in a while you dressed up as a pirate. But I wouldn’t advise holding her relatives for ransom nookie. She might shoot you in the head. Several times. With silver bullets.
Ilona Andrews (Magic Strikes (Kate Daniels, #3))
Christopher Phelan was talking with Prudence Mercer. The scheme of formal black and white was becoming to any man. On someone like Christopher, it was literally breathtaking. He wore the clothes with natural ease, his posture relaxed but straight, his shoulders broad. The crisp white of his starched cravat provided a striking contrast to his tawny skin, while the light of chandeliers glittered over his golden-bronze hair. Following her gaze, Amelia lifted her brows. “What an attractive man,” she said. Her attention returned to Beatrix. “You like him, don’t you?” Before Beatrix could help herself, she sent her sister a pained glance. Letting her gaze drop to the floor, she said, “There have been a dozen times in the past when I should have liked a particular gentleman. When it would have been convenient, and appropriate, and easy. But no, I had to wait for someone special. Someone who would make my heart feel as if it’s been trampled by elephants, thrown into the Amazon, and eaten by piranhas.” Amelia smiled at her compassionately. Her gloved hand slipped over Beatrix’s. “Darling Bea. Would it console you to hear that such feelings of infatuation are perfectly ordinary?” Beatrix turned her palm upward, returning the clasp of her sister’s hand. Since their mother had died when Bea was twelve, Amelia had been a source of endless love and patience. “Is it infatuation?” she heard herself asking softly. “Because it feels much worse than that. Like a fatal disease.” “I don’t know, dear. It’s difficult to tell the difference between love and infatuation. Time will reveal it, eventually.” Amelia paused. “He is attracted to you,” she said. “We all noticed the other night. Why don’t you encourage him, dear?” Beatrix felt her throat tighten. “I can’t.” “Why not?” “I can’t explain,” Beatrix said miserably, “except to say that I’ve deceived him.” Amelia glanced at her in surprise. “That doesn’t sound like you. You’re the least deceptive person I’ve ever known.” “I didn’t mean to do it. And he doesn’t know that it was me. But I think he suspects.” “Oh.” Amelia frowned as she absorbed the perplexing statement. “Well. This does seem to be a muddle. Perhaps you should confide in him. His reaction may surprise you. What is it that Mother used to say whenever we pushed her to the limits of her patience?...’Love forgives all things.’ Do you remember?” “Of course,” Beatrix said. She had written that exact phrase to Christopher in one of her letters. Her throat went very tight. “Amelia, I can’t discuss this now. Or I’ll start weeping and throw myself to the floor.” “Heavens, don’t do that. Someone might trip over you.
Lisa Kleypas (Love in the Afternoon (The Hathaways, #5))
Kayla froze and looked at her neighbor’s fence. A low masculine chuckle floated on the night, doing funny things to her insides. Grass crunched as footsteps approached the five-foot fence. When a handsome face appeared above it, butterflies filled her belly. Nick Belanger smiled at her, his brown eyes glinting with amusement in the ambient illumination cast by the floodlights. “Everything okay?” Straightening, she returned his smile and held up the snail. “Yes. Just stopping this little bugger. He and his buddies keep devouring my pepper plants.” He grinned. Damn, he was handsome. Not in a pretty-boy way, but in a ruggedly masculine way. His short black hair was slicked back from his face, still wet from a recent shower. His strong jaw bore a five-o’clock shadow. His straight white teeth provided sharp contrast to the dark stubble that coated his cheeks. She’d been attracted to him ever since she had moved next door to him six years ago.
Dianne Duvall (Broken Dawn (Immortal Guardians, #10))
Only sanitary art could reach the highest ideals of beauty, Ruskin theorized. Rembrandt’s canvases, Ruskin specifically objected, were “unromantic and unhygienic.” By contrast, he extolled J. M. W. Turner’s landscapes for their bright colors extending even to white, and for their direct depiction of sunlight. Such work, according to Ruskin, was modern, hygienic, and romantic. Sanitation helped to further a change of style and sensibility in the arts, associating modernity with clarity of line, bright tones, and vivid colors. All that was dark was dirty, stinky, and abhorrent.
Frank M. Snowden III (Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present)
Based on US government stats from 2005, over a third of the verified 111,490 rapes and sexual assaults on white women that year were committed by blacks, leading to a total estimated number of black-on-white victims at 37,460. By contrast, black victims of white sexual predators were listed at 0.0%. Scanning these government stats from 2003 to 2008, I counted 135,207 rapes and sexual assaults perpetrated by blacks against whites and ZERO committed by whites against blacks. For the year 2006, Wikipedia’s “Rape in the United States” entry cites statistics that work out to roughly 32,443 black-on-white sexual assaults compared to “a negligible number of white offenders.
Jim Goad (Whiteness: The Original Sin)
Wikipedia: The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy The role of genetics in the black-white IQ gap has been particularly controversial. The question regarding this in the survey asked "Which of the following best characterizes your opinion of the heritability of black-white differences in IQ?" Amongst the 661 returned questionnaires, 14% declined to answer the question, 24% said that there was insufficient evidence to give an answer, 1% said that the gap was "due entirely to genetic variation", 15% voted that it was "due entirely to environmental variation" and 45% said that it was a "product of genetic and environmental variation". According to Snyderman and Rothman, this contrasts greatly with the coverage of these views as represented in the media, where the reader is led to draw the conclusion that "only a few maverick 'experts' support the view that genetic variation plays a significant role in individual or group difference, while the vast majority of experts believe that such differences are purely the result of environmental factors.
Mark Snyderman (The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy)
He was a man of black and white. And she was color. All the color he had.
Fredrick Backman, A Man Called Ove
That Americans of African origin once wore chains of chattels remains alive in the memory of both races and continues to separate them. Black Americans are Americans, yet they still subsist as aliens in the only land they know. Other groups may remain outside the mainstream… but they do so voluntarily. In contrast, blacks must endure a segregation that is far from freely chosen. So America may be seen as two separate nations… in most significant respects, the separation is pervasive and penetrating. As social and human division, it surpasses all others–even gender–in intensity and subordination.
Andrew Hacker (Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal)
Black founders also continue to deal with overt racism. As reported in the 2015 CB Insights Analysis, about 1 percent of venture capital investments end up in the hands of Black founders, despite the fact that Black founders represent 11 percent of the population. In addition, Black founders are often denied loans or receive a lesser loan amount than requested. More than 53 percent of loan applications by Black founders are denied. In contrast, approximately 25 percent of loans for White founders are denied.
Seth Levine (The New Builders: Face to Face With the True Future of Business)
A survey was conducted in 1995 asking the following question: “Would you close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me?” The startling results were published in the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education. Ninety-five percent of respondents pictured a black drug user, while only 5 percent imagined other racial groups.37 These results contrast sharply with the reality of drug crime in America. African Americans constituted only 15 percent of current drug users in 1995, and they constitute roughly the same percentage today. Whites constituted the vast majority of drug users then (and now), but almost no one pictured a white person when asked to imagine what a drug user looks like. The same group of respondents also perceived the typical drug trafficker as black. There
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
When colours are surrounded by black they glow out of the dark and that gives the colours a special importance. If you put colours on white, in a white frame or in white surroundings, then they appear muddy. White dulls the colours.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
Nessa has dropped our gifts off at the reception table, and now she’s sliding into her seat next to Mikolaj, directly behind me. Miko had been silent and scowling up until that moment, his pale face and white blond hair in stark contrast to his all-black suit. When Nessa sits beside him, his expression changes entirely. His sharp features soften into a smile, and a light comes into his ice blue eyes, until he hardly looks like the same person. Now he seems almost approachable and not like he might murder all of us. He lifts one heavily tattooed hand to tuck a lock of hair back behind Nessa’s ear. In his accented voice, he says, “You look stunning, moja mała baletnica.
Sophie Lark (Broken Vow (Brutal Birthright, #5))
At length, one of those low murmurs that are so apt to disturb a multitude, was heard, and the whole nation arose to their feet by a common impulse. At that the door of the lodge in question opened, and three men, issuing from it, slowly approached the place of consultation. They were all aged, even beyond that period to which the oldest present had reached; but one in the centre, who leaned on his companions for support, had numbered an amount of years to which the human race is seldom permitted to attain. His frame, which had once been tall and erect, like the cedar, was now bending under the pressure of more than a century. The elastic, light step of an Indian was gone, and in its place he was compelled to toil his tardy way over the ground, inch by inch. His dark, wrinkled countenance was in singular and wild contrast with the long white locks which floated on his shoulders in such thickness as to announce that generations had probably passed away since they had last been shorn. The dress of this patriarch — for such, considering his vast age, in conjunction with his affinity and influence with his people, he might very properly be termed — was rich and imposing, though strictly after the simple fashions of the tribe. His robe was of the finest skins, which had been deprived of their fur, in order to admit of a hieroglyphical representation of various deeds in arms, done in former ages. His bosom was loaded with medals, some in massive silver, and one or two even in gold, the gifts of various Christian potentates during the long period of his life. He also wore armlets, and cinctures above the ankles, of the latter precious metal. His head, on the whole of which the hair had been permitted to grow, the pursuits of war having so long been abandoned, was encircled by a sort of plated diadem, which, in its turn, bore lesser and more glittering ornaments, that sparkled amid the glossy hues of three drooping ostrich feathers, dyed a deep black, in touching contrast to the color of his snow-white locks. His tomahawk was nearly hid in silver, and the handle of his knife shone like a horn of solid gold. So soon as the first hum of emotion and pleasure, which the sudden appearance of this venerated individual created, had a little subsided, the name of “Tamenund” was whispered from mouth to mouth.
Book House (100 Books You Must Read Before You Die - volume 1 [newly updated] [Pride and Prejudice; Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; Tarzan of the Apes; The Count of ... (The Greatest Writers of All Time))
Line: An artist’s tool used to illustrate the outer edges of shapes and forms. Technically, no physical lines exist in nature. For example, there is not an actual line around an apple to distinguish it from the table it’s sitting on, nor is there a physical line between the sky and the land at the horizon; therefore, lines in art are an artist’s interpretation of the boundaries between forms in a scene, or the perceived edges of shapes in a composition. Repeated lines can also be used to create values and textures in two-dimensional and three-dimensional art. Shape: The outside two-dimensional contour, outline or border of a form, figure or structure. Form: The three-dimensional representation of a shape. In drawings, paintings and other two-dimensional art, the artist creates the illusion of a three-dimensional form in space using light, shadow and other rendering techniques. In sculpture, the form is the manifestation of the object itself. Texture: The distinctive surface qualities found on all things as well as the overall visual patterns and tactile feel of objects and their surroundings. Value: The relative lightness or darkness of shapes, forms and backgrounds of two-dimensional or three-dimensional compositions. Value plays a prominent role in both black-and-white and color artworks, potentially adding dramatic contrasts and depth to an otherwise bland composition. Color: The spectrum of hues, values and intensities of natural light and man-made pigments, paints and mineral compounds that can be used in all art forms.
Dean Nimmer (Creating Abstract Art: Ideas and Inspirations for Passionate Art-Making)
The boar was a popular heraldic charge, used long before heraldry became standardised. The sanglier was the most dangerous and difficult animal to hunt, a beste noire (like the wolf and the bear) whose killer was greatly honoured. In contrast to the stag (one of the bestes rouges) which came to symbolise the Christian virtues – a flying stag was particularly associated with the kings of France – the boar stood for the sinner,12 but at the same time the boar’s very ferocity and power caused it to develop from a symbol of evil to an emblem of him who defeated it. In most stories the boar of evil is black and it is likely Richard very consciously chose a white boar to exorcise in advance all the vices of the animal and leave it only its virtues.
Anne F. Sutton (Richard III's Books: Ideals and Reality in the Life and Library of a Medieval Prince)
turns out that white people in America are much less likely than people of color to rank environmental problems as a pressing concern. Public opinion surveys show that Black and Latinx people are more supportive of national and international climate change solutions than white people are. In fact, if it were up to only white people, we might not act at all. According to the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, fewer than 25 percent of white people said they were willing to join a campaign to convince government to act on climate change. The majority of white Americans fell into the categories the researchers called “Cautious,” “Disengaged,” “Doubtful,” or “Dismissive,” meaning they don’t know enough, don’t care, or are outright opposed to taking action. By contrast, 70 percent of Latinx and 57 percent of Black people are either “Alarmed” or “Concerned.” Like so many issues in public life, race appears to significantly shape your worldview about climate change.
Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World Essentials))
Griffin’s narrative, by contrast, seems more steeped in indignities. Some of the scenes he endures are stomach-turning: being shooed away from white restaurants, as if his race will taint the food; hearing from Blacks about the difficulty of taking even brief trips away from home due to the scarcity of “coloured” bathrooms and drinking fountains, effectively confining them to their own neighbourhoods; being constantly questioned by white men about his sexual prowess and where they themselves could find loose Black women. Most painful to Griffin is what he refers to as the “hate stare.” He writes: “Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it terrifies you.” It is this, beyond everything, that starts to get to him: not racism’s physical threats, but the way it distorts the mind and dehumanizes everyone it touches, both the hated and the one who hates.
Esi Edugyan (Out of The Sun: Essays at the Crossroads of Race)
than 5% of Black children currently reside in census tracts with a low poverty rate (below 10%) and fathers present in more than half of homes. In contrast, 62.5% of White children live in low-poverty areas with fathers living in more than half of children’s homes. Here we can see the contemporary legacy of racial neighborhood segregation in the US, which was cemented by decades of the discriminatory and harmful practice of “redlining” in US mortgage and housing markets.
Melissa S. Kearney (The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind)
fewer than 5% of Black children currently reside in census tracts with a low poverty rate (below 10%) and fathers present in more than half of homes. In contrast, 62.5% of White children live in low-poverty areas with fathers living in more than half of children’s homes. Here we can see the contemporary legacy of racial neighborhood segregation in the US, which was cemented by decades of the discriminatory and harmful practice of “redlining” in US mortgage and housing markets.
Melissa S. Kearney (The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind)
I took a black and white photograph, which I also posted on Instagram. Her New Balance shoes and her feet crossed, hanging as she sat atop the pile of aluminum chairs, against the backdrop of the many legs of the chairs shining in the street lights in contrast to her dark shoes and leggings, were so captivating. There was a lightness in the way she sat there with her crossed legs dangling, as if she was perched on a cloud and it was the most natural thing as she was my angel. I was still unsure if she really existed or if I had only made her up with Pinto cat one night. It was all like a lucid dream. I was so glad for us and for us becoming rich soon too. I was so glad I could provide her with a future in Europe. I was so glad we would be rich and happy and we would be able to make all our dreams come true and travel the world freely together. I can show her Italy and Hungary and Europe. We can pick where do we want to live or make family. I knew all my life, all my work had led to this girl, this moment, and this future. Ours. She started to rap in Spanish in the Rioplatense dialect as I started to record her. „Loco, loco…” - she was so cute, it sounded like she had learned it on the streets of Buenos Aires, skipping school. She was amazing - so young, so true, so natural and pure and cute. I couldn't get enough of her. I wanted to make kids with her. With only her. Nobody else. By the wall of the church and the bar tables, there were a bunch of metal mobile railings with the Ajuntamiento de Barcelona logo in the middle of each of them. I told Martina to squat down to the level of the Ajuntamiento sign, and before I could finish my sentence, she was already doing it. She posed with the mobile railings, making a funny, cool and happy face while squeezing the Ajuntamiento logo between two of her fingers and pointing at it with her other hand, as if we were mocking the authorities of the Ajuntamiento. She was reading my mind. Like she knew magic. She was such a good girl. She was so pretty, smart and sexy. She was smiling, biting her lower lip, excited, turned on, and in love, I thought, looking like a bunny, or like Whitney Houston on the Brazilian live concert video, so I began to call her “Bunny”. I showed her how Whitney was smiling the same way. I was so blind to see the connection. (“The Cocaine Queen”) I was so much in love with her, so under her spell, I just really wanted her to be the One, I guess. I explained to her that the Camorra was one of my costumers and they had a club close by too and they were taking away other people's coffeeshops, menacing their lives and their families'. I explained to her that we were going to do all demolition and remodeling without any permit, without telling a word to anyone. I told her that we would lie to the residents of the building above us about what we were going to do there for months and months. I told her that she must keep it as our secret. She was nodding happily and she seemed happy that I trusted her. I explained everything to her, I told her about Rachel and Tom and I signing the founding document at Amina's office at the beginning of the same year, 2013. She seemed to understand the weight of all I told her and the reasons why I told her about it all, so she would know, so she wouldn't make a mistake saying the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time. I asked her to pay attention to her surroundings in Barcelona from then on, as there were a lot of criminals, and she was a very pretty girl - not only my girlfriend. She seemed to take it as a privilege to be my girlfriend, and she seemed eternally happy, as was I. I told her that she was the only person I fully trusted. I wanted to send the video of Martina rapping on WhatsApp to Adam, but Martina told me I shouldn't because it was late and, at the end, Adam was my boss. “Yeah but he is not really my boss, in Spain, I am the boss.
Tomas Adam Nyapi
blacks outnumbered whites by thirty to one.14 In Jamaica or in Saint-Domingue/Haiti, the proportion of slaves in the overall population was only slightly less, between 80 percent and 85 percent, while in Cuba it was no less than 70 percent. In the United States, by contrast, slaves only made up a majority in South Carolina and Mississippi, and even here they made up proportionally much less of the population than in the places I have just mentioned, never more than 55 percent.
Eduardo Grüner (The Haitian Revolution: Capitalism, Slavery and Counter-Modernity (Critical South))
Her eyes bothered him most. Unlike the Kai, hers were layers of opaque white, blue ringed in gray and black pinpoint centers that expanded or contracted with the light. The first time he’d witnessed that reaction in a human, all the hairs on his nape stood straight up. That, and the way the contrasting colors made it easy to see the eyes move in their sockets gave the impression they weren’t body parts but entities unto themselves living as parasites inside their hosts’ skulls. He was used to seeing the frantic eye-rolling in a frightened horse but not a person.
Grace Draven (Radiance (Wraith Kings, #1))
ON JUNE 25, 1890, W. E. B. Du Bois spoke at his Harvard graduation ceremony. He had now excelled, and had graduated from the most prestigious historically Black college and the most prestigious historically White college in the United States. He felt he was showing off the capability of his race. Du Bois’s “brilliant and eloquent address,” as judged by the reporters, was on “Jefferson Davis as Representative of Civilization.” In Du Bois’s rendering, Jefferson Davis, who had died the year before, represented the rugged individualism and domineering European civilization, in contrast to the rugged “submission” and selflessness of African civilization. The European “met civilization and crushed it,” Du Bois concluded. “The Negro met civilization and was crushed by it.” According to Du Bois’s biographer, the Harvard graduate contrasted the civilized European “Strong Man” to the civilized African “Submissive Man.”5
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
Since heavily policed inner-city Blacks were much more likely than Whites to be arrested and imprisoned in the 1990s—since more homicides occurred in their neighborhoods—racists assumed that Black people were actually using more drugs, dealing more in drugs, and committing more crimes of all types than White people. These false assumptions fixed the image in people’s minds of the dangerous Black inner-city neighborhood as well as the contrasting image of the safe White suburban neighborhood, a racist notion that affected so many decisions of so many Americans, from housing choices to drug policing to politics, that they cannot be quantified. The “dangerous Black neighborhood” conception is based on racist ideas, not reality. There is such a thing as a dangerous “unemployed neighborhood,” however. One study, for example, based on the National Longitudinal Youth Survey data collected from 1976 to 1989, found that young Black males were far more likely than young White males to engage in serious violent crime. But when the researchers compared only employed young males, the racial differences in violent behavior disappeared. Certain violent crime rates were higher in Black neighborhoods simply because unemployed people were concentrated in Black neighborhoods.
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
Ultimately, the imperative to be practical in our field hinges on a deep (if somewhat paradoxical) individualism. In spite of overtones of inclusivity, it treats critical work as self-contained, suggesting that truly ethical work in the library world requires each of us to come up with complete sets of questions and complete sets of answers, to individually balance what is understood to be theory with what is understood to be practice, to ensure that our language is always going to be intelligible to everyone. We in the library world ought to understand that this is neither possible nor desirable, as so much of what we do points to the fact that all work is both necessarily incomplete and necessarily interdependent--the citation, the bibliography and its community of complicated absences, the shelf with more than one item, the marginalia and corporeal micro-residues (visible and invisible) left on magazines pulled through circulation, the reference interaction in which knowledge reveals itself to be created between subjects rather than springing forth ex nihilo as the stuff of individual genius. But the individualist myth of exhaustiveness is pervasive, even if it is persistently exhausting. Such tiresome individualism is, of course, profoundly entangled with whiteness, serving as an animating force in well-worn colonial narratives of race: the unhinged white loner as mass shooter, as contrasted with the terrorist motivated by collective cultural allegiance; the intrepid white explorer 'discovering' the land through economic enterprise; the dark masses of migrants threatening to flood the white nation's border, containable only through mass detention, expulsion, or assimilation; the dispossession of a black single mother read as black cultural pathology. More specifically, it aligns epistemologically with the individualism of liberal racial politics: racism as an attribute of individuals, anti-racism as self-work, the problem and solution collocated and self-contained
David James Hudson
I almost always use dark grey for the graph title. This ensures that it stands out, but without the sharp contrast you get from pure black on white (rather, I preserve the use of black for a standout color when I’m not using any other colors). A number of preattentive attributes are employed to draw attention to the “Progress to date” trend: color, thickness of line, presence of data marker and label on the final point, and the size of the corresponding text.
Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic (Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals)
Together with black enfranchisement, immigration has transformed American political parties. These new voters have disproportionately supported the Democratic Party. The nonwhite share of the Democratic vote rose from 7 percent in the 1950s to 44 percent in 2012. Republican voters, by contrast, were still nearly 90 percent white into the 2000s. So as the Democrats have increasingly become a party of ethnic minorities, the Republican Party has remained almost entirely a party of whites.
Steven Levitsky (How Democracies Die)
Ritual characterizes every aspect of life here, and even mundane, daily activities take on an ageless quality. The daily rhythm begins at dawn, as the fishermen launch boats from countless harbors, an event that has taken place for centuries. The women go to market, exchanging greetings and comments. Ritual rules the care and time taken with every detail of the midday meal, from the hearty seafood appetizers to the strong, syrupy coffee that marks the end of the feast. The day winds down with the evening stroll, a tradition thoroughly ingrained in the culture of the Greek Isles. In villages and towns throughout the islands, sunset brings cooler air and draws people from their homes and the beaches for an enjoyable evening walk through town squares, portside promenades, and narrow streets. Ancient crafts still flourish in the artisans’ studios and in tidy homes of countless mountain villages and ports. Embroidery--traditionally the province of Greek women--is created by hand to adorn the regional costumes worn during festivals. Artists craft delicate silver utensils, engraved gems, blown glass, and gold jewelry. Potters create ceramic pieces featuring some of the same decorative patterns and mythological subjects that captured their ancestors’ imagination. Weddings, festivals, saints’ days. And other celebrations with family and friends provide a backdrop for grave and energetic Greek dancing. For centuries--probably ever since people have lived on the islands--Greek islanders have seized every opportunity to play music, sing, and dance. Dancing in Greece is always a group activity, a way to create and reinforce bonds among families, friends, and communities, and island men have been dancing circle dances like the Kalamatianos and the Tsamikos since antiquity. Musicians accompany revelers on stringed instruments like the bouzouki--the modern equivalent of the lyre. While traditional attire is reserved mainly for festive occasions, on some islands people still sport these garments daily. On Lefkada and Crete, it is not unusual to find men wearing vraka, or baggy trousers, and vests, along with the high boots known as stivania. Women wear long, dark, pleated skirts woven on a traditional loom, and long silk scarves or kerchiefs adorn their heads. All the garments are ornamented by hand with rich brocades and elaborate embroidery. All over the Greek Isles, Orthodox priests dress in long black robes, their shadowy figures contrasting with the bright whites, blues, and greens of Greek village architecture.
Laura Brooks (Greek Isles (Timeless Places))
The curtain billows gently in the breeze behind him as he steps out to meet me, his hair jet-black by contrast with the translucent white fabric. I jump, gasp, and nearly swallow the grip that I’m still holding between my lips; quickly, I pull it out before it goes down my throat and chokes me. It’s wet with drool. Lovely, Violet. Really attractive. I shove it into my hair, anywhere, praying it will stay and not fall on the floor, still dripping with spit. Luca’s smiling down at me. His face is half in light, half in shade, from the spots playing across the dance floor, his blue eyes gleaming. “You like to dance,” he observes conversationally. “Yes…” Safe question, safe answer. Well, at least I didn’t babble. But he doesn’t say anything else; he’s just looking me up and down, and I feel incredibly awkward under his scrutiny. I’m sweaty, catching my breath; my eyeliner’s probably running. I desperately need to escape into the dark night beyond the dance floor, where the breeze will cool me down and the shadows will hide my shiny face. “I want to get some fresh air,” I say, and move around him, stepping off onto the stone slabs and promptly sinking with one heel into the narrow space between them. “Oops!” I say idiotically, ignoring the hand that Luca is stretching out to help me. The last thing I need right now is to touch him, for all sorts of reasons. I keep walking, pulling my heel out from between the paving stones; mercifully, it comes out without catching or ripping off. I honestly think that even if it did, I would keep going; I’d walk on a sandal without a heel all night, balance on my toes, pretend nothing had happened, and think it a fair price to pay for my flight into the comparative darkness of the chill-out area, where Luca can’t see the sweat on my face.
Lauren Henderson (Flirting in Italian (Flirting in Italian #1))
My base color is grey, not black, to allow for greater contrast since color stands out more against grey than black. For my attention-grabbing color, I often use blue for a number of reasons: (1) I like it, (2) you avoid issues of colorblindness that we’ll discuss momentarily, and (3) it prints well in black-and-white. That said, blue is certainly not your only option (and you’ll see many examples where I deviate from my typical blue for various reasons).
Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic (Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals)
It used to be black and white. It used to be more obvious. Nowadays? Everyone on this planet is tainted to some degree. Once upon a time, there were villains of a memorable –perhaps even admirable –scale. But now? Without contrast it’s hard to see the differences. I miss that –the delineation of great evil from banal nastiness.
Angela Slatter (Four Horrifying Tales)
a PhD dissertation at the University of California, Davis.11 After carefully weighing the contrasting arguments of Taggart and Bush, I determined that Bush made by far the more convincing case—specifically his central thesis that the priesthood ban resulted from socio-economic prejudices endemic in American society at large. Such anti-black attitudes as embraced by Brigham Young were incorporated as policy, which evolved into doctrine—all of which occurred following the death of Joseph Smith.12 Striking was the breadth of Bush’s historical narrative tracing the evolution of Mormon anti-black attitudes and related practices from the 1830s to the 1970s. Impressive was the array of primary documents Bush marshaled in support of his arguments. By contrast, Taggart’s relatively limited work proved wanting in its overly simplistic “Missouri Thesis” that Joseph Smith had impulsively implemented the priesthood ban in a futile effort to alleviate Mormon difficulties in that slave state. The thoroughness of Bush’s findings notwithstanding, I determined that Bush had not adequately dealt with the origins of the ban as it involved Joseph Smith. Specifically, I became convinced that Smith himself held certain racist, anti-black attitudes which, in turn, were given scriptural legitimacy through his canonical writings, specifically the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price. Bush, moreover, failed to acknowledge the crucial role played by the emergence of Mormon ethnic whiteness affirming the Saints’ self-perceived status as a divinely favored race. Conversely, Mormons viewed blacks as a marginalized race, the accursed descendants of Cain, Ham, and Caanan. Further validating African-American’s accursed status was their dark skin.
Newell G. Bringhurst (Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People Within Mormonism, 2nd ed.)
By contrast, in his sermon Negro and White published in 1958, John R. Rice said: “People of all races are members of the same human family. We are blood brothers…so whether Caucasian, Mongolian, or Negro, all races alike are descended from Adam and Eve…Everybody alive on the earth now descended from Noah and his three sons. Racial differences are incidental. We are one race of beings and all alike have the blood of Adam and the blood of Noah in our veins.” He quoted the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans in which Paul told how God offers salvation alike to all, and punishes sin alike with all, concluding that “there is no respect of persons with God who views all His children, both black and white, as equals in his sight.”[185]
Andrew Himes (The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family)
She was wearing a simple silver sheath cut within an inch of indecency, curving round her slender shoulders and then falling away to expose the smooth white skin of her back and just a hint of the soft round curve of her breasts. She had on no jewellery, only a pale wash of lipstick, and again the black halo of hair was arranged so that it looked almost wind tossed. Yet her dark tresses shone, framing her face with a soft, unearthly light. Next to the other women at the table, with their diamonds, heavy strands of pearls, and meticulously groomed faces and hair, she seemed feral and bewitching. The impact of her beauty lay in her confidence and her utter lack of self-awareness. In contrast, others appeared to be trying too hard, careful and staid.
Kathleen Tessaro (The Perfume Collector)
One of Stevens’s epigrams ran, ‘Black is white with a bright ring around it.’ The Orwellian tone of that statement is justified. Stevens knew only too well that you can get people to believe almost anything about their own perceptions with a little sleight of hand. Subjectively, there are no absolutes, only contrasts.
William Poundstone (Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It))
Riddick, it’s that we’re all basically the same. White or black, we’re all going to end up in the same place (well, one of two places), but most of us don’t like to think about death. And even fewer of us take the time to plan for it. Which is kind of funny when you consider the odds of it happening. By contrast, think about how much time we take planning for other stuff. We talk to people, check out things on Google, and weigh our options on everything from the type of wedding cake we want to which career looks most promising. We analyze our health benefits, test-drive cars, and peek in the crawl spaces of our houses. When children come along, we buy books about what to name them, how to toilet train them, and what we should do when they announce that they don’t need us anymore and they’re leaving home to follow a rock-’n’-roll band.
Dee Oliver (The Undertaker's Wife: A True Story of Love, Loss, and Laughter in the Unlikeliest of Places)
Will was sitting on the apartment block steps with his arms folded. He was wearing black Calvin Klein trousers and a bright, white shirt that contrasted dramatically with his thick, dark hair.
Paul Pilkington (The One You Love (Emma Holden Suspense Mystery, #1))
Riddick, it’s that we’re all basically the same. White or black, we’re all going to end up in the same place (well, one of two places), but most of us don’t like to think about death. And even fewer of us take the time to plan for it. Which is kind of funny when you consider the odds of it happening. By contrast, think about how much time we take planning for other stuff. We talk to people, check out things on Google, and weigh our options on everything from the type of wedding cake we want to which career looks most promising. We analyze our health benefits, test-drive cars, and peek in the crawl spaces of our houses. When children come along, we buy books about what to name them, how to toilet train them, and what we should do when they announce that they don’t need us anymore and they’re leaving home to follow a rock-’n’-roll band.
Anonymous
persuasive book. Among the educated elite the traditional family is thriving: fewer than 10% of births to female college graduates are outside marriage—a figure that is barely higher than it was in 1970. In 2007 among women with just a high-school education, by contrast, 65% of births were non-marital. Race makes a difference: only 2% of births to white college graduates are out-of-wedlock, compared with 80% among African-Americans with no more than a high-school education, but neither of these figures has changed much since the 1970s. However, the non-marital birth proportion among high-school-educated whites has quadrupled, to 50%, and the same figure for college-educated blacks has fallen by a third, to 25%. Thus the class divide is growing even as the racial gap is shrinking.
Anonymous
Over the past two generations, 48 percent of all African American families have lived in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods in each generation. The most common experience for black families since the 1970s, by a wide margin, has been to live in the poorest American neighborhoods over consecutive generations. Only 7 percent of white families have experienced similar poverty in their neighborhood environments for consecutive generations. By contrast, persistent neighborhood advantage is virtually nonexistent for black families. One out of every one hundred black families in the United States has lived in affluent neighborhoods over the past two generations, compared to roughly one out of five white families.
Patrick Sharkey (Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality)
Life is wonderful contrast of black & white.
Arbab J. Edhi