“
As a kid I understood that people were different colors, but in my head white and black and brown were like types of chocolate. Dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and I was the milk chocolate. But we were all just chocolate.
”
”
Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood)
“
Price,” Wrath said, still looking at his brother.
“Well, here’s the thing.” As the king cursed, the man, Lassiter, laughed. “It’s not a price, though.”
“What. Is. It.”
“We’re a two-for-one-deal.”
“Excuse me?”
“I come with him.”
“The fuck you do.”
The man lost any levity in his voice. “It’s past of the arrangement, and believe me, I wouldn’t choose this either. Fact is, he’s my last change, so yeah, I’m sorry, but I go with him. And if you say no, by the way, I’m going to level us all like that.”
The man snapped his fingers, a brilliant white spark flaring against the night sky.
After a moment, Wrath turned to John. “This is Lassiter, the fallen angel. One of the last times he was on earth, there was a plague in central Europe –“
“Okay, that was so not my fault –”
“ – that wiped out two-thirds of the human population.”
“I’d like to remind you that you don’t like humans.”
“They smell bad when they’re dead.”
“All you mortal types do.”
John could barely follow the conversation; he was too busy staring into Tohr’s face. Open your eyes…open your eyes…please God…
“Come on, John.” Wrath turned back to the Brotherhood and started walking. When he came up to them, he said softly, “Our brother is returned.”
“Oh, Christ, is he alive,” someone said.
“Thank God,” someone else groaned.
“Tell them,” Lassiter demanded from behind. “Tell them he comes with a roommate.”
As one, the Brothers’ heads snapped up.
“Fuck. Me, “Vishous breathed.
“I will so pass on that,” Lassiter muttered.
”
”
J.R. Ward (Lover Enshrined (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #6))
“
I liked to feel his desire. On the other hand, I didn’t like myself. That type of wild, cold little girl—”I have white teeth and a black heart”—seemed to me playacting for old gentlemen.
”
”
Françoise Sagan (A Certain Smile)
“
Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals, which cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property. This type can be recorded by television cameras; it can frequently be observed in the process of commission. The second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts. But it is no less destructive of human life. The second type originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first type. When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society. But when in that same city - Birmingham, Alabama - five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism. When a black family moves into a home in a white neighborhood and is stoned, burned or routed out, they are victims of an overt act of individual racism which many people will condemn - at least in words. But it is institutional racism that keeps black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estate agents. The society either pretends it does not know of this latter situation, or is in fact incapable of doing anything meaningful about it.
”
”
Stokely Carmichael (Black Power: The Politics of Liberation)
“
Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them.
But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists’ hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred.
”
”
Theodore John Kaczynski (Industrial Society and Its Future)
“
I wrote Unwind for lots of reasons, and it poses questions about a
lot of subjects. To state it briefly, I wanted to point out how when people
take intractable positions on an issue, and stick to extreme sides,
sometimes the result is a compromise that is worse than either extreme. I
meant it as a wake up call to society -- and to point out that sometimes the
problem IS that we take sides on an issue, when a different sort of approach
is needed. It's also to pose questions about what it means to be alive.
Where does life begin, where does it end -- and point out that there is no
single answer to these questions. The problem is people who think there are
simple answers. People who see things as simple black-and-white
right-and-wrong are the type of people who will end up with a world like the
world in Unwind.
”
”
Neal Shusterman
“
The most common theory points to the fact that men are stronger than women and that they have used their greater physical power to force women into submission. A more subtle version of this claim argues that their strength allows men to monopolize tasks that demand hard manual labor, such as plowing and harvesting. This gives them control of food production, which in turn translates into political clout. There are two problems with this emphasis on muscle power. First, the statement that men are stronger is true only on average and only with regard to certain types of strength. Women are generally more resistant to hunger, disease, and fatigue than men. There are also many women who can run faster and lift heavier weights than many men. Furthermore, and most problematically for this theory, women have, throughout history, mainly been excluded from jobs that required little physical effort, such as the priesthood, law, and politics, while engaging in hard manual labor in the fields....and in the household. If social power were divided in direct relation to physical strength or stamina, women should have got far more of it. Even more importantly, there simply is no direct relation between physical strength and social power among humans. People in their sixties usually exercise power over people in their twenties, even though twenty-somethings are much stronger than their elders. ...Boxing matches were not used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic popes. In forager societies, political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature. In fact, human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power. In most societies, it’s the lower classes who do the manual labor.
Another theory explains that masculine dominance results not from strength but from aggression. Millions of years of evolution have made men far more violent than women. Women can match men as far as hatred, greed, and abuse are concern, but when push comes to shove…men are more willing to engage in raw physical violence. This is why, throughout history, warfare has been a masculine prerogative. In times of war, men’s control of the armed forces has made them the masters of civilian society too. They then use their control of civilian society to fight more and more wars. …Recent studies of the hormonal and cognitive systems of men and women strengthen the assumption that men indeed have more aggressive and violent tendencies and are…on average, better suited to serve as common soldiers. Yet, granted that the common soldiers are all men, does it follow that the ones managing the war and enjoying its fruits must also be men? That makes no sense. It’s like assuming that because all the slaves cultivating cotton fields are all Black, plantation owners will be Black as well. Just as an all-Black workforce might be controlled by an all-White management, why couldn’t an all-male soldiery be controlled by an all-female government?
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
As a kid I understood that people were different colors, but in my head white and black and brown were like types of chocolate. Dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and I was the milk chocolate. But we were all just chocolate. I didn’t know any of it had anything to do with “race.” I didn't know what race was. My mother never referred to my dad as white or to me as mixed. So when the other kids in Soweto called me "white", even though I was light brown, I just thought that they had their colors mixed up, like they hadn't learned them properly. "Ah, yes, my friend. You've confused aqua with turquoise. I can see how you made that mistake. You're not the first.
”
”
Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood)
“
Middle-class and more affluent blacks are also disproportionately the targets of subprime mortgage loans, paying much higher rates of interest than comparable white borrowers, and are subjected, according to the available evidence, to racial profiling of all types.
”
”
Tim Wise (Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority)
“
Nnaife did not realise that Dr Meers's laughter was inspired by that type of wickedness that reduces any man, white or black, intelligent or not, to a new low; lower than the basest of animals, for animals at least respected each other's feelings, each other's dignity.
”
”
Buchi Emecheta (The Joys of Motherhood)
“
And that damned man in the White House doesn’t help things any. He represents the type of political hatred I’m talking about. Guys like him play to the worst fears of white men. Are you having a bad time of it right now? Lost your job? Having difficulty making ends meet? It’s not my fault or your fault. It’s the black man’s fault. It’s the Muslims’ fault. Blame a Mexican immigrant. Man’s got everyone lining up, taking sides, white people versus people of color, different religions arguing their way is the right way. This is a bad time in America. It’s an especially terrible time for a black woman to be taking on a white cop or the white establishment.
”
”
Mark M. Bello (Betrayal In Black (Zachary Blake Legal Thriller, #4))
“
He’s wearing a white button down, black pants, and suspenders. He’s not my type, but the getup is pretty sexy. Like, put your brother in suspenders and he might become hot too. Okay, that was too far, and I need to stop watching Game of Thrones. Kit
”
”
Tarryn Fisher (F*ck Love)
“
Absolutes do not exist in this universe. If you try to force your experiences into absolute categories, you will be constantly depressed because your perceptions will not conform to reality. You will set yourself up for discrediting yourself endlessly because whatever you do will never measure up to your exaggerated expectations. The technical name for this type of perceptual error is "dichotomous thinking." You see everything as black or white—shades of gray do not exist.
”
”
David D. Burns (Feeling Good: Overcome Depression and Anxiety with Proven Techniques)
“
I don’t know about black or white magic I just know one type and that is your magic.
”
”
M.F. Moonzajer
“
One very important difference between white people and black people is that white people think you are your work...Now, a black person has more sense than that because he knows that what I am doing doesn't have anything to do with what I want to do to what I do when I am doing for myself. Now, black people think that my work is just what I have to do to get what I want."
Ms. Madison's perspective criticizes definitions of work that grant White men more status and human worth because they are employed in better-paid occupations. She recognizes that work is a contested construct and that evaluating individual worth by the type of work performed is a questionable practice in systems based on race and gender inequality.
”
”
Patricia Hill Collins (Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment)
“
The sky is blue,’ came us. ‘What colour else can it be?’
Of course we knew really that the sky could be more than blue, two more, but why should any of us admit to that? I myself have never admitted it. Not even the week before when I experienced my first sunset with maybe-boyfriend did I admit it. Even then, even though there were more colours than the acceptable three in the sky – blue (the day sky), black (the night sky) and white (clouds) – that evening still I kept my mouth shut. And now the others in this class – all older than me, some as old as thirty – also weren’t admitting it. It was the convention not to admit it, not to accept detail for this type of detail would mean choice and choice would mean responsibility and what if we failed in our responsibility? Failed too, in the interrogation of the consequence of seeing more than we could cope with? Worse, what if it was nice, whatever it was, and we liked it, got used to it, were cheered up by it, came to rely upon it, only for it to go away, or be wrenched away, never to come back again? Better not to have had it in the first place was the prevailing feeling, and that was why blue was the colour for our sky to be.
”
”
Anna Burns (Milkman)
“
And that damned man in the White House doesn’t help things any. He represents the type of political hatred I’m talking about. Guys like him play to the worst fears of white men. Are you having a bad time of it right now? Lost your job? Having difficulty making ends meet? It’s not my fault or your fault. It’s the black man’s fault. It’s the Muslims’ fault. Blame a Mexican immigrant. Man’s got everyone lining up, taking sides, white people versus people of color,
different religions arguing their way is the right way. This is a bad time in America. It’s an especially terrible time for a black woman to be taking on a white cop or the white establishment.
”
”
Mark M. Bello (Betrayal In Black (Zachary Blake Legal Thriller, #4))
“
There's something ironic about a man like Ron Finley—who plants gardens in spaces white supremacy created to nutritionally and intellectually starve minorities—being celebrated by the mainstream white news media. The goal of guerrilla gardening isn't to make black folks look more peaceful and benevolent; it's to engage in a new type of fight in which we are taking care of ourselves in an era that's actively trying to poison and kill us. It's an act of survival. It's great that people like Ron and other urban farmers are engaging with DIY, grassroots activism to fight back. However, we need to watch how we frame their stories and most importantly, we need to watch out for who is framing these stories.
”
”
Aph Ko (Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters)
“
Some of these types, like the Persians and Ottoman Turks, are largely white; others, like the southern Indians and Yemenite Arabs, are largely black; while still others, like the Himalayan and Central Asian peoples, have much yellow blood.
”
”
T. Lothrop Stoddard (The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy)
“
What possible rationale demanded this many debased representations of the recently freed Black people produced in the final third of the nineteenth century? How many ways can one call a woman or a man a "n*****" or a "c***"? How many watermelons does a person have to devour, how many chickens does an individual have to steal, to make the point that Black people are manifestly, by nature, both gluttons and thieves? Why in the world was it necessary to produce tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of these separate and distinct racist images to demean the status of the newly freed slaves in a set of fixed types and motifs, which reached their perverse apex with the characterizations of Black people during Reconstruction in The Birth of a Nation, in the figures of deracinated Black elected officials and, of course, the black male as rapist? The explanation comes in three words: justifying Jim Crow, or, in three different words, disenfranchising Black voters
”
”
Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow)
“
This photograph, this swipe of grain, so briefly glimpsed: I could tell it contained extraordinary information. It was black and white. It was about power. Twelve men were depicted there, in unmistakable configuration. Twelve men, but two distinct human types, equally represented, six of one type, half a dozen of the other. The first type had power, and safety in numbers. The second type had no power-had numbers, but no safety: numbers conferred only grief and weakness. The first type was silently saying something to the second type. Six men were saying to the other six: Whatever else divides us, whatever else is between us, only one thing matters. We belong to the living, you to the dead. We are the living and you are the dead. The dead.
”
”
Martin Amis (Time's Arrow)
“
It's another to the body, and it looks like Louis is going down.' My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed and raped. A Black boy whipped and maimed. It was hounds on the trip of a man running through slimy swamps. It was a white woman slapping her maid for being forgetful...This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than the apes. True that we were stupid and ugly and lazy and dirty and, unlucky and worst of all, that God Himself hated us and ordained us to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and ever, world without end. We didn't breathe. We didn't hope. We waited.
”
”
Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou's Autobiography, #1))
“
She wore a black pantsuit with a white silk shirt that had an almost metallic sheen to it. He wondered whom she had already gone into mourning for; then he reminded himself that she was the type of woman who mourned damaged reputations and lost opportunities, not human beings.
”
”
Christopher Rice
“
TRUE Hebrew Israelites DO NOT hate white people.
TRUE Hebrew Israelites DO NOT have more than one wife.
TRUE Hebrew Israelites DO NOT smoke marijuana or do any other types of drugs
TRUE Hebrew Israelites DO NOT have to stand on corners Intimidating people into believing the way.
”
”
Alex Hartley Jr.
“
Diminishing their intellect was yet another way to justify enslaving African Americans, and it had the added benefit of preserving some types of work for whites, and creating and maintaining clear social and economic boundaries between blacks and whites. In an explicit challenge to African Americans’ intellect, eighteen prominent Massachusetts white men—including John Hancock and Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of the colony—examined Phillis Wheatley in Boston’s Town Hall in 1772 to determine whether she could possibly have produced the poetry she claimed to have written.
”
”
Heather Andrea Williams (American Slavery: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
As a kid I understood that people were different colors, but in my head white and black and brown were like types of chocolate. Dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and I was the milk chocolate. But we were all just chocolate. I didn’t know any of it had anything to do with “race.
”
”
Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (One World Essentials))
“
Search for ‘Black family’ and you will see smiling black families all the way down, without even a mixed-race family in sight. Type in ‘White family’ on the other hand and three out of the five images in the first line alone are either of a black or mixed-race family. Soon it is black family after black family.
”
”
Douglas Murray (The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity)
“
These rich, white Harvard types. Everything they said sounded like a speech from a candidate for Congress. It was a nice thought, but if so many Americans were already angry at the sight of a black man in uniform, standing tall and proud with a gun in his hand, Aubrey doubted whether a chest full of medals would make a difference.
”
”
Julie Berry (Lovely War)
“
Unfortunately, complex human societies seem to require imagined hierarchies and unjust discrimination. Of course not all hierarchies are morally identical, and some societies suffered from more extreme types of discrimination than others, yet scholars know of no large society that has been able to dispense with discrimination altogether. Time and again people have created order in their societies by classifying the population into imagined categories, such as superiors, commoners and slaves; whites and blacks; patricians and plebeians; Brahmins and Shudras; or rich and poor. These categories have regulated relations between millions of humans by making some people legally, politically or socially superior to others.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
She felt the sly type of racism here, longer waits for tables, white girls who expected her to walk on the slushy part of the sidewalk, a drunk boy outside a salsa club yelling that she was pretty for a black girl. In a way, subtle racism was worse because it made you feel crazy. You were always left wondering, was that actually racist? Had you just imagined it?
”
”
Brit Bennett (The Mothers)
“
If there is an essential truism in typesetting, it is that a page contains no voids, only spaces between printed elements. The essence of typesetting is regulating the size of those spaces to control the balance and rhythm between black and white. This is the key to a graphically harmonious page—one with good type color—as well as to text that is pleasing and easy to read.
”
”
James Felici
“
Yes. You do understand, you do. I knew you would. It was that analogy you made to the Quran that got me thinking in the first place. Metaphors: knowledge existing in several states simultaneously and without contradiction. The stag and the doe and the trap. Instead of working with linear strings of ones and zeroes, the computer could work with bundles that were one and zero and every point in between, all at once. If, if, if you could teach it to overcome its binary nature."
"That sounds very complicated indeed."
"It should be impossible, but it isn't." Alif began typing furiously. "All modern computers are pedants. To them the world is divided into black and white, off and on, right and wrong. But I will teach yours to recognize multiple origin points, interrelated geneses, systems of multivalent cause and effect.
”
”
G. Willow Wilson (Alif the Unseen)
“
I’ll let you in on a secret. There are actually three kinds of “Yes”: Counterfeit, Confirmation, and Commitment. A counterfeit “yes” is one in which your counterpart plans on saying “no” but either feels “yes” is an easier escape route or just wants to disingenuously keep the conversation going to obtain more information or some other kind of edge. A confirmation “yes” is generally innocent, a reflexive response to a black-or-white question; it’s sometimes used to lay a trap but mostly it’s just simple affirmation with no promise of action. And a commitment “yes” is the real deal; it’s a true agreement that leads to action, a “yes” at the table that ends with a signature on the contract. The commitment “yes” is what you want, but the three types sound almost the same so you have to learn how to recognize which one is being used. Human
”
”
Chris Voss (Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It)
“
Consequently, here was a group that could be mobilized against the status quo, and if the status quo could be identified with capitalism, here was a group that should be open to socialism. Through a kind of Marxist transposition, “blacks” would become the working class, “whites” the capitalist class. Race, in this analysis, takes the place of class. This is how we get Afro-socialism, and from here it is a short step to Latino socialism and every other type of ethnic socialism.
”
”
Dinesh D'Souza (United States of Socialism: Who's Behind It. Why It's Evil. How to Stop It.)
“
Zach, who had the darkest skin, was often treated the worst. Larry and Ruthanne made references to him being “blue Black,” a variation of an old racial slur. Some people, particularly a certain type of southerner, believed that Black people’s ancestry could be determined by looking into their mouths. If their gums were very dark or bluish, it was believed to represent a pure bloodline (100 percent African), proof, in their eyes, that they were dumber, lazier, and more savage than everyone else.
”
”
Rachel Dolezal (In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World)
“
The true paradox is arresting because it breaks all laws, but calming because it breaks all laws, but calming because that is so easy in language. it is easy to write that black is white, that up is down and that good is evil. It's as easy as typing, and as difficult. I can't do it, and I just did. But by breaking the laws of the universe, the true paradox lifts us out of it. The true paradox is, necessarily, a mystical moment, despite the fact that from a writer's point of view it's immensely easy.
”
”
Mark Forsyth (The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase)
“
I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass.; I evoked the anklebones and other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters (as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo ); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as in old Peru; solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling and accordions floating to the strains of sacred music; professional imposters regurgitating moist cheesecloth; Mr. Duncan, a lady medium's dignified husband, who, when asked if he would submit to a search, excused himself on the ground of soiled underwear; old Alfred Russel Wallace, the naive naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form with bare feet and unperforated earlobes before him, at a private pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just seen asleep, in her curtained corner, all dressed in black, wearing laced-up boots and earrings; two other investigators, small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely clinging with arms and legs about Eusapia, a large, plump elderly female reeking of garlic, who still managed to fool them; and the skeptical and embarrassed magician, instructed by charming young Margery's "control" not to get lost in the bathrobe's lining but to follow up the left stocking until he reached the bare thigh - upon the warm skin of which he felt a "teleplastic" mass that appeared to the touch uncommonly like cold, uncooked liver. ("The Vane Sisters")
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now)
“
As a kid I understood that people were different colors, but in my head white and black and brown were like types of chocolate. Dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and I was the milk chocolate. But we were all just chocolate. I didn’t know any of it had anything to do with “race.” I didn’t know what race was. My mother never referred to my dad as white or to me as mixed. So when the other kids in Soweto called me “white,” even though I was light brown, I just thought they had their colors mixed up, like they hadn’t learned them properly.
”
”
Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (One World Essentials))
“
Girls, I was dead and down
in the Underworld, a shade,
a shadow of my former self, nowhen.
It was a place where language stopped,
a black full stop, a black hole
Where the words had to come to an end.
And end they did there,
last words,
famous or not.
It suited me down to the ground.
So imagine me there,
unavailable,
out of this world,
then picture my face in that place
of Eternal Repose,
in the one place you’d think a girl would be safe
from the kind of a man
who follows her round
writing poems,
hovers about
while she reads them,
calls her His Muse,
and once sulked for a night and a day
because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns.
Just picture my face
when I heard -
Ye Gods -
a familiar knock-knock at Death’s door.
Him.
Big O.
Larger than life.
With his lyre
and a poem to pitch, with me as the prize.
Things were different back then.
For the men, verse-wise,
Big O was the boy. Legendary.
The blurb on the back of his books claimed
that animals,
aardvark to zebra,
flocked to his side when he sang,
fish leapt in their shoals
at the sound of his voice,
even the mute, sullen stones at his feet
wept wee, silver tears.
Bollocks. (I’d done all the typing myself,
I should know.)
And given my time all over again,
rest assured that I’d rather speak for myself
than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess etc., etc.
In fact girls, I’d rather be dead.
But the Gods are like publishers,
usually male,
and what you doubtless know of my tale
is the deal.
Orpheus strutted his stuff.
The bloodless ghosts were in tears.
Sisyphus sat on his rock for the first time in years.
Tantalus was permitted a couple of beers.
The woman in question could scarcely believe her ears.
Like it or not,
I must follow him back to our life -
Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife -
to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes,
octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets,
elegies, limericks, villanelles,
histories, myths…
He’d been told that he mustn’t look back
or turn round,
but walk steadily upwards,
myself right behind him,
out of the Underworld
into the upper air that for me was the past.
He’d been warned
that one look would lose me
for ever and ever.
So we walked, we walked.
Nobody talked.
Girls, forget what you’ve read.
It happened like this -
I did everything in my power
to make him look back.
What did I have to do, I said,
to make him see we were through?
I was dead. Deceased.
I was Resting in Peace. Passé. Late.
Past my sell-by date…
I stretched out my hand
to touch him once
on the back of the neck.
Please let me stay.
But already the light had saddened from purple to grey.
It was an uphill schlep
from death to life
and with every step
I willed him to turn.
I was thinking of filching the poem
out of his cloak,
when inspiration finally struck.
I stopped, thrilled.
He was a yard in front.
My voice shook when I spoke -
Orpheus, your poem’s a masterpiece.
I’d love to hear it again…
He was smiling modestly,
when he turned,
when he turned and he looked at me.
What else?
I noticed he hadn’t shaved.
I waved once and was gone.
The dead are so talented.
The living walk by the edge of a vast lake
near, the wise, drowned silence of the dead.
”
”
Carol Ann Duffy (The World's Wife)
“
It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and have no idea how it happened. It didn’t take more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs to realize something was wrong. Really wrong. She was so black she scared me. Midnight black, Sudanese black. I’m light-skinned, with good hair, what we call high yellow, and so is Lula Ann’s father. Ain’t nobody in my family anywhere near that color. Tar is the closest I can think of yet her hair don’t go with the skin. It’s different—straight but curly like those naked tribes in Australia. You might think she’s a throwback, but throwback to what? You should’ve seen my grandmother; she passed for white and never said another word to any one of her children. Any letter she got from my mother or my aunts she sent right back, unopened. Finally they got the message of no message and let her be. Almost all mulatto types and quadroons did that back in the day—if they had the right kind of hair, that is. Can you imagine how many white folks have Negro blood running and hiding in their veins? Guess. Twenty percent, I heard. My own mother, Lula Mae, could have passed easy, but she chose not to. She told me the price she paid for that decision. When she and my father went to the courthouse to get married there were two Bibles and they had to put their hands on the one reserved for Negroes. The other one was for white people’s hands.
”
”
Toni Morrison (God Help the Child)
“
A counterfeit “yes” is one in which your counterpart plans on saying “no” but either feels “yes” is an easier escape route or just wants to disingenuously keep the conversation going to obtain more information or some other kind of edge. A confirmation “yes” is generally innocent, a reflexive response to a black-or-white question; it’s sometimes used to lay a trap but mostly it’s just simple affirmation with no promise of action. And a commitment “yes” is the real deal; it’s a true agreement that leads to action, a “yes” at the table that ends with a signature on the contract. The commitment “yes” is what you want, but the three types sound almost the same so you have to learn how to recognize which one is being used.
”
”
Chris Voss (Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It)
“
Now you take dark Negroes like you, Mr. Griffin, and me," he went on. "We're old Uncle Toms to our people, no matter how much education and morals we've got. No, you have to be almost a mulatto, have your hair conked and all slicked out and look like a Valentino. Then the Negro will look up to you. You've got class. Isn't that a pitiful hero-type?"
"And the white man knows that," Mr. Davis said.
"Yes," the cafe owner continued. "He utilizes this knowledge to flatter some of us, tell us we're above our people, not like most Negroes. We're so stupid we fall for it and work against own own. Why, if we'd work just half as hard to boost our race as we do to please whites whose attentions flatter us, we'd really get somewhere.
”
”
John Howard Griffin (Black Like Me)
“
Octopuses and their relatives have what Woods Hole researcher Roger Hanlon calls electric skin. For its color palette, the octopus uses three layers of three different types of cells near the skin’s surface—all controlled in different ways. The deepest layer, containing the white leucophores, passively reflects background light. This process appears to involve no muscles or nerves. The middle layer contains the tiny iridophores, each 100 microns across. These also reflect light, including polarized light (which humans can’t see, but a number of octopuses’ predators, including birds, do). The iridophores create an array of glittering greens, blues, golds, and pinks. Some of these little organs seem to be passive, but other iridophores appear to be controlled by the nervous system. They are associated with the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, the first neurotransmitter to be identified in any animal. Acetylcholine helps with contraction of muscles; in humans, it is also important in memory, learning, and REM sleep. In octopuses, more of it “turns on” the greens and blues; less creates pinks and golds. The topmost layer of the octopus’s skin contains chromatophores, tiny sacks of yellow, red, brown, and black pigment, each in an elastic container that can be opened or closed to reveal more or less color. Camouflaging the eye alone—with a variety of patterns including a bar, a bandit’s mask, and a starburst pattern—can involve as many as 5 million chromatophores. Each chromatophore is regulated via an array of nerves and muscles, all under the octopus’s voluntary control.
”
”
Sy Montgomery (The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness)
“
In the years after The Fire Next Time, Baldwin openly questioned capitalism—even commending, with Bobby Seale, a “Yankee Doodle”–type socialism. He relentlessly criticized white supremacy, railed against U.S. imperialism, and prophesied the end of the West. In his open letter to Angela Davis in 1970, he succinctly summarized that politics: “We know that we, the blacks, and not only we, the blacks, have been, and are, the victims of a system whose only fuel is greed, whose only god is profit. We know that the fruits of this system have been ignorance, despair, and death, and we know that the system is doomed because the world can no longer afford it—if, indeed, it ever could have….The enormous revolution in black consciousness which has occurred in your generation…means the beginning or the end of America
”
”
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own)
“
Magnus’s head was tipped back, his shimmering white suit rumpled like bedsheets in the morning, his white cloak swaying after him like a moonbeam. His mirrorlike mask was askew, his black hair wild, his slim body arching with the dance, and wrapped around his fingers like ten shimmering rings was the light of his magic, casting a spotlight on one dancer, then another.
The faerie Hyacinth caught one radiant stream of magic and whirled, holding on to it as if the light were a ribbon on a maypole. The vampire woman in the violet cheongsam, Lily, was dancing with another vampire who Alec presumed was Elliott, given the blue and green stains around his mouth and all down his shirtfront. Malcolm Fade joined in the dance with Hyacinth, though he appeared to be doing a jig and she seemed very puzzled. The blue warlock who Magnus had called Catarina was waltzing with a tall horned faerie.The dark-skinned faerie whom Magnus had addressed as a prince was surrounded by others whom Alec presumed were courtiers, dancing in a circle around him.
Magnus laughed as he saw Hyacinth using his magic like a ribbon, and sent shimmering streamers of blue light in several directions. Catarina batted away Magnus’s magic, her own hand glowing faintly white. The two vampires Lily and Elliott both let a magic ribbon wrap around one of their wrists. They did not seem like trusting types, but they instantly leaned into Magnus with perfect faith, Lily pretending to be a captive and Elliott shimmying enthusiastically as Magnus laughed and pulled them toward him in the dance. Music and starshine filled the room, and Magnus shone brightest in all that bright company.
As Alec made for the stairs, he brushed past Raphael Santiago, who was leaning against the balcony rail and looking down at the dancing crowd, his dark eyes lingering on Lily and Elliott and Magnus. There was a tiny smile on the vampire’s face. When Raphael noticed Alec, the scowl snapped immediately back on.
“I find such wanton expressions of joy disgusting,” he declaimed.
“If you say so,” said Alec. “I like it myself.”
He reached the foot of the stairs and was crossing the gleaming ballroom floor when a voice boomed out from above.
“This is DJ Bat, greatest werewolf DJ in the world, or at least in the top five, coming to you live from Venice because warlocks make irresponsible financial decisions, and this one is for the lovers! Or people with friends who will dance with them. Some of us are lonely jerks, and we’ll be doing shots at the bar.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (The Red Scrolls of Magic (The Eldest Curses, #1))
“
Kant distinguished between two types of truths: (1) analytic propositions, which derive from logic and “reason itself” rather than from observing the world; for example, all bachelors are unmarried, two plus two equals four, and the angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees; and (2) synthetic propositions, which are based on experience and observations; for example, Munich is bigger than Bern, all swans are white. Synthetic propositions could be revised by new empirical evidence, but not analytic ones. We may discover a black swan but not a married bachelor or (at least so Kant thought) a triangle with 181 degrees. As Einstein said of Kant’s first category of truths: “This is held to be the case, for example, in the propositions of geometry and in the principle of causality. These and certain other types of knowledge… do not previously have to be gained from sense data, in other words they are a priori knowledge.” Einstein
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
“
By the time Bond had taken in these details, he had come to within fifty yards of the two men. He was reflecting on the ranges of various types of weapon and the possibilities of cover when an extraordinary and terrible scene was enacted. Red-man seemed to give a short nod to Blue-man. With a quick movement Blue-man unslung his blue camera case. Blue-man, and Bond could not see exactly as the trunk of a plane-tree beside him just then intervened to obscure his vision, bent forward and seemed to fiddle with the case. Then with a blinding flash of white light there was the ear-splitting crack of a monstrous explosion and Bond, despite the protection of the tree-trunk, was slammed down to the pavement by a solid bolt of hot air which dented his cheeks and stomach as if they had been made of paper. He lay, gazing up at the sun, while the air (or so it seemed to him) went on twanging with the explosion as if someone had hit the bass register of a piano with a sledgehammer. When, dazed and half-conscious, he raised himself on one knee, a ghastly rain of pieces of flesh and shreds of blood-soaked clothing fell on him and around him, mingled with branches and gravel. Then a shower of small twigs and leaves. From all sides came the sharp tinkle of falling glass. Above in the sky hung a mushroom of black smoke which rose and dissolved as he drunkenly watched it. There was an obscene smell of high explosive, of burning wood, and of, yes, that was it – roast mutton. For fifty yards down the boulevard the trees were leafless and charred. Opposite, two of them had snapped off near the base and lay drunkenly across the road. Between them there was a still smoking crater. Of the two men in straw hats, there remained absolutely nothing. But there were red traces on the road, and on the pavements and against the trunks of the trees, and there were glittering shreds high up in the branches. Bond felt himself starting to vomit. It was Mathis who got to him first, and by that time Bond was standing with his arm round the tree which had saved his life.
”
”
Ian Fleming (Casino Royale (James Bond, #1))
“
The fearful began to instantly see the entire humanity of an individual in a cheeky, offensive tweet and were outraged; people were attacked and unfriended for backing the “wrong” candidate or having the “wrong” opinion or for simply stating the “wrong” belief. It was as if no one could differentiate between a living person and a string of words hastily typed out on a black sapphire screen. The culture at large seemed to encourage discourse but social media had become a trap, and what it really wanted to do was shut down the individual. What often activated my stress was that other people were always angry about everything, presenting themselves as enraged by opinions that I believed in and liked or thought were simply innocuous. My pushback against all of this forced me to confront a degraded fantasy of myself—an actor, as someone I never thought existed—and this, in turn, became a constant reminder of my failings. And what was worse: this anger could become addictive to the point where I just gave up and sat there exhausted, mute with stress. But ultimately silence and submission were what the machine wanted.
”
”
Bret Easton Ellis (White)
“
Racial stereotyping. For Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders, the sin of white racism was stereotyping all black people as inferior. It was a prejudice to be sure, but it was predicated on the assumption that all blacks were the same. King objected to stereotyping because he wanted blacks to be treated as individuals and not reduced exclusively to their racial identity (hence the meaning of his famous statement about the content of one's character taking precedence over the color of one's skin).
The postmodern left turns the civil rights model on its head. It embraces racial stereotyping -- racial identity by any other name -- and reverses it, transforming it into something positive, provided the pecking order of power is kept in place. In the new moral scheme of racial identities, black inferiority is replaced by white culpability, rendering the entire white race, with few exceptions, collectively guilty of racial oppression. The switch is justified through the logic of racial justice, but that does not change the fact that people are being defined by their racial characteristic. Racism is viewed as structural, so it is permissible to use overtly positive discrimination (i.e., affirmative action) to reorder society.
This end-justifies-the-means mentality of course predates the postmodern left. It can be found in the doctrine of affirmative action. But the racial theorists of identity politics have taken "positive" discrimination to a whole new level. Whereas affirmative action was justified mainly in terms of trying to give disadvantaged blacks a temporary leg up, the racial theorists of the postmodern left see corrective action as permanent. The unending struggle that ensues necessitates acceptance of a new type of racial stereotyping as a way of life and increasingly as something that needs to be enshrined in administrative regulations and the law.
The idea of positive stereotyping contains all sorts of illiberal troublemaking. Once one race is set up as victim and another as guilty of racism, any means necessary are permitted to correct the alleged unjust distribution of power. Justice becomes retaliatory rather than color blind -- a matter of vengeance rather than justice. The notion of collective racial guilt, once a horror to liberal opinion, is routinely accepted today as the true mark of a progressive. Casualties are not only King's dream of racial harmony but also the hope that someday we can all -- blacks and whites -- rise above racial stereotypes.
”
”
Kim R. Holmes (The Closing of the Liberal Mind: How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left)
“
I’ll go myself,” the sergeant said tersely. He was getting annoyed. The stairway went down underneath the ground floor to a depth of about eight feet. A short paved corridor ran in front of the boiler room at right angles to the stairs, where each end was closed off by unpainted panelled doors. Both the stairs and the corridor felt like loose gravel underfoot, but otherwise they were clean. Splotches of blood were more in evidence in the corridor and a bloody hand mark showed clearly on the unpainted door to the rear. “Let’s not touch anything,” the sergeant cautioned, taking out a clean white handkerchief to handle the doorknob. “I better call the fingerprint crew,” the photographer said. “No, Joe will call them; I’ll need you. And you local fellows better wait outside, we’re so crowded in here we’ll destroy the evidence.” “Ed and I won’t move,” Grave Digger said. Coffin Ed grunted. Taking no further notice of them, the sergeant pushed open the door. It was black and dark inside. First he shone his light over the wall alongside the door and all over the corridor looking for electric light switches. One was located to the right of each door. Taking care to avoid stepping in any of the blood splotches, the sergeant moved from one switch to another, but none worked. “Blown fuse,” he muttered, picking his way back to the open room. Without having to move, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed could see all they wanted through the open door. Originally made to accommodate a part-time janitor or any type of laborer who would fire the boiler for a place to sleep, the room had been converted into a pad. All that remained of the original was a partitioned-off toilet in one corner and a washbasin in the other. An opening enclosed by heavy wire mesh opened into the boiler room, serving for both ventilation and heat. Otherwise the room was furnished like a boudoir. There was a dressing-table with a triple mirror, three-quarter bed with chenille spread, numerous foam-rubber pillows in a variety of shapes, three round yellow scatter rugs. On the whitewashed walls an obscene mural had been painted in watercolors depicting black and white silhouettes in a variety of perverted sex acts, some of which could only be performed by male contortionists. And everything was splattered with blood, the walls, the bed, the rugs. The furnishings were not so much disarrayed, as though a violent struggle had taken place, but just bloodied. “Mother-raper stood still and let his throat be cut,” Grave Digger observed. “Wasn’t that,” Coffin Ed corrected. “He just didn’t believe it is all.
”
”
Chester Himes (Blind Man with a Pistol (Harlem Cycle, #8))
“
Every Sorcerer on the continent of Kiesalhima — regardless of how skilled they might be — had to chant spells in order to use their sorcery. In other words, their voice was the medium through which they channeled their mana in order to produce all sorts of effects. However, since their medium was their own voice, this also meant that their spells were only effective for as far as their voice could carry. Places where their voice couldn’t reach would remain unaffected by their sorcery, no matter how powerful, and they could likewise only keep the effects of the spell alive for as long as their voice continued to carry through their surroundings. Spells were transient by their very nature, because any Sorcerer’s voice would be lost to the winds eventually. It was said that there only existed two types of human Sorcerers: Black Sorcerers, and White Sorcerers. Black Sorcerers like Orphen specialized in spells dealing with heat or light, various types of energy, or even the body itself. They were those with a degree of control over the physical realm. White Sorcerers, on the other hand, specialized in spells that could manipulate time, the mind, or the spirit. They were those with a degree of control over the mental or spiritual realms. White Sorcery was much more difficult by far, and those with an aptitude for it were extremely rare to the point where keeping count of them was of trivial difficulty...
”
”
Yoshinobu Akita (Sorcerous Stabber Orphen: The Wayward Journey Volume 1)
“
One of the gunmen in the room, ending his call to his wife, and seeing me typing, came across and shook my hand. “You going to make a lot of money off this story!” the gunman with the Rastafarian hairstyle said. His pump-action shotgun was slung in the crook of his arm. He was smiling. “Yeah”, I said. “If I get out of here alive.” “You all right, you going to be all right”, he said, laughing. But you see me? I don’t know too much about my future right now.” “Everybody’s going to be all right,” I said. He laughed again. And reached into his back pocket and came out with a little white slip of paper in his hand. “I don’t know about me,” he said, smiling. “But if you write the story and make a lot of money, maybe you could get these things for the wife for me.” He handed me the slip of paper. On it, in block letters, was an itemized list: TV SET VIDEO SET WASHING MACHINE FRIDGE For a moment I shook my head in bewilderment, looking at that list. But he was laughing again and saying: “So if you make a lot of money off your book, get those things for the wife for me, nuh.” I said: “Sure.” I pocketed the note and walked away, flooded by nausea, thinking: so this is what he’s in it for, this young Trinidadian with the Rasta hairdo, the fake army camouflage shirt and pants tucked into his big soldier-looking black boots, with the wicked-looking shotgun crooked in his arm. A free television set. A video set. A washing machine. A fridge.
”
”
Raoul Pantin (Days of Wrath: The 1990 Coup in Trinidad and Tobago)
“
When it begins it is like a light in a tunnel, a rush of steel and
steam across a torn up life. It is a low rumble, an earthquake in the
back of the mind. My spine is a track with cold black steel racing on
it, a trail of steam and dust following behind, ghost like. It feels
like my whole life is holding its breath.
By the time she leaves the room I am surprised that she can’t see the
train. It has jumped the track of my spine and landed in my mothers’
living room. A cold dark thing, black steel and redwood paneling. It
is the old type, from the western movies I loved as a kid.
He throws open the doors to the outside world, to the dark ocean. I
feel a breeze tugging at me, a slender finger of wind that catches at
my shirt. Pulling. Grabbing. I can feel the panic build in me, the
need to scream or cry rising in my throat.
And then I am out the door, running, tumbling down the steps falling
out into the darkened world, falling out into the lifeless ocean. Out
into the blackness. Out among the stars and shadows.
And underneath my skin, in the back of my head and down the back of my
spine I can feel the desperation and I can feel the noise. I can feel
the deep and ancient ache of loudness that litters across my bones.
It’s like an old lover, comfortable and well known, but unwelcome and
inappropriate with her stories of our frolicking.
And then she’s gone and the Conductor is closing the door. The
darkness swells around us, enveloping us in a cocoon, pressing flat
against the train like a storm. I wonder, what is this place?
Those had been heady days, full and intense. It’s funny. I remember
the problems, the confusions and the fears of life we all dealt with.
But, that all seems to fade. It all seems to be replaced by images of
the days when it was all just okay. We all had plans back then,
patterns in which we expected the world to fit, how it was to be
deciphered.
Eventually you just can’t carry yourself any longer, can’t keep your
eyelids open, and can’t focus on anything but the flickering light of
the stars. Hours pass, at first slowly like a river and then all in a
rush, a climax and I am home in the dorm, waking up to the ringing of
the telephone.
When she is gone the apartment is silent, empty, almost like a person
sleeping, waiting to wake up. When she is gone, and I am alone, I curl
up on the bed, wait for the house to eject me from its dying corpse.
Crazy thoughts cross through my head, like slants of light in an
attic.
The Boston 395 rocks a bit, a creaking noise spilling in from the
undercarriage. I have decided that whatever this place is, all these
noises, sensations - all the train-ness of this place - is a
fabrication. It lulls you into a sense of security, allows you to feel
as if it’s a familiar place. But whatever it is, it’s not a train, or
at least not just a train.
The air, heightened, tense against the glass. I can hear the squeak of
shoes on linoleum, I can hear the soft rattle of a dying man’s
breathing. Men in white uniforms, sharp pressed lines, run past,
rolling gurneys down florescent hallways.
”
”
Jason Derr (The Boston 395)
“
Nico looked very tall and thin wearing a opaque black sweatshirt hoodie and dark inked skinny jeans. His outer physical structure was handsome and gaunt, straight jet black hair razored and clipped in angles, a few purple highlights, and his white skin toned the color of alabaster. She had always liked the slender salamander type. He totally looked punk rock tonight, and that made him look absolutely awesome! A curtain of fog parted in front of him, giving him even more of the illusion as if he was part of a rock band at a rock band concert. Katty now saw Nico with exaggerated clarity. Nico Rocket looked so freakin' hot! He looked so good-looking at times, especially within the dark scenes of rolling fog and a pitchy darkness. She randomly wondered what he looked like before he was bit and turned into a Vampire. Had he been a Renaissance geek just like her? Before she could really examine him and fantasize of what he must have looked like before turning into a Vampire, the fog closed in all around him again, surrounding him with a ring of solitary imprisonment. He now lurked as a shadow among the shadows, disappearing into the illusion of gray’s. She didn't like him for not showing up on time, but all had been forgiven as soon as she had seen him all dressed up in his Gothic best. So what if he didn't believe in punctuality? His hotness sure made up for the rest! Through the fog, she saw his bright red eyes pierce through the heaviness of the darkness. He then broke free from the fog, leaving a trail of the thickened smoke lingering far behind, and wide.
”
”
Keira D. Skye (Bite!)
“
Trust in the familiar seems to be matched by wariness of the unfamiliar. Jennifer Richeson of Northwestern University has conducted experiments in which white subjects had to interact in some way with a white or a black man before taking a mental test. Those who dealt with the black man got lower scores on the test, and their brain scans showed what Prof. Richeson called “heightened activity in areas of the brain associated with regulating our thoughts and emotions.” She interpreted this to mean that white subjects were struggling with the “awkwardness” or “exhaustion” of dealing with a black man, and that this interfered with their ability to take the mental test.
Researchers at Harvard and New York University had white and black subjects look repeatedly at a series of photographs of black and white faces, all with neutral expressions. Every time the subjects looked at one particular black face and one particular white face they got a mild electric shock. Lie detector-type devices showed that subjects would sweat—a typical stress reaction—when they saw the two faces they associated with the shocks. The researchers showed the photo series several times again, but without the shocks. White subjects quickly stopped sweating when they saw the white face formerly associated with the shock, but continued to sweat when they saw the black face. Black subjects had the opposite reaction, continuing to sweat when they saw the white but not the black face. Mahzarin Banaji, the study’s leader, concluded that this was a sign of natural human wariness of unfamiliar groups.
”
”
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
“
Dr. Knox Todd began documenting how patients’ race affects the treatment of pain when he was a doctor in the UCLA Emergency Center in the 1990s.46 He and colleagues examined the way doctors treated 139 white and Latino patients coming to the emergency room over a two-year period with a single injury—fractures of a long bone in either the arm or leg. Because this type of fracture is extremely painful, there is no medical reason to distinguish between the two groups of patients. Yet the researchers discovered that Latinos were twice as likely as whites to receive no pain medication while in the emergency room.47 Although it’s possible that the Latino patients complained less of pain, the doctors should have been aware of the high degree of pain they suffered, given the nature of their injuries. When Todd moved to Emory University School of Medicine, he led an Atlanta-based study that confirmed his finding in Los Angeles. This time his research team analyzed medical charts of 217 patients who were treated for long-bone fractures at an inner-city emergency room that served both black and white patients. In a 2000 article in Annals of Emergency Medicine, Todd reported that 43 percent of blacks, but only 26 percent of whites, received no pain medication. In this study, Todd took the additional step of documenting whether or not the patients expressed pain to their doctors. By carefully looking at notations in the medical files, he found that black patients were about as likely as whites to complain of pain. Black patients thus received pain medication half as often as whites because doctors did not order it for them, not because blacks do not feel pain or do not want pain relief.
”
”
Dorothy Roberts (Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century)
“
Olo-keZ G-- a tc
There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven.
-ECCLESIASTES 3:1
What would we do without our day planners? I have a large one for my desk and a carry-all that goes with me. I don't know how a person functions without some type of organizer. I just love it; it truly has become my daily-calendar bible. I take it with me everywhere. My whole life is in that book. Each evening I peek in to see what tomorrow has to bring. I just love to see a busy calendar; it makes me feel so alive. I've got this to do and that to do.
Then I come upon a day that has all white space. Not one thing to do. What, oh what, will I do to fill the space and time? That's the way I used to think and plan. All my spaces had appointments written down, and many times they even overlapped.
I now plan for white spaces. I even plan ahead weeks or months and black out "saved for me or my family" days. I have begun to realize that there are
precious times for myself and my loved ones. Bob and I really try to protect these saved spaces just for us. We may not go anywhere or do anything out of the ordinary, but it's our special time. We can do anything we want: sleep in, stay out late, go to lunch, read a book, go to a movie, or take a nap. I really look forward with great anticipation to when these white spaces appear on my calendar.
I've been so impressed when I've read biographies of famous people. Many of them are controllers of their own time. They don't let outsiders dictate their schedules. Sure, there are times when things have to be done on special days, but generally that isn't the case. When we begin to control our calendars, we will find that our lives are more enjoyable and that the tensions of life are more manageable. Make those white spaces your friend, not your enemy.
”
”
Emilie Barnes (The Tea Lover's Devotional)
“
Three-and-a-half-month-old infants already seem to exhibit the other-race effect. In a study at the University of Kentucky, white babies were very good at distinguishing faces with 100 percent Caucasian features from faces that had been graphically morphed to include features that were 70 percent white and 30 percent Asian. They couldn’t do the reverse: They could not tell 100 percent Asian faces from those that were morphed to include 30 percent white features. In other words, they could detect small differences between white and not-quite-white faces, but not the same kinds of differences between Asian and not-quite-Asian faces.
Lawrence A. Hirschfeld of the University of Michigan did some of the pioneering work on how early in life children begin to understand race. He showed children of ages three, four, and seven, a picture of “Johnny:” a chubby black boy in a police uniform, complete with whistle and toy gun. He then showed them pictures of adults who shared two of Johnny’s three main traits of race, body build, and uniform. Prof. Hirschfeld prepared all combinations—policemen who were fat but were white, thin black policemen, etc.—and asked the children which was Johnny’s daddy or which was Johnny all grown up. Even the three-year-olds were significantly more likely to choose the black man rather than the fat man or the policeman. They knew that weight and occupation can change but race is permanent.
In 1996, after 15 years of studying children and race, Prof. Hirschfeld concluded: “Our minds seem to be organized in a way that makes thinking racially—thinking that the human world can be segmented into discrete racial populations—an almost automatic part of our mental repertoire.”
When white preschoolers are shown racially ambiguous faces that look angry, they tend to say they are faces of blacks, but categorize happy faces as white. “These filters through which people see the world are present very early,” explained Andrew Baron of Harvard.
Phyllis Katz, then a professor at the University of Colorado, studied young children for their first six years. At age three, she showed them photographs of other children and asked them whom they would like to have as friends. Eighty-six percent of white children chose photographs of white children. At age five and six, she gave children pictures of people and told them to sort them into two piles by any criteria they liked. Sixty-eight percent sorted by race and only 16 by sex. Of her entire six-year study Prof. Katz said, “I think it is fair to say that at no point in the study did the children exhibit the Rousseau type of color-blindness that many adults expect.
”
”
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
“
I started blasting my gun. Letting loose a stream of words like I'd never used before. True to form, Misty didn't stay put and stood at my side. Tears stained her cheeks. Her gun firing wildly. It was a blur. The next thing I knew, no zombies were left standing and we knelt at Kali's side. I took out a rag and wiped the feathers from his face. We could tell he was still alive. His chest rising and falling in jerks. "Kali, how bad are you hurt?" I asked with an unsteady voice. "I'm okay, guys. Did we get all of them?" he whispered. "Nate, he's been bit all over!" I looked down at his body, covered in white feathers, speckled with splotches of deep red. "Yep. You got 'em, even those freak chickens." "Nate, I'm thirsty," his voice shaky and cracking. "Okay, buddy. We've got water in the truck." "No, not water. How about a glass of lemonade?" "Kali, what are you saying?" Misty's voice was tense as a piano string. "Hurry, Nate. I'm getting weak—the lemonade." I think running into the crowd of zombies would have been easier than this. Maybe that's why Kali chucked a rock at my head—he knew he could count on me for this. I ripped off a small water gun I had taped on my suit and tore off the cap. "Oh, Nate, don't. Maybe there's something we can do. Maybe—" she stopped. I put my hand behind Kali's neck and felt a slight burn, probably zombie snot. Misty took one of his hands and held it to her chest. "You were so brave, Kali, so brave." My hands didn't shake anymore; they were numb, as if they didn't belong to me. I manipulated them the best I could—like using chopsticks. Lifting Kali's head, I poured the juice into his mouth until it was gone. He was burning up; his skin felt like it was on fire. "I never thought I'd have friends, real friends—thank you, guys." He closed his eyes and I felt the muscles in his neck go limp. Gently, I put his head down and cleaned my blistering hand with the rag. Misty wiped her tears as I put the rag over Kali's face. "No, thank you, kid." We sat there still, silent except for the small cries that we both let slip out. Misty, still holding his hand. Me, staring down at my hands, soaked in tears. I don't know how much time passed. It could have been five minutes; it might have been an hour. Suddenly, the feathers moved, flying in every direction. Looking up, I saw a helicopter coming down in front of us—one of those big black military ones. It landed and three men stepped out. They wore protective gear like you see in those alien movies. I worried a little about what they might have planned for us. I've seen enough movies to know those government types can't be trusted—especially when they're in those protective suits. "What happened here? How did you manage to negate the virus?" one of the hooded figures asked. "Zombie juice," I replied. "Zombie juice?" "Actually it was the Super Zombie Juice Mega Bomb," Misty added as she stood and took my hand.
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M.J.A. Ware (Super Zombie Juice Mega Bomb (A Zombie Apocalypse Novel Book 1))
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If we consider the possibility that all women–from the infant suckling her mother’s breast, to the grown woman experiencing orgasmic sensations while suckling her own child, perhaps recalling her mother’s milk-smell in her own; to two women, like Virginia Woolf’s Chloe and Olivia, who share a laboratory; to the woman dying at ninety, touched and handled by women–exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not. It allows us to connect aspects of woman-identification as diverse as the impudent, intimate girl-friendships of eight- or nine-year-olds and the banding together of those women of the twelfth and fifteenth centuries known as Beguines who “shared houses, rented to one another, bequeathed houses to their room-mates … in cheap subdivided houses in the artisans’ area of town,” who “practiced Christian virtue on their own, dressing and living simply and not associating with men,” who earned their livings as spinners, bakers, nurses, or ran schools for young girls, and who managed–until the Church forced them to disperse–to live independent both of marriage and of conventual restrictions. It allows us to connect these women with the more celebrated “Lesbians” of the women’s school around Sappho of the seventh century B.C.; with the secret sororities and economic networks reported among African women; and with the Chinese marriage resistance sisterhoods–communities of women who refused marriage, or who if married often refused to consummate their marriages and soon left their husbands–the only women in China who were not footbound and who, Agnes Smedley tells us, welcomed the births of daughters and organized successful women’s strikes in the silk mills. It allows us to connect and compare disparate individual instances of marriage resistance: for example, the type of autonomy claimed by Emily Dickinson, a nineteenth-century white woman genius, with the strategies available to Zora Neale Hurston, a twentieth-century black woman genius. Dickinson never married, had tenuous intellectual friendships with men, lived self-convented in her genteel father’s house, and wrote a lifetime of passionate letters to her sister-in-law Sue Gilbert and a smaller group of such letters to her friend Kate Scott Anthon. Hurston married twice but soon left each husband, scrambled her way from Florida to Harlem to Columbia University to Haiti and finally back to Florida, moved in and out of white patronage and poverty, professional success and failure; her survival relationships were all with women, beginning with her mother. Both of these women in their vastly different circumstances were marriage resisters, committed to their own work and selfhood, and were later characterized as “apolitical ”. Both were drawn to men of intellectual quality; for both of them women provided the ongoing fascination and sustenance of life.
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Adrienne Rich (Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence)
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He ran long at the White House, and arrived late to his next meeting with Hillary Clinton, Jake Sullivan and Frank Ruggiero—their first major strategy session on Taliban talks after the secret meeting with A-Rod. She was waiting in her outer office, a spacious room paneled in white and gilt wood, with tasseled blue and pink curtains and an array of colorfully upholstered chairs and couches. In my time reporting to her later, I only ever saw Clinton take the couch, with guests of honor in the large chair kitty-corner to her. She’d left it open for him that day. “He came rushing in. . . . ” Clinton later said. “And, you know, he was saying ‘oh I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’ ” He sat down heavily and shrugged off his coat, rattling off a litany of his latest meetings, including his stop-in at the White House. “That was typical Richard. It was, like, ‘I’m doing a million things and I’m trying to keep all the balls in the air,’ ” she remembered. As he was talking, a “scarlet red” flush went up his face, according to Clinton. He pressed his hands over his eyes, his chest heaving. “Richard, what’s the matter?” Clinton asked. “Something horrible is happening,” he said. A few minutes later, Holbrooke was in an ambulance, strapped to a gurney, headed to nearby George Washington University Hospital, where Clinton had told her own internist to prepare the emergency room. In his typically brash style, he’d demanded that the ambulance take him to the more distant Sibley Memorial Hospital. Clinton overruled him. One of our deputies on the SRAP team, Dan Feldman, rode with him and held his hand. Feldman didn’t have his BlackBerry, so he scrawled notes on a State Department expense form for a dinner at Meiwah Restaurant as Holbrooke dictated messages and a doctor assessed him. The notes are a nonlinear stream of Holbrooke’s indomitable personality, slashed through with medical realities. “Call Eric in Axelrod’s office,” the first read. Nearby: “aortic dissection—type A . . . operation risk @ > 50 percent”—that would be chance of death. A series of messages for people in his life, again interrupted by his deteriorating condition: “S”—Secretary Clinton—“why always together for medical crises?” (The year before, he’d been with Clinton when she fell to the concrete floor of the State Department garage, fracturing her elbow.) “Kids—how much love them + stepkids” . . . “best staff ever” . . . “don’t let him die here” . . . “vascular surgery” . . . “no flow, no feeling legs” . . . “clot” . . . and then, again: “don’t let him die here want to die at home w/ his fam.” The seriousness of the situation fully dawning on him, Holbrooke turned to job succession: “Tell Frank”—Ruggiero—“he’s acting.” And finally: “I love so many people . . . I have a lot left to do . . . my career in public service is over.” Holbrooke cracked wise until they put him under for surgery. “Get me anything you need,” he demanded. “A pig’s heart. Dan’s heart.
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Ronan Farrow (War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence)
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Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A good slice of the settler population of that region were men who’d been given a choice between being shipped off to the New World in leg-irons and spending the rest of their lives in English prisons. The Crown saw no point in feeding them year after year, and they were far too dangerous to be turned loose on the streets of London—so, rather than overload the public hanging schedule, the King’s Minister of Gaol decided to put this scum to work on the other side of the Atlantic, in The Colonies, where cheap labor was much in demand.
Most of these poor bastards wound up in what is now the Deep South because of the wretched climate. No settler with good sense and a few dollars in his pocket would venture south of Richmond. There was plenty of opportunity around Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—and by British standards the climate in places like South Carolina and Georgia was close to Hell on Earth: swamps, alligators, mosquitoes, tropical disease... all this plus a boiling sun all day long and no way to make money unless you had a land grant from the King...
So the South was sparsely settled at first, and the shortage of skilled labor was a serious problem to the scattered aristocracy of would-be cotton barons who’d been granted huge tracts of good land that would make them all rich if they could only get people to work it.
The slave-trade was one answer, but Africa in 1699 was not a fertile breeding ground for middle-management types... and the planters said it was damn near impossible for one white man to establish any kind of control over a boatload of black primitives. The bastards couldn’t even speak English. How could a man get the crop in, with brutes like that for help?
There would have to be managers, keepers, overseers: white men who spoke the language, and had a sense of purpose in life. But where would they come from? There was no middle class in the South: only masters and slaves... and all that rich land lying fallow.
The King was quick to grasp the financial implications of the problem: The crops must be planted and harvested, in order to sell them for gold—and if all those lazy bastards needed was a few thousand half-bright English-speaking lackeys in order to bring the crops in... hell, that was easy: Clean out the jails, cut back on the Crown’s grocery bill, jolt the liberals off balance by announcing a new “Progressive Amnesty” program for hardened criminals....
Wonderful. Dispatch royal messengers to spread the good word in every corner of the kingdom; and after that send out professional pollsters to record an amazing 66 percent jump in the King’s popularity... then wait a few weeks before announcing the new 10 percent sales tax on ale.
That’s how the South got settled. Not the whole story, perhaps, but it goes a long way toward explaining why George Wallace is the Governor of Alabama. He has the same smile as his great-grandfather—a thrice-convicted pig thief from somewhere near Nottingham, who made a small reputation, they say, as a jailhouse lawyer, before he got shipped out.
With a bit of imagination you can almost hear the cranky little bastard haranguing his fellow prisoners in London jail, urging them on to revolt:
“Lissen here, you poor fools! There’s not much time! Even now—up there in the tower—they’re cookin up some kind of cruel new punishment for us! How much longer will we stand for it? And now they want to ship us across the ocean to work like slaves in a swamp with a bunch of goddamn Hottentots!
“We won’t go! It’s asinine! We’ll tear this place apart before we’ll let that thieving old faggot of a king send us off to work next to Africans!
“How much more of this misery can we stand, boys? I know you’re fed right up to here with it. I can see it in your eyes— pure misery! And I’m tellin’ you, we don’t have to stand for it!...
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Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72)
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only 1 of every 3 young black male high school dropouts was able to obtain any type of employment during the average month in 2005” and just 23 percent worked full time. That so few African American dropouts find any kind of work explains how their annual earnings can be so low—an excess of zero earnings drives down the average. Wilson (2008, 58, figure 4.1) adds that the black-white employment gap widens as one descends the education ladder, from 86 percent versus 88 percent among male college graduates in 2005, to 57 percent versus 73 percent among high school graduates, to 33 percent versus 54 percent among high school dropouts.12
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Karl Alexander (The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood (The American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology))
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When we assume that our suffering is stable and permanent, or when we have been suffering for a long time, we begin to engage in what psychologists call black-and-white, or all-or-nothing, thinking. This means we perceive the world through a dualistic eye, seeing things and situations as either all good or all bad. This type of thinking can easily lead you to generalize about your future based on how you feel now. The assumption is that life stinks and it won’t get better, and the resulting emotion is, understandably, depression.
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Sameet M. Kumar (Grieving Mindfully: A Compassionate and Spiritual Guide to Coping with Loss)
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I'm so tired of being a type... it's not just a black and white thing. Jock. Geek. Stoner. No one is considered just a human being, it seems like.
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Bill Konigsberg (Honestly Ben (Openly Straight, #2))
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Flares of light began to pulse from Evie’s chest, just as they had when her father’s scale sank into the cauldron. She glared at Hardcastle with fierce righteousness, and found that she was no longer alone on that black tower. She stood in a vast, sun-washed meadow of flowing grass and tiny yellow flowers. A figure materialized from the crisp, clear air behind her, a woman in an ethereal violet gown with a lily in her hair. The same princess she had seen the first time she looked into the dragon’s blood. “You are not alone,” she said. “Who are you?” “I am Princess Middlemiss. And I am always with you. We are all always with you.” A sheet of air glistened behind her, and dozens of others appeared. They were princesses of all ages, all shapes and shades and types. She saw a woman with black hair and sharp blue eyes and knew her instantly as Princess Snow White. There were others she recognized from Volf’s books: Blackstone and Rose-Red and Chambéry. The great princesses of the past and present, all standing with her now. “As long as there is goodness in your heart, you are never alone.
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M.A. Larson (Pennyroyal Academy (Pennyroyal Academy, #1))
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The Indian tribes living along the river valleys and on the offshore islands from northern Washington to Alaska are called the Northwest Coast tribes. They are noted for their wood-carving, particularly for their totem poles. These carved cedar poles were originally corner posts for the Indian houses. Later the custom of erecting one large pole in front of the house was adopted. There are several different types of totem poles. Some were erected to the memory of the dead. Others portrayed the owner’s family tree or illustrated some mythological adventure.
The poles varied in height from about 40 to 70 feet. The larger ones were as much as 3 feet in diameter. The carver was an important person in his tribe. For his work he might be paid from one hundred to two hundred and fifty blankets, each worth about three dollars. The early poles were painted black, white, and red. Other colors were used when the traders brought in factory-made paints.
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W. Ben Hunt (Indian Crafts & Lore)
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order established by the Americans in 1776 also established a hierarchy. It created a hierarchy between men, who benefited from it, and women, whom it left disempowered. It created a hierarchy between whites, who enjoyed liberty, and blacks and American Indians, who were considered humans of a lesser type and therefore did not share in the equal rights of men.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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When mostly white donors gave money, out of a type of love that really resembled guilt, their hearts were not bent toward my family and neighbors necessarily. They were moved by the emotional vulnerability of other white people who claimed proximity to Camden's people and stories by subjecting themselves to the way of life in an impoverished city.
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Darnell L. Moore (No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America)
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As a kid I understood that people were different colors, but in my head white and black and brown were like types of chocolate. Dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and I was the milk chocolate. But we were all just chocolate. I didn’t know any of it had anything to do with “race.” I didn’t know what race was.
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Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (One World Essentials))
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What to remove? Dairy. From cows, goats, and sheep (including butter). Grains. For the more intensive version of this 30-day diet, eliminate all grains. This is important for those with digestive or autoimmune conditions. If this feels undoable for a full month, add in a small serving a day of gluten-free grains like white rice or quinoa. If that still feels undoable, consider a whole-foods diet rich in vegetables that is strictly gluten- and dairy-free. Legumes. Beans of all kinds (soy, black, kidney, pinto, etc.), lentils, and peanuts. Green peas and snap peas are okay. Sweeteners, real or artificial. Sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, maple syrup, honey, agave, Splenda, Equal, NutraSweet, xylitol, stevia, etc. Processed or refined snack foods. Sodas and diet sodas. Alcohol in any form. White potatoes. Premade sauces and seasonings. How to avoid common pitfalls: Prepare well beforehand. Choose a time frame during which you will have limited or reduced travel, and that doesn’t include holidays or special occasions. Study the list of foods allowed on the diet and make a shopping list. Remove the foods from your pantry or refrigerator that aren’t allowed on the diet, if that makes it easier. Engage the whole family to try this together, or find a friend to join you. Success happens in community. Set up a calendar to mark your progress. Print out a free 30-day online calendar, tape it to the refrigerator door, and mark off each day. Pack snacks with you, pack your lunch, call ahead to restaurants to check their menu (or check online). Get enough vegetables and fats. If you feel jittery or lose too much weight, increase your carbohydrates (starchy vegetables like yams, taro, sweet potatoes). Don’t misread withdrawal-type symptoms as the diet “not working.” These symptoms usually resolve within a week’s time. Personalize it. Start with the basics above and: * If you’re having trouble with autoimmune conditions, eliminate eggs, too. * If you’re prone to weight gain, eat less meat and heavier foods (ex: stews, chili), more vegetables and raw foods. * If you’re prone to weight loss or having trouble gaining weight, eat more meats and heavier foods (ex: stews, chili), less raw foods like salads. * If you’re generally healthy and wanting a boost in energy, try short-term fasts of 12–16 hours. Due to the circadian rhythm of the digestive tract, skipping dinner is best (as opposed to skipping breakfast). Try this 1–2 times a week. (This fast also means no supplements or beverages other than tea or water during the fasting time.)
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Cynthia Li (Brave New Medicine: A Doctor's Unconventional Path to Healing Her Autoimmune Illness)
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I could have heard, the black white Ink, in my type writer.
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Petra Hermans (Voor een betere wereld)
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The War on Drugs pushed by President Ronald Reagan. Even though White people and Black people were selling and using drugs at similar rates, the new drug laws targeted Black people. For example, one law made it a more serious crime to be caught with small amounts of the types of drugs more often found in poor Black neighborhoods than with larger amounts of the types of drugs more often found in rich White neighborhoods. The result of this new policy was that millions of Black Americans were sent to jail. It was a war on Black people, and it devastated Black communities.
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Sonja Cherry-Paul (Stamped (For Kids): Racism, Antiracism, and You)
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I say: if the debt you feel has not been paid, then pray for the grace to forgive those you believe are indebted to you. You will come to know a peace you have never known, and you will embrace a feeling of freedom simply because you are free. Those whose lives had been marred by the ravages of Jim Crow segregationist laws live far richer spiritual lives by practicing radical forgiveness towards those who oppressed them than they would by seeking retributive justice. This is because an obsession with justice and entitlement shackles the soul in some sense to the compensations of the one who has harmed one. A spirit of aggrievement, paradoxically, places one in a dependent role on the other; in this instance, one is not free. Radical forgiveness frees the soul from resentment and fosters an ethic of care towards those who have harmed one. Radical forgiveness not only forges new relationships, but it also heralds a model for a new type of humanity, a new planetary ethic, and humanism devoid of bitterness that will change the world. To the black individual rising and striving to make something superlative of his or her own life, who refuses to be shackled by the racial script that would ossify the soul and calcify the heart, you are a historical process emerging in this world. You know as I do that for this to happen, the race to which we were assigned must die so that the individual can rise. The individual must rise!
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Jason D. Hill (What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression)
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I spend most of my Mondays with blood. I am a hematologist by training. I study blood and treat blood diseases, including cancers and precancers of white blood cells. On Monday, I arrive much earlier than my patients, when the morning light is still aslant across the black slate of the lab benches. I close the shutters and peer through the microscope at blood smears. A droplet of blood has been spread across a glass slide, to make a film of single cells, each stained with special dyes. The slides are like previews of books, or movie trailers. The cells will begin to reveal the stories of the patients even before I see them in person. I sit by the microscope in the darkened room, a notepad by my side, and whisper to myself as I go through the slides. It’s an old habit; a passerby might well consider me unhinged. Each time I examine a slide, I mumble out the method that my hematology professor in medical school, a tall man with a perpetually leaking pen in his pocket, taught me: “Divide the main cellular components of blood. Red cell. White cell. Platelet. Examine each cell type separately. Write what you observe about each type. Move methodically. Number, color, morphology, shape, size.” It is, by far, the favorite time of my day at work. Number, color, morphology, shape, size. I move methodically. I love looking at cells, in the way that a gardener loves looking at plants—not just the whole but also the parts within the parts: the leaves, the fronds, the precise smell of loam around a fern, the way the woodpecker has bored into the high branches of a tree. Blood speaks to me—but only if I pay attention.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human)
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There is a correlation between the personality types of technical people and our “black or white” mindsets. We have chosen career fields where the fundamentals are 1s and 0s, on or off, so it makes sense we view the world as black and white, rather than with shades of gray.
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Christian Espinosa (The Smartest Person in the Room: The Root Cause and New Solution for Cybersecurity)
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One of Origen’s arguments for the truth of Christianity was that while philosophy had only made the elite good, Christianity had lifted people of all levels of society and of every different type and race to a “philosophical” way of life. . . . Just as male needs female, rich needs poor, white needs black, so intellectuals need the simple. . . . The church is itself when it bridges all these gaps and tensions between people of different kinds.
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Samuel Wells (Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics)
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Outsiders... projected their fear of race mixing onto the Latter-Day Saints almost from the beginning. Some Missouri residents... complained that the Saints had 'opened an asylum for rogues and vagabonds and free blacks,' while others were concerned that the Saints promoted black 'ascendancy over whites.'... Four days after Phelp's 'extra' appeared in print, a crowd of Jackson County residents stormed his printing office and destroyed all remaining copies of the extra as well as the original July issue of the Star. They scattered Phelp's type and the press itself and demolished his office and home. They seized Bishop Edward Partridge and Charles Allen and hauled them to the town square, where they tarred and feathered them... It marked the beginning of the Latter-Day Saint expulsion from Jackson County. Before the end of the year, some 1,200 Latter-Day Saints would be driven from their homes, charged, at least in part, with being too inclusive.
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W. Paul Reeve (Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood)
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Being with you is disrespectful to me. You are nowhere close to what I like. Everyone that knows me, knows what type of women I prefer. Hell, even you know. When my friends ask me why I married someone like you, I don’t have an answer for them. This marriage is pointless and I’m no longer wasting your time or mine. I did what I did the past few nights because I wanted to see if I could muster any feelings for you, and I couldn’t. That’s why I didn’t put my dick in you. I couldn’t even get hard enough with you. Your kind just doesn’t do it for me.
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Octavia Grant (Black Husband White Wife)
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Heightened capacity for visual imagery and fantasy “Was able to move imaginary parts in relation to each other.” “It was the non-specific fantasy that triggered the idea.” “The next insight came as an image of an oyster shell, with the mother-of-pearl shining in different colors. I translated that in the idea of an interferometer—two layers separated by a gap equal to the wavelength it is desired to reflect.” “As soon as I began to visualize the problem, one possibility immediately occurred. A few problems with that concept occurred, which seemed to solve themselves rather quickly…. Visualizing the required cross section was instantaneous.” “Somewhere along in here, I began to see an image of the circuit. The gates themselves were little silver cones linked together by lines. I watched the circuit flipping through its paces….” “I began visualizing all the properties known to me that a photon possesses and attempted to make a model for a photon…. The photon was comprised of an electron and a positron cloud moving together in an intermeshed synchronized helical orbit…. This model was reduced for visualizing purposes to a black-and-white ball propagating in a screwlike fashion through space. I kept putting the model through all sorts of known tests.” 5. Increased ability to concentrate “Was able to shut out virtually all distracting influences.” “I was easily able to follow a train of thought to a conclusion where normally I would have been distracted many times.” “I was impressed with the intensity of concentration, the forcefulness and exuberance with which I could proceed toward the solution.” “I considered the process of photoconductivity…. I kept asking myself, ‘What is light? and subsequently, ‘What is a photon?’ The latter question I repeated to myself several hundred times till it was being said automatically in synchronism with each breath. I probably never in my life pressured myself as intently with a question as I did this one.” “It is hard to estimate how long this problem might have taken without the psychedelic agent, but it was the type of problem that might never have been solved. It would have taken a great deal of effort and racking of the brains to arrive at what seemed to come more easily during the session.” 6. Heightened empathy with external processes and objects “…the sense of the problem as a living thing that is growing toward its inherent solution.” “First I somehow considered being the needle and being bounced around in the groove.” “I spent a productive period …climbing down on my retina, walking around and thinking about certain problems relating to the mechanism of vision.” “Ability to grasp the problem in its entirety, to ‘dive’ into it without reservations, almost like becoming the problem.” “Awareness of the problem itself rather than the ‘I’ that is trying to solve it.” 7. Heightened empathy with people “It was also felt that group performance was affected in …subtle ways. This may be evidence that some sort of group action was going on all the time.” “Only at intervals did I become aware of the music. Sometimes, when I felt the other guys listening to it, it was a physical feeling of them listening to it.” “Sometimes we even had the feeling of having the same thoughts or ideas.” 8. Subconscious data more accessible “…brought about almost total recall of a course that I had had in thermodynamics; something that I had never given any thought about in years.” “I was in my early teens and wandering through the gardens where I actually grew up. I felt all my prior emotions in relation to my surroundings.
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James Fadiman (The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys)
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Judith Richards (1993), a teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, recounts her experience in a third/fourth grade classroom of children of white and African-American professionals and working-class Haitian immigrants. When she structured a traditional math problem-solving activity, the children of professionals invariably took the lead. However, when she embedded the same type of math problem-solving activity in a traditional Haitian folk tale, the Haitian children took the lead. It seems reasonable that culturally responsive pedagogy would positively affect learning. In both instances, the cognitive task facing children from cultures that were different from mainstream culture was simplified when they did not have to deal with both an unfamiliar speech event and instructional content. Further, one can imagine that using a familiar communication style could possibly reduce cultural dissonance, create a sense of membership, and symbolically affirm children who are members of racial minority groups (Erickson 1987).
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Theresa Perry (Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement among African-American Students)
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In fact, Nick had not run into anything yet that he didn’t consider trash. There were too many blacks and Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. Not to mention, too many rich, stuck-up, white people. Elite, better-than-you types that really pissed Nick off. He had to get back to the damn South and fast.
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Stan R. Mitchell (Sold Out)
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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.
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Dee Oliver (The Undertaker's Wife: A True Story of Love, Loss, and Laughter in the Unlikeliest of Places)
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Traditionally, the needs of ethnically diverse consumers had been met by smaller companies—the equivalent, in movie terms, of independent filmmakers. In the seventies, Shindana introduced two Barbie-like fashion dolls: Malaika, taller and stouter than Barbie; and Career Girl Wanda, about three-quarters as tall as Barbie and as proportionately svelte. But in 1991, when Mattel brought out its "Shani" line—three Barbie-sized African-American dolls available with mahogany, tawny, or beige complexions— there could be no doubt that "politically correct" was profitable. "For six years, I had been preaching these demographics—showing pie charts of black kids under ten representing eighteen percent of the under-ten population and Hispanic kids representing sixteen percent—and nobody was interested," said Yla Eason, an African-American graduate of Harvard Business School who in 1985 founded Olmec Corporation, which makes dolls and action figures of color. "But when Mattel came out with those same demographics and said, 'Ethnically correct is the way,' it legitimatized our business." Some say that the toy industry's idea of "ethnically correct" doesn't go far enough, however. Ann duCille, chairman of the African-American Studies Program and an associate professor of English at Wesleyan University, is a severe critic. After studying representations of race in fashion dolls for over a year, she feels that the dolls reflect a sort of "easy pluralism." "I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say I'd rather see no black dolls than see something like Shani or Black Barbie," she told me, "but I would hope for something more—which is not about to happen." Nor is she wholly enamored of Imani and Melenik, Olmec's equivalent of Barbie and Ken. "Supposedly these are dolls for black kids to play with that look like them, when in fact they don't look like them. That's a problematic statement, of course, because there's no 'generic black kid.' But those dolls look too like Barbie for me. They have the same body type, the same long, straight hair—and I think it sends a problematic message to kids. It's about marketing, about business—so don't try to pass it off as being about the welfare of black children." Lisa Jones, an African-American writer who chronicled the introduction of Mattel's Shani dolls for the Village Voice, is less harsh. Too old to have played with Christie—Barbie's black friend, born in 1968—Jones recalls as a child having expressed annoyance with her white classmates by ripping the heads and arms off her two white Barbie dolls. Any fashion doll of color, she thinks, would have been better for her than those blondes. "Having been a little girl who grew up without the images," she told me, "I realize that however they fail to reach the Utopian mark, they're still useful.
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M.G. Lord (Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll)
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Ebonics – describes the type of “black English” spoken by (some) black children and adults. Note that no “word” has been created to describe the speech patterns and mispronounciations of English by poor or uneducated whites (to the authors’ knowledge).
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Anonymous (Trojan Horse: Death of a Dark Nation)
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Naturally, the type of dual economy articulated in Verwoerd’s speech is rather different from Lewis’s dual economy theory. In South Africa the dual economy was not an inevitable outcome of the process of development. It was created by the state. In South Africa there was to be no seamless movement of poor people from the backward to the modern sector as the economy developed. On the contrary, the success of the modern sector relied on the existence of the backward sector, which enabled white employers to make huge profits by paying very low wages to black unskilled workers. In South Africa there would not be a process of the unskilled workers from the traditional sector gradually becoming educated and skilled, as Lewis’s approach envisaged. In fact, the black workers were purposefully kept unskilled and were barred from high-skill occupations so that skilled white workers would not face competition and could enjoy high wages. In South Africa black Africans were indeed “trapped” in the traditional economy, in the Homelands. But this was not the problem of development that growth would make good. The Homelands were what enabled the development of the white economy. It
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Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty)
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Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers.' Huntington concludes (regretfully) this was no longer possible by the late sixties. Why not? Presidential authority was eroded. There was a broad reappraisal of governmental action and 'morality' in the post-Vietnam/post-Watergate era among political leaders who, like the general public, openly questioned 'the legitimacy of hierarchy, coercion, discipline, secrecy, and deception—all of which are, in some measure,' according to Huntington, 'inescapable attributes of the process of government.' Congressional power became more decentralized and party allegiances to the administration weakened. Traditional forms of public and private authority were undermined as 'people no longer felt the same compulsion to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character, or talents.' ¶ Throughout the sixties and into the seventies, too many people participated too much: 'Previously passive or unorganized groups in the population, blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students, and women now embarked on concerted efforts to establish their claims to opportunities, positions, rewards, and privileges, which they had not considered themselves entitled [sic] before. [Italics mine.] ¶ Against their will, these 'groups'—the majority of the population—have been denied 'opportunities, positions, rewards and privileges.' More democracy is not the answer: 'applying that cure at the present time could well be adding fuel to the flames.' Huntington concludes that 'some of the problems in governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy...Needed, instead, is a greater degree of moderation in democracy.' ¶ '...The effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups. In the past, every democratic society has had a marginal population, of greater or lesser size, which has not actively participated in politics. In itself, this marginality on the part of some groups is inherently undemocratic but it is also one of the factors which has enabled democracy to function effectively. [Italics mine.]' ¶ With a candor which has shocked those trilateralists who are more accustomed to espousing the type of 'symbolic populism' Carter employed so effectively in his campaign, the Governability Report expressed the open secret that effective capitalist democracy is limited democracy! (See Alan Wolfe, 'Capitalism Shows Its Face.')
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Holly Sklar (Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management)
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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.
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Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
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Lard-type breeds, such as the Mangalista, Guinea Hog, and Large Black, tend to have compact bodies and a high proportion of fat; bacon-type pigs, such as the Yorkshire and Tamworth, are long bodied and low fat. Intermediate breeds, such as the Chester White, Hampshire, and Large White, are sometimes referred to as “meat-type” because they are now used primarily for hams, loins, and such, but they were originally more all-purpose.
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Anonymous
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Rather than employ Aristotelian logic—that is, the binary, yes/no, black versus white type of thinking—the Count favored multivalued, pluralistic thought that was modulated by—but not ruled by—subjective feeling. Basically, Korzybski was saying, Hey, be cool: “Don’t get mad—get Null-A!
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Donald Fagen (Eminent Hipsters)
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You can't stop the thought about hell, probably you know that it doesn't exist as far as I can tell you and some other type of sources. But what happen with the serial killers?? THe brutal killers, they go to heaven??? - Really??
So there isn't communication between hell and heaven so they put all in one place?? - WTF, how big this soul planet is it?
200000000000000000000000000 People even and more are there and everyday you see new born child or children and old people or young people die.... Okay some die because of start of smoke at early age, other people start to smoke and drink alcohol because other have said them it's incrediable to drink, you aren't a human without a drink, you can't be in our group if you don't drink and many other stuff (as Alan Macmillan Orr said in his book The Little book of life)...
- Did you knew that there are stuff which believers don't know or know and still believe??
You should check out the holy book what's said think little and then do whatever you are on the way to do.
- As first I just read a an article called "Souls do not Exist Evidence from Science & Philosophy Against Mind-Body Dualism" what I read it will blow your mind. I'm sure if you believe in god the % will go low or probably you will change you direction...
As far as I'm on the road I can tell that there are people which read this and this and this and continue to believe, but it's WRITTEN BLACK ON WHITE THE TRUTH AND THEY PREFER TO STAY IN THE COMFORT ZONE, BECAUSE THERE IS COMFORT IF THEY COME HERE THERE WON'T BE COMFORT FOR THE FEW WEEKS, MONTHS OR EVEN YEARS, THEY NEED TO BUILD EVERYTHING LIKE AGAIN, LIKE YOU HAVE RESET YOUR SCORE AT GAME AND YOU START AGAIN AND AGAIN...
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Deyth Banger
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McClury folded back the rifle’s bipod and stood, disturbing the light covering of snow that lay across his body. His weapon was an Accuracy International L96, a bolt-action rifle made by the Brits. In McClury’s opinion one of the best all-round rifles in the world for this type of work. Precise and powerful but not too big or heavy. He’d used enough of them in the past to qualify his opinion. He wore white Gore-Tex pants, a jacket with a hood, and a white ski mask. The rifle’s furniture had been wrapped in strips of white electrical tape. McClury unbuttoned and unzipped the jacket and threw it off. It was camouflage and protection against the cold but impeded movement. Underneath he wore a black thermal shirt. He felt the chill immediately, but for now he could live with it. He left the white ski mask in place. His hide was a little under five hundred yards away, overlooking the target’s chalet. McClury had been set up just under the crest of a snowy outcrop dotted with trees to hide his silhouette and to make him virtually invisible.
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Tom Wood (The Hunter (Victor the Assassin, #1))
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RICHARD NIXON AND his team of aides had carefully studied George Wallace’s presidential campaigns. They realized that his segregationist banter made him attractive only to “the foam-at-the-mouth-segregationists.” Nixon decided to appeal to these Wallace-type segregationists while also attracting all those Americans refusing to live in “dangerous” Black neighborhoods, refusing to believe that Black schools could be equal, refusing to accept busing initiatives to integrate schools, refusing to individualize Black negativity, refusing to believe that Black welfare mothers were deserving, and refusing to champion Black Power over majority-Black counties and cities—all those racists who refused to believe they were racist in 1968. Nixon framed his campaign, as a close adviser explained, to allow a potential supporter to “avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by [the] racist appeal.” How would he do that? Easy. Demean Black people, and praise White people, without ever saying Black people or White people.1 Historians have named this the “southern strategy.” In fact, it was—and remained over the next five decades—the national Republican strategy as the GOP tried to unite northern and southern anti-Black (and anti-Latina/o) racists, war hawks, and fiscal and social conservatives. The
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Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
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Mid-twentieth-century Virginia congratulated itself on having devised the “Virginia Way,” a distinctive form of Jim Crow in which Blacks and whites lived peaceably together in lives of “separation by consent,” in the words of Douglas Southall Freeman, a Richmond newspaper editor and renowned Robert E. Lee biographer. Freeman acknowledged that this was a social order designed to perpetuate “the continued and unchallengeable dominance of Southern whites,” who, he told his readers, would work to provide the assurance of safety and security to Black Virginians in return for their acquiescence in the status quo. “Southern Negroes,” he explained, “have far more to gain by conforming than by rebellion … by deserving rather than demanding more.” Elite white Virginians, he posited, had inherited a legacy of gentility accompanied by the imperatives of noblesse oblige; Virginia’s Black people, in turn, were “inherently of a higher type than those of any other state.” Nowhere else, Freeman insisted, “are the Negroes more encouraged through the influence of friendship for and confidence in them, on the part of whites, to be law abiding and industrious.” But never to claim equality.5
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Drew Gilpin Faust (Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury)
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Something akin to pride kreeps into his voice, but it's a hollow sort of pride. It's the pride of someone who's rarely proud of anything. It's the type of pride that can be knocked over with a feather, and so it rarely gets to shine in the face of the world.
The little Black kid flashes those impossibly white teeth at me and he laughs and then he covers his smile and quells the laughter [...], and I know that he's spent his entire life being afraid to be happy.
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Jason Mott (Hell of a Book)
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Quiet as it's kept, there is a certain type of "upper class" white folks who don't use "colored help" at all. In fact, household labor is a segregated occupation. A Lancashire-born (English) butler, asked if he had encountered many black men and women in his 20 years of service, said reflectively, "I can't think of one I worked with. On one job we had Italian cook, an Irish kitchen man, a French lady's maid, an English butler, and an English parlormaid." The upper echelon's household staff is 99-99/100% white.
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Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor (Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off: A Domestic Rap by Verta Mae)
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The most obvious explanation for explaining black-white inequality, especially historically, is racism and discrimination. African Americans first arrived in the United States in large numbers in colonial times via the slave trade and were heavily concentrated in southern states, such as South Carolina and Mississippi, where they often worked on plantations. They had few rights and could be bought and sold at will, meaning that families were frequently broken up at the discretion of their owners. Each state had its slave code that regulated the relationship between the slave and owner. The South Carolina slave code, for example, stated, among many provisions, that no slave should be taught to write and that slaves were forbidden to leave the owner’s property unless accompanied by a white person or by permission. Masters who killed their slaves without justification were subject to a fine, but all types of punishments (including those leading to the death of slaves) for infractions were allowed.
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John Iceland (Race and Ethnicity in America (Sociology in the Twenty-First Century Book 2))
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Do You Like Animals? is a wild animal menagerie of fun as children view pictures and read stories about elephants, lions, leopards, rhinos, hippos, zebras, giraffes, camels, kangaroos, penguins, and much more. The book helps children meet the animals up close and learn fun facts about how they live in the wild. The author/illustrator viewed the animals in the jungles, bush, and deserts of Africa, Australia, and South America before writing about them and painting them in forms that would be enjoyable and educational for children.
For example, children will learn why elephants have trunks, why giraffes and leopards have spots, whether zebras’ stripes are black-on-white or white-on-black, how long hippos can hold their breath, the amazing characteristics of howler monkeys’ tails, why some kangaroos have a pouch, whether ostriches really bury their heads in the sand, the types of camels that have either one or two humps…
Through stories that rhyme and pictures painted with punch this book is a must for children who like to have fun while they learn!
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M.S. Gatto (Do You Like Wild Animals?)
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Most of his fellow TRU deputies were white country boys of a type Carl knew well. The majority were ten to fifteen years older than he, and some were over fifty. In a town with high unemployment, men didn't give up jobs with benefits unless they were pushed out usually after an election. But despite the age and background of the men, there was an attitude of benign tolerance toward black officers in the unit. Prejudice still existed, but it was an amorphous thing, difficult to point at and impossible to prove, except in a few cases. Even the hardcore, Southern-rock NASCAR types accepted that civil rights reforms were here to stay, and they tried to make the best of it.
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Greg Iles (Third Degree)
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The wanting frightened me. I wasn’t the type to hang my hope on another person. It was too dangerous
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Hailey Edwards (Black Arts, White Craft (Black Hat Bureau, #2))