“
This promise - that you will get more because they exist to get less - is woven throughout our entire society. Our politics, our education system, our infrastructure - anywhere there is a finite amount of power, influence, visibility, wealth, or opportunity. Anywhere in which someone might miss out. There the lure of that promise sustains racism.
White Supremacy is this nation's oldest pyramid scheme. Even those who have lost everything to the scheme are still hanging in there, waiting for their turn to cash out.
”
”
Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race)
“
There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this -- which will not be tomorrow and will not be today and may very well be never -- the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.
”
”
James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
“
Racism still exists in the U.S., but we have the strength and courage to overcome it.
”
”
Leonard Seet
“
I wanna say I am somebody. I wanna say it on subway, TV, movie, LOUD. I see the pink faces in suits look over top of my head. I watch myself disappear in their eyes, their tesses. I talk loud but still I don't exist.
”
”
Sapphire (Push)
“
Even today there still exists in the South--and in certain areas of the North--the license that our society allows to unjust officials who implement their authority in the name of justice to practice injustice against minorities. Where, in the days of slavery, social license and custom placed the unbridled power of the whip in the hands of overseers and masters, today--especially in the southern half of the nation--armies of officials are clothed in uniform, invested with authority, armed with the instruments of violence and death and conditioned to believe that they can intimidate, maim or kill Negroes with the same recklessness that once motivated the slaveowner. If one doubts this conclusion, let him search the records and find how rarely in any southern state a police officer has been punished for abusing a Negro.
”
”
Martin Luther King Jr. (Why We Can't Wait)
“
It was not only colored people who praised John, since they could not, John felt, in any case really know; but white people also said it, in fact had said it first and said it still. It was when John was five years old and in the first grade that he was first noticed; and since he was noticed by an eye altogether alien and impersonal, he began to perceive, in wild uneasiness, his individual existence.
”
”
James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain)
“
Racial hatred in America still exists but never was it anything like the time immediately after the Civil War. The western history of our nation would not be complete without the story of former slaves that helped develop the unique character of the West.
”
”
William Silverman
“
It's alive and well everywhere. Native Americans get a lot of crap in the West and south west. Muslims get treated like crap in just about every country in the Western world lately. Black people are mistreated in some parts of the US still. There are black people who are racist against white people. I've recently encountered someone who decided they couldn't tolerate my presence because I'm catholic, which according them makes me a pedophile, Satan worshipper and a whore.
I've even encountered discrimination from people over seas for being American. Especially with my cousin's friends from England. They were rude to me the entire visit. They thought that I had to be an ignorant, xenophobic, racist slob just because I was from America and they spent most of the time trying to pick a fight with me to prove it.
Racism exists, but don't take the comments you read online seriously. A good 80-90% of those are trolls looking for attention or a bored teenager who thinks it's funny to be an idiot.
”
”
Kathryn Stockett
“
We are going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the Almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands. So however difficult it is during this period, however difficult it is to continue to live with the agony and the continued existence of racism, however difficult it is to live amidst the constant hurt, the constant insult and the constant disrespect, I can still sing we shall overcome. We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.
We shall overcome because Carlisle is right. "No lie can live forever." We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right. "Truth crushed to earth will rise again." We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right. "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne." Yet that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the Bible is right. "You shall reap what you sow." With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all of God's children all over this nation - black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old negro spiritual, "Free at Last, Free at Last, Thank God Almighty, We are Free At Last.
”
”
Martin Luther King Jr.
“
The humanitarian philosophies that have been developed (sometimes under some religious banner and invariably in the face of religious opposition) are human inventions, as the name implies - and our species deserves the credit. I am a devout atheist - nothing else makes any sense to me and I must admit to being bewildered by those, who in the face of what appears so obvious, still believe in a mystical creator. However I can see that the promise of infinite immortality is a more palatable proposition than the absolute certainty of finite mortality which those of us who are subject to free thought (as opposed to free will) have to look forward to and many may not have the strength of character to accept it.
Thus I am a supporter of Amnesty International, a humanist and an atheist. I believe in a secular, democratic society in which women and men have total equality, and individuals can pursue their lives as they wish, free of constraints - religious or otherwise. I feel that the difficult ethical and social problems which invariably arise must be solved, as best they can, by discussion and am opposed to the crude simplistic application of dogmatic rules invented in past millennia and ascribed to a plethora of mystical creators - or the latest invention; a single creator masquerading under a plethora of pseudonyms. Organisations which seek political influence by co-ordinated effort disturb me and thus I believe religious and related pressure groups which operate in this way are acting antidemocratically and should play no part in politics. I also have problems with those who preach racist and related ideologies which seem almost indistinguishable from nationalism, patriotism and religious conviction.
”
”
Harry W. Kroto
“
That racism still exists is taken as evidence of the failure of the liberal project, but of course nobody has made the case that it has been eradicated. If a disease is cured but a few symptoms linger, one does not claim that the treatment was ineffective. Social liberalism is an ongoing process because it recognizes the imperfectability of human nature.
”
”
Andrew Doyle (The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World)
“
Darwinism met with such overwhelming success because it provided, on the basis of inheritance, the ideological weapons for race and well as class rule and could be used for, as well as against, race discrimination. Politically speaking, Darwinism as such was neutral, and it has led, indeed, to all kinds of pacifism and cosmopolitanism as well as to the sharpest forms of imperialistic ideologies. In the seventies and eighties of the last century, Darwinism was still almost exclusively in the hands of the utilitarian anti-colonial party in England. And the first philosopher of evolution, Herbert Spencer, who treated sociology as part of biology, believed natural selection to benefit the evolution of mankind and to result in everlasting peace. For political discussion, Darwinism offered two important concepts: the struggle for existence with optimistic assertion of the necessary and automatic "survival of the fittest," and the indefinite possibilities which seemed to lie in the evolution of man out of animal life and which started the new "science" of eugenics.
”
”
Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)
“
no one on this planet
is in more denial
than the white man
who regardless of all
the evidence in front of him
still thinks racism and sexism
and all the world’s pain don’t exist
”
”
Rupi Kaur (Home Body)
“
Here we raise his children for him, cook for him, bring up his crops, butcher his hogs - even fight his wars for him - and he still won't acknowledge our existence.
”
”
James Sallis (Moth (Lew Griffin, #2))
“
If we acknowledge our racist history, it's harder to perpetuate American exceptionalism. It's harder to genuinely say 'Make America Great again.' It's harder to ignore systemic White supremacy and racism that still exists.
”
”
April Ajoy
“
Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be. I do not think, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world-which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne in on us, very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will--that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
”
”
James Baldwin (Notes of a Native Son)
“
American slavery was specifically racist slavery. It could not exist apart from racism, and could not be separated from it. Slavery was a massive institution, but its evil was only enabled by the constraints of law and power. Change the law, and you can end the slaver, for the slavery rested on law. But racism rests in the heart and mind. You can change laws, but changing hearts is a whole different matter. Once the slavery was taken away, the racism still existed. The hearts of millions of whiles hated and despised blacks just as before, only now even more so. Now they would have the added insult of an occupying government and military force attempting to make them live as equals - politically at the very least. If the racism remained, unrepentant and unhealed - and it certainly did - the evil would only manifest in a new way.
”
”
Joel McDurmon (The Problem of Slavery in Christian America)
“
Don’t set yourself apart in the way you dress, the way you think, the outdated codes of behavior you cling to,
the ideologies to which you attach your loyalties.
Because if you do, you will be treated differently—not because of racism, though that does still exist,
but because you insist on your difference from everyone else in this
multiethnic, multireligious, multitudinous United Kingdom of ours.
And look at all you miss out on because of it.
”
”
Kamila Shamsie (Home Fire)
“
Children today are so open. When the old folks die off, we will finally be free of racism.” “I grew up in a small rural community, so I was very sheltered. I didn’t learn anything about racism.” “I judge people by what they do, not who they are.” “I don’t see color; I see people.” “We are all red under the skin.” “I marched in the sixties.” New racism is a term coined by film professor Martin Barker to capture the ways in which racism has adapted over time so that modern norms, policies, and practices result in similar racial outcomes as those in the past, while not appearing to be explicitly racist.1 Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva captures this dynamic in the title of his book Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America.2 He says that though virtually no one claims to be racist anymore, racism still exists. How is that possible? Racism can still exist because it is highly adaptive.
”
”
Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
“
In a nation still stuck in an old Jim Crow mind-set - which equates racism with white bigotry and views racial diversity as proof the problem has been solved- a racially diverse police department invites questions like: "How can you say the Oakland Police Department's drug raids are racist? There's a black police chief, and most of the officers involved in the drug raids are black." If the caste dimensions of mass incarceration were better understood and the limitations of cosmetic diversity were better appreciated, the existence of black police chiefs and black police officers would be no more encouraging today than the presence of black slave drivers and black plantation owners hundreds of years ago.
When meaningful change fails to materialize following the achievement of superficial diversity, those who remain locked out can become extremely discouraged and demoralized, resulting in cynicism and resignation. Perhaps more concerning, though, is the fact that inclusion of people of color in power structures, particularly at the top, can paralyze reform efforts.
”
”
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
Discriminatory barriers in housing seem to be almost the sine qua non of prejudice. Men reflect their true values, ideas, and attitudes, most directly in the intimate primary realm of living that surrounds the home. Discriminatory barriers in housing are strong because they are probably the last citadel for those basic attitudes of racial antipathy which … still exist in the minds of the majority of white people. The idea of integration in housing directly challenges this citadel and the attitudes it represents. Integration in housing, therefore, has much deeper implication than integration in any other area of social intercourse.
”
”
John LaFarge (The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations (The Catholic Viewpoint Series, #1))
“
When I found your name, in my early adulthood, I don't think I'd ever heard the term "white working class". The experience it describes contains both racial privilege and economic disadvantage, which can exist simultaneously. This was an obvious, apolitical fact for those of us who lived that juxtaposition every day. But it seemed tomake some people uneasy, as though our grievance put us in competition with poor people of other races. Wealthy white people, in particular, seemed to want to distance themselves from our place and our truth. Our struggles forced a question about America that many were not willing to face: If a person could go to work every day and still not be able to pay the bills and the reason wasn't racism, what less articulated problem was afoot?
”
”
Sarah Smarsh (Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth)
“
A fatal mistake in the history of the world which at the current moment still continues to be made is the confusion of the nation with its ethnicity. A nation can be made of many enthicities; tribes unite and divide all the time, and they go from one nation to another; or they just live on the territories of two or other nations, which further helps with the process of fusion of other different countries altogether. The examples are almost everywhere you look. But when a certain type of ethnicity gets confused that it is the nation, it almost certainly leads to discrimination, conflicts, racism and over all pretty bad and nasty things. The same thing happens when an ethnicity which lives in the territory of a certain nation starts to capsulate itself (to deny its belongings to any type of nation), or to seek a national identity elsewhere—then we have separatism.
”
”
Borislav Vakinov (Heresy & Metaphysics: A Compendium of Thoughts and Ideas about Magic, Philosophy, Art, Identity, the Occult and the Deeply Weird Side of Existence)
“
Do we expect minority officers, whose livelihood depends on the very departments charged with waging the war, to play the role of peacenik? That expectation seems unreasonable, yet the dilemma for racial justice advocates is a real one. The quiet complicity of minority officers in the War on Drugs serves to legitimate the system and insulate it from critique. In a nation still stuck in an old Jim Crow mindset - which equates racism with white bigotry and views racial diversity as proof the problem has been solved - a racially diverse police department invites questions like: 'How can you say the Oakland Police Department's drug raids are racist? There's a black police chief, and most of the officers involved in the drug raids are black.' If the caste dimensions of mass incarceration were better understood and the limitations of cosmetic diversity were better appreciated, the existence of black police chiefs and black officers would be no more encouraging today than the presence of black slave drivers and black plantation owners hundreds of years ago.
”
”
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
And so being a Negro in America is not a comfortable existence. It means being a part of the company of the bruised, the battered, the scarred and the defeated. Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having your legs cut off, and then being condemned for being a cripple. It means seeing your mother and father spiritually murdered by the slings and arrows of daily exploitation, and then being hated for being an orphan. Being a Negro in America means listening to suburban politicians talk eloquently against open housing while arguing in the same breath that they are not racists. It means being harried by day and haunted by night by a nagging sense of nobodyness and constantly fighting to be saved from the poison of bitterness. It means the ache and anguish of living in so many situations where hopes unborn have died.
After 348 years racial injustice is still the Negro’s burden and America’s shame.
”
”
Martin Luther King Jr. (Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?)
“
The most powerful speaker, I thought, was a Lakeview resident, Richard Westmoreland, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, who said that Robert E. Lee was a great general, but compared him to Erwin Rommel, the World War II German tank commander. There are no statues of Rommel in Germany, he continued. "They are ashamed. The question is, why aren't we?" Westmoreland said. "Make no mistake, slavery was the great sin of this nation." In a letter to the New Orleans Advocate, Westmoreland wrote: "The "heritage" argument doesn't stand the test of time. These men were traitors. We are the United States before we are the South. How can anyone begin to think that these remembrances aren't offensive and disrespectful to African Americans? They are offensive to me as a retired military officer. They are offensive to me as a citizen; our tax money maintains these sites. Their existence is offensive to me as a human being; the monuments to the Confederacy on our public lands are disrespectful at best. They are subtle, government-sanctioned racism. There is nothing about our "heritage" with the Confederacy worthy of embracing. We are not who we once were. We should be proud of that. We are our brother's keeper. I am white, by the way, a fact that shouldn't be relevant in this argument, but we know it still is.
”
”
Mitch Landrieu (In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History)
“
Having judged, condemned, abandoned his cultural forms, his language, his food habits, his sexual behavior, his way of sitting down, of resting, of laughing, of enjoying himself, the oppressed flings himself upon the imposed culture with the desperation of a drowning man.
Developing his technical knowledge in contact with more and more perfected machines, entering into the dynamic circuit of industrial production, meeting men from remote regions in the framework of the concentration of capital, that is to say, on the job, discovering the assembly line, the team, production �time,� in other words yield per hour, the oppressed is shocked to find that he continues to be the object of racism and contempt.
It is at this level that racism is treated as a question of persons.
�There are a few hopeless racists, but you must admit that on the whole the population likes….�
�With time all this will disappear.�
�This is the country where there is the least amount of race prejudice.�
�At the United Nations there is a commission to fight race prejudice.�
Films on race prejudice, poems on race prejudice, messages on race prejudice.
Spectacular and futile condemnations of race prejudice. In reality, a colonial country is a racist country. If in England, in Belgium, or in France, despite the democratic principles affirmed by these respective nations, there are still racists, it is these racists who, in their opposition to the country as a whole, are logically consistent.
It is not possible to enslave men without logically making them inferior through and through. And racism is only the emotional, affective, sometimes intellectual explanation of this inferiorization.
The racist in a culture with racism is therefore normal. He has achieved a perfect harmony of economic relations and ideology. The idea that one forms of man, to be sure, is never totally dependent on economic relations, in other words—and this must not be forgotten—on relations existing historically and geographically among men and groups. An ever greater number of members belonging to racist societies are taking a position. They are dedicating themselves to a world in which racism would be impossible. But everyone is not up to this kind of objectivity, this abstraction, this solemn commitment. One cannot with impunity require of a man that he be against �the prejudices of his group.�
And, we repeat, every colonialist group is racist.
�Acculturized� and deculturized at one and the same time, the oppressed continues to come up against racism. He finds this sequel illogical, what be has left behind him inexplicable, without motive, incorrect. His knowledge, the appropriation of precise and complicated techniques, sometimes his intellectual superiority as compared to a great number of racists, lead him to qualify the racist world as passion-charged. He perceives that the racist atmosphere impregnates all the elements of the social life. The sense of an overwhelming injustice is correspondingly very strong. Forgetting racism as a consequence, one concentrates on racism as cause. Campaigns of deintoxication are launched. Appeal is made to the sense of humanity, to love, to respect for the supreme values.
”
”
Frantz Fanon (Toward the African Revolution)
“
The great masses, he wrote in Mein Kampf, “will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one, since they themselves perhaps also lie sometimes in little things, but would certainly still be too much ashamed of too great lies. Thus, such an untruth will not at all enter their heads, and therefore they will be unable to believe in the possibility of the enormous impudence of the most infamous distortion in others.” Hitler’s lies spread misinformation that was favorable to Germany and unfavorable to us and our allies, and sowed dissension among the American public not just about the war effort but about our own basic system of government. His very well-funded propaganda mission in the United States was twofold: to try to keep the United States from getting into World War II, and also to soften us up, to mess with us, to make us less effective as a country, by finding and exploiting what the Germans called “kernels of disturbance” in the United States. The German propaganda operation in America, according to the first U.S. academic study on the topic, identified these kernels of disturbance as “racial controversies, economic inequalities, petty jealousies in public life,” and “differences of opinion which divide political parties and minority groups.” Even the “frustrated ambitions of discarded politicians.” Germany’s agents were tasked with finding these fissures in American society and then prying them further apart, exploiting them to make Americans hate and suspect each other, and maybe even wish for a new kind of country altogether. A partisan, bickering, demoralized America, the Nazis believed, would be incapable of mounting a successful war effort in Europe. It might even soften us up for an eventual takeover. Hitler was counting above all on racism and religious bigotry to carry the day in the United States, and to set the stage for global domination. “The wholesome aversion for the Negroes and the colored races in general, including the Jews, the existence of popular justice [lynching]…scholars who have studied immigration and gained an insight, by means of intelligence tests, into the inequality of the races—all these strains are an assurance that the sound elements of the United States will one day awaken as they have awakened in Germany,” Hitler said.
”
”
Rachel Maddow (Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism)
“
Allyship is the corruption of radical spirit and imagination; it's the dead end of decolonization. The ally establishment co-opts decolonization as a banner to fly at its unending anti-oppression gala. What is not understood is that decolonization is a threat to the very existence of settlers "allies." No matter how liberated you are, if you are still occupying indigenous lands, you are still a colonizer.
Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex. Taking Sides.
”
”
Indigenous Action Media
“
In a nation still stuck in an old Jim Crow mind-set—which equates racism with white bigotry and views racial diversity as proof the problem has been solved—a racially diverse police department invites questions like: "How can you say the Oakland Police Department's drug raids are racist? There's a black police chief, and most of the officers involved in the drug raids are black." If the caste dimensions of mass incarceration were better understood and the limitations of cosmetic diversity were better appreciated, the existence of black police chiefs and black officers would be no more encouraging today than the presence of black slave drivers and black plantation owners hundreds of years ago.
”
”
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
I know that no matter how liberal or progressive I profess to be, no matter how successfully, how diligently I seek to be enlightened and nuanced in my understanding of the world and those around me, I know that there still is a tiny, virulent nugget, a germ of prejudice that exists deep within me — the product of those stereotypes and awful jokes of childhood and adolescence, and that it must always be powerfully held at bay by reason, understanding and love.
”
”
Michael Winship
“
Nobody likes to hear the hard truth. Individually and as a culture, we avoid what we need to hear most. This world is fucked up, there are major problems in our society. We are still dividing ourselves up along racial and cultural lines, and people don’t have the balls to hear it! The truth is racism and bigotry still fucking exist and some people are so thin-skinned they refuse to admit that.
”
”
David Goggins (Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds)
“
A universal politics cannot denigrate the affective appeal of the antiracist movement, nor should it compromise on its cognitive critique. It must engage in both: “Cold analysis and passionate struggle not only do not exclude each other, they need each other” (Žižek 2020g, 51). If Harvey errs in adopting too narrow an economic focus, sidelining the fact of antiblackness, the cultural Left errs in its fetishization of nonviolence, failing to attend to black anger and dissatisfaction. The cultural Left purports to support black dissident voices against right-wing populists, but what it really wants is a decaffeinated BLM. Liberals are eager to fold BLM’s anger into a reformist agenda: multicultural tolerance as the ultimate antidote to racist prejudices. From their perspective, the “violent excess” of the protests is in principle avoidable. They fail to appreciate its real meaning: “a reaction to the fact that liberal, peaceful and gradual political change has not worked and systemic racism persists in the US. What emerges in violent protest is an anger that cannot be adequately represented in our political space” (Žižek 2020a). The virtual radicalization of that anger is what terrifies the cultural Left and establishment Right alike. Blaming Trump and the rise of the alt-right for antiblackness conveniently forgets that BLM came into existence during the “golden age” of the Obama presidency. Another cultural war fought within the coordinates of the present system will not yield true change. An antiracism worthy of its name still awaits. A universal politics thus cannot and must not denigrate sites of resistance that do not align immediately with the workers’ struggle. Quite the contrary, it takes as axiomatic the shift from one revolutionary agent to “proletarian positions”: “an explosive combination of different agents” is the path for a “new emancipatory politics” (Žižek 2009a, 92).
”
”
Zahi Zalloua (Universal Politics)
“
have many such memories, but I’ll never forget a meeting with a young blond Senate banking committee staffer in 2003. After hearing our research presentation, she said with a sad little shake of her head, “the problem was we put these people into houses when we shouldn’t have.” I marveled at the inversion of agency in her phrasing. Who was the “we”? Not the hardworking strivers who had finally gotten their fingers around the American Dream despite every barrier and obstacle. No, the “we” was well-intentioned people in government—undoubtedly white, in her mental map. Never mind that most of the predatory loans we were talking about weren’t intended to help people purchase homes, but rather, were draining equity from existing homeowners. From 1998 to 2006, the majority of subprime mortgages created were for refinancing, and less than 10 percent were for first-time homebuyers. It was still a typical refrain, redolent of long-standing stereotypes about people of color being unable to handle money—a tidy justification for denying them ways to obtain it.
”
”
Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World Essentials))
“
Patriotism can be turned to good or ill purposes, but in most people it never dies. It’s a persistent attachment, like loyalty to your family, a source of meaning and togetherness, strongest when it’s hardly conscious. National loyalty is an attachment to what makes your country yours, distinct from the rest, even when you can’t stand it, even when it breaks your heart. This feeling can’t be wished out of existence. And because people still live their lives in an actual place, and the nation is the largest place with which they can identify—world citizenship is too abstract to be meaningful—patriotic feeling has to be tapped if you want to achieve anything big. If your goal is to slow climate change, or reverse inequality, or stop racism, or rebuild democracy, you will need the national solidarity that comes from patriotism.
”
”
George Packer
“
I wonder what's going on in white people's heads. Why don't so many white people care about race? Is it because they're ashamed? They know they benefit from white privilege, but they don't talk about the horrible things their ancestors did. Whenever I read a book with a white main character, written by a white person, they never even consider the ways that their world has been shaped by the racism they're still benefiting from. It's as if race doesn't even exist for them, and when I used to look at Goodreads, white people would complain whenever they see a book that talks about race and other issues in the character's life. There's too much going on, they would write. A lot of white people don't want to know that race exists for them, I guess—and that's the problem.
”
”
Kacen Callender (Lark & Kasim Start a Revolution)
“
Esperanza Impossible Sonnet 1
Earth is but a bedlam,
All the beings are loonies.
We are so engrossed in prejudice,
Integration feels like blasphemy.
We still cannot live side by side,
We want it all for ourselves.
We won't even move a single inch,
When it comes to our opinion and ways.
Selfishness, thy name is Sapiens,
Upon its norm we philosophize kindness.
We invented fancy terms like altruism,
Lest we're infected with common humanness.
Humanity is too alive to be bound by ism.
Dead things can be dogmatized, not expansion.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence)
“
Racism still exists, but I don’t look at everything as black or white. I know some wonderful black people, like my grandparents, but there are black people who cheat, steal, even murder — and white people who do the same. There are good and bad people in every group. It’s ridiculous to paint an entire race with a broad brush.
”
”
Jennifer Lane (Aced (Blocked #2))
“
For instance, if a Black person is watching tv, instead of being bombarded by anti-Black images and messages hour after hour, they should be able to relax and be at peace in the knowledge that Black people control the media. When their children go off to school in the morning, Black parents and other members of their community who provide love and support for their children, should be able to know that the teachers won’t be anti-Black and won’t fill their children’s heads with ideas that make them hate themselves or feel less worthy and less valuable. The Black community should be confident that their children are being taught their history, their ideas (Black Thought), and are being told they are beautiful and good. There shouldn’t be any worries about schoolmates of another race making their children feel inferior. When they grow up and go to college, Black students should be confident that Black administrators and Black professors have created an environment and curriculum which encourages their entire educational development, not only providing skills for the workplace but nurturing their minds and their sense of community. And when these students go out into the workplace, they should be confident that Black-controlled industries will be hiring them with Black managers in charge. Racism will become a non-factor. Most significantly, when Black people have control over their community and have Black citizenship they won’t be forced to go through every day under the constant terror of being harassed, brutalized and killed by the police. The psychological weight that would be lifted from them would be historic. A new sense of energy and security could be channeled into self-affirmation and community-building. I have little doubt that such a moment in history would lead to unprecedented strong race relations between citizens of this Black nation and whites in the current nation. It’s almost impossible to have truly strong or positive race relations when one group is constantly required to bear the burden of oppression, and the other group feels the need to ignore or deny the existence of this oppression while also enforcing it. The levels of tension and dishonesty are an enormous drain on everyone involved. What a sweet and beautiful day it would be when Black people would simply not have to think about whites anymore. In the same way that amerikans spend so little of our time thinking about Lithuanians or Norwegians. And when you aren’t forced to think about someone, or forced to live the way they tell you to live, it’s a pleasure to get together and visit voluntarily. Black people and Europeans on this continent (amerikans) would still talk to one another. We might even still live in the same neighborhoods. But the difference is that Black people would be their own people. They would no longer be surrounded by the circle of whiteness. The black dot on the white page: the exception to the rule. White rule. Black people would be a nation. An entity unto themselves. They would not be required to imagine themselves within the context of whiteness. Their minds would be freed from the perpetual interpretation of every action and word (it seems even every thought) through whiteness. Africans (Black people) would simply be Africans. A people defined by their own terms, their identity neither within nor without the boundaries of whiteness.
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Samantha Foster (an experiment in revolutionary expression: by samantha j foster)
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Slavery still exists. And now that I know it does, I have no choice but to do something about it. Further, now that you know it does, you have no choice but to do something about it.
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David Platt (A Compassionate Call to Counter Culture in a World of Poverty, Same-Sex Marriage, Racism, Sex Slavery, Immigration, Abortion, Persecution, Orphans and Pornography)
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I always believed the movement leaders had to be a little wild-haired. Like that fearless Fred Shuttlesworth. I swear, that man was from another world. This might surprise you, but I thought we had turned a corner by the seventies. I knew racism still existed, but I was hopeful that Black Power and education would sustain us and keep it at bay. We’d been to hell and back, so the seventies had to get better.
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Dolen Perkins-Valdez (Take My Hand)
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The people of the East End have a marvellous tradition of fighting facism, but facism still always manifests itself in the East End because poverty exists at its heart.
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Matthew Collins (HATE: My Life In The British Far Right)
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This is not to say that the race question is any nearer resolution in Brazil than anywhere else - simply that racist ideology faces a more difficult task in Brazil on account of the racial confusion and the range of race mixtures that exist there. Discrimination confronts a web of racial lines as unpredictable as the lines of the human palm. This invalidation of racism by virtue of the scattering of its object is far more subtle and effective than ideological struggle, whose ambiguity invariably revives the very problem it seeks to resolve.
Racism will never end so long as it is combated frontally in terms of rational rebuttal. It can be defeated only through an ironic give-and-take founded precisely on racial differences: not at all through the legitimation of differences by legal means, but through an ultimately violent interaction grounded in seduction and voracity. One thinks of the Bishop of Pernambuco; one thinks of the words 'How good he was, my little Frenchman!' He is very good-looking, so he is sanctified - and eaten. He is granted something greater than the right to exist: the prestige of dying. If racism is a violent abreaction in response to the Other's seductive power (rather than to the Other's difference), it can surely be defused only by an increase in seductiveness itself.
So many other cultures enjoy a more original situation than ours. For us everything is predictable: we have extraordinary analytical means but no situation to analyse. We live theoretically well beyond our own events: hence our deep melancholy. For others destiny still flickers: they live it, but it remains for them, in life as in death, something forever indecipherable. As for us, we have abolished 'elsewhere' . Cultures stranger than ours live in prostration (before the heavens, before destiny); we live in consternation (at the absence of destiny). Nothing can come from anywhere except from us. This is, in a way, the most absolute misfortune.
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Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
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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 result of unlimited immigration is showing plainly in the rapid decline in the birth rate of native Americans because the poorer classes of Colonial stock, where they still exist, will not bring children into the world to compete in the labor market with the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian and the Jew. The native American is too proud to mix socially with them and is gradually withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which he conquered and developed. The man of the old stock is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners just as he is to-day being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race.
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Madison Grant (The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History)
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no one on this planet is in more denial than the white man who regardless of all the evidence in front of him still thinks racism and sexism and all the world’s pain don’t exist
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Rupi Kaur (Home Body)
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Meanwhile, my willingness to admit that somebody writing in a language I don’t know may have surpassed Shakespeare does not compel me to rush in haste to join Prof. Taylor and the School of Resentment (as Bloom calls them) in their effort to promote any writer over Shakespeare if that writer happens to lack white skin and male genitalia. Such a nonwhite female super-genius may exist, I stipulate; but I will not assume her existence until I discover her works and personally find them superior. Meanwhile, I think the attempt to dump Shakespeare because of his skin-color and gender illustrates the kind of blatant racism and sexism that once marked “the ragged and the golden rabble”; and I do not see why such racism and sexism, reversed but still foolish, have become the Dogma of our totally-indoctrinated and half-educated neo-Left Wing.
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Robert Anton Wilson (Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death)
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Ruscism is worse than fascism, nazism and racism, worse than all misanthropic ideologies... Ichkeria has curbed (Russia's) appetite, but it has not stopped. There will be carnage in Crimea. Ukraine will still clash with Russia in irreconcilable circumstances. As long as Ruscism exists, it will never give up its ambitions. They want to take over Belarus, Ukraine, under the "Slavic" brand, just like in the old days. Now nobody wants to ally with Russia, not militarily, politically, economically, or even trade-wise. Russia is essentially a racketeer. By threats, tanks, and armadas it extorts money for itself. And now it threatens to give nuclear technology to Iran. And if the civilized world does not want this (to suffer), says - give us money to make up for this profit. This is what is called racketeering.
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Dzhokhar Dudayev
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Communities of Color are asked for burden of proof that racism still exists.
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Natalie Y. Gutiérrez, LMFT (The Pain We Carry: Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color (The Social Justice Handbook Series))
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This happens often: Communities of Color are asked for burden of proof that racism still exists.
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Natalie Y. Gutiérrez, LMFT (The Pain We Carry: Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color (The Social Justice Handbook Series))
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Scholars pointed out everyday phrases such as black sheep, blackballing, blackmail, and blacklisting, among others, that had long associated Blackness and negativity. Two other words could’ve been included—words that still exist today: minority, as if Black people are minor, making White people major; and ghetto, a term first used to describe an undesirable area of a city in which Jewish people were forced to live. But in the racist context of America, ghetto and minority became synonyms for Black. And all three of those words seemed to be knives.
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Jason Reynolds (Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You)
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Although the federal government had been trying to persuade middle-class families to buy single-family homes for more than fourteen years, the campaign had achieved little by the time Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933. Homeownership remained prohibitively expensive for working- and middle-class families: bank mortgages typically required 50 percent down, interest-only payments, and repayment in full after five to seven years, at which point the borrower would have to refinance or find another bank to issue a new mortgage with similar terms. Few urban working- and middle-class families had the financial capacity to do what was being asked.
The Depression made the housing crisis even worse. Many property-owning families with mortgages couldn't make their payments and were subject to foreclosure. With most others unable to afford homes at all, the construction industry was stalled. The New Deal designed one program to support existing homeowners who couldn't make payments, and another to make first-time homeownership possible for the middle class.
In 1933, to rescue households that were about to default, the administration created the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC). It purchased existing mortgages that were subject to imminent foreclosure and then issued new mortgages with repayment schedules of up to fifteen years (later extended to twenty-five years). In addition, HOLC mortgages were amortized, meaning that each month's payment included some principal as well as interest, so when the loan was paid off, the borrower would own the home. Thus, for the first time, working- and middle-class homeowners could gradually gain equity while their properties were still mortgaged. If a family with an amortized mortgage sold its home, the equity (including any appreciation) would be the family's to keep.
HOLC mortgages had low interest rates, but the borrowers still were obligated to make regular payments. The HOLC, therefore, had to exercise prudence about. its borrowers' abilities to avoid default. to assess risk, the HOLC wanted to know something about the condition of the house and of surrounding houses in the neighborhood to see whether the property would likely maintain its value. The HOLC hired local real estate agents to make the appraisals on which refinancing decisions could be based. With these agents required by their national ethics code to maintain segregation, it's not surprising that in gauging risk HOLK considered the racial composition of neighborhoods. The HOLC created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation, with the safest neighborhoods colored green and the riskiest colored red. A neighborhood earned a red color if African Americans lived in it, even if it was a solid middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes.
For example, in St. Louis, the white middle-class suburb of Ladue was colored green because, according to an HOLC appraiser in 1940, it had 'not a single foreigner or negro.' The similarly middle-class suburban area of Lincoln Terrace was colored red because it had 'little or no value today . . . due to the colored element now controlling the district.' Although HOLC did not always decline to rescue homeowners in neighborhoods colored red on its maps (i.e., redlined neighborhoods), the maps had a huge impact and put the federal government on record as judging that African Americans, simply because of their race, were poor risks.
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Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
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You see, the remedy is not simply not being racist. We must be antiracist—we must actively work to end racism. In a world where systemic racism still exists and even thrives, the ultimate burden of responsibility rests on what we tell our children about how to treat others.
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Qasim Rashid (Talk To Me: Changing the Narrative on Race, Religion, and Education)
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We still tiptoe around having an honest discussion about what it really means to exist while Black in this country. All lives can’t matter if Black lives don’t matter. Demanding equality and equity isn’t radicalism. This is realism. We make these demands because the Constitution isn’t an accurate reflection of Black life in this country. If liberty escapes few, it escapes all.
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D.B. Mays (Black Lives, Lines, and Lyrics)
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Though tremendous legislative strides have been made regarding both racial and gender equality, it is sad but true to acknowledge that racism and sexism still exist. They exist because "isms" are not legal conditions, they are heart conditions, and legislation does not change hearts.
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Mary Detweiler (When Going with the Flow Isn't Enough... Swim Upstream)
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The first step of good democracy is to choose a good leader, or more importantly, to not choose an animal as a leader - yet we made that ghastly mistake in 2016 by electing the most non-presidential creature on earth as the leader of our United States of America. There are good presidents, there are not so good presidents, but the unique problem with the president that we chose in the previous election was that it was not even a civilized human to begin with - it was an "it" not a he or she or they, and even after being handed over the very lives of the people that savage beast showed no sign of accountability whatsoever.
Thus, we broke our democracy in 2016, but with sheer determination and conscientious persistence we have succeeded in fixing that mistake. Yes, I am filled with joy unspeakable to say out loud, that we have corrected our mistake and fixed the democracy into its usual imperfect but functional state. I say imperfect because democracy by nature is not perfect, but the problem we created last time was that we took things too far, and in the process turned a somewhat functional democracy into an absolutely dysfunctional one - in short, we broke it. And had the leader we chose been a smart one, that is, if that idiot had been not an idiot, but an actual cunning dictator, we wouldn't be celebrating our victory as a civilized people today, instead we would be mourning the burial of democracy.
Fortunately, the insane ravings of a brainless, spineless and heartless maniac will no longer have to be considered as the statements originating from the sacred office of the President of the United States of America. We have fixed the broken democracy - yes - but the problems that existed before the maniac came to power still exist today. Therefore, we may cherish the restoration of our democracy as much as we want, the real work begins now. Choosing a proper human as a President doesn't magically make the problems of our nation disappear - those problems still exist - and they'll continue to give us chills time and again, unless we as a people stand accountable, both the government and the citizenry alike, and start working on those problems. Remember, the United States of America is not the responsibility of merely the President, the Vice President and their administration, it is the responsibility of each and every one of us whose veins carry the spirit of liberty and whose nerves carry the torrents of bravery.
We have won the battle of making the White House human again, but the war has just begun - the war against systemic racism, against misogyny, against homophobia, against islamophobia, against gun violence, and against post-pandemic health and economic crisis. So, though we may celebrate the victory for a short while, we mustn't lose sight of the issues - we must now actually start working as one people - as the American people to heal the wounds on the soul of our land of liberty. It's time to once again start dreaming and working towards the impossible dream - the dream of freedom not oppression, the dream of assimilation not discrimination, and above all, the dream of ascension not descension. Never forget my friend, AMERICA means Affectionate, Merciful, Egalitarian, Responsible, Inclusive, Conscientious and Accepting.
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Abhijit Naskar (Sleepless for Society)
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The dream is the “perfect world,” unpolluted by blacks. If whites are to construct this world, blacks must be separated through state violence. Yet they still must exist, for the existence of blacks provides the needed other against which whites may rise. Thus, white identity depends in particular on the projection of inferiority onto blacks and the oppression this inferior status justifies for the white collective.
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Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
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Racism can still exist because it is highly adaptive. Because of this adaptability, we must be able to identify how it changes over time.
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Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
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He says that though virtually no one claims to be racist anymore, racism still exists. How is that possible? Racism can still exist because it is highly adaptive. Because of this adaptability, we must be able to identify how it changes over time. For example, after a white nationalist march and the murder of a counter-protester, the president of the United States said that there are “very fine people on both sides.
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Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
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White is a false identity, an identity of false superiority. In that sense, whiteness isn’t real. The dream is the “perfect world,” unpolluted by blacks. If whites are to construct this world, blacks must be separated through state violence. Yet they still must exist, for the existence of blacks provides the needed other against which whites may rise. Thus, white identity depends in particular on the projection of inferiority onto blacks and the oppression this inferior
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Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
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White is a false identity, an identity of false superiority. In that sense, whiteness isn’t real. The dream is the “perfect world,” unpolluted by blacks. If whites are to construct this world, blacks must be separated through state violence. Yet they still must exist, for the existence of blacks provides the needed other against which whites may rise. Thus, white identity depends in particular on the projection of inferiority onto blacks and the oppression this inferior status justifies for the white collective.
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Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
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now.” After Ifemelu hung up, still amused, she decided to change the title of her blog to Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. Job Vacancy in America—National Arbiter in Chief of “Who Is Racist” In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here’s the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven’t
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah)
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Too often we still live with the pinched expectations of a culture of conformity, which sees daring as dangerous. Go along to get along: that’s its mantra. Only a principled refusal to be terrorized by these stingy standards will save you from a Frankenstein life made up of other people’s expectations grafted together into a poor imitation of existence. You can’t afford to do that. It is what has poisoned our culture, our community, and our national character. No one does the right thing from fear, and so many of the wrong things are done in its long shadow. Homophobia, racism, religious bigotry: they are all bricks in a wall that divides us, bricks cast of the clay of fear, fear of that which is different or unknown.
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Katie Couric (The Best Advice I Ever Got: Lessons from Extraordinary Lives)
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Maybe you should write some songs. You know, poetry."
"Like Emmett's?"
"Yeah, just like that. About darkies trying to get back to da plantation 'cause dey miss Massa."
"I thought about tearing out his songs and burning them, but they would still exist. Those crackers would still sing them. Better to know they exist. Don't you think?
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Percival Everett (James)