The Help Segregation Quotes

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To really change the world, we have to help people change the way they see things.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
There is no trickier subject for a writer from the South than that of affection between a black person and a white one in the unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism.(Howell Raines's Pulitzer Prize winning article "Grady's Gift")-Sockett admired this quote and used it in her summary...
Kathryn Stockett (The Help)
Even as a professional in an integrated world, I had been the only black woman in enough drawing rooms and boardrooms to have an inkling of the chutzpah it took for an African American woman in a segregated southern workplace to tell her bosses she was sure her calculations would put a man on the Moon.
Margot Lee Shetterly (Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race)
Gallantry doesn’t mean sleeping with people, gallantry means standing by the helpless, the discriminated, the downtrodden and the forgotten, even if it means going against an entire army.
Abhijit Naskar (Aşkanjali: The Sufi Sermon)
I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me. So I have a special place for every library, in my heart of hearts.
Maya Angelou
Lincoln didn’t just end slavery. King didn’t just dream segregation away. Parks didn’t just get tired one day. It is often the unrecognized actions of previous generations that push a society to eventually embrace mantras such as hope, equality, change, and other ideals, which transform the political landscape. Chisholm's actions remind us that there are hundreds of forgotten foot soldiers in history that helped to bring these watershed moments to fruition. For
Shirley Chisholm (Unbought and Unbossed)
Augustine had emailed them to me segregated into two helpful categories: will kill you and can kill you. This was going to be one hell of a soiree.
Ilona Andrews (White Hot (Hidden Legacy, #2))
Christianity, Islam and Judaism, the dominant faiths in our culture, were devised to guide people living in very different circumstances to our own – put simply, deserts. How do the teachings of Christ or Abraham or Muhammad help us in the modern, post-industrial, secular world? Not to say these stories are totally obsolete; there’s some terrific advice in all of them. Primarily, though, they have become tools for oppression, segregation and conflict. The aspects of these ideologies that testify against oppression, segregation and conflict, which would seem to be the most vital bits, are consistently ignored.
Russell Brand (Revolution)
We are in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and a black man has twice been elected president in a country where blacks are only 13 percent of the population. Yet liberals continue to pretend that it’s still 1965, and that voters must be segregated in order for blacks to win office.
Jason L. Riley (Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed)
There is a much stronger case to be made that efforts to help blacks have had more pernicious and lasting effects on black attitudes and habits than either slavery or segregation. Social welfare programs that were initiated or greatly expanded during the 1960s resulted in the government effectively displacing black fathers as breadwinners, and made work less attractive. Even before Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty began in earnest, New York and other states had already been expanding their social welfare programs. And despite the best intentions, the results were not encouraging.
Jason L. Riley (Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed)
In the 1940s, the American labor force was strictly segregated by gender. There were newspaper want ads that read “Male Help Wanted” and others that read “Female Help Wanted.
Liza Mundy (Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II)
their duty to “prove” their need for education by demonstrating their resourcefulness in helping to achieve it.
Vanessa Siddle Walker (Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South)
But I bring up my background in the law because hatred is a pretty big reason I’ve written this book. Not the healthiest emotion, I know, but for me it’s clarifying. What conservatives do and try to do through the Constitution and the law is disgusting. They use the law to humiliate people, to torture people, and to murder people, and tell you they’re just “following orders” from the Constitution. They frustrate legislation meant to help people, free people, or cure people, and they tell you it’s because of “doctrinal interpretative framework.” They use the very same legal arguments that have been used to justify slavery, segregation, and oppression for four hundred years on this continent and tell you it’s the only “objective” way of interpreting the law.
Elie Mystal (Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution)
Many of our white brothers misunderstand this fact because many of them fail to interpret correctly the nature of the Negro Revolution. Some believe that it is the work of skilled agitators who have the power to raise or lower the floodgates at will. Such a movement, maneuverable by a talented few, would not be a genuine revolution. This Revolution is genuine because it was born from the same womb that always gives birth to massive social upheavals--the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations. In this time and circumstance, no leader or set of leaders could have acted as ringmasters, whipping a whole race out of purring contentment into leonine courage and action. If such credit is to be given to any single group, it might well go to the segregationists, who, with their callous and cynical code, helped to arouse and ignite the righteous wrath of the Negro.
Martin Luther King Jr. (Why We Can't Wait)
In a racially separated world, it's possible to have racial disadvantage without racial prejudice. Whites can turn for help to white neighbors with good connections in the plant. Blacks turn to black neighbors without them.
Arlie Russell Hochschild (Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right)
But I bring up my background in the law because hatred is a pretty big reason I’ve written this book. Not the healthiest emotion, I know, but for me it’s clarifying. What conservatives do and try to do through the Constitution and the law is disgusting. They use the law to humiliate people, to torture people, and to murder people, and tell you they’re just “following orders” from the Constitution. They frustrate legislation meant to help people, free people, or cure people, and they tell you it’s because of “doctrinal interpretative framework.” They use the very same legal arguments that have been used to justify slavery, segregation, and oppression for four hundred years on this continent and tell you it’s the only “objective” way of interpreting the law. Most legal stories
Elie Mystal (Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution)
Dan Berrigan wrote a "Meditation" at the time of the Catonsville incident: Our apologies good friends for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise. . . . We say: killing is disorder, life and gentleness and community and unselfishness is the only order we recognize. for the sake of that order, we risk our liberty, our good name. The time is past when good men can remain silent, when obedience can segregate men form public risk, when the poor can die without defense.
Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present)
This morally blinkered way of conceiving merit and the public good has weakened democratic societies in several ways. The first is the most obvious: Over the past four decades, meritocratic elites have not governed very well. The elites who governed the United States from 1940 to 1980 were far more successful. They won World War II, helped rebuild Europe and Japan, strengthened the welfare state, dismantled segregation, and presided over four decades of economic growth that flowed to rich and poor alike. By contrast, the elites who have governed since have brought us four decades of stagnant wages for most workers, inequalities of income and wealth not seen since the 1920s, the Iraq War, a nineteen-year, inconclusive war in Afghanistan, financial deregulation, the financial crisis of 2008, a decaying infrastructure, the highest incarceration rate in the world, and a system of campaign finance and gerrymandered congressional districts that makes a mockery of democracy.
Michael J. Sandel (The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?)
Much of what it takes to succeed in school, at work, and in one’s community consists of cultural habits acquired by adaptation to the social environment. Such cultural adaptations are known as “cultural capital.” Segregation leads social groups to form different codes of conduct and communication. Some habits that help individuals in intensely segregated, disadvantaged environments undermine their ability to succeed in integrated, more advantaged environments. At Strive, a job training organization, Gyasi Headen teaches young black and Latino men how to drop their “game face” at work. The “game face” is the angry, menacing demeanor these men adopt to ward off attacks in their crime-ridden, segregated neighborhoods. As one trainee described it, it is the face you wear “at 12 o’clock at night, you’re in the ‘hood and they’re going to try to get you.”102 But the habit may freeze it into place, frightening people from outside the ghetto, who mistake the defensive posture for an aggressive one. It may be so entrenched that black men may be unaware that they are glowering at others. This reduces their chance of getting hired. The “game face” is a form of cultural capital that circulates in segregated underclass communities, helping its members survive. Outside these communities, it burdens its possessors with severe disadvantages. Urban ethnographer Elijah Anderson highlights the cruel dilemma this poses for ghetto residents who aspire to mainstream values and seek responsible positions in mainstream society.103 If they manifest their “decent” values in their neighborhoods, they become targets for merciless harassment by those committed to “street” values, who win esteem from their peers by demonstrating their ability and willingness to insult and physically intimidate others with impunity. To protect themselves against their tormentors, and to gain esteem among their peers, they adopt the game face, wear “gangster” clothing, and engage in the posturing style that signals that they are “bad.” This survival strategy makes them pariahs in the wider community. Police target them for questioning, searches, and arrests.104 Store owners refuse to serve them, or serve them brusquely, while shadowing them to make sure they are not shoplifting. Employers refuse to employ them.105 Or they employ them in inferior, segregated jobs. A restaurant owner may hire blacks as dishwashers, but not as wait staff, where they could earn tips.
Elizabeth S. Anderson (The Imperative of Integration)
Grady’s Gift”: There is no trickier subject for a writer from the South than that of affection between a black person and a white one in the unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism.
Kathryn Stockett (The Help)
High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination,” wrote William Stuntz. “The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments.”15
Jason L. Riley (Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed)
The poverty argument is especially weak. In the 1950s, when segregation was legal, overt racism was rampant, and black poverty was much higher than today, black crime rates were lower and blacks comprised a smaller percentage of the prison population. And then there is the experience of other groups who endured rampant poverty, racial discrimination, and high unemployment without becoming overrepresented in the criminal justice system.
Jason L. Riley (Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed)
Virtually all of the former Confederate states threw out their Reconstruction-era constitutions—those that black people helped draft and which they voted to ratify—and wrote new ones that included disenfranchisement provisions, antimiscegenation provisions, and separate-but-equal Jim Crow provisions. Though “race neutral” in language, these new constitutions solidified Southern states as governed by legal segregation and discrimination.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow)
I am sure we can help,” I said finally. “But it will take a considerable amount of work. Women have been told for so long that they can achieve equality in the professional and public spheres. They will not welcome the…” I sought for a word. “The segregation.” “It was always a cruelty to promise them equality,” he said, “since by their nature they can never achieve it. We have already begun the merciful task of lowering their expectations.
Margaret Atwood (The Testaments (The Handmaid's Tale, #2))
Sadly, not all veterans had equal access to an education, even under the GI Bill’s amendments. Although no provision prevented African American and female veterans from securing an education under the bill, these veterans returned to a nation that still endorsed segregated schools and largely believed a woman’s place was in the home. For African American veterans, educational opportunities were limited. In the words of historian Christopher P. Loss, “Legalized segregation denied most black veterans admission into the nation’s elite, overwhelmingly white universities, and insufficient capacity at the all-black schools they could attend failed to match black veterans’ demand.” The number of African American students at U.S. colleges and universities tripled between 1940 and 1950, but many prospective students were turned away because of their race. For those African Americans who did earn a degree under the GI Bill, employment discrimination prevented them from gaining positions commensurate with their education. Many African American college graduates were offered low-level jobs that they could have secured without any education. Almost a decade elapsed between V-J Day and the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down segregated schools. It would take another decade after Brown for the civil rights movement to fully develop and for public schools to make significant strides in integrating.
Molly Guptill Manning (When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II)
While we were forming mobs to drive an Autherine Lucy [the black woman who integrated the University of Alabama in 1956] from an Alabama campus, the Russians were compelling ALL children to attend the best possible schools,” opined the Chicago Defender. Until the United States cured its “Mississippiitis”—that disease of segregation, violence, and oppression that plagued America like a chronic bout of consumption—the paper declared, it would never merit the position of world leadership.
Margot Lee Shetterly (Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race)
Over the past few decades, we have developed euphemisms to help us forget how we, as a nation, have segregated African American citizens. We have become embarrassed about saying ghetto, a word that accurately describes a neighborhood where government has not only concentrated a minority but established barriers to its exit. We don’t hesitate to acknowledge that Jews in Eastern Europe were forced to live in ghettos where opportunity was limited and leaving was difficult or impossible. Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as the inner city, yet everyone knows what we mean. (When affluent whites gentrify the same geographic areas, we don’t characterize those whites as inner city families.) Before we became ashamed to admit that the country had circumscribed African Americans in ghettos, analysts of race relations, both African American and white, consistently and accurately used ghetto to describe low-income African American neighborhoods, created by public policy, with a shortage of opportunity, and with barriers to exit. No other term succinctly describes this combination of characteristics, so I use the term as well.† We’ve developed other euphemisms, too, so that polite company doesn’t have to confront our history of racial exclusion. When we consider problems that arise when African Americans are absent in significant numbers from schools that whites attend, we say we seek diversity, not racial integration. When we wish to pretend that the nation did not single out African Americans in a system of segregation specifically aimed at them, we diffuse them as just another people of color. I try to avoid such phrases.
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
A 1967 New York Times editorial declared Milwaukee “America’s most segregated city.” A supermajority in both houses had helped President Johnson pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but legislators backed by real estate lobbies refused to get behind his open housing law, which would have criminalized housing discrimination. It took Martin Luther King Jr. being murdered on a Memphis balcony, and the riots that ensued, for Congress to include a real open housing measure later that year in the 1968 Civil Rights Act, commonly called the Fair Housing Act.
Matthew Desmond (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City)
Lives to Serve Before I Sleep (The Poem) Lives to serve before I sleep, Cause service is my salvation; Wounds to heal before I sleep, Cause time is wailing for absolution; Bridges to build before I sleep, Cause too many walls are raised already; Peoples to unite before I sleep, Cause civilization is trembling and walking unsteady. Shackles to shatter before I sleep, Cause corruption festers in the stagnant norm; Labels to erase before I sleep, Cause they've only confused our global dorm; Sects to humanize before I sleep, Cause segregation has weakened the human bond; Blades to burn before I sleep, Cause they've turned the world into a bloody pond. Tears to wipe before I sleep, Cause the society is lost in fun; Homes to heal before I sleep, Cause ego has wrecked the nests a ton; Biases to alleviate before I sleep, Cause bigotry has outweighed compassion; Purity to pour before I sleep, Cause all are chasing petty gratification. Spirits to lift before I sleep, Cause the minds are running dry; Gods to build before I sleep, Cause orthodoxy makes humanity cry; Wars to end before I sleep, Cause no life is expendable and puny; Humans to raise before I sleep, Cause where humans act human there reigns harmony.
Abhijit Naskar (Lives to Serve Before I Sleep)
Individualism, relationalism, and antistructuralism have built renowned and racially homogenous ministries, but these have been cold comfort to those members of the body of Christ who exist outside the boundaries of racial whiteness. If white Christians are to reckon with racial discipleship, we must also look critically at the deeply held assumptions that have thus far hindered our attempts to address racial segregation and injustice. While it’s been over a hundred years since Ida B. Wells and Dwight L. Moody overlapped in Chicago, the dynamic they illustrate continues today. In the current cultural moment, black Christians are fighting for more equitable criminal justice policies, immigrant churches are advocating for policies that don’t separate asylum-seeking parents from their children, and Native American believers are lamenting as ancient tribal lands are being polluted by oil pipelines. At the same time, there are prominent white Christians publicly debating whether justice, from a biblical vantage point, can ever be social. Some of these leaders wonder whether justice can even be considered Christian when not limited to an individual. As disheartening as this divide is between white Christianity and many Christians of color, white Christianity’s tools help us to see why we haven’t been able to move past it.
David W. Swanson (Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity)
Given the steady stream of abuse reports from around the world, perhaps it’s time to recognise that the assumption that male staff can work in female facilities as they do in male facilities is another example of where gender neutrality turns into gender discrimination. Perhaps sex-segregation needs to extend beyond sanitation facilities, and perhaps no male staff should be in positions of power over vulnerable women. Perhaps. But if this is going to happen, authorities would first have to countenance the idea that male officials might be exploiting the women they are meant to be variously helping, guarding or processing. And, currently, authorities are not countenancing this.
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
Black newspapers and their readers wasted no time in making the link between America’s inadequacy in space and the dreadful conditions facing many black students in the South. “While we were forming mobs to drive an Autherine Lucy [the black woman who integrated the University of Alabama in 1956] from an Alabama campus, the Russians were compelling ALL children to attend the best possible schools,” opined the Chicago Defender. Until the United States cured its “Mississippiitis”—that disease of segregation, violence, and oppression that plagued America like a chronic bout of consumption—the paper declared, it would never merit the position of world leadership. An editorial in the Cleveland Call and Post
Margot Lee Shetterly (Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race)
As painful as it was, reading about sexual violence toward Black women and girls helped me with necessary creative depictions. My book could not have been written without Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye as well as Beloved, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple—this last book is so special to me because Ms. Walker is a native of Eatonton, Georgia, the home of my maternal ancestors. (My mother was one of Ms. Walker’s teachers.) My mother—Trellie James Jeffers—published an early germinal essay about colorism in the Black community, “The Black Black Woman and the Black Middle Class,” which allowed me to witness (vicariously) intra-racist sexism in African American communities. Another essay by her, “From the Old Slave Shack: Memoirs of a Teacher,” offers historical background about Mama’s experiences attending segregated schools in Eatonton, Georgia, in the 1930s and 1940s, before attending Spelman College in 1951.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois)
With Selma and the Voting Rights Act one phase of development in the civil rights revolution came to an end. A new phase opened, but few observers realized it or were prepared for its implications. For the vast majority of white Americans, the past decade—the first phase—had been a struggle to treat the Negro with a degree of decency, not of equality. White America was ready to demand that the Negro should be spared the lash of brutality and coarse degradation, but it had never been truly committed to helping him out of poverty, exploitation or all forms of discrimination. The outraged white citizen had been sincere when he snatched the whips from the Southern sheriffs and forbade them more cruelties. But when this was to a degree accomplished, the emotions that had momentarily inflamed him melted away. White Americans left the Negro on the ground and in devastating numbers walked off with the aggressor. It appeared that the white segregationist and the ordinary white citizen had more in common with one another than either had with the Negro.
Martin Luther King Jr. (Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?)
It is possible and necessary to approach Britain's colonial history by more satisfactory methodological routes. Its racial subjects need a more complex genealogy than those debates allow. Industrial decline has been intertwined with technological change, with immigration and settlement, with ideological racism and spatial segregation along economic and cultural lines. We need to grasp how their coming together took place in a desperate setting which nonetheless allowed black communities over several generations to be recognised as political actors: they were irreducible to their class positions because racism entered into the multi-modal processes in which classes were being constituted. It helps to appreciate that this historical predicament was overdetermined by Britain's painful loss of Empire and, that the country's communities of the strange and alien are still sometimes at risk of being engulfed by the profound cultural and psychological consequences of decline which is evident on many levels: economic and material as well as cultural and psychological.
Paul Gilroy (There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (Routledge Classics))
Over the past few decades we have developed euphemisms to help us forget how we, as a nation, have segregated African American citizens. We have become embarrassed about saying "ghetto", a word that accurately describes a neighborhood where government has not only concentrated a minority but established barriers to its exit. We don't hesitate to acknowledge that Jews in eastern Europe were forced to live in ghettos where opportunity was limited and leaving was difficult or impossible. Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as "the inner city", yet everyone knows what we mean. When affluent whites gentrify the same geographic areas, we don't characterize those whites as "inner city families". Before we became ashamed to admit that the country had circumscribed African Americans in ghettos, analysts of race relations, both African American and white, consistently and accurately used "ghetto" to describe low-income African American neighborhoods created by public policy, with a shortage of opportunity, and with barriers to exit.
Richard Rothstein
The decision to prioritize a victory in space over problems on Earth was the most widespread criticism against the space program. But even those voices in the black community who expressed admiration for the astronauts, who supported the program and its mission, took NASA to the woodshed for its lack of black faces. No black television commentators, no black administrators, no black faces in Mission Control, and most of all, no black astronauts. Blacks were still smarting over the perceived mistreatment of Ed Dwight, an astronaut trainee who was given his walking papers before he could even report for duty. Though groups like ACD and Reentry Physics still employed several of the former West Computers, Katherine and others found themselves the only black employees in their branch. They were maybe less visible at work now that segregation had been ended. But they were perhaps more invisible professionally in the black community. The white NASA folks tended to live in enclaves, carpooling together and barbecuing together and sending their kids to school together. They talked about work and imported the hierarchies and nuances of their work lives into their neighborhoods.
Margot Lee Shetterly (Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race)
The wounding legacy of segregation and growing up knowing adults who had worked for civil rights and equal opportunities for African Americans was part of what made me understand that many kids in my community and around the world were still treated differently because of the color of their skin.  My mothers work on behalf of girls and women, first in Arkansas and later around the world, helped me understand how being born a girl is often seen as a reason to deny someone the right to go to school or make her own decisions, or even about who or when to marry.  One of the unique things about SEWA [Self-Employed Women's Association] is that it brings together Muslim and Hindu women in a part of the world where fighting between people from different religious backgrounds has cost countless lives, both between countries and within India.  Women from all different backgrounds told us how they'd learned how much more they had in common than they'd first thought because of their different religions. Their support for each other gave them the confidence to stand up to bullying and harassment, and the relationships they'd built helped prevent violence between Hindus and Muslims, because they saw each other as friends and real people, not only as representatives of different religions.
Chelsea Clinton (It's Your World: Get Informed, Get Inspired & Get Going!)
Yes, my friends, your hunger for history is still pretty segregated. Your knowledge of America often ends at the color line. You end up erasing the black story as the American story, black history as American history. You certainly have an insatiable thirst for history, but only if that history justifies whiteness. Most black folk can’t help but notice what many whites rarely wish, or are compelled, to see: you embrace history as your faithful flame when she kisses you, and yet you spurn her as a cheating mate when she nods or winks at others. You love history when it’s yet another book about, say, the Founding Fathers. No amount of minutia is too tedious. No new fact is too obscure to report. The curiosity about presidents is nearly inexhaustible. History is a friend to white America when it celebrates the glories of American exceptionalism, the beauty of American invention, the genius of the American soul. History is unrestrained bliss when it sings Walt Whitman’s body electric or touts the lyrical vision of the Transcendentalists. History that swings at the plate with Babe Ruth or slides into home with Joe DiMaggio is the American pastime at its best. History hovers low in solemn regard for the men who gave up the ghost at Appomattox and speaks with quiet reverence for the Confederate flags that gleefully waved to secession. Of course all of you don’t sing from the same hymnal. But American history, the collective force of white identity that picks up velocity across the centuries, mouths every note.
Michael Eric Dyson (Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America)
Mass incarceration thus perpetuates and deepens pre-existing patterns of racial segregation and isolation, not just by removing people of color from society and putting them in prisons, but by dumping them back into ghettos upon their release. Youth of color who might have escaped their ghetto communities—or helped to transform them—if they had been given a fair shot in life and not been labeled felons—instead find themselves trapped in a closed circuit of perpetual marginality, circulating between ghetto and prison.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
is necessary to remember that the issue of school segregation and the harm it inflicted on black children did not first come to the Court’s attention in the Brown litigation: blacks had been attacking the validity of these policies for 100 years. Yet, prior to Brown, black claims that segregated public schools were inferior had been met by orders requiring merely that facilities be made equal. What accounted, then, for the sudden shift in 1954 away from the separate but equal doctrine and towards a commitment to desegregation? The decision in Brown to break with the Court’s long-held position on these issues cannot be understood without some consideration of the decision’s value to whites, not simply those concerned about the immorality of racial inequality, but also those whites in policymaking positions able to see the economic and political advances at home and abroad that would follow abandonment of segregation. First, the decision helped to provide immediate credibility to America’s struggle with Communist countries to win the hearts and minds of emerging third world peoples. Advanced by lawyers for both the NAACP and the federal government, this point was not lost on the news media. Time magazine, for example, predicted that the international impact of Brown would prove scarcely less important than its effect on the education of black children: “In many countries, where U.S. prestige and leadership have been damaged by the fact of U.S. segregation, it will come as a timely reassertion of the basic American principle that ‘all men are created equal.’”5
Derrick A. Bell (The Derrick Bell Reader (Critical America))
These typical white racial claims depend on an underlying framework of meaning. Identifying this framework can help us understand how we manage to make such claims in the context of extreme segregation and racial inequity. Imagine a pier stretching out over the water.
Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
There are very practical reasons why multiracial movements are vital to building the world we deserve. Segregation by race and class has been used throughout history to maintain power relationships. Segregation, whether through redlining or denying citizenship, helps to create an other, which helps in turn to justify why some people have and other people don't. It reinforces the narratives that make unequal power relationships normal.
Alicia Garza (The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart)
Those who made excuses for Jerry Lewis didn't recognize disability bigotry when they saw it, insisted attorney Harriet Johnson, who had one of the diseases Jerry was curing. "When bigotry is part of mainstream culture, it feels like ‘the way things are.'" My grandfather's generation of white men in the South didn't recognize sexism. They thought women really were magnolia blossoms requiring protection. They didn't recognize racism either. They thought African Americans really were inherently inferior, suitable to menial work, and that the structures of segregation were for the good of both races. They'd say it wasn't prejudice, but the way things are. This is where we are with disability today. Lewis says he uses pity because, hey, we're pitiful. And people agree. If you don't see the profound animus in Jerry Lewis's statement, try substituting the minority group. What if he said, "If you don't want to be bashed for being gay, stay in your house"? Or, "If you don't want to be groped for being a broad, stay in your house"? Or  -- if you believe the "charity" work excuses hate  -- consider this scenario. What if the United Negro College Fund hired a white comedian to raise money from white people, using bigotry. "Give because they're so stupid, so hopelessly ignorant, they need their own schools to keep them out of our schools." Would the success of such a pitch justify it? Or would we recognize that the more it succeeds  -- the more people buy into it  -- the more harm it does? I think  -- I hope  -- we're at a point now where people would be up in arms if one of those other minority groups were treated with such profound disrespect, for decades, by a charity ostensibly dedicated to "helping" them. But with disability, it's a lesson yet to be learned.
Mary Johnson (Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve & The Case Against Disability Rights)
A good rule of thumb is that an organization is ready to deploy mindset-change efforts to the next level in an organization when those in the next level are seeing real change in the level above. Leaders demonstrate noticeable change as they begin questioning the privileges they reserve for themselves. To prompt such helpful changes, leaders could begin asking themselves questions like these: Do we need the prime parking spots? The best office spaces? Do we segregate ourselves in different cafeterias or more preferred parts of the building? Can perks that the few enjoy be made available to others? Can any trappings of “bigshotness” be removed? If we treat and pay ourselves generously, are we appropriately generous as well with our employees? And so on.
Arbinger Institute (The Outward Mindset: How to Change Lives and Transform Organizations)
A PRAYER FOR MY BELOVED COUNTRY Father God remember my beautiful land of South Africa, remember my nation and remember my beautiful people. Protect the country of South Africa and her people from these demonic forces and give wisdom to the leaders of the nation. Dismantle every single weapon and every demonic plan that is meant to destroy South Africa and her people. You are unchanging and forgiving God. You are the same God who liberated us from the decades and decades of evil racial segregation and I know and believe that you can do it again. You are our only hope, help us to stand firm for the truth, peace and unity. Thank you Lord for your unconditional love and your faithfulness in Jesus name amen. SOUTH AFRICA BELONGS TO GOD.
Euginia Herlihy
thepsychchic chips clips i How often are we actually in control, I wondered? And how does the perception of being in control in situations where luck is queen actually play out in our decision making? How do people respond when placed in uncertain situations, with incomplete information? 13 Personal accountability, without the possibility of deflecting onto someone else, is key. 41 There’s never a default to anything. It’s always a matter of deliberation. 56 Erik: You have to have a clear thought process for every single hand. What do I know? What have I seen? How will that help me make an informed judgment about this hand? 74 … find the fold … 86 Erik: There’s nothing like getting in there and making a bunch of mistakes. 88 Erik: Pick your spots. 91 Erik: Have you ever heard the expression ‘snap fold’? A snap fold, you do it immediately. You’re thrilled to let it go. So. snap fold. This lets you shove with basically the same enthusiasm. It tells you which hands to go with when you have different amounts of big blinds. 98 There’s a false sense of security in passivity. You think that you can’t get into too much trouble—but really, every passive decision leads to a slow but steady loss of chips. And chances are, if I’m choosing those lines at the table, there are deeper issues at play. Who knows how many proverbial chips a default passivity has cost me throughout my life. How many times have I walked away from situations because of someone else's show of strength, when I really shouldn't have. How many times I've passively stayed in a situation, eventually letting it get the better of me, instead of actively taking control and turning things around. Hanging back only seems like an easy solution. In truth, it can be the seed of far bigger problems. 100-101 Gambler's fallacy -- the faulty idea that probability has a memory. 107 Frank Lantz, NYU Game Center, former poker player: Part of what I get out of a game is being confronted with reality in a way that is not accommodating to my incorrect preconceptions. 109 Only play within your bankroll. 126 Re: Ladies Event: Yes, I completely understand the intention, but somehow, segregating women into a separate player pool, as if admitting that they can’t compete in an open player pool, feels equal parts degrading and demoralizing. … if I’m known as anything in this game, I want to be known as a good poker player, not a good female player. No modifiers need apply. 127 Erik: Bad beats are a really bad mental habit. You don’t want to ever dwell on them. It doesn’t help you become a better player. It’s like dumping your garbage on someone else’s lawn. It just stinks.” 132-33 No bad beats. Forget they ever happened. 136 As W H Auden told an interviewer, Webster Schott, in a 1970 conversation: "Language is the mother, not the handmaiden of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.” The language we use becomes our mental habits—and our mental habits determine how we learn, how we grow, what we become. It’s not just a question of semantics: telling bad beats stories matters. Our thinking about luck has real consequences in terms of our emotional well-being, our decisions and the way we implicitly view the world and our role in it. 133
Maria Konnikova (The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win)
Even before zoning, differing locational needs help to nudge the most incompatible uses apart: • Industries need to be where land is cheap and transportation is accessible, and complaining neighbors are few and far between. • Large office and commercial centers thrive on the visibility and access afforded by major corridors and transit interchanges. • Residential developments are content to fill up the quiet side streets in between, along with inoffensive retail—think corner stores and cafes. Homeowners don’t want factories or malls showing up on their cul-de-sacs—and they can rest assured that those factories and malls don’t want to open up on their cul-de-sac either. As the legal scholar Bernard Siegan observed in his landmark study of Houston, the city achieves much of what we might consider to be desirable use segregation
M. Nolan Gray (Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It)
There are forces that have always attempted, and ultimately failed, to make America static and rigid. But America has proven to be elastic. Our ancestors have always had to push and stretch America to accommodate its many residents and communities. We now have to do our part. If any of you have been active students of US history, you know that with every two steps we march forward toward progress, we always get pushed one step back. The racially anxious men and women with hoods, tiki torches, and business suits will do everything in their power to violently chokehold and drag America back to 1953. This is the year before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. I'm convinced that 1953 is also the year that many enemies of diversity and progress believe America was allegedly "great.
Wajahat Ali (Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American)
For this Christ stood outside the closed society, outside the doors of the segregated white churches, beyond the Southern Way of Life. This Christ signaled the power of the new breaking into the old. No wonder that those who follow after in obedience cannot help but appear peculiar and alien, always the outsider, their commitments propelled by a “grammar of dissent.”103
Charles Marsh (God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights)
Look at a successful progressive movement of the past and you’ll hear a lot of “common-humanity” rhetoric—the kind captured by civil rights activist Pauli Murray in her essay An American Credo: I intend to destroy segregation by positive and embracing methods. When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. Where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind.
Tim Urban (What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies)
The United Nations has often defined culture as being created, contested, and recreated within the social praxis of diverse groups in economic, social, and political arenas. There is no point to segregation — to further an invisible line dividing Christians and Muslims. Just as men need to stand up for women in gender rights, Catholics must stand with our Muslim brothers and sisters for sustainable peace. We must be the first to oppose whenever Muslims are branded and discriminated against. As the old Chinese proverb say — Just as a fence has to be built with pegs, an able person needs the help of three others.
Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo , Night Owl: A Nationbuilder’s Manual
Because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that, as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself.… — BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURAL ADDRESS, JANUARY 20, 2009
Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
The United Nations has often defined culture as being created, contested, and recreated within the social praxis of diverse groups in economic, social, and political arenas. There is no point to segregation — to further an invisible line dividing Christians and Muslims. Just as men need to stand up for women in gender rights, Catholics must stand with our Muslim brothers and sisters for sustainable peace. We must be the first to oppose whenever Muslims are branded and discriminated against. As the old Chinese proverb say — Just as a fence has to be built with pegs, an able person needs the help of three others.” - Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo , Night Owl: A Nationbuilder’s Manual 2nd Edition (p. 232, Surpassing the invisible line)
Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo
To control risk further, I replaced Bamberger’s segregation into industry groups by a statistical procedure called factor analysis. Factors are common tendencies shared by several, many, or all companies. The most important is called the market factor, which measures the tendency of each stock price to move up and down with the market. The daily returns on any stock can be expressed as a part that follows the market plus what’s left over, the so-called residual. Financial theorists and practitioners have identified a large number of such factors that help explain changes in securities prices. Some, like participation in a specified industry group or sector (say, oil or finance) mainly affect subgroups of stocks. Other factors, such as the market itself, the levels of short-term and long-term interest rates, and inflation, affect nearly all stocks. The beauty of a statistical arbitrage product is that it can be designed to offset the effects of as many of these factors as you desire. The portfolio is already market-neutral by constraining the relation between the long and short portfolios so that the tendency of the long side to follow the market is offset by an equal but opposite effect on the short side. The portfolio becomes inflation-neutral, oil-price-neutral, and so on, by doing the same thing individually with each of those factors. Of course, there is a trade-off: The reduction in risk is accompanied by limiting the choice of possible portfolios.
Edward O. Thorp (A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market)
Tolerate no hate, Moderate no help. Segregate no shelf, Alienate no sect.
Abhijit Naskar (World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets (Sonnet Centuries))
There is a lost and dying world out there. They need to see that the Church is different from their socially-segregated high schools. They need to see a 'family' operating as a team, not a bunch of cliques playing a role.
Anna M. Aquino (Cursing the Church or Helping It?: Exposing the Spirit of Balaam)
Putnam, echoing Charles Murray, points out that America has become rigorously segregated. The functional insulate themselves and their children from the dysfunctional. Imbued with a therapeutic ethos that softens the rigors they impose on themselves and their children, and often cowed by multiculturalism, today’s rich won’t speak up for a common culture that imposes standards on personal behavior. They won’t support the traditional common culture that helped Jesse’s parents achieve their goal of raising a dignified man. Instead, they quietly and covertly pass on social capital to their children. Their kids go to schools that, for all their celebration of “diversity” and “inclusion,” are ruthlessly segregated by social class, ensuring that no “unhealthy” or “anti-social” attitudes infect their charmed world of pleasures without penalties and permissions without punishments. In this controlled, segregated environment, rich kids are prepared for success in today’s hypercompetitive meritocracy. C
R.R. Reno (Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society)
The value of white working- and middle-class families’ suburban housing appreciated substantially over the years, resulting in vast wealth differences between whites and blacks that helped to define permanently our racial living arrangements. Because parents can bequeath assets to their children, the racial wealth gap is even more persistent down through the generations than income differences.
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
How can congregations expect to have healthy intergenerational worship when they segregate by age in all of their other ministries during the week? The only time various generations connect is during an hour on Sunday around songs one generation or the other doesn’t particularly like. If congregations are depending on the music of that one hour to be the solitary driver of intergenerational worship, then music can’t help but get the solitary blame when conflict arises.
David W. Manner (Better Sundays Begin on Monday: 52 Exercises for Evaluating Weekly Worship)
students who use vouchers tend to fare worse academically than closely matched peers who attend public schools. A 2017 Century Foundation report concluded that vouchers intensify racial and religious segregation. Another report, from the Economic Policy Institute, asserted that the loss of community-based schools makes it harder for poor families to access wraparound services, such as job training, health care, and academic support, that can help lift them out of poverty. “All of these yield much higher returns than the minor, if any, gains that have been estimated for voucher students,
Katherine Stewart (The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism)
As American citizens, whatever routes we or our particular ancestors took to get to this point, we’re all in this together now. Over the past few decades, we have developed euphemisms to help us forget how we, as a nation, have segregated African American citizens.
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
Culture guides how we process information. Cultures with a strong oral tradition rely heavily on the brain’s memory and social engagement systems to process new learning. Learning will be more effective if processed using the common cultural learning aids—stories, music, and repetition. These elements help build neural pathways and activate myelination. They help neurons fire and wire together in ways that make learning “sticky.” Collectivist cultures use social interactions such as conversation and storytelling as learning aids. Because of society’s history of segregation and unequal educational opportunities, many communities of color continue to use the natural learning modalities in the home and community. As a result, their neural pathways are primed to learn using story, art, movement, and music.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
Our task (the rich countries), in our own interest as well as theirs, is to help the poor become healthier and wealthier. If we do not, they will seek to take what they cannot make; and if they cannot earn by exporting commodities, they will export people. In short, wealth is an irresistible magnet; and poverty is a potentially raging contaminant: it cannot be segregated, and our peace and prosperity depend in the long run on the well-being of others.
David S. Landes (Wealth And Poverty Of Nations)
The American Sonnet On Mayflower we arrived filled with hope, Escaping persecution and atrocities. Upon landing we became the persecutor, And atrociously evicted communities. Apparently we were civilized people, Who wanted it all for ourselves. We snatched it all from the innocent natives, And gave reservations to help themselves. Even today we ignore these atrocities, And continue to perpetuate segregation. We may look civilized on the outside, Inside we are walking discrimination. We are the land of liberty but only in theory, It's time to walk the talk and embody the glory.
Abhijit Naskar (Boldly Comes Justice: Sentient Not Silent)
As with the legal case of Irene Morgan, the woman arrested in Virginia’s Gloucester County in 1946 for the same infraction, the battle over integration on Montgomery buses eventually won a hearing in front of the Supreme Court. Once again America’s highest court ruled segregation illegal. The controversy over the bus boycott vaulted the young Dr. King into the national headlines as the leader of the civil rights movement. Langley
Margot Lee Shetterly (Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race)
The Byrd cronies retaliated by diverting taxpayer money to fund whites-only “segregation academies,” private schools founded to circumvent integrated public schools.
Margot Lee Shetterly (Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race)
In the United States the continued influence of the old elite meant that southern politics fell under the domination of a Democratic Party that gloried the Confederacy, the Lost Cause, the Ku Klux Klan, and resistance to Reconstruction. White supremacy was made into the fundamental cause of the South, and racism became the tool to enforce white unity behind the Democratic Party whenever a political challenge arose. Another tactic used over and over again to maintain the Solid South was to warn against outside threats and outside agitators. The mentality of a defensive, isolated, but gallant South helped Democratic leaders to deflect attention from the problems of their society and the effects of their rule. These powerful social currents, aided by women’s groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, shaped and inhibited the region’s culture. Conformity to white supremacy, segregation, and Democratic Party rule was a social imperative for generations of southerners who were indoctrinated in the belief that they had suffered grave injustice with the defeat of their glorious Lost Cause. Had the diverse political leaders of so-called Radical Reconstruction continued to exercise some power or influence, the South would have been a very different society [187].
Paul D. Escott (Uncommonly Savage: Civil War and Remembrance in Spain and the United States)
The Democrats did play a role in Reconstruction—they worked to block it. The party struck out against Reconstruction in two ways. The first was to form a network of terrorist organizations with names like the Constitutional Guards, the White Brotherhood, the Society of Pale Faces, and the Knights of the White Camelia. The second was to institute state-sponsored segregation throughout the South. Let us consider these two approaches one by one. The Democrats started numerous terror groups, but the most notorious of these was the Ku Klux Klan. Founded in 1866, the Klan was initially led by a former Confederate army officer, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who served two years later as a Democratic delegate to the party’s 1868 national convention. Forrest’s role in the Klan is controversial; he later disputed that he was ever involved, insisting he was active in attempting to disband the organization. Initially the Klan’s main targets weren’t blacks but rather white people who were believed to be in cahoots with blacks. The Klan unleashed its violence against northern Republicans who were accused of being “carpetbaggers” and unwarrantedly interfering in southern life, as well as southern “scalawags” and “white niggers” who the Klan considered to be in league with the northern Republicans. The Klan’s goal was to repress blacks by getting rid of these perceived allies of the black cause. Once again Republicans moved into action, passing a series of measures collectively termed the Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1871. These acts came to be known as the Force Bill, signed into law by a Republican President, Ulysses Grant. They restricted northern Democratic inflows of money and weapons to the Klan, and also empowered federal officials to crack down on the Klan’s organized violence. The Force Bill was implemented by military governors appointed by Grant. These anti-Klan measures seem modest in attempting to arrest what Grant described as an “invisible empire throughout the South.” But historian Eric Foner says the Force Bill did markedly reduce lawless violence by the Democrats. The measures taken by Republicans actually helped shut down the Ku Klux Klan. By 1873, the Klan was defunct, until it was revived a quarter-century later by a new group of racist Democrats.
Dinesh D'Souza (Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party)
Over the past few decades, we have developed euphemisms to help us forget how we, as a nation, have segregated African American citizens. We have become embarrassed about saying ghetto, a word that accurately describes a neighborhood where government has not only concentrated a minority but established barriers to its exist. We don't hesitate to acknowledge that Jews in Eastern Europe were forced to live in ghettos where opportunity was limited and leaving was difficult or impossible. Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as the inner city, yet everyone knows what we mean. (When affluent whites gentrify the same geographic areas, we don't characterize those whites as inner city families.) Before we became ashamed to admit that the country had circumscribed African Americans in ghettos, analyses of race relations, both African American and white, consistently and accurately used ghetto to describe low-income African American neighborhoods, created by public policy, with a shortage of opportunity, and with barriers to exit.
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
The walls covered with paintings and tapestries that often concealed the doors didn't help either. There were countless animal heads of all kinds lit by torches in several corridors, and I could have sworn I saw them move, but I was always so late for the lessons that I had no time to pay attention to them. Intense smells of herbs, vapors, and fumes filled this space, as potions and spells were constantly being played throughout the days and nights. Every time we passed Mrs. Fitz's secretary's office, we had to pinch our Nose, because she seemed to burn horrible herbs while she worked, and the smell spread down the hallway to the classrooms. Then there was Miss Melva Flin with her ever-vigilant bat. She controlled every person who came in and out of Philcrocks and roamed the corridors making sure no students broke the rules or tried to stick their noses where they weren't called. She had two spare eyes as her bat squeaked whenever it detected problems. No student liked her and everyone wished they could close that bat in the library where he could eat the bookworms for the rest of his life. Found the practice sites, there were still the lessons. Every Thursday at midnight the clan would gather in the High Ridge stone circle, at which hour it aligned with the moon, and it was possible to make omens from the constellations. On Tuesdays we went to the Philcrocks Woods where we watched the wild animals and any other species that walked around, hunted and fished in the river and even stayed overnight for the next day hoping to see the vampires hunt, which did not happen. I still couldn't believe vampires existed but the next day I turned away from all the sarcophagi I came across in the castle corridors. The most boring of the chairs was the Philcrocks Story, where they talked about the story of magic. Especially because the teacher talked monotonously and always behind the book, which made it impossible to see his face and understand what he was saying. He also made references to maps and wall articles that no one understood, which did not matter to him as long as he remained immersed in its reading aloud. Most interesting so far has been the story of the division of the 3 kingdoms and the emergence of the 3 clans. For many centuries they had lived peacefully until pure races emerged and the thirst for power increased, promoting their perpetuation. The segregation of sleves began there. King Elive's Night Clan was destroyed by King Ashen and the Night Clan disappeared, except for some sorcerers who chose the Shadow Kingdom to live on and continued the clan to which I now belong. Having to memorize endless dates and events was the worst part. It was hard to remember if it was Orlk or Orls who started the battle and whether it was in Cral or Crap, especially since all those names were strange to me.
M.P.
Negroes joined their countrymen in recoiling at the horrors Germany Visited upon its Jewish citizens by restricting the type of jobs they were allowed to hold and the businesses they could start, imprisoning them wantonly and depriving them of due process and all citizenship rights, subjecting them to state-sanctioned humiliation and violence, segregating them into ghettos, and ultimately working them to death in slave camps and marking them for extermination. How could an American Negro observe the annihilation happening in Europe without identifying it with their own four-century struggle against deprivation, disenfranchisement, slavery and violence?
Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The Untold True Story of Four African-American Women Who Helpe
Next, we found numerous instances where developers have administrative access to production applications and databases. This violates the required segregation of duty required to prevent risk for fraud.
Gene Kim (The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win)
The world is my home, it’s my hood, and it’s under my protection. So before any bigot or segregationist tries to poison it with barbarian fantasies, they'll have to go through me first. Either I'll turn every inhumanity into ashes or I'll become ashes myself while trying.
Abhijit Naskar (When Call The People: My World My Responsibility)
The Maker (Sonnet) Step by step we'll reach the mountaintop, We'll build roads penetrating impediments. Bit by bit we'll trash our conformities, We’ll erect civilization upon reason and sentiments. Day and night we'll stand tall in service, Through storm, rain, heat and gloom. There's no time for selfishness, Being selfish would bring universal doom. Sanity is in giving and caring, It’s in every act of collective concern. Because if you care only for the self, Deserting your children your neighbors will run. The world is our home and we must be its caretaker. Comfort is luxury, it’s time we rise as the maker.
Abhijit Naskar (When Call The People: My World My Responsibility)
We must rush to the aid of the helpless - we must rush to the aid of the discriminated - we must rush to the aid of the segregated - we must rush to the aid of the alienated.
Abhijit Naskar (See No Gender)
Most young people find school hard to use. Indeed, many young people find school a negative learning environment. Not only do schools fail to help students become competent in important life skills, they provide a warped image of learning as something that takes place only in schools, segregated from the real world, organized by disciplines and school bells, and assessed by multiple-choice, paper-and-pencil tests. Schools have scores of written and unwritten rules that stifle young people’s innate drive for learning and restrict their choices about at what they want to excel, when to practice, from whom to learn, and how to learn. It is no wonder that so many creative and entrepreneurial youth disengage from productive learning. They recognize that staying in the schools we offer them constitutes dropping out from the real world.
Ken Robinson (Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education)
It’s important, Lemuel.” He took another look and shook his head. “What’d this guy do?” he asked. “Helped plant cocaine on some Cambodians so their vehicle and cash could be confiscated.” “I ain’t following you.” “He’s a cop. You see him again, you let me know.” Lemuel leaned back in his chair and looked out at the road, suddenly disconnected from me and a conversation involving a corrupt white police officer. “Lemuel?” I said. “Got to clean my li’l house now. Dust keep blowing out of the yard t’rew the screen, dirtying up my whole house. Just cain’t keep it clean, no matter what I do. See you another time, Dave.” WE LIVE IN the New South. Legal segregation has slipped into history; the Klan has moved west, into white supremacist compounds, where they feel safe from the people whom they fear; and in Mississippi black state troopers ticket white motorists. But memories can be long, fear is fear, and race is at the heart of virtually every political issue in the states of the Old Confederacy, particularly in the realignment of the two national political parties. As I drove back to New Iberia, the fields of early sugar cane rippling in the breeze, the buttercups blooming along the rain ditches, I wondered about the memories of violence and injustice that my friend Lemuel Melancon would probably never share with me. But they obviously lived inside him, and I knew that as a white man it was presumptuous of me to ask that he set aside the cautionary instincts that had allowed him to be a survivor.
James Lee Burke (Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux, #14))
there are today three types of PACs: The first is “separate segregated funds” (SSFs) that are attached to corporations and unions, and which may solicit contributions only from employees, stockholders, owners, or members. Major corporations such as Ebay and Microsoft, as well as large unions like the AFL-CIO typically have SSFs. The second is “non-connected” PACs that are not affiliated with a corporate or labor interest, and that solicit contributions from the public at large in support of a common value. For example, EMILY’s List, whose name is an acronym for “Early Money Is Like Yeast,” helps women candidates “rise” by providing them with funding to jumpstart their campaigns. EMILY’s List may accept contributions from anyone willing to donate to the cause. Finally, “leadership PACs” are established by federal officeholders to help other candidates get elected. When members of Congress do not face a strong challenge in their own reelection campaigns, for instance, they can channel part of their war chest to other candidates via a Leadership PAC.
Conor M. Dowling (Super PAC!: Money, Elections, and Voters after Citizens United (Routledge Research in American Politics and Governance))
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.
Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor (Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off: A Domestic Rap by Verta Mae)
Ross took two important lessons from Bell Town. The first was to remember that the issue that gets people upset might not be the issue to tackle. In Bell Town, the catalyst hadn’t been school segregation but the proposed bond measure. Part of the organizing process was to encourage others to think through a problem, to turn it around in their heads and talk through the merits of various solutions. An organizer always starts out where the people are, but that doesn’t mean that he or she can’t help them get to a different place.
Gabriel Thompson (America's Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century)