“If the whiteness they pursue is cool and haughty and blank,
history is uncool, reaches out gawkily for affinities, asserts itself boldly,
threatens to mark, to break through and stain the primed white canvas
that is their life.
For, having primed it, they do not know where to start,
how to make a mark. They are alone in the world, a small new
island of whiteness. Or so they think; they do not know, or perhaps
they do not want to know, that the neighbourhood is full of people
like them. Thus they are steeped in its silence.”
Playing in the Light (2006)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Zoë Wicomb 1
South African author resident in Scotland 1948Related quotes
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, ch. 2 (1912).
Variant: All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.
Source: It Chooses You
From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, FEMINISM
At a town hall meeting in North Berwick. http://www.pressherald.com/2016/08/25/aclu-of-maine-asks-lepage-to-produce-binder-of-recent-maine-drug-arrests/ (August 25, 2016)
“The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it.”
GoodReads https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/5712889.Sitting_Bull
Attributed quotes
Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Red Prophet (1988), Chapter 2.
“We white people think that we know everything.”
Child of Storm (1913), CHAPTER I, ALLAN QUATERMAIN HEARS OF MAMEENA
As quoted by James Baldwin, “Highroad to Destiny,” a chapter in Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Profile, edited by C. Eric Lincoln, New York, NY, Hill & Wang, 1993, p. 97, (Rev. King speech to a black congregation in St. Louis), reprinted from the February, 1961 issue of Harper’s magazine under the title: “The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King.”
1960s