Quotes about blackness
page 8

“Universal ghetto life, holla black you know it well”

Mos Def (1973) American rapper and actor

From "Auditorium"
Album The Ecstatic

“A number of people including William Wilberforce, sought to refute these arguments by painting in black colors the horrible customs of the Hindus such as sati, infanticide, throwing the children into the Ganga, religious suicides, and above all idolatry. Vivid descriptions were given of the massacre of the innocent resulting from the car procession of Lord Jagannath at Puri, and the Baptists put down the number of annual victims at not less than 120,000. When challenged they had to admit that they did not actually count the dead bodies but arrived at the figure by an ingenious calculation.”

R. C. Majumdar (1888–1980) Indian historian

R. C. Majumdar, The History and Culture of Indian People. Vol. X, 2nd ed., Bombay, 1981, p. 152-153.

Children, People, Cars, Color

“I was lucky to be part of the "underground comix" thing in which cartoonists were completely free to express themselves. To function on those terms means putting everything out in the open—no need to hold anything back—total liberation from censorship, including the inner censor! A lot of my satire is considered by some to be "too hard." My "negro" characters are not about black people, but are more about pushing these "uncool" stereotypes in readers' faces, so suddenly they have to deal with a very tacky part of our human nature. … Who did I think I was appealing to? I don't know. I was just being a punk, putting down on paper all these messy parts of the culture we internalize and keep quiet about. I admit I'm occasionally embarrassed when I look at some of that work now.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 256

People, Nature, Thinking, Parting

“They were murderers and they still are, but policemen are like dogs on a leash.… The police function under political direction. They go after whoever they are sent after, and that's where the problem comes in.… Black people were moving out of their traditional position in America. Nobody knew what to do about it. The white politicians were confused, the blacks were confused.… the police were told to go out, stop those civil-rights marches … and they went out and did that. When you talk to police now who participated in that, you find out that they were in the same position we were in — just trying to find the right formula.”

Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998) American activist

Interview by Reason magazine (1986)
1980s

People, Dogs, Problem

“A world view which supports than they are by Jews (the liberals, the Wall Street people, journalists from the East Coast, lovers of black people, Hillary Clinton’s friends), we have struck quite a good deal. Trump and his friends see Israel as a forefront against the barbarians, and they are not exactly very observant.”

Yaron London (1940) Israeli journalist, actor and songwriter

Why Israel isn’t shocked by anti-Semites in White House (November 21, 2016)

People, World, Lovers, Support

“Of course black lives matter. But instead of people pointing fingers at each other and just creating strife, what we need to be talking about is: How do we solve problems in the black community? … Whether I get the votes or not, I want people to start listening to what I am saying and understanding that … there is a way to go that will lead to upward mobility as opposed to dependency.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Speech in Harlem https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-should-follow-ben-carsons-lead-on-black-lives-matter/2015/08/17/cd242572-44d7-11e5-8e7d-9c033e6745d8_story.html (August 2015).

People, Way, Communication, Understanding

“The mirrors in the room go black and blue”

Ryan Adams (1974) American alt-country/rock singer-songwriter

Cold Roses
29 (2005)

“There is no God, no man-made God; a bigger, stronger, crueller man;
Black phantom of our baby-fears, ere Thought, the life of Life, began.”

Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) British explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, lin…

The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)

Life, God, Fear, Baby

“They'd be no threat to me. I have a black belt in Haiku. And a black vest in the cleaners.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

“Unable to grasp the importance of Black women’s intersectional experiences, not only courts, but feminist and civil rights thinkers as well have treated Black women in ways that deny both the unique compoundedness of their situation and the centrality of their experiences to the larger classes of women and Blacks. Black women are regarded either as too much like women or Blacks and the compounded nature of their experience is absorbed into the collective experiences of either group or as too different, in which case Black women’s Blackness or femaleness sometimes has placed their needs and perspectives at the margin of the feminist and Black liberationist agendas. While it could be argued that this failure represents an absence of political will to include Black women, I believe that it reflects an uncritical and disturbing acceptance of dominant ways of thinking about discrimination. Consider first the definition of discrimination that seems to be operative in antidiscrimination law: Discrimination which is wrongful proceeds from the identification of a specific class or category; either a discriminator intentionally identifies this category, or a process is adopted which somehow disadvantages all members of this category.”

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw book Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex

Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex (1989)

Women, Law, Way, Failure

“.. upon the frightening gray sky one can see a black mountain, completely black even with black houses, and all of a sudden a fire-red house appears, a violet path with snowflakes and on the path a black chain of people like crows.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

Quote from Werefkin's letter to Alexej von Jawlensky, 1910 Lithuanian Martynas-Mazvydas-National Library, Vilnius, RS (F19-1458,1.31) as reprinted in Weidle, Marianne Werefkin, Die Farbe beisst mich ans Herz, 108; as quoted in 'Identity and Reminiscence in Marianne Werefkin's Return Home', c. 1909; Adrienne Kochman http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring06/52-spring06/spring06article/171-ambiguity-of-home-identity-and-reminiscence-in-marianne-werefkins-return-home-c-1909 1906 - 1911

People, Mountain, Appearance, Housing

“Arus saw a tall powerfully built youth, naked but for a loin-cloth, and sandals strapped high about his ankles. His skin was burned brown as by the suns of the wastelands and Arus glanced nervously at his broad shoulders, massive chest and heavy arms, A single look at the moody, broad-browed features told the watchman the man was no Nemedian. From under a mop of unruly black hair smoldered a pair of dangerous blue eyes. A long sword hung in a leather scabbard at his girdle.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The God in the Bowl" (1952)

Youth, Sun, Clothes

“In the final analysis the weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the black man needs the white man and the white man needs the black man. However much we may try to romanticize the slogan, there is no separate black path to power and fulfillment that dies not intersect white paths, and there is no separate white path to power and fulfillment, short of social disaster, that does not share that power with black aspirations for freedom and human dignity. We are bound together in a single garment of destiny. The language, the cultural patterns, the music, the material prosperity, and even the food of America are an amalgam of black and white.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

As quoted in Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)
1960s

Food, Music, Failure, Freedom

“Black propaganda and negative politics do not and will not work here or elsewhere, simply because of one thing - it is based on a lie. As Rex Gatchalian, spokesperson of Senator Grace Poe said earlier, "The recent story being circulated that Senator Chiz had abandoned Senator Grace is baseless and barefaced lie. If the people behind this story plan to drive a wedge between the two candidates, they should stop wasting their time as the two candidates continue to fight the battle together, side-by-side. The Poe-Escudero tandem remains strong despite all the black propaganda hurled against them. It's disgusting that certain groups continue to destroy our candidates - first individually and now as a tandem."”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Escudero, F. [Francis]. (2015, December 28). Retrieved from Official Facebook Page of Francis Escudero https://www.facebook.com/senchizescudero/posts/10153773916510610/ 2015, Facebook

People, Lie, Strong, Time

“Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.”

Philip Larkin book The Less Deceived

Next, Please
The Less Deceived (1955)

Silence, Water

“She could take the dark out the nighttime and paint the daytime black.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), She Belongs to Me

Painting

“For years, whenever I saw Mubarak, he reminded me of a mummy. He spent a considerable time each day to “prepare” himself. That meant dying his hair and eyebrows jet black, and applying rouge to his cheeks to make them look rosy, in more or less the same way Egyptian mummy makers did with dead pharaohs. He also wore heels to look taller and used a corset to keep his belly in. Despite declining eyesight, he shunned glasses in public. Even in his 80s, he wanted to appear alive and young, just as pharaohs had done. Mubarak’s attempts at securing eternal youth were faintly comical and ultimately harmless. What was not comical and certainly harmless was the mummification of his regime.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"Curse of the mummy" http://nypost.com/2011/02/13/curse-of-the-mummy/, New York Post (February 13, 2011). New York Post

Youth, Way, Appearance, Time

“The force of the idea was such that I drew the car to the side of the road and stopped and, for some reason, laughed. It was a loud laugh, unsteady, and sounded, even to my own ears, slightly maniacal. Thinking back now, I realise it was less a laugh than the birth-cry of my dark and twin brother Benjamin Black.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville on the birth of his dark twin, Benjamin Black (2011)

Cars, Idea, Birth, Thinking

“Chicken-neck weakness is like a god now. And being totally passive, and being a huge jellyfish slacker who looks like a fried egg in a chair. That is the culture of this, okay? The worship of being destroyed. Literally, I've now discovered the secrets of it. … And everyone's wearing like pink and little green non-threatening, you know, colors, and this is what we face. This is what men look like now, on average. In fact, I used to bash men who were all into being big and muscular with tattoos and black on and going "raagh", now I get it! You don't wanna be like these people! Okay? I used to get mad at guys trying to act tough—no, no! That's good! Do that! In fact, I think I'm gonna just go all out with cut-off sleeves and drive a big fast car and be like "graagh", 'cause I mean I'm starting to get it! Men are running to that, because they see the armies… literally men in pastels… Now there's men everywhere wearing dresses, I'm telling you! It's like, they're just like "New World Order, slaughter me, please!"”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

And the New World Order is like "Act like a jellyfish coward and giggle at all reality", and they're like "Yes, yes!" "Alex Jones: I'm So Trendy Rant!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBA-sa97UYg March 2012. 2012

Men, God, People, Secret

“Black holes are not rare, and they are not an accidental embellishment of our Universe. They are a fundamental driving force of its evolution. They are a dominant source of energy. For every ounce of matter consumed, they yield more than ten times as much energy as the nuclear reactions of fusion and fission that cause our sun to shine and our hydrogen bombs to explode.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

Universe, Time, Sun

“If we have respect for our fathers and we have respect for our children, we will have a better life. I watched on TV when America sent men to the moon, and there were a lot of people whose names weren't given who helped make it possible. You don't have the names of those who run the computers and other things. But they worked together and this is what you have to have … Chinese, American, Jewish, black and white, people working side by side.

This is what you have to do to make this a better life. When you can give opportunity to everybody, we won't have to wait to die to get to heaven. We are going to have heaven on earth.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Conclusion of Tris Speaker Award acceptance speech, as quoted in "800 Turn Out for Baseball Dinner" by Joe Heiling, in The Houston Post (January 30, 1971, p. 1-B)
Other, <big><big>1970s</big></big>

Life, Men, Children, People

“Use materials with forceful MUSCULAR colours – the reddest of reds, the most purple of purples, the greenest of greens, intense yellows, orange, vermillion – and SKELETON tones of white, grey and black.”

Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) Italian artist

(Manuscript, 1914); as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 148
Futurist Manifesto of Men's clothing,' 1913/1914

“Afrikaners: The time for white supremacism is gone. You cannot hope to survive while you are so intrinsically entwined with black labour. You used them for everything, even to murdering you and then digging your grave. You cannot survive while every single thing you do, every enterprise, every interaction, every aspect of your lives, is determined by your reliance on black labour. Because, whether you like it or not, black people also have rights, and they have claimed them. You cannot think that you have a right to rule over black people — you do not.”

Arthur Kemp (1962) British writer

Let Eugene Terre’Blanche’s Tomb be the End of Apartheid and White Supremacism, blog post http://www.arthurkemp.com/?p=508 Quotes from other works:

People, Hope, Thinking, Time

“The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments, or the future dangers of the United States, the observer is invariably led to this as a primary fact.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Source: Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter XV-IXX, Chapter XVIII.

Future

“There is, and always will be, until every Black man, woman, and child is free, a Black Liberation Army. The main function of the Black.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

To My People (July 4, 1973)

“A series of ever-decreasing splashes drip and plop into black water… thus the beginning of the film is reprised.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Prospero's Books

Water

“They call us thieves and bandits. They say we steal. But it was not we who stole millions of Black people from the continent of Africa. We were robbed of our language, of our Gods, of our culture, of our human dignity, of our labor, and of our lives. They call us thieves, yet it is not.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

To My People (July 4, 1973)

God, People

“How do you stand this? I don't care who you are; man, woman, gay, straight, black, white, Jew, gentile, it doesn't make any difference - how do you stand this? I can't. I can not…I can't handle this- You wanna know how I deal with this? When I finish these topics, or these letters, or these diaries, or these reports, and the show's over, I have to blank my mind - literally. Can you do that? I can, I have learned how to do that. I blank it out. I don't know where Israel is, I don't know what Palestinian means, I don't know what burned and mutilated children have to do with anything - it means nothing, it goes away. I must draw a dark black curtain in my consciousness. I can not deal with this, how do you? I have children, I've had children, I have grand-children, I have a four-and-a-half year-old… This is not right! This is not right…”

Mike Malloy (1942) American radio broadcaster

Mike cuts feed to music early
http://youtube.com/watch?v=mWemE3fcVXo
On the conflict in Gaza

Children, Music, Learning, Drawing

“Today, Psycho still holds up extraordinarily well (another reason why a remake seems pointless). With the exception of Halloween, no latter-day horror/thriller has been capable of generating as many goosebumps. The black-and-white photography is perfect for the film's tone and mood — the starkness of color would have blurred the nightmarish quality. The painstaking care with which [director Alfred] Hitchcock composed every scene is evident in the quality of the final product.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=669 of Psycho (1960). Three-and-a-half star reviews

Color, Mood, Perfection

“Many thanks for your kind care for my health; I certainly have not been well for many weeks, and about a week ago I was very poorly. I have had a good deal of fever at times, and indifferent nights; but I am considerably better now and am recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough — black and white, and every wrong colour. I must not depend upon being ever very blooming again. Sickness is a dangerous indulgence at my time of life.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to Fanny Knight (1817-03-23) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

Life, Health, Time, Dependency

“It is the glistening and softly spoken lie; the amiable fallacy; the patriotic lie of the historian, the provident lie of the politician, the zealous lie of the partisan, the merciful lie of the friend, and the careless lie of each man to himself, that cast that black mystery over humanity, through which we thank any man who pierces, as we would thank one who dug a well in a desert.”

John Ruskin book The Seven Lamps of Architecture

Source: The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), Chapter II: The Lamp of Truth, section 1.

Lie

“I knew that the stories of the two murders would immediately grab the glands of millions of American white men, prejudicing them in ways they would never admit publicly.... (It) would enliven the insecurities of millions of white male psyches. The old college girl's chant, “Once you go black you never go back!””

Carl Rowan (1925–2000) American journalist

surely would take on feverish new meaning.
Quoington Star article entitled "Has President Nixon Gone Crazy?", "The Coming Race War in America: A Wake-up Call" (1996)

Men, Way, Girl

“The way out of the maze of whiteness and blackness that led inevitably, repeatedly, to violent conflict was through the simple recognition of and respect for blacks and whites as not two races but one: the human race.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(Whiteness and Race Relations, p. 82)).
Book Sources, The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois (2003)

Way

“I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented. (p. 57 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

The God Delusion (2006)

God

“The pivotal struggle which must be waged in the ranks of the working class is consequently the open, unreserved battle against entrenched racism. The white worker must become conscious of the threads which bind him to a James Johnson, Black auto worker, member of UAW, and a political prisoner presently facing charges for the killings of two foremen and a job setter. The merciless proliferation of the power of monopoly capital may ultimately push him inexorably down the very same path of desperation. No potential victim of the fascist terror should be without the knowledge that the greatest menace to racism and fascism is unity!”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

If They Come in The Morning (1971)

Knowledge

“And death was a soft thing, soft and black, cool and sweet and gracious. He slipped into it as a swimmer slips into the surf and it closed over him and held him and he felt the pulse and beat of it and knew the vastness and sureness of it.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter XXVI (p. 139)

Death

“Activists laud Beck for establishing cooperative relationships with a number of communities, particularly Latinos and blacks, and for his sophisticated approach to gang crime, which has been cut in half during his tenure.”

Charlie Beck (1953) Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department

December 5, 2014, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck earns good reviews; tough challenges lie ahead, Los Angeles Daily News, August 9, 2014, Brenda Gazzar http://www.dailynews.com/government-and-politics/20140809/lapd-chief-charlie-beck-earns-good-reviews-tough-challenges-lie-ahead, About

Communication

“Carter had been doubtful about using the black box, pointing out that this was not a Vigils meeting. How can we make Archie try for the marbles? Obie had the answer, the kind of answer Archie himself would have given. "Because there are four hundred kids out there yelling for blood. And they don't care whose blood it is anymore. Everybody in the school knows about the black box- how can Archie back down?"”

Robert Cormier book The Chocolate War

The Chocolate War (1974)

School, Box

“As a young man, I was more a white liberal than I ever tried to put on black. For all that, I ended up a “minority,” the beneficiary of affirmative action programs to redress black exclusion. And, harder to say, my brown advantage became a kind of embarrassment. For I never had an adversarial relationship to American culture. I was never at war with the tongue. Brown was no longer invisible by the time I got to college. In the white appraisal, brown skin became a coat of disadvantage, which was my advantage. Acknowledgment came at a price, then as now. (Three decades later, the price of being a published brown author is that one cannot be shelved near those one has loved. The price is segregation.) I remain at best ambivalent about those Hispanic anthologies where I end up; about those anthologies where I end up the Hispanic; about shelves at the bookstore where I look for myself and find myself. The fact that my books are published at all is the result of the slaphappy strategy of the northern black Civil Rights movement.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Love, War, Books, Time

“The greatest danger to the British Empire and to the British people is not to be found among the enormous fleets and armies of the European Continent, nor in the solemn problems of Hindustan; it is not in the 'Yellow Peril' nor the 'Black Peril' nor any danger in the wide circuit of colonial and foreign affairs. No, it is here in our midst, close at home, close at hand in the vast growing cities of England and Scotland, and in the dwindling and cramped villages of our denuded countryside. It is there you will find the seeds of Imperial ruin and national decay—the unnatural gap between rich and poor, the divorce of the people from the land, the want of proper discipline and training in our youth, the exploitation of boy labour, the physical degeneration which seems to follow so swiftly on civilized poverty, the awful jumbles of an obsolete Poor Law, the horrid havoc of the liquor traffic, the constant insecurity in the means of subsistence and employment which breaks the heart of many a sober, hard-working man, the absence of any established minimum standard of life and comfort among the workers, and, at the other end, the swift increase of vulgar, joyless luxury—here are the enemies of Britain. Beware lest they shatter the foundations of her power.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The People's Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 139-140
Early career years (1898–1929)

Life, People, Youth, Law

“All has been looted, betrayed, sold;
black death's wing flashed ahead.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

"Looted" (1921), as translated by Dmitri Obolensky

Death

“This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.”

Ted Hughes book The Hawk in the Rain

"Wind"
The Hawk in the Rain (1957)

Light, Housing, Sea, Madness

“I'll know how outraged I am when I know how many black people were on those flights.”

Al Sharpton (1954) American Baptist minister, civil rights activist, and television/radio talk show host

Attributed as a remark on The O'Reilly Factor on 13 October 2002. There was no episode of "The O'Reilly Factor" on this date.
Misattributed

People

“I save myself in a church. Dark, empty. Lights flickering before icons. One sings everything that one has sung before in the past. Some black figures - and the heart is heavy. The tears take one's breath away and the past rises up again. Home.... in Peter's office [Marianne's brother, governor of Kovno Province, Lithuania], my entire soul starts to ache for him, for that battle for everything that is sweet and good, which is called Russian life. Empty, empty in the house, no one. Whoever comes - doesn't get his fill of him. And then such a heated rush of love rips out of the [visitor's] heart, begging one's pardon and forgetting the trouble behind, that the whole house swells.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

1906 - 1911 Source: a letter to Alexej von Jawlensky, between December 1909 and Spring 1910; as quoted in 'Ambiguity of Home: Identity and Reminiscence in Marianne Werefkin's Return Home, c. 1909', Adrienne Kochman http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring06/52-spring06/spring06article/171-ambiguity-of-home-identity-and-reminiscence-in-marianne-werefkins-return-home-c-1909

Love, Life, Home, Soul

“[T]here suddenly appeared on the scene Precious Virtue. Though only a trifle older than Black Jade, she showed a tact and understanding far beyond her years. She was completely unspoiled, always ready to please and enter into the spirit of the occasion and always kind to the servants and handmaids. In contrast, Black Jade was inclined to haughtiness and held herself aloof. Thus in a short time, Precious Virtue won the hearts of all, and Black Jade could not help feeling a little jealous.”

Wang Chi-chen (1899–2001)

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (1958), p. 38

Feeling, Understanding, Appearance, Time

“The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison. There are thus real and often quite complicated connections between the deindustrialization of the economy—a process that reached its peak during the 1980s—and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began to spiral during the Reagan-Bush era. However, the demand for more prisons was represented to the public in simplistic terms. More prisons were needed because there was more crime. Yet many scholars have demonstrated that by the time the prison construction boom began, official crime statistics were already falling.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter One

People, Time, Wealth

“The growing openness to members of all the world's races was always possible under the terms of the Declaration of Independence, which, as Lincoln noted, made a transracial principle, the equal natural rights of all men, the basis of citizenship. For that reason, America from the beginning was always a multinational and multiracial society. As early as 1776, as we saw in the first chapter, some blacks were citizens, as were many non-British Europeans.”

Thomas G. West (1945) American academic

Source: 2000s, Vindicating the Founders (2001), p. 167

Men, World, Nature

“He imprisons and tortures at Guantanamo. He imprisoned and tortured at Abu Ghraib. He has secret torture chambers in Europe. Yes, he imprisons even here in the United States, with his jails carrying more blacks than his universities can ever enroll. He even suspends the provisions of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Take Guantanamo for example; at that concentration camp international law does not apply. The national laws of the people there do not apply. Laws of the United States of America do not apply. Only Bush's law applies. Can the international community accept being lectured by this man on the provisions of the universal declaration of human rights? Definitely not!”

Robert Mugabe (1924–2019) former President of Zimbabwe

Speech to the United Nations General Assembly (26 September 2007)
2000s, 2005 - 2009

People, Secret, Law, Communication

“The stars of death stood over us.
And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed
under the crunch of bloodstained boots,
under the wheels of Black Marias.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Stars of death stood
Above us, and innocent Russia
Writhed under bloodstained boots, and
Under the tyres of Black Marias.
Translated by D. M. Thomas
Requiem; 1935-1940 (1963; 1987), Prologue

Death, Star

“I have positively identified this group as what I call the Black Nobility, which includes the Queen and Prince Phillip. By the time I get to Vancouver, I'll be able to reveal the true role of the Queen of England and the real facts around Lady Diana's death.”

David Icke (1952) English writer and public speaker

Source: Who's Controlling Who? An Interview With David Icke by Joseph W. Duggan in Shared-Vision Magazine

Death, Time

“I had recklessly dared to do what I wouldn't dare to do today. The knight performs his morning prayer. When he is ready to pack up his chess set, he turns around, and there stands Death. 'Who are you?' asks the knight. 'I am Death.' Bengt Ekerot and I agreed that Death should have the features of a white clown. An amalgamation of a clown mask and a skull. It was a delicate and dangerous artistic move, which could have failed. Suddenly, an actor appears in whiteface, dressed all in black, and announces that he is Death. Everyone accepted the dramatic feat that he was Death, instead of saying, 'Come on now, don't try to put something over us! You can't fool us! We can see that you are just a talented actor who is painted white and clad in black! You're not Death at all!”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

But nobody protested. That made me feel triumphant and joyous.
Images : My Life in Films (1990)

Death, Fools, Feeling, Appearance

“I think nobody really loves America more than black Americans, because black Americans loved America even when America didn’t love us back”

Jamal Simmons (1971) American journalist

Simmons at the Canadian-American Business Council luncheon. 2008-11-13 http://eaves.ca/2008/11/14/quote-of-the-day

Love, Thinking

“Liberation Army at this time is to create good examples, to struggle for Black freedom, and to prepare for the future. We must defend ourselves and let no one disrespect us. We must gain our liberation by any means necessary.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

To My People (July 4, 1973)

Freedom, Time, Future

“To some extent my generation was reared on the Three Cheers view of history. This patriotic view of our past had a long run. It saw Australian history as largely a success. While the convict era was a source of shame or unease, nearly everything that came after was believed to be pretty good. There is a rival view, which I call the Black Armband view of history. In recent years it has assailed the optimistic view of history. The black armbands were quietly worn in official circles in 1988. The multicultural folk busily preached their message that until they arrived much of Australian history was a disgrace. The past treatment of Aborigines, of Chinese, of Kanakas, of non-British migrants, of women, the very old, the very young, and the poor was singled out, sometimes legitimately, sometimes not. … The Black Armband view of history might well represent the swing of the pendulum from a position that had been too favourable, too self congratulatory, to an opposite extreme that is even more unreal and decidedly jaundiced.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

"Balance Sheet On Our History," Quadrant (July 1993)

Women, History, Success, Past

“They're a migratory tribe, so you find them everywhere […] They're hardy, longevitous, resistant to infection by disease or new ideas, little modified by regional influences. The accent drifts a bit, maybe. The dialect adapts itself to the local patois: but that's a chameleon's trick: protective colouring, no more. The rest of it, the sinuous mind, the easy passion, the leery eye, the ready smile, the fine, swaggering, billycock-and-shillelagh walk, the flexible moralities, the bel canto oratory, the black bilious angers, these never change.”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

Martin Gregory in Ch. 1 (on Irish politicians)
Cassidy (1986)

Disease, Smile, Idea, Passion

“I am just as white myself as I am black; and I am not afraid of the negro getting the upper hand in me… If you build the negro a church on every hill, and a schoolhouse in every valley, and endow them all for a hundred years, you will not make up for the wrongs you have done him. Who is it that asks for protection at the polls and for equal education? The men who came forth to clutch with iron fingers your faltering flag, and shed their blood for you, who protected the women and children of the South during the war, who have tilled your soil with their horny hands, and watered it with their tears!”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1890s, Speech at Tremont Temple (1890)

Women, Men, War, Children

“We walked along Buitenkant and there by the sand works at the Oosterspoor [former train-station in Amsterdam], I can' tell you how beautiful it was there in the twilight. Rembrandt, Michel, [French Barbizon painter] and others have painted it, the ground dark, the sky still lit by the glow of the sun, already gone down, the row of houses and towers standing out above, the lights in the windows everywhere, everything reflected in the water. And the people and carriages like small black figures everywhere. Like one sometimes sees in a Rembrandt. And it put us in such a mood that we began talking about all sorts of things.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

1870s

People, Beauty, Mood, Light

“A Ku Klux Klan member would be mortified to learn that he was actually a Black man. Many people’s reaction to learning that they are actually animals, or actually apes, is the same.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 156

People, Learning, Animals

“Years ago I read a man named Machado de Assis who wrote a book called Dom Casmurro. Machado de Assis is a South American writer — black father, Portuguese mother — writing in 1865, say. I thought the book was very nice. Then I went back and read the book and said, Hmm. I didn’t realize all that was in that book. Then I read it again, and again, and I came to the conclusion that what Machado de Assis had done for me was almost a trick: he had beckoned me onto the beach to watch a sunset. And I had watched the sunset with pleasure. When I turned around to come back in I found that the tide had come in over my head. That’s when I decided to write.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Paris Review Interview (1990)

Pleasure, Books, Reading

“While I expected serious, rigorous evaluation of my work, I was totally unprepared for the hostility and contempt shown me by women whom I did not and do not see as enemies. Despite their responses I share with them an ongoing commitment to feminist struggle. To me this does not mean that we must approach feminism from the same perspective. It does mean we have a basis for communication, that our political commitments should lead us to talk and struggle together. Unfortunately it is often easier to ignore, dismiss, reject, and even hurt one another rather than engage in constructive confrontation. Were it not for the overwhelmingly positive responses to the book from black women who felt it compelled them to either re-think or think for the first time about the impact of sexism on our lives and the importance of feminist movement, I might have become terribly disheartened and disillusioned. Thanks to them and many other women and men this book was not written in isolation. … Such encouragement renews my commitment to feminist politics and strengthens my conviction that the value of feminist writing must be determined not only by the way a work is received among feminist activists but by the extent to which it draws women and men who are outside feminist struggle inside.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Acknowledgments https://books.google.com/books?id=ClWvBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT8. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984)

Women, Men, Hostility, Books

“Sleep slunk up like a black panther and sank its kindly fangs into what remained of the Mortdecai brain.”

Kyril Bonfiglioli (1928–1985) British art dealer

Source: The Mortdecai Trilogy, After You With The Pistol (1979), Ch. 17.

Sleep

“Let the black flower blossom as it may!”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The Scarlet Letter

Source: The Scarlet Letter (1850), Chapter XIV: Hester and the Physician

Flowers

“Burn shavings and splinters of pitch pine, and when they turn to charcoal, put them out, and pound them into mortar with size. This will make a pretty black for fresco painting.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book VII, Chapter X, Sec. 3

Painting

“The black man should seek to be, and he should be encouraged to be, the best possible black man and not the best possible imitation of a white man.”

Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) American politician, 29th president of the United States (in office from 1921 to 1923)

Speech delivered in Birmingham, Alabama, quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, 27 October 1921, p. 2.
1920s

“Black and white are the colors of photography. To me, they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected. Most of my photographs are of people; they are seen simply, as through the eyes of the man in the street. There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough—there has to be vision and the two together can make a good photograph. It is difficult to describe this thin line where matter ends and mind begins.”

Robert Frank (1924–2019) American photographer and filmmaker

Robert Frank, in: Nathan Lyons, Photographers on photography: a critical anthology, (1966), p. 66

People, Hope, Color, Despair

“If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil. That is to say, it will not be the equality of social conditions but rather their inequality which may give rise thereto.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book Three, Chapter XXI.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Three

“I was walking along a path with two friends — the sun was setting — suddenly the sky turned blood red — I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence — there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city — my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety — and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

Quote of an entry in his Diary (22 January 1892), on the experience which inspired his famous painting, '(The Scream)' ('Shrik'), originally titled: 'Der Schrei der Natur' ('The Cry of Nature')
1880 - 1895

Feeling, Nature, Sense, Sun

“It was once said by Abraham Lincoln that this Republic could not long endure half slave and half free; and the same may be said with even more truth of the black citizens of this country. They cannot remain half slave and half free. They must be one thing or the other. And this brings me to consider the alternative now presented between slavery and freedom in this country. From my outlook, I am free to affirm that I see nothing for the negro of the South but a condition of absolute freedom, or of absolute slavery. I see no half-way place for him. One or the other of these conditions is to solve the so-called negro problem. There are forces at work in both of these directions, and for the present that which aims at the re-enslavement of the negro seems to have the advantage. Let it be remembered that the labor of the negro is his only capital. Take this from him, and he dies from starvation. The present mode of obtaining his labor in the South gives the old master-class a complete mastery over him. I showed this in my last annual celebration address, and I need not go into it here. The payment of the negro by orders on stores, where the storekeeper controls price, quality, and quantity, and is subject to no competition, so that the negro must buy there and nowhere else–an arrangement by which the negro never has a dollar to lay by, and can be kept in debt to his employer, year in and year out–puts him completely at the mercy of the old master-class. He who could say to the negro, when a slave, you shall work for me or be whipped to death, can now say to him with equal emphasis, you shall work for me, or I will starve you to death… This is the plain, matter-of-fact, and unexaggerated condition of the plantation negro in the Southern States today.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Speech http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-nations-problem/

Death, Truth, Way, Problem

“His face was lit up with a divine look as lie uttered these words. Though not a handsome man, and ungainly in his person, yet in his enthusiasm he seemed the personification of manly beauty, and that sad face of his looked down in kindness upon these ignorant blacks with a grace that could not be excelled. He really seemed of another world.”

David Dixon Porter (1813–1891) United States Navy admiral

Source: 1880s, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (1885), p. 296

Lie, World, Sadness, Beauty

“I detest racialism because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a white man.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

1990s, Long Walk to Freedom (1995)

“Joanna (Lady of Wales): Mama… why do I not look like you? Why do I have hair black like a crow?
Clemence: Because you take after him. That was all I asked of God, that I need not see him each time I looked into your face. Little enough to ask, I should think. But we do pay and pay for our sins, it seems, and you grow more like him with each day that passes.”

Sharon Kay Penman book Here Be Dragons

Here Be Dragons (1985), Book 1

God, Thinking, Time

“Like searching at midnight in a dark cellar for a black cat that isn’t there.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Starman Jones

Source: Starman Jones (1953), Chapter 11, “Through the Cargo Hatch” (p. 115)

Search, Cats

“I am now convinced that the Reformation of the church will come from the east. In the west there is no spiritual life. (I'm speaking of the Protestant church and not the Roman Catholic church.) We have civilisation and we try to keep up culture, but we have no spiritual life. The east has a spiritual life. They know that colour influences the spirit more than black lines. In Russia there is still the notion that art is nearer religion than thinking in lines and logic. All abstract rationalising needs to be filled out with sensual thinking and feelings. In Russia there is still a strong impression of colour.”

Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor

Statement on his admiration of the Eastern Orthodox traditions (1982), as quoted in Martin Niemöller, 1892-1984 (1984) by James Bentley, p. 207

Life, Religion, Art, Feeling

“Nowadays people seem to imagine that impartiality means readiness to treat lies and truth the same, readiness to hold white as bad as black and black as good as white. I, on the contrary, believe that without integrity a man had much better not approach a problem at all. I came here with an open mind and I testify that I have seen. I believe that righteousness exalteth a nation and righteousness does not mean playing off one side against the other while you guard your own interests.”

Orde Charles Wingate (1903–1944) British Army General

Quoted in Christopher Sykes Orde Wingate, (1959), p. 166.

People, Truth, Imagination, Problem

“There are earth-shattering events going on around you, Lydia. men are scheming, debating, plotting, intriguing for the future of our country but, despite all their talk, it is the little children who are really creating the future. While these big men spend hours talking and arguing, you and your friends are busy building a nation. I don't exaggerate: all societies must be based on justice, love, trust and sharing. Though only 3, you are already practising them in your playgroup. Left to yourselves, you black and white children are actually doing that, while the politicians nervously insert clauses into bills to guard their investments and vested interest, or to protect people from people. You don't need to be protected from children of other races, because to you they are simply your friends, and you accept them totally for what they are. Your playgroup is based on trust. That is a precious commodity. I hope you never lose it. When men in Namibia act on that lesson we too, like you, can begin to build a nation.”

Colin Winter (1928–1981) Bishop of Damaraland noted for opposing apartheid; exiled Bishop of Namibia; Irish-British Anglican bishop

"An Open Letter to Lydia Morrow" Pro Veritate, V.15, No. 4 (September 1976) http://disa.nu.ac.za/articledisplaypage.asp?filename=PVSep76&articletitle=An+open+letter+to+Lydia+Morrow+from+Colin+Winter%2C+Bishop+of+Damaraland+in+exile+++++++++&searchtype=browse. Pro Veritate http://disa.nu.ac.za/journals/jourpvexpand.htm was a Christian monthly journal published in South Africa from 1962 to 1977. Lydia Morrow was the small daughter of Winter's friends and associates, Edward and Laureen Morrow.

Love, Men, Children, People

“Let us be Christians toward our fellow-whites, as well as philanthropists toward the blacks our fellow-men. In all things, and toward all, we are enjoined to do as we would be done by.”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

Supplement
Battle Pieces: And Aspects of the War (1860)

Men

“By now it has become a formula to attach new ideas on the grounds of extremism and unintelligibility. Every phase of modern art has in turn been attacked on these grounds, until the new phase became acceptable. Although the present attacks are focused on those who emphasize the subjective side of abstract painting, the threat to other sections of the modern painting is implicit. The attacks are always focused on those who are considered the black sheep, for reasons of non-conformity. They are conspicuous, because they are different, and therefore may be easy targets.”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

Gottlieb's comment on the attacks on artistic freedom in the United States, 1948
Quote from Gottlieb's lecture at Forum: the Artist Speaks, museum of Modern Art, New York, May 5, 1948.
1940s

Art, Idea, Freedom, Painting

“I looked down at the poor calf. Its hide was spotted black and white and it had the most delicate ankles. From the slightly open mouth there appeared a pink tongue. I closed my eyes and ran out of Hellfrick's room and threw myself on the floor in my room. I lay there and shuddered, thinking of the old cow alone in the field in the moonlight, old cow mooing for her calf. Murder!”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust (1939), Chapter Thirteen

Thinking, Appearance

“I may sound a little black, but I'm really pretty well adjusted.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Letter to Kay Menyers (17 March 1958), p. 109
1990s, The Proud Highway : The Fear and Loathing Letters Volume I (1997)

“And the young gay people in the Altoona, Pennsylvanias and the Richmond, Minnesotas who are coming out and hear Anita Bryant in television and her story. The only thing they have to look forward to is hope. And you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right. Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us'es, the us'es will give up. And if you help elect to the central committee and other offices, more gay people, that gives a green light to all who feel disenfranchised, a green light to move forward. It means hope to a nation that has given up, because if a gay person makes it, the doors are open to everyone.”

Harvey Milk (1930–1978) American politician who became a martyr in the gay community

A version of his staple "Hope Speech," quoted in Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (1982), p. 363

People, World, Hope, Feeling

“A family without a black sheep is not a typical family.”

Heinrich Böll book Black Sheep

Eine Familie, die keine schwarzen Schafe hat, ist keine charakteristische Familie.
"Die schwarzen Schafe" (1951); cited from 1947 bis 1951 (Köln: F. Middelhauve, 1963) p. 478. Translation: "Black Sheep", in Leila Vennewitz (trans.) The Stories of Heinrich Böll (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995) p. 408.

Family

“Neil Cavuto: …your campaign has received a $500 campaign donation from a white supremacist in West Palm Beach. And your campaign had indicated you have no intention to return it. What are you going to do with that?
Ron Paul: It is probably already spent. Why give it back to him and use it for bad purposes?
Neil Cavuto: …this Don Black who made the donation, and who ran a site called "Stormfront, White Pride Worldwide," now that you know it, now that you're familiar after the fact, you still would not return it?
Ron Paul: Well, if I spent his money and I took the money that maybe you might have sent to me and donate it back to him, that does not make any sense to me. Why should I give him money to promote his cause?
Neil Cavuto: …Hillary Clinton has had to do this, a number of other candidates have had to do this. Do you think that just is a bad practice?
Ron Paul: I think it is pandering. I think it is playing the political correctness… What about the people who get donations, want to get special interests from the military industrial complex? They put in — they raise, bundle their money, and send millions of dollars in there. And they want to rob the taxpayers. That is the real evil … that buys influence in government. And this is, to me, the corruption that should be corrected… you are missing the whole boat — the whole boat, because it is the immorality of government, it's the special interests in government, it's fighting illegal wars…
Neil Cavuto: All right.
Ron Paul: …and financing, and taxing the people, destroying the people through inflation, and undermining this prosperity of the country.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Your World with Neil Cavuto, FOX News, December 19, 2007 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,317536,00.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrRtZaG63o8 2000s, 2006-2009

Money, War, People, Thinking

“Many nights I stood on the bridge — and in the middle alone — lost — a defenseless prey to the surrounding swarming darkness — crushed by the mountainous black impenetrability of the skyscrapers — here and there lights resembling suspended falls of astral bodies or fantastic splendors of remote rites — shaken by the underground tumult of the trains in perpetual motion, like blood in the arteries—at times, ringing as alarm in a tempest, the shrill sulphurous voice of the trolley wires — now and then strange moanings of appeal from tugboats, guessed more than seen, through the infernal recesses below — I felt deeply moved, as if on the threshold of a new religion or in the presence of a new DIVINITY.”

Joseph Stella (1877–1946) American artist

Source: "The Brooklyn Bridge (A page of my life)," 1929, p. 88; Cited in: Beth Venn, Adam D. Weinberg. Frames of Reference: Looking at American Art, 1900-1950 : Works from the Whitney Museum of American Art. University of California Press, 1999. p. 123

Religion, Mountain, Light, Time

“I do not believe -- and I have never believed -- that the crack cocaine explosion was a conscious CIA conspiracy, or anybody's conspiracy, to decimate black America. I've never believed that South Central Los Angeles was targeted by the U. S. government to become the crack capitol of the world. But that isn't to say that the CIA's hands or the U. S. government's hands are clean in this matter. Actually, far from it. After spending three years of my life looking into this, I am more convinced than ever that the U. S. government's responsibility for the drug problems in South Central Los Angeles and other inner cities is greater than I ever wrote in the newspaper.”

Gary Webb (1955–2004) American investigative journalist

January 16, 1999, Eugene, Oregon. http://www.parascope.com/mx/articles/garywebb/notAConspiracy.wav

Life, World, Angels, Problem

“Ye subterranean gods! whose awful sway
The gliding ghosts and silent shades obey:
O Chaos, hear! and Phlegethon profound!
Whose solemn empire stretches wide around!
Give me, ye great tremendous powers! to tell
Of scenes and wonders in the depths of Hell;
Give me your mighty secrets to display
From those black realms of darkness to the day.”

Christopher Pitt (1699–1748) English poet

Book VI, line 371
The Æneid of Virgil (1740)

God, Secret, Hell

“He replaced the gray of the walls with a darker shade by closing his eyes. It felt good to shut out some of the light. Not all, but just some. Just enough so there was a gray without images or threatening corners. Not the blackness that gives birth to those sudden flashes of stinging light that slashes your eyes, or the velvety darkness that thickens and become animated and flows and somehow moves around and over you. Just a soothing gray. Nothing to see.”

Hubert Selby Jr. book The Room

The Room (1971)

Birth, Light, Animals

“Bush is now undermining the United Nations. He is acting outside it, not withstanding the fact that the United Nations was the idea of President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Both Bush, as well as Tony Blair, are undermining an idea which was sponsored by their predecessors. They do not care. Is it because the secretary-general of the United Nations [Ghanaian Kofi Annan] is now a black man? They never did that when secretary-generals were white.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

2000s, Iraq War speech (2003)

Idea

“I met a white man who walked a black dog.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall

Dogs

“Cilla Black: What are you like?
Russell: A bit like Jesus but with an electric willy.”

Russell Brand (1975) British comedian, actor, and author

Radio 2 Show (2007–2008)

“States should practice multilateralism and abandon unilateral actions that adversely affect a democratic and equitable international order, refraining from the threat or use of force. They should apply international law uniformly, abandon overreliance on “positivism” and efforts to circumvent treaty obligations or invent loopholes. As “nature abhors a vacuum” (Spinoza, Ethics), human rights law abhors “legal black holes””

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

United Nations General Assembly - Promotion of a democratic and equitable international order http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/IntOrder/A-68-284_en.pdf. 2013

Law, Nature, Effort

“A system designed to protect individual liberty will have no punishments for any group and no privileges. Today, I think inner-city folks and minorities are punished unfairly in the war on drugs.
For instance, blacks make up 14% of those who use drugs, yet 36 percent of those arrested are Blacks and it ends up that 63% of those who finally end up in prison are Blacks. This has to change.
We don’t have to have more courts and more prisons. We need to repeal the whole war on drugs. It isn’t working. We have already spent over $400 billion since the early 1970s, and it is wasted money. Prohibition didn’t work. Prohibition on drugs doesn’t work. So we need to come to our senses. And, absolutely, it’s a disease. We don’t treat alcoholics like this. This is a disease, and we should orient ourselves to this. That is one way you could have equal justice under the law.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

GOP Presidential Forum at Morgan State University http://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/p/30724045/Stands-on-race-Paul-can-not-deny.aspx, September 27, 2007 2000s, 2006-2009

Money, War, Alcohol, Disease

“Gone are the days when my heart was young and gay,
Gone are my friends from the cotton fields away,
Gone from the earth to a better land I know,
I hear their gentle voices calling "Old Black Joe."”

Stephen Foster (1826–1864) American songwriter

Old Black Joe, Firth, Pond & Co. (1860).

Heart

“Spread along the platform was a mass of bobbing black hair like a long wave of silk. Suddenly I felt the first stirrings of what I would later come to recognize as kinship, a feeling that alarmed me, a sense that I was of a piece with a group of people for the most basic reasons, simple to the senses and irrational. They all looked like me.”

Zia Haider Rahman British novelist

In The Light of what We Know (2014)

People, Feeling, Sense

“I just can't believe all the things people say -- Controversy
Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay? -- Controversy
Do I believe in God? Do I believe in me?”

Prince (1958–2016) American pop, songwriter, musician and actor

Controversy
Song lyrics, Controversy (1981)

God, People

“He and Don came up to the corpse of the German truck. The scrounger who'd been messing around there was gone. "Who's that asshole gonna sell his scrap to?" Charlie said. "Us- you wait and see. We're dumb enough to pay good money to put these mothers back on their feet now that we stomped 'em." "Yeah, that's like us, all right," Dom agreed. "We-" The truck blew up. Next thing Charlie knew, he was sprawled on the ground a surprisingly long way from the road. Dom- no, a piece of Dom- lay not far away. Charlie tried to reach out. His arm didn't want to work. WHen he looked down at what was left of himself, he understood why. It didn't hurt. Then, all at once, it did. His shriek bubbled through the blood filling his mouth. Mercifully, blackness enfolded him.”

Harry Turtledove (1949) American novelist, short story author, essayist, historian

Source: The Man With the Iron Heart (2008), p. 17

Money, Way, Waiting, Hurt

“When people wanted to criticize the Affordable Care Act they would often say “This is reparations. This is reparations.” Liberals [were often saying (somewhat indistinct)] “No, no, no. This isn’t for black people. This will benefit everybody.” In a just world we would say “Yes. This does disproportionately benefit black people and that’s a very, very good thing because for most of our history we have disproportionately injured black people and our policy should be structured in such a way that take that into account.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975) writer, journalist, and educator

"Ta-Nehisi Coates on Segregation, Housing Discrimination and 'The Case for Reparations'" https://www.democracynow.org/2014/5/30/part_2_ta_nehisi_coates_on (May 30, 2014) Part 2, Democracy Now! https://www.democracynow.org

People, World, Way, History

“Man," said he, "tell me your name, so that my brothers in Vanaheim may know who was the last of Wulfhere's band to fall before the sword of Heimdul."
"Not in Vanaheim," growled the black-haired warrior, "but in Valhalla will you tell your brothers that you met Conan of Cimmeria.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Frost-Giant's Daughter" (1953)