This past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering — enough is certainly as good as a feast — but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth — and indeed, no church — can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable. This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words. If one is continually surviving the worse that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. And at this level of experience one’s bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry. . Anonymous
Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.
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Harper Lee
I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you....
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Toni Morrison
Walking to the train station I Wikipedia Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi, the man Hizb-ut-Tahrir refuse to accept as Islamic State's leader. I discover he is only one year older than me. I'm hit with that melancholy you get when you realise someone around your age...
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John Safran
The only honest way to approach the question of whiteness and blackness is to start by accepting that these are arbitrary categories that were invented in the 17th and 18th century in order to justify imperialism and slavery. They’re categories intended for the enforcement of...
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Jess Row
The Murchisons are honest-to- God-real-foe-rich colored people, and the only people in the world who are more snobbish than rich white people are rich colored people. I though everybody knew that.
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Lorraine Hansberry
