Edward Ball > Quotes

“The cult of the individual that dominates modern minds, the ideology of the “I,” prevents most of us from seeing ourselves as products of the chronicle and choices of our predecessors”
― Edward Ball, Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy

“stepped into the witness box to be examined. The defense wanted jurors who empathized with Muybridge—a married man who had a runaway wife, on the one hand, and a man who confronted a sexual rival, on the other.”
― Edward Ball, The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures

“The past feels like a comfortable place to make moral judgments. It is comfortable because we underestimate the people who live in it. We regard them as less than we are—or in reverse, grander than we are—but always, not like what we are. The past is a place where we can enjoy moral judgment and feel superior to a roomful of unfortunate people, not so enlightened as us, who had the bad luck to live when and where they did. One value in spinning out the story of a plain man is to show how complex an ordinary person can be, or was; to show the multitudes a life contains. It is dreadful what this character, my unlikeable protagonist, does with himself and with others. What would it mean to say that his judgments are not different by much from our own? One value in writing this particular life is to refuse to let the past be a refuge, to decline to feel superior to it, to reject feeling good because you are better than the uncountable idiots who are conveniently dead.”
― Edward Ball, Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy

“More than six out of ten runaways from the Balls and their peers had been born in Africa.”
― Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family

“In May 1896, the thoughtful justices of the high court, men who help to clarify national standards for everyone, determine that "repellent intimacy" is a persuasive argument. The law of quarantine is affirmed.
"We think the enforced separation of the races. . .neither abridges the privileges or immunities of the colored man, deprives him of his property without due process of law, nor denies him the equal protection of the laws," writes associate justice Henry B. Brown in a 7-1 ruling. The main point, says Justice Brown, is that "legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts."
The encirclement is complete. Race quarantine becomes the custom in all the land. White supremacy is acclaimed in habit, in thought and in law.”
― Edward Ball, Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy

“Aunt Maud was a schoolteacher during her working life. For forty years she taught in the white public schools in New Orleans. English was her subject, mainly, and in retirement, genealogy became her vocation. She was quiet and inward. Maud never married, she had no children. Our ancestors were her offspring.”
― Edward Ball, Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy

“The names of families are the front doors of history.”
― Edward Ball, Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy

“Marriage between cousins was common in the planter families—rather, it was expected.”
― Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family

“White supremacy is not a marginal ideology. It is the early build of the country. It is a foundation on which the social edifice rises, bedrock of institutions. White supremacy also lies on the floor of our minds. Whiteness is not a deformation of thought, but a kind of thought itself.”
― Edward Ball, Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy

“Family memory flows more completely through women. It is the women who learn much of the lore and who convey it to the young. Men forget the past in all its fleshiness and select which parts best fit into their lives.”
― Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family

“The forty-fifth president of the United States is the son of a man, Fred C. Trump, who was arrested in New York one Memorial Day during the 1920s at a rally staged by the Ku Klux Klan. On May 31, 1927, in Queens, New York, about one thousand Klan marchers made their way through the borough's dense streets. They wore robes and hoods. The parade turned into a riot when the Klansmen attached a smaller Memorial Day march of Italian Americans. Whites beat up other whites because the second Klan, led by Protestants was anti-Catholic as well as anti-color. Fred C. Trump, age twenty-five, resident of the Jamaica section of Queens, was among seven arrested. The forty-fifth president, in his retirement, if he possessed the means of reading and writing, might himself produce a family history entitled "Life of a Klansman." The public awaits.”
― Edward Ball, Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy

“The US Congress passes the first Civil Rights Act in March 1866. The law defines birthright citizenship, the idea that anyone born in the United States belongs to the nation. It conveys citizenship on the nearly ten percent of the American population once enslaved, whose legal status is still persona non grata, alien invader. The Civil Rights Act makes clear that blacks can own property, sue or be sued, make contracts and enforce them, give evidence in court -- ordinary things that whites think are natural. It is the first law of its kind. Yet the Civil Rights Act is a gesture at symbolic equity. It is not a material answer to 246 years of enslavement, and not at all an attempt at restitution.”
― Edward Ball, Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy

“Ecclesiastes 1:15, “The perverse are hard to be corrected, and the number of fools is infinite.”
― Edward Ball, Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy

“It is a performance of blackness that whites want, not the real life of being black. They still want it, I think.”
― Edward Ball, Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy