“History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals.
I attest to this: the world is not white; it never was white, cannot be white. White is a metaphor for power, and that is simply a way of describing Chase Manhattan Bank.”
― I Am Not Your Negro
I attest to this: the world is not white; it never was white, cannot be white. White is a metaphor for power, and that is simply a way of describing Chase Manhattan Bank.”
― I Am Not Your Negro
“Well, I may or may not be bitter, but if I were I would have good reasons for it: chief among them that American blindness, or cowardice, which allows us to pretend that life presents no reasons for being bitter.”
― I Am Not Your Negro
― I Am Not Your Negro
“I don't think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it's only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect.”
― Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement
― Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement
“Now I'm awake to the world. I was asleep before. That's how we let it happen. When they slaughtered Congress, we didn't wake up. When they blamed terrorists and suspended the constitution, we didn't wake up then, either. Nothing changes instantaneously. In a gradually heating bathtub, you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.”
―
―
“The root of the black man's hatred is rage,
and he does not so much had the white man
as simply as want the out of his way,
and, more than that,
out of his children's way.
The root of the white man's hatred is terror,
a bottomless and nameless terror,
which focuses on this dread figure,
an entity which lives only in his mind.”
― I Am Not Your Negro
and he does not so much had the white man
as simply as want the out of his way,
and, more than that,
out of his children's way.
The root of the white man's hatred is terror,
a bottomless and nameless terror,
which focuses on this dread figure,
an entity which lives only in his mind.”
― I Am Not Your Negro
Claire’s 2025 Year in Books
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