Quotes About Injustice

colonial entailments do not have a life of their own. They wrap around contemporary problems; adhere in the logics of governance; are plaited through racialized distinctions; and hold tight to the less tangible emotional economies of humiliations, indignities, and resentments

the "imperial dispositions of disregard": that which makes it possible—sometimes effortlessly and sometimes with strenuous if unremarked labor—to look away.

From the time she was born, she had been hemmed into an ever-narrowing space, until now she was very nearly walled in and the wall had been built up brick by brick by eager white hands.

Lutie watched her from the front porch. Damn white people, she thought. Damn them. And then—but it isn't that woman's fault. It's your fault. That's right, but the reason Pop came here to live was because he couldn't get a job and we had to have the State children because Jim couldn't get a job. Damn white people, she repeated.

Listen, Junto,' he said. 'They can wave flags. They can tell me the Germans cut off baby's behinds and rape women and turn black men into slaves. They can tell me any damn thing. None of it means nothing.' 'Why?' 'Because, no matter how scared they are of Germans, they're still more scared of me. I'm black, see? And they hate Germans, but they hate me worse. If that wasn't so they wouldn't have a separate army for black men.

Her thoughts returned to Junto, and the bitterness and the hardness increased. In every direction, anywhere one turned, there was always the implacable figure of a white man blocking the way, so that it was impossible to escape. If she needed anything to spur her on, she thought, this fierce hatred, this deep contempt, for white people would do it. She would never forget Junto. She would keep her hatred of him alive. She would feed it as though it were a fire.

This was, by comparison, a safe, secure, clean world. And looking at it, she thought it must be rather pleasant to be able to live anywhere you wanted to, just so you could pay the rent, instead of having to find out first whether it was a place where colored people were permitted to live.

Lutie sat down near the back of the room. It was filled with colored women, sitting in huddled-over positions. They sat quietly, not moving. Their patient silence filled the room, made her uneasy. Why were all of them colored? Was it because the mothers of white children had safe places for them to play in, because the mothers of white children didn't have to work?

That any human being should willingly afflict a fellow being who had never injured, or even offended him; that, unswayed by passion, he should deliberately become the means of torturing him, appeared to Vivaldi nearly incredible!

Can this be in human nature! — Can such horrible perversion of right be permitted! Can man, who calls himself endowed with reason, and immeasurably superior to every other created being, argue himself into the commission of such horrible folly, such inveterate cruelty, as exceeds all the acts of the most irrational and ferocious brute.

Poor George [Bush], he can't help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.

Let me say the good are often punished unfairly.

In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody "identified" me . . . and whispered in my ear . . . "Can you describe this?" And I said: "Yes, I can."

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem too insignificant for our concern? Yet in my heart I never will deny her, who suffered death because she chose to turn. - Lot's Wife

All my contemporaries— hundred-and-fivers or convicts— will tell you how we lived in barely sentient fear, raising children for the executioner, prison, or the torture chamber.

And so the decades file by, torture, Deportations, executions. Sing — You see... I can't

After generation upon generation, fathers upon forefathers, mothers upon foremothers, centuries and millennia of being one colour officially and three colours unofficially, a colourful sky, just like that, could not be allowed to be.

People always said you'd better be careful. Though how, when things are out of your hands, when things were never really in your hands, when things are stacked against you, does a person - the little person down here on the earth - be that?

Time has reversed many of the old verdicts of history which once we thought fixed, our whole theory of natural science has been changed--all that seems to us now of little use. But the lessons of justice or of injustice which we saw every day, the image of the beautiful sternness of truth or the cringing and wavering falsehood which filled the atmosphere of the old school rooms--those we remember still.

Racism has been for everyone like a horrible, tragic car crash, and we've all been heavily sedated from it. If we don't come into consciousness of this tragedy, there's going to be a violent awakening we don't want. The question is, can we wake up?

I feel like my work has been my path to freedom from having grown up in a segregated environment.

To get a headline, to get on the evening news, you have to attack a Jew. Otherwise you're ignored. And it's a shame. And we all play into it.

You see the mistakes of one system—the surveillance—and the mistakes of the other—the inequality—but there's nothing you could have done in the one and nothing you can do now about the other. She laughs wryly. "And the clearer you see that, the worse you feel.

The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement in a manner that would be amusingly absurd were it not so monstrously unjust and socially harmful.