Quotes About Injustice

Baldwin put it this way in No Name in the Street: "One may see that the history, which is now indivisible from oneself, has been full of errors and excesses; but this is not the same thing as seeing that, for millions of people, this history…has been nothing but an intolerable yoke, a stinking prison, a shrieking grave.

White people deserved whatever happened to them, he said. The problem is that we don't deserve any of it.

black people are essentially inferior, less human than white people, and therefore deserving of their particular station in American life.

people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn't…anything else but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one's life was to say that he was not a man. For if he wasn't, then no crime had been committed. That lie is the basis of our present trouble. American

Tell the story. Make it real for those who refuse to believe that such a thing can happen/has happened/is happening here. Bring the suffering to the attention of those who wallow in willful ignorance. In short, shatter the illusion of innocence at every turn and attack all the shibboleths the country holds sacred.

The lynched relative; the buried son or daughter killed at the hands of the police; the millions locked away to rot in prisons; the children languishing in failed schools; the smothering, concentrated poverty passed down from generation to generation; and the indifference to lives lived in the shadows of the American dream are generally understood as exceptions to the American story, not the rule. Blasphemous facts must be banished from view by a host of public rituals and incantations.

It was a place that denied the contradiction between its commitments to freedom and democracy and its practice of slavery and white supremacy.

what W.E.B. Du Bois described as "a hope not hopeless but unhopeful.

Trump and his legions invoke a history to justify their belief in the value gap. In doing so, they stand in the long lineage of white people in the United States who have used a certain understanding of the past to reinforce the injustices of the present day. Baldwin's moral vision requires a confrontation with history—with slavery and with the ongoing consequences of the after times—shorn of the rosy tint of American innocence in order to overcome its hold on us.

Don Sturkey's images of Dorothy Counts find their inheritors in pictures and videos we see today of the suffering of black people at the hands of police forces. We have become a world of people using their cellphone cameras to bear witness, filming the brutality of police or recording the callousness of white people who feel threatened

In front of him was the bitterness and disappointment in a country that fought them at every turn.

My mom's messed up," his mom said. "The nuns messed her up. They made her think everything Indian was evil. And that includes you and me.

Suppose a boy steals an apple From the tray at the grocery store, And they all begin to call him a thief, The editor, minister, judge, and all the people – «A thief», «a thief», «a thief», wherever he goes. And he can't get work, and he can't get bread Without stealing it, why the boy will steal. It's the way people regard the theft of an apple That makes the boy what he is.

The whites that wanted to live like the blacks were as immoral as you could imagine. Ask any black and they will tell you that you haven't lived until you have been a nigger on a Saturday night.

A look at Chinese history showed that some of China's ablest patriots were at one time or another labeled bandits.

Abuse a man unjustly, and you will make friends for him.

Convention (is) so often a mask for injustice.

We asked ourselves whether, in these days of equality in which we live, there are classes unworthy the notice of the author and the reader, misfortunes too lowly, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes too commonplace in the terror they inspire.

Fraud is the ready minister of injustice.

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

A rapacious and licentious soldiery.

Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.

Bad law is the worst sort of tyranny.

The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the world is by one man's pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another.