Quotes About Injustice

As a country, we've given up our birthright for even less than bread and pottage. We've given it up for nothing—although I'm sure some people somewhere are richer now.

He led the way past the main house away from the slave cabins and other buildings, away from the small slave children who chased each other and shouted and didn't understand yet that they were slaves.

There was no shame in raping a black woman, but there could be shame in loving one.

My ancestors in this hemisphere were, by law, chattel slaves. In the U.S., they were chattel slaves for two and a half centuries—at least 10 generations. I used to think I knew what that meant. Now I realize that I can't begin to imagine the many terrible things that it must have done to them. How did they survive it all and keep their humanity? Certainly, they were never intended to keep it, just as we weren't.

I couldn't let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn't leave people quite whole.

His father wasn't the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn't a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper.

have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive.

I couldn't really let her come all the way back. I couldn't let her return to what she was, I couldn't let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn't leave people quite whole.

How many people, I wonder, can be penned up and tormented—reeducated—before it begins to matter to the majority of Americans? How does this penning people up look to other countries? Do they know? Would they care? There are worse things happening here in the States and elsewhere, I know.

You do everything they tell you," she wept, "and they still treat you like a old dog. Go here, open your legs; go there, bust your back. What they care! I ain't s'pose to have no feelin's!

I saw a woman die in childbirth once," he said. I nodded. "I never saw it, but I kept hearing about it happening. It was pretty common back then, I guess. Poor medical care or none at all." "No, medical care had nothing to do with the case I saw. This woman's master strung her up by her wrists and beat her until the baby came out of her—dropped onto the ground.

How many people, I wonder, can be penned up and tormented—reeducated—before it begins to matter to the majority of Americans? How does this penning people up look to other countries? Do they know? Would they care?

The ease. Us, the children … I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.

Patrols. Groups of young whites who ostensibly maintained order among the slaves. Patrols. Forerunners of the Ku Klux Klan.

Once he's made everyone who isn't like him sound evil, then he can blame them for problems he knows they didn't cause. That's easier than trying to fix the problems.

They say detailed news doesn't matter. Since we can't change the stupid, greedy, vicious things that powerful people do, they think we should try to ignore them. No matter how many times we're forced to admit we can't really hide, some of us still find ways to try. Well, we can't hide. So it's best to pay attention to what goes on. The more we know, the better able we'll be to survive.

It's hard to believe that kind of thing happened here, in the United States in the twenty-first century, but it did.

West," I said bitterly. "That's where they're doing it to the Indians instead of the blacks!" He looked at me strangely. He had been doing that a lot lately.

Haven't you seen the men slaves in this country who are used for breeding? They are never permitted to learn what it means to be a man. They are not permitted to care for their children.

Slaves did that two hundred years ago. They sneaked around and educated themselves as best they could, sometimes suffering whipping, sale, or mutilation for their efforts.

It bothered me very much that they took both women away. The fat crazy woman had been permitted to go about her business until someone resisted. Then both victim and victimizer were treated as equally guilty.

So much agony caused, so much evil done in God's name.

We walk the highways and scrounge and scavenge and ask for work, and all of that reminds people that what's happened to us can happen to them. They don't like to think about stuff like that, so they get mad at us. They make the cops arrest us or run us out of town.

Interesting that they fear Edward Jay Smith's supposed incompetence more than they fear Jarret's obvious tyranny.