Saturday, April 21, 2007

5:29 AM | Some Thoughts

On calling a spade a spade

"If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves. We should, therefore, protest openly everything...that smacks of discrimination or slander."

--Mary McLeod Bethune

"Our thoughts are unseen hands shaping the people we meet. Whatever we truly think them to be, that's what they'll become for us."

--Richard Cowper


On minding mindless comments as harmless

"That is the problem. Its very innocence is the crux of its guilt. It’s the sort of thing that can easily be waved off by saying one is sorry, one didn’t mean any harm by it. Which will probably be well meant. But that is how the indigenous people are trampled upon in the worst of all—innocently. By remarks that people are compelled to ignore or accept or laugh at, at the risk of being called humorless, or fault-finder, or makulit. That’s how sexist remarks work too half the time. They are so seemingly harmless, so wickedly droll taking offense at them makes you look like your features are set in a perpetual scowl. But, well, the women have shown that’s not so at all. The remarks are neither funny nor harmless. They are cruel and baneful. Indeed, the people who make them have been known to bristle over equally 'innocent' jokes that concern their manhood. Then they are no longer jokes. Then they are things to pull out a knife for while drinking gin with the neighbors."

--Conrado de Quiros, "Brown Skin, White Masks"


On the roots of discrimination

"The first thing you do if you want to destroy somebody is to rob him of his humanity. If you can persuade yourself that someone is a gook and therefore not a real person, you can kill him rather more easily, burn down his home, separate him from his family... you can more easily hate and hurt him... [Mindless comments] are the seeds of discrimination and of murders, big and little."

--Charles Osgood, "Real Men and Women"

Labels: issues, quotes

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

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