"In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it."
"Mama and I would go to a funeral and she'd stand up to read the dead person's eulogy. She made the ignorant and ugly sound like scholars and movie stars, turned the mean and evil into saints and angels. She knew what people had meant to be in their hearts, not what the world had forced them to become. She knew the ways in which working too hard for paltry wages could turn you mean and cold, could kill the thing that made you laugh."
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Source: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (2011). “Colored People”, p.20, Vintage
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