66 Quotes by Charles M. Blow

I say, seeking to diminish the human dignity of another whose only crime is not loving whom you would have him or her love is immoral and an offense to the indomitable determination of the heart.

Progress is the wall behind which white America hides. (Even many Black leaders have absorbed and regurgitate the progress narrative.) White liberals expect Black people to applaud their efforts. But how is that a fair and legitimate expectation? Slavery, white supremacy, and racism are horrid, man-made constructs that should never have existed in the first place. Are we meant to cheer the slow, creeping, centuries-long undoing of a thing that never should have been done?

White supremacy cannot be appeased. It can't be bargained with. It can't be convinced. White supremacy is a ravenous and vicious. It is America's embryotic fluid. America was born in it and genetically coded by it. No amount or hoping or waiting, coalition-building or Kumbaya can redress that reality. Racism is a flaw in the oppressor, not the oppressed.

People think that they avoid the appellation [white supremacist] because they do not openly hate. But hate is not a requirement of white supremacy. Just because one abhors violence and cruelty doesn't mean that one truly believes that all people are equal – culturally, intellectually, creatively, morally.

Systems now do the bulk of the work; there is a perpetualness to racialized poverty and oppression. At a certain point – one long since passed in America – little effort is required to maintain the structures. Hopelessness and despair seep into the psyche. The damage becomes generational inheritance and culture caste.

And although rage has often been an effective tool to focus attention and shift narratives, it rarely produces policy gains or positively shifts societal perspective. The beneficiaries of Black rage are often the moderate figures with whom those in a rage are compared. Martin Luther King owes part of his success to Malcolm X, whom many whites saw as a more dangerous, and less acceptable, alternative.

My father was short for a man, with a child's plaything for a name - Spinner. He had flawless dark brown skin and a head full of big, wet-looking curls, black as oil. And he had the smile of a scoundrel - the kind of smile that disarmed men and undressed women.

The first memory I have in the world is of death and tears. That is how I would mark the beginning of my life: the way people mark the end of one. My family had gathered at Papa Joe's house because Mam' Grace was slipping away, only I didn't register it that way. For some reason I thought that it was her birthday.

One thing the gay rights movement taught the world is the importance of being visible.