“Individual white males seeking alternatives to patriarchal masculinity turned to black men, especially artists and musicians, for new definitions of manhood. Writing about his fascination with black masculinity in the 1963 essay “My Negro Problem-And Ours,” Norman Podhoretz declared: “Just as in childhood I envied Negroes for what seemed to me their superior masculinity, so I envy them today for what seems to be their superior physical grace and beauty.” Black masculinity then and now, was seen as the quintessential embodiment of man as “outsider” and “rebel”. Black males had access to the “cool” white men longed for.”
—bell hooks
November 2011
39 posts
“A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.”
—George Jean Nathan
“Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.”
—Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Down with Plessy v Ferguson … Props to Brown v Board of Education of Topeka
“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”
—Richard Wright (via alywoods)
“The clear consensus among…Americans is that waiting on government programs to get out of poverty, relying on welfare checks and subsidies, can kill the human spirit. Government programs have built housing projects that concentrate poor people in decaying neighborhoods with a culture of poverty- drugs, crime, fatalism, and a lack of access to jobs and the larger culture of work. That is quicksand, pulling poor people under, suffocating them by not-so-subtly encouraging them to surrender any dream of getting into the economic mainstream of American life.”
—
“Take a ride through the city man and tell me what you witness.
Poverty, richness, crooked cops and misfits,
violence, hatred, real devastation,
neighborhoods looking like there’s still segregation,
welfare, single mothers, no jobs,
tryna get a piece for yourself, but they hogging up the whole pie,
fiends in the street so high off of that crack shit,
this nigga thirteen with a gat under his mattress…
White folks got the road to success mapped and that’s all good,
but why don’t black’s got that same atlas?
I asked the same question a million ways
and it seems like I had prayed for a million days.
Still the ills remain - just bills and pain.
Shoot outs and project buildings, children slain,
skies filled with rain and I just sit and wonder why.
Its enough to make a nigga wanna cry,
but I can’t though…” —J Cole (Can’t Cry)
Poverty, richness, crooked cops and misfits,
violence, hatred, real devastation,
neighborhoods looking like there’s still segregation,
welfare, single mothers, no jobs,
tryna get a piece for yourself, but they hogging up the whole pie,
fiends in the street so high off of that crack shit,
this nigga thirteen with a gat under his mattress…
White folks got the road to success mapped and that’s all good,
but why don’t black’s got that same atlas?
I asked the same question a million ways
and it seems like I had prayed for a million days.
Still the ills remain - just bills and pain.
Shoot outs and project buildings, children slain,
skies filled with rain and I just sit and wonder why.
Its enough to make a nigga wanna cry,
but I can’t though…” —J Cole (Can’t Cry)
“The reality of poor black Americans literally trying to keep their heads above water prompted soul-searching questions about why black Americans are always left behind. Asian immigrants are loading themselves into hulls of cargo ships, risking suffocating death to come to America. Mexican immigrants risk death to cross desert sands and avoid border guards so that they can get into the United States. Immigrants from Cuba and Haiti will set out across the ocean in rafts made from inner tubes as they try to make it to America. The bright, luminous attraction of American education, economic opportunity, and political freedom is so magnetic that people from all corners of the globe risk everything to get to the United States.”
—Not telling you….
“The best kind of friend is the kind you can sit on a porch with, never say a word, and walk away feeling like it was the best conversation you have ever had.”
—Unknown
“
Reparations send a message to Americans of every other race that blacks are wards of the state because they are a broken people. Social ills in the black community would be exaggerated as black people, flush with one big check, decide they don’t need school, don’t need a job, and remove themselves from the vitality of mainstream American life. Black people would be more highly stigmatized and stereotyped than ever before.
The suffering of ancestors is not a claim ticket for a bag full of cash. Who wants money in their pocket that is stained with the blood of slaves? That is obscene. The great civil rights struggle has always been for the right to an equal opportunity to compete. Being equal requires the confidence that comes from knowing you have earned your way, even against great odds and injustice.
” —Juan Williams (On the debate agains reparations)
“For the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had and always will have an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.”
—W.E.B. DuBois (The Souls of Black Folk)
“
Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man’s business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked; ”Am I my brother’s keeper?” That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.
Yes, I am my brother’s keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death.
” —Eugene V. Debs (1908)
“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”
—C.S. Lewis (“The Problem of Pain”)
“Who are you? When heavy weather is blowing. Where is your character? The one who keeps you going.”
—Mara Hruby (Character)
“And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.”
—Ezekiel 25:17 (KJV)
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