The monk laughed. “Didn’t Shakespeare say something about ‘every fool in error can find a passage of Scripture to back him up’? He knew his religious bigots.”

But since racism always hides under a respectable guise - usually the guise of patriotism and religion - a great many people loathed us for knocking holes in these respectable guises.

“It’s high time we stopped giving the communists credit for every decent, brave, considerate act” white men might show in regard to black men.

the gracious Southerner, the wise Southerner, the kind Southerner was nowhere visible. I knew that if I were white, I would find him easily, for his other face is there for whites to see. It is not a false face; it is simply different from the one the Negro sees.

“We need a conversion of morals,” the elderly man said. “Not just superficially, but profoundly. And in both races. We need a great saint - some enlightened common sense. Otherwise, we’ll never have the right answers when the pressure groups - those racists, super-patriots, whatever you want to call them - tag every move toward racial justice as

We were already a land of two peoples (more, of course, but we are concerned with two here) possessing entirely different sets of information, and we were out of touch with one another.

every culture teaches us to honor its way while subtly denigrating other cultures.

Speaking of the religiosity of racists, Maritain observes: God is invoked … and He is invoked against the God of the spirit, of intelligence and love - excluding and hating this God. What an extraordinary spiritual phenomenon this is: people believe in God and yet do not know God. The idea of God is affirmed and at the same time disfigured and

“It isn’t my nature to be an activist,” he told Studs Terkel in 1978, “but your vocation doesn’t necessarily conform to your nature.”