“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.”

though prejudice changes names—colonialism, racism, genocide, anti-Semitism, apartheid, ethnic-cleansing and profiling—every alias results in the same injustice. We shall remain prisoners of culture unless we become aware of the process and force ourselves to confront it and to deprogram it.

but they have warned me that any time the police see a Negro idling, especially one they do not recognize, they will surely question him. This is worrisome, certainly an experience any Negro wants to avoid.

If some spark does set the keg afire, it will be a senseless tragedy of ignorant against ignorant, injustice answering injustice - a holocaust that will drag down the innocent and right-thinking masses of human beings. Then we will all pay for not having cried for justice long ago.

“blackness was not a color but a lived experience.”

“Racist Sins of Christians” was first published in 1963 by Sign magazine

he as an individual can live in dignity, even though he as a Negro cannot.

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 perv

He cannot understand how the white man can show the most demeaning aspects of his nature and at the same time delude himself into thinking he is inherently superior.