If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.
From James Baldwin
The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.
It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.
The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.
Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
The paradox of education is precisely this; that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
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1 perspectives