When you're the victim of the behavior, it's black and white; when you're the perpetrator, there are a million shades of gray.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
There's so much grey to every story - nothing is so black and white.
Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.
I generally don't think most situations can be labeled as black or white.
It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.
I also believe that you are what you have to defend, and if you're a black man that's always going to be the bar against which you are judged, whether you want to align yourself with those themes or not. You can think of yourself as a colourless person, but nobody else is gonna.
The thing is, when you paint somebody in all of their colors, they're never all bad or all good. Even the worst person has humanity in there somewhere.
To me, most of life kind of lives in the grey and I don't just mean morally. I just mean kind of everything. If things were black and white it would be a lot clearer as to what to do all the time.
When writing on black life, whites have often been unwelcome, usually called upon to give witness or hauled in as the accused.
The stark reality is that crime happens in communities of color.
Everything in life is gray, you know.