A Quote by George Pelecanos

We couldn't have known - who could've predicted what happened in American politics in the 2016? The rise of racism again, or the peeling back of the onion and seeing racism again, was a bit of a surprise in the last couple years.
I said this man [Donald Trump] is peeling back the onion of White civility; and every level of that onion that he peels back, more and more of the nakedness of rancor and hate and bitterness is coming up out of the followers. This is one of the most interesting of all of the political presidential runs that I have had the blessing of seeing in my 83 years on this planet.
And what is the Republican solution to these outrageous [racial] inequalities? There isn't one. And that's the point. Denying racism is the new racism. To not acknowledge those statistics, to think of that as a 'black problem' and not an American problem. To believe, as a majority of FOX viewers do, that reverse-racism is a bigger problem than racism, that's racist.
The racism in South Asia is the most specific racism in the world. It's like racism against a slightly different language group. It's like micro-racism.
If anyone had told us in 1945 that there are certain battles we'll have to fight again we wouldn't have believed it. Racism, anti-Semitism, starvation of children and, who would have believed that? At least I was convinced then, naively, that at least something happened in history that, because of myself, certain things cannot happen again.
When a black man is stopped by a cop for no apparent reason, that is covert racism. When a black woman shops in a fancy store and is followed by security guards, that is covert racism. It is more subtle than 1960s racism, but it is still racism.
First there was racism. Then liberals created institutional racism and coded racism. You can only hear it with a dog whistle.
I've seen and always been extremely aware of racism... casual racism, serious racism... all of that.
There's a difference between racism and "I don't know any better. I'm clueless." Racism is like, "I'm trying to make you feel bad." That's racism.
You cannot be responsible for Jim Crow. You can not be responsible for racism. This is much more a problem for the person exercising racism.You are confronted with the reality of racism when you go in the streets, when the eyes of others come upon you. [James] Baldwin goes back with you to all the experiences you went through and gives a name to them, and explains why it is like this.
There is a national climate here. We're seeing a rise in hate speech, in intolerance, in racism, in division.
Racism and bigotry generally are the great driving engines of modern American liberalism. Even a remote hint of racism can trigger a kind of moral entrepreneurism.
Everybody's scared for their ass. There aren't too many people ready to die for racism. They'll kill for racism but they won't die for racism.
Racism is like high blood pressure—the person who has it doesn’t know he has it until he drops over with a God damned stroke. There are no symptoms of racism. The victim of racism is in a much better position to tell you whether or not you’re a racist than you are.
The really important victory of the civil rights movement was that it made racism unpopular, whereas a generation ago at the turn of the last century, you had to embrace racism to get elected to anything.
I think some people feel that if you question the reality of race, you're questioning racism; you're saying racism isn't real. Racism is real because people actually believe race is real. We'd have to really let go of the 500-year-old idea of race as a worldview in order to undo racism.
As the years pass, I find that writers who were once central to me aren't anymore. I revered Yeats's poetry in college. I respect it now and am still ravished by certain lines, but I don't go back to him again and again. I do go back to Emily Dickinson again and again.
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