A Quote by Jess Row
Disguising your own origins is a deeply American impulse, but that doesn't make it any less compromising. The way I live my life is to try to foreground the tensions and paradoxes of being a white person who's interested in racial justice and reconciliation, rather than disguise or obliterate them.
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I want you to understand that racial justice is not about justice for those who are black or brown; racial justice is about American justice. Justice for LGBT Americans is not about gay and lesbian justice; it's about American justice. Equality for women isn't about women; it's about United States equality. You cannot enjoy justice anywhere in this country until we make sure there is justice everywhere in this country.
Try to find your individuality, your integrity, and make the effort of not compromising. Because the more you compromise, the less you are an individual. You are only a cog in the wheel, just a part in the vast mechanism, just a small part of the mob - not an individual in your own beauty, in your own right. I am absolutely against compromise. Death is far more beautiful than a life of compromise.
Many people crave security and stability rather than risk-taking, and that doesn't make them any less American. They are the workers rather than the job creators, and all societies need both.
I don't think Dr. King helped racial harmony, I think he helped racial justice. What I profess to do is help the oppressed and if I cause a load of discomfort in the white community and the black community, that in my opinion means I'm being effective, because I'm not trying to make them comfortable. The job of an activist is to make people tense and cause social change.
There’s nothing more embarrassing than a person who tries to guess what the great American public would like, makes a compromise for the first time, and falls flat on his face… I would rather be a failure on my own terms than a success on someone else’s. That’s a difficult statement to live up to, but then I’ve always believed that the way you affect your audience is more important than how many of them are there.
I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I see not beyond death. Let me live while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. I know this: if life is an illusion, then I am no less than an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.
Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.
If we took as much pains to be what we ought, as we do to deceive others by disguising what we are; we might appear as we are, without being at the trouble of any disguise.
I left things out - my motivations, my history, my emotional responses - because I am not good at understanding them or writing about them. I tried and it was generally boring and always unconvincing. Most importantly I wanted to try to place Afghans and Afghanistan in the foreground rather than my own character.
My consciousness is a process, and that includes my relationship with my husband. His being white doesn't make me any less black or invested in black issues, the same way him being a man doesn't make me any less of a feminist.
White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress.
You must want to be first-class ...meaning the best, the very best you are capable of becoming. If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities.
There are two kinds of paradoxes. They are not so much the good and the bad, nor even the true and the false. Rather they are the fruitful and the barren; the paradoxes which produce life and the paradoxes that merely announce death. Nearly all modern paradoxes merely announce death.
There's more to life than being an actor in a Hollywood movie. I'm not going to adapt my life after that existence, where a lot of people do. And they get the publicist, and they get all that stuff, and it becomes them. I think it's a stupid way to live your life. A really dumb way to live your life.
It's your life - but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else . . . you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.
You promote your films; it's part of your job. You do the magazine covers and stuff, and then I try to live a really normal life. I definitely don't try to make it into any more craziness than it is.
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