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Prejudice Quotes

“Cry about the simple hell people give other people – without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they’re people, too.”

– Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 20. Dolphus Raymond is predicting that Dill won’t cry about these things when he gets older. Once Scout and Dill get accustomed to the world as it is, they will no longer be shocked by the prejudices and injustices they witness. To Dolphus, it seems children have more moral outrage than adults.

George patted a wrinkle out of his bed, and sat down. “Give the stable buck hell?” he asked.
“Sure. Ya see the stable buck’s a n****r.”
“N****r, huh?”
“Yeah. Nice fella too…The boss gives him hell when he’s mad. But the stable buck don’t give a damn about that.”

– John Steinbeck

Of Mice and Men, Chapter 2, George and Candy talk about Crooks. The boss makes Crooks the whipping boy of the ranch and lashes out at him whenever he is angry. In this novella, Crooks is the symbol of 1930s racism and prejudice.

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

– Arundhati Roy
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