Quote of the Day

It was common for white folk to tell their views to black folk: black people constantly, endlessly, helplessly listened, listened, listened, and then listened some more -- as servants, friends, colleagues, and allies, even -- to white folks' fears, desperation, and desires; their hopes, hates, and highs; their lows, too; their depression and exhilaration, their plans and pains, their utterly ordinary and unsurprisingly mediocre lives.  They did so without pausing or being asked to speak of their own lives and fears, their own apprehensions and terrors, their own deferred dreams and chilling nightmares -- the way something as simple as the slip of a tongue, the glance of an eye, a whistle might send them to their graves, disappearing into the very nothingness that white folk never noticed they had come from or would return to without fanfare or acclaim, without the gentle recognition of their humanity or magic or majestic ordinariness.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 16