I became aware of how the world is and how the white establishment plays black people against each other.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the manipulation within societal structures that exacerbates racial tensions.
Claudette Colvin's quote emphasizes her realization of the systemic issues within society, particularly how the dominant white establishment perpetuates divisions among black individuals. It suggests a deeper understanding of the social dynamics at play, indicating that the struggles faced by black communities are often intensified by external forces seeking to create discord rather than unity.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion on racial equality and justice.
As long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.
When our founding fathers drafted the Constitution and Bill of Rights, black people weren't even considered human.
I'd like my grandchildren to be able to see that their grandmother stood up for something, a long time ago.
Back then, as a teenager, I kept thinking, why don't the adults around here just say something? Say it so they know we don't accept segregation? I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there's no easy way to get it. You can't sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, 'This is not right.'
I wanted the young African-American girls also on the bus to know that they had a right to be there, because they had paid their fare just like the white passengers.
I always tell young people to hold on to their dreams. And sometimes you have to stand up for what you think is right even if you have to stand alone.
For a culture that has such a problem with death, we seem to deal with it in a quite bizarre way. We see people shot, killed and blown up, and we find it funny and sexy and all those things. But, the reality of it is that every day people die, and people are really sad and they grieve and they go through a really difficult process with it.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, old people in America had prayed, "Please God, don't let me look poor." In the year 2000, they prayed, "Please God, don't let me look old." Sexiness was equated with youth, and youth ruled. The most widespread age-related disease was not senility but juvenility.
I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say definitely what is and what is not possible.
We're living in an age of genocide. ...And we do believe that there is not only the genocide of war, and the genocide that took place with the extermination of the Jews, but the whole program....of birth control and abortion is another form of genocide.... [T]hey claim the poor are bringing forth tremendous numbers of children and so the solution is to kill them off.
I find more and more, as I grow older, that I prefer women to men, children to adults, animals to humans.... And rocks to living things? No, I'm not that old yet.
There must be some kind of way out of here,' said the joker to the thief.
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