Black is beautiful when it is a slum kid studying to enter college, when it is a man learning new skills for a new job. . . .
Whitney M. YoungRead
The danger is that people may mistake what is basically a change in vocabulary for a change in behavior, practices, and attitudes. While practically all Americans have learned to talk inoffensively, not enough have learned to think differently, nor act positively.
Interpretation
Changing the words we use does not necessarily mean our actions or attitudes are changing.
Whitney M. Young emphasizes that merely altering our language to sound more inoffensive does not equate to genuine behavioral change or a shift in attitudes. He warns that many may focus on superficial changes in expression while failing to engage in the deeper, more meaningful transformations in thought and action that are needed for true progress.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about social justice to highlight the need for genuine change.
Black is beautiful when it is a slum kid studying to enter college, when it is a man learning new skills for a new job. . . .
No race has a monopoly on vice or virtue, and the worth of an individual is not related to the color of his skin.
Black Power simply means: Look at me, I'm here. I have dignity. I have pride. I have roots. I insist, I demand that I participate in those decisions that affect my life and the lives of my children. It means that I am somebody.
Every man is our brother, and every man’s burden is our own. Where poverty exists, all are poorer. Where hate flourishes, all are corrupted. Where injustice reins, all are unequal.
Comrades, there is no true social revolution without the liberation of women. May my eyes never see and my feet never take me to a society where half the people are held in silence. I hear the roar of women’s silence. I sense the rumble of their storm and feel the fury of their revolt.
This will be a great day in our history; the date of a New Revolution - quite as much needed as the old one. Even now as I write they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind which will come soon!
I'm so tired of waiting, aren't you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind?
The most critical variable [to becoming a change-maker] is one's willingness to give oneself permission. To break the mental chains that make us small because everyone tells us we cannot.
For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.
It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge intime, toprotest againstchange, particularlychangefor the better.
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