I have long since passed that period when I felt personal discomfort at the sight of an ill-dressed or illiterate Negro. Social awareness has taught me where to lay the blame.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a shift in perspective from personal discomfort to understanding the systemic issues that contribute to social inequities.
Lorraine Hansberry expresses a significant evolution in her thoughts regarding social injustice, specifically concerning race and class. Instead of feeling uncomfortable at the sight of those who are ill-dressed or illiterate, she recognizes that the problem lies not with individuals but within the broader societal structures that perpetuate inequality. This quote emphasizes the importance of social awareness and personal growth in understanding and addressing complex societal issues.
In practice
In a discussion on systemic racism, this quote can highlight the importance of social awareness.
I feel that women - without wishing to foster any strict separatist notions, homo or hetero - indeed have a need for their own publications and organizations. Our problems, our experiences as women are profoundly unique as compared to the other half of the human race.
It is difficult for the American mind to adjust to the realization that the Rhetts and the Scarletts were as much monsters as the keepers of Buchenwald-they just dressed more attractively.
I am a writer. I suppose I think that the highest gift that man has is art, and I am audacious enough to think of myself as an artist - that there is both joy and beauty and illumination and communion between people to be achieved through the dissection of personality.
I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough and - I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations.
Daddy felt that this country was hopeless in its treatment of Negroes. So he became a refugee from America. He bought a house in Polanco, a suburb of Mexico City, and we were planning to move there when he died. I was fourteen at the time.
Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most; when they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain't through learning - because that ain't the time at all... When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.
To give aid to every poor man is far beyond the reach and power of every man. Care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole.
Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.
Until we Dream of Life and Life becomes a Dream.
The soul is innocent and immortal, it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse.
When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength.
Into this wild-beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.
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