“I will flatly say that the bulk of this country’s white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation.  They have been white, if I may put it, too long…” (James Baldwin, The New York Times, Feb. 2, 1969).

“Since English and American law could not countenance unfree human beings who had not broken the law, the Englishmen and Americans who wanted to own slaves had to divest their victims of humanity itself, to render them less than human in order to seize the slaves’ freedom and live morally and intellectually with themselves. This feat required the slave owner to look into the face of his slave and see no human.”

“Under Anglo-American law, the system could have been justified and lived with no other way, leaving white Americans today with what may be the most difficult psychological wounds human beings can suffer – the self-disfiguration that is the consequence of having denied the humanity of human beings.” (The Accommodation-The Politics of Race in an American City by Jim Shutze: p. 52-53).

“If white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly; the cost has been greater perhaps than we can yet know. If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself. As a member of the dominant race, he has felt little compulsion to acknowledge it or speak of it; the more painful it has grown the more deeply he has hidden it within himself. But the wound is there, and it is a profound disorder, as great a damage in his mind as it is in his society.

“This wound is in me, as complex and deep in my flesh as blood and nerves. I have borne it all my life, with varying degrees of consciousness, but always carefully, always with the most delicate consideration for the pain I would feel if I were somehow forced to acknowledge it . But now I am increasingly aware of the opposite compulsion.  I want to know, as fully and exactly as I can, what the wound is and how much I am suffering from it.  And I want to be cured; I want to be free of the wound myself, and I do not want to pass it on to my children.

“Perhaps this is only wishful thinking; perhaps such a thing is not to be done by one man, or in one generation. Surely a man would have to be almost dangerously proud to think himself capable of it.  And so maybe I am really saying only that I feel an obligation to make the attempt, and that I know if I fail to make at least the attempt I forfeit any right to hope that the world will be better than it is now.”

(Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, pp. 3-4).

“But I want to tell you something. This pattern this ‘system’ that the white man created, of teaching Negroes to hide the truth from him behind a facade of grinning, ‘yessir-bossing,’ foot-shuffling and head-scratching–that system has done the American man more harm than an invading army would do to him.”  (The Autobiography of Malcolm X).

“Grief is usually thought of as a product of losing something or someone.  But what happens if parts of myself were tied off at the stump with the fine threads of White Culture, never allowed to develop in the first place? What is the absence of humanity inside of me created by Whiteness? And what would it mean to fully grieve that absence?”  (Abraham Lateiner, “Grieving the White Void,” Medium, 3/24/2016).

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Relative Quotes:

“Understanding that your life is not about you is the connection point with everything else.  It lowers the mountains and fills in the valley that we created, as we gradually recognize that the myriad forms of life in the universe are merely parts of the one life that most of us call God.” (p. 61, Adam’s Return. Richard Rohr)

“And though it all, each of us in our own private way has been brought face to face with the struggle that comes with every shift of social ground, every loosening of social certainties.  The struggle between variables has become endemic.  We find ourselves confronted with an experience of humanity, a sense of personal uprootedness that we have never known before.” (p.10, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, Joan D. Chittister)

“As a Wanderer, you apprentice to the unknown, to mystery.  You long to be initiated into the fully embodied life of your soul, but you will have to wait.  The fallow time of the Cocoon, the time between death and (re)birth, cannot be dodged. (p. 255, Nature and the Human Soul, Bill Plotkin)

“The life of contemplation in action and purity of heart is then, a life of great simplicity and inner liberty.  One is not seeking anything special or demanding any particular satisfaction.  One is content with what is.” (p. 66, The Inner Experience, Thomas Merton)