June 2012
“A good deal of time and energy were spent during the nineteenth century proving that black people deserved to be slaves. Not the least of which effort was in the representation of blacks to children as funny, but barely verbal, animals—which is so chillingly displayed in the book The Funny Little Darkies. This book, published in the early nineteen-hundreds, intensified the dumbfoundedness I had always felt when considering how careless white people were of what they were admitting about themselves. Surely they knew that intelligence was judged by the ability to tell the difference between one thing and another. Surely they knew that intellect itself was the skill in determining the difference between one blood cell and another, between one molecule and another, between one leaf and another. That the finer the distinctions, the higher the intellect. The inability, then, to tell one black person from another was tantamount to a public admission of brain damage.”
—Toni Morrison. 1974. ‘Rediscovering Black History.’ in What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction. University of Mississippi Press. P. 47. (via james-bliss)
