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| Acknowledgments | |
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| Glossary | |
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| Introduction: "I think this anthropology is just another way to call me a nigger." | |
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| A Nation Within a Nation | |
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| "Black men have no country, but they are a country in their hearts." | |
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| "We are a nation primarily because we think we are a nation." | |
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| "Sometimes I wonder if there are any other Americans besides us." | |
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| "That man has got his country and we are our country." | |
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| The Legacy of Slavery | |
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| "I'm not saying 'Yessir' to no damn cracker." | |
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| "When you don't know when you have been spit on, it does not matter too much what else you think you know." | |
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| "In many ways I was more of a slave than most of my black ancestors." | |
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| "Many people say our people are unpredictable." | |
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| "There is nothing on this earth as low and lazy and cowardly as a cracker." | |
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| "I am a hard woman because I have had a hard time out here." | |
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| The Many Shades of Black | |
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| "Too many blackfolks are fools about color and hair." | |
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| "He looks as white as any white person, but you'd better not tell him that unless you are ready to go to war." | |
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| "One reason the whole thing is so hard to deal with is that nobody really talks about it." | |
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| "It's sex and color that present the most difficulty, right?" | |
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| "I don't trust anybody who would deny their color like that." | |
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| "I think that is rotten of them to lie to a blind man like that!" | |
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| The Mojo and the Sayso | |
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| "The business of white men is to rule." | |
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| "The white man must pretend to know more than he does, but we must always show less than we know." | |
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| "Whitefolks are how folks and blackfolks are what folks." | |
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| "The biggest difference between us and white people is that we know when we are playing." | |
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| "There are two kinds of whitefolks. A few live like they want to and the rest try to live like their big boss leaders." | |
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| "The power to do one thing is never the power to do all things." | |
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| The Welfare Siege | |
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| "You cannot walk the streets without running into something bad." | |
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| "We need to get up, not just get over." | |
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| "These whitefolks is evermore giving people things they cannot use or do not want." | |
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| "I thank God that I don't need anything from the white man." | |
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| "You can't just take anything this man hands out, because he has a hundred different kinds of chains." | |
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| "You push enough for the white man and you get a Cadillac out of his small change." | |
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| Sex and Work | |
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| "Hard work don't have a thing between its legs." | |
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| "When you lose control of your body, you have just about lost all you have in this world!" | |
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| "One thing about Cal'donia, if she don't want you, you are out of luck because that thing between her legs is hers and hers alone." | |
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| "He was a man and I was a woman, so we didn't neither of us have to raise the other." | |
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| "I can handle black men; what I can't handle is this prejudice." | |
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| Turn | |
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| "I'm twenty-four, but sometimes I feel much older because the things I believe in are the old ways." | |
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| "Christ warned us by his life and death, so who am I that I should not warn my daughter by my life?" | |
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| "If you teach your children to be fair and honest only some of the time and only to some people, you are really telling them that the truth is unimportant." | |
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| "I feel like something heavy just rolled off my chest." | |
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| "In high school they told me that it was the wonderful world of work and my father told me, 'Shug, it's a bitch out there.'" | |
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| "A junkie generally has to mess up the people he can - that means his mother or his sisters or his brothers." | |
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| "My daughter listens to me sometimes, but I listened to my mother all the time." | |
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| "Now, how is having a lot of fatherless children for the white man to half support going to help us?" | |
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| "I always wanted my mother to be proud of me, but I never really turned out to be nothin'." | |
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| More Than Mere Survival | |
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| "You got to live it the best you know how." | |
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| "All these doctors want to do is cut you or starve you." | |
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| "Right now, every day is just something you got to get through." | |
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| "I'm no respecter of churches in the same way that the Lord is no respecter of persons." | |
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| "God is the baddest ass in the firmament!" | |
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| "Some people are the horse shit of the earth." | |
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| "A faithful person means more than anything else in the world!" | |
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| "I have learned to stop feeling sorry for myself, I think." | |
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