bell hooks on white terrorism

    "Returning to memories of growing up in the social circumstances created by racial apartheid, to all black spaces on the edges of town, I reinhabit a location where black folks associated whiteness with the terrible, the terrifying, the terrorizing. White people were regarded as terrorists, especially those who dared to enter that segregated space of blackness. As a child, I did not know any white people. They were strangers, rarely seen in our neighborhoods. The "official" white men who came across the tracks were there to sell products, Bibles and insurance. They terrorized by economic exploitation. What did I see in the gazes of those white men who crossed our thresholds that made me afraid, that made black children unable to speak? Did they understand at all how strange their whiteness appeared in our living rooms, how threatening? Did they journey across the tracks with the same "adventurous" spirit that other white men carried to Africa, Asia, to those mysterious places they would one day call the "third world"? Did they come to our houses to meet the Other face-to-face and reenact the colonizer role, dominating us on our own turf?
      Their presence terrified me. Whatever their mission, they looked too much like the unofficial white men who came to enact rituals of terror and torture. .. . .
      In the absence of the reality of whiteness, I learned as a child that to be "safe," it was important to recognize the power of whiteness, even to fear it, and to avoid encounter. There was nothing terrifying about the sharing of this knowledge as survival strategy. . .
     Even though I live and move in spaces where I am surrounded by whiteness, there is no comfort that makes the terrorism disappear. All black people in the United States, irrespective of their class status or politics, live with the possibility that they will be terrorized by whiteness."

--bell hooks, "Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination" in White Privilege: essential readings on the other side of racism. 2nd ed. Ed. by Paula S. Rothenberg, 2005, Worth, New York, pp 22-23.

Mother Teresa quote

"People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered; Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; Be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies; Succeed anyway. If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you; Be honest and sincere anyway. What you spend years creating others could destroy overnight; Create anyway. If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous; Be happy anyway. The good you do today, will often be forgotten; Do good anyway. Give the best you have, and it may never be enough; Give your best anyway. You see, in the final analysis, It is between you and God; It was never between you and them anyway." - Mother Teresa