The most effectual way to be deceived is to believe oneself more cunning than one's neighbors.
They are as blind to some of the tendencies of the time as the French Noblese was before the French Revolution.
I talk about race a lot. It's been my work ever since I came out of acting school. But it's true that in a way talking about race is a taboo. Because so many of our debates about race have to do not with race but with what we are willing to see, what we will not see and what we don't want to see.
The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.
That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.
This administration is totally colorblind.
The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own time.
It is very easy for whites to miss problems that aren’t our own; that’s a function not of being white but of being human.
Our friends don't see our faults, or conceal them, or soften them.
I have lived in Chicago all my life and I still say we have no ghettos in Chicago.
I was shocked when I came to New Orleans. I never knew there were beggars on the streets here. I didn't know that there were poor people. I thought this was Heaven, you know?
Christians, even in enlightened and gospelized lands, may be blind to the great wickedness of certain customs and institutions
I'm very much to blame for not seeing it before, but who on earth goes about suspecting an impossible outlandish thing like murder? That's something that happens in books, not among people you know.
One function of the income gap is that the people at the top of the heap have a hard time even seeing those at the bottom. They practically need a telescope. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt probably didn't was a lot of time thinking about the people who build their pyramids, either.
The big majority of Americans, who are comparatively well-off, have developed an ability to have enclaves of people living in the greatest misery almost without noticing them.
Some people are at the top of the ladder, some are in the middle, still more are at the bottom, and a whole lot more don't even know there is a ladder.
I think there is this whole part of America that people overlook. I think they know it's there, but they tend to overlook it, become ignorant to it, and refuse to see it for what it is.
My darkness has been filled with the light of intelligence, and behold, the outer day-lit world was stumbling and groping in social blindness.
In men this blunder still you find; all think their little set mankind.
At least black people knew when they were slaves; you remain clueless.
The grace of novelty and the length of habit, though so very opposite to one another, yet agree in this, that they both alike keepus from discovering the faults of our friends.
The Seven Deadly Sins of the Press: - Concentrated Power of the Big Press. - Passing of competition and the coming of monopoly. - Governmental control of the press. - Timidity, especially in the face of group and corporate pressures. - Big Business mentality. - Clannishness among the newspaper publishers that has prevented them from criticizing each other. - Social blindness.
The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.
The glaring injustice is there for all who are not blinded by prejudice to see.
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
