Margaret Halsey - Race Quotes

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In race relations, the single gesture and the single individual are more often than not doomed to failure. Only the group and the long-term, undeviating policy make much headway.... if you want to make the world a better place, the first thing you must accept is the fact that you cannot transcend your limitations as an individual.

Margaret Halsey
There's nothing you can do about the race problem, Tom says, that's safe. We've let it go too long for that. The only choice we have left is between perilous courses that are democratic and perilous courses that aren't democratic.

Margaret Halsey
One of the less dismaying aspects of race relations in the United States is that their improvement is not a matter of a few people having a great deal of courage. It is a matter of a great many people having just a little courage.

Margaret Halsey
American business, while it does not frown on helping the human race, frowns on people who start right in helping the human race without first proving that they can sell things to it.

Margaret Halsey
The great disadvantage of being in a rat race is that it is humiliating. The competitors in a rat race are, by definition, rodents.

Margaret Halsey
The only way not to worry about the race problem is to be doing something about it yourself. When you are, natural human vanity makes you feel that now the thing is in good hands.

Margaret Halsey
The feelings, myths and prejudices about the Negro American which now seem so valid and real to some of our white contemporaries will take their place on the shelf along with the belief in witches and the notion that the earth is the center of the solar system.  Nobody knows as yet whether the future [of the race situation] is hopeless. All we know is that it can be made hopeless, if enough people choose to consider it so.

Margaret Halsey