It is impossible for one class to appreciate the wrongs of another.
Class
I knew about holiness, never having missed a Sunday-school class since I started at four years. But if Jews were also religious, how could our neighbor with the grease-grimy shirt use the word ‘damn’ about them?
And if we don’t have a test, what we may end up doing is going back to what this country has done before. We could use social class and we still do, but in the 50s, it was, do you have the right last name and are your parents in privileged positions?
We cannot afford the creeping paralysis that destroys the effective will of democracy – the paralysis carried by hate and rancor, between class and class, person and person, party and party, as plague is carried through the streets of a town.
The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.
In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable.
Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire nation, or the entire human race.
What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.
When I teach and meet a class for the first time, you realize that there are people there that have exceptional abilities or have the potential to do exceptional things and you never know who those people are. My job is to provide the best information I can.
The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.