White people were both good and bad, like everybody else, he would say. The average white person, he told his boys, did not sit around all day thinking of how to suppress black folks. Most of them were just trying to get through their own hard little lives. They had their own problems too, their bills to be paid, their illnesses, their own fears and shortcomings. Most of them didn’t feel very secure or very powerful. Only a few of them, the really dangerous ones, thought much about keeping black people down. But most people, he told his sons, were reasonable, caught like everyone else in
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