Dispatches from Pluto Quotes

“It’s why the Delta doesn’t progress. It’s not having anything, and not really wanting anything, because that would mean change. That would mean taking on more responsibility. Too many of our people are not interested in progress and change.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“that it was good for different cultures to come together, and chip away at human prejudice one party at a time.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“Things have come a long way in Mississippi. That’s the usual shorthand. Perhaps nowhere else in America has made more progress in its race relations, but then again, nowhere else had so far to go. Mississippi had the most lynchings, the worst Klan violence, the staunchest resistance to the civil rights movement. When the Emmett Till case was tried, the all-white jury found the two defendants not guilty in an hour and eight minutes. One juror said it would have been quicker if they hadn’t taken a break to drink Coca-Colas. Those days are gone now, but inevitably, they bleed through and stain the present.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“Mississippi is the center of the universe,” he said. “The two biggest issues in western Christian civilization are the white-black race issue and the rich-and-poor issue. Mississippi is at the apex of both. And if anybody in the world can solve the problem, it’s Mississippi.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“People here talk about firearms and hunting in the same way that urban liberals go on about nutrition and exercise.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“No state has a more beautiful name—Miss and Sis are sipping on something sippy, and it’s probably a sweet tea or an iced bourbon drink—but no state is more synonymous in the rest of the country with racism, ignorance, and cultural backwardness.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“One famous study on the subject found that poor children on average hear thirty million fewer words than rich children in the first four years of their life. Closing that gap is extremely difficult, especially when you factor in all the social ills associated with poverty in America. The poorest Americans have the highest rates of alcohol and drug abuse, violence against children, sexual abuse of children, neglect of children, illiteracy, mental illness, teenage pregnancy, delinquency, incarceration.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“Sometimes, when people in the South tell you to have a blessed day, it means fuck you and I hope you have a nice time in hell.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“We drank a glass of wine on the front porch, and the Thompsons made some generalizations about black people that made us feel uncomfortable, although I had certainly heard worse from my father and his friends in London. They loved Lucy and Monk like family, and Cadi loved to go to black church, but there were a lot of worthless blacks on welfare who didn’t want to work, and we should never stop in Tchula, even if we ran down a pedestrian, because the people there would surely rob us, and quite possibly rape Mariah by the side of the road.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“It was all so familiar from Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean: the collapsing infrastructure, the intermittent electricity supply, the air of lassitude and disorganization, the ancient forms. It brought back memories of multiple trips to the visa office in Bujumbura, in the small African county of Burundi. I was also reminded of Britain in the 1970s, when nothing worked properly, the tea break was sacrosanct and an obstructive time-wasting surliness prevailed at every interface between institutions and the public. But I'd never come across anything like it in America before.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“Mariah put something useful in a nutshell when she said: If white person is lazy around here, it is because they have a poor work ethic. If a black person is lazy, it’s because they are black.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“A kind of affectionate racism prevailed among the delta gentry, they had kind, paternalistic feelings toward black people and a genuine appreciation for black culture, but they didn’t want a black man dating their daughters or sitting down to eat dinner at their table, because that wasn’t the way things were done or meant to be.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“If you were from a state that didn’t fight for the Confederacy, you were a Yankee.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“Here, race was so difficult and complicated, it was a kaleidoscope you could keep on turning.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“Mariah and I had never thought so much about race and racism in our lives. It was the great underlying obsession of the Mississippi delta. The elephant in every room. Almost every charming, gracious, hospitable, generous white landowner we met came from a family that had profited from an American version of apartheid. Or more accurately a blueprint for the South African version.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“Legal segregation was long gone, but a strong tradition prevailed in both communities that it was best to live separately.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“People seemed uniquely printed to believe in plots and conspiracies, miracles and demons.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“Alan Lomax recordings of the prisoners singing”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“Sometimes when you are feeling buried, you're just planted”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“One of her classmates asked a prisoner what was the worst thing about being there. “The first time they fuck you in the ass,” he replied, and this was the first time that she and her classmates learned about that kind of rape.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta