"Terkel writes: "My wife was driving down the street in a black neighborhood. The people at the corners were all gesticulating at her. She was very frightened, turned up the windows, and drove determinedly. She discovered after several blocks, she was going the wrong way on a one-way street and they were trying to help her. Her assumption was they blacks and out to get her. Mind you, she's a very enlightened person. You'd never associate her with racism, yet her first reaction was that they were dangerous."
"'My father is the kindest, sweetest man you ever wanted to know,' says another black woman. She writes for a trade journal. 'He's very dark-skinned. It infuriates me to think that some little white woman would get on the elevator with my father and assume, just by the color of his skin, that he is going to harm her, and clutch her purse tighter. To think that my father, who's worked hard all his life, put us through school, loves us, took care of us-to think that she would clutch her purse because he's there. The thought makes me so angry.'"
"'I went through a bad time,' recalls a fireman's wife. 'I felt like being white middle-class had a stigma to it. Everything was our fault. Every time I turned on the TV, it would be constant trying to send me on a guilt trip because I had a decent life. I was sick of people making the connotation that because I was raising a good family, I was responsible for the ills of the world. The white middle class was getting a bum rap. Even when I went to church, I was angry.'"
"'What I found fascinating is the tragically humorous condition of northern whites. The civil rights movement made the white ethnic groups more democratic. The Poles, Jews, Italians, and Irish could all get together in their hostility to the blacks. It has become another aspect of the democratic creed. Being white in America made them feel equal to all other whites, as long as the black man was down below.'"
"'I think you become an adult when you reach a point where you don't need anyone underneath you. When you can look at yourself and say, "I'm okay the way I am." One of the things that keeps my class of people from having any vision is race hatred. You're so busy hating somebody else, you're not going to realize how beautiful you are and how much you destroy all that 's good in the world.'"
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