As a chief justice of the United States once said, blacks were three-fifths of a human, and only a full human being should have rights, the implicati… - Sidney Poitier

Now, I don’t think we are killing people because we’re any worse than anybody else or any better. I think that what we are doing is showing the darker side of what human beings have always been: we have a capacity for love, a capacity for kindness, a capacity for passion, and we have an equal capacity for their opposites. Love is infinitely more effective in the world than hate, but love and hate have their opposites, and we have now a huge dilemma: we have the world’s number-one spot, we are the strongest military in the world, and we have more people hating us than ever before. I

There is a sense of self, of character, and of personal self-worth and kindness and hopefulness and embrace that is characteristic of such people, educated and noneducated alike.

A lot of black leaders, along with a lot of sympathetic white people, would say it’s too early in this country for forgiveness. We haven’t dealt with accountability yet, admission of guilt yet. And we certainly don’t have equality yet. But among the things that we must try to get done is the nurturing of a civilized, fair, principled, humane society. Now, if a part of that nurturing — part of the movement toward it, some of the efforts spent in that direction — would bring us to a new understanding, a new acceptance, even some forgiveness, what then? And not just forgiveness from the people who’ve been wronged. Forgiveness works two ways, in most instances. People have to forgive themselves too. The powerful have to forgive themselves for their behavior. That should be a sacred process.