Quote of the Week

I am obviously not arguing that discrimination against the Irish or the Italians or the Poles is or was anything like that which our black brothers have had to endure, but I am suggesting that bigotry is by no means a lower-class phenomenon and that compassion among the elites is by no means universal. And yet, an attitude of compassion towards one group mixed with bigotry towards another group is, in the final analysis, intolerable -- intolerable on moral grounds because it is hypocritical and intolerable on political grounds because it is self-defeating. The intellectual who “loves” the blacks and the “poor” but has contempt for the Irish or the Italians or the “middle class” is in the final analysis every bit as much a bigot as the blue-collar worker who “hates niggers,” for both are asking, “Why Can’t They Be Like Us?” And to this titular question in this book there can be but one satisfactory answer: “Because they don’t want to be and in the United States of America, they don’t have to be.”
--Andrew M. Greeley, Why Can’t They Be Like Us?: America’s White Ethnic Groups