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Source image: CHRISTINA HH

“[...] When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before. […]
     So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years.
     If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, ‘Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.’ It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t.
     The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.”
— Chris Rock in conversation with Frank Rich, via Upworthy
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“Figure-Ground: The characteristically unequal emphasis in human visual perception on a figure, which stands out against an undifferentiated background, which merely contributes to that perception. This unequal emphasis is found in the distinction between a word and its context between an organism and its environment or between pattern and chance. There are many visual examples of figure and ground reversals which are the equivalents of paradoxes. cybernetics has synthesised the paradoxes arising out of this alternating emphasis by the construction of systems of interacting subsystems in which each is simultaneously a figure in its own right and part of the background for the other subsystems. (Krippendorff)”
— Principia Cybernetica Web
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