If Beale Street Could Talk quotes about race & the color line

The truth of a case doesn’t matter. What matters is – who wins.

But they are wrong to be ashamed. The people responsible for these jails should be ashamed.

They looked at us as though we were zebras – and, you know, some people like zebras and some people don’t. But nobody ever asks the zebra.

The world sees what it wishes to see, or, when the chips are down, what you tell it to see: it does not wish to see who, or what, or why you are.

Despair can make one monstrous, but it can also make one noble: and here these children are, in the arena, up for grabs.

The poor are always crossing the Sahara. And the lawyers and bonds-men and all that crowd circle around the poor, exactly like vultures.

Maybe I’d feel different if I had done something and got caught. But I didn’t do nothing. They were just playing with me, man, because they could.

Remember, Tish, after all, it isn’t very much of a case. If Fonny were white, it wouldn’t be a case at all.

These captive men are the hidden price for a hidden and dreadful terror: the righteous must be able to locate the damned.

But you don’t know – the worst thing, man, the worst thing – is that they can make you so fucking scared. Scared, man. Scared.