▪️The first sentence of this quote is from Golding, but the rest isn’t. It’s from a contemporary black author almost no one has heard of, Erick Gray. The meme makes a tiny note of an “addendum” by Gray, but the viewer is left believing the quote is from Golding.
https://william-golding.co.uk/internationalwomensday

▪️The real Golding quote is much less flattering. He’s explaining why he used all boys in the Lord of the Flies, not girls:
🔹“if you land with a group of little boys, they are more like a scaled-down version of society than a group of little girls would be. Don’t ask me why, and this is a terrible thing to say because I’m going to be chased from hell to breakfast by all the women who talk about equality — this is nothing to do with equality at all. I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been. But one thing you can’t do with them is take a bunch of them and boil them down, so to speak, into a set of little girls who would then become a kind of image of civilisation, of society.”

You can hear the clip here:
https://youtu.be/vYnfSV27vLY?si=sM_XDX9V8DHhJdqd

▪️Golding’s lasting influence was to insert a pessimism about the nature of man into our culture, most of us had to read The Lord of the Flies in school. But our teachers never gave us the counter, real world example of a group of school boys who shipwrecked and survived, working largely in harmony and peace.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/shipwreck-deserted-island-south-pacific-survivors-60-minutes-2021-07-18/

▪️Instead, we were taught to believe the opposite about boys, that they are on the precipice of being savages, and if left on their own would descend into barbarism. All based on the imagination of Golding, a writer who raped a girl and ended up spending the bulk of his life as a depressed alcoholic.