We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy Quotes
"We were eight years in power. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt the ferries. In short, we had reconstructed the State and placed it upon the road to prosperity."
"If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than bad Negro government, it was good Negro government."
"The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of our revolution. And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong."
"What this country really fears is black respectability, Good Negro Government."
"Symbols don’t just represent reality but can become tools to change it."
"The most precious thing I had then is the most precious thing I have now—my own curiosity."
"All you know is Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jackson. Forget about a check....This is how we lost to the white man."
"The ultimate fate of black people lies in their own hands, not in the hands of their antagonists."
"Go to the corner and get some ice cream. It has calcium in it."
"The depth of his commitment would seem to belie such suspicions, and in any case, they do not seem to have affected his hold on his audience."
"The rage that lives in all African Americans, a collective feeling of disgrace that borders on self-hatred."
"Liberalism, with its pat logic and focus on structural inequities, offers no balm for this sort of raw pain."
"The sacrifices of the '60s weren't made so that rappers and young people could repeatedly use the word nigger. But that’s exactly why they were made."
"I need people to guide me. I need the possibility of change."
"The temptation toward satire and sardonicism is powerful here."
"I remembered that once, as a child, I was filled with wonder."
"The mourning continues. Even today, from time to time, I find myself...mourning, hoping that I and all my wonder, my long-lost friend, have not yet run out of time."
"I was afraid of heights, but a mix of machismo and curiosity pushed me forth."
"We struggle out of fear for our children. We struggle out of fear for ourselves."
"I could remember, as a child, the nationalists claiming the country was built by slaves."
"The blog was a gym, my commenters were my trainers."
"Slavery was contrary to America's stated democratic precepts, but in fact, it was slavery that allowed American democracy to exist in the first place."
"It was slavery that gifted much of the South with a working class that lived outside of all protections."
"At every stop I was moved. The stories of suffering, limbs amputated, men burned alive, the bravery and gallantry, all of it seeped up out of the ground and enveloped me."
"White men have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist were white men to fill the position here occupied by the servile race." - Jefferson Davis
"Among us the poor white laborer is respected as an equal. His family is treated with kindness, consideration and respect." - Joseph E. Brown
"In fact, there would be no grappling. Obama was denounced for having attacked the police, and the furor grew so great that it momentarily threatened to waylay his agenda."
"America had a biography, and in that biography, the shackling of black people—slaves and free—featured prominently."
"The belief that the Civil War wasn’t for us was the result of the country’s long search for a narrative that could reconcile white people with each other."
"But the same year I began my exploration of the Civil War...Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested."
"For African Americans, war commenced not in 1861, but in 1661, when the Virginia Colony began passing America’s first black codes."
"Over the next two centuries, the vast majority of the country’s blacks were robbed of their labor and subjected to constant and capricious violence."
"The first generation of the South’s postbellum black political leadership was largely supplied by this class."
"Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin?"
"Always lurking among Malcolm’s condemnations of white racism was a subtler, and more inspiring, notion—'You’re better than you think you are,' he seemed to say to us. 'Now act like it.'"
"Life was short, and death undefeated. So I loved hard, since I would not love for long. So I loved directly and fixed myself to solid things—my wife, my child, my family, health, work, friends."
"The truth was in the everything that came after atheism, after the amorality of the universe is taken not as a problem but as a given."
"If Celia, Margaret, and Ida had failed to help the country at large locate its morality, they had succeeded in living by their own."
"The lessons they passed down were not about an abstract hope, an unknowable dream. They were about the power and necessity of immediate defiance."
"I too would gather my words and scream into the roaring waves, because to scream was to defy the story, and that defiance had meaning, no matter that the waves kept coming, would come, maybe, forever."
"The world might fall off a cliff, but I did not have to be among those pushing it and more, I did not have to nod along while fools insisted that gravity was debatable."
"This defiance was my firm ground—as real as my wife, my son, my family, my friends, my community."
"The work of Adolph Reed was never far from mind."
"The thing is, a black man can't be president in America, given the racial aversion and history that's still out there."
"In virtually any American conflict, Kennedy’s father rooted for the foreign country."
"I have no love for America," he declaimed in a lecture to the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1847. "I have no patriotism….I desire to see [the government] overthrown as speedily as possible and its Constitution shivered in a thousand fragments."
"The message is 'You are not American.' The countermessage—God Damn America—is an old one, and is surprising only to people unfamiliar with the politics of black life in this country."
"Both Kennedy’s father and Wright were military men. My own father went to Vietnam dreaming of John Wayne, but came back quoting Malcolm X."
"They act like they don’t love their country. No, what it is, is they found out their country don’t love them."
"Love of country, like all other forms of love, requires that you tell those you care about not simply what they want to hear but what they need to hear."
"It was in these early years that Ross began to understand himself as an American—he did not live under the blind decree of justice, but under the heel of a regime that elevated armed robbery to a governing principle."
"He fought in World War II to save the world from tyranny. But when he returned to Clarksdale, he found that tyranny had followed him home."
"This was writer fame, not George Clooney fame. But it was disturbing."
"I had come to love the invisibility of writing—the safe distance between my face and the work."
"When I found myself caught up in it, I said, ‘How? I just left this mess. I just left no laws. And no regard. And then I come here and get cheated wide open.’"
"The Contract Buyers League fought back. Members—who would eventually number more than five hundred—went out to the posh suburbs where the speculators lived and embarrassed them by knocking on their neighbors’ doors and informing them of the details of the contract-lending trade."
"They wanted the crime publicly ruled as such. They wanted the crime’s executors declared to be offensive to society. And they wanted restitution for the great injury brought upon them by said offenders."
"The lives of black Americans are better than they were half a century ago...But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere."
"The essence of American racism is disrespect. And in the wake of the grim numbers, we see the grim inheritance."
"The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable."
"We inherit our ample patrimony with all its incumbrances; and are bound to pay the debts of our ancestors."
"America begins in black plunder and white democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary."
"The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political violence was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted out toward black people of ambition."
"The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same."
"To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte."
"Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap."
"The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world."
"An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer."
"When we think of white supremacy, we should picture pirate flags."
"The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter."
"Reparations beckon us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans."
"The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill gotten and selective in its distribution."
"What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt."
"Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name."
"All of our solutions to the great problems of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are troubled by what must go unspoken."
"The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now. It’s because of then."
"The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration."
"An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future."
"To be black in America was to be plundered. To be white was to benefit from, and at times directly execute, this plunder."
"Racism was banditry, pure and simple. And the banditry was not incidental to America, it was essential to it."
"The theory of banditry not only failed to credit that myth, it directly assaulted it."
"Whatever one might say about that dominance, about its propensity to plunder, it offered a coherent story around which purpose and community could be built."
"Through war, hatred, violence, communities draw fences and define themselves."
"But if nationalism offered no way out, its sense of ancestry and tradition was a balm."
"If greatly increased severity of punishment and higher imprisonment rates caused American crime rates to fall after 1990, then what caused the Canadian rates to fall?"
"Prison is no longer a rare or extreme event among our nation’s most marginalized groups, but has now become a normal and anticipated marker in the transition to adulthood."
"The emergence of the carceral state has had far-reaching consequences for the economic viability of black families."
"More than half of fathers in state prison report being the primary breadwinner in their family."
"Many fathers simply fall through the cracks after they’re released."
"It is estimated that between 30 and 50 percent of all parolees in Los Angeles and San Francisco are homeless."
"The incarcerated attempt to hold on to family and old social ties through phone calls and visitations."
"First I would get one [visit] like every four months, and then I wouldn’t get none for like maybe a year."
"Ex-offenders are excluded from a wide variety of jobs, running the gamut from septic tank cleaner to barber to real estate agent, depending on the state."
"Our value system became surviving versus living."
"It's not just being poor; it's discrimination in the housing market, it's subprime loans, it's drug addiction—and then all of that following you over time."
"What building contracts and police graft were to the 19th-century urban Irish, the welfare department, Head Start, and Black Studies programs will be to the coming generation of Negroes."
"We cannot…repair the American community and restore the American family until we provide the structure, the values, the discipline, and the reward that work gives."
"No one—not our fathers, not our police, and not our gods—is coming to save us."
"It just takes someone laying hands on you and saying, ‘Hey, man, you count.’"
"The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room, and then start trying to figure out how is this problem going to be solved."