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January 31 - February 13, 2021
Whiteness is an advantage and privilege because you have made it so, not because the universe demands it.
Whiteness has privilege and power connected to it, no matter how poor you are.
But the truth is that what so often passes for American history is really a record of white priorities or conquests set down as white achievement.
The failure to see color only benefits white America. A world without color is a world without racial debt.
You often deem black dissent as disloyalty to America. But that black dissent may yet redeem a white innocence that threatens the nation’s moral and patriotic health.
Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.
“We have bad seeds,” says the innocence narrative, “but those bad seeds only prove how good the plant is. A few of us are guilty, but only a few. The rest of us are innocent.”
Donald Trump is the literal face of white innocence without consciousness, white privilege without apology.
Trump, more than anything else, signifies the undying force of the fear unleashed by Obama’s presidency. He manipulates a confused and self-pitying white public.
As long as it didn’t impact Republican, or white, interests, the lives Trump imperiled didn’t matter.
We projected onto Obama our desire to crush bigotry with enlightened democracy.
What we did not fully understand, or account for, is the deep-seated, intractable anger of the white Americans who never viewed Obama as either fully American or quite human.
For so many of you, what it means to be white is what it means to be American, and vice versa; your American identity is indissolubly linked to your whiteness. It is a possessive whiteness, too, one that hogs to itself the meanings of democracy.
Black folk have been viewed suspiciously throughout American history because of a willingness to be critical of the nation even as they love and embrace it.
Black folk have, throughout history, displayed their patriotism by criticizing the nation for its shortcomings.
My friends, none of these black figures hated the nation. Instead, they wanted the nation to straighten up and fly right.
Kaepernick is the best kind of American there is: one willing to criticize his country precisely because he loves it so much.
We must see Kaepernick’s criticism as love—the tough love that America needs.
The opposition to black displays of dissent rests on a faulty premise and a confusion of terms. Many of you who oppose our dissent because of patriotism are really opposing us because of nationalism,
big difference between nationalism and patriotism.
Nationalism is the belief that no matter what one’s country does—whether racist, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, or the like—it must be supported and accepted entirely.
Patriotism is the belief in the best values of one’s country, and the pursuit of the best means to realize those values. If the nation strays, then it must be corrected.
Martin Luther King, Jr., said that charity is a poor substitute for justice.
The status quo always favors neutrality, which, in truth, is never neutral at all, but supports those who stand against change.
you’ve shown a brutal consistency through the centuries by not hesitating to kill a nigger on sight.
I know that no matter how much education I’ve got, how well I behave, how much compassion I show to white folk, how well-heeled I am in polite company, no matter how articulate I am, I am still just a nigger to so many white folk. And it’s not just the lunatic fringe that swells with bigots.
social deprivation leads desperate people to act desperately.
communities bereft of hope and resource claim as its victims the people who seek to escape its fatal grip.
The police have a higher standard to meet, a greater obligation to be cautious in using lethal force.
We cry out against what goes on in black communities across this nation. We think it is horrid. We know such communities are vexed by problems faced by all neighborhoods that are depleted of dollars and hope. These communities are emptied of good schools. They are deprived of the social and economic buffers
People usually murder where they nest. They aim their rage at easy targets.
If you want interracial killing you have to have interracial communities.
White folk commit the bulk of the crimes in our nation.
white folk commit the most violent crimes too.
white folk are far more likely to target the vulnerable too. White folk lead the way in forcible rape. You’re also more likely to kill children, the elderly, significant others, family members, and even yourselves. White folk commit a majority of gang-related murders too. A majority of the homicide victims in this country are white. White folk are six times as likely to be murdered by a white person as they are to be taken out by a black “thug.” The white-on-white mayhem is profound, yet no one speaks of it in racial terms.
the systemic removal of goods and services that drive some folk to crime.
black folk lacking the social supports that other ethnic groups enjoy.
failure of the markets that are supposedly neutral, but which, in fact, favor those ...
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Better to say we’re all just a little bigoted, yes, or prejudiced for certain. But I’m afraid you’ve got to own racism all by yourselves, beloved. It signals the power not only to hate, but to make that hate into law, and into convention, habit, and a moral duty.
The logic is as simple as it is brutal: I will beat my kids so white folk won’t kill them.
We can’t seem to shake our hypocrisy, and thus end up mimicking the whiteness we claim to despise.
If you’re honest you’ll see that the police force is a metaphysical collective with a gift for racial punishment that has never viewed black folk as human beings,
the law that they are charged to enforce has never seen us as human beings.
the Constitution that the law rests on did not write us ...
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The police car is a mobile plantation, and the siren is the sound of dogs hunting us down in the dark woods.
Police have badges and batons and Tasers and bullets and guns. Police begin with a shield of honor and incorruptibility. Police start with the support of the state. We are hardly equal.
Cops seem to know that all those white folk who come at cops with swinging fists or menacing demeanors or drawn guns don’t really mean them any harm.
