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“Our preference for nostalgia and for a history that never happened is not without consequence,”
“Although we teach [students] that slavery happened…in some cases, we minimize slavery’s significance so much that we render its impact—on people and on the nation—inconsequential.”
white Americans desire to be free of a past they do not want to remember, while Black Americans remain bound to a past they can never forget.36 This
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.
“any white man in the world says, ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ the entire white world applauds. When a Black man says exactly the same thing—word for word—he is judged a criminal and treated like one, and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad [n——] so there won’t be any more like him.”7
Our nation must acknowledge the four hundred years of injustice that haunt us. Truth-telling can be powerful. In many faith traditions, salvation and redemption can come only after confession and repentance. In Germany, there has been a meaningful reckoning with the history of the Holocaust; this sort of reflection and remembrance has been largely absent in America, where many people resist confronting the most disturbing and difficult parts of our past.
society recovering from a history of horrific human rights violations must make a commitment to truth and justice. As long as we deny the legacy of slavery and avoid this commitment, we will fail to overcome the racially biased, punitive systems of control that have become serious barriers to freedom in this country. It’s tempting for some to believe otherwise, but much work remains.
that I am not a fool, and yet I feel like one—the coon they expect to see— smiling and swallowing. Smiling. Swallowing.
we have never been able to be our authentic selves
The singular racial history of the United States is therefore a dual racial history of two opposing forces: historical steps toward equity and justice and historical steps toward inequity and injustice.
“The negro is now a voter and a citizen. Let him hereafter take his chances in the battle of life.”43 From this point forward, white Americans were ready to blame Black behavior, and not racism and the deprivations of 250 years of enslavement, for persisting racial inequities.
“Negro poverty is not white poverty…. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice and present prejudice. They are anguishing to observe. For the Negro they are a constant reminder of oppression. For the white they are a constant reminder of guilt. But they must be faced, and they must be dealt with, and they must be overcome; if we are ever to reach the time when the only difference between Negroes and whites is the color of their skin.”17
In other words, while Black Americans were being systematically, generationally deprived of the ability to build wealth, and while some of them were also being robbed of the little they had managed to gain, white Americans were not only free to earn money and accumulate wealth with exclusive access to the best jobs, best schools, and best credit terms but were also getting substantial government help in doing so.
About 97 percent of the study participants overestimated Black-white wealth equality, and most assumed that highly educated, high-income Black households were the most likely to achieve economic parity with white counterparts. That is also wrong. The magnitude of the wealth gap only widens as Black people earn more income.69
wow!
Black families hold almost no wealth to begin with, Black students are the most likely to borrow money to pay for college and then to borrow more money in total. That debt, in turn, means that Black students cannot start saving immediately upon graduation, the way their less-debt-burdened peers can.75
not because a majority of Black families are led by a single mother. White single women with children hold the same amount of wealth as single Black women with no children, and the typical white single parent has twice the wealth of the typical two-parent Black family.
The legacy of this nation to Black Americans has consisted of immorally high rates of poverty, incarceration, and death and the lowest rates of land and home ownership, employment, school funding, and wealth. All of this reveals that Black Americans, along with Indigenous people—the two groups forced to be part of this nation—remain the most neglected beneficiaries of the America that would not exist without us. This unacknowledged debt, all of it, is still accruing. And it will continue to accrue
