An African American and Latinx History of the United States Quotes

“that the ability of oppressed people throughout the world to exercise genuine self-determination would strengthen liberty in the United States. This idea of emancipatory internationalism was born of centuries of struggle against slavery, colonialism, and oppression in the Americas. When Martin Luther King connected the lives of Vietnamese villagers with the prospects of Black youths in South Central Los Angeles he was drawing on an extraordinary fountain of experiential wisdom.”
― Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States

“The United States drove itself to civil war because the society valued profits over Black humanity,”
― Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States

“Antislavery insurgencies gravely threatened racial capitalism and forced the hand of Southern politicians. Southern elites viewed the preservation of slavery and the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act to be nonnegotiable. The leading white women of Broward’s Neck, Florida, informed the Jacksonville Standard shortly after the election of 1858, “In our humble opinion the single issue is now presented to the Southern people, will they submit to all the degradation threatened by the North toward our slave property and be made to what England has made white people experience in the West India Islands—the negroes afforded a place on the same footing with their former owners, to be made legislators, to sit as Judges.” In the spring of 1860, Democrats in Jacksonville stated that regardless of who was nominated to run for president, “The amplest protection and security to slave property in the territories owned by the General Government” and “the surrender [of] fugitive slaves when legally demanded” were vital to Florida’s interests. If these terms were not met, they asserted, “then we are of the opinion that the rights of the citizens of Florida are no longer safe in the Union, and we think that she should raise the banner of secession and invite her Southern sisters to join her.”47 The following year, John C. McGehee, the president of the Florida Secession Convention, gave the most concise reason why the majority of his colleagues supported secession: “At the South, and with our People of course, slavery is the element of all value, and a destruction of that destroys all that is property.”
― Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States

“The people of that neighborhood, it seems, take a peculiar interest in the support of the system of Slavery, flattering themselves, of course, that it is a patriotic love of the Union, and of justice, but like all the patriotism that goes by the name now-a-days, it is easily resolved into a base love of dollars and cents.”
― Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States

“[Bernardo Ruiz] Suarez observed, “The White race is haughty and domineering everywhere. In those countries where religion, education, and other influences have softened the hearts of men, the sentiment of brotherhood tends to level the inequalities and barriers of race, and to give reality to that form of society, which in political science is called: democracy.”
Suarez warned, that the United States lacked “the sentiment of brotherhood altogether.” But the race which colonized and still forms the majority of the people of the United States, with its historical antecedents and its degrading record of bloodshed, cannot be classified, in the opinion of an impartial observer, as a democratic race. The refusal of people in Haiti, Nicaragua, Mexico, and other nations to submit quietly to US power inspired African Americans trying to ward off racial capitalism’s blows in the United States throughout the 20th century.
Veterans of the war on the government of American banks, would have taken exception to a later generation of scholars who characterized the United States as either isolationist or democratic. The insurgent citizenry of the Americas, who faced the colossus of the north, would have scoffed at the idea that the United States was not an empire. The opponents of the US military invasions of the early 20th century, demanded that the United States be held accountable for its overseas depredations. Instead, historians shrouded the country’s history in a veil of innocence and exceptionalism, which has undermined the nation’s ability to reform itself to this day. It cannot be said that scholars lacked sources that could have guided them to the truth.
Suarez, whose nation had dealt with US power for decades, spoke for many in the Global South in 1922 when he concluded, “No matter what is said to the contrary, and there is much truth that may be said, the United States of America have by no means lived up to their professed abhorence of autocracy and aggressive imperialism in their international affairs.”
― Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States

“In America the greater or less degree of whiteness of skin decides the rank which man occupies in society. A white who rides barefooted on horseback thinks he belongs to the nobility of the country.”3 As a priest, Morelos had engaged in an act of resistance during the 1804 padron (census) by refusing to categorize people by race.4”
― Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States

“In the nineteenth century, slavery was understood to be the cornerstone of American exceptionalism. The proslavery New York Daily News mocked slavery’s detractors as not understanding the foundations of American business prosperity: “If slavery was so great a sin, how comes it that through its agency this country attained the greatest amount of prosperity in the shortest space of time any nation ever attained?”
― Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States

“the Haitian Revolution was the inspiration for the pursuit of liberty in the Americas.”
― Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States

“the third draft of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence listed as primary grievances against King George III “prompting our negroes to rise in arms among us” and, in the next sentence, “endeavoring to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, & conditions of existence.”
― Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States

“Cuban refugees to Key West found a relatively easy pathway to the ballot box via “declarant alien voting,” which was passed by Florida’s Reconstruction legislature in 1868 (“declarant aliens” were resident aliens who declared their intent to naturalize).62 According to Article 14 of the 1868 Florida constitution, a man who swore to defend the laws of the land and to eventually become a citizen could vote.”
― Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States

“Slavery has destroyed kingdoms and empires, and what may we not expect will happen to those religious communities in which this crying evil is tolerated? The least evils that we can expect are disaffection and division.”
― Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States

“Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed of most white people in the nation: “They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately, this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.”
― Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States

“Douglass had to dismantle what Americans have always treasured most: their innocence, and the sense that their history was so exceptional that they had managed to avoid the problems other nations faced.”
― Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States

“Emancipatory internationalism had been born in the first stormy years of the republic when African Americans and their allies recognized that slavery, racial capitalism, and imperialism were fatally intertwined. Now, even as they were embroiled in struggles for land, the right to vote, and protection from Ku Klux Klan terrorism, African Americans insisted that their emancipation was incomplete as long as oppression existed elsewhere.”
― Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States