Under Fire Quotes

“matter of consciousness: “It always makes me think of the great Harriet Tubman who said when she was praised for going into the dark of night in the South and helping to liberate hundreds and hundreds of slaves, ‘I could have liberated many more if only they knew they were slaves.’ We must always remember it is about consciousness.”
― April Ryan, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House

“So, 2017 might not have been the year of the woman the way we expected, but the Trump White House did give women, especially minority women, the motivation to become more vocal about the challenges we face. It also reminded us that while we can be aggressive and persistent when necessary, we also need to be aware of its toll on our health.”
― April Ryan, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House

“Trump is hardly the first president to promise a crackdown on illegal immigration. But he has tried to erase the political distinction between illegal and legal immigration, the former in the interest of law and order and the latter in the interest of national security. Of course, reality is very different than the one Trump portrays. He dismisses the socio-economic importance of immigration, keeping our working population younger as the baby boomers retire. And he ignores the push and pull behind global migration. The push relates to the disintegration of fragile countries due to conflict and climate change. The pull involves the unmet need for low skill work within the United States at a time of effective full employment, which existing immigration quotas can’t meet due to political paralysis. Given the political polarization, the parties talk past one another. Calls for comprehensive immigration reform are blunted by accusations of amnesty. Thus, there is no reasoned debate and little room for compromise.”
― April Ryan, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House

“Mary Frances Berry, the former head of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, addressed the Politics and Prose Black Authors Race Panel discussion on January 15, 2018, saying that the Twitter platform is powerful, but not that powerful. “Some people think social media is a substitute for action. It’s not. You have to get out and do something.”
― April Ryan, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House

“One of the dangers of the Internet is that people have entirely different realities. They can be cocooned into information that reinforces their current biases. The question has to do with how we harness technology in a way that allows a multiplicity of voices and a diversity of views and doesn’t lead to a divide in our society, but instead provides ways of finding common ground.”
― April Ryan, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House

“She had mistaken my kindness for weakness,”
― April Ryan, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House

“I keep going back because I did nothing wrong!”
― April Ryan, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House

“Although a Black man had helped to right the tilted economy, he was still guilty of being a Black man in the highest office in the land.”
― April Ryan, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House

“That fact that Barack Obama eventually released a copy of his birth certificate did nothing to sway the naysayers, mainly because it was just the beginning of what is now commonplace. It was the start of this perception that you can make up anything to attack someone’s credibility if you don’t agree with them. No facts are needed because they only get in the way of the real mission, to tarnish someone’s reputation.”
― April Ryan, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House

“But Trump’s claim was never about the birth certificate. The issue was clearly race-based, and it was more about the pigment of the baby’s skin and that of the baby’s father as well. Father and baby were both guilty of being Black, which is still the unwritten crime this nation subtly acknowledges in everyday life.”
― April Ryan, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House

“In a November 13, 1988, Washington Post opinion piece titled “What a Real President Was Like,” Bill Moyers noted that in 1960 in Tennessee after a meeting with local dignitaries, then-Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson said something that rings so true this day: “If you can convince the lowest White man he’s better than the best Colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
― April Ryan, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House

“You are not sending a message of protest when you don’t vote. You are compounding the problem and, in some cases, getting exactly what you did not want.”
― April Ryan, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House

“But what boggles my mind is that the Black and Brown communities in this country have the highest numbers of negatives in every category. So why is voter apathy in the Black and Brown communities creeping back into the discussion at a time when voter suppression is still an issue, more than fifty years after the Voting Rights Act was passed into law?”
― April Ryan, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House

“vote in the majority for Trump and, of course, that more than 90 percent of Black women voted for Hillary Clinton. And Black women are more likely to be independent in their thought process and therefore they well understand what their own interests are.”
― April Ryan, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House

“One of the main reasons for Trump’s inability to assimilate with most politicians is his inability to take the spotlight off himself and shine it on the country as he should be doing.”
― April Ryan, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House

“The unrelenting chaos that characterizes the Trump presidency and the administration’s gleeful disregard for the truth is unprecedented.”
― April Ryan, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House

“in 1960 in Tennessee after a meeting with local dignitaries, then-Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson said something that rings so true this day: “If you can convince the lowest White man he’s better than the best Colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody”
― April Ryan, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House