We Are Not Yet Equal Quotes

“This did not have to be. The Land of Opportunity did not have to be the Land of Missed Opportunities. It is time to defuse the power of white rage.”
― Carol Anderson, We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide

“In July 2015, not even a full month after Dylann Roof gunned down nine black people at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Republican front-runner Donald Trump fired up his “silent majority” audience of thousands with a macabre promise: “Don’t worry, we’ll take our country back.” It is time instead that we the people take our country forward. More than a century and a half of anger and fear have undermined American democracy, trampled the constitution, and treated some citizens as chattel and others as collateral damage.”
― Carol Anderson, We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide

“It is time to rethink America. Imagine if Reconstruction had actually honored the citizenship of four million freed people—provided the education, political autonomy, and economic wherewithal warranted by their and their ancestors’ hundreds of years of free labor.”
― Carol Anderson, We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide

“White angst and rage rose further with the more overtly militant shift in the black freedom movement’s pursuit of justice and equality of opportunity.”
― Carol Anderson, We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide

“Since the days of enslavement, black people have fought to gain access to quality education. Education can be transformative. Education reshapes the health outcomes of a people. Education breaks the cycle of poverty. Education improves housing conditions. Education raises the standard of living. Perhaps most meaningfully, educational attainment significantly increases voter participation. In short, education strengthens a democracy.”
― Carol Anderson, We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide

“For white Southerners, black migration—black advancement and independence—was a threat to their culture along with their economy.”
― Carol Anderson, We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide

“The movement of people fleeing tyranny, violence, and withered opportunities is precious, sacrosanct to Americans. “Freedom of movement” is a treasured American right. Yet when thousands of black people began leaving the land below the Mason-Dixon Line, which along with the Ohio River became the dividing line between the North and the South, white Southern elites raged with cool, calculated efficiency.”
― Carol Anderson, We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide

“The entirety of the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibits chattel slavery in the United States and its territories but allows for jails and prisons to force convicted criminals to work for no wages while in custody.”
― Carol Anderson, We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide

“But for your race among us there could not be war,” said the president. As to just how and why “your race” came to be “among us,” Lincoln conveniently ignored that. His framing of the issue absolved slaveholders and their political allies of responsibility for catapulting the nation into a civil war. It also signaled the power of racism over patriotism.”
― Carol Anderson, We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide

“The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship. It is blackness that refuses to accept subjugation, to give up. A formidable array of policy assaults and legal contortions has consistently punished black resilience, black resolve.”
― Carol Anderson, We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide