The Devil You Know Quotes

“In some cases, white allies even began to center their own maltreatment while protesting rather than the fundamental issue at hand: the treatment of Black people throughout their lives. How dare the police treat these white liberals poorly, unfairly assault or arrest them? For Black people, state violence and injustice are an intrinsic reality; for white liberals, it was a jarring outrage, an assault on their privilege.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“Racism doesn't wither, but is trained when to advance or retreat. It becomes self-regulating.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“Project Implicit, a virtual laboratory maintained by Harvard University, the University of Washington, and the University of Virginia, has administered hundreds of thousands of online tests designed to detect hidden racial biases. The tests find not only that three-quarters of whites have an implicit pro-white, anti-Black bias, but also that nearly as many Hispanics and Asians share that pro-white, anti-Black bias.5 Furthermore,”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“The list of these outrages is nauseatingly long, but they point to the way white people, particularly white women, in these supposedly liberal destination cities, with the ease of 911, have warmed to a new way to use the police—still often an overwhelmingly white power—as their muscle, as a cudgel against Black people who stir within them even the slightest unease. The police have become instruments of their intolerance, a way to swing the ax without using one’s hands. There is no longer a need to yell or taunt or spit. One need only dial. Keypad tones are the new barking hounds. White wrath can hide behind a phone call and a blue wall. These women now even have their own pejorative, Karen, personified by the woman who called the police on Christian Cooper, a Black birdwatcher in Central Park. It is all about white power over Black bodies.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“White supremacy cannot be appeased. It can't be bargained with. It can't be convinced. White supremacy is a ravenous and vicious. It is America's embryotic fluid. America was born in it and genetically coded by it. No amount or hoping or waiting, coalition-building or Kumbaya can redress that reality. Racism is a flaw in the oppressor, not the oppressed.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“America is essentially operating a network of debtors' prisons. In 2017 in New York, $268 million in bail bonds was posted and another $53 million was posted in cash bail. For people using commercial bail companies, they paid $27 million in nonrefundable fees, and the city reaped $15 million in forfeited or abandoned cash bail.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“Forty percent of slave owners were white women. It was white women who made the market for Black women's breast milk and who were attended by Black women in the big house. It was white women who upheld much of the day-to-day white supremacy – the schoolteachers, the store clerks, the waitresses. And it is now often white women activating police interactions with Black people.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“White women have known from the beginning in this country that they possess this power, the power to activate white supremacy and spur it to extreme violence... The activation of white terror is a white woman's soft power... We like to masculinize white supremacy, to presume it reeks of testosterone, when in fact, it is just as likely to be spritzed by perfume.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“Systems now do the bulk of the work; there is a perpetualness to racialized poverty and oppression. At a certain point – one long since passed in America – little effort is required to maintain the structures. Hopelessness and despair seep into the psyche. The damage becomes generational inheritance and culture caste.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“Black people have it within their power to be their own saviors, to craft their own liberty, to author a new narrative.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“As Julian Bond once put it, “America, after all, unscrambled, spells ‘I am race.’”31”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“If a vocal minority7, however fervent its cause, prevails over reason and the will of the majority, this nation has no future as a free society,” Richard Nixon proclaimed during an Oval Office address on November 3, 1969, nearly a year to the day from when he was elected.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“Furthermore, if the Great Migration hadn’t taken place, Black people could control or form the majority influence for as many as ninety Electoral College votes, more than California and New York State combined. And, if they and other groups voted the same way that they now do, they could have ensured that almost every president in the last fifty years was a Democrat. More specifically, if in the 2016 presidential election Hillary Clinton had been able to carry the states in which Black people are already the majority or plurality of voters in the Democratic primaries—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina—she would have become president, midwestern losses notwithstanding,6 and would have added three new justices to the Supreme Court.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“in the real world as well as the imagined one, white people in America have been acculturated to possession of power and possibility, and Black people to the absence of it. We need consolidated state power for the reclamation of memory and the faithful telling of history, from the initial telling of the tales, to the ability to influence or even control the textbooks from which our children are taught, textbooks that still do not fully incorporate Black history, Black humanity, and Black achievement.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“could control or form the majority influence for as many as ninety Electoral College votes, more than California and New York State combined.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“People were then forced to consider whether many of the people who marched and carried signs were truly committed to Black lives and Black liberation or whether some, deprived of rites of passage, parties and proms, had simply developed a cabin fever racial consciousness, using the protests as congregational outlets, treating them like a social justice Coachella, a systemic racism Woodstock.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“Black people are told that the racists will soon die off and we will be left with a society blissfully free of racial prejudice. This is magical thinking. Generations of people have died waiting on the racists to die out. Black people are told that the racial progress America has made and continues to make is undeniable, and we should take heart in that fact. It has been four hundred years since “20 and odd” enslaved Africans stolen from what would now be Angola disembarked the privateer White Lion at Point-Comfort, Virginia, in 1619.10 The vast majority of that time has seen the active, vicious oppression of Black people in this country: 250 years of slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow, and now 50-plus years of mass incarceration.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“A sad truth throughout the world—and specifically in this country—is that whiteness, aesthetical if not cultural, for many has become aspirational.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“In fact, the events Obama referenced were not hopes or ripples, but actions. During his presidency he helped popularize the quotation, which was born of a nineteenth-century Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker, and paraphrased by Martin Luther King Jr., “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” I say that it doesn’t simply bend as a consequence of natural progression; it must be bent, with great force and at great cost. And, I say that the time for hoping and waiting, as a political strategy among Black people, must end. The path to power and relief from racial oppression is before us. We need to take it.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“But Black people are still too heavily indoctrinated into a philosophy that promises comfort, justice, and peace in an afterlife, particularly to those who don’t have it in this one. Karl Marx was right when he called religion “the opium of the people.” So long as people are shouting in church they are less likely to shout in the streets. My view of religion is simple:”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“And yet hoping is rooted in the Black experience in this country and pervades Black politics. Historically it has consumed the rhetoric of Black politicians and the rhetoric directed at Black voters. Andre C. Willis, an assistant professor of religious studies at Brown University, describes African-American hoping as a tradition that has been “crafted over centuries of despair and dehumanization.”2 Hope was an essential commodity among the downhearted, often the only light visible from the darkest of places.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“Hope, as a religious tool, may well be essential; but hope, as a political tool, is folly.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“As Monnica T. Williams, a psychologist and associate professor at the University of Connecticut, wrote in Psychology Today in 201521: We are surrounded by constant reminders that race-related danger can occur at any time, anywhere, to anyone. We might see clips on the nightly news featuring unarmed African Americans being killed on the street, in a holding cell, or even in a church. Learning of these events brings up an array of painful racially-charged memories, and what has been termed “vicarious traumatization.” Even if the specific tragic news item has never happened to us directly, we may have had parents or aunts who have had similar experiences, or we know people in our community who have, and their stories have been passed down. Over the centuries the Black community has developed a cultural knowledge of these sorts of horrific events, which then primes us for traumatization when we hear about yet another act of violence. Another unarmed Black man has been shot by police in our communities and nowhere feels safe.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“As long as the northern liberals could maintain the illusion of their moral superiority, they could also justify their own lack of progress in terms of racial equality. The North’s arrogant insistence that it had no race problem, or at least a minimal one, allowed a racialized police militarism to take root and flourish there. It was a kind of once-removed racism in which individual citizens could keep their hands clean, claiming deniability for the oppression that they passively facilitated. It allowed a balkanized housing and education segregation to develop in supposedly “diverse” cities. It allowed for the rise of Black ghettos and concentrated poverty as well as white flight and urban disinvestment.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“But in the binding, as is always the case, the precise, particular grievance of Black America is ever in danger of subsumption. The Black battle is not necessarily joined but hijacked, overwhelmed, by the white liberal grievance. E.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“Millions of people, hitherto confined to homes by a deadly pandemic and a halted economy, poured into the street, mostly young, mostly white, to assert that Black lives matter, and to demand police accountability and reform as well as racial justice and equality. A Pew Research Center report in late June 2020 found that 6 percent of American adults said1 they attended a protest or rally that focused on issues related to race or racial equality in the month preceding the survey.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“Too many of the Black elite get drafted into white-adjacent privilege, suckled by personal prosperity and personal comfort, blinded by the glamour of the high society. They become the neo house Negroes, placated, passive, a resurrection of an antebellum relic in which the best and brightest of Black society, those who would otherwise be the generals in resistance and rebellion, are lulled to sleep by luxuries.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“People think that they avoid the appellation [white supremacist] because they do not openly hate. But hate is not a requirement of white supremacy. Just because one abhors violence and cruelty doesn't mean that one truly believes that all people are equal – culturally, intellectually, creatively, morally.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“Progress is the wall behind which white America hides. (Even many Black leaders have absorbed and regurgitate the progress narrative.) White liberals expect Black people to applaud their efforts. But how is that a fair and legitimate expectation? Slavery, white supremacy, and racism are horrid, man-made constructs that should never have existed in the first place. Are we meant to cheer the slow, creeping, centuries-long undoing of a thing that never should have been done?”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“And although rage has often been an effective tool to focus attention and shift narratives, it rarely produces policy gains or positively shifts societal perspective. The beneficiaries of Black rage are often the moderate figures with whom those in a rage are compared. Martin Luther King owes part of his success to Malcolm X, whom many whites saw as a more dangerous, and less acceptable, alternative.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto