The Reckoning Quotes

“Failing to demand a reckoning for atrocities, even retrospectively, creates a situation in which we ensure such atrocities or crimes or transgressions will happen again. Failing to call them out is to condone them.”
― Mary L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal

“When your motive is not simply winning at all costs but grievance and revenge, you’re more dangerous than a straight-up sociopath. Donald is much worse than that—he’s someone with a gaping wound where his soul should”
― Mary L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal

“If you are white in America and feel you’ve been left behind and shut out of the prosperity afforded to others, it’s not because of Black people and immigrants. It’s because the politicians you continue to vote for stoke your bigotry and sense of grievance while exploiting your ignorance in order to keep you exactly where you are—disempowered, angry, and fearful.”
― Mary L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal

“fascists leads people to question the extremity of”
― Mary L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal

“White people were allowed to buy houses with low-interest mortgages and receive free college educations. In the first instance this enabled them to amass wealth and equity, in the second it enabled them to live free of often crushing debt. Blacks were denied these opportunities, robbing them of untold wealth, the result of which has reverberated through succeeding generations.”
― Mary L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal

“our tragic beginnings; the ensuing transgenerational trauma inflicted on both the overwhelmed Native American and enslaved African populations; the white majority’s tendency to exclude perceived out-groups from the protection of civil society; the evolution and reemergence of white supremacy; our society’s insistence upon silencing those who have suffered because of our cruelty, indifference, and ineptitude; the economic and racial disparities that have only worsened since 2016; our devaluing of human life; the increase in anti-Black policies like voter suppression and gerrymandering; the resurgence of lynching as a means of terror and control. We are a nation shackled by a cultural imperative to move on from the pain of war, mass death, disease, and government-sanctioned barbarity in the name of “peace” or “healing” or “a return to normal,” when all we’ve really been doing is preserving the unchecked impunity of the powerful to inflict pain again and again and again.”
― Mary L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal

“Toni Morrison wrote, “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”
― Mary L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal

“One of the worst things that was done to us during the year of COVID was the purposeful attempt to divide us and further isolate us from one another. One of the very few mitigating factors of mass trauma is the sense that we are all in it together. In times of war, for example, suicide rates go down because there is a sense of common purpose. Members of the Trump administration made that impossible not because they were incompetent but because they thought it was a winning strategy. Promoting divisiveness among us suited their purposes, just as setting up a false dichotomy between the pandemic and the economy did. In real time it could be hard to gauge how cynical and cruel this ploy was, but in retrospect the extent of the deliberate sabotage is breathtaking. It’s hard to grapple with what was taken from us and even harder to fathom the depth of depravity required to do the taking.”
― Mary L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal

“White Americans worry that by acknowledging the atrocities of the past, the guilt of the actual perpetrators will somehow attach to us, while it’s the failure to acknowledge those atrocities that makes us complicit. We as a nation cannot begin to heal unless we face our past head-on with complete honesty and begin to understand how our country’s legacy continues to affect every aspect of our lives.”
― Mary L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal

“But what else do you call it when a mob of white men shouts “Jews will not replace us” in the service of protecting a statue of Robert E. Lee? How else do you describe a party that didn’t just tolerate but supported putting children in concentration camps; suppressing dissent during peaceful Black Lives Matter protests with seemingly unidentified paramilitaries; dismantling truth and distrusting reality; designating a free press and whistleblowers as enemies of the people—and by extension of the state? How do you describe a party that made one of its chief goals the theocratization of the federal judiciary? If anybody thinks after all of this that calling them fascist is rude, then we have a very serious problem.”
― Mary L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal

“Working-class whites are victims of the system, too. They have been tricked into voting against their own self-interest by a ruling class that has convinced them that allegiance to their whiteness is more valuable than health care or any other social programs that would lift them up. Superiority over Blacks, they have been told, just as the white laborers in the colonies were told, is more important than financial gain. Joining forces with the wealthy and powerful would be more beneficial symbolically, if not materially, than joining forces with the Black working class. Of course, none of that is true, but it's a compelling narrative, so much easier than facing the truth of your having been used and lied to.

If you are white in America and feel you've been left behind and shut out of the prosperity afforded to others, it's not because of Black people and immigrants. It's because the politicians you continue to vote for stoke your bigotry and sense of grievance while exploiting your ignorance in order to keep you exactly where you are -- disempowered, angry, and fearful.”
― Mary L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal

“What freedmen and freedwomen accomplished between 1865 and 1877 was nothing short of astonishing, especially considering the extent and seriousness of the impediments put in their way, from uninterrupted racism and white supremacy to inadequate assistance from the North and campaigns of terrorist violence. Given the climate, it shouldn’t be surprising that the gains made at the beginning of Reconstruction, as impressive as they were, proved to be fleeting.”
― Mary L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal

“The North won the armed conflict after an extraordinary loss of blood and treasure, but it was at the point of surrender that the South, symbolically and rhetorically, won the war itself.”
― Mary L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal

“On August 3, 2020, a day before the United States surpassed 150,000 deaths from COVID, Donald’s interview with Axios reporter Jonathan Swan aired on HBO. “It is what it is,” he said after Swan pointed out that a thousand Americans were dying every day. That was a popular expression in my family, and hearing it sent a chill down my spine. Whenever my grandfather, my aunt, or one of my uncles had said it, it was always with a cruel indifference to somebody else in despair.”
― Mary L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal

“and grievance for four”
― Mary L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal