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8278c6b
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And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes--believes with all its heart--that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.
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war
slavery
america
us
united-states-of-america
native-americans
usa
delusions
united-states
cruelty
race-relations
theft
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Colson Whitehead |
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0ab7cf9
|
You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies--the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects--are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.
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racism
america
united-states-of-america
blacks
whites
police-reform
usa
united-states
race-relations
police
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e4d787d
|
If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn't be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it'd still be his. If the white man wasn't destined to take this new world, he wouldn't own it now. Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor--if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.
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slavery
america
us
united-states-of-america
white-people
possessions
native-americans
usa
united-states
ownership
race-relations
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Colson Whitehead |
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8ce372e
|
The other patrollers were boys and men of bad character; the work attracted a type. In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.
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slavery
slave-catchers
us
united-states-of-america
jobs
usa
united-states
criminals
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Colson Whitehead |
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ba97a54
|
Across the sea fat kings watched and were gleeful, that something begun so well had now gone off the rails (as down South similar kings watched), and if it went off the rails, so went the whole kit, forever, and if someone ever thought to start it up again, well, it would be said (and said truly): The rabble cannot manage itself. Well, the rabble could. The rabble would. He would lead the rabble in managing. The thing would be won.
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|
war
america
us
united-states-of-america
lincoln
usa
united-states
civil-war
victory
democracy
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George Saunders |
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3a750d1
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It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness.
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racism
america
learning
united-states-of-america
blacks
usa
united-states
race-relations
knowledge
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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721900d
|
"If this were a courageous country, it would ask Gloria to lead it since she is sane and funny and beautiful and smart and the National Leaders we've always had are not. When I listen to her talk about women's rights children's rights men's rights I think of the long line of Americans who should have been president, but weren't. Imagine Crazy Horse as president. Sojourner Truth. John Brown. Harriet Tubman. Black Elk or Geronimo. Imagine President Martin Luther King confronting the youthful "Oppie" Oppenheimer. Imagine President Malcolm X going after the Klan. Imagine President Stevie Wonder dealing with the "Truly Needy." Imagine President Shirley Chisholm, Ron Dellums, or Sweet Honey in the Rock dealing with Anything. It is imagining to make us weep with frustration, as we languish under real estate dealers, killers, and bad actors."
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|
politics
leadership
change
us
united-states-of-america
presidents
usa
leaders
united-states
|
Alice Walker |
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188b684
|
It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.
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g-n-p
united-states-of-america
brave
social
spring
purpose
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Joan Didion |
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c5fa88d
|
We do not admire their president. We know why the White House is white. We do not find their children irresistible; We do not agree they should inherit the earth.
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|
poems
poetry
us
united-states-of-america
native-americans
whites
usa
united-states
race-relations
|
Alice Walker |
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41e03b5
|
"Some newspapers, at the very start of the war, protested. Horace Greeley wrote in the New York Tribune, May 12, 1846: We can easily defeat the armies of Mexico, slaughter them by thousands, and pursue them perhaps to their capital; we can conquer and "annex" their territory; but what then? Have the histories of the ruin of Greek and Roman liberty consequent on such extensions of empire by the sword no lesson for us? Who believes that a score of victories over Mexico, the "annexation" of half her provinces, will give us more Liberty, a purer Morality, a more prosperous Industry, than we now have? . . . Is not Life miserable enough, comes not Death soon enough, without resort to the hideous enginery of War?"
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war
united-states-of-america
|
Howard Zinn |
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d62be0e
|
I was a Shoemaker, & got my living by my Labor. When this Rebellion come on, I saw some of my Neighbors got into Commission, who were no better than myself. I was very ambitious, & did not like to see those Men above me. I was asked to enlist as a private Soldier. . . I offered to enlist upon having a Lieutenants Commission; which was granted. I imagined my self now in a way of Promotion: if I was killed in Battle, there would be an end of me, but if my Captain was killed, I should rise in Rank, & should still have a Chance to rise higher. These Sir! were the only Motives of my entering into the Service; for as the Dispute between Great Britain & the colonies, I know nothing of it. . .
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great-britain
united-states-of-america
revolution
|
Howard Zinn |
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073fef8
|
"Speaking of California, the Illinois State Register asked: "Shall this garden of beauty be suffered to lie dormant in its wild and useless luxuriance? . . . myriads of enterprising Americans would flock to its rich and inviting prairies; the hum of Anglo-American industry would be heard in its valleys; cities would rise upon its plains and sea-coast, and the resources and wealth of the nation increased in an incalculable degree."
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|
wealth
united-states-of-america
|
Howard Zinn |
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43854a2
|
"Here is how I propose to end book-banning in this country once and for all: Every candidate for school committee should be hooked up to a lie detector and asked this question: "Have you read a book from start to finish since high school?" or "Did you even read a book from start to finish in high school?" If the truthful answer is "no," then the candidate should be told politely that he cannot get on the school committee and blow off his big bazoo about how books make children crazy. Whenever ideas are squashed in this country, literate lovers of the American experiment write careful and intricate explanations of why all ideas must be allowed to live. It is time for them to realize that they are attempting to explain America at its bravest and most optimistic to orangutans. From now on, I intend to limit my discourse with dimwitted Savonarolas to this advice: "Have somebody read the First Amendment to the United States Constitution out loud to you, you God damned fool!" Well--the American Civil Liberties Union or somebody like that will come to the scene of trouble, as they always do. They will explain what is in the Constitution, and to whom it applies. They will win. And there will be millions who are bewildered and heartbroken by the legal victory, who think some things should never be said--especially about religion. They are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hi ho."
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book-banning
literature
books
united-states-of-america
first-amendment
freedom-of-speech
constitution
censorship
|
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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0b703f3
|
In 1868, the Georgia legislature voted to expel all its Negro members-two senators, twenty-five representatives-and Turner spoke to the Georgia House of Representatives (a black woman graduate student at Atlanta University later brought his speech to light): Mr. Speaker. . . I wish the members of this House to understand the position that I take. I hold that I am a member of this body. Therefore, sir, I shall neither fawn or cringe before any party, nor stoop to beg them for my rights. . . I am here to demand my rights, and to hurl thunderbolts at the men who would dare to cross the threshold of my manhood.
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|
politics
united-states-of-america
|
Howard Zinn |
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b424ec3
|
Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village like an angry phantom. She didn't understand the words, most of them at any rate, but 'created equal' was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn't understand it either, if 'all men' did not truly mean all men.
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equality
slavery
freedom
united-states-of-america
|
Colson Whitehead |
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35c7689
|
"Wait till Buzz takes charge of us. A real Fascist dictatorship!" "Nonsense! Nonsense!" snorted Tasbrough. "That couldn't happen here in America, not possibly! We're a country of freemen." "The answer to that," suggested Doremus Jessup, "if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is 'the hell it can't!' Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical--yes, or more obsequious!--than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio--divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding's appointees? Could Hitler's bunch, or Windrip's, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the--well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimee McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?... Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?... Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition--shooting down people just because they be transporting liquor--no, that couldn't happen in ! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!"
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dictatorships
us
united-states-of-america
usa
fascism
democracy
hysterics
|
Sinclair Lewis |
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a477750
|
Being on the frontier, as I've said, required doing rather than imagining: clearing land, building shelter, obtaining food supplies. Frontiers test ideologies like nothing else. There is no time for the theoretical. That, ultimately, is why America has not been friendly to communism, fascism, or other, more benign forms of utopianism. Idealized concepts have rarely taken firm root in America, and so intellectuals have had to look to Europe for inspiration. People here are too busy making money - an extension, of course, of the frontier ethos, with its emphasis on practical initiative.
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|
united-states-of-america
frontier
|
Robert D. Kaplan |