“Antitrust has become a legal backwater in recent decades. But the curse of bigness is back, and antitrust enforcement must come back with it, updated to perform its original, republican function: protecting the independence of the American people from oligarchic control.”
“Benjamin Franklin, one of the most revered intellectuals of his day, was instrumental in importing Enlightenment thinking to the British colonies in North America. There, Enlightenment scientists understanding of race served a critical political function: the view that nature had created racial distinctions resolved the contradiction between the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and tolerance and the enslavement of African people. The shift to secular thinking reinforced the view that Black people were innately and immutably inferior as a race and therefore were subject to permanent enslavement. After chattel slavery ended, the biological concept of race continued to shape the social and biological sciences, medical practice, and social policies, forming a scientific foundation for eugenics, Jim Crow, and post-civil rights color-blind ideology that ignores racism s persistent impact.”
“I regard President Trump as “America’s Terrorist’.”
“My parents spoke as though Amrika, with her fair-haired men and her torch, would cast a spell and transform us all into charmed, unrecognizable creatures.”
“Every effort to extend equality into the heart of American citizenship, to erase the race line drawn by Chief Justice Taney, and to enlarge the we who belong to the American project continues the work of overturning Dred Scott. Also implicated is the extent to which these questions can be left to democratic majorities or even empowered pluralities. Indeed, the doctrine of popular sovereignty would have left these questions to a vote. But true equality cannot be left to the whims of an electorate--it is the predicate for democracy and the vote, not their product. This, too, is a lesson from the period of the late 1850s: that a constitution or declaration constitutes the we, and that this act of constituting structures all other distributive decisions and identity itself. Thus, who we are, and who belongs, is the most fundamental question that we have ever asked or can ever ask. We are still struggling to get the answer to this question right. We are still coming up short.”
“During this period, [Frederick] Douglass became more than just an orator or a journalist: he became a prophet of a United States who embodied the courage of its convictions, a country that, as Douglass put it, shall not brand the Declaration of Independence as a lie. At the time, it was horror to the white South and a foolish dream to much of the white North. Today Douglass s vision of America is so pervasive that even its strongest opponents pretend to believe in it: an America that actually recognizes that all are created equal, where the rights of citizenship are not abridged on the basis of accidents of birth.”
“If we re to live up to our own time, then victory won t lie in the blade. But in all the bridges we ve made, that is the promise to glade, the hill we climb. If only we dare. It s because being American is more than a pride we inherit, it s the past we step into and how we repair it.”
“Even today, American political conflicts are defined by the limits of American citizenship and who is allowed to claim it. In this sense, [Frederick] Douglass understood that until Black Americans could claim full citizenship, the nation he envisioned could not exist. Men talk of the Negro problem. There is no Negro problem, Douglass declared in 1894, as the shadow of Jim Crow fell across the nation. The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their Constitution. More than a century later, that problem is still with us.”
“Rising levels of abuse, addiction, and drug-related violence should have been a sign that something was wrong with America. It should have led the nation to focus on the myriad ways in which 350 years of white supremacy had produced persistent Black suffering and disadvantage. It should have caused politicians to interrogate the cumulative impact of convict leasing, lynching, redlining, school segregation, and drinking water poisoned with lead. Instead of asking, What kind of people are they that would use and sell drugs? the nation should have been asking a question that, to this day, demands an answer: What kind of people are we that build prisons while closing treatment centers?”
“Hurricane Katrina is easily a metaphor for America s attitude toward Black women: rejected, neglected, and never protected. But Black women s persistence and their insistence on survival and restoration are a metaphor for their attitude toward America.”
“I do not understand why America fails to see that by continuing to make education at college level unaffordable, credit rating-dependent and student loans almost impossible to repay, it is obstructing tertiary education from its potential brightest and poorest, and killing their best prospects of attracting high-paying employment.”
“Barack Obama had cobbled together a mighty coalition of people young and old, Black and white. The diversity of the coalition that backed him demonstrated the future he sought, one where people of all backgrounds would come together and push our great nation forward. The power of that thought, the audacity of his imagination to dream of what a better, more inclusive country might look like, frightened many who saw their lives dependent on the continuation of a racial hierarchy.”
“...it was like she wrote essays in her brain and then recited them verbatim. She once explained to me that she thought this was part of being Black in America.”
“A friend argues that Americans battle between the historical self and the self self. By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning.”
“Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?”
“Gridlock is best understood not as governmental failure but as a policy failure, indicating that neither party has been able to come up with an idea attractive enough to the other party s voters to enable its implementation.”
“It has often been said that the most common idols in the West are Power, Sex, and Money; with this I am not in any profound disagreement. However, inasmuch as these idols are connected to a larger vision of life, such as the American dream, or the inalienable rights of free people, they become part of a nation’s civil religion. I would contend, in fact, that the most alluring and dangerous deity in the United States is the omnipresent, syncretistic god of nationalism mixed with Christianity lite: religious beliefs, language, and practices that are superficially Christian but infused with national myths and habits. Sadly, most of this civil religion’s practitioners belong to Christian churches, which is precisely why Revelation is addressed to the seven churches (not to Babylon), to all Christians tempted by the civil cult.”