“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.”
“I love this country because it is my home, and my parents’ home, and my grandparents’ home, and because I was raised to believe in the opportunity and equality America promises, but this does not prevent me from seeing its problems, seeing all the ways it has failed its people again and again.”
“What America explores today, the world explores a decade later.”
“America is impossibility made possible.”
“I also wish I knew why millions of bright American children turn overnight into teenage nerds. The substitution of the automobile for the natural body, which our culture has effected in the most evil perversion of humanity since chivalry, is one cause; narcosis by drugs and Dionysian music is another.”
“The Empire State Building is a lady. She’s like the queen in chess, the most powerful piece. She’s like America.”
“Baseball is what we were. Football is what we have become.”
“It’s a great country but you can’t live in it for nothing.”