“Why America Exists When oppression became unbearable, America was born - when discrimination turned extreme, America was born - when rigidity became intolerable, America was born. America was born of an unbending desire for freedom - America was born of a drive for self-correction - America was born of an urge for progression. Yes we did many mistakes in the process, even committed horrible atrocities - we drove people off their lands to build a new world for our children - and nothing that we can do today can mend those atrocities of yesterday, but what we can do is to make a promise to ourselves to never repeat those atrocities of our ancestors no more. It s time we become the new Americans - Americans with more accountability than recklessness - Americans with more curiosity than rigidity - Americans with more acceptability than prejudice - Americans with more inclusivity than discrimination. There is no our America and their America, there s only one America - the United States of America. You see, ours is not just the United States of America, ours is the United States of Assimilation. And we must practice this principle to the letter and spirit everyday of our lives. For example, we of all people cannot in right mind deny shelter to those seeking refuge, especially when we are both sociologically and economically capable of doing so. Whoever comes to these shores of liberty, in the hope of life, freedom and happiness, automatically becomes an American, by measure of the same determination and will that made our founding fathers set foot on Plymouth Rock escaping British bigotry, snobbery and barbarism. Our very country is founded by immigrants. America was built by refugees, and as such, if this land can t be a refuge for the subjugated and persecuted, then it is an insult on our very existence as the great land of the free and brave.”
“I believe that there lives a burning desire in the most sequestered private heart of every American, a desire to belong to a great country. I believe that every citizen wants to stand on the world stage and represent a noble country where the mighty do not always crush the weak and the dream of a democracy is not the sole possession of the strong. We must hear the questions raised by Fannie Lou Hamer forty years ago. Every American everywhere asks herself, himself, these questions Hamer asked: What do I think of my country? What is there, which elevates my shoulders and stirs my blood when I hear the words, the United States of America: Do I praise my country enough? Do I laud my fellow citizens enough? What is there about my country that makes me hang my head and avert my eyes when I hear the words the United States of America, and what am I doing about it? Am I relating my disappointment to my leaders and to my fellow citizens, or am I like someone not involved, sitting high and looking low? As Americans, we should not be afraid to respond.”
“For the past four decades our national spirit and natural joy have ebbed. Our national expectations have diminished. Our hope for the future has waned to such a degree that we risk sneers and snorts of derision when we confess that we are hoping for bright tomorrows. How have we come so late and lonely to this place? When did we relinquish our desire for a high moral ground to those who clutter our national landscape with vulgar accusations and gross speculations? Are we not the same people who have fought a war in Europe to eradicate an Aryan threat to murder an entire race? Have we not worked, prayed, planned to create a better world? Are we not the same citizens who struggled, marched, and went to jail to obliterate legalized racism from our country? Didn t we dream of a country where freedom was in the national conscience and dignity was the goal? We must insist that the men and women who expect to lead us recognize the true desires of those who are being led. We do not choose to be herded into a building burning with hate nor into a system rife with intolerance. Politicians must set their aims for the high ground and according to our various leanings, Democratic, Republican, Independent, we will follow. Politicians must be told if they continue to sink into the mud of obscenity, they will proceed alone. If we tolerate vulgarity, our future will sway and fall under a burden of ignorance. It need not be so. We have the brains and the heart to face our futures bravely. Taking responsibility for the time we take up and the space we occupy. To respect our ancestors and out of concern for our descendants, we must show ourselves as courteous and courageous well-meaning Americans. Now.”
“Tyranny is locking us up. Tyranny is taking our freedom. Tyranny is right here. Tyranny is American.”
“Black Lives Matter, Too Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean this fist, but it does mean resist When oppression and injustice are not up for discussion Insurrections and protections when wrongs aren’t corrected. It means black is equal, inherits the same rights, Liberties, protections, and the pursuit of happiness as whites”
“Liang Qichao came away disappointed. American democracy seemed to spawn mediocre politicians, corruption, disorder, racism, imperialism . In short, noted the late J K Fairbank, most prolific and influential of America s sinologists, he got our number, and it turned him off.”
“Now I am old enough to understand to understand that we live on land that remembers. I hear the voices when I touch the brick or pavement, catch fragments of words exchanged hundreds of years before the island of Mannahatta was paved. I sometimes think about the Arabs and other immigrants who came here a century before my own family, hoping they wouldn t be devoured by the bottomless hunger of the very forces that drove them from their homelands, hoping they could survive in this place that was not built for them.”
“In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down. We are the carpenter ants of the service industry, the apparatchiks of the corporate world, we are math-crunching middle managers who keep the corporate wheels greased but who never get promoted since we don’t have the right ‘face’ for leadership. We have a content problem. They think we have no inner resources. But while I may look impassive, I m frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy. There s a ton of literature on the self-hating Jew and the self-hating African American, but not enough has been said about the self-hating Asian. Racial self hatred is seeing yourself whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy. Your only defence is to be hard on yourself, which becomes compulsive, and therefore a comfort: to peck yourself to death.”
“Mr. President, Dr. Biden, Madam Vice President, Mr. Emhoff, Americans and the world, when day comes we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry asea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace. In the norms and notions of what just is isn’t always justice. And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished. We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one. And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect. We are striving to forge our union with purpose. To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man. And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another. We seek harm to none and harmony for all. Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true. That even as we grieved, we grew. That even as we hurt, we hoped. That even as we tired, we tried that will forever be tied together victorious. Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division. Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid. If we’re to live up to her 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. We’ve seen a forest that would shatter our nation rather than share it. Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. This effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated. In this truth, in this faith we trust for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us. This is the era of just redemption. We feared it at its inception. We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour, but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves so while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe? Now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us? We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be a country that is bruised, but whole, benevolent, but bold, fierce, and free. We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation. Our blunders become their burdens. But one thing is certain, if we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright. So let us leave behind a country better than one we were left with. Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one. We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the West. We will rise from the wind-swept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution. We will rise from the Lake Rim cities of the Midwestern states. We will rise from the sun-baked South. We will rebuild, reconcile and recover in every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful. When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid. The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light. If only we’re brave enough.”
“This cargo, this group of twenty to thirty Angolans, sold from the deck of the White Lion by criminal English marauders in exchange for food and supplies, was also foundational to the American story. But while every American child learns about the Mayflower, virtually no American child learns about the White Lion. And yet the story of the White Lion is classically American. It is a harrowing tale--one filled with all the things that this country would rather not remember, a taint on a nation that believes above all else in its exceptionality. The Adams and Eves of Black America did not arrive here in search of freedom or a better life. They had been captured and stolen, forced onto a ship, shackled, writhing in filth as they suffered and starved. Some 40 percent of the Angolans who boarded that ghastly vessel did not make it across the Middle Passage. They embarked not as people but as property, sold to white colonists who were just beginning to birth democracy for themselves, commencing a four-hundred-year struggle between the two opposing ideas foundational to America. And so the White Lion has been relegated to what Bennett called the back alley of American history. There are no annual classroom commemorations of that moment in August 1619. No children dress up as its occupants or perform classroom skits. No holiday honors it. The White Lion and the people on that ship have been expunged from our collective memory. This omission is intentional: when we are creating a shared history, what we remember is just as revelatory as what we forget.”
“The contradictions between these two founding arrivals--the Mayflower and the White Lion--would lead to the deadliest war in American history, fought over how much of our nation would be enslaved and how much would be free. They would lead us to spend a century seeking to expand democracy abroad, beckoning other lands to Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, while violently suppressing democracy at home for the descendants of those involuntary immigrants who arrived on ships like the White Lion. They would lead to the elections--back-to-back--of the first Black president and then of a white nationalist one.”
“The true significance of slavery in the United States to the whole social development of America lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy. What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States? If all labor, black as well as white, became free – were given schools and the right to vote – what control could or should be set to the power and action of these laborers? Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men regardless of race and color, or if not, what power of dictatorship and control; and how would property and privilege be protected? This was the great and primary question which was in the minds of the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States and continued in the minds of thinkers down through the slavery controversy. It still remains with the world as the problem of democracy expands and touches all races and nations.”
“In history textbooks and in popular memory, the enslavement of people of African descent is often depicted as an unfortunate yet unavoidable occurrence in the otherwise glorious history of the American republic. Echoing this common sentiment, Republican senator Tom Cotton called slavery the necessary evil upon which the union was built in his objection to adding The 1619 Project to school curriculums. The United States was indeed built on chattel slavery, which deemed people of African descent inferior to white people and defined Black people as commodities to be bought, sold, insured, and willed. That was certainly evil. It was not, however, necessary or inevitable. The system of racialized slavery that is now seared into the American public consciousness took centuries to metastasize and mature.”
“Looking back on the past four hundred years, this nation s story of racism can seem almost inevitable. But it didn t have to be this way. At critical turning points throughout history, people made deliberate choices to construct and reinforce a racist America. Our generation has the opportunity to make different choices, ones that lead to greater human dignity and justice, but only if we pay heed to our history and respond with the truth and courage that confronting racism requires.”
“America doesn t mean white or color, America means celebration of diversity.”
“Even those on the left talk about how immigrants make America great. They point to photographs of happy refugees turned good citizens, listing their contributions, as if that is the price of existing in the same country, on the same earth.”
“The real pandemic in America isn t Covid-19. It s stupidity. And unfortunately, it s incurable.”