Randall Robinson > Quotes

“Small wonder our national spirit is husk empty. We have more information but less knowledge. More communication but less community. More goods but less goodwill. More of virtually everything save that which the human spirit requires. So distracted have we become sating this new need or that material appetite, we hardly noticed the departure of happiness”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“Unbalanced power poisons introspection. In its vacated space lay living society's imperative questions, unseen, unphrased, unasked, unanswered.”
― Randall Robinson

“I am not a churchgoing man. Strangled in the vines of form and choked with ritual Christians, Sunday service held no appeal for me as a child. When my parents released me from compulsory attendance, I would never return. In my view, religion is best practiced out of doors, in nature's cathedral of miracles where spirits and the arts of heaven mingle unencumbered. The spirits were present on the tiny unmarked parcel at Mount Vernon that early autumn afternoon.

Hazel and I stood for a long while in complete silence. Words would have marred, much as they misserve this inadequate telling of what we felt. We had been touched by wearied souls calling, in a language ethereal as morning mist, from the near realm that awaits us all.

These were 'our' ancestors and, alone behind an old wooden outbuilding, my wife and I had wordlessly worshiped with them on that clear crisp afternoon.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“...son, you won't need to talk to my headstone in order to talk to me. I won't be there. I'll be in the air and the Earth. I'll be in the stars that light the African heavens. I'll be watchin' over you and your family. My spirit will always be close enough to touch and protect you all. So, do not grieve for me. My body will die, but my soul will live on. For my soul cannot die. Always remember that my soul is the spark of God in me.”
― Randall Robinson, Makeda

“Trouble is, George Washington is not my ancestor, private or public. He owned my ancestors, abused them as chattel and willed them to his wife, Martha, upon his death. I and mine need to know about George and Martha but, assuredly, we do not need to revere them. Indeed, psychically we cannot afford to revere them.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“It is as if, since its very establishment, America had chosen to hold, as Napoleon would, that "history is the myth that men choose to believe." The crypto-Machiavellians who serve as the perennial stewards of American public affairs understand that people on the whole are about as malleable as their history can be made to be. The landscape is rife with examples, from historically overarching lies and half-truths to popular culture deceits.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“Racist behavior in our society is largely static, unnoticed, unremarked, and unconsciously accommodated by Americans of all colors.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“Ancestor worship is not alone the exotic preoccupation of quaint people mired in superstition in some remote corner of the world. Larger-than-life evidence of its industrialized-world variants can be seen in virtually every public park in America.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“Later, on April 15, 1999, a crowd of protestors led by the Reverend Al Sharpton shut down half of the Brooklyn Bridge, capping ten weeks of demonstrations following the killing of a twenty-three-year-old West African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, by four white New York City police officers. The officers had sprayed forty-one bullets into Mr. Diallo's apartment building vestibule, striking him nineteen times. Mr. Diallo was unarmed and had no police record. New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a Republican, declined to criticize the police department whose tactics he had historically endorsed. As the crowd, estimated from fifteen to twenty-five thousand, gathered at Brooklyn's Cadman Plaza, jury selection proceeded next door in the trial of four different white New York City police officers accused of torturing Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, in a Brooklyn police station in 1997. The demonstrations, growing larger and more multiracial, had begun to spread around the country in response to the horrific acts of police brutality. The canvas, stood back from, had a chilling Kafkaesque quality about it. Instrumentalities of the state had been used to spectacularly kill one completely innocent and defenseless man and brutally maim another. Mayor Giuliani appeared to accept this as a reasonable price of effective law enforcement.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“George Washington is the quintessential American public ancestor. Americans worship him before an obelisk in Washington, a statue in Baltimore, a square in New York, an engraving on the dollar, and Stuart prints hanging from coast to coast. (Washington couldn't have known that the obelisk to be dedicated in memory of him, on February 21, 1885, would be the world's largest replica of a 3,500-year-old monument to the Egyptian sun god.)”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“Greek civilization derived in its religion, its philosophy, its mathematics and much else, from the ancient civilizations of Africa above all from Egypt of the Pharaohs. To those 'founding fathers' in classical Greece, any notion that Africans were inferior, morally or intellectually, would have seemed silly. –Basil Davidson, Africa in History (1991)”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“Until America's white ruling class accepts the fact that the book never closes on massive unredressed social wrongs, America can have no future as one people.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“Though it would appear that Americans grow less knowledgeable by the day, there are still many American schoolchildren who recognize the Roman Colosseum, the Great Wall of China, the Parthenon, the Tower of London. From Africa, only the great pyramids of Egypt enjoy such broad recognition, and they are popularly and wrongly attributed to a civilization not spawned from Africa's interior.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“No one outside of Africa would remember that from 1890 to 1910 the Belgian King Leopold II (who was viewed at the time in Europe and America as a "philanthropic" monarch) genocidally plundered the Congo, killing as many as ten million people.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“State and federal budgets, to which Asians, Hispanics, and African Americans contribute, are uniformly controlled by whites who seem to uniformly believe that the only ancestor worship worth funding is theirs.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“They [i.e., the Greek historians relied upon by the writer] say also that the Egyptians are colonists sent out by the Ethiopians [i.e., not the modern Ethiopians, but, the black peoples from inner Africa south of Egypt], Osiris having been the leader of the colony.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“Solutions must be tailored to the scope of the crime in a way that would make the victim whole. In this case, the psychic and economic injury is enormous, multidimensional and long-running. Thus must be America's restitution to blacks for the damage done.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“As inclined as blacks understandably are by painful experience to believe the contrary, racism is not black-specific. It is like the Hydra, the lethal many-headed mythological snake whose heads regenerated as fast as they were severed. Racism is a social disease that exempts no race from either of its two rosters: victims and victimizers.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“It was the cap, or rather the logo that was stitched to it. The grin was hideous. The huge teeth hung from the roof of the head like gleaming convex stalactites that descended from the middle of the crown down to the cap's brim. The cavernous mouth crowded the nose and eyes into the hairline and strained without success to close around incisors that claimed three quarters of the clownish face. Had the face been black or brown, it would have incited urban riots, so patent was its insult. But the face was red and Justice wore the cap with jaunty insouciance.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“To do what is necessary, of course, will require a virtual Marshall Plan of federal resources, far in excess of anything contemplated between the nearly touching poles of conventional palliatives. But I see no evidence of any will to do anything much. In the areas of mathematics and reading, for example, a variety of pedagogical techniques have been developed that would work well enough if picked up and used broadly. No need to discuss them here. Their efficacy has been proved. That's not the problem. The problem is one of will–and consensus on course setting.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“When America liked it? When Cuba was racially segregated? When education was only available to a privileged few? When the poor died of easily curable ailments? When vice was rampant? Had they preferred Batista's mafia-infested Cuba? Or the Cuba between the state that Teddy Roosevelt preened to subjugate and Franklin Delano Roosevelt worked to keep?”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“This book is about the great still-unfolding massive crime of official and unofficial America against Africa, African slaves, and their descendants in America.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“George Washington was a third-generation slaveholder, who with Martha owned more than three hundred slaves. He prized them particularly; as a signal of wealth in his world, such property exceeded gold and real estate. He had once written to a fellow planter urging that he send him strong slaves in good health who were not "addicted to running away." At the end of the Revolutionary War, he cordoned the beaches with soldiers to prevent runaway slaves who had fought with the British from leaving America with the redcoats.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“Like slavery, other human rights crimes have resulted in the loss of millions of lives. But only slavery, with its sadistic patience, asphyxiated memory, and smothered cultures, has hulled empty a whole race of people with inter-generational efficiency. Every artifact of the victims' past cultures, every custom, every ritual, every god, every language, every trace element of a people's whole hereditary identity, wrenched from them and ground into a sharp choking dust. It is a human rights crime without parallel in the modern world. For it produces its victims ad infinitum, long after the active stage of the crime has ended.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“For the varieties of bigotry spring from a common root. To tolerate one form, either wittingly or not, is to accept all the rest.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“most African Americans have no knowledge of the history of our people before slavery or even that there exist richly detailed accounts of great African civilizations reaching back three thousand years and beyond. Most of us might not dare believe that a French nobleman and adventurer, Count Constantin de Volney, made the following observation in 1787: How we are astonished … when we reflect that to the race of Negroes, at present our slaves, and the objects of our extreme contempt, we owe our arts, sciences, and even the very use of speech, and when we recollect that, in the midst of those nations who call themselves the friends of liberty and humanity, the most barbarous of slaveries is justified; and that it is even a problem whether the understanding of Negroes be of the same species with that of white men.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“Don Rickles, the Jewish comedian, in a late-night television appearance on July 19, 1999, told host David Letterman that were it not for Mexicans, his bed would never be made at his Las Vegas hotel. It was a nakedly racist remark.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“By such wicked and inhuman ways the English are said to enslave toward one hundred thousand yearly; of which thirty thousand are supposed to die by barbarous treatment in the first year; besides all that are slain in the unnatural wars excited to take them. So much innocent blood have the managers and supporters of this inhuman trade to answer for to the common Lord of all.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“As Sir Eric Williams wrote in From Columbus to Castro: The situation was more discouraging in Cuba, which was in every sense of the term an American colony. The Americans openly supported, in the interest of stability, the dictator Machado who raised no awkward questions of Cuban independence and who was concerned merely with the exile or assassination of hostile labour leaders and the reckless and enormous increase of the public debt, both public and private. America dominated the scene. One American writer has stated that no one could become President of Cuba without the endorsement of the United States. According to another, the American Ambassador in Havana was the most important man in Cuba. A third analyses United States policy as "putting a veto on revolution whatever the cause". The Platt Amendment dominated the relations between the United States and Cuba. On the occasion of a threatened rebellion by a Negro political party, the Independent Party of Colour, the United States sent troops to Cuba. In reply to Cuba's protests Secretary of State Knox stated: "The United States does not undertake first to consult the Cuban Government if a crisis arises requiring a temporary landing somewhere." In 1933 Ambassador Sumner Welles identified six desirable characteristics which a Cuban president should possess. These read in part: "First, his thorough acquaintance with the desires of this Government… Sixth, his amenability to suggestions or advice which might be made to him by the American Legation.”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“But the differences between the two races, especially that of colour, led Jefferson to advocate the total removal of the Negroes, after emancipation, "beyond the reach of mixture." My dear Miss Sally Hemings, has the man no shame?”
― Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks