Mark Charles > Quotes

“However, the most challenging comparison is that we—the United States of America, the leaders of the modern-day heretical kingdom of Christendom, one exceptional nation that for centuries has been thriving, growing, and expanding (supposedly) under God—are not that dissimilar from Nazi Germany.”
― Mark Charles, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“When one nation is able to control the telling of their own history for hundreds of years, a mythology forms that allows injustice, oppression, exploitation, and even war crimes to be seen as benign and even to possibly be honored and celebrated.”
― Mark Charles, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“Many authors, professors, pastors, and social justice leaders and organizations (both Christian and secular) who are considered to be on the forefront on the racial dialogue frequently use the term “white privilege.” However, the word privilege suggests that the inequality that favors white people is actually a blessing which they must learn to share. The term white privilege perpetuates an implicit bias. Whiteness is neither a privilege nor a blessing to be shared, it is a diseased social construct that needs to be confronted.”
― Mark Charles, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“This 2005 opinion reveals a white supremacist legal opinion written by the United States Supreme Court that reiterates the highly problematic M’Intosh verdict written nearly two hundred years earlier. The opinion in the 2005 case, City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of N. Y., was written and delivered by the iconic progressive Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”
― Mark Charles, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“Whiteness is neither a privilege nor a blessing to be shared, it is a diseased social construct that needs to be confronted.”
― Mark Charles, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“The implicit bias of white supremacy is alive and well in the United States of America and is a bipartisan value that is perpetuated by nearly every US citizen (or at least every US citizen who owns, or hopes to own, land).”
― Mark Charles, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“  It feels like our indigenous peoples are an old grandmother who lives in a very large house. It is a beautiful house with plenty of rooms and comfortable furniture. But years ago, some people came into her house and locked her upstairs in the bedroom. Today her home is full of people. They are sitting on her furniture. They are eating her food. They are having a party in her house. They have since come upstairs and unlocked the door to her, bedroom but now it is much later, and she is tired, old, weak and sick; so she can't or doesn't want to come out. But what is the most hurtful and what causes her the most pain, is that virtually no one from this party ever comes upstairs to find the grandmother in the bedroom.  No one sits down next to her on the bed, takes her hand, and simply says, "Thank you. Thank you for letting us be in your house.”
― Mark Charles, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

“The myth of American exceptionalism is a bipartisan and unifying theme for most every American. One of the major challenges for a nation that believes in its own exceptionalism but also has a simplistic two-party political system is that when any flaw is uncovered that might blemish the exceptional nature of the whole, that flaw is blamed on the opposing political party (or any other available scapegoat). That way the mythology of American exceptionalism can remain intact.”
― Mark Charles, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery