Wesley Morris > Quotes

“Minstrelsy's grotesquerie deluded white audiences into feeling better about themselves. It induced a bearable cognitive dissonance that outlasted enslavement. The caricatures of Black people as extravagantly lazy, licentious, vulgar, disheveled, and abject always drew a comforting contrast with a white person's sense of honor and civility, with a white person's simply being white.”
― Wesley Morris, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“Something about white America's desire for Blackness warps and perverts its source, lampoons and cheapens it even in adoration. Loving Black culture has never demanded a corresponding love of Black people. And loving Black culture has tended to result in loving the life out of it.”
― Wesley Morris, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“As they were being worked, sometimes to death, white people, desperate with anticipation, were paying to see a terrible distortion of the enslaved depicted at play.”
― Wesley Morris, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“What minstrelsy offered the country during this period was an entertainment of talent, ribaldry, and polemics. But it also lent racism a stage upon which existential fear could become jubilation, and contempt could become fantasy.”
― Wesley Morris, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“In fact, the removal of those books is one cut in the death by a thousand small cuts being meted out to democracy. Given that so many of the recent political cataclysms have unfolded when more countries than at any time call themselves democracies, just imagine the number (and severity) of calamities possible in a world dominated by totalitarian regimes. Picture America being one of those countries, ruled by an autocrat, with no regard to the history that has shaped us, and nothing but disdain for anyone who does not hold the methods of tyranny close to the heart.”
― Wesley Morris, The Best American Essays 2024