Jason D. Hill > Quotes

“The state’s racist policies were a cancerous blight against the noble ideals on which America was founded.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“The Founders, despite their compromise about slavery, got what I call the fundamentals correct;”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“Self-ownership is the means for securing the right to preservation, which, in turn, secures the right to life. Marriage is one of the most formal ways in which the highest values one holds are ratified by the state—friendship, love, bonds of affection, family, commitment, and oaths of loyalty and fidelity. Given the centrality of valued persons in our lives, and the psychological need to have them esteemed in the public sphere, we understand marriage as, among other things, the insignia of public approval of the choices made by two people. We make sacred the union of such people by granting unto it the juridical imprimatur of the state. Marriage is beyond mere legality; it is taken to be the nucleus in which regeneration, social validation, and affirmation take place.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“the search for man’s destiny demands an interaction with radically different others that forces him to revise the narrative construct on which his previous identity was predicated.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“it inclines human beings not to search for their origins but, rather, their destiny. It is the first nation in history where—despite lip service to hyphenated identities that are purely symbolic—human beings have been driven to flee from their origins and remake themselves through a process of becoming a new specimen—oftentimes, a radically new person.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“I say: if the debt you feel has not been paid, then pray for the grace to forgive those you believe are indebted to you. You will come to know a peace you have never known, and you will embrace a feeling of freedom simply because you are free. Those whose lives had been marred by the ravages of Jim Crow segregationist laws live far richer spiritual lives by practicing radical forgiveness towards those who oppressed them than they would by seeking retributive justice. This is because an obsession with justice and entitlement shackles the soul in some sense to the compensations of the one who has harmed one. A spirit of aggrievement, paradoxically, places one in a dependent role on the other; in this instance, one is not free. Radical forgiveness frees the soul from resentment and fosters an ethic of care towards those who have harmed one. Radical forgiveness not only forges new relationships, but it also heralds a model for a new type of humanity, a new planetary ethic, and humanism devoid of bitterness that will change the world. To the black individual rising and striving to make something superlative of his or her own life, who refuses to be shackled by the racial script that would ossify the soul and calcify the heart, you are a historical process emerging in this world. You know as I do that for this to happen, the race to which we were assigned must die so that the individual can rise. The individual must rise!”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“When Jefferson stated: “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man,” he was uttering an ode and a love letter to the inviolable and indubitable characteristic that marks man as man—his rational, sovereign mind.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“truth is a death knell, as it emancipates them from their self-curated silos and forces them into a universe that cares only about facts, not feelings or wishful thinking.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“The eugenic moment of the Civil Rights Act is expressed in the premise: human rights supersede property rights.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“He is never sentimentally nostalgic for an irretrievable golden era—unless it is universal in nature and grounded in a common human identity.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“no white person would exchange his personhood status for a three-fifth share in humanity and be satisfied that his full humanity and personhood were still upheld.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“Values, beliefs, and character are what constitute identity, not race, which is a neutral characteristic that reveals nothing about the core content of a person’s moral agency.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“The Founders accomplished a remarkable feat by making it possible for America to be opened to foreigners and strangers from all walks of life. It accepted the poor and huddled masses all over the world—those who were rejected and persecuted by their own societies and families—and offered them a chance to fulfil a universal end in the pursuit and achievement of happiness and their meaning and purpose in life.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“But in all his subcutaneous modes of transcendence of this world he has left behind, he is forced to live in this world—the one he has psychologically departed from.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“From Greta Thunberg, nativists, white nationalists to black separatists and all racial and ethnonational particularists, woke fascists, and xenophobes of all stripes—the maniacal urge to fall into a state of wiled nihilism is deliberate, not accidental. The goals are to retrogress and reduce humanity to a state of premodernism. Their fear of independence, objective reality, and reason”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“what he utters is unadulterated, pure nonsense. Truth is predicated on objectivity. Truths are determined from perceived facts of reality. Such facts much be discoverable in an objective universe that exists independently of human consciousness. These facts are unassailable and indubitable. Such is the nature of facts; they cannot change as a result of wishes and desires. When human consciousness perceives facts in reality, truth is the cognitive designation given to the codification of those facts.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“deserved to have the sanctity of his life protected by non-punitive rules—negative liberties that consisted not in what he had to do but what he ought to refrain from doing regarding the well-being of his fellow compatriots.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“and you will embrace a feeling of freedom simply because you are free. Those whose lives had been marred by the ravages of Jim Crow segregationist laws live far richer spiritual lives by practicing radical forgiveness towards those who oppressed them than they would by seeking retributive justice. This is because an obsession with justice and entitlement shackles the soul in some sense to the compensations of the one who has harmed one. A spirit of aggrievement, paradoxically, places one in a dependent role on the other; in this instance, one is not free. Radical forgiveness frees the soul from resentment and fosters an ethic of care towards those who have harmed one. Radical forgiveness not only forges new relationships, but it also heralds a model for a new”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“the social and inherited attributes by which human beings were appraised were not only largely irrelevant, but in those cases where they were relevant, they were subject to innumerable contestations and contingent, provisional appraisals”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“To hold this position, while convincing individuals that a transracial cosmopolitan is not a lifestyle that only educated privileged people can embrace, is to play one more role in the division of labor on behalf of his life. The task is to find ways to socialize nonintellectuals by means of his universal cosmopolitan virtues and values.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“the transracial cosmopolitan identity is a weaned identity. Unlike the childlike creatures of their surroundings who cling to ethnic and racial identities the way a neurotic forty-year-old clings to his mother’s skirt, moral cosmopolitans have no preference for their “own kind.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“The subordination of nature and its radical adaption to man’s needs is the juncture where history begins.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“The ruling principle in all Victim Revolution Studies departments was racial, ethnic, and sexual subjectivism.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“cultures that have discovered that an environment in which freedom and liberty are the milieu in which the individual needs to cultivate his or her rational nature and live an optimal existence, are superior cultures, morally, spiritually, and politically speaking, to those that cultivate environments consonant with human nature, which require freedom and liberty.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“The state has to adopt an activist role in rehumanizing vast swaths of human beings that it made into psychotic and irrational racists into moral creatures. This activist role was achieved by state intrusion into the sphere of property ownership by white individuals. Property rights are not absolute; they are contextual.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“Given the system of affirmative action for white business owners in the form of subsidies, patents, and government-backed, guaranteed loans in the railroad industry, farming, and banking, to name a few, financed by the extracted tax dollars from black and white citizens alike,”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“Because if the moral meaning and purpose of your existence as a far-left liberal rests on my suffering and victimization as a black person, then you will need me to suffer indefinitely in order to continue to cull some meaning and purpose from your life. If I reject your help on the grounds that I will not let you expropriate my agency on behalf of my life, that I will cultivate the virtues in my character that are needed to emancipate my life from the hell you imagine it to be, then I’ve annihilated your meaning here on earth. I’ve identified your moral sadism in the relief of my suffering and named the moral hypocrisy of your life. It was never about me all along. It was about your redemption. You needed me to suffer so you could gain atonement, meaning and redemption. Now that I don’t have to suffer (really, I never had to) you have no purpose for living. Your existence is void of moral meaning. I have, in essence, damned you to a living hell. These alt-left individuals have a”
― Jason D. Hill, We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People

“Without the proper morality, political systems are doomed to fail. But without the proper epistemology, or proper ethical and moral system, values and virtues remain obscured from the realm of human cognition.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“The very faculty that distinguishes us from every other creature and makes man a human being—reason—is being called into question as a social construct meant to erase the identities of marginalized people.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression

“In the end, the moral and political vocabularies and the sociopolitical machinery that formed the republic was one that was generative. It propelled itself into an indefinite future in which blacks would be the legatees and beneficiaries.”
― Jason D. Hill, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression