Liz

“In his 1964 essay “The White Problem,” published in Robert A. Goodwin’s edited volume 100 Years of Emancipation, Baldwin placed the lie at the heart of the country’s founding. The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn’t…anything else but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man. For if he wasn’t, then no crime had been committed. That lie is the basis of our present trouble.”
― Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

“minimizes the trauma, either by shifting blame for it onto fringe actors of the present (“These acts don’t represent who we are”), relative values of the times (“Everyone back then believed in slavery”), or, worst, back onto the traumatized (“They are responsible for themselves”). There has never been a mechanism, through something like a truth and reconciliation commission, for telling ourselves the truth about what we have done in a way that would broadly legitimate government policies to repair systemic discrimination across generations. Instead, we pine for national rituals of expiation that wash away our guilt without the need for an admission of guilt, celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day or pointing to the election of Barack Obama, and in the process doing further damage to the traumatized through a kind of historical gaslighting.”
― Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

“King told the audience that night, “was that black people have been kept in oppression and deprivation by a poisonous fog of lies that depicted them as inferior, born deficient, and deservedly doomed to servitude to the grave.” He went on to say that “so long as the lie was believed the brutality and criminality of conduct toward the Negro was easy for the conscience to bear.”
― Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

“Then, setting the glass down, he looked at me and waited. Because that's what has-beens do: they wait. When it comes to waiting, has-beens have had plenty of practice. Like when they were waiting for their big break, or their number to come in. Once it became clear that those things weren't going to happen, they started waiting for other things. Like for the bars to open, or the welfare check to arrive. Before too long, they were waiting to see what it would be like to sleep in a park, or take the last two puffs from a discarded cigarette. They were waiting to see what new indignity they could become accustomed to while they were waiting to be forgotten by those they once held dear. But most of all, they waited for the end.”
― Amor Towles, Lincoln Highway