Page Osborne

“History can never be objective or unbiased because, no matter how hard the storytellers may try, the perception of reality prejudices all stories. The academic field of history is dominated by white men handicapped by the inability to see whiteness’s impact on America’s biography. The best historians try to approximate the truth by unbending the collection of funhouse mirrors through which the past has been viewed, but it isn’t simply a counterfeit version of history, it is a fable that erases the reflection of an entire people to ensure that the mythology of the heroes lives happily ever after.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America—The New York Times Bestselling Retelling of US History Through the Experiences of Black Americans

“As the desire for enslaved people increased, Europeans had to justify the human plunder. In order to rationalize taking a person from their home, separating them from their family, and shipping them across an ocean to work in a system of intergenerational bondage, Eloi said, these Europeans could not see these Africans as people. “They considered Black Africans not as human beings but as a simple merchandise. If they consider Africans as merchandise, that is because they understand the necessity to dehumanize Africans in order to work for the acceptance by all the Europeans. The necessity to use Africans because Africans are not human beings.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Men talk of the Negro problem,” said Frederick Douglass in one of his last public speeches, in 1893. “There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution.”
― Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them

“While history is what happened, it is also, just as important, how we think about what happened and what we unearth and choose to remember about what happened”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New American Origin Story