marcus miller

“America’s mainstream religion is at bottom one form or another of popular deism, and popular deism is just atheism adapted to the limitations of the common understanding of things. To say that the United States is “one nation under God” is to conceal behind a euphemism the fact that it is and always has been one nation under nature. Whatever else we pretend to believe, we are in practice mostly atheists now--and for that we should be grateful.” p 426”
― Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

“The Trump years amazed a certain kind of white person; they had no reference for national vulgarity, for such broad corruption and venality, until it was too late. The least reflective of them say, “This is not America.” But some of them suspect that it is America, and there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else. I could hear that same pain in Avner’s and Guy’s words. They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth—that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“If you're Native American and you pray to the wolves, you're a savage. If you're African and you pray to your ancestors, you're a primitive. But when white people pray to a guy who turns water into wine, well, that's just common sense.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood