James J. Johnson

“Lee Atwater, a Republican consultant and the Paganini of the modern political dog whistle, once explained the Southern Strategy, a ploy by which his party used coded racism to appeal to white voters. “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’” Atwater said. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, it backfires—so you say stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’ and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.”
― Andrew Marantz, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation

“Music should be censored,” said Moissaye Boguslawski of the Chicago Symphony. “There is censorship for the film and for the stage, yet none for music, for which it is even more needed. I believe much recent criminal endeavor by youths has to a degree been influenced by jazz. Americans probably would not be so highly flattered if they knew they were paying tribute to the music of Africa.”
― Kliph Nesteroff, Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars

“The bigoted propagandists of the alt-right are wrong about almost everything, but they are correct about this much: the United States of America was founded by white men, for white men. The problem with the bigots is not that they acknowledge this aspect of the country’s history; the problem is that they cling to it,”
― Andrew Marantz, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation

“Dwight Eisenhower had said: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in a final sense a theft from those who are hungry and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States