Azriel

“My parents, like so many others in the darker nation, shared the family stories of achievement but omitted the details of racial slights and discrimination, as if the telling were subject to what the historian Jonathan Holloway describes as a “psychologically enduring editor’s pencil.” So for me, writing this book has been a journey of discovery,”
― Stephen L. Carter, Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America's Most Powerful Mobster

“the hegemony of America in the community of the free world creates some curious moral hazards. We are ironically held responsible for disparities in wealth and well-being which are chiefly due to differences in standards of productivity. But they lend themselves with a remarkable degree of plausibility to the Marxist indictment, which attributes all such differences to exploitation. Thus, every effort we make to prove the virtue of our “way of life” by calling attention to our prosperity is used by our enemies and detractors as proof of our guilt. Our experience of an ironic guilt when we pretend to be innocent is thus balanced by the irony of an alleged guilt when we are comparatively innocent.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

“The militants fought to protect us from the Americans and the Americans fought to protect us from the militants, and being so protected, life was very dangerous.”
― Elliot Ackerman, Green on Blue

“This is class warfare by elites on the working class, in which the elites try to hide the way they have benefited from skyrocketing inequality by portraying themselves as more virtuous than those on the other side of the tracks, and thus more worthy of their good fortune. Call it COVID Calvinism: you aren’t simply lucky that your job allowed you to stay home or could never possibly be threatened by someone who doesn’t speak English; you are more virtuous, and therefore justified in perpetuating the yawning gulf between yourself and the workers. You then use allegations of racism or sexism or transphobia to hide the class divide from which you are benefiting. Woke politics, in other words, is a smokescreen that obscures the realities of class.”
― Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy