Academics From The United States

"“Peace,” Robinson repeated. His head lolled back against the chair until he was looking up into the cabin’s rafters. “There’s been more fighting about that than almost anything you can name. Do you know, Gregory, there’s a very simple reason why peace on earth is a pipe dream. Peace has the disadvantage of freezing the status quo, and there’ll always be individuals, groups, nations who find the status quo unacceptable.”"

"The bureaucracy staggers on like a beheaded chicken, its stubborn autonomic functions creating the illusion of life."

"“I guess it just happens. How many really happy couples do you know?” Arens blew smoke skyward. “Not many. Seems like everybody settles for less than they thought they were going to get.” “I thought we were going to be different.” “Everybody does,” Arens said."

"“Thank you for not disappointing me,” Somerset said. “You’re every bit the ass I was told to expect.” “So you don’t bother to deny it.” “No, I don’t. Because I don’t bother to deny idiotic blather,” Somerset snapped."

"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. Paxton, R. O. (2004). The Anatomy of Fascism. Alfred A. Knopf. 336 p. (Allen Lane History.) ISBN 1-4000-4094-9. P. 218."

"“I thought Green was where the mob owned Washington.” “It is,” Tackett said. “It makes less difference than you might think.”"

"The goal of disinformation is not merely to raise doubt but to weaponize it into distrust, and eventually, denial."

"The halfway point between the truth and a lie is still a lie."

"The first step toward winning the war on truth is to accept that we are in one."

"Doubt can be overcome by evidence; distrust cannot."

"Science denial is not a mistake, it's a lie."

"Most science deniers don't have a deficit of information, but a deficit of trust."

"Virtually all conspiracy theorists are what I call 'cafeteria skeptics'."

"The right to free speech./Jeanne Kirkpatrick walks out when students hiss./She has the right to free speech/any time/anywhere/because she defends/U.S. imperialism./But Merle Woo?/Merle Woo gets fired/from the classroom./She speaks about democracy./For students, staff and faculty. Against censorship./For a Third World College. Against cultural genocide./For lesbians and gays. Against heterosexism./For the possibility of all our voices,/in all languages, singing out."

"Merle Woo wrote a letter to her mother, stating her pride in being a Chinese-Korean-American woman: "We have such a proud heritage, such a courageous tradition.""

"I feel even more deeply hurt when I realize how many people, how so many people, because of racism and sexism, fail to see what power we sacrifice by not joining hands."

"Try to understand that our distrust is from experience, and that our distrust is powerless. Racism is an essential part of the status quo, powerful, and continues to keep us down. It is a rule taught to all of us from birth. Is it no wonder that we fear there are no exceptions?""

"In the last few years, I have realized the value of Homework: I have studied the history of our people in this country. I cannot tell you how proud I am to be a Chinese/Korean American Woman. We have such a proud heritage, such a courageous tradition. I want to tell everyone about that, all the particulars that are left out in the schools. And the full awareness of being a woman makes me want to sing."

"To the white female poet who says, "Well, frankly, I believe that politics and poetry don't necessarily have to go together," I say, "Your little taste of white privilege has deluded you into thinking that you don't have to fight against sexism in this society. You are talking to me from your own isolation and your own racism. If you feel that you don't have to fight for me, that you don't have to speak out against capitalism, the exploitation of human and natural resources, then you in your silence, your inability to make connections, are siding with a system that will eventually get you, after it has gotten me. And if you think that's not a political stance, you're more than simply deluded, you're crazy!" This is the same white voice that says, "I am writing about and looking for themes that are 'universal."" Well, most of the time when "universal" is used, it is just a euphemism for "white:" white themes, white significance, white culture. And denying minority groups their rightful place and time in US history is simply racist."

"We no longer can afford to stand back and watch while an insatiable elite ravages and devours resources that are enough for all of us. The obstacles are so huge and overwhelming that often I do become cynical and want to give up. And if I were struggling alone, I know I would never even attempt to put into action what I believe in my heart, that (and this is primarily because of you, Ma) Yellow Women are strong and have the potential to be powerful and effective leaders."

"Yellow Feminist means being a core for change, and that core means having the belief in our potential as human beings. I will work with anyone, support anyone, who shares my sensibility, my objectives."

"But there are barriers to unity: white women who are racist, and Asian American men who are sexist. My very being declares that those two groups do not share my complete sensibility. I would be fragmented, mutilated, if I did not fight against racism and sexism together."

"Right now, my techniques are education and writing."

"And this is when the pain of the struggle hits home. How many white women have taken on the responsibility to educate themselves about Third World people, their history, their culture? How many white women really think about the stereotypes they retain as truth about women of color?"

"Today, I am satisfied to call myself either an Asian American Feminist or Yellow Feminist. The two terms are inseparable because race and sex are an integral part of me. This means that I am working with others to realize pride in culture and women and heritage (the heritage that is the exploited yellow immigrant: Daddy and you). Being a Yellow Feminist means being a community activist and a humanist. It does not mean "separatism," either by cutting myself off from non-Asians or men. It does not mean retaining the same structure and substituting more women in positions of control."

"I get so tired of being the instant resource for information on Asian American women. Being the token representative, going from class to class, group to group, bleeding for white women so they can have an easy answer and then-and this is what really gets to me-they usually leave to never continue their education about us on their own."

"I'm George Bridges, I use he/him pronouns. I begin our time together today by acknowledging the indigenous people of the Medicine Creek Treaty, whose land was stolen and on which the college stands. I would like to acknowledge the Squaxin people who are the traditional custodians of this land and pay respect to elders past and present of the Squaxin Island Tribe. I extend that respect to other Native people present. In response to Native Student Alliance requests, we commit to opening every event with this acknowledgement."

"Do you see your repressed anger manifested in me? What doors would groan wide open if you heard my words with complete understanding? Are you afraid that your daughter is breaking out of our shackles, and into total anarchy? That your daughter has turned into a crazy woman who advocates not only equality for Third World people, for women, but for gays as well? Please don't shudder, Ma, when I speak of homosexuality. Until we can all present ourselves to the world in our completeness, as fully and beautifully as we see ourselves naked in our bedrooms, we are not free."

"To the racist white female professor who says, "If I have to watch everything I say I wouldn't say anything," I want to say, "Then get out of teaching.""

"When you distort what I say, like thinking I am against all "Caucasians" or that I am ashamed of Dad, then I feel anger and more frustration and want to slash out, not at you, but at those external forces which keep us apart. What deepens the chasms between us are our different reactions to those forces. Yours has been one of silence, self-denial, self-effacement; you believing it is your fault that you never fully experienced self-pride and freedom of choice. But listen, Ma, only with a deliberate consciousness is my reaction different from yours."

"Pop's sense of right and wrong was much more of a secular than a religious matter. As a boy, he had been a regular attendee at the Presbyterian Church Sunday school, earning medals for not missing a single class, year after year. But as my mother told the story, his experience as a young teenager selling newspapers at the crack of dawn changed his ideas about organized religion. He had seen church fathers returning from late-night visits to the Negro section of town, and he was old enough to know what they had been up to. Their hypocrisy stuck in his craw and solidified into a hostility toward formal religion that lasted the rest of his life."

"It is still not easy for us white southerners to come to grips with our collective blindness to these evils, but it seems to me that we must. So, then, how can we understand our inability, our refusal, to see slavery (and later racial segregation) for what it truly was?"

"My ancestors did more than coexist with this institution and draw monetary gain from it. They endorsed it, they embraced it, they celebrated it, they destroyed a hallowed political union to protect it, and they launched what turned out to be the most blood-drenched war in American history to defend it. And with racial segregation, my parents' generation, and my generation, did much the same thing- no secession and civil war this time around, but blood was shed over and over again as the terror of lynching gripped the South in the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. And the Jim Crow laws and institutions built by that turn-of-the-century generation, the generation of "Radical racism," were passed down as immutable folkways and endured into my own generation."

"I have an exercise that I ask the students in my History of the Old South course to undertake toward the end of the semester. It comes after we have spent weeks studying the institution of slavery and the impact of slavery on the society, the politics, the culture, the economy, and the mind of the antebellum South. I ask them to read two letters, two of the most powerful manuscripts I have come across in my archival searches. Their assignment is to go over these two documents very carefully, line by line, analyze their contents, and answer the following question: "Would antebellum white southerners experience guilt over slavery after reading what is written here? Or did they find ways to look the consequences of slavery in the face on a daily basis and experience no guilt over the South's 'peculiar institution'?" I add that historians have debated this question vigorously for decades and have come down on both sides of the guilt question. Their task- my students' task- is to analyze the two primary documents in light of this question. Again, would antebellum white southerners familiar with the content of these two letters have experienced guilt over what is written here? Or would they have done just the opposite and experienced no guilt over what is described? My final comment to them is that there is no way to answer this question definitively, but we can try to understand white southern attitudes during this era and get some idea of how they saw the world in which they lived."

"Woodberry Forest School is a stunningly beautiful place located in the rolling Virginia Piedmont just outside the small town of Orange. The campus of imposing red brick and white-columned buildings was surrounded by green athletic fields, a working farm, and a nine-hole golf course, with a magnificent visual backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the western distance. While I was a student there, I roamed the nearby Confederate trenches, leaf-filled but still clearly visible, along the south bank of the Rapidan River, where men from Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had wintered in 1864-1865. The Confederate battle flag that hung in my dorm room during my three years at Woodberry bore witness to my love for the south and a near reverence for the soldiers in grey who manned those trenches on the Rapidan in defense of my native region."

"In some ways, I did a lot of growing up during my time at Woodberry. Mandatory evening study halls, supervised by masters (as we referred to our teachers), were a major irritant and were absolutely vital to my emergence as a decent student who could aspire to making it into a decent college. We read constantly, even over the summer (I thought I would never make it through O.E. Rølvaag's Giants in the Earth), we memorized (I can still recite long passages of "Thanatopsis"), we took tests and exams (all the time, it seemed to me), we had math and lab science courses that drove me crazy, and we competed on those green, frequently muddy, athletic fields all three seasons of every year (football and winter and spring track for me)."

"It is a sordid tale, all of this, spanning centuries and generations, but we are not doomed by it. We can do better, we have done better, we have done better. But we must do better still. We have to shuck off the last vestiges of the reptilian skin of racism, even if we do not think we are still carrying it around. Because we are. And our failure to shed that skin will continue to poison our politics and shackle the South, and in many ways the rest of the country, with decades of continuing strife and racial injustice. We should strive to be, and we should become, the generation of "grown-ups" who finally, at long last, refuse to put the "hate in children.""

"Charles B. Dew is Ephraim Williams Professor of American History at Williams College and the author of the Fletcher Pratt Award-winning Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secessionist Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Virginia) and Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge, selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year."

"With every drug, whether it's cocaine, PCP, or marijuana, there's some historical report about the horrors of this drug producing superhuman strength. It provides a rationale to engage in police brutality. This is quintessential American racism."

"my conscience will no longer allow me to remain silent about my drug use, nor can I remain silent about the absurdity of punishing people for what they put into their own bodies...The point is that whether I use a drug or not is my decision; it is not the government's decision."

"Contrary to popular media portrayals, most drug users are not addicts. They are responsible members of their communities. They pay their bills and taxes on time; they take care of their families; and they volunteer in their local and global communities. They are artists, engineers, firemen, homemakers, judges, lawyers, pastors, physicians, politicians, professors, schoolteachers, scientists, social workers, truck drivers, writers, and many other types of professionals."

"If our current government-or any government-were genuinely concerned about the health and safety of drug users, it would ensure that free, anonymous drug-safety testing services were widely available. This practical approach informs users of the contents of their substances and decreases the likelihood of people ingesting fatal amounts of unknown substances."

"I'm now firm in my belief that marijuana is a key ingredient to happiness for a great number of people. What kind of person prevents another's responsible pursuit of happiness? Not a very humane one."

"the reefer-madness rhetoric of the past has not evaporated; it has evolved and reinvented itself...with each new generation, the myth of reefer madness is revamped and disguised as empirical evidence rather than as what it is: misinformed rhetoric."

"Would we tolerate children being removed from their mother just because she drank a glass of wine?...Can you imagine being told that your child is better off without you merely because you smoked a joint?...The fact is that many parents who use drugs are good parents, and their children are clearly better off with them."

"the first priority of law enforcement should be to keep users safe, not to arrest them."

"The main effects of smoking marijuana are contentment, relaxation, sedation, euphoria, and increased hunger, all peaking within five to fifteen minutes after smoking and lasting for about two hours...very high THC concentrations...can cause mild paranoia and visual and auditory distortions, but even these effects are rare and usually seen only in very inexperienced users."

"If the ideas expressed in this book are embraced, we can get on with the business of treating each other better and enjoying more meaningful and fulfilling lives. And isn't that what we all want?"

"I share my story in an effort to encourage others, especially successful professionals who are less at risk than people on the margins of society, to get out of the closet about their own drug use. If they did so, more people would see that there are far more respectable drug users than our criminal-justice regime and popular culture would have us know."

"Our researchers are from a particular class and they are predominantly white. They don't even think of themselves as being a part of the political machinery, but they help to prop up our drug laws."