Academics From The United States

"What would be the use of all these books now? Why worry about one of them? Why worry about all the millions of them? There was no one left, now, to carry on. Books themselves, mere wood pulp and lampblack, were nothing—without a mind to use them."

"Men go and come, but earth abides."

"In any basic struggle for power, the intellectual man went under."

"The boundaries, like defenses, drew lines that were hard and uncompromising. They, too, were man-made, abstractions dominating reality. When you crossed by the highway, on a line, the road surface changed. It was smooth in Delaware, but when you went into Maryland, you felt a change in vibration, and all at once the tires hummed differently. “State line,” the sign read. “Entering Nebraska. Speed limit 60 m.p.h.” So even right and wrong altered with the sharp snap of a discontinuity, and you stepped harder on the throttle. At the national boundary the flags showed different colors, though the same breeze blew them. You stopped for customs and immigration, and were suddenly a stranger, unfamiliar. “Look,” you said, “that policeman has a different uniform!” You got new money, and even for picture postcards the stamps had to have another face on them. “Better drive extra carefully,” you said. “Wouldn’t be good to get arrested over here.” That was a funny business! You stepped across a line you couldn’t see, and then you were one of those queer people—a foreigner! But boundaries fade even faster than fences. Imaginary lines need no rust to efface them."

"What you were preparing against—that never happened! All the best-laid plans could not prevent the disaster against which no plans had been laid."

"But, granting the numbers, the family group was just what it might have been at any time in almost any society—father, mother, and children, tightly grouped to form the basic social unit, so basic in fact that it might be considered biological rather than social. After all, he thought, the family was the toughest of all human institutions. It had preceded civilization, and so it naturally survived afterward."

"The people who live in any generation do much, he realized, either to create or to solve the problems for the people who come in the generations later."

"Man invented civilization, and was inordinately proud of it. But in no way did civilization change life more than by sharpening the line between work and play, and at last that division came to be more important than the old one between sleeping and waking. Sleep came to be thought a kind of relaxation, and “sleeping on the job” a heinous sin. The turning out of the light and the ringing of the alarm clock were not so much the symbols of man’s dual life as were the punching of the time clock and the blowing of the whistle. Men marched on picket lines and threw bricks and exploded dynamite to shift an hour from one classification to the other, and other men fought equally hard to prevent them. And always work became more laborious and odious, and play grew more artificial and febrile."

"If there is a God who made us and we did wrong before His eyes—as George says—at least we did wrong only because we were as God made us, and I do not think that He should set traps. Oh, you should know better than George! Let us not bring all that back into the world again—the angry God, the mean God—the one who does not tell us the rules of the game, and then strikes us when we break them. Let us not bring Him back!"

"To think of that as something bad was merely to think in terms of what had once been and no longer existed."

"Firearms were as likely to create as to solve difficulties."

"“Oh, don’t worry,” he thought, putting it into words, “there never had been perfection yet, and it certainly isn’t going to start now for me.”"

"There had been many definitions of Man; he would make another: “The noise-producing animal.”"

"Yes, he realized, if a man began to think of himself as divinely appointed, he was close to thinking of himself as God—and at that point lay insanity."

"“There are no atheists in foxholes,” he remembered, but the whole world now was nothing but a huge foxhole! But certainly what had happened did not inspire one to think that God was particularly interested in the human race, or in its individuals."

"Suddenly he felt that all civilization depended not only upon men but also upon these other things which had marched with him like kinsman and friends and companions. If Saint Francis had hailed the sun as brother, might not we also say, “Oh, Brother Wheat! Oh, Sister Barley!” He smiled to himself. Yes, one could go on: “Oh, Grandfather Wheel! Oh, Cousin Compass! Oh, Friend Binomial Theorem!”"

"Perhaps rationalism—like so much else—had only been one of the luxuries which men could afford under civilization."

"“It has never happened!” cannot be construed to mean, “It can never happen!”—as well say, “Because I have never broken my leg, my leg is unbreakable,” or “Because I’ve never died, I am immortal.”"

"People certainly tended to overestimate the intelligence of dogs!"

"A dead cat, it seemed, lay on the counter, but as he looked, it stirred to life and he realized that it had merely been lying, after the the habit of cats, in such a position that it looked dead. The cat looked at him with a kind of cold effrontery, as the duchess at the chambermaid. Ish felt uncomfortable, and had to remind himself that this was the way cats had always behaved."

"So trying to keep certain things off television or out of books is futile. That same energy should be applied to helping children develop their own capacities for judgment, taste and sensitivity, so that they know how to make decisions that are based, we hope, on positive values."

"I don't think baseball could survive without all the statistical appurtenances involved in calculating pitching, hitting and fielding percentages. Some people could do without the games as long as they got the box scores."

"We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us."

"Looking at the business corporation through something other than the eyes of its equity holders has inspired great efforts to translate that intuitive appeal into a theory... The promise of stakeholder theory to offer a cogent alternative to the economic account of the firm, however, is impeded by a set of assumptions designed to accommodate economic considerations."

"A preoccupation with instrumental consequences renders a theory that accommodates economic premises yet sidesteps the underlying tensions between the social and economic imperatives that confront organisations. Such a theory risks omitting the pressing descriptive and normative questions raised by these tensions, which, when explored, might hold great promise for a new theory and even for addressing practical management challenges."

"Clint Smith, one of our most thoughtful writers and thinkers, skillfully documents how echoes of enslavement remain everywhere...How the Word Is Passed is a vital, desperately needed contribution to that reckoning.""

"(The book that…should be on every college syllabus:) How The Word is Passed by Clint Smith. This book is fundamental to understanding how, why, and when commemorations around slavery have happened in the United States and the ramifications of honoring but not acknowledging the sins of slaveholders."

"To deny the full humanity of others is to deny it within ourselves."

"I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn't simply escape like Douglass, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn't they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy; it illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, in the most brutal circumstances, attain superhuman heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, the people who maintained it. In overly mythologizing our ancestors, we forget an all-too-important reality: the vast majority were ordinary people, which is to say they were people just like everyone else. This ordinariness is only shameful when used to legitimate oppression. This is its own quiet violence."

"The Statue of Liberty is an extension of a tradition that seems to embody the contradictions in America's promise, and a reminder that its promises have not always been extended to us. As the narrator in James Baldwin's 1960 short story "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" puts it, "I would never know what this statue meant to others, she had always been an ugly joke for me.""

"Black-and-white photographs and film footage can convince us that these episodes transpired in a distant past, untouched by our contemporary world. Segregation shaped every aspect of my grandmother's education."

"When I read Jefferson's disparagement of Wheatley, it felt like he had been disparaging the entire lineage of Black poets who would follow her, myself included, and I saw a man who had not had a clear understanding of what love is. When Robert Hayden gave us the ballads to remember how captured Africans survived the Middle Passage and arrived on these shores, it was an act of love. When Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about the children on the South Side of Chicago playing with one another in neighborhoods left neglected by the city, it was an act of love. When Audre Lorde fractured this language and then built us a new one, giving us a fresh way to make sense of who we are in the world, it was an act of love. When Sonia Sanchez makes lightning of her tongue, moving from Southern colloquialisms to stanzas shaped by Swahili, traversing an ocean in one breath, it is an act of love. Jefferson's conceptions of love seem to have been so distorted by his own prejudices that he was unable to recognize the endless examples of love that pervaded plantations across the country: mothers who huddled over their children and took the lash so their little ones wouldn't have to; surrogate mothers, fathers, and grandparents who took in children and raised them as their own when their biological parents were disappeared in the middle of the night; the people who loved and married and committed to one another despite the omnipresent threat that they might be separated at any moment. What is love if not this?"

"While a life like Frederick Douglass's is remarkable, we must remember that not every person who lived through slavery was like Douglass. Most did not learn to read or write. Most did not engage in hand-to-hand combat with white slave breakers. Most did not live close enough to free states in the North to have any hope of escape. No one, enslaved or otherwise, was like Douglass. There were other brilliant, exceptional people who lived under slavery, and many resisted the institution in innumerable ways, but our country's teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives at the expense of the millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told."

"It’s not a feeling of guilt. It’s a feeling of ‘discovered ignorance'"

"do you know what it means for your existence to be defined by someone else’s intentions?"

"At some point it is no longer a question of whether we can learn this history but whether we have the collective will to reckon with it."

"I think all the time about having grown up in New Orleans, and to get to school, I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard; to get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Highway; that my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy; that the street my parents live on today is named after somebody who owned 115 enslaved people."

"And the thing is that names and symbols and holidays, like, aren’t just names and symbols and symbolism. What they are are reflective of the stories that people tell. And those stories shape the narratives that societies carry. And those narratives shape public policy. And public policy, that shapes the material conditions of people’s lives. Which is not to say that taking down a statue of Robert E. Lee or making Juneteenth a holiday is going to erase the racial wealth gap. Of course not. But what it is is part of an ecosystem of narratives and stories and ideas that can help us recalibrate our understanding of why certain communities look the way that they do and what needs to be done and invested in those communities to create a new set of opportunities. So, we should recognize and celebrate that Juneteenth is a holiday, and we should also recognize that that is not enough — it is not nearly enough — and that it is one part of a much longer struggle and a much larger struggle to make sure that we are creating a more equitable and just world."

"What a lot of people don’t know is that New York City, for an extended period of time, was the second-largest slave port in the country, after Charleston, South Carolina; that in 1860, on the brink of the Civil War, when South Carolina was about to secede from the Union after the election of Abraham Lincoln, that New York City’s mayor, Fernando Wood, proposed that New York City should also secede from the Union alongside the Southern states, because New York’s financial and political infrastructure were so deeply entangled and tied to the slavocracy of the South; also that the Statue of Liberty was originally conceived by Édouard de Laboulaye, a French abolitionist, who conceived of the idea of the Statue of Liberty and giving it to the United States as a gift, that it was originally conceived as an idea to celebrate the end of the Civil War and to celebrate abolition. The original conception of the statue actually had Lady Liberty breaking shackles, like a pair of broken shackles on her wrists, to symbolize the end of slavery. And over time, it became very clear that that would not have the sort of wide stream — or, wide mainstream support of people across the country, obviously this having been just not too long after the end of the Civil War, so there were still a lot of fresh wounds. And so they shifted the meaning of the statue to be more about sort of inclusivity, more about the American experience, the American project, the American promise, the promise of democracy, and sort of obfuscated the original meaning, to the point where even the design changed. And so they replaced the shackles with a tablet and the torch, and then put the shackles very subtly sort of underneath her robe. And you can — but the only way you can see them, these broken chains, these broken links, are from a helicopter or from an airplane. And in many ways, I think that that is a microcosm for how we hide the story of slavery across this country, that these chain links are hidden, out of sight, out of view of most people, under the robe of Lady Liberty, and how the story of slavery across this country is very — as we see now, very intentionally trying to be hidden and kept from so many people, so that we have a fundamentally inconsistent understanding of the way that slavery shaped our contemporary society today."

"it is very clear not only that New York City had enslaved people itself for an extended period of time, as did places in New England, Connecticut, Rhode Island, but that it is the financial and economic infrastructure of New York City and the people who created mass amounts of wealth in that city that allowed slavery to continue to evolve and prosper."

"And so, part of what is happening in these state legislatures across the country with regard to the effort to push back against teaching of history — 1619 Project, critical race theory and the like — is a recognition that we have developed in this country a more sophisticated understanding, a more sophisticated framework, a more sophisticated public lexicon, with which to understand how slavery — how racism was not just an interpersonal phenomenon, it was a historic one, it was a structural one, it was a systemic one. And I’m very much sympathetic — I know there’s some sentiment out there, that people are saying, “Well, we didn’t ask for Juneteenth to become a holiday. We want voting rights. We want police reform. We want abolition. We want” — and I 100% understand that. I also think that we should not undervalue what it means for Juneteenth to become a holiday, in part because then we are not valuing the work that Black activists have done over the course of decades to get there, and because while symbols are not necessarily material change, they are not irrelevant."

"we should be clear that the thing that people are calling critical race theory is just — that is the language that they are using to talk about the idea of teaching any sort of history that rejects the idea that America is a singularly exceptional place, and that we should not account for the history of harm that has been enacted to create opportunities and intergenerational wealth for millions of people, that has come at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people across generations."

"I think we tend to have this sort of bifurcated view and overly simplistic view of, like, “Oh, the people in the North were the good guys, and people in the South were the bad guys.” But there were a lot of people in the North, and, as I talked about, in New York City, who were deeply committed to the perpetuation and existence of slavery in the South, because it was beneficial for them economically, it was beneficial for them politically, it was beneficial for them socially. And it was in line with how they understood the role of enslaved people and Black people in this country. They might not have wanted to have owned enslaved people themselves, but they most certainly did not believe in abolition, or they most certainly did not think that they wanted something to prevent the massive influx of capital that they were receiving from continuing to flow into their hands."

"Spent this week in Senegal & have been thinking about how activists there are pushing to have the street signs named after French colonists removed in ways paralleling the fight to take down Confederate statues. It was a reminder how global the fight against white supremacy is."

"I'll keep saying it, keeping millions of ppl in poverty is a choice this country makes every day. There is enough money for ppl not to be evicted from their homes, there is enough for ppl not to go hungry, there is enough for ppl to avoid jail bc of a parking ticket. It's absurd."

"when I think of Juneteenth, part of what I think about is the both-handedness of it, that it is this moment in which we mourn the fact that freedom was kept from hundreds of thousands of enslaved people for years and for months after it had been attained by them, and then, at the same time, celebrating the end of one of the most egregious things that this country has ever done."

"I've said this before, but if you're doing an MLK day service project consider bringing King-level analysis to it. Don't just serve lunch at a soup kitchen, interrogate why millions of ppl live in poverty in the first place. King's legacy isn't about charity, it's about justice."

"I simply cannot imagine having access to that much wealth (a billion dollars is one thousand stacks of a million dollars!) and thinking that using a minuscule percentage of that money to make sure other people have access to food, homes, and education was a bad thing."

"I went to Galveston, Texas, in part, because I wanted to spend time with people who were the actual descendants of those who had been freed by General Gordon Granger’s General Order No. 3. And it was a really remarkable moment, because I was in this place, on this island, on this land, with people for whom Juneteenth was not an abstraction. It was not a performance. It was not merely a symbol. It was part of their tradition. It was part of their lineage. It was an heirloom that had been passed down, that had made their lives possible. And so, I think I gained a more intimate sense of what that holiday meant."

"if we don’t fully understand and account for this history, that actually wasn’t that long ago, that in the scope of human history was only just yesterday, then we won’t fully understand our contemporary landscape of inequality today. We won’t understand how slavery shaped the political, economic and social infrastructure of this country. And when you have a more acute understanding of how slavery shaped the infrastructure of this country, then you’re able to more effectively look around you and see how the reason one community looks one way and another community looks another way is not because of the people in those communities, but is because of what has been done to those communities, generation after generation after generation. And I think that that is central to the sort of public pedagogy that so many of these activists and organizers who have been attempting to make Juneteenth a holiday and bring attention to it as an entry point to think more wholly and honestly about the legacy of slavery have been doing."