Essayists From The United States

"Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, “Never again.” But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us."

"You know, the two great crimes in American history is obviously...the near destruction...of this country’s Native American population, the theft of their land, and on to work that land was brought in native Africans into this country, beginning in 1619. Those twin processes profoundly altered the shape of the world and made this country possible. Obviously, first of all, you know, the land on which America and Americans currently reside was the land of Native Americans, but the people brought in to break that land just transformed it."

"[A white person] was among the most fanatical agents I ever encountered on the Underground. All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave."

"Ta-Nehisi is speaking to us from Washington, D.C., where he testified yesterday, and he’s speaking in front of an image of the Capitol, which was built by enslaved people. Ta-Nehisi Coates, writer-in-residence at New York University, author of a number of books, including We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, that includes his “Case Against [sic] Reparations”—his “Case for Reparations.” We’ll be back with Ta-Nehisi in a minute."

"We feared [Ryland's Hounds] and hated them, perhaps more than we feared and hated the Quality who held us, for all of us were low, we were all Tasked, and we should be in union and arrayed against the Quality, if only the low whites would wager their crumbs for a slice of the whole cake. (p. 57)"

"The rich world, for the most part, pretty much ignores these calls, dismissing it all as ancient history, much as the U.S. government manages to disregard calls for slavery reparations from African Americans (though in the spring of 2014, the calls grew distinctly louder, thanks to breakthrough reporting by The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates, which once again rekindled the debate)."

"A large portion of this country... want to see somebody who can beat Trump. I get that. And there is, you know, a feeling, I think, among certain people that Joe Biden can out-white-man Donald Trump.... I get that beating Donald Trump is extremely, externally important. I get that. But I just hope that that’s the floor and not the ceiling."

"Well, I think I should say before I say that, my understanding is that Senator Sanders now supports H.R. 40. I think that’s where we are now. So I’m obviously pretty pleased about that."

"I think all of the things that Bernie Sanders... listed about paying attention to distressed communities should be done. And we should also have reparations. So, I don’t see those two things as in conflict. It’s not clear to me why both can’t be on the agenda. In fact, it was never clear to me why both can’t be on the agenda, why one can’t associate themselves with the massive gaps in the wealth, that don’t just exist in the African-American community, but exist in communities across the country, and at the same time recognize that there’s something specific about the gap in the African-American community that’s tied to the specificity of American history. But, you know, as I said, I’m happy Senator Sanders now supports H.R. 40."

"I think the testimony was that one should not receive payment that would properly be due to the enslaved. But this country is, to this very day, receiving payment that was due to its enslavers. That’s the way inheritance works in this country, however one might feel about that. If I assemble a mass of money, I have the right to pass that on to my kid. My kid has the right to do whatever and then pass it on to their kid. And so, there’s something fundamentally injust if I have secured that money by taking it from one group, and then I pass that money on to my kid."

"Joe Biden shouldn’t be president. You know? You know, obviously, I don’t think I’m breaking any news here. You know, if he ends up being the nominee, better him than Trump, but I think that’s a really, really low standard."

"Mitch McConnell... does not want to be responsible for enslavement that happened 150 years ago, but, yet and still, wants the right to operate his business or operate his career in a building that was built by enslaved people."

"I think when you have somebody who is celebrating their relationship, the ability of a person who saw no problem depriving an entire population of African Americans in their state of the right to vote, the right to participate as American citizens, the fact that that person was polite to them?... And so, I don’t know what is going on in your brain where you decide to celebrate the fact these people were polite."

"And so, that is the long history of this country, that doesn’t end, again, conservatively, until 1968. And so, there are people who are very, very much alive who have experienced that, who are suffering the after-effects and effects of that. And that’s what, you know, as far as I’m concerned, the whole movement around reparations is about."

"You know, Joe Biden says that he’s been involved with civil rights his entire career. It’s worth remembering Joe Biden opposed busing and bragged about it, you know, in the 1970s. Joe Biden is on the record as being to the right of actually the New Democrats in the 1990s on the issue of mass incarceration, wanted more people sentenced to the death penalty, wanted more jails. And so, you know, I’m not surprised. I mean, this is who Joe Biden is."

"So, when the state of Mississippi, for instance, taxes black people and then builds one facility for education and another for—one facility for education for whites and then an inferior facility for blacks, that’s theft. That’s theft. If I build a public pool system and then tell you you can’t use that public pool system, that’s theft."

"The average African-American family in this country making $100,000, which is, you know, decent money, actually lives in the same kind of neighborhood that the average white family making $35,000 a year lives in. That is totally tied to the legacy of enslavement and Jim Crow and the input and the idea in the mind that white people and black people are somehow deserving of different things."

"If I injure you, the injury persists even after I actually commit the act. If I stab you, you may suffer complications long after that initial actual stabbing. If I shoot you, you may suffer complications long after that initial shooting. That’s the case with African Americans. There are people well within the living memory of this country that are still suffering from the after-effects of that."

"The onset of the Civil War, the greatest preponderance, the greatest population per capita of millionaires and multimillionaires in this country was in the Mississippi River Valley. It wasn’t in Boston, wasn’t in Chicago, wasn’t in New York. The richest people in this country were slaveholders. Most of our earliest presidents were slaveholders. And the fact that they were presidents is not incidental to the fact that they—to their slaveholding. That was how they built their wealth. That was how Thomas Jefferson built his wealth. That was how George Washington built his wealth. Individual slaves were the equivalent of, say, owning a home today. They were people, but turned into objects of extreme wealth. So, just from the economic perspective, there’s that."

"This whole thing about who should get a check, and should we cut checks, you know, I understand those questions. That’s great. Those people should support H.R. 40, though, because that’s what H.R. 40 does. It tries to get that figured out, and get that math figured out, and figure out the best way to do it. But if we don’t actually have a study, we can’t actually answer those questions. You can’t ask a doctor to make a diagnosis before there’s an actual examination."

"And in terms of poverty and race in this country, again, you know, one of the things that I really, really wanted to stress is, the level of poverty specifically that you see in the African-American community is not accidental. It’s not accidental. This is part of the process. The process of enslavement involves stealing something from someone. It involves taking something from someone."

"Jim Crow was theft. First and foremost, it was theft. If I tax you or if tell you you have to be loyal to this country and pledge fealty to its laws, but then I don’t give you the same degree of protection, I don’t give you the same access to resources that I give to another group of people, I have effectively stolen something from you. I have stolen your tax money. I have stolen your fealty."

"He argues that although we are theoretically a democracy, which should empower the majority, in practice, an elite has taken over, “a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.” ... Lapham argues that contemporary Washington looks surprisingly like the court of the Sun King of Absolutist France where the courtiers’ whole worth is measured by where one gets to sit or stand or by the bow with which one greets or is greeted. Officials in the court of 20th-Century America are obsessed with equivalent hierarchical distinctions. Who gets to ride in the secretary’s limousine? Who will occupy the office overlooking the lawn? These are the questions our officials really care about, although they hide their petty, narcissistic impulses behind socially correct rhetoric about the people’s welfare... Lapham tries to jolt us out of our stupor. He urges us to act and become engaged in the world to reclaim the democratic values that define the best of what we are and can be. ... In Lapham’s most probing chapter... he argues that although we think we want democracy, deep-down we really want kings--or the illusion of kings, or any kind of authoritative being."

"But the line of thought that I'd been chasing for several days was implicit in the ruins of the old Roman Empire, which gradually destroyed itself by substituting the faith in a legion of miraculous words for the strength of armies and the weight of walls."

"In the garden of tabloid delight, there is always a clean towel and another song."

"But I had forgotten about the seven bowls of God's wrath stored in the minds of some of the unhappier prophets on the reactionary right,..."

"At this late stage in the history of American capitalism I'm not sure I know how much testimony still needs to be presented to establish the relation between profit and theft."

"The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business."

"The gentlemen who wrote the Constitution were as suspicious of efficient government as they were wary of democracy, a "turbulence and a folly" that was associated with the unruly ignorance of an urban mob."

"I sometimes think that the American story is the one about the reading of the will."

"The pose of innocence is as mandatory as the ability to eat banquet food and endure the scourging of the press."

"Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction."

"Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned. If no individual or institution possesses the authority to act without of everybody else in the room, then nobody is at fault if anything goes wrong."

"It isn't money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament."

"Never in the history of the world have so many people been so rich; never in the history off the world have so many of those same people felt themselves so poor."

"The playing field is more sacred than the stock exchange, more blessed than Capital Hill or the vaults of Fort Knox. The diamond and the gridiron - and, to a lesser degree, the court, the rink, the track, and the ring - embody the American dream of Eden."

"Nobody wants to say, at least not for publication, that we live in a society that cares as much about the humanities as it cares about the color of the rain in Tashkent."

"That’s what’s remarkable about our current circumstances: the poverty of our imagination. We haven’t had a new political idea in 50 years. And the reason is that we talk about money, instead of about ideas, or feeling or emotion. Reading this book Dawn of Everything gives me reason to feel that men at one time had the imagination to create a future fit for human beings, instead of a future fit for machines, which is what we’ve got going now. I mean, the belief in money, like the belief in technology, in and of itself, is a revolution in the direction of the world made by and for machines. We have to figure out a way to make a future fit for human beings. And that is the problem that we’re confronting at the moment. And the more that we look for the answer in money, the less likely we are to find it."

"Once having proclaimed our loyalty to the abstract idea that all men are created equal, we do everything in our power to prove ourselves unequal. Among the world's peoples, none other belongs to so many clubs, associations, committees and secret societies."

"We are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever seeking the invisible through the image of the visible."

"Seeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible, the Americans never can get quite all the way to the end of the American dream."

"The rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard."

"We need not seek our own best selves, and in the meantime we inoculate ourselves against the viruses of age and idealism, which, as the advertising agencies well know, depress sales and sour the feasts of consumption."

"Good intentions, like mother’s milk, are a perishable commodity. As wealth accumulates, men decay, and sooner or later an aristocracy that once might have aspired to an ideal of wisdom and virtue goes rancid in the sun, becomes an oligarchy distinguished by a character that Aristotle likened to that of “the prosperous fool”—its members so besotted by their faith in money that “they therefore imagine there is nothing that it cannot buy.”"

"Let the corporations do as they please - pillage the environment, falsify their advertising, rig the securities markets - and it is none of the federal government's business to interfere with the will of heaven."

"By the word "liberty" they meant liberty for property, not liberty for persons."

"A certain kind of rich man afflicted with the symptoms of moral dandyism sooner or later comes to the conclusion that it isn't enough merely to make money. He feels obliged to hold views, to espouse causes and elect Presidents, to explain to a trembling world how and why the world went wrong."

"As a child growing up in the precincts of wealth, and later as a college student, newspaper reporter and resident of New York's Upper East Side, I got used to listening to the talk of financial killings and sexual misalliance that animates the conversation of the rich and the familiars of the rich."

"What kind of people do we wish to become, and how do we know an American when we see one? Is it possible to pursue a common purpose without a common history or a standard text?"

"Happily, at least for the moment, the society is rich enough to afford the staging of the fiction of democracy as a means of quieting the suspicions of a potentially riotous mob with the telling of a fairy tale. The rising cost of the production — the pointless nominating conventions decorated with 15,000 journalists as backdrop for the 150,000 balloons - reflects the ever-increasing rarity of the demonstrable fact. The country is being asked to vote in November for television commercials because only in the fanciful time-zone of a television commercial can the American democracy still be said to exist."