“Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage.”

This feeling African-Americans have, this skepticism towards the police and the skepticism that the police show towards African-Americans is actually quite old. And it may be one of the most durable aspects of the relationship between black people and their country really in our history.

[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.

I mean, the president, you know, at one point when he was campaigning said I believe that Donald Trump was not qualified to run a 7-Eleven.

If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.

[Grew up in Hawaii] that gave [Barack Obama] a kind of optimism, an ability to see things, you know, and frankly, an ability to trust, you know, in his fellow, you know, white countrymen in a way that I, for instance, you know, and the vast majority of black people I know never really could.

The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.

To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.

I’m asking you as an American to see all of the freedoms that you enjoy and see how they are rooted in things that the country you belong to condoned or actively participated in the past.

Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?

And I think that’s reflected in the fact that, when we have problems that really are problems of employment, that are really problems of mental health, that are really problems of drugs, our answer is the police.

[Barack Obama] grew up in Hawaii, far, far removed from the most, you know, sort of violent, you know, tendencies of Jim Crow and segregation. He wasn’t directly exposed to that. He was untraumatized.

You know, the thing I always think about, you get up early in the morning to go to work and there’s some dude outside drinking and you come home and the same dude is outside drinking hanging on the corner. And then this engenders a level of anger I think and a level of shame.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.

I don’t know how you bridge that contradiction, but I felt that Barack Obama was sincere. It didn’t feel like a line to me.

I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.

I think the sad fact is, there’s a long history in this country at looking at African-American as subhuman.

To become a token woman – whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters – is to become something less than a man.

No human is perfect; we all have our hidden sins. Hypocrisy is to delude yourself into denying your own sins and allow arrogance to grow within you.