“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.”

More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people.

I think there’s a sort of, you know, very thin way of reading this that says, well, Barack Obama is biracial thus that gives him some understanding of both white America and black America, but that’s not really it.

Giving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.

Talk about class and hope no one notices.

What I am telling you is that you do not need to know to love, and it is right that you feel it all in any moment. And it is right that you see it through–that you are amazed, then curious, then belligerent, then heartbroken, then numb. You have the right to all of it.

What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.

That’s not an accident that Donald Trump didn’t begin with, say, trade or jobs or anything, that he actually began by otherizing the first African-American president of the United States.

And they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.

To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.

The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths.

The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy.

Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.

Better you knuckle up and go for yours than have to bow your head and tuck your chain.

Part of that is ordinary African-Americans, you come out of your house and you see the conditions in your neighborhood and you see, folks in your neighborhood doing certain things that, are irresponsible.

All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy.

In particular in how [Barack Obama] has directed what you could describe as patronizing remarks to African-American communities.

I have a very happy, healthy relationship with the country, so it’s really easy to go everywhere because I always have Iceland to go back to. It’s sort of a contradiction, but that’s how it works somehow.

The exercise of authority over the same area by two States is a contradiction.

In the contradiction lies the hope.

All concord’s born of contraries.

One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.

I am a person always full of contradictions… It was hard to choose whether to devote myself to revolution as a soldier or as a writer.

These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.

A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory.