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

When you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth.

Just because you came here in 1880, 1950, whenever, you became an American. You get to celebrate July 4th like every other American.

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.

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.