“What sets black people apart is not some deficit in personal responsibility. It’s the weight on our shoulders. That is what’s actually different. We have the weight and burden of history.”

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.

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 very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.

For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.

Who has not sat before his own heart’s curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.

It’s going to take a shoehorn to prise these two teams apart

Was sort of intellectually shocked. Contagion is the critical phenomenon which causes the thing to fall apart.

That which once united man Now drives him apart.

You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.

When life falls apart always remember that this too will pass. Life will have its unexpected turns.