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

I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.

What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices-more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe.

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.

An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.

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.

When I read these texts, I understood something about human greatness. What I understood from his writings was: What is greatest in human beings is what makes them equal to everybody else.

One could with equal justification talk about a Judeo-Islamic tradition or a Christian-Islamic tradition. These three religions are interlinked in many signification ways, which marks them off from the rest of the world.

Medicare provided guaranteed equal coverage, something that the private sector could not

All men are born equal, but quite a few eventually get over it.

justice itself is a chimera, a delusion. Justice is not a flat yardstick, applied in equal measure to an equal situation.

Our status as a land of equal opportunity has made us a rich and powerful nation, but it has also transformed lives. It has given people like me the chance to grow up knowing that no dream was too big and no goal out of reach.

Violence doesn’t equal strength.

SUSTAINABLE PEACE IS POSSIBLE ONLY WITH WOMEN’S FULL PARTICIPATION, their perspectives, their leadership, their daily, equal presence wherever we seek to make and keep the peace.