17 quotes
I will never write anything as concise and explanatory about race in America as this.
I hope people who should have known better then, understand now that Giuliani succeeding Dinkins was an outcome of similar forces that led to Trump succeeding Obama.
Race allows humanity to keep inventing, in language that can bend the most rational minds, groups of people whose supposed characteristics justify whatever cruelty we might wish to indulge.
Trump and Barr let the biggest drug dealers in America off with a slap on the wrist. Law and Order indeed.
They would rather not have democracy than have to share it with people who are different from them
"Woke capital" doesn't exist, only capital, and those obsesses with the former are not at all opposed to the power of the latter
If editors made writers define what they mean by "woke" in pieces before using it derisively I suspect we wouldn't see it used very much.
Yesterday's assault on the Capitol was an attack on multiracial American democracy, a fragile experiment younger than most US senators.
'Blue Lives Matter' was always an expression of the belief that the role of police is to defend America's traditional racial order, not an actual statement about the value of human life
American religious pluralism, however imperfectly practiced, is centuries older than the European commitment to purging anti-Semitism, which is younger than Israel itself. (p 222)
The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America (2021)
The subtext of a lot of the "how to be a good ally" stuff is that a lot of liberal white folks still have pretty segregated social circles and the truth is if they started tugging on that thread they'd find some questions that lead to the answers they're looking for.
Multiracial democracy is hard and messy and sometimes rude, but it is preferable to the alternatives (p 77)
The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America (2021)
the anti-political correctness types are really just trying to enforce their own standards of acceptable discourse and are furious at their inability to do so
The invention of the police is like the invention of race; memory and history have conspired to make the recent seem eternal. And yet both are recent innovations. (p 254 "Abolish Police Unions")
The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America (2021)
It is important for non-Jews to understand that the Israeli prime minister is not the pope of the Jews. He is not a religious leader to whom global Jewry looks for guidance. He is a secular politician...
Since the Civil War, American Jews have built a place for themselves here much the way other minorities have-by holding the United States accountable to its own principles (p 210)
The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America (2021)
You see, when only white men are hired, it's just a question of competence and merit. But when white men are not hired, it's prejudice. Don't ever let anyone tell you conservatives don't understand systemic racism! They just think it only exists for them.