George Washington, Letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport, 8/21/1790
The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy — a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
Jackie Robinson, “Murder, Hate and Violence Will Be Weapons of ‘New’ Republicans”
A new breed of Republicans has taken over the GOP. It is a new breed which is seeking to sell to America a doctrine which is as old as mankind — the doctrine of racial division, the doctrine of racial prejudice, the doctrine of white supremacy.
This is no fantastic charge. I know it is true because I have felt it and experienced it as I lived through the unbelievable hours of the National GOP Convention. If I could couch in one single sentence the way I felt, watching this controlled steam-roller operation roll into high gear, I would put it this way. I would say that I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.
The same high-handed methods are here. The same belief in the superiority of the Protestant white man over the black man or the Jew is here. The same thinly masked contempt for minorities is here.
Julia Ioffe, “How much responsibility does Trump bear for the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh?”
Culpability is a tricky thing, and politicians, especially of the demagogic variety, know this very well. Unless they go as far as organized, documented, state-implemented slaughter, they don’t give specific directions. They don’t have to. They simply set the tone. In the end, someone else does the dirty work, and they never have to lift a finger — let alone stain it with blood. I saw it while reporting on Russia, where, after unexpected pro-democracy protests and the annexation of Crimea, Putin created an environment so vicious, so toxic (he called his critics “national traitors” and “a fifth column”) that, when assassins killed opposition leader Boris Nemtsov at the foot of the Kremlin walls in 2015, it was easy for people to blame the divisive political rhetoric as if it were a spontaneous weather pattern, rather than Putin himself for creating it. And everyone understood immediately the message it sent: Dissent is a deadly business. Putin may not have ordered Nemtsov’s assassination, but Russia’s elite could clearly see he wasn’t too upset about the outcome.
Jill Lepore, “How to Respond to the Crisis of Our Institutions”
Trump’s presidency is a failure by so many different measures.
[Let’s] set aside the things Trump has been charged with, or things that have been alleged about Trump, just looking at the things that Trump has said and done. Defaming racial groups, defaming religious groups. Just, the things that he has done openly, gleefully, cruelly, without consequence. We’re at a staggering level of misconduct in that way.
James Baldwin, “An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis”
Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness—for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps — they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will think of — and justify — as a racial war. They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. They will perish (as we once put it in our black church) in their sins — that is, in their delusions. And this is happening, needless to say, already, all around us.
… White lives, for the forces which rule in this country, are no more sacred than black ones. … But the American delusion is not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites are all their brothers.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In