Thomas Chatterton Williams Quotes

When people think about reparations, they immediately think about people who've been dead for 100 years.

I don’t want to see the issue of Black reparations for slavery close the door to historic memory and continuing responsibility.

Only when we ensure that the mistakes of our past are not the vision for our future, will we truly have achieved justice.

The originating sin of America is slavery, for which reparations should be paid and will never be paid; as a result, mini-reparations are paid daily, and the NBA remains, for me, reparations theater.

In this room we're all here together, but there's probably a lot of different views, people sitting here thinking, I don't own any slaves, all the slaves are dead. Why am I responsible? My family were immigrants, too.

Regardless of the eventual shape of the evolved discourse and policy on reparations, there are five essential aspects which must be addressed and included in any meaningful and moral approach to reparations. They are public admission, public apology, public recognition, compensation, and institutional preventive measures against the recurrence of holocaust and other similar forms of massive destruction of human life, human culture and human possibility.

Until we really heal the wounds that we dealt with during slavery, I don't think we'll be a fully realized country.

There's injustices within our system that we inherited from this time, from slavery, and until we confront our past, we're not going to be able to heal the wounds for our future.

America says we are a great democratic society and other people should follow our example. Well, I say we benefited from slavery, and as a nation, we never faced that because the people in power chose not to.

For anyone who has ever asked why the U.S. needs to address the issue of reparations for its history of slavery, Donald Trump is why. He is the living embodiment of America's unresolved issues.

Black America now has the power to achieve economic inclusion, which we rightfully deserve because we built this country. This is a conversation that white America doesn't really want to have.

Race, redemption and healing - that's my thing.

White Americans believe we've made more progress since the end of slavery in 1865 than do black Americans for whom '12 Years a Slave' documents a collective memory, passed down in the genes and by the lore of generations.

We have three hundred years of neglect to pay for.

What has happened in America over 400 years has never been cleaned up. We just put on some new clothes in the midst of the old filth.

With 'Underground,' we see that the wounds that we all, as a nation, inflicted upon our brothers and sisters during slavery have not been healed.

To me, as I see it, reparations would be something that is fairly specific to the descendants of slaves, and it would also be an official apology from the United States government for slavery.

I think only now am I at the age where I've forgiven the past enough to say, 'You know what? Slavery was there. Let's talk about it in ways that will help us face tomorrow.

We've got to stand up at some point and say, 'We are not gonna pay slavery reparations in the United States Congress.' That war's been fought. That was over a century ago. That debt was paid for in blood, and it was paid for in the blood of a lot of Yankees, especially. And there's no reparations for the blood that paid for the sin of slavery.

Disguising your own origins is a deeply American impulse, but that doesn't make it any less compromising. The way I live my life is to try to foreground the tensions and paradoxes of being a white person who's interested in racial justice and reconciliation, rather than disguise or obliterate them.

Look at the American history of slavery. Can you say that hundreds of years later that has been eased? That pain has not yet been eased.

We need to dismantle the systems that were built on racism, that were built on the backs of black people.

We don't need to go back in time and make America great again, because really, America was only great for certain people.

Reparative justice is not about black people standing on the street corners expecting charities from white folks. This is about building of bridges across lines of moral justice.

Black people have been marginalized and kept away from the economics of this country. I think people are starting to understand that and are trying to figure out how we can change that and allow everybody to join in this game of capitalism.