Robert Matsui Quotes

Nobody wants to get over the legacy of slavery more than Black people do.

It's a shameful piece of history and I think - I don't mean to be political or sobering or anything - but I think America, the United States, we still have to deal with the issue of our original sin, which was slavery. And I think we're seeing the ramifications, the consequences, of not really facing the truth as to what we as a nation struggled towards. You know, struggled with and are still struggling and rectifying.

Part of the reason why we're only now reaching a point in American society where we can talk about the need for truth and reconciliation and the legacy of slavery is that it was such a dominant part of our history.

Rosewood is what Americans did to Americans. We have to hold the mirror up... and look at ourselves. Sometimes that's an ugly sight. And sometimes you have to go through that pain - both black America and white America - so we can finally find some racial harmony.

A majority of Americans want redemption for racism - for our terrible, destructive racist past - and so see a vote for Obama as redemptive.

You cannot turn the clock back, you cannot give the island of Manhattan back to the indigenous, but on the other hand, you can ensure that the indigenous can maintain their way of life.

I do think that some form of reparations for the descendants of American slavery would go a long way.

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

Coming up in America in the '80s and '90s, we were not too far removed from slavery. People forget that.

I feel like we haven't dealt with the ghosts of America's past, and the way to deal with it is to confront it, so every time people see me, I want them to be reminded and to confront that ghost.

We have far more options for black Americans to tell stories outside of slavery, but whenever it comes to slavery, it's an uncomfortable subject. Why? Because it's the most unresolved subject in American history.

In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.

I have been trying to create a campaign to have our country make an apology for slavery, for the way that blacks were treated before the Civil War and after the Civil War.

I think, the argument sometimes that I've had with folks who are much more interested in sort of race-specific programs is less an argument about what is practically achievable and sometimes maybe more an argument of "We want society to see what's happened, and internalize it, and answer it in demonstrable ways." And those impulses I very much understand.

Theoretically, you can make, obviously, a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps. That those were wrongs done to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it's not in the form of individual reparations checks, but in the form of a Marshall Plan, in order to close those gaps. It is easy to make that theoretical argument.

A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present. America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay.

We recall our terrible past so that we can deal with it, to forgive where forgiveness is necessary, without forgetting; to ensure that never again will such inhumanity tear us apart; and to move ourselves to eradicate a legacy that lurks dangerously as a threat to our democracy.

I truly believe that one of the things that has been lacking in the USA is a spirit of repentance about the injustices of slavery and the injustices of segregation and racism generally.

White privilege allows a certain kind of leisure that can be deployed by white people of advantage toward our restoration. That's all true and good. But it also suggests that there is an individual approach to the issues that many of these white people have taken up as a recognition of their tie to and responsibility for some of the inequities that exist. And I don't think it has to be an either-or. I think it has to be a bifocal approach.

I think that the opportunity to improve race relations in the United States has been put off temporarily.

I think there is a commitment on the part of the White House to racial justice in this country, and no ambiguity.

For anybody who's ever been on the other end of, like, racial violence logic is not something that can be used.

I rise today to offer a formal and heartfelt apology to all the victims of lynching in our history, and for the failure of the United States Senate to take action when action was most needed.

Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him. Every being cries out silently to be read differently.

I think the election of [Barack] Obama was a great step to prove to the world that we believe that all men were created equal. I think it will show that we have humility.