Blase J. Cupich Quotes

Throughout every presidency since the heist of our country from indigenous peoples, the black American experience has been exceptional in its discomfort. And no chief executive of this great nation has, in earnest, developed a unique plan to remedy that discomfort.

The history of black America was from slavery, oppression, civil rights, and you felt kind of isolated as an entity in our country.

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.

Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media - of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we've already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We're out of 'affirmative actions' of all kinds.

Until the legacy of remembered and reenacted trauma is taken seriously, black America cannot heal.

The dysfunction of African-Americans is directly related to the fact that African-Americans as a racial group are no longer needed to bolster the economy as they were in slavery days.

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

African American Communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they've ever been before. Ever, ever, ever.

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

I'm looking at the head of the household, and the house hasn't been run properly for a long time, ... Clinton was the first person ever to make a formal apology to black people for slavery, which was very warm and appreciated. But African-Americans haven't healed at all . The wound is still very open. And seeing the differences in how people live, it just puts salt in it- constantly . Seeing the way we're treated within these United States ... it burns you even more every day.

Black people cannot look to government to solve their problems.

Speaking as a black person, welfare is the worst thing that's ever happened to us.

We have defeated Jim Crow, but now we have to deal with his son, James Crow Jr., esquire.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed.

The plunder of black communities is not a bump along the road, but it is, in fact, the road itself that you can't have in America without enslavement, without Jim Crow, terrorism, everything that came after that.

Sadly, whites are rarely open to what black and brown folks have to say regarding their ongoing experiences with racist mistreatment. And we are especially reluctant to discuss what that mistreatment means for us as whites: namely that we end up with more and better opportunities as the flipside of discrimination.

If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus?

We are told, if you work hard, you'll succeed—but if that were true, Black people would own this country.

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.

Our people historically have gone through a lot. That is our story. You can trace it all the way back to slavery. But it is incumbent upon everyone, no matter what field, to make it easier on the next generation.

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.

I wanted to remind myself and others of the old Jim Crow, so that we can remind ourselves that we're still living in the new Jim Crow. I feel it's important to dress in the fashion of the times.

When I was making 'Strong Island,' it was very clear to me that my brother's death was a point on a line that stretched back into the 1940s and beyond in my family - and in the nation.

Effectively transcending and conquering the legacies of enchainment, impoverishment and racial denigration continue to elude us. Residual elements of the plantation-based past continue to shape our societies and determine their trajectories.

I think, if you're in the United States, we've seen people trying to speak out in different ways and trying to make themselves heard about the United States' failure to move on generationally, given the long-festering wound of our history around race.