Historical Inequity Quotes

Whoever may be benefited by the results of this war, it will not be the present generation of negroes.

To be a black in a white society isn’t to stand on level and equal ground. While the races may stand side be side, whites stand on history’s mountain and blacks stand in history’s hollow. Until we overcome unequal history we cannot overcome unequal opportunity.

This younger generation is paying in many cases, for the sins of its elders.

Reparations, I believe, are talked about for political reasons, trying to cater for the purpose of getting votes. If Congress was serious about reparations - in '93 and '94 the Democrats controlled the House, the Senate and the White House, and not one single Republican vote was needed for reparations.

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

There's never really been a true apology for slavery.

I've been reading about and writing about the Civil War period and it is so striking that slavery was never made right - [Abraham] Lincoln was killed, Reconstruction came along, and all of that inequity was frozen in place and carried forward rather smugly. So I think the burden is now upon us white people, to say that this systemic inequality offends us.

Histories of discrimination can live on in digital platforms, and if they go unquestioned, they become part of the logic of everyday algorithmic systems.

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.

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.