Randall Robinson Quotes

Small wonder our national spirit is husk empty. We have more information but less knowledge. More communication but less community. More goods but less goodwill. More of virtually everything save that which the human spirit requires. So distracted have we become sating this new need or that material appetite, we hardly noticed the departure of happiness

Unbalanced power poisons introspection. In its vacated space lay living society's imperative questions, unseen, unphrased, unasked, unanswered.

Racist behavior in our society is largely static, unnoticed, unremarked, and unconsciously accommodated by Americans of all colors.

Until America's white ruling class accepts the fact that the book never closes on massive unredressed social wrongs, America can have no future as one people.

...son, you won't need to talk to my headstone in order to talk to me. I won't be there. I'll be in the air and the Earth. I'll be in the stars that light the African heavens. I'll be watchin' over you and your family. My spirit will always be close enough to touch and protect you all. So, do not grieve for me. My body will die, but my soul will live on. For my soul cannot die. Always remember that my soul is the spark of God in me.

I am not a churchgoing man. Strangled in the vines of form and choked with ritual Christians, Sunday service held no appeal for me as a child. When my parents released me from compulsory attendance, I would never return. In my view, religion is best practiced out of doors, in nature's cathedral of miracles where spirits and the arts of heaven mingle unencumbered. The spirits were present on the tiny unmarked parcel at Mount Vernon that early autumn afternoon. Hazel and I stood for a long while in complete silence. Words would have marred, much as they misserve this inadequate telling of what we felt. We had been touched by wearied souls calling, in a language ethereal as morning mist, from the near realm that awaits us all. These were 'our' ancestors and, alone behind an old wooden outbuilding, my wife and I had wordlessly worshiped with them on that clear crisp afternoon.

Ancestor worship is not alone the exotic preoccupation of quaint people mired in superstition in some remote corner of the world. Larger-than-life evidence of its industrialized-world variants can be seen in virtually every public park in America.

Trouble is, George Washington is not my ancestor, private or public. He owned my ancestors, abused them as chattel and willed them to his wife, Martha, upon his death. I and mine need to know about George and Martha but, assuredly, we do not need to revere them. Indeed, psychically we cannot afford to revere them.

Greek civilization derived in its religion, its philosophy, its mathematics and much else, from the ancient civilizations of Africa above all from Egypt of the Pharaohs. To those 'founding fathers' in classical Greece, any notion that Africans were inferior, morally or intellectually, would have seemed silly. –Basil Davidson, Africa in History (1991)

George Washington is the quintessential American public ancestor. Americans worship him before an obelisk in Washington, a statue in Baltimore, a square in New York, an engraving on the dollar, and Stuart prints hanging from coast to coast. (Washington couldn't have known that the obelisk to be dedicated in memory of him, on February 21, 1885, would be the world's largest replica of a 3,500-year-old monument to the Egyptian sun god.)

It is as if, since its very establishment, America had chosen to hold, as Napoleon would, that "history is the myth that men choose to believe." The crypto-Machiavellians who serve as the perennial stewards of American public affairs understand that people on the whole are about as malleable as their history can be made to be. The landscape is rife with examples, from historically overarching lies and half-truths to popular culture deceits.

But Henry was not prepared to submit. In a speech supporting his resolutions, he supposedly exclaimed, "Tarquin and Caesar had each his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third..." Before he could finish the phrase, red-robed Speaker of the House John Robinson cried, "Treason! Treason," as other burgesses took up the cry. But Henry stared the Speaker in the eye and finished his sentence: "...may profit by their example! If this be treason, make the most of it!

Later, on April 15, 1999, a crowd of protestors led by the Reverend Al Sharpton shut down half of the Brooklyn Bridge, capping ten weeks of demonstrations following the killing of a twenty-three-year-old West African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, by four white New York City police officers. The officers had sprayed forty-one bullets into Mr. Diallo's apartment building vestibule, striking him nineteen times. Mr. Diallo was unarmed and had no police record. New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a Republican, declined to criticize the police department whose tactics he had historically endorsed. As the crowd, estimated from fifteen to twenty-five thousand, gathered at Brooklyn's Cadman Plaza, jury selection proceeded next door in the trial of four different white New York City police officers accused of torturing Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, in a Brooklyn police station in 1997. The demonstrations, growing larger and more multiracial, had begun to spread around the country in response to the horrific acts of police brutality. The canvas, stood back from, had a chilling Kafkaesque quality about it. Instrumentalities of the state had been used to spectacularly kill one completely innocent and defenseless man and brutally maim another. Mayor Giuliani appeared to accept this as a reasonable price of effective law enforcement.

I’ve been fortunate over the years to talk to my heroes Charlie Munger and Daniel Kahneman about thinking and decision-making, along with other master practitioners like Bill Ackman, Annie Duke, Adam Robinson, Randall Stutman, and Kat Cole. Many of these conversations are public on The Knowledge Project podcast.

That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain is rather lamentable than strange… The managers of that trade themselves, and others, testify that many of these African nations inhabit fertile countries, are industrious farmers, enjoy plenty and lived quietly, averse to war, before the Europeans debauched them with liquors, and bribed them against one another, and that these inoffensive people are brought into slavery, by stealing them, tempting kings to sell subjects, which they have no right to do, and hiring one tribe to war against another to catch prisoners.

By such wicked and inhuman ways the English are said to enslave toward one hundred thousand yearly; of which thirty thousand are supposed to die by barbarous treatment in the first year; besides all that are slain in the unnatural wars excited to take them. So much innocent blood have the managers and supporters of this inhuman trade to answer for to the common Lord of all.

Such was the quality of goldsmithery that a Dutch captain would write: "The thread and texture of their hatbands and chaining is so fine that … our ablest European artists would find it difficult to imitate them.

The estimates vary. Anywhere from ten to twenty-five million Africans died in slave ships en route from Africa to the Americas. A lifetime of bondage awaited those who survived the passage. This massive crime against humanity–the enslavement and exploitation of tens of millions of human beings–is an American holocaust. (The extermination of the Native American population is another.) Yet one can scour the commemorative architecture of the nation's capital and find little evidence that America's racial holocaust ever occurred.

In the animated Dreamworks movie Prince of Egypt the ancient Egyptians are drawn to appear more Arab than African. But the ancient Egyptians came originally from Africa's interior to the south. They were not Arabs, not people from Arabia, but indigenous Africans. Egyptian civilization was thousands of years old by the time the Arabs, with a modest army under General 'Amr ibn as- 'As, entered in December of 639 A.D.

African Americans must spiritually survive from the meager basket of a few mean yesterdays. No chance for significant group progress there. None. For we have been largely overwhelmed by a majority culture that wronged us dramatically, emptied our memories, undermined our self-esteem, implanted us with palatable voices, and stripped us along the way of the sheerest corona of self-definition.

There are in Timbuktu numerous judges, doctors [of letters] and priests [i.e., learned Muslims]. [The ruler] greatly honors scholarship. Here too they sell many handwritten books that arrive from Barbary [i.e., North Africa]. More profit is had from their sale than from any other merchandise. –Leo Africanus (1550)

To do what is necessary, of course, will require a virtual Marshall Plan of federal resources, far in excess of anything contemplated between the nearly touching poles of conventional palliatives. But I see no evidence of any will to do anything much. In the areas of mathematics and reading, for example, a variety of pedagogical techniques have been developed that would work well enough if picked up and used broadly. No need to discuss them here. Their efficacy has been proved. That's not the problem. The problem is one of will–and consensus on course setting.

First, it must own up to slavery and acknowledge its debt to slavery's contemporary victims. It must, at long last, pay that debt in massive restitutions made to America's only involuntary members. It must help to rebuild the black esteem it destroyed, by democratizing access to a trove of histories, near and ancient, to which blacks contributed seminally and prominently. It must open wide a scholarly concourse to the African ancients to which its highly evolved culture owes much credit and gives none. It must rearrange the furniture of its national myths, monuments, lores, symbols, iconography, legends, and arts to reflect the contributions and sensibilities of all Americans. It must set afoot new values. It must purify memory. It must recast its lying face.

Looking back on it, the elites were right, but only partially so. The voices of dissent were every bit as right, but woefully bereft of tools. They have faded to quiet now. The black community badly needs their fire–combined with an element of erudition without which broad credibility is simply not achievable. Suffice it to say that black elected officials, alone, will lead the black community nowhere near where it needs to go. They will put us under no levitating sunlight,

For speaking generally, what is now Egypt, they maintain, was not land but sea when in the beginning the universe was being formed; afterwards, however, as the Nile during the times of its inundating carried down the mud from [the land of the black peoples], land was gradually built up from the deposit… And the larger part of the customs of the Egyptians are, they [i.e., the Greek historians] hold, Ethiopian, the colonists still preserving their ancient manners. –Diodorus Siculus (circa 50 B.C.)

By and large, only behind the most obscure doors of high academe can one unearth a mention of the great African empires and polities of antiquity like Kush, Benin, Meroe, Djenne, Ghana, and Songhay.

No race, no ethnic or religious group, has suffered so much over so long a span as blacks have, and do still, at the hands of those who benefited, with the connivance of the United States government, from slavery and the century of legalized American racial hostility that followed it. It is a miracle that the victims–weary dark souls long shorn of a venerable and ancient identity–have survived at all, stymied as they are by the blocked roads to economic equality.

At long last, let America contemplate the scope of its enduring human-rights wrong against the whole of a people. Let the vision of blacks not become so blighted from a sunless eternity that we fail to see the staggering breadth of America's crime against us.

For wasn't the practice of slavery at least as serious a system of human-rights wrongs as the Nazi holocaust? Did not the holocaust of slavery last longer–indeed, 234 years longer? Did it not claim at least twice as many lives, in the Middle Passage alone? Did it not savagely eviscerate the emotional core of a whole race of people on three continents? In raising any defense of Jefferson, a powerful American cog in slavery's long-grinding machine, are we not then subscribing to Jefferson's view that a black life has lesser value, black suffering an inconsequential significance? Their griefs are transient. Does not the continued unremarked American deification of Jefferson tell us all how profoundly contemptuous of black sensibilities American society persists in being? How deeply, stubbornly, poisonously racist our society to this day remains?

Jefferson was a slaveholder, a racist, and–if one accepts that consent cannot be given if it cannot be denied–a rapist.

While there were those like Thomas Paine who found the whole business of the slave trade abhorrent, they were far outnumbered by slaveholders who, among other things, forced female slaves into sexual service.

Would-be Machiavellis, some long dead before the Florentine statesman himself ever lived, anticipate the historian's enquiries by booby-trapping evidence, laying false trails, and liquidating artifacts. (This might have been what Napoleon had in mind when he blew off the nose of the Sphinx. Or was it Mohammed Sa'im al-Dahr who did it, in 1378 A.D.? No one really knows.)

In his book Black Spark, White Fire, historian Richard Poe makes a case that black Egyptians were among the first philosophers and explorers, traveling as far from Egypt as Russia and turning up with the Romans at Troy.

According to Poe, "History was designed to justify European domination.

One hundred fifty years before, one hundred fifty miles to the west, slaves in Haiti had won their freedom by defeating the sixty-thousand-man army of Napoleon Bonaparte. This, never told to class.

But the differences between the two races, especially that of colour, led Jefferson to advocate the total removal of the Negroes, after emancipation, "beyond the reach of mixture." My dear Miss Sally Hemings, has the man no shame?

What then was I doing visiting George Washington's Mount Vernon many years ago with Hazel? Confused? Confessedly. How can any American who isn't white not be?

We, like others, need to define ourselves, to place our lives in a long-term linear intergenerational context. We, like others, need to celebrate ourselves by seeing ourselves celebrated. We, like others, need to stare at objects that can help us discover reflections of ourselves in an idealized past. That's really what it's all about, isn't it? Remembering. The human's innate need to remember one's self before one's own time.

The devil white man cut these black people off from all knowledge of their own kind, and cut them off from any knowledge of their own language, religion, and past culture, until the black man in America was the earth's only race of people who had absolutely no knowledge of his true identity.–The Autobiography of Malcolm X

They [i.e., the Greek historians relied upon by the writer] say also that the Egyptians are colonists sent out by the Ethiopians [i.e., not the modern Ethiopians, but, the black peoples from inner Africa south of Egypt], Osiris having been the leader of the colony.

Though it would appear that Americans grow less knowledgeable by the day, there are still many American schoolchildren who recognize the Roman Colosseum, the Great Wall of China, the Parthenon, the Tower of London. From Africa, only the great pyramids of Egypt enjoy such broad recognition, and they are popularly and wrongly attributed to a civilization not spawned from Africa's interior.

This book is about the great still-unfolding massive crime of official and unofficial America against Africa, African slaves, and their descendants in America.

As Germany and other interests that profited owed reparations to Jews following the holocaust of Nazi persecution, America and other interests that profited owe reparations to blacks following the holocaust of African slavery which has carried forward from slavery's inception for 350-odd years to the end of U.S. government–embraced racial discrimination–an end that arrived, it would seem, only just yesterday.

Solutions must be tailored to the scope of the crime in a way that would make the victim whole. In this case, the psychic and economic injury is enormous, multidimensional and long-running. Thus must be America's restitution to blacks for the damage done.

George Washington was a third-generation slaveholder, who with Martha owned more than three hundred slaves. He prized them particularly; as a signal of wealth in his world, such property exceeded gold and real estate. He had once written to a fellow planter urging that he send him strong slaves in good health who were not "addicted to running away." At the end of the Revolutionary War, he cordoned the beaches with soldiers to prevent runaway slaves who had fought with the British from leaving America with the redcoats.

State and federal budgets, to which Asians, Hispanics, and African Americans contribute, are uniformly controlled by whites who seem to uniformly believe that the only ancestor worship worth funding is theirs.

It was the cap, or rather the logo that was stitched to it. The grin was hideous. The huge teeth hung from the roof of the head like gleaming convex stalactites that descended from the middle of the crown down to the cap's brim. The cavernous mouth crowded the nose and eyes into the hairline and strained without success to close around incisors that claimed three quarters of the clownish face. Had the face been black or brown, it would have incited urban riots, so patent was its insult. But the face was red and Justice wore the cap with jaunty insouciance.

Don Rickles, the Jewish comedian, in a late-night television appearance on July 19, 1999, told host David Letterman that were it not for Mexicans, his bed would never be made at his Las Vegas hotel. It was a nakedly racist remark.

most African Americans have no knowledge of the history of our people before slavery or even that there exist richly detailed accounts of great African civilizations reaching back three thousand years and beyond. Most of us might not dare believe that a French nobleman and adventurer, Count Constantin de Volney, made the following observation in 1787: How we are astonished … when we reflect that to the race of Negroes, at present our slaves, and the objects of our extreme contempt, we owe our arts, sciences, and even the very use of speech, and when we recollect that, in the midst of those nations who call themselves the friends of liberty and humanity, the most barbarous of slaveries is justified; and that it is even a problem whether the understanding of Negroes be of the same species with that of white men.

For the rest of us, the price of our inability to place ourselves in the fullness of world history has been crippling.

A slur against any group by a member of another can never go unremarked if our society is to have any long-term future.

As inclined as blacks understandably are by painful experience to believe the contrary, racism is not black-specific. It is like the Hydra, the lethal many-headed mythological snake whose heads regenerated as fast as they were severed. Racism is a social disease that exempts no race from either of its two rosters: victims and victimizers.

For the varieties of bigotry spring from a common root. To tolerate one form, either wittingly or not, is to accept all the rest.

That such views were commonly held before Volney's time surprises many–and is a measure of slavery's comprehensive psychic and social costs, to those who bore them directly and to us their damaged descendants who bear them still today.

Habit dulls all senses, even the victim's, especially when the victim sees that crimes against the voiceless do not count.

Volney wrote that civilization had been first conceived "on the borders of the Upper Nile, among a black race of men.

No nation can enslave a race of people for hundreds of years, set them free bedraggled and penniless, pit them, without assistance in a hostile environment, against privileged victimizers, and then reasonably expect the gap between the heirs of the two groups to narrow. Lines, begun parallel and left alone, can never touch.

I was not always a believer in reparations. I’d read TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson’s work on the subject in the late ’90s, which convinced me that the negative conditions of black people were tied to the fact of slavery and that recompense for that crime made sense in the broadest way. But like most people who agreed with the idea in principle, I thought it was a wildly impractical solution. Some years later I read Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth Jackson’s history of the suburbs and the cities they ringed. I remembered the bracing section on how black families had been cut out of the FHA loan program and thus excluded from much of the suburban housing development in the postwar years. Jackson argued that there was a link between the impoverished cities where black people lived and the relatively affluent suburbs where they did not, and the link was neither mystical nor natural but was the knowable actions of our government. I knew that housing was a great source of the wealth for American families. So was the gap in wealth between black and white families tied to this government action?

If people believe the government is giving them AIDS and blowing up levees, and that white-owned companies are trying to sterilize them, they would be lacking in normal human emotions if they did not—to put it bluntly—hate the people they believed responsible. Indeed, vigorous expressions of hatred go back to at least the time of W.E.B. Du Bois, who once wrote, “It takes extraordinary training, gift and opportunity to make the average white man anything but an overbearing hog, but the most ordinary Negro is an instinctive gentleman.” On another occasion he expressed himself in verse: 'I hate them, Oh! I hate them well, I hate them, Christ! As I hate hell! If I were God, I’d sound their knell This day!' Such sentiments are still common. Amiri Baraka, originally known as LeRoi Jones, is one of America’s most famous and well-regarded black poets, but his work is brimming with anti-white vitriol. These lines are from “Black Dada Nihilismus:” 'Come up, black dada nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats.' Here are more of his lines: 'You cant steal nothin from a white man, he’s already stole it he owes you anything you want, even his life. All the stores will open up if you will say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall motherfucker this is a stick up!' In “Leroy” he wrote: “When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to black people. May they pick me apart and take the useful parts, the sweet meat of my feelings. And leave the bitter bullshit rotten white parts alone.” When he was asked by a white woman what white people could do to help the race problem, he replied, “You can help by dying. You are a cancer. You can help the world’s people with your death.” In July, 2002, Mr. Baraka was appointed poet laureate of New Jersey. The celebrated black author James Baldwin once said: “[T]here is, I should think, no Negro living in America who has not felt, briefly or for long periods, . . . simple, naked and unanswerable hatred; who has not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter in a day, to violate, out of motives of the cruelest vengeance, their women, to break the bodies of all white people and bring them low.” Toni Morrison is a highly-regarded black author who has won the Nobel Prize. “With very few exceptions,” she has written, “I feel that White people will betray me; that in the final analysis they’ll give me up.” Author Randall Robinson concluded after years of activism that “in the autumn of my life, I am left regarding white people, before knowing them individually, with irreducible mistrust and dull dislike.” He wrote that it gave him pleasure when his dying father slapped a white nurse, telling her not “to put her white hands on him.” Leonard Jeffries is the chairman of the African-American studies department of the City College of New York and is famous for his hatred of whites. Once in answer to the question, “What kind of world do you want to leave to your children?” he replied, “A world in which there aren’t any white people.

I was troubled by this, finding their passion as inexplicable as that of white American truck drivers who had supported Ronald Reagan. The Cuban Americans claimed that Castro had rendered Cuba an "unfree" country. But had they thought Cuba a freer society before Castro?

When America liked it? When Cuba was racially segregated? When education was only available to a privileged few? When the poor died of easily curable ailments? When vice was rampant? Had they preferred Batista's mafia-infested Cuba? Or the Cuba between the state that Teddy Roosevelt preened to subjugate and Franklin Delano Roosevelt worked to keep?

As Sir Eric Williams wrote in From Columbus to Castro: The situation was more discouraging in Cuba, which was in every sense of the term an American colony. The Americans openly supported, in the interest of stability, the dictator Machado who raised no awkward questions of Cuban independence and who was concerned merely with the exile or assassination of hostile labour leaders and the reckless and enormous increase of the public debt, both public and private. America dominated the scene. One American writer has stated that no one could become President of Cuba without the endorsement of the United States. According to another, the American Ambassador in Havana was the most important man in Cuba. A third analyses United States policy as "putting a veto on revolution whatever the cause". The Platt Amendment dominated the relations between the United States and Cuba. On the occasion of a threatened rebellion by a Negro political party, the Independent Party of Colour, the United States sent troops to Cuba. In reply to Cuba's protests Secretary of State Knox stated: "The United States does not undertake first to consult the Cuban Government if a crisis arises requiring a temporary landing somewhere." In 1933 Ambassador Sumner Welles identified six desirable characteristics which a Cuban president should possess. These read in part: "First, his thorough acquaintance with the desires of this Government… Sixth, his amenability to suggestions or advice which might be made to him by the American Legation.

Then he arrived. And with (whatever it may have been originally) an idea of his own. This had maddened Americans. Made them crazy, like some consciousness-altering brew rendering circles square and squares oblong. Look at a thing dead on, and flat not see it. See a thing, quite literally, that wasn't there. If our government decided to hate him for declining to play the Latin cipher, our people with small inspiration decided to hate him for stuff they would just make up, without, I think, knowing they were fabricating rationales for their reflexive antipathies. Their comments would quite frequently make them look silly, but not to each other because they believed what they were saying no matter how baseless. Nice people, even, said these things. Not lying, because I believe they thought they were telling the truth.

Come out. Come out. Wherever you are. Monstrous systems do turn people into monsters. Every day. All the time. With unerring efficiency. But those in our society who hallucinate somewhere blithely in the upper reaches of its class remove, prefer not to know this. Oh, I think they know it, but whenever possible they elect not to think about it. Not to see it.

Our whole society must first be brought to a consensus that it wants to close the socioeconomic gap between the races. It must accept that the gap derives from the social depredations of slavery. Once and for all, America must face its past, open itself to a fair telling of all of its peoples' histories, and accept full responsibility for the hardships it has occasioned for so many. It must come to grips with the increasingly indisputable reality that this is not a white nation. Therefore it must dramatically reconfigure its symbolized picture of itself, to itself. Its national parks, museums, monuments, statues, artworks must be recast in a way to include all Americans–Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, African Americans as well as European Americans. White people do not own the idea of America, and should they continue to deny others a place in the idea's iconograph, those others, who fifty years from now will form the majority of America's citizens, will be inspired to punish them for it.

If Bell is right that African Americans will not be compensated for the massive wrongs and social injuries inflicted upon them by their government, during and after slavery, then there is no chance that America can solve its racial problems–if solving these problems means, as I believe it must, closing the yawning economic gap between blacks and whites in this country. The gap was opened by the 246-year practice of slavery. It has been resolutely nurtured since in law and public behavior. It has now ossified. It is structural. Its framing beams are disguised only by the counterfeit manners of a hypocritical governing class.

For twelve years Nazi Germany inflicted horrors upon European Jews. And Germany paid. It paid Jews individually. It paid the state of Israel. For two and a half centuries, Europe and America inflicted unimaginable horrors upon Africa and its people. Europe not only paid nothing to Africa in compensation, but followed the slave trade with the remapping of Africa for further European economic exploitation. (European governments have yet even to accede to Africa's request for the return of Africa's art treasures looted along with its natural resources during the century-long colonial era.)

The founders of Brown University, Nicholas and Joseph Brown, got their wealth by manufacturing and selling slave ships and investing in the slave trade. –The Black Holocaust for Beginners, S. E. Anderson

No one outside of Africa would remember that from 1890 to 1910 the Belgian King Leopold II (who was viewed at the time in Europe and America as a "philanthropic" monarch) genocidally plundered the Congo, killing as many as ten million people.

Yet the black holocaust is far and away the most heinous human rights crime visited upon any group of people in the world over the last five hundred years.

Like slavery, other human rights crimes have resulted in the loss of millions of lives. But only slavery, with its sadistic patience, asphyxiated memory, and smothered cultures, has hulled empty a whole race of people with inter-generational efficiency. Every artifact of the victims' past cultures, every custom, every ritual, every god, every language, every trace element of a people's whole hereditary identity, wrenched from them and ground into a sharp choking dust. It is a human rights crime without parallel in the modern world. For it produces its victims ad infinitum, long after the active stage of the crime has ended.

No,' she said, eyes still locked with Randall’s. 'No, they don’t get to do this. They don’t get to swoop in and take everything from us in less than a day. We have to stand up for ourselves.