Quote of the Day

The billy club and the baseball bat are competing weapons in the war for the mind of white America.  The brutal swing of the billy club on besieged black bodies can be symbolically fought by the sweet swing of a black star at the plate.  If baseball was once America's pastime, so, too, was hatred, and fear, of black people.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 251-252

Quote of the Day

Will we in retrospect see the elections of 2016 much as Russians see the elections of 1990, or Czechs the elections of 1946, or Germans the elections of 1932?  This, for now, depends upon us.  Much needs to be done to fix the gerrymandered system so that each citizen has one equal vote, and so that each vote can be simply counted by a fellow citizen.  We need paper ballots, because they cannot be tampered with remotely and can always be recounted.  This sort of work can be done at the local and state levels.  We can be sure that the elections of 2018, assuming they take place, will be a test of American traditions.  So there is much to do in the meantime.

-- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, p. 30-31

Quote of the Day

"You'll never know how easy you and Jackie and [Larry] Doby and Campy [Roy Campanella] made it for me to do my job by what you did on the baseball field," Martin Luther King, Jr. said to baseball superstar Don Newcombe a few weeks before King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.  Newcombe was humbled.  "Imagine, here is Martin getting beaten with billy clubs, bitten by dogs and thrown in jail, and he says we made his job easier."

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 251

Quote of the Day

Where annual elections end, tyranny begins.

-- Early American proverb

Quote of the Day

Americans who are angry with Colin Kaepernick often forget how black entertainers and athletes have used their fame to break down barriers of discrimination.  Singer Ray Charles helped to desegregate concert halls; Jackie Robinson integrated an entire league.  Entertainers and athletes also helped to combat fear of black culture and encouraged the acceptance of black talent.  They did something even more crucial that continues to this day: they convinced white America that the folk these athletes loved and admired were just as worthy of support and respect.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 249-250

Quote of the Day

We (Americans) believe that we have checks and balances, but have rarely faced a situation like the present: when the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power at the federal level, as well as the majority of statehouses.  The party that exercises such control proposes few policies that are popular with the society at large, and several that are generally unpopular -- and thus must either fear democracy or weaken it.

-- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, p. 30

Quote of the Day

[If] I had to choose tomorrow between the Baseball Hall of Fame and full citizenship for my people, I would choose full citizenship time and again.

-- Jackie Robinson

Quote of the Day

The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens.

-- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, p. 29-30

Quote of the Day

When former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick decided to kneel during the performance of the national anthem to pay homage to black victims of police brutality, closing the gulf between patriotic ideals and the reality of black suffering, he was, predictably, pilloried.  Kaepernick was met with the same charges of most every black person -- whether it was Frederick Douglass or Barack Obama, Sojourner Truth or Maxine Waters, Jack Johnson or football player Malcolm Jenkins -- who dared speak out against injustice: that he is un-American, unpatriotic, disrespectful, and ungrateful.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 247

Quote of the Day

When fascists or Nazis or communists did well in elections in the 1930s or '40s, what followed was some combination of spectacle, repression, and salami tactics -- slicing off layers of opposition one by one.

-- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, p. 28

Quote of the Day

We prefer our heroes dead or quiet; Muhammad Ali's silenced tongue surely hurried him into an iconic space that may have been impossible to occupy had he been able to continue to raise his voice against injustice.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 246

Quote of the Day

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

-- Wendell Phillips

Quote of the Day

America has always been in love with change in reverse, in the safely settled past, not the dangerously changeable present.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 246

Quote of the Day

Thomas Jefferson probably never said that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," but other Americans of his era certainly did.  When we think of this saying today, we imagine our own righteous vigilance directed outward, against misguided and hostile others.  We see ourselves as a city on the hill, a stronghold of democracy, looking out for threats that come from abroad.  But the sense of the saying was entirely different: that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end.

-- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, p. 27

Quote of the Day

Shedding tears over Muhammad Ali's death while ignoring the tears of those who suffer today soils Ali's heroic legacy; extolling Ali's courage as a spokesman for truth while pillorying those who dare tell the truth now is a rejection of Ali too.  Black protest is a form of black humanitarianism and, in fact, is its prelude and often its most righteous incarnation.  The critical effort to see black folk as humane, as viable participants in humanitarian enterprise, is a political battle. 

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 244-245

Quote of the Day

Beware the one-party state.  The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start.  They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents.  So support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections.  Vote in local and state elections while you can.  Consider running for office.

-- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, p. 26

Quote of the Day

As America caught up to Muhammad Ali's political vision, it pushed closer to a redemptive core: humanitarianism is not a substitute for justice, but may be one measure of its fulfillment.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 243

Quote of the Day

Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were, so that they gird the new order rather than resisting it.  This is what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung.

-- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, p. 24

Quote of the Day

Like the great thinkers and leaders who preceded him -- from Du Bois, to Anna Julia Cooper, to Ida B. Wells-Barnett, to Paul Robeson, to Pauli Murray, and to King and Malcolm -- Ali's embrace of the world's beleaguered and downtrodden masses forced the nation to come to grips with its foul treatment of its own citizens of color.  Thus, like those figures, Ali's insistence that America do the right thing was far more loyal to the nation's ideals than those figures who savaged the once-deposed champ in the name of American patriotism.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 242-243

Quote of the Day

The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions -- even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do.

-- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, p. 24

Quote of the Day

James Baldwin argued that until black heroes became the heroes of white America, a bitterness would rage that would destroy the ghetto and the larger city.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 230

Quote of the Day

Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting.  They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority.

-- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, p. 21

Quote of the Day

The unfortunate surrender of the black left to ideological purity has lessened its use to the black masses, forgetting a lesson that James Baldwin and his fellow thinkers and activists never forgot: the point of witness, and the policy that it informs, is, always, the achievement of justice for the black folk witnesses claim to speak for.  Anything less than that, any idea other than that, is but a roadblock to genuine change.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 228

Quote of the Day

After the German elections of 1932, which permitted Adolf Hitler to form a government, or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where communists were victorious, the next crucial step was anticipatory obedience.  Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change.  The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed.

-- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, p. 18

Quote of the Day

If segments of the black left harshly criticized Clinton for her neoliberal policies, they should have far greater reason to lament the racist policies of the Trump administration.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 224

Quote of the Day

Do not obey in advance.  Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.  In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.  A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

-- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, p. 17

Quote of the Day

It is even more irresponsible for black activists and thinkers to argue that there was little difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump; that, as Cornel West put it, Trump was "a neo-fascist catastrophe" and Clinton was "a neo-liberal disaster."  Such thinking helped open the door to a man whose policies and personal witness are rooted in racist thinking.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 223

Quote of the Day

Don't make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to people's blow-dried outsides.  

-- Mary Karr

Quote of the Day

In politics, being deceived is no excuse.

-- Leszek Kolakowski

Meeting Kate Moynihan

I had the pleasure of hearing artist/author Kate Moynihan speak last night at the Herrick District Library.  Having been a fan of Moynihan Gallery for many years, it was a treat to meet Kate and have her sign my copy of her new memoir, A Lone Birch: My Artistic Journey.

Quote of the Day

If Bill Clinton gave black America bad policy and Obama gave black America no policy, then Hillary Clinton made the effort to offer good policy.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like, p. 213