Jamelle Bouie Quotes

The larger implication is clear enough: a majority made up of liberals and nonwhites isn't a real majority. And the solution is clear, too: to write those people out of the polity, to use every available tool to weaken their influence on American politics-whether that means raising barriers to voting and registration or slashing access to the ballot box itself or anything in between.

why this moment? Why Juneteenth has sort of erupted in this way over the past couple weeks, why people find it so resonant right now is that Juneteenth is very much a holiday about the distance between freedom that is promised and freedom that is lived. And right now, millions of Americans are seeing with regards to police brutality, with regard to inequality, the distance that still exists between freedom and liberty, as we imagine it, as we have proclaimed it, and that has actually experienced by ordinary people.

The story of emancipation, going really back to the founding of the country all the way to the civil war is very much the story of enslaved Africans and freed blacks taking the initiative to put their freedom on the agenda of national politics. That's especially true during the Civil War. The war, as many people know, it does not begin as a war for abolition. It begins as a war for union. But as soon as the shooting starts, enslaved people are escaping to union lines. They're leaving work on plantations. They're offering their assistance to- to union soldiers as guides, as laborers and eventually as soldiers. And it's those actions that transform the war for union into a war for liberation, into a war for emancipation. And although Juneteenth commemorates those enslaved Africans who were whisked away to Texas to avoid the Emancipation Proclamation, I think it's still an opportunity for us to really think and take seriously the fact that emancipation does not happen without the actions of the enslaved, not just over the war, but really over the course of 80 years.

if you could get 10 percent of people doing their daily life on a bike,that clears up roads, that kind of makes it easier for everyone else who does rely on cars and does rely on motorized transportation to get around.

[B]lack Americans live with a level of poverty that is simply unknown to the vast majority of whites. It’s tempting to attribute this to the income disparity between blacks and whites. Since blacks are more likely to be poor, it stands to reason that they’re more likely to live in poor neighborhoods. But the fact of large-scale neighborhood poverty holds true for higher-income black Americans as well. Middle-class blacks are far more likely than middle-class whites to live in areas with significant amounts of poverty. Among today’s cohort of middle- and upper-class blacks, about half were raised in neighborhoods of at least 20 percent poverty. Only 1 percent of today’s middle- and upper-class whites can say the same. In short, if you took two children—one white, one black—and gave them parents with similar jobs, similar educations, and similar values, the black child would be much more likely to grow up in a neighborhood with higher poverty, worse schools, and more violence. This is an outright disaster for income mobility. Given their circumstances, blacks face a reversal of their gains over the last generation. Simply put, the persistence of poor neighborhoods is a fact of life for the large majority of blacks; it’s been transmitted from one generation to the next, and shows little sign of changing.

There is a homegrown ideology of reaction in the United States, inextricably tied to our system of slavery. And while that ideology no longer carries the explicit racism of the past, the basic framework remains: fear of rival political majorities; of demographic "replacement"; of a government that threatens privilege and hierarchy.

Arguably the most prominent and accomplished of these planter-politicians was John Calhoun...On this defense of the prerogatives of the Southern section of the nation, Calhoun built an entire theory of government. Seeing the threat democracy posed to slavery, he set out to limit democracy...The problem, in Calhoun's eyes, was that the will of the majority, as expressed in the House of Representatives and the election of the president, had too much power. It had to be curbed, lest it overrun this "true and perfect voice of the people." And those "people" whose voices must be heard, of course, were those like him. Those with power. Those with property. Those who enslaved others.

Republicans stepped onto this path after America elected its first Black president, and they thereafter embraced a racist demagogue and his attacks on the legitimacy of the nation's multiracial character; these actions speak to how the threads of history tie past and present together.

Making the city less car dependent is making the city less expensive for people.

I occasionally tweet very vociferously about land-use decisions in this city. And a lot of that’s inspired just by actually seeing, like, 70 percent, 80 percent of lots in the city. Like, I’ve actually seen much of the built environment of Charlottesville just from biking around.

there is no national drive, no national politician saying the United States needs to construct much more housing than it does. And I think it has everything to do with how the party coalitions right now are what their nature is.

one consequence of the fact that our popular historical understanding erases roughly 1870 to 1932 from public memory is that many Americans have a distinctly warped view of how resilient american democracy actually is

A multiracial coalition of Black, brown, and white Americans had defeated Trump and put Biden and Kamala Harris, the first woman and first woman of color to become vice president, in the White House, and the president's supporters, with his direct encouragement, stormed the national legislature to try to nullify the result.

ah, the halycon free speech days of 1954, when two-thirds of american blacks - about 10 million people - lived in a brutal and lawless apartheid state

"The central question that emerges," the National Review's founding editor, William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote in 1957, amid congressional debate over the first Civil Rights of the modern era, "is whether the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is yes-the white community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race." He continued: "It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority." It was a strikingly blunt defense of Jim Crow and affirmation of white supremacy from the father of the conservative movement. Later, when key civil rights questions had been settled by law, Buckley would essentially renounce these views, praising the movement and criticizing race-baiting demagogues like George C. Wallace. Still, his initial impulse-to give white political minorities a veto not just over policy but over democracy itself-reflected a tendency that would express itself again and again in the conservative politics he ushered into the mainstream, emerging when political, cultural, and demographic change threatened a narrow, exclusionary vision of American democracy.