Quotes from Randall Robinson

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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 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.

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.