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Charles M. Blow

Charles M. Blow Books

Journalist

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“Trump’s America is not America: not today’s or tomorrow’s, but yesterday’s. Trump’s America is brutal, perverse, regressive, insular and afraid. There is no hope in it; there is no light in it. It is a vast expanse of darkness and desolation. And that is a vision of America that most of the people in this country cannot and will not abide.”

AmericaHopeDarknessUnited StatesCitizensFuturePositivityUsaProtestNegativityUnited States Of AmericaUsDonald TrumpPresidentsPotus
Author:Charles M. Blow
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“The same year that the Civil War ended, the two states among those with the largest percentage of Black people – Mississippi, with 54 percent in the 1870 census, and South Carolina, with 59 percent – passed what came to be known as “Black codes,” a repressive slate of laws to “regulate the Domestic Relations of Persons of Colour.” These laws forced freedmen into contractual labor agreements, which looked eerily similar to slavery, with white farmers. The South Carolina act even stipulated that “all persons of color who make contracts for service or labor, shall be known as servants, and those with whom they contract, shall be known as masters.” Freedmen without “some lawful and respectable employment” could be charged with vagrancy. They literally made Black unemployment a crime for Black people.”

RacismInstitutionalized RacismBlack CodesCodified Racism
Book:The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto
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“White women have known from the beginning in this country that they possess this power, the power to activate white supremacy and spur it to extreme violence... The activation of white terror is a white woman's soft power... We like to masculinize white supremacy, to presume it reeks of testosterone, when in fact, it is just as likely to be spritzed by perfume.”

RacismWhite Women
Book:The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto
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“Forty percent of slave owners were white women. It was white women who made the market for Black women's breast milk and who were attended by Black women in the big house. It was white women who upheld much of the day-to-day white supremacy – the schoolteachers, the store clerks, the waitresses. And it is now often white women activating police interactions with Black people.”

RacismWhite WomenKaren
Book:The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto
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“Progress is the wall behind which white America hides. (Even many Black leaders have absorbed and regurgitate the progress narrative.) White liberals expect Black people to applaud their efforts. But how is that a fair and legitimate expectation? Slavery, white supremacy, and racism are horrid, man-made constructs that should never have existed in the first place. Are we meant to cheer the slow, creeping, centuries-long undoing of a thing that never should have been done?”

Racism In AmericaWhite LiberalsBlack Progress
Book:The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto
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“And although rage has often been an effective tool to focus attention and shift narratives, it rarely produces policy gains or positively shifts societal perspective. The beneficiaries of Black rage are often the moderate figures with whom those in a rage are compared. Martin Luther King owes part of his success to Malcolm X, whom many whites saw as a more dangerous, and less acceptable, alternative.”

Black LeadersBlack Rage
Book:The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto
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“When I was a freshman in college, I went to a broadcast class by mistake. The first day, the instructor said, "Television anchors sound like they could be from everywhere and nowhere." From that point on, every time I was near an anchor, when no one was around, they would say something and I would say it right after them. It was this effort to get rid of my accent.”

FirstsSaidSoundEffortMistakeClassTelevisionCollegeAccentsAnchorsInstructorsFreshman
Author:Charles M. Blow
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