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21 " I think Southern whites are very literal-minded about the Bible, and the Constitution as well, because they are always searching for ways to read texts that would support their racial views. It goes beyond race to support a hierarchical worldview in which everyone has a place: slaves, children, women. A typical Sunday morning starts with a biblical text that gives legitimacy to whatever the preacher wants to say. "
― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil
22 " Mississippi is a place where the resistance to the Enlightenment is out in the open, making it anything but obsolete. "
23 " No white person I met in the South would say their distaste for Obama was a function of racism. I don’t agree with his liberal policies, they’d tell me. But disagreement is not hatred, and a growing body of literature argues that racism was the deciding factor in the 2016 election. "
24 " Unless you’ve lived a long time in Germany, you’ll be surprised to learn that descendants of the Wehrmacht made the same claims as the descendants of the Confederate Army. Not only in the dark, shell-shocked days that followed the unconditional surrender outside Berlin in 1945; such remarks continued to be made in public through the end of the twentieth century, when the Wehrmacht Exhibit broke West Germany’s final taboo. "
25 " Social justice activists in the South, for example, who are struggling to force their neighbors to face the ways their racist history informs the racist present, are above all aware of how hard it all is. The acknowledgments are too defensive, the racism too tenacious, the impulse to insist on one’s own victimization too "
26 " The 2017 demonstrations against the planned removal of the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, established one thing beyond doubt: Nazis are not just a German problem. You may prefer to call the demonstrators white supremacists, but that’s a distinction without a difference. The deliberate use of Nazi symbols—swastikas, torches—and slogans—Blood and Soil! Jews will not replace us!—leaves no room for doubt. Not everyone who wants to preserve those symbols is a Nazi. But American Nazis’ embrace of the Confederate cause made clear that anyone who fights for those symbols is fighting for values that unite Nazis with racists of all varieties. "
27 " Social justice activists in the South, for example, who are struggling to force their neighbors to face the ways their racist history informs the racist present, are above all aware of how hard it all is. The acknowledgments are too defensive, the racism too tenacious, the impulse to insist on one’s own victimization too strong. "
28 " What drives me nuts about Southern Republicans,” said Wilson, “is the way they rail against the federal government while taking more federal tax money than any other part of the country. "
29 " There are empty villages from Poland to Portugal. Why not give refugees a chance to rebuild them? The viciousness of readers’ reactions was chilling. Didn’t I know the majority of migrants are African, who have no experience overcoming difficulties through hard work? How could I expect them to develop abandoned villages? And speaking of abandoned: the young people have abandoned those villages, but older people remain. How can I propose to let their world be overrun by dominating African hordes? "
30 " The achievements of Obama’s presidency, especially impressive in the face of massive opposition to every move he made, undermined the last rationalizations for white supremacy—which is just what provoked the massive backlash that led to the election of the least qualified man ever to approach the White House. "
31 " I will argue that the 2016 election resulted, in large part, from America’s failure to confront its own history. "
32 " In the 1920s, Nazis looked to the American eugenics movement to support their own bumbling race science. Hitler took American westward expansion, with its destruction of Native peoples, as the template for the eastward expansion he said was needed to provide Germans with Lebensraum—room to live. Nazi jurists studied American race laws extensively, particularly concerning citizenship rights, immigration, and miscegenation, before drafting the notorious Nuremberg Laws. "
33 " All those stately columns gracing mansion porticoes look elegant till you know what ideology was written into the architecture. "
34 " As Cummings pointed out when the museum opened in 2014, there are more Holocaust museums in the United States than in Israel, Germany, and Poland combined, but not one devoted to slavery. "
35 " Participating in Southern debates about Confederate monuments led me to try, over and over, to imagine a Germany filled with monuments to the men who fought for the Nazis. My imagination failed. For anyone who has lived in contemporary Germany, the vision of statues honoring those men is inconceivable. Even those who privately mourn for family members lost at the front, knowing that only a fraction of the Wehrmacht belonged to the Nazi Party, know that their loved ones cannot be publically honored without honoring the cause for which they died. "
36 " cannot show: that the terror began not in far-off Poland, but in the heart of a city full of clubs and cafés, spaces where you can still buy a lottery ticket or go to the dentist. Each four-inch square recalls an ordinary human being, in the midst of her life, who was deported and murdered with little notice and no protest from the other ordinary human beings who surrounded her every day. The terror was here. "
37 " And there’s no doubt that the presence of a black family in the White House enraged a sufficient number of Americans to insure the election of a swindling, violent successor whose policies, such as they are, are at odds with the interests of all but a handful of billionaires. "
38 " The stumbling stones document what larger memorials cannot show: that the terror began not in far-off Poland, but in the heart of a city full of clubs and cafés, spaces where you can still buy a lottery ticket or go to the dentist. Each four-inch square recalls an ordinary human being, in the midst of her life, who was deported and murdered with little notice and no protest from the other ordinary human beings who surrounded her every day. The terror was here. "
39 " What is certain: it’s good that those deeds have been marked and preserved. Imagine a world where the greatest crimes ever committed were consigned to dust. Where nothing acknowledged racist terror of any kind—the Holocaust, the genocides, the lynchings were left without a trace. Whatever helps us escape oblivion is welcome. "
40 " Forget the past and move on isn’t even helpful in the realms of individual psychology; as political advice, it is worthless. When pasts fester, they become open wounds. "