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Sunbeams

There are fundamentally two ways you can experience the police in America: [One is] as the people you call when there’s a problem, the nice man in uniform who pats a toddler’s head and has an easy smile for the old lady as she buys her coffee. For others, the police are the people who are called on them. They are the ominous knock on the door, the sudden flashlight in the face, the barked orders. Depending on who you are, the sight of an officer can produce either a warm sense of safety and contentment or a plummeting feeling of terror.

Chris Hayes

Sunbeams

Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. . . . We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Our Fellow Americans

Paul Chaat Smith On The Complex Truth Of Native American History

To see the full picture of Indians — as people who have had a continuing, complex relationship with all aspects of American culture — is just too much for some people. They want to put Indians in a box.

Sunbeams

It is an illusion to suppose that a dictator makes himself; at most he seizes an opportunity made for him by passive, stupid, incompetent, and, above all, unsatisfied and fearful men.

L. Susan Stebbing

Big Lies

Benjamin Carter Hett On What We Can Learn From Hitler’s Rise To Power

Hitler could only make angry arguments. Trump, too, can’t make an appeal to reason. All he can do is push the anger button and throw abuse at people. In a sense, he is just lucky that the one thing he can do is something that resonates with a certain segment of the population.

Sunbeams

Government is a tool, like a hammer. You can use a hammer to build or you can use a hammer to destroy.

Molly Ivins

The Great Work

Ralph Nader On Taking Back Power From The Corporate State

Every major advance for justice in our country took no more than 1 percent of adults — around 2.5 million people — with public opinion behind them, mobilizing to change government policy. If you’ve got 2.5 million people, you can recover our country, recover our government, recover our hopes and dreams.

Small Protest

The word fascist has lost all meaning. We need a new term to describe people who build detention camps for infants at the Texas border.

Not So Black And White

Dorothy Roberts On The Myth Of Race

I’m not saying that race is a natural division of human beings that can lead to unjust hierarchies. I’m saying that the very concept of race was invented to create and enforce such hierarchies.