Historical Trauma Quotes

There’s no question whatsoever that conquered people have been treated in a terrible way. Being conquered by the Romans was not a fate you would wish on anyone. But the fact is that the net result has been that those parts of Europe conquered by the Romans have been the most advanced parts of Europe for centuries. Similarly, when someone black says . . . ‘I’m worse off because of slavery,’ there’s no way in hell you can say that with a straight face. If you’re going to base reparations on the difference between where blacks today would be if it were not for slavery, then blacks would have to pay reparations to white people.

The white race is the cancer of human history.

Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.

We're not Americans, we're Africans who happen to be in America. We were kidnapped and brought here against our will from Africa. We didn't land on Plymouth Rock - that rock landed on us.

Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure.

The Civil War still remains the crossroads of our being.

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

Perhaps some day someone will explain how, on the level of man, Auschwitz was possible; but on the level of God, it will forever remain the most disturbing of mysteries.

My family history, like that of many Polish, German and Jewish families from Central Europe in the 20th century, is complex.

The government has a history of not treating people fairly, from the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II to African-Americans in the Civil Rights era.

A weak people and its equally debilitated leaders are bludgeoned by history. It maims them into the cripples that they are meant to be.

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history.

Anyone who saw Nagasaki would suddenly realize that they'd been kept in the dark by the United States government as to what atomic bombs can do.

Slavery is nothing to joke about. The history of this nation's involvement with slavery is nothing to pass off in a joke.

My father didn't know his real name. My father got his name from his grandfather and he got his name from his grandfather and he got it from the slave master.

We didn't land on plymouth rock, Plymouth rock landed on us".

What did you expect? I don’t know why you’re so surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for 300 years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.

When our forefathers first met on this island, your red brethren were more numerous; but since the introduction amongst us, of what you call spirituous liquors, and what we think may justly be called poison, our numbers have greatly diminished…It is not an evil of our own making; we have not placed it amongst ourselves; it is an evil placed amongst us by white people.

Who today remembers the extermination of the Armenians.

American Indian and Alaska Native people suffer from unacceptable and disproportionately high levels of violence, which can have lasting impacts on families and communities.

The Armenian movement was the deadliest of all threats. From the conquered lands of the Serbs, Bulgars, Albanians, and Greeks, they could, however reluctantly, withdraw, abandoning distant provinces and bringing the imperial frontier nearer home. But the Armenians, stretching across turkey-in-Asia from the Caucasian frontier to the Mediterranean coast, lay in the very heart of the turkish homeland—and to renounce these lands would have meant not the truncation, but the dissolution of the turkish state. turkish and Armenian villages, inextricably mixed, had for centuries lived in neighborly association. now a desperate struggle between them began—a struggle between two nations for the possession of a single homeland, that ended with the terrible holocaust of 1915, when a million and a half Armenians perished.

Racism was a big part of our community. I'm not going to revisit history, and I'm not going to call out those communities, but the communities we grew up around, we were treated like second- or third-class citizens.

If more Africans had eaten missionaries, the continent would be in better shape.

The West has been leading a crusade against the Muslims for a thousand years.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.