When white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our “fault.” But it is undeniably our inheritance. Douglas A. Blackmon
About This Quote

This quote can be interpreted in many different ways. For example, it may be referencing the idea that all white Americans are guilty of some form of oppression or racism. It may also be referring to the fact that all Americans are influenced by their ancestors. The author is making the point, however, that everyone has some sort of connection to their family's past.

Source: Slavery By Another Name: The Reenslavement Of Black Americans From The Civil War To World War Ii

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More Quotes By Douglas A. Blackmon
  1. When white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we...
  2. In my quest to find Green Cottenham, I also discovered an unsettling truth that when white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections...
  3. Certainly, the great record of forced labor across the South demands that any consideration of the progress of civil rights remedy in the United States must acknowledge that slavery, real slavery, didn't end until 1945 - well into the childhoods of the black Americans who...
  4. Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery's full grip on U.S. Society - its intimate connections to present day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end - can we reconcile the...
  5. In every aspect and among almost every demographic, how American society digested and processed the long, dark chapter between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the civil rights movement has been delusion.
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