The wound, in my mind, is slavery. It was never reconciled. The great sin in America has never really been addressed. I mean, it’s—it’s painful. You were asking me about things that occurred during my childhood—like witnessing the bombing and the killing of the four girls, and the torture and the mutilation of Emmett Till— the pictures I saw when I was four years old. Getting beaten with a chain for drinking out of a white person’s water faucet. ... There needs to be a healing.

I’m going to quote James Baldwin again:...“There are many ways in which to be despicable that would quite make the head spin, but for one to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.” And I think that when people say, “You oughta get over slavery”— 400 years of dehumanization, 400 years of oppression, of subjugation, 400 years of doubting your own self-worth. Can you imagine what it’s like to walk into a room where you’re the only African American and wondering whether you’re good enough to be in that room? Or can you imagine looking in a mirror and saying to yourself, “But for this Blackness, I could go somewhere and be comfortable. I could go somewhere and not worry about being confronted, or I could drive my car and not worry about a police officer stopping me for some ridiculous reason, and gunning me down and telling people that I resisted arrest—or that I could just travel the world and just be left alone—just to feel the freedom of — Just. Enjoying. Life. Just enjoying the scenery. Just watching nature and not be worried about being accosted because I’m somewhere that I’m not supposed to be, and I just happen to be wearing the wrong color of skin. I mean—give me a break! What human being can honestly say that that wouldn’t grate on them from time to time?

—Journalist Norman Hollis Robinson, 2020, in the podcast Slow Burn. In a televised debate during the Louisiana gubernatorial race of 1991, Hollis asked former Ku Klux Klan leader and Republican candidate David Duke why, given Duke’s record of hate speech, any minority citizen should entrust their lives and the lives of their children to him.