Healing America’s Narratives: Freedom, Truth, & Shadow
in the 21st Century
This is a very small, in-process, essential, and inevitably incomplete selection of some of the voices, across a variety of disciplines and issues, that inform the book and the courses that have emerged from it. The working bibliography, also in-process, is available here.
History
The Subjugation of Women
“… if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.”
– Sojourner Truth (Isabella Bomfree), 1867
“But I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off of our necks, and permit us to stand upright on the ground which God has designed us to occupy.” – Sarah Grimké, 1838
“…children, in their desire to establish themselves as boys, were putting on a cloak of masculinity. They were disguising themselves by shielding those aspects of themselves that would lead them to be seen as not masculine (meaning feminine) or as like a woman (girly or gay), in a world where being a man means being superior.” – Carol Gilligan, In a Human Voice, (2023)
Lucy Stone earned her baccalaureate at Ohio’s Oberlin College in 1847. When she was asked to write the commencement address for her class, she refused upon learning that her words would have to be read by a man.
“When I hear my work being cast in terms of whether women and men are really (essentially) different or who is better than whom, I know that I have lost my voice, because these are not my questions.”
– Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (in “Letter to Readers,” 1993 edition)
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, an extension of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, provides that “No person in the United States shall, based on sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
The University of Oregon’s Sedona Prince took to social media with video and voice-over that exposed the disparities in the training facilities for women in San Antonio and men in Indianapolis at the 2021 NCAA basketball tournaments. When the NCAA responded that the issue was space, not money, Prince returned with video proving that the women’s facility had plenty of unused space.
Jeannette Rankin, from Montana, was the first woman to serve in the U.S. Congress, before she, herself, could vote. She was elected to the House in the 65th Congress (1917-1919).
“Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter. Any chance you might drop the ‘Dr.’ before your name? ‘Dr. Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.” – Joseph Epstein, WSJ, December 11, 2020
“[Girls whose parents, doctor, or school has not taught them to expect a period and what it is] feel alone, scared, embarrassed, [and may] worry that there’s something wrong with them, that they’re dying, and even worse for this age group, they feel like they’re not normal…but on top of that, imagine that this person doesn’t have the means to afford menstrual products.”
– Dr. Shelby Davis, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
The Subjugation of Indigenous Peoples
“I feel conscious of having done my duty to my red children, and if any failure of my good intention arises, it will be attributable to their want of duty to themselves, not to me.”
– President Andrew Jackson, 1830
“But what shall I do with the Third Colorado Regiment if I make peace? They have been raised to kill Indians, and they must kill Indians.” – Colorado Territory Governor, John Evans, 1864
“I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians.” – U.S. Army Colonel, John M. Chivington, 1864
“From this day forward all war between the parties to this agreement shall forever cease.”
– Fort Laramie Treaty, Article I, November 6, 1868
“The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” – U.S. Army General, Philip Sheridan, c. 1868
“These promises have not been kept…. All the words have proved to be false.” – Chief Spotted Tail, signatory to the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, 1877
“… an Indian is a person within the meaning of the laws of the United States…. no rightful authority exists for removing by force any of the [Indians] to the Indian Territory, [and they] must be discharged from custody.”
– Judge Elmer S. Dundy, upholding the 14th Amendment rights of Ponca Chief Standing Bear, 1879
“No missionary ever realized that it was less the reality of his religion, and more the threat of extinction that brought converts to him.” – Vine Deloria, Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins, 1969
In April 2009 S. J. Res. 14, in just over 1,000 words, resolved “To acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the Federal Government regarding Indian tribes and offer an apology to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United States,” including some serious transgressions, such as the 1830 Indian Removal Act, “many” treaty violations, “unlawful acquisition of recognized tribal land,” “the Sand Creek Massacre,” “the forcible removal of Native children from their families,” and some embarrassing euphemisms like “the arrival of Europeans in North America opened a new chapter in the history of Native Peoples.” By the time S. J. Res. 14 was signed into law on December 19, 2009, the House had added it to H. R. 3326, which became Public Law 111-118, more commonly known as the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2010. All of the context-setting reasons for the apology were gone, leaving a 270-word “Sec. 8113” on page 45 of the 67-page law, immediately below Sec. 8112’s provision that “up to $15,000,000 shall be available for the purpose of High Priority National Guard Counterdrug Programs.”
“Why don’t you talk, and go straight, and let all be well?” – Southern Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle
The Subjugation of Africans & African Americans
“I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.” – Paul Weyrich, Co-Founder, The Heritage Foundation, ALEC, the Council for National Policy, etc., Dallas, Texas, August 1980
“…I advise everybody…stay woke – keep their eyes open.” – Lead Belly, “Scottsboro Boys” 1931
“…the natural human response from someone weaned on their caste’s inherent superiority is to perceive a threat to their existence, a heightened sense of unease, of displacement, of fear for their very survival. ‘If the things that I have believed are not true, then might I not be who I thought I was?’ The disaffection is more than economic. The malaise is spiritual, psychological, emotional. Who are you if there is no one to be better than?” – Isabelle Wilkerson, Caste (2020)
“Everything was going to change now. No longer would I have to ride a broken-down bus almost forty miles each day to attend classes at a ‘training’ school with hand-me-down books and supplies. Come fall I’d be riding a state-of-the-art bus to a state-of-the art school, an integrated school.” – Fourteen-year-old John Lewis, after reading the May 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, in Walking With the Wind (1998)
“I can’t breathe.” – George Floyd, as he was being killed by four Minneapolis police officers, May 25, 2020
“I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, into our churches.” – South Carolina Governor and presidential
candidate, Strom Thurmond, October 7, 1948
“This new cause—or rather the true question of the war revived—is the supremacy of the white race and along with it and strengthening it, the reassertion of our political traditions, and the protection of our ancient fabrics of government.” – Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause Regained, c. 1868
“History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.” – James Baldwin, “The White Man’s Guilt,” August 1965
“We are determined to take our country back. We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he’s going to take our country back. And that’s what we gotta do.” – David Duke, former Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
grand wizard and Louisiana State Representative
“To be antiracist is to think nothing is behaviorally wrong or right—inferior or superior—with any of the racial groups. Whenever the antiracist sees individuals behaving positively or negatively, the antiracist sees exactly that: individuals behaving positively or negatively, not representatives of whole races.” – Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019)
The War in Vietnam
“They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed and died because they were embarrassed not to…. They died so as not to die of embarrassment…. I couldn’t make myself be brave…. I would go to the war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to.”
– Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (2009)
“This immortal statement is extracted from the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. Understood in the broader sense, this means: “All peoples on the earth are born equal; every person has the right to live to be happy and free.” – Ho Chi Minh, “Proclamation of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam” (September 2, 1945)
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” – President Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 1953
“What Calley and others who participated in the [1968 My Lai] massacre did that was different was to kill hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese in two hamlets in a single morning and to kill point-blank with rifles, pistols, and machine guns. Had they killed just as many over a larger area in a longer period of time and killed impersonally with bombs, shells, rockets, white phosphorous, and napalm, they would have been following the normal pattern of American military conduct. The soldier and the junior officer observed the lack of regard his superiors had for the Vietnamese. The value of Vietnamese life was systematically cheapened in his mind…. The military leaders of the United States, and the civilian leaders who permitted the generals to wage war as they did, had made the massacre inevitable.”
– Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie (1988)
As cited in The Pentagon Papers and here, a March 10, 1965 memorandum from Assistant Secretary of Defense, John McNaughton quantified the justification for the U. S. aims for “Action for South Vietnam” as follows:
- 70%—To avoid a humiliating US defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor).
- 20%—To keep SVN (and then adjacent) territory from Chinese hands.
- 10%—To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life.
- Also—To emerge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used.
- Not—To “help a friend,” although it would be hard to stay if asked out.
“Among the vets, there are as many different opinions about the war as there are vets…. There is one thing any Vietnam vet, regardless of his political views, is sure of: The custodians of the official versions lie. Governments lie. Histories lie, and few people care that soldiers and others die for the lies.”
– Doug Anderson, Keep Your Head Down (2009)
“I may not tell you how I’m feeling. I try to separate human emotions from the larger issues of human welfare. Human welfare requires that we avoid conflict. I try not to let my human emotions interfere with efforts to resolve conflict.” – Robert McNamara in David K. Shipler, “Robert McNamara and the Ghosts of Vietnam.” New York Times, August 10, 1997
“Finally—even though it took ten years, cost the lives of 58,000 young Americans and inflicted humiliating defeat on a nation that had never before lost a war—some of us learned that Clausewitz had it right 150 years earlier when he wrote these words: ‘No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it’.” – U. S. Army Lt. General Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once…and Young (1992)
“I only killed one human being in Vietnam, and that was the first man that I ever killed. I was sick with guilt about killing that guy and thinking I’m gonna have to do this for the next thirteen months, and I’m gonna go crazy. And I saw a Marine step on a Bouncing Betty mine, and that’s when I made my deal with the devil and that I said I will never kill another human being as long as I’m in Vietnam. However, I will waste as many gooks as I can find; I’ll wax as many dinks as I can find; I’ll smoke as many zips as I can find. But I ain’t gonna’ kill anybody, y’know? Turn a subject into an object: Racism 101—it turns out to be a very necessary tool when you have children fighting your wars, for them to stay sane doing their work.” – U. S. Marine Corporal John Musgrave, “This Is What We Do (July 1967-December 1967)” The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Season 1, Episode 5: 16:10-17:10
Always a war somewhere and underneath
the crack of rifles, the sound of money
sliding down the chute, and a
whimpering of mothers over here, over there.
– Doug Anderson, from “Same Old,” in Horse Medicine (2015)
Post-9/11 Wars in Afghanistan & Iraq
“Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” – President George W. Bush, May 1, 2003
“No” – Representative Barbara Lee, 9th Congressional District, California, in the 420-1 vote on S.J. Res. 23, which gave the president the power “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001…” The Senate vote was 98-0.
“The main mistake of American policy in Iraq was waging war at all.” – Jonathan Schell, “The Importance of Losing,” The Jonathan Schell Reader (2004), italics in original.
“Instead, [early on September 12, 2001] I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq. At first I was incredulous…. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq.”
– Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies (2004)
“Call them the sacred trinity: an abiding conviction that the minimum essentials of international peace and order require the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism.” – Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (2010), italics in original
“This [neoconservative] ideology stated that authoritarian states were inherently destabilizing and dangerous; that it was both a moral good and a strategic necessity for America to replace those dictatorships with democracy—and to dominate the world as the unquestioned moral and military leader…. Their case was always grandly ideological, rooted in highly abstract and untested theories about the nature of the world and America’s rightful place in it.” – Max Fisher, “America’s unlearned lesson: the forgotten truth about why we invaded Iraq,” Vox, February 16, 2016
“…the purse is now open . . . any member of Congress who doesn’t vote for the funds we need to defend this country will be looking for a new job after next November.” – Harry Stonecipher, Boeing vice president, October 2001, in William D. Hartung, “Profits of War: Corporate Beneficiaries of the Post-9/11 Pentagon Spending Surge,” Center for International Policy & Watson Institute, International & Public Affairs at Brown University, September 13, 2021
“The U. S. government did not understand the Afghan context and therefore failed to tailor its efforts accordingly…. Lack of knowledge at the local level meant projects intended to mitigate conflict often exacerbated it, and even inadvertently funded insurgents.”
– John F. Sopko, et. al., What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction, (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, August 2021)
“We also have to work though, sort of, the dark side, if you will. We’re gonna spend time in the shadows, the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies if we’re gonna be successful.” – Vice President Dick Cheney, Meet the Press, September 16, 2001
“…the State Department said they were told to look for the legal equivalent of outer space, and that’s what Guantanamo was meant to be—a place where no law applied.” – Michel Paradis, senior attorney for the Department of Defense, Office of the Chief Defense Counsel, in Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror, Netflix, Ep. 3, “The Dark Side,” Brian Knappenberger, director, (2021)
“The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders.” – Donald Rumsfeld, November 2001, in response to Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar’s offer to surrender
On Current(ish) Events
“I don’t believe there is any problem of American politics and American public life which is more significant today than the pervasive civic ignorance of the Constitution of the United States and the structure of government….an ignorant people can never remain a free people. Democracy cannot survive too much ignorance.” – David Souter, Retired U. S. Supreme Court Justice, University of New Hampshire Law School interview, September 14, 2012
“All social structures that male society has built so far have included within them the suppression of other men…. What a relatively few men in our advanced society have been able to build has been at the great expense of other men.” – Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women, (1976)
“Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states. Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread to the democratic world instead.” – Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. (2024)
“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.” – Donald J. Trump, August 9, 2016
“Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. One advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.” – Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (2017/2021)
“Universities do not pursue knowledge and truth. They pursue deceit and lies.” – J. D. Vance, 2021
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
– Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. We want, when they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work. Because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We wanna put them in trauma.”
– Russell Vought (2023), co-author, Project 2025, and currently (June 2025) Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)
“Markets cannot be free. Only people can be free.”
– Timothy Snyder, On Freedom (2024)
“When you say ‘I think’ it is often not you who think, but ‘they’—it is the anonymous authority of the collectivity speaking through your mask.” – Thomas Merton, “The Inner Experience” (1967)
Some Guides for the Journey
“It is true that the mind is restless and difficult to control, but it can be conquered… through regular practice and detachment” (6.35) – Bhagavad Gita, c. 500-200 BCE
“Love is the joyful acceptance of belonging.” – David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer (1984)
“What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.”
– Epictetus, The Enchiridion¸ c. 0-200 CE.
“Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
– M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled (1978)
“No one finds it easy to accept the lot Fortune has sent him…. So nothing is miserable except when you think it so, and vice versa, all luck is good luck to the man who bears it with equanimity.”
– Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, c. 522-524 CE.
“I want to … encourage you to think about the creative responsibility involved in the fact that there are different ways to tell your stories. It’s not that one is true and another is not true. It’s a matter of emphasis and context.”
– Mary Catherine Bateson, “Composing a Life,” in Charles Simpkinson and Anne Simpkinson, Sacred Stories: A Celebration of the Power of Stories to Transform and Heal (1993)
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
– Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)
“Truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline.”
– Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach
“The question we should be asking is not ‘Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?’…. A better question would be ‘Now that this has happened to me, what am I going to do about it?’”
– Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (1981)
“…the individual human Soul is…the particular ecological niche a person is born to occupy whether or not that niche is ever consciously discovered or embodied.… By human Soul, I mean a person’s unique place, not in human culture, but in the greater Earth community, the more-than-human world…. an identity much deeper than our personality, social-vocational role, or political or religious affiliations.”
– Bill Plotkin, The Journey of Soul Initiation (2021), italics in original
“Before intention and choice, before ideas and understanding and everything we think we know about ourselves–we love this world around us…. We love this world, this living planet: we feel joy when life thrives, grief when it suffers and dies.”
– David Hinton, Wild Mind, Wild Earth (2022)
Healing America's Narratives 