Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass.

Textbooks should show that neither morality nor immorality can simply be conferred upon us by history. Merely being part of the United States, without regard to our own acts and ideas, does not make us moral or immoral beings. History is more complicated than that.

Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade.

Many Americans have never owned a book, and I'm not talking about because of the recent digital revolution. I'm talking about before there even was a digital revolution.

We preach democracy while supporting dictatorships.

Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history.

The world, of course, doesn't come divided into disciplines. The world just is.