“In America, your uniqueness stands but you also have the E Pluribus Unum. We are one.”
“But that takes work.”
“The solution’s easy but doing it is really, really hard. The first thing is not to spend your energy on the extremists. People need to get off of social media and TV because you can find someone there telling you everything is racist, and you have to ignore that. In the real world, most of us are the same. We get up, we go to work to pay the bills, we pick up the kids, we have dinner and move on. We want the same things; we’re not that different.”
“We also have to make sure we’re not having conversations from a political space. Once you get into politics, people put their stuff on you through a partisan lens. We need to understand that people can’t really fit into boxes. I don’t use the term ‘both sides’ because there are usually four or five sides. We need to understand it’s not just this or that.”
“To come together, we need to make academic excellence an important priority, because, regardless of what you believe or what you do, you need to have critical thinking skills. You need to be able to read, write and do math. And you need to understand our history and civics in a complete way.”
“The way it is now, anything that has to do with America is removed or made negative. They don’t teach civics at all. There needs to be a healthy nationalism – that word doesn’t have to mean extreme. It’s keeping your culture, but being American. There’s nothing wrong with keeping your family’s historic culture, but the unique bond still needs to be: America. Instead, we’re raising people to stay separate by teaching them that America is bad. You need to be able to say, I’m an American, because America is where I want to be. There are flaws, but I am going to be part of improving America. If you hate this country, you don’t care about fixing it.”
“If you’re saying ‘it’s not my country,’ what you don’t realize you’re doing is you’re also negating the accomplishments that your ancestors had – especially if you’re black and your ancestors were slaves. You can’t say on the one hand, we built this country, and then say, the country is not yours.”
“We can’t control what other people think, but we can control education, so why don’t we focus on that? Education might be the best place to work because it affects everything else, and you can also work with people when they’re younger. Let’s put people in positions where they can achieve regardless of what’s going on. We all seem to agree and understand that, no matter what racism exists, your prospects increase dramatically if you’re educated. And you’re pretty likely not to live in poverty, regardless of your race, and regardless of racism, if you achieve certain things academically and have the skills or if you follow a certain sequence.”
“Instead of complaining about problems, let’s focus on the solution.”
Charles Love
Chicago, Illinois
Charles Love is the Executive Director of Seeking Educational Excellence, a non-profit whose mission is to empower disadvantaged students to reach their full potential. In addition, he is the host of The Charles Love Show and a scholar at 1776 Unites.
