Politics & Power Quote by Constance Baker Motley

Motley’s sentence is doing two kinds of work at once: locating her inside the American origin story, then prying that story open to show what it was built to exclude. “The oldest settled part of the nation” sounds like civic bragging, the kind of phrase used to claim legitimacy and inheritance. She takes that inherited prestige and flips it into an indictment. If the nation’s “oldest” places are also where racism was “officially mooted,” then racism isn’t a regional glitch or a late corruption. It’s baked into the country’s early institutions, the part people are most eager to romanticize.

The word choice is surgical. “Environment” suggests something ambient, breathed in daily, not just encountered in dramatic confrontations. “Officially” points to systems rather than feelings: laws, school policies, hiring practices, courtroom norms. And “mooted” is the stealthiest barb in the line. It’s legalistic, almost polite, implying racism was not merely practiced but debated, normalized, given a hearing as a legitimate public question. That diction matters coming from an activist who became a civil rights lawyer and later a federal judge: she’s speaking in the language of institutions because she spent her life forcing those institutions to answer for themselves.

The subtext is a refusal of comforting geography. Northern liberal mythology likes to outsource racism to “somewhere else.” Motley’s biography undermines that alibi: she is from the “settled” center, and that center still required extraordinary struggle to make its promises apply. The intent isn’t confession; it’s evidence.