"Most people would say "Ah, Mahatma Gandhi, what a wonderful man, Mother Teresa, maybe Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Dalai Lama." And when you look at those people it's not the macho, aggressive, successful people, we may envy them, their bank balances and kind of thing, yes and for being successful. But we do not revere them."

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Theoretically, you can make, obviously, a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps. That those were wrongs done to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it's not in the form of individual reparations checks, but in the form of a Marshall Plan, in order to close those gaps. It is easy to make that theoretical argument.

— Barack Obama