Let me tell you, never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period, in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.

Gregory frames Black advancement as historically unprecedented in speed and scale, implicitly measuring the post–civil rights era against centuries of enforced exclusion. The claim is both celebratory and admonitory: progress is real, but it has been impeded by mutual self-deception—white America’s comforting myths about equality already achieved and some Black Americans’ internal or strategic acceptance of those myths. By stressing “lying to one another,” he points to the social costs of denial: it blunts urgency, distorts policy debates, and weakens solidarity. The quote reflects Gregory’s characteristic blend of optimism about collective resilience and skepticism toward narratives that sanitize ongoing structural inequities.