|
36a3c22
|
"You see," he said turning to Mr Norton, "he has eyes and ears and a good distended African nose, but he fails to understand the simple facts of life. Understand. Understand? It's worse than that. He registers with his senses but short-circuits his brain. Nothing has meaning. He takes it in but he doesn't digest it. Already he is--well, bless my soul! Behold! a walking zombie! Already he's learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He's invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir! The mechanical man!"
|
|
invisibility
race-in-america
|
Ralph Ellison |
|
374a48e
|
In most black people, there is a South Side, a sense of home, that never leaves, and yet to compete in the world, we have to go forth. So we learn to code-switch and become bilingual. We save our Timberlands for the weekend, and our jokes for the cats in the mail room. Some of us give ourselves up completely and become the mask, while others overcompensate and turn every dustup into the Montgomery bus boycott. But increasingly, as we move into the mainstream, black folks are taking a third road -- becoming ourselves.
|
|
bilingualism
black-people
minorities
race-in-america
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
d82e290
|
You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.
|
|
racism
disparities
systematic-oppression
systematic-racism
race-relations
race-in-america
|
James Baldwin |
|
de96818
|
it trains the kid in question to determine when people in the corner of his eye are talking about him and when they are not, a useful skill in later life when sorting out bona-fide persecution from perceived persecution, the this-is-actually-happening from the mere paranoid manifestation
|
|
race-in-america
persecution
|
Colson Whitehead |
|
c9669a2
|
...the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.
|
|
white-privilegel
race-in-america
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
8eca955
|
"You can't write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it'll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you're going to write about race, you have to make sure it's so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn't read between the lines won't even know it's about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy." "Or just find a white writer. White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn't threatening."
|
|
race-relations
literature-about-literature
race-in-america
race
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
|
3f85bb6
|
It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the method of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the Earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves.
|
|
pedestrians
sprawl
race-in-america
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |