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b4e9a24
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We were lying on our backs in the foothills, watching the sky and making a list called "Never." All the things we would never do. Let's never get married. Let's never get fat. Let's never sleep with a married man. Let's never stop being students, even after we graduate. Let's never get dull-eyed and ironic. Let's never get stuck in a rut-- or trapped in a life we didn't choose. Let's never grow bitter." --
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Danzy Senna |
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54984f4
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He began to talk about the fact that race was not only a construct but a scientific error along the magnitude of the error that the world was flat. . . 'And when they discover their mistake, I mean, truly discover it, it'll be as big as when they learned the world was, in fact, round. It'll open up a whole new world. And nothing will ever be the same.
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Danzy Senna |
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4064b6a
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Looking at those photographs, I remembered how my parents had never said "I love you" to each other. How they had said only "I miss you." At the time, I hadn't been able to figure out what this meant. But now it seemed clear: this was how they defined their love--by how deeply they missed each other when they were together. They felt the loss before it happened, and their love was defined by that loss. They hungered even as they ate, thirst..
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Danzy Senna |
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d064bed
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It's funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, 'I want to go home.' But then you come home, and of course it's not the same. You can't live with it, you can't live away from it. And it seems like from then on there's always this yearning for some place that doesn't exist. I felt that. Still do. I'm never completely at home anywhere. But it's a good place to be, I think. It's like floating. From up above, you c..
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Danzy Senna |
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7369da8
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When there is a gap--between your face and your race, between the baby and the mother, between your body and yourself--you are expected, everywhere you go, to explain the gap.
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identity
multiracial
race
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Danzy Senna |
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83141d1
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I wondered if whiteness were contagious. If it were, then surely I had caught it. I imagined this "condition" affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and at its most advanced stage, the way I looked at the world and at other people."
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whiteness
race
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Danzy Senna |
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06b627e
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She has decided all university campuses are alike- the sense of possibility and stasis. She thinks this too: all graduate students, if you look closely enough, exude the same aura of privilege and poverty.
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university
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Danzy Senna |
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b2ff507
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My father tells me that the further you get away from an experience, the deeper it roots itself inside of you. Don't fool yourself, baby, he said. Time does not heal and history is not progressive.
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Danzy Senna |
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35970fe
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much privilege leads to bad manners,
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Danzy Senna |
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a414706
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and very carefully to them the truth of what you know, but with kindness in your heart. Have compassion for them, because not everybody starts on an equal playing field. Love, Gloria
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Danzy Senna |
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980d2ab
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I recalled a theory my father had concocted one night, while we sat in an Oakland juke joint sharing a plate of ribs. He'd said humor, above all else, was what bound each of us and separated each of us from one another. Humor was the great moment of truth. What we thought was funny was how we defined ourselves, and revealed ourselves, whether we knew it or not.
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Danzy Senna |
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2335757
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He seemed particularly insistent. I both did and didn't want to be left alone at the house with my mother. There was an aching in my chest that surprised me, and my eyes were watering up against my will.
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Danzy Senna |
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886188a
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We learn in school that the civil rights movement was about overcoming segregation. But as my father has pointed out to me, what an oddly neutral word - segregation to describe what was happening in this country. We prefer it to more blunt descriptions of that social arrangement: subjugation, oppression. And perhaps, also, we don't want to acknowledge the ways in which we were not segregated at all, the ways in which the lives of black and ..
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Danzy Senna |
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02df379
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I think the narcolepsy is adorable. Someday you'll be happy for these little lulls. Who the fuck wants a man to be awake all the time?
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Danzy Senna |
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4fa490a
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My father's subject: the relationship between history and the individual. He believes everybody is an 'excretion' of his or her environment. That's the word he uses. Excretion.
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Danzy Senna |
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8b1d69f
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something--to make something right and final--is to kill it.
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Danzy Senna |
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3181a61
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She is beginning to understand that completion is not so much about reaching perfection as it is making the choice to look away from the material. What was it Khalil used to say when she couldn't finish a paper in college? Be a
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Danzy Senna |
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1847c2f
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Don't hate white people. They can't help it. They have a learning disability. They need your compassion. They need accommodations. They are like preschoolers--their understanding of race is so basic. They can't be faulted for being uncomfortable with somebody who has what amounts to a graduate degree in race--that is, us. It's not fair for preschoolers to be placed in the same classroom with graduate students and be forced to compete. Pity ..
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Danzy Senna |