“Only by creating loyal­ties to something more universal than our im­mediate tribe — to ideas and values like community, tolerance, plural­ism, and equality — can we begin the process of reciprocity and reconcil­iation between blacks and Jews.”

“Growing up in New Orleans,” you told me later, “it would be impossible to see race as anything but socially constructed. But that doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

“Once a privileged sign of white femininity, ‘blondness’ is now simply a sign of the freedom of choice.”

“As in: white people and how they fuck and is there anything to it.”

Whiteness is invisible, empty of content, a conceptual black hole to be found Herewith, a guide to help fill in the blanc.

“We now have three key white modes of dealing with multiracial America — offense, defense, and self­-abasement.”

“My mother is white. And I am black. This is how I choose to define myself and this is how America chooses to define me. I have no regrets about my racial classification other than to lament, off and on, that classifications exist period.”

“Although you might not think so, the phrase ‘white people’ is, in and of itself, a slur against white people.”

“I suppose that’s the white thing: never having to define what you are, while other people scramble to define themselves in relationship to you.”

“When did whites come into the world? When was the first time that Europeans, faced with otherness, looked at each other and said, ‘We’re white’?”