“Just look at all the T-shirts, the buttons, the photographs, the records, the film and video appearances. Malcolm is today's black hero, a black ideal for turbulent times: the steely mirror image we want ourselves to see.”
“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.”
“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.”
