“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.”

“A handful of publishing houses account for a majority of the books published in the United States. In these companies, the question is not how many people of color they employ at decision-making levels, but whether they have any at all”

“For the first five years that I was writing for The New Yorker,” says a longtime contributor, “the closest I ever got to a person of color was a young white fact-checker with dreads.”

“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.”