“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.”
June 11, 2020
“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”
Originally published August 1, 1995
“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.”
Originally published July 25, 1995
“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.”
Originally published March 20, 1984
“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.”
Originally published December 6, 1994
“Once a privileged sign of white femininity, ‘blondness’ is now simply a sign of the freedom of choice.”
Originally published May 18, 1993
“As in: white people and how they fuck and is there anything to it.”
Originally published May 18, 1993
Whiteness is invisible, empty of content, a conceptual black hole to be found Herewith, a guide to help fill in the blanc.
Originally published May 18, 1993
“We now have three key white modes of dealing with multiracial America — offense, defense, and self-abasement.”
Originally published May 18, 1993
“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.”
Originally published May 18, 1993