Quotes from Wahneema Lubiano

Lee Rainwater and William Yancey have suggested, "The year 1965 may be known in history as the time when the civil rights movement discovered, in the sense of becoming explicitly aware, that abolishing legal racism would not produce Negro equality.

He looks out on a raging battlefield and sees error everywhere, and he thinks he can find the truth by avoiding error. —Lerone Bennett, "Tea and Sympathy: Liberals and Other White Hopes," 1964

The truth is that it is the refusal to see race—the willful color blindness of the liberal camp—that acquiesces to the racial status quo, and does so by consigning blacks to a twilight zone where they are politically invisible

West harkens back to the halcyon days when there was "a vital community bound by its ethical ideals."56 Unfortunately, oppression does not always produce such felicitous outcomes, and the victims of oppression are not always ennobled by their experience and an inspiration to the rest of us.

whites' obsessive preoccupation with the happenstance of skin color?

Friedman described the situation in 1963 in these epigrammatic terms: "to the Negro demand for 'now,' to which the Deep South has replied 'never,' many liberal whites are increasingly responding 'later.

Baldwin wrote in Notes of a Native Son that because he loved America "more than any other country in the world," he insisted on the right "to criticize her perpetually."49 Our love for black America demands no less.

Counterracism was never an option.

The current anticrime debate takes place within a reified mathematical realm - a strategy reminiscent of Malthus's notion of the geometrical increase in population and the arithmetical increase in food sources, thus the inevitability of poverty and the means of suppressing it: war, disease, famine, and natural disasters.

Since language is community, if the cognitive ecology of a language is altered, so is the community.

As ethnic groups struggle to be a part of the mainstream, they are often forced to make a place for themselves by serving the interests of the state.

To understand that antiracist and antihomophobic politics are informed by a common ethical interest is to create the possibility of coalition across difference.

difference that is prized but unprivileged,

Far from being destroyed, however, the white "politics of difference" is now being trumpeted as an ideology of victimization. The situation would be farcical if it weren't so dangerous, reflecting venerable white anxieties and fortifying the drift to the right which, now as in the past, is highly conducive to race-baiting

Black nationalism establishes itself as counter to the narrativizing of race as class within this social order.

Not only ordinary individuals, but even specialists—say, anthropologists or sociologists or geneticists—cannot present a convincing rationale for distinguishing among human groups by physical characteristics. Our "second nature," our "common sense" about race, it turns out, is deeply uncertain, almost mythical.

Our dire political situation demands that we reinvent coalition politics, not as an alternative to the "politics of difference," but as a supplement to it. A radical democratic politics would permit both plural and singular organizational projects, both multiracial and particular types of initiatives.

In the retreat to a heterosexist conception of black identity, the jargon of racial authenticity does not repudiate but instead reveals its reliance on the white supremacist logic from which it purports to declare its independence.

But the time may come when this becomes a possibility, in the context of a stronger multiracial movement for radical democracy.

No individual belongs to "just" one socially constructed category: each has his or her multiple racial, gender, class-based, national identities, and that's just a start of the list. Nor are these categories uniform or stable; we are Whitmanesque, we contain multitudes.

Ironically, the heteronormative vision of a unitary racial identity that would suppress sexual difference among African Americans does not exorcise the specter of white supremacy from the body of black America, but rather reincorporates white racism's phobic conceptions of black sexuality in the denigrated figure of the colored homosexual.

To recognize our many selves is to understand the vast social construction that is not only the individual, but history itself, the present as history. A radical democratic politics must invite us to comprehend this.

Not through repression, but through knowledge of the differences within ourselves can we achieve the solidarity with others which, though necessarily partial, is essential for the creation of a more just and free world.

the Howard speech is a prime example of what Moynihan calls "semantic infiltration."20 This term refers to the appropriation of the language of one's political opponents for the purpose of blurring distinctions and molding it to one's own political position.