Quotes About Diversity

I once overheard a young white man at a book festival say to his friend, "Have you read the new Kureishi? Same old thing—loads of Indian people." To which you want to reply, "Have you read the new Franzen? Same old thing—loads of white people.

They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. ~ on children growing up.

We don't always have to judge difference or categorize it or criminalize it. We don't have to take it personally. We can also just let it be.

I am fascinated to presume, as a reader, that many types of people, strange to me in life, might be revealed, through the intimate space of fiction, to have griefs not unlike my own. And so I read.

kids are like pissing cats or burrowing moles, marking off land within land, each section with its own rules, beliefs, laws of engagement.

No one was more liberal than anyone else anywhere anyway. It was only that here, in Willesden, there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up against any other thing and send it running to the cellars while windows were smashed.

Liberal? Hosh-kosh nonsense!' No one was more liberal than anyone else anywhere anyway. It was only that here, in Willesden, there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up against any other thing and send it running to the cellars while windows were smashed.

We have different ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be.

A clear and unified voice. In that context, this business of being biracial, of being half black and half white, is awkward.

because white novelists are not white novelists but simply "novelists," and white characters are not white characters but simply "human," and criticism of both is not partial or personal but a matter of aesthetics. Such critics will always sound like the neutral universal, and the black women who have championed Their Eyes Were Watching God in the past, and the one doing so now, will seem like black women talking about a black book.

no geographic or racial qualification guarantees a writer her subject. Baldwin's pedigree didn't gift him The Jimmy. Only interest, knowledge and love will do that...

In a vision, Irie has seen a time, a time not far from now, when roots won't matter any more because they can't because they mustn't because they're too long and they're too tortuous and they're just buried too damn deep. She looks forward to it.

Racial homogeneity is no guarantor of peace, any more than racial heterogeneity is fated to fail.

Everybody's got their tribe. Whose tribe are you in anyway?

These forms of criticism that make black women the privileged readers of a black woman writer go against Hurston's own grain. She saw things otherwise: "When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue. . . . the cosmic Zora emerges. . . . How can anybody deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me!" This is exactly right. No one should deny themselves the pleasure of Zora—of whatever color or background or gender.

When I showed her my well-worn copy of Stormy Weather she reacted in a way I hadn't anticipated, she was offended by it—hurt, even. Why was everybody black? It was unkind, she said, to have only black people in a film, it wasn't fair. Maybe in America you could do that, but not here, in England, where everybody was equal anyway and there was no need to "go on about it." And

If my dad hadn't died young? No way I'd be here. It's the pain. Jews, gays, women, blacks—the bloody Irish. That's our secret fucking strength.

Othering whoever has othered us, in reverse, is no liberation — as cathartic as it may feel. Liberation is liberation: the recognition of somebody in everybody.

Most of us have complicated backstories, messy histories, multiple narratives. It was a high-wire strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective human messiness. His enemies latched on to its imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American nature of Dream City, this ill-defined place where you could be from Hawaii and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time, where you could jive talk like a street hustler and orate like a senator.

He saw that the highest compliment a white Englishman can give himself is the assertion that he is "color-blind," by which he means he has been able to overlook the fact of your color—to look past it—to the "you" beneath.

Nine SPEAKING IN TONGUES The following is based on a lecture given at the New York Public Library in December 2008. 1

Be completely fearless. [...]Write without constraints, or worrying about who you represent, or whether you should represent anyone, or who your audience is, or what you can or can't do with a female character, or a black character, or someone of restricted growth, or someone who's hugely fat. You must write total confidence that the fiction is its own justification.

Hey! 'Hey!' But there was no name to put on the end of Hey and a six foot two black man shouting Hey in a dense crowd does not create easiness wherever he goes.

I knew there was something not quite right about her rigid notions—black music, white music—that there must be a world somewhere in which the two combined.