Quotes About Identity

And of course you want the days to add up to something more than you came in and out of the sun and drank the potable water of your developed world--

a friend once told you there exists the medical term—John Henryism—for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.

The girl is Catholic with waist-length brown hair. You can't remember her name: Mary? Catherine? You never really speak except for the time she makes her request and later when she tells you you smell good and have features more like a white person. You assume she thinks she is thanking you for letting her cheat and feels better cheating from an almost white person.

I don't think white people identify themselves as white Americans. They think their perspective is objective. They don't realize they're always invested in the advancement of white people.

And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.

And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description. I

underscore the difficulty inherent in any attempt by black artists to metabolize real rage.

And you are not the guy and and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.

Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists the medical term - John Henryism - for people exposed to the stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.

The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much to you—

What happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you. It's not yours. Not yours only." - Claudia Rankine (cited near the title page of 'An American Marriage")

What happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you. It's not yours. Not yours only. - Claudia Rankine (cited near the title page of 'An American Marriage' by Tayari Jones)

Patricia Williams has pointed out in The Alchemy of Race and Rights: "The cold game of equality staring makes me feel like a thin sheet of glass…. I could force my presence, the real me contained in those eyes, upon them, but I would be smashed in the process." Interviewed

Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. You can feel everyone lean in. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this. For

Charlotte: Racism exists outside of reason. Black people have never been human. Charles: That is so hopeless. Charlotte: Go further into that hopelessness, and then we can really begin to see each other.

If white people don't see their whiteness, how can they speak to it? Was the student white? Who wrote the scenario? Does diversity not include any training to see ourselves or is it simply about addressing black grievance?

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really just say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed?

Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists the medical term--John Henryism--for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.

A friend argues that Americans battle between the "historical self" and the "self self." By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning.

By landscape we also mean memory...

Just us, just people, the same people, but what is it that the just people are feeling or wanting or being? The brouhaha so brutal, rising, rising up, rise up. What rises up within, between us? What comes up because we are the history within us?

I made myself platinum, but I was born a dirty blonde.

History shows that it is not only senseless and cruel, but also difficult to state who is a foreigner.

Today, questioning oneself about Europe means asking oneself how one relates to Germany.