Quotes About Identity

We have to work extra hard, because we in America are very ethnocentric--we think our culture is superior. Why's that? It's because we've got moon rocks, and nobody else has moon rocks.

It's more about what this training teaches a man about himself than a skill he'll take with him into the groups or into combat," Captain Shields added.

My father always insisted that Persians basically did not have a home, except in their literature, especially their poetry. This country, our country, he would say, has been attacked and invaded numerous times, and each time, when Persians had lost their sense of their own history, culture and language, they found their poets as the true guardians of their true home." - Foreword by Azar Nafisi

I inherited my brother's life. Inherited his desk, his business, his gadgets, his enemies, his horses and his mistress. I inherited my brother's life, and it nearly killed me.

When I had finished dressing, I took another look in the same long mirror. There was the man who had come from Australia four months ago, a man in a good dark-gray suit, a white shirt, and a navy-blue silk tie; there was his shell, anyway. Inside I wasn't the same man, nor ever would be again.

How not to sound like a upper class man. It had been mostly a matter, I'd found, of speaking not far back in the throat but up behind the teeth, a reversal of the way I'd just painstakingly learned to speak French like a Frenchman

I did not do anything. They had a go at me for being who I am That doesn't make sense Conrad said, People don't get attacked just for being who they are Tell that to the Jews Dart said

Dear Momma?Wherever you are, if ever you hear the word nigger again, remember they are advertising my book.

I was learning that just being a Negro doesn't qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine.

We have problems all over the world today, because men cease to be individuals. We like to identify with everything other than ourselves. We like to identify with groups, races, religions, you hear it every day. 'I'm Italian! I'm German! I'm Negro! I'm Jewish!' So what? Do you realize that when you identify with anything other than yourself, first as an individual, you have a cheap way out a lot of your own shortcomings?

I guess that makes me as white as you now, boy. I got your spit inside me.

Was mir vor allen Dingen unbestreitbar vorkommt, ist die Tatsache, das ein solches Ausbleiben des Klassengefühls eine bürgerliche Kindheit kennzeichnet. Die Herrschenden merken nicht, dass ihre Welt nur einer partikularen, situierten Wahrheit entspricht (so wie ein Weißer sich nicht seines Weißseins und ein Heterosexueller sich nicht seiner Heterosexualität bewusst ist).

Para poder inventarme, antes que nada, debía disociarme.

The boundaries that divide these worlds help define within each of them radically different ways of perceiving what it is possible to be or to become, of perceiving what it is possible to aspire to or not.

Pero mi vida no sólo está acechada por el porvenir, también lo está por los fantasmas de mi propio pasado, que surgieron luego del deceso de quien encarnaba todo lo que yo había querido abandonar, todo con lo que había querido romper y que, seguramente, había constituido para mí una suerte de modelo social negativo, un contrapunto en el trabajo que había llevado a cabo para crearme a mí mismo.

American socialists have introduced a unique element—identity politics—that Marx would have repudiated and other socialists assiduously avoided. Consequently, American socialism deserves its own name, and the name I propose is "identity socialism.

Bill Ayers, Frank Marshall Davis, Edward Said, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, and Jeremiah Wright. This is a group I've previously called "Obama's founding fathers.

My agenda for this book is twofold: first, to make the moral argument against identity socialism, and second, to make the moral argument for free market capitalism. I will debunk the socialist dream and affirm the American dream. These arguments are not a simple matter of ideological refutation.

No Scandinavian has ever identified American socialism as resembling Scandinavian socialism, even in embryo. The defining features of American socialism and the American Left (identity politics, class and ethnic division, and social intimidation to enforce these categories) are simply absent in the Nordic countries. -chapter 4

The point of this is not merely to teach ethnic pride or self-esteem. Nor is it, as usually advertised, a campaign to defeat "hate." Rather, it is to teach Hispanics—along with blacks, Native Americans and Asian Americans—to each affirm their ethnic identity and, even more, to define it in resistance to a white identity or even a unified American identity.

One prominent Democrat, South Carolina governor (and later senator) Ben Tillman, explained how this came about. "Republicanism means Negro equality, while the Democratic Party means that the white man is superior. That's why we Southerners are all Democrats."4

Whiteness, maleness and heterosexuality are now viewed as pathological, as forms of oppression. In this way, the left by design seeks to demonize white male heterosexuals and thus make a large body of Americans feel like aliens in their own country.

Today's socialist Left, however, wants an America that integrates the groups seen as previously excluded while excluding the group that was previously included. "If you are white, male, heterosexual, and religiously or socially conservative," writes author and editor Rod Dreher, "there's no place for you" on the progressive left.

Today when Republicans who are black, Hispanic, or Native American expose Democratic chicanery, they are routinely denounced—not just by Democrats but also by their allies in the press—as sellouts and, in the case of African Americans, "Uncle Toms.