Quotes About Identity

Whiteness (and blackness) have been historically created, and it is necessary to understand some key insights into the formation of 'whiteness' and 'blackness',

But crucially, the difficulties surrounding racial classification also meant that definitions of black and white remained indeterminate.

However, blackness, no less than whiteness, has been and continues to be a socially constructed and therefore highly contentious racial description.

This is the paradox of being white and 'seeing white', but being to all intents and purposes 'invisible' or, more appropriately, as Frankenberg, Garner, and other sociologists of 'whiteness' have suggested, 'unmarked'. In Western societies

In the light of the history sketched out above, it should be clear, counterintuitive though it may seem, that 'whiteness' (and 'blackness') is as much achieved as ascribed.

the populations being discussed as 'Muslims' were already racialized as 'Pakis' and 'Arabs'. So the point about whether Muslims are a race or not is somewhat beside the point. 'Muslims' have only appeared in the frame of 'race' after they had already put in an appearance in the framework of racialization, but under another guise, before they themselves began to assert the Islamic aspect of their identities,

The non-white person therefore stands accused of a perverse form of racism: 'reverse racism'.

Essentialism' denotes the view that members of a group share one or more defining characteristics which are innate and unalterable.

Anthropomorphic measurements and detailed genealogies were conducted, which showed that hybrid populations resulting from 'mixture' between blacks and whites displayed a homogeneity which was even greater than that found among those of 'pure' European descent.

the concept of race simply refused to provide unambiguously different types. To put it differently, no 'pure' races could be identified.

encounters between police and young black and Asian men are not solely defined by racialization; they become contests of masculinity. Racialization is interwoven with other forms of identity, as we shall see in the discussion of 'intersectionality'.

in the Cheddar Gorge area of Somerset, revealed that these Britons were far from the light-skinned, straight- and fair-haired humans that they had been supposed to be.

However, this is by no means an argument that prevents us from recognizing the myriad ways in which Muslims are racialized.

Cause nobody's the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves - except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends. Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineerings of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark.

The proper word for me," Robin Goodman says, "is me.

You never stop being yourself on the inside, whatever age people think you are by looking at you from the outside.

He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life. But he really looked like a girl. She was the most beautiful boy I'd ever seen in my life.

Imagine if you made something and then you always had to be seen through what you'd made, as if the thing you'd made became you.

Is there any escaping the junkshop of the self?

This isn't fiction, the man says. This is the Post Office.

Fear is one of my belongings. Fear will always be a part of any belonging, anywhere, that I ever do, for the rest of my life. I fought hard, to get here to your country. And the first thing you did when I arrived was hand me a letter saying, "Welcome to a country in which you are not welcome. You are now a designated unwelcome person with whom we will do as we please.

What if the girl says. Instead of saying, this border divides places. We said, this border holds together two really interesting different places. What if we declared border crossings places where, listen, when you crossed them, you yourself became doubly possible.

An idiolect. That's what he is, a language no one else alive in the world speaks. He is the last living speaker of himself. He's been too blithe, he'd forgotten for a whole train journey, for almost a whole day, that he himself is dead as a disappeared grammar, a graveyard scatter of phonemes and morphemes.

We all mine and undermine and landmine ourselves, in our own ways, in our own time, Sophia thinks.