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21 " Slowly I began to realized," [Eddie] Murphy says later in voice-over, after a white clerk won't let him pay for a newspaper, "that when white people are alone, they give things to each other for free. "
― Thomas Page McBee , Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man
22 " [...] passing exists because we categorize bodies into social binaries like race, class, and gender, and where there are binaries, there is usually reward (economic, social) and a price (family, community, identity) to crossing over to the "other" side. "
23 " Race is an idea, not a fact," Nell Irvin Painter wrote in The History of White People. Regardless, race evolved through a collective complicity where virtually every wave of "white" immigrants learned to shed their old cultures. These "expansions of whiteness," Painter argues, included more and more immigrants and ethnicities until only "people of color" were left behind. "
24 " I didn't yet realize that fighting was mostly about what you did when you were overpowered. This man, backed into a corner, learning how to fight—this was a glimpse of who I was under the rubble of trauma and expectation and loss. "
25 " People sometimes think that being trans means I live "between" worlds, but that's not exactly true. If anything, it has just created within me a potential for empathy that I must work every day, like a muscle, to grow. "
26 " To call a man a fool is not necessarily an insult," said the philosopher Sam Keen, "for the authentic life has frequently been pictured under the metaphor of the fool. In figures such as Socrates, Christ, and the Idiot of Dostoyevsky we see that foolishness and wisdom are not always what they seem to be. "
27 " When I'd left the apartment, Jess did not tell me to be careful but wished me luck instead. It was a measure of adulthood, I thought, carrying my bag down the stairs, that no one was around anymore to worry over my body in the way a mother does. What a burden and freedom to be the sole person in charge of my safety, to risk what I wanted of it, and to be trusted to survive. "