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1 " My parents already know I'm bereft of their culture, that their son is almost as Frank or Bill as any other American, but they also believe this is necessary: that if their son is to become president, it won't happen while he is wearing a turban. They're willing to surrender their culture in order to assure my success, which means the price of my inclusion here is our alienation from each other. "
― , Of Color
2 " The white masters, masters though they may be, are oblivious to those experiences of bigotry and exclusion that are condemnably common for the rest of us. In this essential matter, those writers of the literary canon are utterly ignorant, and so their reports on the human condition are gapingly incomplete. And still there are critics who argue that lyricism is a finished thing, that a white account of the self is a sufficiently universal contemplation, that any emphasis on race will only diminish its universality. "
3 " The thing I least believe about race in America is that we can disregard it. I'm nowehere close to alone in this, and yet the person I encounter far more often than the racist is the one who believes race isn't an active factor in her thinking, isn't an influence on his interactions with the racial other. "
4 " Shifting demographics are cited as evidence of the continued dimishment of white thriving. The arrival of minorities where they haven't been permitted or expected before--in the White House, on television, in literary journals, at book award ceremonies--are framed as coming at the expense of white achievement. But the losses of one white person, or even of several white people, don't represent the losses of all white people. To see evidence of a systemic conspiracy in a person of color's asecnsion to any position once held exclusively by white people, exclusively for white people, is to mistake the outlier for the system. Rather than acknowledging my experiences of racist abuse or anyone else's rather than confronting the real threats people of color in this country face daily, the claim to reverse racism creates a false equivalency between subjugation and inconvenience. "