5
" I felt sick with hatred then for my own people. If you had asked me why I hated them, I might have said that I hated them for being so loud and for being so drunk. But now I believe I hated them for suddenly being my people, not just other people. In the United States, it is very easy for me to forget that the people around me are my people. It is easy, with all our divisions, to think of myself as an outsider in my own country. I have been taught, and I have learned well, I realize now, to think of myself as distinctly different from other white folks - more educated, more articulate, less crude. But in Mexico these distinctions became as meaningless to me as they should have always been. "
― Eula Biss , Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays
15
" When I think about the nature of guilt, I think, inevitably, about “Notes of a Native Son.” In that essay James Baldwin writes about the bitterness and anger that destroyed his father, and then about the bitterness and anger he feels toward his father, feelings so closely tied to his feelings about his country that they cannot be untangled. “I saw nothing very clearly,” he writes, “but I did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart. "
― Eula Biss , Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays
17
" A Union soldier serving in the South said of the freedman, “Human or not, there he is in our midst, millions strong; and if he is not educated mentally and morally, he will make us trouble.” That, in short, is the theory on which our public school system is based. By 1880 it had already developed its fundamental characteristics—it was, and is, as Michael Katz writes, “universal, tax-supported, free, compulsory, bureaucratic, racist, and class-biased. "
― Eula Biss , Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays
