In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it’s almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white.
In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.
In 1957, when I was in second grade, black children integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. We watched it on TV. All of us watched it. I don’t mean Mama and Daddy and Rocky. I mean all the colored people in America watched it, together, with one set of eyes.
The thing about living in a village at the foot of a mountain is that the world for you becomes, without thinking about it, self-contained. People are of two kinds, really: from the Valley, and from Elsewhere.
An impressively researched and documented collection of the finest thought produced by writers throughout the African Diaspora. A magnificent achievement.
That’s what I mean by being bilingual: comfortable in your skin, comfortable with all parts of who you are.
If America has a civic religion, the First Amendment is its central article of faith.
I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time, but to do so in order to come out on the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color.
It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution.
The first slave to read and write was the first to run away.
You have a diasporic black world, and the only way to put it back together again is symbolic. It’s like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever could edit the ‘Encyclopedia Africana’ would provide symbolic order to the fragments created over the past 500 years. That is a major contribution.
You notice patterns. White guests often are mortified – that word again – when they learn their ancestors owned slaves. But I’ve never had a black guest who was upset to learn about white ancestry that probably involved forced sexual relations.
Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique.
Instill respect for teachers.
America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system.
The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.
Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity.
Learning to sing one’s own songs, to trust the particular cadences of own’s voices, is also the goal of any writer.
My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.
It’s fascinating how life works.