The tension between people is palpable, and the ideal of what it means to be and look American becomes a preoccupation to folks around the country, including me.
Raquel CepedaTags: identity america status-quo race racism race-relations latino identity-politics identity-crisis american-people american-society racial-tension latino-americans latina-americans hispanics
Many of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too.
Salman RushdieTags: racism human-rights freedom-of-expression cultural-relativism 1994
While America will always, I think, feel foreign to me, New York City is my home. This is where I can construct my own identity freely and reject labels imposed on me.
Raquel CepedaTags: freedom identity home america united-states freedom-of-thought self-awareness freedom-of-choice new-york-city race racism labels foreign homeland racial-constructs
...being Latino means being from everywhere, and that is exactly what America is supposed to be about.
Raquel CepedaTags: identity america race racism race-matters internationalism hispanic latino-american latino-american-identity racial-constructs being-latina being-latino
To both the racist and the puritan, childhood is not a time of life that we grow out of, as the life of the child grows out of the life of the parent or as a plant grows out of the soil, but a time and state of consciousness to be left behind, to cut oneself off from ... The child may be joyous, the man must be sober and self-denying; the child may be free, the man is to be "responsible"; the child may be candid in his feelings, the man must be polite, restrained, mindful of the demands of convention; the child may be playful, the man must be industrious. I am not necessarily objecting to the manly virtues, but I am objecting that they should be so exclusively assigned to grownups, and that grownups should be so exclusively restricted to them. A man may have all the prescribed adult virtues and, if he lacks the childhood virtues, still be a dunce and a bore and a liar.
Wendell BerryTags: joy childhood adulthood racism puritanism
No man will ever be whole and dignified and free except in the knowledge that the men around him are whole and dignified and free, and that the world itself is free of contempt and misuse.
Wendell BerryIt is, then, not simply a question of black power or white power, but of how meaningfully to reenfranchise human power. This, as I think Martin Luther King understood, is the real point, the real gift to America, of the struggle of the black people. In accepting the humanity of the black race, the white people will not be giving accommodation to an alien people; it will be receiving into itself half of its own experience, vital and indispensable to it, which it has so far denied at great cost.
Wendell BerryIt is not, I think, a question of when and how the white people will "free" the black and the red people. It is a condescension to believe that we have the power to do that. Until we have recognized in them the full strength and grace of their distinctive humanity we will be able to set no one free, for we will not be free ourselves. When we realize that they possess a knowledge for the lack of which we are incomplete and in pain, then the wound in our history will be healed. Then they will simply be free, among us--and so will we, among ourselves for the first time, and among them.
Wendell BerryWhen we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and "whites only" signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, goodhearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners--and wished them well--nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation... Our understanding of racism is therefore shaped by the most extreme expressions of individual bigotry, not by the way in which it functions naturally, almost invisibly (and sometimes with genuinely benign intent), when it is embedded in the structure of a social system.
Michelle AlexanderTags: injustice racism bigotry jim-crow
Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black.
Michelle AlexanderTags: injustice racism bigotry jim-crow
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