Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I lament that Paris can be a threatening space for Jews, Roma, Africans and Arabs, but the truth is, as a black American, I've never felt safer or less harassed anywhere.
I am not renouncing my blackness and going on about my day. I am rejecting the legitimacy of the entire racial construct in which blackness functions as one orienting pole.
A map of Trump country would look a lot like a map of the various regions and counties from which young people with the best opportunities have consistently chosen to flee.
Like my father, I used to believe that hard work and mastery of a standardized exam was the fairest way for students like me to compete with those who had far more resources.
We are all living in a techno-dystopian fantasy, the Internet-connected portals we rely on rendering the world in all its granular detail and absurdity like Borges's 'Aleph.'
There were books all over the house, and I was always told that I could write and that it was something good to do. So when I finally did it, it wasn't so strange or bizarre.
There are few things more American than falling back on the language of race when what we're really talking about is class or, more accurate still, manners, values and taste.
A couple of years ago, leaving a restaurant near the Louvre, I held the door for a black man in a camel overcoat. Only as he passed did I realize it was the rapper Kanye West.
BET was a touchstone for me and a lot of my friends - it was a place you could go to see exactly what being black in 1992 and 1996 was like and what it was supposed to look like.
I have spent my whole life earnestly believing the fundamental American dictum that a single 'drop of black blood' makes a person 'black' primarily because they can never be 'white.'
We would have a much more honest and respected political system if the Republican party could no longer squeeze out as much success from white resentment and white identity politics.
To speak about yourself, you must first be able to assemble a sense of origin. For descendants of slaves, this has proved one of the most precious losses of self-knowledge we've endured.
The problem is, authentic hip-hop culture is street culture. And so you've got middle-class blacks really emulating the norms of the South Bronx, which is not really in their best interests.
Racism is a perceptive error, and what you actually have to do is you have to get into spaces where you're meeting people and perceiving them as human beings and not as racial stereotypes and myths.
The truth is that ideas matter... If we really want to repair what is wrong in our society, it is going to require not just new policies or even new behaviors, but nothing less heroic than new ideas.
Like neurotics obsessed with amputating their own healthy limbs, middle-class blacks concerned with 'keeping it real' are engaging in gratuitously self-destructive and violently masochistic behavior.
I think it's absolutely undeniable that nobody really advocates for complete total speech without any consequence or absolute freedom of expression. There's a line that most of us agree on somewhere.
My father very early on had both short and long-term strategies in his approach to raising his children, so my father was disturbed by the extent to which I was interested in both hip-hop and sports.
Martha's Vineyard is a very strange place, racially speaking. Or maybe it's the way things could be if everyone had a bit more money and job security and status and could meet on equal enough footing.
A lot of people say there's no such thing as cancel culture and then you name an example and they're, like, 'That person deserved it,' so then there is cancel culture, but it works in its accountability.
Years ago, I worked briefly as a consultant for Sciences-Po, one of Paris's famed grandes ecoles, encouraging American high school students and their parents to pursue an English-language education abroad.
In this post-post-racial, post-Obama era of resurgent populism and Balkanized identity politics, it really does feel as though it matters - and matters more than anything else - whether you're black or white.
Paris has long been a palimpsest of different cities, each new iteration grafted on top of the still visible last, spanning the extremes of human excellence and beauty and, just as crucially, filth and squalor.
Why does a writer labor over nuance and context if it won't be respected, if a critic insists on ignoring the writing at hand in favor of a more convenient analysis of his or her own particular pet peeves and straw men?
I grew up in New Jersey, but my parents are from out west. They moved the family to New Jersey when my father, a sociologist by training, took a job in Newark running anti-poverty programs for the Episcopal Archdiocese.
I think I was drawn to black culture by the same things that have been drawing the entire world to it since the days of Richard Wright, Josephine Baker and Louis Armstrong. This culture is original, potent and seductive.
In 'Losing My Cool,' I argue repeatedly that it is a terrible lie, which has been foisted on us and sold to us for decades now, that hip-hop culture equals black culture, that being authentically black means keeping it real.
Intellectual development was paramount to my father, of course, but he was hardly a geek. He was a man who happened to be of a certain Southern culture and a certain age, and his talents and tastes had been molded accordingly.
As we all know, the evil of slavery and the sting of the whip have given us many things including the voice of Nina Simone, the prose of James Baldwin, the Air Jordan sneaker, the blues, jazz, moonwalking, and more recently gangsta rap.
What has changed immensely in America since 2017, the first year of the Trump administration, is the relentless demonization of nonwhite immigrants, economic migrants and asylum seekers from the highest levels of institutional authority.
Whenever I ask myself what blackness means to me, I am struck by the parallels that exist between my predicament and that of many Western Jews, who struggle with questions of assimilation at a time when marrying outside the faith is common.
The problem of racial difference in America - and in modern life more broadly - is always presented as an economic, political, biological or cultural problem. But I want to say that it's at least as much a philosophical and imaginative disaster.
Mixed-race blacks have an ethical obligation to identify as black - and interracial couples share a similar moral imperative to inculcate certain ideas of black heritage and racial identity in their mixed-race children, regardless of how they look.
White people have basically been encouraged for most of recent history in America to think of themselves as outside of race. White people do have race. They need to understand how their race has been constructed as artificially as everybody else's.
I do not propose to solve the Israeli-Palestine conflict. But I do think the world would be a vastly safer place - and maybe a happier one, too - if more of us learned to see beyond our biases, our preferences, and became optimists capable of letting go.
In my own young black life, I have done my part to gentrify a half-dozen mixed neighborhoods ranging from Spanish Harlem to Fort Greene to the ninth arrondissement of Paris. Many of my well-educated black, Latino, Asian and Arab friends have done the same.
The cultural pressure for a middle-class Chinese-American to walk, talk and act like a lower-class thug from Chinatown is nil. The same can be said of Jews, or of any other ethnic group. But in black America the folly is so commonplace it fails to attract serious attention.
I've been socially deemed black in America, and this is a category that's been hurting my family for generations and that has also led to extraordinary cultural contributions that I'm very proud of, but it's not a real category and our society is damaged by insisting on it.
It's a bad strategy to have an identity-based strategy on the left. De-emphasizing identity all-around would help our politics because we would have to pay more attention to the issues. We may have to pay more attention to class if we didn't have these self-defeating identity agendas.
If the first year of the Trump administration has made anything clear, it's that experience, knowledge, education and political wisdom matter tremendously. Governing is something else entirely from campaigning. And perhaps, most important, celebrities do not make excellent heads of state.
The French, whose fascination with 19th-century Japanese painting and decorative art led them to coin the term 'Japonisme,' have reciprocated the interest, and the exchange - in food, fashion and design - is ongoing. After all, these are two countries where style is considered essential to life.
For me, what disturbs me about some of the conversations on the left is that you get the impression that times are so divisive, that there's so much discomfort with what Trump has exposed, that some people on the left don't actually have the goal of a kind of racially transcendent future. They don't want that.
Yet exactly what constitutes privilege and disadvantage can be counterintuitive: There is no metric to take into account the casual racism that I had to navigate in my neighborhood, a difficulty I was keenly aware friends of mine on the more socially cohesive and nurturing black side of town were often able to avoid.
What I know now is that I used to not just tolerate but submit to and even on some deep level need our society's web of problems called race, its received and dangerous habits of thinking about and organizing people along a binary of white and black, free and unfree, even once I suspected them to be irredeemably flawed.
If white people on a larger scale really de-emphasized their whiteness, I think that would have to transform the Republican party into a more responsible party that couldn't get by on just playing into white resentment, especially white middle and working class resentment while taking care of the interests of plutocrats.
I tried to fortify myself with the best nonfiction and fiction I could lay my hands on, from the essays of James Baldwin and Joan Didion, to the stories and novels of Ralph Ellison, Roberto Bolano and Celine. Distinctive voices like these were a source of constant nourishment on all range of matters, from punctuation to philosophy.