As the mores and laws of the South made such liaisons illegitimate by law and nonexistent in speech, race mixing became an erasable element of one’s past. Sexual intimacy between blacks and whites was not a subversive act provided it was not formally acknowledged.
As they wrote Jim Crowe into law, purveyors of sectional reconciliation largely erased the campaign for black equality—and often black people themselves—from the history books.
I think that's something that we as black people in this country have been robbed of. I compare it to my brother's wife, who is Hispanic. She was born in America but her parents are from Honduras. She speaks Spanish. She knows the culture. But most black people, we were robbed of that. We don't know our heritage.
The rumor is Chu Hing really wanted the 'Green Turtle' to be Chinese American, but the publisher didn't think that would sell. If you read those books, the hero almost always has his back facing the camera so you can't see his face. When he turns around, his face is obscured.
When you hear my records today hear a vanilla sounding artist with no black inflection, although I was trying to imitate what I heard.
A lot of people decide, if you're mixed, you're black. And so they try to force you to choose a culture.
When people talked about O.J. Simpson being race-neutral, that was a race card. It just meant we don't think of him as black. But race-neutral is just like flesh-tone Band-aids. It's not neutral; it's white.
It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.
If you read the memoirs of slave-owning families, you'd be hard pressed to find evidence of black people in the lives of the whites, even though for most of the time on the plantations black people outnumbered whites by a ratio of seven to one.
When I was in school, I conceptually didn't want black people to have context, to take it out of all that history. I wanted nothing to indicate where they are or what time it is, to place them anywhere.
Sometimes I even feel funny to say I'm in a biracial marriage because people are like, 'Oh, he's Asian?' The subtext is, 'Who cares? You didn't marry a black person.'
Many people have told me that once they learn of Madam Walker's accomplishments they are surprised, even embarrassed, that they have never heard of her. But they shouldn't be. Her extraordinary story was simply omitted from the history books.
My family is Jamaican. We were just the slaves that were dropped off over there. And at the end of the day when you live and exist as a Black person in America, at least to white society, to a certain extent, no one is asking where you're from and where you were born.
I think that for the most part, black people specifically have sort of been used as props in TV shows as a way to move story along or as a way to make things more entertaining.
Often people would mistake me for white when I was younger, and I didn't correct them; there would be a period of time that they just thought I was.
The reason that I like to use classical myths as models is because African American writers and African American stories are usually understood as occurring in some kind of vacuum - because of slavery.
When people say Jerry Lee Lewis invented rock n' roll, they forget Little Richard. People talk about Elvis Presley and forget he was singing black music. I don't blame Elvis. It was the music business figuring it could make more money from this music if it weren't presented from the original source.
Please don't erase my race because I'm white-passing. There is literally nothing I can do about my complexion.
[It is possible] that the race of red men ... will, before many generations, be remembered only as a strange, weird, dream-like specter, which has passed once before the eyes of men, but had departed forever.
Pop culture says that if a black girl is to be taken seriously, she has to assimilate and be as white as possible, to the point of bleaching her hair blonde.
Most African Americans, if given a chance, would have chosen to be 'just Americans' ever since the first of us was brought here to Jamestown colony in 1619, a year before the Mayflower landed. But that choice has never been left up to us.
White writers in many cases choose not to populate their fiction with people of color. A lot of what I'm doing is trying to write against that, not about race but against the avoidance of race that's such a dominant model in white literary discourse.
There are fewer representations of black figures in the historical record.
