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 think that unlearning race for black people is more along the lines of seriously saying blackness isn't real, race isn't real.
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.
I'm the son of a Black man who was born in the segregated South.
When I look at my daughter now, I see another facet of myself, I see my own inimitable child.
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.
I momentarily but genuinely believed that Barack Obama was the answer not only to our nation's depressing politics but to the question of our racial enlightenment.
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.
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.
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.
Pent-up white racism did fire Mr. Trump's candidacy, and he happily fanned the flames.
Well, I think that hip-hop is not just a music. It's really a culture and it's a way of life.
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.
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.'
I believe that a lot of minority writers stress about whether they get pigeonholed in writing about identity stuff, like you can't write about other things.
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.
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.
Pleas for white acceptance of black humanity have a long and terrible history in America, stretching back to the first slave narratives.
When I was in college, the Roots, the sui generis ensemble from Philadelphia encompassing all manner of black music, played a show on campus.
Though I'd always known in an intellectual way that rock and roll was a 'black' form - the way I know that English breakfast tea is Indian - I had never felt this truth.
