Fortunately, there are also wiser voices around. One of them is the American writer Thomas Chatterton Williams. In his recent memoir, Self-Portrait in Black and White, Williams writes: “One way or another, we are going to have to figure out how to make our multi-ethnic realities work, and one of the great intellectual projects facing us—in America and abroad—will be to develop a vision of ourselves strong and supple enough both to acknowledge the lingering importance of inherited group identities while also attenuating, rather than reinforcing, the extent to which such identities are able to
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