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since it is in the nature of tastes to differ, how can a standard erected by one person’s taste be used to cast judgement on another’s? How, for example, can we pretend that one type of music is superior or inferior to another when
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“The only certainty, it seems to me, is that those who believe they are certainly right are certainly wrong.”
― The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
― The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
“When presidential candidate Barack Obama presented himself to the black community, he was not to be believed. It strained credulity to think that a man sporting the same rigorously managed haircut as Jay-Z, a man who was a hard-core pickup basketball player, and who was married to a dark-skinned black woman from the South Side, could coax large numbers of white voters into the booth. Obama’s blackness quotient is often a subject of debate. (He himself once joked, while speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists in 2007, “I want to apologize for being a little bit late, but you guys keep on asking whether I’m black enough.”) But despite Obama’s post-election reluctance to talk about race, he has always displayed both an obvious affinity for black culture and a distinct ability to defy black America’s worst self-conceptions.”
― We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
― We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
“Whatever Obama’s other triumphs, arguably his greatest has been an expansion of the black imagination to encompass this: the idea that a man can be culturally black and many other things also—biracial, Ivy League, intellectual, cosmopolitan, temperamentally conservative, presidential.”
― We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
― We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
“Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation: These bonded white people into a broad aristocracy united by the salient fact of unblackness.”
― We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
― We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
“But any investigation into the actual details revealed that the ladders themselves were not equal—that to be a member of the “black race” in America had specific, quantifiable consequences. Not only did poor blacks tend to be much less likely to advance up their ladder, but those who did stood a much greater likelihood of tumbling back. That was because the middle-class rung of the black ladder lacked the financial stability enjoyed by the white ladder. Whites in the middle class often brought with them generational wealth—the home of a deceased parent, a modest inheritance, a gift from a favorite uncle. Blacks in the middle class often brought with them generational debt—an incarcerated father, an evicted niece, a mother forced to take in her sister’s kids. And these conditions, themselves, could not be separated out from the specific injury of racism, one that was not addressed by simply moving up a rung.”
― We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
― We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
Chris’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Chris’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
409 books
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76 friends
950 books
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837 friends
1,058 books
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394 friends
101 books
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4,804 friends
82 books
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701 friends
242 books
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570 friends
1,395 books
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299 friends
137 books
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88 friends
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Chris
Lists liked by Chris
