The House That Race Built Quotes

“Since language is community, if the cognitive ecology of a language is altered, so is the community.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“In this moment the U.S. state has made family values a means of policing the exercise largely (but not solely) of female desire, as well as a way to establish the state's moral right to influence and even direct the private sphere.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“As ethnic groups struggle to be a part of the mainstream, they are often forced to make a place for themselves by serving the interests of the state.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“Black nationalism establishes itself as counter to the narrativizing of race as class within this social order.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“The current anticrime debate takes place within a reified mathematical realm - a strategy reminiscent of Malthus's notion of the geometrical increase in population and the arithmetical increase in food sources, thus the inevitability of poverty and the means of suppressing it: war, disease, famine, and natural disasters.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“Baldwin wrote in Notes of a Native Son that because he loved America “more than any other country in the world,” he insisted on the right “to criticize her perpetually.”49 Our love for black America demands no less.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“Ironically, the heteronormative vision of a unitary racial identity that would suppress sexual difference among African Americans does not exorcise the specter of white supremacy from the body of black America, but rather reincorporates white racism’s phobic conceptions of black sexuality in the denigrated figure of the colored homosexual.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“In the retreat to a heterosexist conception of black identity, the jargon of racial authenticity does not repudiate but instead reveals its reliance on the white supremacist logic from which it purports to declare its independence.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“To understand that antiracist and antihomophobic politics are informed by a common ethical interest is to create the possibility of coalition across difference.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“Not through repression, but through knowledge of the differences within ourselves can we achieve the solidarity with others which, though necessarily partial, is essential for the creation of a more just and free world.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“To recognize our many selves is to understand the vast social construction that is not only the individual, but history itself, the present as history. A radical democratic politics must invite us to comprehend this.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“No individual belongs to “just” one socially constructed category: each has his or her multiple racial, gender, class-based, national identities, and that’s just a start of the list. Nor are these categories uniform or stable; we are Whitmanesque, we contain multitudes.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“But the time may come when this becomes a possibility, in the context of a stronger multiracial movement for radical democracy.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“Our dire political situation demands that we reinvent coalition politics, not as an alternative to the “politics of difference,” but as a supplement to it. A radical democratic politics would permit both plural and singular organizational projects, both multiracial and particular types of initiatives.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“All the evidence suggests that once created and institutionalized, once having evolved over many centuries, racial difference is a permanent, though flexible, attribute of human society (Winant 1994). Racial categories can neither be liquidated (“color blindness”), nor reified as unchanging features of human nature (biologistic racism). Somewhat paradoxically, then, the permanence of race coexists with the necessarily contingent and contextual character of racial identity and racial difference. Racial dualism at century’s end.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“Far from being destroyed, however, the white “politics of difference” is now being trumpeted as an ideology of victimization. The situation would be farcical if it weren’t so dangerous, reflecting venerable white anxieties and fortifying the drift to the right which, now as in the past, is highly conducive to race-baiting”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“Not only ordinary individuals, but even specialists—say, anthropologists or sociologists or geneticists—cannot present a convincing rationale for distinguishing among human groups by physical characteristics. Our “second nature,” our “common sense” about race, it turns out, is deeply uncertain, almost mythical.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“The truth is that it is the refusal to see race—the willful color blindness of the liberal camp—that acquiesces to the racial status quo, and does so by consigning blacks to a twilight zone where they are politically invisible”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“whites’ obsessive preoccupation with the happenstance of skin color?”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“the Howard speech is a prime example of what Moynihan calls “semantic infiltration.”20 This term refers to the appropriation of the language of one’s political opponents for the purpose of blurring distinctions and molding it to one’s own political position.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“To the optimistic view that the nation was making progress (“not enough progress, to be sure, but progress nevertheless”), Baldwin had this to say: I’m delighted to know there’ve been many fewer lynchings in the year 1963 than there were in the year 1933, but I also have to bear in mind—I have to bear it in mind because my life depends on it—that there are a great many ways to lynch a man. The impulse in American society, as far as I can tell from my experience in it, has essentially been to ignore me when it could, and then when it couldn’t, to intimidate me; and when that failed, to make concessions.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“West harkens back to the halcyon days when there was “a vital community bound by its ethical ideals.”56 Unfortunately, oppression does not always produce such felicitous outcomes, and the victims of oppression are not always ennobled by their experience and an inspiration to the rest of us.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“Friedman described the situation in 1963 in these epigrammatic terms: “to the Negro demand for ‘now,’ to which the Deep South has replied ‘never,’ many liberal whites are increasingly responding ‘later.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“He looks out on a raging battlefield and sees error everywhere, and he thinks he can find the truth by avoiding error. —Lerone Bennett, “Tea and Sympathy:
Liberals and Other White Hopes,” 1964”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“Lee Rainwater and William Yancey have suggested, “The year 1965 may be known in history as the time when the civil rights movement discovered, in the sense of becoming explicitly aware, that abolishing legal racism would not produce Negro equality.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“difference that is prized but unprivileged,”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“Counterracism was never an option.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“Central to the existence of racism is the politics of its denial. It is in the best interests of the right to assert the nonexistence of racism except as a manifestation of individual pathology—a matter simply of individuals with bad attitudes. But it is the shame of liberals who think of themselves as guardians and witnesses of corrective concern and conscience that they too have elected to treat racism as a problem of individual social relations and not the systematic operation of power at work throughout our political economy. These essays call into question and to account a liberal majority that trivializes racism by turning its attention to individual remedies, to attitude adjustment, to “color-blind” legal adjudication.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today