Being agreeable’ is the highest duty of any human being mingling with other people….Practicing good manners should be as natural as displaying the teeth).
The human psyche is pathetic, I say–I declaim–to my psychopharmacologist.It's what we have, Miss Jefferson, he replies, it's what we have.And what I have is what I take to my psychotherapist each week...
Striving ardently to be what they were and were not. Behold the Race Flaneur: the bourgeois rebel who goes slumming, and finds not just adventure but the objective correlative for his secret despair.
Regularly denounce Caucasians, whose behavior toward us, and all dark-skinned people, proved they did not morally deserve their privilege. We
Negro privilege had to be circumspect: impeccable but not arrogant; confident yet obliging; dignified, not intrusive.
What I would have to do later, starting in college and in the years following, to become a person of inner consequence: break that fawning inner self into pieces.
Lawrence Otis Graham is a sprightly gossip in the Clamorgan mode: he writes largely for white magazines and is considered something of an upstart by old-line blacks. His 1999 Our Kind of People: Insid...
I hate when I'm supposed to be having fun and Race singles me out for special chores and duties.
Elbow grease is not a metaphor.
We sing more colored than the Africans, boasted John Lennon, and few Americans were inclined to dispute him.
You are a single woman; you intend to remain one. You’ve acquired enough sexual experience to feel you belong to your times. You do not have children; you never intended to. Sustained romantic intensi...
I was taught you don't tell your secrets to strangers - certainly not secrets that expose error, weakness, failure. My generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements receive...
And out in the wide wide world, the famous women we gazed upon never stopped reminding us that we must cherish that generic female future.
I’ve never been so sick of RACE in my life.Every group with its rights and grievances, its mathematically precise litany of what has been denied, what should have been granted long ago, what must be r...
Too, rolled and
I think it's too easy to recount your unhappy memories when you write about yourself. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.
What's often not acknowledged about depression is how much anger is in it.
Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain con...
As the years pass, I find that writers who were once central to me aren't anymore. I revered Yeats's poetry in college. I respect it now and am still ravished by certain lines, but I don't go back to...
White people wanted to be white just as much as we did. They worked just as hard at it. They failed more often. But they could pass, so no one objected.
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