A race of people is like and individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself.
The point of my work is to show that culture and education aren't simply hobbies or minor influences. They are hugely important in the affirmation of differences between groups and social classes and in the reproduction of those differences.
Coming up in the African-American culture, we were taught that we belonged to the universe and society was wrong in the way it dealt with us. We had to learn to express and affirm values not from the winning position.
We're Mexican not Mexican't!
My grandmother would always tell me that I was hers, that I was Mexican. That was her role. It was not my teacher's role to tell me I was Mexican. It was my teacher's role to tell me I was an American.
To me, you have to declare yourself a Chicano in order to be a Chicano. That makes a Chicano a Mexican-American with a defiant political attitude that centers on his or her right to self-definition. I'm a Chicano because I say I am.
Our people live in a limbo culture that is not quite Indian and not quite White either …. If you can get each person to be proud of himself, little by little, you can get the whole tribe to be proud.
There is no African, myself included, who does not appreciate the help of the wider world, but we do question whether aid is genuine or given in the spirit of affirming one's cultural superiority.
The stories I always see about a first-generation kid trying to erase where they came from, or trying to just be white, I would watch those shows or movies and I was like, 'I don't get this.' This isn't how I feel.
It is in our culture that we don't want to admit that our culture is good.
So many times I've encountered people who are just kind of like, 'Yeah, Nigeria,' and, you know, thump their chest and seem very sure of, like, being Nigerian. And I'm just kind of, like, I wish I could be that sure.
The egg cream is psychologically the opposite of circumcision--it pleasurably reaffirms your Jewishness.
Just by the nature of making the choice to be true to who I am, I'm political. Sometimes that's all you need to do: Show up and be black, gay and Christian in America and actually say it out loud. And refuse to let anything or anybody take that away from you.
The one thing that I learned very young was to own my identity. And, I knew, I'm Asian through and through. There's nothing I needed to prove.
A nation can assume that the addition of the words "under God" to its pledge of allegiance gives evidence that its citizens actually believe in God whereas all it really proves is that they believe in "believing" in God
