Sublime

his skin, too, was dark, and his eyes seemed purple or brown, very softly coloured behind his glasses.

his Jheri-curled Afro shimmering in the light.

The black man loses his “blackness,” which is a state of grace and nothing to do with skin color. Clarence Thomas isn’t “really” black but Bill Clinton is, in the same way that the Eucharist literally becomes the body of Christ. Similarly, the disabled object of empathy and veneration becomes a hateful heretic, and eugenics remains a taboo that mus

Banal, in that, despite an uncustomary gentleness of mien, the morphological type was one very much in the public domain; it exemplified what I take to be a specifically American criterion of ‘cuteness’ – which is to say, beauty untranscended by mystery, tragedy or spirituality, beauty golden and well nourished and so vacuously secure in its own na

he had offended the daily critics in the book by referring to the New York crowd as “angleworms in a bottle” and to critics as the lice that crawl on literature;

Neither blackness nor “people of color” stimulates in me notions of excessive, limitless love, anarchy, or routine dread.

Mama-spoiled black man, will you mature with me? Culture-bearing black woman, whose culture are you bearing?