Sublime
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White men were always extending offers of work to Elwood, recognizing his industrious nature and steady character, or at least recognizing that he carried himself differently than other colored boys his age and taking this for industry.
Colson Whitehead • The Nickel Boys: the new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad
As a nonwhite person, the General, like myself, knew he must be patient with white people, who were easily scared by the nonwhite. Even with liberal white people, one could go only so far, and with average white people one could barely go anywhere.
Viet Thanh Nguyen • The Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
Most people said he was half white, but Eva said he was all white. That she knew blood when she saw it, and he didn’t have none.
Toni Morrison • Sula
But for the Virginia-born Wilson, the New Freedom was for whites only. The first southerner elected president since Zachary Taylor, Wilson immediately segregated the government’s workforce.
Jean Edward Smith • FDR
Emma and Wallace had become friends by virtue of the fact that neither of them was a white man in their program.
Brandon Taylor • Real Life: A Novel
Moses built one pool in Harlem, in Colonial Park, at 146th Street, and he was determined that that was going to be the only pool that Negroes—or Puerto Ricans, whom he classed with Negroes as “colored people”—were going to use. He didn’t want them “mixing” with white people in other pools, in part because he was afraid, probably with cause, that
... See moreRobert A. Caro • The Power Broker
In Atlanta, a few months after my visit with Walter, I would go to a Bearden exhibition at the High Museum. The pieces depicted his youth in Charlotte, North Carolina, before his family moved north. There was also a video installation showing in the center of the exhibition room. Albert Murray sits alongside Bearden in much of it. They talk about
... See moreImani Perry • South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
When he was thirty-two years old, Thomy Lafon was listed in the 1842 city directory as a merchant. His mother was born a free woman in Haiti and had arrived with other migrants post-revolution. Lafon grew wealthy through real estate. The Holy Family nursing home was the result of one of many of his charitable donations made in service of Black
... See moreImani Perry • South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
According to the scholar Daryl J. Maeda, Asian American veterans reported being humiliated and dehumanized by their fellow GIs as “gooks” while their supposed enemies, the Vietnamese, often identified them as their own. In the 1977 play Honey Bucket by Melvyn Escueta, an old Vietnamese woman touches the black hair of an American soldier named Andy.
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