Richard Wright on Race & America

So poignant in the face of claims of a "post-racial" America:

As I, in memory, think back now upon those girls and their lives I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task. Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the entire tide and direction of American culture. Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it is felt to be wrong to admit him freely. Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti-Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part - though a significantly significant one - of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves it conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.

-pg. 273 of Black Boy (1944) by Richard Wright

Related to this is Tim Wise's Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama

ebaadenews.blogspot.com

New Faith, Olds Fears

It seems like New Faith, Old Fears: Muslims and Other Asian Immigrants in American Religious Life (2002) by Bruce Lawrence hasn't gotten much attention in the Muslim community nor on the web in general from what I can see from my google search...I just started it (have gotten it from amazon, used though new quality for really cheap) and love it so far. Here's an excerpt from the preface:

"Alongside Native American voices are those of African Americans. Victims of court injustice and denial of rights even with the official end of slavery more than a century ago, they embody the racism that has marked U.S. history since long before the first waves of Asian immigrants arrived at the turn of the twentieth century, and more recently, since 1965. All Americans, not just African Americans, "are imprisoned by the history of racial subordination in America," writes legal scholar Derrick Bell. While the way out of the prison is to delegitimate racism, "we can only delegitimate it," argues Bell, "if we can accurately pinpoint it. And racism lies at the center, not the periphery; in the permanent, not in the fleeting; in the real lives of black and white [and red and brown and yellow and mixed] people, not in the caverns of the mind."-p. xv-xvi

"It is my central thesis that without sustained attention to racizalized class prejudice one can comprehend neither culture nor religion, neither the views of the dominant class toward immigrants and other marginal groups nor the hopes and the fears that Asian immigrants share with other disadvantaged folk in the twenty-first-century America."-xvi

UPDATE: Additional quotes from the Introduction

"In its broadest formulation the challenge for Asian Americans is to understand where they are, or can be, or should be, in the racialized pattern of American society. At the subjective level there is no longer the bipolar model of white/black or black/white. Always complicated by the presence of Native Americans, it is now multiplied by the recent immigration of Asians and Hispanics." - p. 2

"The decisive analytic rubric is best defined as racialized class prejudice. Whiteness studies have demonstrated the pervasive influence of whiteness as an unmarked category projecting Ango privilege. Class prejudice underscores how the economic and social and cultural resources of whiteness are denied to all nonwhites, but especially to one race that is underlined as occupying the other end of an unspoken U.S. hierarchical social order, namely, African Americans. Far from being freed of racial taintedness because they are neither white nor black, neither Anglo nor African American, other minority groups--Asians, Hispanics, and also Amerindians--are implicated in that persistent biracial patterning of norms and values. Racialized class prejudice applies to immigrants as much as it does to African or Anglo Americans; it also suffuses religion and politics."-p. 10

"In sum, to pursue a binary analysis or to rely on binary categories of Asian-American or black-American is to miss the sense in which Anglo unhyphenated still projects the fullest form of U.S. citizenship, placing Anglo Americans apart from and above all other groups, whether those groups are deemed to be others, outsiders, or minorities. At the outset of new millennium the old prejudice lingers: all non-Anglos have yet to find the equal access, equal rights, equal hopes that mark the American dream."-pg. 11

"The option most often explored is to overleap class prejudice even when racial prejudice lingers. Bruce Lee and Tiger Woods may have made it, but the message of their success is not people of color unite and resist the oppressor; it is rather work hard so that you are less excluded than the other nameless minority--the Guptas or Singhs or Kims."- pg. 11