Orlando Patterson

"The present wave of immigrants and their children are rapidly assimilating into an ever-vibrant American mainstream culture, and at a pace greater than the Europeans who came during the previous large wave"

"Going back to the earliest years of the Republic, we find that Black Americans, while being exploited as slaves and workers, and while being shunned socially into rural and urban ghettos, have nonetheless been embraced culturally. Few other groups, with the possible exception of the Jews of Europe, have contributed more to the culture of the group that dominated and excluded them, than black Americans—in music, dance, theatre, literature, sports and more generally in the style and vibrancy of its dominant culture, America is indelibly blackish. Trying to imagine America without blacks, is like trying to imagine Lake Erie without oxygen."

"...It is truly amazing that, for all this progress black Americans remain today almost as socially segregated as they were in the late sixties; that for all this cultural and political progress, combined with striking changes in the racial attitudes of white Americans, black Americans are still twice as unemployed as white Americans, that they continue to earn 65% of the median income of white Americans, exactly the same proportion that they earned in 1970, that the typical white household has 16 times the wealth of a black one, that one in 3 black youth are certain to spend part of their lives in prison, that the police of this nation still enter and treat black neighborhoods as if they are an occupying army and still feel empowered to cut down our black youth with impunity."

"Pessimism is a self-fulfilling malady."

"Praised across the humanities as a Renaissance scholar, Patterson has written globally influential books on slavery and its opposite pole, freedom. His works are profoundly interdisciplinary, mining comparative histories and insisting on the complex significance of culture."

"...Despite the critical acclaim for his fiction, the young scholar cooled to writing additional novels after a visit to , the legendary Barbados-born writer and Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner. Patterson found Lamming living in a remote one-room apartment, a bed-sit, above a cottage in north London, and decided to stick with the regular paychecks of academia."