"With greater solidarity, justice for people of color could be won. And an even bigger prize would be possible: a U.S. society that advances beyond "equality," beyond granting people of color a respect equal to that given to Euro-Americans. Too often "equality" leaves whites still at the center, still embodying the Americanness by which others are judged, still defining the national character. In her book Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison writes eloquently of this problem from an African-American perspective. Her words resonate for other peoples of color as well: "American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.... In the scholarship on the formation of an American character [a] major item to be added to the list must be an Africanist presence-decidedly not American, decidedly 'other.'"
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Novelists from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesChildren's authorsEditors from the United StatesPlaywrights from the United States
Original Language: English
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Sources
Elizabeth Martinez, De Colores Means All of Us (1998)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison
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Toni Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor, and college professor, who received a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
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