3:34pm October 12, 2014

“Critics generally don’t associate Black people with ideas. They see marginal people; they see just another story about Black folks. They regard the whole thing as sociologically interesting perhaps, but very parochial. There’s a notion out in the land that there are human beings one writes about, and then there are Black people or Indians or some other marginal group. If you write about the world from that point of view, somehow it is considered lesser. We are people, not aliens. We live, we love, and we die.”

Toni Morrison (via blackcontemporaryart)

Sherman Alexie was once asked if he would ever stop writing about American Indians. He said that white authors never got asked that question, and would anyone ever ask if Faulkner would quit writing about poor white Southerners? The very idea that there’s any group of human beings where the entire drama of human life doesn’t play out in full and can’t be written about endlessly, is racist (or ableist, or sexist, or whatever group is being targeted by this toxic nonsense).

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