In America One Drop Of Black Ancestry

Arnold Rampersad's Stunningly Revealing Biography Has, At Long Last, Unveiled-in Magisterial Prose-the Very Complex And Vulnerable Man Behind Ralph Ellison's Own Masks And Myths. One Of The Nation's Most Brilliant Writers Emerges As All The More Fascinating Precisely Because He Was So Very Human. Painstakingly Researched And Compellingly Written, Ralph Ellison Is A Masterwork Of The Genre Of Literary Biography.

What People Forget Is That The Most Radical Thing About Obama Is That He Was The First Black Man In History To Imagine That He Could Become President, Who Was Able To Make Other Americans Believe It As Well. Other Than That, He Is A Centrist, Just Like I Try To Be. He's Been Bridging Divisions His Whole Life.

Very Few Black People Ever Embraced Back To Africa Movements, And Very Few Actually, A Tiny Number Actually Went Back To Africa. They Said, "we Are Going To Make America Live Up To The Ideals Of The Declaration Of Independence And The Constitution Of The United States." They Produced One Of The World's Great Cultures; They Produced Individuals Who Were Just As Brilliant And Made Contributions To The World Civilization. In Fact, They Produced A World-class Civilization, The African American Civilization, In Music, In Dance, In Oratory, In Religion, In Writing.

In The Old Days, You Lived In One Neighborhood, You Knew All Your Neighbors And Your Daughter Married The Guy Next Door. That Was Social And Economic Progress. That Model Is Gone Now. We Also Had A World Order That Was Fraught But Fairly Stable.

We Must Begin To Understand The Nature Of Intertextuality . . . The Manner By Which Texts Poems And Novels Respond To Other Texts. After All, All Cats May Be Black At Night, But Not To Other Cats.