There is something very quiet and reserved and pessimistic about Obama's temperament that is deeply un-American. There are those people who claim, "Oh, he wasn't born here" - all that is nonsense. Jess Row More Quotes by Jess Row More Quotes From Jess Row Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues. Jess Row hong-kong I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs. Jess Row program writing people I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome. Jess Row overcoming expectations long Not unlike gender reassignment surgery, someone determines that they are of a different race on the inside and they wish to surgically correct that. Jess Row different race wish My parents didn't really restrict my movement, so I got involved in the underground music scene and the activism scene; I was doing some volunteering in food relief. I spent a lot of time throughout the city in poor areas, even though my family lived in a wealthy area. Jess Row volunteer parent cities I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King. Jess Row later-in-life kings baby I was raised with opera and very white-bread folk music like The Kingston Trio. That was about as daring as it got. So when I discovered hip-hop as a teenager, at first it made no sense to me at all. Jess Row teenager hip-hop white The hip-hop that I really connected with was Public Enemy, KRS-One, Ice Cube, and N.W.A. That late '80s and early '90s era. The beginning of gangster rap and the beginning of politically conscious rap. I had a very immature, adolescent feeling of, "Wow, I can really connect with these people through the stories they're telling in this music." Jess Row rap ice people That became my aesthetic - a very Chekhovian, American realist aesthetic in the tradition of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. The perfectible, realist story that had these somewhat articulate characters, a lot of silence, a lot of obscured suffering, a lot of manliness, a lot of drinking, a lot of divorces. As my writing went on, I shed a lot of those elements. Jess Row divorce drinking character My greatest fear about a world in which racial reassignment surgery becomes common is that it then becomes an expression of all kinds of class privilege. You have a truly dystopian society divided between the people who can afford to be racially altered and perfected and the ones who can't. Jess Row you society fear people As a white teen, I was very drawn to hip-hop culture, almost to the point of disappearing in it - there was a sense of having no sense of authenticity except this one that wasn't mine. Jess Row teen hip-hop white culture The truth is that much of the plastic surgery we see today has a racial or ethnic component because it has to do with inherently racial concepts of physical perfection, like the 'Roman nose.' Jess Row truth-is truth perfection today Writers of color are given certain messages - explicit or implicit - about what they're allowed to write about or what will be successful if they write about it. And white writers are given another set of implicit and, sometimes, explicit messages. Jess Row will color white sometimes When I read 'Another Country' when I was in my early 20s, you know, as soon as I put the book down, my first thought was, 'I will never be able to write a book like this.' And my second thought was, 'I really want to try writing a book like this for the 21st century.' Jess Row down you country book White writers in many cases choose not to populate their fiction with people of color. A lot of what I'm doing is trying to write against that, not about race but against the avoidance of race that's such a dominant model in white literary discourse. Jess Row doing color white people There's a feeling among white Americans that there's no such thing as racial harmony, no such thing as a positive, productive relationship with people of color. Jess Row feeling positive relationship people White Americans have the option of not having to think about race on a daily basis. People of color don't. Race is a major deciding factor in their lives and the histories of their families. Jess Row daily think white people There's an enormous amount of obliviousness: a desire among young gentrifiers to see only the city they want to see. Jess Row city see want desire It's difficult for me to imagine a circumstance in which you're disguising your origins in which someone doesn't get hurt. Jess Row someone me you hurt Disguising your own origins is a deeply American impulse, but that doesn't make it any less compromising. The way I live my life is to try to foreground the tensions and paradoxes of being a white person who's interested in racial justice and reconciliation, rather than disguise or obliterate them. Jess Row my-life white justice life
