Race is the true protagonist of the American novel. Our most popular classic fictions have known this, from 'Moby Dick' to 'Beloved;' all these books take on race or talk it out, often in other forms; they are less 'horror stories for boys' than ghost stories from a haunted conscience.
Tags: talk, conscience, race, true

Other Quotes by "Kevin Young"

Hip-hop at its zenith insists on thinking and dancing simultaneously. In fact, it sees them as synonymous.
Tags: fact, dancing, hip-hop, thinking
At our peril, we ignore the fact that black vernacular, like the blues, both has a form and performs... For just as there would be no American music without black folks, there would be very little of our American language.
Tags: language, ignore, black, music
It took a while for anyone to want to publish 'To Repel Ghosts.' I thought people would want to publish a three-hundred-and-fifty-page book about a dead painter, but they didn't.
Tags: want, dead, book, people
Forget reparations - we need to rescue aspects of black culture abandoned even by black folks, whether it is the blues or home cookin' or broader forms of not just survival but triumph.
Tags: survival, black, culture, home
Can you explore real issues as a fake character? Yes - it's called acting. Or fiction. But acting is not a method of engaging with the actual world, just as pretending to know what a character might eat does not a novel make - much less make that make-believe real.
Tags: fake, world, character, you
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