..out of the counterfeiting of the black American's identity [in blackface minstrelsy] there arises a profound doubt in the white man's mind as to the authenticity of his own image of himself. He, after all, went into the business when he refused the king's shilling and revolted. He had put on a mask of his own, as it were.. For the ex-colonials, the declaration of an American identity meant the assumption of a mask, and it imposed not only the discipline of national self-consciousness, it gave Americans an ironic awareness of the joke that always lies between appearance and reality, between the discontinuity of social tradition and that sense of the past which clings to the mind. And perhaps even an awareness of the joke that society is man's creation, not God's. Americans began their revolt from the English fatherland when they dumped the tea into Boston Harbor, masked as Indians, and the mobility of the society created in this limitless space has encouraged the use of the mask for good and evil ever since. Ralph Ellison
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Men build too many walls and not enough bridges. - Joseph Fort Newton
  2. Being vegan is easy. Are there social pressures that encourage you to continue to eat, wear, and use animal products? Of course there are. But in a patriarchal, racist, homophobic, and ableist society, there are social pressures to participate and engage in sexism, racism, homophobia,... - Gary L. Francione
  3. Ethical veganism results in a profound revolution within the individual; a complete rejection of the paradigm of oppression and violence that she has been taught from childhood to accept as the natural order. It changes her life and the lives of those with whom she... - Gary L. Francione
  4. I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls. - Unknown
  5. Achievement has no color - Abraham Lincoln
More Quotes By Ralph Ellison
  1. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
  2. I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
  3. But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something...
  4. God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
  5. I was no longer afraid. Not of important men, not of trustees and such; for knowing now that there was nothing which I could expect from them, there was no reason to be afraid.
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