“…Even though we talk about race a lot in the literature, there’s still this idea of “Well, if we make this person blue and give them pointy ears, then we don’t have to actually talk about what’s happening in the real world.””

And those of us who live in racialized bodies feel that lack, we feel that erasure, so yes, there was something quite deliberate in my doing half the speech as an alien.
On race still being a taboo topic in the world of science fiction in “Interview: Nalo Hopkinson” http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-nalo-hopkinson/ in Lightspeed (June 2013)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "…Even though we talk about race a lot in the literature, there’s still this idea of “Well, if we make this person blue …" by Nalo Hopkinson?
Nalo Hopkinson photo
Nalo Hopkinson 22
Jamaican Canadian writer 1960

Related quotes

Raymond Carver photo

“You see, this happened a few months ago, but it's still going on right now, and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.”

Raymond Carver (1938–1988) American short story author and poet

Source: Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

Alan Moore photo

“To me, when we talk about the world, we are talking about our ideas of the world. Our ideas of organisation, our different religions, our different economic systems, our ideas about it are the world.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: To me, when we talk about the world, we are talking about our ideas of the world. Our ideas of organisation, our different religions, our different economic systems, our ideas about it are the world. We are heading for a radical revision where you could say we are heading towards the end of the world, but more in the R. E. M. sense than the Revelation sense. That is what apocalypse means – revelation. I could square that with the end of the world, a revelation, a new way of looking at things, something that completely radicalises our notions of the where we were, when we were, what we were, something like that would constitute an end to the world in the kind of abstract – yet very real sense – that I am talking about. A change in the language, a change in the thinking, a change in the music. It wouldn’t take much – one big scientific idea, or artistic idea, one good book, one good painting – who knows – we are at a critical point where the ideas are coming thicker and faster and stranger and stranger than they ever were before. They are realised at a greater speed, everything has become very fluid.

Joseph Fred Naumann photo

“I’d also like to say to our priests: we can’t fail to talk to our people about these real sins that affect the lives of our people. If we talk about sins they don’t commit, of what good is that?”

Joseph Fred Naumann (1949) Catholic archbishop

Archbishop Naumann: “If the Church is silent on the destruction of life, we’re being negligent” https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2017/12/04/archbishop-naumann-if-the-church-is-silent-on-the-destruction-of-life-were-being-negligent/ (December 4, 2017)

Raymond Carver photo

“It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.”

Variant: and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.
Source: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

“No matter what we talk about, we are talking about ourselves”

Hugh Prather (1938–2010) American writer

Source: I Touch the Earth, the Earth Touches Me

“All these things have happened in our history, and we need to talk about them. What kind of country are we that our history is so tragic?”

Yuan Tengfei (1972) history teacher in Beijing, China

Reported in Didi Kirsten Tatlow, "A System Afraid of Its Own History", The New York Times (September 16, 2010).

Lauren Jauregui photo
Noam Chomsky photo

“The US intervened in the Philippines to "uplift and christianize" the backward people, killing a couple of hundred thousand of them and destroying the place. The same thing happened in Haiti, the same thing happened with other countries. We cannot disregard the historical record and talk about an ideal world. It makes sense to work towards a better world, but it doesn't make any sense to have illusions about what the real world is.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Seminar at Bard College, New York, February 2, 2000 http://www.bard.edu/hrp/resource_pdfs/hhrs.chomsky.pdf.
Quotes 2000s, 2000
Context: Actually, on humanitarian intervention in general, I guess my view is not unlike the view that was attributed to Gandhi, accurately or not, when he was supposedly asked what he thought about western civilization. He is supposed to have said that he thought it would be a good idea. Similarly, humanitarian intervention would be a good idea, in principle. [... ] can we expect that with the existing power structure, distribution of power in the world, there will be humanitarian intervention? There is nothing new about the question, of course. The idea of humanitarian intervention goes back to the days of the Concert of Europe a century ago - in the 19th Century there was lots of talk about civilizing missions and interventions that would do good things. The US intervened in the Philippines to "uplift and christianize" the backward people, killing a couple of hundred thousand of them and destroying the place. The same thing happened in Haiti, the same thing happened with other countries. We cannot disregard the historical record and talk about an ideal world. It makes sense to work towards a better world, but it doesn't make any sense to have illusions about what the real world is.

Jean-Luc Godard photo
Donald J. Trump photo

“We are losing a lot of people to the Internet. We have to do something. We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what's happening. We have to talk to them [about], maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way. Some people will say, ‘Freedom of speech, Freedom of speech.'”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

These are foolish people.
Google's Eric Schmidt calls for 'spell-checkers for hate and harassment' https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/08/googles-eric-schmidt-spell-checkers-hate-harassment-terrorism, 8 December 2015, by Alex Hern.
2015

Related topics