Today’s multiracial Americans are at greater liberty to choose how they’d like to be seen, and under less pressure to pass for white. Eric Liu Read Quote
The summer of 1991, I took $2,000 of my savings and a desktop program, and I asked my friends to write 800 words about something they cared about. I got eight or nine articles and put them together. It was no frills, black and white, no graphics. I printed them out and just dumped piles around D.C. Eric Liu Read Quote
I had heard so much negative talk about our generation, that we’re slackers and young fogies, that I knew wasn’t true of the people I know. Eric Liu Read Quote
Imagine filling a college with the first 1,000 students to get perfect SATs. Whatever the racial composition of that class would be, the notion seems absurd because we know that college in America is supposed to be about creating citizens and leaders in a diverse nation. Eric Liu Read Quote
Americans need to call on Boomers, in their next act onstage, to behave like grown-ups. And there is no better way for them to do this than to guide young people to lives of greater meaning, effectiveness, and purpose. Eric Liu Read Quote
America is exceptional: but because it yields the likes of Obama, not the likes of Bush. Eric Liu Read Quote
What we should celebrate more than diversity is what we do with it. How do we bring everyone in the tent and create something together? In a twenty-first century way that activates our true potential, we all need to become sworn-again. Eric Liu Read Quote
Talk of citizenship today is often thin and tinny. The word has a faintly old-fashioned feel to it when used in everyday conversation. When evoked in national politics, it’s usually accompanied by the shrill whine of a descending culture-war mortar. Eric Liu Read Quote
I know many people on the left are suspicious of words like Americanization. To them, it can sound like a cover for white privilege and warmongering. It suggests arrogance and groupthink. But these connotations are not fixed. It is in our power to reshape them by recalling the best of America. Eric Liu Read Quote
In the end no segregationist scheme has withstood the force of a simple idea: equality under law. Eric Liu Read Quote
