"In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it."
"Arnold Rampersad's stunningly revealing biography has, at long last, unveiled-in magisterial prose-the very complex and vulnerable man behind Ralph Ellison's own masks and myths. One of the nation's most brilliant writers emerges as all the more fascinating precisely because he was so very human. Painstakingly researched and compellingly written, Ralph Ellison is a masterwork of the genre of literary biography."
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Source: Henry Louis Gates (1989). “Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the racial Self”, p.176, Oxford University Press on Demand
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