A biography for Eric Liuhasn’t been written yet.
“The next time someone uses denial of citizenship as a weapon or brandishes the special status conferred upon him by the accident of birth, ask him this: What have you done lately to earn it?”
“Race in America has always centered on our mutual agreement not to see each other. White or non-white. Black or non-black. Mongoloid, Hindoo. We've always bought into to the crudest, humanity-denying forms of sorting.”
“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.”
“In the end, a new Americanization movement can't just be about listing our privileges and immunities, which we catalog in our laws. It also has to be about reinforcing our duties, which we convey in our habits.”
“My grandfather was a general in the Nationalist Chinese Air Force during World War II, and I grew up hearing the pilot stories and seeing pictures of him in uniform.”
“Jeremy Lin is the only Asian American in the NBA today and one of the few in any professional U.S. sport. His arrival is surely leading other talented Asian American athletes this week to contemplate a pro career.”
“If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness - just a drop of it - does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America.”
“To be sure, the United States has profound problems, not least our faltering educational and physical infrastructure.”
“You want to defend citizenship? Don't persecute or isolate those without papers. Just live like a citizen. That'd be a first-class way to be American.”
“Republicans say they want citizenship to truly mean something. Let's be equal-opportunity about it and test everyone, including those very Republicans and others whose forbears came here generations ago.”
“Like the 'little emperors' of one-child China, too many Boomers were taught early that the world was made (or saved) for their comfort and enjoyment. They behaved accordingly, with a self-indulgence that was wholly rational, given their situation.”
“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.”
“In the end, arguing about affirmative action in selective colleges is like arguing about the size of a spigot while ignoring the pool and the pipeline that feed it. Slots at Duke and Princeton and Cal are finite.”
“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.”
“We live in a great country. It's time again to get religion about it.”
“If half-black Barack Obama had decided years ago to call himself white - which his genes certainly entitled him to do - his story would have carried very different meaning. If millions of part-black people had followed him into whiteness, then the N.A.A.C.P. would be in true crisis.”