134 Quotes by Kevin Young

We've learned quickly that the Web is far more pseudonymous than anonymous: online, our names have simply been changed to a number, an I.P. address, protocol, and code.

Blackface remains exoticist and offensive as a practice, not just because of its long tradition of being used to mock black selfhood, sexuality, and speech but because of its assertion that black people are merely white people sullied by dark skin.

The mid-eighteen-thirties marked the rise of eugenics and racialism, with phrenology emerging as just one of the many pseudosciences that sought to enact, reinforce, and restrict racial difference.

When I was ten and in fifth grade, I read all of 'Robinson Crusoe' in one weekend.

We had moved cross-country from upstate New York to Kansas in the heat wave of 1980, with two cars, no air-conditioning, and a black dog. I can still see the infernal temperature of a hundred and nineteen degrees on a bank sign somewhere near Ohio.

I was a professor for 20 years, 12 of those at Emory University.

I think Barnum is at the center of American culture. He's helping to invent what we now think of as pop culture. He invented pretty much our notions of the circus.

Certainly, there is, in our culture, this notion of, you know, you can become anything. You can change.

I think that I try really hard to think about how we deceive ourselves, and we let ourselves be deceived.