By Rivka Galchen — 2014
The rise of Misty Copeland.
Read on www.newyorker.com
CLEAR ALL
Who owns your identity, and how can old ways of thinking be replaced?
1
Close to 11% of American adults with Hispanic ancestors don’t even identify as Hispanic or Latino.
As both James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr., insisted, America is an identity that white people will protect at any cost, and the country’s history—its founding documents, its national heroes—is the supporting argument that underpins that identity.
To the list of identities Black people in America have assumed or been asked to, we can now add, thanks to this presidential election season, “Obama’s people” and “the African Americans.”