Some favorite quotes from Zadie Smith's essay Speaking in Tongues:

"... I haven't described Dream City. I'll try to. It is a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion. Naturally, Obama was born there. So was I. When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the neither-this-nor-that beige of your skin—well, anyone can see you come from Dream City. In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues."

"Throughout his campaign Obama was careful always to say we. He was noticeably wary of I. By speaking so, he wasn't simply avoiding a singularity he didn't feel; he was also drawing us in with him. He had the audacity to suggest that, even if you can't see it stamped on their faces, most people come from Dream City, too. Most of us have complicated backstories, messy histories, multiple narratives. (...) how many Americans, in their daily lives, conjure contrasting voices and seek synthesis between disparate things. Turns out, Dream City wasn't so strange to them."

"It's amazing how many of our cross-cultural and cross-class encounters are limited not by hate or pride or shame, but by another equally insidious, less-discussed, emotion: embarrassment."

"A hesitation in the face of difference, which leads to caution before difference and ends in fear of it. Before long, the only voice you recognize, the only life you can emphasize with, is your own. (...) I believe that a flexibility in voice leads to a flexibility in all things."

"[Obama] He seems just the man to demonstrate that between those two voices there exists no contradiction and no equivocation, but rather a proper and decent human harmony."

Speaking in Tongues
Changing My Mind
Zadie Smith

I really enjoyed this essay, as I don't often seek out or read pieces about being multicultural, biracial, w/e. I might start reading more about it, as it was an issue that was stirred in me at PSO.