Jess Row Quotes

Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it.

I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender.

There's an enormous difference between normative white masculinity and normative black masculinity.

It's only when an American steps outside of their own culture that you see how integral it is.

Hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock.

Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.

I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs.

I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King.

Not unlike gender reassignment surgery, someone determines that they are of a different race on the inside and they wish to surgically correct that.

There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture.

You think about every piece of idiomatic speech adopted by white men over the past ten or twenty years; virtually all of it comes from hip-hop.

Narrative stories are nothing but models of karma and causality - how one thing leads to another. And a lot of narrative fiction is about causality that we don't immediately understand.

The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

For me, there's a very clear parallel between the practice of insight in Buddhism and what's called prajna - the insight that arrives through meditation.

The politics of transgender identity are really complicated. And the debate over how much of gender is biological and how much of it is socially constructed is a very complex debate.

There is something very quiet and reserved and pessimistic about Obama's temperament that is deeply un-American. There are those people who claim, "Oh, he wasn't born here" - all that is nonsense.

I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome.

I was raised with opera and very white-bread folk music like The Kingston Trio. That was about as daring as it got. So when I discovered hip-hop as a teenager, at first it made no sense to me at all.

The truth is that an intellectual life is available to almost anyone, almost anywhere, if they work hard enough and are given some kind of access point.

Prajna is insight into the world. And a lot of that insight has to do with karma and the way karma affects our lives.

Only when you leave do you appreciate what binds American people and our cultural experience together.

It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.

The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable.

Does it, does it—I'm flailing here—does it have a name? What you've

As a white teen, I was very drawn to hip-hop culture, almost to the point of disappearing in it - there was a sense of having no sense of authenticity except this one that wasn't mine.