Relative To What?

"Remember when we spoke to that group and you said that after watching 'Roots' on TV you were so mad you wanted to put big hurt on white people?"
"And when you spoke you looked straight at me and said, 'Did you get mad enough to get rid of your white identity?'  I'd thought about it, but in those days most of the guys into taking Afrikan identities were into violence . . ."
"All this talk about black this and black that.  Who's black?"
" . . . and I'd have had to do it legally, go to court, change the name on my vital statistics -- all that paper work --"
"Yeah, would've been a tremendous inconvenience for you compared to what those people, black and white, portrayed in 'Roots' had to contend with . . ."

"Besides, everybody knew me as 'Sam' and they weren't going to suddenly start calling me Olatunde."
"I'd rather call you Olatunde than Sam.  What does it mean?"
" 'Honor comes again.'  My friends would be looking at me funny, as if I was a traitor or something."
"You could've gotten new friends."
"It's just so much trouble, going through so many changes just over a name -- and my relatives never would've  understood."
"There's more to a person's identity than a name.  You could call yourself Ching Lee, but that wouldn't make you a Chinese."

"What about black people and this hair thing?"
"Again, it takes more than a name and the way you wear your hair to give you an identity. You have to have a culture, and that requires a language -- sloppy English isn't a black language, it's just the sloppy English of poorly educated people . . ."
"We went through that Afro thing, trying to get blacks to wear their hair natural.  Now, over fifty years later, they'r still addicted to that hair thing.  Trying to make tacking ropes to it as a cultural feature to cover a fascination  for long, loose locks . . . and after a hundred years still following 'leaders' who teach them to blame whites for our self-hate, self-destruction, and all our problems as if we had no brains to think . . ."
"Liars . . . dummies -- Ghosts all?  Relative to what?"