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One of the things I noticed when I worked at Vibe was that backstage at a fashion show, they always referred to the black models as black girls. I thought, They never say 'white girls.'

Hilton Als

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Hilton Als
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: January 1
Journalist
Theatre Critic
Writer
New York City
New York
Shows
Models
Thought
Worked
Always
Girls
Things
Fashion
Never
Show
Backstage
White
Vibe
Girl
Referred
Black
Noticed

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I think Northern California is the most beautiful place on earth. And I adore New Orleans, but there's something about the air in SF, for instance. It changes from moment to moment, like one's thoughts.
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For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don't like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they're babies.
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I think it's cultural racism more than anything, which dovetails with actual racism, but the cultural racism to me is even more shocking.
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People have a copyright on their own life.
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I think I'm just generally more interested in figuration than abstraction. I think that painting abstraction often feels like painting colors to me, whereas portraits always feel like something connected. I like the exchange, the collaborative aspect of sitter and subject for sure.
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I was so well loved by my mother that if people have any expectations of me I really don't notice because I'm hardest on myself.
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I used to always love taking photos, but I would always give a camera away to someone else. Now I don't give the camera away anymore. It also takes a long time to develop a visual style, and I think that the things that I was imitating were people I love, like Judy Linn or Gerald Turner, and then it slowly started to become more myself.
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I think you're not really teaching anyone unless you're learning yourself.
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Who says reading should be easy? Shouldn't it challenge you as hard sometimes as love. Maybe hard is not the right word in this context. Ha!
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People are quick to make monuments of anything they live long enough to control.
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People approach people of color with preconceived ideas. I don't think this is just restricted to white people, but I think that lots of black and white artists, when race is a subject matter, they put race or the ideology around race first. They don't see the person and the complications of the human being.
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I think writing is an act of remembrance, I think that Instagram is an act of remembrance, and I think curating a show is an act of memory, too.
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I think that if you feel imaginatively towards a subject, you really shouldn't do it in a journalistic context, because then you're just fabricating, and that's crazy.
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There were so few black men who were successful and who successfully conveyed black male fear - how America can make you feel crazy, and how America can create interesting levels of contradiction.
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Great sadness can be off putting, hard to comprehend, especially if it hasn't been your experience. It's amazing for me to know now that AIDS, for instance, is something a lot of people don't get, whereas it entirely shaped my social life since the time I was twenty until I was almost forty.
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Images are really powerful. People fall in love with images, and as a way of falling in love with someone because they're like an image.
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I thought of the structure as musical. The first piece, for instance, contains the names/subject matter of every person to come in the book. Like a piece of music with themes, etc.
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I really don't think we should dismiss a book because we feel messed about intellectually. Or emotionally. That's the writer's job!
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