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" When I was a child, my parents took my brothers and me to Port-au-Prince during the summer so we could get to know the country of our ancestors. Because Haiti is an island, the beach is everywhere. Haitians are particular, even snobby, about beaches. "

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" I live in Indiana and teach at Purdue University, a wonderful school with some of the brightest students I have ever had the privilege of working with. My colleagues are powerful and intelligent and kind. The cost of living is low, the prairie is wide, and on clear nights, I can see all the stars in the sky above. "

Roxane Gay

Stars

School

Powerful

" I reject the idea that when young women make choices with which we disagree, they are acting without autonomy. "

" I have a job I'm pretty good at. I am in charge of things. I am on committees. People respect me and take my counsel. I want to be strong and professional, but I resent how hard I have to work to be taken seriously, to receive a fraction of the consideration I might otherwise receive. "

Roxane Gay

Job

Work

" My parents have been married for 42 years. Their marriage has been - from what I can see - a happy one. "

" This is the real problem feminism faces. Too many people are willfully ignorant about what the word means and what the movement aims to achieve. "

" The first amendment makes it clear that we are free to practice religion without government interference. The Constitution also establishes the separation of church and state so that the laws we live by our never guided by religious zeal. "

" We all have our vanities. The retouching magazines like 'Vogue' do is the professional version of the retouching we do when we, for example, apply Instagram filters to the pictures we take and share on our social networks. "

" I don't want the whole of my writing or my intellectual energy given over to race because I have diverse interests. "

" I believe in the freedom of expression, unequivocally - though, as I have written before, I wish more people would understand that freedom of expression is not freedom from consequence. "

" Florida is a strange place: hot, beautiful, ugly. I love it here, and how nothing makes sense but still, somehow, there is a rhythm. "

" People don't want to think... I mean, they don't! They just want to say, 'Oh, okay, feminists are humorless man-haters,' and that's simply not the case. There are radical people and radical ideas in absolutely every movement, but that doesn't mean they define the ideals. "

" Most of the serious disagreement I get comes through email or social media, where people are more comfortable. "

" Most open letters undoubtedly come from a good place, rising out of genuine outrage or concern or care. There is, admittedly, also a smugness to most open letters: a sense that we, as the writers of such letters, know better than those to whom the letters are addressed. We will impart our opinions to you, with or without your consent. "

" We cannot sway extremists with rational thought or with our ideas of right and wrong. "

" There is an odd assumption that compassion and care are finite or that critics can be everything to everyone - commenting on everything simply because they can. That's not what cultural criticism is. "

" I recognize that I'm human, and the older I get, the more I realize how fallible I am, how fallible we all are. "

Roxane Gay

Older

How

" The expansive anarchy of the Internet continues to lull us into believing that, because we can see something, that something should be seen. Because we can say something, there is something that must be said. "

" I read too many romance novels during my formative years. I have a penchant for romantic comedies. I understand why 'Romeo and Juliet' came to such a pass. "

" The open letter has always been an interesting rhetorical strategy - a way of delivering a pointed message to a specific individual or group while also reaching a wide audience. "

" That's what is always fascinating about racism - how it is allowed, if not encouraged, to flourish freely in public spaces, the way racism and bigotry are so often unquestioned. "

" Day after day with them, I see more and more of my parents in me. I see where all my quirks come from. I see my future. "

Roxane Gay

Future

Day

" You can't control the fact that you are born a white man or born into wealth. When people say, 'Check your privilege,' they're saying, 'Acknowledge how these factors helped you move through life.' They're not saying apologize for it. "

" It's so hard to write about countries like Haiti because there's truths behind the misperceptions people have. But there's so much more. There are multiple truths. "

Roxane Gay

Hard

People

" Public intellectuals are often put in the position of having their words, no matter how off-the-cuff, treated as doctrine. "

" If a woman wants to take her husband's name, that's her choice, and I still think she can be feminist while doing that. "

" It sometimes feels like the workplace is immune from social upheaval. We go to work and do the best we can, and at the end of the day, we return to our lives. We don't abandon who we are, however, when we begin and end our workday. Who we are shapes how we are perceived in the workplace and, in turn, how we perform in the workplace. "

" I think the world is ambivalent about feminism. So I can't blame college students. I think they're reflecting the greater culture's attitude toward feminism. So what I can do is, in ways that are appropriate, advocate for feminism and help the students learn what feminism is about. "

" There has been, and there will continue to be, vigorous discussions about race in America. I worry that little will come of these discussions because we aren't addressing what must be done to change the current racial climate. "

" If you feel like it's hard to be friends with women, consider that maybe women aren't the problem. Maybe it's just you. "

" I think it was really entering my 30s that I began to embrace feminism and call myself a feminist. "