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We'll return to this question next Tuesday,
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but let me leave you with this
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There is no African-American writer, and some white writers,
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worth their salt, from the 1870s and '80s,
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right on through well into the twentieth century,
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who could ever avert their eyes from this story
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This is a passage from James Weldon Johnson's
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The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
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If you've ever read that wonderful 1912 novel,
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you'll know it's the story
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of a black man who's passing for white,
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but because he's passing in the South