Full citizenship need not require abandoning a distinct racial identity

Evidence

[W]hat we must now ask ourselves is when we become equal American citizens what will be our aims and ideals and what we will have to do with selecting these aims and ideals. Are we to assume that we will simply adopt the ideals of Americans and become what they are or want to be and that we will have in this process no ideals of our own? That would mean that we would cease to be Negroes as such and become white in action if not completely in color. We would take on the culture of white Americans doing as they do and thinking as they think. Manifestly this would not be satisfactory. Physically it would mean that we would be integrated with Americans losing first of all, the physical evidence of color and hair and racial type. We would lose our memory of Negro history and of those racial peculiarities which have long been associated with the Negro. We would cease to acknowledge any greater tie with Africa than with England or Germany. We would not try to develop Negro music and Art and Literature as distinctive and different, but allow them to be (among other traits) were deemed to be racial in character. — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 38

Categorization

• QUESTION: Which thinker is being quoted here, and how does their argument position within early civil-rights debates about assimilation vs. cultural distinctiveness?
• XREF: Aligned with Du Bois’s double-consciousness and cultural-pluralism strands the chapter traces; connects to debates about assimilation.