“WHITE AMERICANS HAVE A VERY UNUSUAL SENSE OF HISTORY. They make it up as they go along, constantly revising to suit their tastes in a manner that would make Stalin blush. Very few of them saw any irony in the fact that during a recent nasty Balkans conflict, when Uncle Sam intervened to stop the Serbs from ethnically cleansing the Bosnians, the military action was performed using Apache helicopter gunships. Helicopters named after a people that had been ethnically cleansedin the United States less than one hundred years previously. Sixteen lane highways across the sacred burial grounds. Yee-hah.”

“We still name our military helicopter gunships after victims of genocide. Nobody bats an eyelash about that: Blackhawk. Apache. And Comanche. If the Luftwaffe named its military helicopters Jew and Gypsy, I suppose people would notice.”

“We need a new, deeper appreciation of the ethnic histories of the American people, not a reduction of American history to ethnic histories.”

“God is great and God is good," Lisa says. "But where are the Apache attack helicopters when you need them?”

“White Americans cannot deny their long history of abusive transactions with people of color. These offenses, it should be noted out of fairness, can be explained in part by the fact that no other sizable national state has ever been formed from the confluence of so many diverse ethnic streams. All our heterogeneous ferment no doubt made contentiousness inevitable.”

“The state does not oppose the freedom of people to express their particular cultural attachments, but nor does it nurture such expression—rather [...] it responds with 'benign neglect' [....] The members of ethnic and national groups are protected against discrimination and prejudice, and they are free to maintain whatever part of their ethnic heritage or identity they wish, consistent with the rights of others. But their efforts are purely private, and it is not the place of public agencies to attach legal identities or disabilities to cultural membership or ethnic identity. This separation of state and ethnicity precludes any legal or governmental recognition of ethnic groups, or any use of ethnic criteria in the distribution of rights, resources, and duties.”