You wake up white, and you think about certain things every day. You wake up black, and you think about certain things. You wake up Chinese, and you think certain things - but those things aren't major. What's major is that you are good at your craft.
Interpretation
The quote highlights how identity influences our daily thoughts, while emphasizing the importance of excellence in one's work over racial or cultural identity.
Judith Jamison's quote points out the inherent differences in how individuals from various backgrounds may perceive the world and their place in it. It suggests that while identity and race can shape daily thoughts and experiences, the true essence of a person lies in their skills and dedication to their craft. The quote encourages the recognition of one's own talents and contributions regardless of their background, reinforcing the idea that personal excellence transcends cultural or racial contexts.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech to emphasize the importance of skills over identity.
As a dancer, you really try to stay true to whatever the choreographer/artistic director is giving you. So, now the shoe is on the other foot and I have to trust everyone else - I have to trust the dancer. As I was trusted as a dancer, I trust my dancers.
It's never too early to teach your children about the tool of money. Teach them how to work for it and they learn pride and self-respect. Teach them how to save it and they learn security and self-worth. Teach them how to be generous with it and they learn love.
We can go on talking about racism and who treated whom badly, but what are you going to do about it? Are you going to wallow in that or are you going to create your own agenda?
I've always felt that complement of opposites: body and soul, solitude and companionship, and in the dance studio, contraction and release, rise and fall.
You don't enter a dance studio and say "I can't do that." If you do, then why are you in the studio in the first place?
Maybe it's a generational thing, but I never wanted to be the best black dancer in the world. I just wanted to be the best.
There are ways in, journeys to the center of life, through time; through air, matter, dream and thought. The ways are not always mapped or charted, but sometimes being lost, if there is such a thing, is the sweetest place to be. And always, in this search, a person might find that she is already there, at the center of the world. It may be a broken world, but it is glorious nonetheless.
In the light of eternity we shall see that what we desired would have been fatal to us, and that what we would have avoided was essential to our well-being.
There can be no tyrants where there are no slaves.
In the total expanse of human life there is not a single square inch of which the Christ, who alone is sovereign, does not declare, 'That is mine!'.
Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the competition of other ideas.
I used to tell women graduate students, half-seriously, that the role of slightly rebellious daughter was one of the better roles for women living in patriarchy.
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