Toni Morrison: «Antigamente, éramos cidadãos; agora, somos contribuintes.»
O resumo de uma conversa de Toni Morrison (Nobel de 1993) com o crítico Hilton Als, da New Yorker:
“I couldn’t write about now, I felt, because it was so slippery. Until I thought I knew – what was very definitive about now is that it’s so powerfully self-reverential. Selfies, look at me, novels about me, stories about me ...
The complexity of the so-called individual that’s been praised for decades in America somehow has narrowed itself to the ‘me’. When I was a young girl we were called citizens – American citizens. We were second-class citizens, but that was the word. In the 50s and 60s they started calling us consumers. So we did – consume. Now they don’t use those words any more – it’s the American taxpayer and those are different attitudes.”