All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do ...something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extin...ction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be w...ho I am?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the vi...olated and the deprived.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The purpose of polite behavior is never virtuous. Deceit, surrender, and concealment: these are not virtues. The goal of the manne...rly is comfort, per se.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Self-determination has to mean that the leader is your individual gut, and heart, and mind or we're talking about power, again, an...d its rather well-known impurities. Who is really going to care whether you live or die and who is going to know the most intimate motivation for your laughter and your tears is the only person to be trusted to speak for you and to decide what you will or will not do.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring ne...w life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them.... Smug in our certain awareness that ... communal life must be more difficult even than nuclear family life, which we know, to our very nerve endings, is disastrous, we condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakeable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money- bitten, frightened, adult lives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that t...hey forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can't think of a single supposedly Black issue that hasn't wasted the original Black target group and then spread like the measl...es to outlying white experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »