There can be no more ancient and traditional American value than ignorance. English-only speakers brought it with them to this cou...ntry three centuries ago, and they quickly imposed it on the Africans--who were not allowed to learn to read and write--and on the Native Americans, who were simply not allowed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I have ... been guilty of watching Westerns without acknowledging that Native Americans have gone through the same madness as A...frican Americans. Isn't it extraordinary that sometimes the most offended have not seen others being offended?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No troop or squadron or regiment's gonna keep the Apaches on this reservation unless they want to stay here. Five years ago we mad...e a treaty with Cochise. He and his Cherokowas and some of the other Apache bands came on the reservation. They wanted to live here in peace and did for two years. And then Meacham, here, was sent by the Indian ring, the dirtiest, most corrupt political group in our history. And then it began--whiskey but no beef, trinkets instead of blankets, the women degraded, the children sickly, and the men turning into drunken animals. So Cochise did the only thing a decent man could do. He left. Took most of his people and crossed the Rio Bravo into Mexico.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the ...rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of th...e heart, everything falls away except one's native State;Mneither can you seize hold of that, unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Afrocentric exploration of the black past only scratches the surface. A full examination of the ancestry of those who are refe...rred to in the newspapers as blacks and African Americans must include Europe and Native America.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, ...that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »