Except for the beast fables, which are anciently derived from the world's multi-racial heritage, American Negro humor is rooted in... social oppression. And--again excepting the animal fables--it differs from classical Western and white American humor in another respect. It is totally devoid of those myth-making and myth-transmuting elements and symbols that appeal so deeply to the American mind in the works of the tall-tale tellers such as Davy Crockett, Seba Smith, Mike Fink, and Mark Twain. There are no Rip Van Winkles, Johnny Appleseeds, Paul Bunyans, or Calamity Janes--and none bearing the faintest resemblance to them--in Negro American humor. The myth-making figures in the literature of black Americans are the blues-haunted characters. They are Stagolee, John Henry, and Big Boy; they are Mary Lou, Frankie, and Sister Caroline. And they are not funny, least of all to the nameless hundreds of folk-Negroes who created them and the still-living thousands who love them and perpetuate them in song and story.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Martin Luther King, Jr., was the conscience of his generation.... He and I grew up in the same South, he the son of a clergyman, I... the son of a farmer. We both knew from opposite sides, the invisible wall of racial segregation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the At...lanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn't know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Rarely do American parents deliberately teach their children to hate members of another racial, religious, or nationality group. M...any parents, however, communicate the prevailing racial attitudes to their children in subtle and sometimes unconscious ways.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Put simply, conservatives highlight the government's role in promoting individual virtue but downplay the government's responsibil...ity to create a society in which virtue can flourish. Liberals are wary of regulating personal behavior, but would give government a powerful say over the shape of social and economic life. In essence, liberals and conservatives disagree over what are the most important sins. For conservatives, the sins that matter are personal irresponsibility, the flight from family life, sexual permissiveness, the failure of individuals to work hard. For liberals, the gravest sins are intolerance, a lack of generosity toward the needy, narrow-mindedness toward social and racial minorities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I could be, I discovered, by turns stern, loving, wise, silly, youthful, aged, racial, universal, indulgent, strict, with a remark...ably easy and often cunning detachment ... various ways that an adult, spurred by guilt, by annoyance, by condescension, by loneliness, deals with the prerogatives of power and love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Once the visitor was told rather repetitively that this city was the melting pot; never before in history had so many people of su...ch varied languages, customs, colors and culinary habits lived so amicably together. Although New York remains peaceful by most standards, this self-congratulation is now less often heard, since it was discovered some years ago that racial harmony depended unduly on the willingness of the blacks (and latterly the Puerto Ricans) to do for the other races the meanest jobs at the lowest wages and then to return to live by themselves in the worst slums.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most young black females learn to be suspicious and critical of feminist thinking long before they have any clear understanding of... its theory and politics.... Without rigorously engaging feminist thought, they insist that racial separatism works best. This attitude is dangerous. It not only erases the reality of common female experience as a basis for academic study; it also constructs a framework in which differences cannot be examined comparatively.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »