... there is a dangerous trend observable in some quarters of the Movement to program Sapphire out of her "evil" ways into a cover...-up, shut-up, lay-back-and-be-cool obedience role. She is being assigned an unreal role of mute servant that supposedly neutralizes the acidic tension that exists between Black men and Black women. She is being encouraged--in the name of revolution no less--to cultivate "virtues" that if listed would sound like the personality traits of slaves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appeared ...among Europeans of all classes.... In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year.... It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law.... Industrialized America added brutalizing child labor to the oppressions of the young.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 »
In America, you can segregate the people, but the problems will travel. From slavery to equal rights, from state suppression of di...ssent to crime, drugs and unemployment, I can't think of a supposedly Black issue that hasn't wasted the original Black target group and then spread like measles to outlying white experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Has anyone ever told you that you overplay your various roles rather severely, Mr. Kaplan? First you're the outraged Madison Avenu...e man who claims he's been mistaken for someone else. Then you play the fugitive from justice, supposedly trying to clear his name of a crime he knows he didn't commit. And now you play the peevish lover stung by jealously and betrayal. It seems to me you fellows could stand a little less training from the FBI and a little more from the Actors Studio.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Anti-Semitism is a horrible disease from which nobody is immune, and it has a kind of evil fascination that makes an enlightened p...erson draw near the source of infection, supposedly in a scientific spirit, but really to sniff the vapors and dally with the possibility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a nominally egalitarian society the ideal situation (socially speaking) is one in which the members of the "wrong" groups have ...the freedom to engage in literature (or equally significant activities) and yet do not do so, thus proving that they can't. But, alas, give them the least real freedom and they will do it. The trick thus becomes to make the freedom as nominal a freedom as possible and then--since some of the so-and-so's will do it anyway--develop various strategies for ignoring, condemning, or belittling the artistic works that result. If properly done, these strategies result in a social situation in which the "wrong" people are (supposedly) free to commit literature, art, or whatever, but very few do, and those who do (it seems) do it badly, so we can all go home to lunch.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You will recall the proud statement made recently by a Fascist general--"We have four columns in front of Madrid and a fifth insid...e the city."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »