Word: africanism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Shaking his head at his own experience in the U.S. Marine Corps when troops were segregated, Dinkins proceeded to condemn the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the "deranged" Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis), South African apartheid and violent repression in several African and Asian nations...
Arguing that "African Americans in the United States ought to challenge racism when any group of people is touched by depravity," Dinkins said "too many good people are silent...
Last winter, when a Chinese instead of a South African flag flew over Harvard Yard, no one was giving Jiang Zemin any honorary degrees. He came on a cold day with rain falling like freezing spikes, and thousands of protesters greeted his fleet of black limousines before he was safely delivered to Sanders Theatre. Like Mandela's speech, the content of Jiang's was largely irrelevant. The Chinese president's visit, also like Mandela's, was preceded by speeches from a flock of Harvard professors...
Anyone who claims to actually remember what Mandela said is probably lying. What was truly moving was not his speech or even his voice, but the physical moment of his arrival on the dais. We were asked to rise, and suddenly, we heard the sounds of African drums reverberating through the Yard. As we caught sight of him, a cheer swept across the crowd like a rush of wind, as if we were standing at the coronation of an ancient king...
...keep one step ahead of the students and teach myself about African empires and the Justinian Code, I think back to all the failed Faculty debates on including History 10a and 10b in the Core, all the swirling chatter about "methods and approaches to knowledge," and I wonder: To what end the self-righteous administrators' smugness at keeping the Core untainted by survey courses, if I hold a degree from Harvard and cannot call myself liberally educated...