Word: belled
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...order to appraise the contradictions and inconsistencies that pervade the all too real world of racial oppression, I have chosen in this book the tools not only of reason but of unreason, of fantasy," Bell writes. Given the seeming intractability of American racism, imagination is needed to bring about racial justice...
...emphasized in court, and not without reason. The power to create a reality, to imagine an allegory which lays bare the essence of a case, is as unfair as it is liberating, allowing the tangible reality to give way to the perceived reality of a mind such as Bell's. Should justice be meted out based on his--or even a people's--collective imagination? Can real cases be seen most accurately as allegories of imagined realities...
...this reflects Bell's emphasis on long-term process rather than immediate result. His goal is less to find legal remedies to the immediate problems confronting Blacks than it is for America somehow to transcend its racist past and present through its own legal practices...
...Bell invokes the metaphor of disease throughout And We Are Not Saved to describe negative aspects of Black behavior. Thus the crime rate among Blacks can be cured like an illness. Again and again, cures for Black pathologies are discovered, then destroyed. But Bell is doing more than laying bare the hypocrisy of whites who blame the victims. By harping on the analogy of disease as an absurd explanation for Black behavior, he makes the unstated point that it is whites who are stricken with a disease: racism. Ultimately, it is they who must be cured. And, Bell seems...
...Curia sisters say, "We find courage in the knowledge that we are not the opressors and that we have commited our lives to fighting the oppression of oursleves as well as others." One hopes that Bell does not abandon his search for a new way of talking about civil rights and that And We Are Not Saved marks the beginnings of a legal movement that forces Americans finally to realize their own ideals...