Word: benignity
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Americans, of course, have produced their own unflattering images of the Japanese over the years -- from the malevolent figures depicted on World War II posters to more benign, but not necessarily inoffensive, postwar depictions. "If there were yellow dolls in the U.S. with buck teeth, narrow slanted eyes and called Jap, of course the Japanese would be angry," says Kaname Saruya, who teaches American history at Tokyo Woman's Christian University. "They're doing the same thing here with Sambo, but they don't realize it. Japanese are obtuse." Obtuse or not, that is little consolation for American blacks: having...
...first thing that strikes you in the great still lifes and interiors of the 1940s and '50s, and it lends them the breadth and declamatory power of traditional fresco. Even when the form is inherently mysterious or logically inexplicable -- like the bird that flaps like a silent, benign apparition through the workaday clutter in his Studio paintings of 1949-56 -- you are aware of its density...
...access to water and be protected from the fierce solar ultraviolet radiation that rains down on the surface, virtually unobstructed by the Martian atmosphere. Sedimentary rocks in the ancient riverbeds would be an ideal place to hunt for fossils of organisms that may have lived when Mars was more benign, with a thicker atmosphere, warmer climate and running water on its surface...
...days things were almost better. Compared with Hollywood's caricaturing of other minorities, the industry's treatment of Hispanics was benign. In the silent era of the Latin lover, actors named Ricardo Cortez, Antonio Moreno and Ramon Novarro all wooed Garbo on screen. In the '30s and '40s, Hollywood called on Cesar Romero, Gilbert Roland or Ricardo Montalban for Continental elegance and rewarded them with careers as durable as Corinthian leather. Even those two camp goddesses of the '40s, Carmen Miranda and Maria Montez, did not wallow in the spitfire stereotype so much as they exploded it, with...
...premise for propagating the royal line in a benign African monarchy, it is as farfetched as it is far-darting. As an excuse for propagating a few laughs, it turns an honorable tradition upside down. Princes and princesses from innocently backward realms used to turn up regularly in movies, looking for romantic and material bedazzlement in the more highly developed lands. This young potentate experiments with the notion that fun may be found in letting royalty rough it for a while below the poverty line. Besides, Eddie Murphy, the nation's top box-office star, is Akeem. And Arsenio Hall...