Word: blacking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Temple of My Familiar is almost all talk -- monologues and dialogues, chiefly by and among black women. The skeletal plot is an excuse to get the conversations going. Suwelo, a black professor of American history, travels from his California home to attend an uncle's funeral in Baltimore and to dispose of the house that comes as his inheritance. Suwelo is grateful for the respite provided by this visit; his wife Fanny (the granddaughter of Miss Celie, the heroine of The Color Purple) has discovered feminism and wants a divorce. It is not that she has stopped loving...
...home to white people as well, but they were driven out because their pitifully pale skins could not protect them from the blazing heat and light ("The white man," Miss Lissie notes, "worships gold because it is the sun he has lost"). Thus was conceived whites' envy of blacks and a determination to crush them, a process that began, at least symbolically, in Greek mythology when Perseus beheaded Medusa, who was really the Great Mother, the Black African Goddess...
Physicians from a local hospital provide comprehensive health care. Tutors recruited from the Junior League help with homework, and employment counselors place the kids in summer jobs. "Many employers have stereotypes of black urban youth," says Mary Kay Penn, who manages the Milbank program. "It is very hard to persuade them to take these kids on, even when we pay the salary." But last summer Penn placed 75 of the kids in jobs, and Carrera added a silk-screening program so they could learn to design and sell T shirts...
...fund raising from private as well as public sources. The cost for each teenager is about $1,500 a year, and the paid staff members are all indigenous to the community. "Most adolescent pregnancy programs are headed by white female social workers," says Cary Dixon, a 48-year-old black man who teaches the family-life course to boys at the Frederick Douglass housing project...
...regents were responding to a series of obnoxious acts by white students. Last fall the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity staged a mock slave auction, complete with some pledges in blackface. More recently, white male students have trailed black female students, shouting, "I've never tried a nigger before." Some civil libertarians have complained, however, that the new rule violates constitutional guarantees of free speech, no matter how irresponsibly that right is exercised...