Word: blackless
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...more like a primitive reflex, a throwback to the dim past of tribal experience, which we rationalize and try to make respectable by dressing it up in the gaudy and highly questionable trappings of what we call the "concept of race." Yet, despite its absurdity, the fantasy of a blackless America continues to turn up. It is a fantasy born not merely of racism but of petulance, of exasperation, of moral fatigue. It is like a boil bursting forth from impurities in the bloodstream of democracy...
Lanning Prescott Budd, born in 1899, son of the European sales manager of Budd Gunmakers, lives on the Riviera with his delicious mother, Beauty Budd, nee Mabel Blackless. A symbolic opening scene shows young Lanny dancing in a Dalcroze festival in Germany, in 1913-the dance being an interpretation in "Eurythmics," the rage of the time, of the triumph of music over the furies of Hell in Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice. Before the real furies set sail over Europe the following summer, Lanny visits charming upper-class friends in England and Germany, glimpses the squalor of the lower...
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