Word: crouching
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...freshness to his writing," says producer Thomas Lennon, who persuaded Steele to do the PBS special Seven Days in Bensonhurst after reading one of his essays in Harper's. "By making himself his own laboratory, he cuts at familiar issues in a very unfamiliar way." Says author Stanley Crouch, like Steele a critic of affirmative action: "One of the most important things he is doing is questioning Pavlovian racial responses. What's important is not that other people agree with what he says. It's that serious discussion is brought to the discourse dominated by slogans and cliches...
...only the latest of a small but widely publicized band of black intellectuals who have been lifted from relative obscurity by a white establishment bent on promoting any African American who publicly attacks mainstream black thinking on affirmative action and other civil rights causes. Like other black conservatives, including Crouch, Stanford economist Thomas Sowell and Harvard political scientist Glenn Loury, Steele takes a heavy verbal beating from black thinkers who argue that the mavericks are undeserving of the attention they receive. Says Martin Kilson, Harvard's first black tenured professor: "Steele's stuff is simpleminded, one-dimensional psychological reductionism...
...should pick a new running mate for '92. "My skills," Quayle said recently, "have always been in negotiating and conciliating." That sounds like wishful thinking from a man so long under assault, including the deadly assault of laughter. Like Charlie Chaplin in the ring, what can he do but crouch behind the referee and wave his gloves in vague call-it-off gestures? Yet he practiced conciliation even before he stood so badly in need...
...Thus Crouch dismisses black filmmaker Spike Lee as a "middle-class would-be street Negro." He puts down Toni Morrison's moving novel Beloved as no more than an effort "to enter American slavery into the big-time martyr ratings contest." He castigates James Baldwin for undermining the moral basis of the civil rights movement with essays that "transformed white America into Big Daddy and the Negro movement into an obnoxious, pouting adolescent demanding the car keys...
When he is able to restrain his rhetoric, Crouch argues cogently that blacks imprison themselves when they view their history as one mainly of oppression. He sees things white observers often miss: Jesse Jackson is most convincing when he demands "the best of those who live in the worst conditions"; Louis Farrakhan's anti-Semitism appeals to many blacks because they envy the clout of Jews; such artists as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and writer Albert Murray have blended the traditions of Africans, Europeans, Native Americans and Asians into "the rich mulatto textures of American culture." When he sticks...