Word: feelings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...blights on his happy childhood seem small, but, Updike argues, they inexorably determined the life he would lead. As a boy, he developed psoriasis and a sporadic stammer; he could savor reality's entrancing parade but never feel comfortable joining it himself. The recurring rashes on his skin kept him apart, drove his attention inward: "You are forced to the mirror, again and again; psoriasis compels narcissism, if we can suppose a Narcissus who did not like what he saw." One of the hallmarks of his fiction became elaborate celebrations of the status quo. Updike thinks he knows...
...leaving for the airport to catch an important business flight, Gilbert stood on a busy avenue futilely hailing cab after speeding cab. Finally he phoned his secretary for assistance. She got one on her first attempt. Gilbert's secretary is white. He is black. "It's pretty hard to feel like you're mainstream," he says with a sigh, "when you're wearing $2,000 worth of clothes and you can't catch a cab at night...
Rather than welcoming blacks into the mainstream, some whites feel threatened by their arrival. They seem to believe that the good life -- the desirable neighborhood, the right school, the best country club -- is for whites only. Blacks in token numbers may be tolerated. But when their numbers exceed a so-called tipping point, many whites go on the defensive. A generation ago, the color bar was rigid and well defined: no blacks allowed. Now it has become a shifting barrier that can suddenly materialize, curtly reminding blacks that no matter how successful they may be, they remain in some ways...
Twelve-year-old Khalil Kinsey is one of only three black youngsters in his sixth-grade class in Los Angeles. In school, he says, "kids like to feel my hair because it's fuzzy. They ask questions like do I get sunburned when I go to the beach. Dumb questions like that. Just because I'm black doesn't mean I'm different." Khalil's father Bernard, a Xerox executive, would like his son to someday attend Florida A&M, the mostly black school he and his wife attended. "It's important for a black kid to understand that there...
Nevertheless, the decline of the underclass imposes a psychological burden, in part because whites remain far too willing to associate all blacks with welfare dependency, crime and broken families. Moreover, many middle-class blacks feel personally guilty about the unpromising prospects of poorer blacks. That may be the most unfair burden of all, since the black middle class by itself does not have nearly enough resources to lift the underclass into the mainstream. Patricia Grayson speaks for many affluent blacks when she observes, "One person can do only so much. I think it's unfair for people...