Word: gwaltney
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That same bitterness, powerfully expressed, lies at the heart of nearly every conversation John Gwaltney has recorded in his new book, whose title means "ordinary" in one American Black argot. One man, a coal miner, says this of whites: "Just thinking about them makes me feel like I have swallowed shit. I mean, a rat or a maggot is better than the best white cat who ever drew breath. Just looking at those things makes me want to spit up. Everything they do is rotten." Or this from a cook: "These people hide their dirt or make everybody...
...that they are sick of it. Probably, they are more tired of being supposed to feel guilty than of worrying about med school admissions; probably, the rhetoric more than the result of affirmative action troubles them. And if that is the case, it is all the sadder, for if Gwaltney's chilling work proves one thing, it's that commitment, that admission of error, even of guilt, leading to a true change in attitude, is the only possible cure...
...Thieving/ Very potent sexually/ Scars/ Generally inferior/ But natural rhythms." White America has also created itself-a world that, when depicted in a novel like William Melvin Kelley's dem (1967), comes off as pallid, literally colorless, and trapped. In Drylongso, an oral history collected by John Langston Gwaltney and published last July, Jackson Jordan Jr., a nearly 90-year-old black North Carolinian, puts it to white people rather kindly: "Pretending to know everything or just pretending to be better than you know you are must be a terrible strain on anybody...
...Gwaltney got the idea for something like the Chronicle in 1957, when he was editor of the Johns Hopkins alumni magazine. At that time, he helped fashion an insert dealing with various national issues in education. The supplement took off and soon reached a circulation of 2.4 million. In an effort to widen his focus, Gwaltney left the Hopkins magazine and got a grant from the Carnegie Foundation "to find out," as he puts it, "what information educators needed and weren't getting." In 1966 he began publishing the Chronicle. Last July the paper finally moved into the black...
Independent of any educational organization, the paper is usually in the center of whatever controversy is brewing on campus. Nonetheless, the Chronicle carries no editorials, and Gwaltney remains adamantly opposed to opinion in his news columns. Says he: "We talk to an enormously sophisticated audience whose trust we want to keep. They need our information, not our opinion. If there is one thing that has never been a problem on campuses, it's getting people's opinions...