Word: mainstream
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...include any public employee who is a role model?" asked University of Michigan Law Professor Yale Kamisar. Other experts doubted that the court would uphold random drug tests for a broad spectrum of Government employees. "The pattern of votes on the court suggests that as you get closer to mainstream workers, the number of dissenters picks up," observed Columbia University Law Professor Gerard Lynch...
...been a revolution without much fanfare, but a revolution nonetheless. While the nation's attention focused on the plight of the urban underclass, millions of black Americans marched quietly into the mainstream, creating a vibrant middle class with incomes, educations and life-styles rivaling those of its white counterpart. For them, the passions and suffering of the civil rights struggle have culminated, as they were meant to, in the mundane pleasures and pangs of middle-class life. Theirs is the infrequently told success story of American race relations...
...undeniable progress, the black middle class still seems more to be poised on the banks of the mainstream than to be swimming in its current. Its members are haunted by a feeling of alienation from the white majority with which they have so much in common, a sense that somehow they still do not quite fit in. They speak again and again of "living in two worlds." In one they are judged by their credentials and capabilities. In the other, race still comes first...
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...
...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 to try to make successful blacks feel guilty for not feeling guilty all the time...