Word: meanness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...tacit consensus of the intellectual establishment that objectivity does not exist. Hence the personal comment which attempts to do no more than state one man's point of view on a certain patch of experience." "Pure objectivity," he says, is probably an unattainable ideal. "But this does not mean that it should be abandoned any more than we should stop trying to tell each other the truth because an awful lot of people in this world are liars...
White America is endlessly accommodating, verbally, in the matter of race. Southern politicians are learning to say "Negro" when they mean "nigger," and Northern liberals are careful now to say "black" when they mean "Negro." (That's because blacks have begun saying "Negro" when they mean "sellout.") Opportunities to use these terms do not occur every day, but whites keep in practice just in case...
When Black-White conversation does occur, it is likely to consist of Black's saying blackly that "America as it now exists must be destroyed," and White's answering, "Yes, but what do you really mean?" Kill Whitey? Or (smiling whitely) merely destruction of the social order? And what then? Black points out with sour pleasure that his "revolution" has 22 million members and that there are few recruiting or dropout problems. White says yes, but so long as blackness and separatism are requirements, the membership can do no more than cause disruption, because it can never grow...
...Mean Mischief These new books offer some value as footnotes to the argument. Julius Lester is a former field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. His Look Out, Whitey! is a long harangue that reproduces accurately the black tone of voice at its angriest. It is street-corner oratory aimed at blacks but spoken, as the mean mischief of the title suggests, with sly awareness of the whites standing at the edge of the crowd...
...blow of the Civil War in Sherman's brazen march through the entire swamp of the South. The hurricane comes and the upheaval is as potent as it is wide-ranging. To Mrs. Chestnut, the Southern lady of the manor who tries to preserve her hopes, which comes to mean in the end simply preserving the life of her last son, the effects are puzzling but no more. To the blacks, (the only ones shown in the play are a group of captured soldiers from an all-black Northern regiment) the event is a sordid release but one that...