Word: negroness
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...room of a big house: "If you never go into that room, you don't know anything about [it]. If I come out of that room to clean many other things in the rest of the house, then I know about the whole house." Richard Wright said that the "Negro is America's metaphor." The idea is that black people, merely by existing, hold up a mirror to white America, in which it may see itself darkly...
...mansions of the rich and respectable. Who are then revealed to be the source of all civic corruption. Precisely because Easy is black and an unlicensed investigator, his journey through the social strata is much more perilous than Marlowe's ever was. In Los Angeles 50 years ago a "Negro" risked his life (or anyway a nasty beating) if he was found in a white neighborhood or in the company of a white woman. And the cops, of course, could be counted on to treat him with brutal contempt (perhaps the only American tradition that has survived intact to this...
...when I first understood that I belonged to a minority. In those early years, I had no such sense, because on Banana Kelly there was no majority. Everybody was either a Jew, an Italian, a Pole, a Greek, a Puerto Rican or, as we said in those days, a Negro. Racial epithets were hurled around and sometimes led to fistfights. But it was not "You're inferior--I'm better.'' The fighting was more like avenging an insult to your team. Among my boyhood friends were Victor Ramirez, Walter Schwartz, Manny Garcia, Melvin Klein. The Kleins were the first family...
...wars that now, at the sour close of the 20th century, seems remote and glittering, like something enclosed in a bell jar. This was the moment when New York, pupating into a modernist capital, contained all the other buzz-word News-new woman, new paganism, new verse, the New Negro and the New Republic...
...strafing ground targets. Eventually, they began escorting bombers to their targets, but the commander of the fighter group, Colonel William Momyer, went out of his way to make them feel unwelcome. Time, in its Sept. 20, 1943, issue, questioned the fighting capability of blacks in general, asking, "Is the Negro as good a soldier as the white...