Word: pinning
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This is the shortsightedness of victimology. You're goddam right he made it by himself. Now you are going to take that away from him and say he made it because of affirmative action. He didn't have affirmative action back there in Pin Point, Ga. His grandfather made him go to school and study hard, and then he gets into the position where, yes, maybe he could benefit. But if all that early work had not been done, we wouldn't know Clarence Thomas today...
...fact they often weren't terribly useful. So the two sides would go back to the one subject where they could accomplish something -- arms control -- and the exercise became increasingly esoteric and rarefied. Like medieval theologians debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, the statesmen would % dicker over how many warheads would be allowed on a Soviet ICBM and how many cruise missiles would be allowed on an American bomber. Nuclear diplomacy also became more controversial because it involved cooperation and compromise with a feared and hated enemy. For example, the political opposition to SALT...
Thomas was born with the help of a midwife in 1948 in a wooden house close to the marshes in Pin Point, Ga., a segregated enclave without paved streets or sewers. His mother Leola Williams, only 18 when he was born, already had an infant daughter. When Thomas was two, his father walked out on the family, heading to Philadelphia in search of a better life. Pregnant with a third child, Thomas' mother lived in a dirt-floor one-room shack that belonged to an aunt and went to work at the factory next door, picking crabmeat for 5 cents...
...look like sheep. One could detect the bleatings of the herd in a recent televised exchange between columnist Robert Novak and Congressman Joe Kennedy. Frustrated by the Congressman's failure to agree with him on a range of issues, Novak suddenly snapped, "Where's your American-flag lapel pin?" Never mind that young Kennedy has chosen to serve his nation on a full-time basis, he wasn't, in the conservative columnist's eyes, patriotically correct...
Shelby Steele, an English professor at California's San Jose State University, has emerged as the most eloquent proponent of this view. He asserts that affirmative action has reinforced a self-defeating sense of victimization among blacks by encouraging them to pin their failures on white racism instead of their own shortcomings. Says he: "Blacks now stand to lose more from affirmative action than they gain...