Word: quilting
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Jackson likes to end speeches with the story of his grandmother, who took odds and ends of cloth ("not hardly fit to wipe your shoes with, some of them") and stitched them into a quilt that kept him warm as a child. Then, referring to different minorities or excluded parts of his audience, he tells farmers, or strikers, or Hispanics, that "you're right, but your patch ain't big enough." The minorities must unite to extend their influence. He does not reach the real conclusion of his parable -- that the white patch ain't big enough either; the majority...
...drama of South Africa seems to be playing itself out with Aristotelian balance. There was a beginning, in the late 1940s, when the white minority government instituted apartheid, a crazy quilt of laws designed to restrict, presumably forever, the freedoms and aspirations of a black majority. The middle, the escalating restiveness and violence provoked by a system too rigid to bend, is now. And surely an end, whether it be awful or awesome, must come. Unlike such interminably troubled spots as Northern Ireland or the Middle East, South Africa generates each day one of the oldest questions to capture human...
...seemed easy in theory: getting a majority of Supreme Court Justices to sign a single opinion clarifying the rules for combatting discrimination. But from 1979 until the Johnson decision last week, that goal eluded a deeply divided high court, which had stitched together majorities through a patchwork quilt of separate opinions that raised as many questions as they answered. Which forms of affirmative action are legal? When are they mandatory? Are quotas ever permissible? Required? Even though the Supreme Court will continue to refine the boundaries of affirmative action through a case-by-case approach, the Johnson decision has helped...
WHEN I FIRST heard Harvard people bragging about their great diversity, I thought they were talking about some kind of graduate school for scuba divers. I soon discovered that what they were referring to was the rag-tag, motley, kaleidoscopic, crazy-quilt, incongruous mixture of humanity that gathers each year in Cambridge to pursue its lofty goals...
...camped closer to the Prudential than to the ballpark, tossing backpacks on the grass and stretching out on a quilt...