Word: white
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Lester is good at it. He scornfully caricatures the breakup of the civil rights movement. Thus S.N.C.C. had been getting heads busted and shot in Mississippi since 1961, he says, but it was not until whites came into the state three years later that there was any press attention. Then the stories, he claims, went something like this: "Blop-blop is a blue-eyed blonde from Diamond Junction-on-the-Hudson, N.Y. She is a 20-year-old junior at Radcliffe majoring in Oriental metaphysics and its relationship to the quantum theory when the sun is in Sagittarius. This summer...
...bestselling Is Paris Burning?, make prime melodrama out of El Cordobés' story, and they are frequently informative about the brutal, corrupt realities beneath bullfighting's cloak of romanticism. But the problem with their cinematic technique is that while it requires only a grainy black-and-white script, they give it a glossy, Technicolor treatment. Every irony is underlined, every climax hammered home, every scene overstuffed with authentic touches from their well-stocked notebooks. The result, paradoxically, is that their finished product is rarely as vivid and compelling as their raw material must have been...
...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...
...would seem that there has to be first, a dramatically interesting story that occurs at a human level, a story resonant with analogies so complex and yet, at moments, instantly and strikingly identifiable, that it fleshes out the political fact. The turbulence of war, the patterns of black-white intimacies, the historically right setting, all these are fit ingredients for such a story. And finally, most important, the touches of unstammering, heroic rhetoric to scald the benches into the grip of the ultimate social and political meanings...