Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 147 of 447 · 20 per page

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AUGUSTINE. (Tract. xxix. s. 6) Should any one however not understand this, let him hear the advice which immediately follows from our Lord: If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of Myself. What meaneth this, If any man will do His will? To do His will is to believe on Him, as He Himself says, This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent. (c. 6:29) And who does not know, that to work the work of God, is to do His will? To know is to understand. Do not then seek to understand in order to believe, but believe in order to understand, for, Except ye believe, ye shall not understand. (Is. 7:9. Vulg.) CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. xlix. 1) This is as much as to say, Put away the anger, envy, and hatred which you have towards Me, and there will be nothing to prevent your knowing, that the words which I speak are from God. Then He brings in an irresistible argument taken from human experience: He that speaketh of himself, seeketh his own glory: as if to say, He who aims at establishing some doctrine of his own, does so for no purpose, but to get glory. But I seek the glory of Him that sent me, and wish to teach you for His, i. e. another’s, sake: and then it follows, But he that seeketh His glory that sent Him, the same is true, and there is no unrighteousness in Him. THEOPHYLACT. As if He said, I speak the truth, because My doctrine containeth the truth: there is no unrighteousness in Me, because I usurp not another’s glory. AUGUSTINE. (Tract. xxix. s. 8) He who seeketh his own glory is Antichrist. But our Lord set us an example of humility, in that being found in fashion as a man, He sought His Father’s glory, not His own. Thou, when thou doest good, takest glory to thyself, when thou doest evil, upbraidest God. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. xlix. 2) Observe, the reason why He spake so humbly of Himself, is to let men know, that He does not aim at glory, or power; and to accommodate Himself to their weakness, and to teach them moderation, and a humble, as distinguished from an assuming, way of speaking of themselves. 7:19–2419. did not Moses give you the law, and yet none of you keepeth the law? Why go ye about to kill me? 20. The people answered and said, Thou hast a devil: who goeth about to kill thee? 21. Jesus answered and said unto them, I have done one work, and ye all marvel. 22. Moses therefore gave unto you circumcision: (not because it is of Moses, but of the fathers:) and ye on the sabbath day circumcise a man.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  He can retreat from his uneasiness in only one direction: into a callousn ess which very shortly becomes second nature. He becomes more callous, the population be comes more hostile, the situation grows more tense, and the police force is increased. One day, to everyone's astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up. Before the dust has settled or the blood congealed, editorials, speeches, and civil-r ights commissions are loud in the land, demanding to know what happened. What happened is that Negroes want to be treated like men. Negroes JVant to be treated like men: a perfectly straight forward statement, containing only seven words. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable. The idea seems to threaten profound, barely conscious assumptions. A kind of panic paralyzes their features, as though they found themselves trapped on the edge of a steep place. I once tried to describe to a very well-k nown American intellectual the conditions among Negroes in the South. My recital disturbed him and made him indignant; and he asked me in pe rfect innocence, "Why don't all the Negroes in the South move North?" I tried to explain what has happened, unfailingly, whenever a significant body of Negroes move North. They do not escape Jim Crow: they merely encounter another, not less-deadly variety. They do not move to Chicago, they move to the South Side; they do not move to New York, they move to Harlem. The pressure within the ghetto causes the ghetto 178 NOBODY KNOW S MY NAME walls to expand, and this expansion is always violent. White people hold the line as long as they can, and in as many ways as they can, from verbal intimidation to physical violence. But inevitably the border which has divided the ghetto from the rest of the world falls into the hands of the ghetto. The white people fall back bitterly before the black horde; the landl ords make a tidy profit by raising the rent, chopping up the rooms, and all but dispensing with the upkeep; and what has once been a neighborhood turns into a "tu rf." This is precisely what happened when the Puerto Ricans arrived in their thousands-and the bitterness thus caused is, as I write, being fought out all up and down those streets. Northerners indulge in an extremely dangerous lux ury.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And, though I know that it has now become inconven ient and impolite to speak of the American Jew in the same breath with which one speaks of the American black (I hate to say I told you so, sings the right righteous Reverend Ray Charles, but: I told you so), I yet contend that the mobs in the streets of Hitler's Germany were in those streets not only by the will of the German State, but by the will of the western world, including those architects of hu man freedom, the Brit ish, and the presumed guardian of Christian and human mo rality, the Pope. The American Jew, if I may say so-and I THE PRICE OF THE TICKET say so with love, whether or not you believe me-makes the error of believing that his Holocaust ends in the New World, where mine begins. My diaspora continues, the end is not in sight, and I certainly cannot depend on the morality of this panic-stricken consumer society to bring me out of-: Egypt. A mob cannot afford to doubt: that the Jews killed Christ or that niggers want to rape their sisters or that anyone who fails to make it in the land of the free and the home of the brave deserves to be wretched. But these ideas do not come from the mob. They come from the state, which creates and manipulates the mob. The idea of black persons as property, for example, does not come from the mob. It is not a spon taneous idea. It does not come from the people, who knew better, who thought nothing of intermarriage until they were penalized for it: this idea comes from the architects of the American State. These architects decided that the concept of Property was more important-more real-than the possibil ities of the human being. In the church I come from- which is not at all the same church to which white Americans belon g-we were coun selled, from time to time, to do our first works over. Though the church I come from and the church to which most white Americans belong are both Christian churches, their relation ship-- due to those pragmatic decisions concerning Property made by a Christian State sometime ago-c annot be said to involve, or suggest, the fellowship of Christians. We do not, therefore, share the same hope or speak the same language. To do your first works over means to reexamine everything. Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, ex amine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testifY or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  They have been seeing it happen to others, and enduring what has happened to them, for nearly as long as Malcolm has been on earth. Archie, par ticularly, is struck by something he sees in the boy. So, when Malcolm, stumbling back from the jukebox, stumbles over Archie's shoes, Archie uses this as a pretext to invite the boy over to the table. And that is all there is to the scene. My collaborator brought it back to me, translated. It was really the same scene, he explained, but he had added a little action-thus, when Malcolm stumbles over Archie's shoes, CHAPTER THREE 553 Archie becomes furious. Malcolm, in turn, becomes furious, and the scene turns into a shoot-out fr om High Noon, with everybody in the bar taking bets as to who will draw first. In this way, said my collaborator (with which judgment the stu dio, of course, agreed) everyone in the audience could see what Archie saw in Malcolm: he admired the "country boy's" guts. We are to believe, then, on the basis of the "translated" scene, that a group of seasoned hustlers, in a very hip Harlem bar, allow a child fr om the country whom nobody knows to precipitate a crisis which may bring the heat down on every body, and in which the child, by no means incidentally, may lose his life-while they take bets. West Indian Archie is so angry that a child stepped on his shoes that he forgets he has all that numbers money on him, and all those people waiting to be paid-both above and below the line. And, furthermore, this was not at all what Archie saw in Malcolm, nor was it what I wanted the audience to see. The rewritten scene was much longer than the original scene, and, though it occurs quite early in the script, derailed the script completely. With all of my scenes being "translated" in this way, the script would grow bulkier than War and Peace, and the script, therefore, would have to be cut. And I saw how that would work. Having fallen into the trap of ac cepting "technical" assistance, I would not, at the cutting point, be able to reject it; and the script would then be cut according to the "action" line, and in the interest of "enter tainment" values. How I got myself out of this fix doesn't concern us here-1 simply walked out, taking my original script with me-but the adventure remained very painfully in my mind, and, indeed, was to shed a certain light for me on the adventure occurring through the American looking-glass.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless. I and two Negro acquaintances, all of us well past thirty, and looking it, were in the bar of Chicago's O'H are Airport several months ago, and the bar tender refused to serve us, because, he said, we looked too young. It took a vast amount of patience not to strangle him, and great insistence and some luck to get the manager, who defended his bartender on the ground that he was "new" and had not yet, presumably, learned how to distinguish between a Negro boy of twenty and a Negro "boy" of thirty-seven. \Veil, we were served, finally, of course, but by this time no amount of Scotch would have helped us. The bar was very DO WN AT THE CROSS 319 crowded, and our altercation had been extremely noisy; not one customer in the bar had done anything to help us. When it was over, and the three of us stood at the bar tr embling with rage and fru strat ion, and drinking-and trapped, now, in the airport, for we had deliberately come early in order to have a few drinks and to eat-a young white man standing near us asked if we were students. I suppose he thought that this was the only possible explanation for our putting up a fight. I told him that he hadn't wanted to talk to us earlier and we didn't want to talk to him now. The reply visibly hurt his feelings, and this, in turn, caused me to despise him. But when one of us, a Korean \Var veter an, told this young man that the fight we had been having in the bar had been his fight, too, the young man said, "I lost my conscience a long time ago," and turned and walked out. I know that one would rather not think so, but this young man is typical. So, on the basis of the evidence, had e\·eryone else in the bar lost his consci ence. A few years ago, I would ha,·e hated these people with all my heart. Now I pitied them, pitied them in order not to despise them. And this is not the happiest way to feel toward one's countryme n. But, in the end, it is the threat of un iversal extinction hang ing over all the world today that changes, totally and forever, the nature of reality and brings into de,·astating question the true meaning of man's history. \Ve human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement. \Ve have taken this journey and ar ri,·ed at this place in God's name. This, then, is the best that God (the white God) can do.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘I promise you, my dear,’ he said, with cloying candour. James had expressed an interest in Staines, and a dirty-minded and vengeful interest in the pictures of Colin: I liked him in that mood, when he got rid of his selfless wretchedness and we could drunkenly slag people off together. I knew he would be ready to visit the photographer’s house. There was no word from Phil that night. I was in a tense, vacant condition, but I drank a bottle of wine, and managed to sleep. Dreamlife was wildly disturbed, however. There was a barely remembered sequence in which I met Taha, who was a very old but beautiful man, and began to interview him about Charles and their life together. And there was another, more vivid, in which Phil and Bill were going off on holiday. They were loading up the roofrack on my old Fiat with tentpoles and buckets and spades, and standing about in the road with various other things they had brought from my flat. I wanted to help but kept getting in the way. ‘Be careful where you put that,’ I said. ‘Don’t forget about the blind spot.’ Phil was already in tiny swimming-trunks and Bill gave him a saucy slap on the rear, leaving a large oily handprint. Across the top of the windscreen the sticker read ‘PHIL and BILL’. It was funny, I thought, as I came round, how you never did see cars saying ‘GARY and CHRIS’ or ‘LANCE and DEREK’. They would probably have got smashed up. James came to lunch with me, and I had taken special care to stuff some aubergines and make a bitter and original little salad. I felt something of that homely, maternal impulse which would occasionally surface in me at times of strain. One could potter pathetically with one’s chicory and watercress and enjoy an almost creative feeling. James, of course, had been hard at work for hours, and I thought what a great narcotic a job could be; and then one earned one’s own money. ‘How are you getting on?’ he asked. ‘I feel pretty helpless. I thought it was a good thing there had been no sordid row or anything, but one would like some kind of contact. It’s so stupid. I don’t know what’s going on. Why doesn’t the little fucker ring me? I feel furious for a while, and then—well, I love him so much. I want to be with him again. And then at other times I feel like a sort of Pantaloon figure, who’s been hoodwinked. Actually I don’t see how any of us can do anything without a certain loss of dignity.’ ‘You could just go round to the hotel.’ ‘What, and find them frigging away again? I’m not into that.’ ‘I thought you thought it couldn’t possibly still be going on.’

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  If one is per mitted to treat any group of people with special disfavor be cause of their race or the color of their skin, there is no limit to what one will force them to endure, and, since the entire race has been mysteriously indicted, no reason not to attempt to destroy it root and branch. This is precisely what the Nazis attempted. Their only originality lay in the means they used. It is scarcely worthwhile to attempt remembering how many times the sun has looked down on the slaughter of the in nocents. I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. I think I know-we see it around us every day-the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads. It is so simple a tact and one that is so hard, ap parently, to grasp: Whoever debases others is debasing himself That is not a mystical statement but a most realistic one, which is proved by the eyes of any Alabama sherif f-and I would not like to see Negroes ever arrive at so wretched a condition. Now, it is extremely unlik ely that Negroes will ever rise to po\\'cr in the Unit ed States, because they are only approxi mately a ninth of this nation. They arc not in the position of the Africans, who arc attempting to reclaim their land and break the colonial yoke and recover from the colonial expe rience. The Negro situation is dangerous in a different way, both fc>r the Negro qua Negro and for the country of which he f(mns so troubled and troubling a part. The American Ne gro is a unique creation; he has no counter part anywhere, and no predecessors. The Muslims react to this fact by referring to the Negro as "the so-called American Negro" and substi- DO WN AT THE CROSS 335 tuting for the names inher ited from slavery the letter "X." It is a fact that every American Negro bears a name that origi nally belonged to the white man whose chattel he was. I am called Baldwin because I was either sold by my African tribe or kidnapped out of it into the hands of a white Christian named Baldwin, who forced me to kneel at the foot of the cross. I am, then, both visibly and legally the descendant of slaves in a white, Protestant count ry, and this is what it means to be an American Negro, this is who he is-a kidnapped pagan, who was sold like an animal and treated like one, who was once defined by the American Constitution as "three fifths" of a man, and who, according to the Dred Scott de cision, had no rights that a white man was bound to respect.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Courts could ease children’s lives many ways. After examining dozens of court-issued guidelines for visiting and attending many court sessions, I’m astonished at the silence surrounding the child. Lawyers speak up for what parents want but no one speaks for the child. As we saw in many stories in this book, her wishes, her preferences, how she feels about the proposed plans, and how she wishes to spend her time separate from each parent are considerations that are hardly ever raised. In our current system, a child is treated like a rag doll that quietly sits wherever it is placed. The children of divorce that I know would be startled to learn that the courts were ever seriously concerned with their interests. Despite our bright assurances that children are central in divorce proceedings, they remain voiceless. No provisions are made for changing visiting arrangements as the child matures and wishes to make her own vacation and weekend plans. School-age children in intact families spend most of their time with friends and playmates, in school and on the playground—and not in the company of their parents. Adolescents in intact families are encouraged to participate in planning their own activities. But children from divorced families whose schedules are dictated by rigid court or mediated orders complain bitterly that they feel like second-class citizens. Compared to their peers from intact homes, they have fewer rights and privileges and fewer opportunities for social relationships and activities that could enrich their lives. When they are able to speak honestly, they express intense anger at the courts and the parent or parents who insist on maintaining orders that the children feel no longer suit their needs. Most of all, they want a say in their own lives and feel aggrieved at being excluded from the planning process. They want respect for choosing their own friends and interests. These youngsters are right on every count. Peer relationships are not only important to a child, they are critical to her development as a good citizen and cooperative member of a group. Visiting orders for children should be flexible and subject to review and change at regular intervals as each child matures.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Unfortunately, many women in this position run into the “don’t criticize” policies of our legal system and are constrained from giving their children the moral guidance they need. Most judges prefer “the friendly parent” who encourages frequent and regular contact with the other parent. If a parent complains about the misbehavior of the other, attorneys argue that the offending parent is deliberately trying to alienate the children against their client. One woman whose husband held a loaded pistol to her head during the marriage was faulted in the custody report for not encouraging her child to have a friendly relationship with her father. A serious unintended result of the “don’t criticize” rule is that it’s very difficult for a parent with serious grievances to tell the child what really happened or to defend the child’s interests in court or with a mediator. As a consequence, children are kept from learning the moral implications of the breakup and they are unprotected. These policies, which reflect the court’s giving priority to parents’ rights, are further damaging to already traumatized children. AlliancesONE OTHER SCENARIO can play out after divorce in families where there is high conflict or where enmity overshadows good sense. In these cases one parent and one child form an alliance, with all their energy and criticism aimed viciously against the second parent. Larry and his father formed such an alliance. They were bound by their shared feeling that Larry’s mother had betrayed her family capriciously and that she, like all women, was a fool. What brings these parent-child alliances about? How long do they last? How much harm do they do to the child? I have seen many alliances like the one between Larry and his father. Typically these coalitions are formed during or after the breakup with the goal of punishing one of the parents. In these situations, the child is usually a preadolescent or young adolescent and the targeted parent is the one who sought the divorce. The ally parent, like Larry’s father, has presumably been hurt and humiliated by rejection. The child, like Larry, feels himself to be the family guardian—a gallant Horatio standing at the bridge who seeks to restore the family or help the sorrowful parent. At the breakup, one-fifth of the children in this study formed such alliances on behalf of one parent against the other.5 They were very talented nabobs of negativism, often provocative and very rude. It was as if they had been granted a hunting license by the powerful authority of one parent (the ally who was teaching them to be good) to destroy the wicked parent in their sights. Pull your skirt down, you’re a whore, God will punish you, and so on. The mischief wrought by presumably well-bred children was astonishing.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Therefore, my desire to be seduced, charmed, was a hope poisoned by despair: for better or for worse, it simply was not in me to make a separate peace. It was a symptom of how bitterly weary I was of wandering, how I hoped to find a resting place, reconciliation, in the land where I was born. But everything that might have charmed me merely reminded me of how many were excluded, how many were suffering and groaning and dying, not far fr om a paradise which was itself but another circle of hell. Everything that charmed me re minded me of someplace else, someplace where I could walk and talk, someplace where I was fr eer than I was at home, someplace where I could live without the stifling mask-made me homesick tor a liberty I had never tasted here, and without which I could never live or work. In America, I was free only in battle, never fr ee to rest-and he who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle. Watts doesn't immediately look like a slum, if you come fr om �ew York; but it docs ifyou drive fr om Beverly Hills. I have said that it is a very long drive, long and increasingly ugly; then one is in the long, flat streets of Watts, low, flat houses on either side. for a New Yorker, where the filth is piled so high that the light can never break through, Watts looks, at first, like a fine place to raise a child. There are little TO BE BAPTIZED 4-3 1 patches of yard, which can be enclosed by a fence, and a tree to which one can attach a swing, and space for a barbecue pit. But, then, one looks again and sees how spare, shabby, and dark the houses are. One sees that garbage collection is scarcely more efficient here than it is in Harlem. One walks the long street and sees all that one sees in the East: the shabby pool halls, the shabby bars, the boarded-up doors and windows, the plethora of churches and lodges and liquor stores, the shining automobiles, the wine bottles in the gutter, the garbage-strewn alleys, and the young people, boys and girls, in the streets. Over it all hangs a miasma of fury and frustration, a perceptible darkening, as of storm clouds, of rage and despair, and the girls move with a ruthless, defiant dignity, and the boys move against the traffic as though they are moving against the enemy.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  At first, Paula and Joan were allowed to call their friends in Marin from Santa Rosa, but when their mom refused to share in the long-distance bills, telephone calls were barred. When play invitations and friends’ birthday parties fell on a Santa Rosa weekend, they could not go. Joan, now in junior high school, had many weekend projects that involved working with an assigned group. She was told that she could only work with her group after six o’clock on Sunday evenings, after she got back from Santa Rosa. When other parents offered to have Joan or Paula stay with them so that school projects could be facilitated, their dad refused. This was, he claimed, his only time for seeing his daughters. Having regular time with them was important to him in that it helped him stabilize his life and develop his sense of being a responsible person and father. But he really didn’t know them as individuals. He didn’t ask and no one helped him catch up with the important years of growth that he had missed. Having little experience in the daily life of children, he was not aware of their interests or needs and fully expected that they would conform to his life. He was content with the arrangement and only vaguely aware that they were not. Joan’s perspective on the visiting was entirely different from that of her father. She felt increasingly distressed at losing out on school and friends and was intensely angry at her father and at the court for intervening in her life without warrant. When I spoke with her on her fourteenth birthday, she asked me with great urgency, “How old do I have to be before I can refuse to visit my father?” She explained, “I feel like a stranger at his place. I don’t feel comfortable there. I have no friends and there’s nothing for me to do.” “Why do you go?” I asked, trying to find out what she had been told and what she understood about the purpose of her bimonthly trips. “Because I have to,” she replied. “Why do you have to?” “I don’t really know,” Joan said. “Some silly judge said that I had to. I have to go two weekends every month and all July.” “Does your father want to see you?” “I don’t think so.” She frowned. “He doesn’t love me. People who love people respect them. He never asks me whether I want to come or what I want to do. He never gives me permission not to come. He was different when he lived with us.”

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I sat with pounding pulse through the next few bars, crooningly underpinned by Hawaiian guitars, prinked with a cocktail-lounge piano, fouled by slurs of blue, and felt that I might well have proved my case. The whole lost day had been haunted by my father—I heard his clear tenor on a childhood morning, in the old Dent translation that seemed gracefully to describe the song itself, "O loveliness beyond compare". I looked up at the waiter, who was nodding as I had seen him nod earlier to his Walkman, and who gave a shrug as though politicly conceding that this classical stuff wasn't too bad, if you actually listened to it; while the mother said, "We've always loved Mozart." Nothing I said in the next two minutes was brilliant or even persuasive, but it came torrentially, from I don't know where. I was only faintly conscious of my small audience, of other staff coming in from the kitchen and standing with cloths in their hands, and of their swings of feeling between hurt and anger and cynical appeasement. I had ruined their evening with my bad language and my fist banging the table, but perhaps I had made it too: they would never forget the man who went mad and raved against the music that no one else had minded, and against them too and the poor young waiter who seemed to draw from him a special wildness of reproach, like an unfaithful husband. Afterwards I couldn't remember my words, only the sensation of having spoken, of voicing opinions I never knew I had, of the routed resort to fundamentals. I didn't manage a peroration. I faltered on my high phrase about "the mockery of everything I hold dear"—one hand gripping the waiter's reluctant but dutiful wrist, the other tugged at dumbly across the table by Marcel, in pity or fear or the shadow of an earlier day, when his mother had made such a scene in a public place. Then I was free, I strode out as if my tears, after this, would be somehow a disgrace, and hurried into the Gents; though even there, in the deadlit gloom, the vandalised music was faintly relayed. I went out later and walked in the damp, buffeting air to the end of the town. The night was cloudy, the sea invisible save when it thumped like a distant bomb-blast on the sea-wall below and sent up drenching spouts into the lamplight of the promenade.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Du ring the em-naval which precedes Lent, two village children have their faces blackened-out of which bloodless darkness their blue eyes shine like icc-and fantastic horsehair wigs arc placed on their blond heads; thus disguised, they solicit among the villagers for money f(>r the missionaries in Africa. Between the box in the church and the blackened chil dren, the village "bought" last year six or eight African na tives. This was reported to me with pride by the wife of one of the bistro owners and I was careful to express astonishment and pleasure at the solicitude shown by the village for the souls of black fi>lk. The bistro owner's wife beamed with a pleasure far more genuine than my own and seemed to feel that I might now breathe more easily concerning the souls of at least six of my kinsmen. I tried not to think of these so lately baptized kinsmen, of the price paid fi>r them, or the peculiar price they themselves would pay, and said nothing about my father, who having taken his own conversion too literally never, at bottom, for gave the white world (which he described as heathen) for hav ing saddled him with a Christ in whom, to judge at least from their treatment of him, they themselves no longer believed. I thought of white men arriving for the first time in an Mrican village, strangers there, as I am a stranger here, and tried to imagine the astounded populace touching their hair and mar veling at the color of their skin. But there is a great difference between being the first white man to be seen by Mricans and being the first black man to be seen by whites. The white man takes the astonishment as tribute, for he arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to himself is not even to be questioned; whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose cul ture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The merchants along 12 5 th Street were Jewish-at least many of them were; I don't know if Grant's or Woolworth's are Jewish names-and I well remember that it was only after the Harlem riot of 1935 that Negroes were allowed to earn a little money in some of the stores where they spent so much. Not all of these white people were cruel-on the contrary, I remember some who were certainly as thoughtful as the bleak circumstances allowed-but all of them were exploiting us, and that was why we hated them. But we also hated the welfare workers, of whom some were white, some colored, some Jewish, and some not. We hated the policemen, not all of whom were Jewish, and some of whom were black. The poor, ofwhatever color, do not trust the law and certainly have no reason to, and God knows we didn't. "If you must call a cop," we said in those days, "for 7 39 OTHER ESSAYS God's sake, make sure it's a white one." We did not feel that the cops were protecting us, for we knew too much about the reasons for the kinds of crimes committed in the ghetto; but we teared black cops even more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder-on your head-to prove to himself and his colleagues that he was not like all the other niggers. We hated many of our teachers at school because they so clearly despised us and treated us like dirty, ignorant savages. Not all of these teachers were Jewish. Some of them, alas, were black. I used to carry my father's union dues downtown for him sometimes. I hated everyone in that den of thieves, especially the man who took the envelope fr om me, the en velope which contained my father's hard-earned money, that envelope which contained bread for his children. "Thieves," I thought, "every one of you!" And I know I was right about that, and I have not changed my mind. But whether or not all these people were Jewish, I really do not know. The Army may or may not be controlled by Jews; I don't know and I don't care. I know that when I worked for the Army I hated all my bosses because of the way they treated me. I don't know if the post office is Jewish but I would certainly dread working for it again. I don't know if Wana maker's was Jewish, but I didn't like running their elevator, and I didn't like any of their customers. I don't know if Na bisco is Jewish, but I didn't like cleaning their basement.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I would tell you that life’s a breeze, great job, nice girl, parents’ divorce super, no sweat. I would hide my feelings like I have learned all my life with smiles and lies, even when I feel like I’m dead or wish I was. But you would know that I was bullshitting you because you knew me when. So what I’m trying to say is, I’m not lying to you.” I thanked Billy for his trust in me but was shaken by his outburst. I have struggled for years to understand the powerlessness that so many of these men feel in their relationships with women. Why was it so rare for any of them to fight for someone they loved and wanted— or even to challenge her leaving? One man who suspected his wife of infidelity tapped her telephone for weeks and found his suspicions justified. Instead of confronting her, he filed for divorce. The fact that she was the mother of his two-year-old child didn’t lead him to a moment’s hesitation. “Why didn’t you talk with her?” I asked. “What for?” he asked. This kind of passivity was not as apparent in other parts of the men’s lives. They were able to be reasonably competitive although not aggressive in the workplace. However, at home, when the partner’s behavior coincided with what they feared, it’s as if they lay down and played dead. The nightmare came alive. I’ve seen this sort of passivity in both men and women who grew up in divorced families, although it seems to affect more men. In my earliest writing about the responses of children at the time of the breakup, I described how helpless children feel. As we’ve seen, they don’t protest largely because no one is willing to take them seriously and listen to their complaints. They learn to keep their heads down, to lower their expectations, and to keep their feelings to themselves. The passivity of young men like Billy makes sense if you think of it as a masked form of helpless rage. How else to explain their extraordinary willingness to put the worst face on incidents that might or might not have meaning? Does riding on a motorbike with a guy really establish infidelity and warrant the man’s leaving? Perhaps she hurt her ankle. Perhaps the man was an old friend. Perhaps the meeting with her girlfriends was canceled. Of the many possibilities, Billy chooses infidelity. His suspicions are so powerfully convincing— and his fear of being hurt is so overriding—that he cannot summon the courage to ask the woman. His anger happens so fast that he loses his capacity to consider other alternatives rationally.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  She never asked anything about Racer. Anyway, she explained that Brad and I should draw up a plan and that it was important for fathers to stay involved with their kids and that was the law. “Brad isn’t dangerous according to their criteria,” Paula said. “He makes good money painting Victorian homes. People from all over the Bay Area want to hire him because he’s so talented. He never hit anyone in his life. Mostly he passes out. I tried to tell the mediator about the drinking and the parties. I tried to tell her about the time Racer was almost killed when Brad fell asleep. I told her I was trying to stay sober and that I’d be happy for Racer to live half-time with Brad when and if Brad cleaned up his act. Brad of course denied he had a problem with anything. He still has his big brown Italian eyes and he can be real sincere sounding and convincing.” Paula rolled her eyes and shrugged. Then her face hardened and she looked away. “The bottom line is that nothing I said made a damn bit of difference. She said the only thing that mattered was the present. The past was history. So we ended up drawing up a schedule that gave Brad the maximum time between Racer’s beginning kindergarten here in Berkeley and Brad’s work. So Racer spends every other Friday through Monday morning with Brad and Wednesday from after school until bedtime. And six weeks in the summer. We alternate holidays. I asked what happens if Brad is out of it when Racer is there, but she would not hear that. She said that I should stuff my criticism of Brad and pretend for Racer’s sake that everything is wonderful. So I figured that was it and I gave up. And we had a mediated agreement.” Mediation and Public Policy IN MANY STATES mediation is fast becoming the primary method for settling the disputes between divorcing couples. The goal is to keep their differences out of the court’s adversarial system, which all too often makes people angrier and reduces their desire to cooperate in the postdivorce years. Mediation is rooted in several principles. First, conflict between parents is harmful to children and should be actively discouraged. Second, parents know more about their children’s needs than any judge whose job it is to know the law. And third, parents are more likely to cooperate with a postdivorce plan if it is mutually negotiated versus being imposed against the will of one parent.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Although the image of a child beating his mother is startling, and indeed should shock us to the core, it is reliably reported in a 1980 national study that 18 percent of children below age seventeen engaged in acts of violence toward their parents—usually their mothers.1 Other recent studies show that this brand of violence is higher in divorced families;2 I saw several serious instances of it in the families we studied. Such teenagers tend to be extremely angry and are not constrained by the protective presence of their fathers. I was badly frightened on behalf of the women whose youngsters attacked them with a savagery that looked identical to the father’s loss of control. Sometimes the older violent child would attack younger siblings. Moreover, the behavior lasted several years. For example, Larry beat his mother seven years after his father left home. One thirteen-year-old girl pinned her mother to the wall with a ski pole after an argument over a curfew. Larry’s crisis provided a major break in his skewed understanding of the divorce. After years of planning how he and his father would live happily together, his father backed off abruptly when it headed for reality. Driven to utter despair and realizing that all his expectations of his father were built on sand, Larry turned on his mother. Luckily, she now was able to call for help. As it happened, the hours they spent at the police station were a nodal point of change for Larry. For the first time since his parents split up, he began to face the loneliness and sorrow of his loss, to cry instead of rage. But it took several more years for this change to work its way through his twisted world view. Adolescent Anger and Adult BurdensCOMPARED TO INTACT families, parents and children in divorced families share a different kind of history that throws a long shadow over their relationships during adolescence. In many homes, structure disappears for years because no one has the time or the energy to enforce routines and discipline. As we saw in Karen’s family, young children can take responsibility for raising themselves or are cared for by slightly older siblings. But not all of them move into this role with grace and compassion. Some resent every moment, infuriated by the burdens placed on them. This anger can translate into trouble for single or remarried mothers who want to set disciplinary standards for their teenage children. They have less capital to draw on because their earlier absence and the child’s lasting anger stands in the way. The child feels that the parent has not earned the right to lay down rules. “Where were you when I needed you?” becomes a battle cry between them. The child’s anger at the parent for particular past deprivations is reignited by the adolescent’s resentment of parents in general.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Now, what am I to say concerning the presidential candi dates, season after ignoble season? Carter has learned to sing Let my people go, speaking of the hostages in Iran, while taking no responsibility at all for the political prisoners all over his home state of Georgia. He is prepared for massive retaliation against the Ayatollah Khomeini but, after Miami, can only assure the city's blacks that violence is not the answer. This despite the fact that in the event of "m assive retaliation," blacks will assuredly be sent to fight in Iran-and for what? Despite the news of the acquittal of the tour Miami policemen who beat the black man McDuffie to death. That news made page 24-of The New York Times. The uprising resulting from the acquit tal made page one. The ghetto man, woman, or child who may already wonder why curbing inflation means starving him out of existence (or into the Army) may also wonder why violence is right for Carter, or for any other white man, but wrong for the black man. The ghetto people I am talking to, or about, are not at all stupid, and if I lie to them, how can I teach them? Dark days. Recently I was back in the South, more than a quarter of a century after the Supreme Court decision that outl awed segregation in the Republic's schools, a decision to be implemented with "all deliberate speed." My friends with whom I had worked and walked in those dark days are no longer in their teens, or even their thirties. Their chil dren are now as old as their parents were then, and, obviously, some of my comrades are now roughly as old as I, and I am facing sixty. Dark days, for we know how much there is to be done and how unl ikely it is that we will live another sixty years. We know, t(>r that matter, how utterly improbable it is-i ndeed, miraculous-that we can still have a drink, or a pork chop, or a laugh together. I walked into an Alabama courtroom, in Birmingham, where my old friend the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth was sitting. I had not seen him in more than twenty years; his ch urch was bombed shortly after I last saw him. Now, some- DARK DAYS 797 thing like twenty-t wo years later, the man accused of bombing the church was on trial. The Reverend Shuttles worth was very cool, much cooler than I, given that the trial had been dela yed twenty-two years. How slowly the mills of justice grind if one is black. What in the world can possibly happen in the mind and heart of a black student, observing, who must stumble out of this courtroom and back to Yale? It was a desegregated(!) courtroom, and it was certainly a mock trial. The only reason the def endant, J. B.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But since, in the main, they seem to lack the energy to change this condition, they would rather not be reminded of it. Does this mean that, in their conversations with one another, they merely make reassuring sounds? It scarcely seems possible, and Y.�:!,_ O!L the other hand, it se�I)'!S ali too likely� In-any case, whatever they bring to one another, it is certainly not fr eedom fr om guilt. The guilt remains, more deeply rooted, more se curely lodged, than the oldest of old trees. And to have to deal with such people can be unutterably exhausting, for they, with a really dazzling ingenuity, a tireless agility, are perpetually defending themselves against charges which one, disagreeable mirror though one may be, has not, really, for the moment, made. One does not have to make them. The record is there for all to read. It resounds all over the world. It might as well be written in the sky. One wishes that Americans, white Americans, would read, for their own sakes, this record, and stop defending themselves against it. Only then will they be enabled to change their lives. The fact that they have not yet been able to do this-to tace their history, to change their lives-hideously menaces this country. Indeed, it menaces the entire world. White man, hear me ! History, as nearly no on e s ee ms _ t:o know, is not merely sometnii1g to be read . And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, 7 22 THE WHITE MAN ' S GUILT 7 23 the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this. In great pain and terror one begins to assess the history which has placed one where one is, and formed one's point ofview.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Well, he did. So I said, will you please step out of this room till I get dressed? He wouldn't leave." This collector of evidence against the boys was later arrested on charges of possessing and passing counterfeit money (he pleaded guilty to a mis demeanor, "conspiring" to pass counterfeit money). The of ficer's home in Hartsdale, N.Y., is valued at $ 3 s,ooo, he owns two cars, one a Cadillac, and when he was arrested, had $1, 3 00 in his pockets. But the families ofThe Harlem Six do not have enough money for counsel. The court appointed counsel, and refused to allow the boys counsel of their own choice, even though the boys made it clear that they had no confidence in their court-appointed counsel, and even though four leading civil rights lawyers had asked to be allowed to handle the case. The boys were convicted of first-degree murder, and are now ending their childhood and may end their lives in jail. These things happen, in all our Harlems, every single day. If we ignore this fact, and our common responsibility to change this fact, we are sealing our doom. Here is the boy, Daniel Hamm, speaking-speaking of his country, which has sworn to bring peace and fr eedom to so many millions: "They don't want us here. They don't want us-period! All they want us to do is work on these penny-ante jobs for them and that's it. And beat our heads in whenever they feel like it. They don't want us on the street 'cause the World's Fair OTHER ESSAYS is coming. And they figure that all black people are hoodlums anyway, or bums, with no character of our own. So they put us otT the streets, so their fr iends fr om Europe, Paris or Vietnam-wherever they come fr om-can come and see this supposed-to-be great city." There is a very bitter prescience in what this boy-this "bad nigger"-is saying, and he was not born knowing it. We taught it to him in seventeen years. He is draft age now, and if he were not in jail, would very probably be on his way to Southeast Asia. Many of his contemporaries are there, and the American Government and the American press are extremely proud of them. They are dying there like flies; they are dying in the streets of all our Harlems far more hideously than flies. A member of my family said to me when we learned of the bombing of the four little girls in the Birmingham Sunday school, "Well, they don't need us for work no more. Where are they building the gas ovens?"