Hope

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.

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• From My People (2022)

  “We are the students for social change,” said Ylerilene Murphy, a sixteen-year-old student who is one of twenty-four academy graduates accepted as fully matriculated freshmen at the State University of Iowa. She was one of several speakers at the graduation. Livingston L. Wingate, executive director of the New York Urban League, called the graduation “an incredible achievement.” In the last year, four of the ten street academies lost the support of four major corporations and were forced to close. The street academies, each of which had been getting $50,000 a year from the corporations, were roughly the equivalent of junior high schools. The next school level in the program is the “transition academy,” followed by the prep school, the highest level. Newark Preparatory School, which had absorbed many of the graduates of the two transition academies in the past, closed last year because of financial difficulties. Financial problems at Harlem Preparatory School—founded about the same time the street academies opened four years ago, but not connected—forced it to restrict its admissions. “We didn’t know exactly where we were going with our students,” said Kwami A. Taha, director of the street-academy program. Students from the four closed academies had been worked into the remaining six, for a total of 1,278 students. It was then that Dr. Susie O. Bryant, one of the program’s founders, suggested creating “our own prep school,” Mr. Taha said. Thus, the Urban League’s school was born—with no money, but with a staff borrowed from the other segments of the program who agreed to double up on their time, Mr. Taha explained. Their salaries remained unchanged. In April, as the outlook for the forty-two college candidates began to look its bleakest, a former Urban League employee became dean of admissions at the State University of Iowa and wrote asking Mr. Taha for students. In addition to the forty-two college-bound graduates, twenty-nine graduated yesterday from the street academies into transition academies, and fourteen went from there into the new prep school. The CornerThe New Yorker JANUARY 7, 1967 Over the past forty years—give or take a few—there have been many corners in Harlem where people have gathered for one reason or another, but the most popular by far has been the southwest corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, a rallying place all day Saturday for disaffected Negroes who live around there. On The Corner, as it is known locally, there is nearly always someone orating, preaching, exhorting, though the face of the speaker may change from time to time. And people in the community stop to listen, and often to respond aloud to what they hear. When one listener leaves, the gap is immediately filled by another. But if the crowd shifts, it does not change. Nor does the theme.

• From My People (2022)

  Porter’s hope that his players will eventually give up their other jobs—their main source of income now—and become full-time members of the Harlem Philharmonic. The group has received about $30,000 in gifts and grants over the last two years from foundations, the Department of Parks, and the New York Council on the Arts. Columbia University donates space for rehearsals. In recent months, to relieve Mr. Porter of some of the burdens of fund-raising, a board of directors has been organized. One of their first official acts was a twenty-dollar-a-plate champagne/soul-food buffet attended by more than two hundred invited guests at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “They may have saved me,” Mr. Porter commented. Part IVA Single Garment of DestinyA few weeks before I began my life in the professional world in 1963, I took time out from my studies and read Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” That was April 16, 1963. And while every word was memorable, the ones that I took with me into my professional journey were these: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Though these words resonated deeply at the time, it would be some twenty-two years later before I was in a position to explore that idea firsthand, the result of witnessing friends and familiar strangers who were involved in the Free South Africa Movement, which started in the nation’s capital in 1984. It was at a time when South Africans themselves were engaged in efforts to end apartheid—segregation based on race, so much like the system of Jim Crow in the American South, in which the white race saw itself as superior and, to maintain that belief, often went to extremes of viciousness against those who did not look like them. It was the system I grew up in during my early years. As demonstrators of every color and social status started and kept up their protests outside the South African embassy, I began to look more closely at South Africa, a nation of fourteen different languages and cultures, including its white minority. And so it was I began to see it and its current struggle as possibly the last great experiment on earth in ending racism. At the University of Georgia’s commemoration of ending its Jim Crow history of segregation some forty years earlier, I told the audience: I am once again hearing the siren call of history as I observe with a professional detachment that is informed by a history that is at least forty years old. Mine is more than an academic understanding of this Great Experiment, it is visceral, fueling my passion to tell the story. . . . One of the reasons, by the way, I have never liked the term objective , for we are all creatures of our environments and backgrounds.

• From My People (2022)

  But my essential message was that I was there to affirm them and their important goals. I recalled the students of the American civil rights movement—who were their age—who did, in fact, achieve the change that they believed in and fought for, and I said that, having listened to and observed them over the past twenty-four hours, I believed they were capable of achieving this in their own countries. Soon I was shaking 250 hands as the students walked across the stage to receive their diplomas. I heard their names and majors, which included petroleum engineering, economics, information systems, computer science, the arts, and, of course, journalism and communications. Within a few more hours, I was on a plane for the long ride back to the United States. Despite all of Nigeria’s, and the continent’s, ongoing problems, I was returning more hopeful than ever about an African renaissance. The Dangerous Case of Eskinder NegaThe New Yorker JULY 17, 2012 The last time I saw Eskinder Nega was in 2006, on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, and what remains etched in my mind is the image of him gently rubbing his pregnant wife’s stomach during a rare, brief encounter on a dirt path on the way back to their respective prison cells. Both had been arrested and put in Kaliti prison by the Ethiopian authorities for critical reporting of a violent crackdown on protests following disputed parliamentary elections, in which, according to some reports, security forces killed nearly two hundred people. Eskinder and his wife, Serkalem Fasil, a newspaper publisher, were acquitted in 2007, but their publications were banned and the Ethiopian government denied them licenses to launch new newspapers. But Eskinder persevered. He was educated in the United States, at American University in Washington, D.C., where he studied economics and continued to write on American-based Ethiopian diaspora news sites, pursuing what he saw as his duty as a journalist: holding the Ethiopian government accountable to its democratic promise. The couple’s son, the child who was born in that prison, is now seven years old; if the government has its way, he will be twenty-five years old when his father has his freedom again. Eskinder was arrested last September, a few days after publishing an online article criticizing the government’s misuse of an antiterrorism law to arrest independent journalists and political dissidents. (One of those arrested was the seventy-two-year-old iconic Ethiopian actor Debebe Eshetu.) And Eskinder is not alone. More than a hundred other Ethiopians, including nine journalists, were charged under the sweeping, not to mention vague—but let’s do mention it—antiterrorism law. The law was passed in 2009 and was “a game changer,” as one journalist told me when I was in Ethiopia recently. The specific charge against Eskinder was that he conspired with a banned opposition party called Ginbot 7 to overthrow the government.

• From My People (2022)

  Not that there wouldn’t be challenges. It might be hard for them to imagine the experience of fifteen-year-old Brenda Travis, who, in 1961, joined protesters in McComb County, Mississippi, over the objections of the civil rights leaders who were worried about the ethics of taking young activists out of school. She sat in a segregated bus station, where black travelers had to use the back door, and was arrested and incarcerated. But Brenda, and the other young people fighting at that time, eventually saw justice done. I told the students in Pennsylvania about the journey traveled by those young people and many before them. And I told the worried students of the need to know that history, so that now and as they age they can embrace and erase their fear and contribute in whatever way they choose, and, in the words of the song often called the black national anthem, they can march on “till victory is won.” I felt so lucky to be able to talk to these students. They need to know that history, but also that it included not only black sacrifice but the sacrifice of white Americans who believed in freedom and justice for all and worked with the black activists toward a more perfect union. When some of the students condemned the attitudes of “white people” in general, I responded first as a journalist, talking to them about the importance of precision in language, and also about the many white people who joined with black people in their quest for justice. I told them about Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner and Viola Liuzzo and the Reverend James Reeb and others who died or were brutalized. They lived ubuntu, without knowing that word, so often used by President Mandela: it means I am who I am because you are who you are. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has explained, a person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, and feels diminished when others are humiliated or oppressed. The people in the country now who are spouting hate-filled words don’t seem to know their own American history. There is enough blame to go around as to why. But when it comes to fixing what’s wrong with America, one of our priorities should be making more of an effort to put our history into our classrooms in the earliest years, and to educate our teachers, too. I want all of our people—even the haters—to know why we have needed that armor and how we can, while wearing it, remain open to one another. Teaching the Civil Rights MovementBeccastone JANUARY 2012 Although the American civil rights movement has been described as “one of the defining moments in U.S. history,” a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center tells us that civil rights education in America “boils down to two people and four words: Rosa Parks, Dr.

• From My People (2022)

  Hall’s success and that of other black women who have moved into managerial and professional posts is due in part to the two-year-old Atlanta-based Black Women’s Employment Program, a pilot project aimed at increasing the number of minority women holding white-collar jobs. In 1972, when Mrs. Hall went to the project seeking help, black women made up 4.6 percent of the total workforce in the country, compared with 33.4 percent white women. Among all Americans in white-collar jobs, black women make up only 3.8 percent of the total compared with 44.6 percent white women, according to the latest Census Bureau figures. Most of the jobs are clerical. While no figures are yet available for 1974, there was a slight upward change in 1973, and the Black Women’s Employment Program is hopeful that its work will begin to have an impact on increasing that trend. Since the program started in 1972 with a grant from the Labor Department, more than 1,600 black women have sought advice on professional advancement. Of that number, 200 have been placed in white-collar jobs that carry such opportunities. In Atlanta and Houston, which were chosen for the project because of their expanding labor markets and the pool of untapped resources, only a few minority women were employed in white-collar positions, according to Alexis M. Herman, twenty-seven, and Paulette E. Norvel, twenty-eight, who are directing the project. “White women were moving up,” Miss Norvel said, “but black females were not moving beyond the clerical level.” Miss Norvel and Miss Herman visited companies in Atlanta and Houston to find out why. “We encountered a lot of attitudinal problems,” Miss Herman said, “things like ‘Women can’t supervise’ or ‘Black women are looking for a handout.’ “A lot of the companies had affirmative action programs. But for the most part, they were not in compliance, and their inevitable response was, ‘Can’t find anyone qualified.’” It was a difficult answer to accept, particularly in Atlanta, where there are excellent opportunities for blacks as well as an influx of young people lured by the city’s progressive image. Of the 1,600 women with college degrees in the project’s files, 60 percent have been unemployed and 30 percent underemployed. Many who were working, according to Miss Herman, were earning $6,000 or less with bachelor of arts degrees and $9,000 or less with master’s degrees. Deborah Conley, for example, was graduated from Clark College in Atlanta in 1969 and went to work for an antipoverty agency as an accountant for $8,000 a year. “I began looking around,” she said, “because federally funded programs are just not that secure. But I really didn’t know where to start. Anything in the newspapers, I found, was not worth looking at. The jobs were valid, the salaries good. But I could tell they didn’t want to hire me because I was black. I was having a hard time.” Last year, Mrs. Conley, twenty-six, heard about the Black Women’s Employment Program and “got a job right away.

• From My People (2022)

  But Strode will stay in this country to make The Revengers , a “regular knock-down, drag-out western” with William Holden. And he has a publicity agent now—now that he hopes Black Jesus will make him “a different kind of star.” Sig Shore, who has come into Woody’s suite, remarks, “Woody now has a chance to be a giant.” But the facts of all those years do not change overnight—even when the money is right. After Shore joined us, Woody started talking about “all the opportunities here in America now and the way the black man must fight to win. “You don’t fight him head-on,” he was saying of the white man. “He’s definitely going to knock you down that way. Like he did the Cheyenne and the Sioux. We’ve got thirty million black people—and Old Uncle Tom saved the goddamn thirty million.” And just as he started to get into that and how the black people could learn from the Jews and their struggle for survival—“I know their history better than my own because it’s printed”—Sig Shore interrupted. “I hate actors in politics,” he said with a wave of his hand. And Woody’s eyes flashed a change. “Yeah, let’s sell the picture,” he said, slumping back in his chair. At about which time Myrna Post reminded him that it was almost noon. “You’ve got to be in Union City,” she said. “And time is running out.” Roots Getting a Grip on People EverywhereThe New York Times JANUARY 28, 1977 “My children and I just sat there, crying,” said a black public relations director in Nashville. “We couldn’t talk. We just cried.” “It has made the brutality of slavery more vivid for me than anything I’ve seen or read,” said a black economist in Philadelphia. “It’s so powerful,” said a white secretary in New York. “It’s so distressful, I just feel awful, but I’m glad my children are watching.” All across the country this week, millions of people have been drawn to the unfolding drama of Roots , the eight-part television adaptation of the book by Alex Haley, tracing his origins back to an African village. It has produced the third-largest audience in television history (only the two parts of Gone with the Wind in 1976 drew more). Nearly 80 million people have sat before their television sets in penthouses and tenements, bars and brownstones, fraternity houses and dormitories as the saga of Kunta Kinte had flashed before them night after night since last Sunday. Doubters and enthusiasts, whites as well as blacks, young and old, wealthy and poor had reactions they wanted to share. Some laughed when a hungry Itunta Kinte, who was thought to have learned no English, suddenly thrust his plate toward the older slave, Fiddler, and said, “Grits, dummy.” Some cried as Kunta Kinte finally gave in to the whip’s lash and accepted the slave name Toby. And some got angry at the long, deep scars on his back in a later episode.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  This kind of algorithmic reasoning may work well in the domain of logic. Yet human existence demands engagement with aspects of life characterised by ambiguity, uncertainty and complexity – such as medical diagnosis and forensic examination.15 Questions of meaning and moral value lie even further beyond the scope of mechanical reasoning, not least on account of their deeply subjective significance. Information, as Susan Sontag points out, is ‘always, by definition, partial, incomplete, fragmentary’.16 In both clinics and courts of law, human judgement is of critical importance in creating trustworthy syntheses of the partial and fragmentary – a judgement that rests on wisdom, in the form of long experience and reflection in coping with such complex questions. The process of reflection is an art, and its outcomes are beliefs. In his Dark Materials trilogy, Philip Pullman develops one of the most creative – though oblique – critiques of mechanical models of human reasoning. Pullman introduces us to the ‘alethiometer,’ a complex rational calculating machine, ‘very like a clock, or a compass’, which delivers secure readings of reality once the symbols of its three wheels are correctly set to frame the question being asked. Yet the alethiometer can only be read correctly by a small group of people who have developed the art of doing so – including the central character of the trilogy, Lyra Silvertongue, who is initially able to use the device intuitively. Puzzled by the device’s behaviour, Lyra asks Farder Coram whether it is functioning properly. ‘It’s working all right, Lyra. What we don’t know is whether we’re reading it right. That’s a subtle art.’17 Answering life’s great questions is indeed an art, a skill that has to be acquired, transcending mechanistic and algorithmic ways of thinking or understandings of human rationality, and alert to the importance of interpretation and the inevitability of ambiguity. How might we find such habitable beliefs? Bernard Lonergan’s ‘dangerous voyage of exploration’ and Carlo Rovelli’s ‘vast intermediate space’ of ambiguity and uncertainty help us imagine a voyage of exploration for an existentially habitable island in a vast ocean of possibilities – a place of safety in which we can hope to flourish and become the people we are meant to be. Such islands already exist, and we do not need to invent them. Some of them have been known and found to be habitable for thousands of years. Our task is to locate them, check them out, and work out whether we can make them our home. Others have found them before us, often leaving us accounts of how this happened and assessments of the difference that this made to the quality of their lives.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  These abductions, well paid for and always effected a great distance from here, bring no consequent discomfitures; I have never heard of any that resulted in legal action; their extreme caution protects them against everything. They do not absolutely confine themselves to virgins: a girl who has been seduced already or a married woman may prove equally pleasing, but a forcible abduction has got to take place, rape must be involved, and it must be definitely verified; this circumstance arouses them; they wish to be certain their crimes cost tears; they would send away any girl who was to come here voluntarily; had you not made a prodigious defense, had they not recognized a veritable fund of virtue in you, and, consequently, the possibility of crime, they would not have kept you twenty-four hours. Everyone here, Therese, comes of a distinguished line; my dear friend, you see before you the only daughter of the Comte de * * *, carried off from Paris at the age of twelve and destined one day to have a dowry of a hundred thousand crowns: I was ravished from the arms of my governess who was taking me by carriage, unoccupied save for ourselves, from my father's country seat to the Abbey of Panthemont where I was brought up; my guardian disappeared; she was in all likelihood bought; I was fetched hither by post chaise. The same applies to all the others. The girl of twenty belongs to one of the noblest families of Poitou. The one sixteen years old is the daughter of the Baron de * * *, one of the greatest of the Lorraine squires; Counts, Dukes, and Margraves are the fathers of the girls of twenty-three, twelve, and thirty-two; in a word, there is not one who cannot claim the loftiest titles, not one who is not treated with the greatest ignominy. But these depraved men are not content to stop at these horrors; they have wished to bring dishonor into the very bosom of their own family. The young lady of twenty-six, without doubt one of the most beautiful amongst us, is Clement's daughter; she of thirty-six is the niece of Jerome. "As soon as a new girl has arrived in this cloaca, as soon as she has been sealed in here forever to become a stranger to the world, another is immediately retrenched: such is our sufferings' complement; the cruelest of our afflictions is to be in ignorance of what happens to us during these terrible and disquieting dismissals. It is absolutely impossible to say what becomes of one upon leaving this place. From all the evidence we in our isolation are able to assemble, it seems as if the girls the monks retire from service never appear again; they themselves warn us, they do not conceal from us that this retreat is our tomb, but do they assassinate us? Great Heaven!

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "Very well," I say to my companion, "if no one has helped you it is because you have had to deal with frail, intimidated creatures, or women with children who dared not attempt anything for you. That they will kill us is not my fear; at least, I don't believe they do: that reasoning beings could carry crime to that point... it is unthinkable... I know that full well... After what I have seen and undergone I perhaps ought not defend mankind as I do, but, my dear, it is simply inconceivable that they can execute horrors the very idea of which defies the imagination. Oh dear companion!" I pursued with great emotion, "would you like to exchange that promise which for my part I swear I will fulfill!... Do you wish it ?" "Yes." "Ah, I swear to you in the name of all I hold most holy, in the name of the God Who makes me to breathe and Whom only I adore... I vow to you I will either die in the undertaking or destroy these infamies... will you promise me the same?" "Do not doubt it," Omphale replied, "but be certain of these promises' futility; others more embittered than you, stauncher, no less resolute and not so scrupulous, in a word, friends who would have shed their last drop of blood for us, have not kept identical vows; and so, dear Therese, and so allow my cruel experience to consider ours equally vain and to count upon them no more." "And the monks," I said, "do they also vary, do new ones often come here?" "No," answered Omphale, "Antonin has been here ten years, Clement eighteen, Jerome thirty, Severino twenty-five. The superior was born in Italy, he is closely allied to the Pope with whom he is in intimate contact; only since his arrival have the so-called miracles of the Virgin assured the monastery's reputation and prevented scandalmongers from observing too closely what takes place here; but when he came the house was already furnished as presently you see it to be; it has subsisted in the same style and upon this footing for above a century, and all the superiors who have governed it have perpetuated a system which so amicably smiles upon their pleasures. Severino, the most libertine man of our times, has only installed himself here in order to lead a life consonant with his tastes.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  One can say with considerable certainty that the sexual revolution would have had little impetus, the Woman’s Movement still less, without the growth of higher education for women, one of the major achievements of the period. While the first phase gave women their initial opportunity for higher education, much impetus was lost in the reaction which followed. An equal education is yet to come. But even the taste of knowledge was sufficiently revolutionary to spark an enormous unrest and provide the movement with its leaders, a large number of whom came fresh from the new colleges. In order to explore the depth and complexity of the issue of education for women, literary sources are particularly illustrative. In England Tennyson’s The Princess furnished the spectacle of a major poet composing a long work devoted to the problem. The poem tends to fall apart at its joints, leaving a heap of shining lyrics as its relic. In Tennyson’s uneasy asides one finds sufficient evidence of his difficulty in deciding on the proper tone to adopt. Indeed, the subject matter, educational polemic, is hardly one that instantly recommends itself as poetic material. Tennyson starts out bravely enough in the vein of smug badinage. But immediately it begins to betray him. First of all, he grows a bit ashamed of his own levity. The opening of university education to women, a topic he was sure could afford nothing but comic material, begins to turn unexpectedly serious when he projects himself into his heroine’s position. In his early poetry, Tennyson was fond of describing his own moods through lilylike maidens, Shalott, Mariana, etc. But in The Princess the fable becomes something of a case history of the poet’s own problems of sexual identity. The prince who tells the story is not promising material—an epileptic with long golden curls who goes about in drag, and sings falsetto while courting. Tennyson veers between identifying with this paragon and the princess herself, also a poet, whose fierce desire for learning makes her a passionate and fairly commanding spirit. However, his initial “gamesome” tone rather soon begins to tire under the conflicts produced by Tennyson’s own male chauvinism. A teasing patronization then gives way to a more urgent insecurity.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Changes as drastic and fundamental as those of a sexual revolution are not easily arrived at. Nor should it be surprising that such change might take place by stages that are capable of interruption and temporary regression. In view of this fact, the shortcomings of the first phase are understandable, and even the arrest and subversion of its progress which one encounters in the next era, while irritating and deplorable, is, to a degree, explicable as a comprehensible pause or plateau within an ongoing ‘process. Although the first phase fell woefully short of accomplishing the aims of its theorists and its most far-seeing exponents, it did nevertheless make some monumental progress and furnish a groundwork on which the present and the future can build. Although failing to penetrate deeply enough into the substructure of patriarchal ideology and socialization, it did attack the most obvious abuses in its political, economic, and legal superstructure, accomplishing very notable reform in the area of legislative and other civil rights, suffrage, education, and employment. For a group excluded—as women were—from minimal civil liberties throughout the historical period, their very attainment was a great deal to achieve in one century. By an oversight too conspicuous to be accidental, historians have ignored the issue of sexual revolution, dismissed it with frivolous footnotes intended to demonstrate the folly of “votes for women,” or mistaken it for a trivial exhibitionist ripple in sexual fashion. Yet the great cultural change which the beginnings of a sexual revolution represent is at least as dramatic as the four or five other social upheavals in the modem period to which historiographical attention is zealously devoted. Since the Enlightenment, the West has undergone a number of cataclysmic changes: industrial, economic, and political revolution. But each appeared to operate, to a large extent, without much visible or direct reference to one half of humanity. It is rather disturbing how the great changes brought about by the extension of the franchise and by the development of democracy which the eighteenth and nineteenth century accomplished, the redistribution of wealth which was the aim of socialism (and which has even had its effect upon the capitalist countries) and finally, the vast changes wrought by the industrial revolution and the emergence of technology-all, had and to some degree still have, but a tangential and contingent effect upon the lives of that majority of the population who might be female. Knowledge of this is bound to draw our attention to the fact that the primary social and political distinctions are not even those based on wealth or rank but those based on sex. For the most pertinent and fundamental consideration one can bestow upon our culture is to recognize its basis in patriarchy.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  And it was against patriarchy that the sexual revolution was directed. Difficult as it is to explain such a radical shift in collective consciousness, it is almost as difficult to date it precisely. One might look back as far as the Renaissance and consider the effect of the liberal education it devised when such learning was finally permitted to women. Or one might reflect on the influence of the Enlightenment: the subversive impact of its agnostic rationalism upon patriarchal religion, the tendency of its humanism to extend dignity to a number of deprived groups, and the invigorating clarity which the science it sponsored exercised upon traditional notions both of the female and of nature. One might also speculate upon the marginal impetus provided by the French Revolution in breaking down other ancient hierarchies of power. Two beliefs which French radicalism had bequeathed to the American Revolution must also have had an effect: the idea that government relies for its legitimacy on the consent of the governed, and the faith in the existence in inalienable human rights. Out of this intellectual milieu came Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, the first document asserting the full humanity of women and insisting upon its recognition. A friend of Paine and of French revolutionaries, its author was sufficiently in touch with revolutionary thought to urge the application of its basic premises to that majority still excluded from the Rights of Man.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  There is one more cardinal point in Engels’ theory of sexual revolution, bound to provoke more controversy than all the others: ‘With the transformation of the means of production into collective property, the monogamous family will cease to be the economic unit of society. The care and education of children becomes a public matter.”156 This last point is perhaps the most crucial of Engels’ propositions, though it meets with the greatest resistance. There is something logical and even inevitable in this recommendation, for so long as every female, simply by virtue of her anatomy, is obliged, even forced, to be the sole or primary caretaker of childhood, she is prevented from being a free human being. The care of children, even from the period when their cognitive powers first emerge, is infinitely better left to the best trained practitioners of both sexes who have chosen it as a vocation, rather than to harried and all too frequently unhappy persons with little time nor taste for the work of educating minds, however young or beloved. The radical outcome of Engels’ analysis is that the family, as that term is presently understood, must go. In view of the institution’s history, this is a kind fate. Engels was heresy in his age. These many decades after, he is heresy still. But revolution is always heresy, perhaps sexual revolution most of all. LITERARY One can locate three different responses to the sexual revolution in the literature of the period. The first is the realistic or revolutionary. It took in a wide spectrum of radical analysis from Engels to Mill, to the critics and reformers such as Ibsen and Shaw, to the moderates such as Dickens and Meredith. If a critical attitude toward the sexual politics of patriarchy precedes reform, reform itself precedes revolution. The first school expressed themselves either deliberately in theory or polemic, or indirectly in the fictive situations of the theatre or the novel.

• From My People (2022)

  Arabi wrote was the final kicker for me because it reminded me of myself at an early age, when I dreamed of becoming a journalist in a segregated world where that possibility was far from being a reality. “I came to realize,” he wrote, “that we only have a chance to achieve our dreams if we are confident and truly believe in them. AUN taught me to be innovative and courageous, never to be afraid of what others think about our dreams.” That did it for me, despite the fact that even longtime Nigerian friends whom I consulted about the trip always ended our conversation with “Well, just be careful.” Then the day came when my plane touched down in the tiny airport in Yola and I, along with U.S. ambassador Terence McCulley and Rwandan ambassador Joseph Habineza, was welcomed by officials from the university. Their warmth and ease helped dispel the little bit of concern that still occupied some space in a corner of my mind. But there was no time to dwell on unease. As we rode the short distance from the airport, the reason for the university’s emphasis on development unfolded before our eyes: a landscape filled with tumbledown shacks and littered with the detritus of poverty, scenes similar to ones I have witnessed all over the continent. Within an hour of arriving at a newly built, university-sponsored hotel and with just barely time to change, we were in a gigantic hall filled with flowing thin, white cloth hanging from the ceiling in graceful waves and some two hundred tables set for dining. As is always the case in Nigeria, women and men turned out in some of the most beautiful long gowns and robes I’ve ever seen. It was awards night for the graduating seniors. Local officials, parents, and students were joined by other ambassadors from the European Union. It was here that I learned that half the student body is Muslim, the other half Christian, and that they live together on the grounds of this five-hundred-acre campus. It is a model of interfaith cooperation that the country sorely needs in the face of the ongoing religious and ethnic violence. I was delighted to see that two of the main three speakers were young women, who also spoke of how they had grown since coming to AUN. One of them, Shalom Otuene, said that after years of responding to every question with “I don’t know,” she has now permanently deleted the phrase from her vocabulary. Her major is internal and comparative politics. It seemed as if in no time, the following day dawned. Then I—along with members of the faculty from Africa, the United States, and other parts of the world—was outfitted in a long, bright red robe to march down the aisle of that same hall. The tables were now gone and replaced by four thousand chairs for the parents, loved ones, and supporters of the graduating class.

• From My People (2022)

  “Physically we had nowhere else to go, and yet we knew we had to address ourselves to new services for those not able to meet their own needs,” he said. The new complex, he explained, is a part of a ten-year expansion plan and is a “new channel through which the community can develop its potential.” It includes, for example, a preschool day-care center, which is subsidized, in part, by the Department of Social Services so mothers who cannot afford the $32-a-week fee can bring their children free. The church also has an auditorium-gymnasium with lockers, showers, and dressing rooms, a cultural and performing arts program, several multipurpose activity rooms, and among other things, a kitchen where hot lunches are prepared for the children in the day-care center. Housing has been identified as a major need in the area, and the church is in the process of developing two hundred units for senior citizens on 133d Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, and 242 “low and modest” income apartments on Eighth Avenue from 133d to 134th Street. Dr. Weston also has the approval of the church to convert the old parish house into a nonresidential prevention and rehabilitation narcotics center. “This shows a new kind of awareness on the part of our church people, too,” he said. As one of the founders of the Carver Savings Bank, a black institution in Harlem, and recently elected chairman of its board, Dr. Weston is optimistic about future development plans. But he feels that while there are public avenues for funds that should be utilized, “it is the private sector—not the public sector—which we have to look to for support. “The grant system will never do it,” he asserted. “One of my greatest disappointments was the ultimate consequence of the poverty program. I was involved in Haryou-Act [Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited] for two years in the hope that if we could get larger public funds from the federal level we could channel them into the black community into organizations where black people could control it. Then we could bring about meaningful change. But that didn’t happen. “Worship creates a power potential. We become a catalyst for community leadership, direction, and therefore control.” How Black-ish Unpacks Hard Topics with Humor and NuancePBS NewsHour JANUARY 15, 2018 Judy Woodruff: Now, as part of our ongoing Race Matters series focusing on solutions, special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault has a second part of her conversation with Golden Globe–winning actress Tracee Ellis Ross. Last week, they talked about the momentum behind the Time’s Up movement supporting women. Tonight, Charlayne examines the popular TV series Black-ish , starring Ellis Ross, and how it handles race. The daughter of singer Diana Ross, Ellis Ross plays Rainbow Johnson, or just plain Bow.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Genet’s homosexual analysis of sexual politics was chosen, not only for the insights it affords into the arbitrary status content of sexual role, but because it was against the taboo of homosexuality that Mailer’s counterrevolutionary ardor has hurled its last force. Yet there is evidence in the last few years that the reactionary sexual ethic we have traced, beginning with Lawrence’s cunning sabotage of the feminist argument and Miller’s flamboyant contempt for it, has nearly spent itself. Other progressive forces have recently asserted themselves, notably the revolt of youth against the masculine tradition of war and virility. Of course the most pertinent recent development is the emergence of a new feminist movement. Here again, it is difficult to explain just why such a development occurred when it did.107 The enormous social change involved in a sexual revolution is basically a matter of altered consciousness, the exposure and elimination of social and psychological realities underlying political and cultural structures. We are speaking, then, of a cultural revolution, which, while, it must necessarily involve the political and economic reorganization traditionally implied by the term revolution, must go far beyond this as well. And here it would seem that the most profound changes implied are ones accomplished by human growth and true re-education, rather than those arrived at through the theatrics of armed struggle-even should the latter become inevitable. There is much reason to believe that the possession of numbers, dedication, and creative intelligence could even render unnecessary the usual self-destructive resort to violent tactics. Yet no lengthy evolutionary process need be implied here, rather the deliberate speed fostered by modern communication, in an age when groups such as students, for example, can become organized in a great number of countries in a matter of some two years. When one surveys the spontaneous mass movements taking place all over the world, one is led to hope that human understanding itself has grown ripe for change. In America one may expect the new women’s movement to ally itself on an equal basis with blacks and students in a growing radical coalition. It is also possible that women now represent a very crucial element capable of swinging the national mood, poised at this moment between the alternatives of progress or political repression, toward meaningful change. As the largest alienated element in our society, and because of their numbers, passion, and length of oppression, its largest revolutionary base, women might come to play a leadership part in social revolution, quite unknown before in history. The changes in fundamental values such a coalition of expropriated groups-blacks, youth, women, the poor-would seek are especially pertinent to realizing not only sexual revolution but a gathering impetus toward freedom from rank or prescriptive role, sexual or otherwise. For to actually change the quality of life is to transform personality, and this cannot be done without freeing humanity from the tyranny of sexual-social category and conformity to sexual stereotype—as well as abolishing racial caste and economic class.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Altogether, about 120 people were huddled in the pitch-black basement, serving time in the Rehabilitation Project Force. The ranks of the RPF had expanded along with the church’s need for cheap labor to renovate its recently purchased buildings in Hollywood. The federal agents had no idea what they were seeing. Within moments, a representative of the church’s Guardian’s Office arrived and began shouting at the agents that they were exceeding the limits of their search warrants. Seeing that the Sea Org members posed no threat to them, the agents shrugged and moved on. It is instructive to realize that none of the Sea Org members consigned to the RPF dungeon took the opportunity to escape. If the FBI had bothered to interrogate them, it’s unlikely that any of them would have said that they were there against their will. Most of them believed that they were there by mistake, or that they deserved their punishment and would benefit by the work and study they were prescribed. Even those who had been physically forced into the RPF were not inclined to leave. Despite federal laws against human trafficking and unlawful imprisonment, the FBI never opened the door on the RPF again. Jesse Prince, one of the very few black members of the Sea Org, was among those being punished. He had been attracted to Scientology by the beautiful girls and the promise of superhuman powers. He recalls being told he would learn to levitate, travel through time, control the thoughts of others, and have total command over the material universe. In 1976, when he signed up for the Sea Org, Scientology had just purchased the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, part of the real-estate empire that the church was acquiring in Hollywood, along with the Château Élysée and the old Wilcox Hotel, which functioned as Sea Org berthing. The hospital was a mess; there were leftover medical devices and body parts in laboratory jars; there was even a corpse in the basement morgue. The Sea Org crew slaved to convert the hospital into a dormitory and offices. One night Prince was awakened after an hour of sleep and ordered to report to a superior, who chewed him out for slacking off. Prince had had enough. “ Fuck you, I’m outta here,” he said. His superior told him he wasn’t going anywhere. “He snapped his fingers and six people came and put me in a room,” Prince recalled. “I was literally incarcerated.” It was March 1977. Prince was placed in the RPF with two hundred other Sea Org members, doing heavy labor and studying Hubbard’s spiritual technology. He would be held there for eighteen months. “They told me the only way to get out is to learn this tech to a ‘T’ and then be able to apply it.” The question posed by Prince’s experience in the RPF is whether or not he was brainwashed.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Can you imagine a place where white people are scared of Indians and not the other way around? That’s Montana. And my sister had married one of those crazy Indians. She didn’t even tell our parents or grandmother or me before she left. She called Mom from St. Ignatius, Montana, on the Flathead Indian Reservation, and said, “Hey, Mom, I’m a married woman now. I want to have ten babies and live here forever and ever.” How weird is that? It’s almost romantic. And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a romance novel. Man, that takes courage and imagination. Well, it also took some degree of mental illness, too, but I was suddenly happy for her. And a little scared. Well, a lot scared. She was trying to live out her dream. We should have all been delirious that she’d moved out of the basement. We’d been trying to get her out of there for years. Of course, my mother and father would have been happy if she’d just gotten a part-time job at the post office or trading post, and maybe just moved into an upstairs bedroom in our house. But I just kept thinking that my sister’s spirit hadn’t been killed. She hadn’t given up. This reservation had tried to suffocate her, had kept her trapped in a basement, and now she was out roaming the huge grassy fields of Montana. How cool! I felt inspired. Of course, my parents and grandmother were in shock. They thought my sister and I were going absolutely crazy. But I thought we were being warriors, you know? And a warrior isn’t afraid of confrontation. So I went to school the next day and walked right up to Gordy the Genius White Boy. “Gordy,” I said. “I need to talk to you.” “I don’t have time,” he said. “Mr. Orcutt and I have to debug some PCs. Don’t you hate PCs? They are sickly and fragile and vulnerable to viruses. PCs are like French people living during the bubonic plague.” Wow, and people thought I was a freak. “I much prefer Macs, don’t you?” he asked. “They’re so poetic.” This guy was in love with computers. I wondered if he was secretly writing a romance about a skinny, white boy genius who was having sex with a half-breed Apple computer. “Computers are computers,” I said. “One or the other, it’s all the same.” Gordy sighed. “So, Mr. Spirit,” he said. “Are you going to bore me with your tautologies all day or are you going to actually say something?” Tautologies? What the heck were tautologies? I couldn’t ask Gordy because then he’d know I was an illiterate Indian idiot. “You don’t know what a tautology is, do you?” he asked. “Yes, I do,” I said. “Really, I do.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Madam was, however, so well pleased with her bargain that fearing I presume, lest better advice or some accident might occasion my slipping through her fingers, she would officiously take me in a coach to my inn, where, calling herself for my box, it was, I being present, delivered without the least scruple or explanation as to where I was going. This being over, she bid the coachman drive to a shop in St. Paul’s Churchyard, where she bought a pair of gloves, which she gave me, and thence renewed her directions to the coachman to drive to her house in ——— street, who accordingly landed us at the door, after I had been cheered up and entertained by the way with the most plausible flams, without one syllable from which I could conclude anything but that I was, by the greatest luck, fallen into the hands of kindest mistress, not to say friend, that the vast world could afford; and accordingly I entered her doors with most complete confidence and exultation, promising, myself that, as soon as I could be a little settled, I would acquaint Esther Davis with my rare good fortune. You may be sure the good opinion of my place was not lessened by the appearance of a very handsome back parlor, into which I was led and which seemed to me magnificently furnished, who had never seen better rooms than the ordinary ones in inns upon the road. There were two gilt pier-glasses, and a buffet, on which a few pieces of plate, set out to the most shew, dazzled, and altogether persuaded me that I must be got into a very reputable family. Here my mistress first began her part, with telling me that I must have good spirits, and learn to be free with her; that she had not taken me to be a common servant, to do domestic drudgery, but to be a kind of companion to her; and that if I would be a good girl, she would do more than twenty mothers for me; to all which I answered only by the profoundest and the awkwardest curtsies, and a few monosyllables, such as “’yes! no! to be sure!” Presently my mistress touched the bell, and in came a strapping maid-servant, who had let us in. “Here, Martha,” said Mrs. Brown, “I have just hired this young woman to look after my linen; so step up and show her her chamber; and I charge you to use her with as much respect as you would myself, for I have taken a prodigious liking to her, and I do not know what I shall do for her.”

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  I’d never seen a sober adult cry. “But not you,” Mr. P said. “You can’t give up. You won’t give up. You threw that book in my face because somewhere inside you refuse to give up.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. Or maybe I just didn’t want to know. Jeez, it was a lot of pressure to put on a kid. I was carrying the burden of my race, you know? I was going to get a bad back from it. “If you stay on this rez,” Mr. P said, “they’re going to kill you. I’m going to kill you. We’re all going to kill you. You can’t fight us forever.” “I don’t want to fight anybody,” I said. “You’ve been fighting since you were born,” he said. “You fought off that brain surgery. You fought off those seizures. You fought off all the drunks and drug addicts. You kept your hope. And now, you have to take your hope and go somewhere where other people have hope.” I was starting to understand. He was a math teacher. I had to add my hope to somebody else’s hope. I had to multiply hope by hope. “Where is hope?” I asked. “Who has hope?” “Son,” Mr. P said. “You’re going to find more and more hope the farther and farther you walk away from this sad, sad, sad reservation.” Go Means Go After Mr. P left, I sat on the porch for a long time and thought about my life. What the heck was I supposed to do? I felt like life had just knocked me on my ass. I was so happy when Mom and Dad got home from work. “Hey, little man,” Dad said. “Hey, Dad, Mom.” “Junior, why are you looking so sad?” Mom asked. She knew stuff. I didn’t know how to start, so I just started with the biggest question. “Who has the most hope?” I asked. Mom and Dad looked at each other. They studied each other’s eyes, you know, like they had antennas and were sending radio signals to each other. And then they both looked back at me. “Come on,” I said. “Who has the most hope?” “White people,” my parents said at the same time. That’s exactly what I thought they were going to say, so I said the most surprising thing they’d ever heard from me. “I want to transfer schools,” I said. “You want to go to Hunters?” Mom said. It’s another school on the west end of the reservation, filled with poor Indians and poorer white kids. Yes, there is a place in the world where the white people are poorer than the Indians. “No,” I said. “You want to go to Springdale?” Dad asked.