Dear Mrs. Morrison,
Someone sent me a copy of The Black Book and if at all possible I would like to have two more. I need one copy to give to a friend, another to throw against the wall over and over and over. The one I already own I want to hold in my hand against my heart.
Emmett just barely got on that train to Mississippi. We could hear the whistle blowing. As he was running up the steps, I said, "Bo," -- that's what I called him -- "you didn't kiss me. How do I know I'll ever see you again?" He turned around and said, "Oh, Mama." Gently scolding me.
He ran down those steps and gave me a kiss.
Inspired by The Dead Matador by Edouard Manet, Rockwell initially portrayed a black man and his white friend dead in a ghetto. With the war in Indochina raging, Look requested that Rockwell substitute a Vietnamese village for the inner city. Rockwell's haunting revision showed two dead marines -- one black, one white -- in a pool of melding blood. "His idea for the painting," Claridge wires in Norman Rockwell: A Life, "was the visual mixing of blood flowing from both men, reminding the audience that skin color didn't affect the deepest levels of human connection."
Look again passed on the piece, notifying Rockwell that an African American editor at the magazine found the painting "patronizing." The comment wounded Rockwell and led to some self-doubt. But any misgivings about Blood Brothers receded in time. According to Claridge, Rockwell ultimately concluded, "Look lost its nerve."
a found poem
the acting mayor
delivered a short address
respectful
a bit wooden
then stepped back
making room
for a row of schoolgirls
to recite verses
they had memorized
but
an animated gray-haired man
edged his way
alongside the podium
and stepped onto it
sending whispers
through the crowd
In the audience, Vartyan S. Mardirosyan, a lawyer, was chuckling delightedly at the spectacle. He said the authorities in Sochi had cracked down so hard on dissent that it reminded him of Soviet times, when people were too afraid to express their political opinions outside their own kitchens. The ceremony had been an “undeclared competition,” said Mr. Mardirosyan, 68, with Mr. Kasparov both the underdog and the undisputed winner.
He began walking home, a broad smile plastered on his face.
“He didn’t just play chess,” Mr. Mardirosyan said. “That was a checkmate.”
I don’t care. I’m making Obama blue today.
I worked for twenty years as a cartoon illustrator, doing drawings for books, magazines and advertising. I was often given clear guidelines on how I was supposed to draw African-Americans: with “small noses” and “thin lips”. I was instructed to make any crowds of cartoon characters racially diverse, but only diverse in color, not in facial features. Thick lips and wide noses on African American faces would be returned to me for correction, with a polite reminder of the corporate policies on depictions of minority facial features.
This provided the fuel for our first rant on the biases that people bear, and it's become an easier and easier topic for us to tear into whenever we hook up over my hair. Race isn't something I talk about much with my friends who are white, although civil rights come up quite a bit with friends who are white and gay. I don't fit the profile of someone who should get outraged over discrimination -- I'm straight and I'm white and most doors in society open easily for me.
I owe my rage to my 5th grade teacher, Mrs. Stevens.
I loved school, and school always came easy for me. I was such a nerd about school that I was often the teacher's pet. By my 3rd grade year I realized that this was a social liability -- no one likes the teacher's pet -- and in my 4th grade year I experimented with ways to still get off on school without being singled out.
I wouldn't raise my hand even when I knew the answer. I passed notes in class and earned disapproving looks from my teacher, Mrs. Easterling. I tried to pick up on the whole gym thing, although dodge ball (the dodging part) was the only thing I ever managed well. Near the end of the school year Mrs. Easterling gave everyone in the class a unique award. Kimberley, who was long and lithe and whose dad was a Denver Nuggets basketball player, got the Bionic Beauty award. I got the Bionic Brain award. I was crestfallen. My plan had failed.
Then we moved to the Northwest and I was assigned to Mrs. Stevens' 5th grade class.
Through an accident of the school system Mrs. Stevens was teaching the same 4th grade class she had taught the year before, only now as 5th graders. She had a complicated system for assigning and logging class assignments and homework that the entire class was familiar with and well-practised in, because this was the second year they had to abide by it. It was my first year with the system and it left me baffled. I don't recall that she ever took time to explain it, and because I had never been baffled before in school I didn't know how to ask for help.
I started missing assignments because I didn't know they had been assigned. I was the new girl and too shy to ask my new classmates for help. When I did turn in my assignments I received poor marks -- because they were late? I don't know, but it snowballed, and I was receiving C's for the first time in my life. The only subject I continued to excel in was reading, probably because in the misery of that year I retreated deeper and deeper into books. It was as if Mrs. Stevens had decided what I was capable of -- had decided that I wasn't capable of much -- and graded me accordingly. Unthinkingly.
Her perception of me was pervasive -- I saw its effects in the other kids. One day in gym class when I struggled to climb the ropes -- and failed -- I returned to the line and the little girl in front of me said: "Mrs. Stevens said bad students are usually bad in gym too." I said nothing. My face flamed red and I felt the deep rage of being thought someone I was not and the shame of thinking maybe what the little girl thought was true. Nothing I did changed Mrs. Stevens' mind about me and I limped my way through my 5th grade year, happy only to have survived it.
I shook off the stigma in 6th grade and stayed on top of things from there on out, never regretting being teacher's pet again. I learned how to ask for help, and I had my moment of triumph when Mrs. Stevens brought her 5th grade class over from the Elementary School to see the Middle School play in which I had the starring role as Penelope the Pride of the Pickle Factory. (When I peeked through the curtains and saw her there with her class the old terror flooded through me, but I went on stage and pulled it off. Later my sister told me that the other kids said "wow -- was that your sister? She was so good," and I glowed.)
I hated Mrs. Stevens for what she thought of me, hated the way she warped my world into something untrue and unjust, hated that she never saw me for who I really was.
I hated her, but she may have taught me the truest lesson I ever learned.
Obama is obviously inspirational, but we wondered whether he would contribute to an improvement in something as important as black test-taking. We were skeptical that we would find any effect, but our results surprised us.
Researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.
[Lincoln's Memorial is] but a hollow mockery, a symbol of hypocrisy, unless we can make real in our national life, in every state and every section, the things for which he died.
A remarkable fact of which I was unaware is that the last third of the speech — the part about the dream — was extemporized by King. He had a text, completed the night before. But as he was addressing the crowd, protesting the indignities and brutalities suffered by blacks, he put the prepared speech aside, paused for a moment and then introduced an entirely new theme.
“I still have a dream,” he said. “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ ”
With that quotation from the Declaration of Independence, King made clear that his vision of the future for black Americans was for them to be part of the larger society, not embittered opponents of it. He reiterated the point a few minutes later. Faith in his dream, he said, will bring a day “when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, ‘My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.’ ”(...)
Why did King abandon his written text that day at the Memorial? It may be, Sundquist suggests, that despite shouts of approval he felt he had not really connected with the audience. His wife, Coretta Scott King, thought the words “flowed from some higher place.” In any event, the result was for the ages.
“Speaking suddenly from the heart,” Sundquist writes, “he delivered a speech elegantly structured, commanding in tone, and altogether more profound than anything heard on American soil in nearly a century. In the midst of speaking, King rewrote his speech and created a new national scripture.”
We didn't want the right wing to get hold of the book.
