I'm not ignoring the weightier words but some give me a special picture, indirectly but descriptively. I love it. "...but you should know I exist and am not a unicorn."
I happen to have experienced a side of 'highbrow' Black Culture teaching at Chicago State College in the late 60s. I encountered the term "Mink Ghetto" and taught students - middle aged women school teachers mostly - who were getting their Master's degrees to better their families. And thanks to this post I now see much more clearly that families are what it was all about. In Chicago, I learned from these students how their fathers or grandfathers had come up from Mississippi to fill jobs during the labor shortage of WW1 and and managed to hang onto them with employers like the Post Office and how their mothers and grandmothers and the Black churches had held those families together. Some among the younger ones had fire in the belly. One young woman who was really angry at the world and certainly suspicious of me as a white teacher took my ordinary assignment to create an annotated bibliography, which could be easily completed in the library, and did original scholarship by working with the widow of Malcolm X to compile an annotated bibliography of some of his private papers. Another young man was genuinely involved in contemporary poetry - yes Leroy Jones who read at the college - but also the then major poets of the NY School - Ashbury, Koch, and O'hara whom I knew from NY. I remember these fellow Americas and many others like them whenever I'm told what to think about racism these days and also the little white sign I saw on the lawn outside a roadhouse in Virginia in 1963 that said "Whites Only" the first time I went south of the Mason Dixon line.
Certainly. I am proud to be your friend. It is an honor.
I look forward to the passing of the current wave of insanity so that we may all be friendlier again.
I'm not ignoring the weightier words but some give me a special picture, indirectly but descriptively. I love it. "...but you should know I exist and am not a unicorn."
I happen to have experienced a side of 'highbrow' Black Culture teaching at Chicago State College in the late 60s. I encountered the term "Mink Ghetto" and taught students - middle aged women school teachers mostly - who were getting their Master's degrees to better their families. And thanks to this post I now see much more clearly that families are what it was all about. In Chicago, I learned from these students how their fathers or grandfathers had come up from Mississippi to fill jobs during the labor shortage of WW1 and and managed to hang onto them with employers like the Post Office and how their mothers and grandmothers and the Black churches had held those families together. Some among the younger ones had fire in the belly. One young woman who was really angry at the world and certainly suspicious of me as a white teacher took my ordinary assignment to create an annotated bibliography, which could be easily completed in the library, and did original scholarship by working with the widow of Malcolm X to compile an annotated bibliography of some of his private papers. Another young man was genuinely involved in contemporary poetry - yes Leroy Jones who read at the college - but also the then major poets of the NY School - Ashbury, Koch, and O'hara whom I knew from NY. I remember these fellow Americas and many others like them whenever I'm told what to think about racism these days and also the little white sign I saw on the lawn outside a roadhouse in Virginia in 1963 that said "Whites Only" the first time I went south of the Mason Dixon line.