Sublime
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on a visit to New York City, he saw hungry-looking men sleeping in alleyways, as if one foot were already in the grave. “These people are Les Miseràbles of America,” he wrote to his parents in September 1965. “People that don’t make it in America’s social race to succeed are simply run over.”
Ariel Sabar • My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

A 1967 New York Times editorial declared Milwaukee “America’s most segregated city.” A supermajority in both houses had helped President Johnson pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but legislators backed by real estate lobbies refused to get behind his open housing law, which would have criminalized housing discrimi
... See moreMatthew Desmond • Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
The American Negro cannot explain to the African what surely seems in himself to be a want of manliness, of racial pride, a maudlin ability to forgive. It is difficult to make clear that he is not seeking to forfeit his birthright as a black man, but that, on the contrary, it is precisely this birthright which he is struggling to recognize and make
... See moreJames Baldwin • Notes of a Native Son
se multiplient les incitations à se gérer telle une « marchandise en quête d’un acheteur47 » à chaque intermittence de l’emploi. Gorz le sartrien constate lucidement : À défaut d’emploi, les stages destinés à assurer une « employabilité » censée être insuffisante ont une fonction idéologique inavouée : ils consolident et développent l’aptitude à l’
... See moreFrançoise GOLLAIN • André Gorz et l'écosocialisme (French Edition)
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster. The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new
... See moreJames Baldwin • Notes of a Native Son
The civil rights struggle in Appalachia, as elsewhere in the South, was an effort at remaking what it meant to be Americans. The Highlander Folk School is one of the most important institutions in that generations-long endeavor. In 1932, in the Tennessee hills, Highlander was established.
Imani Perry • South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
