The revolutionary movement, as a search for—and momentarily finding of—our own selves, transformed Mexico. To be oneself is always to become that other person who is one’s real self, that hidden promise or possibility. In one sense, then, the Revolution …
I AM NOT, I HOPE, INDULGING in that most middle-aged of pastimes, boasting of how terrible things were when I was young. And yet, it must be said that, for all the current talk of repression in American society, what …
So we have left footprints on the face of the moon. An admirable feat. We can congratulate ourselves, we can be proud, we have shown that it can be done. Most likely, it had to be done even though the …
ONE AFTERNOON last summer I happened to be watching a TV discussion among five or six black teenagers. All were speaking out of a deep pride in their blackness, as it is almost mandatory to do today, and also out …
Like other minorities, black Americans have a history of their own peculiar sufferings and peculiar experiences, as well as special forms of resistance or of protective evasion. But this history is distinguished from the history of all other minorities in …
In recent books, Adolph L. Reed Jr. and Imani Perry offer divergent explanations of Southern inequality.
SEPTEMBER 7, 1991 The remarkable events in the Soviet Union since the failed coup of August 18–remarkable both for the depth and rapidity of change-make it almost reckless to venture a serious comment as we prepare this issue of Dissent …
Minority rule is a major obstacle to ensuring abortion rights.
The so-called drag golden age is really a gilded age, where the runaway success of a few is made possible at the expense of the many.
In an increasingly expensive and antisocial world, tradwives forsake life with others for the lonely, constrictive spaces of bourgeois ownership.
An interview with Loretta J. Ross.
Paisley Currah’s Sex Is as Sex Does raises questions about efforts to achieve equal recognition under laws that sanction repression and inequality.
I don’t want to answer Mike Walzer in any detail, since much of what he says by way of criticism I also strongly affirm in my book—he is not a close reader. Perhaps I write too much in the old …
Schools reflect a culture; they do not transform it—Unsigned review, The New Yorker, November 16, 1963. A university should not be a weather vane, responsive to every variation of popular whim. Universities must at times give society, not what society …
In a recent issue of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz published an article called “My Negro Problem—and Ours.” In it he told about the time a bunch of Negro kids clobbered him when he was a little boy in Brownsville, and how …
