I had forgotten the incident completely, until I read Trey Ellis’s essay, “Remember My Name,” in a recent issue of the Village Voice (June 13, 1989). But there, in the middle of an extended italicized list of the by-names of …
It is sobering to read the entry on “homelessness” in the 1968 edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, which declares that although wandering men can be found in many societies, “homeless women and children are relatively rare. …
Martin Duberman’s excellent biography supplies a great deal of new information and insight about a man previously shrouded in myth. What Paul Robeson thought is still elusive—he wrote very little and maintained a “protective secretiveness” that not even his friends …
The status of the Afro-American intellectual community has changed drastically during the last twenty years. As a result of the civil rights movement and the urban uprisings of the 1960s, predominantly white universities began to open their doors to black …
I want to mention very briefly–not discuss, not analyze–a few matters that we will be returning to in future issues of Dissent. They are central to our moment. A few facts, perhaps known but worth repeating: Nearly one out of …
In the early 1970s, when I worked for a child welfare agency, a Catholic colleague told me that she became prochoice the day she was called to find foster homes for five children whose mother had just died from a …
Hungary today is a land of possibilities, perils, and unpredictability. In the past year, the ruling (Communist) Hungarian Socialist Workers party (HSWP) reluctantly recognized that ineffective leadership and lack of legitimacy had rendered it increasingly incapable of coping with the …
The climax of China’s spring 1989 student protest movement is well known, at least outside of China. Troops acting to clear Tiananmen Square of protesters and enforce martial law succeeded in their charge, firing automatic assault weapons on unarmed citizens …
The authors of these important and informative volumes, Bonnie S. Anderson, a historian at Brooklyn College, and Judith P. Zinsser, a member of the humanities department of the United Nations International School, came to their task because of the disparity …
Any attempt to study black Americans immediately confronts a number of stubborn theoretical issues, compounded by a great deal of moral and political controversy. The most fundamental of these is the explanatory significance of cultural factors. Up to the sixties …
The aftereffects of the mass movements of the late 1960s, of sustained racial unrest and the riots of 1967 and 1968 on black urban society are as yet not fully understood. Yet I believe they lie at the root of …
This may hardly be the ideal moment for general reflections on the significance of the present tragic turn in Chinese affairs. The brutal repression in Tiananmen Square was a decisive event, but the shape of things to come is still …
The point is not that Horowitz thought badly twenty years ago. Nineteen hundred and sixty-nine was a bad year for political sense. I, for example, wrote a favorable review of Empire and Revolution in Ramparts, the New Left monthly of …
This essay examines three broad questions: First, what part—and how much—of the Soviet economy is in need of reform; second, what kind of reforms have been proposed; and third, are the projected reforms viable and will they work when (and …
By the time you read this, Time Inc. will have bought up Warner Bros., or Paramount will have taken over Time, or perhaps both Warner’s and Time. The stockholders with the right information will have their windfall, some executives will …
