Word: birthright
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...political realities just as much at fair Harvard as at San Francisco State,"and that whites are ill-advised to try instantly to pump black acquaintances for their views on the Problem. Harlon Dalton's introduction, provocatively addressed to those "for whom the Black experience is not a birthright," is terribly convincing: on the evidence of these pages, there is a great deal for whites to envy in the articulateness and heterogeneous but coherent community of Harvard blacks...
BORN IN Virginia, Wolfe describes his childhood as "growing up in the first drive-in era." In accepting that birthright, Wolfe echoes Vladimir Nabakov, who -- in repudiating charges of Lolita's anti-Americanism--wrote, "I needed a certain exhilerating milieu. Nothing is more exhilerating than philistine volgarity." It is thus appropriately ironic that Tom Wolfe started out with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale. Later, while working as a reporter in Washington, he discovered poor tenement families eating dirt; in the story that followed, Wolfe cited a 19th century American book that discussed the same phenomenon. Today, he concludes...
...bright, stupid or anything in between. His starting position on the intelligence scale is predetermined-a biological sentence, like the one that orders tigers to give birth to tiger cubs and the human female to produce human babies. But nothing prevents a normal man from enriching his intellectual birthright, if it is allowed to mature in a hospitable environment. The obverse is equally true. Potential geniuses, deprived of suitable stimulation, will never fulfill their endowment...
Nonetheless, Psychologist Jerome S. Bruner believes that they must be there, that the full splendor of intelligence is part of the human birthright. Everything the infant needs-to master a tongue, to coax new music from strings, to find undiscovered stars-is already embedded in his nervous system. To test this premise, Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies has been conducting a series of unusual experiments on the human baby. The studies are based on Bruner's conviction that the infant is "a complicated programming system" and that a great deal of research on the child has presumed...
...Protestant background and his expansive American experience. "If you are a Wasp, you have the confidence that the Establishment is yours and that you are on the top," says Novelist Herbert Gold. "There is the feeling that the love of a horsy woman comes to you as a birthright," Hollywood may be filled mainly with non-Wasps, but they still usually take Wasp names and act out Wasp fantasies in films. In Jewish novels, the central character is often driven to live a Wasp-like life. Herzog finds his ultimate solace in a little bit of land he owns...