Word: evenness
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...Shelby Steele argues, preferential treatment for blacks has an even more pernicious cost: it creates corrosive doubt in the eyes of both whites and blacks about the worth of any black achievement. However much people may deny it, no one can see a black professor or doctor without having the thought run through his mind: Did he make it on his own or did he get through on a quota? These doubts gratuitously reinforce in both blacks and whites a presumption of racial inferiority...
European diplomats were delighted to find that grim Grom's avuncular-looking successor was pleasant, modest and easy to deal with, even on tough questions. Shevardnadze described himself as a pragmatist: "The Soviet Union is firmly in favor of a solid and honest dialogue," he said. "We are interested in results...
...words were even more shocking than his manner. Shocking to the nearly 2,000 members of the Congress of People's Deputies, meeting in a Kremlin auditorium; to his longtime close friend, President Mikhail Gorbachev, watching on the tribune behind Shevardnadze; and to a world that had been wondering with increasing apprehension which way the U.S.S.R. was going. Shevardnadze thought he knew: back toward the terrible past. "Reactionaries" were gaining power, he said, and nobody would speak out against them. "Comrade democrats!" Shevardnadze shouted, "You have scattered. Reformers have slunk into the bushes. A dictatorship is coming...
Most of the time, that strategy worked. But during the past year or so it has been falling apart. The reform forces have lost all cohesion, splintering into myriad tiny groups. All 15 Soviet republics have declared sovereignty, and so have regions and even cities within republics, producing a state of near anarchy. Gorbachev lost his best and perhaps his last chance to remain the leader of the reformists in October when he backed away from a 500-Day Plan for radical economic reform that had been worked out with Russian republic leader Boris Yeltsin, his chief domestic rival. When...
Partly at Shevardnadze's urging, the West has placed all its hopes for a new world order on Gorbachev. French and German authorities last week even urged that aid be accelerated, arguing that at this critical time for the survival of perestroika Gorbachev needs all the help he can get. But what if the next figure to follow Shevardnadze to a podium and announce that a triumphant right has left him no choice but to resign were Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev...