Word: mcwhorter
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...CARRY ME HOME A white native of Birmingham, Ala., Diane McWhorter was 10 in 1963, roughly the same age as the four black girls killed in her hometown's notorious church bombing. Her adult questions about her father's hostility toward the civil rights movement has led to a comprehensive, fast-paced history of that era and its tangled racial animosities...
Carry Me Home A white native of Birmingham, Ala., Diane McWhorter was 10 in 1963, roughly the same age as the four black girls killed in her hometown's notorious church bombing. Her adult questions about her father's hostility toward the civil rights movement has led to a comprehensive, fast-paced history of that era and its tangled racial animosities...
...recent discussion of slavery at schools like Yale leads one to ask, “Why does all that matter?” Many think it is simply irrelevant. Professor John McWhorter of the University of California—Berkeley, one of this country’s leading conservative black intellectuals, maintains that it is “inappropriate to render a moral judgment on the worth of a person’s life based on moral standards which didn’t exist at that time...
...These episodes remind us that universities are often the product and beneficiary of the great interests (in this case what used to be called the “slave power”). As a result, they are often more likely to justify than to condemn those interests. Professor McWhorter is just another in a long line of teachers, stretching back to the leading pro-slavery authors of the 1800s, who believe with Alexander Pope that “whatever is, is right.” He may honestly, if mistakenly, believe that slavery was morally (as well as legally) acceptable...
...McWhorter intertwines these dramatic events with an unsettling account of her father's descent into racial vigilantism. For decades, she writes, he boasted about his Klan affiliations and the unaccounted-for nights he spent "at one of his civil rights meetings." But when she finally confronted him, he admitted that he had not been deeply involved with the Klan because "I would have had to kill people." Writes McWhorter: "I couldn't quite grasp the grandiosity that would make someone falsely claim intimate knowledge of the most horrible crime of his time." Neither can we. Like McWhorter, the best...