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Break the cycle at one point and you end its vicious repetition.
The goal was to eliminate poverty without making any other major changes.
No top policy-makers wanted community action programs to become ways of achieving political power for the poor.
It was to have been a self-help program without the self.
began to understand that they had struggled too hard to fight prejudice and make it possible for individuals to win freedom and power, and not hard enough to build organizations on ethnic lines to achieve group power and freedom. Many kinds of economic self-help organizations have started to appear. It has also become increasingly clear to minorities that they cannot ignore the political arena. If they are going to enter the economic mainstream, they will have to become signifi- cantly involved in politics.
The history of the war on poverty shows, among other things, that people are learning to rebel against government that imposes on them policies that they had no hand in form- ing.
White women are at an economic disadvantage even compared to black men, and black women are nowhere on the earnings scale.
albatross
Women should perceive that the nega- tive attitudes they hold toward their own femaleness are the creation of an antifeminist society, just as the black shame at being black was the product of racism. Women should start to replace their negative ideas of their femininity with posi- tive ones affirming their nature more and more strongly.
If we reject our restricted roles, we do not have to reject these values of femaleness. They are enduring values, and we must develop the capacity to hold them and to dispense them to those around us. We must become revolutionaries in the style of Gandhi and King. Then, working toward our own freedom, we can help the others work free from the traps of their stereotypes.
equivalent to the same thing — anti-humanism. The values of life must be maintained against the enemies in every guise. We can do it by confront- ing people with their own humanity and their own inhuman- ity whenever we meet them, in the streets, in school, in church, in bars, in the halls of legislatures. We must reject not only the stereotypes that others have of us but also those we have of ourselves and others.
One distressing thing is the way men react to women who assert their equality: their ultimate weapon is to call them unfeminine. They think she is anti-male; they even whisper that she's probably a lesbian, a tactic some members of the Women's Liberation Front have encountered.
One question bothers me a lot: Who's listening to me? Some of the time, I feel dishearteningly small and futile. It's as if I'm facing a seamless brick wall, as if most people are deaf to what I try to say.
zealots
Their goals are the same — to in- sure individual liberty and equality of opportunity, and forever to thwart the tyrannous tendencies of government, which inevitably arise from the arrogance and isolation of men who are securely in power. All they want, if it were not too unfashionable for them to say so, is for the American dream to come true, at least in its less materialistic aspects. They want to heal the gaping breach between this country's promises and its performance, a breach that goes back to its founding on a Constitution that denied that black persons
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verisimili- tude.
It could be a perfect metaphor for the way our country was founded and grew, with lofty and pure words on its lips and the basest bigotry hidden in its heart.
They know most adults are selling something they can't deliver.
One reason for youthful distaste for politics has been the fact that the eighteen to twenty-one-year-old population was for years our largest disenfranchised group.
They could see clearly that they were being given all of the duties and none of the privileges of citizenship.
Youth is in the process of being classed with the dark- skinned minorities as the object of popular scorn and hatred. It is as if Americans have to have a "nigger," a target for its hidden frustrations and guilt. Without someone to blame, like the Communists abroad and the young and black at home, middle America would be forced to consider whether all the problems of our time were in any way its own fault. That is the one thing it could never stand to do. Hence, it finds scapegoats.
Individually and collectively, Americans can no longer get away with proclaiming their democratic faith and jealously guarding their special privileges. We cannot hope any longer to be believed when we claim to be defending freedom, after so many years of being seen to care nothing about the freedom of citizens of Latin American, Asian, European, and Caribbean nations where we prop up dictatorial regimes.
If those in power will not respond to their simple demands for justice, their violent young hands will be laid upon the structure of the social and political system, and they will try to tear it down.
If it happens, it will mean that our streets would be forever stained with the blood of our best young sons and daughters.
I don’t measure America by its achievement, but by its potential.
There are still many things that we haven’t tried – that I haven’t tried – to change the way our present system operates. I haven’t exhausted the opportunities for action in the course I’m pursuing.
The alternative, of course, is reform – renewal, revitalization of the institutions of this potentially great nation.
We need men and women who have far greater abilities and far broader appeal than I will ever have, but who have my kind of independence – who will dare to declare that they are free of the old ways that have led us wrong, and who owe nothing to the traditional concentrations of capital and power that have subverted this nation’s ideals.
1970’s children’s album, “Free to Be You and Me.”
Chisholm again while reading Paula Giddings’ “When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America.”
On the 1972 campaign trail that Shirley Chisholm asked, whether or not “black people are politically sophisticated enough to be aware of the fact that my candidacy is not to be regarded as a candidacy in which I can win the presidency of this country at this moment, but a candidacy that is paving the way for people of other ethnic groups, including blacks, to run and perhaps win the office. Or are we suffering so much from the inculcation of certain values in America that even black people can’t even conceive at this point that a black person should run for president?”
History is not just a series of facts to memorize, but a narrative that provides a context and foundation of psychological and emotional support. Without a sense of history we are as condemned as Sisyphus in Greek Mythology, whose purgatory is to push a heavy boulder up hill only to have it roll back down every time he reaches the top, forcing him to begin again. We repeat the same mistakes of the past because we have no opportunity to learn from them.
It is also a lonely burden being a rugged individual carrying the weight of oppression without the strength of a collective legacy.
There is more to black history than the struggles of slavery and segregation in the standard American history narrative. The black community has never just been composed of passive participants enduring a series of tragic events. The story of blacks in America is one of survival, struggle, and rebellion by a whole range of people whose actions served as a foundation for community. Each challenge, mistake, and triumph informed me, and learning of these historical struggles broke the Sisyphus curse, providing a context for my own.
“Chisholm ’72”
When most black women were domestics, teachers, or nurses, Chisholm ran a campaign for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States; and unlike many of her male counterparts, she made it all the way to the Democratic National Convention floor. Shirley Chisholm will always stand out in history as an ordinary person who had the audacity to take hold of the opportunities of her time and act extraordinarily. She did not allow other people to define her goals. She may not have won the election,
Chisholm understood that she didn’t rise to political heights on her own merits alone; she stood on the shoulders of those that came before her.
Shirley Chisholm so accessible. Lincoln didn’t just end slavery. King didn’t just dream segregation away. Parks didn’t just get tired one day. It is often the unrecognized actions of previous generations that push a society to eventually embrace mantras such as hope, equality, change, and other ideals, which transform the political landscape. Chisholm's actions remind us that there are hundreds of forgotten foot soldiers in history that helped to bring these watershed moments to fruition.
