Our neighborhood school, P.S. 29, is 75 per cent Negro and Puerto Rican, mostly Puerto Rican. The kids are a tough lot, coming from the tenements off Columbia Street, which runs south from Atlantic Avenue along Brooklyn’s waterfront into Red …
List the symptoms. We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd, a homosexual genius who spent thirty years as a …
Only rarely does a book immediately convey a sense that it will rank among the influential works of the time. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is just such a book. It is badly written, badly organized and chaotic. …
The “loss of community” in modern society has become a major theme in contemporary social criticism. One could even say that the discipline of sociology begins with a concern over the decline of such traditional forms of association as small …
A university as politically engaged as the University of California cannot help but become egocentric. Politically involved students automatically become the center of their own universe. The old joke about the Polish scholar who was doing a study of the …
A peaceful settlement of the Vietnam war requires some initial conception of a reasonable bargaining position for both sides. In my judgment, the United States has not sufficiently shown that it understands or is prepared to negotiate on such a …
On important holidays and especially at Christmas, the buses and trains leaving the North and heading South are heavy-laden with what seems like an infinite assortment of black people. They are young and old, good, bad, indifferent. There are children …
That the machine does in fact displace workers had been directly experienced during the Industrial Revolution by hand loom weaver and Luddite. Yet economists have always persisted in consoling workers with the optimistic notion that in the long run new …
The press has done justice to the woeful catalogue of demonstrations, shootings, and court injunctions suffered by this papermill town in the past year. There has been little exploration, however, of the causes of Bogalusa’s agony: automation, economic frustration, and …
The looted stores are still vacant and the burned-out ones still heaps of rubble. But an ironic and ludicrous quality pervades Watts, for hoardes of investigators, analysts and reporters have descended upon the area with clip boards, tape recorders and …
U.S. policy in the Dominican Republic may take a slight turn for the better with the transfer of Ambassador Tapely Bennett to Portugal, a country that shares his antipathy to democracy. The reasons for the current “rethinking” in Washington are …
Something important is happening in South Vietnam, even if its exact nature is not yet clear. The demonstrations in Saigon and Hue, the consolidation of the Buddhist factions into an apparently united force, the visible weakness of Ky’s military government …
In The Political Economy of Slavery, Eugene Genovese has made an original contribution to our understanding of ante-bellum Southern history. His contribution lies not so much in the discovery of new facts as in placing familiar materials in a fresh theoretical context. Genovese is the first to systematically …
One always preserves the fears of his youth. Those who grew up in the fifties will never forget McCarthy: when they see a Communist being attacked, they are sure it’s a witch hunt. Some liberals are so obsessed by the …
By now, there is a fair-sized library devoted to the definition and description of poverty in the United States. The Government itself has financed some excellent studies (Mollie Orshansky’s analysis for the Social Security Administration is an outstanding example). And …
