The story of the American Civil War is essentially one of human beings––Northerners, Southerners, Blacks, Whites, men, women–– holding themselves accountable for the future of a nation.
Somehow, all the talk about tenure and anthropology had given her visions of a thick-walled, libraried adobe, the kind of place that was covered with kilim rugs and fertility sculptures. The white stucco in front of her looked only slightly more subs...
Raised on a cotton farm in rural Georgia, as many white/negro families did to make a meager living, my daddy had a saying. 'All a poor man has is his good name and good credit. God help him if he looses either of those.' I still believe that.
Between the radiant white of a clear conscience and the coal black of a conscience sullied by sin lie many shades of gray--where most of us live our lives. Not perfect but not beyond redemption.
Rahul’s great idea, he said that having either darkness or too much white made someone’s sanity decay and made them easier to manipulate. In the dark, though, they felt they could hide, and in Rahul’s words... 'They can hide, but they can’t r...
Mr. Schlubb, the pear-shaped PE teacher, sent us all out to run half a dozen laps around a preposterously enormous cinder track. For the Greenwood kids—all of us white, marshmallowy, innately unphysical, squinting unfamiliarly in the bright sunshin...
It was a woman--as pale and luminescent as a ghost, with swirling white hair. Ezra startled, dropping his pencil into the water. Her face snapped toward him. Her eyes were too large, clear green, and had horizontal, slit-shaped pupils, reminiscent of...
I had a friend who got pregnant at age 14 and wasn’t quite sure who the father was. Her paternity test went a little something like this: “If it comes out black, its Darwin’s and if it comes out white its Ray’s.” This is how things were don...
Pointed teeth would give one an appearance of ferocity," he said, tapping a straight white tooth. "Although that might require one to follow through with biting someone from time to time, and the thought is enough to make one feel ill. I don't even l...
The evening's light, silvery, casts its dull brightness onto the trees--trees gelid in this blue light of winter. But whiteness dominates with the pines and evergreens steeped in vibrant grades of silver. I hear notes in the mist, like silvery chatte...
Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it's some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don't know nothin' but what we see.
The Jetavana Temple bells ring the passing of all things. Twinned sala trees, white in full flower, declare the great man's certain fall. The arrogant do not long endure: They are like a dream one night in spring. The bold and brave perish in the end...
Papa said that the parish priest in Abba was not spiritual enough. That was the problem with our people, Papa told us, our priorities were wrong; we cared too much about huge church buildings and mighty statues. You would never see white people doing...
If anyone had been paying attention to the signs, they would have realized that air turns white when things are about to change, that paper cuts mean there's more to what's written on the page than meets the eye, and that birds are always out to prot...
The Divine "goodness" differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different; it differs from ours not as white from black, but as a perfect circle from a child's first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that th...
But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my tumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more s...
She smiled sinisterly. Light mist started to slowly swirl around us. All I could see was her, the tall rocks and the white wall. She beckoned to me. I took a step and another. I was now ankle deep into the water. The mysterious girl smiled like a pre...
Everybody granted that if "Tom" were white and free it would be unquestionably right to punish him--it would be no loss to anybody; but to shut up a valuable slave for life--that was quite another matter. As soon as the Governor understood the case, ...
The Mommy Wars, as they stand today, serve as an effective check on the ambitions of the American mother. The phenomenon keeps women in a perpetual state of guilt, shame and inadequacy, and does so without involving anyone but wealthy white women.
The fiendlike skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white ci...
I think a cool war helmet is painted with red and white concentric circles, exactly like a bull’s eye. But I’m not a fighter—I’m a lover. That’s why I’m joining the military. I figure after well over a decade of continuous war, all they d...
