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What children know
The editor of the Threepenny Review selects her five favorite novels about childhood.

By Wendy Lesser
[08/23/99]

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"The Boy on the Green Bicycle"
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By John Freeman
[08/23/99]


"To my executors"
Witnessing the furor over posthumously published books by Ernest Hemingway and Ralph Ellison, a novelist engineers his own literary legacy.

By Ken Kalfus
[08/20/99]

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Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings
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By Saul Anton
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Ivory Tower
Extracurricular class
A Yale student glimpses behind the ivy-covered myth that all students are equal.

By Simon Rodberg
[08/20/99]

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Ivory Tower

----MAKE BLACK THE NIGHT
Was planning a march against violence against women
an inherently racist undertaking?

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By Tanya Shaffer

August 23, 1999 | There is one person on the planet whom I can honestly say I hate. This in spite of two and a half years of lovingkindness meditation. I'm not talking about the profound yet somehow abstract hatred you feel for a brutal dictator in a far-off land, nor the reluctant half-desire, half-loathing of an ex-lover. I'm talking about the peculiarly bitter, tenacious hatred you feel for a person who once caused you an acute and unforgettable humiliation before a tribunal of peers.

Oberlin College in the mid-'80s was fertile ground for humiliation. "Identity" politics were gathering steam, and everyone was discovering his or her oppression. In the larger superstructure of both the college and society, minorities of all categories still struggled for basic parity. Our student social life, however, had become a sort of inverted universe: The more oppressed groups you belonged to, the higher your status. And the higher your status, the more license you had to publicly call people on their unconscious bigotry.

Generally, those of us whose sole claim to oppression was gender had only white males on whom to take out our anger (and I took mine out in spades). Occasionally, however, someone could gain status through the sheer force of moral indignation and be accepted as an honorary member of a more oppressed group than her own. These individuals were always the most virulently righteous when taking other members of their own societal subsection to task for their sexism, racism, classism or homophobia.

Don't misunderstand me. I have no desire to belittle anyone's anger at injustice by slapping it with the mocking label "politically correct." College is a violently politicizing time; the sudden awareness of your personal story as part of a broader societal mosaic can galvanize phenomenal growth, courage and action. And if some tender feelings get hurt along the way, I'm not convinced that's always a bad thing, especially if those feelings have survived 18 years without close examination. Given all of that, why do I still hate her, after all this time?

. Next page | Laura, my hippy heroine


 
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