What If They Gave Out Compassionate Conservatism and Nobody Cared?
"Why Blacks Should Give Bush a Chance" sounded like the punch line of a joke.
continue readingJohn McWhorter
John McWhorter is author of Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America. He is a Senior Fellow in Public Policy at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal.
Articles by John McWhorter
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What If They Gave Out Compassionate Conservatism and Nobody Cared? – "Why Blacks Should Give Bush a Chance" sounded like the punch line of a joke
During the first months of the Bush administration, I wrote an article for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal called “Why Blacks Should Give Bush a Chance.” I made reference to the administration’s plans to make public schools accountable for closing the racial gap in grades and test scores, and its intention to earmark funds for churches and other faith-based institutions to help poor communities help themselves.
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Everyday Purpose
One might make a most basic distinction between motives for reading: on the one hand, reading to escape oneself, on the other, reading to discover one’s purpose in life. The former is well addressed at newsstands. There is pleasure in buying a paperback before a journey, in involving ourselves in a story of ten generations in a Southern American town or in the quest to find the murderer of a CIA agent decapitated in an Internet café. Once we’ve boarded a carriage, we can abstract ourselves from current surroundings and enter a more agreeable, or at least agreeably different world, breaking off to take in the passing scenery, while holding open our volume at the point where a detective has shot off a gun, or a farmhand has kissed the heroine – until our destination is announced, and we re-emerge into reality.
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More Than Polyester: the Rediscovery of The Thrift Shop
The wide-collared, blue polyester shirt I was wearing required serious mending, given the rip at the collar and the various colored threads that I'd used to reattach its buttons. But with my girlfriend's parents waiting for me at a fancy Manhattan bistro, I hardly had time to stop at a tailor. So, with $20 in my pocket, I headed for the thrift store where I originally found the shirt five years ago, Andy's Chee-Pees on West Broadway in Greenwich Village.
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