Place And Explain The Quote
"It is a great play...!"
President Roosevelt
“Everything that I had been shutting out was something I turned to.”
Chapter 1, Kallen says this after taking Wendell's English courses, it is a shift from I am a modern American to I am a Jewish
"I am not a race problem."
Chapter 3, Locke says it, he is frustrated that his self and career are over determined, the rest of the quote is "I am Alain LeRoy Locke and if these people don’t stop I’ll tell them something that will make them."
Religion was a source of play and amusement...but also of identity and community.
Chapter 8, Weinfeld writing about an older Kallen signing his letters with a mix of holidays and langauges, this is the echo to the early in the book sentence about playful Locke, in their friendship Kallen learns that culture is creative (playful) and Locke learns that culture is the essential foundation of tradition (inherited and determined)...one half enriches the other to create the whole beneath a theory of cultural pluralism that endures today
“My Jewish difference could be no less real, worthy, and honorable than any other I might be fleeing to, that unlearning it might more greatly diminish me than living and orchestrating it.”
Chapter 8, Kallen says this in a 1966 biographical essay on cultural pluralism, published in Saturday Review, it is a conclusive I'm staying right here from a child/man/scholar who spent his life asking questions about whether leaving or staying was a better answer (for his soul)...it would do me harm to chase something that is no better than what I already have
“...we should stop thinking in Greek terms, not think in terms of a distinction between appearance and reality or between mind and body or between intellect and sense, but think of ourselves, in the wake of Darwin, as what nature called clever animals, who find clever and clever ways of talking about what's going on, and clever and clever ways of dealing with what's going on, but never do anything like penetrating beyond the world of the senses or penetrating beyond appearance to reality or ascending from the body to the mind…”
This quote is taken from a video in which Richard Rorty is defining pragmatism, it speaks to the rejection in pragmatisim of truth and getting beyond the real, physical, and everyday, pragmatism offers that truth is whatever this particular group of humans thinks it is right now, and that truth came to them via experience
He made his own truth.
Chapter 2, about Locke, He was born in 1885 but told people it was 1886. Weinfeld thinks it's a cool defining quality of young Locke that he does whatever he wants even if he is the only one to ever do so.
…d’Ennery argued that a dramatist could not use the stage to fight against popular sentiment. Thus, if he introduced Jewish characters into his plays, they would need to be “users, swindlers, or traitors--in short, villains.” Being a Jew himself, this would be disagreeable. “What was I to do then?” he asked, and then responded, “I have suppressed the Jew entirely in my plays.”
This quote was part of our Israel Zangwill bio handout. It is outlining that a playwrite who worked before Zangwill thought an author could not change the expectations and stereotypes of the reader (audience member). To avoid injury to himself a Jewish author cannot write Jewish characters. Zangwill will challenge this--and counters that “perhaps it is the playwright’s habit of molding events in the dream-world that leads to these attempts to manipulate the tougher material of the real,” and “Playwriting…is a Branch of Politics.”
Any “who can breed together” belong to the same race, “their diversities are primarily cultural, not biological.”
Chapter 6, Kallen writing to the poet T. S. Eliot, by the middle of his life Kallen has shifted from a biological model of difference to a social model of difference, throughout Weinfeld's text we get different Kallen quotes, and different Locke quotes, at different moments of place, time, and thought. Toether these quotes sketch a journey of thinking about what divides you from others, what your difference is, and also why or why not that difference is signficant (to you or to others).
Their story, one of overcoming obstacles and changing minds, being attracted to difference and fighting bigotry--including one’s own--and ultimately developing a loyal friendship, offers hope in troubled times`. The legacy of their friendship offers hope for a diverse and divided United States, and for all countries where different peoples meet, learn, love, become friends, and contribute to the symphony of civilization.
Conclusion, Weinfled's sense of the story he told and the reason it matters--American friendships are the how to of a symphony of civilization...and this American friendship in particular is a story of two imperfect but consequential Americans whose friendship crafted the cultural diversity conversations and coursework on your own 21st-century campus
absolutist religion presented the gravest threat to American democracy
Chapter 6, a quote from Kallen that came from a paragraph about his experience being arrested for blasphemy in Boston when he said, at a 1928 memorial, “If Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists, so were Jesus Christ, Socrates.”
“you can’t keep a man down in a ditch without yourself staying down in the ditch to keep him there”
Chapter 7, Weinfeld writes, “Rosenwald had been inspired by Booker T. Washington’s philosophy ‘that you can’t keep a man down in a ditch without yourself staying down in the ditch to keep him there.’ Put another way, ‘the cause and best interests of any and all minorities is really the cause and best interests of the majority, and that common interests are the proper and most effective basis of philanthropic enterprise.’ This section of the text sketches the conventional American friendship Weinfeld seeks to enrich with his research.
They asserted communal strength by educating their children.
Chapter 2, about Locke's parents/community, the Black Bourgeoisie of Philadelphia participated in education, cared for their children's minds, as their common identity.
The Nergo of the Northern centers has reached a stage where tutelage even of the most interested and well-intentioned sort, must give place to new relationships, where positive self-direction must be reckoned with in ever increasing measure.
From Locke’s “Harlem,” published in the 1925 issue Locke edited. Locke is dismissing the benevolence that decides for Black Americans. He is declaring, in the essay and with the issue of the magazine as a whole, the Black consciousness exists. Black people (individually and as a whole) are a whole, capable, and human people.
Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. The sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, were theirs, not mine. But htey should not keep these prizes...
DuBois, from a book titled The Souls of Black Folk, we looked at an excerpt that included this to think about Locke at the end of Harvard
Our language reveals us. The fact that "we do not belong to ourselves" is enshrined in the very nature of language. And language retains its impersonal dimension even in the most individual utterances.
A sentence authored by scholar David Bell, including quotes from F. R. Leavis. This quote appeared in our course as part of a conversation about literary societies and the beliefs--about language, literature, self, and society--on the college campus that Locke and Kallen studied on.
When they sang “American college songs,” the color they both cared about most appeared to be Crimson, or perhaps red, white, and blue. The United States, and more specifically Harvard, served as the linchpin that allowed for cultural pluralism, even in far away Oxford.
Chapter 4, about Kallen and Locke after they have become friends when Locke was not invited to Thanksgiving dinner, by way of a "definite claim on me" Locke and Kallen have found common ground, the making of America? (or this is how Weinfeld tells the story :))
“Men may change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religions, their…: they cannot change their grandfathers.”
Chapter 5, Kallen says this in rejection of Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism, the you cannot reject, but you can disappoint and abandon your grandfather (and he should not force you to stay) will follow in the next chapters, traditions you inherit are given the form of grandfather in Weinfeld’s text, and Kallen and Locke’s words, so that the pieces of difference, of culture, become more clear
He eventually came to terms with his hybrid identity, and his dual commitment to universalism and particularism, by championing Black culture for its unique contributions to the United States and the world.
Chapter 7, Weinfeld writes this about Locke, proposing that Locke made sense of the frustration of being both Locke and Black by writing the Black beauty he saw, experienced, and knew to be
It is--or promises at least to be--a race capital.
From Locke’s “Harlem,” published in the 1925 issue Locke edited. Locke is declaring Harlem to be the geographic site at which a Black people are gathering, physically, and awakening, mentally. In Harlem “negro life is…finding a new soul.”