Watts article

[Paul Mackin]

I found another good quote from the Roth essay that applies to
discrimation against minorities in general.


"There was exclusion in America, to be sure. Jews were deliberately and
systematically excluded from partaking of certain advantages and making
certain affiliations and entering important portals at every level of
American society, and exclusion is a primary form of humiliation, and
humiliation is crippling -- it does terrible injury to people, it twists
them, it deforms them, as every American minority can attest and as the
best American minority writers make clear in their work (all too clear
for the comfort of the minority boosters who babble on about ''pride'').
In this book it's the humiliation that helps to tear apart and very
nearly disable the family, inasmuch as each person in the family
responds to it differently. What is it to be a man, to be a woman, to be
a child, and not be humiliated? How do you try to remain strong when you
are not welcome?"

 

Note the dig at the mythologists.