Noting ironic parallels between the violent Tea Party rhetoric of the 2000s and the extreme statements of many Black Nationalists in the 1960s and 70s, McPherson cautions against exclusionary or isolationist worldviews and asks that, in their stead, we foster the kinds of “multiracial, extended family unit” that he has worked to create both for himself in Iowa City and for his daughter in her own life and career (187). McPherson selects the Greek word pneuma (“the vital spirit of life itself”) as his keystone term, explaining that he wants the word to represent “an omni-American perspective and sensibility” (187) which privileges community as “an essential dimension of the human experience” (188). In his 2011 essay from Dædalus’s special issue “Race in the Age of Obama,” James McPherson returns to the past-to the ancient past-in his search for the proper way to name the surprising “institutional receptivity to non-white students” (184) he experienced upon joining the faculty at the University of Iowa in the early 1980s. I would employ the ancient Greek word pneuma, meaning “the vital spirit of life itself”… neuma is foundational in all systems of religious belief, but it seems to me that, as a civic conviction, it is still vital in communities rooted in rural mores. She came always in the night to scream because she, like himself, was in misery, and did not know what else to do.
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Jones or because he had once buried someone for her for free, or even because she liked the blue-and-white lighted sign. It was all very clear, and now he understood that the Barefoot Lady came in the night not because she really loved Mr. Though I couldn’t possibly have known it at the time, this simple assignment - perform a five-page “close reading” of a text from the first half of the class - has had a profound impact on my current interest in the vocabularies of racial identity.
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The following mini-essay was originally written for an African American Literature course I took in the spring of 2012.