Day 26

• Name game!
• Final paper and speech
• small group discussion (will be homework if we don't get to it during class)

• Which writer has had the best "power" with words?
• Pick one story/article and discuss why it was written.
• How is the meaning of words created/controlled/enforced?
• What is your philosophy with word use?
• Is "Marrakech" offensive/racist?
• "All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the work they do, the less visible they are.  Still, a white skin is always fairly conspicuous.  In northern Europe, when you see a labourer ploughing a field, you probably give him a second glance.  In a hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances are that you don't even see him.  I have noticed this again and again.  In a tropical landscape one's eye takes in everything except the human beings.  It takes in the dried up soil, the prickly pear, the palm tree and the distant mountain, but it always misses the peasant hoeing at his patch.  He is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less interesting to look at."
• But there is one thought which ever white man (and in this connection it doesn't matter twopence if he calls himself a socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past.  "How much longer can we go on kidding these people?  How long before they turn their guns in the other direction?"  [paragraph break removed]  It was curious, really.  Every white man there had this thought stowed somewhere or other in his mind.  I had it, so had the other onlookers, so had the officers on their sweating chargers and the white N.C.O's marking in the ranks.  It was a kind of secret which all knew and were too clever to tell, only the Negroes didn't know it.  And really it was like watching a flock of cattle to see the long column, a mile or two miles of armed men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the great white birds drifted over them in the opposite direction, glittering like scraps of paper."