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The world or "life" may seem to more often overwhelm the human being, but it is the human being's capacity for struggling against being overwhelmed which is remarkable and exhilarating.
-LORRAINE HANSBERRY
Oppression functions not simply by forcing people to submit . . . but also works by rendering its victims unlovable.
-PATRICIA HILL COLLINS, Black Sexual Politics
Here you were: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world. . . . We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived.
-JAMES BALDWIN, The Fire Next Time
At the emotional climax of Lorraine Hansberry's landmark 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, Walter's sister Beneatha is on the verge of totally rejecting him. Walter is planning to take a payoff from Mr. Lindner, a neighborhood association representative, for agreeing not to racially integrate their all-white community. This seeming acceptance of white people's rejection and dehumanization of them enrages Beneatha and Walter's wife, Ruth, for two reasons: first, because of its seeming internalization of the hatred represented by the payoff, and second, because it occurs right after Walter had been scammed out of a significant portion of Mama's deceased husband's insurance money in a liquor store scheme by his runaway friend, Willy Harris. This life insurance money (some of which Mama used for a down payment on the house in question) was a small way that her husband felt he could pay forward in death some of the value of a life of exploited labor. With his sacrifice, he hoped to advance the lives of the next generation. The money Walter lost (which Mama gave him to "manage" after he complained that he was not given any fiscal decision-making power in the family) had been especially held aside to pay for Beneatha's education. Walter's agreement to take the payoff money from Lindner is presented as the last straw, the final indignity. In this pivotal scene, Walter articulates a kind of ethical nihilism; he rejects the history of Black dignity as a form of political resistance, claiming, "There ain't no causes-there ain't nothing but taking in this world, and he who takes most is smartest-and...