CR passages

Test Preparation SAT Preparation
1

<p>So I searched online for the CR passages based on what I remember; so far I’ve found three. Here they are. If they help you remember other questions that we’ve forgotten, or if they resolve an of the disputes, post here:</p>

<p>The Ella Baker passage:
Ella Josephine Baker’s activist career spanned from 1930 to 1980, touched thousands of lives, and contributed to over three dozen organizations. She was an internationalist, but her cultural and political home was the African American community. Ella Baker spent her entire adult life trying to “change the system.” Somewhere along the way she recognized that her goal was not a single “end” but rather an ongoing “means,” that is, a process. Radical change for Ella Baker was about a persistent and protracted process of discourse, debate, consensus, reflection, and struggle. As she put it in 1969:</p>

<p>We are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning – getting down to and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system. </p>

<p>If larger and large numbers of communities were engaged in such a process, she reasoned, day in and day out, year after year, the revolution would be well under way. Ella Baker understood that laws, structures, and institutions had to change in order to correct injustice and oppression, but part of the process had to involve oppressed people, ordinary people, infusing new meanings into the concept of democracy and finding their own individual and collective power to determine their lives and shape the direction of history. These were the radical terms that Ella Baker thought in and the radical ideas she fought for with her mind and her body. Just as the “end” for her was not a scripted utopia but another phase of struggle, the means of getting there was not scripted either. Baker’s theory of social change and political organization was inscribed in her practice. Her ideas were written in her work: a coherent body of lived text spanning nearly sixty years.
Biography is a profoundly personal genre of historical scholarship, and the humbling but empowering process of finding our own meanings in another person’s life poses unique challenges. As biographers, we ask questions about lives that the subjects themselves may never have asked outright and certainly did not consciously answer. Answers are always elusive. We search for them by carefully reading and interpreting the fragmented messages left behind. Feminist biographers and scholar-activists like myself face particular challenges. It is imperative that we be ever cautious of the danger inherent to our work: imposing our contemporary dilemmas and expectations on a generation of women who spoke a different language, moved at a different rhythm, and juggled a different set of issues and concerns. The task of tailoring a life to fit a neat and cohesive narrative is a daunting one: an awkward and sometimes uncomfortable process of wading barefoot into the still and often murky waters of someone else’s life, interrogating her choices, speculating about her motives, mapping her movements, and weighing every word. No single descriptor ever seems adequate to capture the richly nuanced complexity of a life fully lived. Every term is inherently inadequate, each one loaded with someone else’s meanings, someone else’s baggage. How can a biographer frame a unique life, rendering it full-bodied, textured, even contradictory, yet still accessible for those who wan to step inside and look around?
My journey into Ella Jo Baker’s work has been a personal, political, and intellectual journey, often joyous and at times painful. It has taken me in and out of some twenty cities and numerous libraries, archives, county courthouses, kitchen tables, front porches, and a few dusty attics. This long journey has been marked by periods of difficult separation followed by hopeful reunions. In the process I have revisited the faces, experiences, and southern roots of my own mother, father, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins: Mississippi sharecroppers, domestic and factory workers, honest, generous, hard-working, resilient black people. Most importantly, in the process I have developed an intense and unique relationship with my subject. I have chatted, argued, commiserated, and rejoiced with Ella Baker in an ongoing conversation between sisters, one living and one dead. In this book, I have tried to tell Ella Baker’s story partly as she would have told it and partly the way I – a historian and an activist of a different time and place 0 felt it would have been told.
There are those who insist that biographical writing is composed and tainted by an author’s identification and closeness with her subject. This does not have to be the case. I do not apologize for my admiration for Ella Baker. She earned it. I admire her for the courageous and remarkable life she led and for the contributions she made without any promise of immediate reward. I admire her for the ways in which she redefined the meaning of radical and engaged in intellectual work, of cross-class and interracial organizing, and of a democratic and humanistic way of being in the world, all the while trying to mold the world around her into something better.
I first came upon Ella Baker’s story through my search for political role models, not research subjects. As an anti-apartheid and antiracist student and activist and Columbia University and the University of Michigan in the 1980s and as a black feminist organizer thereafter, I was drawn to the example of Ella Baker as a woman who fought militantly but democratically for a better world and who fought simultaneously for her own right to play more than a circumscribed role in that world. As an insurgent intellectual with a passion for justice and democracy, Ella Baker held and affinity for the most oppressed sectors of society. So, my first connection to Ella Baker was a political one. This connection has enhanced rather than lessened my desire to be thorough, rigorous, and balanced in my treatment of her life and ideas. For me, there is more at stake in exploring Ella Baker’s story than an interesting intellectual exercise or even the worthy act of writing a corrective history that adds a previously muted, black, female voice to the chorus of people of the past. To understand her weaknesses as well as her triumphs, her confusion as well as her clarity is to pay her the greatest honor I can imagine. To tell her life truths with all the depth and richness is to affirm her humanity and all that she was able to accomplish, because of and at the times in spit of who she was.</p>

2

<p>Here’s the second Nuclear passage:
Here’s one of the nuclear passages:
On a cool spring morning a quarter century ago, a place in Pennsylvania called Three Mile Island exploded into the headlines and stopped the US nuclear power industry in its tracks. What had been billed as the clean, cheap, limitless energy source for a shining future was suddenly too hot to handle.
In the years since, we’ve searched for alternatives, pouring billions of dollars into windmills, solar panels, and biofuels. We’ve designed fantastically efficient lightbulbs, air conditioners, and refrigerators. We’ve built enough gas-fired generators to bankrupt California. But mainly, each year we hack 400 million more tons of coal out of Earth’s crust than we did a quarter century before, light it on fire, and shoot the proceeds into the atmosphere.
The consequences aren’t pretty. Burning coal and other fossil fuels is driving climate change, which is blamed for everything from western forest fires and Florida hurricanes to melting polar ice sheets and flooded Himalayan hamlets. On top of that, coal-burning electric power plants have fouled the air with enough heavy metals and other noxious pollutants to cause 15,000 premature deaths annually in the US alone, according to a Harvard School of Public Health study. Believe it or not, a coal-fired plant releases 100 times more radioactive material than an equivalent nuclear reactor - right into the air, too, not into some carefully guarded storage site. (And, by the way, more than 5,200 Chinese coal miners perished in accidents last year.)
Burning hydrocarbons is a luxury that a planet with 6 billion energy-hungry souls can’t afford. There’s only one sane, practical alternative: nuclear power.
We now know that the risks of splitting atoms pale beside the dreadful toll exacted by fossil fuels. Radiation containment, waste disposal, and nuclear weapons proliferation are manageable problems in a way that global warming is not. Unlike the usual green alternatives - water, wind, solar, and biomass - nuclear energy is here, now, in industrial quantities. Sure, nuke plants are expensive to build - upward of $2 billion apiece - but they start to look cheap when you factor in the true cost to people and the planet of burning fossil fuels. And nuclear is our best hope for cleanly and efficiently generating hydrogen, which would end our other ugly hydrocarbon addiction - dependence on gasoline and diesel for transport.</p>

3

<p>And the roommate passage:</p>

<p>Tim the Pastor and I broke up and he went to another room, with consent of the dorm-master. When he left I went about being wanton. I took my mattress off the bed frame, slept with it on the floor, taped up the pictures of all the models of Esquire magazine, girls dressed in silk and fur and slips and reckless sandals. My phonograph was always wailing. I brushed my teeth once a day and took a cigarette freely on impulse. ON the back of my door was a picture of Maynard Ferguson, old scar-tissue-lipped Ferg, with his trumpet and wearing a purple balloon enclosing the words “Practice, you ■■■■■■■.” And all this is what passed for being a beatnik at Hedermansever. I’d already been thrown out of the student center twice for playing jazz with a few musician acquaintances. We drew a crowd of coeds itching to dance; the ex-preacher who had an easy loft here as a student dean came in to tell us loud dance music wasn’t the right thing at Hedermansever. This man held an office and drew a salary for such services. Like a social disease, he showed up on such occasions as involved clandestine pleasure; showed up, a raving, red-faced symptom, wherever joy became too unconfined – in his natty orlon shirt and loafers and his Ive League crew-cut and his failing youth, just one of the boys.</p>

<p>Two weeks went by before they threw in Bobby Dove to live with me. He took almost a week to truck in all the books and machinery that went along with him. His correct whole name was Robert Dove Fleece. He hadn’t made it with his roomie either. One thing I could see: he dragged in so much clutter that there wasn’t really room for anybody else to live with him. Fleece said little to me the first week. Then one afternoon I walked in on him and he broke open.
“You’re some counselor they’ve hired to live with me, aren’t you?” I had interrupted his reading at the long plywood table he had for a desk.
“No. I’m not. I’m in music.”
“Are you a genius?” Fleece asked me.
“No. I’ve never considered being a gen – “
“Just going to clog up the field of music, are you? I understand, I guess. I’d hoped we’d have some ideas transpiring around this room. I am a genius. I’m going to bring something forth, my brains are going to come up with something.” He caught me staring at him. “All right, rube, stare at me. I’ve got skinny limbs, I’m not Mister Muscle. Want to see me look like a puppet?” He stood up and formed himself into a slump which made him look exactly like a pale marionette out of work and hanging. Even sitting back down on his chair, he seemed to be worked from above by some cynical puppeteer. “Did you notice that fulgurant mother of a forehead I’ve got, though?” He tapped it. Then he put his little finger in one ear and hooked it upwards lovingly: “Brains up there, he said.
I’ve got ideas. I don’t mean I don’t have any ideas,” I defended myself. “There is a lot of idea in music, you know. When I play the trumpet, for example –“
“No, I’m afraid that music is not idea. Music is instinct dignified by instruments and voice. Music is howling in tune. The Guts come first, and there is no disinterestedness, as in actual Idea.”
“What would that be like?”
“Idea? An idea is something which exists already and does not care whether you like it or not. You probably haven’t any ideas, rube, not fonking away on a horn. Sorry. I have ideas, I live at the top of my brain. You look like somebody who’s looking out of his navel. Oh ho! You want to get me don’t you, Ruben? You want a fistfight! You peer meanly at me! Oh yes, attack! Thinking I look like a limp dry pea-pod or the like, aren’t you? Some sort of fragile herb with hair on its arms. Go ahead, have a blast at me. Everybody else has. Easy stuff! Just one thing: I am a meatball at heart, a red meatball.”
“I just wanted to get along,” I said.</p>