Americans live, still, in an atmosphere of phantasmagorical genocide — we kill each other with looks, judgments, the fantasies that white is better than black and that blackness is bestial while being somehow more "humane" — read mentally inferior — than whiteness.
Looking at online menus for a restaurant to take a visiting friend, I read "humane meat" and had to do a double-take.
In 1985, early in the AIDS epidemic, he organized a task force to place placards on buses and subways reading "AIDS is a human disease and deserves a humane response".
A space alien, reading their e-mails, might conclude that "humane" meant cowardly, or callous, or conveniently craven, or sympathetic only to those in one's own social or professional circle.
Ms. Nussbaum may be speaking to a more humane motive in hate-reading those we know intimately.
I discovered Carson McCullers only recently and regard The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding as two of the most humane books I have read.
One line will speak for Erpenbeck's entire humane project: "Richard has read Foucault and Baudrillard, and also Hegel and Nietzsche, but he doesn't know what you can eat when you have no money to buy food".
"There has been no evidence from reading his biography or looking at his work that he had a very humane relationship to black people or black men, specifically.
But reading up on the world's great faiths, she became convinced that they all, in one way or another, shared basic humane principles.
That kind of writing — clear, direct, humane — and the reading on which it is based are the very root of the humanities, a set of disciplines that is ultimately an attempt to examine and comprehend the cultural, social and historical activity of our species through the medium of language.
