Misty Copeland Quotes
I know that I'm talented, and I know that I'm not in American Ballet Theater because I'm black - I'm here because I'm a gifted dancer.
Copeland, Misty. Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina. Touchstone, 2014.
This very controversial remark turned out to illustrate the argument that can develop over context. Conservative supporters provided this spin: Bennett was opposed to all kinds of abortion on moral grounds. He was arguing that the opposition to abortion should never be made on a pragmatic basis, but only on a moral basis. To illustrate he gave this example. However he certainly was not advocating the activity. Critics argue that he meant exactly what he said—that he represents a very racist constituency and knew exactly what he was saying and could say it, he thought, because he was not in any, public office at the time. Other critics, who give Bennett the benefit of the doubt, point out that even if he used the example to illustrate that a pragmatic result should not be used to argue the abortion issue, he picked a particularly racially insensitive example which shows his antipathy to Blacks which his critics argue that is part of a long pattern of opposing all legislation and programs designed to reduce the inequality in society.
The great contralto singer, Marian Anderson, an African American, had been refused by the Daughters of the American Revolution the use of Constitution Hall as a venue for her concert based on their White Performers Only policy. First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, resigned in protest from the DAR and she and the President asked Secretary Ickes to arrange a public concert at the Lincoln Memorial and he did. There was no Civil Rights Act at the time.
While not intended as such, this is a great illustration of the complexity of the survival of the fittest concept. Buffet, the top of the heap in the modern industrial democracy, if in a different kind of culture and environment would probably not even survive to breed.
Misty Danielle Copeland is an American ballet dancer for American Ballet Theatre (ABT), one of the three leading classical ballet companies in the United States. On June 30, 2015, Copeland became the first African American woman to be promoted to principal dancer in ABT's 75-year history.
