Michael Palmer, Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:

Despite advances made in civil rights over the years, the horrors of racism are still rampant in our nation, as to jobs, housing, and education, and more. What needs to be for prejudice and racism to end completely is in issue 1264 of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, titled “Racism Can End”—and I want all of America to know it. Aesthetic Realism’s understanding of this subject, the newness and greatness of what editor Ellen Reiss explains, are urgently needed. This landmark issue begins with Ms. Reiss’s commentary on Eli Siegel’s definitive lecture Aesthetic Realism as Thought:

We are serializing the enormously important, amazing 1951 lecture Aesthetic Realism as Thought, by Eli Siegel. In it he shows something never seen before: mathematics, thought as such, emotions, and art have a basis in common. That basis is in the great Aesthetic Realism principle stated by him: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”

For example, every instance of thought—from arithmetic (as he describes here), to Beethoven’s thought as he composed his Fifth Symphony, to a woman’s thought about love—is a dealing with the sameness and difference of reality. For the sameness and difference of things is present in quantities, notes, and our being affected by someone who has the temerity to be not us. How accurately and deeply and richly we see sameness and difference is how good our thought is.

The fact that this matter is the same as pulsing, hoping, and often agonized life, and that Aesthetic Realism is necessary and sweepingly beautiful, can be seen through something reported in the New York Times on June 11. Under the headline “New Survey Shows Americans Pessimistic on Race Relations,” Steven A. Holmes writes that according to a Gallup poll “a majority of Americans are pessimistic that blacks and whites will ever learn to get along.”

I am completely sure that racism can end, through the study of Aesthetic Realism. The philosophy founded by Eli Siegel is the means for white people and black people—as they see one another on the street, in a classroom, in the office—to have feeling about each other that is alive with kindness and respect. >>Read more