叶子南（2）| 精读

Virginia

<罗神>弗吉尼亚贞女(为免受执政官污辱而由亲父杀死的少女)
弗吉尼亚（美国东部大西洋沿岸的州，最大城市弗吉尼亚比奇，首府里士满）

the triumphalist moment

/traɪˈʌmfəlɪst/
adj. 必胜信念的,必胜主义的(showing pleasure and satisfaction because you have won or done better than someone)

by the skin of its teeth

only just succeed in doing it
In modern times, “by the skin of my teeth” is used to describe a situation from which one has barely managed to escape or achieve something

enjoy a free ride

an opportunity or advantage that someone gets without having done anything to deserve it
联想

a gauntlet of challenges

Du Bois color line

In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois prophetically stated: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” It is a well-known sentence that is rarely quoted completely. Du Bois goes on to describe the color line as “the question of how far differences of race . . . will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization.” In The Souls of Black Folk, he says it is “the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” and says, “It was a phase [emphasis mine] of this problem that caused the Civil War.”

杜波依斯相信，资本主义是种族主义的主要原因

https://zh.ert.wiki/wiki/colorline(racism))

inner city

Inner cities represent 10 percent of the U.S. population, 16 percent of unemployment, 22 percent of poverty, and 32 percent of minority poverty.

mitigate

ethnic gerrymandering

这里应该指的是employment?

In the past, many US states have brought about this outcome deliberately, drawing their maps to ensure whites would win every district. That’s a process known as racial gerrymandering.

Sex—and love—between people of different creeds and colors can probabaly be counted on to arrest the disuniting of America.

—是破折号，主语是sex

creed

arrest the disuniting

linguisitic or ethnic ghettos

above all

首先,尤其是

seek clues to

Tocqueville

As “Democracy in America” revealed, Tocqueville believed that equality was the great political and social idea of his era, and he thought that the United States offered the most advanced example of equality in action. He admired American individualism but warned that a society of individuals can easily become atomized and paradoxically uniform when “every citizen, being assimilated to all the rest, is lost in the crowd.” He felt that a society of individuals lacked the intermediate social structures—such as those provided by traditional hierarchies—to mediate relations with the state. The result could be a democratic “tyranny of the majority” in which individual rights were compromised.

Adams’ law of acceleration

“A law of acceleration, definite and constant as any law of mechanics, cannot be supposed to relax its energy to suit the convenience of man.” — Henry Adams

For all

尽管

sanction

Representative democracy

代议民主制（间接民主）

plebiscites

careen on

laissez-faire

自由放任，又称自由放任主义或无干涉主义，西方用法语词汇“laissez-faire”（「让他做、让他去、让他走」）通称，意思让商人自由进行贸易，政府不要干涉。这一词首先在18世纪由重农主义在字典里使用，以反对政府对贸易的干涉。这一词到了19世纪早期和中期成为了自由市场经济学的同义词。自由放任主义反对政府对经济的干涉，并且反对政府征收除了足以维持和平、治安和财产权以外的税赋。
在欧洲和美国早期的经济学理论中，自由放任的经济政策通常与反面的重商主义经济政策做比较，重商主义的经济政策在英国、美国、香港、德国、意大利、西班牙、法国和其他西欧国家崛起时都担当了支配的角色。

unfettered market

unbridled

class warfare

=class struggle
(politics 政治)
opposition between the different social classes in society, especially that described in Marxist theory （尤指马克思主义理论描述的）阶级斗争

social necessities

Social necessities include sex, reproduction, and caretaking of children. Reciprocally, children must have caretakers and require constant attachment figures. Sexual and caretaking necessities require families, and families have been the core of evolutionary survival groups. Such groups comprised clans and tribes consisting of up to hundreds of people. These survival groups in turn had two necessities: territory and organization. Territory provided a defensive perimeter and sources of shelter and food. Organization provided specialization of roles and a hierarchy of leaders and followers. A well-functioning group could now compensate for human biological vulnerability to predators and natural disasters. It could coordinate hunting and defense, distribute resources down a hierarchical line, regulate sexuality, and care for its offspring.

redemption