"Let them talk"

     "It may be that widespread skepticism about the distinction between the public and the private made it inevitable that the recovery movement would translate into a politics; and that this politics would center on a vocabulary of trauma and abuse, in which the verbal forms and the physical forms are seen as equivalent.  Perhaps it was inevitable that the citizen at the center of the political theory of the Enlightenment would be replaced by the infant at the center of modern depth psychology and its popular psychological variants.  The inner child may hurt and grieve, as we have been advised.  But may the inner child also vote?"

     Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Let them talk:  why civil liberties pose no threat to civil rights," a review of Words that wound:  critical race theory, assaultive speech and the First Amendment, ed. Mari J. Matsuda (Boulder, CO:  Westview Press, 1993); The new republic 209, no. 12/13 (September 20 & 27 1993):  47 (37-49).