Compassionate Readership: Anger and Suffering in Sapphire’s <i>Push</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article departs from polarizing academic discussions of compassion by exploring the relationship between anger and compassion in Sapphire’s novel Push. Martha Nussbaum explains that compassion can function as an ethical bridge that links one person to the next. Conversely, affect theorists, such as Lauren Berlant or Candace Vogler, argue that compassion reaffirms unequal relations of power, as individuals give or withhold their compassion when they see fit, leaving the circumstances that lead to suffering unaddressed. These discussions are complicated by the ongoing stereotypes that blame black women for their plight, leading people to withhold their compassion. Rather than expose these stereotypes as false constructs, this article focuses on the narrative pattern where Precious experiences egregious abuse, expresses intense anger at her suffering, and then longs for markers of privilege, such as white skin and affluence. It contends that Precious’s anger disrupts passive compassion, reminding readers of vectors of identity such as race, class, and body size that simultaneously give rise to and erase Precious’s suffering.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".