Posts from ‘Race’
An economist, one of my former colleagues, challenged one of the central tenets of economics.  Much like physics intro teachers ignored “friction” to produced examples  to focus on what they want you to learn, economists include free choice in the lessons they want to teach. My friend wanted to argue that there is never free choice in economic decisions because there is differential access to information.  People are making their choices not in a free and unconstrained manner but because of the information available to them.  Those with superior information are more likely to make better choices while those with poor information will make less informed and more likely poor economic decisions.
I was reminded of the general question of un-free choice after I watched this CNN black host’s agreement with conservative Fox News about what is wrong in the black community: Don Lemon. Both he and the conservative folks trace the breakdowns in family, education and income among African Americans to decisions that black folks made themselves. The upshot is that black folks themselves can solve these problems if they make the right choices as they are free to do. Depending on which side of the coin you look at this is “blaming the victim” by rooting the cause of their failures in their own character or saying “they have the agency” to cure what ails them. Both of these positions depend on the fiction that they have unconstrained choice in making their decisions. Continue Reading
President Obama’s administration has been nothing if not controversial. His impromptu statement on Trayvon Martin is a good example. In it he is articulate, reasonable, aware and pragmatic as has been his hallmark. In the end however it is more rhetoric than action and even that has kicked up dust. The right would have us believe that there is no racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, access to voting, education, life chances or health care when the statistics tell us otherwise. Â Yet they maintain that this discrimination is not racism but calling America on its discrimination is racism. Â It is an Orwellian world in which the word is what the deed is not.
The right hates Obama with a passion that not only opposes his policies but demonstrates a personal animosity that may be unprecedented for any president. The Republican party opposes not only his policies but those of their own that he supports and parrots back to them, simply because he says them. Progressives on the left  oppose him because many of his policies (drone strikes, firm support of Wall Street, looking for compromises with the right wing) break campaign promises or are at best centrist and at worst moderately conservative themselves. Black progressives point to his failure to address issues in the black community where the last recession has wiped out black wealth and structural changes in the economy have produced greater, still growing inequality. African Americans gave him over 90% of their vote yet he has done little specifically for the black community. He has rarely gotten his moderate agenda passed let alone a progressive one. He did get some health care reform passed but even that is a bastardization that is far from the single payer health service that most progressives would endorse. Even so the Republicans keep trying to repeal it when even the health insurers should endorse it. The modest gun control measures he introduced went down to failure at a time when an overwhelming  majority of people, outside the NRA and Republicans in Congress, were in favor of it.
What makes progressives believe that even if Obama heeded the better angels of his nature to advocate a progressive agenda, that he could get it passed by a right wing Congress?  Whether the right wing conservatives have a majority or not such an agenda has a snowball’s chance in hell of even getting heard let alone passage. Even when the right wingers are in the minority they use filibusters, cloture and demagoguery to stop that agenda cold. So let’s be clear: Obama is not a progressive.  In the good old days he would have been a pragmatic moderate Republican.  Hoping he will be more is hoping frogs fly. His modest proposals even though kowtowing to the right are difficult if not impossible to get passed.  He has drunk the balanced budget Kool-Aid and though he wants to balance it at a higher level of spending and taxation, his is still a budget that doesn’t put people, let alone the black community, first. Conservative Republicans will  continue to try to tie Obama in knots over molehill scandals when they have no ideas other than opposing everything Obama does. They shout about  lower taxes or balanced budgets while the middle class goes to hell, infrastructure collapses, and inequality increases.
We should look at Obama not as a failed progressive but as the lesser of two evils or a defensive gesture to prevent the crazies from winning. One can look at the glass as nine tenths empty or one tenth full.  He can be a step along the way if we learn the lesson his campaign taught us.  There is a hidden power in grassroots organization as the election demographics change. Criticism from the left will never make Obama into something that he’s not.  I am not calling for it to stop because it does influence him on things he can change by executive order or through the power of his presidential pulpit e.g. don’t ask, don’t tell in the military.  His endorsement of gay marriage does signal that his opinion can change. He will not however lead us to the promised land.  We have to get there for ourselves with grass roots organizing to finally get a Congress that represents the will of the people. I know it’s an uphill battle.  If Elizabeth Warren has to fight like hell in a liberal state like Massachusetts then we know it’s going to be harder in other states and almost impossible in conservative states. Actions that shape the 2014 and subsequent Congressional elections will decide if even moderate reforms can become law. I do not know or even care to speculate on who the next president will be although I would doubt that such a person would have support and Teflon within the black community like Obama. Regardless of who it is we need to have more progressives like Bernie Sanders, Barney Frank and Elizabeth Warren in Congress.  We need to have the Congressional Black Caucus taken seriously by their peers, and we need to have an effective coalition with Latino and women members to offset the old boy’s club that is Congress.  That however is where the real battle is, not the battle over Obama.
We awoke the morning after the Zimmerman verdict to the same America we went to sleep with.  It is an America that uses its fear of Black people as a justification for murder.  An America that uses its fear of black people as a rationale for convicting and incarcerating black folk. An America that allows its fear of black people to serve as a basis for the operation of its legal system. I have been on a couple of juries in my lifetime and so I understand that court decisions are often made with little concern for justice. A court case usually turns on the simple question of whether the prosecution has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the law was broken.  When court decisions result in travesties of justice like the Trayvon Martin case it is usually the result of inadequacies in the prosecution’s case or the fact that the law does not serve justice.  I will leave it to my legal colleagues to discuss the prosecution’s performance in this case .   I am sure it will be raw meat for the lions, hyenas and vultures of the legal profession in the days to come. I would like to raise the question of the stand your ground law itself. The law itself is a reflection of the propertied class’s (white, brown and black) fear of the less propertied class and the lower class’s (white, brown and black) fear of itself. The result as we have seen is the legalization of the murder of lower class white, brown and black people.  If it hasn’t reached your community yet be assured it is coming. The jury decided that the law was not violated not that justice was served. The real question for the jury of six white women was whether they would empathize with Trayvon’s mother and her loss to supersede the law or empathize with Zimmerman and his fear to uphold it.
The only thing that has changed the morning after is us. For some it is the illusion of racial progress that has been lost. Â For some it is the belief in white liberals who have remained silent. For others it is the belief in Obama whose weaselly statement urging us to to simply accept the legal verdict belies the Obama who stated that Trayvon Martin could have been his child. Many will say that they knew what the verdict would be all the time. Â For some this is just whistling in the dark at their loss of faith that things had gotten better. Â For others it is just a confirmation of their cynicism, hopelessness and despair.
For me and I hope others it is just a goad to work harder to bring about the world we want to live in. Â It is just a reminder of the difficulties we face and the strength of the opposition. Â Trayvon and so many, many others have died suffered and worked to get us as far as we are today although we are far from our goals. But like Lincoln at Gettysburg let us vow that these honored dead shall not have died in vain. Let us rededicate ourselves to continue our work, use our ingenuity to find new means to press on, find our toughness to move past this setback and rely on our hope as a light in this wilderness.
I must admit that the thought of somebody learning their history from movies makes me despair for the future of the human race. Imagine learning about World War 2 (or even just about spelling) from “Inglorious Basterds,” about U.S. Reconstruction from “Birth of a Nation,” or the American revolution from Mel Gibson’s “The Patriot,” just to take American history.  When it comes to world history United States produced films are even worse.  I am sure that there are people who learn history that way and please excuse me but I am not talking to you. The simple truth is that movies, whatever their historical setting, are about contemporary concerns and not the historical one they portray. This is not necessarily a bad thing.  If history is (as the ancient Greek father of history Thucydides told us long ago) about teaching moral lessons, the cinematic use of history to teach contemporary “lessons” is not too far out of bounds. If historians want to call the filmmakers out for distorting history they are certainly doing a public service and being true to their profession. They are also being beside the point. Movies doubtless distort history but so does historians’ history. The historians are supposedly kept in check by their colleagues who not only fact check and revise history they subscribe to an orthodoxy of method as well as a code of ethics.  Yet the best selling histories on the New York Times list are written by Bill O’Reilly. To be fair Mr. O’Reilly doesn’t have the opportunity to teach in college classrooms but only a minority of people learn their history there. The majority of people learn history from ideologues like Mr. O’Reilly or popular culture including the movies. These usually get the history wrong intentionally or unintentionally, in the interests of simplifying it or making a point.
All of this brings us to two current movies that purport to deal with race in the United States: Spielberg’s “Lincoln” and Tarantino’s “Django Unchained.” Both historians and African American scholars of the historical or other persuasions have weighed in on the merits or shortcomings of each of these movies. As an example one of my colleagues has done so (http://www.bowdoin.edu/faculty/p/prael/django-unchained) and although he probably couldn’t go toe to toe with a film historian (or even Tarantino,) his nineteenth century African American history chops are excellent.  His take on these films is measured, well researched and interesting. I on the other hand am now retired and so I don’t have to be any of those things in my public writing. I can just write about my thoughts and  feelings after having seen both movies.
I would put “Lincoln” in the category of “my, wasn’t slavery hard on white people” as was Spielberg’s earlier movie about slavery “Amistad.” In fact his Schindler’s List was as much about a guilty accomplice to the Nazi atrocities as it was about the Jews or victims of those atrocities. Applying our principle of contemporaneous real themes, “Lincoln” was a message to elected officials to hold firm to principle while doing whatever it takes to get the job done. If that is change, publicly lying about your principles,  making political deals, buying votes etc, so be it. Are you listening President Obama? I must add that Spielberg is an accomplished film maker (so was D.W. Griffith the director of birth of a Nation) and “Lincoln” is a well made movie.  I was especially impressed by the art direction which made mid-nineteenth century Washington and surrounding areas look sufficiently raw and primitive. The acting by Daniel Day-Lewis was superb and the rest of the acting ensemble was adequate to good. Many have complained that it could have told us more about history by taking a wider swath both in time and by including more actors or having more for them to do. That’s a fair criticism but not my major objection to the movie.  The movie is built to appeal to the liberal white viewer and only has a role for blacks as noble victims in it.  By now Hollywood should be beyond this underestimation of its audience. The movie’s thrust therefore seems to me outdated.  Yes these are the people who vote for the Academy Awards and such, but they are not the real America that is coming into being. The movie and at least the audience I saw it with therefore skews old.
“Django Unchained” however doesn’t have that problem. Although it uses the form of the “spaghetti western” from the sixties and seventies it has just as much kinship with the first person shooter video games of the last few years.  The progression of the musical score from spaghetti western music to Tupac provides some evidence for this. Tarantino movies have a commonality (he’s really a one trick pony when it comes to themes):  righteous anger which explodes into violence e.g. Kill Bill, Inglorious Basterds. This is the contemporary theme in Django. Its naturalistic (not necessarily realistic)  portrayals of the atrocities inherent in slavery (when something gives absolute legal power over others for as long as slavery did, there are few atrocities that did not occur) make the violence which Django perpetrates completely righteous and justified. The cheers and the verbal approval given these acts of violence (oh and I must say that Django is very, very violent) by my audience, testify to the acceptance of this theme. Its climactic, over the top bloodbath was hard for an old fuddy duddy like myself to watch.
Critics have pointed to the violence in movies like Django and video games as a cause of the violence we see in America.  They blame the tragedies in Colorado and Connecticut on the glorification of violence in our popular culture.  I wonder whether the causal arrow actually  goes the other way.  These games and movies are popular because of the violence in some ways inherent in our culture. I would much rather see that violence expressed virtually in video games or subliminally in movies than acted out in elementary or other schools and theaters. How many real atrocities have been averted rather than caused because of these outlets. Tarantino is not as accomplished a film maker as Spielberg and the films show that.  I also must admit that there was more levity in Django than Lincoln which drowns in its own earnestness. At the same time there is a generational difference between the two directors, the audiences they aim at and consequently the movies they have produced. Tarantino’s movie is directed at the underdog while Spielberg’s is directed at those in power. Spielberg’s movie ignores black agency and Tarentino’s reduces it to a revenge fantasy. Neither tells the real story of slavery but each is in its own way a contemporary fable with a moral to make. Hollywood will probably never make a movie that tells the truth about slavery and its abolition.  That won’t be its goal and probably not its job.  It can however tell better moral fables than these. I just won’t hold my breath.
One of my Facebook friends posted an old video from Sesame Street showing Big Bird and Snufffalufagus explain to kids what disco was. It got me to thinking about how you explain complicated concepts to children without talking down to them or oversimplifying the concepts. Sesame Street is pretty good at this though far from perfect. How should one explain race for example? It does no good to say that race doesn’t exist because they can visibly see that it does. Similarly it does no good to say that race exists but it doesn’t matter because we live in a world where it indeed matters.  One’s chances in life, the opinion one has about you, and the actions others take toward you are all conditioned upon racial beliefs. Rather than write some cutesy dialogue (l’ll leave that to others more talented at that sort of thing), I thought I would think of the things such a dialogue should contain.  It should make three points: race exists as a physical category, everybody has a race, race is not just one thing it is a collection of physical traits. The problems come when you try to use race to explain anything. e.g. a certain race acts this way or a certain person acts this way because he is a member of a particular race.  The first problem is that “race” is actually a collection of physical traits none of which determine behavior.  Brown skin, flat noses and kinky hair do not impel complex things like behavior any more than white skin, blue eyes and straight hair.  Furthermore those we consign to racial categories based on “race” rarely have an unmixed collection of those physical characteristics.
It is also true that not all of the people we put in a racial category behave the same way. My investigations of  twentieth century African American history have shown that the seemingly preferred tactic of most civil rights leaders was to show that there were blacks who behaved in decent, moral and otherwise proper ways that were not those of the racial stereotype attributed to blacks. Apparently television hasn’t gotten that memo particularly about other races. With the rare exceptions like “The Cosby Show” few media productions show other races without resort to racial stereotypes. As America has become more diverse the media has simply included more racial steroetypes in their productions.
The major problem however is that the concept of race as become part of the web of power relations in our world. I recall a review of a John Coltrane Quartet album that states the drummer (Elvin Jones) sets the rhythm so well in the first few bars that he doesn’t have to continue to do it, it is always implied.  So it is with race and power. Race is so embedded in American power relationships that whether one consciously mentions it or not it is always there. It still determines who holds power (yes I know a black man is president but look at the attacks upon him), the way those who seek power campaign ( look at how ethnic pandering and ethnic voting blocs are as categories are taken for granted) , and how police relationships with their communities are structured for example. By historically limiting residential, economic and educational opportunities, ghettoes and cultures have been created that perpetuate inequalities even when the initial restrictions are no longer legal. In both the oppressors and the oppressed race has created behaviors that will ensure that the same dance of of racialized power relations will go on and on.
That is why race still “matters.” Statistically and actuarially one can predict life expectancy, educational attainment, and economic achievement based on race. To counter the power relationships, racial “explanations”, and behaviors among and between oppressers and the oppressed, we have an uphill battle that is going to last way beyond my lifetime and even the next few generations.  I have done what I usually do when faced with a seemingly unwinnable battle; I have gone for help. I have looked to younger generations and tried to teach them about race.  We should all be Elvin Jones and state the drumbeat of freedom as MLK Jr. called it or the truth about race as I called it,  so strongly in the beginning that it will be there in all future generations do. They need to recognize racial concepts in others and eliminate them in themselves. Let’s talk to kids about race.
Over the last few years I have been preparing a multimedia project on Walter White, the leader of the NAACP from 1929 until his death in 1955. I am almost finished. Here is my closing statement:
Walter White was an unarmed David who fought against an entrenched Goliath whose belief in the inferiority of African Americans was unquestioned. The actions of most white Americans ran from benign indifference to the maintenance of a racial caste system which ensured white superiority. Walter White changed that. Between Booker T. Washington’s death and Martin Luther King Jr.’s rise he came to be the personification of hope for those millions of African Americans trapped behind the color line. As his sister wrote him, “the little people in the alleys and slums might not know who the President is or even who Abraham Lincoln was, but they all know and worship Walter White.” Compared to his contemporaries W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey or A. Phillip Randolph his actions and deeds rather than their words improved the lives of more African Americans than anyone else did between the First World War and his death in 1955. As his biographer summed up:
He was opinionated, vain and impulsive, can could engage in chicanery with the best. [Lester Granger of the National Urban League wrote] “His cocky aggressiveness stayed with him as long as he lived – as did his boyhood vanity – but it was these very qualities that helped to make him the best lobbyist our race has ever produced, and one of the best of any race.”…White was “restless, energetic cocky,'” or in the words of his friend Louis Wright, “that damned little pony, always prancing around.”
He was all that and so much more. He was a Negro by moral choice as well as ancestry. Once having made that moral choice he literally dedicated his life to the service of civil rights. He never doubted what side he was on. The long hours, constant stress, and continual travel undoubtedly contributed to the brevity of his life. No matter how many times he lost he persevered in his struggle against racism. He understood full well the difference between power (the ability to make policy decisions) and influence (the ability to sway those who did). At a time when a black man had to content himself with hoping to influence those in power rather than holding power himself, White became a master at it. He led the campaign to bring federal power to bear when local legal and governmental structures were designed to keep African Americans as second class citizens. The NAACP’s legal battles were to move individual discrimination cases all the way to the Supreme Court so that federal power would be brought to bear to end discrimination. The Brown vs Board of Education Supreme Court decision was just one example of such cases. They challenged everything from graduate and professional school discrimination to housing discrimination to voting rights.
By the time of his death his brand of elite politics had perhaps run its course and further progress needed the mass politics he always avoided for fear that he could not control it. The civil rights movement was about to move into a new phase of mass direct action which would raise up a new leader, Martin Luther King Jr. However it is worth noting that Rosa Parks whose refusal to give up her bus seat sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, had been a member of the NAACP since 1943 and was volunteer secretary for the Montgomery NAACP branch when she took her action. She was in a sense the child of the struggle that Walter White had led. The modern civil rights movement grew upon the legacy and organization that White had built into a force potent enough to change America.
Finally Walter wanted to make it possible for black people to marry anyone they wanted. His own happiness to be with his soul mate took courage to act in the face of what he knew would be outrage from his own NAACP colleagues as well as those racists who opposed interracial marriage. His marriage to whomever he wanted transcended the racial mores, political realities and expectations of others. When he transcended his “Negro” status for personal happiness he tragically lost his place in history. His “tragedy” was our failure.
News that Arizona has censured its first public school ethnic studies program has prompted me to write about it. I first did so in this blog about a year ago.
- It is counterproductive, i.e. it stirs up more anger and resentment than it prevents
H.L Mencken has written, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” This reminds me of what we called in my un-politically correct youth a “Chinese handcuff.” That was a woven tube into which you placed the forefinger of each hand and then tried to free them. If you did the obvious thing and simply tried to pull your fingers out of it, the tube merely tightened and held you more firmly. The trick was to do the counter-intuitive thing and to push your fingers into the tube more. It loosened and was thus easy to escape. In my thirty years of teaching “ethnic studies” courses at the college level students were much more likely to become angry at the idea that this information had been hidden from them in public education than angry at “whites” for things they had done in the past. In fact those who had taken such courses gained a greater appreciation for America where things like racism and religious bigotry could be confronted and overcome. We should allow increased opportunities for minorities to develop a group consciousness and for individuals to succeed in society despite America’s shortcomings. Indeed the exceptions in the law for native Americans and the Holocaust provide examples where federal or mainstream politics recognizes the value of this. I was at a conference once where the keynote speaker lamented that “we had asked for revolution and a share of the power and all they gave us was ethnic dinners.” In other words the real power sharing demands had been mollified by the acknowledgment and steering of ethnic demands into non-threatening areas. America and capitalism’s ability to absorb and steer challenges to it into things like the marketing of “ethnicity” plays a great role in preserving it.An anti-ethnic studies law conceals things you should know about.
2. I am struck by the “ostrich” aspect of this law.
It is based on the ludicrous assumption that if we don’t talk about something, it ceases to exist. Incidentally the corallary to this is also false” something” only comes into being when we talk about it (take the concern about too early sex education.) What the law calls “ethnic studies,” is most often “American studies” just told from a different perspective. “Ethnic studies” did not make up anti-Native American policies, slavery, Jim Crow laws, the Chinese exclusion Act, race riots, the Japanese internment camps or modern “ethnic” movements like the civil right movement, farm-worker movements, the women’s movement etc. These are parts of American history that all should know about. Whether you spin these into a narrative about an ever improving America or mine it for models to emulate and adapt to conservative causes, it is a history even conservatives should know about. Whether one agrees with “ethnic studies” one has to understand the reality of today’s America to adequately plan tactics and strategies. If there is resentment against or by an ethnic group you need to understand how to use it to support your cause, enlist allies, broaden your message and defend against challenges.
3. “Ethnic studies” teaches and demonstrates values you want inculcated in young people.
The whole anti-ethnic studies movement is based upon incorrect assumptions about what actually happens in such classes. The fear represented in this law is that by teaching people that they have been oppressed they will react as a group and resent their oppressors as a group rather than acting as individuals or seeing other ethnic groups as individuals. This is hogwash. First of all the word has already slipped out that minority groups have been, are and will continue to be oppressed. Some members of minority groups don’t believe it and some do, but their belief will be shaped by the conditions of their lives not what is said in ethnic studies classes. It is these conditions like how and where one lives, one’s chances for success, how others you know have fared and the opportunities available to you, which will determine how you feel about other groups. It is individual circumstances and personal relationships that shape whether you see yourself oppressed as an individual or as a group and whether you see other ethnicities as individuals or as a faceless group. How you are treated now is much more important to you than how your group was treated historically.
Moreover many of the values which those who support this law say they hold are taught by the “ethnic studies” courses. An ethnic group’s spirituality, the importance of family, the meaning of liberty, the value of making up your own mind, one’s own uniqueness and the viewing of pronouncements critically are far more meaningful things that one learns in an ethnic studies course. To deny students these teachings for fear they may resent your group historically seems to me throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I am a fan of the NBA though not of the Los Angeles Lakers. However after the lockout I was so starved for professional basketball that I even watched the two Laker games that were offered nationally during the last few days. They were both Laker losses incidentally and the announcers and commentators were mostly talking about their decline and Kobe Bryant. They only talked a little bit about Ron Artest’s name change to Metta World Peace. Now name changes in the NBA go all the way back to Lloyd B. Free’s change to World B. Free in 1981. More recently in football Chad Johnson changed his last name to Ochocinco to match his uniform number. It certainly made sense for Ron Artest to change his name. Not only has he become an erstwhile rapper but the name itself has become remembered for a basketball brawl when he went up into the stand after a fan during a Indiana Pacers- Detroit Pistons game. Artest grew up in Queensbridge, New York, went to college at St. John’s University in Queens. He got a reputation as a tough defensive player and was in fact the NBA defensive player of the year in 2004. There is of course the inevitable racial angle that he was looked at as the stereotypical “angry black man”. This was never made more clear than in the brawl when he stirred up racial fears by going after a white man who had thrown beer at him. I don’t want to condone his actions in any way, but only to point out the racial elephant in the room. The NBA didn’t want to stir up fear among its white fan base and punished him severely.
So changing his name made perfect sense. Changing it to Metta World Peace has made the Laker games much more fun than I had anticipated it would. One announcer on the ABC televised game on Sunday referred to how much fun it was to hear the deep voiced arena play by play announcer say “World Peace” from time to time. The on air announcers also had fun with it: “score one for World Peace.” “World Peace enters the game.” “Kobe gives it up to World Peace.” “World Peace is fouled.” The possible puns are endless and I urge you to come up with your own. He is of course the same hard nosed defender he has always been although some skills have inevitably diminished with time. He is to be commended however for making his name now be the opposite of what the old one had become and for making it so enjoyable for the rest of us. Let us enjoy World Peace while we can.
I have refrained from saying anything about the Republican primary field because I am, in Obama’s words, waiting for them to throw people off the island. After all it is only the winner of the Republican nomination with whom we should primarily (pun intended) concern ourselves. I have therefore not commented on the insane economic plans, moral hypocrisy, corruption, ignorance of foreign affairs, distortions of history, and plain recklessness and irresponsibility (not to mention outright lies) the field has heretofore produced.
Candidate Newt Gingrich has however made comments about “the poor” which need to be addressed. He has advocated paid internships doing maintenance work at schools to teach poor youngsters responsibility, punctuality and to give them experience doing something and getting paid for it. This is not only ignorant about the lives the poor live but it is insulting as well. The millions of working poor where men and especially women work one, two or three jobs to support a family, the people who have lost their jobs due to the recession, and their children should say “Hey Newt (insert Cee Lo Green song refrain here.)” Newt’s conception of the poor is part of a conservative fantasy where people who live on public aid have a problem with even conceiving of holding a job or having a work ethic. If we decode “the poor” to mean people of color then we have the same justification for low wage slavery that we had in the 1800’s for actual slavery. Read the defenses of slavery, oh I forgot, Newt is an historian so he may have done so already. We have the same “culture of poverty” arguments that we have had since the 1960’s. Newt acts as if the changes in the welfare system under Clinton and the Congress of which Newt was House speaker, don’t exist. The actual amount people receive on welfare, the time restrictions, the need to supplement it that Newt himself helped create, don’t exist in this Neverland that is in Newt’s head. He took his plan which is only in the hazy beginning formulations and consulted that expert on the poor, Donald Trump. This is farce becoming tragedy.
But what if we accept Newt’s argument that kids are not learning the proper work ethic even if the parents themselves are working hard? Surely this is not confined to the poor. How many middle class or even upper class kids have not properly consumed the work ethic Kool-aid. I don’t hear Newt calling for them to work as low wage interns for their schools. Wouldn’t that create an uproar among those very parents whose votes Newt is courting. What about the charge that no one is teaching them how to hold down a job? Wouldn’t that be insulting?
The crux of his statement is not that he cares one bit about the welfare of poor youth. If so wouldn’t we have been able to see it in the long time that Newt has been on the public stage? His real goal is getting votes by using his mock “concern for the poor” to perpetuate a racist, classist, outdated and imaginary vision of the poor among potential voters who share that vision. This is politics at its most cynical and hypocritical. So I too say “Hey Newt, (insert Cee Lo Green song refrain here.)”
My wife and I are volunteering in a program called ABQ Reads which takes us into a local elementary school to help kindergarteners work on their reading skills. It is based on reading recovery programs developed elsewhere. Albuquerque schools face an enormous challenge in that by third grade only about 60% of students are reading at grade level and none of them meet No Child Left Behind standards. Rather than addressing this problem the politicians are squabbling about “social promotion” in which kids are passed on to the next grade for social development reasons rather than because they have achieved grade levels in reading and writing. Giving a student more of what is not working anyway (by holding them back) doesn’t seem to me to solve the problem. The ABQ Reads program is based on the idea that by working on the lack of reading preparation at the beginning more students will be at grade level after the first year and will continue on later. Although I don’t buy that they will continue on without further assistance I recognize that the problem is so great we have to start somewhere to work on it.
Why am I who has spent thirty years teaching 18-22 year-olds devoting some time to teaching 5 year-olds? Well to start with the kids are cute and it is quite refreshing to teach students who are so thirsty for knowledge, attention or simply someone to listen to them and to do it on a one-to-one basis. They are not representatives or symbols of anything, they’re just kids. It is more than that however. Starting at the beginning rather than the end (the college level) seems to me a good way to try to make the dream of public education a reality. John Dewey and his bunch always thought that public education should be the mechanism to reduce social inequality although today it is only occasionally fulfilling that function. That social inequality starts for a child long before they enter school and certainly continues in their lives outside school while they progress through the grade levels. Kindergarten is that first point where public educational institutions start to intervene in the social process of inequality. Why not make that intervention one the kids enjoy so much they want to continue?
We are just beginning our service but what have I noticed so far? Well a lot of “experts” have obviously given a lot of thought to the best way to teach reading to five year-olds. They have studied child development in physical, intellectual and social skills quite extensively in coming up with the best ways to teach the most children. I must defer to them and follow their curriculum as much as possible. The curriculum seems to me to be overly regimented and does not allow for much “wiggle room” for individualizing for particular students nor in allowing for the great creativity of children at this age. Far be it for me to throw a monkey wrench into what they are doing (don’t laugh) but perhaps even in the half hour a week I spend with each of two students I can add a little bit to what they are teaching. The school system also seems limited in its ambition perhaps because of all the problems they are facing shrinking resources, and increased scrutiny, interference and criticism from outsiders. Their biggest concern is getting the greatest number of kids up to grade level reading. They seem only secondarily concerned with creating curious people, lifelong learners, good citizens or what educational concerns they should have for the 21st century, if they are concerned about these things at all. Part of this is of course the tunnel vision one must develop in an ongoing battle to have any success. To have to rely on volunteers to achieve even these limited goals is our country’s shame but it also means there is nothing to spare for these other things. It will take years for these other things to trickle down to public school teachers. Maybe they won’t at all. In the meantime if they just need volunteer bodies I’m willing to go out to the front lines. It may be like trying to douse a forest fire with a glass of water but I feel good doing it.