Posts from ‘Meta’
The Scariest Thing I’ve Read This Week
In an interview with a New Hampshire newspaper Jeb Bush, Republican candidate for president, criticized Obama’s foreign policy for taking a “nuanced approach – where it’s all kind of so sophisticated it makes no sense, you know what I’m saying? Big-syllable words and lots of fancy conferences and meetings – but we’re not leading, that creates chaos, it creates a more dangerous world.†This anti-intellectualism is of course a pose.  Bush went to that most fancy and intellectual prep school Phillips Academy in Massachusetts and is a college graduate. Yet he feels that he must dumb himself down (and that is saying something for a member of the Bush family) in order to appeal to those he wants to vote for him. If that is not an insult to the American people I don’t know what is. It is moreover a statement that says that the rest of the world is as dumb as he assumes the American electorate to be. It is an appeal to get away from Obama’s “nuanced” approach to foreign policy and back to the old American foreign policy of being a bull in a china shop wielding American lives and money as a club.
Unlike others among the Republican presidential candidates Bush is not a lawyer. Â His diplomatic experience is limited to teaching classes in Mexico as a high school student, speaking Spanish and marrying a Mexican woman. He feels and wants to convince us that his experience as a wealthy real estate developer and former governor of Florida is exactly what this country needs in its leadership. There are other Republican candidates with gubernatorial experience and others with much more public service experience than Bush. Â If real estate development experience is a prerequisite then Trump has even more than Bush and we can see where that leads. Why then should people vote for Bush? Yes his family name recognition makes him a front runner and he has managed to raise money from the Republican fat cats, but why does he say we should vote for him? We should vote for him because he is less nuanced, doesn’t use as many three syllable words and doesn’t have as many meetings on foreign policy.
This is horrifying. We should all want our leaders to have a nuanced foreign policy, use whatever words necessary, and have as many meetings as it takes to avoid sending our troops off to war or to keep from sending our money abroad. The idea that the people who are working on our behalf should be “dumber” or less skilled is certainly an odd one. I for one want them to be better than that and as good as they can be. We should want our diplomats to be as much better than us at “diplomatting” as our soldiers are better than us at fighting.
I have hope that our electorate is better than this and there are enough voters to see the hypocrisy of Bush’s attempts to portray himself as one of the people. I hope we have learned our lesson about the last Bush we elected and will not fall for this again. Â Fool me once shame on you; fool me twice shame on me.
The news: Two police officers were shot to death by a black man claiming it was in retaliation for the police murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. This is a tragedy clear and simple and my heart goes out to the families of the two police officers.  However it is not the media nor President Obama nor the mayor of New York that is to blame as the Police Benevolent Society official and probably many police officers claim. It is the fault of one insane man who wanted to go out by making a splash.  The issue of police over-reaction and brutality must not be subsumed by this tragedy. The right to protest nor any media coverage of it should not be affected no matter how conservatives will spin it. Last summer two whites killed police officers in Las Vegas, but there was no thought that all whites should be looked on suspiciously as a result.  There should be no police, media or public reaction that this incident proves black males are inherently violent. Put another way  if a white cop killing a black man does not prove that cops are violent, then a black man killing a cop doesn’t prove that blacks are inherently violent. Unfortunately that is the lesson some folks will take from this.  In political debate people too often take whatever happens as confirmation for whatever political or social prejudice one has. Some police and some whites will take this as proof of the inherent violence of the communities that people of color inhabit and will try to use it to justify a continuation of heavy handed tactics. They should realize that it is these heavy handed tactics that are contributing to their danger instead of blaming the mayor, the president, protesters, and anyone else that calls them on it. The community support that would have warned them that such a gunman was stalking them must be painstakingly built for policeman’s own safety as well as the community.
Those who blame the media or the politicians have learned nothing and they will not become safer through this reaction. Increased safety should be their goal. Avoiding the things that lead to a rupture with their communities rather than fighting publicity and reaction to police behavior, is the way out of this quagmire.  Doing what they have been doing will not make them safer. What the protesters and critics are doing is pointing the way to safer policing for both the police and the community by showing them the behavior that is counter productive. If they will listen rather than reacting with knee-jerk defensiveness they will become safer in an inherently dangerous job. The real tragedy is if we do not learn from this senseless act.  Then the sacrifice of these two officers and their families will be in vain.
In response to the Facebook challenge to list ten books that were important to me I want to briefly add some to the list of those I have already mentioned
Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon. It turned me around on the psychological effects of colonialism and made me realize how much like African colonialism the situation of African Americans was.
“Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you want them to understand.†…“Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.†… “A government or a party gets the people it deserves and sooner or later a people gets the government it deserves.†… “To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.â€Â
Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. DuBois. It made me realize how lyrical and poetic memoir, sociology, history, politics and even musicology could be in the right hands. Its most famous quote:
“the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro… two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz. It contains an essay called “Religion as a Cultural System,” which looks at systems of belief as solutions to fundamental problems of existence. I used that essay several times in class to mixed success. Many students were fervent believers in some religion and viewed an attempt to see belief systems as solutions to problems as an atheistic heresy rather than a process of thought. For others the act of thinking about thinking just gave them a headache. Admittedly Geertz is not the easiest thing to read. Â Here is a sample:
“sacred symbols function to synthesize a people’s ethos–the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood –and their world view–the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order. In religious belief and practice a group’s ethos is rendered intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life ideally adapted to the actual state of affairs the world view describes, while the world view is rendered emotionally convincing by being presented as an image of an actual state of affairs peculiarly well-arranged to accommodate such a way of life. This confrontation and mutual confirmation has two fundamental effects. On the one hand, it objectivizes moral and aesthetic preferences by depicting them as the imposed conditions of life implicit in a world with a particular structure, as mere common sense given the unalterable shape of reality. On the other, it supports these received beliefs about the world’s body by invoking deeply felt moral and aesthetic sentiments as experiential evidence for their truth. Religious symbols formulate a basic congruence between a particular style of life and a specific (if, most often, implicit) metaphysic, and in so doing sustain each with the borrowed authority of the other.”
For people who are inside a belief system apparently talking about it in a “meta” way is a difficult thing to do because they think it implies that the “reality” the belief system  describes isn’t real. I never took this to be Geertz’s point but other folks did. Perhaps it was because it implied that other realities and religions were also valid.
That’s enough to ponder.
I don’t think I’ve told this story about meeting Maya Angelou before.  In the course of  heading my college’s Africana Studies department I’ve had the good fortune to meet many celebrities black and white who came to the college to speak.  As a young professor I had the privilege of meeting her.  The talk was to be given in the theater on campus.  She had a small dressing room in the basement of the theater and I was escorting her up some stairs backstage before her speech.  As we climbed the industrial type stairs she held tight to my arm explaining that her vision in the dark wasn’t as good as it used to be.
After her talk she was escorted back down to her dressing room. It was a beehive of activity with students, well wishers crowding the tiny room. Â I intended just to stay a few minutes to hand Ms. Angelou the honorarium for her visit. Â While I was there a tentative knock on the door. I opened it and it was a small elderly white gentlemen with a bouquet for Ms. Angelou. Â I passed the bouquet along to students who passed it to Ms. Angelou. She began reading the card with the flowers. Â In the meantime the man had turned to go. Â Ms. Angelou exclaimed, “Oh that is Mr. (I won’t give his name) please ask him in.” Â I stopped the man from leaving and escorted him over to Ms. Angelou. She explained that he was from a small town in central Maine and they had been corresponding for years. I don’t think they had ever met face to face. They made an odd couple: the majestically dark and tall Ms. Angelou and the tiny white man who looked to be in his seventies. They began to talk as if there wasn’t any chaos around them. It struck me as one of the best examples of the family of human kind I had ever seen. Â Their relationship was based on the commonality of their humanity even though they were from vastly different experiences. I cannot remember her speech that night but her actions that night will never leave me. As the tributes to her talents, her writing, and her quotes pour in, it is her simple humanity that I recall. Â Rest in peace Ms. Angelou.
The deal that Amazon Prime made with HBO to show its old shows allowed me to watch the first episode of “The Wire.”  The Wire is a profane, cynical, profound, humanistic show that has even become the subject of entire college courses. It entertains, informs and unsettles all the stereotypes about black folks, white folks, the drug trade, the school system, local politics and even the media.  It is the best that television can be, that is, it makes you think, laugh and cry sometimes all at the same time. I picked up on it some time in its first season so I actually had never seen the first episode. The full quote from which the title of the episode and this post derives is: “Don’t give a fuck when it’s not your turn to give a fuck.” It is about an anti-hero hero who is a policeman who sits in on a trial of a case that isn’t even his. The cousin of a drug dealer has murdered someone and is eventually acquitted when a witness recants her testimony having been bribed or intimidated by the drug dealer. The judge who knows the policeman from the good old days calls him into his chambers and asks him what he knows about the case.  The policeman tells him it is about a drug dealer who is running the drug trade in black neighborhoods.  This drug dealer has rigged three murder cases that led to acquittals through witness intimidation.  After he leaves the judge calls the deputy chief of the police force and asks him what he knows about this drug dealer.  The deputy chief knows nothing but  the police scramble to find out about him although they had been ignoring him before presumably because he confines himself to black neighborhoods. The rest of the series is thereby set in motion to catch this drug dealer. It is all the result of somebody giving a fuck when it wasn’t his turn or responsibility to give a fuck.
The Wire is really about the collapse of all the institutions we have set in place and none of which operate as they should because of the human frailties of people who inhabit them. Shocked that the administrators of VA hospitals care more about covering their asses than providing services to veterans; then you haven’t seen the Wire. Amazed that the Republicans can govern this badly and still be favored to win the Senate in the fall; then you haven’t seen the Wire. Stunned that someone could post videos on YouTube, write a 140 page manifesto, see therapists, be investigated by police and still get guns to shoot people near University of Santa Barbara; well then you haven’t seen the Wire. Let me cite just one story from this episode. A black youth has been killed and the policeman is just sitting at the scene talking to another youngster who knew him. The youngster is surprised that someone would shoot that boy.  He tells the policeman that every Friday his friends and he get together for a game of craps. Every Friday the dead boy had played with him but eventually grabbed the money in the pot and ran away with it. The policeman asks if they knew he was going to steal the pot each week, why did they let him play?  The boy turns to him and says, “This is America.” Why did all the institutions fail to stop that killer from his rampage, “This is America.” The freedom to do what you want is protected so much even if someone eventually  (and continually) uses his freedom to kill innocent people, the right still is protected even when it makes no common sense.
Why does all this madness continue? Â I would say it is because no one gives a fuck when it isn’t their turn to give a fuck. Christians might rephrase that but they mean the same thing. Â When God asks Cain where his brother is he answers somewhat sarcastically “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Â The answer is yes.
Recently we have seen the fiftieth anniversary of two seminal events in the history of the civil rights movement: the 1963 March on Washington and the Birmingham church bombing. Each event has something to tell us about race and oppression, but are we learning the right lessons? Â At the March on Washington anniversary celebration the weekend before the actual anniversary we had another gathering of fewer people but we had speakers to remind the crowd of how we may have made some progress but we still have far to go. On the Wednesday of the actual anniversary we again had speeches from leaders including President Obama though they couldn’t hold a candle to the originals. I have often felt that there has been too much emphasis on the speakers rather than the audience. Although Martin Luther King’s oratory on that day soared I always felt that he would disagree with the constant reminder that that speech became what is remembered about that day. It smacks of what he called “the drum major instinct” where leaders become enamored of the notoriety and fame of their place at the head of the band. I have always felt that historians and teachers have placed too much of their lessons on the few who were on the stage rather than the many who were in the audience. Â After all it is the band that makes the music and without them the drum major is just a man flapping his arms. The real heroes of that day, indeed of the entire civil rights movement, were the ordinary people who did extraordinary things like travel by car, bus or foot to Washington D.C. that day. They are the ones who, often at the risk of injury or death, marched, sat-in, protested, or tried to vote. Â They are the ones who worked to end the indignities, fear and violence that was a part of segregation.
The other anniversary to note is the Birmingham, Alabama church bombing that killed four little girls and injured others. It was an action whose savagery, location, and innocent victims shocked America and made clear the violence that enforced and underlay segregation. A major part of King’s nonviolent action was to make that violence manifest itself by bringing it down upon himself and his fellow civil rights workers. The hope was that their clearly undeserved suffering would stir the consciences of Americans. The leaders of Birmingham were  happy to oblige. The adolescent industry of television was able to broadcast it to the entire country and the world.  Newspapers around the world blared headlines so loud that civil rights became a Cold War foreign policy issue for the U.S. government. The bombing of the church and the deaths of these children made the country and world understand that what southerners wanted to present as a peculiar social practice was actually enforced by murder, hatred and viciousness.
I have often told students that oppression can’t be maintained by violence alone. Â There is a psychological component to it in which the people being oppressed have to be so intimidated by violence that they accept their oppression as an unfortunate but unchangeable reality. Â They may even accept the logic or rationale upon which their oppression is based. Franz Fanon has explored this psychological aspect of oppression through out his work especially in Wretched of the Earth. He concludes that the oppressed, in his case the colonized, can, must, and will throw off their psychological acceptance of their oppression. Â For Fanon this can only be done through violence against the oppressor. Â His model and experience of this was the Algerian battle against the French forever immortalized in the magnificent film The Battle of Algiers. Martin Luther King Jr. was trying to do this nonviolently and it is in this context that we need to view the March on Washington. The march was an attempt to bring all the people who were working on the front-lines of the battle against racism together. Â It was an occasion to demonstrate the widespread support that the movement had, an occasion to show the foot soldiers that they were not alone, an occasion to provide inspiration to continue and an occasion to demonstrate that the movement was an interracial one. It was acknowledgement, encouragement and respite for those who had successfully overcome the psychological bonds of racism.
Just as the victims of racism had to overcome their belief in its inevitability and sometimes their belief in their own inferiority, the perpetrators of racism and the silent majority who allowed it to occur, had to overcome their sense of its correctness, inevitability and necessity. Racism’s underlying logic was that there was an inferiority among all blacks and a superiority among all whites that made segregation or second class treatment of African Americans the thing to do. Segregation was only common sense since God had made blacks inferior and entrusted their care to superior whites. The Birmingham bombing shattered the self righteousness of their belief in segregation. Even if they still believed in the inferiority of blacks could they accept what the maintenance of the racist system required or led to? Were you really superior if you had to bomb churches and kill children to prove it? In blindly following the logic of their system could they live with what they had become? The bombing produced cracks in the support of the segregation system, cracks that would eventually bring about its downfall.
Amid all the hoopla it is therefore necessary to examine these events for their real meaning and not the one popular culture, superficial history, politics and the media give to them. I believe their weakening of the psychological aspects of oppression were key.
One day you wake up and realize that you are living in that science fiction world you dreamed of as a kid. Â Yeah I know we don’t have the Jetsons’ flying cars and robot maids or Star Trek’s transporters or phasers. We do have “roombas”, tablets, smartphones and that thing they call the internet. The internet for example, is the greatest accumulator and disperser of information that humans have ever created. Â In fact it is so good at its job that we humans have made it difficult to use. Â Among the videos of pets and stupid human tricks, there is so much misinformation, lies, damned lies, and statistics that it is hard to find the dependable, factual information that we crave. In some of the science fiction stories I began reading as a kid one could check a device usually wearable or small to get reliable information about any topic. Smartphones and tablets offer that possibility today, but real information is usually drowned out by the constant blare of the useless, irrelevant and misinformed stuff that is out there on the web. In addition there is no sanity test one has to pass before posting something on the web and the crazies are out in full force. Anyone with an ax to grind can find someplace on the web to grind it. The mainstream media has been captured by the corporate world and has adapted to use social media to spread the narratives it wants to spread whenever it is not telling us about celebrities. In this way the “free ” press can put the important things on page twelve (if they cover them at all) while beguiling us with nonsense, providing a distortion of reality and indoctrinating us on page one. Having trained the public in what it wants them to crave the mainstream press can then fall back on the “we are just giving the public what it wants” argument to justify itself.
I have therefore in my hubris started my own web site that posts what I think is important. It cherry picks the mainstream media notably the New York Times op ed section, some of the leftish blogs like democracy now.com , African American mainstream blogs like Ebony and the Root.com, and things that my Facebook friends alert me to. I also occasionally link to Digital Professor to provide commentary. Indeed I have an open invitation to anyone who wants to write commentary to send it to me for Afamonline.com as it is called. I try to post things that are not receiving enough attention in the mainstream, offer new interesting insights on the news, history that is relevant to today, and music that is noteworthy. Â In the future I also hope to add articles about art and more things written specifically for the site. I try to write little intros or outros that explain why an entry is important and I always link to the whole article to complement my abridged version.
I always tell you where an entry is from, use accredited academics or respected journalists, and offer information that I believe to be true. Â I also understand the weaknesses of these sources. Â I have learned long ago that academic studies can be skewed to prove whatever it is you want to prove, that there is no knowable objective reality, and even respected or accredited people can be wrong. Â However I try to use the best information we have and things that make sense or are at least insightful. Â I also realize I can be wrong (as rare an occurrence as that may be.) I am quite willing to be corrected or persuaded otherwise.
So check out my version of the world at http://www.afamonline.com
Having to make a speech from the same spot as MLK Jr. is a daunting task. Â Did Obama pull it off at the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington? Well, not quite. To be sure the speech had its moments and his focus on the real lesson of the civil rights movement: it was the accomplishment of ordinary people, is an important point. Â Although the history books may list the leaders it was that not leaders but ordinary people who marched, demonstrated and worked who made the difference. Obama’s speech may have politely urged people to take action but when it came to rousing them it was something of a dud. Continue Reading
I attended the funeral of dear relative a few weeks ago. Â It combined her wishes and the needs of the mourners in an interesting way. Â It had sermons, music, and an interpretive dance as well as the standard funeral trappings. It got me thinking about my own funeral. Â Now I have no reason to think that it will be anytime in the near future but it is inevitable so I guess I should be prepared. Some may think the thought morbid but I don’t. I know that there is no guarantee that one’s wishes will be carried out once one no longer has any say in the matter. Â My father always said that he want the $200 GI special funeral with as little cost and fuss as was possible. Â Inflation and my mother made that impossible. She insisted on a “dignified” ceremony. Â When she passed I tried to make sure she had the funeral that she wanted and accepted plenty of help from those who mourned her.
So for what it’s worth here are the things I would want. Â First of all I do not want my corpse to be the centerpiece for any ritual. Â I have always found that ghoulish especially with all those people who say “he looks good.” I don’t think looking dead looks “good.”. Â If I have to be there at all just have my ashes in an urn or better yet just display a nice picture. As the opening music I want Bill Evans playing “My Foolish Heart.”Upload My Foolish Heart Album Version. Â After that I want some honorary pallbearers to come up front and do some of that old Motown choreography like the Temptations or the Pips. Â Okay, okay no dancing pallbearers but could at least some of the people who come up to speak about me do a dance step or at least one of those Monty Python silly walks. Why? Well because the real me will be in that step, the one who looked at life with a twinkle in his eye, who punctured earnestness and solemnity and ceremony. If not at the funeral or memorial service please do so at some other occasion. That is the me I want remembered.
As a eulogy I would want this by Sweet Honey In the Rock:  1-01 Ella’s Song. I went to college during the turbulent sixties from 1967 to 1971.  In those days naive “us” thought the “revolution” in thought, circumstances, morals and values was just around the corner. Once it became clear that the “revolution” not only would not be televised but was actually generations away, I decided my best course of action was to help others learn what I had learned about the world.  So I went into college teaching and history writing. My only hope is that I opened up a few minds along the way and better prepared some to deal with the world we are leaving behind. I hope that they pass that message on to their children and students.
Finally this is the music I want as a recessional. There were many occasions after a particularly difficult day when I was depressed and down that I had to remind myself that humans could create beauty as well as ugliness.  After walking in the shanty towns in South Africa, after watching the twin towers fall, after the MLK and RFK assassinations or just when dealing with assholes all day (and now the Boston Marathon bombings) , I would play John Coltrane’s version of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life.” Lush Life abridged_01. Amazingly it was written by Strayhorn as a gay teenager in a small town dreaming of a sophisticated world that he would one day inhabit. It is a song fundamentally of hope.
I remember during my wife’s doctoral training in social work a teacher in a course on end of life issues taught the class to ask “Okay what do you want to do once you are dead?” In other words how do you want your memory to affect those who remember you? Funerals are of course for the living; the dead are beyond caring.  Whatever people want to do is fine with me (including taking little notice of my passing) as it was with the relative whose funeral started my train of thought in this direction. I also think a funeral should present the deceased in the way the want to be remembered. There were of course many versions of me in all the personas one assumes during life. Students may see you in one way, colleagues in another, civilians to the academic world in yet another.  Time also changes those personas and those perceptions. No one ceremony can capture the complexities of a human being and I don’t expect my funeral to be any different.  I am however comfortable with the presentation of this “me”. Think about what “you” you would be comfortable presenting.
Two things happened recently that have led to this post. First I received my first payment from Social Security and secondly I was doing some research for that project on Walter White and the NAACP which I have been working on. Receiving my first Social security payment made me wonder about the Social Security Act and since I was researching race and the New Deal programs anyway I decided to look at what has been written about America’s first welfare program Social Security. The last time I had looked at the New Deal was awhile ago but the accepted wisdom was that it was discriminatory mostly because the white liberal New Dealers had to make concessions to the racist southern Congressmen in order to get things passed into law. FDR and the rest of the New Dealers were willing to sacrifice the rights of African Americans in order to do what they thought was best for the country. This was the view that liberal historians like William Chace and Harvard Sitkoff expounded in their books on the New Deal.
This was especially true of the Social Security Act which intentionally excluded those occupations of most African American workers like domestic service, farmer workers and professional work (together almost two thirds of African American workers, 85% of African American women workers) from the Act’s coverage. It was true of other New Deal Acts as well. In my research however I ran into this little book by Mary Poole called The Segregated Origins of Social Security, University of North Carolina Press, 2006. She did research into the papers of the originators of the act, the congressional papers and debates among the New Deal staff. She concludes:
…African Americans were not denied the benefits of Social Security because of the machinations of southern congressional leadership as is assumed. The Act was made discriminatory through a shifting web of alliances of white policy makers that crossed regions and political parties. The members of the group that wielded the greatest influence on these developments were not southerners in Congress, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s own …who genuinely sought to build a fairer and better world…but whose vision was steeped in racial privilege.
She concludes that the policymakers “shared an interest in protecting the political and economic value of whiteness.”
The most interesting thing about her analysis however are the long term effects she sees. It channeled most African Americans away from the programs created for workers and into public assistance if at all. In a society that assigns economic and social value to all things considered “white’ and “self made” it assigned a stigma to those who received public assistance. They had failed as individuals and are a burden on society. Even though later changes in the 1960’s would change some aspects of this discrimination the stigma attached continues to this day in the “American cultural imagination.” Welfare and black underclass have become synonymous in that imagination even though the numbers prove that welfare recipients are a diverse group and whites are the leading recipients. Secondly generations of African American families and communities “lost out on the baseline of economic security…offered to covered workers.”
The first effect continues to affect politics today as white conservatives appeal to poor and middle class whites, even those receiving government benefits through social security or medicare, about big government “wasting” the taxpayers’ hard earned money on charity for the poor. This distinction between earned benefits for whites and charity for blacks was however established by the government itself at the dawn of the American welfare state.