Category Archives for #BlackLivesMatter

They Were Born for This Moment: How the student activists of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High demonstrate the power of privilege.

Dahlia Lithwick’s take on the impact of teenagers from Parkland, Florida after yet another mass school shooting is a flawed Bob Dole read on the power of education. The most telling moment that this misreading of why America seems to embrace these teenagers comes here:

Despite the gradual erosion of the arts and physical education in America’s public schools, the students of Stoneman Douglas have been the beneficiaries of the kind of 1950s-style public education that has all but vanished in America and that is being dismantled with great deliberation as funding for things like the arts, civics, and enrichment are zeroed out. In no small part because the school is more affluent than its counterparts across the country (fewer than 23 percent of its students received free or reduced-price lunches in 2015–16, compared to about 64 percent across Broward County Public Schools) these kids have managed to score the kind of extracurricular education we’ve been eviscerating for decades in the United States. These kids aren’t prodigiously gifted. They’ve just had the gift of the kind of education we no longer value.

Political analysis of Dole’s last failed run for president often includes that Dole’s narrative focused on going back to an idealized and whitewashed past, while Bill Clinton focused on the future.

To suggest a “1950s-style public education” is a major element of the good ol’ days is an incomplete and ultimately offensive view of history.

Public schools reflected and perpetuated in mid-twentieth century all of the very worst aspects of American society, including segregation and corrosive inequity along race, social class, and gender lines.

The disturbing irony of the flawed central thesis of this argument is that the student activists from Stoneman Douglas High do in fact represent the realities of 1950s-style public education: Privileged children in the U.S. also benefit from privileged schooling—a fact of the 1950s and of the 2010s.

There are, however, two lessons from the activism of these Parkland, Florida teens:

  1. It provides another entry point into debunking that education is the great equalizer, and
  2. it represents in contrast to how America has responded to #BlackLivesMatter activism the lingering racial divide about whose voices, and thus lives, matter.

To the first lesson, consider the following:

And as a powerful visual for understanding that educational attainment does not level racial inequity, consider this (as well as a wealth of research contradicting education as the great equalizer):

Yet, Lithwick maintains:

Part of the reason the Stoneman Douglas students have become stars in recent weeks is in no small part due to the fact that they are in a school system that boasts, for example, of a “system-wide debate program that teaches extemporaneous speaking from an early age.”

The mistake here is that educational opportunities are a marker for the accident of birth most children enjoy or suffer; highlighting the rich schooling experiences of the Parkland, Florida students receive is a veneer for confronting that they mostly are the beneficiaries of privilege, first in their homes and communities, and then in their schools, which reflect and perpetuate their privilege.

To be clear, this is no condemnation of these teen activists, but their access to widespread national recognition is driven mostly by their privilege in many of the same ways that the Bush family and the Trumps have parlayed generational wealth into more (often ill-got) power, regardless of their merit.

This misreading of the reasons why the Parkland, Florida teens are being heard provides cover for the more damning and problematic second lesson, as Sarah Ruiz-Grossman confronts:

For some black activists who have long been mobilizing around gun violence, the current wave of public attention and outrage over the issue is welcome. But it also invites the question of why there’s been comparatively little attention and outrage focused on the even more common reality of routine gun homicides in the country, which disproportionately affect communities of color, and specifically black Americans.

Prominent black organizers and public figures have also noted the largely positive public response to the student activists from Parkland ― most of whom are not black and who attended school in a largely white, relatively affluent Florida suburb ― compared to the frequent vilification of young black activists protesting gun violence, particularly police shootings.

The Stoneman Douglas High teens are no more credible in their activism than the many black teen activists who have responded to the equally disturbing normal of police shootings that disproportionately kill blacks.

When affluent and a certain kind of articulate young people confront mass gun violence, their privilege sparks responses that are distinct from the responses to a differently racialized and classed protest against gun violence perpetually killing one person at a time.

Kurt Vonnegut, who died of lung cancer, confessed in the preface to a collection of short stories: “The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.”

Beyond the macabre humor and stark reality of Vonnegut’s admission, we must see that he is deconstructing the power of normal; once something become normal, it projects the impression that is also right.

In the U.S., the messengers and the messaging are more powerful than the message. And this is the large scale lesson of the Parkland, Florida activism: Privileged voices and lives matter.

Public schools in the U.S. are not game changers, not great equalizers. Further, as the Parkland, Florida teens argue, no public school should be tasked with defending children against a negligent political class bought and owned by the NRA.

1950s nostalgia also ignores the celebrity class, often movie stars, doing the dirty work for Big Tobacco, ruining the health of America’s youth for the sake of commerce, and this too fits in an ironic and ugly way with misreading why privileged Stoneman Douglas High teens are now waging a battle with the NRA controlling negligent political leaders.

Simply saying something is true doesn’t make it true, and just because it is normal doesn’t mean it is right.

The Stoneman Douglas High teen activists were born for this moment. They demonstrate the power of privilege.

Please see these Twitter exchanges as well:

 

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Margins

Although I am sure more people have blocked me on social media, I remain aware of and concerned about two of those—both women, one black and one white.

The reason for my concern is that I would count them both members of the communities I support, ideologically and practically. Also, since I am blocked, I remain mostly uncertain of why, although with one I did have an exchange on an email forum about her perceptions of me (what I view as unwarranted assumptions).

Being blocked, I recognize however, was the result of both these women functioning in much narrower margins than I do because of my privileges of gender, race, and economics. In other words, regardless of my good intentions, regardless of whether or not I behaved in any way that warranted being blocked, these women do not have the margins to risk examining whether I am part of the toxic masculinity, toxic whiteness, or toxic affluence that threatens them moment by moment.

Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir in their Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much label the margins of economic privilege and disadvantage as “slack” (privilege and thus huge margins) and “scarcity” (disadvantage and thus very thin margins). I think those terms apply equally as well to gender and race.

In retrospect, I am reminded of a moment from my teaching high school English when a white boy brushed a copy of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” from his desk when I handed them out, announcing that he wasn’t reading that “[racial slur].” The student was adamant that King was an adulterer, having a pamphlet that excoriated King; the pamphlet, if one bothered to look carefully, had been created by the KKK, which had a vibrant following in the small town just south of the high school.

The margins (scarcity) for MLK—using “adultery” as a veneer for racism—must be placed against, for example, the social slack afforded John F. Kennedy, who is allowed his claimed accomplishments despite his personal indiscretions, unlike how any small failure by MLK is used to discredit all of his work.

More recently, the US has witnessed eight years of unrelenting discrediting of Barack Obama as president through unfounded claims about his birthplace; Obama as the first black president had to be perfect or completely discredited.

Immediately succeeding Obama is Donald Trump, who survived video/audio evidence of language and attitudes toward women most people would not tolerate in children; in other words, Trump’s gender, race, and economic privilege (slack) is so powerful, he appears nearly capable of doing anything with impunity.

Trump himself declared this himself during his campaign:

This is the most vivid and gross example of the power of slack grounded in race, gender, and economic privilege.

Black Film/ White Film: More on Slack and Scarcity

Since I am a comic book advocate, having collected Marvel comics throughout the 1970s and more recently published scholarship on the intersections of race and gender in superhero comics, I have watched and listened carefully to the public responses to Black Panther, the most recent Marvel Universe film.

While I have not yet seen the film, I have followed the sputtering path of the character Black Panther since he was introduced in the 1960s; as a teenager collecting comics, I was a fan of Black Panther as well as The Falcon, who was cover-billed along with Captain America throughout much of the 1970s.

Black_Panther_Vol_1_1  Captain_America_Vol_1_117

I lacked critical discernment as a teen, but can recognize that these two characters laid a foundation for my discovering black authors and thinkers in college as I struggled to cast off the worst aspects of my upbringing in the racist and intolerant South.

Most have responded to Black Panther the film with enthusiasm and even glee, and the box office has reflected some powerfully positive messages about black films and actors. But a few have begun to unpack problems with nationalism and the white savior trope in the narrative.

Here we may be inclined to argue that the highest form of equity, the absence of racism, would require that the film receive something akin to objective analyses—not unduly criticized (veneers for racism) and not sheltered from criticism as a sort of inverse racism.

There, however, this claim is not as simple as it may seem—especially if we ground how we respond to the film in terms of slack and scarcity, in terms of the King/Kennedy inequity.

Certainly, the film cannot be above credible criticism, but in that pursuit, we must guard against the perfection bar often manifested as scarcity when applied to disadvantages associated with race, class, and gender.

White films, for example, are not called “white,” but simply films. Adam Sandler and Kevin James, for example, have long resumes of films that certainly have been allowed an incredible amount of slack—forgiven the nearly unforgivable (think Trump) for hopes of some glimmer of humor nestled among the truly cliche, offensive, and just plain lazy.

Black Panther, even in the praise, is rendered into scarcity as a black film, and by implication must carry the weight of all black films, all black actors, all black writers (although the character was spawned by white creators in a very white, often racist industry).

Since Kevin James was allowed Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, just how close to perfect does Black Panther need to be?

The truest test of equity may be that all films have the same degree of slack.

School Safety: Slack and Scarcity as a Matter of Life and Death

While many in the US are reveling in the pop culture frenzy around Black Panther, the ugliest aspects of American culture once again expose how our on-screen violences pale against our gun culture and the ever-present threat of mass shootings, especially at the expense of students in school.

Although most mass shooters are white men, gun violence tends to prompt concerns about gangs and black-on-black crime, yet another demonstration of inequitable margins: White male mass shooters never prompt outcries about all white men (since the shooters are often framed as mentally ill) even though simply the threat of terrorism evokes blanket narratives and even policies about Muslims.

The paradox of gun violence and mass shootings in the US is that Americans have experienced increasingly less crime over the past four or so decades, even as the rate of mass shootings and gun violence remains disturbingly high when compared to other countries.

Debates about gun violence become yet more evidence of slack and scarcity linked to race.

Why has the country responded so positively to the teens speaking out after the shooting in Parkland, Florida but tended to reject or ignore the outcries from teens surrounding the all-to-frequent police shootings of young blacks, the #BlackLivesMatter movement?

Simply stated, when anything appears to encroach on the huge slack whites perceive (safety in this case), mainstream responses flair, but the margins for safety are so thin for blacks, for example, that to live in danger as a black person has become normalized beneath the implication that blacks themselves are the ones perpetuating violence.*

Whites as victims (slack), and blacks as violent (scarcity).

Taking care about whether or not we criticize Black Panther holds some important symbolic value, but in terms of how we respond to a school shootings, we are now making decisions that are life and death.

Responses to the Parkland, Florida shooting have focused on how to make schools safer—in part, to avoid the larger gun control debate that is muted by the NRA.

Arming teachers is one extreme, but in an Op-Ed for The State (Columbia, SC), Will Britt argues:

My recommendations are all achievable and avoid the most controversial ideas, so that they have a chance of happening. Still, they will require unified and emphatic parental endorsement: Install metal detectors, restrict campus and building access and connect 360-degree interior and exterior video monitoring for every public school.

This is a compelling argument to those living in the slack of race privilege, but is a red flag to those living in slack, in very thin margins.

First, Britt’s argument is solidly refuted by evidence:

Impact of Security Measures on Violence

  • There is no clear evidence that the use of metal detectors, security cameras, or guards in schools is effective in preventing school violence, 8,9,10,11 and little is known about the potential for unintended consequences that may accompany their adoption.12
  • There has not been sufficient research to determine if the presence of metal detectors in schools reduces the risk of violent behavior among students. 13
  • Some researchers have expressed concern about the widespread use of guards, cameras, and other security technologies, given that so little is known about their effectiveness. 14,15
  • Research has found security strategies, such as the use of security guards and metal detectors, to be consistently ineffective in protecting students16 and to be associated with more incidents of school crime and disruption17 and higher levels of disorder in schools. 18
  • Evidence from a school–police partnership implemented in New York City reveals that students in these schools continue to experience higher than average problems linked directly to future criminality, compared to students in other New York City schools not involved in the partnership. 19
  • Surveillance cameras in schools may have the effect of simply moving misbehavior to places in schools or outside of schools that lack surveillance. Even more troubling, it’s possible that cameras may function as enticement to large-scale violence, such as in the case of the Virginia Tech shooter who mailed video images of himself to news outlets.20
  • Research suggests that the presence of security guards and metal detectors in schools may actually increase levels of violence in schools by strengthening the influence of youth “street” culture with its emphasis on self-protection.21

If these measures do not work, why are they compelling?

Calls for more security, research shows, in fact is more veneer for racism since extreme measures such as metal detectors and surveillance cameras are more common in high-minority schools even when discipline issues are not more pronounced.

White slack dictates that white safety must be protected at all costs; black/brown scarcity dictates that there is no margin of error for protecting against black/brown violence.

American culture is today awash in a triumphant celebration of Black Panther jammed against a national scramble to confront our daily violences in the form of guns.

Turning our schools into fortresses if not prisons, and even arming teachers, presents those with race, gender, and economic slack a much different picture (more safety) than those with race, gender, and economic scarcity (more violence).

Margins still define us, and margins left unchecked are apt to destroy us in the end.

* The mainstream media and political focus on black-on-black crime allows whites to ignore that all crime is mostly same-race since white-on-white crime rates are nearly identical to black-on-black crime rates.

Research excerpt sources:

8 Garcia, C. A. (2003). School safety technology in America: Current use and perceived effectiveness. Criminal Justice Policy Review, 14, 30-54.

9 Addington, L. A. (2009). Cops and cameras: Public school security as a policy response to Columbine. American Behavioral Scientist, 52, 1424-1446.

10 Borum, R., Cornell, D. G., Modzeleski, W., & Jimerson, S. R. (2010). What can be done about school shootings? A review of the evidence. Educational Researcher, 39, 27-37.

11 Casella, R. (2006). Selling us the fortress: The promotion of techno-security equipment in schools. New York: Routledge.

12 Addington, L. A. (2009). Cops and cameras: Public school security as a policy response to Columbine. American Behavioral Scientist, 52, 1424-1446.

13 Hankin, A., Hertz, M., & Simon, T. (2011). Impacts of metal detector use in schools: Insights from 15 years of research. Journal of School Health, 81, 100-106.

14 Birkland, T. A., & Lawrence, R. G. (2009). Media framing and policy change after Columbine. American Behavioral Scientist, 52, 1405-1425.

15 Green, M. B. (2005). Reducing violence and aggression in schools. Trauma, Violence and Abuse, 6, 236-253.

16 Schreck, C. J., & Miller, J. M., & Gibson, C. L. (2003). Trouble in the school yard: A study of the risk factors of victimization at school. Crime & Delinquency, 49, 460-484.

17 Nickerson, A. B., & Martens, M. R. (2008). School violence: Associations with control, security/enforcement, educational/therapeutic approaches, and demographic factors. School Psychology Review, 37, 228-243.

18 Mayer, M. J., & Leaone, P. E. (1999). A structural analysis of school violence and disruption: Implications for creating safer schools. Education and Treatment of Children, 22, 333-356.

19 Brady, K. P., Balmer, S., & Phenix, D. (2007). School-police partnership effectiveness in urban schools: An analysis of New York City’s Impact Schools Initiative. Education and Urban Society, 39, 455-478.

20 Warnick, B. R. (2007). Surveillance cameras in schools: An ethical analysis. Harvard Educational Review, 77, 317- 343.

21 Phaneuf, S. W. (2009). Security in schools: Its effect on students. El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC.

Resistance in Black and White: On White Proximity and Solidarity

The uncomfortable history of professional athletes being activists is often whitewashed itself, in part through the sort of revisionism that conservatives seem to reject. Think of how Muhammad Ali was mistreated while the Greatest athlete on the planet in the 1960s and then how he was praised in the decline of his life.

Peter Norman has become a symbol for white athlete proximity to black protests.

Because of ostracized Colin Kaepernick, the current focus on athletes as activists is the NFL, and we must ask how this monstrosity has become the focal point of moral urgency and debate.

The NFL coddles violence in its playing as well as violence outside the lines by the players who are deemed essential. The NFL coddles and embraces a white ownership and white elite players who are directly partisan in their politics, but christens black activism as too political.

The newest version of this circus is a call by black NFL players to their white teammates, resulting in a slow drip of white players showing solidarity with the pre-season protests of a few black players. The talking heads on sports media and those displays of so-called solidarity, however, continue to reek of a white resistance to resistance.

Images of black players sitting, kneeling, and raising a fist with a white teammate standing nearby, with a hand or arm displaying support, is ultimately a show of white correction—a see how I am supporting you but I cannot actually kneel, sit, or raise a fist.

AP photo/Matt Rourke

The vitriol of white supremacists and their ideology are likely not the real problem in the U.S. in 2017. Their hatred probably blinds and deafens them to black resistance and white solidarity.

Where we need change the most and where that change has the best chance of making a difference is among whites who consider themselves good people, much like the few white NFL players standing in solidarity with black players.

Whites must consider the following before resisting black resistance:

  • Check the urge to claim you are not racist and instead acknowledge the facts of systemic racism and white privilege without becoming defensive about what those forces say about you personally.
  • Recognize that all whites benefit from white privilege and are complicit in systemic racism even when some whites struggle and even as whites live in ways that seem to them to be “not racist” (“I have black friends”).
  • Black protests against inequity and injustice that focus on blacks is a call that matters to all people, a widening of the circle of equity and justice. Protests grounded in racial inequity are themselves not racist just because they highlight race.
  • Rethink what “racism” means by understanding that it is the combination of race and power, not just race. Blacks expressing anger toward or distrust of whites (as a generalization) is grounded in evidence that these generalizations are valid, but whites expressing white nationalism and white superiority are baseless and hate-filled ideologies that lack merit (race is a social construct and there is no biological differences that could be traced to one identifiable group being superior to the other).
  • Dignify black expressions of resistance and protest by honoring that space (stay out), remaining quiet in order to listen, and never interjecting a “yes, but” commentary.
  • Understand and reject respectability politics. Saying that you support a person’s right to protest, but disagree with the how and where is not an act of solidarity; it is itself an act of racism.
  • Don’t shift the focus of any black protests by asking “what about” and determining what issues matter for others through your white lens.
  • Assume the history you know is flawed, and then, commit yourself to knowing a richer story of history that includes all the voices omitted when the version you learned was being written.
  • Be careful about your solidarity and appreciate when you are checked for appearing to offer your white approval. To agree may often require that you (as noted above) step back and remain silent—even when you have a genuine contribution.
  • Resist confusing any individuals with identifiable groups; do not ask a person to speak for any group and do not assume anyone who looks as if they belong to a group somehow prove any generalization. Blacks such asOJ. Simpson, Bill Cosby, and Ben Carson do not prove any arguments among white resistance to black resistance simply because they echo the white “yes, but.”
  • Step away from blaming black protests of racism for creating or inciting racism; this is blaming the victim and is itself a form of oppression.
  • Solidarity can begin with asking how you can help; the advantages of white privilege are not your problem, but your problem is in what ways you use that privilege, for whose benefit.

Racism and white privilege were created by and maintained by whites with power, mostly ill-got power.

Whites are now responsible for ending both.

To resist black resistance to inequity and injustice is a great white failure that cannot be explained away, must itself be resisted.

Dismantling Monuments: History as a Living Document

Disturbance at the Heron House
A stampede at the monument
To liberty and honor under the honor roll

“Disturbance At The Heron House,” R.E.M.

“And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

“Ozymandias,” Percy Bysshe Shelley

Possibly one of the greatest failures of formal K-12 schooling has been not only what students are taught in history and social studies, but how history as a discipline has been misrepresented (paralleled, I think, by a similar message about science) as fixed and objective.

History is never fixed or objective, but always a living document—one written by those who have power, access to the telling.

A powerful and vivid example of this fact is how Howard Zinn has been marginalized as more an activist than a historian because his work was committed to changing the perspective of history from the power elites to the people. Zinn was both heralded and demonized, for example, when his work asked everyone to rethink Christopher Columbus and the concept of “discovering” lands already occupied.

Traditionalists remain trapped in the belief that history has been and can be objective, can avoid being political, and once anyone seeks to better understand a person or the narratives of the past, those traditionalists shout “revisionism,” as if that new understanding is something to be shunned.

That any human expression can be objective, apolitical, is a naive position. In response to those arguing Ivanka Trump’s new book is not a political work, Ani Kokobobo reveals:

She claims she wrote it before her father’s election, “from the perspective of an executive and an entrepreneur.” And though they criticize her for being trite, derivative, out of touch and racially tone-deaf, most readers have accepted the premise that this is a largely apolitical book.

Yet as every scholar of literature knows, each book contains what theorist Fredric Jameson has dubbed a “political unconscious.” In other words, through the sheer act of narrating, a book reinforces one particular point of view while policing others.

This last point perfectly captures the reality of all history. And thus, the great irony of slurring history with “revisionism” is that history as a living document should be a constant act of revisionism as a retelling history in an effort to make the story clearer, more accurate—not an erasing of history.

Teaching that Washington never told a lie or that Columbus discovered America was in the moment an act of revisionism since they both are distortions in the name of some agenda. To seek ways that better portray Washington and how Europe reaching the West began what is now the U.S. and other countries is the great promise history and historical thought can offer a free people.

In a time now characterized by the rise of Trump (as a marker for nationalism masking racism) against the #BlackLivesMatter movement (as a confrontation of the racial inequities in policing and the justice system), we become witnesses to the power of monuments to maintain racism: calls for renaming Tillman Hall at Clemson University, New Orleans removing Civil War statues, and near my university, black students petitioning to rename a high school.

These efforts to revise history, bending it toward a greater clarity, a more credible Truth, cannot be divorced from how political, media, and public responses frame calls for dismantling monuments to the flawed and often awful past.

As a recent example, local coverage of students’ petitioning to rename a high school has a revealing title, Petition calls for dropping ‘racist’ name of Wade Hampton, and lede paragraph:

Wade Hampton III was a Confederate lieutenant general, one of the largest slaveholders in the Southeast and, by today’s standards, a blatant “racist,” according to historians.

When I raised concern about the word racist being placed in quote marks in the article, the journalist noted that it was to identify “charged language” and to avoid bias.

Couched within the lingering racism driven by denying and tip-toeing about confronting racism is the pervasive failure of both-sides journalism that refuses to acknowledge that some perspectives are credible while others are not.

The article itself quotes a historian acknowledging the fact of racism that the article treats as “charged language,” and thus, possibly lacking credibility.

A revised view of history allows us to acknowledge what is not debatable—many with power in the past, mostly white men, were racists—and is essential for helping us resolve what is debatable—whether or not we rename buildings/institutions and dismantle monuments.

If we believe in an optimistic view of human history, associated with Martin Luther King Jr. (“How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”), that we can somehow shape the world for the good of all, there is much to dismantle—the monuments grounded in human actions devoid of a more refined moral view as well as a tentative discourse that refuses to name and steps around the very facts that allow us to engage in robust debate.

It is an anemic approach to wait for monuments to crumble under their own baselessness, and thus, it is our duty to hasten the process on the path to justice, even when that duty is hard and seemingly unpopular.

We make history with each step we take, and we reshape history necessarily in that procession.

See Also

Opinion: Leave Wade Hampton in the history books, Asha Marie

The Young Black Activists Targeting New Orleans’s Confederate Monuments, Clint Smith

“Something Like Scales”

Immediately, something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes, and he could see again.

Acts 9:18 (NIV)

The existential crisis of my youth was my embarrassment and shame for having been raised in ignorance. My redneck past erupted from my mouth in the first weeks of college, and I exposed myself an arrogant fool.

Racist, sexist, brash, and incredibly insensitive to human dignity—I had no sense of community, no humility, little compassion, and no room for anything to replace the incredible callousness that filled my mind, my heart, and my soul.

Many years later in my doctoral program, I discovered Lou LaBrant and was immediately drawn to her warnings about word magic and provincialism, and her faith in progressive education as a path out of ignorance and bigotry:

The English class does not differ from other classes in responsibility for social situations which militate against prejudice and intolerance. Classifications which result in racial or cultural segregation, encouragement of small cliques, avoidance of crucial issues-all of these may be evils in the English classes as in others. Indeed, many of our classifications, built on results of reading tests, tend to promote rather than to destroy the kind of antisocial situation just mentioned….The question is briefly: Do the very words we use and our attitudes toward them affect our tendency to accept or reject other human beings? (p. 323)

In my mid-30s, I had already made significant strides along the journey captured by LaBrant, a journey that was deeply indebted to my reading black and women writers who shook the scales from my eyes and pointed me to the light leading away from the provincialism of my youth.

Concurrent to my passion for fiction and literature was my self-taught commitment to reading existential philosophy, which also resonated with me as I had become aware that every human is a prisoner of her/his own Being.

It was not that I came to know the world through my being white, male, heterosexual, and a non-believer; it was that I made the error of not recognizing those lenses, falling into the trap expressed by Claudia Rankine and James Baldwin.

That trap was to ignore my whiteness and to fail to understand that anything that defines any individual is inseparable from the world around that individual; as Baldwin explains:

White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption—which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards—is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from Bobby Kennedy’s assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years to the unfortunate tone of warm congratulation with which so many liberals address their Negro equals. It is the Negro, of course, who is presumed to have become equal—an achievement that not only proves the comforting fact that perseverance has no color but also overwhelmingly corroborates the white man’s sense of his own value.

The existential crisis of my first three years of college did not bring me to some miraculous enlightenment. Neither did my doctoral experience in my mid-30s.

As I stumble toward 60, the crisis remains, and the journey continues.

My most recent leg of that journey has been grounded in social media, where I have gathered (especially on Twitter) connections that allow me to listen beyond myself about race, social class, gender, sexuality, ablism, and a whole host of contexts that, as LaBrant confronted, address “our tendency to accept or reject other human beings.”

Over the past few years when I have increased my public writing as well as my presence on social media, I have learned two important lessons.

First—although it has taken me decades to recognize and come to understand better my own struggles with anxiety and introversion—I am a lifelong outsider, a non-joiner.

However, I have experienced a few vicious (and unfounded) attacks directed at me either through a virtual connection only or about my role as a public intellectual.

In these cases, the conflict was grounded entirely (again as LaBrant noted) in how the other person was naming me, especially in terms of how that naming associated me with allegiances I do not have (to organizations, to known personalities, to acquiring financial benefits).

My non-joiner Self has always been rooted in my fidelity to ideas and ideals, not people or organizations. I am perpetually checking if people and organizations share that fidelity, but I cannot pledge allegiance to anyone or any organization.

These conflicts happened, it is important to stress, with both people I consider allies and those who are clearly in different camps than I am.

Just as a broad example, I have felt tension from union members and advocates because, I think, I hold an odd stance of never having been in a union (living my entire life in a right-to-work state) and of criticizing strongly both of the major teachers’ unions and their leaders—all the while being an unapologetic advocate for unionization.

I have also been discounted and discredited among my narrow field of teaching ELA because many within the field misunderstand blogging and academic publishing (neither of which is about making money, by the way).

This first lesson, then, is about how we label each other through association, and as a result, create fractures, angry divisions—much of which is inaccurate, or at least misleading.

Commitments to people and organizations to the exclusion of the ideals those people and organizations claim to be working toward are ultimately counterproductive.

But my second lesson moves beyond the personal and to the wider chasms of the U.S. as a people.

As a perpetual stranger, I am a critical observer, and I have witnessed a powerful and corrosive dynamic captured by the story of Saul’s conversion: “something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes, and he could see again.”

What I have witnessed is about power and privilege as the scales that blind the powerful and privileged.

From the Bernie Sander’s campaign to Hillary Clinton’s campaign to the accountability education reform resistance—and many other contexts—I have watched as white people with some degree of privilege and power have squandered their good intentions, alienating marginalized people by not listening.

The worst of which has been the tone deaf All Lives Matter (and Blue Lives Matter) response to Black Lives Matter.

In a recent post about rescuing education reform from post-truth, I highlighted that both the reform mindset that public education is a failure and the counter-resistance (that often says public education is not the problem because poverty is) are equally flawed—the latter because it spits in the face of the vulnerable students (black, brown, English language learners, special needs students) who are in fact being cheated by an inadequate K-12 public school system.

I think ultimately the second lesson is about missionary zeal, the bleeding-heart liberal urge to save the world, an urge that ignores (as Baldwin challenges) the arrogance of privilege, the condescension of privilege.

And thus, even as I have framed this with a sight metaphor, when the scales drop from our eyes—when we resist viewing the world through our provincialism, through our necessarily personal biases (and bigotry)—we are freed to listen and to hear with compassion and awareness so that our worlds expand.

Freedom and equity no longer appear to be a zero-sum game.

Ending racism is the responsibility of whites. Ending sexism is the responsibility of men. Ending economic inequity is the responsibility of the wealthy.

Privilege and power control how the U.S. works, for whom it works as well as over whom it plows.

Our country is in desperate need of a conversion such as Saul’s, the scales dropping from our eyes so that we may listen, understand, and act in the service of those we have too long failed to see or hear.

What Trumplandia Confirms about Republican Party, Christian Right, and White America

I just want to ask a question:
Who really cares, to save a world in despair?
Who really cares?

“Save the Children,” Marvin Gaye

I was born and have lived my entire life in the cesspool of hypocrisy that is the Bible Belt—where conservative Republicanism and Christian values are thin veneer for hatred, bigotry, sexism, gun-lust, and enduring racism.

That hypocrisy failed me and then as a young adult and throughout my life I have been taught critical love and kindness by great writers and thinkers: Kurt Vonnegut, Eugene V. Debs, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, and the greatest witness of all, James Baldwin.

With the election of Donald Trump as the U.S. president, the entire nation has before it this reality: Trumplandia confirms that the Republican Party, Christian Right, and white America have abdicated all rights to any moral authority.

First, despite efforts by mainstream media and pundits to argue otherwise, Trump and his rhetoric are continuations of central efforts by the Republican Party reaching back at least to Reagan: “tough on crime” as code for racist beliefs about blacks and Latinx, “build a wall” as just more xenophobia, and anti-government ranting as code for denying “free” offerings to the “lazy” people of color and “illegal immigrants.”

Trump’s Republicanism is directly in line with Reagan Republicanism. The only real difference is Trump’s outlandish and brash admissions aloud of the very worst of the Republican Party, such as calling Mexicans rapists and murderers. Traditional Republicans only hint at such.

Even more important is that the overwhelming support for Trump by the Christian Right is stunningly damning:

For eight years, Barack Obama and his family—despite a history of being practicing Christians, despite Obama himself offering several eloquent and Christian speeches and hymns in times of tragedy, and despite Obama and his family living essentially good (read: Christian) lives—the Christian Right, and Trump, have refuted Obama’s Christianity and used accusations of his being a Muslim as a slur.

Yet, Trump’s hedonism, adultery, sexual assault, profane discourse, hate speech, sexism, and rapacious behavior as a business man and pseudo-billionaire [1], for the Christian Right, prove to be just fine.

Trumplandia has exposed there is nothing “Christian” or “right” about the Christian Right.

Finally, however, the most damning and least addressed consequence of Trumplandia is what it has exposed about white America, who overwhelmingly supported Trump:

As expected, Trump did best among white voters without a college degree, beating Clinton by the enormous margin of 72 percent to 23 percent. Trump also won among white, non-college women 62 to 34 percent and white college-educated men, 54 to 39 percent. Among white voters, Clinton only won among women with a college degree by a 51 to 45 percent margin. Interestingly, among white voters, there is no evidence in the exit poll that income affected the likelihood that they supported Trump.

The conventional wisdom being promoted by whitewashed mainstream media is that the working and middle class have been abandoned by Democrats and the U.S. government; yet, exit polls show that the two lowest income categories chose Clinton by a slim majority (certainly skewed, however, by people of color over-represented in these groups, revealing how the media is mostly worried about “working class” and “middle class” only as that relates to whites):

Both sets of exit data from CBS and NYT, then, suggest that Trump’s support has more to do with race than disgruntled working class whites being ignored and disenfranchised.

Actually, mainstream media has its argument backward because Trumplandia confirms that white America has abandoned commitments to equity for all—not that any political party or the U.S. government has abandoned white America.

The problem with the hurting working/middle class white argument is that this is racially inequitable America:

And this is racially inequitable America:

The America where race and gender create exponential inequity:

As a powerful contrast to the white male and female support to Trump, note that black women were by far least likely to vote for Trump—and they have the greatest reason to be disenfranchised (the lowest wages at every level of education, above):

The ultimate problem with the suffering working and middle class white argument for Trump’s rise is twofold: (1) white suffering may exist, but by comparison to black/brown suffering and gender suffering, white suffering remains relatively less significant, and (2) if whites are hurting, that fact should have spurred solidarity with historically marginalized groups, not the antagonism being heard from white America.

If white America ever really believed in the melting pot, believed in a country of immigrants, believed in equity for all, that may have existed in some distant and idealized past when white America saw that pot melting disparate whites into one homogenous white: equity for all who look like us (white).

Trumplandia is a white response (whitelash), not from working and middle class suffering, but against rising demands by oppressed groups (#BlackLivesMatter, Colin Kaepernick, gender neutral restrooms, marriage equity, immigration reform, etc.) for equity for all.

The only thing whites are poised to lose is their unearned privilege, but the rise of white support of Trump confirms that whites see their privilege as more important to preserve than equity for all is to attain.

“Make America Great Again” is slogan-as-code for maintaining white (and male) privilege.

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In the tumultuous world faced by Marvin Gaye—especially war torn—he sang:

But who really cares?
Who’s willing to try?
To save our world
To save our sweet world
To save a world
That is destined…to die

Trumplandia is a defiant “Not us” from white America—and efforts to whitewash that callousness as economic angst is further proof that the dirtiest word in the U.S. to utter is “racism” because of the delicate sensibilities of the most powerful people in the country.

[1] Matthew 19:24: Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

“the white man’s sense of his own value”: James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time

White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption—which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards—is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from Bobby Kennedy’s assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years to the unfortunate tone of warm congratulation with which so many liberals address their Negro equals. It is the Negro, of course, who is presumed to have become equal—an achievement that not only proves the comforting fact that perseverance has no color but also overwhelmingly corroborates the white man’s sense of his own value.

Why James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time Still Matters, 

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Baldwin in London, 1969;via Wikimedia Commons

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A 1960s edition of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (via Flickr user Robert Huffstutter)