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Culture

A cynic's view of our cultural landscape
 Between Ta-Nehisi Coates & Me
 
           The intersection of my 45th Reunion at Yale University and completing my reading of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me has led to some deep soul-searching.  Two years into retirement from a teaching career in a wide variety of institutions (from elite Ivy League schools to New York City public high schools) I admit to a certain self-satisfaction in trying to fashion a career that was relentless In pursuing equity and social justice --- a personal passion initially driven by JFK’s “ask what you can do for your country” lo, those many years ago. But Coates’s book brought me up short when I had to face how shallow my thinking has been and just how deeply ingrained the pervasive white-European narrative is.  This is not a confessional piece lamenting what a horrible, privileged liberal I have been.  I believe I did some important and good work over the years, and think former students could attest to that.  Nonetheless, beyond the old, “if I knew then what I know now,” it is far more serious than that --- and that’s what I’m writing about.
          I started reading Between the World and Me in the San Diego airport on May 27.  Having seen Ta-Nehisi Coates on several talk shows and having heard the buzz about the book, I thought I should read it (plus, it’s only 152 pages and might be read during a 6 hour flight to JFK).  It took several days to finish it, though, because I kept stopping and reading passages aloud to Carol Marie (my wife, an equally dedicated educator) and we would discuss what I read, examining our efforts as white, privileged teachers, in addressing the issues Coates raises. In the end, I realized the overwhelming impact of the book was that, while believing myself a thoughtful and culturally sensitive teacher, I don’t have a clue.  I had not given nearly enough thought --- deep, reflective thought --- to issues I somehow (arrogantly) believed I was “on top of.”  Again, I think former students might say I’m being hard on myself, but hear me out.
          A personal mantra during my years of teaching high school was that I hoped every student would be given the opportunities I had been afforded.   Quite simply, I knew in the fall of 1967, when I started classes at (the all-male) Yale College, I had hit the lottery.  And I also knew that being a white guy named Johnson played some part in that.  Yale is far more diverse today. When we co-educated in 1969, with women transfers making ours the first co-educated class of Yale undergraduates, it became clear to me just how lucky I had been.  One of those 1969 transfers was a woman who had been the Salutatorian of my public high school graduating class in 1967.  Clearly, if women could have applied in the fall of 1966, I would not have been admitted.  That’s how good fortune and opportunities have always fallen for me --- and I always wished the same for my students (including the $cholar$hip money, the great teachers, the loyal friends, and the supportive family). 
          Wherever I was & whatever I was teaching, race was always at the forefront of my curriculum.  Working with privileged, white suburban kids, the message was “Given your advantages in society, what are you going to give back?”  Working at Brown and Yale, my objective was to recruit and prepare as many educators of color as possible and raise the cultural consciousness of the Caucasian students.  I created a course at Brown entitled “Critical Pedagogy and White Privilege.”  When I tried to offer it at Yale --- students from two residential colleges wanted it as a “College Seminar” --- it was quashed by the Council of Masters (now called “Heads of College”), who deemed it inappropriate for Yale.  Working in New York City high schools my last six years of teaching, 98% of my students were “of color” and I tried to impress upon them the importance of getting an education, leveraging power, and working to “uplift the race” (in the old, clichéd jargon).  After reading Between the World and Me, I realize how much more I should have tried to do.
         It’s not that I was not empathetic and sympathetic to the “situation” of black people in the United States.  When confronted by someone complaining that “they” were now getting “all the breaks” (the “reverse discrimination” myth many Trump supporters subscribe to), I’d ask a simple question: Would you be a black person in America?  If they answered, “yes,” (often saying they’d like to be Michael Jordan or Denzel Washington) I’d accuse them of lying and if they said “no,” I’d point out that they understood the odds against black Americans.  While I think this is a fair question to easily confront a basic issue, I believe I’ve been too self-satisfied with my own cleverness while being too shallow thinking I understood why the answer is “no.”
           And that’s where Coates’s book was revelatory.  In what is, essentially, a letter to his 15-year-old son, Coates eloquently animates just how endemic and deep-seated U.S. racism is.  While my question about “would you be . . .?” might evoke the obvious thoughts about being followed in stores or images of redneck hate, it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the daily struggle being black in America elicits.  If I were still preparing history/social studies teachers I would insist that this be the first book assigned.  Knowing my students of color may have already read it --- or would simply applaud someone who had put their daily experience into words --- I know the white students, no matter how well-meaning, well-educated, and progressive they might be, would need extensive discussion to process the book. 
          Flashing forward to my 45th Reunion, we (Carol Marie & I) were struck by how few people of color were there and how much it felt like 1916 not 2016.  More than that, I was struck by thinking how my political activism and lifelong beliefs were forged in this crucible during the late 60s/early 70s.  Helping create the first alternative high school in New Haven (The High School in the Community is still around!), working on the May Day protests in support of the Black Panthers and the Chicago 8, and tutoring in the New Haven schools, were all part of my formative experience at Yale.  And, while I was proud to have been a member of the NAACP at age 15, participating in voter registration work, I never gave any deep thought to my own simple question’s answer: why wouldn’t I choose not to be a black person in America?  Beyond the superficial, I never probed where Coates goes, thinking about how, when you are black in America, you can be harassed indiscriminately by the police, how you are always a suspect to the majority, how every day your every movement is scrutinized, and how your body is ​not yours --- your entire history, in fact, is based on that!  While abolition may have come and gone, while Brown v. Board of Ed. may have been ruled, while civil rights and voting rights bills have been signed, one basic premise has not changed since 1619: black people are not equal, as all the recent violence --- Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddy Gray, Eric Garner, et al --- clearly highlights.
                  Three years ago, undercover NYPD officers gunned down a student who attended the NYC school where I taught.  They claimed he had a gun.  We knew that couldn’t be true and suspected the weapon “found” at the scene was a plant.  The 15 year-old boy was shot 7 times, four in the back.  A recent NY Daily News article, barely noticed, I’m sure, reported that the investigation of the shooting revealed that our student’s DNA and fingerprints were nowhere to be found on the gun in question.  The officers weren’t suspended or disciplined --- then or now.  As Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, that’s just the expectation.  America barely blinks as another black kid is shot by police.  Even when the video of the defenseless Laquan McDonald being riddled with 16 bullets on a Chicago street is released, we get several days of coverage and then move on.  Is it any wonder people of color are skeptical about getting fair treatment, much less justice in this country?
            If we confront our Nation of Incarceration, our disproportionate poverty rates, our “achievement gap,” can we really believe we are in the “post-racial” America some claim Obama has delivered?  Yes, we have had eight years of a black presidency but that has wrought the Trump backlash, the Charleston shootings, the need for a Black Lives Matter movement, and a much keener awareness, for me, of ideas I should have been paying more, and closer, attention to far sooner. 
         As new stories emerge, almost daily, about “vacated” sentences for black men falsely accused, of privileged white rapists given 6-month sentences when blacks serve 15 to 25 years for the same offense, as the 24/7 news cycle reveal realities to white America that our black citizens have known for years --- the impact of Between the World and Me is all the more stunning.  Left to reflect, I recognize my teaching was not hurtful but was not all it could have been. I was arrogant, believing I was far “cooler” than I was.  I allowed a black student’s compliment (“Isn’t Bil Johnson the blackest white man you ever met?”) carry my feelings farther than I should have.  The “blackest white man” is still a clueless white man --- and a perfect example of just how clueless whites are.  Coates’s story about bumping into another black man at a baggage carousel and their exchanging a simple “My bad” and “You straight” was far more than a lesson in Ebonics.  “And in that exchange there was so much of the private rapport that can only exist between two particular strangers of this tribe we call black.” (pp.119-120) It’s not only that white people can never be members of that tribe, it’s recognizing the larger issues Coates raises about an American “Dream” built on oppression and “plunder.”  That blacks were slaves longer (by almost a century!) than they have been free is a stunning historical fact.  I was born only two years after Jackie Robinson first played for the Brooklyn Dodgers and five years before Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education.  Watching George Wallace stand in the doorway of the University of Alabama to stop integration is a clear t.v. memory, as is the “I Have a Dream” speech.  But I was never told I needed to be “twice as good” to get “half as much,” an adage that still holds true in black America.  Missing the parallels between Emmitt Till and Trayvon Martin speaks to the historical blind spot we white people, and our media, have perpetuated. 
         “Race” (a social construct and not a biological category) has always been the Elephant in America’s living room.  Between the World and Me makes it clear that it is a problem created by white people who insist black people must solve it.  The irony is perverse.  Those of us “who believe we are white” (Coates’s repeated phrase, adapted from James Baldwin) cannot ignore what this book clearly presents:  the United States was built on the backs of oppressed peoples who were sold an unattainable “Dream.”  What Coates makes abundantly clear is that the majoritarian culture built a world whose rules allow for their rationalizations while accepting the perpetuation of inequality; a world where “the police reflect America in all of its will and fear” (p.78), and that “Hate gives identity.  The nigger, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the Dream of being white, of being a Man.” (p. 60)  A brutally harsh critique that is flawlessly accurate. 
          Between the World and Me provides no answers for blacks or whites.  It offers advice from a black father to his son, pulling no punches and painting a realistic picture of the American landscape, historically and presently.  For white readers it provides a window to the world as it is, not how we’d like it to be, or hope it will be.  Eight years of a black President has not changed the realities of black life in America --- in some ways, the intensity of racism may have increased!
              Between the World and Me is direct and scathing, insightful and informative, eloquent and enlightening.  So, read it, all of you "who believe you are white."  Read it.

June 10, 2016


   
A Boomer View of the Future
​
     July 3, 2015
          Okay, it’s 2015, I’m 66 years old, and the world has passed me by.  Not just the technology, mind you, but the entire culture.  Some time in the 1990s I stopped paying attention to “popular” music (r & b, folk, alternative, you name it) and began listening only to jazz and blues.  Fashion, never my strong suit (classic NYC all-black for me), went in directions I still haven’t caught up with.  I pretty much stopped going to movies once CG kicked in and serious plots, film noir, and decent comedies faded from view (Adam Sandler is a movie star?  Please.)  Television became an even vaster wasteland once cable and satellite took over (little did Newton Minnow know what was coming when he coined that phrase in the 60s).  Sports, once my great love in life, became corrupted, diluted, and not much fun.  The NBA hasn’t been interesting or high quality since Bird and Magic left the scene, the NFL is a concussion and human growth hormone factory, and baseball, my greatest love, was taken over by PED junkies and over expanded to new levels of mediocrity. 
         And college athletes, of course, are simply unpaid professionals who rarely obtain degrees and, more and more, leave their lovely campuses after one or two seasons.  And, yes, I sound like a cranky old man yearning for the “good old days”  --- but  I do honestly believe that things like “today’s” music can’t hold a candle to the innovation and creativity of the 60s & 70s; that people who didn’t see Oscar Robertson complete an entire season averaging a triple-double, and those who watch Hollywood’s pandering to “Matrixes,” “Avatars,”  and Pixar, at the expense of creating a “Chinatown,” or even “Bull Durham” illustrate how we are living at the end of America’s Empire --- and it also proves just how far behind the culture curve I’ve fallen.
        Enough rant; on to observation.  While I know that, in white America, children’s’ names change generationally (I grew up with a lot of Jimmies, Susies, Bobbies, and K/Cathies) and, as a teacher, watched a generation of Sarahs, Megans, Jasons, Jessicas and Jennifers fly by.  So maybe I shouldn’t be shocked that the boys in this (Boomer’s) grandchildren generation all seem to have what used to be last names as their first names!  In a Little League game in Fairfield County, Connecticut, it would not be unusual for there to be at least one each of the following in a game: Logan, Connor, Cody, Casey, Embry, Cooper, Tyler, Cole, Bailey, Greyson, Harrison, Mason, Gavin, Everett, Callum, Braden, Rider, Lawson, and Austin.  Until about 2005 all those were surnames!  I just want to know if somehow, in my absence from participating in American culture, I missed the memo that instructed people to begin naming their male children with what used to be Last Names! 
          Much has been written about “helicopter” parents in this 21st Century but it must be witnessed to be appreciated.  My friend, Craig Lambert, in his book Shadow Work (Counterpoint Press, Berkeley, 2015), excellently documents what has happened to children’s’ sports (“Herds of Zebras Drive Kids off Sandlots,” pp. 82-97) because of adult interference.  Craig longs for the sandlot culture we grew up in during the 1950s and early 1960s, when kids set their own boundaries (literally, regarding their ball fields) and learned to resolve disputes, figure out what teamwork was about, and play games because it was “fun” and not a community, or parental, requirement.  Watching 9 and 10 year olds who are not very skilled at throwing and catching baseballs --- much less hitting or pitching to a strike zone --- leads me to wonder how and when they are supposed to develop those skills.  Boomers learned to throw, catch, hit, toss a spiral with a football, sink a jump shot from the key and most other athletic skills by simply putting hours of time in, practicing with each other, no adults around.  When do today’s kids get the time to do that?  What with “play-dates,” instrument and/or dance rehearsals and concerts, adult-organized and supervised sports practices ---- and then games?  Not to mention, from September to June,  the school-related pressures on the kids to do all those extra-curricular activities as well as their school work and homework.  Lambert notes the growth of “snowplow” parents, who push their children, the teachers,and  the school, as they see fit to meet their ends.  Where does it end?
         Interestingly, if we look at who is excelling in collegiate and professional sports we see a disproportionate number of “minority” and “Third World” athletes represented.  And here’s the more significant takeaway.  Very few of the Anglo suburban kids are headed for higher level (Bowl Game, Final Four, College World Series) collegiate, much less professional, teams.  No, those teams will be populated by the poor kids who don’t have the advantages and privilege of music or dance instruction, “play dates,” highly organized adult-supervised sporting leagues.  Those “poor” kids (from blighted urban neighborhoods and under-resourced Latin American backwaters) will learn to throw, catch, hit, play football and basketball the old fashioned way --- on the sandlots with their friends, in school yards playing older and better athletes along the way, and seldom being “supervised” by adults.  Eventually, of course, there will be coaches, but in a far less intense and dramatic fashion than the suburban kids.   And some of those kids, a very small percentage, by the way, will become the high level collegiate and professional athletes watched on TV. and in huge arenas and stadiums around the country.
          So, what about all those privileged, over-scheduled white suburban kids who have to play in those adult-supervised leagues and participate in all those other adult-run activities?  Well, looking at it with a wider lens, they are learning how to operate in corporate culture.  They’re learning what the CEOs (adults) want and how to do as they’re told (“coached”).  There’s not a lot of time to process and reflect on the games or other events they’re involved in but  they do learn how adults think and act and work --- valuable lessons for the ruling class and for those who will not only attend “prestigious” institutions of higher education but also get their degrees and more!  It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a social, political, and economic construct; an environment designed to reward those who already have advantages and privilege.  Keep an eye out for this prediction:
by 2050 an inordinate number of CEOs will have surname First Names.  Mark my words.

A Reaction to the Boomer Piece - by John Ormiston
My dear old friend, John Ormiston (Yale classmate and captain of our '71 Hockey Team), had a reaction to reading the Baby Boomer piece and sent the following note.  I think it's a great statement that reinforces Craig Lambert's point and my own perspective, so I got John's permission to put it here on the site.  Enjoy!

      We were, indeed, the last of the “impromptu” and, in some ways, ad hoc generation — the "learn by doing" with whomever you could get to do it with you; or by yourself, if necessary. That is how I learned to play hockey. And I mean learning by getting the shit kicked out of me at 1am in some godforsaken rink when I wasn’t old enough to drive by myself but could find someone to drive me there. Top down in a Chevy SS 427 (fast) in the summer, a few beers, a lot of bruises.  And a lot of smiles, as I was one of the happiest people in the world.  Why? Because I was learning to fly without any net and the only approval or acceptance needed came from my peers.  I am still trying to catch my breath from a shoulder in the gut that Tim Taylor gave me at Lynn Arena back in 1965…long before we became great friends.  Better still, he asked me to play with his Annisquam team the next week when they were short a man for the midnight game. (And, yes, I was at work the next morning with shovel-in-the-ground at 7am).
       Tell me: what is the best way to learn? I believe from our peers, from people who show you (if you are willing to apprentice) because they do it better, from competitors.  Not from parents, play dates, or scripted bullshit. I guess I believe that you have to want to get beyond the normal routines in order to have any kind of personal growth.
         Life is a contact sport — both physically and emotionally.  Make your own introductions.

 
 


​

 Editorial "Poetry" or maybe a Song

Smart Phones ​     
December 10-11, 2016
(Think “The Night Before Xmas” cadence)
 In the world before smart phones, everyone smiled,
Even walking  down streets, where garbage was piled,
News was delivered on paper, oh, my,
Not like today where it comes from the sky!
 
​In the world before smart phones we all got around,
Without GPS’s or Waze’s sounds,
We managed to talk without texts every day,
And nobody – NO ONE – withered away!
 
In the world before smart phones, no Snapchat or Tinder,
The world didn’t sit on everyone’s finger,
Sometimes we’d actually wait for our mail,
to come from a person,  who sometimes failed.
 
In the world before smart phones, we somehow got by,
We had pretty nice lives without  that Wi-Fi,
Our friends were quite real, and not virtual,
Nobody feared that their life would go viral!
 
In the world before smart phones, our lives were less stressed,
No hitting “Send” and making a mess,
Most of our world was straight face-to-face,
No virtual friends, no virtual place.
 
In the world before smart phones, how’d we tell time?
Or even take pictures, or shop --- not online!
We somehow had families and talked on the phone,
and, even better, found time alone.
 
So, listen up, people and techies alike,
This may be something that gives you a fright,
People lived ages without those new tools,
Maybe it’s time to stop acting like fools.
***********************************************
This is a chorus, if this becomes a song (in the fashion of Talking Heads “Facts are simple”).
 Smart phones may be lots of fun
but  smart phones really make you dumb,           
They do too much for me and you,
That REAL LIVE people ought to do…
Sure smart phones they can save you time,
But things we lose might be our minds!
So listen up, hear what I say,

Use your smart phone less each day!

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