Beyond School

An example worth sharing to students of a kid who figured out the power of simple blogging — combined, of course, with quality thinking and writing — and blogged his way to stardom by age 27. In China.

From the excellent China Digital Times, with emphasis added:

Han Han was named as the ‘Person of the Year” in 2009 by two influential publications: Guangzhou-based newspaper Southern Weekend（南方周末) and Hong Kong-based magazine Asia Weekly (亚洲周刊). Here are some excerpts of the relevant articles in both publications, translated by CDT:

By Asia Weekly: Han Han: Youthful Citizen vs Power 亚洲周刊二零零九年度风云人物韩寒——青春公民VS权力.

Han Han is a 27-year-old author and race car driver, and his blog has generated nearly 300 million visits since 2006. He follows and is concerned with public rights defending events. On the Shanghai “Fishing” incident, Hangzhou “70 yards” incident, forced eviction incident and other events his clear and powerful writing has generated an enormous influence on public opinion. As a member of the post-80s generation, he lives authentically and freely, and demonstrates the energy of China’s youthful citizens and the hope of civil society in China.

韩寒，二十七岁的作家和赛车手，博客浏览量近三亿，他关注、跟进公共维权事件，在上海「钓鱼」事件、杭州「七十码」、强拆民居事件中，言论清醒、有力，产生巨大舆论影响力；作为「八零后」一代，他活得真实、自由，展示中国青春公民的能量和中国公民社会的希望。

From Southern Weekend: The Name of Han Han Means to Offend [the Establishment]

In the public eyes for ten years, he is now a household name, and still young, he is called by his supporters “Young Master Han.” This nickname is flattering and lighthearted, saying that he has style and quality, and is not a boring person. Young Master Han is an author, the only National Champion of in both field and rally car race, is an idol, and owns a blog which has the highest traffic in the world. He is so famous, that people often forget how extraordinary it is that one person has all these different titles. But Young Master Han became the Han Han that is now widely respected after he started a blog, and began writing social commentary which resonates with our time. His self-styled commentaries caused controversy, but were also widely popular. One day, even the most conservative people started to realize that this young man was not full of nonsense. Behind the 300 million clicks on his blog posts was a fresh humanist radiating the wave of freedom. [read the rest]

Regular readers will know I’ve become somewhat of an elitist when it comes to urging the young to blog, only wanting to “attract” those rare students who have the gifts but don’t seem to understand the tools we now have to manifest those gifts to the world — and this example is a case in point: Han can write well and think critically, “follows” (surely via RSS?) issues he “is concerned with” and writes about them. In other words, he’s got the gifts of curiosity, passion, a drive for socio-political engagement and reform, and an apparently wicked mind and pen. And a “humanist” to boot.¹

The most delicious detail in this young man’s delicious life? His secondary school held him back a year, and he dropped out of school without graduating.

Han Han was born on September 23, 1982. He won the first class award in the first “New Concept” writing contest in 1999, and was held back in his first year in the Songjian Number 2 High School in Shanghai the same year. He dropped out of high school in 2000, and published his first novel “Three Gates.” This book has sold 2,030,000 copies since then.

{…}

In 2008, he published a selected collection of his blog posts, “Random Texts.” In 2009, he published a novel, “His Nation,” a collection of essays, “Grass,” and a collection of blog posts, “Lovely Predators”…. Also in 2009, he announced he would publish a magazine “A Chorus of Solos.” [Han Han originally planned to name the magazine Renaissance, but the name was not approved by authorities.]

P.S.–To any students at my school: if you think you have this kind of talent, and want me to help you learn the simple blogging tools, come see me. I’ll work overtime with you, and it will have nothing to do with grades, homework, or GPA’s.

1. I’m teaching the Enlightenment right now in European history, alongside my Chinese history course, and Han for all the world sounds like a Chinese Voltaire to me. And good god, just think if Voltaire could have blogged. [↩]

Oh, the French wit. Just the right sauce for my Freedom Fries:

Asked to sum up Bush’s record on the [climate change] issue, France’s climate ambassador Brice Lalonde chose instead to pass on a story he had heard.

A man comes to the White House asking to see Bush. “He doesn’t live here anymore,” he is told. The next two days he comes again asking the same question, and receiving the same answer.

On the fourth day, the exasperated guard shot back: “I’ve already told you, he’s no longer here.”

“I know, I know,” the man replied. “But it’s such a pleasure to hear you say it.” (source)

It really is a pleasure.

It’s also a pleasure to hear the (at long last) outgoing Texan-in-Chief tell us that there’s “proof of evolution” that Biblical literalism can’t reasonably refute. If you missed that, here’s a little video I cooked up to applaud the occasion:

Help the Texas Freedom Network in their work to defend science in schools.

In case you missed the post on Smart Mobbing against creationism in U.S. science textbooks – my, how I’d love to see high school students jump on this idea – the post is here.

Picture this: enterprising students in cities in Texas, particularly, and other cities nationwide – along with counterparts in Romania, which just mandated a Creationism-only science curriculum (I kid you not), and maybe Turkey, for good measure – organize Smart Mobs to strike, peacefully and simultaneously, out of the blue to demand only 21st century science – yes, I mean evolution – be included in their biology and other science textbooks.

And they do it quickly, before Texas’ Creationist-dominated Board of Education votes next Spring to insert Creationism yet again into its science standards. (See this post.)

They happen at such places as the Texas capitol building, the lobbies of textbook publishers’ headquarters, science museums, the national capitol, and wherever else seems like a good idea.

And they simply follow the steps of this excellent video (h/t to the Personal Democracy Forum):

And, because they’re good, peaceful citizens showing the will and responsibility to act for the education they deserve, the students who organize these events (more than once, please) include this as a bullet on their college application, to show that they’re more original and more consequential than the herd that joins the schooly National Honor Society and such. And the admissions officers at the best colleges see that bullet, and place their applications in the acceptance pile.

And they live actively and powerfully ever after.

If Obama’s doing it, kids, maybe it’s something you should consider as worth your time to learn. It might just help your future more than a couple hundred extra points on your SAT.

(Add to TheIndyDebate map)

So, because the Texas vote will set science standards for the next decade, textbook publishers will likely be aiming to please the creationists until 2018. And other states, to repeat Loewen, will have to choose amongst science textbooks designed for these Creationists in charge of Texas schools.

That’s why it matters. By 2018, Obama will have left his (knock wood) second term in office for a two full years – but most students during his presidency will have studied anti-science textbooks because of the actions of the Texas Board of Education.

Call it an Obama presidency with a Palin education policy.

3. Solutions?

Is it possible to influence the Texas BOE to vote down the provision in January or the following spring? It seems unlikely. Most of the members belong to the extreme religious right, with open ties to the creationist Discovery Institute that supported similar anti-science campaigns in Kansas and Pennsylvania.

But unlikely is not impossible. So here are some ideas:

1. Call on Obama to use the bully pulpit.

Click image to see Climate Change message on YouTube.

Last month, Obama declared an end to climate change science deniers. Earlier in the campaign, he openly voiced his opposition to creationism in all its guises during the campaign. If he appealed not to the ideological BOE, but to the nation – and the textbook industry – to shout down Texas, that might limit the damage to textbook content nationwide.²

2. Use Smart Mob and/or Tipping Point campaigns

Pressure the Texas BOE and, again, the textbook publishers, with opposition. Get schools nationwide to declare their support for evolution-friendly textbooks, and their refusal to buy anything else. (If I were to do that, show of hands: who would support it by spreading the word?)

3. Longer term, organize to defeat the creationists in school board elections.

It’s amazing that Board of Education officials need no scientific or educational expertise to be elected, yet they control the curriculum, standards, and funds of the public school system in Texas.

Worse, as U. of Arkansas Prof. Jay Greene argues,

Local school board elections on off-election days have very low turnout, often in the single digits. Given the obscurity of local school politics, it’s easier for the employees and their organized interests to dominate school politics. They’re just about the only ones following what is going on and voting in those elections.

What’s good for the creationist goose can be good for the scientific gander too – if only the gander played the politics smarter.

4. [Your ideas here]

1. Here’s a good first-hand account of the hearings in Austin. [↩]
2. Add to TheIndyDebate map. [↩]

Annotations of Obama’s 2004 Interview on His Religious Beliefs

Obama is a year older than me, and that’s only the beginning of the list of ways I relate to him. Here are more things we have in common:

He didn’t grow up rich and privileged. When he got out of college, he drove a car with a rust-hole in the passenger side through which Michelle could see the sidewalk, but he didn’t seem to care: it got him from Point A to B. I had a ‘66 VW Bus in the late ’80s with rust-holes too, and loved it as much as the ‘68 Plymouth Valiant and ‘66 Mercedes 220S I drove in the ’90s. (I especially loved the Mercedes because I found it covered in moss under a tree, where it had sat for years, and bought it for USD $700. I washed it, pulled its engine, learned auto mechanics by rebuilding it [call it a reaction to too much book-learning and not enough manual skills], dropped it back in, and drove it cross-country from Oregon to Tennessee the summer before I entered Boot Camp and the US Army.)

He studied philosophy, religion, politics, history, literature in college. He was seeking wisdom. That’s what I did too. I took my sweet time getting my college coupon – my Bachelor’s Degree – because I wasn’t in college to get out of it, but to get as much out of it as I could. So I took 16 years between my freshman year and my graduation date, studying whatever looked interesting in each semester’s catalogue, and dropping out altogether when I needed a break, or wanted to study more deeply than college permitted. The best drop-out year came after a philosophy class in which we read only a few chapters of Nietzsche. I dropped out to read all 16 or so of his complete works, plus a few biographies and scholarly studies. That took about a year. Then I went back to college for more. Apple CEO Steve Jobs was the same way, describing himself as a “college drop-in.” Obama read the Bible, read Nietzsche, and more, as a young adult. So did I.

Obama smoked, read, and wrote. So did I. I hope his writings were better than mine, but that’s not the point. The point is all of that reading and writing (the smoking was a fix to stay seated, awake, and focused) were self-compelled manifestations of a desire to make sense of life, history, and the world. Others were frying their brain cells in frat-house keg parties and sailing through classes they hoped would make them rich. I know that sounds self-righteous, but there it is. At 46 years old, I am thankful for all of that seeking. It has paid off in a daily happiness I never would have had otherwise. And when I compare myself to the rich parents of my students, who seem to have chosen those get-rich college classes and succeeded in reaching their goals – but at the expense of having a reading, writing, and culture life at all – I become even more thankful. They have more money than me, but they also seem poorer. I wouldn’t trade places.

Finally – the wrong word, since I suspect I’ll be fascinated by this man for the rest of my life, and will never delete the Google News “Obama” feed in my RSS Reader until Life deletes me – Obama says, in the interview below, that his life-long quest for values he felt right to live by (call it his “quest for God,” if you will) did not reach solid ground until he reached his fortieth year. Same here, roughly, though my years teaching Asian history in Shanghai threw some Buddha and Tao headily into my own mix, and very influentially, when I was 42 or so.

But the point is this: We talk, in our edu-lingo, about the importance of constructing meaning from our studies, not just swallowing and regurgitating received information.  What I love about the interview below is the same thing I (humbly) love about my own path: It shows an understanding of questions about God, the Sacred, and the Good and Right that are eminently constructed. This interview is an example of critical thinking about traditional religion at its best. And while I don’t share Obama’s views about many things below, I do admire that he seems to have gone through the hard work of reflecting his way to those views, instead of just believing the things he was taught by parents, preachers, and all teachers of old dogmas in his life.

Put another way, the interview below is an example of that other (rightfully) sacred cow of modern education, project-based learning – with a vengeance. Because the project was a life-long one, and so authentic it had nothing to do with assignments and grades – nothing to do with school at all. It had everything to do with authentic learning for its own sake, learning for the highest purpose of all: a life of wisdom. And if that sounds high-flown to you, it does to me too, but that doesn’t make it untrue. The guy just made history, after all, by becoming the first mixed-race president of the still very racist United States. If that doesn’t suggest a wisdom, I don’t know what does.

Before I tell you to “enjoy,” note the format of the below: the hollow bullets are snippets from the interview; the square indented bullets are my occasional annotations.

Now: “Enjoy.” We’ve got a life-long learner as our next president. Happy days are here again.

• Obama’s Fascinating Interview with Cathleen Falsani – Steven Waldman – Annotated

  Full transcript of a 2004 interview Obama gave to a religion columnist about his religious beliefs.

• tags: obama, religion, christianity, politics, elections08

  • part of my project in life was probably to spend the first 40 years of my life figuring out what I did believe – I’m 42 now – and it’s not that I had it all completely worked out, but I’m spending a lot of time now trying to apply what I believe and trying to live up to those values.
  • My grandparents who were from small towns in Kansas. My grandmother was Methodist. My grandfather was Baptist. This was at a time when I think the Methodists felt slightly superior to the Baptists. And by the time I was born, they were, I think, my grandparents had joined a Universalist church.
  • • Universal/Unitarian is my favorite denomination. – post by cburell

    [Read the rest below the fold....] Read the rest of this entry »

He wins in a Democrat landslide. Hopes are high for a progressive agenda unseen since the New Deal, and he delivers, in the first days of his presidency, an avalanche of legislation meant to fulfill those hopes.

But he also inherits a military conflict that his advisers are counseling him to escalate – with a “surge,” we might say – and the president follows that advice. Things go downhill from there.

“He,” of course, is President Lyndon Baines Johnson – LBJ. But the parallels with President Obama are obvious. Just substitute “Afghanistan and Iraq” for “Viet Nam.”

LBJ on PBS (click image for larger view)

What an amazing time to be a US History teacher – especially with resources like the “American Experience: The Presidents” documentary series from America’s Public Broadcasting System (PBS) available, free and online (and many available for free download, with close captions ideal for ESL students – get ‘em while they’re hot!).

I just watched the LBJ episode and can’t wait to watch more. Coupling Obama’s presidency with LBJ’s in a compare/contrast discussion would surely enliven any US History classroom this year.

Whether you’re a teacher, student, or life-long learner, you can’t go wrong with this adventure in education. It beats the pants off of textbooks.

(And teachers, be sure to notice the teaching resources and podcasts also available for free on the site.)

‘Nuff said.  I hope it puts the emotion in history for you as it did for me. It’s tragic how emotionless schools can make such an intense subject.

Looking ahead, I have great hope that we will have the courage to embrace the changes necessary to save our economy, our planet and ultimately ourselves.

In an earlier transformative era in American history, President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon within 10 years. Eight years and two months later, Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface. The average age of the systems engineers cheering on Apollo 11 from the Houston control room that day was 26, which means that their average age when President Kennedy announced the challenge was 18.

This year similarly saw the rise of young Americans, whose enthusiasm electrified Barack Obama’s campaign. There is little doubt that this same group of energized youth will play an essential role in this project to secure our national future, once again turning seemingly impossible goals into inspiring success.
–Al Gore, “The Climate for Change.” NYTimes, 2008/11/08 [emphasis added]

How dire is the climate situation? Consider what Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the United Nations’ prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said last month: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.” Pachauri has the distinction, or misfortune, of being both an engineer and an economist, two professions not known for overheated rhetoric.

In fact, far from being an alarmist, Pachauri was specifically chosen as IPCC chair in 2002 after the Bush administration waged a successful campaign to have him replace the outspoken Dr. Robert Watson, who was opposed by fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil. So why is a normally low-key scientist getting more desperate in his efforts to spur the planet to action?

Part of the answer is the most recent IPCC assessment report. For the first time in six years, more than 2,000 of the world’s top scientists reviewed and synthesized all of the scientific knowledge about global warming. The Fourth Assessment Report makes clear that the accelerating emissions of human-generated heat-trapping gases has brought the planet close to crossing a threshold that will lead to irreversible catastrophe. Yet like Cassandra’s warning about the Trojan horse, the IPCC report has fallen on deaf ears, especially those of conservative politicians, even as its findings are the most grave to date.
–Source

Your political persuasion aside, I hope we can all agree that the level of engagement and enthusiasm for democratic engagement – for citizenship - seen in the US presidential elections was an inspiration.

It would be sad to watch that high tide recede, now that the elections are over, as if citizenship in a democracy consisted of nothing more than voting once every few years.

That’s why I’m passing along this request from Ståle Brokvam at International School of Manila to encourage both teachers and students to consider going to the 350.org website to call on President-Elect Obama to attend the UN Climate Meetings in Poland this December.

This 30-second activity, done now, might be a memorable experience for students, if you think about it. Sending a personal appeal to such an historic president might leave a deep impression on them (imagine being able to send JFK or Ronald Reagan an online letter), and one that’s good for the future of democracy in the world. Why? Because this is an act not of adulation and celebrity-esque buzz, but is instead one of treating elected officials – even the president-elect – as the public servants we expect them to be. And letting them know the public will by communicating it in writing.

Put another way, teaching kids to feel excited about an historical politician is one thing; teaching them to feel empowered to communicate their will to that person is another. The first is more about pride, which is fine; but the second, finer still, is about citizenship.

An added bonus: since the president of the US affects the world with his decisions, this site is open to the world. There’s even a globe upon which you and your students can pin their identities.

And the best bonus of all: This would not be an act of irrelevant schooliness. Unless you doubt the overwhelming consensus of scientists worldwide (see the article linked above), climate change does require rapid and decisive leadership on the part of President-elect Obama. So this beats filling out a worksheet.

Body Language: Blue-Eyes in Front, Brown-Eyes in Back

Preface: What I Learned from the Comments on My “Portrait of the Teacher as a Young Racist” Post

I was surprised that my story of anti-black racism in the American South drew strong reactions in the comment thread from readers in New Zealand, Australia, England, and regions of the American Mid-west (where there were no African-Americans, but there were Native Americans).

I start with this point to urge Americans and non-Americans to at the very least watch the film linked below. It’s one of the most remarkable moments in education I’ve ever seen. And it should resonate on a global, and not merely American, scale.

A Day for History

It’s November 4, 2008, an Election Day in the US that, barring a miracle or a crime, will live as long as human history does.

It makes me regret that I’m not teaching US History this year, and able to share this hopeful teachable moment the way I shared the hopeless US invasion of Iraq when teaching World History in 2003.¹  So consider this little post a fantasy of what I would somehow squeeze into my syllabus this week – which I also fantasize someone reading this post might do in the real world.

It has to do with an online documentary goodie that I’ll deliver at the end of this post, but first, a little background from a great book:

“Emotional Objectivity”: A Paradox

Toward the end of his must-read Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, James Loewen writes:

When two-thirds of American seventeen-year-olds cannot place the Civil War in the right half-century, or 22 percent of my students reply that the Vietnam War was fought between North and South Korea, we must salute young people for more than mere ignorance. This is resistance [to " 'learning' isolated, incoherent, and meaningless data"] raised to a high level. Students are simply not learning even those details of American history that educated citizens should know. Still less do they learn what caused the major develpments in our past. Therefore, they cannot apply lessons from the past to current issues.

Unfortunately, students are left with no resources to understand, accept, or rebut historical referents used in arguments by candidates for office,² sociology professors, or newspaper journalists. If knowedge is power, ignorance cannot be bliss.

Emotion is the glue that causes history to stick. We remember where we were when we heard of the attack on the World Trade Center because it affected us emotionally. . . . As textbook critic Mrs. W. K. Haralson writes, “There is no way the glowing, throbbing events of history can be presented fairly, accurately, and factually without involving emotion” (Loewen, 342-3). [Emphases added.]

Linger on the paradox in that last line. In essence, it argues that without emotion, historical objectivity is a fallacy, and this goes against the popular conception of objectivity as a dispassionate stance – “Present all sides and let students come to their own conclusions.” While some history teachers I have known and worked with understood that “all sides” (yes, a problematic concept) can be presented with the emotions attaching to those respective sides, but without crossing the line into indoctrination, more have mistaken this tightrope-walk for a breach of the objective ideal of the profession.

Loewen and Haralson, though, claim that without experiencing the emotions of history, students find it irrelevant and boring, and really don’t learn it more deeply than is necessary to pass the class. Garbage in and out.

The Connotative Maelstrom of a “President Barack Hussein Obama”

Without getting too deep about all of this – I swore I’d keep this post short – just look at all of the strands of major themes in U.S. history woven into that title: President Barack Hussein Obama. Race and racism. The legacy of slavery. The challenge of Islam and post-9/11 terrorist fears. Intermarriage and single parenting. Black liberation theology. FDR and the Great Depression.  JFK in an African-American Camelot. Bobby Kennedy. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jim Crow. Now factor in the race against McCain, a Vietnam Cold Warrior.  On and on go the tropes attached to this man, and back and back into US history go all the attendant hopes and fears. It reminds me of a long-ago post in which David Warlick plays with the idea of teaching history backwards, from the present to the past. All of these issues could begin with explorations of the Obama presidency, and trace the causes of its controversy that make it so historical.

This is more than a “teachable moment;” it’s a full-blown teachable year.

But I’ll stop there, confess again my envy of all US history teachers worldwide, and move on to deliver a plug to a documentary that PBS Frontline makes available to us all, online, for free. It’s called:

A Class Divided

If you take no other recommendation from me ever in your life, take this one. I had read about this famous lesson before, and about the documentary film, but had never watched it myself. So I just took a break during this post to watch it with my wife, and it jolted me in ways text couldn’t.

This third-grade teacher put the emotion in history, and judging by the film, taught her third-graders a lesson that changed them not “until garbage out,” but for life.

From the PBS FRONTLINE site:

This is one of the most requested programs in FRONTLINE’s history. It is about [Jane Elliott,] an Iowa schoolteacher who, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, gave her third-grade students a first-hand experience in the meaning of discrimination. This is the story of what she taught the children, and the impact that lesson had on their lives. . . .

[O]n the night of the day that Martin Luther King was murdered, [Jane's] memories and experiences had coalesced into an idea of how she might give her third-graders a sense of what prejudice and discrimination really meant.

Jane took a deep breath and plunged in. “I don’t think we really know what it would be like to be a black child, do you?” she asked her class. “I mean it would be hard to know, really, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves, wouldn’t it?” Without real interest, the class agreed. “Well, would you like to find out?”

The children’s puzzlement was plain on their faces until she spelled out what she meant. “Suppose we divided the class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed people,” she said. “Suppose that for the rest of today the blue-eyed people became the inferior group. Then, on Monday, we could reverse it so that the brown-eyed children were inferior. Wouldn’t that give us a better understanding of what discrimination means?”

So I’ve said enough. If you do watch it, I’d love to read any thoughts in comments. The social engineering aspect of the lesson is particularly gnarly. After seeing its results, though, and hearing the views of the townspeople about it, is this something you think should be used in classrooms around the world? Have you any stories of such a thing, or lessons similar to it?

Whatever the case, here’s to Jane Elliott, a new hero in my teaching pantheon.

1. And any Surge Enthusiasts out there, please note Petraeus and other generals are far from sharing the blithe forecasts of Bush, McCain, and others in Washington. Several bombings this week in Iraq show how fragile that peace is. [↩]
2. For more on this angle, see yesterday’s post on the correlation of successful fear-mongering campaigns to voters’ educational levels [↩]

Interesting post on “secular parenting” writer Dale McGowan’s The Meming of Life:

….If it’s true that education leads to the left, fear-based campaigning should increase in effectiveness as education levels decrease, and you’d expect states with the lowest per-capita educational attainment to favor the fear-mongering candidate.

The list below ranks all 50 states and the District of Columbia in order by proportion of college degrees in the population (highest to lowest). Those in blue are favoring Obama (as of Nov. 1). Those in red favor McCain. Black indicates a current toss-up:

TOP THIRD BY EDUCATION LEVEL (15 blue, 2 red)
District of Columbia
Massachusetts
Maryland
Colorado
Virginia
New Hampshire
Connecticut
New Jersey
Minnesota
Vermont
Kansas
California
New York
Washington
Utah
Delaware
Illinois

[click here for the rest of the list]

The colors change remarkably as the list continues down the educational ladder, and McGowan concludes with interesting info on the conviction levels (“I’m sure my choice is best”) of voters across the states. Seems the “intellectual arrogance” accusation so often tossed at the “educated elites” from those who seem to prefer a Joe the Plumber in the Oval Office is actually a quality that is common among the “elite-bashers” themselves.

See the full article here, and draw your own conclusions.

[Last paragraph revised for clarity.]

.

Georgia:

“One good thing about Jennifer Hudson’s family tragedy – two less Obama voters.”

A 57-year old grandmother is killed in her home, as is her 29-year-old son. A seven-year-old child is missing and there is every reason to fear for his survival as well.

And [a reader who commented as] “Dagny and John’s Love Child” expresses pleasure that two Obama voters are now gone.
–Jay Bookman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

North Carolina:

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — The Cape Fear BBQ and Chicken Restaurant. Some powerful and at times ugly interaction today.

12:33 p.m. Sen. Barack Obama entered the barbecue joint where an older and majority white clientele of dozens was eating lunch after church services. At the other end of the restaurant, Diane Fanning, 54, who works at a discount club, began yelling: “Socialist, socialist, socialist -– get out of here!”

….Later, Obama came to the long table where Fanning and other members of a local First Presbyterian church were gathered. He held out his hand to her to shake it and asked, “How are you, ma’am?” but she declined to shake.
–LA Times

Tennessee:

Korea:

It’s after midnight and my wife thinks I’m brushing my teeth and coming to bed. Instead, I’m holed away here in my writing corner, needing to get something off my chest at what, you’ve surely noticed, may be a world-historical moment, whether you’re an American or not. I’ve tried to get it right and don’t feel I’ve succeeded. But I want to put it out anyway, in time to meet that moment.

~ ~ ~

Last Things First

I’m a 46-year-old man, a white minority in an interracial marriage in Korea.

Many people in my adopted country look down on my wife for marrying me. They look down on me too. They stare. They occasionally try to menace. They say things in their language that they think I don’t understand. I catch enough words to get the gist.

Other people here, though – my in-laws above all – accept me, value me, and show me through their actions things that feel like love. They help me when I don’t even ask.

You need to know that before you read on.

A Portrait of the Teacher as a Young Racist

The Winner’s Ticket

I spent my first eighteen years in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a scenic little rhinestone studding the Bible Belt in the American South.

When I was about eight years old, around 1970, I was the bat-boy for my older brother’s baseball team. I wore the team uniform with pride, indifferent to the laughs it drew for being several sizes too big.

One night, the team played a city championship game of some sort in the city’s semi-pro Lookout Stadium, in downtown Chattanooga. It was a big affair for us little boys.

Two things were interesting about that night.

The first is trivial, though I want to read meaning into it, and it’s simply this: out of two thousand or so tickets drawn from in a raffle before the game, my ticket was a winner. I remember the laughter as I went onto the field in that oversized uniform to claim my Louisville Slugger baseball bat, emblazoned with Hank Aaron’s signature. The 34-inch bat was as oversized for my eight-year-old frame as was the uniform, but I was proud of that Hank Aaron. Aaron was a Southerner on a Southern team – Go, Atlanta – and even though he was black, he’d set the world on fire by breaking Babe Ruth’s record for most career home runs.

I’m convinced my ticket was drawn because, having no idea what a raffle was and thinking that ticket was just an admission ticket, I had wadded it up as trash and thrown it under my seat as soon as I sat down. When someone came to our section to collect the tickets, a teammate of my brother’s – his name was June, and he was African-American – helped me find it, and tossed it in the box for me.

To this day I still maintain there was a lesson there: The hand that drew my ticket felt something different when it hit that wadded thing among all the flat, straight ones. My ticket won because it was different. I’ve wadded my tickets in every raffle from that day to this. And since then – though usually not by accident – I’ve also wadded up and discarded much of what I was taught was right in my childhood.

The Loser’s Joke

The second thing that happened that night occurred as we rode home after the game.

There must have been more than one vehicle taking the team back to the school, because I was surrounded on that ride home by only white players. June and the other black players were not in the back of that truck with us.

We sat in the open bed of that truck riding under a very fine night through the very worst slums of the city. My brother’s team must have won, because spirits were high all around. These bigger boys hooted, they hollered, they filled the night with their voices. Some of those voices, as we drove through this poor neighborhood, cried off-color things.

I must have wanted to impress them, and so gave it a shot – with the earliest instance of rhetorical sophistication in my entire life. At the appropriate lull in the noise, I filled the silence in that sad neighborhood’s night by yelling, at the top of my eight-year-old lungs:

“Welcome to Nig*ertown, USA! Population: Too many!“

“Population: Too many!” – What a great line. Almost as good as “Two less Obama voters.”

Citadel Yearbook 1977

It was a hit for many of the older boys. They slapped me on the back, congratulated my brother for having a little brother with such wit, and for that brief moment, I was on top of the world. With that one joke, I seemed to have suddenly grown into that uniform.

But that world was the wrong one, and there are hopeful signs it’s dying now. And that uniform? It’s wrong too, and too small for us all.

I’m a 46-year-old man, a white minority in an interracial marriage in Korea. Many people in my adopted country look down on my wife for marrying me. They look down on me too.

Thinking back on that childhood moment, I wonder if any darker-skinned boy or girl, sitting on one of those anxious porches or stoops in that fine night, heard that happy line. I suspect several did. And I wonder if they still remember it, like I do, almost forty years later. Again, I suspect they do.

It’s too late to say I’m sorry to them. But it’s not too late for a different amends.

Baptised in Bigotry

Monday School in Dixie

Though my family didn’t go to church beyond the occasional Christmas or Easter service, my childhood was nonetheless suffused with the Southern Baptist brand of Christianity. I’ll only point at the regular visits to my elementary school of a sweet little lady we called “Mrs. Methuselah.” Her real name I’ve forgotten, but not her blue hair and palsied voice, which croaked out Bible stories as her bony, blue-veined hands manipulated felt Bible characters on an easel – all at taxpayer expense. Because of her visits, I remember to this day the names “Shadrach, Meschach and Abednigo,” though I’ve long since forgotten their story.

I also remember this verse:

“The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the glory of God lasts forever.”

I wrote that verse in crayon in a little state-sponsored, constitution-violating scrapbook she assigned us to keep. I Scotch-taped some grass from the school lawn underneath it that obligingly turned brown after a few days. Beside the grass, for good measure, I taped a dead flower, and drew above them both – framed with a jagged border I hoped suggested lightning – a stern, bearded God. I was a very good student in those days, doing whatever teacher told me to do. Being a Good Boy was for some strange reason extra-important to me. It still is today, with the difference that now I want to be a Good Man.

Anyway, this was 1968, probably. My first year of school. First grade.

At that time, of course, I had no idea my country was dropping napalm on peasant farmers and their families in thatched huts on the other side of the world – surely at the very moments this good woman was giving us these lessons. John McCain probably had no idea he’d soon fall from those skies himself, alongside his payload, while I was still learning my ABC’s, Matthew Mark Luke and Johns, and Shadrach, Meshach and Abednigos in a public school.

Scott’s House

Scott was my best friend in those years. I spent as many days at his home as I did in my own. Scott’s mother and father were second parents to me, and good people. The bookcase and side-tables in their living room were full of books by an author whose name I, the good first-grader, was proud to be able to read: the Reverend Billy Graham.

Scott had a couple of sisters, though, who were already in high school when we were in first grade. Scott and I would often go into their bedroom when they weren’t around, and I can still remember other names I first became aware of in that household, names attached with images on the sisters’ many vinyl LP records: Joan Baez. Bob Dylan. Joni Mitchell. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Jimi Hendrix.

I remember being struck with how different these names felt in comparison to Reverend Graham.

Desegregation is "communist" work of "anti-Christ": Some things don't change. Little Rock, Ark., protest, 1959.

Stefon, Cedric, General, and Scott’s Father

Elbert Long Elementary and Junior High School must have been desegregated a few years before I entered first grade there. At eight years old, I was as clueless about that milestone in American history as I was about those Asian farmers in thatched huts who were daily aflame, literally, via the same tax dollars that paid the good old lady to teach me about fading flowers, withering grass, and glory of God.

All I knew was that I was a six-year-old with classmates who were about 50% dark-skinned and 50% light-skinned. My otherwise decent grandparents called the dark-skinned ones “niggras.”

~

I'm front row, center. Stefon and General are in the third row.

Besides Scott and some other whites, I had friends whose names were as different as their skin-tone: Stefon Talbot, whose spondeed first name was as distinctive as the long-lashed white eyes shining like pearls from his smooth, jet-black face; Cedric Winston, so much bigger than the rest of us we called him “Big Boo,” whose preacher-father equipped him with some hymns that made us laugh to tears when he performed them; and most memorable of all, General Lee Webster. General was not a nickname like Boo – it was birth-certificate official. General had a tougher life than Stefon and Boo – not as handsome as Stefon, not as gently parented as Boo, and infinitely more beetle-browed and bug-eyed than both of them, with a forehead twice as high as normal – and it showed in his hair-trigger temper. Thinking back on him now, General was a black Mercutio to my Romeo, and I loved him.

We all lived near school, and we all walked to and from it. Often, after school, we’d walk together to each others’ homes, to the mall, to all the places we roved in those days.

One day at Scott’s house, his Southern Baptist, Billy Graham-revering father pulled me aside and, with great concern and gravity, asked me, “Clay, why did I see you walking with that black boy on E. Brainerd Road?”

“That black boy” was General.

Coach Moser Teaches History

I’ve changed all the other last names in this story, but I’m not changing Doug Moser’s. Mr. Moser was my junior high art teacher and, more importantly, baseball and wrestling coach. He was new at our school when, now age 12, General, Scott, Stefon, Boo, and I entered seventh grade in 1974.

Coach Moser, seated left. Scott behind him, left. Me standing, right.

I don’t know much about Doug Moser’s background, beyond that his accent marked him as an outsider to the South. Thinking about him now, I’m struck by the fact that he coached several sports but didn’t, like most coaches, teach health or physical education – he taught art. And that suggests he had something in him refined, something cultured. I know that now because I’m a teacher, and know that teachers teach subjects, typically, that they liked in college.

Doug Moser was also, I suspect, fairly new at teaching. He looked to be in his twenties, so he couldn’t have been that far out of college, and while he was married, he and his wife had no children. But the biggest clue to his newness was his classic “new teacher” attempt to create true, caring, authentic relationships with his students.

He invited General, Scott, and me to come with him and his wife to a college wrestling tournament one weekend. He paid for the tickets, he paid for the cokes and hot dogs – and he paid with the disillusionment. My friends and I were too young and immature to appreciate his gesture; instead, we slurped the cokes and wolfed the franks while obsessing – for a ridiculous thirty minutes at least, as we sat in the bleachers two rows behind him and his wife – on some stupid chant we’d created around his name. “Middi-mo, middi-mo, middi-mo.” We chanted it over and over, laughing hysterically at this unfunny play on the name “Mr. Moser,” while he sat awkwardly with his wife, pretending it wasn’t happening. We never had a decent conversation with him that whole day.

He never invited us to a second outing. A teacher now myself, I understand why: I tried similar things, and got similar results. I’ve experienced that sad gap, as Joni Mitchell would sing, “from both sides now.”

But I liked Mr. Moser. In his art class thirty years ago, I was drawing a still life of an ear of corn. He eased up behind me, and very quietly said – I think this is verbatim – “Nice. You’ve got a good eye.” And that felt calming, affirming, good to hear – so good, I remember the corn and the man and his words now, at 46. I remember very little else from those years so clearly.

In short, Doug Moser seems to have been an athlete, an artist, an outsider, and an idealistic young man. And while my bone-headed friends and I disappointed his idealism at that wrestling match, we later, he told us, redeemed it.

Baseball and Race, Take Two

It happened at another baseball game. I was about the age of my brother that night I disgraced myself in the back of that truck by shouting my harmless little genocidal joke.

We had lost the game. We were in the locker room, sullen and self-important over this bit of stick-and-ball-centered trivia, when a few boys walked in who weren’t on the team.

They were all African-American.

One of them spouted some trash about our loss that rubbed me the wrong way, and I told him to shut up. A cliche stand-off followed and we finally came to blows. As usual, I probably took more punches than I threw, but who cares. All my fights back then (and I hope it’s so for kids today) were always broken up before they got dangerous, and this one was no different – with one exception: My friends separated us by pulling me back by my arms. This rendered me defenseless, and my enemy took full advantage of this by landing a free punch or three to my face. The punches didn’t hurt, and it wasn’t serious. Soon that whole gang was persuaded to leave the locker room.

We went back to showering and changing clothes, until somebody came into the locker room with some news: There was a gang of black boys waiting to jump me outside the building.

Again, though I didn’t understand it then, this was 1974 – exactly a decade after the Civil Rights Act ended Jim Crow and racial segregation. My friends and I were guinea pigs in the progressive “social engineering” decried by so many conservatives and reactionaries.

My teammates – not only Scott, but also Stefon, “Boo”, and General – surely didn’t understand this either. They just did what was natural to them: they protected their friend by walking out with him, and stood by him when that gang appeared – and they faced that gang down. I got home safely because of them.

The next school day, there was the schooly disciplinary thing, with the predictable slapped wrists and all of that. But afterwards, at baseball practice, Coach Moser gathered us up for a talk. And in that talk, he interpreted what was just a schoolyard fight to us as the slice of progressive American history it was. He told us that he was not proud of the fact that there was a fight, but that he was proud that in that fight, watching the white boy’s back against the black boys, were other “black boys”: Stefon, Cedric, and General. They had taken sides based not on skin color, but on something deeper. And he was proud of them.

Years earlier, in a little harmless American genocidal humor, I had joked that the black population should be decreased.

Coach Moser interpreted that moment in my young life in a way that taught me something important.

First Things Last

I’ve left my Southern roots and, like that raffle ticket, become something different. Many other Southerners have too, thank goodness, as the polls show. They’re voting for the more intelligent and respectful candidate – who happens to be darker-skinned – instead of the reactionary ticket indulging in smears cloaked in unAmerican Stars and Stripes and unChristian Crosses.

So goodness bless Ms. Betty Waylett, the fellow churchgoer of Ms. Fanning, the lady who refused to shake Obama’s hand in that North Carolina diner, and bless the church’s Pastor Bremer, too, who’s voting McCain for reasons other than race, for their remarks in that LA Times article:

[Obama] spoke at length with many of the other parishioners at the long banquet table, however, and got a much friendlier reception as he spoke about healthcare, taxes and Social Security. Fanning told the pool reporter, “Some of them are just nicer than I am. I know how some of them think.”

But several of her fellow churchgoers said their support was genuine. Betty Waylett, 76, told him, “You’re doing a great job.” She told the pool reporter she is a Republican but will vote for Obama because she likes the way he speaks and his manner.

Waylett, who is white, said Obama’s race was not a factor. “I never thought about it one way or the other.”

Pastor Randal Bremer, also at the table, said Obama told him, “Whether you vote for me or not I’ll need your prayers.” Bremer told the pool reporter, “I’m very impressed by his ability to meet people on a down-to-earth level” and that he would pray from him but that he planned to vote for John McCain, mostly because he prefers smaller government and McCain’s position on the Iraq war.

Scott’s father was a good man, but – Reverend Billy Graham and all – a weak one. He couldn’t apply the Golden Rule of his faith unto all others. “That black boy” – “that one” named General Lee Webster – was closer to any god than the good Southern Baptist father of my white friend.

A different ticket, a welcome change.

Stefon, Cedric, and General sided with me against their skin color because they knew I was on the right side. I was on the wrong side when I poisoned that childhood night in a poor neighborhood with that shameful “Rebel Yell.” And I’m siding with Barack Hussein Obama because I believe he’s on the right side as well.

Doug Moser saw history when the desegregation experiment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 redeemed itself in our schoolyard ten years later. That was the beginning. I didn’t think I’d live to see the culmination of that experiment in the election of an African-American president of the United States in my lifetime.

I’m awed to discover I may be wrong. I want to see more history on November 4. I want to see an America – and my American South, in particular – that has learned that race, while nothing we should vote for, is also nothing we should vote against.

Images:
Hank Aaron by Jaboobie
Citadel Yearbook
Little Rock Brown v. Board of Education protest: Lib. of Congress