As one who tracks our alumni on facebook I am exposed and frequently entertained by the slang of college students. No change seems to strike me more viscerally than their casual use of the “N” word. My reluctance to spell it speaks to its taboo nature. As one who grew up in the South of the 1950’s and lived through the civil rights movement, the word carries considerable moral and historical weight for me which makes its current uses difficult. Are we seeing a reversion to older forms of discrimination or a genuine shift in racial attitude?
I have defended teaching Huckleberry Finn even as I had wished Twain had written “Slave Jim” instead of “Nigger Jim.” I have come to understand the multiple uses of this word within the African American community. Claude Brown’s wonderful essay from the 1970’s on the “soul word” is perhaps the finest balance of intelligent linguistics and felt personal experience about this topic. But I knew that as a white I was barred from this discourse.
Hip hop culture seems to have changed all this. Young white people–mostly men–refer to each other an “my niggah” as if the “ah” erased much of the word’s evil history. At first, I saw this phenomenon as simply disaffected, but relatively privileged, white youth claiming an outsider position. As one who spend the summer of 1968 in San Francisco, I can assure them that this is not a productive political move. Then across my facebook wall I watched a white student call his African American friend “my Niggah,” and saw the African American reply with friendship and no sense of insult. I was shocked. Had the world of my students so changed that this was possible?
Chuck Berry and Motown are credited with moving the civil rights agenda forward. On reflection, I see that America has accepted the cultural prominence of Black people long before it has included them in America’s material prosperity. This morning’s Washington Post reports that the unemployment crises as hit African American men 3 times harder than their white counterparts. The divisions remain, yet this new use of the “N” word seems to imply that generational solidarity may be more important than race . Also this usage marks an era of greater friendship and contact between the cultures.
So maybe this usage is a good thing or maybe I’m just too old to accept a world in which I cut on my computer and am greeted with “Good Morning my Twiggahs.”
Tagged as:
African,
African American,
Chuck Berry,
Civil rights movement,
Ethnicity,
hip hop,
linguistics,
Popular culture
I just had a birthday. Never mind which one. But I have reached an age when birthdays make me reflect on the past more than project into the future. Ten years ago I resigned a tenured college position to accept my current job as a prep school administrator. I have always said that there are two good motivations for becoming a teacher–love of the subject matter and love of helping others learn. These are obviously not mutually exclusive motives, but for most of my college career the love of subject predominated. The system works that way. One writes and studies and “keeps up with the field.” As a young man, I embraced this ethic wholeheartedly.
Now at the end of my career, I’m on the opposite pole. My job is to help students who have not adapted to school culture to learn or more accurately to figure out how to help their teachers help them. I was away at a conference several weeks ago when I had one of those moments that affirm one’s choices. I was checking my email in the midst of a session. (I know why they call them crackberries) Several teachers had suggested that a student who I’ll call Joseph (Not His Real Name) join our rather elite group of academic tutors.
I had worked closely with Joseph and remembered clearly the student who had entered our school. He did drugs, he didn’t pass courses, and was convinced he couldn’t graduate high school. His first months here he became so depressed we had to send him our for a psychiatric evaluation. He returned a zombie from too many medications. Working with our doctors and psychologists we attacked the depression and reduced the medication. Joseph received the tutoring he now volunteered to give. He was encouraged to attempt difficult work and praised when he succeeded. He also suffered the lack of privileges and the extra study halls that any failing student experiences.
We are a school based on the Twelve Steps. If I asked Joseph what helped him to become a student, he’d say something like, “I learned to pray” or “I have God in my life.” Now the brain research on the effects of prayer, mediation, or other mindful practice isirrefutable. Brains whose persons do these things tend to be quieter and focused. What ever effects the brain of Joseph may have experienced, the mind of Joseph has learned about a new world through the school’s teaching about god as you understand him. In that world he is not the center, he is given permission to succeed and because he has learned to trust in a higher power, he has learned to trust his compatriots.
My reflections on Joseph are my reflections on my gamble I took ten years ago. The process of getting here has been fun and here is a pretty good place.
I have been tweeting recently with someone calling herself Slum Goddess. I immediately asked if she was an East Village Fugs fan. As it turns out she is an expat American, living in London, whom some juvenile judge had banned from Greenwich Village when she was fourteen. Her screen name is drawn from a Tuli Kupferberg song, the chorus of which is:
Slum Goddess put away that knife
Slum Goddess come and be my wife.
Slum Goddess of the lower East Side
For those of you too young to remember even parts of the sixties. The Fugs, led by Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, were the original underground rock band. They took their name from the euphemism that Norman Mailer’s publisher had forced on him when he published The Naked and the Dead, in the days before the fuck barrier had been broken. In those days when obscenity was still a challenge to the establishment, their name and some of their lyrics issued a clarion call. They were also interested in poetry and their rendition of William Blake’s “A Sunflower Weary of Time” still remains one of my favorite interpretations of Blake.
This twitter exchange sent my mind spinning and sent me back to my last night in New York before I went to Botswana in the Peace Corps. I and several of my compatriots went pub crawling through the East Village and ended in up in the offices of the East Village Other where we duly made “southern African correspondents.” I don’t think any of us ever filed a story.
I remembered people I hadn’t thought about in years and wondered what had happened to them, but not enough to google them and find out.I remember the brash, confident, and fairly foolish young man I had been with more fondness than chagrin. But mostly I marveled at how memory can serve up images that seem really fresh, even though I know they are over 40 years old. I regret nothing have done, but know that too many of my days have not rendered up images that will sustain me. I was happy to discover this one still does.
Tagged as:
Botswana,
Ed Sanders,
Norman Mailer,
Slum Goddess,
Tuli Kupferberg,
William Blake
To rename is to revise, and to revise is to Signify.–Henry Louis Gates, Jr
In his best known and perhaps best piece of scholarship, The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates traces the development of a distinctly different African American rhetoric. He begins with Yoruba praise songs and traces this development through slavery, many writers and even Mohammad Ali. Indeed he talks about the “trope a dope.” African Americans developed a double voiced rhetoric full of both hyperbole and hidden meaning which was designed to mean one thing in the speaker’s community and another in the wider world. Presumably then Gates knows whites hear certain rhetoric differently than African Americans do.
We can imagine the good professor, tired from his Chinese journey, trying out a little trope a dope on the policemen who missing the irony, as Gates’s theory predicts he would, arrests the professor. Part of my enjoyment of this event has been the way in which knowledge has been rendered useless by “signifying.” For African Americans, including the president, the arrest was an absurd example of what happens too often to African Americans. Its value as a signifier exceeds its value as an individual event.
The white press pretended the event had no “signifying power,” and examined it as a single event. Of course, the president’s remarks were seen as symbolic and “inappropriate.” A similar fate befell Jeremiah Wright whose preaching, or at least the clips I saw on television, were full of signifying and in that sense no different from many other African American preachers. Consistently whites tend to hear only the single voice of a doubled voice and to miss the riffs and syncopation.
This issue ended not by court resolution, not by a journalistic transcript of every word spoken in the Gates house that evening, but in a flury of signifying. The White House garden was turned into that most American of summer places–the patio beer party. The vice president was there to equalize the racial balance and we had that most American of solutions the face to face sit down. All done as a silent movie.
The lack of any honest dialogue about the remaining racial tensions in this country have made us very sensitive to those events, utterances, and acts that signify those differences and tensions with discussing or resolving them. The signifying monkey will be with us along time.
Tagged as:
African,
Henry Louis Gates,
Jeremiah Wright,
Race and ethnicity in the United States Census,
signifying,
signifying mokey
One of the dangers of Dish TV is that one spends time watching movies that one would not normally see. Feeling particularly mindless this weekend I sat through Never Back Down. Now I am not the intended audience for this film which is a formula teen-age movie about extreme fighting (mixed martial arts). It has enough fighting and angst for you average teenage boy, scenes of the girl friend teaching the boy to be sensitive for the girls, and enough skin to appeal to both genders–a perfect date movie.
As is often the case, the interesting thing in the movie is the way it portrays the world its characters live in. Milieu becomes more important, or at least more interesting, than plot or character. What was intriguing to me was not the fighting or the girls interest in it. Mock combat as ground for male bonding or mate advertising has existed since the time of the ancient Greeks. Rather I was struck by the ubiquity of the video camera, the cell phone, and You Tube.
The movie opens with a fight on a football field in Iowa where our hero decks a larger opponent. In the next scene we learn that he, with his brother, and mom are moving to Orlando, because his younger brother has won a scholarship to a tennis academy. At the new school, someone has googled him, the You Tube video of the football fight makes the rounds and our hero is drawn into the fight club. The nerd who befriends him has a video camera virtually glued to his eye, Every fight is filmed and posted. At several times we see students walking down the hall of the high school glued to their cell phones, then we see them stare knowingly at the hero. Everyone accepts this loss of privacy and seem to think that being video and uploaded validates them as a person. The only complaint is a feeble protest at being filmed by two girls making out in a hot tub at a party. We don’t take their complaints seriously.
Now the movie is in no way about privacy. I suspect that only old fogeys like myself noticed this about the film. I admit to be sufficiently wedded to my blackberry to suspect that if I were a teen with the requisite electronics I could fall into this world easily. But at what cost. Must we have a constant audience? Must we be a constant audience? As plot the movie is old fashioned; as psychology it’s trite, but as a portrayal of a brave new world it’s unintentionally frightening.
Tagged as:
High school,
Media,
Mixed martial arts,
Never Back Down,
Privacy
Last week I spend two days traveling the halls of the Senate Office Buildings. The senate will consider legislation regulating therapuetic boarding schools and other sorts of residential care for troubled teens. The visits were arranged by the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs (NATSAP). I brought with me two alumni and the mother of one of them.
I wish I could regale you with tales of expensive dinners, taking senators out on yachts, or any of the other excesses we think of when we hear the term “lobbying.” In fact, we sat down with legislative aides and explained our industry to them. They generously gave us between thirty and forty-five minutes to tell our stories and explain what we liked and what we didn’t in the proposed legislation. For the most part they listened carefully and asked intelligent questions. Whatever our opinion of Congress may be, Congressional aides are, for the most part, as polite and intelligent group of people as you’d ever want to meet. As the mother of my alumnus said, “It feels like our government.”
Regardless of our effect on the legislation, I had a successful trip. The angry, troubled teen girl I had known was now a poised, confident young woman. The drug abusing teen who was two years behind in school when I first met him was now a focused college student. The young woman said in several offices, ” the school is where I grew up.” No greater argument for our effectiveness could have been made than the one made by the presence of these three people. The young people are well on their way to becoming purposeful adults. Both mother and son testified to the improvement in their relationship.
As it turns out I had worked closely with both these people when they were at the school. I am not sure I am entitled to any credit for this success, but I take enormous satisfaction in it.
Tagged as:
Boarding school,
Child and Adolescent,
Lobbying,
United States Congress
In the June 1st issue of The New Yorker, Atul Gawande writes about the practice of medicine in McAllen Texas. Why McAllen? It is one of the most expensive health care markets in the country; only Miami is costlier. McAllen is a much poorer community. His measure, and it is a standard one, is medicare dollars per enrollee. In this post I will repeat several of Gawande’s points, but I urge my readers to read the whole article.
One reason the people of McAllen suggest for this anomaly is that theirs is an unhealthy community. Despite its high obesity rate, its high rate of heavy drinking, and its poverty, it has lower than average cardiovascular disease rates, and low incidents of asthma, H.I.V., infant mortality, cancer, and injury. In short if one judges by the statistics McAllen is a realitively heathy place.
Gawande develops his argument carefully through a series of interviews, references to statistics and and his own experience as a doctor. In a short post I need to skip to his conclusions. He finds that in McAllen and other high cost areas order more tests, operate more frequently, refer to other specialist more often. He also finds that doctors there are entrepreneurs; they own imaging centers, ultrasound machines, or serve as medical directors at nursing homes.
Gawande contrasts these practices to low cost areas. One of them Rochester Minnesota is dominated by the Mayo clinic which pays it’s doctors a good salary, but does not allow them to participate in the ownership of the auxillary services. As a result fewer tests and scans are ordered and the patients needs predominate. Several other cities are discussed with similar conclusions.
Respect for the common health means that we must pay doctors well, but prevent them from developing multiple streams of medical income. In fairness, we will also have to do something about the cost of medical education. A new doctor may begin practice so far in debt that he cannot afford not to be an entrepreneur. As Bernard Shaw says, ” That any sane nation having observed that you could provide for the supply of bread by giving bakers a pecuniary interest in baking for you, should go to give a surgeon a pecuniary interest in cutting off your leg, is enough to make one despair of political humanity.”
Tagged as:
Atul Gawande,
Common Health,
Health,
Medicine
In my earlier post Doctor’s Dilemma, I offered up the idea of the common health, a parallel, I suppose, to the common wealth. We have a measures of common wealth, but no corresponding number for the common health. It is my idea to offer a series of posts on the health care debate. In this first one I want to set some premises and home truths.
It is my belief if we consider only health care and funding insurance, we will fail. A public program must seek to create public health and private health. We must understand that we have a vested interest in our neighbors’ health as well as our own. The recent swine flu scare brought this idea home to many of us.
Some facts we need to acknowledge:
- Life is 100% fatal. Health means we can live a happier, more active life.
- The rich have always had better access to doctors than the rest of us. It’s not until the 20th century that this becomes a major advantage. Diet, cleanliness, and not doing dangerous work account for most of the upper classes health advantages throughout history. Nothing we do will change this.
- Our public health system is currently strained and any serious threat might break it. If swine flu returns as a pandemic this fall and hits the uninsured, our emergency rooms and public clinics will be overwhelmed.
- Medical science is not as advanced as we like to think.
- Private persons are responsible for their own health. No system we put in place can alter that. A concern for your health means a concern for the health of others.
- Medicine is most expensive at the margins of life.
- Whatever our feelings about statistics, health care must use them. If we know that for a set of symptoms a particular test is useless 97% of the time, no insurance should pay for it. If we are in the 3% whose cancer would have been detected early, we want to sue. No system can give millionaire’s coverage to everybody.
There are probably many more facts I could list here, but I’ll start with these. We will need to be willing to examine both market and non-market solutions. In no other area of our lives is the “role of government” more contentious than this one. We need to think deeply and originally about these problems.
Tagged as:
Emergency department,
Health,
Health care,
Insurance,
Medicine,
Public school,
Swine influenza,
Uninsured in the United States
As I watch my Twitter Stream, I see the idea of a personal brand popping up everywhere. Many blogs promise to help me develop my personal brand, tell me of the importance of my personal brand, or like good romance columnists tell me ten mistakes to avoid in creating my personal brand. When I look at people’s twitter profiles and see how many success trainers, motivational speakers, direct marketers, and other who are trying leverage their personality and knowledge into a living, I fully see the motivation for these entries. But part of me wonders if it is wise to participate in the commodification of one’s self.
By “self,” I mean that internal being whom we think of as who we really, truly are. Various philosophers would argue that this “internal being” is a mental construct made up of our beliefs, our desires, and our choices. Phenomenology would argue that we can know who we are only through the world’s response to us. The only way to see the self is through the mirror of other people’s reactions to us.
If one thinks this way about branding, one notes that the words used to describe an effective brand can also desribe the self–integrity, authenticity, accessibility, etc. Obviously the person creating the brand thinks of it as a persona, a mask, which carries his image out into the world and which remains unchanging in the marketplace. We all know that the brand isn’t the person. But happens to the person who has branded herself? Is she trapped in by this mask? In striving to survive in the market, the face may become much more like the mask. Consider the of the meaning of branding cattle. Are our psyches as mutilated as the cattle by this act?
Through personal branding the distance between commercial life and private life shrinks. We will become like the character Crow in Sam Shepard’s play, The Tooth of Crime, who sings:
`I believe in my mask–the man I made up is me
I believe in my dance and my destiny
The validation of our selves becomes the recognition and spreading of the brand–our mask and our dance.
Tagged as:
Brand,
Marketing,
Philosophy,
Sam Shepard,
Tooth of Crime,
Twitter
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