“The Rise in Violent Crime, Gun Violence, and the importance of Police Reform”   July 25, 2021   Dr. Roger Ray

click here for the video

NYT   July 10, 2021 What Does Eric Adams, Working-Class Champion, Mean for the Democrats? By Katie Glueck

 

For the past two generations, there have been a number of genetic scientists who have insisted that race does not exist. In the Medieval era, distinctions were made for three races…. These are the terms they used although two of them will sound offensive to your ears. They identified Caucasian, Mongoloid, and Negroid races. Now, as I said, two of those are now offensive terms. Caucasian is not. Why do you think that is? If you don’t know, please stop this video and sit down and think about it. 

Still, their three racial distinctions were more of a social construct that it was a matter of biology. And, of course, this Medieval language was based on the limited experience of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Arguments have been made to include Australoid and Native Americans as separate races from the other three, and you can throw in at least two or three more with defensible cases for being identifiably different from the others. 

However, as early as 1950, the United Nations proposed dropping the concept of race altogether in favor of simply talking about ethnicity. After all, while you can talk about certain trends of skin, hair, and eye colors, certain facial features and skull shape, as well as height and structure, you cannot point to a single gene that is present in black people that cannot be found in some white people, and no single feature that is present in every Asian but not present in any European. 

So, at a genetic level, we can build a strong argument that race does not exist. We are all humans with a large number of variable shapes and colors. Still, such distinctions as Caucasian, Asian, African, Australian, or Native American, have no basis in the science of biology which has led some among both the well-intended and the unrepentantly racist, to declare that race doesn’t actually exist at all, the fact that it does not exist in terms of genetics does not mean that it does not exist in terms of society. It can’t even be expressed simply as ethnicity because skin color can affect how an exchange with the police will turn out. It affects the verdict rendered in court. It influences hiring, housing, and even dating. Race exists, alright, it just doesn’t exist in genetics, it resides in our language, our culture, our economics, and, sadly, it dominates too much space in our skulls. 

I am all about civil rights, equal rights, gender rights; but I have heard and I have probably been a part of conversations among mostly straight white people, that we are tired of talking about all of it. I don’t want to have to learn a different set of pronouns for people whose gender identity doesn’t fall neatly into the binary  universe of Men’s and Women’s restrooms, clothing, hairstyles, and sometimes even choices in music, movies, or the subtle differences between a tapas bar or a tea-room. And as a person who likes to wear and therefore buy hats, it is amazing how subtle and sometimes important the difference can be in which hats are worn by which gender. 

When I am having a really bad day, very few things can help me to have an effective attitude adjustment better or quicker than indulging myself in buying a new hat, but if you think that there is no difference between these two straw hats, you just don’t have a firm grasp on how the world works. One is clearly a man’s hat and the other is clearly a woman’s hat . . . but give it a few decades, and the fashion trends may reverse those prejudices, but, in the moment, I am dead sexy if I show up at an outdoor jazz festival in the hat on the left, and merely confusing if I were to show up wearing the hat on the right. And that, my dear friends, is all that you need to understand about race, or hats. 

In our most recent presidential election, we have heard a lot about the election of Kamala Harris as vice president, the first woman to hold that office, the first woman of color who has claims to both Asian and African roots. Now, I might tell you that I was more concerned about her history as a prosecutor in California than I was about either her race, ethnicity, or gender but I won’t tell you that because that would sound so white and male that it would come back to haunt me. I can default to a rejection of identity politics in favor of ideas, policies, and plans because everyone who has ever been vice president before the last six months was a white male. We have had one black president but I’m not sure how much that will eventually mean if we don’t have a second one pretty soon.

After all, while we have never had a woman president in the USA, if you consider the fact that most countries that have had a woman head of state: Israel, Pakistan, Taiwan, Croatia, Turkey, Mozambique, Iceland, Norway, the Philippines, Ireland, German . . . have never elected a second one. So, was Obama a one off, or have we actually changed?

The UK, Argentina, and Bangladesh come to mind as exceptions to this but, folks, women own half of the sky but hardly 1% of the offices of heads of state. There is a philosopher who lives in my skull who wants to say that identity politics doesn’t matter but there is a realist in me, with two feet on the ground, that knows that where it really matters… from access to healthcare, to employment, housing, and education; race, gender, ethnicity, language, and religion all matter. 

I realize that I am getting to be very old but still, it is somewhat amazing that within my lifetime, racially segregated schools, and neighborhoods have ended. Gay and lesbian people who have been locked into closets of secrecy for generations are now largely out and proud, and trans people, who often could not find many allies even among the gay and lesbian communities, are enjoying public acceptance which will eventually consign right wing Republican legislatures to the dustbin of shameful history. 

Moment by moment, it seems like change is imperceptibly slow, but over my lifetime, I see shifts in culture that seem to be unbelievably dramatic. Even Springfield, Missouri has a Jewish Synagogue, a Muslim house of prayer, and a Buddhist Temple. 

I can remember when my mother dissolved into tears when she learned that my older brother was marrying a Methodist, because it was another religion. And, truth be told, I have been to some clergy conferences when I felt like maybe mom was onto something, but I am going to choose not to talk about that today.

I took our wisdom lesson today straight out of the newspaper reports of Eric Adam’s victory in the Democratic primary in New York’s mayoral race. New York City is the most liberal Democratic stronghold in the America, but Eric Adam’s is not the most liberal Democrat that was in the race . . . not even close.

From a perspective of identity politics, we can be grateful that a black man won this primary which almost certainly means that he will be New York’s second black mayor but skin color may be about all he has in common with New York’s first black mayor, David Dinkins. Eric Adams has a background in police work, and he has a strong appeal to working class New Yorkers who do not live in Manhattan. I could see that as a good thing except for the fact that in this very volatile and crucial time in history, when the Black Lives Matter movement has brought policing tactics and budgets into the spotlight with bold movements of reform if not downright defunding on the table, we now have an almost certain New York incumbent black mayor who will fight police reform and who campaigned against much of the Black Lives Matter agenda. . . . which leaves this gray bearded white preacher with a great deal that I would like to say, but even more uncertainty about whether I should say it. 

Sociologists do their best work when they are telling us why something happened four or five years ago. They need time to analyze political and social trends, usually enough time to be able to be comfortably right but if I may quote my beloved Soren Kierkegaard here, “Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forward.” 

 We need to understand Adam’s election now, especially when New Yorkers could have elected Andrew Yang, or my favorite, Maya Wiley, or Dianne Morales, or Kathryn Garcia. What does it mean for Democrats to elect a mayor who literally ran against the Democratic party? What made this happen.

Sociologists may want to argue with my conclusions five years from now but since they are not showing up to do the job now, I’ll go ahead and tell you what I think now . . . you surely expect nothing less of me at this point!

I am going to say that it is fear. After all of the big talk about reforming policing, shifting funds away from armed patrolmen and women in favor of hiring more addiction treatment specialists and social workers, now that there has been a sudden uptick in violent crime and shootings in our city streets, just a whiff of fear in a brief period of time, and voters turn like a flock of sheep to be protected by traditional armed police and Adams isn’t even so sure that they don’t need to return to using stop and frisk methods to get guns off of New York’s streets. 

Trying to get my head around a black New York politician who thinks that stop and frisk might be a good idea made me need to pour myself a stiff one. 

Why has there been a sudden uptick in violent crimes and shootings? Is it the pandemic? Is it unemployment? 

Is it low wages, or have the police, under the threat of being defunded, begun pulling back on policing at all, allowing New Yorkers to get a taste of the crime that they believe they have been holding at bay? I don’t live there and I’m not sure that I can pull those threads of speculation apart but there is one thing that I do know for sure: There are too many guns.

The more guns there are in the hands of citizens, the more people get shot and the more violent crimes, the more domestic violence, and the more suicides were are going to have. There is a reason why the USA has more than 40,000 gun deaths per year and most western democracies have fewer than 10. 

We have hundreds of millions of Americans who think that they are qualified to own and use a handgun who do not know how to parallel park and who have not used their turning signals in years! Let me just say this, if you only allowed people with an IQ in the higher average range, say, above 120, to own a gun, 99% of guns would no longer be in the hands of the public, and 95% of the uniformed police force in America would have to find other work. At the risk of sounding like some fake news commentators that we all hate, what I just said may be incendiary, insulting, prejudiced, and unkind, but it is, none-the-less, true. 

No one has yet done a study on IQ and gun ownership but Pew research https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/the-demographics-of-gun-ownership/

Clearly demonstrates that the less education you have, the more likely you are to own a gun. And, so far as the police go, I can cite the 2000 case in New London, Connecticut, where courts upheld the policy of refusing to hire anyone with an IQ higher than 120. The suit was brought by Robert Jordan who scored 125 on his IQ test and he was deemed to be too intelligent to take the training at the police academy. I’m not here trying to make friends; I’m here trying to tell you what is true.     

https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836

Most gun owners say that they own a gun in order to protect their home and family from violent crime when we know that gun owner is 40 times more likely to shoot him or herself than they are to use it in home defense. This is also, a fact. 

But they buy the gun out of fear. All of this talk about the 2^nd amendment is just a smokescreen to say that gun owners are just scared and they think that having a loaded handgun in the drawer next to the bed will protect them from the things that “go bump” in the night when the most substantial danger they face is the fact that they own a gun.

Fear doesn’t help people to make good decisions. It doesn’t make them smarter. In fact, fear is responsible for most of the dumbest things that governments and individuals do.

Let me give you an example, about 3000 Americans were killed on 9-11 in 2001. It was a horrifying event, to be sure, but the USA is protected by the world’s largest Army, Navy, Airforce, and Marines, not to mention the CIA and other security offices. Still, in the wake of 9-11, the Bush administration created the Division of Homeland Security to fight off future terrorist attacks. In January of 2001, the USA already had the largest military budget in the world, more than the next 10 added together, 8 of whom are our allies! But after 9-11, we created the Division of Homeland Security, and they now have an annual budget of more than $50 billion dollars on top of our Defense and CIA budgets. 

I was teaching at Drury University during those early years of the Division of Homeland Security and I went to a student forum in which a recruiter from DHS was trying to persuade students to come to work for this new and all important agency. During the Q and A I pointed out to this young professional that even in 2001 when we had 3000 deaths from terrorists, we still had 40,000 deaths from the flu. If you stretch that out for a decade after 9-11, we have more than a hundred times as many people dying from the flu as we have from terrorist attacks and for 1% of the DHS budget, we could go on an aggressive campaign of hand washing and vaccinating the public and save many more lives.

His red-faced reply was simply, “You don’t understand.” When, in fact, I understood very well. The government uses fear of terrorists to build government bureaucracy and to fatten the profits of the military industrial complex while offering virtually no greater degree of safety to the public. Inconsequential.

3000 Americans were killed by foreign terrorists 20 years ago, and we still spend $50 billion a year in response, but this year more than 600,000 Americans have died from Covid 19 infections and most of our area residents have still not had a vaccine and most of them still say that Covid is either a hoax or irrelevant while none of them doubted the events of 9-11. Fear doesn’t make you smart. Fear doesn’t lead to good decisions. Fear doesn’t help us to have a good or efficient government. Fear has led us into the longest, most expensive, and most entirely unnecessary wars of our entire history. 

Fear is driving a move among Americans to turn away from much needed police reform and to embrace the constant increase in spending for armed police. But please, take a look at this chart that shows the rate of violent crime in our cities over the past 30 years. Between 1990 and 2020, violent crime was down by nearly 50%. Is there a significant surge in violent crime in America or does the media stoke fear because that gets more viewers and politicians stoke fear to get more voters and to get the citizens to cower in fear from everything that goes “bump in the night.” 

 

You have heard me say this before, if all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. If you are afraid of crime then the public is led to believe that there is only one answer, put more armed police on the streets. 

But I can tell you this, crime goes down when unemployment goes down. Crime goes down when wages go up. Domestic violence will go down when we have safe affordable child care for parents who need to go to work. There are dozens of things that we can do to lower the crime rate that have nothing to do with putting more armed police on the streets and most of those solutions are less expensive, are more satisfying to the public, and go to create a better society. All we have to do, is top reacting in fear. Fear may be a natural response, but it isn’t your best one and it sure isn’t your smartest one. So, I will say to you what I have said to you many times in the past: 

I want you to stop being afraid.

 

Let’s make America smart again.

 

 

 

 

“Does Democracy + Capitalism have to = Corruption?”

“Does Democracy + Capitalism have to = Corruption?” July 18, 2021  Dr. R. Ray

click here to see the video

The Washington Post, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/an-exxon-lobbyist-thought-he-was-in-a-job-interview-instead-it-was-a-secretly-recorded-zoom-call/ar-AALI8g8?ocid=BingNewsSearch

 

Keith McCoy thought he was talking to a job recruiter. Speaking on a Zoom video call in May, the longtime Washington lobbyist talked openly about efforts to blunt the Biden administration’s climate agenda on behalf of the nation’s largest oil and gas company, ExxonMobil.

In reality, it was not job interview. It was a sting conducted by Greenpeace UK, an environmental group more than 3,000 miles away. 

In the video, McCoy argued Biden’s goals for cutting greenhouse gas emissions are “insane.” The president campaigned on making the country carbon neutral by the middle of the century. “We’re playing defense, because President Biden is talking about this big infrastructure package and he’s going to pay for it by increasing corporate taxes,” he said in the recording. McCoy did not respond to requests for comment.

 

Paul Piff, a psychology professor at UC Irvine, conducted an experiment earlier this year to determine if being rich necessarily makes you turn into a jerk. He put different groups of students into games of Monopoly but rather than everyone starting out with the same amount of money and the same roll of the dice to compete for property, he divided the students into rich and poor, giving the rich students twice as much money at the beginning of the game as he gave to the poor students. He also allowed the rich students to roll twice with each turn and to collect $400 every time they passed “Go” rather than the usual $200 that the poor students received.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/does-wealth-rob-brain-compassion/618496/

Obviously, this game is heavily rigged, and it was virtually impossible for the rich students to lose or for the poor students to win. But this was not an economics experiment, this is a psychological experiment. Piff was interested in observing how the behavior and attitudes changed in the course of the game. How did being privileged and rich change the behavior of the advantaged students towards the disadvantaged students?

 

The results of these experiments were both predictable and disappointing. Consistently, Piff observed the rich students taking credit for their victory, as if having twice as much money to start with and twice as many rolls had nothing to do with their victory. Entitlement tends to lead to narcissistic behavior. So that the entitled believe that they somehow both earned and deserve their favored status, and they say things and behave in ways that demonstrate their sense of superiority.

 

As a pastor, because I have had to raise charitable donations to both support the church and our various mission projects over the past 40 years, I have noted that our largest donors are rarely the wealthiest members. In fact, the people who have donated the most to our work, still had a mortgage on their home and still lived within a modest budget. Our few real trust fund babies, the genuinely wealthy, often donated nothing at all or very modestly. Rich people often have a different relationship with money than those of us who have worked for a salary and have to pay our life’s expenses as we go. The working poor tend to see money as something that is useful and necessary, but the wealthy tend to have a more intimate relationship with their money because it doesn’t merely represent rent, groceries, and a car payment, it represents family status and heritage, it is a gauge of their importance, their self-esteem. Your money can be spent, donated, or used . . . their money is to be conserved and, frankly, flaunted.

This isn’t always true, of course. The British nobility had a concept that they were so proud of that they said it in French, “Noblesse Oblige,” which claims that the nobility have an obligation to use their position and their resources for the common good. We might all agree that the rich have an obligation to use their power and money for the common good but what we see in practice is more commonly the opposite, that those in power use the resources of the poor, to pay the expenses of the rich, as I discussed last week, in reference to how our country’s largest employers keep wages low, forcing tax payers to foot the bill for their labor costs through housing, food, and medical subsidies. 

Attempts at putting a pure Marxist Socialist economy in place have not been successful because it does not allow for enough of the inspiration of greed to 

motivate either hard work or innovation. But, on the other hand, an unbridled capitalism doesn’t work because it lacks compassion. Capitalism rewards businesses for making a profit, not for doing things like eradicating poverty or saving the environment. Somehow, we have to recognize that greed is natural and, to some degree, even good, but compassion is not natural enough and it is absolutely necessary. 

A dozen years ago, Time Magazine did a special edition on the subject of intelligent capitalism, about how to harness the innovation and hard work of capitalism while erecting guard rails that made our great wealth also serve the common good. And although such giants of Wall Street as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet weighed in on the subject, virtually none of what they said would make capitalism sustainable have actually been implemented.

Our wage gap and wealth gap continue to grow as we drive like Thelma and Louise, faster and faster towards the edge of the economic cliff.

Greenpeace recently conducted what you might call a sort of journalism honey trap in which they led a leading lobbyist for the oil giant, Exxon, to believe that he was being interviewed for a very lucrative job in the UK. In that interview, Keith McCoy actually bragged about how Exxon publicly acted like they were interested in a carbon tax and other environmentally smart political moves, while, behind the scenes, doing everything they could to suppress climate science and work against a carbon tax. Let me let you listen to just a few seconds of Keith McCoy telling you in his own words just how dishonest these lobbying efforts have been:

When Exxon CEO, Darren Woods, responded to the media hit job, he basically did exactly what Keith McCoy had told Greenpeace that they always do, Woods just repeated the obviously false propaganda statements about Exxon’s support of environmental science and carbon taxes. The wealthy and powerful assume that the working class is not very clever, that we are gullible and that we have a short attention span. 

It is, of course, quite possible that they assume this because, the working class is often not very well informed on these matters and they tend to be intellectually lazy, if not downright gullible, and they absolutely have a short attention span. So, if we, the public, are willing to act a bit dense and gullible, can we really fault big capitalists for treating us as if we are kinda dumb and easily distracted?

Greed is natural. Capitalism is based on the driving force of greed. You can’t fault a scorpion for stinging, since it is in the nature of a scorpion to sting. You can’t fault a snake for biting or a lion for killing an antelope. 

These are the very predictable laws of the jungle, so if you don’t want capitalists to eat the poor and exploit the middle class, you have to put up effective guardrails to make it happen.

The state of California made a laudable effort to stop big capitalism from making dark money donations to political campaigns, the most obvious way that our government has sold out its policy making to big corporations, but the Supreme Court struck down the policy on the first of this month. 

 

As I have noted earlier, very wealthy people are not terribly fond of giving their money away. When they do, they usually get something in return. Big political donations are not simply “no strings attached” charitable donations. When rich people give money to a political campaign, they are buying political influence if not outright buying regulatory laws. These are not donations, these are bribes, and our government is run by those who can pay the biggest bribes. I would absolutely love for anyone to prove me wrong on this point, but we all know that I’m not just being cynical, this is a fact of American politics. 

 

The Koch brothers set up a charity, not ironically named, “Americans for Prosperity,” and they make undisclosed donations to the charity which then supports candidates who will write tax and regulatory laws that protect the energy industry from either social or environmental responsibility. And this rather nifty scam is then protected by supreme court justices appointed by administrations put in power by the same dark money/pro-business donations.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-supreme-court-weighs-conservative-groups-bid-conceal-donors-2021-04-26 in March.

 

It was a 6-3 ruling in the Supreme Court, ironically saying that California’s policy inhibited “free speech” which has to be one of the most paradoxical uses of the word “free” in all time since we are talking about sinister bribes in the hundreds of millions of dollars paid to corrupt politicians. That’s not free, that’s about as expensive as it gets. And, not to insult your intelligence, but the six justices who voted to keep dark money contributions in the dark are the six who have their jobs  because of dark money political donations: Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. All of which underscores how important it is not to let people like Donald Trump appoint Supreme Court Justices. 

 

Folks, I’m not a Marxist Socialist. I am a Democratic Socialist and if you don’t know the difference you should assume that you should never ever use the word “socialist” again. I am not opposed to Capitalism but I am opposed to unregulated Capitalism because I have seen Professor Piff’s Monopoly experiment at work among people I know all too well. Money can change people, it changes most people, and it doesn’t often change them for the better.

There have to be guardrails on Capitalism, and we can’t expect those to magically appear on the floor of congress as long as the members of congress are elected on the strength of dark money donations from the corporations regulated by congress. So, what is left? The media has classically been called the “fourth estate.” In medieval times, it was thought that political power was held in three estates: the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners. You might think that the clergy would be associated with the commoners but, if you look at the history of the church, as Thomas Jefferson once observed: 

“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection of his own.” (Writings Vol. XIV p. 119)

 

So, the advent of print media came to be known as the 4^th Estate, believed to be independent of the influences of clergy, nobility, and commoners. But, since mainstream media is owned by the same corporations that pay bribes to politicians through political donations, it is difficult to trust their objectivity. The commoners might have been effectively represented by labor unions if we had not allowed labor unions to be rendered almost entirely ineffective by driving their membership numbers down over the years.

 

We sometimes talk now about a 5^th Estate, what used to be underground newspapers free of the influence of advertisers and corporate interests but now it is more about podcasts and blogs – or sources like Greenpeace who work to expose the abuses of corporations. 

 

 

I would like to suggest that the clergy, those not in the control of bishops or denominations bent on serving the will of the nobility, specifically, progressive clergy, might be a real 5^th estate force. 

 

I encourage folks to pay attention to alternative news sources like Democracy Now, The Best of the Left, Current Affairs, The Young Turks, and Jim Hightower, but I would put our YouTube and iTunes channels on that short list because progressive churches can offer the ethical lens to a mere listing of current events. 

 

I know that we have a lot of members of the clergy who listen to our podcasts and videos, and I want to say a word especially for you: we were listed in centuries past among the three estates and I believe, for the reasons that Thomas Jefferson gave and for others, we have lost almost all of our moral credibility. We have been relegated to giving historical commentary on ancient scriptures, trying to breathe some relevance into long dead books that no longer hold influence over the minds of modern people.

 

We have been trained to avoid controversy and to become almost like a kind of emotional Red Cross, bandaging up the broken members of society without ever looking up at the top of the cliff to see who keeps throwing all of these people off the cliff and breaking them. If we cannot speak the social forces that create poverty, what does it mean for us to keep passing out boxes of food to the hungry? If we can’t confront the institutions that foster prejudice, what does it mean for us to keep holding support groups and offering prayers for those who are hurting?

 

And while the corporations that are killing our planet can buy politicians with the loose change of their profits, what does it mean for us to encourage people to recycle their paper plates at church dinners? 

 

If you are a preacher and you are not talking about pollution from oil, coal, and natural gas from your pulpits, if you have the attention of a congregation and you are not talking about fighting for a living wage rather than a minimum wage, a justice system rather than a legal system, if you never mention prison reform, or talk about the fact that Black Lives do Matter, and access to higher education is the only way to fight economic classism in America. If you never advocate for immigrants, and to let trans people at least pee in peace, then what are you doing? 

 

I cannot tell you how many times I was warned as a denominational pastor against failing to support the economic and political tyrants of the world or I would be fired. In 2007 I was fired. I’ve lost nearly ¾ of million dollars in income since then. My pension will be half of what it would have been if I had not been fired. But, you know what, they can’t crucify us anymore and I’ve learned to live on less income and I don’t have to take Prilosec anymore to keep my stomach from digesting my backbone, I don’t take anti-depressants, and the only time I talk to a therapist is when they come to see me to tell me how much they hate their jobs.

 

What I’m saying is, if you, like me, have spent years looking into a mirror in the morning trying to decide between shaving and cutting your throat, please hear me: your pulpit is a gift, an opportunity, to join the 5^th estate, and speak truth to power. You can live on less income. You can do work that you will be proud of. You can help to change the world for the better. 

 

There is an old proverb that says that once you become a bishop you will never again eat a bad meal or hear a good joke. There is a reason why Jesus was accused of hanging out with sinners and prostitutes and it is probably because he preferred their company to the company of the pious and the likes of lobbyists and CEOs. 

The one thing that I wish every church could hear me saying is just this, “only dead fish always swim with the current.” If you never swim against the current of this culture, then you are already dead. 

 

Choose to be morally relevant again. Put away your ancient texts. Try to be informed about what is really happening to the earth, to marginalized communities, to the poor, and to your own mind. Exercise more, eat less, go to a comedy club, hang out with some people who have sketchy reputations, and try to make yourself into someone who is worthy of being fired by a dead church. 

“Is Our Minimum Wage Just Slavery Reimagined?”

“Is Our Minimum Wage Just Slavery Reimagined?”   July 11, 2021  Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

MORRIS PEARL AND MARC MORIAL, WRITING FOR THE HILL, 5/26/17 

As Americans, we have always tried to do better, to live up to the ideals upon which we were founded 240 years ago.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote about the self-evident truth that “all men are created equal,” but excluded women, we corrected his mistake. When he wrote that power is derived from the consent of the governed, but left out nonwhite citizens, we corrected his mistake. And when the Founding Fathers allowed Americans to buy and sell their fellow humans as property — America’s original sin — we corrected this injustice.

Or did we? More than 150 years after we ended slavery, we continue to exploit human labor in a misguided attempt to maximize profits for the aristocrats and oligarchs. 

As upsetting and controversial as it can be around here when we see the Confederate battle flag still being flown by those who actually remember the fight to defend slavery with shameless enthusiasm, the American south is not the only place this symbol of racism and slavery still appears. In fact, this is a photo from a graveyard just outside of Sao Paulo, Brazil. 

 

It is one of the less well known aspects of American history that more than a 1000 southern slave owners, at the end of the Civil War, actually moved to Brazil, the last country in the western world where slavery was still legal, to continue what they believed to be the only way that they knew how to live. The descendants of those recalcitrant southerners still have Confederate celebrations today, in Brazil. Yes, it is weird, but racism is still a serious problem in Brazil, just as it still is in much of the United States. It would be easy to cast these people as being just really evil and very stupid but my fear is that there is something else at work here. 

 

My patriarchal family ran a slave plantation in Kentucky. The Civil War plunged my family into poverty after the slaves were freed and the assets of the plantation were plundered. They continued to try to make a living on the farmland for a hundred years before my descendants largely turned to other professions to escape poverty. 

 

I spent many Sunday afternoons in the old plantation house where my aunt and uncle lived and it was not rare for the adults in my family to drift into conversation about the good ol days, repeating the fables they had heard about our family when they were prosperous and happy, convincing themselves that slavery was not really all that bad. 

 

While a hundred years after the Civil War had not delivered my hillbilly relatives to even the threshold of any racial sensitivity, they still were not the worst human beings in the world. Morally blind to reality, to be sure, but generally speaking, they were not criminals, they were honest, hardworking, people who had simply bought into the cultural assumptions of their surrounding society. 

 

It was broadly believed, in the 19^th century south, that the whole world depended upon the agricultural products of the American south but that the heat and humidity of the region was too much for white laborers to bear and that the black race was uniquely suited for this labor. Therefore, they argued, slavery was crucial to the maintenance of the economy, and in fact, the cotton mills and dinner tables of the world were equally at stake. 

Sure, they were racists, but they also assumed that things were the way they were because the world couldn’t go on in any other way. At least a part of what they lacked was the imagination to conceive of the world with a labor supply arrangement that did not include slavery. 

 

Even now, in our own area, it is difficult to get a new roof put on by anyone other than Spanish speaking, probably undocumented labor. It is rare to find someone who works in a nail salon who is not Vietnamese and probably not legal citizens. 

I love the internet meme that says, “I keep waiting for someone to tell me, ‘Yeah, I was a fruit picker until those illegal immigrants arrived.’” Whenever our borders become sufficiently impenetrable to keep undocumented workers out, strawberries rot in the fields, apples, oranges, and peaches fall to the ground and rot, and the prices of everything from chickens to lawn services goes up because not many American citizens are willing to do those jobs for the salaries they can earn.

 

But at a more common level, as we emerge from the unemployment that was caused by the pandemic, many employers are finding it difficult to fill many low waged jobs. Employers who are paying $15/hour or more, have no difficulty in finding people to hire but those employers whose business model is based on paying the minimum wage of $7.25/hour which has not been raised since 2009 . . . it wasn’t a living wage 12 years ago and it has only become increasingly unsufferable since then. 

But the industry that is having the most difficulty in getting back in full operation is the food service industry where the minimum wage for tipped workers is still just $2.13 an hour, an absurdly low figure that has not been raised for 20 years. 

 

Now, some of these tipped workers actually do make a substantial amount of money in tips, but certainly not all of them. And restaurant owners schedule their servers to come in and stay late to do cleaning, setup, and prep work when they are not serving the customers who tip them. So, restaurant owners make these people work for $2.13 an hour to do work that is necessary to running a restaurant but not work that involves waiting on tables. 

 

Now, I have a good friend who owns a restaurant who has gotten very angry with me for my sermons and articles advocating for a $15 minimum wage. She insists, “It would run me out of business.” And, I can tell you as a matter of my own family history, when the institution of slavery became illegal, you couldn’t make a living on a farm if you kept trying to farm the way you farmed when you had slave labor. The end of slavery brought on an industrial revolution that made farming increasingly mechanized to the point that most large farming operations are run, not with hundreds of employees but with only two or three who manage huge farm implements that do almost all of the backbreaking labor of agriculture.

 

Drive through much of Kansas and Oklahoma by the back roads and you encounter one ghost town after another because agriculture no longer employs many people and there is no need for the local businesses which once supported the farm community. The population of rural Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Illinois is actually just a fraction of what it was 150 years ago because everyone has moved to metropolitan areas where there is employment. 

But labor is a commodity. The cost of labor is calculated into the cost of food, clothing, retail goods, and transportation. If you increase labor costs, then you have to typically increase prices for everything from hamburgers to airline tickets. We have gotten used to cheap food because of low minimum wages in restaurants, and underpaid undocumented workers in agriculture. 

 

But increases in the minimum wage do not result in increases of prices in the way you might think. If we doubled the minimum wage, the cost of a Big Mac will not double. In fact, it would probably make it go up by less than 20 cents.

In many countries that already have a minimum wage that is twice what ours is, as in Australia, the actual cost of a Big Mac is less than it is in the USA and those Australian employees also enjoy free universal healthcare, as workers do in all but one western democracy and that one, is, of course, the USA. 

 

Now, that is not to say that raising the minimum wage to a living wage, which, for argument’s sake, we tend to say is $15/hour, though $15 an hour might be a living wage in parts of the Midwest, it wouldn’t be in most metropolitan areas, especially on the coasts, but, even that would cause some labor intensive businesses to close. We have enough Cashew Chicken restaurants in Springfield to be able to seat most of the city population all at one time, so, if wages were more fair, some of the excesses in some food services would close.

 

And, again, to be realistic, you couldn’t raise the minimum wage to $50 an hour all at once without sending destabilizing shockwaves through the whole of the world’s economy, but, gradual increases towards a realistic living wage have been shown to stimulate the economy. Give a poor person and extra $250 a week in their paycheck, and they will spend it, usually in retail stores, increasing profits all across the board. 

 

Now, the reason that this is sermon material is because we, as spiritual people, have a deep interest in justice and in decreasing suffering, especially suffering that is caused by greed, racism, and ignorance. I’m talking about the minimum wage because the income disparity in our country is obscene, and the balance of incomes must be restruck. But where the church and the chamber of commerce ought to be able to hold hands is in the awareness that low wages increase the crime rate while increasing the demand for social services like subsidized housing, Medicaid, and food assistance. 

 

It is no secret that the largest welfare recipient in America is Walmart. Many of us, as a matter of principle, refuse to shop at Walmart because of their abusive employer practices but even if you don’t go to Walmart, your tax dollars do. We pay billions of dollars in taxes to support the housing, healthcare, and food subsidies of the employees at Walmart. 

 

It doesn’t come as a surprise that the wealthy try to become more wealthy and that they often do that by trying to arrange the economy so that the public, through taxation, pay most of their business costs, while they increase their profits. That’s going to happen. The question is the degree to which we allow it to happen. And, at this point in history, we have allowed it to happen to such a degree that the many of the richest people in the world, the Walton family, which still owns more than 50% of Walmart, are also the nation’s largest beneficiaries of public welfare since we, the tax payers, are providing a huge portion of their labor subsidies. 

 

But this isn’t purely a matter of greed. Like the American slave owners who moved to Brazil because they couldn’t imagine trying to farm without slave labor, Walmart is deeply invested in keeping wages low, unions out of their stores, and buying slave produced goods from the third world to keep their profits up. But does it really work?

We are about to get our first Costco box store in our area. It will open next month and it will be the first real competition given to Walmart and Sam’s Clubs. Costco is unionized, pays their employees a living wage from day one, and still, their prices are about the same, their profitability is twice that of Walmart, and their labor costs are actually lower because the retain their employees and because they have better and happier employees, they don’t have to have as many. 

 

If you can make more money by paying your employees more, then your real reason for keeping salaries low has nothing to do with greed. 

Like those southerners who took their slaves to Brazil, profit may have been the stated goal but an assumption of classism, class superiority, and oppression of the poor were a part of the mix. The Walton family is greedy, to be sure, but their also have a deficit of both imagination and compassion.

 

Proud Americans talk about our country being so great because of our freedom and democracy. And, sure, slaves on a plantation are not free to move about, but if your freedom is limited to being able to move from working for starvation wages at McDonalds to working for starvation wages at Walmart, are you really free? As long as we keep wages at $7.25, are the poor among us really free? Are they really a part of democracy, especially if they are prevented from unionizing and often even prevented from voting? Why isn’t election day a national holiday? Or why can’t we all vote on Saturday or Sunday? Why do we always hold elections on Tuesdays during normal office hours? Isn’t obvious that this gives tremendous advantage to owners and managers who can control their own hours, over hourly employees who cannot just take off for an hour or two to go vote? 

 

But what is more close to my heart as a pastor, as a spiritual person, our country used to talk about Liberty and Equality. Now we just seem to shorten that to “freedom.” What ever happened to “equality” as an American value? It is almost like we have become afraid to say the word. Lady Justice appears in courthouse art, blindfolded and holding scales aloft to announce that we are all equal but are the rich and the poor equal in the halls of justice? Are white and black defendants equal when they go to court? 

 

If the Trump administration showed us nothing else, especially with Attorney General, Bill Barr, we don’t have a justice system, we have a legal system. 

We have laws but we don’t have much justice. The wealthy and powerful can literally stage a violent coups to overthrow our democracy and six months later, only the gullible pawns have been arrested, and none of the organizers, instigators, or people who planned to benefit from the coup have even been charged . . . heck, their lackies in the Republican Party won’t even allow them to be investigated because it would be like forming a search party to find the elephant in the room . . . it wouldn’t take long to bring charges of treason against Donald Trump, Bill Barr, and our own Senator Josh Hawley. And because it is so obvious, we are not allowed to open our eyes and look. 

 

We don’t have a justice system, we just have a legal system that can be used to punish the poor for being poor, while turning a blind eye to the crimes of the wealthy and powerful. You have to remember that in their day, slavery was legal, the 19^th century genocide of the American Indians was legal. The 20^th Century German genocide of the Jews was legal. But it wasn’t moral. It wasn’t justice.

 

The legal system is used to keep poor people poor in our day. It is legal but it isn’t just. We religious people are the ones who still believe that equality is a part of what it means to be patriotic. . . even if everyone around us has almost forgotten.

 

I contend that the way things stand now, our minimum wage is little more than a reconfiguring of slavery. Our hypocritical laws about immigration, also forms a layer of slavery that runs most of our agriculture, hotel and motel, and construction industries, and no small portion of our restaurant industry. I insist that prisons are being used to create slave labor camps and transfer tax dollars to for profit corporations. And all of this is happening under the guise of democracy when it is, in any honest view, the opposite of democracy. 

Are we bad people to let this go on? Are we evil if we peacefully accept this inequality, this level of poverty and violence? Well, maybe, or maybe we are like my hillbilly relatives who lacked imagination to envision a world that moved past slavery, that moved past the exploitation of immigrants and the poor, that worked together for the common good, to, as was said, e pluribus unum, to make one nation from the many different races, languages, religions, and tribes of the world, united in liberty and equality. 

 

I don’t think that we are evil. I do think that we lack both compassion and imagination. I don’t hate America, but I do believe in a better America. I am not willing to settle for the status quo because I can imagine something so much better.  The poet Robert Browning said, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” Folks what I am saying is that we cannot just accept the way things are as being the only way that things can be. We must imagine more and better, for all of the people of the world. And if nothing else, at least get ready to burn your Sam’s card and start going to Costco. Baby steps, people, baby steps. But there is more for which we can hope. 

“A True Civic Education”: 1619, 1776, and the Practice of Freedom

“A True Civic Education”: 1619, 1776, and the Practice of Freedom 

David “Katya” Ketchum

July 4, 2021

click here to see the video

 

         Growing up in the 1980s, July 4^th was the All-American holiday and family affair. We had a barbeque, drank strawberry soda (because it is red!), played baseball at the schoolyard, cranked out homemade ice cream, danced in the water sprinkler, took turns standing (sometimes with shoving) in front of the box fan to cool off, and shot off fireworks as the long daylight finally faded into darkness. There were some vague ideas about history, but July 4^th was never really about history. It was more of a feeling, and more than the feeling of eating too many hot dogs and potato chips. We were meant to feel proud about our nation, which popular belief assured us was the best nation on the planet, without ever providing any actual reasoning for the conclusion. Why were we the best? Because we just were. We had the best military, the best democracy, the best food, the best athletes, the best entertainers, the best everything. And if someone didn’t believe it was true, then they didn’t deserve to be here. Because the USA was for the best people in the world, and loving the USA uncritically proved you were worthy – you were part of the elite and wonderful nation of being the best and shared in its best-ness.  

 

“Even If It’s Painful”

 

         This kind of upbringing felt ubiquitous here in the Ozarks, and I suspect it is one of the most important reasons for why there is such outrage over the 1619 Project. 1619 was the year the first enslaved Africans were brought to the Virginia colony, and the Project makes the point of reframing US history from a perspective that does not ignore the role and reality of slavery, or the impacts and contributions of Black Americans. It is meant as a corrective to our (White) civic myth that nothing bad has ever happened in our national history, or, if it has, it has been entirely dealt with in a satisfying and happy way. It refuses to allow us to separate 1776 from the messy reality of history. So, while there is plenty of room for serious conversation among historians about both the framing and content of the 1619 Project, the current controversy is not about the history, sociology, critical social theory, and the like. It is about American (White) denial, our (mainly White-centered) discomfort with history, and our discomfort with how that history is still alive in the present day. As the 1619 Project’s lead reporter, Nikole Hannah-Jones (whom we can congratulate for receiving tenure at UNC this week, in the face of opposition: https://www.npr.org/2021/06/30/1011880598/after-contentious-debate-unc-grants-tenure-to-nikole-hannah-jones ), expressed it: 

 

“if we truly understand that black people are fully American and so the struggle of black people to make our union actually reflect its values is not a negative thing against the country, because we are citizens who are working to make this country better for all Americans. That is something that white Americans, if they really believe as they say that race doesn't matter, we're all Americans, should also be proud of and embrace that story. We cannot deny our past. And if you believe that 1776 matters, if you believe that our Constitution still matters, then you also have to understand that the legacy of slavery still matters and you can't pick and choose what parts of history we think are important and which ones aren't. They all are important. And that narrative that is inclusive and honest even if it's painful is the only way that we can understand our times now and the only way we can move forward.” (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-1619-project-details-the-legacy-of-slavery-in-america )

         

         I can’t remember a time when some variation of this point didn’t seem obvious to me, and I owe a lot of that to the good fortune of growing up in a family that loved books. Both my parents read to us, and my mother took us to the library every week. My father’s time was more limited, working second shift, but he passed on to me a love for history. Our house had lots of books and reading rivaled baseball and gardening as family pastimes – which is saying something for a family that had highlights of the St. Louis Cardinals’ 1967 postseason on vinyl so we could listen to baseball in the offseason at my grandmother’s house. With so much opportunity and encouragement to read, I eventually found the writings that helped me navigate my way through and out of the tangle of absurdities that were taught as inevitable and unassailable truths in the wider culture around me. 

 

         Religion was a big part of that, to be sure, and I spoke last month about the harm that is so quickly and easily done in religious contexts. But the religious lies were ultimately easier to leave behind. Although the road was a long one, it was surprisingly simple to pack up boxes of books to donate to churches and libraries, and then say goodbye. But the world outside of conservative church life is still dominated by coercion and built on its own set of lies and absurdities. We must still live and work in a socio-economic world that shares many of the same features: brutally exploitative, racist, sexist, ableist, classist, and otherwise cruel. And it has its own set of civic myths, one-sided sacred stories of how our nation came into existence and how we US citizens have inherited a solemn responsibility to share democracy with the world. This is meant to make us feel proud while shielding us from the reality of history, the insights of the social sciences, and the ongoing injustices we are complicit in carrying out across the globe. 

 

         Today’s hallowed civic holiday is an opportunity, then, to reflect. An honest reckoning with history does not threaten our national well-being; it threatens the oppressive systems that have leveraged the lies to accumulate power and wealth. When people go out of their way to hide the facts, it indicates that knowing that history could disrupt the way things are. When history is experienced as a threat, it is often because a brittle, oppressive system is still being protected by lies. In my experience, people with relative privilege and power may become afraid that their own legitimacy will be called into question. There may be anxiety of losing reputation, power, or wealth. Most commonly, we are unprepared to deal with the reality of their own complicity. We like to think of ourselves as good people, descended from good people, and history forces upon us uncomfortable and more complicated facts. How do we relate with history beyond easy dichotomies of good guy versus bad guy? How can we learn to hold the lofty aspirations and sometimes incredible acts of courageous compassion in one hand, with the horrifying greed and cruelty that has too often driven history in the other?  

 

The Point of History Class

 

         So, although the outrage over 1619 or Critical Race Theory feels new, it’s important for us to remember that there is nothing new about these kinds of controversies. It is also important to note that the United States is not exceptional in dealing with these issues. People in Turkey and India have been debating their own national origins, while Vladimir Putin famously promoted Stalin as a strong leader who fended off fascism. Back in 2017, ultranationalists in Germany made the news when they “bemoaned how the country’s focus on atoning for the horrors of the Holocaust rendered Germans ‘a totally defeated people.’” Simultaneously, Marine Le Pen pushed back against teaching French children about their nation’s complicity in deporting French Jews, who were sent to concentration camps, saying: “France has been abused in the minds of people for years. We taught our children that they had every reason to criticize, to see only the darkest historic aspects. I want them to be proud of being French again.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/20/project-far-right-fear-history/ )

 

Further, if you study the timeline, you can see patterns in educational controversies. Adam Laats pointed out in his 2015 book, The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education (https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674416710 ), that in contrast to the oft assumed idea that the US education system has been solely shaped by progressive ideals and values, conservative activists have powerfully influenced the US educational landscape. If you want the details of each of these controversies, I’ll share links to Laats’ book and supplementary articles in the manuscript. For our purpose here, please don’t focus as much on the details as on the patterns. Notice how a controversy emerges in each generation and relies on similar accusations and arguments: 

 

·      the Scopes Trial in 1925, the most familiar case and the one that focused on how – or if - the fact of evolution should be taught (https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/51/9/790/288261 ) ;

·      the Rugg textbook controversy in 1939, when conservative groups pushed to stop using popular social studies texts deemed “un-American” for “raising questions about the basic structures of American life and the capitalist economic system” (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/31914978_This_Happened_in_America_Harold_Rugg_and_the_Censure_of_Social_Studies );

·      the forced resignation in 1950 of Willard Goslin, a popular educator and superintendent of Pasadena Public Schools who was denounced as a leftist member of a “cult of progressive educators” who used education “to sell our children on the collapse of our way of life" (https://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2013/Goslin-Willard-E-1899-1969.html ) ; and

·      the 1974 Kanawha County, West Virginia, textbook controversy, in which anti-textbook protestors took exception to including books by Allen Ginsberg, Eldridge Cleaver, Sigmund Freud, George Orwell, and Malcolm X – going as far as keeping children at home, throwing dynamite into schools during the night to force their closure, and using snipers to fire “on state police cruisers that were accompanying school buses” (http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/textbooks/books_and_beliefs.html ).

 

In each of these examples, Laats points out that anti-progressive activists “were fiercely committed to a view of the curriculum that inculcated love of country, reinforced traditional gender roles and family structures, allowed no alternatives to capitalism, and granted religion a central role in civic life.” (https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674416710 )These activists offered a different vision “about what history class is supposed to be for.” And the tension between these different visions of civic education keeps controversies repeating on a loop, using eerily similar language to attack educators, historians, social scientists, activists, and others advocating for just, equitable, and compassionate communities. For example, the conservative school board member who led the charge in the Kanawha County attack eventually proposed guidelines for textbook selection that included: "Textbooks for use in the classrooms of Kanawha County shall recognize the sanctity of the home”; "Textbooks must encourage loyalty to the United States"; and "Textbooks must not defame our nation's founders or misrepresent the ideals and causes for which they struggled and sacrificed." (http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/textbooks/books_and_beliefs.html )

 

         Similarly, Harold Rugg’s emphasis on critical thinking and social justice in the first half of the twentieth century led to accusations that his widely used and praised textbooks would, in the words of one accuser, cause students to doubt “the ‘patriotism’ of the founding fathers and the constitution and ‘to condemn the American system’ of private enterprise” and promote collectivism. Other critics accused the textbooks of “picturing the U.S. as a land of unequal opportunity, and giving a class conscious account of the framing of the U.S. Constitution.” (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/31914978_This_Happened_in_America_Harold_Rugg_and_the_Censure_of_Social_Studies ) One critic, Col. Augustin C. Rudd, said that Harold Rugg used “gentle language and a pedagogic smile” to lead children “through the successive stages of indoctrination.” To prove his point, Rudd pointed to a lesson when students were invited to reflect: “Is the United States a land of opportunity for all our people? Why?” The teacher’s guide encouraged an actual conversation based on the realities of life in the USA: 

 

“The United States is not a land of opportunity for all our people; for one-fifth of the people do not earn any money at all. There are great differences in the standards of living of the different classes of people. The majority does not have any real security.” (https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ718719.pdf )

 

         This is good pedagogy, encouraging and teaching critical thinking skills (which is pretty close to the opposite of indoctrination). But Rugg’s reward was to be labeled as subversive and anti-American. Sadly, I can’t find any evidence that any of the conservative critics ever suggested that the answer to these social disparities was to change society to match their ideals. Instead, insults were dressed up as arguments that relied largely on emotive appeal, mixing their calls for patriotism with appeals to fear. To ask and answer questions honestly was unpatriotic, dangerous, and had to be resisted at all costs. So we inherit the same questions: what is the point of history? Is it to prop up the present order of things, or can it help provide insight into how we can learn to be better, preserving what is good and leaving aside what is unjust, unkind, and unwise? Or, in Laats’ words:

 

“Is the point of history class to introduce young Americans to their heritage of heroes, the glories of American history? Or is history class supposed to make young people into critical examiners of their society, a true civic education that teaches American young people to question every bit of received wisdom and be ready to change what needs changing?” (https://time.com/5889051/history-curriculum-politics/ ) 

 

“Our Tolerance for Complexity”

 

         Remember Laats’ point that anti-progressive activists “were fiercely committed to a view of the curriculum that inculcated love of country, reinforced traditional gender roles and family structures, allowed no alternatives to capitalism, and granted religion a central role in civic life.” In each of these examples, the received wisdom was that the status quo was equitable and just, and that change would be a corruption and a step backwards. In my experience, this allows conservative activists to think of themselves as victims, even martyrs, resisting an attack on their national identity. In resisting change, they can fulfill the role of the patriotic underdog, and true patriots would recognize them and cheer them on. But these examples of conservative activism erase history and hard work that we could actually be proud about. Recall the words of Nikole Hannah-Jones: 

 

“if we truly understand that black people are fully American and so the struggle of black people to make our union actually reflect its values is not a negative thing against the country, because we are citizens who are working to make this country better for all Americans.” (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-1619-project-details-the-legacy-of-slavery-in-america )

 

         We could repeat this for other marginalized and oppressed groups, whose histories we should treasure and teach, rather than ignore and suppress. These are stories that point a pathway toward the actual ideals that the people of the United States say we value: honoring and celebrating the real practice of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If the true meaning of July 4^th is, as I’ve been told, a celebration of obtaining freedom in the face of oppression, then what better starting point is there than 1619? 

 

         To be clear, I am not advocating here for history classes to become a mirror image of the right that simply leans left. Even my heroes remain flawed human beings, and studying history helps me remember and understand that we are constantly making decisions based on limited information. The human experience comes with so many variables and surprises, and history reminds me to proceed with patience and humility. As Stanford School of Education Professor Sam Wineburg has pointed out, 

 

"History as truth, issued from the left or the right, abhors shades of gray … . Such a history atrophies our tolerance for complexity. It makes us allergic to exceptions to the rule. Worst of all it depletes the moral courage we need to revise our beliefs in the face of new evidence. It insures ultimately that tomorrow we will think exactly as we thought yesterday – and the day before and the day before that." (https://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/december/wineburg-historiography-zinn-122012.html )

 

         The social sciences offer tools to help us avoid this kind of trap, encouraging us to think and live reflectively. We want to learn, change, and grow. And this means we should expect these controversies to keep coming, generation after generation, until there is a shift in our national educational culture. As part of this process, we can create more opportunities and support for teachers and administrators from marginalized communities, who have often been most responsible for keeping true civic education alive. For example, Jarvis R. Givens, assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and author of Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching,(https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674983687 ), recently reflected on the impact and importance of attending schools with Black teachers and administrators, and the shock and loss for students he met at university who had never had that opportunity. In this context, the whole debate about racism and education, such as the current controversies over the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory, miss the point. He wrote, 

 

“Lost in the discourse on both sides, however, is the acknowledgment that Black teachers, as early as the 19th century, have been deeply engaged in the work of challenging racial domination in American schools. The traditions of African American teachers provide the country with a model, a vital intellectual resource for more nuanced conversations about the place and possibility of anti-racism in the classroom.” (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/whats-missing-from-the-discourse-about-anti-racist-teaching/618947/ )

 

         Givens’ also reflected on his research on “the subversive teaching practices of African Americans during slavery through Jim Crow” and how it connected with the traditions of Black education: 

 

“Black educators have always known that their students are living in an anti-Black world and, therefore, decided that their teaching must be set against the very order of that world. Their political clarity manifested in lessons that were explicitly about race, history, and Black culture; but their views also shaped the social systems of classrooms, even at times when tenets of anti-racism were not explicitly named. They took a holistic approach to teaching—honoring Black life, with all its beauty and contradictions, and nurturing the ambition of their students, even when the lesson had nothing to do with responding to whiteness or anti-Black violence. In my classrooms growing up, we had to study and enact anti-racism, certainly. But we also had to know that our worth and our offering to the world, and to ourselves, was much more than that.” 

 

         A local demonstration of this can be found in the annual Black History Summer Academy held each summer in Springfield, with words from Christine Peoples that reflect this holistic approach: 

 

"Without our history, we can't know our future … . All of the things that were taught at this table, … that sustained people for their future. The students learned that it was time to pass the torch. They realized that someone really does care about their hopes and their dreams, and they're loved. They can make a difference, and unity is possible." (https://www.sps.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&DomainID=4&ModuleInstanceID=1305&ViewID=6446EE88-D30C-497E-9316-3F8874B3E108&RenderLoc=0&FlexDataID=11230&PageID=1 )

 

This has more to do with honoring and celebrating freedom than fireworks and strawberry soda. There is no reason to be threatened with history if you are willing to learn from it. At its best, history is the study of the human experience, giving us humility in the face of our mistakes (from the most laughable to the most cruel) and hope in the face of our greatest challenges. It is an opportunity to remember that we are making history right now, and we can make a better future not only possible, but something real.