Senator Ted Kennedy: 1932 - 2009

“It's better to send in the Peace Corps than the Marine Corps.”
Ted Kennedy

James C. Collier

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Acting White: Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard

So what’s the big deal with Martha’s Vineyard (MV) anyway? Sure, the first family deserves a vacation, but going to the up-scale Massachusetts island seems to have more significance than, say, Disneyworld, or Yosemite. As a former Bay State resident and serial MV visitor, it took me a few years to figure out why all the hoopla over the 57th largest island in the US, but here goes.

Some people will tell you MV is about the late Jackie O, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Oprah Winfrey, Spike Lee, et al, but this is just the show-people side. The island is really about a nice place where mostly rich men and fewer rich women, white and black, have historically sent their spouses/scions in the late summer, while they (themselves) continue to toil away at making goo-gobs of money in places like New York, DC, Philadelphia, and Boston, until they scoot in the last week of August. This is not what makes the island special.

On closer inspection, MV ‘islanders’ have a similar, albeit more staid, ‘hang loose’, attitude to that which pervades the way-west, native Hawaiians and how they look at things, especially people. Mainlanders are people with hang-ups about status, race, money, sex, age, you name it. Islanders, on the other hand, just go with the flow (or pretend to), even if it’s just for that short time between their arriving and departing boat.

At Disneyworld, rude Americans or Europeans, will cut lines, yell at the help, or complain about how miserable someone or something is making them. True islanders, everybody’s dream, have a relaxed attitude that is unflappable. Of course, the pretenders (and they are everywhere) do just that, pretend to go with the flow, feeling small swatches of what it is like to do the full-time Rodney King shuffle, called ‘getting along’.

There are two-tiers of Vineyarders, the first level is easy and includes anyone thoughtful enough to repeatedly show up to enjoy the place, in the first place. The second tier is the far more select group, not including the stinking rich, with the emotional and financial commitment to buy a home, or hang onto one given them, that they will likely use only a few weeks/months out of the year. I respect these true islanders because they like what they like and they are not afraid to sacrifice the piggy-bank to get it.

Finally, it is easiest to spot the truest Vineyarders on MV by when and whether you see them at all, as they arrive and depart the Woods Hole, Oak Bluffs and Vineyard Haven ferry docks with SUV's loaded from Costco and on schedules nearly opposite our favorite Gulf-Stream driving celebrities, especially politicians.

James C. Collier

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Acting White: Obama, Calling Mr. Kotter

Interesting carrot the Obama team is dangling in front of school administrators and teachers across the country, a sort of a baseball bat made to look like a carrot, or vice-versa, depending on your perspective. And it’s not a small carrot at that, $4.3 billion dollars, to be exact. Only thing is that some folks are miffed because the president is trying to inject vitality into and education dynamic, long in need of over-haul.

Specifically, Obama is offering the funds, under his "Race To The Top" program, only to school systems that link teacher evaluations to the performance of their students. Huh? That socialist S.O.B! So if he wants to do this, I’m wondering what pay is tied to today? Turns out that teacher’s get evaluated based on longevity and their own schooling, not student results. So, if I’m a teacher today and I want a raise, I go to school at night and in the summers, and game the classroom to minimize its outside distraction (on me), unless I have true dedication and a sugar-daddy/momma taking up the bill-paying slack at home.

Some state legislatures are considering changing laws on the books, California being one, which make it illegal to link teacher evaluation and pay to student results. Wow! Illegal! Education - a profession where the law forbids your boss from considering how well you actually teach, when it comes to your pay. It’s no wonder that our schools are failing.

Now do I think that this fixes things? Not by a long shot. We are still stuck in a back-end quality control mindset, rather than one of front-end assurance. But this move sends a nice signal about where education priorities should reside - between the student brains and teacher wallets. Welcome Back Kotter.

James C. Collier

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Acting White: Blue Eyes vs. Black-Skin

I gained an interesting peek a short while ago into a facet of white people. This was not my expressed purpose in helping my friend, but the character of the situation caught my attention nonetheless. Too often, when differences of race or ethnicity appear, we subscribe some nefarious motive to the cause/result and spin-off into our respective worlds of verbal jousting. But more often than not differences are just an illustrative story of the less presented pathways to the present.

The place was an eye specialists’ office, specifically an ophthalmologist/surgeon, with a waiting room stacked full of patients, white patients, each with some form of eye lesion (tumor). Most of the tumors are nearly invisible and benign, but some, unfortunately, are malignant (cancerous) and must be treated, via surgery. Now this room of people was not just white, but of people, curiously, who’s location of ethnic origin (LEO) was Northern Europe and Scandinavia.

If we review eye color in humans, we might recall that mutations beyond classic brown-eyes could and did occur in all people, but only ‘stuck’ in people of higher latitudes and lower sun intensity because, bluntly put, blue/grey/hazel/green eyes did not facilitate their premature death. Fast forward to the doctor’s office and what we see, in part, is what happens when fair-skinned/eyed people move from northern latitudes southward to such places as the US, where their bodies, and in this case eyes, are not well-adapted to a different sun intensity. Wham! Nevus, nevi! Cancer!

So just as blacks in North America experience internal cancers rates that exceed the mean of their brethren in West Africa, and the white population, whites experience ‘external’, or surface-level, rates that exceed the mean of blacks as well as their folks in the old country, and for really the same reason; displacement from the latitudes to which our bodies are best adapted. Blacks were moved north (and to South America) during the Atlantic slave trade and fair whites immigrated west and southward looking for opportunity.

If we continue, we see that the cures for these higher cancer rates, other than returning to our respective ancestral homes, are quite simple. To begin, everybody needs a D3 blood serum level that is adequate. Most of us are deficient in this cheap vitamin supplement, available over-the-counter at any pharmacy/health store, that allows our immune system to root out wayward cells. Following on, everybody, young and old, needs to protect their eyes and skin from the sun. Hats, sunglasses, proper clothing, and sunscreen are needed anytime we are in the sun, not just in summer at high-noon.

It is natural for us to use our differences to exaggerate our group strengths and to attempt to hide perceived weakness, but if we look at ourselves honestly, we will always see that there is much more that makes us similar, even through the lens of our differences.

James C. Collier

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Acting White: Red-Hair vs. Black-Skin

African-Americans often present the Atlantic slave trade as the end-all-beat-all of human abuse in the last millennium, and this is the reason for the intractableness of black pathologies, violence, crime, etc. With only mixed results, some (including me) have tendered an alternate view of what besets the stolen peoples of the Americas and Africa. In this view, the pain and lasting effects of slavery are more relative to freedom opportunity and perspective lost, and less comparable to competing histories of who done who the more wrong (sic).

The article from the NYT last week (here) on the subject of red-haired people as genetically more resistant to pain-medication, and therefore subject to more pain than others, caught my attention, as a interesting illustration of apples-to-oranges comparisons. What matters is not the knee-jerk argument of who hurts the most among brunettes, blonde's, and red-heads, but rather that red-heads have comparably bad teeth because dentist under-anesthetize them, chasing them away, as a group, from essential dental care.

Many African-Americans make the case for special dispensation and compensation, because of how inhumane slavery in the Americas was to blacks, compared to some standard in history, rather than looking at the specific plight of blacks and saying, “what does this group need in order to prosper?” What blacks do not need is more pity, but this is what the often-heard mode of complaint suggests. There is nothing intractable about black pathologies, except the insidious re-application of so-called solutions, better designed to keep people down rather than help them up.

We are living an explosion of fatherless kids because the government rewards such behavior. Schools, as hideouts for bum-teachers and dead-ass parents, have been promoting kids for years who can barely read or add, only to now coach them directly to the tests. Trade jobs are gone to China, as Americans hunger like addicts for more and cheaper consumable goods, to numb themselves to the debt required to pay for them. Sorry folks, it ain’t about who’s slavery was worse, but rather from politicians on down, it is really about who is pitchin’ in to make things for themselves and others - better.

James C. Collier

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Acting White: Life In The Crosswalk - Part III

Today I met with the Oakland HS teacher of the class in which I volunteered, this past spring. I wanted to re-enlist for the fall, if she is game (and she is). Discussing current events, blog topics, and teenager stuff with these kids was very enlightening to me. She said she thought they looked forward to the discussions and got a lot out of them.

We talked about the black young man who was the subject of Part II (here) of this serial posting saga. As she feared, he failed the year and will now attend (hopefully) a continuation school with a GED curriculum. When I mentioned that I recently saw him walking downtown she interrupted me (politely) by saying “I bet he was walking slow”. I shot back, ‘how did you know?’ wherein she replied that the behavior goes hand-in-hand with under performance and the fifty-five percent black male HS dropout rate.

We are both concerned that this kid is headed for a life of depression, self-medication, un/under-employment, continuing lost of self-esteem, and a bad ending. He has admitted to his teacher that he lacks motivation for doing the things he needs to get ahead. There is really very little to be done, within the current education framework. In earlier days, I would have suggested that a stint in the military might buck him up, but that option is not available, as the intellectual and social requirements of the military have risen greatly with the use of technology and the demands of the urban battle theaters, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

The teacher went on to describe another HS-age black young man she is trying to mentor, who recently revealed that his girlfriend is now pregnant with their second child, even as he just barely graduated, through extraordinary intervention. As she described the problems facing this young unmarried couple, all I could do is shake my head with her in wonderment, while thinking that this is what dedicated teachers across the country deal with every teaching day. One thing is sure; we can’t just keep building more prisons.

We need to place a bounty on reaching these youngsters before they enter the revolving door of the vocational prison complex. And whatever this desperately needed approach to the young black male may be, the 'forgotten-fifty-five%', it is guaranteed to look very different than our current affirming programs for boosting the ranks of WEB Dubois’ talented-tenth.

James C. Collier

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Acting White: The Invisible Hand Of Race

It dawns on me that while there is plenty of overlap in viewpoints of the treatment of blacks and whites in our society, there is also a very predictable, nearly invisible hand, guiding respective views of situations like that of Professor Gates and Officer Crowley. It is this invisible hand that directs blacks to see gross unfairness, while whites see the opposite misbehavior. So what is going on here?

What blacks seem to feel is that Gates’ color dictated Crowley’s approach, while whites feel that Gates’ behavior was the driving factor. The Gates, or black perspective, is rooted in assigning the non-randomness of Crowley’s approach, accompanied by arbitrary action, the arrest. Crowley, alternatively, uses Gates’ obstructionist behavior as precipitating evidence of the his justified and objective response. They both are right and wrong at the same time. Crowley is not as colorblind as he believes, and Gates discounts how his own behavior might incite the officer into a more aggressive posture, regardless of ethnicity.

In general, whites feel they too get mistreated everyday by authorities, so they ask ‘why should Gates get special treatment just because he’s black or a big shot?’. On the other hand, blacks, (me included) know that blacks are, at times, singled out unfairly, and are thus denied the rightful opportunity to move about as freely as whites. So how will blacks and whites ever reconcile on their respective plights with authority? Should we all go to a giant beer-bust on the Mall? Perhaps, but maybe not.

More practically, whites might consider how they would feel if police were, for illustrative purposes, more wary of over-weight, or red-haired whites, compared to brown/black-haired, or lean-body mass whites. Knowing that police are more suspicious of you for sub-attributes like weight or hair-color is akin to how blacks feel about being singled out for their ethnicity. Following on, blacks might consider the posture they would normally assume if being detained by a same-ethnicity officer, compared to the posture that they assume with a non-black officer, 'just doing his job'. What response would the professor expect if Crowley had been black?

When we deny others their sensitivities, agreed with or not, we draw a battle line in the sand. Crowley ignored how Gates, the black man, or the professor, might perceive his tone and demeanor, even after identification. Gates, for his part, ignored how Crowley would perceive his verbal rejection of authority, in a bona fide police action. So while it is clear that both men exhibited healthy egos, what they both might work on, as could all of America, is empathy – the propellant of understanding.

James C. Collier

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