Category Archives: current events

A message for graduates 

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No one’s asked me to speak at graduation, but I’ve prepared a message for seniors anyway. 

Theme: Values you’ve been taught in school—forget them. 

1)     Play fair. In sports and group projects you’ve been taught to work cooperatively, follow the rules, and lose gracefully. Forget it. Look out for Number One, remake the rules to guarantee your success, and never admit defeat. 

2)     Always tell the truth. Forget it. Presenting supporting evidence and documenting sources apply only to student research papers. Adults know that the truth is whatever they want it to be. 

3)     Don’t resort to name calling. Forget it. Go with “socialist elitists,” “Pocahontas,” “Sleepy Joe.” Name calling is a very effective way to create negative associations that stick. 

4)   Respect and uphold the Constitution. Forget it. Hug the flag and interpret the Constitution to suit your purposes. 

5)   Value the scientific method, which includes knowing the difference between theories and hypotheses. Forget it. If you benefit, declare that human behavior has nothing to do with global warming.

6)    Understand and value our nation’s history. Forget it—especially if you’re white and have children. You don’t want them feeling guilty about injustices of the past. 

7)  Respect those from different ethnic and racial backgrounds. Forget it. Close the borders. Real Americans (i.e., white) should be winning our national spelling bees, representing us at the Olympics, and be the ones honored for their scientific and technological contributions. 

8)    Share what you have. Forget it. What’s yours is yours. Accumulate all you can.

Graduates, in case you haven’t noticed, the education you’ve received has little relationship to the culture you’re stepping out into. You can, of course, adjust to the real world. Or you can envision a better way, put what you’ve learned in school into practice, and work for change.

Is it left or right?

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I’m confused. I no longer know left from right. 

Vladimir Putin was a member of the KGB of the Soviet Union, a communist confederation. Communists are considered to be on the Far Left of the political spectrum. But there is no longer a Soviet Union, hence no longer a communist state. Property that once belonged to the state now belongs to oligarchs, Putin among them, so he’s no longer Far-Left. China is a communist country, which makes it Far Left. Xi and Putin have declared their friendship. Hmm.

What about the Far Right? We know that Putin’s values are extreme. Now that he’s no longer Far Left, is he Far Right? He’s a Nationalist, isn’t he? Nationalism as an ideology is Far Right. In 2018 Donald Trump said, “I’m a nationalist.” He admires Putin. In the Spanish civil war, the Nationalists were aided by Germany, a Fascist country. Fascist Germans were called Nazis. White nationalists in the U.S. are considered Far-Right. Throngs that stormed the Capitol on January 6thwere Far-Right, weren’t they?

Putin says he sent forces into Ukraine to rid it of Nazis. Nazis are Far Right, no? Does that mean that Putin is Far Left again?

Bernie Sanders is a Socialist, which makes him pretty Far Left. The Republican Party warns American voters of The Left, referring, I guess, to socialists and communists and Bernie Sanders. 

It’s all so confusing.

Of What Value is a Book?

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A few weeks after I arrived to spend a year with a German family in Berlin, I celebrated my sixteenth birthday. They gave me two books: The Diary of Anne Frank and Cry, the Beloved Country. These two books informed my life as no other books have.

Until then I had no knowledge of the Holocaust, no idea that the Nazis had murdered six million Jews. As a Southern girl who rode the city bus to school, sat while Black women and men who’d worked all day stood at the back, I’d given no thought to American racism and knew absolutely nothing about South Africa. Both books were hard to read, not because of vocabulary or complex sentences, but because they burst my bubble of innocence. 

Did I feel guilt, as some parents and school boards fear their children will react? No. I felt empathy. I cried over a girl my age being killed because she was a Jew. I ached because Black characters I knew by name suffered under apartheid in South Africa. I began to wonder about the lives of Jewish kids in my school back home. I thought about tensions related to racial integration in American schools.

WHY do we read? I read to better understand my own experience. Anne Tyler’s and Margaret Atwood’s books about women come to mind. They show me that I’m not alone in how I feel. In Well-Read Black Girl, Black women writers tell what it meant to them as girls to discover the works of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.

I also read to better understand unfamiliar people and cultures. To learn about Afghanistan and other Muslim nations, I have read authors such as Khaled Hosseini. To better understand the experiences of Black women I have read books by Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Bambara, and Toni Morrison.

What else are parents and school boards objecting to? Profanity. Have they listened to their children in conversation with friends? Violence and sex. Have these parents organized protests against film and television producers who “entertain” their children? Are they monitoring the video games their children play?

I see no easy solutions to the pervasiveness of sex and violence in our culture. But I trust teachers and librarians to steer our youth toward books that broaden their worldview.

And that foster an understanding of Other,

In praise of librarians

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The Burke County, NC, librarian pulled directories from the shelves, ran her finger down columns of indices. “Now why would…?” she’d now and then ask. Had it not been for her efforts I might not have written Leander’s Lies, my novel-in-progress.

I don’t remember the librarian of the College Park Branch (Orlando), but she at least kept it running, for every week or so I walked home carrying a stack of books. When my kids were little, a librarian gave mothers an hour of reprieve by organizing weekly story times. In my work as an educator, I saw how librarians went out of their way to help students locate materials that interested them or enabled them to complete a research project.

Public librarians, in addition to keeping the shelves current, schedule events that entertain and educate the citizenry. They offer space for a variety of groups to meet: political, environmental, literary. They allow local artists and writers to present their work.

So how can it be that zealots are threatening this group of helping professionals? Librarians are the preservers of democracy, not its enemy. They order and distribute materials that make an educated public possible. They contribute to our informed discourse. Because of librarians we and our children can read varying positions on a host of issues and make informed decisions.

Fanatics are making threats over a stack of books they find offensive without considering what a valuable resource librarians are to our communities. I guess I’m a snob for concluding that these extremists have probably seldom if ever entered the doors of a library. 

A related observation: Do these parents as carefully monitor what their children watch on their computers and television screens? 

When commitment becomes extreme

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Mary Surratt would not go away. My writing group and readers of earlier drafts kept advising me to delete her. All agreed that a co-conspirator in the assassination of Lincoln had no place in a novel about women trying to save the planet from environmental disaster. She insisted on staying.

The novel, While Earth Still Speaks, originated with my wondering if there was a cause so important to my grandchildren’s future that I’d be willing to give my life. I had, after all, lived more than three score years. All that I read about deforestation and humans taking over animal habitats and global warming led me to choose the environment. My protagonist would be willing to risk her life to save Earth. 

During the past year the degree of Americans’ commitment to a cause has become less hypothetical. A February survey by the American Enterprise Institute “found that nearly three in 10 Americans, including 39% of Republicans, agreed that ‘if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions’” https://www.npr.org/2021/02/11/966498544/a-scary-survey-finding-4-in-10-republicans-say-political-violence-may-be-necessa. More recent news offers no hope that this level of commitment has diminished.

The Mary Surratt who invaded my imagination supported the Confederacy and slavery. Her Washington rooming house was a place where she, her son John, and John Wilkes Booth could strategize. They believed they had a moral obligation to kill the president.

She made her way into my book as a reminder that not all causes merit such commitment. 

When commitment becomes extreme

Sesame Street got it wrong

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The results of the 2020 census are in. We know approximately how many Americans identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian, White, Other. Interesting, but relevant?

I sometimes wonder if we’re wired to differentiate. Over here are plants. Some can heal your wound, some are tasty, and some are pretty to gather. Over here are animals. Some make good pets, some will fight you to protect their young or their turf. This cloud’s going to get me soaking wet. I’ll just lie down and try to find an animal in that one. 

Twice my husband, Jim, and I spent a semester in Seoul, ROK. On the subway we’d often notice a small child staring at us. Even toddlers knew we didn’t resemble people they knew. I admit that sometimes I look at someone on TV and wonder, is that person male or female? Is the person of Middle Eastern or Hispanic descent? Black or something else? I seem to be wired to categorize people. Or are such classifications the result of my living in a society where certain differences are exaggerated? Who decides which ones separate those who belong from those who don’t? 

Any parent who’s watched their child circle objects on school worksheets has seen this reading-readiness exercise: Circle the object that doesn’t belong. A Sesame Street song accompanies a picture of four balloons, three red ones and a blue one. “One of these things is not like the others/ One of these things doesn’t belong.” 

Hey, all four of the objects are balloons! Just because one is blue doesn’t mean it doesn’t belong. It expands as you fill it with air. It will pop of you stick it with a pin.

That’s the real problem, isn’t it? Deciding on the basis of difference that something/someone doesn’t belong. Let’s agree: the category is human.

We all belong.

RBG, Donald Trump. and me

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You’ll be excused for thinking that Donald Trump, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and I had little in common. But last week’s news of RBG’s death and Trump’s announcement that he’ll form a 1776 Commission tasked with promoting patriotic education left me thinking about how all three of us grew up studying the same version of American history. 

I’ve long been interested in history. During third-grade trips to the library, I gravitated toward books with bright orange covers: biographies of famous Americans. Maybe because so few women were in the series, I specifically recall reading about Julia Ward Howe and Dolly Madison. Black Americans? There was George Washington Carver. 

In eighth grade I learned that the Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery but over whether states could leave the Union. 

In college I took enough history classes (including student teaching) to become certified to teach high school history in the state of Virginia. My history teachers were all men, and the material we studied was mainly about war and conquest. Good American men (all of them white) led other men into battle and through their courage and superior abilities overcame the enemy. Then men (all of them white) helped the country recover from whichever war they’d fought so that they’d be ready to fight the next one. 

My current writing project has taken me to North Carolina newspapers from the 1890s. Editors supported an amendment to the state constitution imposing a poll tax and a literacy test for voters. No one was subtle about the amendment’s purpose. It was to “deprive the Negro from suffrage” and “restore to white men the rightful superiority which God gave them.” The amendment passed.

In Begin Again Eddie Gaude, refers to the lies about American history. “According to these lies, America is fundamentally good and innocent….[But] the United States has always been shadowed by practices that contradict our most cherished principles.” 

Trump says that in contrast to the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project his 1776 Commission will teach a more patriotic history. I fear he wants to return to stories of white men and their wars. After all, there’s nothing like conquest to make a man feel virile. The commission will probably add a sprinkle of well-behaved women and Blacks who knew their place. Omit lynchings, Black disenfranchisement, immigrants kept in detention camps, race riots, labor riots, women arrested for distributing literature on contraception. Oh, and slavery of course, except masters who were kind to their slaves.

In her youth RBG, too, studied the “old-fashioned” approach to American history. Instead of limiting her education, though, to white men’s glorious achievements, she paid attention to the history of racial and gender inequality. To the history of Black disenfranchisement and job discrimination against Blacks and women. Instead of thinking about battles won, she focused on those yet needing to be fought—not on a battlefield but in a courtroom. And in the process she made history.

Encountering the migrant

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A recent photo shows me standing in front of a saguaro cactus, my arms spread in imitation. Ah, southern Arizona in March, when flowers bloom and birds are passing through. For me the Sonoran Desert is a great place to hike.

The number of illegal migrants crossing our southern borders, trekking the desert I hike, increased between February and March (the same months retirees from the North migrate to Arizona.) Trump would have us imagine those coming from the south as invaders, most of them drug dealers, criminals.

On TV this morning camera footage out of Mexico showed a large group making camp at a city playground. Children play on swing sets while women sort through piles of donated clothing, searching for items that will fit their families.

These women and children are among the Honduran asylum seekers Trump would have us fear.

For those of us who have options, it’s hard to empathize with people who don’t. Hard to comprehend the fears that drive women and men to pack a few belongings, gather their children, and make a dangerous journey across arid land by foot.

Last week, during the flight home from Tucson, I read Crossing with the Virgin: stories from the migrant trail. Though published eight years ago, the book is still relevant. Three Samaritans, humanitarian volunteers from southern Arizona, write of their experiences. They patrol desert roads and trails searching for migrants who need water, food, and/or medical care. There’s a protocol, rules about what they can and cannot do. For example, they cannot offer a ride. If border patrol personnel are at the scene, the aid workers must ask permission to offer water or food.

Aid volunteers understand migrants not as criminals but as human beings desperate to survive. Migrants leave their homes not for adventure but because home has become a perilous place or because there is no work. Danger awaits them on their journey: dehydration, hunger, bandits who steal their money.

And border patrols. Some personnel are kind, some hostile. Homeland Security buses are parked out in the desert. Even in February and March the afternoon heat on a bus can be suffocating. Once the bus is filled, it carries shackled migrants to detention, where they are locked in a 20X20-foot cell until they appear before a judge.

Reading this book has made me uncomfortable. Can I return to Arizona, hike in the desert, and return to the comfort of a rented apartment, all the while choosing to be blind to the human tragedy taking place within a few miles?

The fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination has been marked with photos. One stands out: I am a man on picket signs carried by protestors of the Memphis sanitation strike.

Empathy doesn’t come naturally to many of us. It’s easier to consider migrants as law breakers than as humanity caught in a crisis. Yet photos call out to us: I am a man; I am a woman; I am a child.

Sexual assault in a sexualized culture

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I’ve never had sex on a desk. Or in an airplane. When I told my grandchildren this, they shouted “Nana!” in embarrassment. I wanted them to know that loving sex between partners who respect each other is not a rip-her-clothes-off/push-her-against-the-wall norm.

Where would they get the idea otherwise? Everywhere.

Harvey Weinstein, Roy Moore, Louis C.K., Al Franken, members of Congress and their staffs, etc.etc. As of October 24, “Twitter confirmed to CBS News that over 1.7 million tweets included the hashtag “#MeToo,” with 85 countries that had at least 1,000 #MeToo tweets” (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/metoo-reaches-85-countries-with-1-7-million-tweets/)

Yes, women are speaking out. They’re disclosing the psychological injury of sexual assault. As a result, commentators are already claiming a “Cultural shift.” Now that powerful men are being confronted, either out of conscience or fear of getting caught, they’ll stop their abusive behavior.

I doubt it. The end of sexual violence against women would require a volcanic shift in media, where women exist for the benefit of men.

Like many Americans, males and females of all ages (my grandchildren included), I watch TV and movies. I like a good story. Readers who know me might be shocked at the kinds of movies I see. I’m sometimes shocked myself. Man meets woman; man desires woman; man f—s woman. Along the way a mystery is solved, a wrong is made right, love wins.

Let’s face it: we live in a highly sexualized society. Sex sells. Advertisers and the entertainment industry know that. It sells cars; it sells pharmaceuticals. Sex is on prime-time TV. Explicit sex. Aggressive sex.

Where do such messages lead? All men, not just men with political or social power, are led to believe they have a right to touch a woman’s breast, stick their tongue in her mouth, or do more.

I often wonder how young women are influenced by so much sex in the media. Have they been persuaded that male acceptance requires submission? I worry that my granddaughters, based on what they see in the media, will think they must give in to sexual advances.

Not that women don’t have hormones and needs of our own. In the 1960s we claimed our own sexuality and desires. But I’d wager that most want a sexual relationship with someone they know and care about.

Americans’ wishes are full of contradictions. We want services without paying taxes. We want cheap goods, yet they should be manufactured in the U.S.

We want men to respect women as equals in the work place. Yet everything men watch on their computers and TV screens shouts that women exist for male pleasure.

Can women, by speaking truthfully of our experiences, bring about a cultural shift? Only if the media quits portraying sex as an expectation of every encounter between a man and a woman.

And media, currently controlled by men, will never do that.

 

Nancy Werking Poling is author of Before It Was Legal: a black-white marriage (1945-1987).

A united work force

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(Excerpt from Before It Was Legal: a black-white marriage (1945-1987)

1940 or ‘41

Daniel often paused outside International Harvester gates at the end of his shift to listen to Jack Carpenter, a union organizer from Chicago. Black metal lunch pails in hand, weary men congregated, a few, like Daniel, clustering around Carpenter. Most, though, lurked in the background lest they be identified as opposed to management. The company’s goal was to make as much money as it could, Carpenter said, and it didn’t give a hoot about the workers. By uniting, organizing a union, the workers could unshackle themselves from the absolute control the company had over them.

There was little doubt in the men’s minds that Carpenter was right. Factory laborers had to work six days a week with no paid vacations, no paid holidays, and no benefits. Anyone unfortunate enough to get sick was quickly replaced by someone who was healthy. Conditions at the plant were hazardous, particularly in the foundry, where men worked with molten hot iron, and out on the tracks, where they did back-breaking tasks without the help of machinery. Workers were often severely burned or injured. Sometimes the company hired a new man, and a month later, without giving any reason, fired an employee who had been on the job five years. There was nowhere to go for redress. Wartime production had not yet begun, and the fact that people still desperately needed jobs made them subject to the whims of business.

At first Daniel didn’t approve of unions, but every day, when he got off work, exhausted and covered with grime, he couldn’t help but think that a united work force was the only means to better conditions and better pay.

Daniel: “Here I was, a college graduate with little hope of using my skills or reaching my potential. As long as laborers were afraid to organize, they were powerless. Besides, if I joined the union, what did I have to lose?”

On a Sunday afternoon in late spring, four workers from Harvester met with Carpenter. Three weeks and four meetings later the smoke-filled room was packed, mostly with men but also with a few women. Sitting on kitchen chairs, footstools, and the floor, they strategized into the early morning hours about organizing a local. In this setting a person’s color wasn’t as important as what he or she could contribute to the cause.

The Richmond plant was the first Harvester plant to organize. Aware that if one factory unionized others would follow, the company tried to frighten and isolate leaders.

Calling the strike in ‘41 was risky. The union was new and still unsure how much support it had among the workers. Its representatives spent hours at the negotiation table, trying to reach a contract with management, but couldn’t get anywhere. Finally, on a Tuesday afternoon union leadership informed Harvester that a vote would be taken that night and a strike was inevitable.

 

(Before It Was Legal: a black-white marriage (1945-1987) is the story of an independent white woman, a talented black man, and the times in which these two remarkable people lived. The book is available wherever books are sold.)