alias Bruce.

Racial torture, libraries, and poems.

This is National Poetry Month, a time when – like Black History Month and Earth Day – corporate culture blinks for a moment at realities it generally ignores. Still, a glimpse can reveal plenty. This month, in one of the main windows of the downtown public library in my town of Baltimore, the poem on display is "If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God" by Joseph Ross, which won the local Pratt Library system's 2012 poetry prize. The poem has to do with the 1955 torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. If you're sketchy on the details, here is Ross's explanation of how Emmett's mother, Mamie, electrified the world by displaying her son in an open casket:

Mamie Till’s decision to bury her son in a casket with a glass top was a momentous one. In her words, she wanted the world “to see what they did to my boy.” In 1955, Mamie Till sent her son Emmett to live with relatives in Mississippi for the summer. One night, he was dragged from his uncle’s house, beaten to death and dumped in the Tallahatchie River, with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His body was found downriver some days later. The image of her son’s beaten and distorted body were broadcast around the world. In the view of some, this murder was seen as the beginning of the civil rights movement.

Emmett Till, as I've mentioned, was not only brutally beaten but tortured, including having one of his eyes gouged out. As it happens, a few years ago I met and interviewed Emmett Till's cousin, who was in the same bedroom with Till the night that white men burst into the house and took him away to murder him. I will never, ever forget it.

Here is a photo of how you'd see Joseph Ross's poem if you walked past the Baltimore downtown library this month:

Photo: Robert Waxman

At a time when today's American brown shirts want for government's sole job to be the killing of infidels and the punishing of scapegoats, it's good to see a public library acting like a public library. My thanks to my friend Rachel for pointing this out.

The video of police pepper spraying peaceful students at UC Davis

 

doesn't require a lot of commentary: an overweight, battle-outfitted cop following orders and flexing his flabby sense of power over a group of passively sitting demonstrators because somebody told him he should or could. The message is clear: The ruling class understands that OWS is ripping the scab off the suffering of the working and middle class and the poor, and the elites are afraid of the truthful and disciplined anger cultivated by the OWS movement, and they are determined to shut it down before it spreads into anything like a mass uprising against corporate monarchy. The bosses' chief weapon, to paraphrase the hysterical enforcer in the old Monty Python "Spanish Inquisition" sketch, is fear: fear that if you protest you will be injured, fear that your dissent will place you in personal physical danger, fear that gathering in public against a Wall Street dictatorship will put you more at risk than you can possibly afford. You can be angry, is the message, but you'd damn well better keep your anger at home and not make public trouble for us.

This may well be an explicitly coordinated strategy. We know, for instance, that the mayors of many cities with active OWS movements have shared ideas in large-scale conference calls about how to respond. We also know that law enforcement has both the national means and the motive to share recommended methodologies for cutting off OWS participants at the knees.

In any case, the plutocrats are scared, and police are being called upon to kick serious ass. This isn't at all new in poor communities of color, where illegal and humiliating public body searches and sodomy attacks and cold-blooded murders by police have been going on for decades as a tool of terror and control. But it is new for today's generation of college-aged and twenty-something mostly-white Wall Street occupiers and protesters, accustomed as they are to freedom from rampant police abuse. Further, this kind of explicitly political national movement of young people (of all colors) against capitalist injustice is something the United States has not seen for nearly a half-century. And so police at places like UC Davis, and Oakland, and Portland, are now being called upon to review the DEFCON pages of their manuals, to pull on their riot gear, and to report for Conan the Barbarian duty.

White kids being brutalized by swaggering over-armored cops doesn't play well on national television. The courage and discipline of a crowd of students who responded by peacefully forcing the storm troopers to retreat while they chanted "Shame on you!" and "You can go!" also makes a strong impression on national TV. Just as powerful (see video below) was the ruthlessly silent shaming of weak UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi by a sea of students who drowned Katehi in their deafening silence as she slunk though them to her car after unsuccessfully begging for their understanding after the pepper-spraying attack. The UC Davis faculty and many others have called for her resignation.

The War on Drugs provided a pretext for militarization of police in low-income communities of color. The culture of police thuggery, having been honed in places like the Bronx and South Central Los Angeles, is now being brought to bear against a potential national anti-corporate movement that taps into popular grievances. We'll see how this plays out. My bet is that OWS and the evolving ideas and actions it has set into motion will give the rich a run for their money.

 

Good for the Penn State Board of Trustees for firing Joe Paterno

in the wake of the horrible sexual abuse scandal there. The entire situation is tragic, but the board acted promptly and rightly in asserting its authority at a school where, as with many big-time football powers, the coach and the athletic program are virtual deities.

In the case of the legendary Paterno, he is as iconic a coach as there is, with more wins than any other major college football coach and a well-deserved reputation as a football titan. But, like many titans, it appears he overestimated himself. He apparently thought he could still dictate the terms of his future at Penn State -- even after having displayed 10 years of reprehensible cowardice regarding the now-public allegations that former Penn State defensive coach and Paterno friend Jerry Sandusky sexually abused at least 8 boys. Essentially, after being told in 2002 by an eyewitness about Sandusky's allegedly sexually molesting a 10-year-old boy in the locker room shower, Paterno simply told his boss and then, when his superiors did nothing, kept his mouth shut for 10 years -- giving Sandusky a decade in which he allegedly continued to ruin more young lives through his access to young boys via a charity he runs for vulnerable youths. The university was sufficiently convinced of Sandusky's dangerousness to bar him from school locker room facilities -- but, for some odd reason, did not feel moved to protect potential victims outside of the university by going public with the embarrassing news about the allegations against one of their own.

Paterno's implicit message, as revealed in his own defense: Hey, I told my boss about this. I followed the rules. If they choose to hide the problem and not tell the police, why should I stick my neck out and bring down my football program by going to the police myself? Well, maybe now Joe realizes why he should have: because preventing 10 years of rapes of children is more important than protecting the brand name of Penn State football.

Paterno apparently thought he could outmaneuver the Board of Trustees by pre-emptively announcing yesterday that he would retire at the end of this season. But he badly underestimated them. The outraged board replied by swiftly and correctly handing Paterno his head, effective immediately, and by just as appropriately booting Penn State President Graham Spanier. Two of Paterno's bosses, Athletic Director Tim Curley and VP for Finance and Business Gary Schultz, have now been indicted for perjury and failing to report the incident to law enforcement. The grand jury says that Spanier also knew about the allegations against Sandusky and kept quiet, but at this point neither he nor Paterno have been indicted.

There are, of course, politics here. Paterno has been angering the board for years with his imperial behavior. His latest stunt, trying to escape the scandal via his sudden statement of retirement without consulting with the board, no doubt angered them more. And Paterno and President Spanier have reportedly tussled for power for years.

But the politics don't alter the facts. Paterno and Spanier are out on their ears because they failed the most basic test of responsibility for the welfare of young people and for the character of the university. And Curley and Schultz have been indicted because failing to be honest about an alleged sex crime on campus and to report it to authorities is, according to the Pennsylvania attorney general, illegal.

But what this is really about is that college football, at the big football schools, is a business. It pulls in big money from alumni benefactors. It generates media hype. It attracts students. It builds a college's brand. It is a collusion among frenetic high school and college coaches, see-no-evil college administrators, the NCAA, the NFL, and glory- and money-hungry athletes. It is an industry, and its ruthless needs trump quaint concerns like ethics, academics, respecting women, and safeguarding the interests of young people in general.

The most tragic thing about the Penn State debacle is that more young people were, according to the charges, set up to be sexually brutalized and traumatized in the ensuing years in part because a coach and several administrators were afraid to damage their venerated football program.

The second-most-tragic thing is that, in the midst of a Great Recession and the kinds of vast suffering and plutocratic brutality we've not seen since the 1930s, thousands of students at Penn State now feel moved to near-riots involving toppled lampposts and overturned cars not because American society is sinking toward peonage and fascism but because they are losing their football coach.

Penn State is perennially rated as one of the nation's top party schools by Princeton Review. It was ranked the #1 party school in 2009, when this episode of the popular radio program This American Life provided a glimpse into the circus-like aspects of student life there.

One can wonder, too, how administrators could have worked for 10 years to bury this awful Sandusky issue without word leaking out to anyone on the Board of Trustees. I mean, these are heavyweights we are talking about: the board's vice chairman, who made the announcement of Paterno's firing, is CEO of U.S. Steel, for God's sake.

Still, it's good to see that even as crowds rage on campus, the Penn State Board of Trustees appears to be awake, sober, and willing to act.

What happened on the first Columbus Day.

Most of us know that the Christopher Columbus for which the celebrations and holiday are named is nothing like the man who actually lived.

But do you know any of the actual details of what happened on Columbus's landing in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492 – and in the weeks, months, and years that immediately followed?

If you're prepared for this information, read the following excerpt from the late historian Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. A caveat: this excerpt covers just the beginning of what was done by Columbus's hand.

Chapter One

Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress

Arawak men and women... emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:

"They . . . brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells, They willingly traded everything they owned . . . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features . . . They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane . . . They would make fine servants . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.

Columbus wrote: "As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts."

The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold? He had persuaded the king and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to the lands, the wealth, he expected would be on the other side of the Atlantic--the Indies and Asia, gold and spices. For, like other informed people of his time, he knew the world was round and he could sail west in order to get to the Far East.

Spain was recently unified, one of the new modern nation-states, like France, England, and Portugal. Its population, mostly poor peasants, worked for the nobility, who were 2 percent of the population and owned 95 percent of the land. Spain had tied itself to the, Catholic Church, expelled all the Jews, driven out the Moors. Like other states of the modern world, Spain sought gold, which was becoming the new mark of wealth, more useful than land because it could buy anything.

There was gold in Asia, it was thought, and certainly silks and spices, for Marco Polo and others had brought back marvelous things from their overland expeditions centuries before. Now that the Turks had conquered Constantinople and the eastern Mediterranean, and controlled the land routes to Asia, a sea route was needed. Portuguese sailors were working their way around the southern tip of Africa. Spain decided to gamble on a long sail across an unknown ocean.
In return for bringing back gold and spices, they promised Columbus 10 percent of the profits, governorship over new-found lands, and the fame that would go with a new title: Admiral of the Ocean Sea. He was a merchant's clerk from the Italian city of Genoa, part-time weaver (the son of a skilled weaver), and expert sailor. He set out with three sailing ships, the largest of which was the Santa Maria, perhaps 100 feet long, and thirty-nine crew members.

Columbus would never have made it to Asia, which was thousands of miles farther away than he had calculated, imagining a smaller world. He would have been doomed by that great expanse of sea. But he was lucky. One-fourth of the way there he came upon an unknown, uncharted land that lay between Europe and Asia--the Americas. It was early October 1492, and thirty-three days since he and his crew had left the Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Now they saw branches and sticks floating in the water. They saw flocks of birds. These were signs of land. Then, on October 12, a sailor called Rodrigo saw the early morning moon shining on white sands, and cried out. It was an island in the Bahamas, the Caribbean sea. The first man to sight land was supposed to get a yearly pension of 10,000 maravedis for life, but Rodrigo never got it. Columbus claimed he had seen a light the evening before. He got the reward.

So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians, who swam out to greet them. The Arawaks lived in village communes, had a developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears.

This was to have enormous consequences: it led Columbus to take some of them aboard ship as prisoners because he insisted that they guide him to the source of the gold. He then sailed to what is now Cuba, then to Hispaniola (the island which today consists of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). There, bits of visible gold in the rivers, and a gold mask presented to Columbus by a local Indian chief, led to wild visions of gold fields.

On Hispaniola, out of timbers from the Santa Maria, which had run aground, Columbus built a fort, the first European military base in the Western Hemisphere. He called it Navidad (Christmas) and left thirty-nine crewmembers there, with instructions to find and store the gold. He took more Indian prisoners and put them aboard his two remaining ships. At one part of the island he got into a fight with Indians who refused to trade as many bows and arrows as he and his men wanted. Two were run through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain. When the weather turned cold, the Indian prisoners began to die...

– from A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present. Copyright © by Howard Zinn. Published by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

CUNY's withholding Tony Kushner's honorary degree

on the basis of his criticisms of Israeli policies is a bush-league witch hunt that does more damage to the reputation of the university than to that of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright.

As you may have heard, the board of trustees of the City University of New York voted Monday to withhold an honorary degree that had been slated to be awarded to Kushner. According to the NYT, the prevailing board contingent, led by trustee Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, claimed that Kushner, who like many artistic intellectuals has been critical of Israeli actions, "disparaged the State of Israel." The board's surprise kick in the teeth to Kushner, which has not happened to a would-be CUNY honoree since 1961, has set off a storm of criticism from CUNY faculty and students. Even the CUNY administration has tactfully distanced itself from the board's decision; a CUNY spokesperson said that “The CUNY board of trustees acted independently and exercised its authority.”

CUNY's leadership looks like a den of dunces right now. And it should.

Sadly, we have seen this kind of hard-line pro-Israel foolishness before, as in 2006 when the New York Theatre Workshop knuckled under to pressure to cancel a play depicting the life of activist Rachel Corrie, an American defender of Palestinian rights who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer as she stood in protest of Israeli demolition of a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip. (See below.) Some apologists for the brutality of the contemporary Israeli regime – who will brook no criticism of Israel's hyper-militarized dominance of Palestinians – just plain lose their marbles when confronted with intelligent indictments of Israeli policy, especially from Jews such as Kushner. Like an exponential magnification of certain blacks' defending the actions of President Obama no matter what, such rationalizers of Israeli actions fiercely denounce critics as being anti-Israel and anti-semitic.

Most such accusations, including those against Kushner, are, of course, complete nonsense. Condemning the current Israeli regime's actions is no more anti-Israeli or anti-semitic than condemning the Bush 2 regime's behavior is anti-American. In fact, I believe that in the long run it is pro-Israeli to criticize current-day Israel's self-destructive contempt for the rights for Palestinians, just as it was pro-American to criticize the Bush 2 regime's trampling of due process and international rule of law.

Many Americans already know this, which is why CUNY now looks so stupid. In fact, I think the intransigence of defenders of Israel's self-pitying posture is in direct proportion to the growing backlash against Israel's hopeless aggressiveness. Decades from now, when reality has forced Israel to acknowledge the territorial and human rights of Palestinians, none of this will even be subject to debate.

Which is why Tony Kushner, a playwright who will be remembered long after the wild-eyed CUNY trustees have been entirely forgotten, doesn't need any stinking honorary degree.

_________________

Here is what I wrote on this blog in 2006 about the Rachel Corrie controversy:

A Sorry Showing.

With our official chroniclers being so generous these days in dispensing the mantle of "hero" (the title is now bestowed upon the tragic legacy of virtually every uniformed American man or woman who dies following senseless orders), the story of Rachel Corrie serves, like an ice-water dunking, to shock us back into understanding the meaning of the word.

You might remember her: the 23-year-old activist from Olympia, Washington who was crushed to death in 2003 by an Israeli military bulldozer as she stood with outstretched arms, wearing an orange vest, attempting to block the demolition of the home of a Palestinian family amid Israel's campaign to clear-cut Palestinian border neighborhoods in the name of security.

As it turns out, Corrie was a writer of some ability as well as an activist, and her copious and revealing journals were edited into a play, a one-woman show titled "My Name is Rachel Corrie," which took London by storm last year. The play was the biggest sellout in 50 years at London's Royal Court Theatre, and has since moved to the West End, London's equivalent of Broadway, where it is expected to be a smash.

This year, New Yorkers were also expecting to be able to see the play until, weeks before its scheduled March 22 opening at the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW), the theater suddenly announced an open-ended postponement of the play's debut amid intense pressure from groups not pleased with the dramatic message of a blue-eyed blond American pro-Palestinian activist. It seems that in an age of quisling liberals diving for cover from post-9/11 political vigilantism, these tickets were, in the words of a cover story in The Nation, "too hot for New York."

The outrage from theatrical luminaries was deservedly swift and widespread. The play's co-creator, Alan Rickman, proclaimed in the Guardian of London, "This is censorship born out of fear." Nobel literary laureate Harold Pinter, in a letter to the New York Times signed by nearly 20 other well-known self-described Jewish playwrights and writers, said that NYTW's claims of recent Mideast developments making the Corrie play too controversial "make no sense," and asked, "what is it about Rachel Corrie's writings... that New York audiences must be protected from?" Actress Vanessa Redgrave declared to Pacifica Radio that NYTW's failure of will is "an act of catastrophic cowardice." Famed playwright Tony Kushner, whose own work has been featured at NYTW, wrote in a letter to the New York Observer that he is "disappointed and disheartened by this decision and... baffled by the subsequent attempts to justify it."

The record, sadly, illustrates NYTW's willing surgical removal of its own spine in this matter. In response to early opposition to the play from some quarters, the theater's leadership, by its own admission in a March 22 interview on Pacifica's Democracy Now!, began a community "dialogue" process that involved pro-Israel partisans but no Arab-Americans. It began backing away from previously-agreed commitments to stage the play. It started to suggest, after the fact, to the play's British creators the need for audience "discussions" including pro-Israel scholars after each performance to place the play in "context." Most damningly, NYTW revealed its own lack of stomach for defense of artistic and political principle in the face of politically and financially influential opposition.

It is to their credit that, after the compost hit the fan, NYTW Artistic Director James Nicola and Managing Director Lynn Moffat agreed to do the Pacifica interview at all; the broadcast was a debate between them on the one side and the play's co-editor, Katherine Viner, whose sense of offense at NYTW's moral cave-in reflects the feelings of the play's other British creators and backers as well as of Corrie's parents themselves [full transcript of the debate is at http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/22/1435259]. Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman is not known for lobbing softballs, and Nicola and Moffat, clearly no more morally steady on their feet than when they first took on the Corrie play, were out of their league. One might feel sorry for them but for the fact that the political cost of their cowardice is, for the broader artistic community, much greater than its personal cost for the two of them. Throughout the interview Nicola and Moffat betrayed, to their lasting shame, a feckless aversion to fighting back against the currently intimidating forces of cultural censorship.

I suggest that you go and hear (or read) Nicola's and Moffat's remarks for yourself. It wasn't pretty: Nicola stumbled, whimpered and equivocated through tortured attempts at self-justification by reiterating how very, very hard it is to try to mount a play when people get mad. And Moffat, for her part, stuck to a steely script of utter nonsense about the play's unique incorrigibility and the awful practical problems it posed. The British co-writer Viner, admirably restraining her likely desire to knock Nicola's and Moffat's squishy heads together, dispatched their hopeless arguments with civil precision. She also left them flat-footed by refusing, on the air, their plaintive offer to try to find some way for NYTW to stage the play; NYTW no longer merits any trust, she replied, and the play's creators have been inundated with offers from other American theaters to put on the play, one of which they hope to accept.

The heart of the matter, I think, is that theater people like Nicola and Moffat have been accepting toasts at cocktail parties and bowing for applauding trustees at board meetings for so long that they have forgotten how to take a flurry of punishing shots to the chops (or to the gut) for the sake of their mission. In the Pacifica interview, both Nicola and Moffat recited, like a mantra, that it was their Herculean task with the Corrie play to, in Nicola's words, make it "safe" for Corrie's message to be heard without its being "polluted" by the raging political argument surrounding the Israeli occupation. It is as if Nicola and Moffat hoped to shuffle mute audiences in and out of this political fireball of a play -- in Manhattan, no less -- with no muss, no fuss, and no need to take a fighting stance in the face of irate theater funders and infuriated political zealots. The essential and unavoidable need to stand up and fight in public for a work such as the Corrie play seems to have entirely taken these two by surprise. Even on the radio, one could sense their blinking disorientation. I think they are still in shock at having had such demands made of them.

Nicola's blubbering, in fact, reached its absurd peak in the interview when he cited, as if pointing to a newly-uncovered neutron bomb, a friend's having told him of an online claim that Rachel Corrie was a registered member of Hamas. People are out to slander Corrie and my play! he gasped. Well, duh. A lot of people hate the cause that Corrie supported, and some of them lie on the Internet, and a few are flat-out wacko, and others will go all-out with their financial and political clout against a theater that takes a stand for a Palestinian-sympathetic production. Hello? Earth to Jim. This is part of the job description for a theater artistic director who has principles. It is high time more artists posed dramatic challenges to the orthodoxy of American support for the amoral militarism and self-excusing atrocities of the current Israeli regime.

Welcome to the new McCarthyism: an era of contagious and officially-mongered fear that, like the 1950s, separates the heroes from the, er, James Nicolas.

(Posted 3/27/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)

Here is a really creative video about self-esteem for girls

made by students at Arts & Ideas Sudbury School in Baltimore. A friend of mine, whose daughter is a student there, told me about it after they posted it on You Tube. Now we need one for boys about how cool it is to be emotionally present.

 

Amy Chua's "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" WSJ article has

  photo: Wall Street Journal

readers and opinionizers in an uproar. In case you've not seen it, Chua's January 8 Wall Street Journal piece, an excerpt from her new book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, is her first-person account of her use of brutal child-rearing tactics in ensuring that her two daughters would grow into trophy offspring – as in fact they have. In the section of the book excerpted by the WSJ, Chua, a Yale law professor, argues that her methods (including calling her children "garbage" and furiously holding her traumatized 7-year-old daughter captive in a piano practice marathon without water or meal or bathroom breaks until the child perfected a difficult piece for a recital) constitute what Chua calls the Chinese approach to child-rearing, which, she says, is far better for kids in the long run than the squishy, permissive customs of Western parenting.

As you'd imagine, the main response to Chua's manifesto has been horror and rage at such treatment of children and at the be-the-best-or-be-worthless values implicit in this.

My take after reading her piece:

– Chua's claim to cultural authority in representing "Chinese parenting" is as phony as that of anyone who presumes to explain how "their people" behave. Although she may be referring to actual Chinese cultural trends, what Chua is really writing about is herself: a child of Chinese parents who was raised in America, is married to a Jewish Yale law professor, and is inevitably influenced by the mores of the prosperous, high-achieving group of Americans to which she has chosen to belong.

– The truth about raising healthy, happy, successful children is somewhere between – and I mean way between – Chua's extreme of an achievement-obsessed parental reign of terror and the opposite extreme of lax child-rearing devoid of expectation or discipline.

– This entire thing looks to be more a commercial than culturally revelatory project. The Wall Street Journal is flacking Chua's inflammatory "Tiger Mother" shtick for everything it's worth. The article's title, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior," is guaranteed to both offend and stereotype. Chua's embedded reply to reader comments in the online WSJ piece is titled, "The Tiger Mother Responds to Readers." WSJ ran the piece four days before Chua's Tiger Mother book's scheduled release. Can you smell the franchise? Chua was reportedly taken aback by WSJ's sensationalist headline and its choice to excerpt the book's most outrageous section, and also displeased with the WSJ excerpt's failure to show how her thinking had shifted somewhat by the end of her book. If so, I feel compassion for her naivete, but I am not convinced that the self-titled "Tiger Mother" will be crying en route to the bank.

At any rate, if you read Chua's piece, I strongly suggest you also read this fierce rebuttal.

Thanks to Herschel and Sandy.

More on the Huck Finn thing:

I have been thinking more about what it is that makes a book like Huck Finn, with its 219 spoken repetitions of "nigger," such a conundrum for Americans.

The real problem, I think, is that many of us in the alleged melting pot are still not ready to see, hear, or think about the awful truth of how racism has sabotaged our relationships. Fact is, even in 1885 when Huck Finn was first published in this country, Mark Twain was eons ahead of 21st-century America. So, in today's era of racialized hatred of a black president, the chickens squawk for the banning (or redacting) of a book that dares to shed light on how our intimate racial estrangement came to be. And, ironically, children who come to school damaged by racism are used to rationalize the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil approach that sustains the tragedy.

You can lead a nation to its medicine, but you can't make it take it.

The new version of Huck Finn replacing the word "nigger"

with "slave," and "injun" with "Indian," manages to accomplish one thing: it worsens the problem it claims to want to solve.

Twain scholar Alan Gribben of Auburn University – whose new edition of the book will come out next month as a joint volume containing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and a similarly-sterilized Tom Sawyer – has an affable enough explanation for his revisionist escapade. Since Huck Finn is so widely outlawed in schools (it is reportedly the fourth-most-banned book in America), Gribben reasons, why should we let a mere word deny students the chance to read one of the great American novels? As the BBC quotes him, "It's such a shame that one word should be a barrier between a marvelous reading experience and a lot of readers."

But here is the problem: Huck Finn was not meant to be a "marvelous reading experience." It was meant to be a story in which the reader is forced to feel the grating contradiction between racism and true human interaction. A story in which the white protagonist's voice, uttering "nigger" 219 times, comes up against the experience of his compelling relationship with an actual black person. The hideous and hurtful resonance of racism throughout Huck Finn is not a "barrier" blocking understanding of the book; it is the very point of the book, by which the reader is confronted with an excruciating question: What created this unjust and insane situation for two people rafting down a river?

There are two ways for readers (and teachers) to respond to this. One is to answer the question. The other is to paint over the question, like a picket fence in need of whitewashing, so that students can be spared the ugliness inherent in the story's lesson and instead enjoy their "marvelous reading experience." By choosing the latter, Gribben actually strengthens the unspoken influence of racism by prettifying it and denying it. It is as if a scholar were to write a revised history of the Holocaust that deleted references to Auschwitz and Dachau so that young people could have an unimpeded "marvelous reading experience" about Nazi society. The entire idea is cowardly and absurd.

Yes, teaching Huck Finn raises profound problems for students, teachers, and parents. It demands context, compassionate support, strong guidance of reading and classroom conversation, and a lot of informed preparation for everyone involved. And it requires particular attention to the needs and feelings of students of color who come to the text already having had a lifetime of demeaning, abusive and injurious racial experiences. These are real problems for teachers in a racist society. But is the answer to ban history? Or to help students to deal with it?

Alan Gribben may mean well. But, like whites who have insisted to me that they "don't see color," he isn't part of the solution. He is part of the problem.

Mayoral control of public schools

is a firestorm of an issue nationally right now. Like most issues, it has more than two sides. But there are two main, and incendiary, points of view on mayoral control.

One view, held (not surprisingly) by many mayors and city administrators, is that broken school systems call for drastic measures. Elected school boards, the argument goes, have had their chance and blown it: they have become hotbeds of cronyism, inept educational decision-making by elected amateurs, and outright corruption. Public schools are busted beyond the point where existing methods of governance can fix them, and there is no point in pretending otherwise. It is time, say these advocates of mayoral control, to try another way and put control of children's educations in the hands of appointed professionals.

The other major view, held by many community activists and educational policymakers, is that mayoral control of schools is inherently anti-democratic. It disenfranchises voters, strips parents of their direct power over educational leadership, and exerts a presumptively racist authority over largely black and Hispanic low-income communities served by urban school systems. The underlying message of mayoral school control, say many of its opponents, is that black and brown students and their communities can be treated as peons by well-connected and -monied political and corporate leaders who decide, on their own, what public schools need to do.

This struggle has played out in such places as New York City, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., and it is now unfolding in Rochester, New York, where I was born and raised. As an expatriate Rochesterian who visits often, I take both a native's and an outsider's interest in Rochester's role in the national mayoral school control wars.

Rochester Mayor and former police chief Bob Duffy -- a seemingly nice enough guy who appears to me to be a pretty dim bulb if you know what I mean -- is pulling out all the stops to put City Hall in control of the public schools, where the graduation rate is below 50 percent and parents are desperate for their kids to not become casualties. In a town that has traditionally had an elected school board, Duffy is on the stump, preaching the gospel of we have to try something different because we can't afford to lose any more kids. He is working this angle hard, appealing to the frustration of taxpayers (including parents) who are sick and tired of schools being in perpetual crisis. Part of the underlying but unspoken sentiment is, WTF, how much worse can it be if we try something else? Duffy appears to have the town's business and higher education leaders supporting him in his quest (or in this case maybe it's more accurate to say that they have Duffy speaking for them).

Trouble is, as with all desperate moves, trying something different can not only fail to make things better; it can make them worse. That is what community activists and many parents in Rochester, and other cities, are afraid of: a power grab by the Invisible Government (read: the local elite) that uses public panic over failing schools as a smokescreen for installing an educational monarchy. There is good reason for this fear. New York City's and Chicago's mayor-controlled school regimes look a lot to me like autocracies where the outcomes do not justify the means. Washington, D.C.'s now-mayor-controlled school system, on the other hand, appears to have empowered a supercharged school superintendent, Michelle Rhee, to passionately if imperfectly confront a broken and corrupt system out of a genuine concern for kids, parents, and results.

I don't have an either/or opinion about this. I can see how dissolving or disempowering an elected school board and allowing an elected mayor to choose who runs the schools can register as flagrantly anti-democratic, although one could point to appointed police and fire chiefs as precedents, and one could argue as well that voters ultimately get to keep or oust a mayor on the basis of his or her choices. I can also see, though, how a "democratically" elected school board system rife with favoritism and chaotic incompetence can be functionally anti-democratic in the sense that it cannot and will not deliver what voters and their children want and need.

It seems to me that in the national mayoral-control debate the most important questions about schools are still too often left unasked. I'd argue that turning failing schools around is less about the structure of governance than it is about how schools are run, period. A strong, dedicated school superintendent with the city administration behind him or her can improve schools, work with teachers and answer to parents. So can a school system overseen by an informed and principled school board. And, conversely, a school system can be betrayed and left for dead by an elected school board or a mayor-appointed school executive. Any entrenched power can shred the public interest. I've seen it happen, and so, no doubt, have you.

And let's not forget the nasty five-letter word lurking beneath this conflict: class. As in which communities within a city have the money to garner the respectful attention of the public school pooh-bahs. And which ones don't. I'll wager that a big chunk of citizens' rage over the looming loss of "democracy" has to do with the fact that an elected school board -- even a lousy, ineffective or dishonest one -- represents their best shot at feeling represented in a school system where middle-class professional parents are much likelier to get their calls to downtown returned or their requests granted than poor parents.

The real questions we need to be asking are: Why are public schools perpetually under-resourced while the so-called "growth" private sector sucks up huge tax breaks and other public giveaways for its assembly plants and hotels and office towers? And when are we going to truly address steady shortages in drug treatment, vanishing urban jobs, the over-criminalization of nonviolent offenses by the for-profit incarceration industry, the lack of a living wage, and other chronic problems that send hungry, traumatized children to public schools to be "taught" how not to be poor and angry?

In a town like Rochester, big enough to have all of these problems but too politically small-minded to date to face them squarely, I am not betting on a Mayor Bob Duffy for any such vision and leadership, any more than I am betting on any given school board in any given year. Let's hope that such leadership will soon emerge from those who see the true problems and recognize the radically necessary solutions. Until then, much of the arguing will be over flavors of failure.