Social Etymologies

"Unhealthy America"

2009-11-06T16:12:28Z

After going to a pharmacy here in Maryland to pick up a medication that my physician prescribed - key word here is prescribed - and then being told my medication was not "covered" by my insurance because "Your insurance says they need proof that your doctor thinks you need this medication," I had to post this article by Nicholas Kristof about our deplorable health care system. (Left: BY Daniel Millberg)

The New York Times
5 November 2009
BY Nicholas D. Kristof

The moment of truth for health care is at hand, and the distortion that perhaps gets the most traction is this:

We have the greatest health care system in the world. Sure, it has flaws, but it saves lives in ways that other countries can only dream of. Abroad, people sit on waiting lists for months, so why should we squander billions of dollars to mess with a system that is the envy of the world? As Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama puts it, President Obama's plans amount to "the first step in destroying the best health care system the world has ever known."

That self-aggrandizing delusion may be the single greatest myth in the health care debate. In fact, America's health care system is worse than Slov--er, oops, more on that later.

The United States ranks 31st in life expectancy (tied with Kuwait and Chile), according to the latest World Health Organization figures. We rank 37th in infant mortality (partly because of many premature births) and 34th in maternal mortality. A child in the United States is two-and-a-half times as likely to die by age 5 as in Singapore or Sweden, and an American woman is 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as a woman in Ireland.

Canadians live longer than Americans do after kidney transplants and after dialysis, and that may be typical of cross-border differences. One review examined 10 studies of how the American and Canadian systems dealt with various medical issues. The United States did better in two, Canada did better in five and in three they were similar or it was difficult to determine.

Yet another study, cited in a recent report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute, looked at how well 19 developed countries succeeded in avoiding "preventable deaths," such as those where a disease could be cured or forestalled. What Senator Shelby called "the best health care system" ranked in last place.

The figures are even worse for members of minority groups. An African-American in New Orleans has a shorter life expectancy than the average person in Vietnam or Honduras.

I regularly receive heartbreaking e-mails from readers simultaneously combating the predations of disease and insurers. One correspondent, Linda, told me how she had been diagnosed earlier this year with abdominal and bladder cancer -- leading to battles with her insurance company.

"I will never forget standing outside the chemo treatment room knowing that the medication needed to save my life was only a few feet away, but that because I had private insurance it wasn't available to me," Linda wrote. "I read a comment from someone saying that they didn't want a faceless government bureaucrat deciding if they would or would not get treatment. Well, a faceless bureaucrat from my private insurance made the decision that I wouldn't get treatment and that I wasn't worth saving."

It's true that Americans have shorter waits to see medical specialists than in most countries, although waits in Germany are shorter than in the United States. But citizens of other countries get longer hospital stays and more medication than Americans do because our insurance companies evict people from hospitals as soon as they can stagger out of bed.

For example, in the United States, 90 percent of hernia surgery is performed on an outpatient basis. In Britain, only 40 percent is, according to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute.

Likewise, Americans take 10 percent fewer drugs than citizens in other countries -- but pay 118 percent more per pill that they do take, McKinsey said.

Opponents of reform assert that the wretched statistics in the United States are simply a consequence of unhealthy lifestyles and a diverse population with pockets of poverty. It's true that America suffers more from obesity than other countries. But McKinsey found that over all, the disease burden in Europe is higher than in the United States, probably because Americans smoke less and because the American population is younger.

Moreover, there is one American health statistic that is strikingly above average: life expectancy for Americans who have already reached the age of 65. At that point, they can expect to live longer than the average in industrialized countries. That's because Americans above age 65 actually have universal health care coverage: Medicare. Suddenly, a diverse population with pockets of poverty is no longer such a drawback.

That brings me to an apology.

In several columns, I've noted indignantly that we have worse health statistics than Slovenia. For example, I noted that an American child is twice as likely to die in its first year as a Slovenian child. The tone -- worse than Slovenia! -- gravely offended Slovenians. They resent having their fine universal health coverage compared with the notoriously dysfunctional American system.

As far as I can tell, every Slovenian has written to me. Twice. So, to all you Slovenians, I apologize profusely for the invidious comparison of our health systems. Yet I still don't see anything wrong with us Americans aspiring for health care every bit as good as yours.

Some Racists Aren't in the Best Interest of the Free Market

2009-10-16T13:09:10Z

Excerpt from "Analysis: Limbaugh's words keep him from a dream"
By JESSE WASHINGTON
AP National Writer

15 October 2009

"The league has 78 percent African-American players," Lebowitz said. "Do you bring in someone who has made racist statements to own a team that's largely made up of players the owner has made slurring statements about?"

The decision to exclude Limbaugh was made Wednesday by a group led by Dave Checketts, chairman of the St. Louis Blues, who are trying to keep the Rams in town. It came after concerns were raised by players, their union, civil rights activists, at least one NFL owner and the commissioner of the country's most popular sports league.

All franchise sales must be approved by 24 of the NFL's 32 teams -- an ownership group that is overwhelmingly white, conservative and focused on the bottom line, which could have suffered if fans or advertisers were angered by Limbaugh.

"There's an argument that says the very principles Rush espouses -- the free market -- are what did him in," said the conservative radio host Michael Smerconish. "This IS the free market. These are private businessmen who made a decision about what was in the best business interest of their thriving venture.

"It's definitely ironic. There's a bit of hypocrisy here as well," Smerconish said, citing a study that showed 70 percent of NFL owners' political contributions went to Republicans. "Through their dollars they are very supportive of the sort of politics that Rush talks."

Said the Rev. Al Sharpton, who was a loud voice of opposition to Limbaugh's bid: "It's remarkable in that he was denied by other powerful whites. At the end of the day, his own peers said, 'You are a liability.' Even the rich and powerful do not want to be identified with racism."

Limbaugh insists that he is not racist, and that comments such as one from a 2007 transcript on his Web site -- "The NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it" -- have been twisted by his liberal critics, and sometimes flat-out fabricated.

Two of the racist quotes recently attributed to Limbaugh, which praised slavery and Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James Earl Ray, may have been falsified and then magnified in the media echo chamber.

The quotes were published in a 2006 book by Jack Huberman, "101 People Who Are Really Screwing America." Asked Thursday for the source of the quotes, Huberman said he had no comment. His publisher, Nation Books, also declined to comment.

But the record shows Limbaugh also was forced to resign from ESPN's Sunday night football broadcast in 2003 after saying of the Eagles' Donovan McNabb: "I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well."

Survey Says? Youth Need Support. Oh.

2009-10-07T13:37:16Z

Yesterday an "idea" was announced. Promoted today as intrepid was a plan for what school systems and social service agencies call "at risk" youth. And it made the front page of The New York Times.

It took six months and a team of eight people in a global U.S. city called Chicago to figure out this $60 million seeming innovation. The idea came after sixty-seven kids died violently in 2007-2008, mostly youth of color, and after one death was captured on tape and broadcast to the world via YouTube.

The Chicago Public Schools' (CPS) plan for youth follows death, murder, and a global financial collapse, just some of the many repercussions of globalization.

]]> The plan comes during Chicago's massive urban "transformation" and public school "renaissance." Social housing projects have been torn down in the city, wiped away to make room for supposed "mixed-income" housing too unaffordable for most of the neighborhoods' former public housing residents.

Chicago moved its poor and working poor, mainly African American residents out and into the suburbs of Chi and the city encouraged predominantly white global financiers to move into newly colonized "communities" re-made just for them. One hundred schools were shut down with the hope of birthing 60 privately-managed ones. But none of this "development" stuff helped the kids who were regulated inside schools that were designed to "transform" them. The youth along with their families got pushed out to the margins of Chicago's new gentrification complexes of entertainment, business, and condos.

But yesterday, the CPS plan came in the form of something akin to a miracle, one not without the usual contentions, yet one promulgated on the basis and merit of Science.

"We were hoping the analysis would reveal what we should do, and in fact it has" said CPS CEO Ron Huberman.

Once again, CPS begins an educational renaissance . . .

Like Richard Dawson on the old Family Feud announcing what that great LED screen holds, the work of analysts was announced and survey says!

Youth of color who are living in poor and/or working poor families need an aggregation of (love) emotional, economic, and political support.

Absolute genius on the part of the Chi-Town Team of Eight who came up with this revelatory information! And, they did so in only six months and after an analysis of only 500 students shot. Wow! Now, that's a smart group of people.

What I say to Chicago is this: Duh.

The plan is to provide almost 10,000 kids that CPS cataloged (and filed away) as "at-risk" what they should have received all along and what all poor and working poor people should receive unconditionally: social and economic support that is intentional, systematic, and ongoing; more adult attention; a 24-hour adult advocate; and a "paid job" ("Focus in Chicago: Students at Risk of Violence," NYT, 6 October 2009).

Yesterday, on the heels of the Derrion Albert murder, the political support for this project was rallied in typical mediated fashion. Huberman made the announcement of his team's discovery. He declared CPS's new approach for the city's "at risk" youth, and the media duly publicized the plan.

The data analysis on which the new, aggressive method is based is supposed to help illuminate for us a particular social problem of which I believe we've always already been aware: poor and working poor African American and Latin@ kids need not just Big Brothers and Sisters, The Boys & Girls Club, community centers, and the community "service" exploits of undergrads in need of CV entries or guilt reduction, they need active, ceaseless social, economic, and political advocacy.

One concern, though, Huberman is a former police officer and transit exec and so he leans toward regulatory principles. As well, most CPS/City of Chicago interventions come in the form of youth management and control, or rather the intense policing of African American and Latin@ bodies.

The plan is directed toward "10,000 high school students with the highest risk of becoming involved" in "violence as victims . . . or even perpetrators" (NYT, 6 October 2009). It "involves the coordination of various city departments and agencies, including the Police Department and Department of Children and Family Services, and local nonprofit and community groups."

And as Huberman notes, don't forget about the kids: "the students will also have 'to bite.'"

Hmmmm, it might be a bit difficult to take a bite from the hands that have historically harrassed you.

The Gao Brothers Express Mao's Guilt

2009-10-06T16:00:09Z

"In China, a Headless Mao Is a Game of Cat and Mouse"
New York Times
6 October 2009
BY Jimmy Wang

(Left, Mao's Guilt / Gao Brothers)

BEIJING -- It's not the kind of sculpture of Chairman Mao you typically see in China. He's on his knees as a supplicant, confessing; his body language and facial expression indicate deep remorse. What's more, the head of this life-size bronze statue, titled "Mao's Guilt" and created by the artist brothers Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang, separates from the body -- by design.

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Exhibitions by the Gao brothers, whose work the authorities find politically challenging, have been shut down in the past, and their studio has been raided. So they keep the head of Mao hidden in a separate location -- reuniting it with its body only on special occasions to show friends and colleagues. Normally, the body of the statue remains headless, unidentifiable and nonthreatening.

"It's something I hope all Chinese people will one day be able to accept and understand," Gao Zhen, 53, said of the work. "We wanted to portray him as a human being, a regular person confessing for the wrongs he's committed."

On Sept. 3 the head came out for a Gao brothers "party" -- the code name for one of the invitation-only private exhibitions they hold several times a year. The location of the exhibition was not disclosed until several hours beforehand and spread via word of mouth and coded text message. Outside the closed doors of their private home studio, a staff member kept watch for unwelcome visitors.

Removable heads and underground exhibitions are just two of the guerrilla tactics the Gao brothers have employed, often with the help of Melanie Ouyang, their broker, to enable fans and friends to view their work. The Gaos are part of a generation of avant-garde Chinese artists who are pushing the boundaries of artistic expression. In the increasingly open Chinese art world, nudity is commonplace where it used to be forbidden, and art parodying the Cultural Revolution has become so ubiquitous that it is passé. Still, the Gaos are a reminder that, especially as China celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Communist revolution, limits to expression remain: although artists are increasingly free to deal with social and political topics, works that explicitly criticize Chinese leaders or symbols of China are still out of bounds.

"Ash Red," a 2006 exhibition the Gao brothers openly advertised and held in their studio in the 798 Art District here, was suppressed by authorities. Several men representing the government walked into the gallery and presented a list of works that "needed to be removed," said Gao Qiang, 47. Posters and catalogs for the show were banned, and interviews the brothers had lined up with local news media were canceled. For several weeks after "Ash Red" was shut down, two guards stood outside the doors of the Gao brothers' home studio, discouraging people from coming inside.

The 798 Arts District has a local management office that, among other things, keeps an eye on art it deems unacceptable and detrimental to the district. "They receive pressure from above," said Gao Yuewen, 29, a staff member at the Gao studio, who noted that the Gao brothers were "classified differently" from other artists by the authorities, meaning that they were suspect.

In March another sculpture by the Gaos, "To Catch a Lady," a reproduction of a photograph of the police hauling away a prostitute during a raid on a brothel, was whisked away during the night. Only after the brothers filed a complaint to the police did the authorities admit to removing the piece.

The Gao brothers' most extensive work is both explicit and critical, seeking to recast Chairman Mao -- a figure in China who is simultaneously capable of arousing deep emotions of pain and despair, as well as admiration, love, and pride -- as a flawed figure. In television movies here Mao's wartime triumph in resisting Japanese invaders is continually on replay, while the Great Leap Forward, the dark side of the Cultural Revolution and Mao's failed policies are played down.

For many older Chinese, Mao remains sacrosanct. But for a younger generation of Chinese, Mao, who died in 1976, feels increasingly irrelevant, and there is little shock value in the Gaos' portrayals of him. In China's larger, more cosmopolitan cities, remnants of Mao's personality cult are less prevalent. Reciting phrases from Mao's "Red Book" has long since been replaced by shopping for laptop computers, Mini Coopers and other "ming pai," or famous brand-name consumer items.

For the Gao brothers, Mao holds a more personal meaning. During the Cultural Revolution their father was labeled a class enemy and dragged off to a place that was "not a prison, not a police station, but something else," Gao Zhen said. After 25 days had passed, the family members were told he had committed suicide.

They think otherwise: "If someone didn't like you at that time, they arbitrarily labeled you a class enemy," Mr. Gao added. "We came to Beijing to petition our father's death." Eventually the family was given the equivalent of about $290 in compensation. "That was a very painful period of our life," Mr. Gao continued. "We were six brothers and a single mother; we didn't have a penny."

That defining event in their childhood has been both the basis and motivation for much of the brothers' work, which often seeks to put a spotlight on people, places and events in Chinese society that are taboo. The mural-size painting "Forever Unfinished Building" shows a smorgasbord of characters representative of many different sectors of society sprawling across a construction site. Front and center is a Chinese woman refusing to be displaced from her home by rich developers.

Still, many Chinese who are critical of the Gaos' work say it lacks subtlety. "I understand what they're trying to say, but I think their pieces are sensationalist -- they're too direct and gaudy," says Feng Ling, 23, an art student who recently came to the Gao brothers' home studio and saw "The Execution of Christ," in which a firing squad of Chairman Maos take aim at Jesus.

Many artists in China have learned to work political meaning and criticism into their art without being as obvious as the Gao brothers. Liu Wei, for example, in his recent work "A Lifestyle," placed various pieces of Chinese exercise equipment, found in parks all over the country, in a giant iron cage that looks like a jail, suggesting the extent to which daily activity and freedom are circumscribed by state power.

"Most artists nowadays have learned to make political commentary without being overtly political, so these kinds of 'underground showings' are happening less than they did in the 1990s," said Phil Tinari, 30, founding editor of Artforum's Chinese-language Web site, artforum.com.cn.

The Gaos, in their latest underground show, sought both to disarm their critics and give a sendoff to the Mao theme; they say "Mao's Guilt" will be their last work based on the Chinese leader "for a while," partly because of the prevalence of art parodying the Cultural Revolution, and also because his image has been recycled over and over in popular art and film.

"The Gao brothers' work on Mao is provocative for many mainland Chinese," said Kai Heinze, 33, director of the Faurschou Gallery in the 798 district. "Their work sets off a trigger, challenging people here to understand and tolerate a view of modern Chinese history that admits shortcoming,"

What Have We Done to the Children?

2009-10-01T18:29:19Z

I'm embedding this into the Social Etymologies blog because I never want to forget this.

I never want to forget the sound of a child's uncomfortable giggle as two-by-four hits young, black bone. I never want to forget the sound of a child saying "Damn!" over and over or someone saying plainly, in the background, "They beat him to death!" I never want to forget a child say with almost Fox News fascination, "Get closer! Get closer!"

I never want to forget a young voice scream desperately "Come on, Derrion! Derrion get up! Derrion, get up!"

I never want to forget that we produced these children. I never want to forget the process and practice of that production.

I never want to forget what we have done to the kids. I never want to forget what we have not done for the kids.

Beating death Of Derrion Albert, age 16, by his peers (24 September 2009, Chicago, IL)

Is the Doctor Accepting New Patients? Sort Of

2009-09-29T17:56:57Z

Harold Graves

I am trying to get my daughter an appointment with a pediatrician for a flu shot. This means I have to find a pediatrician since we just moved to the Eastern Shore. More importantly, I want to give our daughter (us) an opportunity to develop a relationship with a physician with whom she will, hopefully, feel comfortable and with whom she will hopefully maintain a lasting relationship.

I am also looking for a "family practice" doctor or a physician in internal medicine.

I have spent at least 18 hours researching, trying to find background information on various physicians I've discovered. It is virtually impossible to locate information on doctors these days. When you Google any doctor by name, the following sites have taken control of a doctor's background information.

HealthGrades.com
Vitals.com
UCompareHeatlhCare
LinkedIn.com

It seems that these days you may only access information beyond a doctor's name, address, and sometimes education for a fee.

You can obtain some patient ratings for free on RateMDs.com, but my bias is that if a patient's comment seems infused with either complimentary or disparaging statements along with multiple serious grammar and spelling errors, I'm not sure I can trust the recommendation.

I finally contacted a pediatrician I thought might suit our daughter. A woman. A woman of color: Japanese-Irish American. A woman who had been burned as a child and has since dedicated her life to childhood injuries.

"The doctor is no longer taking new patients."

But her partner is. Her partner is white and a woman. I ask to make an appointment for a flu shot for our daughter.

'What is your insurance?' is the first question I am asked.

]]> I tell the receptionist that we have X insurance. I guess I have the right one because the conversation continues. She explains that the doctors are providing flu shots in "clinics." Right now the clinics are "booked out" until November. She tells me that I may schedule an appointment for the November clinic except for one minor problem: they are not allowed to schedule anyone for the November clinic until they receive more flu vaccine so I can't really schedule an appointment for our daughter until then. When is that? I ask.

"I don't know," she says.

"Just go to your local drug store or flu clinic" I am told. But, "If your daughter does become ill, call and we will see her right away."

"Thanks," I say.

"May my daughter meet Dr. H so that we are sure she--?"

"Dr. H does not conduct 'meet and greets.'"

"Oh."

Instead I will have to bring my daughter in for an appointment when something is "wrong with her" in order to "establish a relationship with the doctor." Or, she says, I may bring my daughter in for a "'Well care, age 8,' appointment" except for the fact that the next time they have an opening for a "well care appointment, age 8" is near the end of December. By then, my daughter will have already turned 9.

"You can schedule her for a 'Well Care, Age 9' appointment, then."

I grab the appointment for late December.

I get it now. This is all insurance discourse for those legitimate doctor-patient interactions that are "covered." "Meet and greets," I suppose, are not.

On to trying to make an appointment with a doctor for me so that I may get a "scrip" for my annual mammogram. I call the family practice physician who has come highly recommended from two women in town - one a professor from the college, another a wonderful, dynamic woman and former public school teacher and wife of a soon-to-be retiring professor at the college.

I never see male doctors. But the women remind me that if I get the sniffles, it's always good to have someone local instead of doing that which I was proposing and that which we do for everything good since moving here: drive 60-90 minutes across the bay.

But this highly recommended male doctor who "really listens to what you have to say," "who likes to have you participate in your health care" will not accept a new patient unless the patient first completes a "report," which he reviews. Dr. Personable and Local then decides whether he will accept you as one of his patients or basically tell you to go to . . . elsewhere.

I think that it is important to mention how similar in tone my telephone conversations with doctors' offices have been here in Maryland. The discussion with the local doctor's receptionist went something like this and it was not unlike other interactions I have had:

"Hi, is Dr. X taking new patients?"

"What type of insurance do you have?"

"Excuse me?"

"What type of insurance do you have?

"X insurance."

"It's not an HMO is it?"

"I'm not sure."

"Do you have your card?"

"Yes."

"Look at the back of it and tell me the address where you send claims."

"P.O. Box 725 . . . ."

"Okay, good. Now, the doctor may see you after you complete a report reviewing your medical history. This can be emailed or mailed. Which would you prefer?"

"Email."

I'm thinking about starting a small movement. Maybe I'll call it "The Common Folk for Single Payer Health Care."

As I write this the local church bells chime the hour. They ring out from beginning to end former slave trader John Newton's "Amazing Grace" . . . I once was lost, but now I'm . . .

1 OCTOBER UPDATE: That "report" that the local doctor's receptionist said she would email still has not arrived. I guess I didn't even make the cut over the phone once I gently questioned the doctor's practice of having patient's pass a paper test before being accepted into his family practice.

The Thing-ness of My Child

2009-09-11T15:10:57Z

I worry that my daughter's school is too fantastic for its own good. Her teacher is magnetic; she is an elder teacher who has taught Montessori for almost twenty years yet springs with delight at the thought of each new day and each year's introduction to the Great Lessons.

The head of school is dynamic, a woman who loves words and the ways in which they can inspire innovative and compassionate learning. The head of school reads. She shares her reading with her faculty. She reads historical and informational books, about quilting, for example, and she turns the idea and execution of a quilt into a metaphor for working with kids as a community without judgment and with great gratitude for the fortune of the profession.

Each teacher in the school is "friendly" to a degree that makes any normal human feel that they've given their smile muscles away at the toll booth on the bridge. Each teacher is always happy and their fingers never wag with contempt in the face of any child.

But.

Three times in one week a different child announced my daughter's country of birth: to the PE teacher, to other children, to my daughter herself. And each time, other little ones around her put their lips into a perfect circle and emitted loud OOOHs and then they widened their mouths to let out booming WOWs.

And when I asked someone, not yet (and maybe never to be) a friend, Am I wrong to be concerned that the children are so in awe of my African daughter? She said, Yes. Oh, children like new things; they like new and different and interesting things.

And that's just it. And you know what I am about to say. It is this that bothers me: the thing-ness of my child within the walls of what is supposed to be (or become) her (our) school "community." It bothers me that no other child (to my knowledge) is a thing in the same way that our daughter is. That no other human is new and different and interesting in just the same way. And I don't want any child to be 'discovered' in such a way - discovered to be a new and different and interesting thing. Our daughter is these things to these children because their world has been distorted, shrunken to the size of a lentil.

My daughter has entered into the world of these children, which they believe to be real. And it is highly likely that the other world in which my daughter, our family, and 75% of the world's people live will only be entered by them through food, feathers, and dancing - through, in essence, the novelties of 'Others.' And she, our daughter, will learn (is learning) to be in their world. Our task as parents, Mark and I, is to help our daughter see that adults who love their kids as much as we love her created this small place where white children could always feel that their place and position and existence was - problematically - "natural" and "right."

Daily, we help our daughter understand in her words, through her level of conception that the world of white children is just one 'reality'; it is false and disturbed, yet it is a place that is porous allowing for moments of clarity. Inside the world of white children our daughter needs to know that forgiveness is still possible - of each other - but this will truly only be so if these children learn to see themselves as not so alone in a world but instead of a much larger one. And it is this work that belongs to adults.

Photo credit: "Black & White" by Man Ray, 1936

Mommy & Daddy Made Me Stay Home Today!

2009-09-09T00:29:24Z

C-SPAN / 18:00

There are parents and pundits who criticized Obama's attempt to encourage kids to dream a little and to use school as a way to fulfill those dreams. As many of you know, today, Obama went to Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia and delivered a speech to the nation's school kids. Schools around the country tuned in, and some did not. It was a speech that some parents felt might harm their kids in some way and so they kept them home from school. Some parents were concerned about "bias" in Obama's speech. Bias toward what? Going to school? Did they consider keeping their kids home a radical, political act of resistance? We have to ask, what were you resisting?

Some pundits and parents felt Obama's speech was a "policy speech." If talking about setting educational goals for yourself, believing in yourself, and living out your passions while helping to change the U.S. to be a more compassionate nation is the new U.S. policy, it's one to which more of us should subscribe, no?

In an article on CNN.Politics, one parent was quoted as saying: "Thinking about my kids in school having to listen to that just really upsets me . . . I'm an American. They are Americans, and I don't feel that's OK. I feel very scared to be in this country with our leadership right now." WOW! After actually hearing the speech, this mom from Colorado must be SO incredibly embarrassed. What in the world does being American or not have to do with getting your butt up in the morning, going to school, and engaging in intellectual questions, creativity, and challenge? The parent says knowing her kids will have "to listen to that." "That" to me was about education and if isn't school the place to talk about the challenges of being a kid in school. I think that was the real "that," and thus one of the main points of Obama's speech today.

What did these parents think Obama might say (and weren't their fears quelled by reading the speech which was provided beforehand)? Did they think Obama would use this platform to tout the virtues of socialism? Did they fear he might tell kids the truth about how some parents have been acting at recent health care forums, setting them ablaze with ire and shutting down all hopes of communication? Did they think he'd get up to the Wakefield High School stage and scream out, "You know what, y'all, Republicans suck!"? What in the world did they fear?

Obama asked kids to discover who they want to be as adults and to make those discoveries through school; he asked kids to set some goals, small ones like 'tonight I'll do my homework.' He told kids they won't succeed at everything, but they can accomplish many things. He talked about the initial struggles of J.K. Rowling, author of Harry Potter. He quoted Michael Jordan. To be quite honest, his speech sounded just like the kind of lectures my aunts, uncles, mother, and father used to give me when I was a kid (and at which, as a child, I sometimes rolled my eyes): "Don't ever give up on yourself." Okay, the part about if you give up on yourself you give up on your country was a bit of patrimony, but it wasn't some grave evil with which he was trying to inculcate our kids. It's not like he encouraged them to get naked and do the nasty right there on C-SPAN.

Will those parents who kept their kids home today be embarrassed some day? Imagine being the kid who has to go to school tomorrow and be the one who was kept home because his mommy and daddy were afraid of Obama's stay-in-school speech. Gee wiz, even Laura Bush shared that she felt Obama's speech was a good idea.

Living with the Undergrads

2009-09-03T13:03:27Z

We live among four undergrad houses on a dead end block in this small, southern town. The kids had parties four nights in a row.

Three hundred people at just one of the parties. One girl tells a Ghanaian basketball player: "Go back to Africa!" Girl is grabbed, boys jump in. Fight Muay Thai. (Bodies probably flew.) Cops called. Citations written - $500 for breaking the noise ordinance. Us in the streets, middle of the night, begging for some sleep. No sleep, groggy days, terrible weekends.

This weekend we hope for better as we had the undergrads over for cardamom immersed brownies and discussed how we might all live in community. As always, as kids always are, they were full of heart, ready to do things differently, and never wanted to leave and return to their own houses down the block. Kids . . . We didn't want them to leave either.

"The Near-Death Experience of Antioch College: A Cautionary Tale"

2009-09-01T16:21:15Z

From American Association of University Professors' newsletter:

What happens when a university's corporate management betrays the institution's core educational mission; when it abandons its key constituencies; when it hides its intentions and plans; and when it manipulates or withholds essential financial information? The AAUP's investigative report on Antioch University provides disturbing and disheartening answers to these questions.

Antioch College, founded in 1852 in Yellow Springs, Ohio, has had a long history as a pioneer in liberal arts education. Significant innovations, subsequently adopted by many other institutions, have included cooperative education, experiential learning, community governance, recruitment of African American students before and after Brown vs. Board of Education, and the country's first study abroad program. Through good times and bad, Antioch has produced distinguished graduates such as Coretta Scott King, Stephen Jay Gould, and Eleanor Holmes Norton. It has received top rankings among colleges whose graduates go on to complete the PhD as well as continuing recognition in the areas of academic challenge, enriching educational experience, active and collaborative learning, and student-faculty interaction.

The Antioch University administration and board of trustees, in suspending the operations of Antioch College and then closing the institution on June 30, 2008, appears to have decided that the college's rich history of progressive education and its residential liberal arts setting were luxuries that its 21st-century management philosophy could not afford and did not need. Antioch's closure is thus of concern to everyone interested in high quality liberal arts higher education.

The report of the AAUP's investigative committee analyzes the protracted dissolution of Antioch College in the light of the Association's recommended standards for faculty participation in program development, curricular control, budgetary allocation, declaration of financial exigency, and treatment of faculty under such exigency. The report details the gradual deterioration of faculty governance at Antioch through a series of administrative actions over several decades that led ultimately to the closure of the college. Key managerial decisions made by the administration repeatedly disregarded longstanding principles of faculty consultation and shared governance.

Specifically the report reveals that the Antioch University administration:

usurped the faculty's responsibilities by mandating a new curriculum that the faculty neither initiated nor approved;

failed to consult with the faculty regarding the college's financial condition prior to the declaration of financial exigency and the process by which university administrators and board members had reached that decision;

failed to provide faculty members the right to examine or challenge the decisions both to declare financial exigency and to close the college;

systematically reduced the flow of budgetary information to the Antioch College faculty and its governance bodies;

failed to protect the autonomy of Antioch College and, in fact, significantly undermined it by approving a shift of administrative functions from Antioch College to the university administration without ensuring means for communication or sharing of governance.

During its 156-year history, the college had struggled through many hard times but had been sustained by the strong tradition of its faculty's engagement with enlightened boards, distinguished administrators, eminent alumni, and talented students working together to serve the common good. Fortunately, those devoted to the Antioch tradition have once again taken critical steps toward reopening Antioch College. As announced on June 30, 2009, the governing boards of Antioch University and the college's alumni have reached agreement on opening a new Antioch College, independent of the university. Reopening is anticipated for fall 2011. Antioch College, it seems, will rise again phoenix-like and survive to continue its tradition of progressive education. But its near demise provides clear and eloquent testimony to the havoc wrought by a board and administration that abandoned their commitment to liberal arts education and to the fundamental principles of shared governance.

Gary Rhoades, General Secretary

SeekingBlackCurricular&ExtracurricularLife

2009-08-23T19:02:09Z

Dear USA:

Help.

For a moment, let me be completely blunt about what the assistance you might provide is regarding?

WE ARE IN SEARCH OF BLACK CURRICULAR AND EXTRACURRICULAR LIFE!

Okay, my husband and I are desperate out here in a rural area of Maryland--and yes, this is the south no matter how you slice the state. I know, I know, we moved ourselves out here so why cry out for some social/cultural assistance when we made our own bed to begin with? Well, we're academics, teachers, so there was a job for Mark here, a good one, and the town is only 3.5 hours drive from our family in NY as opposed to hours by plane, and let's face it, Minnesota was like hyperborean cold--so forgive us, we felt compelled.

]]> So here we are, in a town just under 5,000 people which is exploding with khaki, docksiders, and Polo tops. Just about twenty-two percent of the residents of this place are African American and the Latin@ and multiracial populations make up barely 2% of the town.

As you might know, we're a multiracial family: I'm Cuban and African American, Mark is white and Polish, and our daughter, age 8, is African and African American.

How can you help us? We need you to put your feelers out. Who knows who you know who knows someone out here in Maryland. Contact old high school or college friends, long lost loves, old and present business contacts, whomever. We need you to help us find our daughter a life outside of cultures of whiteness. More specifically, she needs one black guitar teacher and one ballet school with a racially and economically diverse student body and faculty. Post all recommendations here on this blog. Thank you in advance for your efforts because my guess is that you'll have to make enormous endeavors to find a healthy stock of black extracurricular life that is not:

a one-time-per week "informal," "free class" for "diverse youth";

the "special" "diversity" programming of some larger highly resourced organization or school, programming whose sparse existence is extremely vulnerable to any slight economic downturn;

scheduled only during 1 or 3 weeks in the summer to keep youth in need (African American and Latin@) kids off the streets;

programmed to meet only once per week (probably only Saturday) because the organization hasn't been as highly resourced as the more culturally and often more predominantly white-skinned (see below for definition of the latter terms) extracurricular activities, particularly in the arts;

recently and/or suddenly canceled due to "low enrollment."

Let me provide some definition here as to what I mean by "culturally white" versus predominantly white-skinned organizations or programming. Quite simply, I think there is a significant distinction between whiteness and white skin. There are many, many families with what we in the North Atlantic recognize as "white skin" who have similar cultural and social values to Mark and me. Many are looking for just the same things in education and after school life. Too often, these "whites" and their hopes and desires for their families are seen as cultural anomalies in their own 'hoods.

Families like these, families like ours are simply seeking curricula in and out of schools (in athletics, arts, the classroom, school community, neighborhood) where actions or ways of doing something within the site don't patrol the boundaries of whiteness to prevent access by people of color; don't imply idealized images of whiteness by promoting ideas about the competence, "articulateness," or behaviorally "appropriate" student or adult of color who by implication is "deserving" of "opportunity"; lastly, and perhaps more importantly, places where actions or ways of doing something don't express or defend supposedly unconscious exclusion or dominance.

Mark and I are fatigued from engaging in the act of seeking what we now jokingly call "black curricular and extracurricular life," which is just our code for life outside cultures of whiteness. We have found from our search for African American, Asian, Latin@ and dare I even say American Indian extracurricular life is, as my southern momma might say, pretty sorry. I don't mean that the youth programming created and run by people of color is bad, I just mean that what of it exists is few and far between and far from where culturally white people have secluded themselves. As academics, this means we will more often than not live in such places among the self-sequestered.

Despite the fact that we live in a town where ¼ of the people are African American, yes, the local schools are "integrated" (and this county was one of the last to do so in the country), there is hardly any (creative or innovative) extracurricular programming here like there is for those who have culturally white values. Let me add right here and right now that we believe this "situation" is not to be easily solved by politics, economics, people who identify as culturally white or culturally black. The problem is far more complex than just that. This is a national, Western, "color line" problem. This is a problem with whiteness and only by larger cultural conditioning, white skin.

Here in this small town in which we now live, Sunday is, in fact, not the most segregated day of the week. Every day is. When we first visited--and as I tell this story you are not allowed to even think 'Why in the heck did they decide on moving there after knowing all of this?!'--we began the drive into town down its main "high" street. Lovely, truly lovely. All kinds of colorful and fragrant flowers in bloom that could never even catch a break in Minnesota. And there was this kind of quiet on the town's day time streets that allowed an east coast-I-spent-my-summers-down-south-with-grammy person to fall deep and heavy into the memory of large, pleasantly noisy crickets scratching their thick southern wings in summer's humidity. Old federal style houses and wee-sized streets and khaki, lots of khaki, hunched backs, and wooden canes, and boats, and brick. Absolutely adorable and cloying; a pure shot back into time.

"Oh, Mark, turn here please! Look at how sweet--"

He turns.

And suddenly, without a warning, behind all of this old time saccharine charm sits the town's blackness snubbed, crowded, bedraggled, cornered, ghettoed and stitched like a post-civil war patch on the ass-pocket of white, rural, sweet southern, Maryland.

And now we live here. Rarely do we see an African American person engaged in the hustle and bustle of the town, which takes place on the town's "high" street[s]. Rarely do I see African Americans in khaki, which here seems to be a sign that you agree, that you were either raised within the type of white milieu that thrives here or have joined, acquiesced, i.e. acculturated.

Perhaps, though sans khaki, because Mark, my daughter, and I walk this town's streets, we are considered one of those people. The working poor are never on the high street in daylight. I can only guess they reclaim their streets after they finish work, after all the white folks have closed up shop and retreated to their homes.

But we accepted the job anyway. Despite the poverty of black folks that we saw in a state touted in 2007 as the union's wealthiest; despite the obvious and stark cut off between black and white; despite the fact that the majority of residents voted for Bush-Cheney in the 2004 election; despite the fact that the only supposedly "good" school on this side of the Bay is an independent school created in 1967 in response to the town school's being forced to integrate by the Supreme Court.

Despite all of this, we moved.

So this is what happens when an interracial couple with an African/African American daughter, a couple who believes that their daughter's life (i.e., school, after school fun and learning) should reflect their seemingly scarce breed of social and cultural values, searches for black curricular/extracurricular life:

They drive 40 hours round trip (to save on air fare) from their home in the Midwest to the state in which the husband's prospective job opportunity has been offered to check out the schools in the deep heat of July.

They spend hours writing explanatory letters to admissions directors of independent schools and they leave long voice mails on anyone's phone at local public schools explaining what they hope for in an education for their daughter and a school experience for their family. They ask the schools: Can we find this here?

They, then, spend the next month, down to the wire trying to decide among public and independent schools. They are compelled, therefore, to decide between denying their values of equity, voice, and mutual responsibility in classroom and school practice and the following: public schools in which certificates to Pizza Hut are awarded to children for reading more than their classmates, and 3rd-grade teachers who advertise their top movie on the school's web site as Tom Cruise's Top Gun and their favorite food as macaroni and cheese; independent schools which enforce a khaki code and state that boys "hair may not approach the brow" and which were established way after Brown II as a way to cloister white children and keep them away from the neighborhood descendants of quite possibly their grand- or great-grandparents' former slaves.

Top Gun trailer (1986) / 2:30

After taking the job, these same parents then spend hours upon hours--and this, after unpacking a lifetime of family belongings and over 125 boxes of just books--scouring the Web looking for something not all-white, not culturally white, but instead some educational program that promotes, perhaps, community and not neoliberal principles of individualism, "free enterprise," and U.S. "patriotism." One school who did not have a required uniform but instead a required "dress code" encourages in their Parent Handbook that parents purchase their childrens' clothing (all of it--both leisure and school) from Lands' End. Lands' End promotes a particular kind of culture: "professional," "business," "casual." Such seemingly neutral language describes what is left out of the discourse: culturally white. The school even provides a link to the store and its online "school uniform" page which displays images like the following:

Parents in search of black curricular/extracurricular life hope for something outside of the small, rural town in which they have chosen to live that will allow their daughter to experience the world as an intriguingly complex place where African American, Latin@, Asian, American Indian, Middle Eastern, multiracial and white people make music, kick soccer balls, read books, count on their fingers, use computers, make films, and raise their torsos en pointe together.

We have learned that this is too much to ask of the Eastern Shore of Maryland and of this country. What makes me angry is that something which seems so right to me begins to appear so wrong in light of the abundance of extracurricular programming for "kids" (code: white-skinned kids). The reality is that programming for kids of color just doesn't really exist in significant numbers; it doesn't exist outside of small pockets of "efforts" toward "diversity" and "multiculturalism." I'm fed up with our desires for our daughter being a dang "special need."

We are a family of longtime educators. Our family's needs and expectations in terms of education are "radical," in that what is important for us really lies at the root--the radix--of a school--i.e., in its demonstrated methodology. Articulated to this interest in the foundation of a school and our own work as educators is the fact that I am Cuban and African American, Mark is white-Polish, and our daughter is East African. Mark is from a working class Polish neighborhood and I grew up in NYC in the Harlem of the '70s and '80s while attending an elite, predominantly white independent school from grades 1-12.

Some families like ours might require that a school visually reflect this racial/ethnic mix, and yes, we would like to see this, too. But, more important to us is that the guiding principles of the school allow for as opposed to resist any organic and/or child-initiated attempts to explore and engage equity, voice, and justice. It is our belief that if children choose to learn what they inherently feel compelled to understand (e.g. some of the interests of our daughter: gorilla mating rituals, Hmong language, or why economic divisions are constructed by people in power) and they do so in a purposeful community of compassion and integrity, then they will go out into the larger world with the necessary foundation for helping to build representative, just societies.

We know that what does not work is the food and feathers attempt at "multiculturalism" or representing what I call in an article on which I'm working: "the iconographies of multiculturalism" in schools or after-school programs. We know that visiting difference, dancing with difference, and tasting oreating difference does not create understanding, especially if such efforts never raise the following questions: Different from what and Different from whom?

Hence, we believe in academics that speak truthfully; academics that complicate history and the contemporary, that, for example, position the "pioneers" and "settlers" as a part of a socio-economic colonialism geared toward Indian removal rather than pioneers travailing at the hands of "violent" Indians. And we want kids to be asked How might you do it all differently? so that kids are able to practice being better than "us," the often fumbling yet courageous adults in their lives.

What we care about most in terms of our daughter's education and our family's membership in a whole-school community can be captured within three significant queries: Will our daughter enter a genuine community of partnership, compassion, choice, and integrity? Will the place of learning to which she belongs provide the open space for its children to 'question, challenge and create' in an environment that respects and encourages the particularities of insight, knowledge, passion, and interest that each young person brings? When visitors or the school's children cross the school's threshold, can they immediately sense an ethos of imagination, ebullience, individuality, and dynamism--qualities based on the mere fact that all within the school (adults and young people alike) are fervently engaged and actively supported in artistic, socio-intellectual, and/or athletic endeavors of their own choosing?

Some have said to me, "Oh Lisa! You and Mark are asking far too much from a school. A school can't be expected to meet all of those needs."

Really? This is too much to ask? It's too much to ask that, quite simply, our daughter be educated fairly, lovingly, openly, critically, truthfully, and genuinely? Call me naïve--and this is probably why I never "made it" politically in Chicago's quid pro quo education environment--but asking that kids be educated with integrity is, quite frankly, the least we should ask. This is the way education is 'spozed to be!

It's like that Chris Rock joke where he talks about black dudes who brag about the fact that they're not in jail and are taking care of their kids according to all the rules. Now, I neither want to mimic (or support) Obama's recent rebuke of African American men nor his use of this same Chris Rock routine I'm about to quote to perform his admonishment, but Rock had a good point about what I'll call the "'spozed-to-be" factor. Maybe I should just call it the "Chris Rock factor." Here's Rock's routine but written in a way useful for encouraging us parents who seek a kind of curricular and extracurricular life for our kids that is apparently considered to be extraordinary and very much unorthodox.

"You know the worst thing about [schools and special youth programming in culturally white organizations]? They always want credit for some [stuff] they supposed to do. [These places] will brag about some [stuff] a normal [place for kids] just does. A school or program will [have a mission] like, "We provide programming for youth in need [code for poor African American and Latin@ youth]. . . or 'We are building a respectful, diverse and nurturing learning community in collaboration with staff, children and families.'" You're supposed to, you dumb[y]! What kind of ignorant [goal] is that? . . . What do you want, a cookie. . . you low-expectation-having [dumby]!" (Chris Rock, Bigger and Blacker)

It's not 'spozed to be so hard to seek and then find black curricular/extracurricular life for all of our kids. And good parents are 'spozed to want sites of joy, compassion, integrity, and intellectual challenge for their kids provided by creatively trained adults who are globally representative.

It is the end of August and just yesterday we finally decided on what we think is an absolutely wonderful and courageous school that meets our educational expectations, not visually, but remember, we said what's going on inside the school to develop individuals who work to provide for all is the most important to us. Yes, it's a kazillion miles away, but no, we did not feel we had a choice in what is now, our town.

Okay, so here is how all of you come in. Like I said, we live in a town where the only representation of blackness our daughter and all the other children have in town is penned into a small ghetto. As well, the only representation the town's kids have of white-skinned people is similarly narrow. They could easily leave this town at age 18 and believe that white-skinned people are either poorly employed people who choose their "paths in life" and whose best friends are African American, or are wealthy whites who disdain the poor ones.

Our daughter totally gets oppression based on sexuality, ability, gender, race, and income, but the racial dynamic in this small, southern town means there are no organized activities made affordable or accessible to the African American kids. So, like the main artery through town, all extracurricular activities flow through the heart of whiteness.

So, do you get your role here? We need our kid engaged in some activity outside of this town and with kids that look like her and with kids that are white and preferably with good teachers who look like her and with those who do not. We need your help because we're actually beyond dismay. We are frightened about the lack of prospects and the seemingly lack of large-scale community-like response to the dearth of black curricular/extracurricular life. We need that secret program we haven't found.

Maybe someone is running something out of their garage like the Johnson & Wales University undergrads baking and selling the best Pain de Campagne I've ever had. We won't know about these kinds of folks unless we begin to ask around. And maybe, just maybe some donor will read this and grant some money to some willing organization ready to begin innovative youth programming nationwide. Heck, I have such grand ideas for programming, give me the money and I'll do it.

Can you hear our desperation? Slowly, the once beautiful vision our girl had of the world--that it was truly multicultural; that all the adult "professionals" in her life were African American, Latin@, Hmong, and white--could so easily slip away. We do all we can do inside our home, but we need the help of those outside our home now. We need you.

Opening photo taken from the web site of Maryland Youth Ballet.

All the Indians Are Dead.

2009-08-18T15:38:20Z

Photo: from Cindy Ott's article "Crossing Cultural Fences: The Intersecting Material World of American Indians and Euro-Americans." The Western Historical Quarterly 39.4 (Winter 2008).

My 8-year old daughter is eating beets and carrots for lunch. Her 7-year old friend from next door watches. He doesn't like beets. I tell my daughter: you're going to help me cook tonight. We're making Indian food.

DAUGHTER: Cool!

CHILD FROM NEXT DOOR: Back then, when the Indians were alive, they didn't have things like carrots and beets . . .

ME: Back then?

CHILD FROM NEXT DOOR: Yeah, when the Indians were alive.

ME: Ohhh, you mean American Indians. Oh, no, no. Tonight we're cooking Indian food like the kind that's made in India the country. The country in Asia. . . Also, American Indians are still living--there are Indians still alive.

CHILD: No there aren't.

ME: Yes there are.

CHILD: No! There arr-en-nt!

ME: Yes. There are.

CHILD: No there aren't. They're all dead.

]]> ME: Nope. There are American Indians all around us. There are Indian doctors, Indian farmers, Indian mothers and fathers, Indian plumbers, Indian teachers.

CHILD: But I can't see them.

ME: Yes you can.

CHILD: They don't look like Indians.

ME: Some Indians look like you [White, blue-eyed, brown hair], some look like me [dark brown and dark brown hair], some look like [daughter, light brown and dark brown hair]. Some are old, some are young. . .

CHILD: Oh, I guess you're right because one time I saw one. . . One day, my grandmother. At my grandmother's. My grandmother has a house in [X-state] and one time I saw a boy there riding a horse, so he must have been an Indian.

ME: Lots of different kinds of people ride horses: White people ride horses, brown people ride horses, and yes, some Indian people ride horses. In fact, American Indians didn't really have or use horses until they were introduced to them about 500 years ago. Just about 500 years ago the Spanish invaded this continent and they used horses to help them carry their food, weapons, and people from their ships to the land and all around the land. And, you know what else?

CHILD: What?!

ME: You see all of this land that the houses on our block stand on?

CHILD: Yeah.

ME: . . . and all of the land around the houses?

CHILD: Yes.

ME: . . . and the town and all of the land around the town?

CHILD: Yeah.

ME: . . . not too long ago, the land that these houses now stand on and all of the town land and all the land around the town was shared by, or some might say it belonged to all different kinds of Indian people---"

DAUGHTER: That was until the White people came and took it.

CHILD: What?

DAUGHTER: Yeah, a long time ago . . . Back then. Um, it was like it was in Africa. Africa was one large place. Then the White people came and they took . . . It was like this house. They took this part here [kitchen] and then they cut it up and then over there [runs to dining room] and cut it up and that part [living room] and cut it up. They took it all and cut it up and they said 'This is one country and this is another country.' Before, there were no countries. Everybody had all the space."

CHILD: "Huh. I thought all the Indians were dead."

Miru Kim: "Naked City Spleen"

2009-08-14T14:59:42Z

Miru Kim's body-image-space work exposes the forgotton-ness and vulnerability of vacant, vacated, abandoned sites. Kim photographs herself nude in an attempt to eliminate all cultural representations in these spaces:

]]> I wanted to create a fictional character or an animal that dwells in these underground spaces, and the simplest way to do it, at the time, was to model myself. I decided against clothing because I wanted the figure to be without any cultural implications or time-specific elements. I wanted a simple way to represent a living body inhabiting these decaying, derelict spaces.

Of course, Kim's naked body is not without all cultural constructions, particularly those of gender and sexuality. Kim is not and cannot be culturally neutral. But we can see what she is ultimately attempting. The problem is that the dominant culture (in the GNorth) predominantly experiences the woman's naked body as an act of exposure--of the body--rather than that of relinquished space and place, which are Kim's more general aims.

Kim's figure mainly hyperbolizes the seemingly uninhabited, underground of cities by exposing and thus reminding us of fear, what has been forgotten or purposefully ignored, as well as the constancy of history.

Here, in this short talk from TED, Kim discusses her interest in and arguments about the underground.

Miru Kim's Underground Art (14:31)

"Wealth (and Dior) on Their Minds"

2009-07-30T13:58:17Z

The New York Times
30 July 2009
Television Review | 'The Real Housewives of Atlanta'

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Thanks to the arrest of the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his house in Cambridge, Mass., two weeks ago, we are now in the midst, we are told, of a national dialogue about race. So it seems as suitable a moment as any to gripe about the profiling instincts of television programmers who in recent years have given us a tight, binary vision of what it means to be black in America in the new millennium.

]]> On the one hand we have the tough-times caricatures of Tyler Perry, whose series "House of Payne" and "Meet the Browns," both on TBS, rank among the top comedies for adults on cable television. Last week TBS announced that it was ordering an additional 20 episodes of "House of Payne," bringing the total number to 172, an astonishing figure for a laugh-track sitcom that began with the wife of a hard-working firefighter becoming a crack addict for no apparent reason. In Mr. Perry's world, the women are large, the foster children are angry, and the men discover daughters they didn't know they had.

At the far end of the spectrum there is "The Real Housewives of Atlanta," Bravo's loopy reality-series nod to diversity, a show in which a 6,000-square-foot house stands for slumming it. The goal here, as in all the "Housewives" shows, isn't getting your children into Harvard, but having the ability to keep shopping at Dior and Vuitton without the downer parameters of a budget.

Mere affluence is what counts for shame on the Atlanta version of the "Real Housewives" franchise (which begins its second season on Thursday). There is no point in marrying a cardiologist (or becoming one) when you can hook up with a professional athlete or a vaguely defined entrepreneur who can provide you with a house that has its own beauty salon and the opportunity to hire an estate manager. As Sheree, one of the show's five power shoppers (all but one of whom are black), put it last season, "I was upper-middle class growing up, but I left that behind for upper class."

In a timely concession to reconfigurations in the economy, the show begins its new season with Sheree enduring some fantasy version of financial misfortune. Her ex-husband, having failed to pay the mortgage on her mansion for months, leaves her with a house in foreclosure, and she must move to a place that might just sleep 10 comfortably and doesn't even have a game room. In response to her situation, Sheree decides to give herself "an independence party" and promptly gets into a shouting match with her way-over-$6-an-hour event planner.

The upper-middle-class values -- an emphasis on academic achievement or quiet taste -- that were so paramount to "The Cosby Show," which made its debut 25 years ago, form no part of the scenery in this universe (or, for that matter, in any area of reality television). Nor have those standards made a mark on other lifestyle reality series focusing on African-Americans. "Deion & Pilar: Prime Time Love," for example, which ran on Oxygen last year, featured the former football and baseball player Deion Sanders navigating his coliseum-size house in Prosper, Tex., on a motorized scooter. "The Real Housewives of Atlanta" are portrayed no differently from "The Real Housewives of Orange County." There's a color blindness to this kind of television. No one stands for anything admirable.

Still, some shows do even worse depicting the lives of African-Americans, combining two equally regrettable stereotypes in one half-hour. The comedy "Under One Roof," which ended this year on MyNetworkTV, put a wealthy real estate developer and his trophy wife in the same mansion as his just-out-of-prison brother, a guy who likes his gold chains thick and his baseball caps worn sideways. Suffice it to say that no one was sitting around reading Mr. Gates's "Signifying Monkey."

Video Promo for Under One Roof | 0:33

From Newsy.com: "Obama Joins Gates-Gate"

2009-07-30T03:31:19Z

A representative of Newsy.com sent me this video compilation regarding Obama's response to the Gates incident and asked that I post it. She writes :

"[The video] uses news coverage from multiple sources to describe President Obama's involvement with the Henry Louis Gates scandal. It examines how the president's statements have affected media coverage of the issue, and raises questions about race relations in America. I hope you will consider embedding the video in Social Etymologies."