NAVEL GAZING AND TOWN: Insults to the sacred dead!

THURSDAY, JUNE 17, 2021

The Harvard professor's pecans: Can something be gained from Tiya Miles' new book?

Presumably, yes. Last Sunday, Slate published an interview in which Rebecca Onion and Professor Miles discussed the professor's new book. The headline which sits atop the piece says this, perhaps a bit strangely:

Understanding the Horror of Slavery Is Impossible. But a Simple Cotton Sack Can Bring Us Closer.

Whoever wrote that headline advanced a somewhat peculiar claim—the claim that it's impossible to understand the horror of slavery. 

Miles' book, All That She Carried, is built around an apparent historical artifact—a simple sack cloth on which an inscription was embroidered in 1921. According to the headline in Slate, that cotton sack can bring us closer to understanding that horror, though we'll never fully get there.

We're going to come right out and say that we find that sentiment appalling. We find it self-involved, self-reverential. We find it tremendously dumb. 

A special problem surrounds Professor Miles' new book. The book is based upon an embroidered inscription on a cloth sack, but Miles wasn't able to establish the accuracy of the family story which led a woman named Ruth Middleton  to create that inscription in 1921.

That said, the inscription describes an horrific incident, assuming the incident really took place. 

Presumably, there's something that someone can gain from reading about the way Professor Miles "tries to imagine herself into the lives of the women she writes about." (We're quoting from the very favorable review which appeared in the New York Times.)

That said, every sane person has known, for some time, about "the horror of slavery." It's hard to choke down the disgust we feel when we're encouraged to indulge ourselves further in the pleasures of such ruminations—especially when we think about the many young people, living today, who Miles and  Onion will never ask their readers to try to imagine about.

In truth, we find this whole project appalling, an act of tribal self-admiration and self-regard. This is why we say that:

For starters, we retched as Professor Miles wallowed in the pride of her craft. In truth, her craft, as practiced here, is utterly useless, except as the latest vehicle for tribal performance of virtue.

Does the professor even speak English at this point? Early in the interview, she tells us this about the sack whose provenance she can't vouch for:

MILES (6/13/21): The power of this object seems to emanate from it, whether a person is seeing it from a distance, on the page of a book or on a screen, or up close and personal in a museum exhibit. And I think the power is anchored in the materiality of it, the fact that it’s a concrete and tangible item, and then the emotionality of what’s expressed on the surface of the sack, through the embroidered story. So the experience of engagement for the viewer or reader is a double or triple whammy—there are all these different modes of connection with the thing itself.

The way I tried to convey this in the book was, you take a few steps back from the sack to talk about that space of emotion, that experience of feeling the kinds of things that we do often want to sidestep in historical investigation. I think that to have avoided emotionality in the research and interpretation of the sack would have been to set aside an important aspect of the meaning of the sack, to the women who packed it and gifted it and carried it, and also potentially for us today. 

This was somewhat of a struggle for me as a scholar, because so many of us are trained to try to adopt an objective stance in relationship to our sources. And though of course I have attempted to work within the accepted and proven methodological parameters of my discipline, I had to really make space for myself to relate to this object in a different way, and also to write about that mode of relating in the book—to be transparent about it, to expose it, and to encourage readers, people who have seen the sack in person or who will see an exhibit with it in the future, to be open to the feelings. That’s where so much of the power lies, so much of the usefulness for us today.

It's all about the materiality of the sack, but also the emotionality of what's expressed on it. In writing the book, the professor wanted to take a few steps back "to talk about that space of emotion." 

In fairness, she struggled with "the methodological parameters of [her] discipline," a discipline she transforms into a vehicle for tribal navel-gazing. She wants to let the reader be "open to the feelings" evoked by the sack, which is where we find "so much of the usefulness for us today."

That said, what is the usefulness of this project for us today? Does someone today still need to be convinced of the horror of slavery? 

We're not sure who that person would be. But as the conversation continues, so does the professor's self-involved navel-gazing:

MILES: Harriet Jacobs, a formerly enslaved woman, told us in her writing that we could not know what slavery was. We just do not have that capacity. She said this to her white, free Northern women readers back in the 19th century—but we, too, due to our moment in time and place, can’t know.

And so we are in this place of not knowing, which is difficult for the scholar. But I think in the end, without this information, I was pushed to narrate the history of these women and their sack differently, and I hope that this will bring the readers a bit closer to the experience. These women had to stretch, bend, experiment, and innovate just to stay alive, to maintain their ties to one another, to their daughters, their sons; they had to innovate to tell their stories. And it has been an incredible gift and a learning experience for me to do something like the same in the research and writing of this book.

According to the Harvard professor, "we're in this place of not knowing." We contemporary people "just do not have the capacity" to "know what slavery was." 

In fact, everyone knows "what slavery was" in any way which still matters. That said, the women in question here "had to stretch, bend, experiment, and innovate just to stay alive." 

Insanely, Miles says she had "to do something like the same in the research and writing of this book." This is the kind of insulting nonsense which emits from Our Town's navel gaze.

The professor hopes her book will bring her readers "a bit closer to the experience"—presumably, to the experience of the enslaved woman and enslaved girl in the unverified family story her book discusses. She doesn't say why she wants readers to attain that state—but at that point, the conversation begins to drift.

According to the family story which Miles can't confirm, the simple cotton sack once contained three handfuls of pecans. The pecans were a gift from a mother to a 9-year-old child—a final gift, given as the mother was being sold away from her daughter.

If that actually happened, it would be one of the millions of horrors which occurred during this historical era. But uh-oh! As Onion and Miles continue, attention spans seem to lag.

The horror everyone already knows about starts to fade from view. In its place, we're suddenly subjected to such self-involved piddle as this:

ONION: I loved your section on the pecans—I never know how to say it, but “pee-cahn” is what sounds right to me!—the “three handfulls” that Ruth reports Rose put into Ashley’s sack. You get into natural history, and botany, and write that you went so far as to plant a pecan tree, to observe its unfurling, to understand the objects in the sack from a bunch of different angles.

MILES: For that part of the story, all we have is the notation: “three handfulls of pecans.” That’s it! So what do we do with that? If we want to try to understand what pecans meant to Rose, and how she may have gotten ahold of them, what they could have meant to Ashley, and how they might have not only sustained her but symbolized her relationship to her mother, a relationship to Black culture, and so on … it was difficult to figure out how to access that when the record has only three words!

Sad! The professor wanted to imagine all sorts of things about the sacred dead. In Onion's rendering, she wanted to understand the objects in the sack from a bunch of different angles (assuming those objects existed).

She wanted to imagine what the pecans, if there really were pecans, could have meant to the 9-year-old girl, if there really was a 9-year-old girl. She even wanted to know how they might have symbolized the 9-year-old child's relationship to her mother and to black culture, assuming that any such symbolic meaning existed at all.

Like Hephaestus dreaming the imagery on Achilles' shield, the professor wanted to imagine many things. She wanted to get closer to the thing-in-itself! The grotesque conversation continues:

MILES (continuing directly): So the move I made was to try to get closer to the thing itself in the present day. So, of course, I have my pecan sapling. It’s still growing! It’s wonderful. I love it.

ONION: Oh, good, I was afraid to ask!

MILES: Yes, it’s going [sic]! I wanted to see what would happen if Ashley had chosen to—if she was able to—plant a pecan tree. And if she tried to grow it, what would it have looked like? My sapling is not the same as Ashley’s, if she ever had one, but being able to see the new leaves on a pecan sapling, to think about what kind of life that could have signified for Ashley—the kind of life that is embodied by a growing plant, the kind of life that is encapsulated in a source of food—that helped me think about telling that part of the story.

I also ate more pecans! I wanted to, through my own senses, connect to what was in the sack. For breakfast today, I had rice cakes with pecan butter and peanut butter. And you’ll see that in the book, I actually include pecan recipes. This is the kind of experimental, exploratory chain of thinking that unfolded: going from the stitched notation on the sack, to trying to grow a little sapling, to eating more pecans, to talking with you today about how "pecan" is pronounced.

There are quite a few "ifs" in that ridiculous passage. Along the way, we got to learn what the Professor had for breakfast. Also this:

Perhaps as her own parting gift, the professor includes pecan recipes in the book! When we asked them to explain this behavior, major top anthropologists simply hung their heads.

In this interview at Slate, the horror of slavery disappears as we wallow in the self-involvement of these  denizens of Our Town. Under the circumstances, we'd describe that gruesome exchange as  an example of Self-Involvement Porn.

It's hard to be sufficiently repulsed by this repulsive—and dumb—conversation. The dumbness lies in the idea that we should want to get as close as we can to fully understanding the horror of slavery. (Not that we could ever fully get there!)

The proposal is so dumb that even the author of the proposal can't seem to sustain it for long. As the boredom and the bad faith set in, we switch to other questions: how to pronounce the word pecan, what Miles eats for breakfast.

For ourselves, we don't think there's much to gain by encouraging modern readers to get closer to the experience of historical enslavement—to the thing-in-itself. 

No one who reads the professor's book doesn't already know everything he or she needs to know about the horror of that lapsed institution. What we don't need to know about is what the professor eats for breakfast, or how much she loves the pecan tree she planted, weirdly thinking it would somehow bring her closer to the alleged experience of the child whose mother was sold away.

Million died in the horror of a different slavery—the horror of the gulag. Yevtushenko may have suggested that those people "cannot be brought back."

If the Rose and Ashley of Miles' book actually existed, they haven't asked to be brought back. Nor is it obvious, at this point, what purpose will be served by trying to "imagine" them, even as we plant our own pecan trees in our own lush, ivied yards.  

We moderns know as much as we need to know about what happened back then. As we noted on Tuesday, documented historical incidents have long since existed, in droves.

But as we read the self-involved conversation beneath that self-referential headline, we thought of people living today—the many people Professor Miles and the gang at Slate won't help us imagine.

The tease about the pecan recipes appeared in Slate last Sunday. One day earlier, some of those other people were disappeared on the front page of the New York Time. 

One day later, some of those people were disappeared in an essay in Slate.

Tomorrow, we'll tell you who those disappeared people are. For today, we'll only say this:

Our tribe is deeply self-impressed and—the anthropologists say—just extremely performative. We deeply involved in finding ways to display our own moral greatness, even as we look away from the actual living children who actually do need our help..

Tomorrow: Invisible 9-year-olds of the modern era

NAVEL GAZING AND TOWN: Professor Miles offers good advice!

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 16, 2021

First, though, the navel-gazing: Surely, no serious person alive today is conflicted about the institution of slavery.

The institution was outlawed in this country in 1865. No one is suggesting that we bring some form of the practice back. 

Over the many years, people have surely become acquainted with the pain, and with the horror, of the discarded institution. For that reason, we thought the prominent headline at Slate this weekend was perhaps a bit peculiar, though also instructive about the Hamptons-based values which prevail in Our Town:

Understanding the Horror of Slavery Is Impossible. But a Simple Cotton Sack Can Bring Us Closer.

Understanding the horror of slavery is impossible? At this point, for whom could some such act of comprehension even be slightly hard?

We thought that headline was slightly peculiar. We had a similar reaction to large parts of the interview which ran beneath it—an interview with Tiya Miles, who has written a book about an apparent horrific incident from the annals of slavery.

Parts of the interview struck us as odd, even as disrespectful, cold, dismissive, self-involved, insulting. That said, we thought Professor Miles offered some good advice as the interview came to an end.

Miles' book is built around an apparent historical artifact—a cotton sack which seems to tell the horrible story of an enslaved woman who was sold away from her place of bondage, never to see her 9-year-old daughter again.

As we noted yesterday, such horrible stories are legion, and have been for hundreds of years. Miles' book examines one such apparent incident—an apparent incident whose particulars can't be verified by normal historical practice.

According to Slate's headline, the cotton sack might help us come closer to understanding the horror of slavery. Late in her interview with Slate's Rebecca Onion, Miles offered some good advice.

The story that cotton sack seems to tell "felt like a gut punch to me," the Harvard professor said at that point in the interview. "All of a sudden I could imagine the vulnerability of my beautiful son, my own child, to this kind of horrific possibility," she also said, perhaps somewhat oddly.

Presumably, Professor Miles isn't going to be sold away from the Harvard campus—from the ivied preserve where so much embarrassing, incompetent and useless conduct occurs. 

Her son won't be left without his mother in some such horrific manner. And of course, horrific stories like the one the cotton sack seems to tell have been well known for centuries, and are certainly well known to Miles.

In that sense, that initial statement by Miles could possibly seem a bit odd. But at that point, as she continued, she offered some sound advice:

MILES (6/13/21): But that kind of electric feeling of connection isn’t really an end goal of this kind of [historical] work. I certainly would not want people to become so lost in the horrors of this time period that the book is attempting to interpret that we forget that change is possible. The powerful emotions that we can feel, and that undertow of horror that can pull us under—they are real, they are true to the history of the experience, but we need pull ourselves back up again and look around in this moment and this time, and think about how we can apply the lessons of the past.

The apparent story told in Miles' book can produce "that kind of electric feeling of connection," the professor now said—but that isn't the point of her book. 

The professor said she doesn't want readers to get so lost in the apparent story she tells that they "forget that change is possible." She didn't say what kind of change she had in mind.

According to the published transcript, Onion didn't ask.

The professor said we should "pull ourselves back up again" from our feelings about the apparent story told in her book. When we do, we should  "think about how we can apply the lessons of the past." 

The interview provides no suggestions as to what sorts of lessons we might draw from the past, or about how we might apply them. But in that moment, at least in principle, Miles was offering some very good advice.

As Miles continued, she continued to sketch out her point. At least in principle, her point was a good one. This is what she said:

MILES: Many people cry when interacting with this object, this story. These are gut-wrenching, heart-wrenching stories. These things happened, and our ancestors—some of them—lived through these atrocious things, and if it weren’t for their persistence and survival, many of us wouldn’t be here. When people who don’t share that ancestral past engage with these materials and also feel an empathetic, emotional reaction, when they recognize, “This is horrible. How could individuals, how could municipalities, how could states, how could the federal government be complicit in this brutality?”—I think that’s a good thing.

In that statement, Miles was responding to a question about how "white" people should respond to an apparent story like the one explored in her book. 

(Onion had asked if it was "self-indulgent, in some way, for audiences to consume this kind of story of Black trauma—maybe especially white audiences?" In our view, that was an excellent question concerning all groups of readers. That was Miles' response.)

According to Miles, "white people" may recognize, while reading her book, that the events in question were "horrible." They may even ask themselves "how the federal government could be complicit in this brutality," the Harvard professor now said, speaking, perhaps a bit oddly, in the present tense.

In principle, we agree with the basic point the Harvard professor was making. People shouldn't wallow in the apparent story her book seems to tell. In principle, people should channel their feelings into an attempt to create "change" in the present day, presumably in societal or governmental practices.

In principle, we very much agree with that; the time is past for feel-good navel-gazing! But that type of gazing had been general up to that point in the interview, and neither Onion nor Miles seemed interested in asking what kinds of "change" this new book might inspire.

Frankly, we found much of this interview appalling, insulting, self-involved, uncaring, vile. In many ways, we think it was Slate and Harvard and even Our Town pretty much all the way down.

In part, we had that reaction because of other things we read, and didn't read, in Our Town's leading journals last week. Another such item appeared in Slate the very next day.

Another such item appeared the next day! More on our reactions tomorrow.

Tomorrow: As always, the top few percent. Plus, the navel-gazing!

Morning Joe has been replaced!

TUESDAY, JUNE 15, 2021

Early morning delight: Today we have stating of confessions.

We're watching very little "cable news" at this point. After decades perched at that post, the pointlessness of the undertaking has finally convinced us to stop.

Within the past week or so, we've passed another milestone. As a general matter, we've stopped watching the first 30-45 minutes of Morning Joe. Instead, we've been retreating to our back deck, at first light—roughly, at 5:30 A.M.—for an early morning tussle with "phantom explanation."

Regarding Morning Joe:

For us, the program's first half-hour became "must see TV" back in 2015. We were amazed by the way Mika and Joe were fawning over the brand new Candidate Trump. We thought their behavior was so strange that we decided to watch the opening segment every morning before heading off to the coffee joint, a place we no longer frequent.

By our lights, Joe and Mika flipped on Trump, rather abruptly, in early 2016. It seemed to us that the flip occurred when the candidate claimed he had no idea who David Duke was, but the lack of transcripts for the program make such impressions hard to research.

Stating the obvious, Joe and Mika turned into aggressive antagonists with respect to their former friend. In the last week or so, we've decided to let this daily activity go, in favor of "first light delight."

We've been starting the day in the cool open air, examining disguised incoherence. Within the past week, we finally returned, after several years' absence, to a favorite puzzling passage of ours—to Walter Isaacson's chapter on Special Relativity, a chapter which starts like that:

CHAPTER SIX / SPECIAL RELATIVITY

The Background

Relativity is a simple concept. It asserts that the fundamental laws of physics are the same whatever your state of motion.

That's how the chapter starts, on page 107. It continues for 32 pages. Yes, that's the full first paragraph.

Just as a first observation, did anyone ever actually think that "the fundamental laws of physics" were going to change depending on his or her state of motion? How fundamental would such laws really be, if they were going to change on so flimsy a basis?

Isaacson's highly-regarded biography (Einstein: His Life and Universe) is very clearly written as long as it deals with the basic events of Einstein's life. But when it starts addressing Einstein's contributions to physics, we'd have to say that phantom explanation abounds.

The book is meant for general readers. That said, how many general readers would have any idea what the "basic laws of physics" even are—the basic laws which, we're told, aren't going to change even if the reader gets out of his chair and decides to start walking around?

That is just the initial paragraph of Isaacson's lengthy chapter. It has occurred to us, in these recent mornings, that there may not be a single paragraph in the chapter we actually understand—and yet the flow of apparent explanation just runs smoothly on.

We aren't trying to single Isaacson out. As basic biography, his book is very well written, and no one else has been able to make Einstein's work understandable for the general reader.

That includes Einstein himself, in the "Einstein made easy" book he himself published in 1916. There's little chance that the general reader will be able to understand that book—and yes, it's still in print. Despite his genius as a physicist, Einstein wasn't especially skilled at the task of making Einstein easy.

We're fascinated by the amounts of "phantom explanation" found in our highest places. So too with Stephen Budiansky's recent attempt to explain whatever it is that Kurt Gödel discovered, established or found.

At some point, we expect to turn to these topics for our main effort each day. The later Wittgenstein is waiting to see those explorations, or so leading experts have said.

On the bright side: There's a great deal of humor lurking in these stories. As we noted last week, Budiansky includes this humorous note about Bertrand Russell's attempt to establish the foundations of mathematics, whatever that might turn out to mean:

BUDIANSKY (page 108): In deciding to take on the fourth of the challenges [David] Hilbert had put forward at the Congress of Mathematicians in 1928, Gödel placed himself at the very center of the storm over mathematical foundations, which had broken with a deeply unnerving discovery Bertrand Russell had made at the turn of the century while working on Principia Mathematica.

Russell's idea had been to establish the soundness of mathematics by showing how it could all be reduced to principles of logic so self-evident as to be beyond doubt. Defining even the simplest operations of arithmetic in terms of what Russell called such "primitive" notions, however, was far from an obvious task. Even the notion of what a number is raised immediate problems.

The laboriousness of the methodology and notation was all too evident in the (often remarked) fact that that it took more than seven hundred pages to reach the conclusion, "1 + 1 = 2," a result which Russell and Whitehead described as "occasionally useful."

Russell's "deeply unnerving discovery" emerged from the wrestling match he staged with "the set of all sets not members of themselves." Meanwhile, it took Russell and Whitehead more than seven hundred pages to establish the fact that 1 + 1 = 2! Actually, no—to establish that fact beyond doubt!

Is it possible that something here never exactly made sense? At any rate, there's more amusement where that came from. A bit less so on Morning Joe, though it's one of the best cable programs

NAVEL GAZING AND TOWN: How hard can it be to know what to think...

TUESDAY, JUNE 15, 2021

...about our (nation's) brutal past?: How hard can it be to know what to think about our brutal past?

Actually, let's put that slightly differently. 

How hard is to to know what to think about our nation's brutal past?

We add one word because the brutal past to which we refer wasn't invented or devised by anyone living today. No one living today made the decisions to which we, on the left, now lovingly tend to return.

Because as humans we're very dumb, we "on the left" often seem eager to make modern people feel guilty about that brutal past. That impulse is dumb in every respect. Did we mention the fact that we're human?

No one living today invented that past, but we humans "on the left" long to keep that past alive in various ways, some of which may make sense. That leads us back to the curious headline which sat atop an interview piece this past weekend at Slate:

"Understanding the Horror of Slavery Is Impossible," the first part of that rather strange headline rather strangely proclaims. The full headline said and says this:

Understanding the Horror of Slavery Is Impossible. But a Simple Cotton Sack Can Bring Us Closer.

The cotton sack in question is an historical artifact. It forms the basis of a new book by Tiya Miles, a history professor at Harvard, whose work we've discussed in the past.

In the piece which carries that headline, Miles is interviewed by Slate's Rebecca Onion. At the end of the interview, Miles offers some good sound advice—advice we'll quote and consider tomorrow.

For today, we want to return to our basic question about that peculiar headline:

For whom is it even hard to understand the horror of slavery, let alone impossible? What can the strange assertion in that headline possibly mean?

Calendars claim that we're living in the year 2021. For whom is the assessment in question difficult, let alone impossible?

According to that rather peculiar headline, the cotton sack discussed in Miles' new book may be able to bring us closer to understanding the horror of slavery. As you can see if you read the interview, the cotton sack is supposed to serve us that way because it evokes one heartbreaking—and brutal—event which apparently took place, apparently in South Carolina, when slavery was still alive.

An inscription on the sack suggests a heartbreaking, brutal story. As Onion and Miles discuss that story, the story is supposed to help us in our attempt to understand—no, to better understand—the horror of that institution, which no longer exists.

That said, we offer a question. Who could possibly need such help? Our reason for asking is this:

Professor Miles hasn't exactly discovered the horror of slavery. Her book revolves around one particular case—an apparent case whose historical details she can't completely pin down.

That said, the horror involved in other such cases have been well known for years. Who isn't fully aware of this fact? Who could possibly need new instruction?

This past Sunday morning, that headline struck us as perhaps even disrespectful. As a result, we pulled out our copy of Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, an award-winning book by Professor Genovese which appeared in 1974. 

(It followed an earlier book by Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made. In Our Town, we continue to recommend aspects of that world in ways which strike us as foolish, inhumane, unintelligent.) 

Roll, Jordan, Roll is a very long, very detailed book, based on a wealth of historical sources (diaries, "slave narratives," newspaper reports.) As happenstance had it, we opened to page 484-485, and our eye fell upon a discussion of sexual assaults on enslaved women during the era in question.

Starting at the bottom on page 5484, Genovese describes one particular incident. His account starts like this:

GENOVESE (page 484): Black women fell victim to white lust, but many escaped because the whites knew they had black men who would rather die than stand idly by. In some cases black men protected their women and got off with a whipping or no punishment at all; in other cases they sacrificed their lives. Knowledge of their inevitable response prevented many outrages from happening.

At that point, Genovese quotes a Georgia woman of the Civil War era ridiculing enslaved black men as "cowards." He's quoting her from a published account. 

She "should have known better," he says.

"In view of the risks, the wonder is not that more black men did not defend their women but that so many did," Genovese writes. He notes that sexual attacks of the type in question caused many of these men to "reveal a far greater strength than most men and women are ever asked—or ever should be asked—to display."

With our apologies for where this leads, Genovese then starts to describe one such incident, apparently from the 1790s. The name of a witness is cited:

GENOVESE: An overseer tried to rape Josiah Henson's mother but was overpowered by his father. Yielding to his wife's pleas and the overseer's promise of no reprisal, the enraged slave desisted from killing him. The overseer broke his promise. Henson's father suffered one hundred lashes and had an ear nailed to the whipping post and then severed.

At this point, we've only started to describe the horror involved in this incident. As he continues, Genovese quotes Josiah Henson himself, drawing from one of Henson's published accounts of his own life.

Henson's published quotation appears in italics. Genovese then proceeds:

GENOVESE (continuing directly): Previous to this affair my father, from all I can learn, had been a good-humored and light-hearted man, the ringleader in all fun at corn-huskings and Christmas buffoonery. His banjo was the life of the farm, and all night long at a merry-making would he play on it while the other negroes danced. But from this hour he became utterly changed. Sullen, morose, and dogged, nothing could be done with him.

Threats of being sold south had no effect on him. The thoughts running through his mind as he came to prefer separation from the wife he loved to enduring life there must remain a matter of speculation. His master sold him to Alabama, and he was never heard from again.

This was the horrific incident we encountered when we flipped open the book. Other such events, sourced to historical records, appears throughout Roll. Jordan, Roll, a book which celebrates the moral brilliance of "the world the slaves made" in the face of such brutal treatment.

(For ourselves, we'd be inclined to use the term "enslaved people," not "slaves.")

Our point about this is simple. There's nothing new about the fact that such behavior abounded during our nation's past. Consider:

Genovese's account of this incident appeared in 1974. The account, one of many, appeared in a book which was widely praised.

That said, this wasn't the first occasion upon which the world was able to learn of this particular incident. In the passage we've posted above, Genovese was quoting from the second of Josiah Henson's three published account of his own life.

More specifically, Genovese was quoting from Truth Stranger Than Fiction. Father Henson's Story of His Own Life, a memoir which appeared in 1858. 

Henson had escaped to Canada in 1830. His three memoirs described the horrors he had witnessed and endured as a child born into slavery in the state of Maryland, not far from the nation's capital.

According to the leading authority on the subject, Henson's first book, which appeared in 1849, "is believed to have inspired the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)."  Also according to that authority, that 1852 novel "was the second best-selling book of the 19th century, following the Bible."

People read about the horror of slavery in all the books we've mentioned. Today, the book by Henson which Genovese quoted is in the public domain. 

You can read Henson's full account of that brutal incident, in the book's opening chapter, simply by clicking this link. You'll find the passage Genovese quoted, along with Henson's own first-person account of that horrific incident.

Our point is simple. The horror of slavery has been well known for an extremely long time. 

No one is recommending the reinstitution of that brutal system. We have no idea why anyone living today would find it hard to "understand" the horror of that institution, an institution which no one living today had a hand in creating or extending.

Who could possibly find it hard, let alone "impossible,"  to "understand the horror of slavery?" Does that headline really reflect anything Onion or Miles actually thought as they discussed the professor's new book? Does it reflect any part of Miles' purpose in creating the book?

As we've noted, Miles offered some good advice as the interview came to an end. But what could that headline possibly mean or intend to suggest? Also, what might it possibly say about the possible moral vapidity of us, the deeply self-involved, possibly navel-gazing denizens of this, Our Own Failing Town?

How hard is it to know what to think about our (nation's) brutal past? How hard is it to "understand" the horror involved in that history?

Who could possibly find the task hard? What can that headline, and parts of that interview, suggest about us in Our Town?

Tomorrow: Possibly a bit late in the game, Miles offers some good advice

Tribal war comes to Loudon County!

MONDAY, JUNE 14, 2021

The Others must always be wrong: The way Our Town is conducting our tribal war becomes more and more depressing.

For one example out of many, consider Robert McCartney's essay in today's Washington Post. In print editions, the mocking headline says this:

White Fragility on Display in Loudon [County]

It's on the front page of today's Metro section. In the course of his rumination, McCartney displays the essence of total war:

The Other Side must be totally wrong. They can't ever have a germ of a sensible point. Everything they say must be wrong. In the end, our team will always be pretty much right.

At issue is a "racial equity initiative" which was adopted two years ago by the public schools of Loudon County, a large Virginia suburban county outside Washington. According to McCartney, complaints about this program are hopelessly dumb. He starts his essay as shown:

MCCARTNEY (6/14/21): How can we combat racism in America if many White people see any attempt to remedy it as a threat and an insult?

That question was front and center last week in Loudoun County at a rowdy school board meeting featuring outraged complaints from scores of conservative parents and activists.

They objected to a racial equity initiative adopted two years ago by the school system in the affluent Northern Virginia suburb. The effort, ordered by the state attorney general, aims to improve treatment of students of color, who are a majority in Loudoun.

The project has led to racial sensitivity training for teachers, the dropping of a pro-Confederate high school mascot and a formal apology for Loudoun’s history of segregation.

According to McCartney, the conservative parents who complained last week "see any attempt to remedy [racism] as a threat and an insult." After mocking some of the comments made by "the mostly White parents," McCartney set about showing how silly their complaints really were.

Their complaints don't super-silly to us. Here are the two examples McCartney finally offers of their "exaggerated concerns:"

MCCARTNEY: For instance, a website opposed to the equity project points to a brief video of a Loudoun teacher in a college-level English class asking students to describe what they saw in a photo showing a Black woman and a White woman standing back to back. When one student said he saw “just two people chillin’,” the teacher faulted the student for refusing to acknowledge the racial difference.

“I think you’re being intentionally coy about what this is a picture of,” the teacher said at one point in a back-and-forth over the photo.

The teacher was more forceful than he should have been, but his comments hardly constituted totalitarian brainwashing as conservatives allege.

The website also cites a slide, allegedly shown to second-graders, asking students to answer the question, “How can you be an anti-racist leader?” A suggested answer: “I can be an anti-racist leader by always being an upstander and doing the right thing. I can always fight for what is fair.”

That’s an outrage only for people who don’t think the schools should try to fight racism.

Let's start with that second example, the one allegedly involving second graders. Just to get started, Good God!

Second-graders are very young! It's one thing to teach them how to sound out words, or how to work with fractions. It's a very different thing to be telling someone else's seven-year-old 1) that he or she should strive to be "an anti-racist leader," and 2) the way to go about becoming such a person.

Teaching values to someone else's kid has always been a tricky proposition. It's especially tricky now as our society  increasingly descends into Babel—as we divide into an increasing number of political and demographic groups with different views about where basic justice and wisdom lie.

A second-grader is somebody else's kid! Teachers need to be very aware of that basic fact. 

McCartney seems to have no sense of this basic state of affairs. To McCartney, if Loudon County calls it "anti-racism," it simply has to be the right thing to tell second-graders to do.

It's tricky when a public school system starts teaching values to very young kids. And no, teachers won't always display the best judgment when asked to do such things.

This returns us to that first example, the example drawn from the "college-level" high school English class. 

In that instance, McCartney was willing to concede that the teacher was "more forceful than he should have been," but he set an extremely low bar as he assessed this audiotaped incident. The teacher's comments didn't "constitute totalitarian brainwashing," so the whole thing was really OK!

Was the whole thing really OK? In fairness, no one died in the incident!

That said, McCartney links to the site which (he says) was dumb enough to voice concern about the teaching involved in this incident. At that site, this transcript of the classroom exchange appears, along with the audiotape:

TEACHER: Tell me what this seems to be a picture of. 

STUDENT: It’s just two people chillin’. 

TEACHER: Right, just two people. Nothing more to that picture? 

STUDENT: Nah, not really. Just two people chillin’. 

TEACHER: I don’t believe that you believe that. I don’t believe that you look at this as just two people. 

STUDENT: It truly is just two people though, is it not? 

TEACHER: I think you’re being intentionally coy about what this is a picture of. 

STUDENT (chuckling): What am I being coy about? It’s two people standing back-to-back in a picture. 

TEACHER: Yeah, and that’s all you see? Two people? 

STUDENT: I’m confused on what you would like me to speak on. 

TEACHER: I don’t think you are. I don’t know why you do this. I’m not trying to call you out, but you...you act as if there’s nothing noticeable about this apart from the fact that there’s two people. 

STUDENT: Well I’m confused. Are you trying to get me to say that there are two different races in this picture? 

TEACHER: Yes, I am asking you to say that.

STUDENT: Well, at the end of the day, wouldn’t that just be feeding into the problem of looking at race, instead of just acknowledging them as two normal people? 

TEACHER: No, it’s not. Because you can’t not look at, you can’t look at the people and not acknowledge that there are racial differences. 

The student wanted to say he was looking at a photograph of two normal people. The teacher wouldn't accept any statement which didn't go straight to their "race."

According to the teacher, "You can’t look at the people and not acknowledge that there are racial differences." Just to get started, Good God!  

That was ghastly teaching and ghastly intellectual work on any conceivable level. That said, we wouldn't blame the teacher for that. He was plainly being asked to engineer a type of conversation he wasn't equipped to handle.

Teaching reading and math is easy; teaching values is hard. Teaching values is a potential imposition, in a way teaching math is not.

In Our Town, we don't seem to know that! In Our Town, the Reverend McCartney is patrolling the aisles. He knows what everyone should think and believe, including your second-grade child. And our teachers know that you should see and mention race ahead of everything else! You should instantly mention everyone's race in every situation!

What is the overall nature of Loudon County's racial equity initiative? We have no idea.

The problems may be few and far between. On the whole, the program may be excellent.

That said, McCartney is demonstrating the basic essence of tribal war. According to prehistoric rules, nothing said by one of The Others can possibly have any merit at all, and nothing done by one of Ours can possibly be wrong.

The Post and the Times are increasingly full of such unhelpful, unintelligent work. On a basic intellectual level, Our Town has never been super-sharp, and today it's sinking quite fast.

The last part of that exchange: That transcript omitted the last exchange on that audiotape. Continuing directly from above, the Student and Teacher say this:

STUDENT (continuing directly from above): But if we're going for—let's say, if we're looking for equality in all this, why would we need to point out things such as that?

TEACHER: Because those things, those differences, are real things.

That teacher's a hundred miles over his head. We feel sorry for the kid.

Is this happening all over the county? We have no way of knowing, but teaching values is tricky, challenging, hard.

Starting tomorrow: SELF-INVOLVEMENT AND TOWN!

MONDAY, JUNE 14, 2021

For whom could this task be hard?: Rebecca Onion writes about historical topics for the routinely ridiculous news org, Slate.

Onion's work isn't routinely ridiculous; we're not sure we've ever seen her present any such work at all. That said, we were struck by the link that was offered this weekend, at the top of Slate's front page, to her latest report.

Over the weekend, it was the featured report on Slate's front page. The link to the report said this:

Understanding the Pain of Slavery Is Impossible. But a Cotton Sack Can Bring Us Closer.

Included was a photograph of a cotton sack with some writing on it. Apparently, that cotton sack could bring us closer to understanding the pain of slavery.

The text of that front-page link struck us as a bit strange, and so we greedily clicked. Below, you see the start of Onion's report, fuller headline included:

Understanding the Horror of Slavery Is Impossible. But a Simple Cotton Sack Can Bring Us Closer.

Perhaps you saw this object on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History in the past few years—if you did, you won’t have forgotten it. It’s a cotton sack, much mended, with a hundred-year-old stitched notation: “ ‘My great grandmother Rose/ mother of Ashley gave her this sack when/ she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina/ it held a tattered dress 3 handfulls of/ pecans a braid of Roses hair. Told her/ It be filled with my Love always/ She never saw her again/ Ashley is my grandmother’—Ruth Middleton/ 1921.”

This object, known as “Ashley’s Sack,” is the subject of historian Tiya Miles’ new book, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. All That She Carried is a master class in the use of context in historical writing...

"Understanding the horror of slavery is impossible," the headline weirdly said. 

There followed a discussion with Professor Miles about her latest book, which we haven't fully read. For today—for right now—let's focus on that headline. 

"Understanding the horror of slavery is impossible," the headline weirdly said.  Our question to you would be this:

For whom is it difficult, let alone impossible, to "understand the horror of slavery?" For what contemporary person would this task be hard in any way at all?

For whom will this task be hard at all, let alone "impossible?" What exactly could such a proclamation actually mean in the end?

Is it really hard for people today to imagine, understand or describe the horror of human enslavement? The horror of such enslavement as it was practiced earlier in our nation's history?

For whom would that be hard at all, let alone impossible/ Also, what could such a peculiar statement possibly mean?

If you read the conversation between Onion and Miles, you may start to get a sense of what that odd statement means, or at least is intended to mean. For now, let's focus on the second part of that headline—the part of the headline which says that the cotton sack in that photograph "can [at least] bring us closer" to some such understanding.

The second part of that headline seems to imply that we are somehow tasked with developing as complete an understanding of that question as we possibly can. We'll never fully understand, but we should continue to try.

We find that sentiment silly, on the borderline of appalling, for the following reason:

Onion's interview was featured on Slate's front page all say Sunday and right through to Monday morning. The day before, the front page of the New York Times featured a news report from West Point, Mississippi, a city with 11,000 residents and one public high school.

The news report concerned an unfortunate local dispute about an unfortunate question—who should have been valedictorian and salutatorian of the graduating class at West Point High School this year?

Due to a bureaucratic bungle or two, the high school ended up naming two co-valedictorians and two co-salutatorians. Because "race" was involved, or at least may have seemed to be involved, this unfortunate local dispute was placed on the Times' front page.

Stephanie Saul did the news report. Headline included, the news report started like this:

SAUL (6/12/21): Two Black Students Won School Honors. Then Came the Calls for a Recount.

At first, it seemed a joyous occasion. There was an audible gasp in the room, then boisterous cheering and applause when the announcement was made: Ikeria Washington and Layla Temple had been named 2021 valedictorian and salutatorian for West Point High School.

The president of the local N.A.A.C.P. in West Point, Miss., Anner Cunningham, smiled as the two young women, both standout students, were photographed. “It was a beautiful and proud moment to witness two young, Black ladies standing side by side given such honors,” Ms. Cunningham said.

Two black kids had won top honors, and this seemed to be surprising. Saul never explained, never tried to explain, why such a thing would have been surprising—would have produced an audible gasp—at a high school whose student population is 81 percent black.

(Saul didn't provide that statistic. Curious, we looked it up.)

As Saul continued, she discussed the unfortunate dispute which had broken out concerning rank in class. Because race seemed to be involved, it went to the front page of the Times, where Our Town's greatest newspaper encourages subscribers to admire their own self-evident virtue.

Slate was recommending the same type of self-involvement.  Or so it may have seemed to us.

Saul's report included a striking photograph of Ikeria Washington, one of West Point High's co-valedictorians. As anyone can see from that beautiful photograph, Ikeria Washington seems like a very impressive young woman. 

That said, we're sure the school is full of good, decent kids, including a lot of good, decent kids who aren't top superstar students. That said, why should it have been surprising to think that Washington had come out on top at West Point High this year? 

Why did that produce an audible gasp? Stephanie Saul didn't ask.

Here in Our Town, we're currently deeply invested in discussions concerning "race." Over the weekend, one such discussion was posted at Slate, another in the New York Times, with about three hundred more in the Washington Post, where the highly tribal posing and posturing continues this morning.

Our self-involvement as we stage these discussions is perhaps our dominant trait. Do we care about the actual needs of children being born today (or going to high school)? Or  do we mainly care about our own performances of virtue and our own moral greatness?

Race was everywhere in Our Town's major papers this weekend. We're performing our virtue around the clock now as we pretend to make up for massive amounts of lost time.

Race was everywhere in our newspapers. But so was the borderline bad faith, and the extremely limited judgment, which tend to dominate our treatment of such issues here in our self-impressed town. Our Town's basic instincts on such matters strike us as less than thoroughly helpful.

We'll hopskotch around on these topics this week. We may even tell you what our initial group of fifth-graders angrily said after they watched the film, The Forgotten Village, in the spring of 1970. 

We may even revisit what was said about the sacred dead of the gulag. "They perish. They cannot be brought back." Or so Yevtushenko said.

Our Town's discussions of race are drenched in limited judgment and in something resembling bad faith. On the brighter side, anthropologists insist that self-referential behavior of this type is very much bred in the bone.

We're wired for such limited judgment, these top major experts all say.

"Understanding the horror of slavery is impossible?" On what planet could such an odd statement even begin to make sense? On what planet would that task even begin to be hard?

Tomorrow: As described in Roll, Jordan, Roll

On the one hand, we apologize!

FRIDAY, JUNE 11, 2021

Then too, afternoon delight: On the one hand, we apologize on this rainy afternoon.

Michele Norris' modest proposal raised so many questions that we couldn't get to them all in the course of a week. 

We do think her "pronoun shift" points in a very serious direction. In fairness, it only matters if you want democracy (such as it is) to win, and autocracy to lose.

We didn't discuss the best part of Norris' essay, the part in which she describes the shortcomings of Germany's ongoing attempt at Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (her word). 

We didn't discuss the howler she published in the Post a few months back, a giant howler which remains uncorrected. Such things happen quite routinely when journalistic and cultural stampedes take place.

We didn't even really explain why that "pronoun shift" matters so much. Basically, it comes down to this:

Do we intend to try to be one people, or do we intend to move ahead as an array of fundamentally separate identity groups? This nation's pursuit of the "one people" ideal has ebbed and flowed over the course of time. Under the stresses produced by the current wave of highly selective journalism, are we moving back away from pursuit of that ideal?

It seems that the answer is yes. People are free to construe our floundering nation's essence in whatever way they think makes sense, but we're going to guess that Vladimir Putin regards that as a win! Also, Donald J. Trump.

That said, afternoon delight:

We've returned, in the past few days, to the explanation we once called the worst explanation ever made or given. And yes, it's a phantom explanation. It makes exactly zero sense, but it seems that no one has ever noticed.

We first discussed this "worst explanation" when it appeared in a Nova retrospective about Einstein's theory of relativity, we think in 2015.

At that time, we didn't realize that Nova had cadged its presentation, step for step, from Einstein himself. Specifically, Nova cadged the explanation from the "Einstein made easy" book Einstein published for general readers, a book which first appeared in 1916.

Yes, it's true! Einstein penned this worst explanation ever. Also, it doesn't make sense!

In the past few days, we've been visiting this worst explanation as it appears in Walter Isaacson's 2007 biography, Einstein: His Life and Universe. (See pages 122-125.)

In that book, Isaacson explains how an intellectual giant like Einstein could have created a book for general readers which, in fact, makes little sense. The secret is this:

While Einstein was the greatest physicist since Newton, he wasn't especially skilled when it came to popular writing. In the course of creating his book for general readers, he came up with a comically awful way of making sure that its presentations would be accessible to such regular folk.

Isaacson explains the comically awful method, apparently without spotting one of its results: One of the basic explanations Einstein offered in his "easy reader" book simply didn't make sense.

(Isaacson's account: Einstein decided to have his teen-aged niece read his manuscript to see if she understood it. In fact, she didn't understand, but she was too much in awe of her famous uncle to be willing to say so. She told him it all made sense to her. Publication followed.) 

The explanation didn't make sense in Einstein's book; it doesn't make sense in Isaacson's. This is the way of much high-end academic work, the later Wittgenstein pretty much said.

Einstein failed to explain that part of his work in a way which made actual sense; major journalists have failed to notice.  This is the way of "phantom explanation," which is found all through our higher-end discourse.

It's a bit like the old joke from the Soviet Union:

"We pretend to work," a rueful Soviet laborer says, "and they pretend to pay us!"

NORRIS EMERGES: Her pronouns take a turn!

FRIDAY, JUNE 11, 2021

An unusual "You" emerges: Should our struggling nation, the United States, conduct "a national conversation on race," as Michele Norris proposed in last Sunday's Washington Post?

If so, how should such a conversation proceed? As an initial point of caution, let us note that our national culture tends toward clownish, dumb. 

Should our conversation proceed from the White House on down, as Norris proposed? Is it really possible that the conversation could continue for decades?

Also, what should get said in some such conversation? Whose views should be considered as the conversation proceeds? Should we listen to everyone? Or should we only listen to those who live in Our Town?

Even as Norris was making her proposal, something resembling that conversation was taking place in that morning's Post.  Starting on its front page, the Post had published a substantial array of news reports and opinion pieces examining various aspects of the nation's racial history. 

In some cases, the utility of the Post's effort might be open to question. But the fact of the undertaking was obvious, and has been for some time. 

Sunday morning's Washington Post was full of that conversation! On the front page, a news report carried this headline:

Calls grow to rename birds and reshape a racist legacy

In the weekly Outlook section, this headline appeared:

On a tour of historical sites, examining how the story of slavery is taught

There were at least three such offerings in the Metro section:

What schools holding on to racist names can learn from D.C.’s Woodson High

Graduates take sides in the war for VMI’s future

Calling foul on the Alexandria Little League

Concerning that local Little League, we assumed some claim of racial misconduct was involved, and sure enough it was. Meanwhile, the naming of schools was also involved in Kathleen Parker's opinion column:

Va. college: We hear you, but we’ll keep our name

Parker's column dealt with the decision by the trustees of Washington & Lee to retain the second half of the school's long-standing name. Yet another report in the Metro section concerned the racial climate at another Virginia college:

Graduates take sides in the war for VMI’s future

The featured report in the Sunday magazine concerned an historical incident. These dual headlines obtained: 

Albert King Is Not Forgotten
In 1941, the U.S. military papered over the killing of a young Black soldier by a White officer. Can there be justice 80 years later?

"Can there be justice 80 years later?" We'd say the obvious answer is no. This calls to mind the text of the poem we'll excerpt below.

Other treatments of "identity" issues appeared in Sunday's Post. As Norris called for a national conversation, something like that was already happening—but that doesn't settle the larger question:

What kind of conversation should we have? What should our conversation be like, if we want it to turn out to be have been a good idea?

Here in Our Town, we Townies are inclined to adopt the view that any such conversation is a good idea. For ourselves, we're much less sanguine on that point. Other possibilities—the possibility of imperfect judgment, error and harm—also seem quite clear.

"Conversations" won't always be helpful! Conversations can even do harm.

We were struck by many parts of Norris' lengthy essay. As we noted yesterday, we were most struck by a peculiar shift in perspective which occurred in this passage—by a striking pronoun shift:

NORRIS (6/6/21): Amnesia gets in the way of atonement in America. But amnesia is actually too benign a word because it sounds as though people just forgot about the horrors of slavery, forgot about people who were forced to work in the fields literally until their death, forgot that between 50,000 and 85,000 Africans died during their forced migration to this country in the way one forgets where they placed their car keys or their passport.

We’ve been through more than a willful forgetting; we’ve had instead an assiduous effort to rewrite history. We’ve built monuments to traitors and raised large sums of money to place the names of generals who fought against their own country all over highways and civic buildings. We’ve allowed turncoats to become heroes of the Lost Cause instead of rebels desperate to keep people in bondage.

On a personal level, this false narrative about America is another act of cruelty, even a kind of larceny. I view the real story, the genuine history—ugly as it is—as part of my people’s wealth. You built this country on the backs of African Americans’ ancestors. Our contributions—in blood, sweat and bondage—must be told. Our children, indeed, all of America, deserve to know what we have endured and survived to understand the depth of our fortitude, but also to understand that, despite centuries of enslavement and years of Black Codes and brutal Jim Crow segregation, our contributions are central to America’s might. The erasure is massive in scope.

To her credit, Norris still spells it "America" at the start of that passage. That said, it does sound a bit like she's scolding everyone in Amerika—everyone but herself—for the willful way everyone has chosen to forget about all those horrors.

Norris' tone is quite dismissive in that passage. We Amerikans have chosen to forget the 85,000 people who died during the Middle Passage, in much the way we might forget where our car keys are. 

What kind of people would do such a thing, a sensible person might ask. 

Here in Our Town, we may be inclined to enjoy such hard-hitting talk. Instinctively, we may assume that Norris is discussing the people Over There. She's referring to Them, not to Us.

Like everyone else, Norris is free to call it as she sees it. But the pronoun shift which occurs in that passage seemed quite striking to us:

"You" did these horrible things, she now says.  And that "you" now seems to be us!

At times during Norris' essay, it almost sounds like Norris herself was subjected to all those horrors—like she is the one who has somehow found a way to "endure and survive."

In fact, she was fortunate enough to have been raised by two accomplished parents in middle-class Minneapolis. (She has written a memoir about her upbringing.) As an adult, she has lived an upper-class life as one of the most highly advantaged people on the face of the earth. 

Today, though, Norris is angry. 

In prior years, she was one of the many highly presentable people found in our upper-end press corps. There was nothing "wrong" with that, and Norris is a good decent person. 

That said, to our ear, the oddest and most instructive part of her essay is found in that passage, right here:

You built this country on the backs of African Americans’ ancestors. Our contributions—in blood, sweat and bondage—must be told. Our children, indeed, all of America, deserve to know what we have endured and survived to understand the depth of our fortitude, 

What a strange shift in pronouns! Who is the "You" to whom Norris refers? Who is the "You" who "built this country" in the way she describes. even as Norris herself apparently found a way to endure and survive?

In that passage, Norris has suddenly crafted a striking Us and You construction. It isn't necessarily "wrong" to see the world that way, but can a nation so conceived really expect to survive?

We've thought this week about the late Sam Banks—about the American history curriculum he crafted, way back in the 1970s, for the Baltimore City Schools. We've thought about our initial fifth-grade class—about the way they reacted to the documentary / fiction film, The Forgotten Village.

We've thought about the poem People, in which Yevtushenko may be referring to another group of people who were subjected to another of the planet's many historical atrocities. 

(Important note to America's schoolkids: These atrocities have happened all over the globe. You must never be part of one.) 

When a person dies, what is lost "is not nothing," Yevtushenko says in his poem. But he says other things too, perhaps about the millions who were mistreated and slain in that human atrocity in that other part of the world. 

Both his grandfathers was arrested as "enemies of the people." Is he thinking of the people who died in that other atrocity? We have no idea:

People 

No people are uninteresting.

[...]

In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.

There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.

But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.

Whom we knew as faulty, the earth’s creatures
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?

Brother of a brother? Friend of friends?
Lover of lover?

We who knew our fathers
in everything, in nothing.

They perish. They cannot be brought back.
The secret worlds are not regenerated.

And every time again and again
I make my lament against destruction.

Yevtushenko may have been thinking of the millions who died in the labor camps. Or who knows? Maybe not!

But if he was thinking of the millions who died, he wasn't engaging in the clatter which sounds like stolen valor. He wasn't talking himself into thinking that he had somehow been tortured and killed in the gulag too.

In this country, a conversation has been underway for some time. Right from the start, a remarkable amount of misrepresentation has been involved in this conversation. According to leading experts, we humans tend to be like that.

That conversation has scared a whole lot of kids, and quite a few parents too. It seems to have convinced some adults that they were dragged over here in the holds of those ships, just like the sacred dead.

It has led to some hints of stolen valor—valor stolen from the brilliant generations who somehow managed to create one of the world's greatest ethical / moral / religious traditions out of centuries of mistreatment.

Their descendants humbly accept the prizes they're handed for their work on NPR. Some are now tilting toward the world of Us and You, as is their perfect right.

Each person can construe our floundering nation in the way which seems right. But we humans are subject to relentless error, and to highly imperfect judgment. When these conversations start, who knows where they might lead?

Tomorrow: The Forgotten Village, May 1970 viewing:

"The project was born out of Steinbeck’s desire to break away from Hollywood productions and produce an authentic portrait of Mexican culture. Featuring the real inhabitants of a rural hamlet in the mountains of Santiago in Mexico, this ethnographic cross between a documentary and a fictional film deals with the basic conflict between the deep-rooted indigenous culture and the sweeping tide of modernization. At stake are the lives of several of the village children, who quickly become the victims of a typhoid epidemic..."

Who would treat their children that way? Inquiring minds wanted to know!

What's a "phantom explanation?"

THURSDAY, JUNE 10, 2021

Afternoon delights: Yesterday afternoon, in award-winning fashion, we introduced an award-winning term—"phantom explanation."

We were thinking of the phenomenon known as "phantom limb." Somehow, an arm or a leg has been lost—but it may continue to feel like the missing limb is there.

A surprising amount of high-level academic communication involves phantom explanation. The phenomenon goes like this:

After some question has arisen, an apparent explanation is offered. In fact, the matter at issue hasn't been explained at all. The apparent explanation doesn't make sense, but the person receiving the apparent explanation can't tell. 

That person believes he's received an explanation. He believes he's understood it.

In fact, that hasn't happened at all. A few simple questions will reveal the fact that the recipient of the phantom explanation actually doesn't understand the matter in question at all.

A surprising amount of high-level academic and journalistic communication involves phantom explanation. The later Wittgenstein seemed to suggest that most academic philosophy comports to this awkward model.

A collection of words is emitted. It sounds like the words make sense—like something has been explained.

Nothing resembling that has occurred. In fact, the explanation is a phantom, but the recipient can't tell.

Phantom explanation will often occur in books about physics or math aimed at the general reader. If the person writing the book is highly regarded, journalists will enthusiastically say that the work in the book is amazingly clear, even though the work in the book is basically incomprehensible.

This question arises in the case of Stephen Budiansky's new biography of Kurt Gödel, Journey to The Edge of Reason. The book is written for the general reader. The problem we face is this:

Gödel is routinely cited as "the greatest logician since Aristotle." With that in mind, what did this greatest logician discover, prove or show?

More to the point, is Budiansky able to explain what Gödel discovered, proved or showed? Beyond that, a second question may even arise:

Are we completely sure that Gödel proved anything of value at all?

The later Wittgenstein might have said no to the latter question. Regarding Budiansky's efforts in his new book, we'll also go with a no. 

(We're not suggesting that anyone else could have done any better.)

In our view, no general reader will emerge from Budiansky's book with anything like an understanding of whatever it is Gödel is alleged to have proven.  The reader may think that he understands. Our prescription?

Let the (simple) questions begin!

We'll have much more in coming weeks about this fascinating topic. Decades after the start of our journey, the pointlessness of commenting on the mainstream public discourse has at last become abundantly clear, even at long last to us!

Meanwhile, what the heck did Gödel prove? Taking a further Wittgensteinian road, do we feel completely sure that he demonstrated, proved or showed anything at all? 

For entertainment purposes only: Budiansky occasionally offers a humorous look at what preceded Gödel. In the passage shown below, he describes the problems which arose when Bertrand Russell decided, at the turn of the century, that he should do whatever it is he did:

BUDIANSKY (page 108): In deciding to take on the fourth of the challenges Hilbert had put forward at the Congress of Mathematicians in 1928, Gödel placed himself at the very center of the storm over mathematical foundations, which had broken with a deeply unnerving discovery Bertrand Russell had made at the turn of the century while working on Principia Mathematica.

Russell's idea had been to establish the soundness of mathematics by showing how it could all be reduced to principles of logic so self-evident as to be beyond doubt. Defining even the simplest operations of arithmetic in terms of what Russell called such "primitive" notions, however, was far from an obvious task. Even the notion of what a number is raised immediate problems.

The laboriousness of the methodology and notation was all too evident in the (often remarked) fact that that it took more than seven hundred pages to reach the conclusion, "1 + 1 = 2," a result which Russell and Whitehead described as "occasionally useful."

It took Russell and Whitehead more than seven hundred pages to establish the fact that 1 + 1 = 2? The amusement only deepens as Russell makes his "deeply unnerving discovery," then later as the years lead on toward the 24-year-old Gödel.

The methodology had been laborious. Are we sure this fandango made sense?

NORRIS EMERGES: "How could anyone do such a thing?"

THURSDAY, JUNE 10, 2021

Menstrual cycles, lost eyes: Long ago and far away, we took over the daily instruction of a fifth grade class, right here in Baltimore.

We were still 21 at the time. We'd been hired as part of a long-standing intern program, in which college graduates were given an eight-week crash course as student teachers, then installed as full-time teachers.

The program existed because Baltimore had never been able to fill its teaching roster with fully certified teachers. We spent eight weeks in the East Baltimore sixth-grade classroom of NAME WITHHELD, then took over our own fifth grade class in November, replacing a day-to-day substitute teacher who seemed like a very nice guy.

It was November 1969. As almost anyone can imagine, we had very little idea what we were doing. 

Over the next dozen years, we spent nine full years as a classroom teacher in Baltimore—seven years teaching fifth grade (plus some sixth-graders), two years teaching junior high math. 

Questions concerning American history did arise.  Around the time the TV program Roots appeared, a group of thoroughly decent kids gave voice to a memorable question.

Their question concerned the institution of slavery. The question they asked was this: 

How could anyone have been willing to do that?

How could anyone have been willing to do that? these extremely good kids now asked.

They were asking a sensible question. We're fairly sure that we recall the gist of the conversation which followed. We stressed the fact that, while we were willing to share our own opinion about that question, it was only our opinion, and they would have to develop their own opinions and views in the years ahead. 

Also, they should listen to their parents or guardians first. We were just their fifth-grade teacher. Their parents or guardians were their most important people. We were willing to tell them what we thought, but their parents or guardians came first.

These thoughts were triggered by reading the comments to Kevin Drum's new post, How Should We Teach History? After offering a somewhat puzzling framework, Kevin asked readers to opine on how American history should be taught at different grade levels.

(Why puzzling? One commenter wrote this: "The scale implies that teaching history necessarily involves persuading kids to accept value judgements about the 'greatness' of America at one end, or its 'sinfulness' at the other. That's a deeply flawed frame of analysis.")

Back to the mid-1970s! What should those fifth-grade kids have been told about American history? About the institution of slavery? About the sensible question they asked?

The TV show Roots had portrayed many things, but it hadn't portrayed every thing. In proposing a "national conversation on race," Michele Norris has suggested that we adults should spend decades discussing  pretty much every thing, not excluding such things as those which are detailed below.

We're not saying that Norris is wrong in what she's proposed. We're merely presenting specifics:

NORRIS (6/6/21): We can read about, watch and praise documentaries and Hollywood projects about the Civil War, or read countless volumes on the abolitionist or civil rights movements. But these are all at a remove from the central horror of enslavement itself. From the kidnappings in Africa to the horrors of the Middle Passage, the beatings and the instruments of bondage, the separation of families, the culture of rape, the abuse of children, the diabolical rationalizations and crimes against humanity—no, we haven’t had that conversation. We have not had that unflinching assessment, and we are long overdue.

[...]

Imagine traveling through an American state and coming upon small, embedded memorials that listed key facts about the lives of the enslaved. Their names. Their fates. Their birth dates. The number of times they were sold. The ways they were separated from their families. The conditions of their toil. Imagine how that might shape the way we comprehend the peculiar institution of slavery, its legacy and its normalized trauma. 

[...]

I also find it deeply ironic that there is such a fierce battle to evade and erase historical teachings about slavery because, in the time of enslavement, there was such an assiduous effort to document and catalogue every aspect of that institution, much in the way people now itemize, assess and insure their valuables. The height, weight, skin color, teeth, hair texture, work habits and scars that might help identify anyone who dared flee were documented. Their teeth, their work habits, their menstrual cycles and their windows of fertility—because producing more enslaved people produced more wealth—were entered like debits and credits in enslavers’ ledgers.

[...]

[Professor Daina] Berry compares the sale of two “first rate prime males” named Guy and Andrew sold in 1859 at what was believed to be the largest auction in U.S. history. They were the same age and size and had similar skills. Andrew sold for $1,040, while Guy elicited a larger sum of $1,280. The difference was that Andrew had lost a right eye. A newspaper reporter covering that two-day auction in 1859 noted that the value of a Black man’s right eye in the South was $240.

[...]

[S]lavery cannot be an optional part of the national story. It should not be excised from the narrative we teach our children about who we are and what we have become.

We must admit to, examine, reflect, lean into and grow through that history. All of that history.

In truth, the history can get worse—can get more brutal, more "inhuman"—than anything Norris lists. But she does list quite a few things, mixed with expressions of anger at the way we modern Amerikans have behaved, by which she apparently seems to mean everyone but herself.

Norris' national conversation would start at the White House level. It would be aimed at adults, but she mentions children as well. 

At the end of her essay, in the last passage posted above, she almost seems to say that we should teach schoolchildren all of that history. Whether we're speaking of children or speaking of adults, does that proposal make sense?

Those fifth-graders, way back when, had an excellent question: How could anyone have done that? 

They weren't asking a rhetorical question. They were genuinely puzzled by what they'd seen, by the things they knew. They genuinely wanted to know.

At the time, they hadn't heard about the itemization of the menstrual cycles, or about the price of one eye. Today, Norris seems to be saying that we should spend decades discussing all that. 

(We'll admit that we sometimes wonder how many decades we should spend discussing the behavior of Norris and her highly successful, upper-end colleagues over the past several decades. But that is plainly a separate question, one for a whole different era.)

Should those fifth-graders, way back then, have been told about every atrocity? They read books about Frederick Douglass, their fellow Baltimorean, and about Harriett Tubman, who had lived on their state's Eastern Shore. Should they have been told  vastly more?

(During the bicentennial year, one of our students, NAME WITHHELD, exchanged letters with a pen pal out in Westwood about a book she'd just read about Douglass. The pen pal may have been the daughter of UCLA professors. "You must be very proud to be growing up in the city where such a great man lived," that excellent kid wrote back.)

We also recall the way a few of the girls read about Florence Nightingale. One of those girls, the late NAME WITHHELD, spent her adult life as a home health care worker. We'll guess that she gave devoted, heartfelt service every single day that she served.

Would it serve children to hear every fact from within our American history? Would such a national conversation serve the interests of adults? Would some such project help build a better world? Can some such undertaking even be sanely imagined?

There is no answer to such questions. Tomorrow, though, as we struggle to finish our week's report, we'll try to discuss several topics:

We'll discuss the journalistically best part of Norris' essay. We'll also discuss this, the part of her essay we found most striking by far:

NORRIS: On a personal level, this false narrative about America is another act of cruelty, even a kind of larceny. I view the real story, the genuine history—ugly as it is—as part of my people’s wealth. You built this country on the backs of African Americans’ ancestors. Our contributions—in blood, sweat and bondage—must be told. Our children, indeed, all of America, deserve to know what we have endured and survived to understand the depth of our fortitude, but also to understand that, despite centuries of enslavement and years of Black Codes and brutal Jim Crow segregation, our contributions are central to America’s might. The erasure is massive in scope.

When Norris suddenly went to "you" and "we," that struck us as most striking and instructive part of her essay, by far.

We'll discuss the occasional carelessness of Norris' recent journalism. We'll discuss the moral meaning of an act in which someone like Norris seems to condemn all others, present and past, while only her goodness endures.

(We humans are strongly inclined to construe things that way, several top experts have told us.)

We'll also discuss our most striking memory from the years we spent in the Baltimore schools. It involves the reaction of that initial fifth-grade class to a certain film we all watched late in the spring of that year.

Those Baltimore kids were eleven years old. (Off in Minneapolis, Norris was eight and a half.) Those kids watched a film, then asked this question:

How could anyone treat children like that?

How could anyone treat children like that? those good decent children now asked. 

The film was set in a rural Mexican village. Sitting in a Baltimore school, those kids were incredulous, angry.

Tomorrow: Separation re-emerges

Spoiler alert: That film can be seen on YouTube today. The Steinbeck Center says this:

“The Forgotten Village” was [John] Steinbeck’s first direct engagement with the art of film. The project was born out of Steinbeck’s desire to break away from Hollywood productions and produce an authentic portrait of Mexican culture. Featuring the real inhabitants of a rural hamlet in the mountains of Santiago in Mexico, this ethnographic cross between a documentary and a fictional film deals with the basic conflict between the deep-rooted indigenous culture and the sweeping tide of modernization...

In a village in Mexico, children were dying. Inside a very warm Baltimore classroom, other kids were incredulous—angry, disturbed. 

Unable to conduct real discussions!

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9, 2021

Kudzu devours the land: Ideology is swarming across our discourse like a fast-growing kudzu.

It's devouring our ability to conduct sensible discussions of any serious topic. It's getting harder and harder to watch us make our attempts.

Where does Our Town look more incoherent? On the (current) question of how public schools should teach our nation's brutal history? Or is it on the (current) question how public schools should teach math?

Then too, consider some of the things Anastasia Higginbotham said to The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf in their recent colloquy about whiteness.

Higginbotham wrote a children's book on the subject of whiteness. She said many odd things in the colloquy. but let's stick to one basic question: 

Based on the evidence shown below, did she know that police officers shoot and kill twice as many white people, as opposed to the number of decedents who are black?

HIGGINBOTHAM (6/5/21): I started [the book] with a shooting because videos of police officers killing unarmed Black people were coming out one after the other—same as now. Each time the Black community would gather to say “Stop killing our families!,” police would violently attack them too. It’s our responsibility to help children cope with life exactly as it is and grow in the process, whether it’s divorce, death, sexuality, or violent white supremacy embedded into all of our systems.

[...]

Whiteness is the reason these killings by police happen—the white cultural mindset that tells us white is good and innocent, while Black is bad and dangerous. Whiteness is the reason cops make split-second decisions to fire their weapons into the body of an unarmed person who is Black, while not even reaching for their weapon during interactions with armed and violent criminals who are white. You ask what is the appropriate age to tell children about police brutality, but which children do you mean? The siblings, cousins, children, and grandchildren of people whose family members are targeted know about it. You mean white children. When is the right age to tell white children about a system so cruel, we fear it will be traumatizing for them to even find out about it? Yes, I think it’s appropriate to teach my book to white kindergartners. (Higginbotham's italics)

Twice as many white kids have had siblings, cousins, parents and grandparents shot and killed by police officers. (We know—that's disproportionate.)

That's "disproportionate," but those are the numerical facts. Leave aside the other things Higginbotham said in the course of her discussion with Friedersdorf. Answer this question alone:

Did Higginbotham know that the numbers are like that? Or did she think that only black people get shot and killed by police officers, perhaps because those are the only videos she sees on Our Town's TV stations?

It would be better if no one got shot and killed? But based upon the things she said, did Higginbotham understand those basic facts? Or is kudzu eating the land?

Along with matters like that, we've been exploring this lofty question: 

In his new biography, can Stephan Budiansky explain Kurt Gödel's iconic "incompleteness theorem" in a way the general reader will understand?

We're prepared to announce the answer today—it's a thousand times no! Explanation simply isn't one our species' key skills.

We're reasonably good at inventing things. Our technologies could always be more advanced, but they're quite dependable. (Amazingly so, we'd allege.)

That said, analysis and explanation simply aren't our species' bags. Thought leaders aren't able to explain most things, and other thought leaders don't notice.

Still coming: No, please. Don't ask!

First, a bit of a dodge: No general reader will understand Budiansky's explanation of the incompleteness theorem. At some point, before too long, we plan to re-explore this fascinating topic.

("Phantom explanation" might be an appropriate name for this ubiquitous syndrome.).

For today, here's what Jennifer Szalai said in her review of Budiansky's book in the New York Times. In fairness, she didn't quite say that Budiansky "made Gödel easy." But we'd describe this as an initial dodge, followed by a flat misstatement:

SZALAI (6/3/21): ...Gödel’s “incompleteness theorem,” which he presented in 1930, when he was 24, upended his profession’s assumption that mathematics should be able to prove a mathematical statement that is true. Gödel’s proof landed on a mathematical statement that was true but unprovable.

For interested readers, Budiansky supplies an appendix that moves through Gödel’s proof, step by step, but granular knowledge of formal logic isn’t essential for anyone’s enjoyment of this moving biography. Budiansky—whose impressive and impressively varied output includes a novel, a book about Oliver Wendell Holmes, another about post-Civil War violence and a history of cats—brings a polymath’s interest to bear on a man whose life intersected with the political and philosophical upheavals of the 20th century.

[...]

Not only does Budiansky offer a clear discussion of the incompleteness theorem along with the accolades it elicited; he takes care to embed the proof in the life, avoiding the kind of gloomy interpretations that so often made Gödel feel misunderstood. Gödel had smashed the establishment understanding of mathematics to pieces—or had he? Gödel refused the nihilistic conclusion drawn by some from his work: that because there were truths that weren’t provable, nothing mathematical was truly knowable. He drew optimistic inferences instead, choosing to emphasize that there would always be new mathematical truths to discover.

First, we're told that you can enjoy this book even if you don't attain "granular knowledge" of the iconic theorem. Later, we're told that Budiansky "offers a clear discussion" of same. A clear discussion, full stop!

Is that accurate? Does Budiansky "offer a clear discussion of the incompleteness theorem?" We're going to say that yes, he does—if you have no idea what a clear discussion looks like.

Our species is wired for slip-slides like this. All through the precincts of Our Town, the kudzu is gaining ground—fast!

NORRIS EMERGES: Conversation or lecture?

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9, 2021

Norris spots flaws Over There: Should the United States undertake a "national conversation on race?" Also, should we undertake a national conversation of the type Michele Norris is proposing?

The conversation proposed by Norris would be quite extensive; it might last for decades, she says. Also, it seems that this conversation would proceed from the top down. Once again, this is her nugget proposal:

NORRIS (6/6/21): When Barack Obama was first elected president in 2008, there was an expectation that he would lead some kind of national conversation about race. We don’t place the same expectations on White leaders for some reason, but we should. President Biden was in Tulsa to mark the 100-year anniversary of one of the most vicious acts of racial violence in U.S. history...and he spoke directly about white supremacy in a way few presidents have...

That is a start. Biden should keep his foot on that pedal and launch an official inquiry about uncomfortable historical truths, and do it in a way that ensures that it will extend over years, if not decades. Because it is time for the United States to convene its own version of a truth and reconciliation commission and fully examine the horrors of slavery and their continued aftermath...

...[T]he collective American narrative needs a strong dose of truth. We need clear eyes and a firm spine, and then we need to chart a new path forward. That kind of step would also launch re-examinations of the treatment of America’s Indigenous peoples, the eugenics movement and the internment camps of the 1940s for U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent.  

As presented in that passage, this conversation would be remarkably extensive. Also, it would be "an official inquiry." It would be launched by President Biden, a good decent person (like Norris herself) who currently lives in the White House.

Norris says the inquiry should examine uncomfortable historical truths. We'll assume she thinks that some such inquiry should examine the full sweep of the nation's history, not just the horrible parts.

That said, she plainly stresses the atrocities and the horrors as her essay continues. Biden should get to them all.

Does it make sense to picture our nation conducting some such "conversation?" Also, is it possible that Norris is picturing something that's more like a lecture, less like a real dialogue?

Before the week is done, we'll return to the "irksome" question Norris says she fielded from a woman in 2015—the irksome question with which she opens and closes her essay. 

Here in Our Town, we sometimes forget that The Others will never be as fully enlightened as we are. If we want to have a "conversation," we're going to have to accept the fact that The Others will always be less insightful and less moral than we are.

If we seek a conversation, we'll definitely have to expose ourselves to irksome comments, questions and points of view. If we want a real conversation, we may have to restrain our natural, possibly understandable tendency to cast aspersions and form prejudgments concerning all Other points of view.

It sometimes seems that Norris can only see or imagine error when it occurs Over There. As she continues, she describes the obstacles standing between what she later calls "our great nation" and the strong dose of truth we need:

NORRIS: ...[T]he collective American narrative needs a strong dose of truth. We need clear eyes and a firm spine, and then we need to chart a new path forward. That kind of step would also launch re-examinations of the treatment of America’s Indigenous peoples, the eugenics movement and the internment camps of the 1940s for U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent.

And yet we are in a moment when hard truths are not just inconvenient, they are challenged and dismissed with great fanfare. A growing cottage industry is taking root among those who use their animus to stoke the fires of white grievance and feed the false claim that the hidden motive of all truth-seeking is to elevate people of color by making White people feel bad about themselves.

It is not surprising that some White people would be reluctant to dive into this history. We are still producing textbooks where the enslaved are called “workers of Africa.” And while racial fatigue is a real thing leading to real tensions and discomfort, it sometimes seems that people claim to be exhausted by a conversation that has never really taken place. I wonder whether people are just repelled by the idea of this conversation or they are really rattled by what they might hear.

These White People Today! Only some of them seem to be making mistakes. Everyone else has it right!

Without question, some "white people" may stand in the way of the perfect unveiling of truth. Is it possible that the same is true of some people from other "racial" groups? Even from some journalists and academics—from thought leaders here in Our Town?

If some white people avoid our true history, are members of other groups inclined to overstate at times? For example:

In the passage posted above,  is that second highlighted statement true? Are "we" still producing textbooks "where the enslaved are called 'workers of Africa?' " 

That's an enervating claim. Can it possibly be true?

For ourselves, we have no idea. As a general matter, we would assume that any foolishness one can imagine does exist, in some form and at some place, within our very large nation.

At the same time, we note that Norris provides no link in support of this claim. Our subsequent attempt at a Google search proved fruitless. How many "textbooks" (plural!) are we talking about?

In our experience, there's a lot of Imperfect cogitation on display in our large, sprawling nation. But Norris may be somewhat inclined to spot the foolishness coming from Others, while failing to imagine the possibility that some of the instincts found in Our Town may be unwise or unhelpful too.

Let's set those alleged textbooks aside. Is it possible that the other highlighted claim in that passage may be overstated or misleading in some way as well? 

If you want to use such heated language, it may be true that some elements in our society are behaving in the way Norris describes—are creating a cottage industry "to stoke the fires of white grievance and feed the false claim that the hidden motive of all truth-seeking is to elevate people of color by making White people feel bad about themselves."

It may be true that some players are doing something like that! But is everyone who disagrees with Norris' instincts and judgments seeking to "feed the false claim that the hidden motive of all truth-seeking is to elevate people of color by making White people feel bad about themselves?" 

Come to think of it, has anyone made that sweeping "false claim?" Has anyone ever really claimed that "the hidden motive of all truth-seeking is to make White people feel bad?" 

Who is making that claim? And is it possible that some of the Others who may seem irksome are actually noting unhelpful or unwise instincts emerging from within Our Town?

Implausible though it may seem, is it possible that We can be wrong on occasion—that we can display imperfect judgment? Is it possible that Norris herself can, at times, be a bit too sure of her current point of view?

If she sometimes is, should that make her irksome? Also, this: 

Is it possible that Norris is picturing a lecture more than a conversation? This basic question came to our mind at various points as we read the well-intentioned essay by the good, decent person in question.

We'll note two additional points:

As Norris was making her proposal, something resembling this national conversation was taking place all over the edition of the Washington Post in which her essay appeared. 

News reports and opinion columns were examining issues of race extending all the way from the names of various birds (front-page report) to the names of various high schools and colleges to a recent seminar on race, for players, conducted by the Alexandria (Va.) Little League. This leads us to offer a gentle observation:

Like others in the mainstream press, Norris could be said to be jumping in front of a parade which is already underway. We sometimes wonder where these highly successful mainstream journalists were in the decades before this.

Something resembling a conversation is already underway! Sometimes, this seems to generate insightful work. Sometimes, it seems to generate trivia, even work which may be larded with exaggeration and  error.

That said, should the conversation come from the top down? Should Biden make it official?

At a time when this nation can't even agree on whether Biden won last year's election, it isn't obvious that an official inquiry would gain traction with all comers. And in a nation conceived and dedicated as our nation officially is,  no national conversation can proceed without an attempt to bring in the broad range of voices.

That means we'll have to tolerate irksome Others. They'll never be as brilliant as we are, but we can't get rid of them yet. If we're holding a conversation, they'll have to be part of the deal.

For today, we note one final point. Despite Norris' somewhat snarky complaint about what we don't expect of white leaders, one white leader already did convene a top-down conversation on race.

That white leader was Bill Clinton. Surely, no one has forgotten this:

One America in the 21st Century: The President's Initiative on Race, or the One America Initiative, was established by U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1997 with Executive Order 13050. The main thrust of the effort was convening and encouraging community dialogue throughout the country. The Advisory Board's principal legacy was the collection and publication of "best practices" for racial reconciliation and dialogue guidelines designed to help communities discuss how to address racial and ethnic divisions in mutually productive ways.

The initiative was launched in June 1997. The  seven-member advisory board was chaired by John Hope Franklin. 

Seventeen months later, the board presented its voluminous findings. No one paid a bit of attention. The year of the great sex chase was on. Their findings blew in the wind. 

None of what happened back then is Norris' fault. We were struck by the hint of snark as she discussed the things we expected from Obama but not from white leaders. As a general matter, we think a "national conversation" on a difficult subject proceeds best in the absence of snark.

Our nation could benefit from conversations on various topics. In theory, our brutal history concerning race would surely be one such topic.

That said, we've been struck, again and again, by the way Our Town has generated snark and error and shaky judgments ever since we decided to focus on issues of gender and race. We've made a lot of mistakes! But even as we generate these unhelpful behaviors, we may tend to retreat to the same space of noting the irksome comments of Others, full and complete total stop.

Conversations can't work that way. That sounds more like a lecture, a dose of truth from the top.

"Devil or angel?" Bobby Vee once asked. Today, it's conversation or lecture! Experts say we may not be perfectly wired for the more productive approach.

Tomorrow: Journalistically, the best part of Norris's essay

Friday: No one can say that such feelings are wrong