A different first day of school

My son started the seventh grade today. He got up, ate breakfast, puttered around a little -- and then, at 8 am, went to his room, turned on his school-issued iPad, and settled into a video chat with his science teacher.

I'm not enamored of distance learning, but that's still kind of an extraordinary thing, isn't it? And then I remember: He's 12. He doesn't remember a world without iPads, or without live video calling.

My own seventh grade experience was somewhat different. My family wasn't poor, exactly, but we weren't comfortable, either. I didn't have a Trapper Keeper. Instead, I had to carry a cheaper, more industrial three-ring binder. (I wonder who invented that locking mechanism those binders have.) It made me feel like I looked poor, and I felt the humiliation keenly. I have to remember that when you're 12, the smallest slights feel huge.

"At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror"

Good lord, the damage we do in the name of our own safety:

“This has been one of the major forms of damage, of course along with the deaths and injuries, that have been caused by these wars,” said David Vine, a professor of anthropology at American University and the lead author of the report. “It tells us that U.S. involvement in these countries has been horrifically catastrophic, horrifically damaging in ways that I don’t think that most people in the United States, in many ways myself included, have grappled with or reckoned with in even the slightest terms.”

While the United States is not the sole cause for the migration from these countries, the authors say it has played either a dominant or contributing role in these conflicts.

Vine says that while having these numbers is helpful, it does not offer any insight into what kinds of lives displaced people are living. “Every day you live in a refugee camp is a day it’s been degraded compared to what it once was,” he said. “It’s another day you’re separated from your home and your home land.”

I will always believe that the War on Terror has created a lot of enemies the United States might not otherwise have had. In the name of national security, we have made ourselves less safe. Dumb.

Rod Dreher endorses the notion that 'code switching' is lying

Rod Dreher* has a lot of anonymous correspondents. But I think this is one super-misguided part of his recent blog post.

My correspondent — let’s call him Henry — argued with the CRT person over power and identity within corporations. Henry has decades of experience with corporate life. His view is that men and women who have reached the top in most corporations have been thoroughly assimilated into corporate culture — and that defines who they are and what they believe. His interlocutor disagreed, and said blacks in corporations retain their black identity and just engage in lots of “code switching.” They tell white people what the white people want to hear. They tell the truth to their black friends.

Henry said that this woman’s view, when understood through communications theory, means that her actual argument is this: that black people lie to white people all the time. Conclusion: the white racists have been right all along. Black people cannot be trusted when they talk to whites.

Understand that we're getting this account of what the corporate trainer said third-hand, so I have some questions about the accuracy of how it's characterized. Nonetheless, Henry's understanding of code switching seems to me to be misinformed.

Code switching, as I understand it -- and hey, I'm not Black, so I've never had to do it -- isn't lying, but rather attempting to communicate in the vernacular of whatever setting you're in. White people don't generally have to code switch because their vernacular tends to be the dominant one. And yes, I suppose it means that the person doing the code switching obscures some part of their "authentic" self to do so, but that doesn't strike me as lying.

Put it this way: If Black people didn't code switch in corporate settings, Dreher would be writing a post complaining about ebonics.

Anyway, here is a good post from last year, "Code-Switching Is Not Trying to Fit in to White Culture, It’s Surviving It."

For African Americans, it is a performative expression that has not only helped some of us thrive in mainstream culture—it has helped many of us simply survive.

Dr. Dione Mahaffey, an Atlanta-based business psychologist and coach, says the very notion of code-switching is draining, but asserts that the practice has been most beneficial as she progressed in her career.

“It’s exhausting, but I wouldn’t go as far to call it inauthentic, because it’s an authentic part of the Black American experience,” Mahaffey says. “Code-switching does not employ an inauthentic version of self, rather, it calls upon certain aspects of our identity in place of others, depending on the space or circumstance. It’s exhausting because we can actually feel the difference.”

Anyway: It's frustrating to see Dreher take a common practice and interpret in the worst possible way for the Black people who practice it. (Typical, though.) For all his smarts, Dreher shows little evidence of considering what the world must look like through the eyes of Black people, or even having read much. He's incurious, which makes him stupid. He could do better. He chooses not to.

* The man gets my goat for some reason. I'll try not to make this a Rod Dreher shitposting blog.

3,000 words

 It took me four days of hard writing, but I just completed a 3,000 word draft of a reported piece.

I know the work isn't over. It never is at this point of the magazine article writing process! But it feels good to have hit this milestone.

Trump is a racist. And....

Here is my column from this morning about how Donald Trump is criticizing Critical Race Theory and "The 1619 Project":

It is unlikely Trump has read or personally tried to understand much about CRT or "The 1619 Project," or possesses the capacity to engage with either meaningfully. But he probably understands one important thing. What both those efforts have in common is an effort to understand and address the experience of being Black in America — where slavery and Jim Crow have been the law of the land for all but a few decades — and to do so from a Black perspective.

That is what Trump is against.

After nearly four years of this guy's presidency, it feels insufficient to say "Trump is a racist" over and over again. I mean: It is one of his defining characteristics. But the people who are going to listen to you say it already agree with you. Also, it's easy. But it also seems worth pointing out how that actually works from time to time.

I'm not sure I have the best handle on how to do it. Here is what I wrote this morning:

Black Americans are definite underdogs in the telling of this country's story. So theories and histories that center their perspective get crosswise with the old axiom that "History is written by the winners." Trump, we know, has a rather narrow idea of who constitutes America's winners — and contempt for everybody else as "suckers" and "losers." So it is to be expected that he defines such Black-centric ideas as "un-American," and attempts to put them outside the bounds of debate.

And here is a more straightforward way of saying what I was getting at.

“To say antiracism is anti-American is to say racism is American, which is to say Trump wants white Americans to be racist,” said Ibram X. Kendi, the author of “How to Be an Anti-Racist” and director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. 

How to address the problems of this era in a true and meaningful way -- rather than just heaping more kindling on the fire -- remains a challenge for me. I'm trying to get there.

My mother's birthday

 She would have been 69 today. She was 61 when she passed. I still miss and love her.

Alan Jacobs on Frederick Douglass

I've been thinking about this piece all day.

Decades ago, I read an essay by a feminist literary critic named Patrocinio Schweickart about how feminists should read misogynistic texts from the past. She counseled them to face the misogyny but also to look for what she called the “utopian moment” in such texts, an “authentic kernel” of human experience that can be shared and celebrated. I think that’s what Douglass does. He has every reason, given what their sins and follies cost him and his Black sisters and brothers, to dismiss the Founders wholly, but he does not. “They were great in their day and generation.”

It would be utterly unfair to demand of anyone wounded as Douglass was wounded the charity he exhibits here. I would not ever dare to ask it. That he speaks as warmly of the Founders as he does strikes me as little less than a miracle.

Please read the whole thing.