Lessons from Meeting Two Presidents and Watching One

Are you tired of hearing (or maybe even saying yourself), “What’s wrong with that man?” when you read what the president has written or hear what he's said?  Seems to me that it’s time to move beyond that to, “What’s wrong with the people who should be monitoring and being a check to the president?”  People know that he’s a crass, self-absorbed grifter.  We heard what he said about his relationship to women in the Access Hollywood recording in 2016, and we’ve heard and read his racist, homophobic, and ableist slurs for the past decade – and even before.  It’s no surprise who he is.  The real question is why aren’t Congress and the Supreme Court holding him accountable.  Why are they giving a man with no moral standing unfettered power? 

 

I’ve met two U.S. presidents in my life.  I met both before they assumed the presidency – when one was the vice-president and the other was a governor.  Curiously enough, both were Republicans – even though the trajectory of my life suggests that if I ever met a president, it should have been a Democrat.  After all, I was raised in a household where my father attended the national 1960 national convention where Kennedy was nominated as an alternative delegate, and he was a leader in the county Democratic Party.  Each of my pre-presidency encounters with these two men was distinct.  And my encounters with each of the men shaped how I view where the nation finds itself today.

 

In March of 1957, I was yet a couple of months from my fifth birthday.  My mother, father, sister, and I lived in Ethiopia where my sister and I were born.  My father taught health and physical education at Medhane Alem School in Addis Ababa – a school the government funded to help the nation adapt to the modern world.  After World War II, Emperor Haile Selassie’s government recruited teachers from developed nations to teach in Ethiopia.  Because Ethiopia had never been colonized or conquered, except for the brief Italian occupation in WWII, bringing in foreign educators didn’t have the same negative, colonizing connotation as it came to have throughout the rest of the continent.  Bringing in foreign education helped foster a cosmopolitan aura in the capital.  Foreign teachers, like my father, could access the highest levels of Ethiopian social structures and often, as my father did, marry Ethiopian nationals. 

 

For dad, who was raised in the segregated south and was only able to get work in the U.S. as a chauffeur at the end of the war, he found new freedoms and opportunities as a Black man in the Ethiopia that emerged from the war.  He left the U.S. in 1947 and began a life in that country where he didn’t speak the language or know anyone.  Within a couple of years after he arrived, he connected to the elite levels of the society – something unavailable and unimaginable to him in his home nation.  In 1949, one of those connections, the son of a wealthy merchant, introduced dad to his sister, the woman dad would marry:  my mother.

 

In 1957 U.S. Vice-President Richard Nixon made a 17-day tour of the African continent.  Historians have different explanations for Nixon’s trip:  He sought to provide a U.S. presence to counter the communist uprisings in the continent; Eisenhower wanted to raise Nixon’s profile for the upcoming 1960 elections; Nixon wanted to be on the right side of the civil rights debate that had gained some visibility since the 1954 Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision.  As evidence of that last explanation, some historians note that he met Dr. Martin Luther King in Ghana for the first time during that trip as Dr. King traveled there to celebrate Ghana’s liberation from colonial rule.  Whatever his reasoning, one of Nixon’s stops was in Addis Ababa where he was scheduled to meet Emperor Haile Selassie.  

 

The emperor’s staff, most likely eager to make a connection to the U.S. vice-president by inviting one of his compatriots, invited my father and our family to Nixon’s formal greeting ceremony.  Clearly, no one briefed the Ethiopian government staff who was arranging the event about race relations in the U.S.  My father wasn’t just a U.S. citizen; he was a Black one – a distinction that had no import in Ethiopia.  It would be years later when the world heard the tapes that exposed the depths of Nixon’s disdain for Black folks, but my father and other U.S. Blacks living in Ethiopia in 1957 already knew.  So when I greeted Nixon on the steps of the imperial palace waving a U.S. flag in my left hand and reaching up to shake his hand with my right hand, one of my father’s friends, a journalist for the Philadelphia Defender, took a picture.  Little me reaching up and shaking the hand of the U.S. vice-president framed by the majestic pillars and stonework of an imperial palace.  The friend jokingly remarked to my father that he took the photo as blackmail.  After all, my father wouldn’t want the picture shown that his son was getting chummy with Tricky Dick, a nickname Nixon already earned years before I met him. 

 

I remember the event because of the photo and the story behind the joke.  My family often told the story of meeting Nixon and of that photo especially.  In the retelling, the moral was that Nixon was forced to act contrary to everything he lived in a moment when he had to meet with a Black family.  He had come to Ethiopia where the rules were different and where he encountered and interacted with people whom he normally would have dismissed as inferior and not worth his time.  Because of the visuals, the four-year-old boy whose hand he shook had to be treated with the gentle respect that any adult should afford to any child.  That may not have been possible in the U.S., but in that place and at that moment, Nixon had to reach down, shake my hand and, as much as he ever did, smile. 

 

Twelve years later, I found myself as a 16-year-old on the steps of a different government building.  I had skipped school that day with a friend.  We drove to the capitol to attend a rally in Sacramento to protest cuts in school funding.  My friend and I were among the few younger people in the crowd which was mostly made of White women who were worried what the funding reductions meant for their children’s education.  I don’t recall any other Black folks there besides me.  The crowd gathered where we filled the steps to the entrance entirely.  This was a comfortable place for me.  I’d been to the building before with my father as he met with state legislative leaders to discuss legislation or political wrangling.  He’d died a year or so before that day, so I was there for the first time without him.  But the place was familiar enough that I stood at the top of the entrance steps feeling relaxed to be there.  I could see the door to the capitol and the crowd below.  People stood with the typical array of placards and chanted in between speakers who loudly complained about the state’s impending budget reductions.

 

You know those westerns where the sheriff ambles confidently outside the jailhouse to quell an angry mob?  The sheriff’s charisma and the moral rightness of his arguments always bring the crowd under control.  Without any violence of threat of violence to them, the crowd shamefully backs down and goes back to their lives as good citizens of the community.  The sheriff goes back inside and tells everyone inside that he’s won the day once again.  The hero against the mob, and the hero wins.  What happened that day felt like the opening of that clichéd, stock scene from movie westerns – the first part where the sheriff strides out with the expectation of subduing the wild mob.

 

As the rally continued, the capitol door opened and out walked Governor Reagan, standing like the mythical sheriff.  Clearly, his many B-movie roles prepared him for this moment.  But unlike the lone sheriff, a formation of plain-clothes security men led the way and stood between him and the crowd.  He stopped and tried to speak.  I can’t recall a word of what he said because he was quickly outshouted by the crowd who refused to hear anything he said.  I joined in the yelling.  He’d come out there expecting a quick ending like those westerns, but the crowd had a different script.  He couldn’t get out more than a few words before the noise silenced him.  I yelled louder, and as I did, he turned his head to look at me.  My voice had risen above the din and caught his attention. 

 

As we looked at each other for a brief moment over the 15 or so feet of distance and through the security guards who separated us, I experienced something I’d never before or since experienced.  I saw his face register fear.  This man, standing behind his large security guards, was afraid of me, a skinny kid who was the only person of color in the crowd.  Fear was the only word to explain the sudden change in his demeanor from the confidence he first showed in confronting the protesters.  He had come to tell the crowd he was in control, but he encountered resistance that made his message impossible to deliver.  That must’ve frustrated him, but that’s my conjecture.  But I do know that in the brief moment as we looked at each other, I saw fear. 

 

The PTA moms yelling at him didn’t create that reaction.  But this skinny brown kid with the long and shaggy hair caused him a moment of fright.  I can now only guess at how he reached the conclusion I was dangerous.  Maybe he figured I was armed like the Panthers who’d entered the state house two years before.  Or maybe he thought I was on some drugs that might give me superhuman strength to overcome the security force.  He made a quick judgment of me that was very different to his reaction to the other people around us who were yelling as much as me. I was dangerous, and they weren’t.  It’s hard for me, even today in retrospection, to understand how or why he feared me.  But the look he returned as I stood yelling at him was unmistakable.  He and the guards retreated back into the building. 

 

Two very different times in my life and two very different encounters.  In the first, I was left to make sense of why a friend of the family thought it was funny to take a picture of me shaking a man’s hand.  It took a few years of understanding history and learning about Nixon to get at the meaning of the experience.  By the time I got to the second encounter, I understood that a leader could be duplicitous and not trustable.  By that point, I had become an activist teen who understood why my father and the people he knew distrusted Nixon in 1957.  As a four-year-old boy, the seeds of my mistrust in some leaders were just being planted by my Nixon encounter, the picture, the stories, and my own observations that followed.  By 1969, those seeds had long sprouted as I had seen the clouds of tear gas from the troops and police that Reagan had sent to Berkeley to quash demonstrations, and I experienced the oppression from what demi-authoritarians like Nixon and Reagan sought to make in the nation.  They feared people like me who wanted the nation to live up to its promises for all. 

 

Reagan and Nixon were the opening act in the country’s most recent right-ward evolution.  They learned to appeal to the fears that the majority felt would lead to their demise if they didn’t keep people like me under control.  As each assumed the presidency, he enacted laws and took actions that ran contrary to the democratic ideals that the nation seeks.  Nixon expanded COINTLPRO to keep tabs on anyone he thought to be subversive.  He also created an “enemies list” which identified specific people he sought to destroy.  During his campaign for the presidency, Reagan undermined his predecessor’s efforts to free U.S. hostages held in Iran.  Then he illegally sold arms to Iran and used the money secretly to fund armed rebels in Central America.  And Congress had to pass its first override of a veto of civil rights legislation since Andrew Johnson (in 1866) when it overrode Regan’s veto of the 1987 Civil Rights Restoration Act. 

 

By the time each of these men became president, I was not surprised by their actions.  My mistrust of them had personal roots, but beyond those roots lay their actions.  What I saw Nixon doing from 1968 until his resignation affirmed who and what my father had believed him to be.  Reagan proved himself to be equally bad.  Although the news still extolls his folksy charm, I’ll always remember him as the guy who took funding from schools and hospitals.  He was also the guy who took one look at me and became afraid.  His policies and actions as governor and later president confirmed that at the heart of all he did was the fear of differences. 

 

As anti-democratic as these two presidents turned out to be, though, we now face something that’s many times worse.  Both Nixon and Reagan were hemmed in by the courts and the legislature.  The courts forced Nixon to reveal the tape recordings that showed the world why people named him “Tricky Dick” decades before.  He resigned when members of his own party refused to support his illegal acts against democracy.  Reagan fared better in the public’s sentiment.  But after his party controlled both houses of Congress for two years, he was forced to negotiate with Democrats as they controlled the House in years after.  While he was able to bring three conservative judges to the Supreme Court, those court’s rulings were mildly ideologically conservative – not completely contrary to past precedent and generations of understanding.  The checks and balances of the legislature and courts worked to keep Nixon’s authoritarianism and Reagan’s libertarianism at bay.

 

That’s not happening today.  That’s not because of the authoritarian rants and actions of the current president.  It’s because, unlike for Nixon and Reagan, the two other branches of government that are designed to balance those tendencies have capitulated or corroborated.  As a result, the nation isn’t at risk of becoming an oligarchy or being run by a despot.  It’s already happened.  Powerful people are granted special favors that give them more money and power.  People of wealth are encouraged to pay tribute to the president and his family.  The president has pardoned convicted criminals who attempted to stop Congress from fulfilling its constitutional duties on January 6, 2021.  The president has assumed powers not constitutionally granted to him.  He has used false pretexts to create a powerful national police force that operates outside of the law and to send federal troops to take over cities – also, extrajudicially.  He has killed foreign nationalists in international waters without any judicial or legislative oversight.  He has sent federal troops into the nation’s cities under while falsely claiming anarchy in the streets.  All of this is being blessed by both the legislature and the Supreme Court.  We’ve already lost the democracy for the present. 

 

Like many others, I’m despairing about the state of the nation.  Decades of progress toward finally living into the ideals expressed at the nation’s founding have been steadily eroded from the time of Nixon and Reagan.  And now that erosion has accelerated by people in power who stoke fear, hatred, and mistrust while being abetted by radical voices and foreign bots that feed misinformation and disinformation through social media.  It’s Nixon and Reagan unfettered.  The protections have been methodically removed so that corruption and acting outside the traditional laws is normative.

 

What to do?  It’s time to put this genie back into the bottle.  The nation will always have people like Nixon and Reagan.  They will always find ways to gain power and attempt to act unilaterally.  But as we did with them, it’s time to organize and fight back.  Not fighting in the military sense, but in the way that we mobilized against acts of tyranny in the past.  That means organizing voting and that means challenging openly undemocratic acts with democratic action.  For me, that means supporting organizations and people who commit to challenging the current status quo.  It means being willing to use my voice to argue for democracy over tyranny.  That’s what it took to counter Nixon and Reagan, and it’s actually what it took to create the nation 250 years ago.  While the military battles are what gets remembered in popular histories, it’s the organizing that really made the difference.  It was a group of people agreeing to common beliefs and actions.  It was the creation of “We, the people.”  The consensus and shared vision are the real genius of this nation when 250 years ago people began the march toward “a more perfect union.”  In that time, until now, that vision has become more perfect as it came to include more people. 

 

The six million voters who voted in 2020 but didn’t vote in the last presidential election contributed to the resulting election of the current president since he won by a slim 1.48% margin of the popular vote.  We need to get those people back involved in voting – not just in the coming midterms, but permanently.  People need to demand that federal legislators take back their roles.  The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse and of declaring war.  Congress cannot allow a president to usurp those responsibilities without damaging the balance of the tripartite system.  Also, we need to hold the federal judiciary accountable to the Constitution.  The recent corrupt acts of certain justices and the court’s willingness to ignore long-standing precedents cannot continue.  We need to demand overhaul of the Supreme Court so that justices live to the same standards as other judges. Finally, those of us who understand the current situation need to find ways to educate others about the severity of our circumstances.  We need to stop just talking to ourselves and find opportunities to remind the nation of what it has been and can become. 

Facts?

I wrote about facts and expertise some time back at THIS link.  But another aspect of facts has currently grabbed my attention.  At least three or four times a day, someone I know unknowingly posts misinformation that’s part of a disinformation campaign on their social media feed.  My friends and colleagues aren’t trying to be dishonest.  They see something that makes sense to them, so they re-post it.  But, often enough, it’s not true.  I only have a few hundred connections in social media, and it’s maybe a few dozen of them who regularly post.  So if I’m seeing this much misinformation, I’m guessing that the problem of posted misinformation is pretty widespread. 

 

There are vast networks of AI bots and troll factories that are creating much of this content.  Topics range from politics to pop culture to sports; from people to organizations.  As you can see from the five links in the previous sentence, the same person can be a source of misinformation and the subject of it.  Misinformation subjects and people get selected by the creators based on how well they can polarize people reading it.  It seems weird that anyone would create a campaign around misinformation, and it may seem harmless.  But it’s not harmless, and there are bad intentions behind it.  The intent is to blur the lines between reality and lies so that readers come to mistrust any information.  These are organized campaigns created by groups or governments seeking to disrupt what people believe.  If you want to know more about how and why this happens, the World Economic Forum published an article in 2024 worth reading. 

 

As you’ll see in that article (and many others like it), disinformation campaigns intend to disrupt societies for economic, social, or political ends.  And the disorder and mistrust these campaigns create are a significant threat to democracies especially.  Nations’ governments have been toppled by these campaigns; and in the U.S., they’ve led to more widespread beliefs in quackery and distrust of longstanding science.  Passing along a story that makes sense to you, but isn’t true, helps to replicate and amplify the confusion that these campaigns intend.  As a result, people mistrust expertise and become more vulnerable to quackery and anti-democratic sentiments.  So your posting is never harmless. 

 

If I see misinformation posted by a friend, I tend not to correct it publicly by posting a reply.  Instead, I’ll send a private message to my friend to share what I know – and usually a link to a site with the correct information (I encourage you to do the same).  But by the time my friend removes the posting, dozens of people may have seen it, and others may have shared it on their own feeds.  The people who saw it may not ever know that my friend removed it.  Once people have seen it, their reaction can further a viral spreading of untruth.  The solution?  Like any virus, the best way to prevent its spread is for you personally not to be a carrier. 

 

Important:  Don’t just re-post something without verifying it first. 

 

I’ve waited for a while to post this.  I didn’t want any one person thinking I was writing about something they did.  Actually, inadvertently re-posting misinformation is something that a lot of folks on my social media feeds have done.  It’s not that they intend to pass along something that’s not true.  But people see a statement with which they agree, so they re-post it.  Unfortunately, a lot of the time what appears as “fact” can either be completely made up or it stretches the truth.  Something that’s not true gets posted and re-posted and re-posted again until it becomes an Internet fact.

 

The solution:  To avoid becoming part of the viral disinformation ecosystem, verify before you re-post. 

 

It only takes a minute to look at one of the fact-checking sites like Snopes.com.  Or you can take the phrase that caught your eye and paste it into a search engine like Google or DuckDuckGo.  You can even search for images in Google Images to see where else a photo has been posted.  See if any legitimate sources confirm the posting you want to share.  If the only places where you see a confirmation is from social media platforms, it’s most likely misinformation that’s spread from one user to another. 

 

Think of this as viral hygiene for your digital life. 

 

Just like we all learned to wash our hands often and avoid going out if we were ill during the COVID pandemic, we need to take steps to check ideas before we re-post them.  I’ve added lots of links above so that you can read more fully on this topic.  Take the time to educate yourself.  After all, there’s a lot at stake.  Life is confusing enough without compounding the general confusion with misinformation.  And none of us wants to be part of spreading a viral disinformation campaign. 

Factories Produce Products – Schools Shouldn't

The start of a school year seems a good time to look at the education system.  The industrialized origins of the current model of education have been well discussed and documented.  But if you don’t read about educational history, you may not be aware of it.  The U.S. education system developed an operational model in the late 1800s and early 1900s as concerns grew about children, especially children of color and immigrants, needing to be prepared to be complacent workers in the industrial workforce of that era.  School was a place to bring compliancy to the growing population.  To meet that aim, large-scale schooling modeled itself after the industrialization that defined the workplace of that era.  The system has gotten more refined over the part 130 years, and it uses less crude expressions to explain its purposes.  But those purposes haven’t changed much as we focus on teaching children to acquiesce to the drudgery they’ll eventually find themselves performing for their adult lives. 

 

In the early 1900s, that drudgery meant repeating the same physical task hundreds of times daily as each worker contributed a small component to whatever was being manufactured.  Now, workers stare at monitors writing code or resolving customer complaints or managing spreadsheets – as they fit their small tasks into a soul-grinding whole.  The environment has changed, but we still want to prepare workers for often de-skilled labor that requires their time and little original thought – hence the society’s need for a system of schooling that continues to emphasize compliance over creativity.  It’s a system that ensures that economic and racial groups stay in their place.  Wealthier children attend schools where they learn how to explore, create, and lead while poorer children are taught to follow rules. 

 

Bleak?  Yep.  Accurate?  Absolutely, when you think about this as a system instead of what happens in individual classrooms or schools.  Some teachers or schools work hard against the mechanized system, but the system isn’t something that those teachers and schools control.  It’s even more bleakly accurate for what are termed “low-performing” schools – those schools that don’t meet the testing outcomes established by regulations and legislation that reify the system and its purposes.  That’s especially bleak when considering that these labeled schools are where people in poverty and most people of color live. 

 

The entire system is a perpetual motion machine that swallows learners’ innate curiosity and creativity and runs them through a conveyor belt of stultifying sitting and listening and pointless drudgery.  If learners ask why, they’re told that it’s for their good because their future economic selves will need what schooling provides.  The result is that most children in most schools will tell you that they hate learning – which they come to equate with schooling.  And the response makes sense.  I worry about anyone who doesn’t feel that way after being subjected to that process.    

 

Let’s get something clear:  This isn’t a conspiracy to keep people subservient – even though it has the effect that planned action would have.  No secret billionaire’s group annually flies their private jets to a clandestine rendezvous in Jackson Hole to plot how schools and schooling will keep the masses in line.  The truth is more complex and insidious than a planned conspiracy.  The system maintains itself through a web of beliefs that focus on students as products that need molding, oversight that privileges only certain people and groups to establish policies and practices, an allocation of resources that keeps education as a low-funded afterthought, an over-reliance on traditional, ineffective practices, and misunderstandings about the ways in which people learn.  The resulting practices favor only certain styles of learners.  That all gets mixed with political pressures that drive everything from the rules for how educators are prepared to what methods teachers use to how textbooks are selected.

 

Think of it like an old-fashioned steam engine driving a train.  That process begins with water that’s heated with a wood- or coal-fired boiler.  Once the water boils, it produces steam that’s then pushed into an engine that takes the steam pressure and converts it to motion.  All the parts work together as the process continues.  Once in motion, it’s hard to stop a steam engine as it converts water, fuel, and heat into action.  A train engineer doesn’t just shut off the steam building process, and the engineer doesn’t immediately stop a moving train.  It takes intentional actions to reduce the pressure slowly to stop the engine, and the train can take a long time after that to stop the resulting motion.  Trains keep running on the track for a long time after they start moving.  And so it is with education. 

 

However, education is unlike the natural laws of thermodynamics where motion eventually leads to atrophy.  Once started, the education machine’s motion is perpetual as its components feed themselves.  Legislators with little or no understanding of learning and teaching pass laws that encourage only certain types of people to work in education; educational systems look to hire those people who can compliantly work within a structure that is defined and regulated externally; educators who are compliant to the system are promoted to leadership roles where they ensure the continuance of the system in which they have excelled.  Over the past 130 years, the system has built itself to run and to move in a specific direction that few people question and few attempt to stop.  During that 130 years, it’s kept going because there are plenty of reasons to keep the machine going, and few incentives to stop or change it. 

 

The closest we’ve come to the potential for major change came during the COVID-19 pandemic.  That created a challenge for the education machine that forced it to think differently.  Schools could not operate as they always had because they were forced to use models where students couldn’t be forced to sit and listen for hours.  However, as the events of time since have shown, the system made modifications that allowed it to return quickly to its prior practices.  The educational system saw the pandemic as a distraction where it couldn’t do what it was built to do; and the system sought to find ways to return to its traditional operations as soon as possible.  The pandemic was a moment metaphorically to ask if we really need a train and whether maybe building a boat would be better.  Rather than questioning if the direction it had been heading was the best one, education saw the moment as a temporary derailment from which it needed to recover.  The machine continued on its tracks. 

 

Technologists saw the pandemic as a time to push their agenda for more technology in schools.  But a steam engine with fancier features is still a steam engine.  Those places that have now adapted to employing more technologies are in no better shape than their less technologically proficient predecessors.  The question of how content is delivered (which is where most discussions that focus on technology begin and end) misses the point.  A system that doesn’t encourage all learners to become explorers and creators is still a substandard system. 

 

People’s beliefs about how learning happens drives what they support in schools and schooling.  If the purpose is to liberate each learner to develop a sense of wonder and exploration, then you begin with the belief that each learner is unique and each learner needs to be treated uniquely for that person to achieve their goals.  If, in contrast, you believe that education’s singular purpose is to prepare students to fit within the economic roles that the society needs, then you think less about students’ individuals needs and more about them as eventual components of the economy.  The system’s actions that evolve from that view has little to do with the ability of a learner to explore and create.  Instead, the centering of economic purpose to learning means that individual needs are less important than societal ones.  Any encouragement toward creativity or exploration comes from seeing creation as a utilitarian experience that furthers learners’ ability to become eventually more useful to the society.  Instead of each moment being grounded in creativity and exploration, the system creates disconnected, unique exercises and activities to mimic creativity and exploration. 

 

But wait a minute.  Does this suggest that schools and schooling shouldn’t focus on preparing children for their economic future?  Does it suggest that all kids need to do is to follow their natural instincts to explore and create?  Won’t that lead to children only learning what they’re willing to explore and, as a result, learn nothing of value?  Those would be valid questions and concerns if we continued with the same narrow perspective that demands only one purpose.  But what if we looked at children’s needs as being occupational and…?  Yes, a society needs its children to be ready to assume the work that the society will require.  But in order for future opportunities to be equitably available, it also needs all children to develop self-efficacy, curiosity, ethical values, and a sense of civic responsibility.  Our future citizens need to understand the importance of a democracy and how to preserve it.  They need to understand how to live and thrive in a diverse community.  There’s so much more beyond the narrow, economic goals that currently drive education’s purpose.  It’s not that education should ignore children’s need to participate in the future economically.  It’s that the many additional purposes can’t be lost to the service of such a narrow purpose.  If education addressed a broader set of needs in its framework, it would go further in supporting the more complex needs that learners bring for their present and future selves. 

 

If you’re familiar with liberationist, progressive, constructivist, or similar educational movements, the above argument is familiar to you.  Nothing I’m suggesting here is new or radically original – it’s all been said and written before.  However, I write it again because we’re trapped in an educational system that acts as if those ideas and the research behind them don’t exist.  So to those reading this who understand and believe in these ideas, I have a simple question:  What are you doing to impact this machine?  If you know something to be true and you’re not working toward changing that, even in a small way, it seems to me that you’re complicit in the problem. 

 

I don’t know what being active in change means for you.  At different times in my career, it meant the way I taught my classes (whether that was ninth grade English or graduate students learning to teach), the curriculum I helped to write, the focus of the research I conducted and published, my advocacy at local and national levels, the models I helped to build – different roles and circumstances allowed me have a different impact.  But at the heart of whatever I was doing was an intentional desire to create education so that it didn’t support the dehumanization of learners in a singular emphasis on economic aims.  If you believe in a liberationist, progressive, etc. perspective, what are you doing daily to make that more than an ideal?  In other words, stop saying that you want something else and do something about what you see. 

 

If you haven’t been exposed to these ideas, especially if you’re not an educator, you’re actually the person I’m most addressing here.  For you, this is the time to explore.  It’s only as people outside the education system see these issues that the machine will be challenged.  When parents and students demand something else, it can help force the machine to slow and consider its impacts.  If the argument here has you wondering how true all this is, do some reading.  There are some great books that aren’t written just for educators and avoid jargon so that they’re accessible.  Here’s a partial list of foundational works.  And I’d bet that some educators I know can add even more, so I encourage them to add other readings as comments:

 

• The Having of Wonderful Ideas by Eleanor Duckworth

• Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freiré

• Lives on the Boundary by Mike Rose

• The Shame of the Nation by Jonathan Kozol

• The Manufactured Crisis by Biddle and Berliner

 

Read these and more if you don’t like what you see in schooling.  Educate yourself and then look for allies who also understand what you understand.  Then start making demands of the education systems and institutions that impact your life.  I’m convinced that collective demands for something different can create needed change.  I’ve seen that happen in my lifetime as the society evolved from serving very narrow segments to at least being aware of the broader needs of more groups.  Women, people of color, those who are neurodiverse – all have demanded change and have started the society on the road toward those changes.  If this really is a market-driven society, then people who advocate for change, who demand it, must be heard.  It’s time to question that purpose of the machine and demand that it offers something else besides helping to mold the next generation of dissatisfied drudges. 

In a Strange Land

“…I have been a stranger in a strange land.”  Exodus 2:22

That was Moses.  If you studied the Hebrew Torah or Christian Old Testament, you read about him as a central historical and religious figure.  The quotation above comes after he fled Egypt, the land where he was born and raised.  Then he lived in a desert community where he made a new life.  He experienced immigration, and he felt like a stranger even after he lived there long enough to have married and had his first son.

 

I’ve been thinking about this line of text a lot because of what’s happening in the U.S. as the current administration conducts authoritarian-style arrests of immigrants and people here on study visas – while banning travel from certain countries.  Those actions make the challenging experience of being in a strange land even more difficult. 

 

The analytics of this blog tell me that there are people who read this in places like Brazil, The Netherlands, Vietnam, or Singapore – I assume to get better understanding of the U.S.  I decided to write for those folks about my experience of being a stranger in this strange land.  Also, I write to my fellow citizens.  It’s important that they know of, at least, one person’s experience since so many voters in the last election seem to agree with the president about keeping out some foreign-born people, a sentiment that could include me. 

 

I came to the U.S. when I was turning five.  My father was a U.S. citizen teaching in Ethiopia, so that meant my sister and I were born with U.S. citizenship.  But we lived our early lives abroad and began our time here with a secondary understanding of the U.S. from our father’s and others’ stories.  I hadn’t yet learned to read, and this was before I’d seen a television; so I could only reference those stories and the phonograph records my parents played to know anything about the U.S.  Arriving here was arriving at an exotic place.  Still, I came with some connections to the country because of my African American father and his family.  However, as is the case for many immigrants, the feeling of being apart from this society never left me – as happened to Moses. 

 

My estrangement has many reasons.  My mother, an Ethiopian national, was naturalized as a U.S. citizen a few years after we came to the states; but she continued to raise us with the values of her homeland.  Until we came to the U.S., she spoke three languages to my sister and me (Amharic, Greek, and English – three of the seven she spoke fluently).  As a result, my sister and I were tri-lingual until we arrived and our mother insisted that we speak only English like others around us.  I’ve since come to understand how much cultural belief gets conveyed by the languages people speak.  People who learn multiple languages from birth gain a cultural fluency that mirrors their linguistic fluency.  As a result, I’ve learned to listen and adapt to the place and group where I find myself.  However, that skill doesn’t make me a member of those groups.  And losing memory of two of those languages over time meant that I lost an important part of my childhood. 

 

People are often surprised that I was born abroad.  Even more are surprised when I explain that I still feel apart from the society after all the years I’ve lived here.  I’ve had more than one person assert something like, “But you don’t have an accent, and you act so American.”  Well, I’ve lived in the U.S. longer than at least 85% of the people currently in the country.  I’ve been living here since I was five – a long time ago.  So, yes, I’ve externally adapted.  Some people assume that someone who’s been living in the U.S. since the late 1950s when he was a child would feel integrated into the country.  While arriving here as a child gave me some time to adapt to the shocks an immigrant experiences, my external adaptations mask an internal sense that echoes Moses. 

 

When I came to the U.S., I was surrounded by hundreds of daily practices and customs that everyone around me absorbed from early childhood forward, yet I never did.  Decades after my arrival, I’m still constantly playing catch up.  Being able to speak the language when we emigrated was a start.  But acclimating to the uniqueness of a new place is much more than mastering the language.  The disconnection can be as simple as understanding a childhood game like rock-paper-scissors.  Everyone around me played it, but no one explained it.  I even watched a documentary that explored its origins, but I still don’t understand how to play it.  And I only discovered who Winnie the Pooh was when I became an adult.  My mother told me other childhood stories about the minotaur-slaying hero Theseus or the foolish King Midas. 

 

More complexly than childhood games or stories, the structure of something as foundational as the hierarchy of relationships in the U.S. also escapes me.  That’s because I was raised understanding formal roles that corresponded to people’s status.  It’s hard to decipher that in the U.S.  For example, I’ve learned to put people at ease in my professional life by asking them to call me by my first name instead of my titles (Dr. Hughes, Professor Hughes, etc.).  Despite the casual external cues, though, people in the U.S. still defer to others with titles.  I took my first job as a dean at a college where I’d been a member of the faculty for years.  People knew me as “Bob” and continued that after I’d changed roles.  Yet once I moved into a dean’s role, my colleagues whom I’d known and worked alongside for years suddenly waited for me to offer an opinion before they’d do so. 

 

The U.S. has a coded and hidden deference where status is implied but not openly acknowledged; and I don’t fully comprehend how it all works.  In my family and cultures, people’s status was always afforded a title that identified that status.  I would’ve never thought to call any adult by their first name as a child – and I still recoil when I hear any child of any age refer to their parents by a parent’s first name.  My inability to apprehend social structures like this is one example among many.  There are hundreds of daily and common activities which I didn’t internalize as I did with the lessons that my family taught me. 

 

However, don’t read this description as me defining a deficit in my life.  It’s the opposite.  The experiences of being disconnected from the larger society are what allow me to connect to others and to extend my connections to people who aren’t like me.  I don’t know what it’s like to be transgender or physically disabled; but my feelings as an outsider teach me how to walk alongside those who are.  My experiences allow me to engage with multiple communities that are different than me.  Thus, the challenges of being a stranger in a strange land define me in very positive ways.  However, it is important to note that there are challenges.  It’s also important to note that immigrants’ challenges are compounded for people who didn’t have the advantages I had with knowing the language and arriving to a ready family network. 

 

Today, the challenges for immigrants are exponentially multiplied since the U.S. has become a place that is, once again, openly hostile to people from some other countries.  It’s not just the president’s xenophobic rants.  During his first election and incumbency, the nation became more honest about its relationship with immigrants.  Until 2016, the U.S. publicly claimed open harbors to people who wanted to share the democratic experience.  People commonly quoted the closing lines of the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed onto the base of the Statue of Liberty.  That public stance masked the true story.  The mainstream of the nation has never been comfortable with differences.  Now, the U.S. overtly returns to nativism that openly proclaims it only wants certain people from certain places.  This isn’t the fringe speaking. 

 

The president and his vice-president claim that the push against immigrants results from the undocumented people living amongst us.  But look at how they pushed racist narratives about criminals and pet eaters to make their case during the election.  Their actions since being elected have cast a wide net around all immigrants.  This is about anyone who is Brown or Black and whom the government can attack.  It was clear from the current president’s first term and in his most recent campaign.  Voters knew this is what he promised.  Because I’ve seen and experienced decades of daily life, I didn’t see this as some radical change in 2016.  This is who the country has been throughout its history.  The difference, now, is that the government that was supposed to protect all people’s rights is being used to violate those rights. 

 

From the theft of Native people’s lands to Chinese exclusion laws to Jim Crow to the internment of citizens with Japanese heritage in WWII to the attacks on anyone perceived to be Muslim after 9-11, the nation has always shown what it is.  Now we have a government that won’t protect Afghan refugees who risked their lives to support the U.S. in its longest war.  We have a government that violates constitutional protections while it imprisons immigrants – even those with legal status.  We have a government that seeks to exclude foreign students from studying here.  We have a government that has revoked the temporary protected status of people who came here to flee war and famine – re-traumatizing them with fear of being returned to those conditions.  But if you have $5 million to pay for a “gold card” visa, the door is open.  Or if you’re an Afrikaner pining for the days of apartheid, the door is open.  The resulting messages’ clarity is unmistakably a jingoistic chauvinism that tells people that this isn’t a good place to come unless you can fit in with White, Christian nationalists.

 

When I came to the U.S. as a child, the laws said the nation had to accept me because my birth certificate said I was a citizen.  But the society I came to live amongst made it clear that I wasn’t welcome.  Laws at the time also declared limits to what I could do, where I could go, and with whom I could socialize.  Over time the laws changed to make the country more protective of people of color like me.  Now, though, there’s a push led by elected leaders in the federal government to withdraw those hard-won protections that people of color pressed the government to enact over the past half-century.  The retrenchment to that progress didn’t come from radical-right groups.  It’s the action of the nation’s official, elected or appointed government in all three branches.  So people like me are threatened.  My sense of being a stranger here is now heightened by fear. 

 

I can anticipate responses to all this from some fellow citizens because I’ve heard them:  “Well, you’re a U.S. citizen by birth, so you’re not a foreigner at all; and life couldn’t have been that bad.  You’ve gotten educated, had a career, and have friends and family – you’ve done okay.”  Unspoken in that is the suggestion that even if they were to consider me a foreigner, I’d be one of the good ones.  Those comments often get followed by, “You aren’t like those people.”  “Those” people?  Do you mean like my mother who was naturalized in her 40s?  So maybe you met my mother at some point and would respond, “She was one of the good ones, too.”  At this point you’re in a rhetorically illogical mess.  How did you decide that my mother and I are “good”?  More importantly, how did you decide that there’s some group of people that isn’t good? 

 

The answer to that last question isn’t hard to find.  The U.S. has a centuries-old history of defining which group of people is good and which is bad.  Fears of certain ethnic and racial groups are what the current president played to in his first and his most recent election campaigns.  He didn’t have to convince anyone that people from Africa or Central and South America are bad.  The lore that supports that position is in every part of this nation’s social mythologies that are embedded in books, movies, and folktales. 

 

When I was a child, Central and South Americans were portrayed as lazy schemers with no moral compass.  That morphed in recent years as they were popularly believed to be dangerous drug dealers and violent criminals.  People with African heritage were similarly stereotyped as dangerous, sub-intelligent, and only good for physical tasks.  Those are the fears and tropes that the current president stoked to get elected.  He didn’t create the images; he exploited what many people already thought.  While he campaigned on ridding the nation of dangers posed by rampant criminality, he’s now fulfilling his promises by targeting all immigrants.  Yet, the image that many people have of dangerous Brown and Black folks is so strong that he need not provide any evidence of the dangers posed by the people his masked goons arrest.  

 

That fear of Black and Brown folks is deeply embedded in the public psyche.  So when someone encounters me, an educated and successful African American professional, they have to adjust their perception; however, they do that by making me an exception rather than seeing that their prejudiced perspective is wrong.  But wrong it is, and that perspective is what makes 77 million of our fellow citizens ignore or support the racist rants of a candidate who becomes more open about his beliefs each day.  Whether or not they openly acknowledge their beliefs, those 77 million share them with the president.  If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have ignored his bigoted and nativist statements.  They may profess only to approve of one part or another of his agenda.  But they didn’t have objections to his blatant racism, homophobia, antisemitism, etc. – beliefs that make him unfit for office.

 

What does that mean for the nation’s future?  The loss of immigrants is a loss of the future.  In nature, any organism that becomes isolated and insulated eventually becomes sick and dies.  I believe that to be true of nations as well.  What does this mean for immigrants?  The sickness of isolationism has already spread with the message:  Unless you can prove you fit in with White, Christian nationalism, this nation doesn’t want you coming here.  In the rush to prove that immigrants are dangerous, the federal government is rounding up and imprisoning people while violating rights guaranteed in the Constitution, laws, and court rulings that were in place until the current Supreme Court.  The government is detaining people at the borders as they come with valid visas.  There are even places like Arizona, Texas, and Florida where I, a U.S. citizen, don’t feel safe right now because of the policies and practices of the state governments there – policies and practices that put people like me at risk.  With the passage of the president’s major funding bill, the Department of Homeland Security will grow to become the nation’s largest federal law enforcement agency.  Over the past six months, that agency has been responsible for persistent and unchecked lawless acts of aggression against people of color.  That will grow as the agency rapidly expands its size to become the equivalent to Mussolini’s Black Shirts.  It’s challenging enough to feel like a “stranger in a strange land.”  But what’s happened in the past six months has added a layer of fear to that alienation.