Louis Armstrong, Myths, and the Rescue Narrative

There’s an article making the rounds on social media and carried by some news outlets that tells a story of how a Jewish family, the Karnofskys, adopted a young Louis Armstrong and started him on the path toward becoming the world-famous musician he later became.  Different versions of the story have the family housing young Louis in their home where the mother sang him to sleep with Jewish lullabies.  Other versions have them purchasing his first instrument for him because they saw his potential.  Yet others discuss how he was affectionately given a Yiddish nickname.  It all sounds very Disneyesque as the young child is helped by a struggling immigrant family who brings him into their home and treats him like an adopted child.  It’s a poignant story for the times (early 1900s) when both Jewish and Black people were so mistreated – especially in New Orleans where Mr. Armstrong spent his childhood.  The story has some truth, but it’s not true.  And it’s an example of why those touching stories your friends pass along may not be the best sources to cite.  It’s an even more significant example of how a false narrative that feeds misinformation can contribute to harmful generalities.

 

First some details about why it’s not a true story.  Louis Armstrong was a documentarian.  He kept extensive handwritten notes about his life.  The notes are in the rough language of someone with limited formal education, and they reflect his times.  But they are extensive and allow us to see, in his own words and from his perspective, what his life was like.  His handwritten notes are available at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, NY.  And there are transcribed versions of some of that material at the University of Chicago online archives.  He wrote an extensive comment about his experiences with the Karnofsky family.  You can read an excerpt at:

 

https://catalog.lib.uchicago.edu/vufind/Record/4065377/Excerpt

 

It’s tough to read some of what’s there because of the times it reflects.  His attitudes toward race, though common in his generation, sound strikingly painful today.  But the account is worth reading because it provides a more honest telling than the stories circulating online.  The relationship he describes with the Karnofskys is one of employee and employer.  He worked for them beginning at the age of seven (yes, seven – not uncommon in that era) working alongside the adults or older Karnofsky children.  Mrs. Karnofsky would provide him with a meal at the end of the day, after he’d been working from sunup; but then he went home to his mother and sister.  The Karnofskys treated him benevolently, and he learned the importance of working hard from them.  But when he decided to purchase a used, blackened cornet he saw in a store, they didn’t purchase it for him.  Mr. Karnofsky advanced him two dollars of the five he needed to purchase the horn.  It was a loan against his salary.  He paid back the loan and paid the other three dollars from money he had saved from his salary.  He admired the Karnofskys’ ability to work as a family and to work toward common goals – traits that he believed were lacking in the people in his own community.  But, no, he didn’t become an adopted member of the family.  They were his kindly employers, and no more than that.  They didn’t nickname him with a Yiddish moniker of “Satchmo” (a name he got later from a fellow musician who shortened it from “satchel mouth” – because he talked so much).  The Karnofskys were models to seven-year-old Louis Armstrong that he didn’t see anywhere else in the world he experienced to that point.  As a result, he had a fondness for them that he later extended to all Jewish people.  This is all documented in his own handwriting. 

 

So why do we so readily want to believe the story of a family rescuing young Louis Armstrong, and why does it continue to make the rounds, even after Snopes and other sources have debunked it?  We like stories where there is, at the heart of troubles, a happy twist of rescue.  The lost puppy finds home, the abandoned child finds a family, Little Orphan Annie finds a Daddy Warbucks benefactor.  Those stories make us feel okay about a world that can often seem otherwise cruel.  But there’s more to a story that involves a seven-year-old Black child who goes to work to help his family survive, especially if that child becomes wealthy and famous as an adult.  That real story is contrary to the more common myths about Black people.  After all, the common story society tells of Black children has been one of generational poverty in generational dysfunction.  Mr. Armstrong himself falls into that trap in his telling of the Black experience in his writing.  It’s painful to read his views of Black families in the link noted above. 

 

The dominant societal narrative is one of failure and distress for Black children.  And that narrative isn’t dependent on political perspectives.  Liberals believe it as strongly as conservatives do.  It is rooted in the perception that Black children grow up in poverty and they later live, as adults, in deprivation.  That was such a dominant theme that it drove much of social service policy and social science research from the Moynihan Report of the mid-1960s to the current day.  It stems from the belief that Black families and their children are flawed and deficient.  For them to do better, as the myth emphasizes, someone must rescue them.

 

So a mythical narrative gets created to explain Louis Armstrong.  It suggests that a generous immigrant family helped and nurtured him.  They taught him love and lullabies, and that gave him the start he needed to succeed.  Except that never happened.  While he talks about learning the importance of work and focus from the Karnofsky family, and while he admired them, it wasn’t their love that he took from his encounter.  At a very young age, he watched, learned, and adapted.  As he later played in a band with his idol, the bandleader King Oliver, or as he fronted his own bands, he understood what it meant to hone his skills through work and determination.  He learned how to work from the Karnofsky family, and he took that lesson with him for the rest of his life.  While he was clearly an originator on the trumpet whom players still imitate today, and while he was exceptionally talented, it was his work ethic that propelled him beyond being just a brilliant trumpet player.  His words tell us that was the value of his experiences with the Karnofskys.  His success didn’t come from some mythical nurturing and rescue.

 

Why is that an important distinction to make?  It’s important because seeing the truth of it leads you to a different understanding of the Black experience.  Louis Armstrong wasn’t rescued.  He found a model and then he adapted the model to his own needs.  He used the lessons he learned while working for the Karnofsky family to rise from the reform school where he was later sent to playing for queens and presidents as an adult.  That’s pretty amazing for a child who grew in the poverty that Mr. Armstrong describes in his writing.  And maybe that’s the story we should be passing around on social media.  It’s certainly more accurate.

 

And while we’re at it, maybe we should look at others who succeeded and see what really propelled them to success.  I think about this because of my great-grandfather who migrated to Texas after the Civil War.  By 1871, when he was 72, he owned his own ranch.  By the early 1900s, his sons owned extensive ranch and farm lands in two counties and had amassed significant wealth.  When my grandfather visited Galveston in the early 1900s, his arrival was often noted in the Black newspaper.  One article in Galveston’s The City Times (February 20, 1915, page 1) noted that he was the brother of another wealthy stockman while saying of him, “His wealth, it is thought, will reach the $100,000 mark” (just under $3 million today).  That was a remarkable change of fortunes for a family that a generation before would have been considered as property in many states.  Although that fortune was systematically stolen by the time the next generation arrived, their success, and that of many other Black families during that era and beyond, rarely gets told.  Those stories are not unique to my family.  There were many Black families who have a similar story in that era and all the way to today. 

It’s time to look at those stories and stop passing along myths that affirm a rescue narrative that isn’t truthful.  We’ve started to be aware of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” because of recent reporting; however, even that’s told as an anomaly.  It’s not.  When I’ve examined the many stories of Black success, whether then or now, I can see a pattern of striving toward achievement that is often thwarted by more powerful forces.  Rather than seeing familial dysfunction, I see attainment that fights against the odds because I know these other stories.  That’s why I’m always suspicious of narratives that promote the rescue storyline.  The truth, whether it’s about Mr. Armstrong, my family, or Black Wall Street, is much more powerful. 

An Observational Exegesis of Popular American Epistemology and an Explication of Expertise

(Go ahead and read this despite the title!  I’m using it to make a point.)   

 

If I can use language like in the title above, it’s clear that I can throw around big words.  I generally don’t talk like that, but it seemed that the topic of this essay needed some words that I know from my professional life to help make a point (more on that later).  To translate, what’s written here are my observations about how we Americans relate to knowledge, truth, and expertise – a relationship that is currently strained and teetering toward a break up.  I hope folks don’t read the title and decide to click past because it all sounds foreign and not something worth taking the time to read.  I hope you read the first sentence of this paragraph and decided that maybe the rest of the paragraph is worth reading.  If the first paragraph is worth reading, then maybe the second one is, too.  And maybe you’ll make it all the way to the bottom and see the whole point.  Anyway, I promise that there isn’t any more specialized language like the title. 

 

To get to my point: 

 

I recently read a news account about a religious leader in my community who refuses to get vaccinated.  This isn’t a rabid fundamentalist like I’ve written about elsewhere.  This leader claims a connection to one of the oldest strains of Christianity.  And he believes that the COVID-19 vaccine is a step toward the “mark of the beast” that the biblical book of Revelations suggests will be the antichrist’s brand on his followers.  The priest also further suggested that the government is exaggerating the COVID-19 death toll to create more profits for the medical profession, and CDC statistics are not to be believed.  This leader cites, as his source, an unnamed scientist friend who claims that other scientists are afraid to speak out against the vaccine.  The religious leader making the claims in the news account offered no data, primary research, or credible sources – just a reported friend with whispers of a deep conspiracy that involves the entire medical profession and the entire government.  Because I’m someone who has expertise in an area (though not medicine), these sorts of ambiguous proclamations trouble me because as I understand expertise in any area, it’s never so vague and hidden. 

 

Expertise?  Me?  As the language in the title of this piece might suggest, I have a college education.  But those years of learning aren’t why people who know me will be able to see something I’ve said as having value.  My education, especially my advanced education, prepared me to begin developing knowledge and expertise in certain areas.  The work I’ve done since I completed those degrees gave me additional knowledge and expertise.  I don’t know much about quarks or cellular biology because that’s not what I studied.  But in my field of knowledge, I do know something.  When I talk or write about those topics, it’s because I’ve developed expertise to do so.  I like to say that “I know stuff.”  Like other experts I know, I openly share my expertise, and I don’t pass it along in whispers only to a few people I know.

 

I appreciate and value all levels of knowledge, but let’s acknowledge that there are levels of knowledge.  The meteorology course that I completed as an undergraduate helps me understand what downslope winds are and how thunderstorms develop.  But taking a course or reading a book doesn’t make me a meteorologist who can predict the next hailstorm.  In my area of expertise, I know stuff because of what makes me an expert.  Specifically, I’ve:

• Conducted my own studies and explored the ideas by looking critically at the ideas of others who also study my areas of knowledge;
• Developed systems and processes that put my ideas into practice;
• Tested those ideas and have information that tells me whether those ideas worked or didn’t;
• Regularly exchanged ideas with others who do similar work;
• Remained in current conversations that challenge my ideas and force them to evolve. 

So my expertise isn’t a fixed body of information; it’s a living experience that I expand all the time.  I am continually learning about my field of knowledge and continually finding new ideas to explore in that field.  That’s what an expert does.  You can’t claim my level of knowledge or expertise without having similarly undertaken steps.  Maybe not exactly the same steps I’ve taken as an academic researcher, but certainly you would need to go through the same level of rigor that I’ve followed by following those bullet points above.  I know expert playwrights who do that by learning to write plays through struggle and focus and time and effort; I know expert beauticians who’ve stood over the heads of thousands of people and gained expert skills; I know truck drivers who’ve spent so much time in the cab of a semi that it feels more at home than their house does. Expertise comes in multiple ways, but it does come, and every expert I know experiences those bulleted points.  As a result, there are people who are experts. You would miss taking advantage of that expertise by dismissing what I or other experts say in our areas of expertise because you disagree with it.  I’m not an expert in everything, and sometimes my opinion is just that:  my ideas that are the same as anyone else’s.  But in my field of knowledge, I’m worth hearing before you reject my ideas.  That’s not boasting or expecting that others should see me as special.  It’s a factual a statement that defines part of who I am.  In my area, I know stuff. 

 

Why should anyone care whether I am or anyone else is an expert?  Unfortunately, with the proliferation of talk shows, social media, and “influencers,” Americans seem to have lost the idea that there are experts who know more than the typical person.  And no matter how overwhelming the expert testimony, if some of us hear just one contrary voice declaring knowledge on a matter, we can sometimes ignore the overwhelming expertise and follow the idea that agrees with our opinions.  In the pre-COVID-19, anti-vaccine world that meant some people continued to follow discredited Andrew Wakefield who falsified his research to falsely claim a connection between autism and vaccines – and, as a result, lost his medical license.  In the current pandemic, there are people who would follow leaders who call on their followers to follow medical quackery over the advice of infectious disease experts who tell them to wear a face mask, keep distant from others, and get vaccinated.  Or there are others who look askance at the massive amount of data and reports on climate change.  The list of topics goes on.  Some have stopped listening to expertise and decided that any idea merits belief if it agrees with what they want to believe.

 

I’m not suggesting a blind following of experts.  That would be as wrong as ignoring them.  In case you haven’t guessed this (or known it already because you know me), my area of expertise is around people’s engagement with new ideas.  I “know stuff” about how people learn and how people teach.  I live into the bulleted points above in my professional life.  And something my expertise has taught me is that people often follow the path of least resistance to access knowledge, especially if that knowledge challenges what they already know.  Blindly following a belief is often the easiest path when the better (and harder) approach is to seek out many sources of information, to weigh those sources of information, and decide which source is most accurate.  For example, if 97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is real, then, at the least, you need to question whether you should be following the advice of the other 3%.  The responsibility is to weigh experts’ ideas and determine which ideas are worth following.  And that’s become especially important when we have so many sources of information. 

 

Those sources are sometimes difficult to understand because any area of expertise has its own language that helps experts discuss ideas in their field – like the title of this essay.  It’s important that people in an area of expertise have a language that they can use among each other so they can talk in the shorthand of that language.  I used to teach my graduate students to use the language like the title of this essay so we could have a common language to discuss the nature of knowledge.  It’s the language that they encountered while reading other experts in my area.  However, while some experts are writing in a language meant for each other, it is critical to find those experts who also share their ideas for those of us outside their world.  There are folks in every area of expertise who’ve worked hard at translating their work to an audience beyond their narrow group of fellow experts.  I don’t mean the charlatan quacks who have their own talk shows or YouTube channel and offer opinions on everything.  You know, the ones who insist on being called “Doctor [Insert First Name Here]” and build a marketing brand around that name.  In contrast are others who reach a wide audience and really do develop expertise through careful inquiry and the kind of first-hand exploration that provides them with the mantle of expert (remember the bulleted list I included above). 

 

Think Michael Eric Dyson, Shirley Ann Jackson, Neil deGrasse Tyson, or Nell Irvin Painter.  These and many more have learned to be translators of their big ideas to make those ideas accessible to an audience beyond their own profession.  These aren’t folks who’ve pandered to a wider audience while losing their drive to gain new knowledge.  These public intellectuals have continued to contribute to their field while learning to communicate their ideas.  While there could be more of that expertise and knowledge made publicly accessible, it is available; and we all need to go looking for it.  If you’ve been on Facebook or Substack lately, you’ve most likely encountered the daily posts from historian Heather Cox Richardson.  She’s the perfect example of what this looks like when done well.  In addition to writing highly respected books in her field of knowledge, she writes a daily summary of current events that places the day into historical perspective.  Her daily comments are free of jargon, and they’re also written in the conversational tone that a letter is written.  As a result, her posts are daily must reading for thousands of readers.  It’s experts like her who are worth finding.

 

So how can we be better at consuming information and looking for experts we can trust? 

 

That was easier 30 years ago when there were fewer sources available.  Today, the answer to that question isn’t easy, but it’s necessary if we’re going to be able to navigate the complex world in which we live.  Like I wrote above, my expertise is in my field of study, so I have to do this, too, with other topics all the time.  We all need to have the skills to evaluate the expertise and information that come to us.  The place to start is by questioning the qualifications of the people offering the information.  My favorite example of misplaced expertise was when Nobel Laureate and chemist Linus Pauling declared almost-magical powers of Vitamin C, to the consternation of medical researchers who understood its limitations.  Pauling’s pronouncements had people taking massive doses of Vitamin C that medical researchers agreed had little curative purposes. 

 

Look, also, to see what viewpoints that the expert uses, so that you can understand the biases that the expert brings.  Take some time to see if there are other experts who agree or disagree with the expert.  In both social sciences and the natural sciences, experts always seek to have our work examined by other experts.  The idea of “peer review” means that other experts in our field have looked closely at our work and have determined it meets the standards of our profession.  That process has limitations, but it does offer some protections.  I mentioned Andrew Wakefield’s anti-vaccination, falsified research above.  His study was originally peer reviewed and published by The Lancet, a major British medical journal.  Over time, though, other medical researchers weren’t able to reproduce his results, and that led to his work being examined more closely.  While his falsified data originally passed initial review, it was through further peer review that The Lancet discovered his fabrication and eventually published a retraction of their original publication of his work.  

 

Whenever I hear someone complain that “experts never agree, so I’m not listening to any of them” on a topic, I realize that I’m hearing someone who believes that maybe having expert knowledge isn’t possible.  That’s not true.  In the rapidly evolving information world that surrounds us, we have to sift through that knowledge and educate ourselves how to know which of that knowledge makes the most sense.  The challenges in determining the worth of expert advice, however, doesn’t mean that we should give up on assessing it – or that we should accept all ideas as equal.  It means that it’s going to be harder to make the judgments.  There’s a balance between cynicism and blind acceptance, and we all need to strive toward that balance.  I think of it as informed skepticism.  You don’t have to be an expert in order to assess the value of expertise or of someone who’s sharing their expertise.  After all, you just got to the bottom of this essay that had a title that you may not have fully understood because of the specialized vocabulary I used in the title.  If I’ve done my job, I’ve conveyed the complexity of my ideas without relying on that vocabulary – so you didn’t have to become an expert to understand my thoughts.  You can look at other sources to see if I really do have the expertise I claim, and you can read other materials that’ll tell you about my perspectives and biases. 

 

Where can you start developing a process that’ll help you develop skills in informed skepticism?  Here are some guides to help:

 

https://library.assumption.edu/factchecking

 

https://fordham.libguides.com/FakeNews/Evaluation

 

https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/

 

These resources offer you the opportunity to develop your informed skepticism by developing your own processes that allow you to evaluate information.  Doing that is the only reasonable alternative to accepting information blindly or ignoring it without assessing its worth. 

Thoughts on living in my 70th year

Scanning over the directory of names on my Facebook friends list, I see a few friends of friends; but for the most part, the names that I see form a road map of my life.  There are relatives from both my direct family and Mary’s.  There are people I’ve known for a lifetime or a few years.  A few know me from early childhood.  Many I’ve known professionally: they’ve been co-workers, bosses, professional colleagues.  There are some whom I’ve gotten to know through community engagements or consulting projects.  There are people from the communities I’ve been part of.  And then there are the students, a handful on the list who are part of the thousands I taught over the years:  people in their late-40s and 50s who are cemented in my memory as teens; and people whom I taught in community college or graduate school as adults and who now have a few more grey hairs than when I first met them.

 

Over my lifetime, I’ve had an odd memory.  I’m awful with names, but there’s something that keeps conversations in my mind.  I can recall discussions that I had in the 1970s almost verbatim.  For many years, I recalled every conversation with that detail; but now with time, age, and volume, my memories of discussions aren’t all as vivid or complete.  They’re still there, just in less clarity.  While I’ve always had challenges recalling a person’s name immediately, I can still remember enough of our discussion about a mother’s illness, a sister’s triumphs, someone’s struggles whether to attend graduate school, how much the person loved a particular breed of dog, or a hundred other minute details that seem glued to the neural pathways of my memory. 

 

Through these recollections of others, I see my own life.  I’ve actually learned how to live in the world through others.   Sociologists tell us that we become habituated to the norms around us by interacting in our worlds.  That’s true for my life.  People showed and told me how they survive tragedy, how they celebrate joy, how they cope with challenges and success.  And I learned how to follow the examples they set – not mirroring their experiences, but certainly by using them as templates for my own actions.  Sometimes those are difficult experiences as I learned who not to trust or who was only out for self-gain.  But, on balance, those were small moments where I learned much and moved ahead. 

 

I’ve often heard that life doesn’t come with an instruction manual.  In my case, it does.  It’s a manual that’s authored in chapters of others’ lives, expanded through each interaction with them.  I think that’s why I recall so many conversations.  Those memories of conversations aren’t just facts about others’ lives.  They’re a roadmap of the growth I’ve experienced.  It’s a wonderful symbiosis of connections where I’ve grown and evolved and become with each person I get to know.  That list of Facebook friends is more than a list of names since each name is the basis of a memory that has helped me to understand life further. 

 

In the auto-biographical chapter I wrote for African American Males in Higher Education Leadership, I noted that my life comes from a long historical lineage that informs and shapes it.  In that book chapter, I wrote how my life, like the great Nile as it fertilizes river valleys downstream, was shaped by what comes before until it’s eventually able to offer something to others.  Since I wrote that chapter, though, I’ve come to believe that I’m also shaped by more than what came before me.  My life gets enriched by each conversation and event that is suggested by the names on the Facebook list and well beyond it.  Life, for me, has been a fortunate exchange of ideas, habits, and values. 

 

At this stage, I’m fortunate that some folks call me “mentor.”  That’s something I’ve learned to be as I’ve known people who’ve shown me how to fill that role.  As I was maturing, I had people who checked in on me, helped me to develop the skills and knowledge I needed to have the impact I wanted to have, and let me gently know when I was heading off course.  Now, as I’ve become the mentor, I’ve learned that one aspect of that role is living to a standard.  The righteous fire to change the world of my youth has been tempered by time and experiences that sometimes give me thoughts about taking it all easy and not taking any difficult routes.  However, being engaged with younger folks reminds me to make choices that are often as challenging as the ones I fought through in prior decades.  I may not be on the same leading edge that I was 30 years ago, but my interactions with others remind me to keep pushing whatever edge that’s before me. 

 

It’s more than not wanting to let down others or appearing to look like I’ve given up.  It’s actually more about being forced to live by the same internal standards that have driven me throughout my life and not compromise because it’s easier, I’m older and more tired, or a hundred other excuses that I’d otherwise have.  To be other than whom I’ve been would negate how I lived the rest of my life.  It’s my connections to other, often now younger, people that keep me accountable to remain whom I’ve always wanted to be. 

 

So at the start of this new year of 2022, as I’m mid-way through my 70th cycle around the sun, thank you to all who’ve shared and continue to share your lives with me.  May we all continue to enrich each other in the year ahead.  Happy new year!

This Feels Familiar: An observation

And I feel

Like I've been here before

Feel

Like I've been here before

And you know

It makes me wonder

What's going on under the ground

 

from Déjà Vu by David Crosby

 

I was a paperboy.  From the time I was around 11 until I was 15, I delivered newspapers in my neighborhood.  And once a month, I’d go “collecting.”  For those not old enough to remember paper carriers and home delivery by children, “collecting” was when I’d take the receipt book that the newspaper company gave me and knock on the doors where I’d been delivering papers.  When someone answered, I’d say, “Collecting for the [name of the newspaper]” like every other newspaper carrier did.  Then the adult who lived there would reach into a wallet or purse for cash, or they’d go over to a desk to write a check.  I was responsible to collect the household’s subscription fee for the month.  I’d give the majority of what I collected to the route manager, and I’d keep a percentage as my salary.  At a time before automated, computer-driven billing, it was an ingenious system that saved newspapers all over the country from having larger billing and collections departments; and it helped me learn the responsibility of earning and managing money.  The job also led to lots of adventures that adults never intended, and those adventures helped shape my world view; but those are for another time. 

 

For the most part, the people from whom I collected were pretty good about my collecting.  While some of them didn’t otherwise treat me especially well, they seemed to understand the relationship between my providing a service and then showing up at the doorstep requesting payment.  The exchanges were polite and formally cordial.  There was an exception, however.  The John Birch House.  That was what I called the house where members of the John Birch Society in the neighborhood lived.  I don’t remember ever having any discussion beyond being handed payment, giving a receipt, and wordlessly being expected to leave as the door closed.  Like just about every other house in the neighborhood, they had children in school, so the lack of communication wasn’t because the adults didn’t know how to converse with children.  There was always silence and the tacit understanding that even in this most American of commercial interactions, having a Black kid on their porch wasn’t what they preferred – no matter the reason.

 

This less-than-amicable interaction won’t be surprising to anyone who even casually knows the John Birch Society.  Think of all of the crackpot conspiracies fomented in recent years by the “Q” crowd and White-nationalist groups that stormed the nation’s capitol building on January 6.  All their ideas and beliefs have their antecedents in the John Birch Society of the late 1950s and 1960s.  Disbelieve government experts?  That was a hallmark of theirs, whether it was water safety or education.  Mistrust “mainstream” journalists?  The Birch Society believed them to have been infiltrated by communists and communist sympathizers who sought to destroy the nation.  Don’t believe that the current president is legitimate?  They believed that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, the man who’d led Allied troops a few years before, was a communist dupe.  The list of whacky beliefs goes on.  So much so that the Republican Party of the era denounced the John Birch Society as being outrageous and dangerous to democracy.  John Birch Society members were especially hostile toward the civil rights movement that they saw as fueled by communist conspirators who were teaching Black folks to step out of line.  Black folks who didn’t know their place as subservient weren’t welcome where members of the John Birch Society lived, even if they were just collecting for the newspaper. 

 

I don’t remember any specific collecting moments during my career as a newspaper carrier except for one at the John Birch House.  At that visit, I knocked on the door.  When it opened, I offered my standard introduction, expecting the usual silence that accompanied it at that house.  The mother of the house who had opened the door, quietly turned and walked back into the living room where a group of men and women sat.  As she retrieved her purse, the group that had been talking became suddenly silent as they stared at me.  Because I was the paperboy, and because I went to school with the children in our area, I knew all of the adults who lived in the neighborhood.  These men and women were unfamiliar.  I grew up in a family that was politically active, and I immediately recognized the signs of a meeting, rather than a social gathering.  It was mid-day on a Saturday, and seating was arranged in a circle.  Some chairs had been brought from the dining room to complete that circle.  People’s postures weren’t casual.  The group was arranged for a discussion, not in an informal gathering.  Some of the people needed to shift their position to look at me.  They continued to stare motionlessly at me as the woman of the house brought back her purse and paid me.  I wrote her a receipt and she held out her hand to take it, then stepped back and closed the door.  It was only as the door closed that I began to see some movement in the group that had been observing me intensely for the few minutes that the exchange took.

 

When you’re one of only a few Black kids in a White community of over 30,000 people in the 1950s and ‘60s, you get used to staring and silence.  But I also immediately realized whom and what I’d seen.  This was the local John Birch Society having a meeting.  They were a very active group in that community as they sought to protect the community from godless communism and fluoride in the drinking water.  They weren’t out burning crosses in people’s yards, but they were clearly about maintaining a system that benefitted White men at the expense of all others.  Their beliefs were very widely known, but it was difficult to know who was a member.  I only knew about the people in this house’s membership because my parents had told me.  Catching this rare glimpse of their meeting was as rare as finding an undiscovered flock of endangered birds. 

 

While there were lots of community groups that people could join, the John Birch Society wasn’t a group where you could attend a membership recruitment meeting or an open forum they offered.  They met in small groups like the one I’d seen, and they did their work behind the scenes.  They started rumor campaigns that employed coded language to rail against Jews as greedy or African Americans as lazy or dangerous in letters to the editor.  They ran for the school board under the banner of protecting traditions and history.  They were quietly persistent, preferring to be cautious about being open about their group membership.  They would never, for example, speak at a school board meeting as the president of the local chapter of the John Birch Society.  Their public posture was that they were individuals who cared about values and tradition and their interpretation of important concepts like liberty and freedom.    

 

They never stood up as a group to say, “We’re the John Birch Society, these are our members, and this is what we believe.”  That openness of their beliefs often happened at the national level, especially through their founding leader Robert Welch.  However, despite their local collective silence, there was a clear local agenda that tied to the national agenda, and that became clear through the actions and comments that aligned to the national organization’s policies.  You only knew that local neighbors were members of the John Birch Society if you paid attention to what they said and how they said it when they engaged publicly.  Again, as a Black kid who grew up in a White community and who was raised by an activist father, I paid attention. 

 

At the local level, they stayed in the background and created small agitations.  They’d fight for the recall of a school board member.  They’d launch a formal complaint against a curriculum or a particular teacher in schools.  They’d appear as concerned citizens at city or county council meetings.  On the surface, it looked like these individuals were good citizens who were exercising their individual rights by advocating for their communities.  In truth, in the pre-social-media-era, through books like None Dare Call It Treason or Robert Welch’s Blue Book, that they could get from the right-wing American Opinion Bookstore in nearby Oakland, they developed a common ideology.  Through meetings like the one I accidentally witnessed, they would plan collective action.  But it never looked like collective action; instead, each action appeared like an individual, citizens-led initiative.  This was the late 1950s and early 1960s, and their insidious, concerted actions that occurred simultaneously in suburban communities around the country helped to shape actions and beliefs that would later emerge as the anti-taxation movements in the 1970s and, eventually, the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. 

 

At that moment on that porch in the mid- ‘60s as the door closed and I walked away from the porch, I was left wondering what they were discussing.  Were they planning the next attack on some unsuspecting teacher because she had students reading To Kill a Mockingbird?  Or were they intending to have members of the group show at the next county planning committee to complain that fair housing laws were just a smokescreen to bring down their property values?  Or were they planning a letter writing campaign to thwart new taxes that were the result of the wasteful government spending they believed existed?  Whatever their immediate topic, I suspected that the conversation shifted to my family and me after the door closed.  In the wake of their silent stares, I was certain they would be they talking about the dangers of having a politically engaged Black family around the corner.  If nothing else, the family of the house would have to explain how someone like me could find himself in their neighborhood.  Guessing their conversation was the best I could do.  And that’s the way it was at that time in that place with that organization.  I could see the outcome of their actions when they did act, but they planned clandestinely behind closed doors.  It was like that often-cited metaphor of only being able to see the top half of the duck as it swims on a pond.  There was much happening underneath, even though what was visible didn’t show it.

 

I’ve watched the news in the past year with much interest. 

 

The nation has now had an attempted insurrection that sought to subvert the most recent presidential election.  There are also movements all over the country to create new legislation that restricts voting.  Republicans who stood up for the rule of law and fought the subversion of democracy are quietly being replaced by radically extreme people in many localities and states.  A woman’s right to make decisions for her health is being challenged.  Groups are showing up at school board meetings to protest teaching practices and curricula.  There are demands and protests against mask mandates and vaccinations.  All these actions appear to be grassroots efforts among concerned conservatives who are answering the call of patriotism.  That’s what the defenders of the insurrection attempt, the voting restrictions movements, and anti-women’s choice all suggest.  But that’s what the John Birch Society looked and sounded like 60 years ago.  While their national leaders made wild claims that were easily refutable, the local followers quietly and persistently agitated for the changes that national leaders suggested. 

 

Donald Trump, his My Pillow sycophant, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Steve Bannon, and the others who have a national profile are easily dismissible as buffoons, incompetent, devious prevaricators, or worse.  None of what they say is ever proven, and their antics are easily dismissed as laughable.  But here’s the danger that my childhood observations taught me:  These nationally visible influencers have acolytes at the local level who are much less outrageous, much more covert, and much more dangerous.  These local workers push toward the larger vision that the national leaders articulate in a choreographed pas de deux.  National and local dance partners each take their steps to move the nation toward the same kind of exclusionary ideology and practices that the folks meeting at the John Birch House 60 years ago would find familiar.  It wasn’t the prominent, national figures of the movement that made that shift.  It was the local advocates who remained true to the cause and maintained a determined message that never wavered over time.  

 

An insurrection doesn’t organically happen; it’s not by accident that these voting exclusion laws and vote “audits” are popping up in multiple places; and it’s not by serendipity that women’s rights are being challenged in many places all at once.  There’s some serious organizing behind all this.  And a significant part of its danger is at the local level.  For these actions to happen simultaneously as they have, folks have to be exchanging ideas online, and also they have to be meeting regularly and quietly to plan like my childhood neighbors did.  While the national news looks at, and generally dismisses, the national-level nonsense, the lack of local reportage means that these local efforts go unchecked.  At a time when local journalism is waning, there aren’t enough local reporters to ferret out the story of local groups and what the impacts of these groups are.  The best that local reporters seem to be able to do is to identify the most radical of these groups:  the Proud Boys, The Three Percenters, etc.  Those are easy to spot, and it’s easy to see what their impacts are.  Less visible are the soccer parents or and PTA factions who also meet to plan action.  They meet on social media to arrange for the next school board protest or the next campaign to denounce vaccines.  We see the duck moving, but don’t know anything about what’s causing the movement.

 

We’ve seen this happen in the past, and the result isn’t good.  Over time, the Republican Party evolved to adopt many of the beliefs and perspectives of the John Birch Society – beliefs that it rejected as laughably too radical in the 1960s.  That group patiently acted locally and like a drip that eventually breaks a dam, it persistently pushed its agenda until the party eventually started to believe what the John Birch Society members offered.  With time, the steady messaging of these groups from the base creates a narrative that becomes commonly accepted.  That slow movement toward the extreme is how two-thirds of Republicans in recent polling have now come to believe that the last presidential election was stolen by the winner – despite all the evidence to the contrary.  At the local level, and online, the lies they hear and see are being spread by people they trust.  That trust extends to national leaders like Trump, but it begins in living rooms and in online postings.  Over time, those mistruths become facts, despite any evidence to the contrary.  These mistruths are spread even more virulently than they were 60 years ago because of pervasive social media.  We’ve learned in recent months how a virus can spread physically.  In the world of the Internet, viral ideas spread as quickly and as dangerously through contacts that happen every day. 

 

So here’s my question to you:  If you’re seeing what looks like concerned individuals who are pushing for the current anti-democracy and fear agendas in your community and state, what’s the local organization that’s really behind what you’re seeing?  Like you would for any virus, do some contact tracing.  Look for the names that keep getting mentioned in these actions.  Look for the names of groups, especially fundamentalist churches that have become a hub, that are involved.  In many ways, the fundamentalist church has taken the role that the John Birch Society had in its growth era.  Look for the patterns of who is doing what, and you’ll soon find who and what groups are active in your community.  I think you’ll be surprised when you uncover the answer to that question.  Even more importantly, you’ll discover who is spreading what story.  Once you make those connections, then you can encourage the few remaining local journalists who cover your area to look further.  There are definitely many local stories there. 

 

Because, like David Crosby ended the song, “We have all been here before….”

About Systems Failures and a Pandemic

I’m annoyed.  Really annoyed.  I live in a community where, as of today, 92.3% of the population, 12 and older received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.  That’s the highest vaccination rate in our county.  We have an incredible volunteer medical and emergency response corps who put together a vaccination campaign that even attracted folks from outside the community to come here and be vaccinated.  Our small, independent pharmacy took a leading role in becoming a hub for vaccinations, and even my dentist’s office purchased a specialized freezer to become a vaccination site.  This is all one outcome of living in a community where large numbers of medical professionals and talented organizers live.  It’s an older population with a median age of 54 where a lot of experienced professionals – many of them retired – are available to organize and participate in making all this happen.  I’m grateful to these people.  My wife and I didn’t move here 24 years ago with the intention of someday living in a secure bubble that protected us from a pandemic.  We came for the forests and connection to the waters that surround us.  But, as it turns out, living here gives us resources that we couldn’t have anticipated – that’s confirmed by our community having the lowest COVID-19 infection rate in the region.  So why am I annoyed?

 

I’m annoyed because these privileges stop at the community’s edge.  The more ethnically/racially and economically diverse communities in my county have higher infection rates and lower vaccination rates than my community.  These other areas also don’t have a large cadre of volunteer medical professionals at the ready to educate them and to organize the medical services that a community like mine can muster.  It’s the same problem that the nation has always had.  Medical service has historically been available to those with resources.  Even in a pandemic where the impacts of no medical service cross geographic lines, the privileged get more services.  In truth, though, I am no more safe from the pandemic than the neighboring communities are.  In truth, I can’t live in a bubble.  When I have an appointment in a neighboring community, when I shop in another community, when someone in those neighboring communities comes to mine – we are all exposed to each other.  The effect of that borderless exposure becomes more real with reports of “breakthrough cases” among the already vaccinated like me – even if my risk for being infected is small.  It’s clear that the folly of the well-resourced being served and others continuing without those resources doesn’t serve anyone well.  That’s always been the case, and a pandemic just makes the interdependence more apparent. 

 

I’m also annoyed because of how the politicization of this pandemic has ensured that some areas of the state and nation choose not to take caution.  We have counties in our state where significant numbers of people see public health precautions as a political issue.  Significant numbers of people in these communities are convinced that putting on a mask, social distancing, avoiding crowds, and, ultimately, getting vaccinated are actions that that somehow connect to their personal liberty.  Certain politicians, television networks, religious leaders, and online media outlets fuel these ideas.  As a result, their followers choose to remain defiant to the virus, or they choose to remain ignorant of its impact; or they believe themselves protected from it; or they believe unreasoned conspiracies about vaccines, masks, and social distancing.  These people ignore the warnings of health professionals and the unfolding facts as over 600,000 of our citizens died and over 35 million were infected.  All of the current data suggest that these folks being convinced to be intransigent contributes to the pandemic’s spread and impact on all of us – as do the inequity of resources and the politicization of public health measures.  Seems to me that I have a right to be annoyed by this as much as I’m annoyed by the inequitable medical system that favors people who live in communities like mine. 

 

Finally, I’m annoyed that economic and political pressures forced an early end to public health and safety measures that were limiting the pandemic’s effect.  Those pressures have supported an anti-science approach where political and economic considerations have equal or more authority as scientific ones.  During a December, 2020 NPR interview, Dr. Fauci said, "I would say 50% would have to get vaccinated before you start to see an impact.  But I would say 75 to 85% would have to get vaccinated if you want to have that blanket of herd immunity."  Throughout December through February, as the vaccines were just starting to be reviewed for use, Dr. Fauci and other epidemiologists noted the importance of getting 75 to 85% of the population vaccinated.  The current federal administration and state administrations lowered that to a more pragmatic goal of 70% when it became clear that people were hesitant to be vaccinated.  Science gets put aside as leaders set about mollifying anti-science believers or their voting base or those with economic interests.  Now we’re being warned about another surge in cases.  I understand the economic forces, and I understand the political forces, but understanding doesn’t lessen my annoyance.

 

So is this just a rant, or do I have an idea of substance to offer here?  Maybe a little of both.  On the other side of this pandemic, when it does end, I like to hope that the lessons of an inequitable health system, the dangers of politicization of matters of social good, and the discounting of science will offer lessons for how we handle the next crisis.  I have this hope, but it’s a dim hope.  Given the issues above, I hear few people, and almost no leaders, discussing the fundamental flaws that led to the problems.  Instead, I hear conversations about the need for technical fixes to existing systems – like providing funding for one short-term solution or other – not the systemic causes we should be discussing. 

 

We’re faced, in this pandemic, with broken economic and political systems that created divisions and favoritism for some.  These systems poorly serve all but the very few who benefit from them.  These systems are intended to ensure their own perpetuity, yet they can’t continue in the models of failure that is their hallmark.  We’re also reaping the rewards of a decades-long anti-intellectualism that generated skepticism for even the most common-sense measures.  All of this is leading to a clash between perceptions and reality.  This clash will either reshape the fundamental ways in which the society operates, or it will generate little change that will eventually lead to a future clash. 

 

What to do?  It seems to me that the first task is to be aware that the failures during the pandemic were systemic.  If your car’s motor stops working, and you notice that the lights aren’t working, changing the headlights isn’t going to get the car moving again.  A dead motor is a system that needs to be fixed.  We need to look beyond what’s immediately visible to get at root causes.  In addressing the post-pandemic future, now is the time to discuss the systems that failed us.  What in our systems allows significant numbers of people in ethnic/racial groups and within certain economic groups to be less well served?  What in our political and social processes allows leaders to lie and manipulate their followers with impunity?  What caused suspicion of science to become so widespread?  These are the questions we should be discussing now as we examine the struggles of the past 18 months.  Answering these questions will determine the nation’s future.  Creating piecemeal technical fixes to those systems isn’t enough to ensure we can address the next crisis.