Civilization out of Africa? Not quite. Ignore ethnicity at your peril? If you say so. Dakotas saw their neighborhood changing in the 1840s. West Side black kids in the 1960s and their limited view ...
As seen in June of '96 . . .
I must have been pondering weak and weary over a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore when I made these mistakes in the last issue:
* Mary Lefkowitz is author of Not Out of Africa, not of Out of Africa, as I inexplicably wrote. Her whole point is that civilization as we know it did not come out of ancient Egypt, as claimed by Afrocentrists, though some very good things did. She teaches at Wellesley College, an elite institution. Elite or not, some of its black students have asked her why she doesn't tell the truth about Socrates being black, etc. These and other students might be unleashed on the world having embraced myth as history. Our Western tradition, on the other hand, distinguishes between the two, and our elite should know better.
* I meant to ask "how big can classes be without sharply limiting ongoing critique of students' writing" -- the sort of annoying omission that shows the importance of ongoing critique or at least copy editing of anyone's writing. But from bad comes good: I can note again how we hurt schooling by reducing staff. It's a rule.
* Discussing special teaching methods for black kids, I should have said, "though we are to assume [it] would help" to have black teachers. I don't assume that, any more than I assume it would help if my 3/4 Irish-American kids had 3/4 Irish-American teachers.
It can be a plus, I admit. There can be immediate unspoken understandings between members of the same ethnic or other group. You can't grow up in an ethnic maelstrom like the Chicago area without knowing that.
Thus, teaching mostly Italian Taylor Street kids and mostly Irish Beverly kids in the '50s, I seemed to the paisanos to favor the micks. Or: at my high school reunion some years back, a classmate referred to having been a Polish kid "in an Irish school." I didn't know it was Irish, and I didn't know he was Polish; but he remembered it 25 years later.
So ethnicity can't be ignored. Or race. But the 16th-century mystic, Teresa of Avila, had this to say about spiritual advisors: if she had to choose, she would rather a smart one than a holy one. So for teachers, what should be the overriding issue, race or competence?
That old Oregon Trail again . . .
As a bookish New England youngster, Francis Parkman developed great interest in the Indians of the West and decided he had to live with them to do the subject justice. That's what he did on the Oregon Trail in 1846, and from the experience came his book of the same name. He's billed as a historian but seems also to have been a cultural anthropologist.
He found the Indians -- Dakota, or Sioux -- curious about things but only within limits. What went beyond their experience they called "great medicine" and let it go at that. They let sleeping dogs lie -- metaphorically if not really. When they wanted a good meal, as we have seen, a dog feast was much appreciated.
Another breed of Oregon Trail cat was what he called "the emigrants," woodsmen and their families pushing ahead in wagon trains to the promised land -- we call them pioneers. These let their curiosity run away with them. At Fort Laramie, they inspected every nook and cranny, even of private quarters, "totally devoid of any sense of delicacy or propriety."
They also were dangerously ignorant of the country they were passing through and its inhabitants. Fearful too, looking on even Parkman and his companion as enemies because they were strangers. Their fearfulness got them into trouble. When Dakotas came looking for food, they gave it in overabundance, afraid to refuse. The Dakotas, spotting easy marks, upped their demands and got nasty, at which point one of the emigrants would pull out a rifle and threaten them.
It didn't help any that about this time the Dakotas were getting nervous about all these strangers. When there were only a few trappers, there was no problem. But as wagon trains appeared in the east, full of palefaces, it dawned on them that there was trouble ahead. The neighborhood was threatened, to say the least.
The Chicago experience . . . Some black kids on the West Side in the '60s thought blacks were in the majority, so few whites did they see. I was asked once if I was a policeman, even if I was wearing black shirt and Roman collar. Sister William of Marillac (settlement) House, dressed in her Daughters of Charity "God's geese" outfit, told of being called a witch by a kid hiding behind a bush. She said she would "whop (him) upside (his) head" for that, and the kid said, surprised, "How'd you know me?" The emigrants should have had her to advise them in dealing with the Dakotas.
In China, if you're black, step back . . .
Eastman Kodak and Fuji are fighting it out for control of the "voracious" China market for photographic film and paper, reports Wall St. Journal, 5/24. Each claims its paper makes skin look lighter. This is important because Asians connect darker skin with laboring classes -- inaccurately, says Kodak, who accuses Fuji of fostering that impression. Meanwhile, Kodak is switching to more expensive paper that gives "whiter whites."
Whites, on the other hand like the yellowish cast and "muted pallor" of Kodak prints, probably for the same reasons they like tanning parlors. May I be permitted to observe, while shades and hues are under discussion, that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence? I may not? I didn't think so.
Book on the way, watch out! . . . Having pushed back the barriers of ignorance with a book two years ago, I have another in mind, about Sunday School. I have visited 17 places where religious education takes place to find out what those educators know about raising kids, or at least about instructing them in godly ways.
Like Diogenes with his lantern, I asked what works, and I'm not sure what I have yet that's salable. Salable? None but a fool writes for other than money, said Sam Johnson. William Heinlein, the revered science-fiction writer, told adoring young people the same thing. For the squeamish, that can be translated to this: money is what people put where their mouths are, to show interest. If nobody shows interest, is there interest? Does the falling tree make noise when no one hears it?
That grubby point being made, the issue is what's to be said about Sunday schools that people will pay to read about, or watch once the movie of the week is made, to be fetchingly titled, "Tales out of Sunday School -- What no director of religious education wants you to know." There you go. Salable.
Black or white teachers who fail to use standard English/proper grammar are hurting students. Cringed when co-workers used the vernacular with kids, who heard it at home, in the streets and in the classroom, then did poorly on standardized tests of Englishj and could not compose a gramatically correct essay.