[FRIAM] Today's Sermon:: a minor awokening
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Sat Sep 5 21:21:08 EDT 2020
> Hi Steve,
>
>
>
> You can’t have read Watchman “decades” ago because it only came out a
> few years ago. It puts Atticus in a whole new perspective.
>
Why does that not surprise me? (that I would have made that mistake) I
checked with Mary and the answer is she did recommend it for our "book
group" in the last year and it would have only been Mockingbird that I read.
doh!
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Steve Smith
> *Sent:* Saturday, September 5, 2020 6:07 PM
> *To:* friam at redfish.com
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Today's Sermon:: a minor awokening
>
>
>
> Nick -
>
> I think I read /Watchmen/ decades ago... it is a good addition to my
> reading list with Mary (she has mentioned it recently)... we read
> books together (how quaint). Right now we are on Victor Klemperer's
> diaries from the Nazi years in Germany as a Jewish man married to an
> Aryan woman, and the slow erosion and decline of their circumstances,
> his rights, and hers by association (in a time/culture where the man
> of the family had primary status, and yet the Aryan of the family had
> higher status in many ways). It is heartbreaking and very cautionary
> as we watch the norms of a society get eroded away on one side as a
> subset of ruthless and ambitious characters seduce and intimidate the
> populace into normalizing pretty marginalizing (and ultimately brutal)
> behaviour of one segment of population against the other. Spoiler
> alert - the time-period is 1934-1944 so you can guess "how it turns out".
>
> Other (re)reads have included Moby Dick, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
> Maintenance, The Woman at Otowi Bridge (Edith Warner), a biography of
> Maria Martinez (potter), the biography of Mabel Dodge-Luhan. Not
> only do these books read differently the second time around (decades
> later) but in the light of a new (2+ years) partner whose backround
> and perspective is radically different. Mary is much more attuned to
> the Civil Rights issues than I... she grew up in her own version of
> remote (a tiny college town, Chadron NE near the Pine Ridge Rez) with
> a mother who was a strong civic member and Democrat amongst mostly
> Republican farm/ranch folks... her father was probably a Republican if
> he voted... her brothers all rode to Sturgis, voted for Trump and are
> likely to again, etc. but/and she loves them, even if she won't
> speak her mind openly on those topics with them.
>
> My sister who dated her African American friend for a time is now in
> her mid-60's asking her children, my children and even Mary and I for
> "something she can read to understand 'all that'"... She and her
> husband voted for Trump but probably won't again, and in her defense,
> lived out-of-country in Spain and Chile for most of their adult lives,
> as part of the colonialism of American Mining interests overseas. A
> previous boyfriend was of a Mexican-American family in the border town
> whose circumstance and status was somewhat higher than our own...
> most of the merchant and professional class were the grandchildren of
> Mexicans who lived there when it *was* Mexico (pre Gadsden
> Purchase). My parents had a similar (though more muted) reaction to
> him... that surprised me as well since well over half of our friends
> and classmates from 1st Grade has Spanish surnames. They may have
> also questioned her more Anglo-Normative boyfriends along the way,
> maybe they were just overprotective?
>
> Rattling on about my sister and her family, they volunteer with
> Central American refugees in Tucson because they are both fluent in
> Spanish and just in the last year acknowledged that maybe Global
> Warming was real AND anthropogenic and maybe they should try to
> recycle or carpool or something (snarky, sorry)...so there is hope...
>
> Yes to "context and perspective"...
>
> - Steve
>
> On 9/5/20 3:27 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com
> <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Steve,
>
>
>
> Your story, like so many of your stories, cuts to the heart. If
> you haven’t already, I recommend you read /Go Call a Watchmen,
> /the pre-written sequel to /To Kill a Mockingbird, /in which Scout
> discovers that, at least from seen from a Northern perspective, is
> actually a flaming racist. That perspective thing, as Glen keeps
> reminding me, is so important. I would love to know what you
> (-all) think of that book.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com>
> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Steve Smith
> *Sent:* Saturday, September 5, 2020 1:27 PM
> *To:* friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Today's Sermon:: a minor awokening
>
>
>
> Nick -
>
> I think I may well know the man of whom you speak... he is in my
> "second order circle" so I only see him while visiting certain
> friends or at events we all share or the occasional criss-cross in
> a public venue. I will try to remember to ask him if he
> remembers YOU... question is which stereotype might I appeal to
> to describe you to him? I won't speculate on what forms that
> might take as I explore my own stereotypes, or worse yet, my
> projections of what *his* stereotypes of you might be. If we
> are talking about the same person I doubt he would have "avoided
> you"... he has been fairly politely blunt with me a few times and
> then resumed the jovial conversations we were having. He seemed
> very practiced at navigating (not so) hidden judgements and
> assumptions about him.
>
> My own mother had a modest amount of self-awareness, growing up in
> KY fairly proud of being a "Yankee" in the sense of north of the
> Mason-Dixon and from a subculture that was too poor to have ever
> risked owning a slave or having a close relative who did. She
> lived with her aunt in the city of Frankfort during the school
> year in the depression for lots of reasons. She was therefore
> raised as an only child, her cousins having recently grown and
> moved out of the family home. She tells an anecdote of having
> developed a friendship with a girl who lived *somewhere* between
> *her school* and her aunt's house... she would pause to play with
> her every day after school until it got to where she started being
> noticeably late home... when she told her aunt why she was late,
> she said "why don't you just invite your friend home next time and
> you can play here!"... she asked her friend who resisted for
> about a week and then finally came home (her aunt married a
> Scottish Doctor, so their home was very meticulous and in a nicer
> neighborhood, but they lived crazy-frugal anyway) and after the
> first day, her aunt very politely told her not to invite the
> friend back, and in fact, was forbidden to play with her
> anymore. The little girl was apparently the first black person
> she had ever met and it was years later that she guessed that that
> was what it was all about... her aunt was too "polite" to make a
> deal about it and too "authoritarian" to be questioned. Later
> her mother gave her a family heirloom which was referred to
> colloquially as a "tar baby" which her mother explained to her had
> been a type of doll that young girls were given to "play with" in
> the style and memory of how their ancestors had been allowed to
> "play with" the slave babies. Her mother explained how wrong
> *all* of it was, from the slavery to the treating even the babies
> as property, to replacing them post-emancipation with effigies,
> etc. I learned this when she was unpacking from one of our moves
> and it showed up in a cardboard barrel amongst her mother's (our
> aunt's) china that we never used... my sister saw it and was
> intrigued and "wanted to play with it" whereupon my mother tried
> to explain all of this to us and then declaring that "the best
> thing I can do is get rid of it, it is just a reflection of a bad
> piece of history". I don't know if it went in the burn barrel
> with our other trash or if she figured out some more respectful
> disposal method... I would like to think she knew of a historian
> or similar for whom such an artifact could be made meaningful.
> This and other similar instances made me think that my parents
> were the least prejudiced people I knew, until at 19 my sister who
> had a small group of friends from college, one of who was African
> American... my parents liked him a lot, he was a very sociable
> and interesting person (his father was career military and his
> mother had died when he was young and he and two sisters were
> raised by "help"). But at some point, the friendship drifted
> into the boyfriend zone and they very sternly, albeit
> embarrassingly disabused me of the thought that they were not
> prejudiced. I don't remember the exact conversations but it was
> clear that they were very much against the relationship, even if
> they didn't quite try to forbid their (adult) daughter from
> continuing. I think they even enlisted one of their (more
> openly) racist friends to have a conversation with her. It did
> not sit well at all with me. But made me realize how hidden some
> of these judgements, stereotypes, opinions, etc can be. I'm sure
> I'm laced with junk like that.
>
> - Steve
>
> Dear fellow congregants,
>
>
>
> One of the things we talk about is our bemusement at Trump
> supporters. One expression you often hear these supporters
> say is that they admire him because “He tells it like it is!”
> They can say this while acknowledging that almost everything
> he says is false. So, if he is lying most of the time, what
> is he telling the truth about?
>
>
>
> I think I know. As I keep insisting, I am not a boomer. I am
> from the Silent Generation, the Lonely Crowd. My mother’s
> life hero was Eleanor Roosevelt. It was I, aged seven, who
> brought the news of the President’s death to my parents, and I
> was startled to seem my mother burst into tears. Crying was
> not her thing. My folks were publishers. We had black,
> Jewish, gay, lesbian, working class, authors visiting the
> house. But – and here is the point – when they visited, they
> visited /as such./ Not that I was told as a child explicitly,
> but it was conveyed to me as a child, somehow, that these
> folks belonged to a different category. And my education, in
> Massachusetts, in the 40’s, was devoid of any explicit contact
> with anybody in any of these categories.
>
>
>
> Ok, fast forward 70 years to Santa Fe. I befriend at Ohoris
> an extremely tall black man, grizzled, slow moving,
> thoughtful, with an intricate, international biography full of
> remarkable connections and coincidences. He fits in every
> conceivable way my childhood stereotype of the “old wise black
> man”. I sit in rapt attention to his stories. I look up to
> him, which, given his height, is my only choice. But, as we
> continue to meet, a tension begins to rise between us that is
> coming largely from me, but I cannot control. He becomes
> aware that I am seeing him through the stereotype of the old
> wise black man. Because I cannot admit to it, he is
> imprisoned by it. /Our conversations are based on a lie./ He
> disappears from Ohoris and I never see him again. He would
> rather eschew good coffee, than live in my lie.
>
>
>
> This is what Donald Trump is truthful about. He tells the
> truth about his own stereotypes. He is truthful about
> himself. That what he believes is FALSE is irrelevant to his
> base. He admits to thoughts which they know many others find
> distasteful. It is hard to live in a world which has moved on
> from one’s childhood, a world in which others find one’s basic
> categorizations distasteful – in fact, a world in which one
> finds one’s own basic categorizations distasteful.
>
>
>
> To break Trump we need to come to a new understanding and
> acknowledgement of type-isms. There are always going to be
> type-isms. We human beings do that sort of thing. Raised in
> a particular way, at a particular time I see a tall grizzled
> black man as wise, and everything he says and does is read
> through that lens. That’s abduction. This person wears a
> dress, this person is a woman, this person is gentle, that ‘s
> abduction. (Well, it’s abduction-deduction, but let that
> go.) Human beings naturally form identity groups that trap
> ourselves and others in false abductions. So we need to
> design our society to counter these. (Libertarians beware.
> Here come Nick’s white vans, again) In this case the white
> van takes the form of aggressive taxation of the rich and
> aggressive education of the poor, and of institutions that
> promote the random mixing of our citizens (like public
> universities and armies – or conservation corps).
>
>
>
> Could my friendship with the tall black guy have been
> rescued? Could we have laughed about my stereotypes? Perhaps
> I should have said, early on, “Look, I’m sorry, I keep seeing
> you as Uncle Remus. I am sure, as I get to know you better,
> I will get over it. Please be patient with me, and please
> call me out whenever you feel confined by it. ”
>
>
>
> A Liberalism that does not free me is not worth the name.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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