Still Trusting the Process

 

When it comes to American sports, winning is everything. Front offices will open up their checkbooks, teams will tank, and athletes will endure unbearable hardship all in service of that ring. Win the last game of the season and you become immortal, to be remembered and feted by a hungry fan base.

There is nothing like winning to elevate the locker room mood and brighten the spirits of an entire city. We live for those moments, so are willing to do whatever it takes to get there. And if we've been to the mountaintop, we'll do whatever it takes to get back. 

With such a single-minded determination, life lessons abound. Eagles QB Jalen Hurts swallowed the pain of losing Super Bowl 57 by saying "you win or you learn." What an extraordinary statement of resolve, to transform the bitter pill of defeat into another step towards victory. And completely on-brand for a young man who continues to impress me with his maturity and humility.

Yet transferring this determination to our lives can be somewhat fraught. We are not megastars upon whose shoulders rest the anxious wishes of a whole region. We are going about the normalcy of our day as workers and parents and friends and citizens, far from the spotlight that shines so brightly on Hurts and others. How do we also "win or learn"?

Let me borrow from another Philly sports team the phrase "trust the process." It is simultaneously an assurance by 76ers management to fans that lean seasons and tough decision will beget future success, and the nickname of Joel Embiid, the centerpiece of that team's hope for championship glory. As such, it has been beaten into the ground around here to be rendered almost meaningless from having been uttered so often.

Yet contained in the phrase is great wisdom. Which helps shore up some of the shortcomings of the first statement about "you win or you learn."

What do I mean? Well, for starters, in life it's important that when you win you are still learning. Winning can cover over a multitude of problems in a bad way, thus allowing those problems to remain unaddressed amid the euphoria of victory. "You win or you learn" thus provides a false dichotomy, as if you should learn when you don't win but don't have to when you do. "Trust the process" means you work on doing the right things the right way independent of the immediate result, even if the temptation is to gloss over things you need to change so long as you keep winning. For the long run, failing forward is better than winning the wrong way.

Furthermore, who said winning is everything? Blasphemy in this country, maybe. But in life, there are competitions where winning matters, and then there are other circumstances that should not be competitions but we can be tempted to make them such. Competition by definition means I win and you lose, but most of what's good in life isn't, or shouldn't be, about one of us winning and one of us losing. I say this as a relatively competitive person, but it saddens me that we've injected too much gamesmanship into things like politics and parenting and community and spirituality. The goal isn't always to win, and to make it so runs the risk of doing damage.

"You win or you learn" is a wonderful thing for Jalen Hurts to say as the QB for the Philadelphia Eagles. I applaud him, I applaud it, and I take the statement to heart. But I also trust the process.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers," by Maxwell King.

To Fred Rogers, every child required special attention, because every child needed assurance that he or she was someone who mattered. This was far more than the informed opinion of an expert educator; it was a profound conviction, one that had motivated Rogers from his own childhood. When Mister Rogers sang, “Would you be mine . . . won’t you be my neighbor,” at the start of every episode of his show, he really meant it. 

Kindness and empathetic outreach had motivated Rogers since he was a sickly, chubby boy himself, whose classmates in industrial Latrobe, Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh, called him “Fat Freddy” and chased him home from school. The lonely only child often spent school lunch breaks in his puppet theater in the attic of his parents’ mansion, entertaining a friendlier classmate who’d come home with him in a chauffeur-driven car. As Fred Rogers acknowledged later, the isolation of his childhood, though painful, was a key source of artistic invention that showed up in the sets, scripts, and songs on a program where he created an idealized version of his hometown.

A precise picture of what would become Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was lodged in Fred Rogers’s head, and the intensity of this picture was matched by his own rock-hard determination to get it done. Outwardly, Fred might seem to be underemployed and adrift, and his parents—particularly his father—were worried about him. Inwardly, he had never been more sure of his course.

In what is still considered one of the most powerful pieces of testimony ever offered before Congress, and one of the most powerful pieces of video persuasion ever filmed, the mild-mannered Fred Rogers employed his gentle demeanor and soft voice to dominate the proceedings, silence a roomful of politicians, and nearly bring the gruff committee chairman to tears. It has been studied ever since by both academics and marketers.

 

As television (and later the internet) infiltrated almost every home in America, it offered marketers and commercial enterprises an extraordinary opportunity to exploit young children, and Fred became the icon of protecting them. He did this through the example of his own program and its high standards, but he also did it by championing the importance of childhood itself. From his own struggles as a child, he had formed a powerful sensitivity to the feelings of young children. 

Later, as a public figure, Rogers’s shyness and modesty would take him to extremes to avoid adults who sought him out because of his notoriety (once, when he was receiving an award from a local Pittsburgh church, he had the seminary official who was escorting him take him down to the catacombs and passages under the old church to help him escape the crowd that awaited him at the front entrance). But whenever he encountered a child, in any circumstances, he felt it a sacred duty to respond and protect.

Tom Junod adds: “Fred’s email address was zzz143@aol.com. Zzz meant simply that he slept soundly at night, which he did, eight hours a night. And one hundred forty-three referred to two things.” First, “his weight. Every morning Fred weighed himself before he went to swim, and every morning he weighed one hundred forty-three pounds . . . that’s remarkable to the extent of near insanity. In another person, it would seem like obsessive-compulsive disorder, but in Fred it didn’t seem that way. 

“In Fred, it seemed this remarkable willed simplicity and consistency from which he decided to make his stand to the world. One-four-three was also reference to the . . . letters it took to say I love you. One, I. Four, love. Three, you. “That’s how Fred approached everything. His email address . . . seems simple, but it was full of all these interesting revelations.”

Fred Rogers got up every morning between 4:30 and 5:30 A.M. to read the Bible and prepare himself for the day before he went to the Pittsburgh Athletic Association to swim. But Rogers’s preparation was not so much professional as it was spiritual: He would study passages of interest from the Bible, and then he would visualize who he would be seeing that day, so that he would be prepared to be as caring and giving as he could be. Fred’s prayers in those early morning sessions were not for success or accomplishment, but rather for the goodness of heart to be the best person he could be in each of the encounters he would have that day.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock," by Dina Gilio-Whitaker.

Ancestors of today’s Lakota, the people of Oceti Sakowin, had for generations warned about a black snake that would slither across the land, bringing destruction to the Earth and her people. The day representatives for Energy Transfer Partners entered the council chambers of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe on September 30, 2014, to present plans for the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), it perhaps came as no surprise to the tribal council that another pipeline was threatening Lakota lands.

The demonstrators refused the term “protestors,” referring to themselves instead as “water protectors,” and their main organizing principle was peaceful prayer and ceremony. “Mni Wiconi” was their mantra, meaning “Water is life” in the Lakota language. Drugs, alcohol, and weapons were banned in the camps. Although violence was strictly eschewed, civil disobedience was embraced; people put their bodies in the way of the construction path, locked themselves to heavy equipment, and got arrested.

The origin of environmental injustice for Indigenous peoples is dispossession of land in all its forms; injustice is continually reproduced in what is inherently a culturally genocidal structure that systematically erases Indigenous peoples’ relationships and responsibilities to their ancestral places.

While many urban Native people today maintain connection to their homelands, their lives and identities are mediated and shaped by these histories of dispossession and displacement. To be an urban Indian is to live under diasporic conditions, sometimes by choice, but more often by circumstances of birth. It is a state of disconnection from land and the culture and lifeways that emanate from land, such as language, ceremonial or religious practices, and traditional food and medicine knowledge. Even considering the remarkable resiliency Indigenous peoples have shown since European colonization, this legacy of loss has still come to be a defining characteristic of Indigenous identity. In both urban and reservation settings, Native identities are formed against a backdrop of historical tragedy and ongoing injustice, which often involves the continued struggle to defend what remains of ancestral lands, territories, resources, and cultures.

The lingering result of the Yellowstone story is that coded within the language of preservation, “wilderness” landscapes—always already in need of protection—are, or should be, free from human presence. But this logic completely evades the fact of ancient Indigenous habitation and cultural use of such places. In Spence’s words, “the context and motives that led to the idealization of uninhabited wilderness not only helps to explain what national parks actually preserve but also reveals the degree to which older cultural values continue to shape current environmentalist and preservationist thinking.” In other words, the paradigm of human-free wilderness articulated by early preservationists laid a foundation for the twentieth-century environmental movement in extremely problematic ways. When environmentalists laud “America’s best idea” and reiterate narratives about pristine national park environments, they are participating in the erasure of Indigenous peoples, thus replicating colonial patterns of white supremacy and settler privilege.

Long before there was ever a concept called “feminism” in the US settler State, there was the knowledge of women’s power in Indigenous communities. The imposition of foreign cultures, and Christianity in particular, was corrosive to societies that were typically matrilineal or matrifocal, were foundationally equitable in the distribution of power between the genders, and often respected the existence of a third gender and non-hetero relationships. As Christianity swept over the continent, it instilled Indigenous societies with patriarchal values that sought not only to diminish women’s inherent cultural power but also to pathologize alternative gender identities, relationships, and marriage practices outside the bounds of monogamy, establishing a general pattern of gender and relationship suppression that constructs modern American society and reordered Native societies.

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great," by Ben Shapiro.

Every week, I drop everything for twenty-five hours. As an Orthodox Jew, I celebrate the Sabbath, which means that my phone and television are off-limits. No work. No computer. No news. No politics. A full day, plus an hour, to spend with my wife and children and parents, with my community. The outside world disappears. It’s the high point of my life. There is no greater happiness than sitting with my wife, watching the kids play with (and occasionally fight with) each other, a book open on my lap. 

I’m not alone. Sabbath is the high point of many Jews’ weeks. There’s an old saying in the Jewish community: the Jews didn’t keep the Sabbath, the Sabbath kept the Jews. It certainly kept us sane. 

Now, I cover politics for a living. And I’m happy doing it—it’s purposeful and important, and working to understand and convey ideas can be thrilling. But politics isn’t the root of happiness for me. Politics is about working to build the framework for the pursuit of happiness, not the achievement of it; politics helps us establish the preconditions necessary for happiness, but can’t provide happiness in and of itself. 

The Founding Fathers knew that. That’s why Thomas Jefferson didn’t write that the government was granted power to grant you happiness: it was there to protect your pursuit of happiness. The government existed to protect your rights, to prevent those rights from being infringed upon. The government was there to stop someone from stealing your horse, from butchering you in your sleep, from letting his cow graze on your land. At no point did Jefferson suggest that government could achieve happiness. None of the Founders thought it could.

The secularist myth holds that religion held back science for millennia. The reverse is true. Without Judeo-Christian foundations, science simply would not exist as it does in the West.

Recommended Reads, 46th in a Quarterly Series

Books I've read lately that I would recommend:

* 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Peterson). Of late he has said (and then doubled down on) some vile things, which is incongruous with his thoughtful and reasoned past writings like this book.

* Iliad and Odyssey (Homer). Must-read among the classics for cultural reasons, and an entertaining experience to boot.

* The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power (Mask). I adored this book: a clever topic, expertly researched and engagingly written.

* Americanah (Adichie). So exquisitely organized and written. I will cherish my time in this story.

* Goldfinch (Tartt). A dramatic and sweeping story I look forward to consuming in movie form soon.

* White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (DiAngelo). Some really useful frameworks for understanding and pushing through barriers to overcoming racism.

* As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock (Gilio-Whitaker). I really enjoyed the intersection between environmental issues and Native American history.

 

Who Are You Reading

 

Take a look at the two photo arrays above. The bottom one is the 50 authors I read in 2012. The top one is the 1st 50 authors I read in 2022 (I think I ended up reading a handful more beyond that.)

Even a cursory glance will tell you my reading benefited from far more diversity last year than 10 years ago, by race/ethnicity and by gender. Indeed, not a single author of color in the entirety of 2012 for me!

I still have a ways to go in making sure what I read reflects a wider span of perspectives and life experiences. Let's check back in 2032.

*** You may note a few repeats, indicating instances where I read multiple books from the same author that year. ***

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism," by Robin DiAngelo.

When a racial group’s collective prejudice is backed by the power of legal authority and institutional control, it is transformed into racism, a far-reaching system that functions independently from the intentions or self-images of individual actors.

In virtually every situation or context deemed normal, neutral or prestigious in society, I belong racially. This belonging is a deep and ever-present feeling that has always been with me. Belonging has settled deep into my consciousness; it shapes my daily thoughts and concerns, what I reach for in life, and what I expect to find. The experience of belonging is so natural that I do not have to think about it. The rare moments in which I don’t belong racially come as a surprise—a surprise that I can either enjoy for its novelty or easily avoid if I find it unsettling.

While making racism bad seems like a positive change, we have to look at how this functions in practice. Within this paradigm, to suggest that I am racist is to deliver a deep moral blow—a kind of character assassination. Having received this blow, I must defend my character, and that is where all my energy will go—to deflecting the charge, rather than reflecting on my behavior. In this way, the good/bad binary makes it nearly impossible to talk to white people about racism, what it is, how it shapes all of us, and the inevitable ways that we are conditioned to participate in it. If we cannot discuss these dynamics or see ourselves within them, we cannot stop participating in racism. The good/bad binary made it effectively impossible for the average white person to understand—much less interrupt—racism.

As African American scholar and filmmaker Omowale Akintunde says: “Racism is a systemic, societal, institutional, omnipresent, and epistemologically embedded phenomenon that pervades every vestige of our reality. For most whites, however, racism is like murder: the concept exists, but someone has to commit it in order for it to happen. This limited view of such a multilayered syndrome cultivates the sinister nature of racism and, in fact, perpetuates racist phenomena rather than eradicates them.”

The good/bad frame is a false dichotomy. All people hold prejudices, especially across racial lines in a society deeply divided by race. I can be told that everyone is equal by my parents, I can have friends of color, and I may not tell racist jokes. Yet I am still affected by the forces of racism as a member of a society in which racism is the bedrock. I will still be seen as white, treated as white, and experience life as a white person. My identity, personality, interests, and investments will develop from a white perspective. I will have a white worldview and a white frame of reference. In a society in which race clearly matters, our race profoundly shapes us. If we want to challenge this construct, we must make an honest accounting of how it is manifest in our own lives and in the society around us.

In my workshops, I often ask people of color, “How often have you given white people feedback on our unaware yet inevitable racism? How often has that gone well for you?” Eye-rolling, head-shaking, and outright laughter follow, along with the consensus of rarely, if ever. I then ask, “What would it be like if you could simply give us feedback, have us graciously receive it, reflect, and work to change the behavior?” Recently a man of color sighed and said, “It would be revolutionary.” I ask my fellow whites to consider the profundity of that response. It would be revolutionary if we could receive, reflect, and work to change the behavior. On the one hand, the man’s response points to how difficult and fragile we are. But on the other hand, it indicates how simple it can be to take responsibility for our racism. However, we aren’t likely to get there if we are operating from the dominant worldview that only intentionally mean people can participate in racism.

 

Shaking my head, I think to myself, “You asked me here to help you see your racism, but by god, I’d better not actually help you see your racism.”

There are many approaches to antiracist work; one of them is to try to develop a positive white identity. Those who promote this approach often suggest we develop this positive identity by reclaiming the cultural heritage that was lost during assimilation into whiteness for European ethnics. However, a positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy. This does not mean that we should stop identifying as white and start claiming only to be Italian or Irish. To do so is to deny the reality of racism in the here and now, and this denial would simply be color-blind racism. Rather, I strive to be “less white.” To be less white is to be less racially oppressive. This requires me to be more racially aware, to be better educated about racism, and to continually challenge racial certitude and arrogance. To be less white is to be open to, interested in, and compassionate toward the racial realities of people of color. I can build a wide range of authentic and sustained relationships across race and accept that I have racist patterns. And rather than be defensive about those patterns, I can be interested in seeing them more clearly so that I might ameliorate them. To be less white is to break with white silence and white solidarity, to stop privileging the comfort of white people over the pain of racism for people of color, to move past guilt and into action. These less oppressive patterns are active, not passive. Ultimately, I strive for a less white identity for my own liberation and sense of justice, not to save people of color.

The Only Asian in the Room

 

It would surprise the childhood version of me to learn that as an adult, I am routinely in rooms where I am the only person of Asian descent. In fact, growing up in an all-Asian family with an extended network of Asian friends and family members, I was often in gatherings that were solely Asian or with token non-Asian representation.

Many of these experiences helped forge my Asian identity but also left me lacking a broader perspective on other cultures and even on my own: what are other settings if all you’ve known is water, and do you even know what water is like if it’s all you’ve known? Conversely, being the only Asian in the room has afforded me insights into similarities and differences across cultures, for which I am deeply grateful, and which have profoundly influenced my worldview. 

Alas, some of the learning and growing has been through the pain of directly or indirectly experiencing some of the dysfunction that characterizes much of race relations in this country. Some people feel free to express their barely veiled racism - towards people who look like me or towards other minority groups - and I have to navigate my own hurts or those of others being mocked while figuring out how to push back. Others share their own fears and frustrations - usually about how they are perceived or treated by white people - in ways that are new and heartbreaking for me even if mundane for them. 

We are better for the diverse experiences we have out and about. But that doesn’t mean those experiences are always easy. I will continue to lean into such opportunities. But some of them break my heart.

Down with Golf

Yesterday was the April Fools post. "Friday? All oops" is an anagram of "April Fool's Day." I've certainly had my share of oops on the course, but that doesn't stop me from loving the game and enjoying the company. Indeed, the fact that it's a hard sport that I'm terrible at is a feature and not a bug: it's good to be bad at something and learn how to remain positive, and it's good to have something that you can work at and get better at over time. No matter how patently awful I am, I will see you on the course!

Done with Golf

Sad to say I've had one too many frustrating sessions on the course so it's time to hang up the clubs. Friday? All oops. Driver didn't work. Irons didn't work. Wedges, man where to start. And somehow putter was the worst of them all. So mad I smashed one club over my knee and threw two others into the street. Goodbye, hobby. Tennis, anyone?