Outraged

 

I remember fondly my days volunteering for my city's school board. Oh sure, I don't wish the punishing schedule of long meetings and agonizing decisions on myself in the present. But I'm honored to have served when I did, and I'm proud of the service I did render.

One thing that was important to me from the beginning was leaning into absorbing the anger of people connected to the school district: teachers, employees, and especially parents. Something a former school board member was gracious enough to impress upon us newbies when we were getting oriented was that an outraged public citizen yelling at you at a meeting was a good thing, because it meant they were still engaged, hoping for change, or at the very least not resigned to remaining in a bad situation. We were encouraged to lean into that anger, to get angry too, and to do what we could to resolve the issue.

Without going into details, I think what was enraging for folks was not just that they had felt wronged (or, for parents, that their child had been wronged), but that there didn't seem to be any way to right the wrong. The bureaucracy was too large, the people in charge seemingly too distant, the pain too great for any sort of satisfying resolution. We probably use the word "trauma" too casually, but this is characteristic trauma, not just the depth of the pain but the sense of not being able to see a way out of it. 

So it never bothered me when people yelled at me, since I usually shared their perspective, so even if I wasn't directly as hurt by it, it was not hard for me to empathize and feel anger too. Plus, most of the time, they weren't yelling at me anyway, I just happened to be the available recipient for their outrage, which I was truly happy to be, since I saw that as an important part of my job and a critical part of the healing process.

I think about this a lot as I see many of our young people making fun of or even celebrating the chilling murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO on the streets of Manhattan earlier this month. A recent poll found that over 40 percent of people age 18 to 29 surveyed felt the killing was at least somewhat if not totally justified. Which, at first blush, is an absolutely unconscionable opinion, that the appropriate response to a company that you feel is participating in wrong is to murder the head of that company in cold blood.

As a democracy, we value things like rule of law, "innocent until proven guilty," and a fair and balanced justice system. And so instances in our history when "vigilante justice" was not only not roundly condemned but outright celebrated are interesting ones to probe, as to why we believe what we believe. And my most charitable take on the large proportion of young people who celebrated the murder of the health insurance CEO is that they are outraged and are desperately looking for a place to express that outrage.

Health insurance, personal finances, and capitalism itself are areas where an increasing number of our youth feel not only anger but resignation. From this worldview, the system is broken, people are hurting, and there is no way to change things without outright revolution. Well, revolutions are messy and bloody, so if it takes ordering hits on corporate execs, throwing paint on Teslas, and blocking traffic during rush hour, more and more of our youth are finding sympathy with mess and blood.

I still think it is wrong to celebrate the cold-blooded murder of a business leader on the sidewalk. But I think that's my point. The fact that it is so clearly wrong, and yet so many of our young people justify it, tells me that the outrage they feel is quite something. What can we do to address this?

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 455

 

Here is an excerpt from a book I recently read, "Pale Fire," by Vladimir Nabokov.

I was an infant when my parents died. They both were ornithologists. I’ve tried 

So often to evoke them that today I have a thousand parents.

Courtesy

 

Oakland A's legend Rickey Henderson, who passed away earlier this month, would've turned 66 years old yesterday. I cannot overstate how much he meant to the kid version of me, growing up in the Bay Area and getting into baseball right as Rickey broke into the bigs. The exaggerated crouched batting stance, the brazenness of his pursuit of stolen bases, and the pimped out home run trots were catnip for me and my friends. Simply put, we became lifelong fans of the game and the team because of Rickey.

I first heard about the tragic death on social media, and I immediately turned to ESPN.com and then MLB.com to read the official news, only to find that neither had anything on their sites. Indeed, several hours from when the story broke, yet still there was no news on either site, which many took to social media to lambaste the sites, either upset that they were purposefully scorning Rickey's legacy or dismissive that they represented the latest in sports and baseball news.

I don't know this for sure, but I suspect the delay was intentional, first to verify the story and second to not get ahead of the family and team publishing their own announcement. If so, I appreciate the decision to delay. In an era when being first has become so important in media, being respectful remains paramount. One may get you clicks and buzz, but the other is far more significant for our integrity.

I thought about this a lot when I was president of the consulting firm where I've been employed for going on 19 years. Such a prominent role, in the firm and in the public space, requires managing relationships and extending courtesy, in ways that stretched me given my naturally introverted and analytical ways. I found myself saying the following things a lot, which for me required thinking about when I needed to say them, to whom, and how:

* "I wanted you to be the first to know"

* "Before we go into this meeting, I want you to know what I'm going to say and why"

* "I need to talk to you about something private in advance of talking with you about it publicly"

I can't say I always got the timing or delivery right; these are learned behaviors that did not come naturally to me. But I hope people knew my heart was in the right place, that my primary interest in any situation was not necessarily a win in that situation but in cherishing the relationships with the people in the situation. Courtesy is a rare commodity these days, and perhaps for that very reason it is worth practicing and appreciating. 

2025 Predictions Guaranteed or Your Money Back

 

True to form, 2024 was an unpredictable year on many levels. As it comes to an end, it’s time to make some predictions about 2025. Here we go:

1. Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads all fail to get traction, and X continues to stand alone.

2. Bucking the previous consolidation of AI efforts within large-scale and largely white-owned tech firms, the field democratizes considerably as lower barriers to entry create an innovative environment into which many diverse voices gain popularity.

3. Despite (or perhaps because of) a broad spectrum of opposition to incoming President Trump, the Democratic Party splinters, as far-left and moderate-middle are unable to reconcile themselves as being in the same group.

4. For the first time ever, a major US professional sports team names a female head coach.

5. Once left for dead and featuring noticeably homogenous casts, soap operas make a spirited comeback, updated for modern sensibilities with more multi-ethnicity in cast and content.

2025 Books I've Read

 

Here are my ratings for the 54 books I read in the past 12 months.  In case you've forgotten, the scale goes like this: 1 - pass, 2 - some good some bad, 3 - recommended, 4 - can't stop raving about it, 5 - fundamentally changed my worldview. 

Please weigh in with recommendations. Especially seeking to diversify into more fiction and more non-white and female authors. Also trying to sprinkle in longer reads and classics. Tell me your must-reads!

Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World (Cooper) 4

Monster (Myers) 4

Bronx Masquerade (Grimes) 4

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (Hannah-Jones) 4

Selected Poems (Brooks) 4

Stay True: A Memoir (Hsu) 4

A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation in America (Martin) 3

The Diary of a Young Girl (Frank) 4

In the Form of a Question: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life (Schneider) 3

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (Oliver) 4

Who You Are: Internalizing the Gospel to Find Your True Identity (Cha) 4

We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (hooks) 3

A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial (Nguyen) 3

How to Raise Kids Who Aren't Assholes: Science-Based Strategies for Better Parenting—from Tots to Teens (Moyer) 3

Brown Girl Dreaming (Woodson) 3

The Poet X (Acevedo) 3

The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe (Gabriele, Perry) 4

Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems (Harjo) 3

Jane Eyre (Bronte) 3

Merging Colleges for Mutual Growth: A New Strategy for Academic Managers (Martin, Samels) 3

When I Was Puerto Rican: A Memoir (Santiago) 4

Jerusalem (Moore) 3

Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel (Habib) 3

Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories (Rothschild) 3

Romney: A Reckoning (Coppins) 4

Les Miserables (Hugo) 3

Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing – Including You (Stulberg) 4

The Family Chao (Chang) 3

Look at Me (Egan) 3

Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet (Lorenz) 4

Thicker Than Water: A Memoir (Washington) 4

Unf*ck Your Habitat: You're Better Than Your Mess (Hoffman) 2

Being Henry: The Fonz…and Beyond (Winkler) 4

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (Knight) 4

The Loneliness Files (Dixon) 3

Ladysitting: My Year with Nana at the End of Her Century (Cary) 4

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (van der Kolk) 4

Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America (Harriot) 4

Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World (MacPhail) 4

LeBron (Benedict) 4

Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation (McGrath) 4

Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery (Rutkow) 4

Let Us Descend (Ward) 3

The Alchemist (Coelho) 3

Three-Body Problem (Liu) 3

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution (Bohannon) 4

Bicycle Diaries (Byrne) 4

This is Your Mind on Plants (Pollan) 4

The Message (Peterson) 5

Straight Talk, No Chaser: How to Find, Keep, and Understand a Man (Harvey) 3

The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother (McBride) 4

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican (Posner) 4

Leaves of Grass (Whitman) 2

Pale Fire (Nabokov) 3

New Year's Resolutions

 

Since 2011, I’ve posted my New Year’s resolutions at the end of each year.  It’s a good way to do a year-end check-up and see how I did and what I need to recommit to into the New Year.  So without further ado:

1. Body - run 720 miles, swim 120 miles, lift 240 times, bike 600 miles; eat better. 

Actual counts for 1st 11 months of 2022: run 568 miles, swim 114.1 miles, lift 215 times, bike 455 miles. Totals down a bit due to tearing my calf muscle in August, but more important for me is that I was otherwise consistent. Feeling good about being disciplined without it becoming a drudgery, and about pushing myself without overdoing it. And, while more erratic, my eating habits are improving, as they need to since I’m no longer a spring chicken. Grade: A

 

2. Civic – leverage skill/opportunity for maximum social impact, make a difference on the hard issues. 

2024 was a year of pruning some formal responsibilities while evolving my informal availability to people and causes. It’s rewarding to contribute, but it’s also important to be quiet and let others’ voices ring. Satisfied with where I am on this. Grade: B

 

3. Friends and family – quality if not quantity, be there when needed. 

Someday I’ll have more time to spend with people I cherish. For now, I try to be intentional with in-person connection where possible – golf is a wonderful way to do this – and supplement with texts as a way to let people know I’m thinking of them. Grade: B

 

4. House – an ounce of prevention, making it a home. 

For most of the year, our house has been a disaster zone of unfinished home improvement projects, Asher’s belongings, and dust. On a positive note, our now five rental properties are all doing well. Grade: B

 

5. Kids – 1-on-1 times each quarter. 

As schedules diverge, quantity of time is hard to come by, which makes the quality times we do spend together – on vacation, day trips, and special occasions – that much more important to cherish. I hope my kids know that their dad has a demanding job and his own personal pursuits, but that they are the most important thing in his life. Grade: B

 

6. Marriage – three kid-free trips. 

We had a weekend in Miami and more kid-free walks in the park, but mostly a million tiny slivers of affection during which we reminded one another that one day we will have more time to sit in the sun. Grade: B

 

7. Mind – read 50 books. 

Later this week I’ll post the titles I read over the past 12 months. By choice, it was a mix of long and short, fiction and non-fiction, representing a wide range of life perspectives. I enjoyed every page. Grade: A.

 

8. Self – three hours per week of uninterrupted me time, three personal day getaways. 

Personal days have been life-giving “me” moments devoid of work and kids and filled with golf and biking. Beyond that, I probably could’ve captured more space for myself, although the year wasn’t without little splurges, taking a solo walk here and buying a book for pure leisure there.

Grade: B

 

9. Spiritual – 100 Bible memory verses, time each morning for Bible/prayer. 

Thankful for the routinization of Scripture memory and morning devotionals, even if the quantity and quality could be better. Grade: B

 

10. Work – set the course for the firm. 

Proud to have moderated a major succession process and stepped down from being president in the process. Both are huge wins I don’t take lightly. And now I have more time to bring in business and do business, both of which I enjoy even if neither are easy. Grade: A

Advent Thoughts

 

 

This post is doing double duty. I swear I will get to the point alluded to in the post's title. But first I need to inventory all of the mechanics I am trying to routinize when I swing a golf club:

1. Flare both feet out, right foot slightly and left foot pretty pronounced
2. Keep my back straight
3. Loose arms draped down
4. Bend my knees so my legs are relaxed
5. Weight evenly distributed between left and right leg
6. Stick my butt out 
7. Shoulders square (or slightly up if hitting driver, or parallel to ground if hitting on an up slope or down slope)
8. I need to see the right two knuckles on my left hand
9. Left thumb nestled inside my right hand grip
10. Give the grip a squeeze and then keep the hands loose
11. Hold the grip high enough to get more torque, but low enough that it doesn't feel like I'm too far away from the ball
12. Rest the club head so that the toe of the club is off the ground
13. When straddling the ball, how far up or down depends on which club I'm swinging
14. Angle of club shaft and placement of club head, relative to ball, depends on which club I'm swinging
15. Head down and still throughout most of the swing
16. Backswing has my club face going straight back, arms and club shaft straight (as if I'm rolling a 2nd ball that is behind my ball directly backwards)
17. Tuck my chin into my left shoulder to exaggerate the stillness of my head throughout the duration of my backswing
    
18. Slow and easy tempo back, slight weight transfer to back leg but not really
19. Keep my lower body relatively still, except for turning my hips so my right buttocks rotates back
20. Come through my swing faster than I went back but still slow and easy (not violent, like I'm trying to kill the ball)
21. Slot the swing a little bit inside out (too far and I blast it right, too little and I duck hook, but if just right then the ball comes out straight or with a slight right-to-left draw shape) 
22. Imagine that I'm hammering a nail downward if hitting wedges or irons, sweeping the floor if a fairway wood, and upper cutting if a driver
23. Forget about the ball and focus on turning my hips all the way through so that my upper body is facing front
24. As I'm turning my hips, I'm moving my arms through so that my left armpit is exposed and my left elbow is practically pointing backwards
25. My hands should be high so that it would be like I was going to use my club face as a back scratcher
26. Weight transfer should be fully to left leg, such that if I wanted to I could lift my right foot off the ground without losing balance
27. End with my face facing front, hopefully everything in balance rather than flailing around

So that's 27 individual aspects in a single swing! (Btw if you read anything above that is wrong, kindly let me know!) Which is obviously too many swing thoughts to have in my mind in the few seconds that each swing takes. So the goal is to repeat the motion so many times that I don't have to think about it, and maybe have a singular swing thought in my head as I go about a particular round. One day it might be to loosen my grip, another day it might be to make sure I'm keeping the tempo of my backswing and forward swing nice and easy, not too fast and not too slow. Whatever I need at a given time, it's zero or one thing to have in my head, not 27.

Which, how's that for a long and golf-related intro, is something that I think applies to Advent too. The holiday season is notorious for being hustle and bustle, whether tying up things at work, tending to extra family responsibilities, or drowning in the whirlwind that is end-of-year shopping ads. Even if we manage to keep things spiritual and virtuous, there's a lot that one could conceivably focus on that would be appropriate for the season: charity, holiness, reverence, and the list goes on and on.

But, as with golf, I think it's best to pick one thing and then do your best to clear your mind of all the noise past that one thing. For me this season, it is gratitude. Any situation, any response, any foreseen or unforeseen circumstance: gratitude can and should be my default location. For you, it may be something else. Whatever it is, I hope you have a holy holiday, whatever that means for you.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 454

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican," by Gerald Posner.

 

Sextus IV had an inspired idea: apply them to souls stuck in Purgatory. Any Catholic could pay so that souls trapped in Purgatory could get on a fast track to Heaven. The assurance that money alone could cut the afterlife in Purgatory was such a powerful inducement that many families sent their life savings to Rome. So much money flooded to Sextus that he was able to build the Sistine Chapel.

Alexander VI—the Spanish Borgia whose Papacy was marked by nepotism and brutal infighting for power—created an indulgence for simply reciting the Rosary in public. The new sales pitch promised the faithful that a generous contribution multiplied the Rosary’s prayer power. Each Pontiff understood that tax revenues from the Papal States paid most of the day-to-day bills, while indulgences paid for everything else. The church overlooked the widespread corruption and graft inherent in collecting so much cash and instead grew ever more dependent on indulgences. And as they got ever easier to buy and promised more forgiveness, they became wildly popular among ordinary Catholics.

Historians credit Johann Tetzel, a popular sixteenth-century Dominican priest and dispenser of indulgences, with the first advertising jingle: “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, a soul from Purgatory springs.”

The three-article financial convention—the Conciliazione—granted “ecclesiastical corporations” a tax exemption. It also compensated the Vatican for the confiscation of the Papal States with 750 million lire in cash and a billion lire in government bonds that paid 5 percent interest. The settlement—worth about $1.3 billion in 2014 dollars—was approximately a third of Italy’s entire annual budget and an enormous windfall for the cash-starved church. The Vatican wanted double that, but Mussolini persuaded the Pope and his negotiators that the government was itself in precarious shape. It could ill afford anything more. As an extra inducement, Italy agreed to pay the meager salaries of all 25,000 parish priests in the country.

“Italy has been given back to God,” the Pope told the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, “and God to Italy.” The church threw its full power behind the fascists. The Vatican disbanded its influential Partito Popolare Italiano and exiled its leader from Italy. Italian bishops swore an oath of allegiance to the fascist government and clerics were prohibited from encouraging the faithful to oppose it. Priests began offering prayers at Sunday Masses for Mussolini and for fascism. Some clergy joined the National Fascist Party and a few even served as officers. 

The Lateran Pacts converted Mussolini into a hero for devout Italians. Many homes soon had a picture of Il Duce hanging next to one of the Pope or a crucifix.96 Even Hitler hailed the church for “making its peace with Fascism.” The influential Cardinal Merry del Val said Mussolini was “visibly protected by God.”

And there was a special accommodation for the Kirchensteuer, the church tax on German Catholics that had been in effect since 1919. The church often had trouble getting the faithful to pay it voluntarily, so the Third Reich agreed to collect the 8 to 10 percent tariff through automatic payroll deductions of Catholic wage earners. It was the first time that any country had agreed to provide the Vatican a share of government-collected tax money. It uniquely tied the church to the Third Reich.

In return, the Vatican gave Hitler the formal endorsement he wanted. Article 16 of the Reichskonkordat required German bishops and cardinals to swear an oath of loyalty to the Third Reich. It was a dramatic reversal from 1932 when a German bishops’ conference had banned membership in the Nazi Party and forbade anyone wearing a swastika from receiving the sacraments. The agreement also decreed that a “special prayer . . . for the welfare of the German Reich” be inserted into every Sunday and Holy Day Mass.

The question of who would be the next Pope made its way even to Hitler. An unidentified intelligence source inside the Vatican approached the Gestapo with a tantalizing offer: the election could be fixed for 3 million gold reichsmarks. Once the secret tariff was paid, the Germans could pick the cardinal they wanted and he would win on the first ballot. Only a handful of top Nazis were let in on the secret proposal, and it ignited a furious debate at the highest level of the Third Reich. Hitler was tempted to approve the bribe but at the last moment he passed, worried the offer was too good to be true and might be a setup to embarrass the Nazis.

 

But the Vatican had a unique power to influence events compared to the Allies. As the head of the world’s then largest religion, Pius wielded a moral authority far beyond the scope of any Western government. The church counted millions of loyal worshippers inside Nazi Germany and the occupied countries. They had become accustomed to Popes setting policy on critical and often divisive issues. Catholics dominated the leadership of every puppet government allied with the Nazis. Many devout Catholics maintained their faith at the same time they worked at concentration camps and ran the Third Reich’s bureaucracy of mass murder. Some priests were involved in both fascist politics and the civilian slaughter. The Pope’s passive behavior did nothing to disabuse them of that contradiction. In an era in which the faithful were more likely to follow Pontifical decrees, an unequivocal declaration from Pius that it was a mortal sin for any Catholic to aid in the killing of Jews might have dealt a serious blow to Hitler’s Final Solution.

The Vatican is the only European nation that denies historians general access to its archives.

What is undeniable is that the Vatican’s stakes in Generali, RAS, Fondiaria, and other insurance firms provided a high rate of return in part because some of the profits were from the escheatment and nonpayment of life insurance and annuities to Jewish policyholders. Since the Vatican itself was not a direct insurer, however, it was never included in any postwar restitution paid by the insurers to the victims. After the war, the U.S. military office in charge of Operation Safehaven—the Allied program to retrieve plundered assets and illegally obtained profits—admitted that when it came to the Italian insurers and their strategic partners, “we know absolutely nothing.”

Sindona did more than just help his friend Paul VI by contributing to political referendums. That same May, a French cardinal, Jean Daniélou, was found dead in the apartment of a twenty-four-year-old nightclub stripper whose husband had a criminal record as a pimp. Police discovered that the cardinal, appointed by Paul VI five years earlier, had about $10,000 in cash on him. The Pope sent a clandestine message to Sindona to ask if his French business contacts might prevent the story from becoming a scandal. Sindona called on banking colleagues who evidently convinced the Parisian detectives that their dossier was best kept secret.

 

Wojtyla also seemed glum, simply staring at his food. More than once he had told his Polish colleague Wyszyński, as well as König, that he did not want to be Pope. 

“You simply must face the truth,” König told him. “This is what the Holy Spirit wishes.” 

“It’s a mistake,” Wojtyla whispered.

And the police discovered a cache of startling photographs, including embarrassing ones of prominent Italians. The investigators ultimately concluded that Gelli had obtained many of the most salacious pictures from P2’s intelligence members. Most were never used as blackmail, but Gelli seemed a compulsive collector of information that one day might prove useful. One of the photos was of a naked Pope John Paul II sunning himself by a pool. The police did not then know that Gelli had sometimes shown that photo to others, using it as an example of how poor the personal security was around the Pontiff: “If it’s possible to take these pictures of the Pope, imagine how easy it is to shoot him.”

What was not evident to most outsiders was that the Vatican’s reactionary policy about sexual abuse by priests was driven largely by worries over financial ramifications. The Pope’s failure to apologize to victims was the direct result of fear that with thousands of lawsuits filed against dozens of dioceses around the world, plaintiffs would use a Pontifical mea culpa as an “admission against interests” by the church. The Vatican was also concerned that the church’s powerful American branch and its large payouts were setting a bad precedent that might soon have dire consequences for dioceses internationally.

Attorneys retained by the church double-checked to ensure that all 2,864 Catholic dioceses and 412,886 parishes worldwide—even Rome itself—were legally independent from the Vatican and that any financial fallout from the sex abuse litigation would not affect the city-state. Putting all the pressure on the individual dioceses had predictable consequences. After a large 1985 jury award, insurance companies in the United States began excluding coverage for sex abuse from their liability policies. That meant many dioceses had to self-insure when it came to the costs of litigating and settling abuse cases.

In 2005, a Mexican bishop said that donating money to the church “purified” it. Some Vaticanologists thought that was a not subtle pitch to get narco-traffickers to be more generous with their religious contributions. A Mexican monsignor addressed the matter more directly: “It is immaterial where the donations from drug trafficking originate and it’s not up to us to investigate the source of the money.” Such donations are called narco limosnas (narco-alms) in Mexico. No money laundering laws are violated so long as the Mexican clerics do not kick some of the cash back to the traffickers. But the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration believes the Mexican church’s willingness not to ask questions about large cash gifts is a significant reason why the Catholic church’s wealth there has multiplied in recent years.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 453

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother," by James McBride.

My family mourned me when I married your father. They said kaddish and sat shiva. 

On her end, Mommy had no model for raising us other than the experience of her own Orthodox Jewish family, which despite the seeming flaws—an unbending nature, a stridency, a focus on money, a deep distrust of all outsiders, not to mention her father’s tyranny—represented the best and worst of the immigrant mentality: hard work, no nonsense, quest for excellence, distrust of authority figures, and a deep belief in God and education. My parents were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America, and over the years they were proven right. 

Yet conflict was a part of our lives, written into our very faces, hands, and arms, and to see how contradiction lived and survived in its essence, we had to look no farther than our own mother. Mommy’s contradictions crashed and slammed against one another like bumper cars at Coney Island. White folks, she felt, were implicitly evil toward blacks, yet she forced us to go to white schools to get the best education. Blacks could be trusted more, but anything involving blacks was probably slightly substandard. She disliked people with money yet was in constant need of it. 

Every year the mighty bureaucratic dinosaur known as the New York City Public School System would belch forth a tiny diamond: they slipped a little notice to parents giving them the opportunity to have their kids bused to different school districts if they wanted; but there was a limited time to enroll, a short window of opportunity that lasted only a few days. Mommy stood poised over that option like a hawk. She invariably chose predominantly Jewish public schools: P.S. 138 in Rosedale, J.H.S. 231 in Springfield Gardens, Benjamin Cardozo, Francis Lewis, Forest Hills, Music and Art. Every morning we hit the door at six-thirty, fanning out across the city like soldiers, armed with books, T squares, musical instruments, an “S” bus pass that allowed you to ride the bus and subway for a nickel, and a free-school-lunch coupon in our pocket. Even the tiniest of us knew the subway and local city bus schedules and routes by heart. The number 3 bus lets you off at the corner, but the 3A turns, so you have to get off…By age twelve, I was traveling an hour and a half one way to junior high school by myself, taking two buses each direction every day. My homeroom teacher, Miss Allison, a young white woman with glasses who generally ignored me, would shrug as I walked in ten minutes late, apologizing about a delayed bus. The white kids stared at me in the cafeteria as I gobbled down the horrible school lunch. Who cared. It was all I had to eat.

In this pre-busing era, my siblings and I were unlike most other kids in our neighborhood, traveling miles and miles to largely white, Jewish communities to attend school while our friends walked to the neighborhood school. We grew accustomed to being the only black, or “Negro,” in school and were standout students, neat and well-mannered, despite the racist attitudes of many of our teachers, who were happy to knock our 95 test scores down to 85’s and 80’s over the most trivial mistakes. Being the token Negro was something I was never entirely comfortable with. I was the only black kid in my fifth-grade class at P.S. 138 in the then all-white enclave of Rosedale, Queens, and one afternoon as the teacher dutifully read aloud from our history book’s one page on “Negro history,” someone in the back of the class whispered, “James is a ni**er!” followed by a ripple of tittering and giggling across the room. The teacher shushed him and glared, but the damage had been done. I felt the blood rush to my face and sank low in my chair, seething inside, yet I did nothing. I imagined what my siblings would have done. They would have gone wild. They would have found that punk and bum-rushed him. They never would’ve allowed anyone to call them a ni**er. But I was not them. I was shy and passive and quiet, and only later did the anger come bursting out of me, roaring out of me with such blast-furnace force that I would wonder who that person was and where it all came from.

Deep inside I knew that my old friend Chicken Man back in Louisville was right. I wasn’t any smarter, or any wiser, or any bolder than the cats on the Corner, and if I chose that life I would end up on the Corner no matter what my brains or potential. I knew I wasn’t raised to drink every day, to work at a gas station, and to get killed fooling around with people like Herman and his gas station knuckleheads. That life wasn’t as wild and as carefree as it looked from the outside anyway. It was ragged and cruel and I didn’t want to end up that way, stabbed to death after an argument over a bottle of wine, or shot dead by some horny dude who was trying to take my manhood. “You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself,” my sister Jack told me several times. “Put yourself in God’s hands and you can’t go wrong.” I knew Jack was right, and when I got back to New York in the fall of 1973 for my junior year in high school I resolved to jump back into my studies and rebuild myself. Like my own mother did in times of stress, I turned to God. I lay in bed at night praying to Him to make me strong, to rid me of anger, to make me a man, and He listened, and I began to change.

Ma was called in to reenter the debate. “Let me think about it again,” she said. She sat down on the couch and immediately dropped off to sleep, snoring away while the rest of us argued. My mother is the only individual I know who can fall asleep instantly for two minutes—deep REM sleep, complete with snoring—only to be awakened instantly by certain select noises. A hurricane won’t move her, but the sound of a crying baby or a falling pot will send her to her feet like a soldier at reveille. When she awoke, she wandered off saying nothing. Days passed. Finally she announced: “We’re staying.” Cheers from the girls. We slowly began to unpack. The very next day she barked: “We’re moving!” Cheers from the boys. We packed again. Ma went back and forth on this for weeks while the realtor pulled out his hair trying to decide if his commission was going to come through or not. The debate lasted literally up to the August morning when we rented a U-Haul truck, loaded it up with all our worldly possessions—some of us riding with the furniture in the back—and pointed it down I-95 toward Wilmington, Delaware, looking like the Beverly Hillbillies.

We thought we’d function in Wilmington as we had in New York, catching subways and buses and living off public transportation and the groove of the city. But Wilmington had no subway and only the very poor took the bus, which stopped running at about nine P.M. Unlike New York, where Ma could stretch a dollar for a mile and lead her troops to the promised land of Macy’s, Gimbels, and Ohrbach’s, entertaining them for free at museums, parades, block parties, and public concerts, Wilmington was a land of suburban shopping malls, high school marching bands, blond prom queens, small-town gossip, and an inner city from which whites were fleeing as fast as their Ford Pintos could take them. We were shocked by the racial division of the city and surrounding county, where most of the black kids attended understaffed and underfunded city schools while whites attended sparkling clean suburban schools with fantastic facilities. The segregated schools came as a complete surprise to Mommy, who had not even considered that problem, and the southern vibe of the city—anything south of Canal Street in Manhattan was the South to us—brought back unpleasant memories for Mommy. She hates the South. 

A few months after we arrived, a group of Delaware state troopers stopped a group of us on a dark highway one night after my older brother David, who was driving, made an illegal U-turn. The troopers were tall, arrogant, and unsympathetic. They surrounded the car full of black kids and white mother, shone flashlights everywhere, and made David, then a doctoral student at Columbia University, stand outside in the cold without his coat while they questioned him pointedly. They then hauled him into night court while the rest of us followed, frightened and angry. Mommy was furious that her shy, intellectual son—she was always so proud of David and would literally have carried his books to school for him if he had asked her to—was placed before a judge, who asked him to announce whether he was “guilty” of the traffic infraction or not. She immediately jumped into F. Lee Bailey mode. “Don’t say guilty!” she cried. “They’ll lock you up!”

At the Dawson affairs, I quietly served chuckling white folks—the president of Du Pont and the governor of Delaware, among others. These people were nothing like me or my mother or anyone else in my family, but I had no anger toward them. My anger at the world had been replaced by burning ambition. I didn’t want to be like them, standing around sipping wine and showing proper manners and acting happy when they weren’t—I’m similar to my mother in that way—but these people had done nothing to me. I could see they were willing to help the band and indirectly me, because I was dying to go to Europe, so I was grateful to them. My expectations of them went no farther than that.

I’ve been welcomed with open arms by about a dozen relatives since this book was published, many of them white and Jewish. I’m a better person, a fuller person, for knowing them. And I hope they feel the same way about me. Naturally there are some among them who have no interest in meeting their black relatives—just as there are a few on my side who have no interest in their white, Jewish relatives. This isn’t the movies; this is the real world. Nothing is perfect. Everyone has a right to his feelings. As for me, I’m proud of my extended family—all of them. They are me and I am them.

Lazy Linking, 243rd in an Occasional Series

 

Stuff I liked lately on the Internets:

243.1 A Democratic polling org's post-mortem on who broke for Trump, when, and why https://blueprint2024.com/polling/post-mortem-2-nov/ 

243.2 Thread on how environmental justice legislation in MA yields similar results as redlining, by discouraging lending in the areas that need it most https://x.com/salimfurth/status/1861467530046447961 

243.3 Uh oh, most of the long-form articles on LinkedIn are written by AI bots? https://www.wired.com/story/linkedin-ai-generated-influencers/ 

243.4 Now this is a smart building! (a classroom in Burkina Faso) Not loaded w/sensors, but a roof designed to naturally keep things cooler https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGX7yosSLCc 

243.5 This chart of who you spend time w/at different ages is guaranteed to make you savor having family and friends in your life https://toddkashdan.substack.com/p/big-sources-of-meaning-in-life