Category Social change

What’s Going On: A play in four acts before intermission 3 of 6 assignments

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Setting: September 1971 to May 1972, rural Alabama

Characters: Twelve northern-born VISTA Volunteers sent to the South to fight poverty. After a week of training, they cut their hair, put away their bell-bottomed jeans and prepare for work as teacher’ aides, family planning specialists, construction supervisors and community organizers. They are full of idealism and brotherhood and the wonderful feeling that they are doing something important. However, their ideas about doing good, about being comfortable in the world are challenged in this culture that is confusing, frightening, and disorienting. They spent that year and the rest of their lives wondering what’s going on.

Soundtrack; Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On

Act 1. Three days after arrival. The VISTAs are placed with host families while they look for housing. The third night one of the women is raped by a teenage boy. She tells her friends. They debate what to do. Reporting this to the police guarantees that the boy will be arrested and may pay with his life. It will also mean the VISTA site is shut down. Not reporting it means that the violation goes unpunished, that the other women may be targeted for other attacks. It is just three days and already they are in over their heads. They make up an excuse to the supervisor to move her to another host family. This event has repercussions all year. 

Act 2. End of September. A cell in the local jail. Sheriff Wilkins welcomes the VISTAs to Lee County. He tells them he can recognize a Yankee at a half mile away – the walk, the swagger, the clothes. He wonders why they would come all the way to Alabama when they have so much trouble with the “coloreds” up north, rioting and all of that. He knows that as outsiders, the VISTAs will be troublemakers and that he will be watching them carefully. Her reminds them that last year, the house that the VISTAs were living in in Beulah, a Black community, was firebombed. He sure hopes they doesn’t happen to them. 

Act 3.  Early October. Three women are renting an old farmhouse from the Belks, a prominent family in Lee County. Bubba Belk, the youngest of four brothers and like the VISTAs, a recent college graduate, visits and brings along the gift of a rifle so the women can have some protection. They refuse his generosity. He insists, reminding them that they have no phone, that the nearest police station is twenty-five miles away, and that everyone knows that three white girls are staying together alone in this house. He reminds them that they are living in Alabama, not where they come from.  He walks them to the backyard, shows them an old whipping post and has each of them learn to load and shoot the rifle. They each take a few shots. They thank him and promise each other to hide the gun away. 

Act 4. A warm May late afternoon, three VISTAs and six Black families gather together to work out the day’s schedule at the self-help housing site. A young man arrives in a pickup truck, yells at them to gather around, jumps into the back of his truck and says, “the Governor’s been shot. Governor Wallace has been shot!” One of the men leads the group in prayer and song. They are praying for the soul and deliverance of the Governor. The VISTA volunteers are quiet, wondering how these folks can be praying when their own hearts are so full of hate.  

Extraordinary Heroes

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We are surrounded by extraordinary heroes. Here are mine. Do you recognize their names? 

Ramsey Orta

Feiden Santana

Jamil Dewar

Karina Vargas

George Holliday

Darnella Frazier

No, these are not names of unarmed black men killed by officers of the law. Every one of these individuals was behind a camera photographing a black man, woman or a teenager being beaten or killed by police officers.  

  • Randy Orta captured the choking death of Eric Garner in 2014. 
  • Walter Scott’s murder was photographed by Fieden Santana in 2015. 
  • Jamil Dewar and Karina Vargas shot videos of 22-year old Oscar Grant in 2009 when he was killed at Fruitvale Station.  
  • George Holliday’s video captured Rodney King’s beating in 1991
  • Seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier took the footage of Derek Chauvin pressing the life out of George Floyd in May 2020. 

I believe that these individuals are heroes.  With courage and composure, not certain of their own safety, they recorded events as they transpired — for others to see and maybe for justice to be done. If it were only so simple. 

Watching these videos should sicken us. The video of the the casual evil that we see in the George Floyd’s killing shines a glaring light on the use of police powers on unarmed black bodies. This imagery has enraged millions of people who have viewed it.  Are these videos so powerful because white people are seeing the violence for themselves, as if Black witnesses to these daily onslaughts are not to be trusted to articulate their own experiences?  

And, as compelling as these videos are, they don’t tell the whole story.  I would like to challenge filmmakers and truth tellers — ordinary heroes — to create and chronicle compelling accounts of other tools of oppression, just as powerful, just as corrupt and perhaps, even more effective as tools of subjugation and marginalization. 

Where’s the Money? I am arguing that we need compelling videos of board meetings where bank presidents plan to hide drug money, fueling not only the delivery of drugs into poor neighborhoods but also enabling the War on Drugs targeted at these communities. I also want to see how banks and financial institutions loot black neighborhoods.  I want footage of the ways in which generations of policies—corporate and governmental — have robbed Black families of opportunities to create wealth.  I want to watch the way payday lenders congregate in these neighborhoods and how banks serve communities of color so poorly. I want to watch the mechanisms that work to pay black men sixty-seven cents for every dollar a white man earns.  I want to see the STOP those stark differences in wealth where the typical white family holds $171,000 in wealth and the typical Black family owns $17,000 come from.  We know that without wealth, families and communities are bereft of safety nets of their own, relying on inadequate, ineffective, and punitive streams of public and private assistance.


Democracy under attack. I am also looking for a video that shows clearly the instruments in place for denying and suppressing the right to vote for people of color.  We need to cast a bright light on town halls and city meeting rooms and sessions of law makers for that video. As dull as gerrymandering may be to examine in process, I want to see the “room where it happens” where voters are sidelined into voting districts that work to undermine the principle of one person, one vote. I want to see it in full color how publicly elected officials undermine the democracy they are supposed to uphold. I want to see how a made-up threat of voter fraud masks the work of taking away a central right of citizenship. 

Ideology. I have been thinking about the genealogy of ideas in America.   What does our family tree of ideas about race look like in America? What is the root of all the ideas we have about race? About people of color?  And what do those ideas begat? And what actions? And what narratives? How do understand our own minds, our biases, our baked-in-the-cake regimes of superiority and inferiority. The hardest footage to capture is those stories and narratives put in place by those in power, our nation’s creation myths, that suggest that the status quo is the nature of things. That hard work makes you successful. That we are playing on an equal playing field. That white folks earn everything they get. Those powerful ideas that explain to us why some of us are at the top of the hierarchy and others at the bottom. White folks can’t understand what it is like to be Black in our nation; we hardly appreciate what it is to be white. 

We need ordinary heroes to tell these stories and others about housing and health care and criminal justice and education. To be sure, we need new tools to fight this fight. We need Oppression Impact Statementswhere we carefully critique and understand the impact of our laws and policies on vulnerable communities of color. We need to understand that even if our ancestors didn’t hold slaves, our ancestors benefitted from programs that advantaged whites and sidelined Black opportunity. And to be sure, white guilt is not the key here. Taking responsibility is—for creating a complete accounting and imagining how we address the wrongs that have created our present. 

Post-script. Darnella Frazier was issued a special award and citation by the Pulitzer Prize board for “courageously reporting the murder of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality around the world, highlight the crucial role of citizens in journalists’ quest for for truth and justice.

Why Martin Luther King, Jr. never gave his I Have a Business Plan Speech

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Unless you put yourself on news diet in higher education or have tossed out all the emails from your university, you’ve been deluged with news about the new kids on campus, innovation and his big brother, disruption.  The innovation movement influences the naming of buildings, the funding of new initiatives, the design of curricular offerings and the branding of programs for our students. What I want to address here is not technological innovation, machine intelligence nor the rise of the robots; I want to address social innovation.  As a twenty-year student of civic engagement on campuses, I’ve been tracking the introduction of programs in social innovation and social entrepreneurship across the country. As chronicled by Ashoka U, more courses are being taught, more faculty are on board, more programs of study are being created and more campuses are signing up to be Changemaker campuses, forty-five universities here and abroad. All to the good. That is how programs are created and make their way into the academic mainstream. Like any new program or discipline that aims to make a place in higher education, problems are framed, claims are advanced, journals are founded, organizations are created, and work begins to establish a presence on campuses.

What is so new about innovation? In some flavors of social entrepreneurship, there is a claim that social entrepreneurship is the panacea we have all been waiting for, that it is new, that it is distinctive and that is far superior to other approaches to social change. In 2015, McBride and Mlyn offered their critique of social innovation’s embrace in higher education, privileging new ideas that will be birthed by our students, instead of carefully teaching them the skills that it really takes to put sound ideas in place—those civic skills and community organizing strategies. As they note, “Engaged citizens know the roles of public, private, and nonprofit sectors and the tools that leverage their work together”.

A recent article in the New York Times takes the recent batch of entrepreneurs to task for solving all wrong problems, those that address the lives of the privileged and connected, paying lip service to social improvement in a cynical use of the term “changing the world”. In Design: The Invention of Desire, Jessica Helfand berates the impulse to destroy, creatively or not. Is “nothing worth saving…is it necessary to start from scratch every time?” According to Helfand, the principles that should guide innovation are not clever branding schemes or the launch of programs that affect people’s lives with the idea that we should fail fast and fail often. As she argues, the values most important for innovation include “empathy, humility, compassion and conscience.” I just looked it up in Google; there is no app for that.

When we think about educating our students for lives and work in the 21st century, we must not neglect their lives as active members of their communities, whether they become volunteers, board members, teachers, social workers, philanthropists, artists, activists, opinion leaders, public officials or other roles.  In a recent issue of Humanities, Danielle Allen reminds us that we ignore our job to nurture “participatory readiness” in our students, preparing them for lives of civic and political participation. The role of arts, humanities and social sciences is particularly important here, although as scholar and teachers, it is also our job to create new tools that fit new social, economic and political challenges.

Fifteen years ago, at the behest of the leadership of the Campus Compact, I co-taught a year long course titled American Traditions of Philanthropy with Brown University Professor Ann Dill. We enrolled students from elite schools, from the public university, four-year college and community college, as well as a private college whose focus was business education and another private Catholic college. After a year’s worth of lectures and an end-of-the-semester community project, we asked students to article their philosophies of doing good. The students from the public four-year and community colleges stipulated that their obligation was to give back to the communities that had nurtured them by becoming teachers, social workers, and health professionals. The students from the business college believed that their role was to apply their management skills to direct nonprofits, which they believed were poorly managed. They contended that doing so would go a long way to changing the world. The students from the private Catholic university saw themselves empowering community members as citizens. Their role was as community organizers. Finally, the students from the elite universities characterized their role as thought leaders and organizational founders. They saw the current landscape of nonprofit organizations and government agencies as inadequate to serve and change communities; new organizations needed to take their place. These differences in how these students saw their roles in the world were striking—some as direct service workers, others as community organizers, still others as managers and finally others as founders and innovators. We need to be sensitive to the ways in which we empower our students and help them understand their agency in the world.

As we consider which students and campuses are in the community engagement and social innovation fields, we can ask which of our students are truly empowered to be social entrepreneurs? Which are delegated to do more direct service without much access to take up leadership or management roles? We should be clearer about these differences and understand to role of campus culture in citizen making.

Great examples of programs on some campuses aim to marry skills in developing and organizing resources, in working with teams, and with critical analysis. Students don’t create new enterprises until they have worked in the problem space. Students and recent graduates whose goals are social entrepreneurship need time “apprenticing with a problem” as Papi-Thornton characterizes it, understanding how organizations already in place define the problem and their theories of change. Working with others and against the current model of the entrepreneur as a single heroic individual develops the skills and orientations citizens need to truly make a difference.

Paul Light’s Driving Social Change reminds us that transformational change never employs such one tool. Advocacy without the passage of laws gets us nowhere. Volunteerism without a larger conceptualization of the roots of the social problems may be short sighted and misplaced. Without those who are preserving the social safety while others are creating new organizations, many would suffer. No question, we do need new blood and new thinking that addresses problems with which we have become too comfortable. I would argue that we should help our students understand that an array of tools is required for social engagement that improves the lives and communities. Students should understand the role of important books, films and other media that have brought issues to the fore, the role of the civil and the public sectors, the history and life cycles of social movements, and when and why a new organization should be created. Importantly, they can appreciate that a business plan is not a social movement. The anchoring of social entrepreneurship in some business schools has tied them to the business plan as the way to organize for social change. Business thinking that points to ramping up and scaling projects may not the best fit given the complicated nature of social problems. Context matters. Echoing many calls for increased civic education, students need to better understand the tools of citizenship and advocacy. We need to expand the tools students master for involvement in the community, not shoehorn them into narrow views of how change happens.

Giving Until It Helps

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There is a lot of good in the world. We focus too much focus on people and institutions that are behaving badly and on things that are not working, major failures and minor aggravations. Instead, we should be paying attention to things that really matter more—like the decent work of millions of people who assure through adhering to social conventions that our lives are livable and in many cases, pleasurable. David Brooks recently quoted Pope Francis who described people who were kind to the needy, who took their turn, and who instead of running the other driver out of the merge lane waved him into traffic, as “the artisans of the common good” (https://nyti.ms/2E9c6iR). I strongly support celebrating this sort of behavior simply to remind us that without it, we’d need to be more vigilant, more wary of each other and require more protection from the other guy. Think of the quiet comfort we enjoy in daily interactions and how one rude clerk or nasty customer can rattle our whole day. Pile too many of these together makes us bitter, prone to act in kind, setting off our own discharges and sparks of misery.

We don’t hear enough about small acts that make a difference, like making a loan through KIVA. About twelve years old, KIVA invests money to micro-entrepreneurs in 82 countries across the world (https://www.kiva.org/). KIVA is not a government agency, neither is it funded by major philanthropists. KIVA relies on small donors—as little as $25—to fund its work. To date, 2.7 million loans amounting to $1.09 billion dollars have been granted to farmers, shop owners, parents who need to pay school fees for their children and other reasons. More than 1.7 million lenders—average citizens and community groups—have loaned these funds. And, in 96.9% of the time, these loans have been repaid. Once repaid, these funds can be re-lent to support the dreams of another entrepreneur or hopeful parent. I established a student-managed KIVA fund at my university, loaning more than $2500 over a five year period. We have funded cucumber farmers in Estonia, a truck driver in Belarus, a women’s coop in Chile, a store in Peru and many more endeavors. We feel that we contributing in a small way to the economic welfare of the individual, her family and her larger community. Certainly we are not saving the world, but we are contributing in a small way to do our part.

Each at the end of year, I receive a report on our fund which prompts me to make another loan. I defer the choice of who to support until I get a chance to meet with my sociology class. Here, we look at our portfolio of outstanding loans to see where we would like to make this small investment. It challenges students to think about how much difference we can make in someone’s like with a $25 loan. Our loan joins others until the amount requested, let’s say $500, is fulfilled. Once the loan is granted, we’ll get reports on the progress of the project and begin to receive loan repayments. To maximize the sense of community, individuals can create a team made up of people who share a common interest—members of a church group, a school, a large family or other basis. The team manages a portfolio of loans and maybe even engages in some friendly competition with other teams about who can loan the most money or manage the most loans. There are more than 36, 000 teams that loan through KIVA but the two leading teams drew my attention (https://www.kiva.org/teams).

In first place among the teams with the greatest amount loaned are KIVA Christians, founded in August 2008. They have 20,648 members and have lent $42,000,000 dollars pooled in 758,425 loans. KIVA Christians loans have biblical inspiration, which they cite in their reasons to give. “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved, so you must love another” John 13:34 and from Corinthians 13:8 “Love never fails.”

In second place is the A+ team of Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious, also established in 2008 The A+ team has 38,108 members (almost twice as many as the Christians), loaning $36,109,650 (less than the Christians) with more than 1,200,000 loans (about half a million more than the Christians). The Atheists et al loan money because they “care about human beings and understand that it takes people to help people. We are one human family and know that people can do good without believing in a god.”

What are we to make of this? I am wondering which group came first? Maybe, a Christian and her pal, the atheist, met in a coffee shop and set down this dare.

I bet that we Christians can donate more money than you non-believers.

We’ll take that bet and challenge you to put your money where your God is, replied the Atheists.

I suppose we could review these portfolios to see what causes each team has supported. Have the atheists spread their investments far and wide while the Christians have supported a different set of causes? Who is supporting the Palestinians? Muslims? Women and children? School fees for girls? Maybe, there is very little difference between their giving patterns and if so, why donate under the banners of Christianity or non-faith. Does even something as seemingly non-partisan as giving a loan carry partisan baggage? What is really the best way to organize ourselves to do some good? Maybe, a donation to KIVA is, in fact, not the best use of these donations.

I would affiliate with neither team nor claim for giving. I don’t want to give because we are all members of one big human family. That squishy premise doesn’t motivate me at all. On the other hand, loving one another as God loves us also leaves me wanting for more. I can harbor all the positive feelings for my fellow human beings and wish them well as other beings on the planet but until I seriously consider the moral obligations that underpin the simple statement that all human lives have equal value, this one human family loved as God loves us, doesn’t carry much weight. Neither principle calls out my obligation to give in a world where the spoils of our economy and polity are so unevenly distributed and where some have so much and others. These inequities should serve as an embarrassment to all of us.

This, for me, is more a matter of justice than it is kindness and compassion. Similarly, I don’t want to give only when the mood strikes me–when I see that suffering child or when I am moved by a sad tale. I want to connect this giving to commitments that motivate me do more and to do it effectively. If I can shop for a cellphone, I can certainly research whether my donations are doing the most good they can. If the world were suffering from too much kindness and compassion, that would be one thing. But the fact that most of the world lives at subsistence level and a small percent of us are doing quite well is quite another. And, maybe, a donation to KIVA is not the best use of my charitable dollars after all.

As a privileged member of a rich nation and a beneficiary of the gifted generation, I believe that I have encumbered unplayable debts. These include government programs and unparalleled prosperity. A recent book (Goldfield 2017) argues that the generous governmental programs—GI bills for education and homeownership, virtually free college tuition at public institutions, and much more—were designed to lift the working class to the middle class. This gave many of us baby boomers and by extension, our children, great advantages that the current college-age population can scarcely believe. We do have to note here that those benefits were not distributed to blacks and other minority groups but they did establish the point that well-crafted government programs served as escalators into better lives for millions of American families. And, according to most economists, these approaches were far more effective than tax-cut supply-side approaches championed by conservative ideology.

It didn’t occur to me until much later in life how much these advantages propelled me and my peers into a middle class life. If I count up all the fortunate breaks that fell my way, all the investments made in me because of the sacrifices and forethought of others, it is clear I will never repay these. How do I repay those Catholic sisters and my parochial school for an excellent education? How do I repay the government for those social security and GI benefits that arrived just in time after my father’s early death? How do I repay the enormous gift of free tuition for four years from my state college? How do I repay that Ivy League university for their scholarship to this working class student so I could earn a Masters Degree, which impressed many people more than it should have? How about those state-sponsored low-interest loans to first-time homebuyers that allowed me, a single woman, to buy a house after three banks had turned down my application? I could go on. These benefits meant sacrifice on the part of others, of course, and I have reaped the benefits greatly.

Prosperity for many of us came because the U.S. In the fifties and sixties was the unchallenged world economic power. This afforded us with great advantages.  This sort of wealth and wealth-making opportunities seduce us into thinking that we climbed through the class hierarchy and the world pecking order due to hard work and brilliant business acumen when in fact, other forces were in play. Much of the ease and prosperity we enjoy comes at the expense of others. The masters of the universe and kings of commerce have figured out how to create a global engine that spits out low-cost consumer products using the lowest wage labor and under-valued raw materials. We could make the argument that our brothers and sisters in the global south subsidize our comfortable lifestyles in the global north. Behind that great curtain of commerce, we cleverly learn not to ask too many questions about who has made this shirt and iPhone and under what conditions. We ignore that man behind the curtain and assume that some one is taking care of these questions. So much for the great human family.

Given that acknowledgement that we have benefitted from programs (state supported and private) and a favorable economy, what should guide our course for giving back. How much and to whom? What commitments should steer these values here? Local giving to alumni organizations? Scholarships to children like me? Perhaps there are other considerations to examine. Is all giving equally good?

For me, the commitment here rests upon basic math. As Peter Singer has calculated, the rich of the world (the 10% of earners) could easily devote 10% of their income to the poorest people on the planet affording them basic educations, clean water, avoiding needless deaths, better nutrition, sanitation and more (2015). Importantly, this would include not the just the richest citizens but many of us who have middle-class lifestyles. Singer’s plan is not directed at only those people we imagine are comfortable enough to give; he would argue that many of us are in that situation. As radical as it seems, this plan would right the world, as we know it. And, this is simply seen in an organization like KIVA or Heifer where a small donation of $25 (a dinner at a reasonably priced restaurant, yet another T-shirt) could really make a difference in saving a life.

The developing effective altruism movement directs our charitable dollars where they will do the most good to organizations and approaches that are vetted and proven to work. Many things that we expect to address poverty, illness and illiteracy don’t. (For more information on this movement and its applications, see Derek Thompson’s article https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/what-is-the-greatest-good/395768/). Movements like the effective altruism movement focus on populations with the greatest need addressing these with field-tested solutions. This approach eliminates the argument heard from so many—who knows where your money goes—and also addresses the concern that one may be throwing good money after bad.

So clarifying the motive to give–those unplayable debt and the great extremes in wealth built upon accidents of birth, the unfair distribution of spoils—and targeting effective strategies to address basic human need—work for me as a compass point for better giving and perhaps deeper commitments to making a difference. This is not to say that this movement lets me live with a clear conscience. Our complicated world is too ethically challenging to do that. But I can live with these questions and hope that they continue to reveal a truer path for me.

References

Brooks, David. 2018. How Would Jesus Drive? New York Times, Jan. 4.

Goldfield. 2017. The Gifted Generation: When Government Was Good. New York: Bloomsbury.

Singer, Peter. 2015. The Most Good You Can Do. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Thompson, Derek. 2015. The Greatest Good. The Atlantic online

 

 

Be the change you wish to see: Speech delivered in 2009

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Be the change you wish to see

President and Mrs. Machtley, Vice Presidents, Deans, members of the Board of Trustees, faculty and staff, parents, sisters and brothers, friends, and of course, students whom we celebrate today. Before I begin my remarks this evening, I want to recognize the leadership of President Machtley and the larger Bryant community in bringing students like you to our campus. It is the president who imagines what a campus should be—what sorts of students should join our community and what sorts of educations we will afford them. To me, Bryant University is community of scholars where we all teach and we all learn from each other. Everyday students like you bless me with an education that is fuller and richer than one I could obtain elsewhere. I think we cheat ourselves of a great education unless we embrace lessons that students like you teach us. So, at the beginning, let me thank you the students for contributing to the education and betterment of the Bryant community.

I bring you greetings from faculty and staff.

In Swahili, Professor Kwesiga says,

Na Mungi awabaraki

In Italian from Professor Misuraca

Auguri

From Professor Jiang in Chinese

Gung xi ni men

In Spanish from Professor Gomez

Buena suerta para el future

In Portuguese from Dee Viera

Parabens!

And in Sanskrit from Professor Beldona

Namaste

In these greetings, we congratulate you and wish you well. If I have inadvertently asked, “Please, Mister, could you bring me my horse?” I apologize. As many of you know, it is a challenge and great advantage to speak in a tongue other than one’s own. I wish I had more of those gifts.

You do me a great honor in asking that I share remarks with you this evening. Your accomplishments are impressive; they are hard won. Only you truly know what sacrifices you have made, what challenges you have overcome to be here this evening. What I believe defines our best students is a curiosity about the world, ready to meet its challenges and eager to learn how to equip themselves to meet circumstances and opportunities that we at this moment can hardly imagine. We are here tonight because many people have come before us, leading the way, sacrificing their lives in some cases, deferring their own dreams so that we might have better opportunities. We should recognize that our achievements are as much to their credit as they are to our own hard work.

I will keep my comments brief tonight and aim to connect them directly to theme of this celebration, Be the Change you wish to see, a quotation attributed to Mahatma Ghandi. Ghandi, the man who gave to the world a powerful social movement, that claim that change could come through nonviolent means. This proposition suggests that all of us have a role and a calling to change the world for the better.

Change is one of those cover words that we employ as if we all understood what it meant but we may not. The change I want to talk about is not change that we ache for because we are bored. And it is not change that aims to alter the leadership of an organization or community expected that if we change the leader that everything else will change. But, it is a delusion to believe that if we change the captain, the direction of the ship will change. It may not. Real positive change doesn’t work that way. It takes more than one leader. It takes all of us.

The change we are alluding to this evening is change that we can dream about and work to create. Change that makes the world a better place for more of its citizens. Change that evens out the chances for more us to have a run at the good things in life. I don’t mean here just a nice home, a fancy car, the latest iPod and the newest cell phone with all the coolest features. I mean change that liberates more of us, that means freedom from hunger and from violence, freedom from fear, freedom from neglect and freedom from needless suffering. The change we wish to see is change that reflects all that is good and honorable in human nature. The change that makes us kinder to one another. The change that makes us curious about how the way we live affects other people, maybe those halfway around the planet, maybe in that poor community down the street. The change that starts with me and with us, connects us with others, and allows us to be inspired and to inspire others with our combined dreams, our shared hopes and the blessings of our talents and our virtues.

When I was in your age, just graduating from college, we faced a world in turmoil. Three years before I graduated Dr. Martin Luther King had been assassinated. Robert Kennedy met the same fate just two months after King. Nelson Mandela was in prison. The Berlin Wall divided East and West Germany. We were fighting a contentious war in Southeast. The population of the world stood at 3.7 billion people. We hadn’t heard of global warming. The personal computer hadn’t been invented. Fast forward to this moment a few decades later and we have elected our first Black president. We are concerned with climate change. In the time it takes me to complete this sentence, we will have welcomed one new American baby, four Chinese babies and five Indian babies to our planet joining a population already close to seven billion people. If that sounds hard to wrap your mind around, someone suggested that it is easy. Just think of yourself, your dreams, how much your life means to you and the people who love you, and multiply that by seven billion. Got it? We have emerging economies where the next generation of innovation and invention will most likely arise. And now, we find ourselves in an increasingly interconnected complicated world where ideas, people and products race around our planet with accelerating speed. One billion Google searches a day. Researchers are wondering how if we lived our lives, B.G. before Google. To whom did we address all these questions? You students may wonder how we lived our lives without cell phones, without the Internet, without text messaging and without 24-hour entertainment. Trust me. Trust your parents. It was not that hard and, in some ways, life was quieter and less packed with distractions. These distractions can take us way off course.

But, for a moment, let’s go back to a time that characterized most of our lives as humans on this planet. Historically, parents could pass on what they knew about the world to their children because the world changed much more slowly than it does now. We remained in our communities from our births through our deaths; we encountered less difference than we do now; we knew less about the larger world; parents could hand down their professions and their crafts to their children and expect that that those skills could last them for a lifetime.

But all this has changed. The Department of Labor reports that the jobs that will be in greatest demand in 2010, next year, didn’t even exist in 2004. They also observe that we are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist—using technologies that haven’t yet been invented—to address problems—challenges and opportunities that we don’t yet know exist. In a world of such rapid and accelerating change, how are we to find and make our way? How do we find an anchor in this running torrent of transition and dislocation? I believe that values and character and courage must serve as our compass.

My father passed away unexpectedly when I was just fourteen years old. Maybe, some of you have been similarly robbed of an anchor in your life. By that time, he had passed on to me mainly through example his kind and gentle way of encountering the world. All my life I have come back to the lessons that he and my mother and my teachers have blessed me with—caring for the world, wondering if I was doing enough, trying to develop and apply my talents to the work in front of me and most importantly, to find important and meaningful work to do.

I think that is the task ahead of you. Finding important work to do, and having a dream that sustains you. I urge you to embrace a dream that embraces others.

In his address to one quarter of a million people on the Lincoln Mall, delivered more than forty years ago, Reverend Martin Luther King did not deliver The I Have a Complaint Speech. Nor did he deliver the I Have a Suggestion speech. Neither was his speech entitled the Please May I have some of what you have for me and my children? No, as you all know, he presented to the nation and the world his I Have a Dream Speech. A Dream that was momentous and ambitious, a dream that challenges all of us to be judged by the content of our character, a dream that lifts up all of us, no matter where we come from and who we are or what privileges or deprivations characterize our backgrounds.

What does it mean to be judged by the content of our character?

To understand this, I would like to propose an analogy. Today, we hear a great deal about our carbon footprint. This is a measure of the impact that we have on the planet. It helps us to understand how we are all connected to each other, to appreciate the burdens of our lifestyles on the planet we all inhabit.

I would like to propose that we also consider developing a Character Footprint—a measure of the impact of our character on the planet. Do we see the world full of problems or full of opportunity? Do we see the world as one of diminishing chances or a world where the opportunities to make a positive change have never been greater nor more important? Do we believe we have a responsibility to make the world a better place or we are content to assume that this work is someone else’s job? Do we clearly understand and appreciate the impact we are having on the world? On those who come from communities that seem remote from us but whose lives are intriguingly connected to our own? And on those whose generations will follow ours?

At every turn, we need to remember that we are part of a long march of history. We are here because our parents, and their parents, and social reformers, and soldiers have paved the way.   Our responsibility then becomes to bring others along, people like us, and those not so like us but just as deserving.

In closing, I would like to leave you with two quotations. The first is from Adlai Stevenson whom you may not know; the second from Nelson Mandela, a hero to many of you. Speaking at a college commencement, Stevenson said the following.

The privilege and the penalty of your education and the position you hold in your community is that over the coming decades, as in the past, you will be the pacesetters for political and social thought in your community. You may not accept this responsibility but it makes no difference, it is inescapable. If you decide to set no pace, to forward no dreams, and to have no vision, you will still be the pace setters. You will simply have decided there is no pace.

 Mandela’s advice is more personal but no less important.

There is no passion to be found playing small, in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.

 Thank you for your kind attention and now on to the most important part of our event, the reason we are gathered here tonight–to recognize our students!

Delivered at the Senior Awards Banquet organized by the Intercultural Center at Bryant University, April 4, 2009.

My diminishing superpowers, mattering and the summoned life

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In an earlier blog post, I wrote about my transformation into Tech Girl, a mature woman who would swoop in to rescue digitally challenged elders who were being attacked by electronic personal assistants and harassed by poorly designed log in routines.  And, while I am still looking forward to that superhero assignment once I retire and have the time I need to become a proper superhero–wardrobe, branding, licensing and insurance coverage—I am increasingly concerned that I am actually losing other superpowers.  Actually, what seems to be to be superpowers at age 66 were talents I took for granted a few decades ago. These seem to be simple enough tasks but it should be remembered that even a genius like Siri can’t do these things very easily so I should give myself a break as well and not be too concerned with these changes.

These superpowers once in hand no longer easily accessed include:

The Begats.  Keeping the names and the progeny of friends and family members straight and remembering without effort who gave birth to whom and in what order. Like the Old Testament in Genesis with all those begats. This contemporary version is harder because it seems back then everyone had his own name and you didn’t have to keep straight all the many Mallorys, Melanies, Melissas and Madison who are in your life.

Old dogs: no tricks. Adults are often surprised beyond reason when they hear a toddler speak perfect French. Well, maybe not like the French majors at the Sorbonne but French that is better than mine despite years of adult effort. While learning algebra or verb tenses seemed to be a normal part of growing up, learning some things grows harder as you age. It seems the memorizing part of your brain diminishes and the area of your brain some idiot designed for forgetting swells up. This is like saving something special in the refrigerator for lunch and having your partner pitch it in the trash (over and over again.)

Disappearing acts. In my earlier days, I could cavalierly reject the advice from Benjamin Franklin or Felix Unger—a place for everything and everything in its place. I could find things no matter I misplaced them. I had a great memory. My bathing suit? At the bottom of the swimming pool. My driver’s license? In that pair of pants I wore last summer. My keys? Somewhere in the house. None of these things were really missing. Just temporarily not in my possession. Now, I am seriously constrained. I spend way too much time putting things where they belong. The ease of the spontaneity has gone. Now, I have a Container Store mentality—I can’t not worry about storage and filing and I hate it. Now, when I lose things, I know right away that they are seriously lost. There is no mystery or hope or wonder.

Mindlessness. There is a lot written about the brain’s executive function. As I understand it, this is your brain’s control center. Like an air traffic manager, this function manages thoughts in and out; it lines up activities. It is a big to-do list maker, directing everything from brushing your teeth to ordering your bigger priorities. I used to leave this function to operate itself. I was confident in the management of my brain. In fact, I would be happy to give it a outsized salary and stock options; it was that high-performing. However, after a decade of disappointing results, I mounted a hostile takeover of operations. Never mind, I grumbled, I’ll do it myself. Now, I spend more time managing things—to do lists everywhere in every format. I write them over and over again. It is weird, no doubt. It is like ordering yourself to do work, like a memo from a manager who doesn’t want to deal with you face-to-face. I have moved from the pleasure of automatic pilot to to-do list automaton. I miss the mindless me.

A tale thrice (or more) told. There is no question but that I was blessed with a reliable memory. Not only could I remember a personal story, I could also recall when and with whom I had shared the tale. Now, when I am about to make a point with that story, I preface the presentation with, “I may have said this to you before” only to have the other party nod as quickly as they can so they don’t have to sit through another rendering. Not only is this embarrassing because it appears you have no recollection of this important conversation you had with your colleague, it is also makes it virtually impossible to lie effectively. To be a great liar, you have to keep track of your tracks and if you can’t do that, you need to be careful with your truth. Maybe, that is why the very young find their grandparents so lovely. Children sense that these elders are not as scheming as their parents because they can’t be. They don’t have good enough memories to cook up an airtight tale. They do, however, have enormous powers to make up things because the facticity of things seems to matter less.

In any case, all these powers came very easily to me in an earlier version of myself and now that they don’t, I am thinking I should make plans to cover my deficits and move onto to some important work legacy-like work. And, in fact, I think the powers that I will discuss below are sufficient compensation for any of the superpowers that I have lost.

I am thinking about the next stage of my life and what I need to leave behind. Erikson’s theories of development suggest that in the last two stages of development that adults are first directed to fashion accomplishments that will outlast them. These efforts are often directed to some work or activities that result in a positive impact for others. The final stage of life is a reflective one where a feeling of fulfillment and contentment may surface if one feels satisfaction from earlier stages.

To guide me in this important work, I draw upon two reservoirs of wisdom: first, the theory of mattering and second, the idea of the summoned life. Mattering is a social psychological concept developed and tested by Professor Gregg Elliott at Brown University. Of all the reading I have done in this field, the appeal of mattering stands out in its power and simplicity. Elliott’s work focuses on adolescent development and mattering explains much in a few empirically tested premises. Three elements are at play here. First, does this child feel that it matters to others that he shows up? Or does he feel invisible when he enters a room? Second, does she feel that other people are invested in her success? Do they indicate that they are on her team? Will they take an extra step for her? Will she feel that she is the object of their special attention? And finally, does the child understand that others can rely on her? That they depend on her to take care of them in some way? Does she appreciate those qualities that she has that others recognize but may be invisible to her?

In my read, mattering works in two dimensions: Am I important to them and are they important to me? Elliott proposed that for children, the former can balance out an absence of the latter. In other words, a child can be neglected by his parents (or the opposite—subject to the object of too much of the wrong kind of attention) yet feel as if he matters if he feels his little brother is relying on him for protection, if his aunt can trust with him to complete his chores, or if a teacher understands that this child will protect more vulnerable children and the child acknowledges that her faith in his goodness.

Although designed to help us understand the treacherous waters of adolescence, mattering has significant practical appeal at each stage of our lives. As an older adult and faculty member, I use every opportunity to help my students understand that they matter. I offer investments and interest–Can I write you a letter of recommendation? I missed you in class on Monday; are you OK? I help them to recognize their strengths, as I understand them. You have such strong analytical abilities, I say. Have you thought about graduate school? Or, I saw how upset you seemed by that comment from that other student. You showed great restraint and did a wonderful job returning our class discussion to a more productive exchange. That takes real emotional maturity. We are lucky to have you in this class.

 I think about a younger generation of colleagues and the challenges they face in moving up and finding their place in the world. For someone with my career trajectory—finding my calling at age fifty—I am a good example of someone who has led a life of experimentation and ‘try and see’. But things seem much more serious for this generation I consider all the messages they receive about how to value their lives. E.E. Cummings once wrote, “To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”

That sense of constantly working towards who we are is a profound recognition of the second source of wisdom, lessons about the summoned life to use the term coined by David Brooks. On the surface of it, the summoned life appears to stand in direct opposition to living to execute one’s passion. Brooks suggests that there are two paths of living one’s life. The first is to drill down and find one’s passion and direct one’s energy toward fulfilling. This path seems to be the chief and only commandment adopted by career guidance services and admissions offices in colleges. We will help you put your passion into practice. You will never be happy until your passion aligns with your actions. But, the truth of is that we can move through many stages of development in our lives and that the individual who knows his passion early on may be the rare case.

The alternative path is the summoned life where contingencies and circumstances call you to action. We may be without a driving dream but we do have an integrity that is so strong that others seek to engage it. We may lack passion because we are divided among multiple interests but someone sees that we find connections they elude others. We are the sort of people who integrate ideas not dice them into tiny bits.

Like being inspired by mattering, I am likewise energized by this idea of the summoned life and the sort of work I want to engage people in. I would like to create flight plans for enrolling others in the summoned life and in embracing daily practices of mattering. I believe these are important tools for legacy making, not in grand gestures but in generously and lovingly passing along our belief and confidence in generations to come. Both help us understand and activate Erikson’s concept of generativity—the concern for making a mark, for co-creating a desirable future, and for making a sense of optimism about the future grounded in purpose. Maybe, these are super-powers that can only be granted if we are willing and able to forego others.

Bibliography

Brooks, David. “The Summoned Self.” New York Times, August 2, 2010.

Elliott, Gregory, Suzanne Kao, and Ann-Marie Grant. “Mattering: Empirical Validation of a Social Psychological Concept.” Self & Identity 3 (2004): 339-354.

It takes a village to raise us all

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Sometime you hear a phrase so often that you want to offer a reward to the person who doesn’t refer to that same quotation in a speech or commentary, even when it makes perfect sense. I believe that an individual who can reach into her collection of choice quotations and not fall on the easiest pick deserves recognition and praise. So, today I want to leave that praising for another occasion and simply suggest that we all take a rest from employing the African proverb: It takes a village to raise a child. We don’t need that break because this aphorism doesn’t reflect the truth but instead because it needs, as the academics would argue, to be unpacked.

In repeating this proverb so casually, we assume that those villages actually exist for all children. I can make an argument that for the most privileged of our children, that their parents can and do, in many cases, build that village by themselves around their children. They can buy tender and nurturing childcare; they can organize communities to support their children. T19926095-heart-shaped-many-houses-icons-realty-concept-vector-eps10hey can fashion every sort of safety net to make certain that their child doesn’t have to rely on services supported by taxes and donations. It may be too strong a statement but we can suggest that the richest families among us have privatized villages, taking care of their own, of course, and depriving our public spaces of their support and engagement. Take schools, example. It is true that in some areas where there are lots of private schools that public schools are not very good. What sort of relationship is that? Do the parents that can afford to do so get their kids out because the schools are bad? Or do the schools get worse because the talented students and their parents with resources have left them?

If children attend schools where there is a concentration of poverty, research suggests that academic achievement will be low. The segregation of Americans by income, culture and other dimensions, the great sorting out in Bishop’s terms, has been further investigated by Robert Putnam and Mark Dunkleman. They have examined the disappearance of middle-range ties, those connections that bridge income and opportunity classes. This, they suggest, hollows out community and leaves us concerned only about our own, because we don’t have encounters with others who are different from us, face different challenges in participating in the American dream and have worldviews that may challenge our own. It is here where I want to make the connection to those villages that are supposed to be raising children.

I am reminded of the story—more a parable—that is often told to college students and congregants where the teaching objective is to get them to consider the root causes of social problems. The Babies in the River story tells the tale of an individual who quite unexpectedly sees a baby floating in the river, and, of course, rescues him. Another baby comes down the river; another rescue ensues and so on and so on until our hero has to enlist others to help her care for the children. More and more babies arrive and pretty soon, a sizable community is needed to care the needs of these infants. Not only are we pulling them out of the water, we are also comforting them. We are seeing if they are well; we are feeding them and fashioning ways to keep them warm and safe. And, we are continually organizing and re-organizing ourselves. Not only do we need caretakers; we need supplies and resources. We need some assurance that these children are ours to care for. We need someone to make certain that these obligations that we are taking on can be supported by our community. And, we need to rely on people who are just as motivated as we are by this mission to save and nurture these children. Imagine today, if your community—you personally had accepted the responsibility of helping to support an unknowable number of infants. Imagine what you would need to get this done.

But, in the telling, that is not the end of the story. The moral of the story is that someone should travel upstream to see how these babies are coming to travel down the river in the first place. Who or what is creating this humanitarian crisis and what can we do to address this? In whose interest are these babies landing in the river? Is someone benefitting from such an arrangement? The lesson here for students is that we shouldn’t get so focused on immediate needs of those we care for that we neglect understanding and addressing roots causes. This makes obvious sense. If we eliminate a disaster, avoid suffering, that is all to the good. But, I think there is another important point that is not often made.

What has made it possible for that community to organize itself on behalf of the babies in the river? What made it impossible for them to walk away from the river in the comfort that certainly this mission was someone else’s? Or that these children or their parents made this misfortune on their own and that released them from obligation? What made it possible for there to be a match between the needs of the children and those who gathered around them? Where did these resources—time, talent, and compassion—originate? This sort of community making doesn’t emerge out of thin air. And finally, what came before, what human connections, communities of caring, trust and concern had evolved in earlier settings and were activated in this one?

Villages require connections and what some call social capital. People bring resources, which are connected to other people; or they know people. Others know how to get things done; they k20498242-cityscape-sketch-seamless-pattern-for-your-designnow when to call City Hall and demand action. Others know when we need some new ideas. With other talents, some know how to tell a story so that our hearts are fired up and our cynicism melted. All this can be enlisted in the building of our village. To use Paul Light’s term, all are drivers for change and without these, no village is complete enough to care for its children.

Certainly, some of us can pay or move our way out of these sorts of obligations but that is not the sort of society that assembles when there is a need nor it is the sort of village that asks for truth when we seek the source of suffering.

And, as Rasmussen would suggest, we ought to look into our own souls, to see if the problem we aim to fix is one that we may have made.

thIn summary, not only does it take a village to raise a child. It takes a village to raise us all up to become members of a community where we contribute our best and which we can turn to when we ourselves are in need of its care and kind concern.

Broken Windows: Slamming Doors

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 It is hard to get your head around issues that don’t directly affect you or the people in your social circle. So, let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine you are a typical family with a few children, one a teenager and one several years younger. Then, imagine that your wages hardly allow you to get by even with a few jobs and careful management of your income. Then, consider how much you can pay for rent and where you are able to live. And, then let’s say that your choices are constrained by your need to live close to transportation and to members of your family. And, finally, let’s suggest that you are living in a high crime neighborhood, not out of choice but from lack of choice. This fact has some startling implications. One, that your life just getting around the streets could be dangerous. Your chances of being the victim of a serious crime are high, not because of your behavior but because of your location. Second, is that because you are in a high crime neighborhood, police may assume that you are a criminal so you will be the object of aggressive policing. These sort of life experiences can be deeply alienating. Your view of law enforcement—the first-hand picture of state authority—for many of our citizens is complicated. The police seem powerless to get the truly bad actors, evidenced by the declining homicide clearance rates in many of our communities, and they seem to wield too much power to intervene in and interrupt the lives of law-abiding citizens. Then, finally, imagine helping your children to understand how to navigate this world and consider how, as well, to have them embrace the idea of hope in their futures and faith in the system. (Elijah’s Anderson ethnography presents a masterful picture of these challenges.) If you can imagine all of that, then you can come to see the other side of mass incarceration and how it works on a smaller more human scale.

A few years ago, I published an article on the relationship between race, gender and mass incarceration (Enos 2012). I argued in that essay that the regime of mass incarceration had been especially harsh on poor women of color. Using incarceration as the only tool in our toolbox applied a hammer to problems that were more appropriately in the domain of mental health care, substance abuse treatment, social and economic supports and community care. Many researchers have provided careful analyses of the roots and branches of mass incarceration, perhaps the best-known Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2012), a damning indictment of the movement to mass incarceration in the United States. The New Jim Crow has sparked an important discussion and more significantly, the beginnings of an important movement that not only incites the usual suspects—liberal politicians, civil rights attorneys–but also Republican and conservative stalwarts like Americans for Tax Reform and some elements of the Tea Party.

If Alexander’s book tells the tale of an overreaching, aggressive ever expanding net of criminal justice intervention that captures many poor men and women of color, Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (2015) tells another side of this story. Her careful and compelling study of homicide set in Los Angeles reveals that the clearance rate for homicide in poor communities of color is less than one of out three. If you are unfamiliar with the technical term, the FBI deems a case is cleared when an arrest has been made for an offense or when it is otherwise solved. Meaning that fewer that one of three homicides of black victims in Los Angeles has been solved. There are similar data in other communities. In Providence, RI, of over 110 homicides committed in the period 2000 to 2013, 43% are unsolved. This reflects a national trend. In 1961, 91% of all homicides cases were cleared; forty years later, the clearance rate had plummeted to 62%. This is not because the murder rate is so much higher that the police are not able to get to this work because of an outsized rate of homicide. The number of homicides has fallen. So, as a character in a crime drama might ask, “So, Sargeant, what’s up with that?” What has broken in our system? Why is harder to solve crimes? And, it should be noted that the clearance rates for other index crimes—assaults, robberies–are typically even lower. And, as tragic as these rates are for the larger community, they are worse for black men and communities of color. Like so many of the statistics about race and criminal justice, these data are absolutely and amazingly stunning if we could imagine them in stable middle class communities. We would have overthrown the government, gotten an attorney, filed a civil action, or most likely, voted with our feet, and taken ourselves, our families and our futures somewhere far away. How can it be that law enforcement both over-police and under-police inner city neighborhoods? It is indeed a special dynamic.

As I have written elsewhere, it truly takes a village to incarcerate millions of our citizens. All hands needed to be on deck for this movement to have been as successful as it has been, not just those in the criminal justice system–law enforcement, courts and corrections–but well beyond that to politics, media, entertainment, employment, credit, education and more. And as Alexander notes, to make the whole thing work–to go from a prison population which was relatively stable for decades to doubling, tripling and those numbers, requires a great social ignorance, an inclination to look the other way. The graph compiled from Bureau of Justice statistics shows incarceration rate, which takes into account changes in the size of the population. As can be readily seen, the variation in incarceration rate from the decades beginning in 1925 and extending to 1975 is small compared to the acceleration in the growth curve beginning in 1975 and continuing a steep climb thereafter. These numbers don’t include inmates held in local jails; neither do they count young offenders help in juvenile detention facilities.

For mass incarceration to have succeeded, the usual systems of checks and balances on excessive power needed to be rolled back or rendered ineffective by the failure of the other branches of government to exercise corrective power So, the Supreme Court needed to support a strict crime control philosophy and reduce its concern about due protections which it did in a series of decisions. State legislatures, eager to find money to support the prison boom and the increasing costs of court processing and detention have passed these off to those who are targets of the system through fines, court fees and other assessments that can drive those charged with crimes into deeper holes–financial and spiritual. A recent suit filed in Ferguson MO highlights some of these abuses. Aggressive policing with stop and frisk policies has been credited with reducing street crimes but these are overwhelmingly put in place in poor minority communities casting too wide a net on law abiding citizens and turning residents into suspects by virtue of their addresses.

The role of these developments—court decisions, the imposition of fines and fees, targeted policing strategies—has all been well documented. There has been some coverage of miscarriages of justice where innocent defendants are finally released, some with state-funded compensation and others who have to file suits to get restitution. We could expect in a system as large as our criminal justice system that mistakes would be made. One in four Americans has an arrest record. We spend $70 billion on corrections alone. The criminal justice “system” is not really a system-each part has a different reporting path. The parts are in some instances adversarial and even worse for defendants, sometimes too friendly with each other. The system and its actors has little interest in what happens in other parts of the system so evaluating whether our policies work well rest on questionable measures–the number of arrests, the number of people in prison, caseloads. If our automotive industry worked in same fashion, we would be counting how many carburetors, drive trains and tires were manufactured, rather than examining the safety, fuel economy and features of our cars.

As we think about problems in this complicated system, it is important to distinguish individual errors from systemic failures. The former may be caused by human errors; the latter are errors that lend themselves to correcting through policies and legislation. What makes the U.S. situation even more interesting is the fact that most criminal justice is done close to home. What I mean by this is we have a fifty-state experiment in criminal justice. We see wide disparities in incarceration and sentencing to rates, in how defense counsel is provided, in rates of return to prison, in the discretion given to judges, in policies to fight street crime from city to city. So, we have lots of ways to make mistakes and great opportunities to do better, especially at this time in our history when increasing number of thinkers and law makers are facing the cold hard facts that we have been running down a bad path for way too long at great expense. If we were getting great results, that would be one argument for staying the mass incarceration path but the truth is that those results have been disastrous for many individuals, many families and many communities.

What’s to be done?

This is an auspicious time in criminal justice. Proposals for reform are being advanced from many sectors—law makers, the bar associations, advocates, community leaders, think tanks. It seems that no one is for mass incarceration any more.

What I would suggest is that we understand the criminal justice as if it really were a system. We need to examine each step and stage and think about all the implications that flow from point of determination and discretion. We need to map out the implications for the people caught in the system—not just in criminal justice—but way beyond. We know that having an arrest record follows as individual like a dark cloud, shutting doors and closing out opportunity. We know that fines and fees disable our neediest citizens and fund public institutions on their backs. We know that long sentences don’t correct any more than do shorter terms in prison. We know all this and more. What I suggesting here is that “fixes” need to be systemic and courageous. We can tweak reforms but those adjustments may not be enough to reassure the family we left in the first paragraph that their streets will be safe even though they are poor.

In an essay that will follow this one, I will investigate sources of error in the criminal justice system. Some are related to police procedure; some to prosecution; others to forensic science or what passes as “science.” I will trace the work of the Innocence Project and assess recent court rulings on the assuring that those who are responsible for miscarriages of justice might be held accountable.It is important to consider how much error we tolerate in our criminal justice system as a society that embraces standards of justice in process and outcome.

Doctoral dissertation

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As wonderful as the digital world is with its gifts and surprise wonders, it is somewhat troubling to find that your stuff is online without you having any idea that this is the case.  Just today, I found my dissertation on line. http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/AAI9831873/

I imagine this is a good thing. No one buys a dissertation, I don’t imagine. So, at least putting it online in the digital commons means that it is available to a wider audience. It was published in 1998 so it is a bit dated but that doesn’t diminish my fondness for it–a 200-page ticket to the most fulfilling career I have ever had.

 

 

 

 

Remarks for 2014 HerStory dinner: Four steps to living a life of purpose summarized in eight minutes

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First, I am delighted to have the honor to speak to you this evening. Friends, faculty, staff, family members, our leaders, President and Mrs. Machtley. This dinner is one of my favorite events here on campus. I leave here feeling recharged and reminded of how blessed I am to be in the company of such exemplary young women and the brilliant, talented and dedicated staff and faculty that bring us all together. Thanks from all of us for the tireless efforts of Toby Simon, Carolina Bogeart and many many more people who make this event happen.

So, I am going to take advantage of this opportunity to share with you, for the first time ever on this stage or any other, my four-step formula for living a good life in just under ten minutes. Based on a lifetime of research and reflection, I will lead you quickly through these steps and hope that you find something valuable and true in what I have to say.

To me, living a meaningful life is more important than anything else we may achieve or possess. My four points are to imagine, to contemplate, to visualize and to reflect. So, let’s get right to it.

STEP ONE Imagine all your possibilities. Living a life where you follow someone else’s dream cheapens the whole enterprise. You may have heard it a million times but it bears repeating again. Life is more amazing than you can plan for. As Alice Walker wrote, “Expect nothing, live frugally, on surprise.”

Don’t put off doing good or following a passion until you are rich and your children enter college. In my life, I have owned a computer consulting business and been a humorist and comedian. It is true that when I was 45 years old I debated whether to chase a career as a stand up comic or to pursue a PhD. To the great relief of my best friend, Tina Fey, I went the professor route and well, she went her own way. I still dream of being a back up singer in a girls group–think of the Supremes, the Shirelles, Destiny’s Child. Check this out—and sing along if you’d like—– ShooBop, ShooBop. I dream of being TechGirl, a superwoman in a cape who would arrive at the scene when your cell phone is dying and your computer seems to need an exorcism.

I have been a construction worker, an aide to the Governor, a child welfare worker. I worked at the state prison. I didn’t know that I was called to teach until I was in my mid-forties and didn’t understand my own sexuality until I was in late thirties. As I said before, one never knows.

But I have a strong creative spirit and I haven’t for a minute thought that I should drown these other interests so that I could be fully a professor. It doesn’t work that way. You are so much more than you know yourself to be at this age.

Of the life we may live, Marcel Proust wrote,

The only true voyage would be not to visit strange lands but to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is.

Unlike many of your advisors, I will urge you not to focus too soon or too narrowly. Be everything. Pursue much. Think right now of something you have been passionate about that you have let go studying in school or moving down a narrow road. Go down that other path and embrace it. It’s what makes you special. In his lovely poem, Langston Hughes wrote,

Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

 STEP TWO Contemplate your galaxy and your orbits. As a sociologist and by temperament, I see the multiple ways that we are connected to people across the planet and back through generations. I think of everything that makes us what and who we are. I think of the people in my personal orbit and how they have influenced me. The steady hand of my now deceased mother who, as proud as she was that I graduated from college, would pull me back into her orbit when she thought I was wandering too far from my working class roots. Or the influence of my oldest friend in the world, a Trappist monk, who reminds me of how distracted my life can be, how far I can range from being fully alive. I think of my friends who have rescued me from deep dark depressions and those whom I saved from other tragedies, an attempted suicide, an abusive husband. I think about the mothers in prison that I’ve met and the children in foster care I have encountered who have fashioned my view of justice and right and wrong more powerfully than have my education and religious training have. These people are all treasures in my life. Think carefully about whom you allow to serve as your guide, as your northern star. Put people in that galaxy who can make you a better, more authentic, more compassionate person who can be challenged to do better.

And think about the gravitational force you exert on others and how you make them better and more loving, more caring, more cared about—or just the reverse. Be always on the search for inspiration; for people and books and ideas that feed your curiosity and push you away from complacency and self-satisfaction.

STEP THREE Visualize the person you would like to be. Even at my mature age, I think about all the potentials we are, all the projects we could begin, all the interests we can pursue. I must say that in many ways, the days that you are living now can be the most challenging times in your lives. We say that these are the best times of your lives but people your age face so much uncertainty. Whom will I marry? What will be I do for a living? How will this all turn out? This uncertainly was true when we were young and it is certainly true now. It is simply a stage of life.

Live your life so that when you are a bit older you can say that I gave it my all, that I was never bored, that I lived my life as if it were a profound gift, that I made beautiful use of the talents, all of the heart, all of the love that had been bestowed upon me. At the end of the day, I can solve that big equation and see that I gave away much more than I took.

STEP FOUR Reflect upon our bounded fates. I am certain that you have heard of Lean In by Sheryl Sanberg of FaceBook. What she means by leaning in is to take up challenges, to put yourself forward, to show them what you’ve got, girl! I’ve been thinking that leaning in is not sufficient if we really want to make a difference, so I tell a short story here. In my mid-twenties, I accepted a position at the state prison where I was the only professional woman in a decidedly male and macho environment. Six months into the job, it was time for my performance review, which determined whether I would keep my job or be asked to leave. My boss said, “Sandra, you’re well liked here; people find you easy to work with; you are very pleasant person; you are an excellent writer.” My gosh, I thought, this is going well. But then he said, “The BEST thing about you is that you think JUST like a man.” Amazed I was to hear this. Actually, I was so young and so undeveloped in my feminist thinking that I took it as a compliment, as a testimony to my, I don’t know, clear thinking, my lack of drama, my ability to understand sports metaphors? I don’t know really. But I know he meant it as a good thing, something that distinguished me from the rest of the women he thought he knew. And while I accepted the complement and was promoted soon after our conversation, I did nothing at all to convince him that I was NOT the exception, that plenty of women thought as clearly as any man, were as smart, and as capable, and in some instances, doing their work in more exceptional ways, just to be considered average. I regret my actions that day—leaving that “compliment” on the table and not making the situation right.

So, I want to propose is that you lean together, not alone; that you don’t just make the mark for yourself, but strive, as you move along in your careers and lives, to advance the case for other women and for others that you believe don’t benefit from easy privilege, and are not part of the insider group. You are old enough and savvy enough to know what I am talking about here. You know in your heart that some of us just don’t get the breaks we deserve–some of us don’t have access to the golden rings. And if you don’t know that, if you don’t feel that, if you think everything that you have you have earned entirely on your own merit, if you feel no obligation to others who have less but deserve more, then we have failed you in your education and I am sorry about that. In this world, it is impossible for us not to make a difference, good or bad. Martin Luther King, Jr. said this beautifully, when he suggested that we are tied together in the single garment of destiny.

As members of this generation, you have been given opportunities that are unprecedented in our history. With so many possibilities and so much promise, we expect a great deal from you. We want you to be happy, to put your talents to good use, and to see the world for what it is, a place of great magic and mystery and fun and hard work. You will be blessed with many gifts and more importantly; you will face challenges that without doubt will reveal your deepest character. You cannot escape this life without ecstatic joy and unbearable pain.

For the seniors in our audience, you know that we love you, that we will miss you for everything you have contributed to Bryant, for lighting up our lives, but more importantly, for the spirits that you are.

May all of your paths shine brightly and may you light the way for others. Thank you very much for your kind attention.

Speech delivered at Bryant University, March 31, 2014.