What's in a name?

More than a year ago, the murders of nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., triggered debate about use of the Confederate flag. Eventually, that flag was removed from South Carolina’s Capitol. That flag, many argued, is a symbol of racism, not just Southern heritage.

Symbols evoke feeling and have great power. So, too, do names.

 

 

In “The Anti-Redskin” (The Atlantic, October), Ariel Sabar writes about the ongoing movement to eliminate the use of “Redskins” as a mascot for sports teams. While this movement has been going on for some time, it has heated up in the last couple of years in reference to Washington, D.C.’s NFL team, the Redskins.

Leading that move, writes Sabar, is Ray Halbritter, the leader of the Oneida Indian Nation. Drawing on his tribe’s wealth, Halbritter, a graduate of Harvard Law School and owner of a casino in upstate New York, has launched “Change the Mascot, a campaign of radio ads, polls, opposition research, academic studies, YouTube videos, Twitter hashtags and media interviews.”

Since the late 1960s, Native American activists have been saying that the Redskins’ name is a slur, but they got little attention. Now, powerful people are speaking out. Sabar lists them: “Marquee sports journalists such as Bob Costas said they would stop using the name, as did more than a dozen news outlets and the editorial board of … The Washington Post; civil-rights groups and sports figures came out against it; 50 U.S. senators signed a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell …; and the Patent and Trademark Office revoked six of the team’s registered trademarks, calling them ‘disparaging.’ ”

Why the difference in attention? Money. Halbritter’s wealth buys media access.

Sabar visited Halbritter and heard a story that helps explain his passion for this cause. In 1976, his aunt and uncle burned to death in their trailer as calls to the City of Oneida Fire Department went unanswered. That, writes Sabar, “was the crisis that sapped the last of Halbritter’s faith in outsiders.”

Two weeks after the fire, the Oneidas opened a bingo hall. Over the next few decades, the tribe diversified into other businesses, including video production, marina management, journalism and sausage making. “Oneida Nation Enterprises, the commercial empire Halbritter founded and leads as CEO, is one of the largest employers in central New York,” Sabar writes.

In early 2013, Halbritter heard about high-school students in nearby Cooperstown, N.Y., pressing school officials to drop their team’s long-standing name, the Redskins. These were white kids in an overwhelmingly white town taking a stand. He offered Cooperstown $10,000 for new athletic uniforms. The school accepted and changed its name to the Hawkeyes.

Soon he took on the NFL team with Change the Mascot. He hired a Yale-trained psychologist to publicize peer-reviewed studies showing that American Indian caricatures lower young Indians’ sense of self-worth and possibility, which, Halbritter argues, “abets the cycles of poverty, alcoholism and suicide.”

Since 2013, at least a dozen schools around the United States have dropped the Redskins name, including Goshen (Ind.) Community Schools. (Halbritter considers the names Indians and Braves a lower priority because neither is “a dictionary-defined racial slur.”)

Other racial slurs have become taboo, but somehow “redskin” has not. At least not yet. Now that may be changing.

Halbritter thinks change will come, he told students at Harvard, “because a critical mass of Americans will no longer tolerate, patronize and cheer on bigotry.”

Let's hope so.

From 'protect and serve' to 'punish and profit'

The increasing number of cases of police officers shooting unarmed African Americans almost certainly reveals an inherent racism that afflicts U.S. society. But another, more economic factor may also contribute to these shootings.

Across the United States, police departments, like many other public-funded services, are increasingly short of money. As a result, cities look for more sources of revenue. One such source is arresting and fining people for petty offenses.

In “Collect and Serve” (Mother Jones, September/October), Jack Hitt points out that many of the victims of police shootings were apprehended for petty offenses. In April, police officer Michael Slager stopped Walter Scott for a busted taillight and then fatally shot him.

 

 

When the Justice Department released its report on Ferguson, Mo., in March, then-Attorney General Eric Holder referenced a woman in that town whose life sounded Walter Scott-like, writes Hitt. “She had received two parking tickets totaling $151. Her efforts to pay those fines fell so behind that she eventually paid out more than $500. At one point, she was jailed for nonpayment and—eight years later—still owes $541 in accrued fees.”

The judge largely responsible for extracting these fees from Ferguson’s poor, writes Hitt, was Ronald J. Brockmeyer, who “owed $172,646 in back taxes. … Even as he was jailing black ladies for parking tickets, Brockmeyer was allegedly erasing citations for white Ferguson residents who happened to be his friends.”

Is this just one person’s bad personal ethics, or is it part of a pattern? In 2010, the Ferguson police and courts generated $1.4 million for the city. This year, they expect to make $3.1 million.

And it’s not just Ferguson doing this. In Oklahoma, Robert Bates, a 73-year-old millionaire insurance broker with scant law enforcement background, was allowed to go out on patrol, “likely because he had donated lots of money and equipment to the local sheriff’s office,” writes Hitt. He killed an unarmed black suspect when he grabbed his gun instead of his Taser.

“Essentially, these small towns in urban areas have municipal infrastructure that can’t be supported by the tax base, and so they ticket everything in sight to keep the town functioning,” says William Maurer, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice.

Thus you get laws like these (in Pagedale, Mo.): You can’t have a hedge more than three feet high or a basketball hoop or a wading pool in front of your house. You can’t walk on the roadway. Pants may not be worn below the waist in public. Blinds must be neatly hung.

Why such laws? Maurer says that in 2010, Missouri passed a law that capped the amount of city revenue any agency could generate from traffic stops. Pagedale saw a 495 percent increase in nontraffic-related arrests.

Scott’s busted taillight is not even a crime in South Carolina. Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes. Michael Brown was walking in the street. Between 2011 and 2013, 95 percent of the perpetrators of this act were African American, writes Hitt, “meaning that ‘walking black’ is not a punch line. It is a crime.”

Police forces have become collection agencies for the municipal court. Jails have become debtors’ prisons. And who pays? We do.

Hitt quotes the director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program: “Having taxpayers foot a bill of $4,000 to incarcerate a man who owes the state $745 or a woman who owes a predatory lender $425 and removing them from the job force makes sense in no reasonable world.”

The mission of police departments have shifted from “protect and serve” to “punish and profit.” That’s just wrong.

A neglected period of history

Last Sunday, Sept. 13, Jeanne and I walked from our home in North Newton, Kan., over to the Bethel College campus to attend a showing of the documentary Slavery by Another Name, which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and had its national broadcast on PBS on Feb. 3, 2012. KIPCOR (Kansas Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution) sponsored the showing and the discussion that followed.

 

 

Slavery by Another Name is a powerful film, based on the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Blackmon. It challenges one of our country’s most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery ended with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. The documentary recounts how in the years following the Civil War, insidious new forms of forced labor emerged in the American South, keeping hundreds of thousands of African Americans in bondage, trapping them in a brutal system that would persist until the onset of World War II.

The film uses archival photographs and dramatic re-enactments to tell forgotten stories of both victims and perpetrators of this neoslavery and includes interviews with their descendants. It also features interviews with Blackmon and leading scholars of the period.

The film recounts how, since slavery was unconstitutional, local authorities in the American South arrested African Americans, often on trumped-up charges, and sent them to prison farms, where they served years in hard labor, to the profit of local businessmen. And when courageous people brought this practice of penury to the attention of the U.S. government, President Teddy Roosevelt looked the other way, not wanting to displease his wealthy supporters. After all, this penal servitude, unpaid labor, was good for business.

Only during World War II, when someone pointed out to President Franklin Roosevelt that this practice would provide the Japanese with propaganda, did the government act to end it. Still, its practice continued for some time.

Slavery by Another Name is hard to watch and elicits strong emotions. In a discussion after the film, Galyn Vesey, Ph.D., director of the Research on Black Wichita Project, asked people about their feelings, their thoughts and their own experiences.

In the audience were many people from Wichita, Kan., most of them African Americans, and what they had to say was as moving as the film. A pastor said that our nation is cursed because of its racism, which he defined as prejudice plus power. A woman pleaded for some kind of change in a society where her son is arrested by police and held in jail when he did nothing illegal. One man told of his experience as a veteran who was arrested at a gas station while simply sitting in the car while his friend pumped gas.

An eloquent man who said he will turn 83 in December recounted how talented blacks are leaving Kansas because jobs are closed to them. He said he has three daughters, all of whom have doctorates, as does he. Two are architects. One of them works at a firm in Atlanta that designed buildings for the 1996 Olympics and the Atlanta airport. Yet when Wichita decided to do a major expansion of its airport, she couldn’t even get an interview.

A white woman in the audience asked what many felt, What do we do? What will help?

A good question. One thing we can do is relearn our nation’s history, like this period that is ignored by most textbooks.

A tragic end to a giften singer

The British documentary Amy looks at the life and brief career of singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse. It shows the perils of celebrity and addiction, which in Winehouse’s case, led to her death by alcohol poisoning on July 23, 2011, at the age of 27.

 

 

Directed by Asif Kapadia, who also directed the fine documentary Senna, Amy uses raw footage taken by friends and family, such as a home movie of her at age 14 singing with her long-time friend Juliette Ashby at a birthday party, as well as that of her performances in clubs, at concerts or that of paparazzi dogging her on the street.

I’d heard of Winehouse and knew she was popular, but I had not listened to her music. My loss. The film offers many examples of her performances and superimposes the lyrics on the screen as she sings.

Her final recording was a duet single, “Body and Soul,” with Tony Bennett, who she called her idol. He later says on film that she would have been one of the great jazz singers, on par with Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald. High praise indeed.

Her voice, even her honest, heartfelt lyrics, seem mature beyond her years. We get to witness her rise to fame and her thoughts about her art.

In 2003, she said, “I don’t think I’ll be famous. I don’t think I could handle it.” She was half-right.

The film shows her rise and fall with poignant detail. By the end, any viewer will feel sadness not only at the loss of a great artist but at how badly a human being was treated.

Like many young artists, she was naïve about the music business and depended on others to guide her. Many of these were in the business to make money. And many of them did.

The person who had perhaps the most profound effect on Winehouse was her father, Mitch, who left his family when Amy was 9. He reappears once she becomes famous and soon latches on to her, seeking to profit from her success. Despite his abandoning her, Amy is emotionally linked to him and generally does what he wishes. At one point, it’s clear she needs to go into rehab from her addiction to heroin and cocaine, but he won’t sign the papers because “it’s up to her.” Another time, he shows up with a camera crew in St. Lucia, where she is taking a long vacation.

If the father is one villain in the story, another is her ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, an egotistical playboy who also plays on her popularity. Again, she is smitten with him, doing whatever he wants, including getting hooked on cocaine and heroin.

A third villain is a familiar one—the tabloid media. Winehouse, once she is popular, is constantly hounded by paparazzi, who wait outside her apartment to pounce on her whenever she emerges.

I don’t mean to imply that Winehouse has no responsibility for her choices or her actions. But the film unfolds this theme of the artist as a creature upon which others prey. There are many others who did care for her and helped her along in her career.

But in the end, this wasn’t enough. A wonderful artist came to a tragic end. In this powerful film, we get to see both the artistry and the tragedy.

How to address a 'jailhouse nation'

Perhaps most of us are familiar with the statistics: with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States holds roughly a quarter of its prisoners: more than 2.3 million people, including 1.6 million in state and federal prisons and more than 700,000 in local jails and immigration pens. Further damning stats: the U.S. incarceration rate has risen sevenfold since the 1970s and is now five times Britain’s, nine times Germany’s and 14 times Japan’s. At any time, one in 35 American adults is in prison, on parole or on probation. One-third of African-American men can expect to be locked up at some point, and one in nine black children has a parent behind bars.

We are, according to The Economist (June 20-26), a “jailhouse nation.” While many bewail this situation, this article asks how to make America’s penal system less punitive and more effective.

 

 

The first step is understanding the extent of the problem and clarifying what it does or does not mean. Some like to say that the decline in America’s crime rate in the last several decades is due to the increase in incarceration.

While it may be true that “in the 1980s expanding prisons … did help slow the rise of crime by taking thugs off the street,” the article says, “mass incarceration has long since become counter-productive.”

For example, the article points out, the number of prisoners over the age of 50 has more than tripled since 1994. “Many of these people are no longer dangerous, but locking up the elderly—and treating their ailments—costs taxpayers a fortune, typically $68,000 per inmate each year.” In addition, the longer prisoners are inside, the harder it is for them to reintegrate into society.

Prison has had a huge effect on working-class families, especially black ones. “Among African Americans aged 25-54, there are only 83 free men for every 100 women,” the article says. “Men behind bars cannot support their offspring, and when they are released, many states make it preposterously hard for them to find jobs.”

In my volunteer work with people in poverty, I’ve seen that having a felony on one’s record makes it almost impossible to get a job. Employers won’t even consider a person’s application, no matter what the circumstances of the crime or that they have served time for it.

So what does this article recommend?

1. End the war on drugs. In fact, the drug war is ebbing: in 1997, drug offenders were 27 percent of all prisoners; now they are around 20 percent.

2. Amend or repeal rules that prevent judges from judging each case on its merits. State and federal “mandatory minimum” and “three strikes” rules compel courts to lock up even relatively minor repeat offenders for most of their lives.

3. Reduce the prison population. “There are roughly 165,000 murderers and 160,000 rapists in U.S. prisons. If America released every single prisoner who has not been convicted of killing or raping someone, its incarceration rate would still be higher than Germany’s.” But it would be a start.

4. Don’t lock up people for so long. Some 49,000 Americans are serving life without the possibility of ever being released. (In England and Wales the number is 55.) “A 50-year sentence does not deter five times as much as a 10-year sentence (though it does cost over five times as much).” Money wasted on long sentences is not available to spend on catching criminals in the first place, which is a more effective deterrent.

There are reforms happening, but more is needed. The article concludes: “There is no single fix for America’s prisons, but there are 2.3 million reasons to try.” We all can add our voice to needed reform.

The benefits of reading literary fiction

As an avid reader, I often take for granted the importance of reading and think, naively, that others do as well. Then I come across statistics such as these (from the Statistic Brain Research Institute):

• 46 percent of U.S. adults can’t understand the labels on their prescriptions;

• 50 percent of U.S. adults are unable to read an eighth-grade-level book;

• 33 percent of U.S. high school graduates will never read a book after high school;

• 42 percent of college students will never read a book after they graduate.

My disappointment deepens when I read of studies showing that a person’s ability to be empathetic increases through reading.

Is this connected to the increasingly vitrolic and mean comments we read online? Do these voices showing hatred, seeing the world in black-and-white terms and failing to allow for the complexity of other human beings reflect the dearth of reading?

In her article “Reading as a Form of Therapy” (newyorker.com), Ceridwen Dovey refers to a study in 2013 in Science that found that “reading literary fiction (rather than popular fiction or literary nonfiction) improved participants’ results on tests that measured social perception and empathy, which are crucial to ‘theory of mind’: the ability to guess with accuracy what another human being might be thinking or feeling, a skill humans only start to develop around the age of 4.”

But what is literary fiction? Some would say it’s elitist, snobbish, hard to understand, an arbitrary label. Wikipedia defines it as “works that offer deliberate social commentary, political criticism, or focus on the individual to explore some part of the human condition.” I would add that it generally presents characters that are complex, not one-dimensional or predictable.

Dovey refers to Keith Oatley, a novelist and emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, who has for many years run a research group interested in the psychology of fiction. He says: “We have started to show how identification with fictional characters occurs, how literary art can improve social abilities, how it can move us emotionally, and can prompt changes of selfhood.”

Dovey writes about her experience with a bibliotherapist named Ella Berthoud, who asked her about her reading habits. After several sessions, conducted via email, Berthoud recommended a list of books for Dovey to read.

She worked her way through the books over the next couple of years and gained some insights. “In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks,” Dovey writes. “Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself.”

Dovey calls bibliotherapy a “broad term for the ancient practice of encouraging reading for therapeutic effect.” She traces the first use of the term to a 1916 article in The Atlantic Monthly, “A Literary Clinic.” The author refers to an early bibliotherapist who says: “You must read more novels. Not pleasant stories that make you forget yourself. They must be searching, drastic, stinging, relentless novels.”

Bibliotherapy is not a panacea, and not every reader is necessarily empathetic. Yet regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than nonreaders.

 

Jeanette Winterson has written that fiction and poetry heal "the rupture reality makes on the imagination." It's worth a try.

Brian Wilson, troubled genius

Love and Mercy, the new bio pic about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, is a searing portrait of a musical genius who suffered from an abusive father, mental illness and an abusive psychotherapist.

 

 

The film, directed by Bill Pohlad, takes an interesting and effective approach, using two actors to portray Wilson. Paul Dano plays the young Wilson, of the 1960s, while John Cusack plays Wilson in the 1980s, after he came under the care and guardianship of Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti). The film’s narrative moves back and forth between the younger and older Wilson, which helps with the pacing of the story, a key element when showing a character’s inner life as much as their outer.

After a panic attack, Wilson withdraws from touring with the popular Beach Boys—made up of his brothers Dennis and Carl, their cousin Mike Love and their friend Al Jardine—and decides to devote his energy to making “the greatest album ever made.”

The film is most alive when showing the making of Pet Sounds, which indeed came to be seen as one of the greatest albums ever made. Wilson’s genius, his detailed attention to combining the sounds of various instruments—many not used in a pop song recording—and the harmonies of the Beach Boys, is on display. We learn of the competition they felt with the Beatles after the release of Revolver, and the Beatles, inspired by Pet Sounds, later produced Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which many consider the greatest album ever made.

While under the care of Dr. Landy, Wilson meets Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), who sells him a Cadillac. They begin dating, but are rarely alone, since Landy and his assistants accompany Wilson wherever he goes. While the controlling, abusive Landy character seems outlandish at times, he was apparently every bit as bad or worse.

Dano and Cusack are excellent in their portrayals, with Dano carrying more of the screen time, while Cusack’s role is more subtle.

The film effectively shows the growing torment Wilson experiences as he hears voices in his head and experiences anxiety. But some of these scenes go on too long and drag, hindering the film’s pacing.

Love and Mercy (the title comes from a 1988 song by Wilson) is a powerful exploration of one man’s descent into mental illness and his emergence into a measure of health. It’s an enjoyable depiction of the creation of a great piece of music. And it shows the power of love and mercy to rescue a person from those wanting to control him.

And for those who love The Beach Boys’ music, there’s plenty of that as well.