The Song and the Silence and Not Screwing This Up

I thought for a minute that I wouldn't write a single word of my own this time, because I pulled enough quotes from the book I read that it could be a post in itself. That's how I justify writing about all the stuff I write about anyway. I make my jokes and metaphors and airtight arguments, but it's all in service of the book I read, right? Like this is definitely not about me, because I mean haha like we need another white guy telling everyone what to think about race and sexism and domestic abuse. Really I'm like read this book.

Right? I definitely don't expend the vast majority of every post telling stories about me and explaining how much I get it and if you guys had only read the books I've read we'd agree about everything. And certainly, certainly, have I never just kind of shoehorned the book in at the end because the point I was trying to make was only tangentially related to it anyway.

Boosting the voices of women and people of color, that's what a good ally does. Not making it about him. Not wasting paragraph after paragraph justifying my existence in a world in which the majority of voices look just like me except usually with hair. O the eternal plight of the white man! To be told all his life that he is special by every TV show, school teacher, and video game but faced daily with his own mediocrity! Why does my blog not have more views, our heroic white man says. Is not my voice unique? Is it not noteworthy? Should I not be praised simply for existing?

Honestly I kind of just talked myself out of writing a blog ever again just then. Oof. This is really awkward. Is this journey of mine of constantly learning and hoping that what I'm learning is of value to someone, and especially hoping that someone will read the book I read, reach out to me and say, "Hey Howie. You exist and I exist and this book exists and isn't it nice to just say that out loud sometimes?" Answer: maybe? I don't know.

Here's what I do know: the more I read about the history of Blacks in the United State of America the more overwhelmed I get. It's really something, this society we've built on the backs of at least one entire race (after stealing it from another). And when they didn't work hard and fast enough we whipped and beat them. And when they fell in love we separated them. And when they had children and were instantly smitten with their babies and thought what love is this? I hardly knew it was possible we took their babies from their arms forever.

They thought about their babies, obviously, because that's what human beings do. But instead of imagining what phenomenal things they would accomplish and make them proud, instead they thought about them slaving in a field at 8 years old. Already knowing the sting of a whip and the fear of death.

I imagine a lot of people don't want to talk about this anymore. There's a history of that. Let's get to the book so I can talk about it. So. Because Yvette Johnson--author of The Song and the Silence--had an NFL football player for a dad, she grew up in a wealthy white neighborhood. Her friends were all White and they were the token Black family. Her dad played for the Chargers, so everyone loved him. Johnson's mom grew up dirt poor in Greenwood, MS, and was hyper aware of race, but Yvette consciously chose not to acknowledge it.

When she learned about the civil rights era at school, it was with a similar kind of distance that I did. Which is kind of an acknowledgment that the time before it was probably pretty bad, but also that things were OK now and it's probably not worth dwelling on it anymore. Remember Remember the Titans? But now there are lots of Black football players so yay!

When Yvette was ignored by the woman at the makeup counter who offered a makeover to every other woman who entered, she assumed it was because she wasn't dressed as nicely as the other women there. At this point she would sometimes spend $1,000 on a single outfit. So one day she dressed up just to prove her point.

I moved closer to the woman at the counter so I'd be ready to accept her offer when she made it. But she didn't offer me anything. Instead, she awkwardly adjusted her body so she could look past me and then motioned to another woman, "Free makeover." I wanted to believe the best. This was not about race. Somehow she just wasn't noticing that I was interested. 

I stood in front of her, smiled, and said, "Hi, I'd like a makeover."
Her persona of crisp excellence and warmth fell away in an instant. She let her shoulders sag, rolled her eyes, and said, "If I give you a makeover, you're going to have to buy something.

She got a makeover, bought a ton of makeup, and walked away proud. "My mom would've made that interaction about race. I refused to do so." She starts to blame her mom every time something comes up that makes her think that racism still exists. "I could be free from whatever ailed my mother and the rest of my family because I wasn't going to wear my race like a martyr's cloak. I was beyond race."

So that's the background. That's the status quo. And with good literature something is going to happen to Yvette that upsets that status quo and sets her on a path from which there is no return. That inciting event comes about when she talks to her grandmother while researching for a family history course in college. She learns about Booker Wright, her grandfather, a man who owned a restaurant during the day, and worked in a whites-only restaurant at night. Booker, it turns out, had a part in the civil rights movement himself, but a unique one.

That clip was part of a documentary called Mississippi: A Self Portrait, by Frank DeFellita. It aired only once, but that clip stuck with people. Because it was never re-broadcast, it disappeared and was only known by its reviews, the majority of which talked about this scene.

When Booker appeared in Frank's documentary, he set alight a fire of compassion in the souls of complete strangers throughout the nation. He didn't speak about voting rights or access to public spaces, as important as those issues were--instead he won them over with his vulnerability. He stood in front of a camera and revealed the deepest parts of himself as if he believed that if people could really see him, really understand what it felt like to be Black in his world, that it would arouse in them not just sorrow but indignation and a commitment to action as well.

Only after Johnson blogged about it did the clip come back to light. The filmmaker's son reached out to her and asked if she wanted to make a new documentary about her grandfather, which brought her back to the Mississippi Delta, specifically the town of Greenwood.

This is the most synopsis I've ever written for a blog post. I got carried away. It's such an interesting story. Johnson goes back and forth between her own life and her telling of Booker's. This might be a huge surprise to you, but it turns out that there are parallels.

Maybe if they'd been living in a different time, the Whites of Greenwood might have been able to better connect with the national conversation on race. Unfortunately the message Greenwood Whites received from this national fervor was not one of compassion for Blacks and concern for their civil rights. Instead, filtered through local leaders with segregationist agendas, the message impressed on many Whites living in the Delta was that it was once again time to fight. Just like in the war for Southern Independence lost less than a century before, outsiders from the North were once again trying to change the South. Only this time, it was hippies and communists who were coming into their towns to recklessly rip away and destroy the sense of magic and community they'd labored to create.

THAT SOUNDS SUPER FAMILIAR.

ALSO THIS

When describing the Blacks who were determined to integrate the Lefore Theater and the Whites who didn't want it integrated at all, Sara referred to them as two "groups who were trying to stir up trouble," making life difficult for the "decent respectable citizens" of Greenwood. 

Sara loved her family, wanted to protect it, and had dreams for her children. Like many others in her community, she seemed blind to the simple fact that Blacks had the same dream.

Sara Miller is a local woman who wrote a journal in 1990 for her family that Johnson quotes often. Her experience as a white woman in Greenwood tells the story of an idyllic, near perfect town of her childhood and a roiling, dangerous one during the civil rights movement.

"Every year," Sara Miller wrote in her memoir, [Fountain's] would put a large curtain over the side window until Thankgiving afternoon, when they opened it for everyone to see what the new toys were that year."

Her daughter, who decided to publish Miller's memoirs, added her own take:

"Greenwood and the Mississippi Delta, in the 1920s, was a harsh and brutal place for many of its inhabitants, white and black, but... for Sara, looking back from 1990 to her childhood, Greenwood was a magical town, set squarely in the center of the universe, and peopled by kind and quirky characters."

Let's go back to that first quote: in it she says that Blacks who wanted to go to a movie and the ones who used violence to stop them were both "groups who were trying to stir up trouble." This was a situation so volatile that when one white family decided they didn't care that the theater was not integrated, they'd watch a movie anyway, their house was shot at. I feel like I've heard talk like that somewhere recently. If only I could place it.

Greenwood, like many towns in the South, was a great place to live, if you were white. Mississippi southerners liked it that way. In DeFillita's documentary, and unnamed white man puts it this way:

"And this thing became a moral issue... Now this was quite a traumatic experience for us in the South, and I think it was for the rest of the nation, to be told all of a sudden that what you've been doing, what you've been believing in, the way you've been living all your life, and the way your parents lived before you and forebears, is not only wrong but immoral is quite a shock, and unfortunately it's easy to understand why the attitude of Mississippi to this new order of the day, this new change, was one of inflexibility and one of defiance."

For Blacks, Greenwood was a very different place. In Greenwood a 14-year-old boy named Emmett Till was visiting family. He was falsely accused of making lewd gestures and remarks to a white woman in a candy store. His mother had told him that in the South it was dangerous to be black. She said "to be very careful… to humble himself to the extent of getting down on his knees." But Till was from Chicago, and a teen, and visiting family. Maybe he didn't act as humble as the locals thought he should. We'll never know what set them off, but man.

The teenager was abducted at gunpoint from his great-uncle’s home on this day, Aug. 28, 60 years ago, by two white men who accused him of having whistled at a white woman in a grocery store. His body was found in the Tallahatchie River three days later. He had been brutally beaten and shot in the head. 

An all-white jury acquitted the defendants (the husband and brother-in-law of the woman who complained about Till), who later confessed to the killing in a raw, unremorseful interview with Look magazine. One said that they had intended only to beat the teen, but decided to kill him when he showed no fear — and refused to grovel. 

“Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless,” J.W. Milam, the woman’s brother-in-law, is quoted as saying. “I'm no bully; I never hurt a [n-----] in my life. I like [n-----s] — in their place — I know how to work 'em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, [n-----s] are gonna stay in their place.” - Time Magazine

Greenwood got so bad, Martin Luther King, Jr. sent a telegram to John F. Kennedy specifically to address the growing tension.

Source: jfklibrary.org

A man from Greenwood's local White Citizen's Council murdered a civil rights activist 100 miles south in Jackson.

Medgar Evers was getting out of his car and preparing to walk into his Jackson, Mississippi home. His wife and children were heading toward the front door to greet him when Byron De La Beckwith, a prominent member of the Greenwood community, shot Evers in the back in his driveway while his children were on their way out to greet him. 

The following year, De La Beckwith was tried twice for the murder of Medgar Evers, with both efforts ending in hung juries. Mississippi's White community continued to support him. His bond and legal defense were funded by the White Citizens' Council, the group that was determined to stop integration, and the former governor of Mississippi interrupted one of the trials to shake De La Beckwith's hand.

When Johnson returns to Greenwood in 2012, she finds it still almost completely segregated. As schools integrated, Whites fled to private schools, leaving the public schools unfunded and ignored. Blacks flocked to White businesses they'd always wanted to frequent, but Whites did not return the favor, leading to economic collapse of Black industry. As more and more horrible stories emerge, she starts to feel her mother's anger. "...there were times when I felt as if I was drowning," she says. "I didn't want to read anymore, I didn't want to see even one more photo of a Black person being beaten, but I couldn't stop."

Their lives were compounded by one trauma after another: the daily trauma of racial abuse, and the physical trauma of being beaten without cause. I stumbled upon an article about the long-term effects of trauma and how repeated emotionally traumatic events can influence an individual's biochemistry, causing not only psychological scars but also chemical changes that influence how someone interacts with their environment. These chemical changes can imprint themselves on genetic code, allowing the remnants of trauma to be passed down from generation to generation. 

My head was spinning.

The study she references could be this one, in which traumatic experiences altered the DNA of mice. Or it could be this one, in which 32 holocaust victims' DNA linked increased stress disorders to their children. The point is that even if racism was completely eliminated from everyday life (which it totally hasn't been), even then the effects would continue for multiple generations.

Creating new laws was only the beginning. Civil rights legislation couldn't keep one group from devaluing another; it couldn't stop them from maintaining distance and nurturing ideas that only served to deepen division. No law is complex enough to address the myriad, nuanced ways in which a group of people can be systematically held back, degraded, and quietly denied the right to a life of respect, safety, prosperity, and peace.

I hope I boosted Yvette Johnson's message a little. Sorry this post didn't have as much me in it. I'm just so sick of this. I'm sick of racists thinking that they are winning and feel brave enough to openly declare themselves. And I'm sick of presidents who say that the people who are fighting for equal rights and those who are using phrasing, symbology, and hand signals that were used by a political party that murdered 6 million people just because of their race are both to blame when a young woman and two police officers lose their lives.

We're all going to remember this time. It feels big. Will it be an annoyance? Will it make us uncomfortable when players who have experienced racism first hand for their whole life kneel during the national anthem? Do our children hear us complain and say, "Why don't they just play football like the good white people pay them to do?" Will we wring our hands, like the citizens of Greenwood, and say they are making life difficult for "the respectable citizens?" Will our grandkids say that we were products of our time and did the best we could? I bet they won't. We have way too much evidence that we should have known better. The memes alone will damn us.

Good night everybody. Let's not screw this up.

Lab Girl and When I Learned Way Too Much About Pumpkins

I think this blog is best when it's not dependent on the current news cycles. Sure, I've jumped in on the bandwagon of good good essays about whatever's on the news, but I'm never the guy with the best opinion put in just the right way. I think I'll leave that to everyone else. There's been some stuff in the news lately that is all cuckoo-bananas, and I've had a lot of opinions about them, but you've read all the stuff by now and I've got nothing new for you.

You already know how to feel about Charlottesville, Tina Fey, and Joss Whedon. If there was ever nuance in those discussions it's gone now. Already at this point there's the right answer and everything else is the wrong one, and that right answer depends mostly on what city you live in and what kind of mustard you use.

Besides, I've talked about most of this stuff in general anyway. For example: I'm afraid of totalitarian governments, and am aware that totalitarianism comes from the right and the left. In that second link I work through the idea of free speech. You can watch me literally do it, because I set out to make one point in that post and ended up talking myself around to the opposite side. And guys, I'm happy to leave the recent news to his family to sort out, though I get why it's being discussed. Honestly I haven't thought of Joss Whedon as a "feminist icon" for quite a while now, because I think if he were really as feminist as he says he is, he'd be giving more jobs to women.

For real, though. These posts take too long to be digested and forgotten as the news cycle moves on. This isn't my job. These are like pots that I lovingly create out of clay where the clay is the 26 letters of the Modern English alphabet, the wheel is an over-sized ergonomic keyboard, and the Patrick Swayze behind me, lovingly guiding my hands, is my local library: nuzzling me with its never-ending supply of free reading material that is my collective muse. I miss you, Patrick. Haunt me with your blog ideas once again. Occupy the Whoopi Golberg that is my library card and serves as an intermediary between me and the treasure trove that is your love/all those books. Dance with me, Whoopi.

I give these misshapen pots freely, like your amateur friend who wears a lot of scarves. I do it with the understanding that they may only be marginally useful, because they are somehow somewhere between an ashtray and a flower pot--yet useless as either--but I put my very soul into them. Much like how Thomas Kinkade puts a tiny bit of his DNA into the signatures he places on his "paintings of light." Where am I going to put these pots when I know he's going to ask about them when he comes to visit, you say. I'll never invite him over again. This gift is a curse and our friendship a sham.

I want these to be unlike Joss Whedon scripts, which is to say somewhat evergreen. I'm often dismayed when I look back at old posts that I'm proud of but are too dated because it's about the election or mongoose. Nobody wants to talk about that anymore. I want Howie's Book Club posts to be like Monty Python sketches: only appealing to nerds timeless. If this were my job, it would be one thing. A post makes money, it's no big deal if it disappears into obscurity when we move on to the next crisis; it paid my rent for the month. But when I'm just doing this to do it, it's a whole different scene.

Here at the HBC, we talk about big ideas. We talk about mashed potatoes here. We define flotsam and jetsam. We explore the psychology of drama kids. Metaphors, philosophy, a woman with the proportional strength of a spider. You know that quote attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt but who the heck knows if anyone really said anything? The one that says, "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." Well that's us here. We're not going to talk about celebrities here because we are bigger than that. We are going to talk instead about pumpkins.

What's a more modern American thing than taking a crop that is so ingrained in human history that pumpkin seeds were found dating back to 7,000 years ago, evidence of their being a staple for food and functionality, and turning it into a Minion. OK, you guys, this is good because it dovetails back to what we'll be talking about soon. That article I just linked is from The Atlantic, which I consider a reputable publication that has been around since 1857. But when I click on the link for how long ago pumpkins were discovered in Central America, this is the source.

So that's a Suwannee County Extension's newsletter reporting an elementary school tour of a pumpkin patch. Where do they get their information? Who knows? So I dig further. I find the reference to 7,000 years to 7,500 years ago when pumpkin seeds were used. So I go to Wikipedia. That entry reaffirms the 7,000 year number, but its citation is pumpkin-patch.com: "Everything you need to know about pumpkins for Halloween!" Also The Columbia Encyclopedia. Which is a dead link. Pumpkin Patch dot com might look only slightly less professional than Howie's Book Club dot com the website, but it's not inspiring confidence.

How far does this rabbit hole go? What is it that Big Pumpkin doesn't want us to know? Whatever it is, I was going to get to the bottom of it. Which I did, ten minutes later, when I found this textbook, which apparently costs $253 dollars but I could access enough of to find some kind of scholarly information regarding pumpkins. The number checks out, you guys. The part about the drying them out and making mats out of them goes, too. Kudos to the Suwannee County Extension, but in the future be a dear and save a guy some time and cite your sources. Turns out the rabbit hole goes approximately as deep as it takes to fit a few rabbits.

Anyway, this is part of my point. We'll get there. So back to pumpkins. Clearly, now that we know the historical record, entire civilizations have lived off of the humble and noble pumpkin. They make mats out of it or whatever. European settlers loved the things and made soups, hollowed them out and packed them with food and baked them. Basically every one of us can credit our very existence to one of our ancestors at some point staving off starvation with one of these heavy orange SOBs.

So Americans spend $100 million dollars a year hollowing them out, throwing all of the food part of them in the garbage, and then carving something ridiculous into them to display for one night before letting them rot long enough for a teenager to throw it from his or her car at my mailbox. Some of us might save some seeds and fry them so that our kids can eat one and say, "it's ok," and not eat anymore even though they asked us 1100 times to fry them because it's "part of Halloween."

If it took existing for thousands of years of cultivation for this to have been carved it will have been worth it

In my book, this means that we're doing pretty well as a species. Many of us are suffering, that is for sure, and many of us do not have the discretionary funds to throw at large gourds that serve no purpose other than to provide free advertisement for perpetually sold out Broadway shows. But enough of us are doing well enough that we'll take that life-sustaining Vitamin A, potassium, and fiber, wrap it up in soggy newspaper, and send it to the landfill. This is like if we took the thing that basically sustained almost half of an entire nation and shot it out of guns at stop signs. You know, for fun.

There's two points here. The first is that sometimes we do things just cause. That's what comes next after our basic needs are filled. Leisure/exploration. And as anyone who has slaved over a Jack-O-Lantern or painted figurines for a role-playing game or made costumes for Comic-Con can tell you, sometimes leisure is work. Sometimes you do something just because you want to find out if you can do it, and if you can learn something while you do. That's the second thing: sometimes we want to know the answer to something even if it has little to no bearing on our life.

I think this is why babies put so much stuff in their mouths. It's clearly not because they're hungry, because babies actually don't eat any food, choosing instead to spit it onto their chin and absorbing nutrition by mashing bananas between their fingers. Instead, they are learning. Babies are little scientists whose mouths are the equivalent of mass spectrometers. What's this made of, they say, and can I destroy it?

The amount of time that humans have been eating pumpkins isn't a question that has bearing on my life. In fact, I hadn't even thought about it until I looked up how much we spend as a nation on pumpkins. But once I saw that number, I thought, how did they come up with that? Because it's interesting. Also how does a little seed turn sunlight and soil nutrients into a giant orange ball that is so, so satisfying to throw out of a moving vehicle? These are important questions.

Like, in Lab Girl, which is the book I read, Hope Jahren is trying to figure out what hackberry seeds are made of. She's a paleobotanist, and hackberry seeds are often found in ancient sites. They are seeds so tough that they can survive centuries of harsh winters and pass through an animals gut unscathed, just waiting for the perfect conditions to germinate and sprout. Since they stick around so long, she guesses that there is data in these pits about conditions from ancient times.

So she uses an acid that dissolves peach pits. It works on some of the seed, which suggests part of it is made of the same stuff, which isn't a surprise. The surprise is the stone like structural lattice behind. Something that the living hackberry tree created. So she borrows some mass spectrometer time in the middle of the night when the creepy lab guy with no boundaries won't be there, and discovers that the lattice is the exact molecular structure as opal. Hackberry trees create rocks. That's nuts (haha). From here she learns how to tease out trace elements from the seeds to calculate climate conditions from ancient history.

That's pretty cool, I think. Like that matters to all of us, whether we believe it or not. But at the root of all of this is just plain old curiosity. That's kind of the thing about science and pumpkins. Sometimes you don't know what you're going to end up with when you start. It could be useful and worth putting on Instagram, or it could be trash that you quietly throw away in order to maintain your illusion of a perfect life. At one point Hope and her endlessly loyal lab partner Bill spend a week taking samples of sphagnum moss in Ireland, only to have them swept into a garbage can at airport security because they didn't have the permits. That's science, too.

Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life.

I'm not going to belabor the pumpkin thing. You get it. Really I picked pumpkins because Lab Girl is about plants and pumpkins are in the top 3 funniest plants there are and the other two are only funny because they are so phallic.

Plants are amazing, that's one thing we learn from this book. Their endless toil to turn sunlight into sugars, while constantly fighting drought, disease, and competition, is inspiring. Jahren draws lots of parallels between plants and humans. Even though she recognizes that in very fundamental ways we are very different, there are still life lessons to be learned. The chapters alternate between very accessible science and personal stories from her life.

Public and private organizations all over the world have studied the mechanics of sexism within science and have concluded that they are complex and multifactorial. In my own small experience, sexism has been something very simple: the cumulative weight of constantly being told that you can’t possibly be what you are.

There's that, too. The sexism in sciences. I don't know if you've heard about this, but it's still out there, I'm told.

I’m good at science because I’m not good at listening. I have been told that I am intelligent, and I have been told that I am simple-minded. I have been told that I am trying to do too much, and I have been told that what I have done amounts to very little. I have been told that I can’t do what I want to do because I am a woman, and I have been told that I have only been allowed to do what I have done because I am a woman. I have been told that I can have eternal life, and I have been told that I will burn myself out into an early death. I have been admonished for being too feminine and I have been distrusted for being too masculine. I have been warned that I am far too sensitive and I have been accused of being heartlessly callous. But I was told all of these things by people who can’t understand the present or see the future any better than I can. Such recurrent pronouncements have forced me to accept that because I am a female scientist, nobody knows what the hell I am, and it has given me the delicious freedom to make it up as I go along. I don’t take advice from my colleagues, and I try not to give it. When I am pressed, I resort to these two sentences: You shouldn’t take this job too seriously. Except for when you should.

I thought that part was pretty interesting, but it wasn't the whole thing. I thought there would be more of it. Jahren is unrelentingly determined, so he recognizes the bias, and then puts her head down and plows through it. For the most part it's really breezy and fun. Jahren has a knack for humor and an even more impressive knack for metaphor. But you guys it wouldn't be a Howie's Book Club approved book if it wasn't a bummer sometimes.

Here's the frustrating thing: Americans want to shoot potatoes out of guns and cut holes in pumpkins and shoot off firework shows that cost literally thousands of dollars in their front yards, but we do not want to spend money on science. We "like" Facebook pages called I Effing Love Science that are really just pictures of space, and yesterday we all gathered in public spaces and loved on an astronomical event that was perfectly predicted by scientists to the second, and yet we'll be damned if someone asks us for one more penny to study the world around us.

You may have heard that America doesn't have enough scientists and is in danger of "falling behind" (whatever that means) because of it. Tell this to an academic scientist and watch her laugh. For the last thirty years, the amount of the U.S. annual budget that goes to non-defense related research has been frozen. From a purely budgetary perspective, we don't have too few scientists, we've got far too many, and we keep graduating more each year. America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn't want to pay for it. Within environmental science in particular, we see the crippling effects that come from having been resource-hobbled for decades: degrading farmland, species extinction, progressive deforestation... The list goes on and on.

And this isn't Sarah Palin making fun of fruit fly research (though that has led to major advances in medical science). This is environmental science, and I hate to be the one to point this out to everyone, but the environment is where we live. It's not just where we go camping or trees in which hippies live to hug spotted owls or whatever. It's everything. Water, air, pumpkins. All of it. It's all the stuff. We happily study things that are built to kill other people. We should be studying the stuff that keeps us alive.

Working in the hospital teaches you that there are only two kinds of people in the world: the sick and the not sick. If you are not sick, shut up and help.

Those of us throwing pumpkins away are the not sick in this case. We're talking about the dang future here. If you can, shut up and help.

The potatoes grew bigger as carbon dioxide increased. This was not a surprise. We also saw that these big potatoes were less nutritious, much lower in protein content, no matter how much fertilizer we gave them. This was a bit of a surprise. It is also bad news, because the poorest and hungriest nations of the world rely on sweet potatoes for a significant amount of dietary protein. It looks as if the bigger potatoes of the future might feed more people while nourishing them less. I don’t have an answer for that one.

Border Child and Pride

Note: I usually write these posts a week in advance, but I think it would be strange to put up a post given recent news without addressing the deaths and injuries that resulted from the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. I wrote a post about this kind of thing a while ago that pretty much covers my thoughts on the subject, but I'm sure I'll write more about this in the future, since I ran out of ideas literally years ago.


I have two caveats before I begin this post. The first is that I was vaguely bothered while reading Border Child that the author isn't Mexican. Also I was bothered that I was bothered by this. The book is superbly written. The prose is spare and no words are wasted. But I couldn't shake the feeling that people should be very careful when writing stories about people whose voices are regularly silenced. I'll refer to a Q and A session with Saint Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, where she answered the following question:

Q: How would you suggest one should write of a culture which is alien without cliche or stereotype? I am male, 50 and white and would like to write about a young Bengali girl. The responsibility feels huge; do you think the task is insurmountable? 

A: I think the first question is: WHY do you want to write about a young Bengali girl? There are still wonderful stories to be told about 50-year-old white men. If it is feeling insurmountable, perhaps that's a sign.

I can't imagine that's the response he wanted. I think he probably wanted to be praised for using his elevated status as a white man to tell the story the right way. I know a guy like that. Then someone else speaks up:

Q: The advice given to the white male writer who wants to write about a Bengali girl is very short-sighted, in my opinion. It will only ensure that we have more books about middle aged white men and no books about disadvantaged Bengali girls. Is that what we want? 

A: It's unfortunate that you seem to assume that if a white middle-aged man doesn't write about a Bengali girl, then the story of Bengali girls will not be written. There are in fact many Bengalis who can write about Bengali girls - and it probably doesn't feel 'insurmountable' to them. And 'disadvantaged Bengali girl' is a very troubling way of framing an idea of a story. It already suggests that this character will be seen through the lenses of her 'disadvantage' alone. People are people. 'Disadvantaged people also have agency, and dream, and think, and desire. Sometimes how one frames a story determines whether or not we will see the fullness of a character.

I think about this exchange a lot. There's a lot to digest there. The idea that the only people who can tell stories are older white men is absurd, but an alternative didn't even occur to either the person who originally asked, or the other one who chides Adichie (which I feel like is something one does at one's own risk). I don't know a lot about publishing, but my assumption is that publishers deal with opportunity cost as much as every other business does. Every book published by a publisher means another book can't be published. For every book a white man publishes, a Bengali author with maybe a less recognizable name or fewer literary connections may not get the nod.

So that's not an insignificant thing. I think that makes intuitive sense to most of us. The other concept is more interesting, though. I have to chew on that one a little. When someone of privilege writes the story of someone they consider to be "disadvantaged," they're running the risk of writing poverty porn. Writers all want to elicit a response from readers, and making us feel sad and maybe a little guilty about how comfortable our lives are is a pretty easy one. The shame of it is that we forget about the beauty.

Later in this post I'm going to show you a video of Guatemalans who live in a garbage dump. That video is intended to raise money to bring food to those people. It seems like a pretty decent reason, and seeing the kids getting their care packages is genuinely heart-warming. But it's probably pretty important to point out that there is more to these people than where they live. If we're watching videos like that because it makes us feel something, it's worth analyzing that feeling. Because I read a lot about horrors, poverty, and oppression, I have to explore what drives that and if it's healthy.

"These people need their story told," I think, after watching a video about horrible living conditions. And I'm right, in this hypothetical situation. "And I'm the guy who should tell it," I say, blowing it. In fact, I'm not. I could go embed myself in one of their families, live among them for years, and still never know what they are going through. I'm there as a tourist, as some kind of anthropologist. Their lives are a curiosity to me. I can leave any time and everything I look at is going to be through the lens of someone who has something better to go home to, and some potentially lucrative end to my self-inflicted suffering. How much better would it be to hear the story from the viewpoint of a person who has lived there, whose grandma lived there, who was raised to believe that there is no other option?

I argue that it would be much better.

So that's the first thing. I can't say I ever got over it. But I still loved Border Child. The other caveat is that I lived in Mexico for two years as an LDS missionary. This gave me a unique experience that simply living in Mexico couldn't provide, but still it was just a tiny experience. I didn't live in tourist areas surrounded by white spring-breakers or ex-pats. I lived in tiny houses and apartments in Mexican neighborhoods. And I spent much of that time in Mexican people's homes. I saw what I would consider extreme poverty. I saw people who lived in dumps. I lived there long enough that I got used to it. I got to know some folks very well, and reading Border Child felt very real to me in that sense. There are moments where the author's camera lingers a little too long on the "disadvantaged" part, but the characters ring super true in their context and I felt value there.

So now you know where I'm coming from. I have slightly more knowledge about the subject than the average white person who grew up in a Utah suburb, but a tiny fraction of knowledge of someone who grew up in Oaxaca. Michel Stone ostensibly knows more than I do (maybe?), but still hasn't lived it. We'll take that with a grain of salt moving forward.

OK, now that I've written a whole post worth of preamble, let's get to the patented observations mixed with mildly annoying humor I'm known for.

First, watch this video:

Adam Ruins Everything is a TV show that is meant to be entertainment and often oversimplifies things, but the discussion about alpha wolves is pretty much right on. If you need further reading, read David Mech's peer-reviewed article here. Like it says in the video, Mech's book, The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species, has been for decades the main source of the myth of the alpha wolf. When the author himself rejects his previous writing, that should probably close the book (in this case literally) on the thing.

That's what science is: using the best available hypothesis until something that better explains the facts comes along. "But what if that science doesn't fit the worldview I already have?" you ask. Well, first of all I'm flattered that you are reading this, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, but I'm afraid that the answer is that your world view is probably wrong. Sorry about that. Also to the Provo guy (Brovo) who keeps calling guys who actually have girlfriends in spite of somehow also respecting women "betas," maybe hold off on the nomenclature until you've observed the same wolf pack for 13 years before typing up your Instagram diatribe.

The reason I bring this up is because while reading Border Child, I kept thinking about Breaking Bad. We all know Breaking Bad, right? It's where a total beta male regular guy with a steady job with benefits and a pretty amazing wife learns to be a real alpha by alienating his entire family and almost certainly directly causing the deaths of hundreds of drug addicts along with a handful of colorful underworld characters along the way. We're shown what a tough guy he becomes when he beats up teenagers in a mall.

The motivation here is that Walter (his name is Walter) gets diagnosed with lung cancer and I guess his teacher insurance doesn't give him good enough benefits to cover the very best doctors. Never mind that some quick research shows that White would have had access to BlueCross Blueshield, which has one of the highest ratings in the country, but OK, got it. We've got to get the chemistry teacher dealing the blue stuff. Further research tells me that Walter really wanted to make sure his family was taken care of if he were no longer unable to support them, which honestly dovetails better into my point anyway.

So forget the insurance part (except that apparently New Mexico teachers also have access to very cheap life insurance, forget all of it!), we all know what Walter's real Achilles heel is: pride. That's what makes this story your very typical Greek-style tragedy. The hero has a fatal flaw. Even in spite of multiple opportunities to have someone else help him financially, he stubbornly insists on doing it his own way. Then, when he has plenty of money, he keeps on going. At the end, we realize the truth: providing for his family was just what he told himself. He tells his wife, "I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really... I was alive."

I think most of us agree that Walter is the villain of the story. If the tale were told from Skyler's point of view, or even Jessie's, he would be an unmitigated trashcan fire, albeit one with a complicated and interesting back story. But because we see everything from his eyes, he's a tragic hero who we root for, even though for most of us there was a line somewhere where it was no longer possible. Even at the end, some folks stayed on Team Walt long enough and passionately enough that they sent death threats to the actress who played his wife, who, I feel I need to reiterate, is not really Skyler White.

Why? Oh, because he's a badass. Whee. Warning: very bad language ahead.

Here's another cinematic "hero" who is actually made of used kitty litter. This "are you man enough," "brass balls," "You see this watch," waffle makes me want to barf. And yet this hyper-masculinity "nonsense," as Ed Harris correctly calls it, is consistently touted as inspirational. This guy is acting like hard-selling properties to people and then manipulating them into not being able to get out of the sale when they are allowed to sit and think about it is real work. This is the kind of video Provo guys would quote when trying to whip up excitement about selling security systems to old people who don't know better at Vivint like it's some kind of noble pursuit if they weren't so afraid of swear words.

When I started Border Child, I thought I was getting into something similar. The story follows Hector and Lilia, a young couple in Oaxaca, Mexico. Their village is poor, with few opportunities, so Hector leaves his wife and baby at home to make the journey to the United States. He ends up in South Carolina where he gets a good job, and promises to bring Lilia and their baby girl, Alejandra, to meet him. Lilia's grandmother--who raised her-- dies, and Lilia, grieving and lonely, hires her own coyote to take her across the "linea." In the process, 2-year-old Alejandra is handed to a woman who promises to take her across and meet at an agreed upon location. Lilia arrives and Alejandra does not.

Years later, after being deported for stopping at a car accident to make sure their friend was OK and then being questioned by police, Hector and Lilia are trying to rebuild their lives. They have an adorable little boy and a little girl on the way, but they never stop searching for Alejandra. On the back of the book, it says "they receive an unexpected tip that might lead them to Alejandra, and both agree they must seize this chance, whatever the cost."

There's a point where it looks like we're going down the inevitable fictional path where Hector starts out doing small jobs, then illegal jobs, and we worry that when given bigger opportunities, he'll forget why he started in the first place, Walter White style. It's the kind of thing that might have made for an interesting, but infuriating book. You'd get that old "don't go into the basement," feeling from watching a scary movie, which is fun and thrilling but ultimately forgettable. You can't respect the character that runs down the stairs, knowing that there isn't an exit, instead of out of the door.

Hector is humble, though. Humble to the dirt. Humble in a way I remember a lot of Mexican men being. In his sphere he is quietly competent. If he hadn't been deported, he'd be foreman at his job in the US. If he hadn't left Mexico, he'd also be foreman and sit in the air-conditioned truck while the rest labored. He's kind and diligent and knows his value. He's forgiven his wife and loves her. Basically Hector rules. But he's also a little broken.

He prayed God would give him the ability to protect her from all the evil in this world. As a younger man, Hector's thoughts had only skirted the edge of contemplating evil. His youthful naivete and hunger to experience the world had kept such considerations at bay. Now he often considered the horrors happening every day everywhere, tragedies unfathomable to him as a younger man. He looked across the aisle where the girl and her brother seemed to slumber, somehow, in peace. He prayed for their safe crossing, and that their uncle was better equipped to protect them than Lilia had been at protecting Alejandra.

Various other characters come in and out of Hector and Lilia's life: there's the village midwife who calmly dispenses wisdom, and the priest, who learns of an orphanage where Alejandra may have stayed. It's in the city of Matamoros, where he learns there are hundreds of men, women, and children who live in the local landfill. Here's a real-life report:

The air along the canal and inside the dump is gritty with black soot, smoke and particles. The soil is dark grey and dusty. Clouds of flies, gulls, crows and grackles swarm around old and new piles of rotting garbage, sickening sour smells emanate from all sides.  When a fire burns, the eyes sting and it becomes more difficult to breathe. In this environment, some 150 men, women and children work daily to collect recyclable materials that they then sell – most frequently to a middleman elsewhere in the city.
 Many of the female workers wear makeup and jewelry, even though by the end of a shift, hands will be black and clothes completely stained. Some of the workers wear gloves; others sort trash with their bare hands. Frequently, evangelical missionaries visit the dump, bringing food and pamphlets to the workers. Ambulatory taco vendors visit the dump to sell food and soft drinks. There is no place to wash hands and no constructed lavatory or outhouse. Workers create staging areas where they gather to eat and bring the recyclables or food they’ve collected and where they park vehicles, if they have any, and rest in the meager shade. They sift through mountains of trash for glass, carton, plastic, metal, food and anything else that might be useful. The workers tie the collected goods together, binding them for transport with salvaged plastic bags, ropes and pallets. They pile their goods onto bicycle carts, in the beds of dilapidated trucks, in wheelbarrows and on their backs, hauling them precariously down the long road to town. 

The priest, knowing how poor his own village is, is nonetheless humbled by the circumstances he learns about just south of the Mexico-US border where crime is rampant and people live in landfills. We're presented with an extremely poor village where there are no opportunities, but at least it's not the dump town, right?

On his walk home he thanked God for the beauty around him, for the goats grazing on weeds in the cemetery, for a squealing piglet and the chickens he passed in the old widower's yard, for the bountiful sea and the fruits and vegetables available to him. His people were not wealthy by any standard, but this community could eat food they grew and caught and prepared. Only the poorest among them asked for handouts, and even then, the village took care of these people. He prayed for the children of the dump, and wondered how such a thing could be.

This isn't a new thing, by the way, or unique. As it is apparently my duty to alert readers to something terrible that is going on in other places on Earth, it turns out that living in landfills is a pretty common thing for people all over the world.



Anyway, that's bad, huh? That's probably not a way people should live. It's pretty scary that fictional Alejandra could be in that situation. It scares Hector quite a bit.

Even in his daydreams Hector had no ability to protect his family, and that secret knowledge haunted him, vexed him like a dull thorn wedged deep beneath a toenail, its silent infection seeping into his veins.

But remember what I said about Hector. Hector rules. He's going to get to the bottom of this, and for reals he's doing it for his family, because that's all he has. He lived in the United States, he had ice water in a cooler in his truck and could have cold water whenever he wants. He considers telling his coworkers in Oaxaca about this but doesn't think they'll believe him. He had a sweet little girl and a wife who wasn't always in mourning about her decision, and who he didn't sometimes blame in spite of himself. They were young and in love. Looking at his life now can sometimes make him want to fall apart. But he doesn't forget. There is a moment where he's promised riches, but also he sees a glimpse of the attendant horrors. He doesn't go in the basement.

Lilia is tough as crap, too. She goes through her own journey, even if most of it takes place in the same room, it's pretty harrowing and inspiring as well.

Guys, when I finished this book I just bawled and bawled. I loved these fake people because they felt like real people. Good job, white lady. And good job, white me. Let's all give ourselves a pat on the back for just getting it so hard.