Albert Einstein made many contributions to modern science, but it’s the videos, bobblehead dolls and Halloween masks using his image that continue to generate millions of dollars long after his death.
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Einstein granddaughter wants a share
by Oliver Wang Allow me to reintroduce myself…[1] I’m Oliver Wang, full-time sociology professor , part-time journalist , all-the-time record junkie . I originally guest-blogged for TNC last summer and feel honored to be asked back, especially in the wake of last week’s all-star team. My daughter, Ella, turns six in a few weeks and she’s currently in kindergarten. As with most schools, major holidays are folded into the curriculum and MLK Day was no exception. Last week, the school librarian read Ella’s class a book on MLK Jr. and the Civil Rights movement; afterwards, she came home and explained what she learned, and I had to come to grips with the fact that my daughter now has become introduced to American race relations and identities. I’ve been dreading and postponing the day until I had to break this down for her. Now, I realized, “oops, someone did it for me.” Let me pause for a moment to point out some obvious ironies: my PhD is in Ethnic Studies, my college minor was in Asian American Studies and I was hired at Cal State Long Beach specifically to teach classes dealing with race/ethnicity and popular culture. My mentor/advisor, Michael Omi, literally co-wrote the book on contemporary American race theory . To boot, my wife writes on race and art and both sides of her family were interned during WWII . So yeah, I knew, eventually, this day would have to come. And believe me, I’m definitely not one of those folks arguing “we should all strive to be colorblind!” just because they don’t want to deal with the realities of racism. But it’s one thing to try to tackle race amongst adults vs. trying to explain it to a child, let alone my child. Consider: prior to last week, Ella’s perspective on race was more or less this: “my friends S___ and A___ are very tan” (they are African-American). Prior, Ella saw skin color, not as something immutable, let alone tied to an identity, but rather, just a physical feature. She, like her mother’s side of the family, tans easily and quite darkly (unlike my I-burn-under-light-bulbs melanin), so having “very tan” friends didn’t seem to make them fundamentally different from her. Frankly … I loved this quality to her world view—that peoples’ appearances weren’t intertwined with group identification—and that terms such as “black people” and “white people” wouldn’t have held much meaning for her. They do now, though: she knows that, “once upon a time, black people and white people couldn’t go the same schools” and that “white people had nicer drinking fountains than black people” and that “white people got to sit in the front of the bus and black people had to move to the back … until Martin Luther King.”[2] Of course, I think it’s important that she know this history. I think it’s absolutely crucial that, at some point, she understand how race works in America, not the least of which is because she’ll inevitably learn it the hard way (and I suppose it says a lot about how sheltered a life she’s had thus far that she hasn’t been confronted with it)[3]. Most importantly, I want to raise her with an investment in social justice and that means she’s going to have to intimately understand the history and function of race and racial inequality. I just hoped this would all come “later.” The truth is, I doubt my pedagogical skills in this realm. I hadn’t figured out how to explain to her what I break down to my college-age students all the time: that race is a biological fiction that attains reality because we, as a society, have made it real. I teach that there’s no inherent logic to race aside from our own propensity to create and sustain differences between people but nonetheless, that social reality has very real, pernicious and horrific consequences. Thus, we have to do this delicate balancing act between dealing with the realities of race whilst simultaneously denying its reality. I trust (hope?) my 18-21-year-olds “get this” but when it comes to trying to explain it to my child, I just didn’t feel confident that this paradox is something I could communicate and have her comprehend. At this point, I no longer have the choice to postpone; the moment (the first of many) is here.[4] And I hope I’m doing an “ok” job in explaining to her that the categories of “white people” and “black people” are ways in which we have unjustly treated people and that the categories shouldn’t matter…but do. As she gets older, I’m sure we’ll have more of these conversations and that she’ll learn to process all this better than I probably could have at her age. For now, I have to take a deep breath, try my best, hope for the best, and nod vigorously when she repeats the other thing she learned last week: “friendship isn’t based on color.” I’d really love to hear from other parents—including TNC—about their own approaches to teaching race to their kids) . Notes: [1] Along with LL’s “don’t call it a comeback this ranks as one of the most re-usable opening rap lines, ever. [2] At some later point, I’ll have to school her on the fact that the good reverend didn’t exactly accomplish any of this alone. I wonder how early I can get her reading I’ve Got the Light of Freedom . [3] This isn’t completely true. This past Halloween, after costume shopping and seeing a parade of Aryan-featured poster children modeling princess dresses and fireman uniforms, Ella told my wife, “blond hair is better than black.” We assume she came to this conclusion because she didn’t see anyone who vaguely resembled her reflected back to her on the costume packaging. Regardless, we were both horrified and tried to disabuse her of this notion. As I began reminding her, black is the color of (both) my true loves’ hair . And then Sesame Street came to our rescue too. [4] Just so I’m clear on this: I’m not at all upset that her school wanted to talk to students about the meaning of MLK Day. I could quibble with the fact that I’m sure they’ve elided the fact that, in Los Angeles especially, many white children and black children (to say nothing of brown and yellow children) still attend different schools. But that said, I appreciate that they’re willing to talk about Jim Crow to a bunch of 5 year olds rather than acting like our adult, elected leaders in brushing the uncomfortable parts of American history under the rug .
Continued here:
Teaching Race to (Your) Children
In city after city, the story has been the same. An extreme weather event hits, the city’s team has been overwhelmed, and the whole issue becomes a small arms firefight between the mayor and whoever else lines up on the ramparts. In February, it was snowmaggedon that left DC’s Adrian Fenty and Balitmore’s Stephanie Rawlings-Blake looking bad. This month, it’s New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg that’s come off looking inept. In 2009 and again this month , it was London’s mayor that looked unprepared. In February, Vincent Cannato, an American history professor at UMass-Boston, told ABC News: “The thing about snow, it is symbolic. It’s symbolic about other problems. It’s symbolic about the way people see the whole city functioning.” We assume that if only city government worked better, the hassles of the weather could be avoided. We blame The Man. There have been plenty of other extreme weather events that have caught cities flat-footed, too. There was the flooding of Fargo early this year, which the mayor there noted was ” uncharted territory ,” but also a ” wake-up call .” Then there was the more recent flooding in San Diego, which got the mayor lashed by a political opponent . And earlier this month, it was Minneapolis’ mayor pleading for the patience of the residents of his city when a snowstorm hit. That city’s transportation supervisor said, “I don’t remember since the Halloween blizzard [of 1991] when we didn’t get through our routes. It’s just overwhelming.” Which brings me to my point: While I’m sure weather emergencies can be handled better or worse, if the weather is crazy enough, the government-quality signal gets drowned out by the weather signal. Cities were built with certain tolerance levels in mind, certain climactic baselines, and if you go outside of them, everyone looks terrible because they’re pulling levers of power and control that are not commensurate with the task they need to fix. Let’s use the floodplain as a metaphor. People tend to build where a flood may happen every once in a long while, but not where a flood happens every couple of years. That just makes sense, and there’s a whole institutional framework that exists around making that happen. But what if the baseline changes? Suddenly the place that used to flood (or get deeply snowed in or run out of water) once every 50 years starts getting hit once every 10 years. It’s not that human beings couldn’t build a system that would allow them to live in that place, but that the system they need is not the one they have. And the system they’d need is also going to be a lot more expensive than they bargained for. The same goes for snow. If you’re a mayor, you could have X number of plows and plow operators and different kinds of anti-snow legions. You could pump money into making sure you had a truly resilient system that could beat any type of storm. Or you could fix the roads and keep up the sewers. Or you could raise taxes and do it all but cost yourself politically. Under those circumstances, most mayors have favored efficiency and lower taxes over resilience at the extreme ends of the weather spectrum. Why prepare for a day that may never come? Why plan for a once-a-decade event when you’ve got people in your ear about things that need fixing tomorrow (or yesterday). But that calculation might start flipping. Because what mayors need to do is restructure their cities, not engage in last-minute heroics a la Cory Booker . (Although let’s be honest, his use of Twitter was pretty awesome, politically and otherwise.) One of the most solid predictions of climate change is an increase in extreme weather events. In fact, such an increase has already been observed. And while you can’t link any individual event directly to greenhouse gas emissions, the trend exists. Here’s the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s response from their FAQ : Q: Are Extreme Events, Like Heat Waves, Droughts or Floods, Expected to Change as the Earth’s Climate Changes? A: Yes; the type, frequency and intensity of extreme events are expected to change as Earth’s climate changes, and these changes could occur even with relatively small mean climate changes. Changes in some types of extreme events have already been observed, for example, increases in the frequency and intensity of heat waves and heavy precipitation events. But all that is dry, technocratic talk. What you need to know is that your city — pretty much wherever it is — was built for a climate that it may no longer have. That’s going to mean tough commutes during the winter and spending more money on air conditioning in the summer. It’s going to mean that your city shuts down more often because some freaky thing happened that no one can remember happening in their lifetimes. It’s going to mean the power’s going to go out because the electric system in your area wasn’t designed to handle the stresses it will be put under. Cities will have to get less efficient and more resilient. Redundancies will have to be built into systems that previously seemed to work just fine. This is how climate change will cost us all money. Maybe more importantly, these kinds of storms can cost politicians elections, which might be the only thing that will start pushing them to make the hard, long-term decisions to adapt to a changing climate. And when the costs of those changes become apparent maybe climate legislation won’t seem like a strange, extraneous tax but like the necessary corrective that it is. Or maybe we’ll just stop carping about the overwhelmed mayor and all just get used to scenes like this:
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Cities and Resilience: The Year Climate Started Hurting Politicians
A mother who blogs about her son’s wish to dress like a girl for Halloween sparks a national discussion about gender issues.
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Well: When Boys Dress Like Girls for Halloween
In case any New Yorkers needed a last-minute reminder why not to vote for Carl Paladino: The Republican candidate for governor posed for photos on Halloween with someone in blackface. Paladino was photographed at Potter’s Field, a bar in South Buffalo….
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Carl Paladino’s Blackface Halloween
The fire service responded to 277 emergency calls across Northern Ireland on Halloween night.
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Firefighters called out 277 times
President Barack Obama welcomed area students and children of military families Sunday to celebrate Halloween at the White House.
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White House hosts Halloween party
Tube passengers are forced to walk through tunnels early on Sunday after a Halloween hat was thrown onto the track.
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‘Witch’s hat’ stalls Tube trains
Samhain – on the same day as Halloween – is extra special for druids this year after their beliefs were granted official status as a religion.
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Druids celebrate Samhain festival
Theatre Bizarre, an 11-year-old party and macabre neighborhood carnival that is part Ringling Brothers, part Dawn of the Dead, may lose its neighborhood site.
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Detroit Reins In an Annual Halloween Revelry
Some cities are choosing to move Halloween from a school night, Sunday, to Saturday or even to Monday.
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The Tricky Business of Halloween Sunday
On Thursday, Gawker published an anonymous account by a man who said he had a one-night stand with Delaware Senate candidate and sex-puritan Christine O’Donnell. He alleged no sex but said they got naked together on Halloween a few years ago. The story…
Cities and Resilience: The Year Climate Started Hurting Politicians
Wednesday, December 29th, 2010
