Faith, Family, and Football

Ask any former high school football player to reflect on his playing days and you’ll undoubtedly notice a certain sparkle in his eye. He’ll crack a smile, look off into the distance, and wave his hands as if he were fending of blockers or stiff-arming a potential tackler.

But sometimes high school football means more to a community than just a game.

It may sound trite, but in Parkersburg, Iowa—a deeply religious community in America’s heartland—high school football is an institution. Each Friday night is a community event. Football is the source of community identity. Football is a community lifeline. Indeed, the Aplington-Parkersburg Falcons have helped unite the sleepy Iowa town after two devastating tragedies. First, in 2008, tornadoes and floods ravished the community, decimating businesses and homes. Buildings could be rebuilt, but nothing shook the foundations of Parkersburg more than the destruction of the Aplington-Parkersburg High School football stadium.

The community rallied together, ultimately placing a priority on rebuilding the football stadium rather than their own homes. You see, a return to normalcy in Parkersburg was defined more by their Friday night community routine than any other aspect of their lives. As one parent eloquently put it, “They might not have their home or their car or their X-Box or any clothes, but they still have each other. They still have football.”

A second tragedy beset the community a mere two months ago: Falcons head coach Ed Thomas was murdered by a former player in the high school weight room. After 35 years of coaching, Thomas was as much a Parkersburg institution as high school football itself. But the team—and the community—pulled through. ESPN ran a special on the tragedy, showing footage from Thomas’ emotionally charged funeral. In one of the most poignant gestures I’ve ever seen, countless Iowa high school football teams, all dressed in their respective team jerseys, lined the road as the funeral procession drove to the cemetery.

Last Friday, the Falcons took the field against archrival Dike-New Hartford for the first time since their coach’s murder. ESPN carried the game nationally, and I tuned in. The play-by-play commentators discussed both the tornado and the murder, noting Parkersburg’s unique resilience. Reese Davis mentioned that university researchers have recently descended upon the community, studying how Parkersburg was able to rebound from adversity so quickly and so successfully. Herm Edwards replied that the answer was simple: “Faith, family, and football.”

But the scene at Thomas’ funeral procession, with hundreds of local football players paying the ultimate respect to a coach they never knew personally, points to a larger phenomenon. What sets Parkersburg apart from other communities isn’t so much their profound religiosity; rather, it’s strong community cohesion and extraordinarily high levels of collective efficacy that distinguishes Parkersburg from comparable communities. Unlike other communities, local residents here are more engaged, more willing to help their neighbors out in times of need. Political scientist Robert Putnam has made a career analyzing this social process, studying how civic engagement affords social capital, which in turn can be leveraged for political power and other resources. Faith may be important, sure. But it’s strong social organization and a collective identity—defined by the local football team—that makes Parkersburg so unique, and so resilient.

When I played high school football, I distinctly remember gazing up into the stands, thinking, Where are all these people were coming from? I mean, they couldn’t all be parents cheering for their sons, or former gridiron giants reflecting on their glory days. In fact, the majority of fans were local community members, old and young, coming together each Friday night to collectively embrace the local team.

I never really grasped what prompted them to put their lives on hold and come watch us play week after week. Now I do.

Racial Inequality and the Rhetoric of Responsibility

Last Spring, Brown University economist Glenn Loury presented at Harvard sociology’s Workshop on Race and Black Youth Culture. He titled his talk “Culture, Causation and Confusion: Why Bill Cosby is Wasting His Time,” engaging with the pervasive “rhetoric of responsibility” frequently applied to blacks in the United States. As Loury argued, our public discourse is saturated with demands on the so-called black community to police its own ranks. This rhetoric of “black communal responsibility” suggests that the solutions to racial inequality are cultural, and the ill-defined “black community” should therefore bear the burden of “fixing” its collective deficiencies.

The rhetoric of black communal responsibility is a common response to discussions of racial inequality, and black folks seem to be hearing it from both sides. From within, you have Bill Cosby, John McWhorter and even President Obama stressing the role of black parents in the cultivation and education of black children. From the outside, you have a slew of white conservatives, wide-eyed and incredulous, wondering why the black community just can’t lift itself out of disadvantage.

The problem, as Loury astutely pointed out, is that categories such as “black community,” “black culture,” and “black leaders” are political constructs void of intellectual definitions. So-called “culture talk” imputes a sense of groupness where no such political collectivity exists. African-Americans, as a race, have no institutional structures to police themselves and bring about the kind of solutions culture critics (like Cosby) demand. They don’t hold conferences or summits—at least, none that all blacks are required to attend by virtue of their racial identity. There aren’t any meeting minutes we can rifle through to make sure they are working to “fix” their collective culture. This notion of an aggregate “black community” was invented ex post facto with a distinctly political motive: impute agency on a racial category where none exists, and wipe our hands clean of any societal responsibility for inequality.

That’s not to say that racial groups don’t share certain histories, privileges, or disadvantages by virtue of their socially constructed racial identity. Moreover, many racial and ethnic groups often share certain traditions, rituals, and affinities. As a Jew, I frequently refer to myself as a “member of the tribe,” implying both a shared allegiance and shared history with my fellow Tribesmen. Such is the general case for other races and ethnicities in the U.S., African-Americans included.

But that doesn’t mean they can be expected to act like a civic collectivity or a civic organization and, by extension, engage in civic action. Who elected Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson to be the spokesmen for the so-called black community? I don’t seem to recall a campaign or election for these self-appointed leaders. Yet the “black culture” rhetoric, purported so frequently in public discourse, assumes their civic appointment. The ability of blacks to act as a distinct group is taken for granted—an assumption of their collective agency. But a racial category is not a group with civic powers. Nor is it a collective body with a unified political or cultural agenda. As University of Chicago sociologist Mario Small has argued on countless occasions, there are multiple black communities and multiple black cultures.

The rhetoric of black communal responsibility imputes collective agency where none exists, assuming group-level cultural deficiencies while ignoring the society-level creation and maintenance of racial inequality. The logic is problematic and condescending at best, dangerous and incendiary at worst. It at once obscures the tremendous diversity among African-Americans and distracts our attention away from the actual causes of inequality. Whatever “the black community” is, we can’t exactly depend on “it” to solve, or do, anything without the institutional means to solve, or do, anything. Assuming communal responsibility is dead-end rhetoric, promoting a self-fulfilling prophecy of disadvantage. It serves a political purpose, but does little to advance our intellectual understanding of inequality.

Individual communities can certainly make important contributions toward greater social equality. But you just can’t expect an artificially constructed group, based on an arbitrarily constructed racial category, to solve inequality at the national level by itself. You can’t expect action where no institutional ability to act exists.

Monday's Musings: New Name, New Look But Same Old Neighborhood, Same Old Politics

I am not one much for looking down on new initiatives that aim to help others. In fact, it is usually quite the opposite, especially when it comes to education initiatives (one of my areas of academic interest). On Sunday, Kathleen McGrory wrote about the changes to Edison Senior High School in Miami in her article “Miami Edison Senior High Gets New Name, New Look.” A little background as to why these changes are so important and worthy of attention. Edison Senior High (aka Haiti High) is a school in one of Miami’s most economically disadvantaged areas, Liberty City, is predominately Haitian (the area is generally called Little Haiti), has made headlines for its deplorable performance on state exams (the FCAT—a grade of F in 7 of its 8 last performances) and tensions between students and staff recently culminated (or rather degraded into) in a riot.

McGrory reports that the new initiatives are aimed at adding that spark, providing that incentive, to get students to take education seriously. To use her words, “the challenge [is to] take one of the state’s lowest-performing schools and transform it into a place the county’s best students are clamoring to attend.” She is right to call such an ambitious goal a challenge. It is herculean task for even the most ambitious of us all. I applaud Miami-Dade County Public School officials for embarking upon such an arduous journey; they are surely to be commended.

One of the key changes to the school that may prove to be its more attractive and efficacious features, to students and teachers alike, is the internal restructuring of the curriculum, broadly defined. More specifically, Edison will now be structured like a university with four colleges within it where students get to choose the college that best fits the academic and extracurricular activities. I believe that this is important because it at once empowers students through their ability to choose and also matching teachers with students actually interested in the material being taught. The former should not be taken lightly; having control over one’s life, in this case, one aspect of one’s life, is empowering. The latter deserves equal credit as having engaged teachers with equally engaged teachers is something special.

However, as the old adage goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Again, I am not arguing against the program; I am simply being and arguing for others to be cautious of accepting such new initiatives blindly for in our zeal for progressive and promising projects, we can become shortsighted. The reason I go along this cautionary road specifically in the case of Edison and its changes is best explained using a car metaphor (bare with me). The oil is the lifeblood of the car; without it, you are not going far. The dirtier the oil, the worse the car runs until it finally breaks down. So far so good. Well, to me, the kids are the oil. The school, the car—literally and figuratively the engine of social (im)mobility. If the students only interacted with the school things would run smoothly (or at least smoother than they do now). The problem is that the oil—these students—must first run through the muck, the dirt, the filth that is the remains of Liberty City, a part of Miami that is poor, hostage to criminal activity, and still recovering from race riots of generations past. It goes without saying that this areas is also as political disenfranchised as it is economically. I am not making an argument against the individuals who attend Edison or live in this area. What I am saying in connecting the students, school, and community has been posited by many immigration and race scholars like Harvard Sociologist Mary Waters and Princeton Sociologist Alejandro Portes: the immediate location of these immigrant and native communities matter with respect to the students’ well-being and how they come to formulate their identities and their connection (or lack thereof) to schooling and mainstream routes to upward mobility.

Portes with his colleague Min Zhou argue that segmented assimilation occurs when immigrants are blocked from upward mobility by different barriers, whether they be political, language, social, cultural, or any combination of the above. In response to such barriers, subsequent generations of immigrants (the second generation) begin to identify with different subcultures—in the case of the Haitian population in Miami, poor, inner-city blacks who have experienced the effects of both interpersonal and structural racism. This is where I find such an initiative as an amazing step forward but one with the possibility to do more harm than good because it places all its resources in the school to the neglect of the community. The problem is that is that if this program does not succeed with amazing results, then cultural arguments will be everyone’s rationale for why things didn’t work: these people, the individuals and their cultural patterns at writ large, are somehow defective. The comment box for the article already presents itself as evidence for such a prediction. However, such attacks against the group would never take factors like the deleterious effects of residential segregation, the cumulative disadvantages of living in concentrated poverty, the racial politics of Miami with respect to its Cuban, Haitian, Black, and White citizenry, and the like into consideration.

The new name—Edison EduPlex—new look—paint job, planting trees, the works—and new “structure”—transforming the internal running of the school to mimic a university with four colleges within it—addresses structural problems of the school. However, by effectively placing the school in the spotlight and key component of the reform efforts to the detriment of a more critical assessment of the antithetical role the community can play when attempting to create initiatives of this kind, we may find ourselves with the same problem once the attraction of the newness wears off. Is this a recipe for change or one of another cycling of resources with mixed and inconclusive results?

Sporadic Anger is Not Political Insurgency

The most recent spats over healthcare (or “Obamacare,” depending on your political persuasion) have centered on the “American-ness” of the angered, predominantly middle-aged white folks throwing fits at town hall meetings across the country. Republican commentators are lauding their civic engagement, while Democratic leaders are deriding their uncivil outbursts. The public debate has recently reached the absurd, with each side jockeying for sole control of the ever-effective “Nazi” insult. Apparently, somebody is Hitler incarnate—we just don’t know if it’s President Obama or Rush Limbaugh.

The ensuing public discussion underscores the point I made last Friday: that the GOP’s “anti-community organizing” rhetoric is antithetical to actual political mobilization. I’ve watched the Youtube videos, and it’s almost pathetic to see potential political activists relegated to mere rabble-rousers. With just a skeleton of an organizational structure, these folks could really make a substantial difference in American political culture, shifting us away from the dead-end debate over their patriotism and instead focusing the national discussion on their concerns and misgivings.

Of course, if that were the focus of the debate, their worries might be assuaged with the logic of Obama’s healthcare plan. Or maybe not. Either way, the current state of affairs is producing roadblocks from all angles: from the outside, the visible anger at these town halls is framing the national discussion on emotions rather than substance, while lack of organization is impeding the “protestors” efforts from the inside.

Sean Hannity has called their actions “as American as apple pie." Michelle Malkin has lauded their “counter insurgency.” Other conservative commentators graciously refer to them as “demonstrators.” Real Americans realizing their democratic duty and standing up for what they believe in. A group of modern-day Paul Reveres, they claim.

As persuasive as these pundits are, I can’t say I’m convinced. Without organization, these outbursts are ephemeral. Organization aids sustainability, and there really isn’t a centralized effort to harness their collective anger. Our failure to discuss political organization is in large part due to our faulty understanding of past political action and protest. Many Americans still hold the historically inaccurate, romanticized vision of Rosa Parks as a courageous individual that was just too tired to give up her seat and move to the back of the bus—a single, individualized event that sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycotts. But Parks worked as a secretary at the NAACP’s Montgomery chapter for years before her famous act of civil disobedience. In fact, that single, courageous act actually took months of planning—and Parks wasn’t even the NAACP’s first choice to be their poster child for the bus boycotts. The original woman chosen by the NAACP—fifteen year-old Claudette Colvin—became pregnant a few months after she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, and the organization feared her pregnancy might delegitimize their cause as a result.

Effective political action occurs after lengthy planning sessions, prolonged mobilizing efforts, and strong leadership. Unfortunately for the Republicans, it doesn’t come through dispersed, decentralized angry outbursts.

Of course, political organizing may be the necessary action to enact change, whereas sporadic yelling and screaming at the town halls may be effective at thwarting change. And at the end of the day that’s what these folks want, after all. But let’s not confuse this for something it’s not. Civic engagement, sure. Political protests? Demonstrations? The seeds of a new social movement? Not by a long shot.

A Different Kind of Concentration Effect: Mental Health in the Juvenile Justice System

A friend from Amherst passed along a Solomon Moore's NYT article, "Mentally Ill Offenders Strain Juvenile System," and asked SSL to comment on it. The article speaks to the current state of mental health issues within the criminal justice systems. More specifically, the trend of courts to funnel juvenile delinquents who have documented mental health issues into the juvenile criminal justice system instead of hospitals or mental health facilities. In responding to the request, I will speak on the content of the article and the article itself.

First, this is some depressing material: “About two-thirds of the nation’s juvenile inmates—who numbered 92,854 in 2006, down from 107,000 in 1999—have at least one mental illness, according to surveys of youth prisons, and are more in need of therapy than punishment.” These numbers are surprising to me because, admittedly, I tend not to factor in mental illnesses like bipolar disorder when thinking about criminal activity. I think part of the reason why the two are decoupled in my mind is because I always considered (emphasis on the past tense here) certain mental disorders as “problems” of the rich (and white). I am revealing my own biases but when one thinks about how mental disorders, as opposed to physical or medical disorders like diabetes, hypertension, arthritis, and the like, are represented in popular media, the news, and even in schools, “illnesses” become stratified by race and class in the mind. To give one example, think back to when the character Kim from Moesha, says something like “Mama always said that the only thing black folks need is Jesus and Oprah.” I do not speak for all; I am simply relating the abstract image of diseases with their social groupings. Reading this article made me realize even more that such stereotypes, as stereotypes always are, obscure reality.

The fact that so many of the youth in the criminal justice system are suffering from mental illnesses is frightening. For if these documented number are this high, what are the projections for those actually suffering but have not received any form of documented help as of yet. However, what saddens me more than the staggering statistics is the slippery slope recent fiscal cutbacks have created for this population. In the article, Moore highlights the fact that since the incorporation of powerful “antipsychotic medications coincided with a national movement to close public mental hospitals” across the nation. What is worse now, given our “we so broke” phase of the recession, more and more youth who are being funneled into the criminal justice system instead of mental health facilities because mental health facilities (both at the community and state levels) are harder hit by budget cutbacks. Even parents have opted to send their children to get help in juvenile facilities because community based facilities are disappearing. In other words, instead of being in an environment with trained mental health professionals, juvenile offenders are instead in a farm environment: prison guards as trained herders, wardens as farm owners, and padded cells as one’s pen.

This “farm” metaphor leads to a different from of concentration effect. In the study of urban poverty, to channel Harvard Sociologist William Julius Wilson, concentration effect is the term used to capture the consequences of the historical social transformation of the inner city which resulted in the disproportionate concentration of the most disadvantaged segments of the urban black population, creating a social milieu significantly different from the environment that existed in all black communities several decades before. This current social milieu is one of rampant crime, high violence, and other social dislocation that plague inner city environments. The prison is yet another one of these institutionalized environments where the concentration of disadvantage leads to increased aberrant behavior.

For those who already suffer from mental disorders being treated like chattel and placed with others who are experiencing the “jail house effect” only places fuel on the fire. To put it simply, it compounds the problem further. It is not surprising that one hears accounts like “he’s been in 130 fights since he’s been with us” (though I think 130 may be an exaggerated number). Such new policy lines by judges, according to Moore, to argue that juvenile are better than mental health facilities ignores such a reality.

With respect to that article itself, I find it troubling that race and class are at once conflated and implicit. I find this problematic because nowhere in the article are we given demographic characteristics to access exactly who the juvenile delinquents are. Though it may not be point of the article, because we are left in the dark (literally and figuratively) with facts about the “who,” we also do not know if even in this disadvantaged population if everyone is placed on the same track into the jails and not mental health facilities. In other words, is there tracking even amongst those who are tracked?

However, the question becomes how do we know that the population is disadvantaged? The answer, which troubles me as well, is because of the offhand comments included in the article. Take for instance, including what the grandmother said about her troubled grandson and then the psychiatrist who Moore uses to close the article. We are left with the picture of abandoned children and helpless (or hopeless) parents.

“I’ve begged D.Y.S. to get him into a mental facility where they’re trained to deal with people like him,” said his grandmother, who asked not to be identified because of the stigma of having a grandson who is mentally ill. “I don’t think a lockup situation is where he should be, although I don’t think he should be on the street either.” (Grandmother)

“Often Daddy is nowhere to be found, Mommy might be in jail,” said Daniel Connor, a psychiatrist for the Connecticut juvenile corrections system. “The home phone is cut off. The parent speaks another language, so it’s often hard to figure out exactly what’s going on with each kid.” (Psychiatrist).

With its faults, I think Moore forces us to look at how the changing policies within the courts are dovetailing with the fiscal reality of communities, states, and the nation as a whole at the expense of those who are in need of help the most. For in this case, the help these young individuals need are beyond changes they can engender themselves.

The Reverse of Discrimination is "Not Discrimination"

I recently went on a road trip with my uncle, traveling from Boston to New York for my brother’s high school graduation. As we drove through western Massachusetts, our conversation eventually drifted to employment and the economy. In what would prove to be a fascinating discussion, my uncle began to recount his first job interview after college. He graduated from Northeastern University in the ‘70s—right around the time President Nixon institutionalized affirmative action and quotas served as the nation’s predominant employment policy. He had worked in Northeastern’s admissions office for a few years, so when a full-time position opened up at the University of Michigan’s admissions office, he made the 14 hour drive halfway across the country to interview for the job.

A funny thing happened during his interview, however. According to my uncle, his interviewer immediately apologized as he entered the room. ‘Look, I hate to say this,’ the interviewer said. ‘But there’s no way we’re going to be able to hire you. If you were a woman or black, I’d hire you on the spot. You are totally qualified, but we’ve got to fill our quotas.’ Naturally, my uncle was none too pleased, commenting plainly (but forcefully) that acts of “reverse discrimination” are unfair. I did my best to defend affirmative action policies, discussing their historical necessity, noting their negligible affect on white male employment, and even waxing philosophical about the entitlement associated with staking claim and ownership over falsely constructed “spots” in colleges or the workforce. It was all to no avail, though. Cliché as the phrase is, my uncle was “passed up” for the job, and there wasn’t much I could say.

We’d be naïve to trivialize my uncle’s experience or write it off as just another “reverse discrimination” fairytale. It happened. It’s a reality. The problem was not that this was an exaggeration; instead, it was that my uncle forgot about his lifetime of advantage as he harped on that one, single experience.

See, claiming reverse discrimination is a lot like recounting your golf score. It’s always the one or two bad rounds that leave the deepest, most painful impressions. You always remember the bogey on the 9th hole, but never the birdie on the 10th. Somehow, the abundance of good holes are taken for granted, while the one or two missteps are amplified and taken as indicative of the entire round. Sure, my uncle remembers getting passed up for the job with the University of Michigan—an event that (probably) happened the way he said it did. But, in the process of recounting this single experience, he forgot about a lifetime of job interviews in which he directly benefited from his whiteness or his gender. In all the jobs my uncle interviewed for, how many times were applicants immediately rejected for having “black” sounding names? How many women were turned away because employers didn’t think they could handle the stress of the job? How many times did my uncle’s employment prospects benefit from acts of statistical discrimination that weeded out potentially qualified minority applicants?

Still, many others that hide behind the “reverse discrimination” mantra often have few, if any, personal experiences to justify their outrage. But the golf analogy still fits. These folks are the ones that throw a fit over their buddy’s 10-stroke handicap. That’s not fair, they complain. But in their moral grandstanding, they forget all of their privileges that negate—and even surpass—their buddy’s handicap. These privileges may include the country club membership that afforded them hours of practice on the course, the childhood golf lessons their parents paid for, or the hand-me-down Callaways their father didn’t need anymore after he got his new set of clubs. Their buddy with the 10-stroke handicap was just allowed to join the country club recently, had parents that couldn’t afford to invest in clubs or other activities, and never inherited any valuable assets. In short, the two golfers didn’t begin the round on equal footing.

With some folks, claims of reverse discrimination are proxies for implicit assumptions of black or brown intellectual inferiority. The operative word here, however, is some. Other folks have had very real experiences with so-called “reverse discrimination”—it’s just that these isolated instances fill a disproportionate share of their memory. The real problem with the “reverse discrimination” debate (besides the logically incoherent label “reverse discrimination”—what is the reverse of discrimination anyway? Not discrimination?) is our inability to honestly discuss the issue. The question shouldn’t be whether or not this incident—or others like it—actually occurred. Instead, we need to ask ourselves, how often does this happen, and to what effect? Such acts rarely occur anymore, and the effect is almost always minor or marginal. And, of course, the folks that decry “reverse discrimination” have almost always benefited from other instances of privilege. They just tend to forget about them.

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