JEB Stuart High School

            For the past several years, the Fairfax County School board has been enmeshed in a debate about what to do about the name of my alma mater: J.E.B. Stuart High School. General J.E.B. Stuart was a dashing cavalry officer who died in service of the Confederate army. Since the 1980s, when I attended, the high school has been one of the most ethnically diverse and stably racially integrated in the United States. Not only are there white and black students in significant numbers, but many students with family backgrounds in Asia and a majority from Latino heritage and origin. Photos suggest that the school continues also to have a significant Muslim population whose presence is not reflected in demographic data.

The arguments for dropping or retaining the school’s name are heated. Two of the most common reasons cited for keeping Stuart’s name on the school are that we cannot change history and the costs associated with the change.

It is true that we cannot change the past. But place, institutional, and personal names do change. Think about the name of the place where you live. Is the word for your city or neighborhood indigenous? The city where I work now does have an Ojibwe name that reflects the prevalence of Anishinaabemowin speakers in this area in the 19^th century. But would the earlier Woodland people who built Wisconsin’s effigy mounds have recognized “Milwaukee” as a meaningful name? The airport now named after Ronald Reagan replaced ones named for Herbert Hoover and the place named for George Washington. In the United States, women who marry and divorce routinely change their names, updating their identities to reflect changes in their personal histories. In all of these cases, people have chosen to update names, not to deny history but to reflect what is most meaningful to them in the present.

We do not have to be ruled by decisions made in the past. J.E.B. Stuart High School was named in 1959, as the “massive resistance” strategy came peaked in Virginia. Massive resistance was a political response to the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board decision ordering racial desegregation of public schools. Rather than comply, whites in Virginia shut down public schools. White children could attend private academies. Black families made the wrenching decision to send their children to other states in order to get their educations. The story was different in Northern Virginia, where the postwar population had boomed. In contrast to the rest of the state, the Fairfax County School Board opened new schools. But no one could mistake the insult to African Americans intended by choosing to name a school after a Confederate hero. Black students might get a public education at J.E.B. Stuart High School, but for years afterwards they also carried on their résumés the name of a man who died for the principle that states could decide whether their ancestors were property or were included in the fundamental American value of liberty. The choice of school name was probably also a thumb in the eye of thousands of white “carpetbaggers” who had come south to work in the booming postwar federal government.

The second reason given against the name change is the cost, which would allegedly eat up funds better spent counteracting cuts to important school programs. The Fairfax County School Board website lists $678,000 in projected costs associated with new signage, in-school branding, athletic and band uniforms, and logo-bearing items. This argument is more compelling but still not persuasive. As the site also notes, items such as uniforms normally wear out and are replaced on a regular basis, and other items fall under the purview of the work of the booster club. The difficulty is coming up with all that money at once rather than amortizing it over multiple budget years. Replacing signage is a one-time cost that could potentially be covered by engaging the community and alumni in fundraising. Further, development professionals know how to turn a crisis into a fundraising opportunity. The school district could take advantage of the heightened interest of alumni in this issue to send out an appeal for the funds needed for special education, parental support, and smaller class sizes to raise private money.

            The naming of local institutions like schools, parks, and streets reflects local values. It is up to the Fairfax County School board to decide what it values more right now: retaining a local heritage name that branded the school as one where black students were second-class citizens or finding a new, less divisive name that students and alumni can carry with pride and help them want to give back to the school for generations to come.

Dear Students from Iran

Dear students from Iran:

It appears that the time has come to say this: I love you.

Iran has been in my consciousness for most of my life. As I child in the United States in the 1970s, I heard often about the Shah on the news. The day the Shah died is burned in my memory. I was packing up my bedroom to move to a new life in the Washington DC suburbs. Because it did not occur to me to retune the little radio that was keeping me company, I listened over and over again to reports about men chanting in the streets of Tehran, “The earthworm of the century is dead.”

Then of course there were the American hostages held at the embassy, who seemed to be the lead story every day for more than a year. I cannot forget the day the hostages flew home, just as Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president. The tension and excitement that day were so intense that my younger brother had a meltdown my whole family still remembers.

The public schools I attended in Northern Virginia were full of children from around the world. I had no idea who was an economic migrant, who was a political refugee, whose heart was in the United States and whose was still abroad. I had friends from Iran, from Libya, from Vietnam, from Korea. The hallways were full of Spanish. All the kids were cooler than I was, and many were kind and friendly and smart. All that mattered more than where they had been born. We were classmates, not enemies.

So I watched with a full heart when Iranian students took to the streets in 2009. Soon after, applications from students Iran started flowing into graduate program I was directing. It has been my privilege to teach and learn from several of you. I am proud of the work we have done together. I have been silently gratified by the notion that we have built personal ties that transcend our national differences. I have not asked you much about Iran not from lack of interest, but because I try not to intrude in my students’ personal lives. You have been kind and friendly and smart, and all of you are cooler than I am.

I do not know how much longer you will be in the United States. I know that some of you are planning on returning home soon. Please take this message to your friends and families in Iran or elsewhere: It is evident that both authoritarian governments and democratic ones are capable of inhumanity and wickedness. The foolishness of our governments does not mean that there must be enmity between our people.

I am not tagging any of you because I do not know what Magnus Frater is watching. I never knew what was safe for you, and I no longer know what is safe for me. But I love you, and I trust that you know who you are.

2016 is not 1968. But they are relatives.

During my first year of doctoral study in history, one of my assignments was to read a month’s worth of newspaper coverage from any year in history. As a student of postwar America, I picked the stretch of time (really two months) between the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, in the spring of 1968.

            It was indeed a tumultuous year. At the end of February, the Kerner Commission issued its report on the riots that had rocked American cities in the summer of 1967. Its most famous line, that America was becoming “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” offered little hope that things would get better. The Democrats were split by the war in Vietnam. In late March, Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run for reelection. Less than a week later, Rev. King was murdered in Memphis, sparking mourning marches that transmogrified into arson-fueled riots as terrible as those the Kerner Commission documented. Robert Kennedy, running for president on an anti-poverty message and invocation of his slain brother’s legacy, was killed just after winning the California primary election. At the Democrats’ convention in late August, political shenanigans reigned inside Chicago’s International Amphitheater while members of the Chicago Police Department beat up protestors on television images that “the whole world [wa]s watching.” The United States seemed fully destabilized.

            With increasing frequency in the past week, I have heard comparisons between the summer of 2016 and the summer of 1968. Two primary factors seem to be driving that comparison: the political stalemate over the deaths of black and brown civilians from guns wielded by police and the mass shooter in Orlando, and the unprecedented presidential campaigns, especially that of Donald Trump. Additionally, the combination of Trump’s mercurial politics and the unfilled Supreme Court seat of Justice Antonin Scalia quietly hint that a constitutional crisis might unfold sometime between August and January, 2017. Finally, the backdrops of the Syrian civil war, multi-national terrorism credited to ISIS, and the echoes of Brexit across the Atlantic keep Americans unsettled about the virtues of entanglements abroad. While some cultural sea changes—most notably the national institutionalization of gay marriage—have occurred with fewer ripples than might have been expected, 2016 is also a strange and uncertain time.

            But the comparison between 1968 and 2016 goes only so far. Forty-eight years on, while they invoke similar feelings of public and personal anxiety, some significant differences reign.

            In 1968, African American public protest took on broad range of issues. Despite the legal gains of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the dismantling of segregation promised by the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education rulings a decade earlier was incomplete. African Americans remained locked out of many employment and housing markets and even nominal school desegregation was bitterly contested. In 2016, the Black Lives Matter movement targets one issue: the deaths of blacks at the hands of police, asking only “Stop killing us.”

            In the 1960s, black public protest took two forms beyond the court system: demonstrations and civil disturbances. The frequency with which protest marches occurred simultaneously with riots confused white observers, who had trouble discerning the differences and roundly condemned public activism as unseemly. Catholic nuns and priests who marched for civil rights received angry letters condemning their political expressions as inappropriate. President Johnson, presented with a proposal for “Demonstration Cities,” insisted that it be renamed “Model Cities.” Riots were such common occurrences in the “long, hot summers” of the mid-1960s that both civil rights and government organizations developed plans for how to respond to them. In 2016, marches protest police shootings of black civilians have been tense but largely peaceful—until the murders of police officers in Dallas by a rogue shooter who was not part of the demonstration. Because of the easy availability of weapons, an angry person who agrees with protesters’ critiques but disagrees with their tactics does not need a mob to wreak havoc.

            That same easy availability of semiautomatic weapons—put to traumatic use in recent years in public places including malls, schools and universities, workplaces, grocery stores, houses of worship, military bases, community centers, and an Orlando nightclub—has put all Americans on guard in a way that they were not in 1968. Although there were from time to time mass murders in the American past—including those committed by the 1966 sniper on the University of Texas campus—the term “going postal” did not signal a cultural phenomenon until the 1990s. Although homicides by gun have actually decreased markedly since the peak period of the 1970s to the 1990s, adults understand that they are implicitly taking a risk when they go out in public. Nonetheless, the New York Times pointed out recently, the vast majority of mass shootings take place in the country’s poorest neighborhoods.

            Even segregation is different in 2016 than it was in 1968. In the 1960s, protest of residential segregation focused on black access to white neighborhoods. Racial steering by real estate dealers, blockbusting, and the dual housing market meant that few white Americans lived near African Americans. Although racial discrimination and exploitative real estate practices still exist in the US, blacks did get legal and financial access to formerly all-white neighborhoods. Many American public schools are somewhat integrated. What hypersegregation means in the 21^st century is that many African Americans do not have white neighbors or classmates.

It was only in 1967 that the Supreme Court’s Loving v. Virginia decision invalidated state laws that prohibited interracial marriage. In the twenty-first century, although it is not necessarily evident to African Americans who still live in all-black neighborhoods, many more white Americans have deep personal connections to people of color. This week, responding to police shootings, two of my Facebook friends shared a meme reading “I can’t keep calm, I have a black son.” One is a white woman married to a black man; another is herself a biracial mother. The dangers felt by blacks who are stopped by police might well be resonating in your mostly-white family.

            In short, in 2016 we are not as separate as we were in 1968. But we surely still are unequal. 2016 is 1968’s grandchild, softer in some ways but harder in others.

Lessons in the Wake of Mass Murder

As the clerk rang up my peanut butter, bread, and cherries, I glanced over my shoulder and could not miss the bright orange turban. A tall young man in the self-check lane, chatting lightly with a young white woman. Although I went to public school in polyglot Northern Virginia with many Sikhs, learned in Sunday School that Sikhism is one of the great world religions, and have a few Sikh colleagues, until this month I knew little about them or their faith.

The glimpse of the orange turban reminded me of some of the things I have learned since the shootings at the gurdwara in Oak Creek: grief, hospitality, sanctuary, doubt, neighbor, intimacy.

A photograph of a former mayor of Oak Creek, sobbing, seeking comfort in her husband’s stoic shoulder. Her feelings were my feelings, etched more sharply: grief.

From a letter to the editor, I learned that visitors to the Golden Temple in the Punjab can stay as guests for several days, asked only if they like what they are seeing, not to pay for the privilege: hospitality.

From several news stories, an opinion piece, from comments made at the memorial service held on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus, I learned that you can enter a gurdwara at any time, through a door from each of the cardinal directions. If you go on Sunday, or perhaps in the middle of the week, you will be offered food. Worship and nourishment: sanctuary.

As I loaded my daughter into our car, the young man with the turban and the white woman walked to their car, parked next to mine. She was wearing denim cutoffs. He was holding a bright blue package of Oreos. He seemed so carefree at the moment; I did not want to remind him of what had happened, just because I was thinking of it at that moment. I looked away.

In Colorado, you cannot tell by looking at a stranger that they might have been at the movie theater, or infer that they know someone who was there. Here in Milwaukee, though, our survivors, our male survivors anyway, are marked. Their dress reveals their faith. The liberal in me rebels against allowing myself to assume anything about someone based on their appearance. Did I look away to spare his feelings, or my own? Doubt.

Yet the murders in Oak Creek felt different to me from the ones in Aurora a few weeks ago, as awful as they felt. Daily, I pass among people for whom Oak Creek is home. I remember after 9/11 disbelieving a New Yorker who angrily insisted that if you were not there, you could not feel what they had felt. But now I feel what proximity brings. Not just our own grief, but inescapable, forceful reminders of what those among us might be feeling as we greet them. Neighbors.

I looked him in the eye. “How are you doing?” I asked. Not a nod, a hollow “how are you?” but “How are you doing?” He answered, not quite lightly, “I’m doing all right.” I knew he meant, “As well as could be expected under the circumstances.”

Intimacy.

Lessons in the wake of mass murder: grief, hospitality, sanctuary, doubt, neighbors, intimacy.

Religion

Being an atheist doesn’t mean being anti-religious. This recent letter in the local newspaper (scroll down to the Ten Commandments header) prompts me to write about something that has bothered me for a long time. Some of us are both definitely atheists and actively religious at the same time.

Most Americans will not recognize the intelligibility of this position. The most common definition of religion that Americans seem to carry around in their heads is that religion is a definite system of belief that describes a person’s views on God and the afterlife. If a group offers no commonly accepted description or definition of God and no position on the possibility of life after death, then it’s not a religion. This kind of definition matters—there was a court case in Texas about a decade ago about whether a religious group that held no position about a Supreme Being counted as a religion or not, and therefore whether it was entitled to a tax exemption under state law.

Definitions of religion that depend on the idea of a deity at the center have always bothered me. I am a third generation Unitarian Universalist, the granddaughter of a humanist and the child of UU ministers with different views of theism. I am sure based on my experience that Unitarian Universalism is a religion; but I am equally sure that there are atheists among us (including me). As a UU youth, I often encountered people who did not believe that my church was a religious group. How could it be, if there was no God? This is a hard question for a kid to answer, and is perhaps only harder (if less frequently encountered) for an adult.

It seems to me that defining one group as a religion and another not based on its position on God is an approach that takes Christianity as a platonic ideal and extrapolates based on Christian elements alone. It is not clear to me, for example, that Buddhism, one of the world’s oldest and most clearly “religious” religions, does not meet this test.

So, for today, here is my definition of a religion:

A religion is a set of beliefs and practice, cultivated in a communal context, that allow people across the lifespan to frame and answer transcendent questions.

Circle Swimming

On Monday morning, I arrived at the pool later than I like to. If I can get up by 5:40, I can get to the Jewish Community Center when it opens at 6:00, swim and shower, and be back home to get the morning crew going by around 7:30. If I’m thrown off by more than 15 or 20 minutes, I have to give up the prospect of a swim for the day.

Because I arrived at the pool at around 6:20, it was already full this morning. A couple people hung around the edges, waiting for a lane to open up, but I didn’t. I started a circle swim in one lane, and one of the waiters asked the lifeguard to help him start one in the center lane. The policy at the J is that when three or more people need a lane, everyone needs to circle swim. Circle swimming isn’t too difficult, especially if people swim at around the same speed, but it does take coordination among the swimmers. I’ve seen people stubbornly pretend they don’t understand the request (even though the rules are posted also in Russian, the dominant second language at the J) or get out of the pool altogether, but I have rarely seen a swimmer get as angry about it as I did this morning.

When the lifeguard asked Mr. Angry if he minded circle swimming, he angrily replied “I do mind” and got out of the pool to berate the lifeguard about what a stupid policy circle swimming was. His tone was not softened to account for the power differential between Mr. Angry and the kid who was lifeguarding; maybe it is easier to speak angrily to someone who is a third your age and makes a poor hourly rate. He pretended that I was not getting into the next lane over, looking right through me and suggesting that it was empty, that everyone else who wanted to swim could wait five or ten minutes and have a private half-lane to themselves. Among his reasons for not circle swimming was that he had paid to be at the pool (to which, the lifeguard responded reasonably, so had everyone else, since it’s pretty much only members who swim early in the morning; and, contradictorily but also rightly, that it was a public pool). He also pointed out that the other swimmers in the lane might get angry about their speed differential, since he was faster than the other swimmers in the lane and would have to pass them. Never mind that his belligerent tone was poisoning the atmosphere in the entire room.

What Mr. Angry seemed to miss altogether was that the J is also a religious and community center, and not just a place where you buy the right to exercise in private. When we are in community together, we do not just atomistically go about our business without regard for the people around us. We say hello to them in a civil fashion. We ask if we can help each other. We ask for help we need. And we share our space, deriving both the benefits and troubles of community life from the interaction.

In this light, circle swimming suddenly came to be a metaphor for the larger business of living in community together. No, it’s not ideal to have to share a lane with another person whose stroke is at a different speed (or who thinks that doing the butterfly in a shared lane is a good idea). But there are larger benefits of sharing the space, which we can appreciate only if we accommodate ourselves at least a little bit to the needs of our fellows.

Amy Winehouse

Since singer Amy Winehouse’s shocking but not surprising death last week, I have been puzzling over why I mourn her so much.

Given only surface considerations, I should not have been so affected by her. We had little in common, other than gender, etymologically close first names, western culture, and, I learned today, Jewish roots. I rarely listen to music recreationally. I am a middle-aged mother and professor. I no longer drink alcohol; have never tried an illegal drug. My talents and my arts overlap only a bit, and none of them will bring me the kind of acclaim that was rightly hers. She was none of those things.

But she caught my attention. About two years ago, I asked my husband about who this Amy Winehouse was, the one who I kept reading about in the newspaper (see how old fashioned and square I am? The actual newspaper!). He explained about her music. I remember vividly that he said that people were wondering “how all that soul got into a tiny little white girl.”

So, off I ran to Youtube to watch her music. Rehab caught me completely. I watched it over and over again, mystified by its appeal but stuck on it nonetheless. Content-wise, there is nothing in it that I can relate to. But musically, I had to keep coming back to it. I even bought Back to Black, which is remarkable given that in any given year I buy only one or two CDs (yes, CDs; forget about downloading music onto some portable machine).

Here is where I have come to this week: I can’t get over Rehab because it is great art. My experience of listening brings to mind the chills I got the first time I heard Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe or how I can hear Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah over and over again without getting tired of it (and, in fact, once again picking through its meaning and arguing in my head with the minister who got it mostly wrong). Or why Mozart’s Dies Irae is my all-time favorite piece of music. Great music, I think today, transcends the meaning of its words and makes the audience pay attention whatever the mismatch of values between musician and auditor.

Thank you, Amy Winehouse, for giving me the opportunity to understand this. I regret the rest of the music you will never create.