Drug-Free School Zone

By Chris Mercogliano

I am in absolute agreement with Bruce E. Levine: it isn’t ODD at all that our society has stepped up its efforts to pathologize young people with biopsychiatric labels like Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD), when they either cannot or will not march in step with the majority culture, and then dose them with the corresponding biopsychiatric drugs.

As Levine reminds us with his deft bit of historical research, America has a long tradition of marginalizing anyone who deviates from established norms—which currently are narrowing at an alarming rate. Or as French philosopher Michel Foucault pointed out in Discipline and Punish, the control of its citizens has always been a primary aim of the state, and what we are witnessing in modern times is the evolution of increasingly subtle ways in which to do so. Today, instead of relying on brute force as was the case in the days of pharaohs and emperors, social institutions like schools, the military, and the mass media subliminally enforce a conformity so pervasive that overt forms of control are no longer necessary. All who resist and refuse to take their places in the social and economic machine, according to Foucault in Madness and Civilization, are labeled with some form of abnormality, and then, as I argue in my book, Teaching the Restless, about the ongoing ADHD hoax, they are medicated with powerful psychotropic drugs that extend society’s control all the way down to the biochemical level.

This business of labeling and drugging kids who won’t sit still, can’t keep up, or don’t fit in became a deep concern of mine in my role as a teacher at the Free School, a noncoercive, democratic, inner-city school for sixty-five students ages two through fourteen in Albany, NY. In the early 1990s there was a sudden spike in the number of students who came to us having been labeled in their previous schools, and so, curious as to why, I embarked on an exhaustive review of the already considerable ADHD literature.

A New Standard in Florida: Evolution is Fundamental

by Glenn Branch

The missing link?

The recent battle over the place of evolution in Florida's state science standards wasn't quite ripped from the pages of a Carl Hiaasen novel—as far as I could tell from my office in California, at any rate, there were no greedy developers, lubricious politicos, or redneck gangsters involved, and no feral ex-governors emerging from the swamp to save the day. But zaniness was abundant among the creationist opponents of the standards, from the fellow who testified that, according to evolution, oranges are "the first cousin to somebody's pet cat," to the student who argued that evolution was unprovable because "no one was around 6,000 years ago." (Then who was it who left a bottle gourd at the Windover site outside Titusville, Florida, about 7,290 years ago?) Ultimately, however, on February 19, 2008, the state board of education voted to accept a new set of state science standards that recognize evolution as a fundamental concept underlying all of biology.

That's quite a change. The previous set of state science standards sedulously avoided even using the e-word, and when the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation conducted its review of state science standards in 2005, it commented, "The superficiality of the treatment of evolutionary biology alone justifies the grade 'F'." But hostility toward evolution education in the Sunshine State is nothing new: after William Jennings Bryan retired to Florida in 1920, he lobbied for legislation prohibiting "the teaching as true of Darwinism or any other evolutionary hypothesis that links man in blood relation with any form of animal life below man." Bryan was only partly successful; in 1923, the legislature passed a resolution that described such teaching as "improper and subversive," but stopped short of prohibiting it altogether. Two years later, the Tennessee legislature passed a law outright banning the teaching of evolution, and the Great Commoner eventually hauled himself from Florida to Dayton, Tennessee, for the trial of John Thomas Scopes.

Note, in Bryan's proposal, the phrase "as true." In a letter to a Florida state senator (quoted in Edward J. Larson's excellent Trial and Error), he explained, "A book which merely mentions [evolution] as a hypothesis can be considered as giving information as to views held, which is very different from teaching it as fact." Bryan died just after the Scopes trial, but his position—that it's okay to teach about evolution, but only as a theory, something conjectural or speculative, and not as a fact—continues to resonate. Creationists who weren't pressing for creationism (whether in the old-fashioned form of creation science or in the new-fangled form of intelligent design) to be added to the Florida state science standards were following Bryan in trying to stigmatize evolution as just a theory. A father in the Panhandle put a Möbian twist on the slogan, saying of his daughters, "I just don't want them to hear a one-sided fact."

Link Roundup: UUs on Street Prophets, Human Guinea Pigs, Teaching Kids About Racism

A link rescue from the not-to-distant past: Carl Elliott, who has a forthcoming Beacon book about consumerism and corruption in the medical industry, had a harrowing piece in the New Yorker about professional human guinea pigs, which is now available on their website.

Most professional guinea pigs are involved in Phase I clinical trials, in which the safety of a potential drug is tested, typically by giving it to healthy subjects and studying any side effects that it produces. (Phase II trials aim at determining dosing requirements and demonstrating therapeutic efficacy; Phase III trials are on a larger scale and usually compare a drug’s results with standard treatments.) The better trial sites offer such amenities as video games, pool tables, and wireless Internet access. If all goes well, a guinea pig can get paid to spend a week watching “The Lord of the Rings” and playing Halo with his friends, in exchange for wearing a hep-lock catheter on one arm and eating institutional food. Nathaniel Miller, a Philadelphia trial veteran who started doing studies to fund his political activism, was once paid fifteen hundred dollars in exchange for three days and two G.I. endoscopies at Temple University, where he was given a private room with a television. “It was like a hotel,” he says, “except that twice they came in and stuck a tube down my nose.”

And one more link rescue, to a story that has timeless importance and made the rounds of AP newspapers a week or so ago: "Ignoring Racist Remarks Is Wrong Lesson For Kids." Many of us have been faced with an uncomfortable situation where someone has made a racially insensitive or offensive comment. Beverley Daniel Tatum, author of Can We Talk About Race, urges parents to broach the issue with the speaker,   but in a way that isn't accusatory or confrontational. The article is a great guide for how to teach children about racism and the importance of honesty, integrity, and diversity.

Over at Street Prophets, this week's Weekly Faith Roundtable is on Unitarian Universalism. Here are a few of the highlights from the discussion:

Lonespark's explanation that she picked the UU church because "I didn't fit into any other boxes."

On the plus side, I love being in a place where my agnostic husband would fit right in if he ever got up that early, where some of my favorite childhood hymns get performed, where all families are valued, where "service is our prayer," and where a dude in my covenant group is very interested in hearing about how I blot to Thor.

A lengthy discussion of where the Seven Principles originated and the possibility of being a "devout UU."

So here's a broader one. We lay claim--lightly--to all of human experience, all science, all scripture, all wisdom traditions as being the heritage of humanity. We draw from those and from individual, personal experience.

So...
    Scripture--check. Our canon is a shade larger and not sealed, however.
    Tradition--check. We see it not as a foundation, but rather as more of a sea anchor.
    Reason--check. Oh yeah. Fiercely. We're coming back around to a wary acceptance of the non-rational, but the irrational is going to be savaged--and that's tradition going back at least to Servetus.
    Experience--check. Very, very much so.

A selection of UU jokes

Great job on the part of Sister Quarterstaff, ogre, lonespark, and bleeding heart, who hosted the discussion.

The Presidential Nomination Process: Time for Reform

by Jane Eisner

MEADVILLE, Pa. - In this pretty, snowy college town deep in Pennsylvania's north country, enterprising college students are mapping out how to fix the way we nominate presidential candidates. Their ideas are too good to ignore.

The Center for Political Participation at Allegheny College is embarking on a two-year Nomination Reform Initiative, and its inaugural event yesterday (Feb. 13th) was inspiring, indeed. Representatives from 15 regional colleges studied the nomination process through an on-line course provided by the New York Times Knowledge Network. They learned the intricacies of the primary process, enumerated its benefits (some) and its flaws (many), examined proposals for reform, and then came up with their own ideas.

While there were unique and intriguing features in some of the reform ideas - I'll get to my favorites in a moment - there were also unmistakable common threads. The students uniformly agreed that the system now on display in 2008 is too long, too messy, too confusing, and just plain unfair. Interestingly, many of the students wanted to retain a central feature of the current primary calendar - that is, the opening roles played by small states such as Iowa and New Hampshire. The opportunity for retail politics, to share conversation with a potential president while sipping coffee at a diner, still holds tremendous appeal even to young Americans groomed in cyberspace.

They do, indeed, want to be able to reach out and touch their candidates. They just don't want to relocate to Iowa or New Hampshire for the privilege.

The Relevance of Nooses and Lynching in the Age of Obama

by Sherrilyn A. Ifill

In the flush of the current presidential campaign, when crowds of blacks and whites caught up in Obama fever chant together, “race doesn’t matter,” and even the mainstream media seems delirious with the possibility that the U.S. may be poised to elect its first black president, it’s hard to remember that only a few months ago college campuses, high schools and workplaces from Louisiana to New York were sites of racial intimidation. 2007 was the year of the noose. Dozens of incidents, in which nooses were hung in places designed to intimidate black workers and students, seemed to engulf the country. Many of these noose hangings seem to have been set off by the case of the Jena Six -- a Louisiana case in which black high school students faced serious criminal charges after a series of violent conflicts with white students. The friction between the students arose after white students hung nooses from a tree that had long been regarded as reserved as a meeting place for white students. Many whites minimized the noose hangings at Jena and in other places as mere pranks. Blacks, by and large, regarded the noose hangings as hate crimes – messages of intimidation and white supremacy inspired by the nearly 5,000 lynchings of black men and women that took place in the 20th century.

Today, it’s almost tempting to dismiss the rash of noose incidents and attendant focus on the history of lynching as just a strange autumnal anomaly -- some kind of retro race moment, a last gasp of 20th century racism. Nooses had fallen so far outside the national conversation that it came as somewhat of a shock last Tuesday when President Bush finally condemned noose displays in a ceremony at the White House commemorating Black History Month. The noose, said the President “is wrong . .. [and has] no place in America today.” The President forcefully insisted that displaying a noose is “not a harmless prank, and lynching is not a word to be mentioned in jest.” Instead the noose, said the President, “is a symbol of gross injustice.”

The timing of the President’s statement was curious. Months earlier, when noose incidents were on the front page of major newspapers every day, a presidential statement denouncing the display of nooses would have been a powerful and authoritative repudiation of racist symbols. Yet at that time, the President was silent on the issue. As a result, President Bush’s statement last week seemed strangely out of time. It read like a random selection from a stack of draft presidential statements, hauled out for Black History Month. Clearly drafted months ago [and perhaps embargoed for unknown reasons], the President’s statement provided no guidance on how to reconcile the rash of noose displays four months ago with the current mood of racial harmony and possibility sweeping the country.

Link Roundup: Israeli Soldiers Speak, UUs in Kenya

Beacon author Philip Winslow, in his recent book Victory for Us is to See You Suffer, several times quotes and highlights the activities of the Israeli group Breaking the Silence, "an organization of veteran Israeli soldiers that collects testimonies of soldiers who served in the Occupied Territories during the Second Intifadah."

Breaking the Silence sponsors tours to Hebron, and has organized exhibits to illustrate the enormous strain the occupation places on the soldiers who are assigned to protect settlements, as well as the myriad injustices and indignities inflicted upon the Palestinians in the Territories. Currently on display in Philadelphia until February 24, and coming to Cambridge March 1, is their exhibit of photos taken by soldiers (including the one featured here), artifacts of the occupation, and video testimonies from former soldiers. Hours and locations are available on their website, as well as photos, video, testimonies, and more information about the group and their goals.

Via Philocrites, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee just returned from a trip to Kenya. The emergency delegation was dispatched to assess the political and human rights situation there in the wake of the election in December. UUSC President Charlie Clements, in addition to submitting testimony to Congress on the mission (pdf), sent blog dispatches describing the unrest:

Kenya feels like it is on the edge of a precipice. Anguish and anger are pushing people into a free fall toward communal violence, which neither the leaders nor the security forces may be able to easily stop once it begins. As Kisumu, and now perhaps Nakuru (if the reports we got this afternoon are true), slip toward economic meltdown, the volatility of the situation will only increase. I fear that both Kibaki and Raila may be too insulated by hardliners to sense that they are engaged in a dangerous game of brinkmanship.

For more information on the crisis, visit the UUSC's Kenya Crisis page.

Obama's Mixed Heritage: A Mother's Perspective

by Barbara Katz Rothman

It's an interesting historical moment to be a white mother of a Black child, as another white mother's Black child is running for president of the United States. Who'd have thought?

I too am a white mother of a Black child. When my Black child, Victoria, was in kindergarten or maybe first grade, sitting around the morning meeting at her politically progressive Quaker school, they were talking about how there'd never been a woman president, or a Black president, or a Jewish president. Victoria   piped up: "I could do it; I could be the first of all of them!" Now that she's older, I think a presidential career is pretty well out for Victoria--the first multi-pierced, Mohawk-wearing, tattooed, electric-bass player president? Probably not. But back when she was in kindergarten, I'd have thought the chances of someone with Obama's family background becoming president were unimaginably slim.

In case you've not seen a news report this year: Obama had an African father and a white American mother-from Kansas, no less, though ultimately her son was raised mostly in Hawaii. Too bad that his mother isn't here to see this; she died, too young, of ovarian cancer. She did live long enough to see him in the Senate, miracle enough that was! If she was here now, I wonder how she'd be responding to the inevitable media attention: people are blogging about why we're calling him "Black" rather than "mixed race,"about his "white heritage,"wondering if he is "Black enough," thinking about his thoroughly unusual and so thoroughly American story.

An Overextended Prison Health System Loses its Mercurial Advocate

by Sasha Abramsky

In the years after World War II, California’s prisons were seen as being some of the most progressive correctional institutions in America. They were generally well funded, and the officials in charge of the system had a real interest in utilizing new rehabilitation tools within their facilities. In the late 1960s and 1970s, a wave of prison riots and rebellions put the skids on reform-based strategies. By the 1980s, when the first waves of the nationwide tough-on-crime, tough-on-criminals movement washed ashore, conditions in the prisons were deteriorating fast.

As the courts sent evermore prisoners into the prison system, even the massive prison-building spree California embarked on couldn’t keep up with the numbers. The prisons got more and more crowded, gyms were converted into dorms, access to medical, mental health, drug treatment, education, and job training services and programs declined. By the 1990s, the state prison system was being rocked by a series of scandals – guards beating inmates, seriously mentally ill inmates being placed in solitary, prisoners dying because they were denied adequate medical care.

A couple years back, the federal courts got so frustrated with the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s inability to deliver basic healthcare to the state’s 170,000 inmates that they hired an independent receiver to push through change. The receiver, Bob Sillen, used his office to force prisons to invest more in basic items, such as specialized vans to take sick prisoners to hospitals; and he also promoted more systemic changes – higher pay for prison doctors and nurses, the investment of tens of millions of dollars in on-site medical facilities.

All's Not Fair in Class Warfare

by Victor Tan Chen

If there's a lesson from the recent debacle over an economic stimulus package, it's this: Republicans need to stop engaging in class warfare.

Class warfare, as the Republicans have pointed out time and time again, is when public policy is unduly influenced by the interests of one group at the expense of everyone else.

Unfortunately, the Republican leadership has been guilty of such hypocrisy in its negotiations over individual tax rebates in the economic stimulus package, which the Senate approved last Thursday. First there was talk of making any legislation contingent on extending President Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy. Then the Republicans sought to kill proposals to extend government checks to the poor, while demanding tax rebates for wealthy Americans. And they stamped out an effort by Senate Democrats to lengthen unemployment benefits.

So, how is this class warfare? An effective stimulus package, according to economists ranging from Ben Bernanke to Martin Feldstein to Lawrence Summers, should be timely, temporary, and targeted. Targeting the stimulus means putting money in the hands of poor and middle-income households. They're more likely to use that money to buy things rather than saving it or using it to pay down debt. (See these articles by economists Paul Krugman and Mark Zandi for more on this point. For some contrarian views, see this summary of recent research on tax rebates -- though it's axiomatic in social science that you shouldn’t put too much faith in surveys of what people say they will do in the future.)

The legislation that both houses of Congress approved will give some benefits to the poor -- a $300 tax rebate check to individuals with at least $3,000 in income -- but many will not receive the $600 maximum rebate for individuals or $1,200 maximum for couples, plus $300 per child, because they do not pay enough income tax. (This is also true for certain segments of the near poor, the group that Katherine Newman and I study in our book The Missing Class.) In passing their own version of the legislation yesterday, the Senate also extended tax rebates to Social Security retirees and veterans with disabilities, though, as for the poor, the benefit will be just $300.

Letter to the Palestinian Leadership: Try a New Approach

by Philip C. Winslow

Open Letter to:

President Mahmoud Abbas, Ramallah
Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, Gaza City
Occupied Palestinian Territories

Dear President Abbas and Prime Minister Haniyeh:

I write to you in frustration and some alarm as the latest violence unfolds in the Gaza Strip and in Israel. I write as a journalist and humanitarian aid worker who has lived in the West Bank, believes in a two-state solution, and supports no political agenda. The violence, driven by factions that should be under your control and then by subsequent Israeli strikes, has again reached dangerous levels. Your leadership and a radical new approach are urgently required.

The week’s news photos were familiar to me, as they were to you and all Palestinians and Israelis. Body parts and glass shards littering the street after the suicide bombing on February 4 – the first in more than a year – at a shopping center in Dimona in southern Israel. The same week, more pictures of Israelis standing in their shattered living rooms in traumatized Sderot after the latest barrage of Palestinian rockets from Gaza. The photos that preceded and followed were equally familiar, of the inevitable funerals of Palestinians killed by Israeli air raids: mourners wearing green Hamas headbands and shouting for revenge and hoisting aloft youthful corpses in open caskets; grieving Palestinian mothers holding photos of their martyred sons.

The empty statements were as disappointing as ever. The script could have been lifted verbatim from any incident between 2001 and 2004 when I lived and worked in the West Bank. Same slaughter, same excuses, just change the place and the name of the speaker.

Dust Off Your Darwin Costume: It's Evolution Weekend!

by Glenn Branch

Not so long ago in Birmingham, England, it was a reggae version of the Origin of Species with a video to match, but soon in San Diego, they’ll be listening to the Galápagos Mountain Boys playing their own brand of scientific bluegrass. In Oslo, Norway, they’ll be attending a series of scholarly lectures on the evolution of language, while they’ll be throwing another shrimp on the barbie by way of celebration in Melbourne, Australia. In Terre Haute, Indiana; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Salem, Oregon, they’ll be sitting down to watch the hilarious documentary Flock of Dodos, but in Philadelphia, they’ll be on their feet to play badminton at the Penn Museum. In Seattle, a Darwin impersonation contest is part of the festivities, while across the Puget Sound in Bremerton, it’s a one-man show with Darwin live and in concert. To top it all, in Whitewater, Wisconsin, the reception is going to feature what’s billed as the world’s largest edible tree of life.

Yes, Darwin Day is back, and still going strong. February 12, 2008, is the 199th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and colleges and universities, schools, libraries, museums, churches, civic groups, and just plain folks across the country—and the world—are preparing to celebrate Darwin Day, on or around February 12, in honor of the life and work of Charles Darwin. Last year, over 850 such events took place worldwide, and 2008—just one year shy of the Darwin bicentennial—is shaping up to be just as abundant in celebration. Darwin Day provides a marvelous opportunity not only to celebrate Darwin’s birthday but also to enjoy, and engage in, public outreach about science, evolution, and the importance of evolution education. The Darwin Day Celebration website, administered by the Institute of Humanist Studies, maintains a useful registry where you can find a Darwin Day event near you and spread the word about your own.

Link Roundup: Mary Oliver, Sherrilyn Ifill, and YouTube

Books are great—we all love books around here—but seeing a writer in person, giving a reading or a talk, can stimulate the intellect, illuminate the work, and delightfully entertain.

Mary Oliver is one of Beacon's most popular writers, and, according to the Poetry Foundation, author of five of the top seven best-selling poetry books last year. When she tours, she fills auditoriums, which, as any poet in America can tell you, doesn't often happen for poetry readings. In fact, her reading on Monday as part of Seattle's Arts and Lectures series sold out in record time, and tickets were reported to be changing hands on Craigslist for as much as $100 per seat.

So does she live up to the hype? Beautifully, says Seattle Post-Intelligencer book critic John Marshall, who says "the poet orchestrated her reading like a maestro, alternating poems of humor with poems showcasing bittersweet truths and honest emotions."

Many were drawn to the Oliver event by her approachable verse with its intense focus on the natural world and its quiet delights, but she soon dispensed with any notion that the evening was destined to be some sort of ecumenical worship service of nature or the poet herself. That seemed a possibility when many in the crowd of 2,500 gave Oliver a standing ovation even before she had uttered a word.

But Oliver's self-effacing sense of humor soon punctured such awe, delivered with a Seinfeldian sense of timing.

"I have a little dog and I'm working hard to make him famous," Oliver said.

Knowing murmurs rippled through the crowd.

"And he deserves it," she added, to widespread laughter.

Another Beacon author, Sherrilyn Ifill (On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century), recently spoke at University of Maryland Law School about a troubling time in the history of race relations in America. Introducing the documentary film Banished, scheduled to air on Independent Lens on PBS later this month, Ifill discussed  "'racial cleansing' of blacks from communities that have remained virtually lily-white, even in the 21st century." In this Baltimore Sun article, columnist Gregory Kane talks about the importance of acknowledging the history of banishments, and of making reparations to citizens whose property was stolen from them after they were driven from their homes in at least twelve different counties:

That dreaded "R-word" is indeed dredged up in Banished. When blacks were driven from Forsyth County in 1912, many left behind land that they owned. They were never paid for that land. It was simply gobbled up and sold by whites who saw an opportunity to make a quick - and easy - buck. Neither the blacks who lost land nor their descendants have been compensated.

But you don't need to leave your house to see a reading or a book talk anymore—in fact, you don't even need to leave your desk chair! The Cambridge Forum, which has featured Katherine Newman, Philip Winslow, and Fred Pearce, among other Beacon authors, has audio and video available on their website. Unfortunately, we can't link to the Cambridge Forum videos via our new YouTube profile, but there are a lot of other good tidbits to be found: Thich Nhat Hahn, Eboo Patel, even Wallace Shawn reading Howard Zinn. For your enjoyment, here's one of our favorites at the moment: Lester Young and Billie Holiday performing "Fine and Mellow".

The People Speak: Performances from Howard Zinn's Voices of a People's History of the United States

by Allison Trzop

Several weeks ago, a couple of folks from Beacon -- including Director Helene Atwan -- had the pleasure and the privilege of attending several readings and tapings for a miniseries being shot over at Emerson College’s Cutler Majestic Theatre here in Boston.

Hosted by Executive Producer Howard Zinn -- not only a wildly influential historian and one of the most inspirational activists of modern times, but also one of the most imminently likable people alive --"The People Speak" featured an all-star line-up performing excerpts primarily taken from Zinn’s book Voices of A People’s History of the United States. The four performances, broken into segments titled "Class," "Women," "Race," and "War," were the culmination of tremendous work by Zinn, Anthony Arnove, and Chris Moore of "Project Greenlight," as well as actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

While every last one of the actors who participated should be loudly applauded (yet again!), standout performances included John Legend pouring his heart and soul into Nina Simone’s "Mississippi Goddamn"; Marisa Tomei reading the words of Cindy Sheehan; David Strathairn standing in for a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which for those of us who loved Good Night, and Good Luck was hilarious; Josh Brolin doing more for Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun than any high school lit class ever could; and every last time Staceyann Chin walked onstage.

Did you ever expect to hear Viggo Mortensen sing Bob Dylan?

For those who couldn’t make it into the filled-to-capacity Cutler Majestic, you can read more about it over at Alternet,  watch some more clips on YouTube, and, with any luck, the producers will find a home for the miniseries.

Allison Trzop is an assistant editor at Beacon Press.

Going To the Territory: The Black Conservative Tradition in American Politics

by Christopher Alan Bracey

During a recent promotional event for my book, Saviors or Sellouts: The Promise and Peril of Black Conservatism, From Booker T. Washington to Condoleezza Rice, a middle-aged African American woman asked me a question that I’ve been hearing a lot these days. Although she agreed with much of what conservatives past and present had to say about issues affecting the black community, she refused to think of herself as a conservative because, in her mind, conservatives (echoing Kanye West’s criticism of the Bush Administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina) “don’t really care about black people.”

The problem, she elaborated, was one of tone. Black conservatives, in her mind, were unduly hostile in their criticisms of the blacks in general, and poor and urban blacks in particular. She simply couldn’t bear to align herself – at least publicly – with these hostile voices. She was, in her own mind, a black conservative masquerading as liberal – and suffering within a deep political crisis as a consequence.

As the 2008 Presidential Campaign lurches forward, Americans of all stripes will be called upon to contemplate and vote their politics. For many African Americans, Barack Obama’s pursuit of the Democratic nomination has, in some ways, reanimated a conversation that has taken place quietly within the black community over the past decade – a conversation about the increasingly conservative nature of black politics.

To be sure, blacks are overwhelmingly registered Democrats. But are blacks overwhelmingly liberal? In a season in which the dominant rhetoric on both sides of the political aisle is one of “change,” what sort of change is needed to best empower the African American community?

Condoleeza Rice

As I detail in the book, there is a growing perception that conservatism within black America is gaining momentum. In 1972, fewer than ten percent of blacks identified as conservative. Today, nearly thirty percent, or 11.2 Million, African Americans do. Fifty-six percent of black voters supported Virginia’s 2006 ban on same-sex marriage. Other polling data reveal that the majority of blacks support other conservative policies, such as privatization of social security, school vouchers.

Do everyday blacks, who believe a more conservative pathway is most attractive, dare to state these views publicly, particularly when the Democratic nomination is at stake? More importantly, if, in the spirit of public discourse, certain blacks declared themselves to be conservative, what exactly does that mean? Is there a black conservative tradition, or multiple traditions? And what obligation, if any, do liberals and progressives have to engage this conservative tradition in a serious way?

Manipulating the Metaphors: the Bush Record on Education

by William Ayers

In his State of the Union address on January 28, President Bush, our self-styled “education president,” urged Congress to re-authorize the No Child Left Behind Act, calling it a “good law” and claiming that because of this legislation student learning is improving and “minority students are closing the achievement gap.”  In reality, student learning is not improving under NCLB, and the so-called racial achievement gap is a fraud.  But through a combination of sleight-of-hand, cooking the numbers, and manipulating the metaphors George Bush could make those claims with a smile. 

The education revolution that Bush touts is the result of decades of “school reform” spearheaded by business and powered by ideologues.  “Global competitiveness” is the preoccupation, “accountability” and “standards” the watch-words, and all of it results in a ramped-up obsession with standardized testing and an emphasis on minimal competencies along a narrow band of cognition and skills.  The business metaphor dominates the discourse: inputs in relation to outputs, discipline and punishment, incentives and competitiveness.

It’s worth asking ourselves what makes education in a democracy distinct.  Of course we want children to study hard, to be responsible, to stay away from drugs, and to be prepared for work.  But those are goals we share with totalitarian regimes, monarchies, dictators and kings.  So what is uniquely characteristic of democratic education?

Sundays in America: Barack Obama's church

by Suzanne Strempek Shea

The woman in the post office doesn't like Hillary, but tells me she's not about to vote for Barack.

"He's Muslim," she leans in to whisper.

I lean in closer and reply "He's not."

Barack Obama is a Christian. But he's also one from a varied cultural and religious family, the specifics of which are spawning all sorts of misinformation as the Illinois senator campaigns for nomination as the Democratic party’s presidential candidate.

The facts: Obama had a black African father who hailed from a Christian/Muslim family; a white Kansan mother who balked at organized religion but stocked the home bookshelves with the Bible, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita, as well as collections of mythology from the world over; a lukewarm Indonesian Muslim stepfather; and non-practicing Baptist and Methodist grandparents. By age ten, Obama had attended both a Catholic and a Muslim public school in Indonesia, then, upon moving to his grandparents' home in his birthplace of Hawaii, was enrolled in a Christian prep school. The salad bar of experiences served up appreciation of other faiths but didn't inspire the self described "reluctant skeptic" to quickly pick a favorite, even when affiliation might have benefited his early political career.

Seventeen years ago, Obama made his choice: the United Church of Christ, created in this country in 1957 via the union of the Evangelical and Reformed Churches with most of the Congregational Christian Churches. The UCC is known for the independence of its 5,633 congregations, spiritual home to 1.2 million. It's also known for the non-traditional ways it can present the Protestant experience, including through its recent TV ads that show congregants being plucked from the pews of an anonymous church due to factors including race and gender, the message being that at UCC, all are welcome.

A Winter Institute: The Transformation of Independent Bookselling

Tom Hallock, Beacon's Associate Publisher, spent last weekend in the company of 500 booksellers at the American Booksellers Associations' third Annual Winter Institute in Louisville, Kentucky.

by Tom Hallock

Independent booksellers, like independent retailers in other industries, have long been under siege by big box and online retailers. In searching for ways to survive, they've found solutions that place them in the vanguard of Americans who are reclaiming their downtown areas, restoring the environment and creating community.

Amidst the workshops on inventory management, loss control, hand selling, and a hilarious one on consumer behavior led by Len Vlahos, were others on green retailing and presentations linking buy local campaigns to national movements on sustainability and climate change. Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Holtzbrinck), spoke about "the special role bookstores and booksellers have to play, as they provide the place "where the community can think about itself". Gary Hirshberg, President and CEO of Stonyfield Farm, author of Stirring It Up: How to Make Money and Save the World (Hyperion), grew his business from a "7 cow start up" to a $300 million dollar a year company by incorporating environmentalism principals and practices. He found it both increased customer loyalty and reduced costs. He encouraged booksellers to think not only about how they lit and heated their stores, but also to examine the supply chain. He mentioned that UPS had saved ten million dollars a year by re-routing their trucks to minimize energy-consuming left turns. He left me thinking about not only our manufacturing practices, but also issues like returns. The ABA has embraced these messages, not only in programming, but by providing conference materials that were so green as to be almost edible. They've also developed a great list of books on community and sustainability [pdf].

Booksellers have taken the lead in developing independent business associations in their communities, educating their customers about the economic and environmental benefits of shopping locally. ABA COO Oren Teicher, a leading advocate of this approach, spoke about a study of 2007 holiday sales which showed that stores in areas that had independent business alliances averaged sales increases of 2.1%, whereas those in areas that lacked them had declines of .3%. In a business famous for its 2% profit margins, the difference is significant. Booksellers such as Steve Bercu, owner of BookPeople in Austin Texas; Betsy Burton, owner of The King's English Bookshop in Salt Lake City (and author of The King's English: Adventures of an Independent Bookseller); Carla Jimenez, co-owner of Inkwood Books in Tampa FL; and Clark Kepler, president of Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, shared their knowledge about creating these alliances. Beacon author Stacy Mitchell (Big Box Swindle) joined McKibben and Michael Shuman (The Small-Mart Revolution, Berrett-Koehler) in a wide ranging conversation about the transformative power of local economies, a talk that brought us all to our feet and which ABA hopes to broadcast on Book TV.