“The prayer of our souls is a petition for persistence; not for the one good deed, or single thought, but deed on deed, and thought on thought, until day calling unto day shall make a life worth living.” -W.E.B. DuBois

What is the prayer of your soul persisting in order to do? How are you called to make a life worth living?

Sunday, October 24, 10:30 a.m.
Cultivating Relationship with Nature
An Online Service with Rev. Stephen Shick

Covid has given many of us both the need and the desire to “go out into nature.” The more you cultivate your relationship with all creatures and plants living on earth the more you begin to realize you can’t   [ … ]

The post Sunday, October 24 ~ Cultivating Relationship with Nature ~ 10:30 a.m. appeared first on Unitarian Church of Marlborough and Hudson.

Diane Dassow

Continue reading "Letting the Questions Float By"

It was the most brutal and flagrant on-field racist attack in NCAA college football history.  The irrefutable evidence was splashed on front pages across the country.  The leading contender for the 1951 Heisman Trophy was severely injured and knocked out of a game causing his undefeated team to lose its only game of the season.  Yet no action was taken against the player who assaulted Johnny Bright, the coach who ordered the hit and drilled the assault in practice, or the administrationwhich apparently approved, defended, and covered up the attack.  In fact, for decade after decade the University denied any wrongdoing and refused to apologize to the wounded player or the team they cheated.  It was not until September 28, 2005 that an Oklahoma State University President acknowledged wrongdoing in a letter to the President Drake University.  The apology came almost 54 years after the assault and 22 years after the victim’s death.

Johnny Bright was born to a working class African American family on June 11, 1930 in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  He was raised with three brothers and a sister by a single mother.  At the city’s Central High School, he was an excellent student and lettered in football, basketball, and track and field, leading his football team to a city title in 1945, and helped the basketball team to two state tournament Final Four appearances.  He also played local league softball and was a successful amateur boxer.

Bright was one of the most heavily recruited high school athletesin the nation when he graduated in 1947.  He accepted a scholarship at Big Ten powerhouse Michigan State University (MSU.)  It was not a good fit.  As a freshman he was unhappy with the direction of the football program and disappointed that coaches seemed to actively discourage “wasting time” on academics instead of concentrating on football. 

Bright dropped out of MSU and accepted a track and field scholarship at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa a smaller but prestigiousuniversity.  Bright’s scholarship allowed him to try out for the football and basketball squads, but because he was a transfer he was redshirted for football in his freshman year.  During his college career he letteredin all three sports.

Drake competed in the Missouri Valley Conference (MVC), then considered a second tier college conference.  Within the conference Drake was a traditional powerhouse.  Once he became eligible for varsity play in his sophomore year, Bright quickly helped the program step up to a whole new level.  In 1949, his sophomore year he rushedfor 975 yards and threw for another 975 to lead the nation in total offense.   The Drake Bulldogs finished their season at 6–2–1.  In Bright’s junior year as a halfback/quarterback he rushed for 1,232 yards and passed for 1,168 yards, setting an NCAA record of 2,400 yards total offense and again led the team to a 6–2–1 record.

Early in his freshman year Bright became the first Black player to compete against MVC rival Oklahoma A&M at Lewis Field in Stillwater.  A&M, which would later become Oklahoma State University, had just, extremely reluctantly, become officially integrated that year.   Bright, then unknown, had competed without incident or controversy and led his team to a victory over the Aggies.  In his sophomore year Drake hosted the contest between the two teams and once again Bright had romped over the Oklahoma team.

Before the beginning of the 1951 season and Bright’s senior year, he had become a genuine national star.  He was rated by sports writers as the hands down favorite to win the Heisman Trophy.  As his team began to roll up victory after victory, Bright became an open target at A&M.  The student newspaper, The Daily O’Collegian, and the Stillwater News Press, reported that Bright was a marked man, and several A&M students were openly bragging that Bright “would not be around at the end of the game.”  A&M Coach Jennings B. Whitworth, an Arkansas native, exhorted his team repeatedly during practices to “get that Nigger!”  He ran special drills featuring his toughest defenseman, tackle Wilbanks Smith practicing how to do just that.

On the day of the game, Bright led a 5-0 team and was the nation’s leading collegiate scorer.  But in the first ten minutes of the A&M game bright was knocked unconscious three times by Smith.  The third time, after Bright had handed the ball off to Drake fullback Gene Macomber, and well behind the play, Smith smashed into his face with his elbow, breaking Bright’s jaw.  Despite the pain, Bright was able to stay in the game long enough to complete a 61-yard touchdown pass to Drake halfback Jim Pilkington a few plays later.  But he was unable to play after the first quarter.  For the first time in his college career Bright had less than 100 yards total offense.  Without their star player, the Bulldogs fell to the Aggies 27-10.

No penalty was called on Smith for the flagrantly late hit.  After the brouhaha over the attack reached national proportions the MVC refused to take any action.  A&M President Oliver Willham denied anything happened even after evidence of the incident was published nationwide.  Drake withdrew from the Conference in protest.

The evidence that caught the nation’s attention was a series of photographs taken byDes Moines Register cameramen John Robinson and Don Ultang.  They had picked up on rumors sweeping the stadium that day that Bright would be targeted.  They set up their cameras specifically to follow him in play.  In six shots they captured the whole sequence of the play from Bright’s hand-off to Smith’s elbow smashing into his face which ran on the front page of the next day’s paper.  The photos were so dramatic that they also ended up on the cover of Life magazine.  Robinson and Ultang won the Pulitzer Prize for their effort.

The Register followed up with an in-depth investigation by reporter Bob Spiegel who interviewed many spectators at the game who confirmed the threats circulating and quoting comments from a A&M player on the bench which confirmed that the attack had been planned and drilled.

The NCAA investigated the incident but took no action against Smith or A&M, much to Drake’s outrage.  They did tweak rules about late hits and illegal blocking and established a new rule requiring ball handling players wear helmets with face guards.

After the game Bright’s jaw was wired shut.  He most likely also suffered a concussion, although those kinds of head injuries were not well understood at the time.  He was only able to see limited action in the team’s remaining three games, but he earned 70 percent of the yards Drake gained and scored 70 percent of the Bulldogs’ points over the whole season anyway.  The limited action in the last games probably costBright the Heisman.  He finished fifth in voting anyway.

Bright was taken fifth in the NFL Draft, picked by the Philadelphia Eagles.  Bright would have been the first Black on the team.  He was concernedthat he would not be well receivedby the many Southerners on the team.  He was not eager, he told people later, to be “football’s Jackie Robinson.” 

Instead after playing in the post-season East-West Shrine Game and the Hula Bowl, Bright unexpectedly accepted an offer from the Calgary Stampeders of the Western Interprovincial Football Union, the precursor to the West Division of the Canadian Football League, leading the Stampeders and the WIFU in rushing with 815 yards his rookie season.  In his third season in Canada, Bright was traded to the Edmonton Eskimos.  He would go on to win three Gray’s Cup Championships with the team, be elected CFL’s Most Outstanding Player in 1959, and establish numerous offensive records in a 13 year long pro career.  When he retired in 1964 he was the League’s all-time leading rusher with, had five consecutive 1,000 yard seasons, and led the CFL in rushing four times.  He is a member of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame, the College Football Hall of Fame, the Missouri Valley Conference Hall of Fame, the Edmonton Eskimos Wall of Honour, the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame, and the Des Moines Register Iowa Sports Hall of Fame.

But the football honors were only part of the remarkable legacy of Johnny Bright.

Like most Canadian football players of the era, Bright held down a full time off-season job.  Using his Drake Bachelor of Science degree, Bright became an Edmonton school teacher.  Over the years he turned down several offers from the NFL because it would have meant giving up teaching.  Bright eventually became principal of D.S. Mackenzie and Hillcrest Junior High Schools in Edmonton.  In profound gratitude for the opportunities Canada provided him, Bright became a citizen in 1962.

Bright was frequently asked about what had become known as the Johnny Bright Incident.  He expressed surprisingly little bitterness toward Wilbanks Smith.  While acknowledging that there was “no way it couldn’t have been racially motivated…What I like about the whole deal now, and what I’m smug enough to say, is that getting a broken jaw has somehow made college athletics better. It made the NCAA take a hard look and clean up some things that were bad.”

Bright died of a massive heart attackon December 14, 1983 at the age of only 53, at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton, while undergoing surgery to correct a knee injury suffered during his football career. He was survived by his wife and four children.

In 2006, the football field at Drake Stadium, in Des Moines was named in Bright’s honor.  Four years later his second career was recognized with the opening of Johnny Bright School, a kindergarten through grade 9 facility in Edmonton.

And what of the villains?  There seems to be some kind of karma and rough justice in the case of Coach Whitworth.  He left Oklahoma A&M after four years as head coach in 1954 with a losing 22–27–1 record. Then he went on to coach his alma mater, the University of Alabama from 1955 to 1957 where he posted miserable a 4–24–2 record that included a 14-game losing streak from 1955 to 1956.  He was firedand replaced by the legendary Bear Bryant.  Whitworth could only get an assistant job at Georgia, where he worked for one year.  He died in 1960 at the age of 52.

Wilbanks Smith was said to have had a successful career in engineering and to have been devoted tocommunity service.  He was said to have taken “personal responsibility for the incident” mainly to deflect criticism of his coach, team, and the University but he never expressed any regretat injuring Bright or made any attempt to contact him or make amends. 

With typical grace, Bright shrugged it off, saying he felt “null and void” about Smith, but adding “The thing has been a great influence on my life. My total philosophy of life now is that, whatever a person’s bias and limitation, they deserve respect. Everyone’s entitled to their own beliefs.”

Prayers can also be doorways to different states of being, such as the ecstatic union with God felt by some mystics or the overwhelming feeling of the divine everywhere described by transcendentalists.

Have you ever felt that your being was one with a larger entity, a holiness that some might call God? What gave you that feeling?

The post Co-Ministers’ Colloquy – Oct. 19th appeared first on Unitarian Universalist Society of Schenectady.

Senior Youth (grades 9-12): Our next meeting is this Sunday, 10/24, at noon. My awesome co-advisors are Mark Hyland and Aaron Tyo.

The post RE This Week – Oct. 19th appeared first on Unitarian Universalist Society of Schenectady.

Rev. Joe Cleveland, minister in Saratoga Springs, invites UUSS to join him in Reading the Tao, held every Wednesday. They meet at 6:00 pm and each session will be no longer than an hour. During these gatherings, Rev. Joe reads one verse of the Tao te Ching in several translations. Those gathered meditate on and discuss the insights found there. – Robin Ahearn, Director of Lifespan Religious Education

The post Reading the Tao – Wednesdays at 6:00 pm appeared first on Unitarian Universalist Society of Schenectady.

The post BIPOC Book Group Read – October 27th appeared first on Unitarian Universalist Society of Schenectady.

I am actually old enough … I mean, I know that Republicans in Texas have been conservative for a long time, but there was a time when conservative Republicans in Texas were not absolutely batshit crazy.

– Charlie Sykes

This week’s featured post is “Reading While Texan“.

This week everybody was talking about Manchin and Sinema

For weeks we’ve been wondering what price they would demand for getting on board with the Build Back Better reconciliation bill. We’re starting to see that price, and it’s steep.

Manchin is against the Clean Electricity Payment Program, which subsidizes the shift away from fossil fuels for generating electricity.

The $150 billion program — officially known as the Clean Electricity Performance Program, or CEPP — would reward energy suppliers who switch from fossil fuels like coal and natural gas to clean power sources like solar, wind, and nuclear power, which already make up about 40 percent of the industry, and fine those who do not.

Manchin claims the program isn’t necessary, because the shift is happening anyway. (The change he cites is over a 20 years period, and mainly shows a shift from coal to natural gas, a somewhat cleaner fossil fuel.) But it makes a huge difference how fast the shift happens. Remember: The most direct plan for cutting carbon emissions is just two steps long:

• Electrify everything.
• Generate electricity without fossil fuels.

He also wants means tests on a number of programs, including the child tax credit, and possibly also a work requirement for parents who get the credit.

Sinema says she won’t vote for Build Back Better until the House passes the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Since it’s almost certain the House will eventually vote for the bill, this plan only makes sense if she wants to back out of whatever commitments she makes in the negotiations to pass both bills.

She also opposes the tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy that pay for the bill in its current form. I’m not sure whether she wants a smaller increase or no increase. Democrats are discussing a carbon tax to fill the fiscal hole, though I’m not sure what Manchin would think of that.

and subpoenas

With Trump’s encouragement, a number of his administration’s former officials and unofficial advisers are defying subpoenas from the House January 6 Committee. The committee will vote tomorrow on whether to hold Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress.

“This potential criminal contempt referral — or will-be criminal contempt referral for Steve Bannon — is the first shot over the bow,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who serves on the committee, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union Sunday. “It’s very real, but it says to anybody else coming in front of the committee, ‘Don’t think that you’re gonna be able to just kind of walk away and we’re gonna forget about you. We’re not.’”

It’s important not to lose sight of just how far the country has gone down this rabbit hole. We’ve gotten used to the idea that Trump obstructs justice. He obstructed the Mueller investigation, the Ukraine investigation of his first impeachment, and the January 6 investigation of his second impeachment. We’ve gotten used to the idea that he makes laughable claims in lawsuits, purely for the purpose of using the courts to delay the release of potentially damaging information.

But Trump’s intransigence is not just politics, it’s new territory in American politics — recall Hillary Clinton testifying to the Benghazi Committee for 11 hours — and it threatens the rule of law. We once believed that politicians would avoid this kind of behavior out of shame, because of course the voters would ask “What is he hiding?” But Trump hides everything, so it’s just what he does. We once believed that no president would pardon his co-conspirators, or that Congress would of course respond to such an outrage by removing him from office. But Trump has done precisely that, and Republican senators let him.

“This potential criminal contempt referral — or will-be criminal contempt referral for Steve Bannon — is the first shot over the bow,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who serves on the committee, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union Sunday. “It’s very real, but it says to anybody else coming in front of the committee, ‘Don’t think that you’re gonna be able to just kind of walk away and we’re gonna forget about you. We’re not.’”

Bannon has zero justification for not testifying:

• He was not a government official during the lead-up to January 6.
• Former presidents have no claim on executive privilege unless the current president grants it, and Biden has not.
• Executive privilege allows a witness not to answer specific questions. It doesn’t justify refusing to testify.

But the law is not the point: Trump wants to run out the clock on this investigation the way he did on all the others. If his party can get the House back in 2022, presumably Kevin McCarthy will get the investigation stopped, and the public will never know what crimes Trump (or Bannon or any of the others) committed.

What’s most appalling is not that Trump and his cronies would try this. It’s that Republicans support his obstruction up and down the line (with rare exceptions like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger), and he loses no support among his followers.

and the economy

As the economy comes back from the pandemic recession, workers are quitting their jobs in unprecedented numbers. Economists are calling it “The Great Resignation“.

“Quits,” as the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls them, are rising in almost every industry. For those in leisure and hospitality, especially, the workplace must feel like one giant revolving door. Nearly 7 percent of employees in the “accommodations and food services” sector left their job in August. That means one in 14 hotel clerks, restaurant servers, and barbacks said sayonara in a single month. Thanks to several pandemic-relief checks, a rent moratorium, and student-loan forgiveness, everybody, particularly if they are young and have a low income, has more freedom to quit jobs they hate and hop to something else.

Atlantic’s Derek Thompson continues:

As a general rule, crises leave an unpredictable mark on history. It didn’t seem obvious that the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 would lead to a revolution in architecture, and yet, it without a doubt contributed directly to the invention of the skyscraper in Chicago. You might be equally surprised that one of the most important scientific legacies of World War II had nothing to do with bombs, weapons, or manufacturing; the conflict also accelerated the development of penicillin and flu vaccines. If you asked me to predict the most salutary long-term effects of the pandemic last year, I might have muttered something about urban redesign and office filtration. But we may instead look back to the pandemic as a crucial inflection point in something more fundamental: Americans’ attitudes toward work. Since early last year, many workers have had to reconsider the boundaries between boss and worker, family time and work time, home and office.

Paul Krugman weighs in:

Until recently conservatives blamed expanded jobless benefits, claiming that these benefits were reducing the incentive to accept jobs. But states that canceled those benefits early saw no increase in employment compared with those that didn’t, and the nationwide end of enhanced benefits last month doesn’t seem to have made much difference to the job situation.

What seems to be happening instead is that the pandemic led many U.S. workers to rethink their lives and ask whether it was worth staying in the lousy jobs too many of them had.

For America is a rich country that treats many of its workers remarkably badly. Wages are often low; adjusted for inflation, the typical male worker earned virtually no more in 2019 than his counterpart did 40 years earlier. Hours are long: America is a “no-vacation nation,” offering far less time off than other advanced countries. Work is also unstable, with many low-wage workers — and nonwhite workers in particular — subject to unpredictable fluctuations in working hours that can wreak havoc on family life.

All along, economists figured that when the economy started to recover, there would be a blip of inflation. Production would have trouble ramping up as fast as spending, as many Americans would have money in their pockets due to a combination of government programs and their inability to spend normally during the pandemic. (Being retired, I don’t want to think about all the driving vacations my wife and I would have taken, which probably would have pushed us to buy a new car by now.)

The question was whether inflation would just blip up briefly, or whether a new inflationary cycle would start that would require some policy intervention (i.e., higher interest rates) to get under control. Paul Krugman has been on what he calls “Team Transitory”, but now he’s not sure; the data he would ordinarily use to tell the difference between the two scenarios is (as he puts it) “weird”. In other words, the current covid/post-covid economy is unique in ways that make it hard to read. He still argues against raising interest rates, because he sees cutting off the recovery as a bigger risk than letting inflation run for a while.

More about inflation in this Washington Post article.

and John Gruden

John Gruden, head coach of the Los Vegas Raiders NFL football team, resigned last Monday, after emails leaked out where he made racist, sexist, and homophobic comments. The emails were part of a trove of 650K emails related to the Washington Football Team (then called the Redskins), which the NFL was investigating because of reports of the toxic and abusive work environment for the team cheerleaders, and possibly other female employees. Presumably somebody at the NFL is responsible for the leak.

The Gruden emails were sent between 2010 and 2018, and though Gruden was not connected with the WFT at the time, he was corresponding with WFT President Bruce Allen, whose emails were being examined. The Gruden emails leaked out of the NFL’s investigation without being formally released.

There’s a lot not to like about this scandal. The comments themselves are reprehensible, and it makes perfect sense that Gruden should leave the Raiders now that they are public. Like every other team in the NFL, the Raiders have a large number of black players, as well as the NFL’s only openly gay player, who came out in June. Knowing that your coach uses slurs against people like you has got to disrupt your relationship with the team. So the players deserve a new coach.

In general, though, I dislike scandals based on people’s private conversations becoming public years later. If I had to be judged by the worst thing I ever said to someone I trusted not to repeat it, I doubt I could pass muster. My guess is that few Americans could. In particular, I wonder how many other NFL coaches could be taken down if their private emails were published.

So yes, Gruden is racist, sexist, homophobic, … but he’s also unlucky, in that he wandered into a investigation aimed at somebody else. And whoever leaked the emails seems to have intentionally targeted him. (First one email came out, and when it started to look like he might weather that storm, more appeared.) By condemning Gruden, we may be inadvertently carrying out somebody’s vendetta.

But any sympathy I might have had for Gruden vanished when he responded by saying that there was “not a blade of racism” in him. I don’t know why people say clueless crap like that, especially right after evidence surfaces that they do have those blades. American culture is a toxic stew of prejudices of all sorts, and we’ve all been soaking in it. Why can’t we just acknowledge that, and then affirm that we’re trying our best to overcome it? (Here’s an example of me practicing what I’m preaching.) It would be refreshing to hear someone respond to past evidence of racism with “I’ve learned a lot since then.” rather than “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.“

The other thing not to like about the Gruden story is that he may not be the worst person in it. Reportedly, the Gruden emails also “featured photos of topless Washington Football Team cheerleaders”. It’s not clear whether Gruden was sending or receiving the images, but Allen was the WFT insider. Was he sharing illicit photos of his female employees?

And that raises a bigger question: The NFL launched this investigation in response to media reports that the Washington Football Team owner and executives harassed women, circulated surreptitiously obtained photos and videos of team cheerleaders, and put the women in “what they considered unsafe situations” with high-rolling season-ticket holders. Why is this the only thing that leaks out? Why is Gruden the only one to lose his job?

The report from that investigation is still secret, though we know that the team was fined $10 million dollars. And while that sounds like a lot, it really isn’t for a team valued at more than $4 billion. And remember: Whenever some law or rule or standard is only enforced by a fine, that means you can break it if you’re rich enough.

Chris Hayes discusses these issues with a former WFT cheerleader.

Friday, the NYT reported on the cozy relationship between Allen and the NFL general counsel who supervises investigations like the one into Allen’s team.

and you also might be interested in …

The downward trend in the Covid numbers continues: New cases are down 22% in the last two weeks, deaths down 19%.

One of those deaths was Colin Powell, who died at 84. He was vaccinated, but was fighting a cancer that compromised his immune system.

As Angela Merkel leaves the chancellorship of Germany, Thom Hartman notes all the ways that her position on the German center-right was considerably to the left of Bernie Sanders in the US.

Democrats are trying to pass an anti-gerrymandering law at the federal level, while simultaneously trying to gerrymander blue states like New York and Illinois more aggressively. At a simplistic level, this looks like hypocrisy, but I think this two-pronged approach is the only way we’ll get rid of gerrymandering. As long as it’s a one-sided advantage for Republicans, they’ll be unified in protecting it.

I believe in the Designated Hitter Principle: You may think that the designated hitter is a terrible idea that mars the purity of baseball. But if you play in a league where DHs are in the rules, you put a DH in your lineup.

Remember Andy McCabe, the guy who became acting head of the FBI after James Comey was fired, and then was fired himself just days before his scheduled retirement, so that his pension wouldn’t vest? He filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department, which is now under new management. This week DoJ settled with McCabe, not admitting any wrongdoing, but giving him back his retirement benefits. “Plaintiff will be deemed to have retired from the FBI on March 19, 2018.” DoJ also pays McCabe’s attorney’s fees.

Media Matters reports:

Nearly a dozen of the Fox News guests the network has presented as concerned parents or educators who oppose the teaching of so-called “critical race theory” in schools also have day jobs as Republican strategists, conservative think-tankers, or right-wing media personalities

The article lists 11 by name, including “concerned parent” Ian Prior, who has appeared 14 times on Fox to denounce CRT, without mentioning his professional work doing communications for the RNC, Jeff Sessions, Karl Rove, and other Republicans.

Fox has been particularly focused on fanning the critical race theory pseudo-issue in Virginia, where Pears and several other astroturf voices are from, and which (coincidentally) is electing a governor in a few weeks.

and let’s close with something reassuring

You may think your expressions in photos look odd, but your face does nothing like what dogs’ faces do when they’re trying to pluck a treat out of the air.

Continue reading "Have an Idea for CERSI 2022 Workshops?"

One of the sources for the living tradition of Unitarian Universalism is the "words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love."

Krista Tippet and Bryan Stevenson are two  of these prophetic women and men.

From Krista Tippet's interview with Bryan Stevenson 

Your worst fears about Texas schools aren’t true. But your next-to-worst fears probably are.

Here’s how deep the rabbit hole goes: NBC News received an audio recording of an administrator in the Dallas suburb of Southlake [1], telling teachers that a new law (HB 3979) requires them to offer an “opposing” perspective if they have books about the Holocaust in their classroom libraries. When a teacher asked “How do you oppose the Holocaust?” the administrator didn’t offer a suggestion, but replied “It’s come up. Believe me.” [2]

What’s most disturbing in this recording, to me at least, is that the administrator doesn’t sound like Holocaust denier who has been itching for years to get her extreme opinions into the curriculum. In general, she sounds like she’s on the teachers’ side. “If you think a book is OK, then let’s go with it. And whatever happens, we’ll fight it together.” She doesn’t seem ideological, she just wants to keep the school district out of trouble — like administrators in every other Texas school district.

On the calm-down side of this story, the NBC article also quotes experts who say that she overreacted to the law. And the school district posted this statement on its Facebook page:

During the conversations with teachers during last week’s meeting, the comments made were in no way to convey that the Holocaust was anything less than a terrible event in history. Additionally, we recognize there are not two sides of the Holocaust. As we continue to work through implementation of HB 3979, we also understand this bill does not require an opposing viewpoint on historical facts.

So — big relief! — Southlake’s school libraries can still display The Diary of Anne Frank without “balancing” it against Mein Kampf.

What is controversial? Even if you accept that the Southlake administrator’s interpretation of the law was over the top, it’s worth taking a moment to read the portion of HB 3979 she was “overreacting” to:

(1) a teacher may not be compelled to discuss a particular current event or widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs;

(2) a teacher who chooses to discuss a topic described by Subdivision (1) shall, to the best of the teacher’s ability, strive to explore the topic from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective;

Apparently, cooler heads have determined that the Holocaust is not “widely debated and currently controversial” in Southlake (and thank God for that). But what is? The law is only eight pages long, and doesn’t give school districts any guidance on exactly how widely debated an issue must be before “diverse and contending perspectives” have to be “explored without deference”.

Worse, “debated” and “controversial” are fundamentally subjective notions. An issue becomes “debated” not because it is objectively dubious, but because somebody chooses to debate it. It becomes “controversial” whenever someone starts a controversy, no matter how baseless that controversy might be. [3] As much as I want to accept the school district’s assurance that “this bill does not require an opposing viewpoint on historical facts”, I can’t find such a clear statement in the text of the law.

And even if you grant an exemption for “historical facts”, the very distinction between facts and opinions is itself controversial these days. The essence of Trumpism is to deny that objective facts can be found by examining evidence. (American intelligence agencies say one thing, but Vladimir Putin says something else. Who can determine where the truth lies?) If Trump repeats something often enough, it is true — or at the very least it becomes an “alternative fact“. Any evidence that refutes his opinion is “fake news”.

So it appears to me that if, say, a large number of people in some Texas community believe the Earth is flat — or if the Oracle of Mar-a-Lago starts making that claim — a classroom’s globe might become debated and controversial; it might need to be balanced against some other representation of the Earth. HB 3979 would then require teachers not to “defer” to the view that the Earth is spherical.

Or suppose one of your students has a parent like this guy, who wore a “Six million wasn’t enough” shirt to a Proud Boys rally in December. (They’re available online.) Would that make the Holocaust “controversial” enough to invoke the provisions of 3979? Or maybe you regard the fact of the Holocaust as beyond controversy, but describing it as “a terrible event” is a value judgment that this guy disputes. Doesn’t that make it “debated”? How many people have to agree with him before it’s “widely” debated?

Maybe that’s what “It’s come up. Believe me.” means.

The big chill. But OK, let’s say you live in a sane town, where the Holocaust and the globe aren’t widely debated. Let’s say your local biology teacher can describe how evolution works without giving a “contending perspective” from Genesis, or that teachers at all levels can refer to Joe Biden as the President without any kind of disclaimer.

Or, at least, that’s how the law would be interpreted by a judge if a case went to court.

If you find that comforting, you’re ignoring the fact that most school administrators don’t want to go to court. Teachers, by and large, don’t want to be at the center of a public controversy. They want to spend their prep time on next week’s lesson plan, not on explaining to a review committee what they said or what books they made available. They don’t want to lose hours in meetings with the school district’s or their union’s lawyer, getting advice on how to present their case to a judge.

In practice, that means that bills like HB 3979 have chilling effects that go far beyond their legally enforceable boundaries.

So hurray! You can teach about the Holocaust, and maybe even say that it was wrong. What about slavery? Jim Crow? Government programs that helped White families accumulate wealth, but weren’t available to Black families? How far do you want to stick your neck out? [4]

New Kid. In a related Texas case, the Houston suburb Katy cancelled a virtual appearance by author Jerry Craft, and pulled his graphic novel New Kid from the shelves after a parent circulated a petition.

“New Kid,” a Newbery Medal-winning graphic novel, is about a seventh grader at a prestigious private school where he is one of the few students of color. …

“It is inappropriate instructional material,” [the petition-starting parent] said. “The books don’t come out and say we want white children to feel like oppressors, but that is absolutely what they will do.” [She] claimed the book promoted critical race theory as well as Marxism. The petition gained a few hundred signatures in a district of more than 80,000 students.

This article, also by NBC News, seems to imply that a “few hundred signatures” is not many. To me, it seems like an incredibly large number of people in one town to take a position on a children’s book. I have to wonder how many of the signers had ever heard of New Kid, and how many just believed that this petition would stop somebody from teaching “critical race theory”, whatever they imagine it to be.

Although HB 3979 is often referred to as a bill against teaching “critical race theory”, the law does not mention that term, and the particular things it does outlaw are a bizarre caricature of anything actually being taught, like

an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex

The petition has been taken down, so I don’t know the text of it. But I doubt it directly invokes the new law. It seems more like a standard attempt to get elected officials to take action.

My reading. I didn’t want to assume baselessly that the woman charging “critical race theory” and “Marxism” is crazy, so I read the book Saturday. (It’s 250 or so pages, but it’s a graphic novel; reading it takes maybe an hour, depending on how closely you examine the images.) Having now done my own research, here’s my newly informed opinion: She’s crazy.

New Kid is a pretty thoroughly uplifting book. What I got out of it is: If you ever reach a point where you can see past your own struggles, you’ll find that just about everybody is struggling in their own way.

The central character is a Black kid named Jordan Banks, so he struggles in a way that a Black kid might, including from the clueless assumptions of White kids and teachers. As the book develops, though, he gets enough slack to raise his glance and see the struggles of the other kids — including one White kid who is pathologically ashamed of the burn mark on her arm, and another who is afraid Jordan won’t like him because his family is too rich.

I can’t fathom what CRT or Marxism has to do with any of this, other than being buzzwords that MAGA-hatters throw at whatever they don’t like.

Craft himself describes what he’s trying to do this way:

As an African American boy who grew up in Washington Heights in New York City, I almost never saw kids like me in any of the books assigned to me in school. Books aimed at kids like me seemed to deal only with history or misery. [5] That’s why it has always been important to me to show kids of color as just regular kids, and to create iconic African American characters like Jordan Banks from New Kid. I hope that readers of all ages will see the kindness and understanding that my characters exhibit and emulate those feelings in their day-to-day lives.

If you look at this book and see nothing but an attempt to make “white children feel like oppressors”, I don’t know what to tell you.

Happy endings? Like Southlake and the Holocaust, the story of Jerry Craft and Katy has an ending that is sort-of-happy, if you don’t look at it too closely: A review committee ruled that the book is appropriate and rescheduled Craft’s appearance. [6]

But again, consider the chilling effect. Suppose you’re a teacher putting together a reading list, or assembling a mini-library for your classroom. Now you know: Even a Newberry Medal book is suspect. Even if nothing on your list would offend any sane person, your name still might wind up in a petition, and you might need to justify your choices to a review committee.

How many worthwhile books (that we’ll never hear about) have teachers struck off their suggested-reading lists, not because they contain anything remotely objectionable, but because the teachers don’t want the hassle of dealing with crazy people? How many children, who might have discovered that reading could actually be interesting, will instead receive bland assignments that have nothing to do with their experiences?

[1] If you think you’ve heard of Southlake before, probably it’s from a previous racial controversy, which became the subject of a six-part NBC podcast.

[2] Let me offer an answer to the Southlake teacher’s question: You can balance a Holocaust book like The Diary of Anne Frank with The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, a first-person novel told from the point of view of an SS officer.

This is not a serious pedagogical suggestion, because Littell’s book is way too long and difficult for most students, not to mention upsetting. (I would worry about a student who managed to finish it.) But if you need to cover your ass, it does present an opposing (or at least contrasting) perspective.

An in-between perspective might be Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy of detective novels. Kerr’s detective Bernie Gunther isn’t a Nazi himself, but given the times, he frequently finds himself unable to say “no” to cases of interest to people like Heydrich or Goebbels. Kerr should be readable by advanced students at the high-school level, and might give them sympathy for the unsavory choices ordinary people face when they live under a totalitarian regime.

Similarly, Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 detective trilogy humanizes one of Stalin’s secret policemen.

[3] Part of what makes a position “debatable” in practice is the wealth and power of the people who debate it. Climate change, for example, is still “debatable” because fossil fuel corporations have the resources to keep their point of view in the public eye, in spite of the scientific consensus on the other side.

[4] The text of the law might be on your side, if you make it into a courtroom.

[T]he State Board of Education shall adopt essential knowledge and skills that develop each student’s civic knowledge, including an understanding of: … the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong

[5] One of the running gags in New Kid is the lack of diversity in the themes of “diversity literature”, which Jordan parodies as “a gritty, urban reminder of the grit of today’s urban grittiness”. One panel is labeled “African American escapist literature”, and features books titled “Escape From Gang Life”, “Escape From Slavery”, “Escape From Poverty”, and “Escape From Prison”.

[6] I give Craft credit for not saying “Fuck you” to the whole town.

The week’s most alarming story, by far, was the claim by a Texas school administrator that teachers might have to offer an “opposing perspective” if they included books about the Holocaust in their classroom libraries. Subsequently, the school district backed away from that public-relations disaster: The Holocaust is not one of the “controversial and widely debated” topics that a new Texas law requires teachers to cover in a balanced way. It is officially “a terrible event in history”, and can be discussed without mentioning any pro-Holocaust perspective.

What a relief!

However, I can’t help but be disturbed by the idea that that’s where the battleline is. And I wonder: What books are Texas teachers tossing out right now because their topics are slightly less one-sided than the Holocaust? So this week’s featured post is “Reading While Texan”. It discusses the Holocaust “controversy” and the law that sparked it. I also look at a different school district — a Houston suburb this time rather than a Dallas suburb — where a Newberry Medal book about a Black seventh-grader got taken off the shelves so that a review committee could decide whether it was “critical race theory”. Again, the story has a “happy” ending: The book is back on the shelves. But if that’s what we’re fighting about, where is the line exactly?

That post is almost ready, and should be out shortly after 9 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover the price Senators Manchin and Sinema are demanding for supporting what will remain of Biden’s Build Back Better plan. Also: the attempt to enforce subpoenas on Trump’s allies, John Gruden, inflation, workers’ reluctance to return to bad jobs, and a few other things. That should be out around noon or so.