Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 874

Go ahead, watch them die: F**k those joyless moralists who hate football and the Super Bowl

Super Bowl (Pretentious Roman Numeral 50) is upon us, America! Let us give thanks to the Gods of the Gridiron for our biggest and brightest holy day! Let us sit in thrall of ornate and savage beauty! Let us watch Cam Newton run wild like some brilliantly branded Caliban! Let us pray that Peyton Manning’s arm remains attached to the rest of his body, at least until the third quarter! Let us praise the cleverness of the sponsors! Let us consume processed foodstuffs until farts explode from our lucky bottoms! I kid, of course. But only because I care. The Super Bowl, after all, offers those of us who are hung up on football the chance to take part in the world’s largest tribal pop shot. Half of our adult population will watch the game. Trillions of dollars will be won and lost. Billions of otherwise billable hours will be wiled away on postmortems. Americans will be provided, if only for 24 sweet hours, a spectacle more triumphant and diverting than Donald Trump’s hair. The problem—and isn’t there always some problem where pleasure is concerned?—is that a bunch of self-righteous ninnies are going to try to make us feel guilty for watching the Super Bowl. And why? Because, they say, the game is “dangerous.” Yeah, well, so is being a construction worker! Or a cop! Or a mountain climber! So why not ban those things, huh? Plus the players get paid a fortune! They’re adults! They know the risks! At least they do now. Seriously. Why is everyone picking on football? Why is the liberal media parading all these dead, demented former players around? People get dementia and die all the time. You don’t see them parading around dead insurance agents. You know what it is? It’s depressing. It’s like having some ugly PETA activist show you video of hogs being decapitated and gutted when all you want to do is enjoy a Little Caesar’s Bacon Wrapped Crust Deep Deep Dish Pizza. Or some bleeding heart cramming footage of bombed kids down your throat during a military flyover. You get the point. These media elites are trying to brainwash you into believing that every single football player gets brain damage, which is capital B Bullshit. The percentage of former NFL players who get brain damage is 30 percent—tops. And that number, by the way, comes from the NFL itself. So, I mean, how can you even trust it? For years, the league totally lied about how dangerous football is. And now, all of a sudden, we’re supposed to believe them? Right. Roger Goodell will do anything to make a buck. I don’t even know how he sleeps at night. But what I really want to know is, what about the other 70 percent, huh? How come you never hear about the guys who turn out just fine? Guys who never would have had a chance to make it out of the ghetto and thanks to football they’re rich and famous and playing in celebrity golf tournaments? How come nobody ever tells that story? I’ll tell you why. Because there’s a whole conspiracy out there of doctors and reporters and authors who are making a fortune off this concussion panic. It’s a whole industry now. Just like with climate change. The goal is to try to make people feel evil for taking pleasure in life, like me sitting there watching the Super Bowl is somehow to blame for the fact that Kenny Stabler’s brain looked like Swiss cheese when he died. How ridiculous is that? Ask yourself: What difference does it really make whether I watch or not? Besides, I loved Kenny Stabler. It totally sucks that he got all messed up later in life and couldn’t listen to music or go outside or whatever. But who’s to say what’s really to blame for that? A bunch of doctors say it was football. Yeah, well, you could pay a bunch of doctors to say anything. The point is, even if football were so dangerous … what about Mixed Martial Arts? And rugby? And soccer! Did you know there are more concussions in girl’s soccer than football? It’s a fact. Plus, the NFL has totally changed the rules. The guys on defense can’t even deliver a decent shot anymore without the league throwing a hissy fit. The sport is already totally wussed out compared to the old days. But here’s what all these naysayers keep forgetting: America has become the greatest nation on the face of the earth because we believe in liberty. And liberty boils down to free will. You can’t tell some badass like Julian Edelman, the Patriots' wide receiver, that he’s got to come out of the Super Bowl just because he maybe got a concussion. And maybe if he gets hit again his brain will maybe hemorrhage and he’ll keel over dead. It’s like the Rev. Stephen A. Smith preached on ESPN, “I don’t give a damn that he was woozy. This is the Super Bowl. Let’s go over it. That’s how I feel. I’m not going to lie. I’m sorry. You got all off-season to get your head right. Get it together. ” Besides, don’t you think Julian Edelman knows his own body better than some doctor? Americans can think for themselves and make up their own minds about what to watch. We don’t need a bunch of benchwarmers trying to smear the game every time some player rapes a woman or beats his kid. Newsflash: Women get raped all the time and kids get abused. Stop blaming football for society’s problems! Stop telling us we’re stupid and evil for loving America’s favorite sport. Stop venting your snobbery in the form of weasely questions about whether “it’s ethical to consume as entertainment a sport so violent it causes brain damage.” Who gave these jags the right to judge us, anyway? The fact is people have always played dangerous games, and fought wars. We’ve always looked up to men man enough to face danger. That’s in our nature. Take a look at the Romans. They packed stadiums to watch gladiators kill each other. You didn’t hear anyone trying to guilt trip them. People should stop blaming football for human nature. They should stop trying to scapegoat other fans for their own hang-ups. If you don’t like football, turn it off and shut up! Because in the end, football is just a game. That’s my whole point. Football is just a game. The Super Bowl is just a game, all the hoopla aside. It brings a lot of joy and meaning to hundreds of millions of Americans. If a few players wind up a little confused later in life, it’s fine to feel bad for them and their loved ones and all that. But let’s not lose sight of what really matters.Super Bowl (Pretentious Roman Numeral 50) is upon us, America! Let us give thanks to the Gods of the Gridiron for our biggest and brightest holy day! Let us sit in thrall of ornate and savage beauty! Let us watch Cam Newton run wild like some brilliantly branded Caliban! Let us pray that Peyton Manning’s arm remains attached to the rest of his body, at least until the third quarter! Let us praise the cleverness of the sponsors! Let us consume processed foodstuffs until farts explode from our lucky bottoms! I kid, of course. But only because I care. The Super Bowl, after all, offers those of us who are hung up on football the chance to take part in the world’s largest tribal pop shot. Half of our adult population will watch the game. Trillions of dollars will be won and lost. Billions of otherwise billable hours will be wiled away on postmortems. Americans will be provided, if only for 24 sweet hours, a spectacle more triumphant and diverting than Donald Trump’s hair. The problem—and isn’t there always some problem where pleasure is concerned?—is that a bunch of self-righteous ninnies are going to try to make us feel guilty for watching the Super Bowl. And why? Because, they say, the game is “dangerous.” Yeah, well, so is being a construction worker! Or a cop! Or a mountain climber! So why not ban those things, huh? Plus the players get paid a fortune! They’re adults! They know the risks! At least they do now. Seriously. Why is everyone picking on football? Why is the liberal media parading all these dead, demented former players around? People get dementia and die all the time. You don’t see them parading around dead insurance agents. You know what it is? It’s depressing. It’s like having some ugly PETA activist show you video of hogs being decapitated and gutted when all you want to do is enjoy a Little Caesar’s Bacon Wrapped Crust Deep Deep Dish Pizza. Or some bleeding heart cramming footage of bombed kids down your throat during a military flyover. You get the point. These media elites are trying to brainwash you into believing that every single football player gets brain damage, which is capital B Bullshit. The percentage of former NFL players who get brain damage is 30 percent—tops. And that number, by the way, comes from the NFL itself. So, I mean, how can you even trust it? For years, the league totally lied about how dangerous football is. And now, all of a sudden, we’re supposed to believe them? Right. Roger Goodell will do anything to make a buck. I don’t even know how he sleeps at night. But what I really want to know is, what about the other 70 percent, huh? How come you never hear about the guys who turn out just fine? Guys who never would have had a chance to make it out of the ghetto and thanks to football they’re rich and famous and playing in celebrity golf tournaments? How come nobody ever tells that story? I’ll tell you why. Because there’s a whole conspiracy out there of doctors and reporters and authors who are making a fortune off this concussion panic. It’s a whole industry now. Just like with climate change. The goal is to try to make people feel evil for taking pleasure in life, like me sitting there watching the Super Bowl is somehow to blame for the fact that Kenny Stabler’s brain looked like Swiss cheese when he died. How ridiculous is that? Ask yourself: What difference does it really make whether I watch or not? Besides, I loved Kenny Stabler. It totally sucks that he got all messed up later in life and couldn’t listen to music or go outside or whatever. But who’s to say what’s really to blame for that? A bunch of doctors say it was football. Yeah, well, you could pay a bunch of doctors to say anything. The point is, even if football were so dangerous … what about Mixed Martial Arts? And rugby? And soccer! Did you know there are more concussions in girl’s soccer than football? It’s a fact. Plus, the NFL has totally changed the rules. The guys on defense can’t even deliver a decent shot anymore without the league throwing a hissy fit. The sport is already totally wussed out compared to the old days. But here’s what all these naysayers keep forgetting: America has become the greatest nation on the face of the earth because we believe in liberty. And liberty boils down to free will. You can’t tell some badass like Julian Edelman, the Patriots' wide receiver, that he’s got to come out of the Super Bowl just because he maybe got a concussion. And maybe if he gets hit again his brain will maybe hemorrhage and he’ll keel over dead. It’s like the Rev. Stephen A. Smith preached on ESPN, “I don’t give a damn that he was woozy. This is the Super Bowl. Let’s go over it. That’s how I feel. I’m not going to lie. I’m sorry. You got all off-season to get your head right. Get it together. ” Besides, don’t you think Julian Edelman knows his own body better than some doctor? Americans can think for themselves and make up their own minds about what to watch. We don’t need a bunch of benchwarmers trying to smear the game every time some player rapes a woman or beats his kid. Newsflash: Women get raped all the time and kids get abused. Stop blaming football for society’s problems! Stop telling us we’re stupid and evil for loving America’s favorite sport. Stop venting your snobbery in the form of weasely questions about whether “it’s ethical to consume as entertainment a sport so violent it causes brain damage.” Who gave these jags the right to judge us, anyway? The fact is people have always played dangerous games, and fought wars. We’ve always looked up to men man enough to face danger. That’s in our nature. Take a look at the Romans. They packed stadiums to watch gladiators kill each other. You didn’t hear anyone trying to guilt trip them. People should stop blaming football for human nature. They should stop trying to scapegoat other fans for their own hang-ups. If you don’t like football, turn it off and shut up! Because in the end, football is just a game. That’s my whole point. Football is just a game. The Super Bowl is just a game, all the hoopla aside. It brings a lot of joy and meaning to hundreds of millions of Americans. If a few players wind up a little confused later in life, it’s fine to feel bad for them and their loved ones and all that. But let’s not lose sight of what really matters.Super Bowl (Pretentious Roman Numeral 50) is upon us, America! Let us give thanks to the Gods of the Gridiron for our biggest and brightest holy day! Let us sit in thrall of ornate and savage beauty! Let us watch Cam Newton run wild like some brilliantly branded Caliban! Let us pray that Peyton Manning’s arm remains attached to the rest of his body, at least until the third quarter! Let us praise the cleverness of the sponsors! Let us consume processed foodstuffs until farts explode from our lucky bottoms! I kid, of course. But only because I care. The Super Bowl, after all, offers those of us who are hung up on football the chance to take part in the world’s largest tribal pop shot. Half of our adult population will watch the game. Trillions of dollars will be won and lost. Billions of otherwise billable hours will be wiled away on postmortems. Americans will be provided, if only for 24 sweet hours, a spectacle more triumphant and diverting than Donald Trump’s hair. The problem—and isn’t there always some problem where pleasure is concerned?—is that a bunch of self-righteous ninnies are going to try to make us feel guilty for watching the Super Bowl. And why? Because, they say, the game is “dangerous.” Yeah, well, so is being a construction worker! Or a cop! Or a mountain climber! So why not ban those things, huh? Plus the players get paid a fortune! They’re adults! They know the risks! At least they do now. Seriously. Why is everyone picking on football? Why is the liberal media parading all these dead, demented former players around? People get dementia and die all the time. You don’t see them parading around dead insurance agents. You know what it is? It’s depressing. It’s like having some ugly PETA activist show you video of hogs being decapitated and gutted when all you want to do is enjoy a Little Caesar’s Bacon Wrapped Crust Deep Deep Dish Pizza. Or some bleeding heart cramming footage of bombed kids down your throat during a military flyover. You get the point. These media elites are trying to brainwash you into believing that every single football player gets brain damage, which is capital B Bullshit. The percentage of former NFL players who get brain damage is 30 percent—tops. And that number, by the way, comes from the NFL itself. So, I mean, how can you even trust it? For years, the league totally lied about how dangerous football is. And now, all of a sudden, we’re supposed to believe them? Right. Roger Goodell will do anything to make a buck. I don’t even know how he sleeps at night. But what I really want to know is, what about the other 70 percent, huh? How come you never hear about the guys who turn out just fine? Guys who never would have had a chance to make it out of the ghetto and thanks to football they’re rich and famous and playing in celebrity golf tournaments? How come nobody ever tells that story? I’ll tell you why. Because there’s a whole conspiracy out there of doctors and reporters and authors who are making a fortune off this concussion panic. It’s a whole industry now. Just like with climate change. The goal is to try to make people feel evil for taking pleasure in life, like me sitting there watching the Super Bowl is somehow to blame for the fact that Kenny Stabler’s brain looked like Swiss cheese when he died. How ridiculous is that? Ask yourself: What difference does it really make whether I watch or not? Besides, I loved Kenny Stabler. It totally sucks that he got all messed up later in life and couldn’t listen to music or go outside or whatever. But who’s to say what’s really to blame for that? A bunch of doctors say it was football. Yeah, well, you could pay a bunch of doctors to say anything. The point is, even if football were so dangerous … what about Mixed Martial Arts? And rugby? And soccer! Did you know there are more concussions in girl’s soccer than football? It’s a fact. Plus, the NFL has totally changed the rules. The guys on defense can’t even deliver a decent shot anymore without the league throwing a hissy fit. The sport is already totally wussed out compared to the old days. But here’s what all these naysayers keep forgetting: America has become the greatest nation on the face of the earth because we believe in liberty. And liberty boils down to free will. You can’t tell some badass like Julian Edelman, the Patriots' wide receiver, that he’s got to come out of the Super Bowl just because he maybe got a concussion. And maybe if he gets hit again his brain will maybe hemorrhage and he’ll keel over dead. It’s like the Rev. Stephen A. Smith preached on ESPN, “I don’t give a damn that he was woozy. This is the Super Bowl. Let’s go over it. That’s how I feel. I’m not going to lie. I’m sorry. You got all off-season to get your head right. Get it together. ” Besides, don’t you think Julian Edelman knows his own body better than some doctor? Americans can think for themselves and make up their own minds about what to watch. We don’t need a bunch of benchwarmers trying to smear the game every time some player rapes a woman or beats his kid. Newsflash: Women get raped all the time and kids get abused. Stop blaming football for society’s problems! Stop telling us we’re stupid and evil for loving America’s favorite sport. Stop venting your snobbery in the form of weasely questions about whether “it’s ethical to consume as entertainment a sport so violent it causes brain damage.” Who gave these jags the right to judge us, anyway? The fact is people have always played dangerous games, and fought wars. We’ve always looked up to men man enough to face danger. That’s in our nature. Take a look at the Romans. They packed stadiums to watch gladiators kill each other. You didn’t hear anyone trying to guilt trip them. People should stop blaming football for human nature. They should stop trying to scapegoat other fans for their own hang-ups. If you don’t like football, turn it off and shut up! Because in the end, football is just a game. That’s my whole point. Football is just a game. The Super Bowl is just a game, all the hoopla aside. It brings a lot of joy and meaning to hundreds of millions of Americans. If a few players wind up a little confused later in life, it’s fine to feel bad for them and their loved ones and all that. But let’s not lose sight of what really matters.

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Economics of an epidemic: These are the 4 states most dependent on the gun industry

We can’t truly address the epidemic of gun violence in the United States without taking a hard look at America’s deep-rooted economic dependence on the arms and ammunitions industry. The firearms sector spans the country, including jobs, political contributions and ownership. According to one analysis, in 2014 alone the guns and ammunitions industry pumped almost $43 billion into the economy. Gun manufacturers have emphasized their roles as job creators to justify their wide presence—and their power. Of course, they do not mention the high financial cost of gun violence, nor the immeasurable human loss. From police killings to mass shootings, the disturbing—and often racialized—nature of gun violence in America is garnering concern and some limited reforms. Meanwhile, many argue that the heft of this industry is precisely the problem, pointing to the need for economic transformation that provides real alternatives to an increasingly deadly sector. A new report from the personal finance website WalletHub provides a state-by-state breakdown of gun industry-dependence, citing data from the National Shooting Sports Foundation. Here are the top four states where the gun industry has a stranglehold on the lives, and the livelihoods of Americans. 1. New Hampshire leads the country in firearms-related jobs per capita, coming in at a stunning seven times that of Washington DC. The state also has the greatest total industry output per capita. Home to large-scale companies like Sturm, Ruger & Co., as well as smaller defense contractors, New Hampshire is peppered with gun and ammunition manufacturers. Notably, when it comes to gun ownership, New Hampshire comes in 47th in the country. 2. Idaho comes in right behind New Hampshire, with the second highest number of firearm industry jobs per capita. However, WalletHub places the state number one in overall gun dependence, thanks to its industry, gun prevalence and “gun politics” ranking. Notably, Idaho comes in 25th in the country in wages and benefits among those employed by the industry, raising questions about how ordinary people are faring amid the state’s heavy dependence. In 2013, Gov. Butch Otter infamously touted the state's low wages in a bid to attract gun manufactuers. 3. New Mexico is number one in exploitation, with workers in the firearms industry suffering the lowest wages and benefits in the nation, at three times less than their counterparts in Washington DC. Pay is suppressed in a state grappling with soaring unemployment and the highest child poverty rate in the country. At a time when many are hurting, the arms and ammunitions industry is paying far short of a living wage. 4. Alaska comes in second in overall gun dependence, but number one in private ownership. The state is followed in ownership by Arkansas, Idaho, West Virginia, and Wyoming, all of them majority rural. According to the study, gun ownership in Alaska is a stunning 12 times that of Delaware. WalletHub has its own national assessment of gun dependence, based on evaluation of the gun industry, politics and prevalence. Here is its ranking from most to least dependent. Idaho Alaska Montana South Dakota Arkansas Wyoming New Hampshire Minnesota Kentucky Alabama North Dakota West Virginia Mississippi Utah Indiana Oregon Colorado South Carolina Kansas Connecticut Tennessee Louisiana Missouri Wisconsin Vermont Nebraska New Mexico Texas Oklahoma Illinois Iowa Arizona Nevada Pennsylvania Florida Georgia North Carolina Massachusetts Virginia Ohio District of Columbia Washington Hawaii Maine Michigan California Maryland New York New Jersey Rhode Island Delaware We can’t truly address the epidemic of gun violence in the United States without taking a hard look at America’s deep-rooted economic dependence on the arms and ammunitions industry. The firearms sector spans the country, including jobs, political contributions and ownership. According to one analysis, in 2014 alone the guns and ammunitions industry pumped almost $43 billion into the economy. Gun manufacturers have emphasized their roles as job creators to justify their wide presence—and their power. Of course, they do not mention the high financial cost of gun violence, nor the immeasurable human loss. From police killings to mass shootings, the disturbing—and often racialized—nature of gun violence in America is garnering concern and some limited reforms. Meanwhile, many argue that the heft of this industry is precisely the problem, pointing to the need for economic transformation that provides real alternatives to an increasingly deadly sector. A new report from the personal finance website WalletHub provides a state-by-state breakdown of gun industry-dependence, citing data from the National Shooting Sports Foundation. Here are the top four states where the gun industry has a stranglehold on the lives, and the livelihoods of Americans. 1. New Hampshire leads the country in firearms-related jobs per capita, coming in at a stunning seven times that of Washington DC. The state also has the greatest total industry output per capita. Home to large-scale companies like Sturm, Ruger & Co., as well as smaller defense contractors, New Hampshire is peppered with gun and ammunition manufacturers. Notably, when it comes to gun ownership, New Hampshire comes in 47th in the country. 2. Idaho comes in right behind New Hampshire, with the second highest number of firearm industry jobs per capita. However, WalletHub places the state number one in overall gun dependence, thanks to its industry, gun prevalence and “gun politics” ranking. Notably, Idaho comes in 25th in the country in wages and benefits among those employed by the industry, raising questions about how ordinary people are faring amid the state’s heavy dependence. In 2013, Gov. Butch Otter infamously touted the state's low wages in a bid to attract gun manufactuers. 3. New Mexico is number one in exploitation, with workers in the firearms industry suffering the lowest wages and benefits in the nation, at three times less than their counterparts in Washington DC. Pay is suppressed in a state grappling with soaring unemployment and the highest child poverty rate in the country. At a time when many are hurting, the arms and ammunitions industry is paying far short of a living wage. 4. Alaska comes in second in overall gun dependence, but number one in private ownership. The state is followed in ownership by Arkansas, Idaho, West Virginia, and Wyoming, all of them majority rural. According to the study, gun ownership in Alaska is a stunning 12 times that of Delaware. WalletHub has its own national assessment of gun dependence, based on evaluation of the gun industry, politics and prevalence. Here is its ranking from most to least dependent. Idaho Alaska Montana South Dakota Arkansas Wyoming New Hampshire Minnesota Kentucky Alabama North Dakota West Virginia Mississippi Utah Indiana Oregon Colorado South Carolina Kansas Connecticut Tennessee Louisiana Missouri Wisconsin Vermont Nebraska New Mexico Texas Oklahoma Illinois Iowa Arizona Nevada Pennsylvania Florida Georgia North Carolina Massachusetts Virginia Ohio District of Columbia Washington Hawaii Maine Michigan California Maryland New York New Jersey Rhode Island Delaware

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American capitalism has failed us: We’re overworked, underemployed and more powerless than ever before

[This is a joint TomDispatch/Nation article and appears in print in slightly shortened form in the new issue of the Nation magazine.] Some years ago, I faced up to the futility of reporting true things about America’s disastrous wars and so I left Afghanistan for another remote mountainous country far away. It was the polar opposite of Afghanistan: a peaceful, prosperous land where nearly everybody seemed to enjoy a good life, on the job and in the family. It’s true that they didn’t work much, not by American standards anyway. In the U.S., full-time salaried workers supposedly laboring 40 hours a week actually average 49, with almost 20% clocking more than 60. These people, on the other hand, worked only about 37 hours a week, when they weren’t away on long paid vacations. At the end of the work day, about four in the afternoon (perhaps three in the summer), they had time to enjoy a hike in the forest or a swim with the kids or a beer with friends -- which helps explain why, unlike so many Americans, they are pleased with their jobs. Often I was invited to go along. I found it refreshing to hike and ski in a country with no land mines, and to hang out in cafés unlikely to be bombed. Gradually, I lost my warzone jitters and settled into the slow, calm, pleasantly uneventful stream of life there. Four years on, thinking I should settle down, I returned to the United States. It felt quite a lot like stepping back into that other violent, impoverished world, where anxiety runs high and people are quarrelsome. I had, in fact, come back to the flip side of Afghanistan and Iraq: to what America’s wars have done to America. Where I live now, in the Homeland, there are not enough shelters for the homeless. Most people are either overworked or hurting for jobs; housing is overpriced; hospitals, crowded and understaffed; schools, largely segregated and not so good. Opioid or heroin overdose is a popular form of death; and men in the street threaten women wearing hijab. Did the American soldiers I covered in Afghanistan know they were fighting for this? Ducking the Subject One night I tuned in to the Democrats’ presidential debate to see if they had any plans to restore the America I used to know. To my amazement, I heard the name of my peaceful mountain hideaway: Norway. Bernie Sanders was denouncing America’s crooked version of “casino capitalism” that floats the already rich ever higher and flushes the working class. He said that we ought to “look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.” He believes, he added, in “a society where all people do well. Not just a handful of billionaires.” That certainly sounds like Norway. For ages they’ve worked at producing things for the use of everyone -- not the profit of a few -- so I was all ears, waiting for Sanders to spell it out for Americans. But Hillary Clinton quickly countered, “We are not Denmark.” Smiling, she said, “I love Denmark,” and then delivered a patriotic punch line: “We are the United States of America.” Well, there’s no denying that. She praised capitalism and “all the small businesses that were started because we have the opportunity and the freedom in our country for people to do that and to make a good living for themselves and their families.” She didn’t seem to know that Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians do that, too, and with much higher rates of success. The truth is that almost a quarter of American startups are not founded on brilliant new ideas, but on the desperation of men or women who can’t get a decent job. The majority of all American enterprises are solo ventures having zero payrolls, employing no one but the entrepreneur, and often quickly wasting away. Sanders said that he was all for small business, too, but that meant nothing “if all of the new income and wealth is going to the top 1 percent.” (As George Carlin said, “The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.”) In that debate, no more was heard of Denmark, Sweden, or Norway. The audience was left in the dark. Later, in a speech at Georgetown University, Sanders tried to clarify his identity as a Democratic socialist. He said he’s not the kind of Socialist (with a capital S) who favors state ownership of anything like the means of production. The Norwegian government, on the other hand, owns the means of producing lots of public assets and is the major stockholder in many a vital private enterprise. I was dumbfounded. Norway, Denmark, and Sweden practice variations of a system that works much better than ours, yet even the Democratic presidential candidates, who say they love or want to learn from those countries, don’t seem to know how they actually work. Why We’re Not Denmark Proof that they do work is delivered every year in data-rich evaluations by the U.N. and other international bodies. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's annual report on international well-being, for example, measures 11 factors, ranging from material conditions like affordable housing and employment to quality of life matters like education, health, life expectancy, voter participation, and overall citizen satisfaction. Year after year, all the Nordic countries cluster at the top, while the United States lags far behind. In addition, Norway ranked first on the U.N. Development Program’s Human Development Index for 12 of the last 15 years, and it consistently tops international comparisons of such matters as democracy, civil and political rights, and freedom of expression and the press. What is it, though, that makes the Scandinavians so different?  Since the Democrats can’t tell you and the Republicans wouldn’t want you to know, let me offer you a quick introduction. What Scandinavians call the Nordic Model is a smart and simple system that starts with a deep commitment to equality and democracy. That’s two concepts combined in a single goal because, as far as they are concerned, you can’t have one without the other. Right there they part company with capitalist America, now the most unequal of all the developed nations, and consequently a democracy no more. Political scientists say it has become an oligarchy -- a country run at the expense of its citizenry by and for the super rich. Perhaps you noticed that. In the last century, Scandinavians, aiming for their egalitarian goal, refused to settle solely for any of the ideologies competing for power -- not capitalism or fascism, not Marxist socialism or communism. Geographically stuck between powerful nations waging hot and cold wars for such doctrines, Scandinavians set out to find a path in between. That path was contested -- by socialist-inspired workers on the one hand and capitalist owners and their elite cronies on the other -- but it led in the end to a mixed economy. Thanks largely to the solidarity and savvy of organized labor and the political parties it backed, the long struggle produced a system that makes capitalism more or less cooperative, and then redistributes equitably the wealth it helps to produce. Struggles like this took place around the world in the twentieth century, but the Scandinavians alone managed to combine the best ideas of both camps, while chucking out the worst. In 1936, the popular U.S. journalist Marquis Childs first described the result to Americans in the book Sweden: The Middle Way. Since then, all the Scandinavian countries and their Nordic neighbors Finland and Iceland have been improving upon that hybrid system. Today in Norway, negotiations between the Confederation of Trade Unions and the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise determine the wages and working conditions of most capitalist enterprises, public and private, that create wealth, while high but fair progressive income taxes fund the state’s universal welfare system, benefitting everyone. In addition, those confederations work together to minimize the disparity between high-wage and lower-wage jobs. As a result, Norway ranks with Sweden, Denmark, and Finland among the most income-equal countries in the world, and its standard of living tops the charts. So here’s the big difference: in Norway, capitalism serves the people. The government, elected by the people, sees to that. All eight of the parties that won parliamentary seats in the last national election, including the conservative Høyre party now leading the government, are committed to maintaining the welfare state. In the U.S., however, neoliberal politics put the foxes in charge of the henhouse, and capitalists have used the wealth generated by their enterprises (as well as financial and political manipulations) to capture the state and pluck the chickens. They’ve done a masterful job of chewing up organized labor. Today, only 11% of American workers belong to a union. In Norway, that number is 52%; in Denmark, 67%; in Sweden, 70%. In the U.S., oligarchs maximize their wealth and keep it, using the “democratically elected” government to shape policies and laws favorable to the interests of their foxy class. They bamboozle the people by insisting, as Hillary Clinton did at that debate, that all of us have the “freedom” to create a business in the “free” marketplace, which implies that being hard up is our own fault. In the Nordic countries, on the other hand, democratically elected governments give their populations freedom from the market by using capitalism as a tool to benefit everyone. That liberates their people from the tyranny of the mighty profit motive that warps so many American lives, leaving them freer to follow their own dreams -- to become poets or philosophers, bartenders or business owners, as they please. Family Matters Maybe our politicians don’t want to talk about the Nordic Model because it shows so clearly that capitalism can be put to work for the many, not just the few. Consider the Norwegian welfare state. It’s universal. In other words, aid to the sick or the elderly is not charity, grudgingly donated by elites to those in need. It is the right of every individual citizen. That includes every woman, whether or not she is somebody’s wife, and every child, no matter its parentage. Treating every person as a citizen affirms the individuality of each and the equality of all. It frees every person from being legally possessed by another -- a husband, for example, or a tyrannical father. Which brings us to the heart of Scandinavian democracy: the equality of women and men. In the 1970s, Norwegian feminists marched into politics and picked up the pace of democratic change. Norway needed a larger labor force, and women were the answer. Housewives moved into paid work on an equal footing with men, nearly doubling the tax base. That has, in fact, meant more to Norwegian prosperity than the coincidental discovery of North Atlantic oil reserves. The Ministry of Finance recently calculated that those additional working mothers add to Norway’s net national wealth a value equivalent to the country’s “total petroleum wealth” -- currently held in the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, worth more than $873 billion. By 1981, women were sitting in parliament, in the prime minister’s chair, and in her cabinet. American feminists also marched for such goals in the 1970s, but the Big Boys, busy with their own White House intrigues, initiated a war on women that set the country back and still rages today in brutal attacks on women’s basic civil rights, health care, and reproductive freedom. In 1971, thanks to the hard work of organized feminists, Congress passed the bipartisanComprehensive Child Development Bill to establish a multi-billion dollar national day care system for the children of working parents. In 1972, President Richard Nixon vetoed it, and that was that. In 1972, Congress also passed a bill (first proposed in 1923) to amend the Constitution to grant equal rights of citizenship to women.  Ratified by only 35 states, three short of the required 38, that Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA, was declared dead in 1982, leaving American women in legal limbo. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, obliterating six decades of federal social welfare policy “as we know it,” ending federal cash payments to the nation’s poor, and consigning millions of female heads of household and their children to poverty, where many still dwell 20 years later. Today, nearly half a century after Nixon trashed national child care, even privileged women, torn between their underpaid work and their kids, are overwhelmed. Things happened very differently in Norway.  There, feminists and sociologists pushed hard against the biggest obstacle still standing in the path to full democracy: the nuclear family. In the 1950s, the world-famous American sociologist Talcott Parsons had pronounced that arrangement -- with hubby at work and the little wife at home -- the ideal setup in which to socialize children. But in the 1970s, the Norwegian state began to deconstruct that undemocratic ideal by taking upon itself the traditional unpaid household duties of women.  Caring for the children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled became the basic responsibilities of the universal welfare state, freeing women in the workforce to enjoy both their jobs and their families. That’s another thing American politicians -- still, boringly, mostly odiously boastful men -- surely don’t want you to think about: that patriarchy can be demolished and everyone be the better for it. Paradoxically, setting women free made family life more genuine. Many in Norway say it has made both men and women more themselves and more alike: more understanding and happier. It also helped kids slip from the shadow of helicopter parents. In Norway, mother and father in turn take paid parental leave from work to see a newborn through its first year or more. At age one, however, children start attending a neighborhood barnehage (kindergarten) for schooling spent largely outdoors. By the time kids enter free primary school at age six, they are remarkably self-sufficient, confident, and good-natured. They know their way around town, and if caught in a snowstorm in the forest, how to build a fire and find the makings of a meal.  (One kindergarten teacher explained, “We teach them early to use an axe so they understand it’s a tool, not a weapon.”) To Americans, the notion of a school “taking away” your child to make her an axe wielder is monstrous.  In fact, Norwegian kids, who are well acquainted in early childhood with many different adults and children, know how to get along with grown ups and look after one another.  More to the point, though it’s hard to measure, it’s likely that Scandinavian children spend more quality time with their work-isn’t-everything parents than does a typical middle-class American child being driven by a stressed-out mother from music lessons to karate practice.  For all these reasons and more, the international organization Save the Children cites Norway as the best country on Earth in which to raise kids, while the U.S. finishes far down the list in 33rd place. Don’t Take My Word For It This little summary just scratches the surface of Scandinavia, so I urge curious readers to Google away.  But be forewarned. You’ll find much criticism of all the Nordic Model countries. The structural matters I’ve described -- of governance and family -- are not the sort of things visible to tourists or visiting journalists, so their comments are often obtuse. Take the American tourist/blogger who complained that he hadn’t been shown the “slums” of Oslo. (There are none.) Or the British journalist who wrote that Norwegian petrol is too expensive. (Though not for Norwegians, who are, in any case, leading the world in switching to electric cars.) Neoliberal pundits, especially the Brits, are always beating up on the Scandinavians in books, magazines, newspapers, and blogs, predicting the imminent demise of their social democracies and bullying them to forsake the best political economy on the planet. Self-styled experts still in thrall to Margaret Thatcher tell Norwegians they must liberalize their economy and privatize everything short of the royal palace. Mostly, the Norwegian government does the opposite, or nothing at all, and social democracy keeps on ticking. It’s not perfect, of course. It has always been a carefully considered work in progress. Governance by consensus takes time and effort.  You might think of it as slow democracy.  But it’s light years ahead of us.

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Just like “The Martian”: Scientists are trying to grow potatoes on “Mars”

The potato, whether fried, roasted or mashed, is one of the most popular foods in the world—not only is it delicious and versatile, it also needs little water and adapts well, thriving in extreme environments where other vegetables are hard-pressed to grow. And then there is its nutritional value. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, consuming a single russet-type potato can add nearly 10 percent of the daily recommended caloric load, providing four grams of fiber, five of protein and only two of sugar. This data has motivated a group of scientists from NASA to team up with the International Potato Center, or CIP (Spanish abbreviation), in Peru to conduct an experiment growing potatoes in conditions similar to Mars, with the hope of generating food for possible future manned missions to the Red Planet. The study began in January and scientists hope to have the first results in three months, says Joel Ranck, CIP spokesperson. For the first phase of the experiment, researchers will try to plant type LTVR (lowland tropic virus-resistant) potato clones. An important feature of this variety is resistance to some of the viruses that most commonly attack potatoes such as PVY, PVX and PLRV. Among its other traits: it ripens fast—in 90 to 100 days; can produce tubers at high temperatures; and has high drought tolerance. The potato clones will be planted in soil samples taken from La Joya Pampas, a sector of the Atacama Desert. With an area of some 105,000 square kilometers an covering parts of Peru, Chile, Argentina and Bolivia, the Atacama is regarded as one of the driest, most desolate places on Earth. “The soils of the Atacama and Mars have much in common,” says Julio Valdivia-Silva, a microgravity and space biology researcher at the National Institute for Research and Training in Telecommunications of Peru, and principal scientist of the experiment. During the past 12 years Valdivia has studied the characteristics of the Atacama Desert and its similarities with the soils of Mars. “Both have extremely low levels of microorganisms and organic material as well as high levels of oxidizing chemical elements. For these reasons, the soils in Atacama have been used as analogous to Mars in research scenarios.” During the second phase of the project researchers will try to freeze the fruits obtained. “The trip from Earth to Mars can take about nine months, and during that time we must…[keep]…potatoes from germinating. So we want to freeze them and thaw them in order to learn if we can revive them and plant them in Martian soil at the right time,” Ranck said. For the third and last phase of the experiment, CIP scientists will try growing potatoes inside CubeSats in space. “We want to explore how they grow within a controlled atmosphere. One of the most important features of Mars is its low atmospheric pressure, and in order to study how the plant reacts, we need a confined environment such as we can have with the CubeSat,” Valdivia-Silva says. Collective project Scientists hope to be able to increase the data collection with the help of researchers and students at various universities. The idea is for students from different corners of the planet to prepare the CubeSats with substrates and potatoes. Melissa Guzman, a researcher in planetary science and astrobiology at NASA Ames Research Center in California, will coordinate the effort from the U.S. "What we want is that the students use CubeSat modules to compile data that we can then compare with the one obtained in Peru. It is a very exciting idea, to think that potatoes could be one of the first meals of future Mars astronauts,”  Guzman says. But it is not all about Mars. Scientists believe that the information gathered will also provide valuable data to find practical solutions to problems potato crops face on Earth, including the effects of global warming. “Our CIP scientists have found that certain extreme climatic conditions hinder the viability of crops. [The] potato is a highly nutritious food that can save many people from starvation. In Peru alone we have 4,000 different species. Perhaps it is a bit ironic that we have to look at Mars to understand ourselves, but no doubt that is also interesting,” Ranck says.

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Naomi Klein: “There are no non-radical options left before us”

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Bernie Sanders slams Hillary Clinton on Twitter for being two-faced: “You cannot be a moderate and a progressive”

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“Hail, Caesar!”: The Coens’ hilarious yarn of ’50s Hollywood goes far beyond farce

There’s already some tendency to pitch “Hail, Caesar!” as a Coen brothers movie made in the duo’s “lighter,” more welcoming and more Hollywood-friendly mode. That’s true up to a point, and that characterization suits the needs of Universal Pictures, which has positioned this star-packed midwinter comedy as a box-office bonanza. But there’s much more to “Hail, Caesar!” than a period showbiz farce in the Mel Brooks school, although I’d be willing to bet that Joel and Ethan Coen have obsessively absorbed Brooks’ movies and method. Underneath the laff-riot and the Hollywood satire, “Hail, Caesar!” is a curiously delicate film built on profound affection for American movies and the illusions they build, and loaded with in-jokes the mainstream audience will grasp incompletely or not at all. Sure, some of “Hail, Caesar!” is not subtle in the least. It features George Clooney as a manly movie star of the early 1950s named Baird Whitlock, who plays the lead in a deadly sword-and-sandal epic set in the time of Jesus. (Yeah, it’s called “Hail, Caesar!” The subtitle is “A Story of the Christ.”) Baird is one of those postwar actors who became huge by doing exactly what he was told and is now almost forgotten; he isn’t anyone specific from Hollywood history but he’s a little bit Kirk Douglas (except worse), a little bit Victor Mature (except better) and a little bit John Wayne (except not as much of a dick). But don’t assume this is a “Clooney movie”: Baird is not a hero, a villain or even a buffoon, and remains pretty much a cipher throughout the film. It takes him quite a while to figure out that he’s been kidnapped, let alone why or by whom. Clooney in fact plays the MacGuffin in this movie, to use Hitchcock’s terminology; he’s a plot device around whom the main characters revolve. With considerably less screen time than Clooney, Channing Tatum actually makes a stronger impression, playing a charismatic, faintly metrosexual song-and-dance man in the Gene Kelly vein, who has a secret that goes much deeper than the obvious secret everyone knows about. Tatum’s show-stopping production number, with a chorus of sailors in a waterfront bar (yes, the “nautical musical” was a thing, as in “Anchors Aweigh” and “Crest of the Wave,” both Kelly vehicles), begins as camp or kitsch and almost immediately pushes past that, until it’s simply flat-out awesome. That’s the level on which “Hail, Caesar!” transcends the slapdash Mel Brooks tradition; if the Coens decide to shoot five minutes of a nautical musical, they’re gonna make damn sure it’s the best nautical musical anybody’s ever seen. Go beyond those two big names, and the movie gets better still. Since we’re exploring the "Jeopardy" category of “forgotten movie genres of the ‘50s,” Alden Ehrenreich, a supremely talented 26-year-old actor who’s been waiting for his big break — you might have seen him in “Stoker” or “Beautiful Creatures,” but probably not — plays an irresistible “singing cowboy” star named Hobie Doyle. The Coens pull off the same trick with Hobie as with the tap-dancing sailors: At first he seems like an ignorant rube with an Okie accent, who has been hopelessly miscast in a Lubitsch-style sex farce directed by a foppish European called Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes, coming as close to playing Lord Voldemort again as he ever will). But that too gets turned upside down: Hobie is both sincere and talented, and his musical “Lazy Ol’ Moon” looks a lot more fun than Laurentz’s third-rate imitation of Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward. And I haven’t even gotten to Eddie Mannix, the strangely heroic and self-sacrificing studio executive played by Josh Brolin. Amid all the more obvious levels of inversion and subversion and satire at work in “Hail, Caesar!” Eddie may be the most extraordinary of all. Has any movie about Hollywood, ever, depicted a studio boss as a selfless and idealistic figure, and explicitly compared him to Jesus Christ? Only the Coens, I suspect, could come up with such a peculiar and brilliant counter-narrative. If you think I’m kidding about the Christ part, or if you suspect the Coens would only employ a devout Catholic protagonist as an object of scorn and derision, well, I’m totally not and they actually wouldn’t. Not because the Jewish brothers from St. Louis Park, Minnesota (setting of “A Simple Man,” their most autobiographical and most Jewish film), are all that interested in Roman Catholic faith as such. But it presents an intriguing narrative challenge, and mockery is way too easy. The first shot of the film (if I remember correctly) is the image of Christ on the cross, above the altar where Eddie makes confession — every single day. Even Eddie’s priest tells him that it’s way too often and that his sins barely register, and that’s about as snarky as the movie gets on that issue. Baird Whitlock’s mysterious disappearance from the set of “Hail, Caesar!” — at first attributed to a daylong bender, or a “chippie” in some hotel room — is the biggest problem Eddie faces on the soundstages and back lot of Capitol Pictures. But not the only one. Laurentz despises Hobie; the Esther Williams-style water ballet star played by Scarlett Johansson (really just a cameo) is having a baby with no visible dad; the twin Hedda Hopper-style gossip columnists played by Tilda Swinton have gotten their fangs into an ancient Baird Whitlock scandal about how he got the leading role in a notorious picture called “On Wings of Eagles.” (Whose title, when uttered aloud, is always accompanied by a distant cawing sound.) And Eddie himself is being courted for a lucrative job in the aircraft industry. As the recruiter for Lockheed observes, reasonably enough: “What’s gonna happen to the pictures when everybody buys a television set?” I’m not super religious when it comes to spoilers (or when it comes to religion), but it wouldn’t be fair to tell you much about Baird’s kidnapping or what it’s all about. Except — I can’t help myself! — that Herbert Marcuse is involved, and that I believe he is the only real-world individual to be named and portrayed in this movie. If you’re already laughing about that you’re in good shape, but if you don’t know who that is it totally does not matter. (On the other hand, if you’re warming up your blogging fingers for an irate diatribe about how this movie’s portrayal of Hollywood leftism is scurrilous, neo-McCarthyite slander, you’re on your own.) “Hail, Caesar!” is the only movie anyone will ever make that features both Marcuse and Saul of Tarsus as characters, along with a scene that perfectly captures the look and feeling of late Stalinist Soviet propaganda films. Apparently Dolph Lundgren plays a submarine captain, though I’m not going to tell you where he comes in or how, and I didn’t know that until I read through the credits. Dolph Lundgren, uncredited, at the helm of the Red October. This movie is exactly that great.

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Let’s stop talking to our kids: I know communication between parents and children is important, but can we also learn to occasionally shut up?

“Look at the traffic light,” I said to my 3-year-old daughter, Zelda, desperate for conversation, my voice hoarse from chatting. It was 8 a.m. but it had already been a long morning of cerebral gymnastics as I arranged every minute, meal and movement for a preschooler and a baby, while making sense of my hectic freelance working day ahead. And, serving oatmeal. Jon was an involved father, but I was the planner, always organizing, hovering above.

Which is why, normally, I loved my strolls to preschool with Zelda, when I was not distracted and could focus on her company. I enjoyed this window into her developing perspective, delighted by her surprising senses of wonder and humor. I’d felt absent from Zelda after an exhausting high-risk pregnancy with her little sister and a demanding work schedule. So I’d made sure to carve out this sacred time for us -- time to talk. Each morning, we pounded through New York’s honking, caffeinated streets, our whole environment an education, a chance for mutual enrichment.

But not today. Today I was talked out. We’d already discussed the foliage, seasons, how some people were short and others tall; we’d done the “whys” and gone through all the prohibitive signs along our path, including the no-liquor in the park. “Grown-ups,” Zelda had sighed.

“Green for go, yellow for slow, red means stop,” I now offered.

“Red means angry,” Zelda added.

“Yes,” I said. “And--.” Suddenly, I was stumped. We’d done emotions over breakfast.

  “What about--” I drew a blank and panicked. I had nothing left to say.

In the past year Zelda had lost a cat and three great-relatives and gained a baby sister who usurped my attention. I’d been inundated with advice on how to talk to her -- about birth, death, sharing, separation, urination. Parents in my middle-class, fauxhemian milieu were always being encouraged to chat to show our awareness and concern; we were taught the lingo and tone to best discuss every single social interaction, from playground politics to sex. When our 3-year-old neighbor tantrumed about a sprinkle cookie, I watched her father lean down and repeat it would be so wonderful to eat a treat right now. “It’s important,” he told me afterward, “to acknowledge emotions and express empathy in the moment.” A colleague complained that her New Year’s fete had been screeched to a halt by a 5-year-old altercation; the adults grouped off to discuss hurt feelings with both parties before brokering a verbal reconciliation. My social media feed was recently overrun by a post that listed specific questions to ask your kid so she would open up and tell you about her day at school. I studied the queries (What was the funniest thing that happened today? Who did you want to sit next to?) as if I was training to be an investigative reporter.

Conversation kept our children alert, linguistically sharp, perhaps even entertained. I often overheard my fellow moms and dads loudly praising or instructing their toddlers – Good walking! I love you more than anyone! You really shouldn’t be eating dried fruit because it’s not ideal for oral hygiene!  Hemp milk, we drink only hemp milk! I can never help wondering whom these conversations are really being performed for.

Zelda’s preschool director once confided in me that sometimes, at drop-off, she heard a parent offer 12 different directives just as the child walked down the stairs to their class. “I’m afraid they’ll fall over! Kids don’t even listen after two or three words.” When I asked her why parents engaged in these running monologues, literally praising or critiquing each step, she right away answered that we levied constant verbal attention because we didn’t trust that our children could succeed without us. “With so many conflicting parenting philosophies readily available, parents can feel insecure. No one knows what to do. Google was never a parent.” I thought of my own upbringing, how I’d been trained to be a cultural critic rather than a diaper-changer. I applied those academic skills to my mothering, nervous about the more physical, instinctive actions required of a parent.   Those of us who worked feel a particular pressure to engage in the “talking cure,” as if our utterances helped concretize and maximize these fleeting moments with our ever-evolving kids.

But amid all these conversational and cultural tips, no one offered advice on one of the most basic things of all: how to be silent.

My Jewish background, with its excess of festivals and calories, didn’t help. We didn’t have Buddhist meditation, Hindu yoga, Sufist wordless worship, Christian monk muteness or Quaker silent services. I was from a people known for babble and volume, complementing our culture’s constantly loud media barrage. I had no rituals for stillness. Silence scared me.

The leaves crunched under our feet, crackling, cackling. Quiet was always a bad sign with my own mother.

Born on my Jewish grandmother Zelda’s flight from the Nazis, Mom was a depressed hoarder. I’d spent my childhood feeling physically and emotionally blocked from her by her piles of newspapers and laundry bins. She left for her government job before I woke up in the morning and was asleep on the couch when I came home – which was a relief. She was prone to mood swings, exploding at random utterances. I’d learned to associate her hush with bottomless sadness or her buried anger about to erupt. When she was awake and quiet, I felt nervous. I didn’t know where she was inside, or what would emerge.

But in those rare moments when she was energized and chatty, asking about my teachers or unpacking for me the double entendres in Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics, my stomach unclenched. Words, at least, showed me where things stood. Conversation guaranteed connection, an acknowledgment of presence, a check-in about mood. When I eagerly left home at 19, we developed a new relationship by phone, the distance beneficial. Our newfound connection was verbal and I hinged onto every syllable, my lingual link to love.

Now I urgently scanned our surroundings, wishing for a similar connection, something to break the silence with my own daughter. “What color is the bakery awning?”

“That’s not a bakery, Mom. That’s McDonald's.”

“Yes, but it’s a special—“

We got to an intersection and I grabbed Zelda’s hand. I squeezed. “Ouch, Mommy.” I suddenly remembered how it was my Bubbie Zelda who walked me home from school each day. She raised me, cooked for me, shepherded me to ballet and drama and judo class. Montreal was freezing in the winter, and as we walked, I’d slip my hand into Bubbie’s pocket, or slide my fingers into her leather gloves, our digits melding. At school I’d been embarrassed by hunchbacked Bubbie who arrived howling in Yiddish, donning her babushka headscarf and flinging plastic bags of fresh vegetables and brisket. I’d walked ahead of her, pretending to myself I was heading to our Jaguar, which just happened to be parked far away. But the more we trudged eastward, the more I would step into pace with Bubbie and slip into a different genre of narrative, a historical one, imagining I was foraging through a Siberian work camp or sneaking across the frozen Vistula or something else she might have done during the war. 

“What, Mommy?” Zelda prodded. “What about the special awning?”

“Oh, nothing.” We stepped onto the curb.

We let go.

Zelda scurried ahead. “Don’t step on the crocodile!” she called back.

“Huh?”

“The lines are crocodiles and the cigarettes are monsters, and the hoses are snakes and you have to step over them or they’ll eat you.”

All I’d seen was a sidewalk overcrowded with coffee vendors.

The truth was that, as with her namesake, Zelda and I are not fused. Silence marks our separation, but also, allows her to move forward, in her own way. Her imagination could grow in the space of my pauses.

So could our bond.

Now, it struck me, I could not recall a single conversation I’d ever had with Bubbie. But boy, did she love me.

Minutes later, we approached the school, where we arrived early -- super early -- of course, in reaction to my own mom’s perpetual lateness. But was rushing to show up before the doors opened any less stress-inducing? I noted my urge to fill these blank minutes with mindless chatter – Don’t forget your hat! Remember to drink your yogurt smoothie! – but I stopped myself. In the quiet hall, my phrases would have echoed, empty. Then again, I couldn’t just leave Zelda without a word. We parents are perched on the fulcrum of the generations, negotiating desires to reiterate and oppose. In overcompensating for my past, in trying not to fail my kids as my mom had failed me, I could so easily repeat similar mistakes. My stillness was not Mom’s quiet sadness. My words were not my daughter’s lifeline. I had to figure out my own way.

So I said, “I love you,” and punctuated it with a kiss.

“Too wet, Mommy,” Zelda replied, then scampered off to her class, leaving me in silence.

“Look at the traffic light,” I said to my 3-year-old daughter, Zelda, desperate for conversation, my voice hoarse from chatting. It was 8 a.m. but it had already been a long morning of cerebral gymnastics as I arranged every minute, meal and movement for a preschooler and a baby, while making sense of my hectic freelance working day ahead. And, serving oatmeal. Jon was an involved father, but I was the planner, always organizing, hovering above.

Which is why, normally, I loved my strolls to preschool with Zelda, when I was not distracted and could focus on her company. I enjoyed this window into her developing perspective, delighted by her surprising senses of wonder and humor. I’d felt absent from Zelda after an exhausting high-risk pregnancy with her little sister and a demanding work schedule. So I’d made sure to carve out this sacred time for us -- time to talk. Each morning, we pounded through New York’s honking, caffeinated streets, our whole environment an education, a chance for mutual enrichment.

But not today. Today I was talked out. We’d already discussed the foliage, seasons, how some people were short and others tall; we’d done the “whys” and gone through all the prohibitive signs along our path, including the no-liquor in the park. “Grown-ups,” Zelda had sighed.

“Green for go, yellow for slow, red means stop,” I now offered.

“Red means angry,” Zelda added.

“Yes,” I said. “And--.” Suddenly, I was stumped. We’d done emotions over breakfast.

  “What about--” I drew a blank and panicked. I had nothing left to say.

In the past year Zelda had lost a cat and three great-relatives and gained a baby sister who usurped my attention. I’d been inundated with advice on how to talk to her -- about birth, death, sharing, separation, urination. Parents in my middle-class, fauxhemian milieu were always being encouraged to chat to show our awareness and concern; we were taught the lingo and tone to best discuss every single social interaction, from playground politics to sex. When our 3-year-old neighbor tantrumed about a sprinkle cookie, I watched her father lean down and repeat it would be so wonderful to eat a treat right now. “It’s important,” he told me afterward, “to acknowledge emotions and express empathy in the moment.” A colleague complained that her New Year’s fete had been screeched to a halt by a 5-year-old altercation; the adults grouped off to discuss hurt feelings with both parties before brokering a verbal reconciliation. My social media feed was recently overrun by a post that listed specific questions to ask your kid so she would open up and tell you about her day at school. I studied the queries (What was the funniest thing that happened today? Who did you want to sit next to?) as if I was training to be an investigative reporter.

Conversation kept our children alert, linguistically sharp, perhaps even entertained. I often overheard my fellow moms and dads loudly praising or instructing their toddlers – Good walking! I love you more than anyone! You really shouldn’t be eating dried fruit because it’s not ideal for oral hygiene!  Hemp milk, we drink only hemp milk! I can never help wondering whom these conversations are really being performed for.

Zelda’s preschool director once confided in me that sometimes, at drop-off, she heard a parent offer 12 different directives just as the child walked down the stairs to their class. “I’m afraid they’ll fall over! Kids don’t even listen after two or three words.” When I asked her why parents engaged in these running monologues, literally praising or critiquing each step, she right away answered that we levied constant verbal attention because we didn’t trust that our children could succeed without us. “With so many conflicting parenting philosophies readily available, parents can feel insecure. No one knows what to do. Google was never a parent.” I thought of my own upbringing, how I’d been trained to be a cultural critic rather than a diaper-changer. I applied those academic skills to my mothering, nervous about the more physical, instinctive actions required of a parent.   Those of us who worked feel a particular pressure to engage in the “talking cure,” as if our utterances helped concretize and maximize these fleeting moments with our ever-evolving kids.

But amid all these conversational and cultural tips, no one offered advice on one of the most basic things of all: how to be silent.

My Jewish background, with its excess of festivals and calories, didn’t help. We didn’t have Buddhist meditation, Hindu yoga, Sufist wordless worship, Christian monk muteness or Quaker silent services. I was from a people known for babble and volume, complementing our culture’s constantly loud media barrage. I had no rituals for stillness. Silence scared me.

The leaves crunched under our feet, crackling, cackling. Quiet was always a bad sign with my own mother.

Born on my Jewish grandmother Zelda’s flight from the Nazis, Mom was a depressed hoarder. I’d spent my childhood feeling physically and emotionally blocked from her by her piles of newspapers and laundry bins. She left for her government job before I woke up in the morning and was asleep on the couch when I came home – which was a relief. She was prone to mood swings, exploding at random utterances. I’d learned to associate her hush with bottomless sadness or her buried anger about to erupt. When she was awake and quiet, I felt nervous. I didn’t know where she was inside, or what would emerge.

But in those rare moments when she was energized and chatty, asking about my teachers or unpacking for me the double entendres in Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics, my stomach unclenched. Words, at least, showed me where things stood. Conversation guaranteed connection, an acknowledgment of presence, a check-in about mood. When I eagerly left home at 19, we developed a new relationship by phone, the distance beneficial. Our newfound connection was verbal and I hinged onto every syllable, my lingual link to love.

Now I urgently scanned our surroundings, wishing for a similar connection, something to break the silence with my own daughter. “What color is the bakery awning?”

“That’s not a bakery, Mom. That’s McDonald's.”

“Yes, but it’s a special—“

We got to an intersection and I grabbed Zelda’s hand. I squeezed. “Ouch, Mommy.” I suddenly remembered how it was my Bubbie Zelda who walked me home from school each day. She raised me, cooked for me, shepherded me to ballet and drama and judo class. Montreal was freezing in the winter, and as we walked, I’d slip my hand into Bubbie’s pocket, or slide my fingers into her leather gloves, our digits melding. At school I’d been embarrassed by hunchbacked Bubbie who arrived howling in Yiddish, donning her babushka headscarf and flinging plastic bags of fresh vegetables and brisket. I’d walked ahead of her, pretending to myself I was heading to our Jaguar, which just happened to be parked far away. But the more we trudged eastward, the more I would step into pace with Bubbie and slip into a different genre of narrative, a historical one, imagining I was foraging through a Siberian work camp or sneaking across the frozen Vistula or something else she might have done during the war. 

“What, Mommy?” Zelda prodded. “What about the special awning?”

“Oh, nothing.” We stepped onto the curb.

We let go.

Zelda scurried ahead. “Don’t step on the crocodile!” she called back.

“Huh?”

“The lines are crocodiles and the cigarettes are monsters, and the hoses are snakes and you have to step over them or they’ll eat you.”

All I’d seen was a sidewalk overcrowded with coffee vendors.

The truth was that, as with her namesake, Zelda and I are not fused. Silence marks our separation, but also, allows her to move forward, in her own way. Her imagination could grow in the space of my pauses.

So could our bond.

Now, it struck me, I could not recall a single conversation I’d ever had with Bubbie. But boy, did she love me.

Minutes later, we approached the school, where we arrived early -- super early -- of course, in reaction to my own mom’s perpetual lateness. But was rushing to show up before the doors opened any less stress-inducing? I noted my urge to fill these blank minutes with mindless chatter – Don’t forget your hat! Remember to drink your yogurt smoothie! – but I stopped myself. In the quiet hall, my phrases would have echoed, empty. Then again, I couldn’t just leave Zelda without a word. We parents are perched on the fulcrum of the generations, negotiating desires to reiterate and oppose. In overcompensating for my past, in trying not to fail my kids as my mom had failed me, I could so easily repeat similar mistakes. My stillness was not Mom’s quiet sadness. My words were not my daughter’s lifeline. I had to figure out my own way.

So I said, “I love you,” and punctuated it with a kiss.

“Too wet, Mommy,” Zelda replied, then scampered off to her class, leaving me in silence.

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No, white people, you still can’t say the N-word: That word belongs to black people and our culture now — not yours

A silly photo of six little ignorant high school girls went viral last month. They attend Desert Vista high school in Phoenix. It was picture day, and a group of seniors wore black shirts with individual gold letters that spelled out "BEST *YOU'VE *EVER* SEEN* CLASS* OF*2016,” when arranged. While shooting, the six students mentioned slid to the side and begin taking their own pictures. The letters on their shirts spelled out NI**ER. Someone posted the picture, shortly after — a media flurry followed, with testimonies from a diverse collection of offended and upset students. The image continued to circulate all over the world making it to me 30-plus times — three via text and the rest scattered on social media from various tweeters, ranging from rightfully infuriated black people to retweets from the cowardly troll accounts that champion racism.

***

My Apple dictionary app defines n***er as an offensive noun, a contemptuous term for a black or dark-skinned person. The usage portion goes on to explain that the word was used as an adjective denoting a black person as early as the 17th century and has long had strong offensive connotations. Today it remains one of the most racially offensive words in the language. Also referred to as "the N-word," it is sometimes used by black people in reference to other black people in a jocular or disparaging manner, or some variant in between. Apple is only semi-right — primarily because the offense is based solely on who’s talking.

***

Way back when I was 6, my cousin Kevin was the best 9-year-old — to me — to ever wrap stubby fingers around a bat. He was greater than great, a lefty who slapped any and every type of pitch out of Ellwood Park. When purposely walked, Kevin had that Deion Sanders speed, quick enough to steal every base and slide home. Those skills earned Kevin a slot on teams all over the city. Often, I’d tag along. On one of those bright days, Kev taking care of business as usual­­ — he slapped a few homers and snagged a few fly balls. Midway through the game, the pitcher beelined Kev with the ball, allowing him to walk to first. He stole second and third and then tried to gun for home plate. The catcher waved his mitt in Kev’s direction as he slid over the base. The umpire called out in what easily could’ve been a debatable call. Kevin and the back catcher exchanged words as he headed for the bench. The back catcher yelled, “This n***er is always cheating!” Kevin snapped, spun around and tackled the catcher. From there he lunged a knee on the kid's torso, and whaled on his face until his mask popped off. It took two adults to pull him off. “You’ll never play in this league again!” a coach or parent yelled as we excited the park. “Yo, you good?” I asked, “You went crazy on that fat boy!” Kev, who called me his “favorite lil n***a” almost every day, stopped with intense eyes, a vein throbbed and parted his forehead into quadrants. “D, listen!” he squeezed my small shoulders. “If a white person ever call you a n***er, you better beat their ass, or I will beat your ass!” From that day on, I knew n***er, n***a, n*g, or any of other variation of the term belonged to black people. As years passed, I gave the same speech to my younger siblings, little cousins and all of their friends. The flip side is that we never really had to apply the rule. See, we’re from east Baltimore and never really interacted with whites other than some school teachers and housing police. The teachers never called us n***er, and we couldn’t whip the white officers who used the word, because they had guns, coupled with a license to kill.

***

College taught me that the word was originally a 15th-16th century Spanish-Portuguese word meaning black. By the 1800s the term had became a permanent fixture in American language. African slaves and free blacks alike were n***ers — bottom feeders, subhuman, the lowest of the low. Back then, similar to now, blacks were taught to praise whiteness — white religions and gods, white traditions, white ideals. Those who subscribed adapted the word, and thus it entered our language with the same derogatory meaning, before we redefined and branded it as a term of love, hate, unity, connection, betrayal or whatever else we wanted to use it for. As the term became more and more forbidden to whites, we branded it more and more as our own. But is this even true? Is it a word created by white people with the purpose of identifying and degrading blacks? Any student of history or American culture knows our nation’s lust for controlling narratives and pushing perspectives that promote and glorify whiteness. I never questioned what I learned in school about the origin of the word until I stumbled across a YouTube clip from 2007 of ESPN’s national spelling bee. Andrew Lay, a tiny “Home Alone” kid-looking sixth-grader from North Carolina approached the mic. The announcer challenged him to spell “negus.” Andrew swallowed his throat, and responded with a blank pause before requesting a repeat along with the definition and origin. Some people who look like they could be his parents gasp. “Ethiopian to Amharic,” the announcer said. “A king, it’s used as the title of the sovereign of Ethiopia.” Andrew froze, bit his lip and asked for a sentence. “The negus ruled Ethiopia until 1974.” Andrew requested the definition again, blinked and said, “N-e-g-u-s? Negus.” The crowd applauded, confirming his correctness. Andrew fist pumped like Kobe after a game winner while heading back to his seat.

***

The same dictionary on my Mac defines "negus" as a ruler, or the supreme ruler of Ethiopia. The word’s origin dates back to the 14th century, far before n***er, which makes me question who created the word and if there is a connection between its African origin, the Portuguese version and the term that made it into the States. I never feel offended when a black person calls me n***a or ni***er (accent and pronunciation based on the region they represent); however, I’m beyond offended when white people use the word — kind of how a veteran would feel if you pissed on an American flag and disrespected the Pentagon, and rightfully so. The N-word is our word, it’s a term only to be used between African Americans — it’s a part of our established culture. There’s American culture, and then there are subcultures within American culture that need to be respected. I went to college with students from Asian cultures who told me that direct eye contact could be considered disrespectful. My grandma wanted you to take your hat off once you entered her home; many churches have the same rule. My writing teacher taught us that non-Jewish people calling Jewish people "Jews" could be offensive. I know Habesha families that require you to remove your shoes when you enter their place. The list goes on and on. The fact is that white people need to get over it. They have no need to use the N-word — they aren’t culturally connected to it in a positive way, and it does nothing to enhance their journey, experience or wellbeing. The ones who use the word or flirt with its existence, like the silly girls in the picture, simply want conflict. It’s not their word, so they want to control it­––they want to cause a stir, offend or be a part of a culture that they can never fully understand. They use it as a trigger word and then run from it when people react in a negative way. The people who mentor or teach the girls in that stupid photo — and indeed, those who mentor or teach all non-black kids who want to play around with this word — need to do more than explain why their action was culturally insensitive. They need to teach them how rough it can be for women in this country and let them know that they may need their perspective considered one day, because one day they could easily end up on the wrong side of discrimination, too.A silly photo of six little ignorant high school girls went viral last month. They attend Desert Vista high school in Phoenix. It was picture day, and a group of seniors wore black shirts with individual gold letters that spelled out "BEST *YOU'VE *EVER* SEEN* CLASS* OF*2016,” when arranged. While shooting, the six students mentioned slid to the side and begin taking their own pictures. The letters on their shirts spelled out NI**ER. Someone posted the picture, shortly after — a media flurry followed, with testimonies from a diverse collection of offended and upset students. The image continued to circulate all over the world making it to me 30-plus times — three via text and the rest scattered on social media from various tweeters, ranging from rightfully infuriated black people to retweets from the cowardly troll accounts that champion racism.

***

My Apple dictionary app defines n***er as an offensive noun, a contemptuous term for a black or dark-skinned person. The usage portion goes on to explain that the word was used as an adjective denoting a black person as early as the 17th century and has long had strong offensive connotations. Today it remains one of the most racially offensive words in the language. Also referred to as "the N-word," it is sometimes used by black people in reference to other black people in a jocular or disparaging manner, or some variant in between. Apple is only semi-right — primarily because the offense is based solely on who’s talking.

***

Way back when I was 6, my cousin Kevin was the best 9-year-old — to me — to ever wrap stubby fingers around a bat. He was greater than great, a lefty who slapped any and every type of pitch out of Ellwood Park. When purposely walked, Kevin had that Deion Sanders speed, quick enough to steal every base and slide home. Those skills earned Kevin a slot on teams all over the city. Often, I’d tag along. On one of those bright days, Kev taking care of business as usual­­ — he slapped a few homers and snagged a few fly balls. Midway through the game, the pitcher beelined Kev with the ball, allowing him to walk to first. He stole second and third and then tried to gun for home plate. The catcher waved his mitt in Kev’s direction as he slid over the base. The umpire called out in what easily could’ve been a debatable call. Kevin and the back catcher exchanged words as he headed for the bench. The back catcher yelled, “This n***er is always cheating!” Kevin snapped, spun around and tackled the catcher. From there he lunged a knee on the kid's torso, and whaled on his face until his mask popped off. It took two adults to pull him off. “You’ll never play in this league again!” a coach or parent yelled as we excited the park. “Yo, you good?” I asked, “You went crazy on that fat boy!” Kev, who called me his “favorite lil n***a” almost every day, stopped with intense eyes, a vein throbbed and parted his forehead into quadrants. “D, listen!” he squeezed my small shoulders. “If a white person ever call you a n***er, you better beat their ass, or I will beat your ass!” From that day on, I knew n***er, n***a, n*g, or any of other variation of the term belonged to black people. As years passed, I gave the same speech to my younger siblings, little cousins and all of their friends. The flip side is that we never really had to apply the rule. See, we’re from east Baltimore and never really interacted with whites other than some school teachers and housing police. The teachers never called us n***er, and we couldn’t whip the white officers who used the word, because they had guns, coupled with a license to kill.

***

College taught me that the word was originally a 15th-16th century Spanish-Portuguese word meaning black. By the 1800s the term had became a permanent fixture in American language. African slaves and free blacks alike were n***ers — bottom feeders, subhuman, the lowest of the low. Back then, similar to now, blacks were taught to praise whiteness — white religions and gods, white traditions, white ideals. Those who subscribed adapted the word, and thus it entered our language with the same derogatory meaning, before we redefined and branded it as a term of love, hate, unity, connection, betrayal or whatever else we wanted to use it for. As the term became more and more forbidden to whites, we branded it more and more as our own. But is this even true? Is it a word created by white people with the purpose of identifying and degrading blacks? Any student of history or American culture knows our nation’s lust for controlling narratives and pushing perspectives that promote and glorify whiteness. I never questioned what I learned in school about the origin of the word until I stumbled across a YouTube clip from 2007 of ESPN’s national spelling bee. Andrew Lay, a tiny “Home Alone” kid-looking sixth-grader from North Carolina approached the mic. The announcer challenged him to spell “negus.” Andrew swallowed his throat, and responded with a blank pause before requesting a repeat along with the definition and origin. Some people who look like they could be his parents gasp. “Ethiopian to Amharic,” the announcer said. “A king, it’s used as the title of the sovereign of Ethiopia.” Andrew froze, bit his lip and asked for a sentence. “The negus ruled Ethiopia until 1974.” Andrew requested the definition again, blinked and said, “N-e-g-u-s? Negus.” The crowd applauded, confirming his correctness. Andrew fist pumped like Kobe after a game winner while heading back to his seat.

***

The same dictionary on my Mac defines "negus" as a ruler, or the supreme ruler of Ethiopia. The word’s origin dates back to the 14th century, far before n***er, which makes me question who created the word and if there is a connection between its African origin, the Portuguese version and the term that made it into the States. I never feel offended when a black person calls me n***a or ni***er (accent and pronunciation based on the region they represent); however, I’m beyond offended when white people use the word — kind of how a veteran would feel if you pissed on an American flag and disrespected the Pentagon, and rightfully so. The N-word is our word, it’s a term only to be used between African Americans — it’s a part of our established culture. There’s American culture, and then there are subcultures within American culture that need to be respected. I went to college with students from Asian cultures who told me that direct eye contact could be considered disrespectful. My grandma wanted you to take your hat off once you entered her home; many churches have the same rule. My writing teacher taught us that non-Jewish people calling Jewish people "Jews" could be offensive. I know Habesha families that require you to remove your shoes when you enter their place. The list goes on and on. The fact is that white people need to get over it. They have no need to use the N-word — they aren’t culturally connected to it in a positive way, and it does nothing to enhance their journey, experience or wellbeing. The ones who use the word or flirt with its existence, like the silly girls in the picture, simply want conflict. It’s not their word, so they want to control it­––they want to cause a stir, offend or be a part of a culture that they can never fully understand. They use it as a trigger word and then run from it when people react in a negative way. The people who mentor or teach the girls in that stupid photo — and indeed, those who mentor or teach all non-black kids who want to play around with this word — need to do more than explain why their action was culturally insensitive. They need to teach them how rough it can be for women in this country and let them know that they may need their perspective considered one day, because one day they could easily end up on the wrong side of discrimination, too.A silly photo of six little ignorant high school girls went viral last month. They attend Desert Vista high school in Phoenix. It was picture day, and a group of seniors wore black shirts with individual gold letters that spelled out "BEST *YOU'VE *EVER* SEEN* CLASS* OF*2016,” when arranged. While shooting, the six students mentioned slid to the side and begin taking their own pictures. The letters on their shirts spelled out NI**ER. Someone posted the picture, shortly after — a media flurry followed, with testimonies from a diverse collection of offended and upset students. The image continued to circulate all over the world making it to me 30-plus times — three via text and the rest scattered on social media from various tweeters, ranging from rightfully infuriated black people to retweets from the cowardly troll accounts that champion racism.

***

My Apple dictionary app defines n***er as an offensive noun, a contemptuous term for a black or dark-skinned person. The usage portion goes on to explain that the word was used as an adjective denoting a black person as early as the 17th century and has long had strong offensive connotations. Today it remains one of the most racially offensive words in the language. Also referred to as "the N-word," it is sometimes used by black people in reference to other black people in a jocular or disparaging manner, or some variant in between. Apple is only semi-right — primarily because the offense is based solely on who’s talking.

***

Way back when I was 6, my cousin Kevin was the best 9-year-old — to me — to ever wrap stubby fingers around a bat. He was greater than great, a lefty who slapped any and every type of pitch out of Ellwood Park. When purposely walked, Kevin had that Deion Sanders speed, quick enough to steal every base and slide home. Those skills earned Kevin a slot on teams all over the city. Often, I’d tag along. On one of those bright days, Kev taking care of business as usual­­ — he slapped a few homers and snagged a few fly balls. Midway through the game, the pitcher beelined Kev with the ball, allowing him to walk to first. He stole second and third and then tried to gun for home plate. The catcher waved his mitt in Kev’s direction as he slid over the base. The umpire called out in what easily could’ve been a debatable call. Kevin and the back catcher exchanged words as he headed for the bench. The back catcher yelled, “This n***er is always cheating!” Kevin snapped, spun around and tackled the catcher. From there he lunged a knee on the kid's torso, and whaled on his face until his mask popped off. It took two adults to pull him off. “You’ll never play in this league again!” a coach or parent yelled as we excited the park. “Yo, you good?” I asked, “You went crazy on that fat boy!” Kev, who called me his “favorite lil n***a” almost every day, stopped with intense eyes, a vein throbbed and parted his forehead into quadrants. “D, listen!” he squeezed my small shoulders. “If a white person ever call you a n***er, you better beat their ass, or I will beat your ass!” From that day on, I knew n***er, n***a, n*g, or any of other variation of the term belonged to black people. As years passed, I gave the same speech to my younger siblings, little cousins and all of their friends. The flip side is that we never really had to apply the rule. See, we’re from east Baltimore and never really interacted with whites other than some school teachers and housing police. The teachers never called us n***er, and we couldn’t whip the white officers who used the word, because they had guns, coupled with a license to kill.

***

College taught me that the word was originally a 15th-16th century Spanish-Portuguese word meaning black. By the 1800s the term had became a permanent fixture in American language. African slaves and free blacks alike were n***ers — bottom feeders, subhuman, the lowest of the low. Back then, similar to now, blacks were taught to praise whiteness — white religions and gods, white traditions, white ideals. Those who subscribed adapted the word, and thus it entered our language with the same derogatory meaning, before we redefined and branded it as a term of love, hate, unity, connection, betrayal or whatever else we wanted to use it for. As the term became more and more forbidden to whites, we branded it more and more as our own. But is this even true? Is it a word created by white people with the purpose of identifying and degrading blacks? Any student of history or American culture knows our nation’s lust for controlling narratives and pushing perspectives that promote and glorify whiteness. I never questioned what I learned in school about the origin of the word until I stumbled across a YouTube clip from 2007 of ESPN’s national spelling bee. Andrew Lay, a tiny “Home Alone” kid-looking sixth-grader from North Carolina approached the mic. The announcer challenged him to spell “negus.” Andrew swallowed his throat, and responded with a blank pause before requesting a repeat along with the definition and origin. Some people who look like they could be his parents gasp. “Ethiopian to Amharic,” the announcer said. “A king, it’s used as the title of the sovereign of Ethiopia.” Andrew froze, bit his lip and asked for a sentence. “The negus ruled Ethiopia until 1974.” Andrew requested the definition again, blinked and said, “N-e-g-u-s? Negus.” The crowd applauded, confirming his correctness. Andrew fist pumped like Kobe after a game winner while heading back to his seat.

***

The same dictionary on my Mac defines "negus" as a ruler, or the supreme ruler of Ethiopia. The word’s origin dates back to the 14th century, far before n***er, which makes me question who created the word and if there is a connection between its African origin, the Portuguese version and the term that made it into the States. I never feel offended when a black person calls me n***a or ni***er (accent and pronunciation based on the region they represent); however, I’m beyond offended when white people use the word — kind of how a veteran would feel if you pissed on an American flag and disrespected the Pentagon, and rightfully so. The N-word is our word, it’s a term only to be used between African Americans — it’s a part of our established culture. There’s American culture, and then there are subcultures within American culture that need to be respected. I went to college with students from Asian cultures who told me that direct eye contact could be considered disrespectful. My grandma wanted you to take your hat off once you entered her home; many churches have the same rule. My writing teacher taught us that non-Jewish people calling Jewish people "Jews" could be offensive. I know Habesha families that require you to remove your shoes when you enter their place. The list goes on and on. The fact is that white people need to get over it. They have no need to use the N-word — they aren’t culturally connected to it in a positive way, and it does nothing to enhance their journey, experience or wellbeing. The ones who use the word or flirt with its existence, like the silly girls in the picture, simply want conflict. It’s not their word, so they want to control it­––they want to cause a stir, offend or be a part of a culture that they can never fully understand. They use it as a trigger word and then run from it when people react in a negative way. The people who mentor or teach the girls in that stupid photo — and indeed, those who mentor or teach all non-black kids who want to play around with this word — need to do more than explain why their action was culturally insensitive. They need to teach them how rough it can be for women in this country and let them know that they may need their perspective considered one day, because one day they could easily end up on the wrong side of discrimination, too.

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Why we’re still fascinated with the O.J. Simpson trial: “The basic centrality of race in America hasn’t changed”

Tuesday night, “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” began its run, revisiting a 22-year-old double-murder case that was never quite resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. The Simpson case was about a lot of things: Celebrity, violence against women, the legal system, wealth. And the initial episode of the miniseries opens with tapes of the Rodney King beating, making clear the centrality of race to the trial with two white victims, an Asian judge and a black suspect. It raises the question: Do people of different races see the same trial, or are perceptions of it impossible to bring into focus? Clearly, people are still intrigued. The show's ratings are already impressive — Ryan Murphy's newest anthology series set an FX series premiere record with 5.11 million viewers tuning in last night. (For comparison's sake, HBO's "Game of Thrones" didn't break the 5 million mark until its third season.) We spoke to Darnell Hunt, a UCLA sociology professor and the author of “O. J. Simpson Facts and Fictions: News Rituals in the Construction of Reality,” which grew out of numerous interviews and may have got him as close to the case as anyone who was not in the courtroom. Hunt spoke about the miniseries, the actual trial, Black Lives Matter, and the contradictions of black celebrity. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. How closely did “The People v. O.J. Simpson” match your memories? Did it work for you, as someone who lived through and studied the case while it was happening? It’s funny, it really took me back. It’s hard to believe it’s been 21 years since the trial and 22 years since the murder. It was a pretty faithful reproduction of the scene. A lot of the landmarks aren’t there anymore. The O.J. Simpson home was demolished when someone bought it, the front of Nicole Brown Simpson’s place was completely remodeled, and they were able to reproduce the way it looked in 1994. I was pretty close to the case; I visited the places, did a lot of research, spoke to a lot of people … I’ve only seen one episode, but it captures the feeling of the moment. Did the trial create a nation in which black people and white people saw things differently, or was the United States already set up that way? That was the central question of my book. I argue in the end that the case brought to the surface underlying differences, underlying perspectives, different takes on reality that had been there all along. It was less, “What did the case do to race in America?” and more, “What did race in America do to the case?” The series does a decent job on this. It opens with the Rodney King beating. If there was ever a case that exposed racial disparities and racial differences in perspectives in America, that was it. It led to the L.A. uprisings of 1992, and the Simpson case came on the heels of that. So the divide was already there, especially in the way people viewed law enforcement. Black people had plenty of reason to distrust the justice system and the Rodney King case fueled their frustration. What did the Simpson trial do to those simmering bad feelings? I argue in my book that there were four political projects that were central to the case. One of them was what I called the “Just Us” project – that feeling among African-Americans that the criminal justice system singles us out for various kinds of mistreatment – whether racial profiling or railroading in the courtroom. All those things were sensitive in that historical moment because of what had just happened a couple years earlier. For part of my study, I followed two different groups – one white, one black -- during the prosecution. And I followed up with them again to see to what extent, if any, their views had changed. What I found was that their views hardened as more evidence came out in the case. What it showed is that evidence is always filtered through our perspectives. It’s a product of our experiences. There are different black and white experiences in America, that predispose different types of viewers to perceive the case in different ways. Race was an absolutely central axis in that process. Did you find that it became hard for people to even talk about the case across racial lines because they saw things so differently? I remember from that period a lot of guarded conversation about the case. There were lots of assumptions made on both sides about what other people thought or believed, and that made it difficult to have a meaningful dialogue along racial lines. The case signified different things to different people. It was about race, but there was the whole celebrity question, and whether or not celebrities are able to buy their freedom. Whether his “dream team” would be able to get him off. There was the huge issue of domestic violence. How did women see the case differently? That was one of the great lessons of the case. Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor in the case, did a relatively good job of fleshing out my understanding of her as a person. She basically assumed she’d get a conviction. She figured, “I’ll win black women over, I’ll put them on the jury, and they’ll give me a conviction.” But where she erred was that black women did not want to appear as victims. So they didn’t give Nicole Brown Simpson victim status. And given the racial dynamics -- white woman/black man – there were other issues that complicated what Marcia Clark thought was an open-and-shut case. It would have been better if she’d put black men on the jury, or any other group besides black women. So there were interesting interactions between race and gender as far as how people saw this and how the case played out. Have white and black perspectives come together since the Simpson case? Diverged even more? It would be interesting to see a contemporary poll today. At the very beginning of the trial, most people hadn’t made up their minds about his innocence and guilt. However, if you looked at those who felt like he was probably guilty or probably innocent, there were pretty major racial differences between blacks and whites, having to do with the age-old differences they had with the criminal justice system. And then as the polls continued into the case, the differences became bigger. You’d think they’d become smaller as more evidence came out, but people are interpreting evidence in different ways, and it’s more or less reinforcing their prior thoughts. So the basic centrality of race in America hasn’t changed. We’re still dealing with racial profiling and the cases that led to the Black Lives Matter movement. So clearly race hasn’t gone away. It would be very interesting for me to see, 21 and 22 years later, how resonant this case still is. It must be if they’re making a show on it. But I have [students] born after the O.J. Simpson case who aren’t that aware of it. They’re much more aware of Rodney King. It would be interesting to see how younger generations interpret the case, who maybe weren’t around in that period. They’re dealing with contemporary manifestations of race. Class and celebrity change the picture too, don’t they? One of the things we do know is that class and education can only inoculate you so much, if you’re African-American, from the disparities that exist in the system. This is a common observation – people think they’re above race until they confront the criminal justice system and then they realize they’re still black. A black celebrity can cease to be seen as a celebrity, after ceasing to be seen as black? Until something happens. Michael Jackson is another example. He almost physically transcended race – his color changes, he becomes this global pop icon in a way that avoided [racial] labels. Until he runs afoul of the law and suddenly the racial issues start to creep back in. Celebrity, like wealth and fame, inoculate you to a degree. But if the conditions are right, the underlying dynamics of American society reassert themselves. And race is one of those. Obama is another great example. He wins the Iowa caucuses, goes on to shock everyone by winning the nomination. And actually wins the election. So you think, he has somehow overcome race. Most people of my generation and before, never in our wildest dreams did we think we could elect a black president. But then he becomes president, he’s the target of all kinds of disrespect on the floor of the Congress … race comes back in despite the achievement. He doesn’t even escape race. It was really, for me, about the ways people determine what they think they know, and how narratives around race, gender and other things affect that. It was an interesting moment in American history … It’s telling that we’re still talking about it 20-some years later.Tuesday night, “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” began its run, revisiting a 22-year-old double-murder case that was never quite resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. The Simpson case was about a lot of things: Celebrity, violence against women, the legal system, wealth. And the initial episode of the miniseries opens with tapes of the Rodney King beating, making clear the centrality of race to the trial with two white victims, an Asian judge and a black suspect. It raises the question: Do people of different races see the same trial, or are perceptions of it impossible to bring into focus? Clearly, people are still intrigued. The show's ratings are already impressive — Ryan Murphy's newest anthology series set an FX series premiere record with 5.11 million viewers tuning in last night. (For comparison's sake, HBO's "Game of Thrones" didn't break the 5 million mark until its third season.) We spoke to Darnell Hunt, a UCLA sociology professor and the author of “O. J. Simpson Facts and Fictions: News Rituals in the Construction of Reality,” which grew out of numerous interviews and may have got him as close to the case as anyone who was not in the courtroom. Hunt spoke about the miniseries, the actual trial, Black Lives Matter, and the contradictions of black celebrity. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. How closely did “The People v. O.J. Simpson” match your memories? Did it work for you, as someone who lived through and studied the case while it was happening? It’s funny, it really took me back. It’s hard to believe it’s been 21 years since the trial and 22 years since the murder. It was a pretty faithful reproduction of the scene. A lot of the landmarks aren’t there anymore. The O.J. Simpson home was demolished when someone bought it, the front of Nicole Brown Simpson’s place was completely remodeled, and they were able to reproduce the way it looked in 1994. I was pretty close to the case; I visited the places, did a lot of research, spoke to a lot of people … I’ve only seen one episode, but it captures the feeling of the moment. Did the trial create a nation in which black people and white people saw things differently, or was the United States already set up that way? That was the central question of my book. I argue in the end that the case brought to the surface underlying differences, underlying perspectives, different takes on reality that had been there all along. It was less, “What did the case do to race in America?” and more, “What did race in America do to the case?” The series does a decent job on this. It opens with the Rodney King beating. If there was ever a case that exposed racial disparities and racial differences in perspectives in America, that was it. It led to the L.A. uprisings of 1992, and the Simpson case came on the heels of that. So the divide was already there, especially in the way people viewed law enforcement. Black people had plenty of reason to distrust the justice system and the Rodney King case fueled their frustration. What did the Simpson trial do to those simmering bad feelings? I argue in my book that there were four political projects that were central to the case. One of them was what I called the “Just Us” project – that feeling among African-Americans that the criminal justice system singles us out for various kinds of mistreatment – whether racial profiling or railroading in the courtroom. All those things were sensitive in that historical moment because of what had just happened a couple years earlier. For part of my study, I followed two different groups – one white, one black -- during the prosecution. And I followed up with them again to see to what extent, if any, their views had changed. What I found was that their views hardened as more evidence came out in the case. What it showed is that evidence is always filtered through our perspectives. It’s a product of our experiences. There are different black and white experiences in America, that predispose different types of viewers to perceive the case in different ways. Race was an absolutely central axis in that process. Did you find that it became hard for people to even talk about the case across racial lines because they saw things so differently? I remember from that period a lot of guarded conversation about the case. There were lots of assumptions made on both sides about what other people thought or believed, and that made it difficult to have a meaningful dialogue along racial lines. The case signified different things to different people. It was about race, but there was the whole celebrity question, and whether or not celebrities are able to buy their freedom. Whether his “dream team” would be able to get him off. There was the huge issue of domestic violence. How did women see the case differently? That was one of the great lessons of the case. Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor in the case, did a relatively good job of fleshing out my understanding of her as a person. She basically assumed she’d get a conviction. She figured, “I’ll win black women over, I’ll put them on the jury, and they’ll give me a conviction.” But where she erred was that black women did not want to appear as victims. So they didn’t give Nicole Brown Simpson victim status. And given the racial dynamics -- white woman/black man – there were other issues that complicated what Marcia Clark thought was an open-and-shut case. It would have been better if she’d put black men on the jury, or any other group besides black women. So there were interesting interactions between race and gender as far as how people saw this and how the case played out. Have white and black perspectives come together since the Simpson case? Diverged even more? It would be interesting to see a contemporary poll today. At the very beginning of the trial, most people hadn’t made up their minds about his innocence and guilt. However, if you looked at those who felt like he was probably guilty or probably innocent, there were pretty major racial differences between blacks and whites, having to do with the age-old differences they had with the criminal justice system. And then as the polls continued into the case, the differences became bigger. You’d think they’d become smaller as more evidence came out, but people are interpreting evidence in different ways, and it’s more or less reinforcing their prior thoughts. So the basic centrality of race in America hasn’t changed. We’re still dealing with racial profiling and the cases that led to the Black Lives Matter movement. So clearly race hasn’t gone away. It would be very interesting for me to see, 21 and 22 years later, how resonant this case still is. It must be if they’re making a show on it. But I have [students] born after the O.J. Simpson case who aren’t that aware of it. They’re much more aware of Rodney King. It would be interesting to see how younger generations interpret the case, who maybe weren’t around in that period. They’re dealing with contemporary manifestations of race. Class and celebrity change the picture too, don’t they? One of the things we do know is that class and education can only inoculate you so much, if you’re African-American, from the disparities that exist in the system. This is a common observation – people think they’re above race until they confront the criminal justice system and then they realize they’re still black. A black celebrity can cease to be seen as a celebrity, after ceasing to be seen as black? Until something happens. Michael Jackson is another example. He almost physically transcended race – his color changes, he becomes this global pop icon in a way that avoided [racial] labels. Until he runs afoul of the law and suddenly the racial issues start to creep back in. Celebrity, like wealth and fame, inoculate you to a degree. But if the conditions are right, the underlying dynamics of American society reassert themselves. And race is one of those. Obama is another great example. He wins the Iowa caucuses, goes on to shock everyone by winning the nomination. And actually wins the election. So you think, he has somehow overcome race. Most people of my generation and before, never in our wildest dreams did we think we could elect a black president. But then he becomes president, he’s the target of all kinds of disrespect on the floor of the Congress … race comes back in despite the achievement. He doesn’t even escape race. It was really, for me, about the ways people determine what they think they know, and how narratives around race, gender and other things affect that. It was an interesting moment in American history … It’s telling that we’re still talking about it 20-some years later.Tuesday night, “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” began its run, revisiting a 22-year-old double-murder case that was never quite resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. The Simpson case was about a lot of things: Celebrity, violence against women, the legal system, wealth. And the initial episode of the miniseries opens with tapes of the Rodney King beating, making clear the centrality of race to the trial with two white victims, an Asian judge and a black suspect. It raises the question: Do people of different races see the same trial, or are perceptions of it impossible to bring into focus? Clearly, people are still intrigued. The show's ratings are already impressive — Ryan Murphy's newest anthology series set an FX series premiere record with 5.11 million viewers tuning in last night. (For comparison's sake, HBO's "Game of Thrones" didn't break the 5 million mark until its third season.) We spoke to Darnell Hunt, a UCLA sociology professor and the author of “O. J. Simpson Facts and Fictions: News Rituals in the Construction of Reality,” which grew out of numerous interviews and may have got him as close to the case as anyone who was not in the courtroom. Hunt spoke about the miniseries, the actual trial, Black Lives Matter, and the contradictions of black celebrity. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. How closely did “The People v. O.J. Simpson” match your memories? Did it work for you, as someone who lived through and studied the case while it was happening? It’s funny, it really took me back. It’s hard to believe it’s been 21 years since the trial and 22 years since the murder. It was a pretty faithful reproduction of the scene. A lot of the landmarks aren’t there anymore. The O.J. Simpson home was demolished when someone bought it, the front of Nicole Brown Simpson’s place was completely remodeled, and they were able to reproduce the way it looked in 1994. I was pretty close to the case; I visited the places, did a lot of research, spoke to a lot of people … I’ve only seen one episode, but it captures the feeling of the moment. Did the trial create a nation in which black people and white people saw things differently, or was the United States already set up that way? That was the central question of my book. I argue in the end that the case brought to the surface underlying differences, underlying perspectives, different takes on reality that had been there all along. It was less, “What did the case do to race in America?” and more, “What did race in America do to the case?” The series does a decent job on this. It opens with the Rodney King beating. If there was ever a case that exposed racial disparities and racial differences in perspectives in America, that was it. It led to the L.A. uprisings of 1992, and the Simpson case came on the heels of that. So the divide was already there, especially in the way people viewed law enforcement. Black people had plenty of reason to distrust the justice system and the Rodney King case fueled their frustration. What did the Simpson trial do to those simmering bad feelings? I argue in my book that there were four political projects that were central to the case. One of them was what I called the “Just Us” project – that feeling among African-Americans that the criminal justice system singles us out for various kinds of mistreatment – whether racial profiling or railroading in the courtroom. All those things were sensitive in that historical moment because of what had just happened a couple years earlier. For part of my study, I followed two different groups – one white, one black -- during the prosecution. And I followed up with them again to see to what extent, if any, their views had changed. What I found was that their views hardened as more evidence came out in the case. What it showed is that evidence is always filtered through our perspectives. It’s a product of our experiences. There are different black and white experiences in America, that predispose different types of viewers to perceive the case in different ways. Race was an absolutely central axis in that process. Did you find that it became hard for people to even talk about the case across racial lines because they saw things so differently? I remember from that period a lot of guarded conversation about the case. There were lots of assumptions made on both sides about what other people thought or believed, and that made it difficult to have a meaningful dialogue along racial lines. The case signified different things to different people. It was about race, but there was the whole celebrity question, and whether or not celebrities are able to buy their freedom. Whether his “dream team” would be able to get him off. There was the huge issue of domestic violence. How did women see the case differently? That was one of the great lessons of the case. Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor in the case, did a relatively good job of fleshing out my understanding of her as a person. She basically assumed she’d get a conviction. She figured, “I’ll win black women over, I’ll put them on the jury, and they’ll give me a conviction.” But where she erred was that black women did not want to appear as victims. So they didn’t give Nicole Brown Simpson victim status. And given the racial dynamics -- white woman/black man – there were other issues that complicated what Marcia Clark thought was an open-and-shut case. It would have been better if she’d put black men on the jury, or any other group besides black women. So there were interesting interactions between race and gender as far as how people saw this and how the case played out. Have white and black perspectives come together since the Simpson case? Diverged even more? It would be interesting to see a contemporary poll today. At the very beginning of the trial, most people hadn’t made up their minds about his innocence and guilt. However, if you looked at those who felt like he was probably guilty or probably innocent, there were pretty major racial differences between blacks and whites, having to do with the age-old differences they had with the criminal justice system. And then as the polls continued into the case, the differences became bigger. You’d think they’d become smaller as more evidence came out, but people are interpreting evidence in different ways, and it’s more or less reinforcing their prior thoughts. So the basic centrality of race in America hasn’t changed. We’re still dealing with racial profiling and the cases that led to the Black Lives Matter movement. So clearly race hasn’t gone away. It would be very interesting for me to see, 21 and 22 years later, how resonant this case still is. It must be if they’re making a show on it. But I have [students] born after the O.J. Simpson case who aren’t that aware of it. They’re much more aware of Rodney King. It would be interesting to see how younger generations interpret the case, who maybe weren’t around in that period. They’re dealing with contemporary manifestations of race. Class and celebrity change the picture too, don’t they? One of the things we do know is that class and education can only inoculate you so much, if you’re African-American, from the disparities that exist in the system. This is a common observation – people think they’re above race until they confront the criminal justice system and then they realize they’re still black. A black celebrity can cease to be seen as a celebrity, after ceasing to be seen as black? Until something happens. Michael Jackson is another example. He almost physically transcended race – his color changes, he becomes this global pop icon in a way that avoided [racial] labels. Until he runs afoul of the law and suddenly the racial issues start to creep back in. Celebrity, like wealth and fame, inoculate you to a degree. But if the conditions are right, the underlying dynamics of American society reassert themselves. And race is one of those. Obama is another great example. He wins the Iowa caucuses, goes on to shock everyone by winning the nomination. And actually wins the election. So you think, he has somehow overcome race. Most people of my generation and before, never in our wildest dreams did we think we could elect a black president. But then he becomes president, he’s the target of all kinds of disrespect on the floor of the Congress … race comes back in despite the achievement. He doesn’t even escape race. It was really, for me, about the ways people determine what they think they know, and how narratives around race, gender and other things affect that. It was an interesting moment in American history … It’s telling that we’re still talking about it 20-some years later.Tuesday night, “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” began its run, revisiting a 22-year-old double-murder case that was never quite resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. The Simpson case was about a lot of things: Celebrity, violence against women, the legal system, wealth. And the initial episode of the miniseries opens with tapes of the Rodney King beating, making clear the centrality of race to the trial with two white victims, an Asian judge and a black suspect. It raises the question: Do people of different races see the same trial, or are perceptions of it impossible to bring into focus? Clearly, people are still intrigued. The show's ratings are already impressive — Ryan Murphy's newest anthology series set an FX series premiere record with 5.11 million viewers tuning in last night. (For comparison's sake, HBO's "Game of Thrones" didn't break the 5 million mark until its third season.) We spoke to Darnell Hunt, a UCLA sociology professor and the author of “O. J. Simpson Facts and Fictions: News Rituals in the Construction of Reality,” which grew out of numerous interviews and may have got him as close to the case as anyone who was not in the courtroom. Hunt spoke about the miniseries, the actual trial, Black Lives Matter, and the contradictions of black celebrity. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. How closely did “The People v. O.J. Simpson” match your memories? Did it work for you, as someone who lived through and studied the case while it was happening? It’s funny, it really took me back. It’s hard to believe it’s been 21 years since the trial and 22 years since the murder. It was a pretty faithful reproduction of the scene. A lot of the landmarks aren’t there anymore. The O.J. Simpson home was demolished when someone bought it, the front of Nicole Brown Simpson’s place was completely remodeled, and they were able to reproduce the way it looked in 1994. I was pretty close to the case; I visited the places, did a lot of research, spoke to a lot of people … I’ve only seen one episode, but it captures the feeling of the moment. Did the trial create a nation in which black people and white people saw things differently, or was the United States already set up that way? That was the central question of my book. I argue in the end that the case brought to the surface underlying differences, underlying perspectives, different takes on reality that had been there all along. It was less, “What did the case do to race in America?” and more, “What did race in America do to the case?” The series does a decent job on this. It opens with the Rodney King beating. If there was ever a case that exposed racial disparities and racial differences in perspectives in America, that was it. It led to the L.A. uprisings of 1992, and the Simpson case came on the heels of that. So the divide was already there, especially in the way people viewed law enforcement. Black people had plenty of reason to distrust the justice system and the Rodney King case fueled their frustration. What did the Simpson trial do to those simmering bad feelings? I argue in my book that there were four political projects that were central to the case. One of them was what I called the “Just Us” project – that feeling among African-Americans that the criminal justice system singles us out for various kinds of mistreatment – whether racial profiling or railroading in the courtroom. All those things were sensitive in that historical moment because of what had just happened a couple years earlier. For part of my study, I followed two different groups – one white, one black -- during the prosecution. And I followed up with them again to see to what extent, if any, their views had changed. What I found was that their views hardened as more evidence came out in the case. What it showed is that evidence is always filtered through our perspectives. It’s a product of our experiences. There are different black and white experiences in America, that predispose different types of viewers to perceive the case in different ways. Race was an absolutely central axis in that process. Did you find that it became hard for people to even talk about the case across racial lines because they saw things so differently? I remember from that period a lot of guarded conversation about the case. There were lots of assumptions made on both sides about what other people thought or believed, and that made it difficult to have a meaningful dialogue along racial lines. The case signified different things to different people. It was about race, but there was the whole celebrity question, and whether or not celebrities are able to buy their freedom. Whether his “dream team” would be able to get him off. There was the huge issue of domestic violence. How did women see the case differently? That was one of the great lessons of the case. Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor in the case, did a relatively good job of fleshing out my understanding of her as a person. She basically assumed she’d get a conviction. She figured, “I’ll win black women over, I’ll put them on the jury, and they’ll give me a conviction.” But where she erred was that black women did not want to appear as victims. So they didn’t give Nicole Brown Simpson victim status. And given the racial dynamics -- white woman/black man – there were other issues that complicated what Marcia Clark thought was an open-and-shut case. It would have been better if she’d put black men on the jury, or any other group besides black women. So there were interesting interactions between race and gender as far as how people saw this and how the case played out. Have white and black perspectives come together since the Simpson case? Diverged even more? It would be interesting to see a contemporary poll today. At the very beginning of the trial, most people hadn’t made up their minds about his innocence and guilt. However, if you looked at those who felt like he was probably guilty or probably innocent, there were pretty major racial differences between blacks and whites, having to do with the age-old differences they had with the criminal justice system. And then as the polls continued into the case, the differences became bigger. You’d think they’d become smaller as more evidence came out, but people are interpreting evidence in different ways, and it’s more or less reinforcing their prior thoughts. So the basic centrality of race in America hasn’t changed. We’re still dealing with racial profiling and the cases that led to the Black Lives Matter movement. So clearly race hasn’t gone away. It would be very interesting for me to see, 21 and 22 years later, how resonant this case still is. It must be if they’re making a show on it. But I have [students] born after the O.J. Simpson case who aren’t that aware of it. They’re much more aware of Rodney King. It would be interesting to see how younger generations interpret the case, who maybe weren’t around in that period. They’re dealing with contemporary manifestations of race. Class and celebrity change the picture too, don’t they? One of the things we do know is that class and education can only inoculate you so much, if you’re African-American, from the disparities that exist in the system. This is a common observation – people think they’re above race until they confront the criminal justice system and then they realize they’re still black. A black celebrity can cease to be seen as a celebrity, after ceasing to be seen as black? Until something happens. Michael Jackson is another example. He almost physically transcended race – his color changes, he becomes this global pop icon in a way that avoided [racial] labels. Until he runs afoul of the law and suddenly the racial issues start to creep back in. Celebrity, like wealth and fame, inoculate you to a degree. But if the conditions are right, the underlying dynamics of American society reassert themselves. And race is one of those. Obama is another great example. He wins the Iowa caucuses, goes on to shock everyone by winning the nomination. And actually wins the election. So you think, he has somehow overcome race. Most people of my generation and before, never in our wildest dreams did we think we could elect a black president. But then he becomes president, he’s the target of all kinds of disrespect on the floor of the Congress … race comes back in despite the achievement. He doesn’t even escape race. It was really, for me, about the ways people determine what they think they know, and how narratives around race, gender and other things affect that. It was an interesting moment in American history … It’s telling that we’re still talking about it 20-some years later.

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