A scientist, a historian and a theologian… almost everyone I mentioned this do said,” walk into a bar!” It does sound like the first line of a joke, but Stanford Carpenter, the “provost” of Comicpalooza University asked me to moderate a panel of the three because of its complexity. He says I have a “flexible brain.” I’m still not sure what that means but there I was with yes, Scott Soloman, a scientist, Julian Chambliss, a historian, and Reverend Doctor Sakena Young-Scaggs, the theologian. They had been asked to talk about imagination.

A phrase often associated with imagination is “flight of fancy,” because our imaginations do lift us into flight, away from the weight of the here and now, to what could be, might be. The reason that colleges are so eager for prospective students to visit their campuses is because the data show that campus decisions are often based on whether a student can imagine themselves there We often associate imagination with children but we all do it all the time. We hide it under the word “to see.” Can I see myself in this house, at this job, with this person? If we can’t “see” it, we often do not do it.

That is a good thing too. One of my favorite things about imagination is that it engages many parts of the brain at once; it is considered a complex “whole brain” process driven by a network of interacting regions, depending on what one is imagining. It colors what we expect, what we hope, what we fear. How we plan for our families, our country, our cosmos.

Our panel conversation was anchored by Scott Soloman’s new book, Becoming Martian: How Living in Space Will Change our Bodies and Minds.

At the start of session, I asked how many people in the audience of about 45 people wanted to go to Mars. About 20 people raised their hands. Most were smiling, excited at the prospect. At the end of the session, all but one had changed their minds.

Mars quickly became a metaphor for how we see ourselves in the universe, how we envision our futures.

The US has been future oriented country since the first Europeans came to North America. One trait that most of us have shared is optimism. It is how people of other countries have defined us. The future, for us, has always been brighter. We have traditionally valued progress. Progress is, well, progressive—it is perceived as unilinear, progressing in one direction and we have traditionally seen that as always good.

This is starting to change. Young adults now are not so optimistic, the first generation who expect their lives to be worse than those of their parents. In response to AI and huge power plants, we are seeing public push back. Progress, it seems, is not always good anymore.

NASA announced in 2018 that we are going to Mars. Since then, billionaires, competing with each, are developing private space exploration.

Adults do not imagine out of whole cloth; we use narratives we already know to explain where we are going. The most important narrative is that of the frontier. We are a frontier nation, ever pushing to the next thing, the next land. The story includes adventure, bravery, “discovery,” and danger. We grew up hearing that space was the final frontier. Science fiction has helped us to imagine it.

But going to Mars is full of problems. It has an extremely harsh climate and landscapes. The picture we are running with this article? That would never happen. She could not just be out in the open with like that, with no head or neck protection. She could not even be outside very long at all, not with the currently developed protections.

As for the planet, the historian kept reminding us of what has happened when humans arrive at new places—we have rarely been good guests, or considered ourselves guests at all, but arrive full of plans to dominate. Already there are plans to mine Mars’ rare metals and to harvest its ice to manufacture methane in addition to drinking water.

Another important and related narrative is that of Immigration. Those who leave to go to Mars may never see their families again, very much like the people who traveled to the US. This country, for better or worse, is a country dominated by immigrants. The idea of leaving home to begin anew is deeply woven into our public imagination.

But other scientific factors are troubling.

Many of us are “specist,” biased toward our own species. The term is more often used in the context of animal rights, but it works here. We assume that we are such a superior life form that people just like us will survive and inhabit the other planets, that we would not have to change in dramatic ways. Our present bodies cannot survive on the surface of Mars. So, some changes are expected to happen quickly, adjusting to living underground, with zero gravity. Even if they could come back, after endless periods of no gravity, reentry to earth’s gravity would be unimaginably painful. Women will have to have C-sections. Children born on Mars might not survive here.

Other changes would evolve over time. Martian immigrants would look and behave differently. They would have to. The historian reminded us that we humans like to arrange beings into hierarchies. Would we consider them human? Would they be better than us, a new superior group? Or would we consider them inferior and so we would try to subordinate or even enslave them.

Who Gets to Go to Space?

In one scenario, we would be leaving a ruined planet, the Earth that we are rapidly destroying.

This is when the entry of billionaires changes the scenario.

Who gets to go? Who gets left behind? The scientist noted that NASA’s flight crew have been increasingly diverse. Social class was not a deciding factor. The crew members worked hard for years to earn their seats. So far, the billionaires have a different roster. They, their wives and friends, celebrities have gotten to go. It seems almost like a joy ride. Gayle King’s fear seemed most appropriate—because yes, they could die. But if space travel becomes the new playground of the wealthy and famous, can ordinary children still dream of space?

Sex in Space

NASA and their counterparts in other countries have refused to investigate sex in space, fearing taxpayers’ ire at supporting it. The billionaires are showing no such inhibitions, and it is easy to imagine wealthy couples paying to be members of the higher than a mile high club. Still, it is a legitimate question: If we cannot reproduce in space, there is little chance of establishing a self-sustaining settlement. Or do we just keep sending people off into space? The ones we highly treasure or the ones we want to be rid of?

Heaven in Space

What does space travel mean for heaven? Where is it? If we go to Mars, does our conceptualization of heaven move or change? Rev. Young-Scaggs said that the Spirit is everywhere, even on Mars, so that space travel does not disrupt her sense of the afterlife. The audience became thoughtful. Pew Research reports that 70 to 76% of Americans believe in heaven so, statistically speaking, three quarters of the audience did. A group of them surrounded her after the session and the organizers had to nudge them away from the stage so that the next panel could start. They were asking about the fits with their specific beliefs. The Judeo-Christian scripture is very oriented toward Earth and earthlings. If we meet other beings, will we regard them as blessed beings whom God loves? Or, as the historian reminded us again, will we regard them the way Europeans first regarded other peoples they “discovered”, as outside of God grace and protection?

Some conservative Christians, some in the administration, have taken up the matter and pre-decided that aliens are demons. There was evidently some consideration that aliens were angels, but the received perception seems to have settled on demons. That would place anyone we find solidly outside of God’s grace and excuse any effort to eliminate them. Alien genocide, or exactly what Europeans did to Indigenous Americans.

As space travel accelerates, how and what we imagine predicts how we will perceive what and, potentially, whom we find. Imagination leads us to choose, to allow, but also to eliminate possibility.

I recently participated in a panel on Nostalgia at the 2026 Comicpalooza in Houston. As always happens, more ideas surface during and after such discussions. I am sharing a description and some expanded ideas:

Nostalgia rests between memory and imagination. A common definition, which I use, is a longing for a past that did not happen. Nostalgia is often considered positive, a reworking of the past or our own pasts into a narrative that is happier, less troublesome than the past.

Nostalgia and healing

Shelly Clevenger and Kathleen Ratajczak, both professors of Victim Studies at Sam Houston State University, spoke of the role of nostalgia in the healing of traumatic memories of individuals. Ratajczak spoke of Disney adults who may have had traumatic childhoods. They are not remembering happy family trips to Disney World, they are enacting a childhood they never had but wished for, tending to the wounded child.

Julia Brown of the University of Houston spoke of a different psychological use, of old horror movies, less graphic than many being produced now, that were useful in the generalized anxiety she suffered as a child. The horror movies gave her something specific to fear, a focus and therefore a grounding of her anxiety.

Nostalgia and Erasure

At our planning meeting, I asked my fellow panelists if they were comfortable with my being disruptive. After listening, they agreed.

Their nostalgia was my erasure.

I was twelve years old, on an extracurricular school-sponsored trip from North Carolina to New York. We would climb the Washington Monument and the Statue of Liberty, see the Rocketts (although I never understood what the high kickers had to do with American history). We stopped at Colonial Williamsburg.

I looked around. I walked up to a White reenactor holding a farm tool. I asked him what he was. He said that he was a “servant.” A servant? I looked around again—no Black people other than me and a few of my classmates. “Who grows the crops around here?” I asked. “I do,” he said. I looked at him with steely incredulity. “Who?” I asked. He repeated himself. I raised my voice. What year is this? And are we still in Virginia? He answered me, that yes, we were in 18^th century Virginia. So, I said again, “Who does the work around here?” He started to sweat. I remember watching a big bead of perspiration rolling from under his hat all the way down the side of his forehead to his cheek. I didn’t care. I was furious! “Who?” this time more of a demand than a question, I just wanted to hear him say the word. Slave. But Colonial Williamsburg did not have slave reenactors at the time. They built a whole colonial plantation and pretended that slavery did not exist. With the tenacity of a child, I intended to hold my ground and torture him until he said it out loud. Finally, we caught the attention of my teacher/chaperone, and the White woman came over and tried to gently nudge me away. She made several attempts before I came, but not without shooting him one more pointed look. I wanted him to remember me.

Younger listeners are stunned by this story, that a “historical” park would omit the fact of slavery, but Colonial Williamsburg opened in the 1930’s and focused only on the lives and achievements of wealthy White men. During the colonial period, more than 50% of Williamsburg was Black. Enslaved Africans did the hardest work. Maybe the park planners did not expect a young Black girls to show up; maybe they did not care.

Colonial Williamsburg introduced slave reenactors in 1979 and reconstructed a Slave Quarter in 1989 at nearby Carter’s Grove, at its original location. It was interesting that rather than inserting slavery more thoroughly into the original park site, they placed the main enslavement exhibit off site. It is historically accurate, which makes it more poignant, but also less disruptive of the main park narrative.

It was not an easy endeavor. They needed real Black people. They contacted the Theatre Department at the University of Maryland. Black students refused—too close to the bone—to spend their summer in the skins of their tortured ancestors was too much to ask. When the exhibit did open, some Black park patrons had panic attacks—really trauma attacks—and the park brought in counselors.

The Disneyfication of Slavery?

Michal Eisner of the Disney company noticed the same thing that 12-year-old me did and he intended to do something about it. After visiting Colonial Williamsburg, Eisner approached Virginia state administration and purchased 3000 acres in Prince William County to build a “fun” $650M historical park. Plans included a “gritty reality” ride simulating the Underground Railroad where tourists could pretend to be runaway slaves.

Bob Weis, senior vice president and the park’s creative director asked “How can you do a park on America and not talk about slavery?...We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave, and what it was like to escape through the Underground Railroad.”

Disney may have wanted park patrons to know what it felt like to be a slave, but Eisner said that they did not plan to whip people or put them in chains. In other words, it would be Slavery Light, a trivialization of a horrific period, echoing proslavery propaganda that made slavery look bucolic, pleasant for everyone. Led by Courney Gallop-Johnson, African Americans and allies formed the Black History Action Coalition. Gallop-Johnson said that “No one will ever know the feelings—the absolute agony and despair of these people.” The Los Angeles Times reported that more than 3000 people, including activist Ralph Nader marched from the Washington Monument to the White House to the Capitol Building, chanting “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Disney’s Got to Go.” Disney did go; the plans were canceled in 1994 due to the fierce opposition from historians, environmentalists and the general public. It is important to note that during the same period Disney was in production of its revisionist “family friendly” Pocahontas film in production. The historical figure we know as Pocahontas was 10 or 11 years old. According to the Indigenous Foundation, she was kidnapped and raped.

The issue is not that no one should speak of slavery or the rape of indigenous children —we should speak of them much more—but how we speak of them. Nostalgia is often playful. Historical events are often not well suited for playfulness, which is a contributing factor for their erasure. Nostalgia omits the hard the hard stuff. Nostalgia erases the marginalized people.

Regenerative Nostalgia

A “regenerative” process renews, restores and regrow a system, a tissue or an environment, seeking to actively heal and improve the underlying system.

Even if the dominant narratives ignore them, marginalized people were and are everywhere, in places and times where we have been led to not expect them. Restoring them to their rightful presence is regenerative. Knowledge of them changes the system. Despite what we may have heard, scholars and artists are still digging and the work of finding them, reclaiming them and depicting them is still going on. For example, Olivette Otele’s book African Europeans documents the presence of Africans in Europe throughout centuries.

Amidst their troubles, marginalized people have always had love, laughter and humor. Filmmaker and “Collective Memory Artist” Ralph Crowder’s The Lost Negroes of North America uses found historical footage to document the day to day lives of middle and upper middle class African Americans in the Midwest of the 1940’s. They were well off enough to have home movies in the 1940’s. Those home movies show them as well dressed and coifed people doing things that affluent people do—riding in their cars, taking trips, strolling in their furs, going on leisurely picnics. The silent film premiered in New York in late 2025, when Crowder invited jazz musicians and singers to improvise accompaniment as they saw the film for the first time.

Entertainment media often takes history and expands upon it. Shonda Rimes’ production, Bridgerton, is a richly layered story of Regency era England, full on minorities. In the first season, a Black duke falls in love with a White woman. In season two, Indian royals join the community. Mixed Black Queen Charlotte and the Indian Sharma sisters are based on historical figures. They are joined by many more fictional people of color.

As publicly practiced in the US, nostalgia can be too easy, equating lack of diversity with lack of problems. If the point is an idealized, playful narrative, our joy and humor deserve a place. But when nostalgia parades as history, the erasure of people of color becomes yet another crime.

It was summertime. My friend and I were riding bikes on the steep hill of our street when we crashed into each other. She was a big girl. We slid down the hill, her on top of me, a tangle of two bodies and two bikes –on my face. I felt my face scraping down the asphalt. When family and neighbors pulled us up, they gasped. Nothing was broken but the whole left side of my face was skinned and deeply cut up, grated as if someone had taken a cheese grater to it-- with bits of stone stuck in the pitted cuts.

My mother cleaned it out, applied antibiotic cream and bandaged it. She took me to a doctor, a dermatologist, I learned later. He said that beyond giving us some antibiotics, there was no more he could do, that my face would heal and eventually scar over. I am Black, so there was the chance of raised keloid scarring. I remember how casually he said that I could be disfigured for the rest of my life. My mother considered him cooly and took me home.

He was White, so maybe he did not know about cocoa butter. She did. It is a staple in Black homes for burns, cuts, and general moisturization. It is light-yellow and has a nutty, buttery aroma with a sweet top note. At the time, it came in little white metal tubes that pushed it up from the bottom, like push popsicles. My mother bought several tubes, dug them out with a warm knife and slowly melted the butter in a pot on the stove, until it was warm but not hot, the consistency of a lotion. Three times a day, she carefully cleaned my face and gently patted the butter thickly into the wound-scape of my face and covered it up with white gauze. My face was being soaked in butter because, she said, it was important that the skin never dry out. I remember that the look on her face was determined.

It worked. By the start of school in the fall, my face did not stand out among my acne-riddled peers. Eventually, it healed completely, with no keloids, no scars at all, and no discoloration. You could not tell it was ever so grated.

Not My Child.

At the start of 5^th grade, several teachers stood in the front of the room. They called up a group of us and took us to the classroom next door. We did not know what was happening but one teacher said, “We will show those white people.” School integration was to happen the following year. Comparing our work with that of the rest of the students, we soon realized that we were going much faster than they were. When they introduced 6^th grade books midyear, we realized that they were teaching us the 5^th and 6^th grade curricula.

When I entered the 6^th grade at the newly integrated David Miller Junior Highschool, I knew all the material, so I did not find it odd that I was ahead of my mostly White classmates. I was actually enjoying tutoring them and the teacher did not seem to take notice. One of my mother’s friends, a fellow teacher, walked by and looked in. She called my mother and asked why I was in the remedial classroom.

Not My Child.

My mother was there the next day. We had an after-school appointment with the principal, a White man. My mother did not mention that she, too, was an educator or that I had been a student at the same school where she taught. She told him that she believed that a mistake had been made. The principal assured her that there had not, that they had carefully reviewed all the incoming children’s files and I was where I was supposed to be. He smiled and said that many parents overestimated their children’s abilities. My mother got that look again. I remember that she settled back in her chair and said, “I’m not leaving until you pull her file.” He sighed. He looked tired. I guess he wanted to go home. He pulled my file. He’d had it in his desk drawer the whole time. He did not open it. My mother did. With one motion, she opened the file directly to the page where the standardized test scores were. She pointed to a section on the page. The principal did a double take and looked at me with surprise. When he recovered, he stood and said he would need to double check that the report was accurate. Still sitting, she turned the page and showed him they were consistent with my scores over the years and answered his unasked question, that yes, she was a teacher too. I was transferred to the “Gifted and Talented” class the next day.

Not My Child.

Years later, I was at a house party of Black professionals. A couple of drinks in, we started telling stories about our mamas. Others joined us until there was a circle of people. Every one of us had stories like mine, about our mamas saying “Not My Child.” One told a story about his mother after a White nun had hit his hand repeatedly with a triangular ruler. He was at the blackboard, working to solve a math problem when he made a mistake. She hit his hand with the sharp edge of the ruler, which caused him to make another mistake, another strike, another mistake, another strike, until his hand was swollen shut. When he got home, his mother asked what happened. She dragged him back to the school and found the nun, who tried to dismiss her and walk away. The Black mother grabbed her arm so forcibly that the nun’s head piece fell off. He had been absolutely sure that they were both going to hell. But the nun never hit him again.

Not My Child.

One by one, every one of us told a story of our mamas going up against White people, fighting for us, against poor treatment and low expectations. After the last one, someone said what we were all thinking, “What would have become of us if our mamas had not done what they did? If they had not pushed against the world’s intentions and assumptions about us Black children?

We don’t even know.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the fierce mamas.

Voting Day was special. I was a little Black girl, sitting in the back seat of our car, watching. My mama and her teacher colleague were dressed up. Not in church dresses but the best of their shirtwaists, ironed, starched so that they flared out from their cinched and belted waists. They did wear their church hairdos, carefully curled and sprayed, and shoes, stilettos that made them stand up straight and arch their backs a little. Stockings. Lipstick. I saw them lift their chins and smile at each other as they walked into the school, knowing that there were people nearby who did not want them to vote, that Black people had died so they could. They were careful to take in their purses their driver’s licenses and proof of current residence in the district, such as a current electric bill.

I and many of my Black friends and family still vote in that spirit, proud that we can vote, that we must vote because people died for us. It is a sacred practice, sanctified by our ancestors’ suffering. If I am my ancestors’ wildest dream, today they are weeping.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority group. Census data has been used to redraw districts to fulfill the promise of Section 2, to protect the voting power of minorities. This week the US Supreme Court voted to limit the use of racial data in redistricting. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent that the Right has completed their “demolition” of voting rights. Reuters called it a “gutting.”

This is not some high-minded discussion. It is about “White discrimination.” This is about managing votes. In 2020, CNN’s John Blake called out voter suppression as Jim Crow 2.0 . We are now seeing those efforts succeed in the courts. While it has never been a perfect relationship, the fact remains that African Americans reliably vote Democratic.

It is important to point out the fallacy. We are witnessing the demolition of the idea of protected classes, supported by the willful ignoring of the presence of forces still in place that minorities need to be protected from. The stated assumption is that there are no longer discriminatory policies and practices in place. That is not the case. Extreme gerrymandering is going on now. The current push for the review of voter records is designed for voter suppression.

Voter intimidation at the polls still stands. Stationing police or ICE at polls is intimidation. It is often said that people who are innocent have nothing to fear. From the perspective of people of color, that is not true. Black neighborhoods are heavily policed and despite the law, residents are often stopped for light infractions, such as minor speeding or burned-out taillights that go unnoticed in other communities. Any interaction with the police has the potential of dangerous, life-changing consequences.

African Americans still regularly experience discrimination, still have to practice protective behaviors. Eighty three percent of African Americans say that racism against them is prevalent--I want to know where that other 17% lives.

It is not about people’s hearts. Americans know. According to Gallup, 64% of Americans of all races believe that racial discrimination of African Americans is still widespread. But when times get tough, as they are now, a certain ruthlessness arises and some people might believe that it’s either you or them.

“Divisiveness”

Chimamanda Adichie warned against the danger of the single story. During Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, the Right called her “divisive.” It seemed counterintuitive at first, but it is clear now that what was meant was that we should get in line behind them and their narratives, to accept their version of history and the current social reality.

We cannot. We will not.

Out of the rubble, a different truth can emerge. Unlike Nazi Germany or Apartheid South Africa we never have had a Truth and Reconciliation process for the historical treatment of African American, Indigenous, Japanese, Chinese or Latine people. Academics and journalists have dug out the hidden histories anyway and the bravest ones continue to do so; the foundational research exists. The job before us and those who care about us is to move it deeply and widely into public awareness.

DEI was never enough.

Let’s be honest. Affirmative Action and then DEI were gentle person’s agreements. Bandaids. While there were and are people and institutions who sincerely worked for racial justice, the purpose of too many was just to keep their companies and institutions from being sued through the court system. Many on one side pretended to care and we pretended that was enough.

But many of those companies and institutions jumped off the DEI train at the first stop of the new conservative landscape. Their apparent lack of conviction means we can move in different ways.

It’s not over. Legal experts are saying that the court left enough gray area that it is not clear how it will play out. There will be more legal wrangling, and the congressional midterms might usher in new legislation. Remember that the courts are only supposed to interpret laws, not make them. In the meantime, I want to consider the way race works as a political tool and to suggest how to strategize around it.

Race is a decoy.

Certainly, there is racial discrimination that none of us can achieve our way out of, but in addition to the more obvious racial discrimination, race plays a role in the ways that “White” people discriminate against each other. Without losing focus on race, social class presents an opportunity for coalition building.

I have written about the ways in which affluent White people have propagandized poor White people into fighting their battles and taking their punishments as the price of belonging to the club of Whiteness. I have written about the racialization of poverty in this country, so that poverty appears to be a Black problem. Most of the poor people in this country are White. Approximately 50 million US Americans live in households below 125% of the poverty line and are counted as low income. Only 11 million are African American, so 39 million are not.

Poor White children are just as hungry as poor Black or Brown children

Twelve-point nine percent of US American households, or 43.7 million people, qualify for SNAP, unable to meet their basic food needs. SNAP and similar food assistance programs are now cut for millions of people so the need to build coalition is urgent. People who have never been before are showing up at food pantries. The widening wealth gap means that even more people are less affluent and have more in common.

Historically, the main public discourse discusses poverty as a personal problem. Many families experience financial shame and work to hide how they are struggling with money. We need to talk out loud about poverty, not as a personal problem but a structural problem that is getting worse instead of better. Enough Americans realizing they have a common struggle to feed their families could make for a formidable movement.

The religious and spiritual Left needs a PR campaign.

They need to be seen and heard. You see their signs among the thousands of the massive protests but there is little sense of the active movement.

Religion and politics are supposed to be separate in the US. They never have been completely so and certainly are not now. The swirl of religion and politics is at a fever pitch, largely dominated by the Christian Right.

I am calling for the religious Left to step out. “Out” because the religious Left has long been stepping up but, as has been the case with much of the Left, too few know about what they are up to. For many people younger than 35,” religious” and “Left” is an oxymoron. There are many religious people on the active Left, but they have been crowded out of the public imagination. Right now is the time to become more visible.

The Pope and the president are sparring. Evangelical Christians are reading the whole Bible in Washington DC at a demonstration. Memes, barbs and cries of blasphemy are flying around the internet. The sands are shifting. Many in the religious Right are questioning previous political alliances. So, the field is open—take it back.

You will notice I did not say “Christian Left.” While Christians must remind the public that the dominant public face of Christianity in this country is not the only face, the public face of Left spirituality must be diverse. That diversity is a plus rather than a minus, with what I have called the “glorious multiplicity” of US culture. If the movement is to kick into higher gear, Christians should organize with all the rest.

Despite the common perception, spirituality is bipartisan.

The US is the most religious of the Western countries. The vast majority of Americans believe in higher beings. Pew Research indicates that 83-90% of Americans believe in God or a spiritual force. Seventy percent of Americans even believe in angels and others believe in ancestral or other close-by spirits who also care about the details of our daily lives. Just as importantly, declines in religion and spiritual belief have stopped, except for evangelical Protestants, down to 23%. Churn is opportunity. If you are not offended by my being strategic about religion (although religions are strategic about religions all the time), now would be a good time to make a move.

While US American are leaving brick and mortar churches, they remain spiritually active. In true US fashion, most of us really follow a rich hodge-podge of beliefs. The three Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, have much in common and there is a lot of Buddhist, Hindu, Yoruba, Wiccan and Voudoun in US popular practice (if the latter two surprise you, spend some time on Etsy). If practiced anywhere near its original cultural context, yoga is rooted in religious practice; those herbal teas that you drink as medicine and those candles you light are divine rituals, watered down but demonstrating that one does not have to be steeped in doctrine to reap at least some feelings of the divine. When I traced the origins and paths of the Sacred Dark Feminine, I found her everywhere, from the origins of Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah.

People are already doing the work. Broad ecumenical coalitions, such as the World Council of Churches and the International Religious Liberty Association, avoid doctrinal differences to foster larger understanding, joint actions and social justice. Sojourners is an organization of “faith and action,” from climate justice and immigration to early childhood development and global poverty. Faith in Action is an international interdenominational organizing and action platform that says,” Together, in our religious, ethical, and spiritual traditions, we find the means and imperative to encounter, disrupt, re-imagine, and prophetically act out justice in the world today.”

Gender and Sexuality Justice

Gender and sexual discrimination are strategic points for action. Treatment of LGBTQIA+ people is mattering greatly in shifts in religious practice, even among those who are not gender or sexual minorities. Younger adults are more accustomed to a diverse world; one third say that they are leaving churches because of discriminatory church stances.

Women are right now the most Left-wing demographic. They say they are leaving mainstream churches due to stances on gender and LGBTQIA+. For instance, Southern Baptists and Catholics, two denominations that dominate the Right’s political base, with majority conservative voters, still forbid the ordination of women. Even within both denominations there are Left activists who are going up against their own national conventions. They could use some back up.

At the same time, at least anecdotally, young men have been observed as moving toward orthodoxy, attracted by the more traditional and patriarchal positions. Yet, the religious “revival” seems to be that in the most physical sense, of attendance to one or two-day tent meetings; there have been large and enthusiastic gatherings but much less long-term involvement. They have not yet shown up in statistically significant ways.

Virtue with Strength, Power and Attention

There are some concepts that can get in the way. Religion and spirituality often call us to be humble. They do not call us for to be invisible.

We have many images of evil as strength and power. Many people can visualize and do good in all kinds of ways, but virtuous people are not supposed to think about power. Virtue plus power is harder. It is more common for us to attribute virtue to suffering rather than to power and we don’t have many everyday images of goodness and extreme strength. When I searched for them, I came up with Michael, the fearsome archangel, and Sir Gallahad, the good knight who, according to the Arthur stories, became an angel to sit with God. And Joan of Arc, who had heavenly visions and was burned at the stake. Maybe the bar is too high?

Maybe it is not clear what ordinary good people actually do? There are stories every day of good people doing good things, but they don’t break through to the serious news cycle. They are presented as “boosts,” cute, personal anecdotes that lift our spirits, not as a movement. They won’t be seen as more without more push. Empathetic goodness needs a national PR campaign.

See more in my previous article: The Meek Will Not Inherit the Earth

Toward a Balanced Humility

Stepping out appears to fly in the face of the teachings of humility, power and publicity by most religions. Good people are not supposed to seek the limelight. They are supposed to do the work without seeking the attention. I too am suspicious of those who seek the limelight for its own sake. A balanced, public path in the space between humility and ego-driven grandstanding is not as well trodden as it should be. There is very little conceptual space between humility and conceit. What is a healthy amount of exposure? What is ethical self-promotion? This is a personal challenge for me. As a Black woman, I had to learn to speak up or be invisible but it still dangerous. We need more models of people who are living balanced moral lives in the light, of strategic ethical publicity,

We can learn from the early mistakes of the environmental movement; for ethical reasons of equality, they chose not to pick visible leaders or spokespeople, so the media just picked people out of the crowd, with the result that the messaging was muddled and disorganized.

Calling Out Hypocrisy: The Special Role for White Christians

An affluent White Christian congregation asked me, “What can good White people do?” We conducted three workshops worth.

I have been saying for years that decent White people need to take their race back from the racists.

This is a refinement of that call. Within the religious Left, White Christians have a specific role to play. I have learned that strategically, some conversations are more impactful if White people call out other White people. As a friendly not-White strategist, I offer a talking point, suggesting that calling out hypocrisy is in order.

As my father would say, not everyone going in the church door is going on to heaven.

“Do not take the Lord’s name in vain” is one of the “top three” of the Ten commandments. It’s not just about language. Theologians include hypocrisy—misusing the Lord’s name for false and self-serving purposes, which is exactly what the extreme Christian Right does every day. Some of the Christian Right support the bombing of Iran because they feel it will speed us to Armageddon and the long awaited Second Coming, but they overlook that their behavior and doctrines violate pretty much everything that the historical Jesus is recorded as saying. If the Second Coming happened today, Jesus would take one look around, pack up and go back home. The Ten Commandments are present in the original or some other form in Jewish, Christian—Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox—and Islamic doctrine. The Hindu Yamas and Buddhist Dharma practice specifically warn against spiritual hypocrisy.

Practical Empathetic Leadership

All the major religions agree that we should be kind to one another. Empathy for people outside of one’s family and friends is the main division of the Right and Left. The Right speaks of the “concentric circles” of empathy, the further away from you and yours, the less empathy. It has been used to back up “America First” and cutting social support programs. The Left is defined by large scale empathy for others. What does balanced, strong, public empathetic leadership and action look like?

It requires a different definition of leadership—with the people instead of in front.

Antonio Gramsci wrote of “organic leadership,” in which a non-authoritarian servant-leader comes from and identifies with the collective. Empathetic Leadership extends the concept into specific practices. speaking to the need to observe and respond to people’s needs. It focuses on the workplace but has much to teach social movement organizations. Terri Givens applies the concept of intellectual empathy for her conceptualization of Radical Empathy (see a short introductory video) getting to the roots of our and their biases and behaviors, and presenting a powerful, pragmatic model for stepping step up and out.

*Personal and family note: I came of age at Calvery Presbyterian Church a historic, progressive church in Asheville, NC. (There are more than 100,000 Black Presbyterians in North Carolina.) My mother, Helen Parks, was longtime Clerk of Session, the most pivotal, elected church officer, and pioneered the city’s first soup kitchen, shelter and the first baby born “out of wedlock” to be christened. My brother, James Parks, is past Moderator of the Baltimore Presbytery and remains a ruling elder and an important voice in the national church’s social justice work. I’ve spoken to and worked with local churches, and two national conventions on social justice and helped the General Assembly mount a national project on youth entrepreneurship in disinvested communities.

Photo courtesy of Duron Chavis, Instagram

I am a Black person. I love watermelons.

Now, how you respond to that statement may depend on your race and where you live. Did I make an innocuous declaration about a delicious fruit, or did I just plunge headfirst into a sore racial stereotype?

Recently, a mural was put on the side of a tattoo shop in the Richmond, Virginia* Northside area, a historically Black neighborhood but one that is now being gentrified. The mural, by Los Angeles-based artist-activist Lauren YS, showed a woman with brown skin and straight black hair, holding a large, horizontal slice of watermelon that seems to have a bite taken out of it. The seeds spell out the words “Free Palestine” on the melon slice.

The mural has drawn criticism from some local Black civil rights leaders who say the artwork revives a painful racist stereotype of Black people enthusiastically eating watermelons. Some African American activists called it “offensive.” Former Richmond Crusade for Voters president Jonathan Davis saw a Black woman and said that the image immediately troubled him.

“I was taken aback because of the imagery that it represents, a watermelon up to the mouth of a Black woman,” Davis told WWBT-TV. “So, to me, understanding the history of our people and what happened during the Jim Crow era and how those images were used to demean us and make fun of us and ridicule us and run us out of the business, it really bothered me.”

The story was reported by local WWBT television and other media. An opinion piece that ran in The Wall Street Journal called on readers to “Pity the poor watermelon.”

As with all perception, interpretation depends on the context and the viewer. The woman’s skin is medium brown. She has full lips with a cupid’s bow*. She has “doe eyes,” a shape that is considered a mark of beauty in Middle Eastern cultures.

There are several sets of meanings—about culture, community aesthetics, and “ownership” at play here. One spokesperson suggested that the owner should have engaged the community. On one hand, the mural is on a private building. They are expensive to produce and maintain and so constitute a considerable investment. On the other hand, the nature of murals comes into play. Murals are big—they become part of the aesthetic landscape of a community so best practice is to involve the community long before the painting starts. It is not unusual for communities to respond negatively when they are not consulted. Another Richmond leader called for its removal. That may seem extreme, but I have seen that happen. In another city, murals had to be removed because parents refused to send their children to a community center anymore. In addition to a waste of thousands of dollars, the center signaled that they did not know or understand the people they hoped would come; they created distrust.

Watermelons and Culture

The watermelon is a symbol. All of the meanings attached to it are cultural. This is a clash of two different meanings.

Most watermelons are red, green, white and black. The colors of the Palestinian flag are red, green, white and black, based on the flag of former the Palestine Liberation Army. The PLA flag was banned in occupied Palestine by Israel in 1967, so protestors creatively and subversively took to depicting their cause with images of watermelons. Since the melons are a food and a commodity, the images were not outlawed.

I know African Americans who won’t eat watermelon in public. Martin Luther King Jr. refused to eat it in mixed race company.

When I joined my first faculty department, I was the only female; at 25 years old, I was the youngest by 10 years, and one of only two people of color. The men did not quite know what to do with me. One man told a joke and laughingly started to slap me on the back but caught himself, his hand hanging mid-air. He couldn’t touch me. The university president’s office already had made it clear to them that they saw me as a test for the department.

For the first faculty potluck, I was assigned a dessert. I come from a line of good cooks, but I didn’t have time to bake, and I wasn’t particularly interested in becoming known for my baking rather than my research and teaching. It was a Sunday, so all the good bakeries on the way were closed. I stopped at a farmer’s market. At the end of the season the best choice available was a watermelon. I thumped them to find a nice ripe one. I knew what I was doing but I bought it anyway. (I can hear some of you groaning.) I didn’t want to be controlled by a stereotype, and my Black male companion and I figured it would be a good litmus test. Yes, we had to discuss the ramifications of a Black person bringing a watermelon. I had to choose between the stereotype of the Black woman as cook or the watermelon eater.

When I put out the bright red wedges, the chair of the department, who was a bit of a rascal, walked up to me with a glint in his eye. He moved in close and said under his breath, “I can’t believe that you brought a watermelon!” I turned on him and said back, just as softly “And I can’t believe you brought it up!” Just ever so slightly overingenious, I continued with what I hoped was an innocent looking face, “I trusted that no one here would treat me any differently.” His face fell.

When you drive into Baltimore in the summer, you will see Black men parked on the shoulders of main roads, their trucks with tags from Georgia and South Carolina. The beds of their trucks are filled to the brims with watermelons, and sometimes peaches. They are carrying out an age-old tradition of watermelons and Black commerce. (I think they stay out of the center city due to regulations and unwelcome competition with our historic Arabbers, other Black men who sell produce from horse drawn wagons.)

African American farmers had grown watermelons while enslaved; The genome of our present day watermelons has been traced back to West and Northeast Africa. Due to the intercontinental slave trade, Africans, the British and Spanish brought seeds to the Americas; the first written record dates to 1629; by the mid-1600’s, Native Americans were growing them in the Mississippi Valley. Enslaved Africans valued them as a reliable source of water and food and often grew them in their small family gardens. They were largely responsible for the cultivation and spread of watermelons throughout the eastern US, the Caribbean and Brazil. As time after time, something that originated with a marginalized group would be turned against them.

The lives of enslaved Black people were brutal; working in the fields from sunup to sundown was typical. There was precious little time away from the fields and with what time they did have, they had to tend to their families and homes, mend and wash clothes, and grow and prepare food. Leisure time was not a factor of slave life, but proslavery advocates often argued that the lives of Black slaves were better than starving Irish families. Proslavery propaganda featured images of leisurely happy slaves, often eating huge, horizontally sliced red watermelons. Lisa Wade argues that it was a deliberate tool with which to misportray African Americans and Justify slavery. Some were romantic portraits of contented servants, but many were cruel caricatures.

Pro-slavery forces used the image to suggest that slaves were simple, that they were content in their lives; they just needed a shade tree and a watermelon. This image is striking because of the large knife stuck in the melon. This slave is so content that we are supposed to believe that he would never even think to use it on his enslavers, but their journals show that slave owners were often afraid. Slaves did resist more commonly than is often assumed, and the rumors swept through their communities and terrified other enslavers.

Upon Emancipation many Black farmers continued to grow and sell watermelons. They were and still are a good cash crop. They come in their own packages and are easy to transport. They continue to develop sugars so they can be harvested early and arrive several days later ready to eat. Like many of the economic initiatives of freed people, the watermelon trade met with displeasure and interruption by White Southerners. Foodways scholars such as Psyche Williams Forson at the University of Maryland have documented what was essentially a propaganda campaign to create negative associations between Black people and watermelons. Postcards, posters, product labels, seed packets, advertisements, minstrel shows, salt and pepper shakers—you name it and there were photos of racist grotesque caricatures of Black people eating watermelons. Scholars have argued that the images were construed to make Black children and adults look undignified, greedy and messy. (In reality, nobody would eat that much watermelon since too much results in diarrhea.)

The Watermelon Controversy

The Palestinian watermelon inadvertently mimics that important element of the racist image: the huge horizontal cut.

During a press conference attended by the Richmond Times Dispatch, J.J. Minor, president of the of the Richmond NAACP chapter, called on the store’s owner to “fix it now.”

On his Instagram site, Black farm activist Duron Chavis supported the mural. He immediately noted that his stance might be unpopular: “Y’all gone hate me but I think folks taking issue with the Free Palestine mural on North Avenue is intellectually dishonest…I live on North Avenue. My aunt-in-law had a cross burned on the lawn in the home I live in. We got bigger issues to organize around.” He mentioned the lack of healthy food outlets and gentrification, suggesting that those who care about watermelons should buy some from local Black farmers.

It is not easy when all sides have a point.

Intergenerational Trauma and Healing

I’ll state the obvious. Slavery was trauma. Jim Crow was trauma. Ongoing racial abuse is trauma. Researchers have found that traumas and their responses are passed down through generations in behavior, emotional responses and even in DNA. Trauma shows up in our brains, our bodies, hormonal responses and in our daily patterns. The US has never reconciled or healed from slavery and those of us who are descendants of it carry it with us every day, even as the rest of the country tries to forget it and the progress made to unearth it is being torn down as we speak.

Palestinians have trauma— decades with wars, starvation, refugee status, and discrimination. No matter what side of the Middle East issue you are on, the suffering of Palestinians is obvious.

The Black leaders say they do not oppose the message but abhor the medium of the watermelon, the symbol.

Richmond Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) chapter president William McGee told WWBT the piece could be reworked to serve both movements. Civil rights activist Gary Flowers proposed swapping the watermelon for a Palestinian flag alongside a Black liberation flag.

We Black people don’t own the image of the watermelon. Maybe it is time to acknowledge and work through the trauma associated with caricatures, but let the melon itself off the hook, draining it of its racist agency. Optimistically, some good can come of this. A community meeting of both groups was held on April 8, citing a long history of cooperation between African Americans and Palestinians. Both groups are talking about their traumas. Watermelons are the starting point, who knows? Americans coming together to calmly learn and talk about conditions in the Middle East might just serve as a model for others.

*Notes:

*A Cupid’s bow forms an “M” at the center of the top lip line. They occur across most demographics but appear most prominent when on fuller lips. The increase in plastic surgeries that some women get to make their bodies appear more like those more common among women of color, butt lifts and implantations and lip fillers, include Cupid’s bows.

*I have been working with a developer and Richmond public housing residents on housing, art, stories and innovation for the past year.

We often use the metaphors of sports and games to discuss politics—horse racing, tennis, chess. But in recent years, the play of politics is bloodsport. Bloodsports are cruelty manifest-- bloodlust and horror for the purposes of entertainment and conquest. The cruelty is constructed as play, as fun. The crowd cheers and applauds; it is not a show of melancholia of tragedy. With violent deportations and war, the metaphors become real. The gaming has consequences. But some still see a game, cheering on the recent violent and deadly deportations and the deaths of war, rooting for their team.

There are two kinds of bloodsports: There are those with two opposing animals, proxies for humans, such as dog fighting or cockfighting, similar to war, when affluent and powerful people send poorer and less powerful people to fight to the death, sometimes as simple matters of pride and bravado, as we see now.

Then there are those bloodsports in which the human is more directly going against the animal/prey, such as bull fighting or fox hunting with a real fox. It is never a fair fight. Bloodsports are always rigged. There is always a scripted winner and loser. The point is to maintain control; the game is prepared so as to keep it that way. The “bait” dog is weaker and untrained. Foxes run from large packs of carefully bred and trained hunting dogs. All are designed and prepared to showcase suffering and, usually, death.

Perfect games for sadists.

The Bullfight

Bullfights are the most spectacular of bloodsports, each event is years in the making. Regular bulls are calmer than you would expect. As boy cows, they mostly stand around and eat grass. They are technically prey animals, but they have a stillness that comes with strength. They know they have it and don’t have to prove it, unless threatened. The bulls of the ring are specially bred for hot temperaments to increase excitement, but they are also sometimes drugged, always strapped with a belt that is painful, provoked and poked with knives. The bull is fighting for its life.

Although I have feelings, I am not debating animal wellbeing versus cultural tradition here. I am making the point that US politics has taken on aspects of bloodsport. I should say, again. Depicting the enemy as other than human is a long-time tool. “Indian fighting,” genocide, was constructed as sport. The dehumanization of the other, pretending they are animals, makes the bloodsport possible. It makes it easier for soldiers to do the inhumane in war.

Dehumanization, as we have seen with immigrants, turns one human into predator, the other into the prey-victim.

Entering the Ring

Although rigged, the outcome is not always sure. Bloodsports create vulnerability if not perfectly executed. The risk is the source of excitement. Yet we react with surprise, horrified when the thing we knew was risked happens, when the bull tramples the matador, when the smaller nation shoots back.

Note the outrage and stumbling of the Right when they are treated roughly. Cruelty, evidently, does not make for thick skins.

Sometimes you have to meet the bully on the field. AOC, Newsom, and Crockett are doing that work. They are fighters. Jamie Raskin and Elizabeth Warren tap in

Surprise plays a role. As a fencer, I learned that I could start to win by shifting the game time to before the meet began, with a subtly intimidating glare and a fierce opening salute. The Left has been so passive for so long that the Right has gotten accustomed to it, assumed it. But surprise is a fleeting maneuver.

Meanwhile, the huge rallies are very important to keep up the pressure; they act like a block or parry, but they don’t advance. They catch the attention of the opponent and create opportunities.

Joint strategy calls for coordination: In the battlefield, it is called “Fire and Maneuver.” While one force is holding off the opponent (here with rhetoric and rallies) their comrades maneuver.

Football was originally created to prepare young men for war, and politics, war and football share language and strategies. The field, artificial turf vs grass, demonstrates a strategy used by the Right. The Right is playing a turf game while the Left is playing a grass game. Turf is untraditional, manufactured. It benefits the powerful owners because it saves money. It also demands a faster game, with more quick turns. It is hard and unforgiving and causes more player injuries. Made from recycled tires, players believe it to be toxic. Grass is traditional, natural, more forgiving; it demands a slower, more nuanced game and is kinder to the bodies of players. But speed and slipperiness of turf set the stage for many more unforced errors. We are seeing that now in the Right’s politics.

The Western brain leans toward balance. We want to return blood for blood, fight fire with fire instead of water. Facing the bully may be a necessary first step but it will not advance the play. The Left does not have to imitate the Right. There are other ways.

Shirley Chisolm said, “Congress seems drugged and inert most of the time…its idea of meeting a problem is to a hold a hearing or, in extreme cases, to appoint a commission.” She is describing how Congress has traditionally operated, but the Right has broken with tradition and the left struggles to update their playbook to find a useful counter strategy.

How can the Left Change the Game?

The Right uses a football term, describing their success at “flooding the zone,” bringing changes so fast that the other side and the media don’t dig deeply into them. One defends against “flooding the zone,” not by more floods, but by reinstituting focus, getting back to required and foundational basics that are difficult to contravene.

In fencing, being strong and flexible were important but being short (I’m 5’2”) and closer to the ground was a game changer. I could come in low and close, at an unexpected angle, surprising them, throwing them out of their practiced, comfortable plane and making it hard for the taller person to return. I made the game asymmetrical.

The fundraising sector screams for more money as if money were the smartest, maybe the only way to win. History suggests otherwise. Asymmetrical strategies are when a less equipped (or shorter) opponent changes the rules. Guerrilla warfare is a type of asymmetrical war. There is nothing more American—the Revolutionary War was asymmetrical. It is how Ukraine has dragged out a war years longer than predicted. It is what the Iranians are doing now.

Bi-partisan Return to Ethics

Michelle Obama said, “When they go low, we go high.” Some have called for the Left to abandon that stance, that the time has passed. I am suggesting the opposite, that instead, the Left should get into it.

The polls indicate that US citizens do not like bloodlust politics. The political game now is awful, so nasty that many are leaving, and many more smart people will never enter. Empathy studies indicate that people on the Left are more empathetic. They are not going to support a nattiness-only campaign.

The game has to be changed.

A Strategy for Right Now: Let others overplay their hand.

Often in sports you don’t have to induce an error. Overconfidence, hubris, will often do the work for you. Read the opponent, looking for their patterns and weaknesses. For every move, there is a block and a counter move. You wait for their signature move, their tell, and execute your counter move. In wrestling, it might be when the opponent stands up too soon, exposing their flank, thinking they are close to winning. That’s what is happening right now.

The Right is currently overplaying their hand on empathy, attacking it as a weakness, even a sin, because they consider it a gateway to abortions, gender affirming care, and racial, sexual and gender equality.

Maybe that argument would be more attractive in other times but right now it is a strategic mistake that opens up an opportunity. Timing is everything: Right now, the media focus on the stock market is obscuring that hundreds of millions of Americans are newly financially struggling. Credit card debt is over $1 trillion, One third of US card holders are maxing out their credit cards for survival. Add to that the 4% of Americans who are completely unbanked—with no relationship with a bank, usually due to poverty. Even the top 10% are struggling. In many locations $200,000 or more is not enough to maintain a stable middle class living. People are hurting, calling for care, respect, dignity and-- dare we say it-- Love?

The countermove is not a mushy, vague speech. It is action. The larger Left (not just Congress) needs to construct and offer actionable programs and platforms to help people who are struggling to live.

The first order is to build trust and respect through action. The polls suggest that the majority of registered Democratic voters do not trust the strategies of their leaders. Trust is an outcome of visible ethics. The polls are also asking for honesty and dignity, a call that crosses political lines. The Ronald Regan Foundation reported that 72% of US Americans wanted to play an active part in restoring civility to our country.

While it seems an anathema at this divisive time, Cooperative Game Theory shows that more advancement is made via cooperation. The Left has a popular, bi-partisan move staring it in the face. What would an Ethics in Action platform look like?

Ethics is not a stylistic choice. It is not the same as manners or even kindness. It is the business end of compassion: a set of systematic moral principles that include dignity, compassion, and respect, that support the wellbeing of the larger group. Applied Ethics links systematically informed and strategic actions to those principles. I am suggesting that we uphold them, but switch from standing on the sidelines to strategy, from reactionary defense to offense.

Second Bi-partisan Strategy for the Longterm: The Most Important Field is the Electoral College

The Right is patient. Projects coming to fruition now have been in the works for two decades.

Pew Research has found that 68% of Americans support abolishing the Electoral College. The Right lost the popular vote in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. Gerrymandering has played a big part of Electoral College wins and 76% of Americans see it as an unfair practice that should be illegal. The Electoral College is not original to the Constitution but was introduced in 1787. The founders did not foresee the technological advances of our time, when American Idol tabulates presidential election level voting overnight. Even the Brookings Institute is calling for its end.

Direct voting would make us what we think we are--more a mass country and a true democracy. One person, one vote would be true. The National Popular Vote System would completely reorient election campaigning. Now, a lot of individuals on the Right and the Left hold power—some a little, some a lot-- in the Electoral College, that they want to keep. The most important playing field now is probably not with Congress or the Courts, as both are primarily reactionary now.

It is with us.

In March 1973, Cesar Chavez was a keynote speaker at the National Teen Organization conference in San Diego. He spoke of the brutal labor and awful living conditions of farm workers, the low pay, poor health and injuries, the impact on children and their education, how teens our ages were already working like adults, often dropping out of school early. NTO was the teen wing of the national YWCA. We operated as a model United Nations, vigorously debating and passing resolutions that would be delivered to the real UN. We supported world peace, women’s rights and the unionization of California farm workers.

I was just young enough to have missed the iconic moments of the Black Civil Rights Movement. As a child, I watched as my older sister and brother fasted and marched. I was just a bystander to the United Farm Workers Movement, but it changed my life and helped to make me an activist.

I had not been allowed to be a Girl Scout like my sister. After the troop instituted a minimum cookie quota, parents had to purchase any boxes that the girls did not sell. It was a neighborhood troop, so our community was saturated. School teachers like my mother could not solicit sales at work so the time-honored tradition of pushing cookies on colleagues was out too. I remember boxes stacked against the wall, on the kitchen table. That’s when we discovered that Girl Scout cookies froze well. We ate them for months. My mother was a YWCA board member (We would later learn that she was the first Black board member in the South) so while she was at the evening meetings I joined the local NTO. I was picked to attend the NTO conference, held simultaneously with the national adult Y conference. I flew out with two adult women, who took me out to dinner and bought me my first mixed drink. I was feeling myself.

After Chavez’s speech, I excitedly stood in line to speak further with him. I stuck my hand out and he took it in both his hands, lightly holding them while we spoke, longer than I had expected. I could not believe that a national leader, a man of such importance to social justice took the time to talk to me. He looked me in the eyes and really listened. He was charming. He seemed a little surprised but very pleased that this Black girl cared about Latine farm workers.

There were hundreds of us, I think 500 hundred girls, at that conference. We formed coalitions. I took to the floor and debated, speaking for my group that pushed for the strongest language, the boldest reforms. I came to understand that our voices were good leverage as members of the Movement quoted us. This large, cross-country multiracial mass mattered. It was the first time that I felt like a real leader. It was the first time that language that I helped to craft would mean something important. I am not altogether sure that you would be reading this now had I not been at that convention.

I went home boycotting table grapes and iceberg lettuce, the only kind available in the grocery stores of Asheville, NC at the time. My mother supported my stance but was so concerned about my willingness to forego salads that she drove 20 minutes each way, to the only farmers’ market open year round, to buy leaf lettuce, a rarity.

It is common, when one is Black, to believe that we are alone. Cesar Chavez showed me a life-changing lesson, the universality of suffering, that the same motivations, the same policies and practices that drove Black suffering also drove the suffering of other people across the country and around the world. It did and still does inform my world view. The powerful do not want us to know how much we have in common. In many places, marginalized groups are pitted against one another so that it is difficult to organize in effective ways. (Decades later, an administrator cried as she called to tell me that I would lose an invited $1.5 million grant, that had received all “Excellent’s” from staff and external reviewers, because I had proposed to bring poor inner city Black youth, poor Western Maryland White youth and immigrant youth all together via art and storytelling. It was vetoed at the last minute by a newly elected conservative administration.)

Like many others, I have revered Cesar Chavez and, later, his memory for decades. There are streets, parks and a California day of service named for him. The New York Times has reported that a number of women have credibly accused him of grooming, sexual harassment and rape. Some were women in the Movement. Some were the children of his close male associates.

The organizations associated with him have not backed away from the allegations but have Issued statements that the Movement must go on. The upcoming Cesar Chavez Day of Service is being renamed Farmworkers Day.

Whether and how to separate the person from their work is an old and, unfortunately, recurring problem. A friend asked me recently about singer and record producer R. Kelly, in prison for similar crimes. I said that I was never a big fan but was even less so after his convictions. I cannot hear his music without hearing his victims. But this is harder for me. I did not personally interact with R. Kelly or any of the other famous child molesters and rapists, so it is not so easy. Chavez is so interwoven with my personal development that it feels like the foundation has crumbled. I have had similar experiences since; my early years as a graduate student were filled with meeting people whose work I admired, only to find that they were often less than stellar human beings. But this one is harder,

When we start to write down the names of powerful people who have gone on to hurt others, the list grows long. It may be a chicken and egg scenario. Certainly, ambitious people seek power, but it turns out that power affects the brain. The centers for reward and self-focus become more activated, diminishing empathy for others.

For me, the timing of meeting Chavez now seems ironic. That spring was a reblooming for me, as I began recovering from being raped and almost killed by an ex-boyfriend who was being groomed to be the next Martin Luther King when I broke up with him. (I wrote about this time in my life in the “Becoming Coretta” chapter in both editions of my book, Fierce Angels.) I had more in common with Chavez’s victims than I did with him. Yet, I came home from San Diego energized to fight for social justice despite the horrible things that had been done to me. A year later, I would deliver one of two student speeches at my graduation. I quoted John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech when he said, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”

I think the answer for me is that I am not a building. The “foundation” metaphor is not dynamic enough to describe living. The early influences of my life are not the “foundation” but rather beginnings that inform my life now but do not determine it. I am the result of many experiences, many interactions.

Like the Movement he led, I continue to grow.

My daughter and I were wearily driving up the street to our home, just arriving back from a long international flight and the long drive from Dulles airport. We’d spent ten days at back-to-back academic conferences in London with a side trip to Northern Ireland to trace the path of the slaveowner who both owned and fathered my ancestors, leaving us emotionally raw. It was just after July 4^th and the town’s celebration committee had lined the street with little US flags. Unlike most US Americans, we live in a mixed race, mixed income neighborhood. Just as unusual, we co-exist peacefully despite obvious political differences. We live on an otherwise White street but other Black people live nearby. We have good neighbors. Many families have lived here for generations but they have embraced us. After the divorce, by silent agreement, one neighbor started cutting my grass. Another plows our snow.

As we drove near home, we saw it.

A Confederate flag, a big one, on a tall flagpole, flying next to the US stars and stripes that had been up there for a while.

One of our neighbors was flying a Confederate flag. They were several houses down and we did not know them.

I thought about what to do. The house across the street had a for sale sign. Funny, the old stereotype was that Black neighbors drove down housing prices and here it would be the Confederate flag. I thought, the White folks will take care of this. I don’t have to. I waited. Meanwhile, I carried out a thought experiment—the flag was a constant racist irritant in my own neighborhood, milder but similar to the way African Americans in the South historically had to live. After a few days, I asked my closer neighbors. They had not noticed. They had to go and look. Although some knew the wife’s family, they did not know the husband. My most conservative neighbor asked if I wanted him to say something. Some neighbors suggested that I go to the neighborhood association. But if it was directed at me, I wanted to settle it.

I started watching, trying to catch them outside.

My daughter returned to college, out of state. One day, driving and talking to her on the phone, I saw them—an older man directing a teenager who was trimming their grass. I told my daughter that I was going to stop. She did not want me to. As I hung up, the last thing I heard was her yelling into the phone: “Mama, don’t get shot!”

He watched me as I pulled into his driveway. He was a big man, shirtless in that Baltimore way. I got out, walked up. He did not speak. I told him my name, that I lived on the next corner. He did not move. “I know who you are.” I took a breath and went on. “I’m not here to try to tell you what to do in your own yard. But I do need to know what that flag means for me and my family.”

He regarded me for a minute. His grandson stilled and watched from the side. Then he introduced them both.

“I’m a veteran,” he said. That confused me because he wasn’t a veteran from that war. “My father was a veteran and his father and his father until you get back to the Civil War.” He explained that men in his family had fought on both sides, that he had added the Confederate flag to honor them.

Neighbors had noticed the Black woman and the Confederate flag guy, slowing down, staring. One driver asked if I was alright. A woman with a fancy stroller walked by. He asked her to take a photo of us. She looked at me. I nodded that it was okay. He handed her his phone. He thought that since we were a spectacle, we should have a photo.

I mentioned that his flag was not the flag under which his ancestors had fought, since every regiment had its own. His was the Segregation flag, created in the wake of the Black Civil Rights Movement. He cleverly said, “I know, but that’s the one people know.” Then he turned back to me, “My wife is upset. She thinks I’m going to turn the neighbors against us.

I asked if his wife were home. He said that she was. I asked if I could see her. He said yes and went inside. When she came out and saw me, the blood drained from her face. I’m still not sure why I did, but I opened my arms. She fell into my embrace and said, “It’s making me sick. I have health problems and I’m so afraid that the neighbors will turn on us.” I looked at him over her shoulder. “You’ve been having fun with this, haven’t you?” He smiled and said that he was. “Is it worth her health?” He looked at his wife in my arms and shook his head. “No, it’s not.”

He asked, “Would you be okay if I flew it at special times—Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day, 4^th of July?” I told him it was not for me to tell him when to fly a flag in his own yard. “But it would make me feel better if you did.” We agreed that he would keep the flag up the rest of the week and fly it on the special days alongside the US flag.

I told him that I needed to go, to call my daughter back because she was afraid that he was going to shoot me. He looked startled, “Why would I shoot you?” I gestured toward his flag, “You know that some people who fly that flag, if I rolled up in their driveway, would shoot me.” He said, “Yeah, I guess they would.”

Before the end of the week, someone stuck a dozen homemade “Black Lives Matter” yard signs across the street. “It wasn’t me!” I called out from my car. “I know,” he said. “You would have talked to me.” He gathered them and put them in his yard, not wanting his cross-the-street neighbors to be bothered, so for the rest of the week the flag and the signs co-existed. He said that he was both—he honored his ancestors and he thought that Black lives did matter. I reminded him that hatred was a part of that heritage. He agreed. He actually knew what the White woman who had put out the signs looked like; she had been caught on a deer camera in his front yard. She lived on another street and came by later, mad that he had moved her signs. He told her she’d placed them to harass him, so they were his signs now.

My neighbor and I would continue to stop and visit when we saw each other. He told me that a nearby White family who had adopted a child of color was so disturbed that they sold their house and moved away. They could see the flag from their front windows. That bothered him. It bothered me too but for a different reason. They were teaching their child to run. I told him the story of how a Black friend in Ohio handled it when the Klan paraded down his street. He and his daughter sat on their front porch and waved; the marchers looked confused. He taught her to stand her ground, not to be run off her own porch.

My neighbor told me what no other White person had ever said to me. He admitted that he had grown up using the N- word. He explained that his family had used it casually, as if it were a regular word, the word for Black people. He also admitted that, while he tried hard, sometimes he slipped when his grandson’s Black friends came around and they played hip-hop music with the word in it. I knew he was smart enough to understand in-group and out-group language and we discussed that. I told him I didn’t like it, even in hip-hop, which I believe has never succeeded in emptying the word of its hatefulness. It was not okay to slip with me. He said he knew.

I joked that if the race war that White Supremacist domestic terrorists keep trying to provoke ever came, I was running to his house. He said he’d pull me in and protect me with his guns.

My daughter and I had met before with the Neo-Confederate flag as an attempted tool of racial fear. We were boarding her competition horse and drove to the barn twice a day that summer to cold hose his injured ankle. We pulled off the main road onto a residential street. I saw him, saw the moment the man looked at us and glared. Maybe he didn’t want to see Black people in his neighborhood; maybe he expected us to cower under his strong visage. I looked him directly back, making eye contact. I nodded once. He frowned.

A couple of days later, the Neo-Confederate flag, the same one that my neighbor knew had been created well after the Civil War, flew from a flagpole attached to his house. It was big and bright. It looked brand new, like he didn’t have one in the back and had to purchase one and put it up. A lot of trouble.

The lesson was to discern whether the White man had any power in our lives. I asked my daughter, “Did he have power over us?” None but that we gave him. None beyond whatever fear he hoped to instill in us.

It is not unusual for horse farms to be located in residential areas, formerly rural regions where development has sprung up around the farm, leaving them as the largest remaining landowner of increasingly appreciating land. The farm owner was important, and we were important to her. Not only were we paying an expensive board fee, but my daughter was a top champion equestrian, bringing her barn prestige, and a gifted horse trainer who was adding value to her herd of horses. I mentioned to the barn owner that one of her neighbors had put up the flag. Again, like my neighbors, she had not noticed. I asked if maybe she did not drive that way? She answered that she did and then looked disturbed. She asked if we wanted her to say something. I said no, just to keep an eye out in case it escalated and to know that my daughter was still processing it. She said something anyway, that he was disturbing her customer, interfering with her business, and the flag came down.

As I wrote in a previous post, there was once a time when every White person had power over every Black person. While systemic racism still touches each of us, no matter how privileged, the days of guaranteed interpersonal White racial power have passed. In that scenario, we were more important to her than her neighbor.

A Black woman close to my family worked in a regional office of a federal agency when she was promoted. The next day, two younger White men came to work, smirking and wearing Confederate caps. She took note but let it go for a couple of days, not displaying any reaction. On the third day with the caps, she walked over and asked what the point was, if the caps were directed at her. They stumbled over themselves, seemingly surprised at the confrontation, and mumbled something about celebrating their heritage. They asked, timidly, if she was disturbed. It wasn’t clear which answer they hoped for, that she was rattled, as seemed their original intent, or that she was not and they would avoid trouble. She was their supervisor. She regarded them silently long enough to make them more nervous. Then she reminded them that there were policies against political clothing and hats and that they had both violated both days in a row. She would not write them up this time. Point made. She did document it in case it happened again. It did not.

None of this is to say that we should “get over it” or regard the Segregation Neo-Confederate flag as anything but what it is. It was designed as an instrument of racial propaganda, to both honor war dead and to terrorize the descendants of those whom they had fought to keep enslaved. Yet it is a weaker symbol now than it once was. We don’t have to abandon our homes and leave town anymore, precisely because we have not overlooked it or what it stands for, because we refuse to “just let it go.” At the same time, we recognize all that we have irrevocably changed, even in this racial landscape.

Victoria Protsak/AdobeStock.com

I thought I had written all that I wanted to about the Bad Bunny Super Bowl half-time show, but the backlash is still going on. I’d like to bring some clarity to the chaos.

Despite a current “English only” executive order, speaking Spanish is not illegal. So, viewers on the Right have tried the “too sexy for the Super Bowl” card, calling the show “disgusting.” A Republican Florida Congressman has called it “woke garbage”--also not illegal--so he called for an investigation of what he said was a “vulgar and disgusting show.”

Some critics invoked child viewers, which is a strategic plant. The definition of pornography is based on what would “deprave” a child if they were to see it. Pornography is legally different from art, assumed to have no artistic merit, and it loses some of its First Amendment rights, making it easier to prosecute.

A more conservative Federal Communications Commission has been busier than usual of late, but it mostly polices television stations; it only has so much bite with individuals. It can issue fines, hefty ones, up to $3 million per violation for a “single continuing act” per the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2005. That’s pretty much it. The Department of Justice would have to investigate criminal penalties—and that would be ridiculous, even in our unsettled times. Shaking your booty with your clothes on in this media landscape? Other countries would laugh at us (again).

The Superbowl is one of the most carefully choreographed televised events in the world because of the unmatched size of its audience. All rehearsed aspects would have been carefully picked over and cleared by the NBC network censors who knew where the lines were. It’s not even the first time. Latina crossover star Shakira (“These Hips Don’t Lie”) and Jennifer Lopez twerked toward the end of their 2020 Pepsi Super Bowl half-time show (featuring, huh, all-Spanish singing by Bad Bunny and Colombian J. Balvin, in addition to Shakira’s Spanish and English songs) amidst so much hip shaking energetic dance that the twerking hardly stands out. The president in office was the same as now. No fines or penalties were imposed.

Expressing joy when the powerful are trying to make you miserable is a particular kind of resistance and expression of freedom. The movement is the message.

I don’t believe that all the people who are outraged, especially the convicted sexual predator, found the images “disgusting.” They are performing outrage. The dance move is undeniably sensual, but “disgusting” is a stretch in our cultural landscape. We are in the middle of an entertainment awards season when female celebrities are competing to be the most naked, with not a peep from the FCC. As of this writing, the reigning queen is Chappell Roan, who wore a sheer dress hanging from the fake nipples of her bare breasts to the Grammys. But the awards season is not over yet.

The twerking women are fully dressed, so it must be the moving that mattered. The scene was rows of women twerking. Ironically, it is the gaze of the viewers that makes them seem, not just sensual, but obscene to them.

The first time many Americans saw twerking was from Miley Cyrus in August 2013 at the MTV VMA awards. Evidently many thought, as too often happens, that she created it. Miley Cyrus is to twerking as John Travolta was to disco dancing, which was the cooptation of the club dance of Black and Latino gay men. They both marked the moments when the mainstream media audience first saw the movements. Twerking had already been co-opted. Cyrus had posted a video in March of the same year that had gone viral.

At the awards show, she added stripper moves and twerked while backed up against Robin Thicke’s pelvis. The same month, “twerking” was added to the Oxford Dictionary Online. One Reddit thread claimed, “without Miley Cyrus, twerking wouldn’t exist.”

Twerking as African Women’s Sacred Cultural Practice

Although she seemed to take credit for it at first, Cyrus had learned the movement from Black women, reportedly from her Black backup dancers. Twerking has a long and culturally rich history as a ritualistic, sacred and political practice of women in Africa and the African diaspora.

Black women called her out on it and she later apologized.

African Ahizi, Dida, and Avikam and other tribal women performed the dance to celebrate joy, fertility, and religious worship. The mapouka was a joyful gateway to the gods. In the African diaspora-- Haiti, Jamaica, New Orleans—it was an expression of community, spiritual release, and resilience for Black women. Religion scholar Elizabeth Perez has written of the ancient and sacred origins of twerking and suggests that the current popular interpretation is an oversimplification.

With documented historical interaction between Puerto Ricans and Africans enslaved in Haiti, twerking became the Puerto Rican dance movement “perreo” expressing sexuality and, at the same time, freedom, even empowerment and political protest in reggaeton, which Bad Bunny sings. The sacred, community and political aspects of twerking are examples of “kinesthetic thinking.” Lizzo twerks in her performances and has traced it from its sacred origins through Southern dance halls to her videos in her TED Talk. Twerking is also good for your body, found to release endorphins and strengthen the pelvic floor.

From Sacred Joy to Disgust

We are the cultural children of the Puritans. Many other countries shield children more from graphic violence and less from sexuality, especially that which is just movement. Our approach is linked to a particular branch of Christianity that privileges the New Testament. The Old Testament has plenty of erotic material, but the US traditionally separates sensuality from other parts of respectable public culture. It seeps through anyway.

The pornographic gaze assumes that pretty much anything and anyone can be sexualized and that the most important sexual gaze is male. (Like many scholars, I differentiate between egalitarian erotica and power-imbalanced pornography.) It also often eroticizes marginalized people for the sexual consumption of the larger culture. So, it’s difficult for many to understand the Super Bowl show’s female sensual movement without an imagined man in the middle, that women shaking what their mamas gave them could mean a celebration of themselves, finding joy and freedom in movement.

Another popular example of women of color joyfully twerking is Jon Batiste’s Freedom video. Twerking is a historic element of his hometown New Orleans dance culture. It’s sensual but so much more.

Can we see the Puerto Rican dancers of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show as following their own Afro-Latina cultural tradition without the larger culture’s appropriated and hyper-sexualized lens?

Much of that which we think of as US culture comes from the margins. The main culture will take something, dilute it and use it up, until there is little of the original meaning left. I taught a class with 35 undergraduate and graduate students; each took one marginalized cultural form or practice and traced it from its cultural roots through to appropriation by the larger culture and its aftereffects. I taught about 15 more, for a class total of 50 cases. There are many, many more. The fact that the larger audience has a hard time unseeing Cyrus’s less culturally specific but more sexualized interpretation shows how difficult it is for marginalized cultures to regain their own cultural practices even after the larger culture has tired of them and moved on to the next thing.

But the performative outrage after the Super Bowl show is an attempt to take it all a step further: Taking something of yours, changing it for their own purposes and then using their misinterpretation of your culture as a battering ram against you. The majority of the audience, however, seems to have understood and participated in both the joy and the culture, dancing in the face of the far-Right backlash.

We may look back at this moment as a defining event in progressive movements (pun intended). Craig Jenkins wrote in New York Magazine’s online platform Vulture that “Bad Bunny made MAGA look stupid.” He called Bad Bunny’s show “incisive” because it moved beyond the tourist gaze to the lives, the joys and challenges, of Puerto Ricans’ lived experiences.

Right now, people are desperate for something real. According to the polls, the majority of US Americans have peeked behind the curtain and see that the great Oz is just a man. Now is the moment to be incisive, to recognize and address the glorious multiplicity that is this country.

This past weekend, I witnessed US audiences paying close attention to the people we call Latine.

Last night, along with 140,000,000 of you, I watched as Bad Bunny sang and danced with more than 400 performers to give us a thorough tableau of Puerto Rican life and culture—in Spanish. If my family and friends are any indication, a lot of folks who don’t understand Spanish were shaking their booties and thoroughly enjoying the show. Many of us will watch it again to pick up the layers of meaning, translator app in hand.

The night before, I was at the Union Market Politics and Prose in DC in conversation with Ana Patricia Rodriguez about her new and wonderful book, Avocado Dreams: Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington DC Metro Area. Eighty people braved the cold and a standing room only room to listen to us talk about the life, art and culture of the Salvadorans who arrived here as refugees to form the largest metropolitan group of Salvadorans in the country. A little over half of them were Salvadorans. The rest were simply very interested.

In this moment, Americans are signaling an interest in Central and South Americans, not just as an overly homogenized Latine minority but as people from individual countries with differences, the way we know the difference between European France and England. We want to know more of their stories.

In the US, the Latine have become the largest minority and are growing faster than any other demographic. Every few years, a new panic erupts about the US becoming a “minority majority” country, with Latine families driving much of the increase, which may give insight into the recent brutal governmental deportations and violence.

We know the names and stories of Renee Goode and Alex Pretti, killed by ICE, but at least 32 people died in 2025 and 9 people have died so far this year in dealings or in custody with ICE, most of them from Central or South America, but also Africa, the Caribbean, China and Ukraine. You can learn their names and stories here.

The title of Ana Patricia Rodriguez’s book, Avocado Dreams: Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington DC Metro Area, is a reference to the luscious fruit native to the region and a slur, akin to when James Brown proclaimed that he was Black and proud. Dr. Rodriguez is a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland, where I worked in support of her work gathering stories of recent immigrants in Prince George’s County, Maryland. She is Salvadoran, the first generation US born after her parents made the cultural and familial sacrifice to leave their homeland, locked in Civil War, to come to the US—not for themselves but for their children.

We often focus on the point of entry, whether immigrants either get in or don’t, not on the before story that drove them here. We think of them as one mass of people, as if there were only one story, with little cultural nuance respective of the individual countries from which they came. For many of us the story also ends at the border. The larger culture thinks too little about their lives here. Maybe we liked to pretend that they live happily ever after but we cannot do that anymore.

Rodriguez interrupts the overly simplistic image of the immigrant, intimately so, as she has lived with them and as one for decades.

Nobody comes here as “Hispanic” or “Latine.” We do that to them. They come as Salvadorans, Mexicans, and Venezuelans. They have different cultures and speak different dialects. (Few speak the Castilian Spanish that I was taught for six years of high school and college.) In the US, we have tried to lump people from Central and South America into one group. Hollywood and corporate interests tried to treat them as one marketing bloc, like Black people. Sears and J.C. Penney tried to save themselves by marketing to an artificial, homogenized cultural group, as documented in the book, Latino Inc.: The Making and Marketing of a People. (Ironically, the term Latino/a or Latine stems from a small group of Puerto Ricans who are, of course like Bad Bunny, American citizens.)

We assume that immigrants consider the US as the land of milk and honey, that they come because of the pull of the US. We do not consider the push, that they are escaping deadly violence, poverty and political unrest, often fomented by the US.

The term “Cold War” between the US and the Soviet Union was a euphemism, hiding the deadly “hot wars” that were proxies for the superpowers. From 1979 to 1992, a civil war raged in El Salvador. The government, backed by the US, killed 75,000 non-combatants and “disappeared,” kidnapped, tortured 9000 more. The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front rebels, backed by the Soviet Union, are thought to have killed 5000. El Salvador was a country of about 4.5 million people, about half the size of present-day New York City. More than 1 million people, more than 20%, were displaced. Five hundred thousand of those left the country as refugees. They escaped to give their children a chance of survival. Leaving home was traumatic. Many would rather have stayed in their home country if they could. Rodriguez writes of the sacrifice and longing of her parents.

What they are going through now in the US is a disappearance with the same methods-- squads that kidnap people from their homes and torture and kill.

Four generations of Salvadorans have made, or as Rodriguez writes, re-made their lives here, sometimes unself-consciously so, and Rodriguez and the artists about whom she writes both use art to pull Salvadoran culture into the light. The aesthetic creative processes and products of artists are seen, felt, considered via the aesthetic experience of the audience member. Rodriguez shows us a persistent type of visibility, cultural and personal, that reflects and feeds. She shows immigrants as people, in this period of dehumanization. Bad Bunny did a similar thing, using art to show the intricate humanity of his people.

Rodriguez writes of coming of age as a scholar just as Latino/a Studies was emerging as a discipline, as a young woman who discovered the writing and art of other Salvadorans of the diaspora, becoming immersed in the voices of her people. It would change how she saw herself, the real meaning of that much misused and maligned term, Identity.

She would come to be one of its leaders, President of the national Latina/o Studies Association from 2017-2019.

There is currently a determined effort to make serious attention to Latine cultures disappear, an attempted re-invisibility. Departments and centers at predominately White institutions are being closed or threatened with closures or mergers with other programs at colleges such the University of Texas at Austin, Harvard, UNC, Duke. The US Department of Education recently signaled slashing $350 Million in federal funds to Minority Serving Institutions and Hispanic Serving Institutions, defined as such by the number of their minority enrollees, where many other departments reside.

We often think of the masses of Latine people in the Southwest and West but at least 15 million have been living on the East coast. The area we call the DMV--for DC, Maryland Virginia—is home to the largest concentration Salvadorans in one US metropolitan area, so many that when we label people as Latine, we are probably seeing a Salvadoran.

The long running expectation was that a good immigrant would melt into US main culture. A common complaint on the right is that brown immigrants keep to their own cultures and languages. The social reality that Rodriguez discusses is a mix as they meet other cultures, with Salvadoran identity as a feeling residing under the skin.

Salvadorans came to DC, the “Chocolate City,” where Black people are the largest demographic. They are no longer the majority but at roughly 45%, they are still the largest racial group, with a long and proud history. Salvadorans were not well equipped to come to an area with so many people with the racial identity of Blackness. The interaction of Central and South Americans and the African diaspora go back centuries, although it is often hidden. South and Central American cultures have traditionally not recognized Black people as a separate group with an identity of their own.

Darker skinned people were brought as slaves and continued to be discriminated against after emancipation, but without the group identity common elsewhere. Afro-Salvadorans and others would come to terms with Black identity and Black pride after contact with the US movement. In DC, as Rodriguez writes, the interactions have been mixed. African Americans take up more of the public imagination, which can cause resentment. On the other hand, many Salvadorans have skin that is light enough to pass for White, making them near-White in the ways that the Irish, Italian and Jews were considered at the time of migration and just as poised to blend into Whiteness and its privileges, skipping over Black Americans, many of whom have been here generations longer.

The beauty of Dr. Rodriguez’s work is that she gets down to the daily rhythms and feelings of people and that is where you see the daily interactions with Black people. You can see how easily people of the two cultures blend—they have much in common—a certain spiciness—of food, style, music, a sensuality that is woven into everyday life. Both groups are “style cultures,” consciously living with their aesthetics and Rodriquez documents how art—broadly defined--helps to remake the culture. Because she is working at the level of the personal, with art and daily culture, she can track the richly layered and nuanced ways in which people interact. She captures the complexity in plainly beautiful writing.

Black culture is a pervasive cultural force in the area, and the two groups have mixed somewhat, producing a new language, a translanguage that is a distinct regional language. Each group has re-created its core culture while borrowing, stirring it up with the other, producing blended music, spirituality and foodways. That’s how humans move. While cultures are real, the hard and fast edges we envision are not.

Sometimes African Americans and Latine have been directly pitted against each other. That is what the screeches that, “They’re taking your Black jobs!” was meant to do. Black people did not take the bait, and it backfired, with Simone Biles and others mockingly showing off their “Black” jobs. Michelle Obama laughed and asked the 2024 Democratic National Convention, “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?”

The work that we all can do is to come to see immigrants, know them and their respective cultures. Rodriguez’s book and Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show are each in their own way, essential, closely observed, culturally immersive, using their own artistic expressions of their lives and culture as signs that we can see.

Target has introduced a 10-4 rule for its public facing employees. If a customer is 10 feet away, they must greet you. If the customer is within 4 feet, the employee must smile at you.

On the face of it, it might seem to be a reasonable demand. Good customer service, one might say.

At its most cynical, if you are a certain struggling retailer, are you pimping smiles? Many public facing employees encounter regulars, lonely people who come in because they have no one else. One can imagine them going to Target because they are guaranteed a smile.

Noted psychologist Paul Ekman, who recently passed away, conducted research concerning facial expressions and “universal” emotions. In studies in various countries, he showed photographs of facial expressions and found the same interpretations across cultures. Smiles cut across culture. In other words, Target directors might assume they can be sure of how smiles would be perceived by customers, regardless of cultural background.

But I have questions: How long do you have to hold the smile? Do you have to smile through the whole “interaction”.

Ekman’s work has recently been called into question, with researchers adding that smiles do not occur in isolation, that we rely on other factors to interpret the facial expression. We often count on that, using other factors to manage the smile situation.

Is the chance of lonely people showing up just for the smiles part of the rationale? Some customers definitely come in for social interaction. Folks who work in retail or food service often see people buying something to buy social time. Most are harmless but the interaction must be subtly managed. Pleasant, because they are customers, but slightly aloof so they don’t see anything more. If I cannot manage my own smiling, I am more vulnerable. We are told that we are in an epidemic of male loneliness, and that women are often expected to fix that. At its most extreme are the Incels, the involuntarily celibate, who are angry.

At the same the shine is off of “Tar-che’.” Customers are not having as much fun as they used to. Target caught itself up in the culture wars. Remember these are the same folks who sold Pride merchandise that did not have a lot to do with Pride, cynically offering rainbow beachballs, then suffered a backlash from conservatives, some violent. For Black History month they offered watermelon plates, in the misguided hope that minorities would buy anything that had certain colors or a highly stereotypical fruit slapped on them.

Does pimping smiles seem any less crazy?

In the wake of the George Floyd murder, Target began to focus on minority hiring and showcasing Black vendors and products, only to renege on those arrangements after the last presidential election. A boycott has affected its value as a company.

Bring on the smiles!

Pimping clerks is not new. I worked in department store retail, at Sears (a company that barely exists today) during high school and college vacations. My female supervisor, noticing that husbands and boyfriends seemed to enjoy repeat purchases of the clothes I picked out for the women in their lives, did suggest that I might wear my clothes a little tighter.

Because my employer did not have total control of my work wardrobe, I did not.

How much control does an employer have over one’s face? How does smiling because you have to, when the customer knows you have to, alter the interaction? At the base level, especially for a lonely customer, the insincere smile might be better than none, but it would seem to cheapen the whole smiling experience.

If I worked at Target, I would develop a Target Smile, only used at work, enough to fulfill the requirement but only just so, holding back in the eye action, keeping my real smiles for myself and my real people. One can look pleasant and approachable without actually smiling.

When I worked at Sears, I smiled when appropriate, but other times customers appreciated a thinking face or even a concerned face if I were trying to fix their problem. There were many occasions when a smile would be inappropriate, rude or even bizarre. Customers would often tell me why they are shopping, clothes for a funeral, a gift for a friend who was just in an accident or getting divorced.

The demand to smile could be especially hard on the neurodivergent, for whom knowing when and how to react can be challenging.

Smiling On Demand

Policing smiles is the height of corporate overreach. But for some of us it may be all too familiar. I suspect that many female readers might have a strong reaction to the Target rule. Smiling or not smiling can be risky.

The majority of Target’s public-facing employees are female. While the corporate leadership is more diverse than elsewhere, the leadership becomes more male further up the chain

That’s Important because smiles are not created equal.

The Target mandate hit me wrong because of the interrelation of smiling and power. Gender is important to any discussion of smiles. Women have been found to smile more, a lot more, than men. Women smile an average of 62 times a day versus 8 times for men. The interesting reason is why. Men appear to smile more to show dominance. Women appear to smile more for the reverse reason, to indicate harmlessness. But the difference between men and women shrinks when they are in similar social or work roles. Women, especially those in subordinate positions, are expected to smile more. Worse, it is not unusual for women to be commanded to do it. As a woman, I care whether or not my smile is of my own free will.

Like all of you, I walk around with thoughts in my head. That means the expression on my face sometimes has more to do with my own thoughts than the people who randomly walk by. It is not unusual for someone, in my experience always a stranger and always a man, to slow down, look at me directly, and tell me to “Smile!” It is sometimes combined with a back handed compliment, something like “you’d be so pretty if you smiled.” I find it irritating because it is full of gendered power assumptions, that I should perform as if I exist to decorate their lives with my smiles, that I should care whether they found me attractive or not. They seem to expect me to see myself through their “male gaze,” when women are traditionally encouraged to judge themselves through the perspective of straight men, rather than their own. The comment ignores whatever I had been thinking and assumes that my face is only an adornment for the pleasure of others.

It is not lost on me that they do not mean for me to smile in a socially general way, but at them. Smiling at someone else is necessarily other-oriented

There are all types of smiles. Some of them, especially when accompanied by the assumed direct eye contact, are tricky for women. The research suggests that women have a wider array of smiles for different situations. It can mean a challenge. It can mean ridicule. I helped men who did not know their wives’ favorite color or what size they wore. They often felt a bit sheepish—the wrong smile could have easily made it worse for them.

I would look insane, walking about with a perpetual smile. But walking around, smiling indiscriminately at everyone you encounter is exactly what Target is requiring of their employees.

Did they think this through? Maybe apply some empathetic leadership or human centered design thinking? The ratio of employees to customers means that it is likely to have several customers around one employee at a time. What are the rules if two approach at the same time? Who crossed the 4-foot threshold first? More than two? Do you treat it like a 4-way stop intersection, rotating clockwise?

How long do you have to hold the smile if someone else is waiting? My face hurts just thinking about it.

It looks like someone did do a little homework because the four-foot distance is significant. It is the borderline between what Americans hold as personal versus social space, the closest that many of us will tolerate a stranger before we back away. Of course, that’s just the average so a sizable number would be uncomfortable up that close. Or would they become avoidant, making sure they never get so close

Target seems to have considered none of this. They expect their employees to give the helpful, less powerful smile. So when you tell the customer they cannot have what they want, you are supposed to smile at them.

Will the smile make the employees seem harmless? Customers often perceive themselves as having more power than the employees. Will constant smiling make it worse? Some Target employees have reacted on social media. While some see it as an extension of good customer service, many others resent the mandate.

The smile as come on

On the street, I usually give the demanding stranger that wan, quickly vanishing half smile that we all know, while I walk away. I learned the hard way that simply avoiding them is considered an insult since they were “just trying to be nice.” I slowly but steadily speed up my walking because when the power dynamic rears its ugly head, the situation can turn nasty or even dangerous.

Forcing smiles puts women and young workers of all genders at greater risk. People who deal with the general public get hit on all the time. They have to manage customers’ expectations. Smiling will only encourage them.

The Target directive includes eye direct contact. That’s a problem because smile-eyes can look like flirting.

A woman recently told me this story: “I was opening a bottle and the seltzer sprayed and so I looked up and smiled and said, “Oh just my luck” and smiled again…. So, he crossed the room and sat next to me. He proceeded to speak French and I said “English”. He said, “You have such a beautiful smile!” And I said, “Thank you for appreciating my beautiful smile; but it was not an invitation for you to approach me.”

As a young professional woman, more men than I wanted to count thought I was coming on them. I finally asked one why; he said I made direct eye contact and smiled at him. Eyes are important to smiles. Turns out that holding eye contact for more than 3 seconds is often construed as flirtatious. That means that women may learn to break eye contact, even if they have to reengage.

How could I be professional, competent and confident, and not make eye contact? Rather than my open-faced, genuine smile, I cultivated another small smile that meant business, narrowing my eyes slightly—but not too much—friendly ----but not too friendly. When I became a university administrator with more power, I cultivated a dean smile, encouraging but noncommittal. If I smiled too much, faculty thought they were about to get funding for their project. Basically, I learned to smile like a man might.

Smiling can be dangerous. Anyone who has had a customer to follow them knows what I’m talking about.

Like the man who came back at closing time and followed me out, catching up to me just as I reached my car, because he “liked Black women.”

Was I supposed to hear that as a compliment, that I was a piece of his favorite flavor? That his appreciative gaze of a stereotype was something for which I should be grateful?

I slipped into my car using the door to shove him back before locking it. I was lucky. He could have just grabbed the door handle. I quickly drove away; in my review mirror, he looked surprised. A store security officer walked me to my car from then on.

Chasing a young woman to her car in a dark, nearly empty parking lot is not how you start a relationship; it is how you start a transaction. And that’s what the Target-smile is, a transaction in the most literal sense.

Smiles for sale.

Martin Luther King sang.

He was passionate about music and sang from the time he was a small child at his mother’s piano, through church youth choir and into adulthood. He loved opera and saw jazz and gospel as “triumphant music” that propelled the Civil Rights movement forward.

He married Coretta Scott, a concert violinist and trained opera singer, with degrees from Antioch College and the New England Conservatory of Music. Some thought that she gave up her music career to support her husband and the movement. She did not. She just changed venues. She organized and performed in her Freedom Concerts, which mixed music—jazz, gospel, spirituals, folk and European classical-- with poetry and narration to raise awareness of the Civil Rights struggle and funds for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

Martin Luther King understood the power of the arts and artfulness to advance the movement. Listen carefully to his speeches and you can hear poetic elements, alliterations and careful word choices, and his song-speech with their rhythms, 3-beat phrases and the rises and falls of his voice. We listen in part because of his song.

Art gives us a safe space to speak dangerous thoughts, to rehearse dangerous actions, sometimes right under the noses of those who would otherwise dominate us. That is why despots go after the arts; they speak truth to power. Towson University professor Kalima Young interviewed Black artists and found that they consciously create as cultural workers, internalizing and digesting traumatic racist news and videos—traumatizing themselves--and producing art works that speak to the traumatic but in a way that furthers discussion and potential action.

Visual artist Amy Sherald shows African Americans in our bittersweet diversity, with intelligence and poignancy. Her work was scheduled to be shown at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Portrait Gallery, but Sherald said that she could not sit with the atmosphere of censorship, after learning that her painting, Trans Forming Liberty of a transgender Statue of Liberty, might be removed to avoid provoking the president. The Baltimore Museum of Art moved quickly and her “America Sublime” exhibit is there until April 5.

At the Kennedy Center, other artists are also withdrawing their work. As of this writing, 15 artists and organizations have pulled out, including the Washington National Opera. Art works when artists have the freedom to say and do as they must. The rest of us must work to protect them and their rights to that freedom.

(Originally posted as a guest blog on the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance Executive Director’s Letter)

--Toppled Jefferson Davis statue at Valentine Museum, Richmond

On December 27, Bill Martin, director of the Richmond Valentine Museum, walked away after checking in on the museum on a Saturday. He was hit by a car and died the next day. According to the Washington Post article, his death was a blow to the city. It was also a blow to the museum world and the ongoing battle against racist propaganda.

Richmond was the seat of the Confederacy and for decades it had been proud of that heritage. The truth was that after losing the war, the South was in shambles. The war that they thought would be very quick and decisive, dragged on for years. They lost. Buildings, roads, the economy, and families were destroyed. On his March to the Sea, Union General Sherman burned down as much of the remaining infrastructure as he could. All the survivors had were their stories. They constructed an alternative reality that claimed that they had never done wrong in the first place.

I have documented how the myth of the faithful and loving mammy grew from realistic stories of women who came in all shapes and sizes, who used what little power they had for their own families and communities, and were the first to leave upon Emancipation. The myth responded to the needs of the vanquished into twentieth century film, with Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. By the Great Depression, asexual but resourceful mammies of film were fighting for “their” White people.

The Confederacy was the very definition of treason, but presidents Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, in hopes of national healing, extended amnesty. As a result, the US never had anything like the Nazi Nuremberg Trials or the South African Truth and Reconciliation hearings. The South was left to mythologize itself, building an elaborate narrative of a grand and noble people who treated their happy slaves as family and entered a glorious war led by brave, brilliant war heroes. By the early 20^th century, Monument Avenue in Richmond was lined with massive statues of strong men on magnificent horses. Like the Davis statue, many of the monuments were sculpted by Edward Valentine, the first director of the museum that still bears his name. Davis had posed for the statue in a building on the grounds.

In the wake of the Black Civil Rights Movement, the myth grew bigger and more delusional. The flag that many identify as the Confederate Flag is a creation of the 1960s. The battle flags varied by state and regiment. The “confederate” flag is propaganda.

Bill reminded Richmond that those statues, as most around the South, were created in an exercise of mythmaking.

He was also White, the picture of a working Southern gentleman, with his button-down shirts, ties and dulcid Southern accent. Here was the message of truth coming from one of their own. He exhibited a 1950 textbook that he had read as a child that made slavery seem like a congenial arrangement.

I grew up in political blue spots. Born in Asheville, NC, I went to undergrad at Chapel Hill. After graduate school in Massachusetts, I settled in Maryland, a Southernish border city, owing as much to its proximity to the Northeast as to the South. Some have told me that I have never really lived in the South. While I would not take it that far—all have lingering elements of the old South—but they have a point. I am uncomfortable in places that reek of the Confederacy, even when they are dressed up in charming finery. I feel the souls of my ancestors. I cannot rest. I cannot escape the knowledge that the pretty places were built upon the tortured bones of my people.

I had always avoided Richmond, although I had friends there. It celebrated its past as the seat of the Confederacy. The street of statues, proud Confederate officers, made regal by their fine equestrian mounts. The national headquarters of the Daughters of the Confederacy, who funded Confederate statues in places such as Arlington Cemetery, is there.

I finally went as a group of leaders who went to meet with leaders in Richmond. I trusted them and they understood that I would think and speak my truths as I saw fit. It is there I met Bill at the Valentine Museum, originally built as a cathedral to that mythical South. When I saw his tie and his gentile Southern ways, my antennae went up. Then he spoke and ushered us into the lobby. Lying on the floor was Valentine’s statue of Jefferson Davis that had been pulled down by protestors in the wake of the George Floyd murder by policemen. He showed us the graffiti, the paint smears, and the urine stains. It was part of an exhibit entitled, “This is Richmond, Virginia.”

His approach was brilliant and strikingly honest. Other cities had agonized over what to do with their statues. It was difficult, if not impossible, to simply display them without also seeming to honor them. Many cities hid them away, risking that future generations would not be aware that they had ever existed. Bill said that the toppled stained stature was part of the story. He was right. The still toppled and stained statue is now on loan to the Museum of Modern Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles.

Later, when I showed an interest in some slave artifacts, he invited me to stay after hours, delighted and patient with my questions. He followed up and introduced me to curators and other staff. Yes, he was very charming—and again honest. I am the descendant of enslaved Americans and other curators have not been as comfortable with me or my questions.

I have argued that we have never really turned around and looked slavery in the face. Bill and the Valentine Museum helped Richmond to do it.

Richmond, more than any other place I have seen, has faced what it was. And because it has, it is able to move forward. I have never really believed the propaganda of a New South—there is still way too much of the old there. Anyone who suggests that the South was anything but a society whose wealth was based on kidnapping, enslavement, torture and systemic rape, first as “building inventory” and later as racial terrorism, is lying. Bill called out the lie.

Know this: Nazi Germany fashioned itself after the Jim Crow South.

We are in the midst of another attempt to erase the memory of the historical atrocities upon which our country was built, requiring national parks and other federal sites to take down exhibits that “reflect negatively on our country.”

See my Substack article on our Second Reconstruction

Americans are very good at collective amnesia. We rewrite history all the time. We lie. Right now, we are witnessing another propaganda campaign, a flagrant attempt to re-rewrite American history, to remove from national parks, archives and museums any mentions and images of the shame of our history: Slavery, genocide of indigenous people of sovereign nations, the grave use and mistreatment of Asians, Latine peoples, and the European poor.

--photo of Peter (formerly identified as Gordon), former slave. The “Scourged Back” photo was among the images recently ordered to be taken down in federal spaces.

It was in large part because of Bill that I listened to other Richmond presenters differently, why I am now consulting in Richmond. The Richman Group approached me to work with them and public housing residents in the planning of redeveloped housing. I felt that I could make a difference in a city that was facing its history.

The lessons Bill Martin bestowed on Richmond and Virginia are ones we all can learn as we anticipate what we have to do now.

The current vice president has announced that, as of now, White people can stop apologizing for being White. Perhaps the Right was expecting a celebration?

The backlash focused on the scarcity of previous apologies. Studies suggest that racism is much more common than is publicly acknowledged, that even progressives often harbor implicit bias. Some have done the hard work of facing those demons, but it is an ongoing process. Racism is in the bloodlines of this country. It seeps out in unexpected ways and at many parties near you.

There is a legal reason for the lack of apology. An apology opens the door to reparations. It’s the same reason your auto insurance company does not want you to jump out of your car and apologize to the other driver you just hit, because an apology is an admission of guilt. Guilt leads to legal remedy.

Nobody expects White people to apologize for being White. It is racists’ practices that deserve apology and redress. Unless—and he leaves the door open for this—he believes that whiteness and belief in white superiority are the same thing, that White people do not have to apologize for the common belief in their own superiority. But he is also signaling that there is something bothering his followers, that they seek relief from something. What is it?

A Response to Absurdity

We are living in an absurd time, so walk with me as we take a short jaunt down this particular rabbit hole.

Let’s focus on the apology for now, on the idea that White folks had been apologizing for just being White, for being born White. Since they had no say in the matter, that would mean, of course, that they have nothing of which to be guilty. So why were they supposedly apologizing? As he and others have said, it was because the “woke” browbeat them into it. That they are the true victims.

The irony is that racists have victimized themselves. Racists have terrified themselves, and it is bad for them. You may have wondered what racists are afraid of. I think they are afraid that if people of color gain enough power, we will turn around and do to them as they have done to us. American mythology suggests that the universe is balanced. Do bad and expect Fate to pay you a return visit, for the other shoe to drop.

If vengeful people of color or Fate don’t get them, Thomas Jefferson reasoned that God would. In Notes on the State of Virginia, he wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” He does not say if God is just; he says that God is just. Just wait for it.

What does it feel like to always wait for Fate? Is it more like a tinnitus or a constant low-grade fever?

It’s worse. It’s wrinkles.

Racism is bad for you and gives you wrinkles

It would be wonderful if racists suddenly saw the error of their ways, had mass moral epiphanies, and renounced racism for the Evil that it is. But it’s been centuries now. Call me jaded, but I will accept a change in behavior, even if the cause is vanity.

Now we all know that racism is very bad for the people on the receiving end of racism. But it is also bad for the health of the racist. Sometimes, I think we should focus on that. A successful European anti-smoking campaign focused on the information that smoking caused acne. Other parts of the campaign showing that smoking could kill you had less impact, but vanity—that worked.

The Daily Show and standup comedian Josh Johnson suggested that racism makes you ugly. (“No wonder the Klan wore sheets!”) Our grandmothers told us the same thing about evil and that “Beauty is as beauty does.” So, shed your racism and you will be healthier, smile more, look younger and perform better at work.

I am not kidding. There is data:

Racism causes wrinkles, weakens bones, contributes to inflammation and other factors that accelerate aging. Racists could be hurting their own hearts. Studies show that racists are walking around with elevated levels of cortisol, the stress hormone that impairs both physical and cognitive health when elevation is chronic. Elevated cortisol levels are strongly linked to accelerated aging, increased DNA damage, and breakdown of the collagen and elastin that keep skin smooth and tight. It contributes to hair loss, osteoarthritis and other age-related disorders such as sleep interruption and metabolic decline. It affects immunity and brain health. High cortisol triggers a weakened response to cortisol, making it all worse--picture the racist’s body swimming in a cortisol-laden whirlpool.

No wonder they look so miserable.

Racism has been shown to hurt one’s job performance, interfering with concentration and performance in the presence of Black people, because racists are distracted by their own negative emotions. It can also lead to greater social isolation. (I wonder if that is why some are trying to form all White towns even if it means going without electricity or sewers; seeing people of color hurts their racist hearts.)

So, I am calling for the Racist Self-Help Movement. Can’t you just see the new cultural industry? Self-help books, 12 step programs, videos, online tutorials, Multilevel Marketing schemes that promise anti-racist rejuvenation rituals. You don’t need collagen drinks or plastic surgery—get rid of your racism! Throw away your expensive skin creams and hair club memberships and go hug your Brown or Black neighbor! (With consent of course.)

Vanity anti-racism. It could work. You heard it here first.

And maybe racists should apologize to themselves for self-inflicted suffering?

“First comes love, then comes marriage” (?)

— (1^st part of schoolyard chant, early 20^th century (question mark mine)

Traditionally family formation was based on geography and pragmatism. The emergence of love from a minor factor to the primary basis for family is pretty new. Romantic love started as a notion in the 18^th century, but “love matches” were not the norm in the US until the middle of the 20^th century when resources such as food, shelter and respect increasingly could be had otherwise. Arranged or pragmatic marriage continues to be practiced in many places.

One third of women report that they expect to be disappointed in marriage. Think about that--they expect to be disappointed. Evidently, they are. Women initiate 70% of divorces and, among college educated women, the number is 90%. Interestingly, divorces in some conservative states—Georgia, Alabama, Oklahoma--are outpacing those in liberal states, as they catch up with rates of women’s employment that started two decades ago elsewhere. The national remarriage rate also is steadily declining, particularly for women.

A common complaint of younger women is that the relationship changes after marriage. The Guardian opined that low expectations were the key to a successful marriage.

Young women are figuring out that heteronormative marriage as it is traditionally defined is rigged against women. Married men live longer but single women live longer. Thirty years of housework studies show that most women carry most of the house, child and kin work alone. It is certainly changing some but work equity is still not the norm. The romantic images of trad wives baking cookies and making soap have been followed by stories of women who have been abandoned with no resources of their own. It has been recently recognized that some midlife women are staying married to keep their financial and social stability but are “quietly quitting” their husbands.

At the same time, monogamy, a cornerstone assumption of US marriage, is being questioned. A 2023 You.Gov poll found a third of respondents described their ideal relationship as something other than complete monogamy. Men were more likely than women to say so. We live much longer now, and sex with the same person for 40 or 50 years may be unattractive for some. Moving from ideas to actions, You.Gov also found that 58% of young women and 50% of young men report having a partner cheat on them; 57% of women and 44% of men said that cheating was very or extremely common, leading one writer to ask if the US were experiencing an infidelity epidemic. But cheating rates have been stable over the last couple of decades.

Polyamory recognizes the phenomenon and introduces ethical considerations and mutual consent. It is estimated that 20% of US relationships have included consensual non-monogamy at some point. As the practice is most popular with young adults, the numbers are likely to rise. (Although, some will still cheat. Psychologists have found that the risk of discovery, with the release of adrenaline and dopamine, enhances the thrill of cheating for some.)

I love a good wedding as much as the next person, but when we focus too much on the marriage, including the wedding and all that comes with it, and not enough on the expected relationship, we are missing the point.

Humans will always find ways to be together, and we have always been flexible about how to form our relationships. The relationships and patterns are not new; same sex attraction, cohabitation, and polyamory have always been a part of our lives. The primary difference between the past and now is that there are fewer shadows, that many are much more open and seek public recognition and fairness. It is not the difference between presence and absence, but between honesty and lies.

“Then comes baby in a baby carriage” (?)

--2^nd part of schoolyard chant, early 20^th century (question mark mine)

The number of adults who choose to remain child-free has doubled in the last twenty years. In 2023, one estimate reported that 47% of adults under 50 years old said they were unlikely to ever have children. Lifestyle articles extol the joys of childlessness—the spontaneity, the savings, the restfulness, while other articles complain of the deprivations of parenthood—of sleep, freedom, sex. The assumption that anyone who could, would have children is no longer the case.

Like marriage, the reasons for having children have changed. Farmers and craftspeople needed children to grow into helpers. Family power and fortunes needed to be joined and stabilized. That has shifted.

I asked my students why their modern parents had them. Few of them worked for their parents and the fact that they were sitting in a university classroom meant that they were very expensive to keep. It would take the whole hour before some brave person said “love?”

About the same era as love matches, affluent western families began to “coddle” children. Before the 18^th century, infant and toddler mortality rates meant that there was a good chance a child would die. It is believed that 30% of children died in the first year and 50% died before their fifth year. Artwork of the time rarely showed children and when they did, artists depicted them as little adults, with the physiology and clothing styles of adults. Families who could afford it often would send their infants away to a wet nurse in an attempt to protect the children’s health and their own emotions. Improvements in medical care led to higher survival rates. Observers noted that mothers in the artisan class began to keep their young children with them, dress them in special clothes and treat them as entertainment. The way we think of childhood now, as a state of grace and innocence to be protected, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment.

The function of the traditional family was to “raise” children, to socialize them and prepare them to be functional citizens. Child raising in the US tends to fall to women more. There are voices on the far Right who are arguing that childbirth and care are the only things women are good for. Lack of universal childcare anchors women in traditional gender roles, which may be one reason for opposition to it. Who are women without babies? What are families without children? The trends are upon us now and people are finding out for themselves.

We do need children. Families don’t need children, but society does. The US is aging quickly. The number of people over 65 will double in the next 40 years. But here, the discussion of race is important. Latine families have more children, a good thing in general, but current deportation policy makes clear that the state does not think so. Parents and children who were on the path to be productive US residents are being pushed out. So, the standard is heteronormative, White families. A White man and White woman, married, and their children, because they are “supposed” to have children. That is the form of a family that the Right would like to return to as the valued standard.

But if you look at all of the ways that the larger population is moving and changing, there is no going back.

When I was in sixth grade, the female principal of my school pulled me into her office and told me that boys did not like girls who were smarter than they. At 12 years old, I replied that I would have an education and a good job. The only reason that I would need a husband would be if he made me happy. She looked confused and sent me back to my classroom.

I was ahead of my time but not by much. That in a nutshell, is the cultural discussion we are having about heteronormative marriage right now. American families are rapidly changing. The Right is pushing hard to return to a model that never worked all that well, especially for women. Despite the backlashes and attempts to push us back to romanticized traditional family formats, people are making their own ways to be together.

I believe deeply that people can come together to make something that is good and true for them. But I also know that the state, society and commercialism push at them to conform to an unwieldy standard. The popular stories of “trad wives,” the war on legal and safe family planning and even the call for the return to pre-1920 one (male) vote per household are all reactions to persistent changes in US families and the ways they survive external forces. For instance, despite the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade and returning abortion back to the states, the number of abortions has actually risen.

Family is an ancient social formation. It predates language and has survived centuries of intrusion by the state and church. It is not fragile. It is tough and flexible.

The state and church have always worked to sanction only some unions. Sexuality, race age, even poverty or disability were prohibitive factors. In 18^th century Germany, impoverished couples could not marry. Many eloped to England. Others just lived together, which was a punishable offense. So was not turning in your neighbors who were living without marriage. People lied, protecting the families of their neighbors, even if it risked going to jail.

More recently, in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast US, people eloped to Maryland. There is a “romantic” history of marriage chapels in Maryland as a destination for eloping couples. It was because the state had more lenient marriage laws, no waiting period and allowed minors with parental and court approval to marry. It even had a “pregnancy exception” for minors under 17. As a result, it had one of the highest rates of child marriage in the country. Unhappy with that designation, the state changed the laws in 2022 and now has stricter laws than some neighboring states. While I don’t disagree, the point is that the state still works to control who gets married.

The US Supreme Court has even mentioned the idea of banning interracial marriage again but two of them, including the conservative who noted it was based on the same precedent that led to striking down federal abortion law, are in interracial marriages themselves.

Humans are social animals. We thrive in packs, and we gather loved ones in a creative variety of forms. Marriage, as we have contrived it, is more fragile. After WWII, families moved away from their families and communities of origin and the stability and help they provided. The single, nuclear family is the most fragile of family types and families are changing it. Middle-class adult children are moving back home in increasing numbers. Ethnic and working-class children never left.

The institution of marriage has been fraying at the edges for some time. Fewer people are getting married and those who do are dating longer and getting married later. The percentage of married couples peaked in 1949 at 78.8%. It’s been below 50 since 2010. The average age of men marrying for the first time is 30.2 years; for women it is 28.6. More women are opting for single life.

Gay people are marrying in larger numbers while more straight people are staying single. The opposition to gay marriage never made sense to me—if you are “pro-marriage” you should want more people to marry, right? In another tangle with a Black minister on this issue, (feel free to step aside in case I am struck by lightning) I asked his congregation’s stance. He said he was against fornication. I said, “So then you must favor same sex marriage?” He balked. I said, “If you don’t want people to have sex outside of marriage, you have to let them get married, right?” He narrowed his eyes and walked away. So did I. The answer is that they are not pro-marriage, they are pro—what they say is marriage—marriage.

But that is not how many people are living their lives. Traditional marriage is trending down and living together is trending up. In 2022, there were 20 million people “cohabitating.” In 2023, approximately 9.1% of US couples were cohabitating, a number that increased from 3.75% in 1996.

Perhaps it is not time to look for a different model of the institution, but to admit that freedom means loving whom you love, in the way you and they choose, less of an institution and more of a private understanding. Being single does not mean being unloved. A family is who we say we are, whom we gather close around us to love, protect and enjoy. Marriage or no, children or no, our right to the pursuit of happiness includes loving and being loved.

Stay Tuned for Part 3, “The Difference between Romance and Marriage”

The Supreme Court recently refused to hear a challenge to same sex marriage. There had been a collective holding of breath when the case appeared on the Supreme Court docket. While the extant marriages would have remained valid, it was feared that many protections and privileges at the state and local levels would have become challenged. The precedent held, but observers expect another challenge will arise.

In the meantime, in three parts, we can take a clear-eyed look at the strategies and unexpected coalitions (teaser: Black women) that worked at the state level and the changes with the institution of marriage itself.

As soon as same sex marriage was legalized at the federal level, marriages took off. There are now 823,000 marriages. The family numbers are much bigger. 2.5 million LGBTQ people are parenting approximately 5 million children under 18 years old. Those are the self-reporting figures. It is easy to imagine that the real numbers are bigger. Some observers said that justices would need to consider the welfare of all those children whose lives would be affected if the marital status of their parents was less protected.

I started to the left of same sex marriage. Many people whom I adore were already making different and innovative forms of committed relationships that fit them better than replicating the heteronormative marriage. I’m not saying that all gay marriages are equal or good. Folks are still human, after all, but removing the heavily stereotyped gender roles creates different patterns that should inform the rest of marriages.

My friends and loved ones assured me that they wanted it anyway. It was, in some ways, a capitulation, a recognition that marriage was the shortest route to equality. The reasons lay at the tradition of marriage and family being considered the same thing, that even if some employers recognized domestic partnerships, medical establishments, the government and too many families of origin did not. Only one parent was recognized. Biological families broke wills and swooped in to seize entire shared estates. Heartbreakingly, partners were excluded from the room at the time of death.

Maryland was one of the states that addressed same sex marriage ahead of the federal case. In 2012, it was put to the electorate as a referendum, a calculation on the Right that the popular vote would fail.

We did a public radio show on WYPR-NPR on African Americans and the referendum. My job was to be the scholar. For fifteen minutes, I mapped out the landscape. The data showed that African Americans were no more homophobic than Whites of the same religious denominations, but they were clustered in those fundamentalist churches. I mentioned that the Bibles people were quoting were the translation of the translation of the translation and that many scholars argued that the original meaning about power had been misconstrued. I had found a study that documented that Black churches were keeping the older King James and American Standard editions of the Bible in print, because of the beautiful language, but that also meant they were getting the most conservative translations. We then interviewed a young Black pastor who had preached in support of the referendum and found his congregation receptive.

Then we interviewed Emmett Burns, a pastor and a state delegate, who was getting national coverage by calling for the NFL to expose and expel gay athletes. If anyone called him on it, he called them racist, banking on the stereotype that homophobia was somehow a Black thing, that I had just undermined on air.

Host Dan Rodricks introduced him and asked for his response to all that I had said.

He was a dramatic speaker. “That lady did not know what she was talking about.” Dan said, “That lady is Dr. Sheri Parks, and she is still here.” Then, in a beautiful moment, Dan smiled at me and rolled his chair all the way back from the studio table and opened his arms—slipping out of the arena and signaling me to go to it.

I was polite. “Yes, this is Dr. Parks, and I am still here. Reverend Burns, I have not had the opportunity to hear your whole argument. First, what do you expect to happen if same sex marriage becomes legal?” He said, “Sodom and Gomorrah!” “Okay,” I said, “so let me give you the opportunity to lay out the entire process by which 15% of the population gains world domination?” Dead air. Then he stuttered. He had no argument. Dan scooted back to the mike, ended the interview and opened the phones. Men called into public radio more often than women and some men called to say that same sex marriage was just wrong. One Black man tried to take away my Black card. Twitter exploded, with younger listeners’ comments that were supportive of me but that we could not repeat on the air because of the language. The producer called in more staff. Emails were flooding in from Black women, who said versions of “I am a Christian and I agree with Dr. Parks” and “love is love.” The response was so big that the program had to carry it over to the next day. When it was over, I said to Dan, “We have just uncovered the gender schism in the Black Church about same sex marriage.”

“I Love My Child”

In the leadup to the vote, national HRC sponsored a media campaign directed at African Americans. (It is a strategy used by both the Right and Left, attracting enough Black votes to push your side over the top. George W. Bush successfully recruited the pastors of some Black megachurches, garnering 2% of the Black vote.) I had done a fair amount of non-profit marketing, and I received an urgent call from a Democratic figure. They had been working with an out-of-state production company. She said, “Even we White women know that it is not working. Shooting is tomorrow.” When she sent me the script, I saw that they had placed the ads geared toward Black women in a beauty parlor. Why? You do not want to wade into Black women with our hair. If they were working with natural hair, you have made a statement. If they are straightening hair, you risk alienating what is probably your core audience. Black women vote more than any other demographic.

What could override homoskepticism or maybe even homophobia? Love of one’s own child. We were never going to get the folks who reject their own children, but could we get enough of the rest? I stayed up all night and rewrote the script and rationale for two ads, one directed at women and one directed at men. The setting was a middle-class home with Black art. I wrote two similar scripts—How is (son or daughter) doing? Great, the job is good, and they’ve met the love of their life. (Close up of framed photograph of happy same sex couple.) “You’re okay with that?” “I wasn’t sure at first, but I love my child. They’re really happy and I’m happy too.” In the notes, I told them to use my Black face and my Ph.D. to convince the production company to change direction. The ads ran in Prince George’s County, the affluent and predominantly Black Maryland suburb of DC.

While we cannot claim direct causality, the referendum passed and organizers credited Black women as the vote that pushed it over the top. Even if the national marriage protection were removed, families in Maryland would be safe.

Polling over the last few years suggests that 67-70% of Americans, including 76% of those important independent voters and even 38% of White Evangelical Protestants support same sex marriage. The tide has turned.

Stay Tuned for Part 2, “Who else is (or is not) getting married?”

New York City Mayor-Elect Johan Mamdani pictured with NY State Attorney General Latitia James.

The Right has been employing a strategy of coming out an onslaught of initiatives so quickly that it is hard to keep up, even harder to respond effectively. Many on the Left have been feeling battered and so have stopped paying attention.

Humor is helping to turn that around.

Zohran Mamdani, an Islamic Social Democrat, just won the New York City mayoral election. He says that humor helped him to do it. “I think, for me, (humor) is more of a natural impulse. And in fact, I have to stop myself sometimes from making one joke too many… I think part of the reason that it’s been effective is also the fact that people are tired of engaging with politics as a performance as opposed to politics as a reflection of the life that they already know.” In keeping, his humor is often observational, riffing off daily life. This is how his humor works: His observation recognizes the lives, feelings and frustrations of potential voters and focuses and repackages them, making them succinct and manageable, because brevity is indeed the soul of wit. It then creates enough distance and abstraction to allow a reframing, to see it is funny. There are at least two opportunities for humor responses here--the joy of recognizing and being recognized and then the turn, the joke work itself. Mamdani often connects several humorous statements in a train so there is continuous laughter, one funny bit feeding the next.

The Guardian called him a “joyful genius.” When questioned about his young (34) age, he pledged, “I am committing for every single day from here on out, I will grow older.” The video drew nearly 7 million views.

The New York Times ran an article that asked, “How are the very rich feeling about New York’s next mayor?” and depicted those very rich people freaking out in their Hamptons mansions. The Mamdani campaign posted a dramatic reading of the article, featuring Morgan Spector, the actor with the resonant voice who portrays the very rich railroad tycoon George Russell on HBO’s The Gilded Age. He is clothed, as we have seen him, in a smoking jacket, drinking brandy, in a highly appointed, booklined room. But something is wrong. By the standards of the Hamptons, everything is just a bit off. Spector is slightly rumpled, his hair curlier than in the show, in a short Afro. The books on the shelves are slightly askew. The point is that the very rich are very not like us and they are unsettled by Mamdani. The former Republican host of The Bulwark found the online bit “very clever” and “so funny it had me rolling.”

How the Right Uses insult and Ridicule

The Right often shares a mean humor that is more telling than a good strategist would advise. Humor does allow us to say difficult things. That’s why people try to cloak their insults in humor with “just kidding.” But just saying you were trying to be funny or pretending to be funny doesn’t make it funny.

It has long been said, mostly by its opposition, that the Left has no sense of humor. What is meant is that the Left “can’t take a joke” about them, that they are too thin-skinned and take life too seriously. The “jokes” are most often thinly veiled and unfunny insults, but the underlying message is that the Left is too angry, and the Right is laughing at them.

There is a very real difference between laughing with and laughing at. Whether you know it or not, you probably know the way they even sound differently. There is the light, lilting sound when we laugh together, when we share laughter, making community. There is a leveling, an equality to laughing with someone. Laughing at is a harsher sound, often deeper and more uniformly ha-ha, as if a performance, and is meant to demean someone, to make you and them feel that you are less and they are more. That is why elite people are surprised that the less elite have jokes about them. This too can make community and enhance a movement by joining the laughers against the object of their humor.

The Right has been employing mostly insult and ridicule. The Left is adding mockery and self-humor. Kamala Harris laughed at herself.

When the Right uses humor, it is often a two-step process. First, the leader publishes an insult. Insult is a form of disparagement meant to offend; it is often not funny. It is meant to assert dominance by pushing down, hurting the feelings of the other. (As it can stem from the insulter’s own sensibility, it can also expose their own weaknesses. Insulters often project.) The insult focuses and opens the door for followers to then ridicule the object of the insult. For instance, “Low IQ,” is not of funny; it’s not meant to be at face value. It alone does not stick when the opponent is obviously intelligent, but it has opened the door for ridicule.

Ridicule is a public belittling, often malicious. It is meant to be funny, as an attempt to make the other the object of laughter. Ridicule can also easily backfire if it violates social rules, redirecting the scorn back to the ridiculer. Online backlashes are an example

Both ridicule and insult work; they can change behavior.

In a study, Ridicule as an educational corrective. of which I was a co-author, we found that both insult and ridicule corrected more effectively than a gentle reminder. Males changed behavior most because of insult. Females changed behavior most because of ridicule. I noticed during the election that both candidates played to their own gender, using the humor strategy to which they were themselves most vulnerable, rather than the strategy that would best the other.

Mocking can involve contempt but also can involve mimicry and can be more playful. Of course, Halloween is the holiday for mimicry and the Washington Post reported plenty of political mocking. Gavin Newsom wrestled away control of the narrative by employing mockery, taking the style, language, even the merchandise of the president and twisting it. At first, it confused some who publicly wondered if he was honoring the president. Targeted mockery can keep the opposition off balance.

“Bleach Blond Bad Built Butch Body”

On May 16, 2024, the House Oversight Committee was to vote on whether to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt for refusing to turn over transcripts of Joe Biden’s interview. It was late, 8 p.m. The meeting was supposed to occur at 11 a.m. but Republicans had traveled to New York to support the then-former president at trial. When they finally met, Jamine Crockett asked a question. Marjorie Taylor Greene interrupted: “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.” She mockingly flapped her hand up and down near her face and smirked.

Greene broke the rule of decorum that Congress members are not supposed to engage in personal attacks. Democrats demanded that Greene’s words be struck and that Greene apologize or be made to leave the chamber. Republican Committee Chair James Comer ruled that Green did not violate the rule.

Crockett did not start the fight, but she would finish it. She immediately returned, calling for a Point of Order as prescribed by Robert’s Rules of Order, and asked for clarification of the ruling.

She started out soft: “I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling.” Then she glided into the strike, “If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach blonde bad built butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”

A perplexed Chairman Comer responded with “A what now?”

Greene’s insult about “fake eyelashes” was racially charged and was read by me and others as a racist comment about the styles of women of color. It seemed meant to signal that Crockett as a Black woman did not belong there.

But as the folks would say, Greene had brought a butter knife to a gunfight. Crockett later told Jimmy Kimmel that she did not have a specific quote prepared. But she was ready. Jasmine Crockett has an entire arsenal of humor, mockery, and ridicule. When someone insults her, they are unknowingly walking into an arena (brandishing their little butter knife)) and she is ready with a smackdown comeback. I find the most interesting to watch is when she signifies. Signifying is a Black ritualistic sport of rhetorical maneuvers of increasing and clever insult. (The Dozens is a specific type of signifying.) She signifies and laughs at her own joke. The humor is in the game itself. You enter the game ready to volley. Like tennis, it goes back and forth. One wins by throwing a particularly clever insult that the other cannot top.

Signifying can also be used to deliver serious content in a non-violent way, making use of rhyme, alliteration and hip-hop style wordplay. There are rules: Insults that are just mean and not funny are out of bounds. Insults away from the game arena would get you smacked. A related skill that we also learned as children was how to quickly read people so that you knew their strengths and their vulnerabilities should the need arise. The humor is best when it has the sting of truth to it.

Crockett’s return was so fast, so hard and smooth that it seemed ready to go in the way a trained athlete would visualize a potential maneuver, having it ready to go if needed. Sports psychologists can train for it. To an experienced player, MTG did not appear to expect a comeback; she did not have a second line. For a long time, at least since the Obama administration, the Right has broken procedure and protocol, hurling insults, relying on the element of surprise, with the very correct assumption that those of the Left would not come back at them as they tried to preserve the dignity of their offices. Insults often rely on the element of surprise—this would especially be the case in a formal, elite setting like Congress. The Right has overplayed that hand, depending on it too much and too long, predicting that they would always arrive unscathed.

Within hours, it went viral on Tik-Tok, Twitter, and Reddit (clevercomeback). Her cadence had a rhythm to it, and online it was put to hip-hop beats. Dailydot reported that views reached six figures on several platforms. Amazon sold the tee shirt. The Los Angeles Times called it “brilliant.” Twitter also posted mocking cartoons memes of muscular blondes.

The Balance of Rage and Humor

bell hooks told George Clancy in an interview,

“We can’t have a meaningful revolution without humor. When political movements lack humor, they tend to fail. Humor brings balance, helping us navigate diversity and difference while building community. I’ve had many conversations with Cornel West, and we were both deeply serious yet found joyful humor in our dialogue. It’s a holy calling to be able to critique and still find humor together. It’s a miracle when we see African American men and women speaking together, critiquing one another, and laughing.”

hooks was best known for her brave anger, but she was very funny in her writing, speeches and in person. We remember the rage of Malcome X, but he was also funny. He famously said, “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us!” In the early days of Hip-hop, there was lots of humor, much of it word play humor. But rage sold better to outside audiences and humorous hip-hop went underground.

Slaves had jokes. My favorite was that inventory could not steal inventory. A slave who took or ate something was just moving the inventory around! Their humor was the origin of the “happy slave” stereotype. It was evidently difficult to see slaves laughing and understand that they could use humor to critique their position and the people who forced them into it. The cakewalks of enslaved people allowed them to mock enslavers right under their noses. The enslavers thought that they were being honored. They weren’t.

Ant Williams, Australian mental fitness psychologist and author of The Redacted Playbook, wrote “Humour is a beautifully deceptive weapon. It’s like a Trojan horse, allowing you to slip past people’s defences while they’re too busy laughing to realise they’ve just lost control of the conversation.”

There is no effective counter move for joy. When the Right insulted Kamala Harris’ laugh, it was to try to get her to stop. When they tried to scare voters and call Zohran Mambani the “new (Islamic) face of the Democratic Party,” did they notice how many photos there were of that face broadly smiling or laughing? He laughed all the way to the New York City’s mayor’s office

Frog Love and Frog Strong: Disarming with Humor

Los Angeles - October 18, 2025 Photo credit: Elliott Cowand Jr.

Any kid who has had to face a bully knows that it is best to joke about oneself, showing a bit of your underside to say you’re not so afraid, while endearing you to the crowd. People like you better when you show that vulnerability. Protestors on the Left have become masterful at self-humor.

Funny signs signal a playful fearlessness. The protestors dressed up in those big animal costumes are literally disarmingly funny. The practice spread from the anti-ICE protests of Portland to protests across the country. Benefactors are paying for costumes and leave them free for the taking. The costumes are heavily padded, the better to protect the wearer.

Frogs have emerged as a favorite animal. Why frogs? They are a smart development, one that breaks through our popular but superficial dichotomy of strong and weak.

From a strategy standpoint, frogs are perfectly balanced. Frogs are kind of cute but not cuddly, fuzzy or cozy. They don’t purr or squeak but neither do they growl or snarl. They are neither fearful nor fearsome. They are patient predators, still and quiet, until they strike. Green, but even more colorful when poisonous. They are polite danger; the color is a warning, as in “I don’t really want to kill you, but you will not be eating me today.” In Maryland, bullfrogs can grow to 8 inches. At mating season, the males form a choir of resonant baritones.

Frogs were symbols of transformation and abundance in world mythologies. Now, they are the feature of Frog Tik-Tok and show up in fashion and crochet and memes. In Portland, posters and tee shirts read “Frogs Together Strong.”

Notable frogs are, of course, Kermit, the wise and patient adult figure of the Muppets. Also, there is the army of smart and brave frogs, of Trevor Pryce’s Kulipari books and cartoon series, who battle an army of scorpions. Pryce says that they remind us that “there is more to power than brute strength.” A former 14-season NFL defensive end, he knows about brute strength, but said that he chose frogs because he was afraid of them as a child. In his young adult novels and his Outlook Company’s animations, the aggressor scorpions and their spider allies make the mistake of underestimating the frogs’ strengths and capabilities, leading to their defeat.

You may have seen those tee shirts, “Underestimate me. That’ll be fun”. It’s like that.

The marchers are using cartoon anthropomorphic frogs, and their tee shirts sometimes show two frogs holding their human-like hands. The protestors were called terrorists, and mercenaries and the costumes created a counter image that was difficult to get around. Shooting tear gas or otherwise hurting someone in a funny frog costume is a much worse photograph than a plain dressed adult.

It also builds community. Laughing together brings us closer, because of a shared interpretation and physical and virtual shared response. Coming together with costumes, being funny together, is even better.

Guilty.

I admit it.

I’ve been waiting for a hero.

I am embarrassed to admit it but there it is.

I have been disappointed in the leadership on the Left. All year, I have been watching, reading, attending virtual town halls, really pining for leadership—plans, directions, initiatives, marching orders, something please? They have not come. I am tired of 20 text messages a day, plus the emails, the phone calls, asking for $3, $5, never with any indication of how exactly the money will be used. I am tired of being told to just wait until 2026 and vote. No clear leader or even central spokesperson has emerged. I am grateful for those who speak up, but I’ve been waiting for a plan and a leading voice.

I am not alone. Surveys indicate that those on the Left do not see a leading voice.

I should know better. Black people, specifically, should know from our obsession for the lone Black leader after Martin Luther King and Malcom X were assassinated in the 1960’s. Since then, we have been waiting for the lone hero who will come for us, the Moses who will lead us through the desert to the Promised Land.

The community of my youth was so immersed in the Black male leader that they sat about selecting and training one. He and we were told that he was going to be the next Martin Luther King. He was 17 years old. I was his girlfriend, which made me Coretta. He cracked under the pressure. I have written about this time and the severe costs in the chapter, Becoming Coretta: A Cautionary Tale, in both editions of my book, Fierce Angels (trauma warning). Over my life, I have dated four Black men whose communities said that they were the next Martin Luther King. I’ve met five other women who dated young men who were told that they were, and the women were also situated as Coretta, the helpmeet, the smart and resourceful woman who was expected to sublimate her own individual dreams in support of the greater Dream. Yet, many of us are still waiting.

I warned, as Barack Obama did, that he was not a messiah, that he could not fix everything,

No one man ever could.

But such is the pull of cultural mythology. The hero myth is one of the strongest recurring myths in Western culture—the strong, smart man who slays the evil and rescues the village. He (and in the traditional myth, he is most definitely a he) then becomes a kind and benevolent King. In second wave feminism, there was a saying: ‘The horse died. The Prince ain’t coming. We have to save ourselves.”

Authoritarianism vs the People

It is historically common for societies to look to authoritarian leaders during times of instability and the uncertainty it brings. But just as often, those “strong” leaders have just changed the words and the optics but did have provided longstanding solutions

We have witnessed the breadth of human cowardice, how quickly fear has made many capitulate before both real and imagined threats. I often wondered how otherwise good people allowed horrific things to happen in their midst but here we are. We have also witnessed tremendous bravery, of people standing between evil and its victims, holding up the law or human decency at great cost to themselves and their families. I am proud to say that I count among my friends people who walked off their jobs, with no new ones in sight, because they would not participate in the cowardice of their bosses. In an example for us all, they went to work for the greater good the very next day, paid or not..

The polls keep reminding us that the majority of Americans want the same things. Good school, clean water, yes, but also to welcome same sex marriages and trans people, more even racial playing fields, even abortion. I do still believe that most Americans are decent people and the polls also say that most of them are unhappy with our public sphere right now—both parties.

David Brooks has asked where is the mass movement that will counter authoritarianism? Robert Reich recently wrote that the great sleeping giant of the American middle was waking up and the population’s vocal opposition to the potential end of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) has emboldened congresspeople. Shouldn’t leaders already be bold?

Will the Left have anything proactive, as opposed to reactive, to say to the people?

We are seeing now that too many of our policies and trusted institutions have been built in such a way that they are only as strong as the humans who choose to enact them—or not. There is work to do shoring up these laws, policies and institutions--local and state as much as federal. Maybe there is not one answer, but many, held together by a common thread.

Perhaps the local solutions become templates for larger platforms. This, by the way, is a model of how a democracy actually works.

The “Discipline” of the Right is not the Answer

There is an impulse to look over at the political Right and try to match it. The Right has had success with spoke-people leaders since Ronald Reagan. It was clear that the former actor, while he had been a governor, was most valuable for his showmanship. While it is a good sign that some on the left are entering the show stage—speaking back, responding to narratives and creating their own, that alone is not leadership. There must be more to it.

There is a centrality on the Right, a tendency to gather quickly and solidly around certain themes. In the days when I hosted public radio, I noticed that on the same day, conservative guests would speak on the same themes, using the exact same words. Finally, off record, a guest told me that, yes, there was a hotline. You could call in and get the message of the day. That would never work on the Left, with its abundance of differences, its coalition of strong and diverse voices.

In a previous post, I noted that the era of mass society was passing, fragmented by streaming and other online communication. Maybe the era of mass, broadcast media that helped to make us seem like a mass society, was a phase. Before mass media, the US was a group of distinct communities who spoke, ate, worshipped, danced, married and just lived distinctly differently. In the internet age, we still live in villages; they are not defined by geography but by online membership.

We are already decentralized. The phenomenon of blockchain is not just a financial platform, it is a metaphor for how our public lives are changing. Rather than looking for a central voice, the Left should create a stable structure that deeply leverages that diversity as a reflection of American culture now.

Corporate studies show that diversity is an operational strength, that the different voices, methods and strategies create stronger cultures of innovation. Beyond window dressing, beyond platitudes about inclusivity, how does the Left truly build on its richness of approaches?

Conservative operatives did not stay secretive that the policies and analyses were coming from less well-known quarters, developed out of the spotlight. There are many Left academics and community activists who are itching to get to work on something real, something smart and strong.

The organizational answer is staring us in the face. Look at the successful action of marches, like the 5 and 7 million strong No Kings Protests. The organizations have been decentralized. The marches are local events with local organizers, loosely connected by virtual and sometimes temporary entities. Their decentralization makes the work safer, much harder for the opposition to surveil and punish.

Protests and rallies are strategically very important right now. They coalesce people and sentiments into a vocal and visible body. It is just as important to back them up, to follow with solutions, plans and strategic actions.

For years, I taught a university class and ran a fellowship program on social action and cultural change. One year, students were protesting tuition hikes in the quad outside the main administration building. The protests were big, lively and were going on for days. I realized that many of the leaders were in my class, fresh from the quad, sitting together and directly applying the strategies of the class. I asked if they had a spokesperson and whether they had written down their requests. The answer to both was “no.” I told them that if their protests went for a couple more days, the door to the administration building would open and out would come the president or a vice president. Even if they did not want to pick a leader, they needed to pick a good talker and a platform of actionable steps. If so, the administrator would listen. If not, they would have wasted their chance. The events unfolded as I predicted and because they were ready, the president invited the spokesperson and several others inside to continue a conversation that resulted in some of their requests becoming policy. The rally drew the attention but the follow-up made the change.

The Coming Spring

It is an enduring trope of mythologies around the world that after destruction comes regeneration, that the destruction clears the ground and makes new growth possible. After this dark winter, there will be spring. It is time to start planting, working for the Reblooming of America. Our grandmothers told us to bloom where you are planted, callng for decentralized actions.

What will they be? Who will we be?

In the famous Pogo cartoon, Pogo is looking in the mirror. The caption reads, “We have seen the enemy, and it is us.” Yes, and we have seen the heroes, and they are us too.

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

I believe that universal truths are found where culture and traditions agree.

A Prophesy Statement by the Hopi Elders was to “Know your garden… Create your community…The time for the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! …And do not look outside yourself for your leader.. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

June Jordan presented a poem to the United Nations in 1978 in commemoration of the 40,000 South African women and children who presented themselves in bodily protest against apartheid on August 9, 1956.

She wrote of “Ferocious affirmation…to hurl into the universe a moving force irreversible as light years traveling to the open eye…We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

The next steps for the Left are those of Ferocious Affirmation of who we are, of what America is. What does that look like? It looks like you. What do you know? What can you do? Who else do you know who will join you?

Why not start now?

A Little Reading Music: I Holding Out for a Hero, Jennifer Saunders, Shrek 2

(*Lyrics: “I’m holding out for a hero…

He’s gotta be sure

And it’s gotta be soon

And he’s gotta be larger than life

(Repeat) He’s gotta be larger than life”)