When my mother and I sat down to speak with my grandfather, Harold Guess, who is approaching his 92nd year of life in a few months, we asked him of all the dishes he’s made, if he had a favorite or specialty that he particularly enjoyed making. He responded with the following:

“The greatest joy I get out of cooking is seeing people enjoy it. It don’t care what it is. I’m always looking for something new to cook.”

This came as no surprise to us as Grandpa has spent the better part of the last three quarters of a century cooking for others. It doesn’t matter the occasion or even the specific meal. Grandpa loves to cook. In the summers, when my family used to come home to visit Louisville from New Jersey, as the end of our stay approached, there were two certainties we knew we would depart with: Grandmas hugs and kisses, and two pans of Grandpa’s cream cheese brownies. When Grandpa left town to spend the holidays with my uncle and his family in St. Louis last year, Grandpa spent the previous week making all sorts of dishes that could be frozen, from smoked turkeys , casseroles to pies so that his grandchildren and great grandchildren he lives with wouldn’t miss a single day of his cooking while he was away.

To highlight the breadth and impact of his cooking, I asked my siblings and cousins for their favorite dish that Grandpa has made for them. Not surprisingly, the cream cheese brownies came up in everyone’s memories, but for each person I was able to speak to, they also had their own unique dish as well. Among the dishes included peach cobbler, tuna steaks, papaya punch, homemade biscuits, chicken and rice, lemon meringue pie, bacon wrapped shrimp, spare ribs, turkey burgers, spaghetti and meatballs, beef and broccoli, orange chicken, and lomi-lomi salmon.

My mother and I sat down with Grandpa to find out how he developed his love of cooking and what his childhood experiences were with food. Did Grandpa have someone in his life that inspired him like he continues to do for us? What we learned from him was beyond anything we were expecting.

Practicality of cooking

When Grandpa was a child during the 1930s and 1940s, food wasn’t the luxurious experience it can feel like it is today. There weren’t many restaurants in his neighborhood that people frequented, and the ones that did exist were not accessible to blacks. Food and cooking were part of the necessities for daily survival, no different than any other chores for maintaining a house and a family.

Just as chores would be done by committee in a household of nine children, no single person was responsible for cooking. When Grandpa was a child he most remembered his older sister Maude, who was 9 years his senior, doing the daily cooking while their parents worked. Grandpa contends that necessity is the biggest teacher. If you need to eat, you’ll figure out how to make things. There wasn’t a notion of “not being able to cook” in his family during that time.

“Cooking per say, is not the same as cooking now. Things were tight. You might go down to haymarket and get a bushel of green beans and you might eat them two or three days in a row. Cook with potatoes, and maybe some bacon, pork chops or something. It didn’t take a lot of preparation to do stuff…as you get older and there’s a number of you, you learn to fix your own breakfast, cereal, cream of wheat, oatmeal, or something like that.”

This of course didn’t preclude his parents cooking. His mother Willie, who Grandpa described as “coming from privilege” with her family owning a funeral home business, didn’t cook when she didn’t want to. She taught at a school before he was born, ran her own businesses from home, and also took over from her father as captain of the voting precinct, a position in which he was the first black person to hold. When she did though, she was described by Grandpa as being a great cook in her own right. One of his favorite food memories he described was her baking yeast rolls during the fall and winter time, and leaving the dough to rise on the registers around the house.

From his early childhood, Grandpa also recounted that his grandmother Alberta, particularly enjoying cooking. She used to run a restaurant out of the house making fabulous meals for people involved in horse racing. There were times where he and his older brother William would be sent to stay with her, and she would extend these “fabulous" meals to their school lunch boxes. He remembers the lunches being made with a beautiful presentation that were the envy of his teachers who felt this was too excessive for a child of around 6 years old!

Special Occasions and Treats

Though cooking day-to-day was a practical affair, “the holidays were all about the food”. During these times, Grandpa’s father George would get a live turkey and butcher it himself during the morning. Preparing and cooking a live turkey was an all day affair that Grandpa and his siblings would assist with. In his grandparents’ garage there was also a pigeon coop, from which they would source their fried squab. It was also normal for people to have live chickens around this time as well.

During the summer, his great uncle that lived next door would harvest the peaches from his peach tree and everyone would help to make peach ice cream. Grandpa remarked how far a gallon and a half of ice cream would go in those days, satisfying six or seven people. While the children enjoyed their peach ice cream, the adults would have their own treat, peach brandy!

Cooking as a vocation

Though Grandpa learned the basics of cooking growing up, his passion really began when he started working as a teenager at the Davis household, the wealthy owners of a drug store in Old Louisville on East Breckinridge street.

“Cooking was not a big deal to me until I started working for the Davis’. And then you start getting interested in things such as why this pie as opposed to that pie...”

What originally began as an after school job that paid $1 a day helping the family maid, grew into a full time live-in job during the summers of Grandpa’s teenage years. There, he was taught by Mrs. Davis how to shop for and prepare full course meals. He compared preparing a meal to building a house, balancing the buying, preparation and cooking of different parts of together and having it all done in a timely manner. He recalled preparing dishes such as veal kidney chops and crab rarebit.

His first full time cooking job came as the result of a planning gaffe. The Davis’ would throw big dinner parties. On this particular occasion in 1949, the party had been scheduled on their maid’s birthday, a day which she took off every year. It was a hard rule that she did not work on her birthdays. No exceptions. In order to salvage the party, with invitations already sent, they turned the teenage assistant. The Davis’ arranged with Grandpa’s mother to have him leave school early and come help prepare for theparty two or three days in advance. After it became apparent that Grandpa was able to handle this level of responsibility, their maid retired and he formally took on the role of cooking for the family.

Grandpa would end up bartending these parties as well. They would take place twice a month, and would from span from “Friday to Sunday” according to his colorful storytelling. They routinely were attended by people such as Mary Alice Hadley of Hadley Pottery, and the Von Allmens of the Von Allmen Dairy Farm. He had a particularly funny anecdote from being in charge of these events.

“You learn what everybody drank. And you learned which ones drove you crazy when they start drinking. So you learned to make sure they passed out! In other words, if they were drinking Vodka Collins, after about three, they just got vodka. Period! That’d get them knocked out and off your back.”

Being black, working for wealthy whites in Kentucky during the 1940s came with its drawbacks. As he implied with “getting people off your back” he would of course encounter prejudiced people. Prejudice was so deeply ingrained in some people that that didn’t realize it to begin with. In most situations it was better to bite your tongue and let the drinks speak!

“There are people that are nice. And then there are people that without ever saying it, will let you know that you were black. The Davis’ told me that most of their friends were prejudiced and they were too old to change.”

Despite these challenges, Grandpa was well regarded and well taken care of by the businesses in the area out of their respect for the Davis family. Mrs. Davis herself did a lot to engender in Grandpa his love of cooking and curiosity to continue his pursuit well beyond his time working for her in high school.

Food in Hawaii

In 1951, while Grandpa was a pharmacy student at Purdue University, his education was cut short by his enlistment in the United States Navy. The navy was a bit of an institution in the family. His older brother William had enlisted years prior and my uncle Chet would follow in their footsteps decades later. After completing his basic courses and training Grandpa would be sent to Hawaii.

The time that he spent in Hawaii would prove to be the most pivotal in his life. He would meet his wife Joyce and within a few years they would be married. Hawaii brought to him a new life and new experiences with an exposure to a culture that was alien to his own he had left behind in Louisville, Kentucky.

Grandpa had his first experiences with chopsticks while eating saimin, a wheat noodle soup of Chinese origin that reflected the influence of Chinese immigrants from the Guandong region. While he didn’t dare to try his hand at wrangling noodles, there was one man who appeared to him an experienced chopsticks user. Much to Grandpa’s dismay though, this man was just as inexperienced as he was, slurping up the soup!

He also experienced his fair share of culture shock with foreign foods. He found octopus poke difficult to eat. He was also not a fan of poi, one of the staple foods of Hawaii made from mashing taro root and adding water until it reaches a viscous consistency. Various dishes with pig’s blood were also something he was less enthusiastic about.

Stir fries and salted meats were dishes that he was able to enjoy though on his limited Navy pay of $30. An example of this would be Lomi-lomi salmon, a salted salmon salad with onion and tomatoes. This was a recipe he brought back with him from Hawaii to Kentucky. Lomi-lomi, originally being a Polynesian massage technique, refers to the orking down of fish cuts with a tougher consistency by massaging salt into it. Salmon, not being a fish indigenous to Hawaii was originally introduced by ships hailing from the Pacific Northwest in the 19th century. The onions were brought to Hawaii by Captain James Cook of the Royal Navy in 1778 and the tomatoes by Spanish horticulturalist Francisco de Paula Marin in the 1790s. While the original version resembled more a salted salmon poke, the modern incarnation of the dish reflects and influence from English and Portuguese sailors for whom salted fish were staples. Hawaii is a melting pot of cultures from Polynesian, East Asia, Europe and the United States, and the evolution of lomi-lomi salmon reflects that crossroads of history.

This dish has been passed down to us from Grandpa who used to make it during the summers when we visited from New Jersey. Eventually my dad taught my mom, nd to this day lomi-lomi salmon is one of the foods my sisters and I each make whenever we are craving a taste of home.

Lessons from a lifetime of cooking

One of the biggest lessons that came up time and time again in our conversation with Grandpa was the practicality of cooking in everyday life. Food is a basic need for survival and for him, necessity is the greatest teacher. From the time he was a child, he would learn from the school of necessity.

Curiosity is also important to expanding beyond what you know, and food as simply a means for survival. You need to be curious and willing to try new things, whether you end up liking them or not. This is how cooking became a joy for him. Cooking for Mrs. Davis taught him the basics of a dining experience and how to prepare full meals for others. His experiences in Hawaii exposed him to food from cultures across the world. These seeds blossomed into a lifetime of curiosity.

The internet has been his biggest tool in aiding this endeavor. Knowledge is ubiquitous today. From refining his turkey carving skills through Youtube videos, to searching recipes for Chinese food, Grandpa has never stopped searching for new recipes and ways to improve.

Finally, cooking is an act of sharing and showing love. Sharing a meal is a communal experience that brings people together of different ages, backgrounds and cultures. Grandpa’s cooking brings the whole family together whether at holidays or through reminiscing together about our favorite meals. At 91 he continues to cook for his family let alone any person that comes by to visit and he has passed down his love of cooking to his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren who have all continued to pay this love forward.

Only 7% of high school football players go on to play at a collegiate level. Only 1.6% of collegiate players go on to play in the NFL. After getting to the NFL the average length of a career is 3 and a half years.

Madieu Williams defies odds.

Madieu is a former NFL player for the Cincinnati Bengals (2004-2007), Minnesota Vikings (2008-2010), San Francisco 49ers (2011), and Washington Redskins (2012). Aside from being a retired player, Madieu Williams wears many hats.

He is an activist. In 2010 Williams was named the Walter Payton Man of the Year.  This prestigious award is presented annually by the NFL to honor a player’s impact off the field and commitment to philanthropy. Each year a winner is selected from 32 nominees from all 32 teams. Madieu was honored for his foundation, the Madieu Williams Foundation founded in 2005. The mission of the foundation is to focus on education and health for underprivileged youth both in the United States and in Sierra Leone. In 2009, Williams donated 2 million dollars to his alma mater the University of Maryland to establish the Madieu Williams Center Global Health Initiatives and to date this is the largest gift to the university by a black alum.

He is an academic. Williams received his B.S from the University of Maryland in Public Health. He then went on to receive his MBA from the University of Maryland global campus.

He is a lawyer. He received his Juris Doctorate from the University of Baltimore Law School. He is currently employed as a settlement officer.

But if you ask Madieu Williams what the most important hat he wears he will answer very simply. He is a father.

Madieu has been passionate about making change for youth athletes to prevent, diagnose, and treat concussions. This is not just limited to football related concussions. His daughter is a cheerleader and is a flyer. This is the person often lifted in the air and susceptible to head injury.  He wants to ensure all children have the pleasure of enjoying sports without the fear of injury. He has been a prominent member of advocating for the Concussion Bill State of Maryland. Madieu Williams ultimate goal is to change youth football so his son can play football in a way that is safe and allows him to enjoy the game without the known repercussions that come with it.

 A recent study investigated the neurological consequences of traumatic brain injuries (TBI) or concussions. They indicated repeated TBIs can be correlated with long term neurodegenerative diseases such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE. They also indicated developing brains in children and teens  are more likely to suffer from a concussion than an adult brain. Children also take longer to recover from concussion. An estimated 80-90% of concussions resolve in 7-10 days but recovery time for children and teens is estimated to be longer. Second impact syndrome or sustaining a second head injury while still having symptoms from the first is also more common in children. Overall recovery time, and outcome can be generally worse for children than adults.

Madieu Williams has a clear vision for the trajectory of youth football. Education, diagnosis, and accommodations. He shared with me,

“A lot of parents aren’t very educated to concussion, they don’t understand the severity and we don’t know the repercussions of what’s coming down the road, we’re worried about what’s his 40? Not about the cognitive data like why are they having cognitive issues”

This is where we both intersect. I am a PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studying in the Matthew Gfeller Center TBI center. Matthew Gfeller was a 15 year old student who suffered a fatal TBI. Since then, his parents like Williams have dedicated their life to preventing, diagnosing, treating and raising awareness of TBIs in football players advocating for the passing of the Gfeller-Waller Awareness Act. This act developed an athletic concussion safety training program that requires all those interacting with middle school and elementary school athletes to understand concussion but also put into place laws about specific emergency actions following a sport induced TBI.

Likewise, Mr. Williams helped develop the Concussion Bill in the State of Maryland. The goal of the bill is to implement strict laws on when students are allowed to play contact football, as well as establishing measures in case they do suffer from a traumatic brain injury. The bill would allow students to have temporary IEP or individual educational plans like ones supplied for students with special needs. That way while they are still having persistent symptoms they can be provided with accommodations. This would allow students to be excused when having a headache, or provide someone take notes for them when they are unable to concentrate. The bill would also prevent full on tackle football until a player is 14 years old. He says youth football lacks the medical resources it needs for the health and safety of the children involved in the game.

“I go to youth football and majority of the time there isn’t anyone certified in first aid and CPR, and if we have someone who is injured or gets his bell rung in practice, We need to make sure that all the referees, coaches, and people associated with the game know when a player needs to be exited out the game.”

Simple laws and practices like this could drastically change the recovery outcomes of students whose brains are still developing. But the problem is everyone seems to think it won’t happen to them or their child. “The whole notion of not my kid. He won’t get it, but what If it is him? What then?”

When I asked him what a perfect world would look like he answered:

“The game of football is changing so much, by the time my child plays, there will be a game that’s much safer, not tackling a guy who’s back is turned. The rule changes will help player safety. They changed the kick off rules and that has already improved safety. The rules are going to evolve where player football safety is becoming more and more evident”

As a father first, Mr. Williams wants his son to love and enjoy football in the same way he did, but in a way where he is setting himself up for success in the future. In regard to advice for current NCAA and NFL players Mr. Williams shared the following:

1. Take the baseline test seriously at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year do it again.

2. Keep the tests

3. When you are injured and have a concussion you need to stay out and not come back too soon. We don’t know how the brain heals, and it may take some time.

4. Post football, start seeing a neurologist consistently and twice a year, so you’re being cared for like any other primary care doctor just to keep monitoring

Football is America’s game, but we are still trying to understand the long-term effects of the subsequent brain damage that comes from playing it. Research indicates the longer and the younger you started playing football the more highly correlated long term neurocognitive decline. If we want to continue to enjoy sports, we all need to work together to protect the future of the players who are playing now.

The textbook definition of the American Dream suggests that anyone can succeed through hard work. The term "anyone" emphasizes inclusivity, while "succeed" is subjective and often equates to a lifestyle of material wealth. However, as we’ve seen with Diddy and others the pursuit of the elusive American Dream can lead to a nightmare, especially for those in the wake of him and those of his ilk who have achieved “success” as defined by material excess.  

Figures like Diddy, Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein, Dan Schneider, and Harvey Weinstein exemplify how fame and fortune often come at the expense of others' suffering.

This pattern isn't new—it's been the norm for years. 

It’s time for us to reimagine the American Dream.

“Trap”ped

In the past few years, I have been writing a doctoral thesis on trap music and one of the central questions I had going into it was raised after reading an article by music journalist Simon Reynolds in his article Trap world: how the 808 beat dominated contemporary music. To close his article Reynolds wrote:

If trap became the defining sound of the 2010s, it’s because it captured the pathologies of our era – the glamour of money, the lure of fame as an individualistic escape route, the decadence of self-medicating hedonism – and welded them to the ultimate party soundtrack. It’s fitting that the decade’s dominant and most addictive sound should derive its name from the place where drugs are sold. The irrepressible and inexhaustible generation of new flows, fresh slanguage, and startling production tricks collides with a stock set of themes and a beat that is instantly recognisable. Trap as the changing same, as a music that keeps reinventing itself even as it serves the base function it always has, is a fitting metaphor for our times.

If hip-hop with trap music as its lingua franca, had officially become the most listened to music in the world by 2019 and one of the defining sounds of the 2010s, what does its popularity and ubiquity say about us as a society? What can be illuminated from the music? As I stated in the introduction to my thesis proposal back in 2020:

In following the trajectory of the “American dream” in its rags-to-riches story, trap music has come to symbolize and celebrate the individualistic hedonism and excesses of extreme wealth. It has provided a mirror to our narratives of wealth and success in a society where the reality of such narratives have begun to collapse in an era of seemingly endless recession and looming economic crisis.

In recent months, this question has come to take a darker turn with the charges of sex trafficking, prostitution and racketeering being brought against hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs. As more information came out about the extent of his crimes and the crimes of those around him, also including forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice, I thought back to the relationship between hip-hop and the American dream.

Diddy has lived the lifestyle promoted in so many hip-hop songs. If one were to literally infer how one would sustain a lifestyle of endless alcohol, drugs, and sex, one would get something akin to the network that P. Diddy has built up. It has been in fashion for decades now to critique and criticize the rags to riches narrative of the American dream, but when placing Diddy into the context of other similar revelations such as those surrounding Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, R. Kelly, and Dan Schneider the “riches” part of the narrative begins to take on a darker tone.

These horrors are becoming less of an aberration - some rogue sick individual - as we’re constantly reassured by our media, and are beginning to take the shape of a feature of the lifestyles of the ultra rich and elites. When we are fed the implicit narrative of our culture to “make it big” and “get rich” we are being encouraged to emulate the lifestyles of the rich and famous, as they have become the “role models” of our society. As with many things in this world, the glamor of being amongst the ultra rich may not be all what it seems.

Déjà vu?

With the number of members of the elite and ultra rich whose crimes have come to light in recent years, it feels like a case of déjà vu whenever they are discussed. In the cases of Jeffrey Epstein, R. Kelly, Dan Schneider, and now Diddy, these things are literally déjà vu. All of them have faced either allegations or trials in the past.

Jeffrey Epstein was brought to court in Florida in 2006 for procuring a minor for prostitution and solicitation of a prostitute, but as investigative journalist Whitney Webb wrote in it in her book One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein, he was given a slap on the wrist:

Alex Acosta, then-serving as Secretary of Labor in the Trump administration, had disclosed to the Trump transition team that he had previously signed off on Epstein’s “sweetheart deal” because Epstein “had belonged to intelligence.” Acosta, then serving as US attorney for Southern Florida, had also been told by unspecified figures at the time that he needed to give Epstein a lenient sentence because of his links to “intelligence.” When Acosta was later asked if Epstein was indeed an intelligence asset in 2019, Acosta chose to neither confirm or deny the claim.

R. Kelly had a whole host of sexual abuse allegations dating back to the 1990s but the most prominent case were the allegations he faced in 2002 of urinating on a minor, which took until 2008 for him to be found not guilty after the victim refused to testify. This was by no means the end of the allegations surrounding R. Kelly, but it wasn’t until recently with the documentary series Surviving R. Kelly, that they finally caught up to him and he was forced to take account.

The same thing can be said about Dan Schneider ’s allegations at Nickelodeon, but it wasn’t until Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV earlier this year that more concrete allegations began to stick.

The Fault in Our Memory

As a culture, it has become apparent that we collectively have a difficult time discussing crimes and atrocities. With regular exposure to the crimes of our government since the days of the Vietnam War, and accelerated by the internet, it becomes tiring to keep track of and properly reckon with the severity and the implications of them.

The way we tend to create a collective memory and define a societal form of remembrance also tends to abstract the severity and the reality of atrocities that those have suffered. German historian Reinhart Koselleck in 1993 made an argument against the notion of collective memory being the main form of remembrance. About this, historian Victor Neumann writes:

Koselleck’s critical reactions began with the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. In 1993 he participated in the debate on the monument for a reunified Germany. According to Koselleck, its dedication, “For the Victims of War and Dictatorship” (Neue Wache), was contradicted by the absurdity of the mass murders committed by the Nazis. In this context, Koselleck asked that the inscription be changed to: “For the Dead: Fallen, Killed, Gassed, Dead, Missing.” By doing so, he drew attention to the need to recognise different experiences and the importance of reconciling the plurality of Germany’s past. He argued for individual memory and against a collective memory of the past, criticizing the way the state, politicians, and shapers of civic opinion impose the meaning of history through an official politics of memory.

How often when you read about atrocities committed do you see that the language used to speak about them ends up relativizing the direct experience of them. You have to look no further than the Western media coverage of the genocide in Gaza and the Israeli bombings of principally civilians in Gaza, the West Bank, and now Lebanon.

People are never “killed”, they simply die. In speaking of the death toll, we even leave out those who are “missing” and unaccounted for. If this weren’t the case, the number of people killed by Israeli bombing alone would reach into the hundreds of thousands as the according to The Lancet. Koselleck wasn’t being pedantic when he argued that those fallen, killed, gassed, dead, and missing should have been included in the inscription for the remembrance of the Second World War.

In the United States, we tend to be more comfortable with blood and gore types of violence than with things such as human trafficking, sex crimes, and crimes against minors. Images of bloody violence saturate our media of course, whether it be the regularity of mass shootings and street violence amongst youths and organized crime, or whether it be the latest Hollywood movie or television series on a streaming platform. Violence is all around us and for the most part, we tend to accept this reality.

But when it comes to the crimes of someone like Jeffrey Epstein, that are of a sexual nature, whose scale and absurdity make them difficult to comprehend, it is hard for us to come to terms with the idea that we live in a society that would allow such a thing. No one wants to wake up in the morning and go to work with the acceptance that there are rich and powerful individuals who are regularly partaking in sexual crimes on an institutional scale.

This explains the internet’s impulse to clown and make fun of the absurdity of the crimes of Diddy. With terms like “the Diddler” getting “diddled” and the jokes about the sheer amount of baby oil he had in his house, it’s hard not to laugh at how ridiculous it all seems. But once it became clear the severity of the allegations of sex trafficking, and how institutional they were not only to his little fiefdom within the entertainment industry, but the music industry as a whole, the notion of Diddy being a sinister individual on the level of a Jeffrey Epstein stopped being as funny.

Still though, the jokes have and will always persist. They have begun to serve more as a societal trauma response more than anything. Dealing with trauma through humor is an indirect way of disarming the cause of the trauma, but it also avoids fully processing it.

But the media also bears responsibility for the sensationalizing of the salacious details of Diddy’s sex parties, euphemistically described as “freak offs” by Diddy himself. On one level, one cannot fully blame them for the sensationalizing as the details and allegations themselves are sensational. It’s easy to draw in readers and viewers this way while still getting the information out there. But on another level, this too contributes to the relativizing of the experiences of those who have suffered at the hands of P. Diddy and those in his network. It is of course too early for us to get many of the first hand testimonies of the victims themselves, but it also may be that we might never get these accounts in the same bandwidth of coverage as we are getting the sensationalism. By that point the moment will have passed and we as a society will have moved on to the next shocking event that occupies the airwaves.

The Simulation of Scandal

Another one of the inherent reasons we find it difficult to properly discuss such crimes publicly also has to do with the nature of “scandals” themselves. Jean Baudrillard in his analysis of Watergate, likens the spectacle of the public scandal to a simulation, no different than Disneyland. The scandal as a concrete event does not exist in reality.

Watergate. The same scenario as in Disneyland (effect of the imaginary concealing that reality no more exists outside than in­ side the limits of the artificial perimeter): here the scandal effect hiding that there is no difference between the facts and their de­nunciation (identical methods on the part of the CIA and of the Washington Post journalists) . Same operation, tending to regener­ate through scandal a moral and political principle, through the imaginary, a sinking reality principle.

The denunciation of scandal is always an homage to the law. And Watergate in particular succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal-in this sense it was a prodigious opera­tion of intoxication.

Watergate as a scandal only exists as an event in our minds, when in reality, it was how the government operated, an open secret that was constantly concealed from the public. There is no morality until the “facts” and the “actors” manifests in the form of the scandal. The scandal as performed by the “actors” and received by society, is the form in which these facts can be processed by the public as a moral event and the commonly agreed upon laws of decency and morality can assert themselves as principles within politics. Nixon by apologizing affirmed his transgression of these morals and laws and the outrage heaped upon him by the Washington Post stood as the conduit for the public shock and anger. This reaffirms the existence of the “good” and the “moral” in politics and consequently reaffirming the public’s belief in such things.

The public scandal thus is a form of simulation. None of it actually exists in concrete reality. The actors like Nixon, and those in-the-know of his paranoid surveillance, as well as the system of US politics and the US government itself do not hold themselves to these so called “laws” of decency and morality that the public perceives them to operate behind. The only thing they care about is power and money as a means of power. Before the scandal these facts simply existed in concealment only for those in certain positions to know. As Baudrillard states:

“Watergate is not a scandal, this is what must be said at all costs, because it is what everyone is busy concealing”

In this way as Baudrillard stated public scandals are nothing more than abstract Disneylands for the public to reaffirm their commitment to belief in the society, its laws and its morality.

This line of thinking can equally apply to the revelations about Diddy. It’s not a scandal but rather as Baudrillard stated, “what everyone is busy concealing”. These things were open secrets in the music industry that occasionally leaked out into public knowledge.

Australian DJ Havana Brown in an interview on Hit WA’s Allan & Carly said that:

“It’s not a secret in the industry at all, what was happening… Absolutely everybody in the industry knew what was going on…I don’t know why it was so kept so secret and why no one said anything about it. Like everyone knew about these freak-off parties. Everyone talked about it.”

Dorothy Carvello, a talent scout for a big name record label in the 1980s, who has been involved in launching a lawsuit against Atlantic Records and its executives had this to say about Diddy and the music industry:

“How did we get Diddy? Everybody in the music business knew about him. It will come out who enabled this,” she told The Sunday Times. “Money is God in this industry. It doesn’t matter who is sacrificed along the way.”

Diddy has become the newest figure in which our society perfomatively and ritualistically shames and draws the distinction between the “moral” in our society and the “immoral”. After successive scandals though, this façade of us existing in a “moral” society begins to wear thin. How much outrage do we actually have left within ourselves if this is being revealed to us is a modus operandi of our elites.

To further hammer this home, Whitney Webb in the introduction to her book, had this to say about Jeffrey Epstein.

Indeed, it was later stated by Cindy McCain, wife of former Senator John McCain, that “we all knew what he [Epstein] was doing” at an event in January 2020, where she also claimed that authorities were “afraid” to properly apprehend him. If he was such an anomaly and a stand-alone con artist – how was he singlehandedly able to intimidate the law enforcement apparatus of an entire nation for decades?The claim that Epstein did not have powerful backers and benefactors stands on incredibly shaky ground.

The exact same thing can be said about Diddy. It will try to be argued by some that Diddy was a sordidly evil individual who corrupted all of those that touched him. In the name of protecting themselves, those involved will condemn him and distance themselves from him and this “scandal” will be memory holed which is what tends to happen, until the next scandal appears.

Diddy and the American Dream

At the very heart of the allegations against the likes of Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffery Epstein, R. Kelly, Dan Schneider and P. Diddy is control and exploitation, particularly of the vulnerable. These two things are at the very center of what it means to be among the ultra rich elite and what the American dream has always been built upon. Western society has been shaped by this hunger for control and the need to exploit.

The wealth of European empires was built on the exploitation of the riches of the Americas, African slave labor, and the natural resources of Africa and the Middle East, and the riches and labor of South Asia. Without the Americas, there is no Spanish or Portuguese empires. Without Africa, France ceases to be a power. Without India, the pearl of the British empire, the empire does not recover as well from the loss of the 13 colonies. Without the American global hegemony that enables the country access to cheap oil through the patronage of the Gulf State monarchies and the divide and conquer strategy that keeps the Middle East in a state of crisis and war, our modern society will cease to function with the same levels of comforts and conveniences afforded to us.

In the same way that our political and financial elites have shaped the world and our societies through exploitation, Diddy kept his tiny slice of his own personal fiefdom through tightly knit webs of exploitation of people and their bodies for the consumption of those in his network. When we aspire to be amongst this upper echelon of society, as the American dream has been sold to us today, this is ultimately what we’re aspiring to be. Diddy is the modern American dream.

The sad thing about our modern society and what will be lamented by future generations is how we have lost sight of the achievements and ideals of our society that were truly worth being proud of and worth defending. The idea of the sovereignty of the human individual which led to the establishment of the idea of inalienable rights, is something to always hold up and aspire to. Even though these ideals have always existed in tension with the reality of how Western societies have treated those outside of it and exploited the weak and vulnerable within it, does not make it any less noble.

On the contrary, it makes it more of an imperative that we take these ideals to heart. In 1948, 48 countries from all regions of the world assembled to affirm the United Nations “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and within it, “their faith in the dignity and worth of all persons.” These ideals have grown far beyond Western society and given the state of the world today, we are in great need of an earnest belief in and application of them.

Historian James Truslow Adams, in his 1931 book The Epic Of America first coined the term, “the American Dream” and he defined it as such:

The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement….It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

Adams was not referring simply to the acquisition of material wealth or the opportunity upward mobility. His vision of the American dream resembles more the vision of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in its belief in a society that upheld the “dignity and worth of all persons”. In the context of our world today, this belief should not just be extended to those who have the wealth and power to be considered a person worthy of dignity and inalienable rights, but to every individual regardless of their circumstances of birth or position in the world. If we live in a world where our governments and our societies can exploit those outside of its borders, what stops this same exploitation from occurring to us?

For this reason we cannot stand by idly as we are more regularly exposed to the depravity of our elites. The revelations of the crimes of people like P. Diddy have to be wake up calls for us to snap out of our state of déjà vu and performative outrage and actually demand accountability and consequences that extend beyond these individuals who ultimately become scapegoats in society’s need to affirm itself as “moral” and “good” in the simulation of scandal.

These incidents are not aberrations but rather are features of a society that has long departed from its ideals and has institutionalized the depravity of power in its place.

In the midst of the Olympic games, the USA Olympic Men’s Basketball team was “shaken” by a scandal that played out across media. Kawhi Leonard was deemed unfit to participate for the team opening up a roster spot. Many people following the team assumed that Boston Celtics Finals MVP, Jaylen Brown would be selected for the team and were shaken when his teammate Derrick White was selected instead to replace Leonard. In a cryptic tweet Jaylen seemed to suggest that Nike was the reason for the snub causing a stir online. All of a sudden people began speculating about a Nike conspiracy to handpick all the USA team players.

But was this actually the case? As one began to investigate into the situation, most of the athletes on the team were in fact Nike athletes. Kawhi Leonard himself used to be a Nike athlete but ended up suing them for ownership of his logo he created for his shoe, though he would lose the lawsuit.

The replacement, Derrick White was indeed a Nike athlete. But under the surface it became obvious that Derrick White was first in line for a replacement, as it had been floated as early as the NBA Finals in June. He fulfilled a role on the team that was thoroughly needed: a two way guard.

If one looked further, Kawhi Leonard was not told he could not play in the Olympics due to his health. The Clippers stressed that they never made such a declaration to the team, as many people had assumed. Even further, Grant Hill spoke very carefully in interviews not to actually state outwardly that Kawhi was too injured to play. If one reads in between the lines, it could be that Kawhi was simply cut from the team, due to redundancy at his position and skillset. Maybe it was insinuated that health was the issue in order for everyone in the situation to save face. Hmmm? So much ado about nothing.

But where does this leave Jaylen Brown and his claim of Nike being behind his snub? Well in comes Stephen A. Smith. Back in May he claims to have been told by an NBA source that Jaylen Brown was “not liked because of his I-am-better-than-you attitude" and was "not as marketable as he should be". Stephen A. doubled down on this claim in light of the conversation generated by the Olympic snub. This all begs the question about what a so-called scandal of a Nike backed conspiracy, a vocal yet cryptic NBA star, and marketability have anything to do with one another.

It all comes back to Jaylen Brown and his position as a public figure. Despite being a Celtics fan, I first became aware of Jaylen Brown off the basketball court when he made waves in 2018 in a very candid interview he did with the Guardian. When speaking about Colin Kaepernick and why no NFL team would sign him to their team, despite his clear ability to play at a high level, Brown noted that he wasn’t surprised that someone as politically outspoken as Kaepernick was being blackballed by teams in the league. He went on to make an important point that made headlines:

“That’s the reality because sports is a mechanism of control. If people didn’t have sports they would be a lot more disappointed with their role in society. There would be a lot more anger or stress about the injustice of poverty and hunger. Sports is a way to channel our energy into something positive. Without sports who knows what half of these kids would be doing?”

It’s important to dig in to what Brown was saying in this comment because it’s very easy to misconstrue his intended point. When he insists that sports is a mechanism for control, he is not literally stating that sports exist for the sake of some conspiracy to control the masses. What he is suggesting is that sports are a form of what French philosopher Jean Baudrillard would call a “simulation”.

Baudrillard came from the field of semiotics, which to put simply is the study of signs and symbols. Think of a sign as a stand in for a real concrete thing. The Coca-Cola logo is a stand in for the real life existing soda. But it doesn’t end there. Coca-Cola also exists as an idea or feeling. When Coke markets, they are selling this feeling. The nostalgia people have of sharing a coke on the beach with friends. The feelings and memories associated with the soda. Unconsciously people are buying this feeling, not the drink itself. The drink is a stand in for the feeling.

Simulation exists when the connection to the referent, or the original, no longer exists as the primary form and reality itself is usurped. With the Coca-Cola example, the feeling of nostalgia becomes the primary reference in the mind of most consumers. When you get enough of this severance or detachment, reality itself is usurped and the primary references are the various forms of abstraction. The entire field of marketing is designed around this abstraction of the “real” existing product into a sign and then that sign into something else. All of these these elements are equally “real” to the consumer. There is no true or false in this equation.

For him [Baudrillard], modern societies are organized around the production and consumption of commodities, while postmodern societies are organized around simulation and the play of images and signs, denoting a situation in which codes, models, and signs are the organizing forms of a new social order where simulation rules. In the society of simulation, identities are constructed by the appropriation of images, and codes and models determine how individuals perceive themselves and relate to other people…The realm of the hyperreal (e.g., media simulations of reality, Disneyland and amusement parks, malls and consumer fantasylands, TV sports, virtual reality games, social networking sites, and other excursions into ideal worlds) is more real than real, whereby the models, images, and codes of the hyperreal come to control thought and behavior.

If one is to take this quote and apply it to Jaylen Brown’s analysis of sports, one can say that sports are a simulation. In this simulation, identities are constructed by the appropriation of these various signs and symbols. When someone defines themselves as a fan of a team, they are constructing an identity around the images of the team, whether it be the logo, colors, or even the players, who ultimately can stand in for the team as symbols. When someone is a fan of a player they construct a similar identity.

This is why someone can simultaneously be a fan of Lebron James while not necessarily being a fan of the Lakers. The identity they have constructed for themselves as a Lebron fan slots into whatever team Lebron currently plays for. At this moment they are Lakers fans but that is conditional upon Lebron playing for them.

Let’s delve a level deeper. Now that we have an identity constructed around the idea of being a fan, we have the “code”. Baudrillard says “that life, or reality can be subordinated to or replaced by a set of categories. The code is what subordinates life to a particular set of systems.” In sports the interactions of fans and fandoms during a game, or in a league and the reality created by that league can be considered the “reality” in which the fans are interacting.

These are the agreed upon rules of engagement for fans when they interact with other fans. Within the confines of a game for fans, nothing else matters. Nothing else exists. Getting fired from your job or getting dumped by your significant other doesn’t sting as hard when your team wins. If your team wins the championship, this feeling can extend much further than the moment of the championship game.

Inflation may be going up, and the country may be engaged in endless wars, but dammit the Celtics are NBA champions! In these moments your identity as the fan of a championship team keeps the simulation of sports relevant. It only matters if other people acknowledge it or else the simulation is ineffective. Sports are a simulation in the same way Disneyland is a simulation. As Baudrillard states in Simulacra and Simulation:

“The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp. Whence the debility of this imaginary, its infantile degeneration. This world wants to be childish in or­der to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is every­ where-that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childish­ness.”

This brings us to a point where Jaylen Brown’s statement became prophetic. In 2020, in the midst of a month long quarantine at the onset of a global pandemic, society came to a halt. Reality asserted itself. As a result, sports had to come to a temporary halt. In that time people could no longer be satisfied to distract themselves with television, streaming, social media, or sports. Whether they liked it or not, life was at a halt, there was a virus spreading through society, the economy was collapsing, and the anxiety of uncertainty took a primary position in peoples’ lives.

What resulted from this was a series of general anger, civil unrest and rioting that was not just confined to a single group of people. People protested against the government and people protested because of the death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer. For a moment it felt as if we were on the verge of something significant politically with people upset with the realization of the 20 years of government infringement upon civil liberties, people were upset with the inequality in our society - socially and economically - and people were upset by how poorly our country was being run top to bottom by the Trump administration in a moment of great crisis.

Of course we remember how this went right? The protests after being overtaken by rioting, died down, the quarantine was lifted with conditions, and the NBA season returned in the form of the NBA bubble. Other leagues followed suit and before we knew it, people were attending NFL games without any care or fear that there was still a pandemic happening. This is what Jaylen Brown was referring to when he was stating that sports were a mechanism of control. The identities people constructed as a fan of their favorite team superseded their identity as a citizen and the idea of the common good and people, who vehemently opposed even going outside at one point in time, were fully indulging in their team’s fandom in the company of tens of thousands of people.

This is simply one instance of the simulation of sports becoming a primary driver over our identity as a citizen acting in the common good of our neighbors. Think about the number of times where sports and arguing with other self professed fans mattered more to your identity and sense of self than the “real” concrete parts of your life.

Now lets bring this full circle with coming back to Jaylen Brown and why he is not “marketable” and why it could have been possible (but of course we cannot truly know at the moment) that Nike had a hand in him not being chosen for the Olympics. Jaylen Brown as a player doesn’t fully participate in the simulation of basketball and sports as whole. His identity isn’t solely dependent upon him as an athlete. He is a multifaceted human being with interests ranging as wide as chess, piano, robotics, politics, social and economic activism.

When he interacts with people in this simulation, he does not fully commit himself to the widely agreed upon contract by all of the participants: this is a fantasy, don’t bring reality into this! This is why there is such a strong sentiment that athletes should just “shut up and dribble”. They are nothing more than representations of the team or their public persona as a player. Jaylen Brown is an individual who meets with the governor of Massachusetts to discuss how he can help his wider community in Boston. He is an individual that wants to educate people on the panopticism and surveillance in our society. He wants to make a difference in society outside of sports and he uses his platform as an athlete to be able to do so. Nike cannot monetize civil commitment to societal betterment without the possibilities of their profits being affected.

The very nature of the reality behind the political simulation we participate is that corporations, our political parties, and many of our public figures simply do not have our interest in mind. They care about power and money as a means for their own advancement at our expense. If they can get us to go along with the means of our own subjugation and disenfranchisement, that is all the sweeter.

Players like Jaylen Brown cannot be allowed to have a Michael Jordan or Lebron James level platform, being a billionaire and having the means to participate in society in the same league as the corporate and political elites. He might just have the ability break through the simulation and shake our society into consciousness just as he routinely breaks the simulation of sports.

Which is why most people don’t know much about Jaylen Brown other than what he has done on the court.

As a culture we are obsessed with heroes. Our movies are centered around them, given the main character of a film is usually called the “hero”, and in recent decades literally with the popularity of superhero movies. We are a culture that looks to entertainers and celebrities for guidance and leadership. We have even historically expected our presidents to conform to the role of the heroic leader. Every Democrat president fashions themselves in some way after Franklin Delano Roosevelt and every Republican president emulates Ronald Reagan.

One of the most culturally powerful and most pervasive heroic myth though comes from the the realm of basketball. The heroic myth of Michael Jordan. His last name Jordan is synonymous with greatness and he is routinely credited as being the greatest of all time and was a transcendent talent that was important for the marketing of the NBA and the sport of basketball at large. Jordan’s success helped build the global popularity of the league as young basketball players all around the world increasingly wanted to “be like Mike”. The legacy of Michael Jordan has become a monolith of sort. It was carefully shaped by Michael Jordan himself, most recently in the heavily curated documentary The Last Dance. It has also become an industry perpetuated by a media circuit that profited from his stardom and is now cashing in on upholding his legacy. This is something I've dubbed the “Big Jordan Lobby”.

Jordan has been made the principal archetype of greatness in the NBA. The standard to which every great player and their career is measured. The more a player’s game and mentality resembles Jordan the more they are celebrated. This of course provides endless talking points and debates that form core programming of mainstream outlets such as ESPN. It’s easy and it’s lucrative. But this way of viewing players has increasingly become counterproductive in assessing the greatness of players as the league has changed significantly in the 28 years since Jordan’s retirement. It hinders our appreciation of the abundance of unique talent we have in the NBA today.

The Myth of Michael Jordan: The Hero’s Journey

In the early days of the NBA, in the 1960s when the league was beginning to form the identity and brand that we understand the NBA to be today, two archetypes of greatness came to dominate the league.

Bill Russell was the defensive anchor and team leader of a Boston Celtics dynasty that won eleven championships. These teams were full of great players that were united together as a team by the leadership of Bill Russell. Through a dedication to the intangibles of defense and rebounding and his unwavering resolve in the face of adversity, the Celtics succeeded in large part due to Russell’s leadership. Russell was the sport’s greatest winner.

In contrast to Russell, Wilt Chamberlain represented overwhelming physical dominance. With his height and unmatched athleticism, Wilt just simply imposed his will upon anything that stood in front of him. As a result he regularly put up absurd statistics, some of which still stand to this day as untouchable. The success of Wilt’s Sixers and Lakers leveraged his overwhelming presence and gravity to build an unstoppable team.

Jordan’s success sits at the intersection of these two primal forces. He was the consummate winner that Russell was, winning six championships without losing a single time approximating Russell’s eight in a row and 11-1 overall NBA finals record. And he was also, like Wilt, a ball dominant force who imposed his will upon the game putting up ridiculous statistics in the process. On top of this, he had a insatiable, pathological drive to win at all costs, taking the burden of winning upon himself in big moments.

Jordan’s career roughly follows a familiar narrative of a hero’s journey, the narrative template identified by Joseph Campbell as one of the most fundamental to western storytelling. His call to adventure begins humbly with him being unable to make his high school basketball team. From that point on he dedicated himself to improving and his ascendance begins. Along the way he was tested at various points until he reached a near insurmountable test in defeating the Detroit Pistons. After reaching his lowest point losing to the Pistons four years in a row, in a moment of transformation he finally overcomes them en route to his first of six championships, after which he retires on top.

These are some of the elements that make up the myth of Michael Jordan. This myth has been carefully cultivated by a media intent upon banking on his marketability, Michael Jordan himself in the interest of shaping his legacy, and the post-Jordan sports media, many of which witnessed Jordan’s career, who have taken this legacy and enshrined it as the platonic ideal of winning in basketball.

The Shadow of Micheal Jordan and the Big Jordan Lobby

In the landscape of the modern sports discourse, the myth of Michael Jordan looms large over every superstar that has followed him. Kobe Bryant famously had to contend with the Michael Jordan comparisons throughout his career, much of which he welcomed, given he openly admitted he modeled his game after Jordan. And then there is LeBron James whose entire life has been marked by this comparison the moment he was anointed as “the chosen one” in high school.

Today the debate has split between the poles of Michael Jordan and LeBron James mostly due to the fans of both players who have an interest in promoting their favorite player as the greatest of all time. This debate is also a lucrative one as it provides for endless debate, much of which is dependent upon how you define success and greatness. And therein lies the issue.

The way we define success has become severely warped over time to the point that we expect every great player to follow the myth of Michael Jordan, a myth that was in itself uniquely great in the context of NBA basketball. If every player followed the trajectory of Jordan, winning six championships, never losing in the NBA finals, and being the ball dominant leader of the team with a killer mentality, Michael Jordan would cease being the greatest of all time and would become the original template of a mass produced design of superstar. His career might become as commonplace as Ikea furniture.

This way of defining success also obscures our view of unique talent that has come and gone in the league and the unique talent that exists in the league today. In a way this is all somewhat intentional. The sheer unattainability of Jordan’s greatness is leveraged as a battering ram by what has become the against any player that might threatened that legacy and serves as something that every superstar has to contend with whether they want to or not. This is the Big Jordan lobby that has a vested interest in preserving the legacy of Michael Jordan as the sole model in which a true superstar should follow.

The Reality of Parity of the Modern NBA

In the context of the modern NBA this way of viewing greatness has become counterproductive for appreciating the abundance of unique talent in the league today. The context of the league has changed significantly and much of these expectations hasn’t adjusted to these changes, but rather resisted them. The Jordan model at times is used as a kind of constrain to what is a great basketball career and what great basketball looks like to resist the changes in basketball that many viewers of previous eras have not enjoyed watching.

The much maligned three-point shot became an equalizer in talent as players over time have developed an ability to shoot it at a high percentage with a high volume leading to on average, role players and bench players being significantly better than they have in the past. This has completely reshaped the league. With better spacing opening up the floor significantly, offenses and defenses have been in an arms race around the reality of anyone on the floor being able to hit a three pointer. At its best modern offenses hum and sing like that of the Golden State Warriors dynasty, with constant motion and ball moment. At its worse modern offense resembles a three point shooting contest which outlier shooting can overcome all odds reducing the game to a track meet. Defenses have had to adjust to both of these realities becoming more flexible relying upon the ability to switch defenders around the perimeter and on pick and roll actions. Defenses have had to focus on split second decision making to counter the often split second decision making of an offense predicated on reacting to what the defense is presenting to them. This has given us great defenses such as that Warriors dynasty, the 2021 Milwaukee Bucks, the 2022 and 2024 Boston Celtics, and the 2024 Minnesota Timberwolves. It has developed to the point that good defense and offense look very different today than they did in previous eras. That doesn’t make them any better or any worse. When it works it works.

This change in style has also coincided with a pivotal point that occurs every decade or so, with the changing of the guard of superstars. The stars of the late 2000s and 2010s are approaching the end of their careers including that of LeBron James, whose 20 years have spanned longer than the lives of some current NBA players. This changing of the guard was symbolically apparent these playoffs with Kevin Durant, Kawhi Leonard, and LeBron James all being knocked out in the first round, and Steph Curry failing to even make the post season.

A power vacuum has opened up in the NBA, one that hasn’t been seen in decades and at this moment parity in competition is returning. With high levels of uncertainty around who will be the next transcendently dominating player, the Big Jordan Lobby has been in overdrive trying to shape the narrative and anoint a successor. Due to this parity in competition, this search has been complicated by the inability of the superstars in the league to dominate as we have expected them to.

We have seen Kawhi Leonard and Giannis Antetokounmpo fall from grace with early playoff exits, Jimmy Butler usurp his position as the great pretender, Steph Curry succumb to the limitation of his teammates (especially those of Draymond Green), and most recently Nikola Jokic fail to fulfill his quest to repeat as an NBA champion in the face of his three MVPs in four years. With the advent of Jokic’s Nuggets being ousted from the playoffs at the hands of the Minnesota Timberwolves, there has been a clear trend of NBA champions being unable to defend their titles since the Golden State Warriors dynasty. In the past six seasons there have been six different champions, and nine different conference champions with only the Warriors, Heat and Celtics being able to make multiple finals runs. This is what parity looks like.

The 2024 NBA champion Boston Celtics are a team that embodies the ethos and trends of this era. If the 90s were defined by a ball dominant leader, the 2000s, by a ball dominant duo, and the 2010s by a big three, this Celtics were a team with no apparent leader, no single player dominating the box score, and every single player in the starting five having the ability to do so. The anointed star of the team Jayson Tatum is a humble individual who does not demand the spotlight (nor does he demand the ball at the end of games) and excels at the dirty work that keeps the team rolling. This is how you get an NBA finals where Jaylen Brown dominates the first two games to a level worthy of his Finals MVP, followed by a 26 point game from Jrue Holiday and a close out game with Jayson Tatum scoring 31 points. To look at this team and to say any single player is the "best” or any single player should be dominating is to miss the point of the team construction and to miss the point of this era of basketball. This era is not about stars dominating but rather a player’s ability to utilize their unique talents to fulfill the role their team needs from them in an elite way. This is why Jayson Tatum is the most fitting “star” for the Boston Celtics. Though he may not always score as much as people may like, the Celtics offense operates through him, his playmaking and his commitment to defending multiple positions and being a primary rebounder. This allows other elite players like Jaylen Brown, Kristaps Porzingis, Jrue Holiday, and Derrick White the room to be elite in what they do without worrying about picking up the slack for the team’s shortcomings.

This era of the NBA is loaded with many more unique talent with players such as Nikola Jokic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Joel Embiid, Luka Doncic, Devin Booker, Anthony Edwards, Jaylen Brunson, Tyrese Haliburton, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Ja Morant, Zion Williamson, Paolo Banchero, Chet Holmgren, and Victor Wembanyama. This list goes on. It is becoming increasingly counterproductive to impose a single narrative of greatness when the very definition of it is in the process of being diversified with all these different and unique styles of players that are all competing to leave their mark on the game, many of which are still in the early stages of their careers.

The situation the NBA finds itself in reminiscent of the retirement of Bill Russell and the era of parity in the 1970s that followed. This was an era that saw the ascendence of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar overtaking Wilt Chamberlain as the best big man, and the merger adding four new teams with electrifying players such as of Dr. J and George Gervin. In this timespan 8 different teams won championships in the span of a decade with only the Knicks and Celtics winning more than once and no team being able to repeat. This era was full of great talent, many of which would go on to transform and shape how the game of basketball was played. The seeds of the fast paced electrifying free flowing 1980s were laid, as well as the hard nosed defensive teams that would also come to mark that decade. We are in the middle of witnessing such a shift yet again in basketball and we should appreciate the talent before us. Appreciate that there will never be another Jordan rather than lamenting it.

In my family debating is a pastime for us. Sports, politics, music, no subject is off limits. But the most frequently debated subject amongst my immediate family as well as my extended family is the sport of basketball. Basketball is something that transcends generations as everyone has strong opinions about it and an encyclopedic set of statistics, anecdotes, and examples to back them up. We have Celtics fans, Mavericks fans, Pacers fans, Louisville fans, and even Kentucky fans! One of my parents favorite things to do during the basketball season is to visit my paternal grandfather and debate with him about the latest happenings in the sport. My grandfather at the ripe age of 91 is a fount of knowledge, wisdom, opinions and hot takes that have been cultivated over many decades of playing and watching basketball. It is especially fun and sometimes funny to hear his opinions on the latest debates, controversies, and playoff matchups. It’s almost necessary to find these things out right as they happen. Recently, I had the privilege of interviewing him and asking him about his perspective on basketball and finding out how all of these debates and hot takes going around ESPN and social media appear to someone like him with the vantage point of five decades of watching basketball. These are some of the lessons I learned from how he approaches these conversations.

“You can’t compare players from different eras”

One of the points that grandpa emphasized the most across the hour I spoke to him was the progress and evolution of the game of basketball. Each era had its own distinct playing style centered around the unique talents suited specifically for that time. For him it’s not a useful conversation to compare someone like Shaquille O’Neal to someone like Giannis Antetokounmpo or even to someone like Wilt Chamberlain. There are too many what ifs that factor into these types of debates. Yes Shaq was one of the most dominant forces ever. But Shaq as we knew him was not conditioned to play in a league like the modern day where shooting, spacing and pace are the utmost importance. As grandpa said “He’d fall over and die halfway before the game is over…plus, you have to be within three feet of your man. If his man is standing over by the three point line, where is he going to be?”

The progress of the modern era

For all of the constant negativity directed at the modern NBA by people who prefer older generations of basketball, Grandpa had a lot of positive things to say about the state of the NBA today. The level of talent and skills across the league have never been as high with any player having the ability to shoot and score at a high volume when asked. He has never seen an era with the level of parity in competition that the NBA has today. Back then “there was no room for anyone but the superstars”. He pointed to the feud between Michael Jordan and his teammate BJ Armstrong with Jordan demanding to know whose team this was. The ability for players to get along today is a strong suit, not a shortcoming of modern players. It allows for players to more readily embrace different roles without worrying as much about stepping on the feet of the superstars and risk being alienated. He loves to see the players on the bench jumping up and down and celebrating their team’s success regardless of who is leading the team at any given moment. A team that he named that embodied these qualities he likes about the modern NBA was the Golden State Warriors dynasty.

He placed his view of the NBA today within the context of technological progress throughout his lifetime. Being someone who enjoys cooking he gave the air fryer as an example of something that has made cooking a diverse array of foods more accessible to people and has made the cooking process for him much easier. The level of skill amongst all players in the league, the three-point shooting, the complexity of offenses are all part in parcel of an overall improvement in the quality of the sport as well as the entertainment value.

His era of basketball

When I asked Grandpa about what it was like to watch the NBA in decades like the 1960s and 1970s, he flat out states “frankly it was kind of boring”. He didn’t enjoy how much the superstars were glorified. Everything they did was beautiful or magnificent. He compared it to how the golfer Tiger Woods was treated in his heyday. “If you said anything about Tiger, you were gone”. The games themselves were also inaccessible to most people as they were generally region locked. Early on he had to listen to the games on the radio. He said that games generally only came on television on Sundays and you only ever saw players outside of your region when the playoffs began.

Grandpa balanced his views of the 1960s and 1970s though when he began to talk about individual players. One of the players he noted that wasn’t glorified by the media of the time was Wilt Chamberlain. “They didn’t like Wilt. So there was no glory thrown his way because Wilt was arrogant. Like Wilt would say preseason, ‘what am I looking forward to this season? I think I’ll average about 50’ and then he’d go out and do it.” Though he didn’t explicitly state Wilt Chamberlain as being one of his favorite players, he spoke for about ten minutes about Wilt’s records, accolades, and funny stories about him.

Bill Russell was a player who is his peer, being only a year younger than him, so he was a player that Grandpa followed throughout his career. When I asked him what the oldest NBA finals he remembered watching, he named the only instance where Russell’s Celtics lost in the finals in 1958 at the hands of the St. Louis Hawks before going on to win 8 straight NBA championships. He went on to say that he remembered Russell’s rookie season because they were peers.

The other player Grandpa named was Oscar Robertson. “Before all this Michael Jordan stuff came along, the prototypical all American boy was Oscar Robertson. Every team he played on from probably mid high school, the whole starting five averaged double figures. For me that’s a point guard getting the job done.”

People’s bias toward their own era

Grandpa contrasted the way that Oscar Robertson played to Michael Jordan and weighed in on his opinions about the GOAT debates (greatest of all time). “My take on this Michael Jordan and the likes of that stuff is that most of the people who will say that are within Michael Jordan’s era. You won’t find any young dudes 20 or 25 now saying Michael Jordan is the best. They’re gonna go with something they know something about”. He stated that everyone likes to think that their time was the best time. Placing this statement placed in the context of his views about the evolution of the game, it makes sense that he wouldn’t tether himself to any era of basketball in specific. He has seen many players come and go and has seen many careers play out. There have always been great players and there will always be great players.

In this light, Grandpa also doesn’t appreciate how statistics from different eras are compared on in one-to-one way without context. He pointed out talking points he heard to glorify more recent players’ accomplishments at the expense of older eras such as the notion that Caitlin Clarke surpassed Pete Maravich’s scoring record. In absolute terms, she surely did. But when placed in context, Pete Maravich played around half the games that Caitlin Clark did to get his numbers without a three-point shot at his disposal. In that light Pete Maravich’s record still stands as an impressive scoring achievement and should not be diminished in conversations.

He did however go on to talk about the impact Caitlin Clark is having on women’s basketball and the viewership she is bringing. Her and her peers are bringing money, endorsements, and attention at a college level in way that he hasn’t seen before. He has even kept up with Caitlin Clark’s WNBA career, having a television package that allows him to watch WNBA games as prodigiously as he does NBA and college basketball games.

Grandpa’s hot takes

My conversation with Grandpa was not devoid of his own spicy or hot takes about basketball. These are the places where you can really see his strong opinion shine through. When talking about 90s basketball, he noted that basketball is supposed to be a non-contact sport and that allowing players to wrestle and tackle each other isn’t good for the health of the game. It diminishes skill and reduces the game to a mud fight.

Regarding the MVP award, Grandpa believes the award itself is extremely subjective and relies on your own definition of what “most valuable” means. For him, the most valuable player on a team is the player that cannot be removed from the team. If that player were to be removed, then the team itself would cease to function as it should. In that light he named Draymond Green as the MVP of the Warriors dynasty, pointing to his importance to the coherence of the team’s defense and defensive identity. We saw the importance of Green this year when the Warriors failed to make the playoffs mainly due to the significant time Green spent out due to injury and suspensions.

When talking about the 1980s Celtics, Grandpa named Kevin McHale as the most important player on that team due to his dominance in the paint and the high percentage he shot the ball. He presented the conundrum of guarding McHale one on one to focus on Larry Bird, or doubling McHale and allowing Larry Bird to kill you. He said he would most certainly double McHale and live with Bird’s high scoring over McHale’s consistent scoring.

And of course Grandpa brought the conversation back to the ongoing 5 year argument my parents have been having with him regarding Jayson Tatum and the Boston Celtics. For my entire life Grandpa has been no fan of the Boston Celtics, and always has reserved his severe criticism for them. He criticized the 2008 Celtics as much as people criticized the Celtics today (though this did not mean he was enthusiastic about Kobe’s Lakers either). Grandpa stated that we need to “stop making excuses for Jayson Tatum.” Grandpa doesn’t care how young Tatum is. He’s been in the league for seven seasons. His development should reflect that reality and not his age. Grandpa also stated that he did not understand what Boston’s offense was trying to do. He compared it to the Indiana Pacers’ offense that similarly relies on penetration and the resultant ball movement, except where the Pacers pass the ball and keep it moving across the floor, the Celtics move the ball around seemingly static players across the three point line. He doesn’t like the stagnancy their offense can have as a result of how they play.

Why we are Celtics fans

This debate has been the most recurring debate. The merit of the Boston Celtics. At one point last year, Grandpa grew so exasperated with our support for the Boston Celtics that he asked how we got to be Celtics fans in the first place. This is where my dad informed him that it was he, who made my dad a Celtics fan when he brought a Bill Russell poster and placed it in his room as a child telling him that this man was the first black coach in the NBA. Nonetheless, he was surprised to hear that he was the reason for our Celtics support.

How players supported themselves after the NBA

In my conversation with Grandpa, he brought up the fact that Russell was the first black coach and the first and only player-coach to win a championship. He noted that this was indeed a feature of how the old Boston Celtics operated and how players elevated themselves to the next level following their retirement. Given players didn’t make that much money compared to modern players, coaching was the obvious next step to prolong your career beyond your 30s and that the Celtics had a system that cultivated this. Russell, K.C. Jones, Don Nelson, Tom Heinsohn, were all players from that era who went on to be head coaches. Grandpa also noted that because of the relatively low salaries for a sport where you retire in your 30s, many players of his era got an education in college and capitalized on that after retirement being able to have careers outside of basketball. He loved the fact that Oscar Robertson, despite knowing he was better than most players in the NBA, still graduated from college before entering the league.

Insights into Grandpa’s childhood

One of the most interesting parts of my conversation with grandpa was when I asked him how he first got into basketball. Unlike most of us that grew up in a time where basketball games were regularly broadcast and highlights were abound, this was not the case in the 1930s and 1940s. He said that of course he was always a Louisville Cardinals fan, but his interest in basketball came early from the very fact that there was a basketball court down the street from his house. Back in his time, there were all kinds of organized activities for children. The park became the center of recreation. This was mainly made possible by adult supervision in the form of park police and that children could stay at the park the entire day because of all the things organized there. At his local park there was basketball, paddle tennis, and softball. In this time baseball reigned supreme though, and was the sport that was the most organized. The sports-centered recreation for children was a result of not having anything else for children to do. Unlike today, shopping and as a result consumerism was inaccessible to black people because of segregation. Malls did not exist. The neighborhoods were generally safe and computers and social media were not around to keep children inside all day.

For me, hearing these kinds of stories and anecdotes are gems because of how much insight they give into a time that most of us today can’t even fathom. 90 years is an abstraction to most and across those 90 years Grandpa has seen and experienced a lot of change, much of which, such as technological change he has embraced. Some of the social change, especially regarding the the condition of black people today and their communities one can only lament. But these are the things that come along with having the privilege to live and thrive at such an advanced age. On Grandpa’s 90th birthday last year when I called him, I asked what it felt like to be 90. He answered simply and humbly, “At my age everyday is a blessing to be alive.” He cherishes everyday of his life and is an example for us all on how to live our lives and age with grace. It was truly a blessing to be able to have this conversation with him, and hopefully will be the first of many that I will have the privilege to write about.

8 bars with, is a series on Educated Guesses where we offer up 8 questions to a special guest for them to ponder and freestyle on. The questions aren't necessarily questions as much as they are prompts or linguistic ink blots meant to stimulate thought. The responses can be short and pithy, long and loquacious or somewhere in between.

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Alicia Hall Moran is a classical-trained, jazz-informed artist who - with passage and purpose - reimagines everything from the main aria of Madame Butterfly to Motown. She debuted on Broadway in the 2012 Tony-winning revival of Porgy and Bess, and has received many commissions, fellowships and residences. Moran has made memorable and moving art with many artists, including choreographer Bill T. Jones, artist Carrie Mae Weems and jazz saxophonist Charles Lloyd. Moran released two albums, Heavy Blue in 2015, and Here Today in 2017, with a new album debuting this year. Moran’s performance works include Black Wall Street, inspired by her father’s Wall Street career and the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, and her musical Breaking Ice, and its sequel Cold Blooded dealing with race and ice skating.

Moran was born in Redwood City, California to a family who passed their generational improvements in education, the arts, and finance down to her. Moran’s father, Ira D. Hall was an engineer, treasurer, and investment banker. Her mother, Carole F. Hall worked in the book publishing industry. The family lived on New York’s West Side, and later moved to Stamford, Connecticut. Moran earned a BA in Music from Barnard College (with a minor in anthropology), and a BM in classical vocal performance from the Manhattan School of Music, where she met her future husband, pianist/composer, and MacArthur award fellow Jason Moran. Their most celebrated 2019 collaboration is Two Wings: The Music of Black America in Migration: a Carnegie Hall commissioned concert. The Morans live in Harlem with their teenage twin sons. 

1. Bloodlines: Al Hibbler and Hall Johnson

What did I understand of the great Al Hibbler back then?  I knew he was my grandmother’s cousin. I knew that his was the great big barrel wave of a voice on the whopping hit Unchained Melody (1955). He brought [his musical] language to Jay McShann’s band, Count Basie and Duke Ellington’s Orchestra, singing on all 8 of Ellington’s Carnegie Hall concerts in the 1940s.

Per my maternal family tradition, my mother told me I would be named for Alice, who was the grandmother of Hall Johnson. But the improvisation to Alicia suits me just fine.  Alice, a former slave, sang the songs that formed in Hall Johnson, my great great uncle what Alvin Ailey called the “blood memory” that inspired Johnson to an international and Hollywood career as choral director, arranger, composer, educator, violinist, and musical director. Johnson taught German diction to opera singers including Shirley Verrett and famed Lincoln Memorial contralto, Marian Anderson. He created arrangements of spirituals sung to this day.

2. The Great Migration to Connecticut

My mother was born in Pennsylvania, but her family migrated to the West Coast during WWII. My father’s family originated in Oklahoma. He went to the West Coast for college, where he met my mother. So I was born on the West Coast, but my parents moved to New York City just before my sister was born.  Following the dream of working in the city, but living in the country, they moved us all out to Connecticut when I was 8. If people ask me where I’m from, I usually say Connecticut because that explains me: I am a Black suburbanite living in Harlem.

 3. Skating while Black

I’ve been skating since I was a kid—I was on a synchronized figure skating team, sort of like a drill team on ice, called the Shadows. We wore half black and half white uniforms and skated to That’s Amore by Dean Martin. I was one half of the anchor, or the pivot center, of the pinwheel.  You dig your toe pick in the ice, link arms with the next tallest girl, and pull in (with grace) for your life as these elite skaters on either side of the pinwheel fly on skates like dolphins swim. I was forced to quit when I joined the high school chamber choir.  But clearly I never got over it because now as an adult I’m back. And adult skating is booming.

I don’t want to be too basic about it, but brown skin shows up extraordinarily beautifully on the ice. We dazzle out there. I love how time suspends on the edges of my blades on the ice. I love how my legs feel. Did you see Usher on roller skates in the Super Bowl?  How he glided by the cameras? It’s such a powerful sort of stance.

4. The Eureka moment when you fell in love with opera

I fell in love with opera so many different times. Watching Shirley Verrett put on a scarf and look in the mirror, that made me love opera. Hearing Kathleen Battle on record singing Purcell, and then seeing that she was a Black woman with a perm—or a billowy blowout—in the 1980s, that made me think I could sing opera. New York City Opera’s Dialogue of the Carmelites directed by Tazewell Thompson, showed me just how racing and immediate opera could be. Hearing Jessye Norman sing live during the Olympics in Atlanta, and watching Leontyne Price, in the middle of her book signing at Tower Records become Aïda, impromptu, in the middle of signing somebody’s book…

I add the moments and glimpses, and gestures; my voice teachers sitting at their pianos during my lessons over these many years: when the warmth of Hilda Harris’ mezzo floated a major scale, or Adele Addison caressed a word in a poem—these make you fall in love with opera, too. Opera embodies a belief that the most important things that need to be said can only be sung.  If you don’t believe that, then you cannot do this.

5. "Who gets to be on stage?"

I was interviewing Tania León for the New York Amsterdam News for a feature on Black Music Month. The editor’s idea was that Black people in Classical music should also have a part in the celebration.  Tania won the Pulitzer for her symphony, Stride, writing her way through thick orchestration and polyrhythms with sheer mastery and care.  During the interview she asks me, “who gets to be on stage?” at a point when our conversation touched on her colleague and friend, the late avant-garde classical composer Julius Eastman…

Tania asked a rhetorical question about this conflict between what artists sacrifice for Art: Do we build our stages, or do we need somebody’s permission? Who gets to be on stage?

6. Working with Jason

When we hit that wavelength, the apartment shakes!  We don’t have to always discuss history or musicology anymore. We live here, and it is close.  Sometimes even the pigeons coo along.  What we make is in nature now, and it’s beyond art forms or criss-crossing genres. I think Jason and I are at that place where we are growing closer, by not changing with the changing winds around us. I think we are there. We've been through some shit, and artistically we have never stopped making things together.

7. Fun with Alicia and Jason

During the pandemic, we were blessed to make Family Ball, a theatrical starring just Jason and I scrolling through our record collection, for ICA/Boston; and we made Chantal, an opera aria for mezzo-soprano with orchestra, commissioned by Washington National Opera that premiered at the Kennedy Center.  We also brought Two Wings to the Mississippi Museum of Art and Baltimore Museum of Art, backed by Black female curators.  For us, that was Two Wings history!

8. Raising Twins

God outdid Himself with the multiples. These guys of mine, who are 16 now, are phenomenal. My mother once told me that all I’d have to do as a parent is just create a child that I would want to be around. And honestly, that has been the only real advice I needed. That alone will keep you busy for 18 years. When they leave for college I am definitely going to be a puddle of tears. I could not be prouder of them. They will be my people, sent off into the world.

9. Bonus Question:

The future of Blacks in opera

It is a fact. Can there be any question?

Dear 15 year old Kennedy,

Twenty eight. It feel so surreal to even say that. We made it to twenty eight! This year was filled with some life changing decisions and lessons. Twenty seven taught us gratitude, dealbreakers, and most of all faith.

I can say that our journey is essentially one of faith. It all starts back with you. The fifteen year old girl who thought life was over. The fifteen year old girl who was so broken by life she deluded herself into thinking that it needed to end right then and there. But guess what? We have lived 13 more years. And man have we LIVED those years. Our twenties have been some of the greatest years of our life. I look back on our journey in Houston and I think and I appreciate the woman we have become: A woman who loves God. A woman who loves herself. A woman who knows what it is that she deserves and does not accept anything less. A woman who enjoys having fun and living life. A woman who has experienced the magnitude of Gods grace and mercy.

The lessons we learned at fifteen set the foundation for us to become this woman. Moving to Houston five years ago was a leap of faith. I look back and think of how scared I was but excited at the same time. I couldn’t wait to live this Carrie Bradshaw life like in Sex and the City. But I was so scared to leave the comfort of being close to home. But now it’s been five years and moving to Houston was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made in our life. Now, unfortunately we have to say goodbye. But for good reason! We are going to be a DOCTOR. That’s right!

Kennedy Guess PhD, CCC-SLP loading…crazy right? I couldn’t wait to get out of school now we are signing up for four more years and moving to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Our city days have ended. It’s funny because I find myself with the same fear I did when I moved here. But now as I reflect I know it’s a familiar one. I know that God has guided us to this point. I know we are poised to have an impact on this world and taking this next step is the continuation of that lifelong journey.

I am going to miss Houston, the city I fell in love with. Remember dreaming of someday finally getting out of Pittsburgh? Remember dreaming of having your own place? Well now, these are all realities. Living here reminds me I am in the walking manifestations of the dreams you had. Now I am walking into the dreams you never even were capable of dreaming of. We received a fully funded PhD. We published a chapter in a neuroscience textbook. We have an amazing job working in research and helping patients within hours of their stroke. We are loved by our family and the family we have built for ourself in Houston. This year has taught us gratitude.

The last thing I want to leave you with is, you accept the love you think you deserve. Sometimes it’s hard to remember. But like Daddy said, “finding love isn’t necessarily about what you want. It’s more about what you refuse to put up with.” We learned what we deserve and not to accept anything less. God orders our steps in the direction of his will. When you trust his will you will be given things you never even thought you could imagine. I’ll leave you with these final words in our year of faith.

1. Trust, Love and Serve God.

2. Respect your boundaries.

3. Take those leaps of faith even if they don’t make sense at the time, even if they scare the crap out of you.

4. Date someone who is your best friend, that you can just be an unfiltered version of yourself, build a friendship and allow it to be the foundation of something beautiful.

5. Let go of the things you cannot control because sometimes it turns out in ways you couldn’t imagine.

Love,

28 year old Kennedy

When my husband Andre and I moved to Saint James Court over 3 years ago we were excited to live in such a beautiful community. People would come from all over Louisville to take pictures in front of the Saint James Court fountain. The Louisville tour trollies often brought visitors to view the fountain. We were especially proud because our condominium sat right in front of the famous fountain. But not too long after we moved in, I started to notice another part of our new community: a sweet little cat sitting in front of our condo. We asked our neighbors Ron and Kathleen in our complex, “Is this your cat?” They said, “No, she belongs to the neighborhood. Her name is Tubby.”

While sitting on the lovely veranda on warm days, I could watch Tubby sit out in the sun and watch all the Tubby fans walk by, stop to say hello, and pet her. She was truly a part of the Saint James Court community even more than the fountain.

Little did I know that like Tubby, we would become a big part of this community. Andre and I have lived in other parts of Louisville, in Jersey City and Montclair, New Jersey, and in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. But living on Saint James Court has become a truly different experience. It taught me the value of being part of a neighborhood and what it meant to be a true neighbor to someone.

Our first encounter with this community was meeting all the other condo owners in our building. They went out of their way to make us feel welcome in the middle of a pandemic! They always greeted us with a smile and genuinely wanted to know how we were doing. Our first connection was with Jack and Diane. Their back door shared a common porch sitting area with our back door.  I would get a simple text saying “check the back porch” and there would often be some cooked dishes awaiting me to bring inside to heat up. Our other porch neighbor Laura would also hit me up with a similar text with fresh veggies or peaches from the peach truck awaiting my back door. Diane knew that my husband was vegan. She and her husband Jack were total foodies and always knew the best places in Louisville to find a great meal, plus, once owned a vegan restaurant in Chicago and was a great cook. Diane would open her home on a whim and have an impromptu wine get together in her condo where I got to meet many of the other Saint James Court neighbors.

Every year my birthday happens during the same week as the famous Saint James Court Art Show in the first week of October. For my first art show weekend my neighbors all jumped in and made sure that I knew the lay of the land, where to park, and how to survive the hustle and bustle of the busy art show weekend. On Sunday, the final day of my first art show weekend, my fellow condo mates along with a few others on Saint James Court met at my condo to throw me a surprise birthday gathering! When my doorbell rang, wine, charcuterie boards, gifts and a cake suddenly appeared out of nowhere! It was a beautiful surprise and truly meant a lot to me.

I have many other memories with Jack and Diane. They have a beautiful collection of art and they would open their door to invite anyone in at any time.  When my grown children would come home to visit during the holidays, Diane would invite them to her place. My son would be at her condo playing the piano and when my house was super cramped my daughter just had to knock on Jack and Diane’s door to be able to use their bathroom. If that is not family, I don’t know what is!

We often joked that Diane was not allowed to purchase any more art from the famous Saint James Art Show because her collection was so extensive, she would have to start nailing art to the ceiling!

I have had many more encounters with these wonderful neighbors. Diane was an animal activist. If someone’s pet was sick, she would pay the vet bill. She was a member of Special Paws that took care of small dogs in Jeffersontown. She volunteered at the Conrad Caldwell Museum on St James Court and often pushed them to have racial equity on the board by nominating people of color to participate on their board. She loved Shakespeare in the park and enjoyed the Louisville Orchestra.

Upon her sudden and unexpected passing the Saint James Court family along with her husband mourned her loss. Losing someone with so much personality and community involvement hit the heart of the neighborhood. The community offered support to her husband by dropping off food, checking on him with texts and phone calls, helping him care for their personal pets and invited him to small get togethers. Her big beautiful quirky spirit will truly be missed because she was one of many neighbors that made the Saint James Court community a special place to live. She demonstrated through her care and actions what it meant to be a neighbor. Tomorrow is not promised so appreciate and “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

My nephew once told me that he did not know a black man with an advanced degree who was not an athlete. Unfortunately, this is the harsh reality for minorities in my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. We are fed a narrative that sports are the only avenue to success, and football is one of the biggest, most celebrated there. However, rarely are individuals educated about the immediate and long-term ramifications of sports related concussions, an injury very prominent at all levels of the sport of football. I know many people who are currently dealing with short term memory loss, chronic headaches, and attention deficits as a result of a sports induced concussion.

In the fall, I will begin my PhD at the Matthew Gfeller Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. When I first applied to the Matthew Gfeller Center I was unaware of who Matthew was. I naively assumed the center was named after a huge donor. Upon learning of Matthews story, I was affirmed in my decision of making a career change. As a speech language pathologist, I have extensive experience with stroke patients and the brain and language but none when it comes to sports related injuries.

Under the Friday Night Lights, on August 22, 2008 Matthew Gfeller was given an opportunity to play in the fourth quarter of his high school football game. His parents were very excited that he was finally given the opportunity to go on the field and play. Matthew was a fifteen-year-old sophomore at R.J. Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He loved football and needless to say, was excited to play in a varsity game. However, this game would change the course of football in North Carolina forever.

Matthew was involved in a helmet-to-helmet hit and subsequently suffered a traumatic brain injury. He was immediately knocked unconscious. Unfortunately, Matthew never regained consciousness and died two days later in the hospital. Following his death his parents Lisa and Bob Gfeller dedicated their lives to preventing any other parents from losing their child to a football related injury.

The Gfeller-Waller Concussion awareness act was passed in 2011 to protect the safety of student-athletes in North Carolina. The three major focuses of this law were to increase education, action and improve post-concussion protocol implantation. The goal is to improve and make clear return to play protocols following a sustained concussion. In addition to this law Bob and Lisa created the Matthew Gfeller Foundation to ensure safety of children in youth football. They aided in the building and implementation of the Matthew Gfeller Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This TBI center is home to some of the top sports related researchers in the field.

As a sports fan, I want to combine my love of sports with my passion for research related to neurological deficits. By obtaining my PhD, I plan to help the people currently suffering from these ailments and prevent tragedies like the head injury to Matthew Gfeller. Through my research and neuroimaging experience I aspire to aid in the understanding of physiological, psychological, and behavioral characteristics that may predict signs of long-term brain disorders due to sports related concussions, such as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), dementia, and Parkinson’s disease. My goal is to clarify the speech pathologist’s expertise and contributions to the interdisciplinary treatment. Although I was never afforded the opportunity to meet Matthew Gfeller, I know his name. His legacy will live on and his simple presence on this earth has changed the safety of high school football players in North Carolina. 

In previous articles, we have gotten an overview of education and the challenges faced by teachers at the elementary school, middle school, and high school levels. If you zoom out from there, we get to the roles of system and district administrators whose job it is to address the challenges or barriers to success that schools may face. From there we then get to the level of the policies and approaches that impact where money and resources come from and how they are allocated. This is the ecosystem of education. Like any ecosystem, everything is interconnected and each part of it plays its own role in the common goal of providing quality education for students and improving the educational environment that teachers and students exist in. This is the role that my cousin Dana Peterson plays in the New Orleans education ecosystem.

Dana Peterson is currently the Chief Executive Officer of New Schools for New Orleans – a non-profit education philanthropic and advocacy organization – and has previously served as an Assistant State Superintendent of the Louisiana Department of Education and the Deputy Superintendent of External Affairs for the Recovery School District. Dana’s career in education has primarily been from a policy and advocacy focus and has been shaped by the unique circumstances of the New Orleans school system. When he first got started in education as a volunteer, he began living in New Orleans with his wife Karen Carter Peterson who was a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives. With a spouse in public office, Dana saw up close the impact of public service and began to think intentionally about how to contribute meaningfully to communities in his new hometown.

In 2008, he began serving on the board of Firstline Schools, a mission-driven homegrown non-profit organization that started one of the first charter schools in the city prior to Hurricane Katrina. Charter schools are public schools that for the most part function independently of the normal bureaucratic controls of the school district it is located in. As Dana explained, that independence or autonomy gives charter schools flexibility that traditional public schools do not normally have. With that flexibility, charter school administrators have the ability to make decisions about curriculum, staffing, and resource allocation on their own and in turn make them and implement them faster. The prevalence of charter schools in New Orleans arose in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when the governor and state legislature passed a state takeover of more than three quarters of all public schools in the city because of persistently low student outcomes, financial mismanagement, and corruption.  Like many urban public-school systems around the country, New Orleans Public Schools faced a myriad of challenges - many the result of decades of racist, segregationist public policy.   However, in New Orleans, schools also struggled mightily to overcome mismanagement, inconsistent leadership, indifference.  In the years prior to Hurricane Katrina damaging nearly eighty percent of buildings in the district’s portfolio, the New Orleans Public Schools had eight superintendents in ten years, and five chief financial officers in five years – before the district’s finances were taken over by an outside consultant.  Student academic outcomes suffered as a result.  Based on state test results, New Orleans ranked 67^th out of 68 school districts in Louisiana; only 54 percent of students graduated high-school on time; and despite enrolling roughly 9 percent of the state’s public school students, the city was home to 44 percent of the state’s lowest performing schools.

Following the aftermath of the storm, in tandem with the effort to rebuild the city, there was also an opportunity to completely overhaul and reform the school system. By 2014, the city had closed down all of the public schools in favor of this new model of charter schools. This allowed the schools to re-open quickly and efficiently as residents began to return to New Orleans. As Dana served on a charter school board a few years after the hurricane he found himself becoming more and more engrossed in his role until he found that he was dedicating himself more to that position than he was his day job. It was then that he found his calling.

The Charter School Model

When discussing what advantages the charter school model brought to the district, he stressed two words: freedom and flexibility.  Schools have the freedom to make decisions specific to their own circumstances and the flexibility to adapt more rapidly to meet the unique needs of their students. This freedom and flexibility puts educators in schools in control of key levers for success. In particular, schools have been able to deploy resources allocated to them in non-traditional and creative ways and it’s this aspect that Dana points out that has led to the amount of recovery that has taken place within the wider school district.  As an example, this was especially critical in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. With the money pushed down to school districts from the federal government in response to the pandemic, charter schools in New Orleans were able to hire extra reading interventionists, tutors, and counselors to address the needs of the students – and often more rapidly than traditional schools. This has led to schools in New Orleans collectively being one of the top five parishes in the state in returning to pre-COVID academic levels.

In New Orleans, parents also exercise freedom and flexibility in important ways. With the emergence of charter schools in the city came an equally unique approach to student enrollment. Seeking to shed the effects of historically inequitable housing patterns, students in New Orleans are not defaulted to the school closest to their home. Families seeking a new school must apply by selecting schools they prefer from across the city; there are no automatic assignments based on residence. This policy is meant to level the playing field among families, many of which can’t afford to move into neighborhoods that are traditionally home to the highest performing schools.

What also makes this model of charter schools unique is the accountability that schools and their administrations face. Dana contends that New Orleans is one of the only places in the country where schools are consistently held accountable for student academic performance. If students aren’t meeting the district’s standards in a particular school, when the contract for running the school comes up for renewal, that organization can lose the privilege of educating students. This engenders a sense of urgency in the schools to make sure the student needs are met and outcomes improve.

Assessing School Performance

In this way, standardized testing is an important aspect for evaluation and assessment for the performance of a school. Across the country, the standard set for students to meet represents a bare minimum that students need to meet. When students are consistently not meeting that standard, in this system, there is accountability for that. Some teachers contend that standardized testing is disruptive to their school year and forces them to teach toward the test which makes it difficult overall for them to teach their students as they see fit. But when these tests can lead to direct action to address issues such as reading proficiency or low math scores, in this context, it can be very important for the constant effort to improve schools and school systems. In assessing why a school isn’t meeting these standards, they may find that the conditions for teachers and the overall environment in the school needs to be addressed and improved and this can have a positive effect on the teachers as well.

This kind of rapid response in New Orleans’ school systems is especially important because they deal primarily in addressing the needs of students from communities that have far fewer resources and suffer from the effects of poverty. As Mary Kenzer, Bonita Peterson, and Morgan Guess have pointed out from their years of teaching, this aspect is one of the most important parts of their jobs as teachers. Many of their students struggle due to the disadvantages from simply not having the basics such as breakfast or lunch, or school supplies, or having parents with the time to assist their children with their homework every night. As Dana says, the experiences from dealing with fractured systems of society are appearing in the classroom. This makes teaching a very difficult and draining job as Mary, Bonita and Morgan have all pointed out.

The Role of Policy and Advocacy

This is where the roles of people like Dana, who work toward a policy and advocacy agenda play an important part in the lives of the students and teachers. He has pointed at that despite the doom and gloom surrounding the state of education today in the United States, the biggest positive is that there is more debate than ever about the different approaches to education policy. There are many paths that an individual school or district can take that were not available in previous eras. Dana stresses that a good healthy education ecosystem and environment has a diversity of different elements and approaches.

Policy and approaches are not just limited to the actual education, but the whole educational environment. The goal of an ecosystem approach is also to ensure that that other systems, healthcare, criminal justice, are more aligned with the deploying of their resources to address the needs that kids have. Interacting with all the different agencies and bodies that can contribute to improving the lives of the students. An example Dana gives is helping schools better leverage Medicaid reimbursement for school-based health services. In recent years more school-based services are eligible for federal reimbursement. But as he notes schools are not built in a way to interface with a heavily bureaucratic system such as Medicaid, but in New Orleans a large percentage of the children in the schools qualify. There have been efforts to better braid together public and private resources to come up with unique solutions that schools and students can benefit from. During the pandemic, it became acutely aware that schools needed more resources to deal with the trauma students endured and address their mental health challenges that brought on by the isolation related to school closures. Just last year, in response, the New Orleans City Council allotted $10 million to partner with the local children’s hospital to hire mental health counselors to support schools.

The Ecosystem of Education

When you begin to see all of these different approaches to improving schools, you can start to see an aggregate portrait of work being done to improve society. Dana says one of the most fulfilling aspects of his work is seeing how education can improve the trajectory for an entire family. Just one child going on to higher education can have a ripple effect not just for them, but for their family around them and their future children. When this happens across multiple families, education can begin to change the trajectory of an entire neighborhood. Dana says that education can remove many barriers for success, and this makes it imperative that public systems work better for the well-being of the public.

This can be a difficult task though and for many the enormity of the issues faced can seem insurmountable. Dana compares focusing on public education in isolation to the myth of Sisyphus who was condemned to push a boulder up a hill for eternity. If it’s just a school board or a school district independent of other systems affecting kids and families, you can only move the boulder so far. However, an ecosystem approach to education can transcend this Sisyphean task  when there is broader alignment and collaboration. This needs to be from the top down and bottom up. We need parents to be involved not just in the education of their child, but also the education policy debate. When parents voice their concerns more and more on policy, they are not just advocating for their own child but their neighbor’s child too. What resources does the community need, and not just a single household? Active parents create better outcomes for children across the board. Teachers do their part by creating a rigorous learning environment. The role of system and school administrators is to recruit, develop, and retain quality teachers. Educational policy seeks to make sure that this entire ecosystem functions and that money and resources are allocated to meet the needs of students, teachers, and administrators. When describing the effort it takes to address the Sisyphean task of education, Dana conveyed the following:

There’s no greater collective action that we could take than to ensure that we have a strong public school system. And I would define strong as one that is demonstrating in its schools year over year that it is developing and supporting young people and improving their academic outcomes. If we were to grow by ten percent next year in the number of students that meet the state’s standard in reading and math, is that going to create a city with more equitable outcomes overnight? No. But that type of consistent growth over a number of years almost  certainly would. If we’re able to generate those type of results year after year, in less than a generation we can transform New Orleans to a place that is not only one of the most culturally relevant in the world but one in which more people are prepared to share in the economic and civic benefits of that culture. The way we get there is by more people joining forces to push that rock up hill. Teachers can’t do it alone. School and system administrators can’t do it alone. Parents can’t do it alone. We need an ecosystem in which everyone is rowing in the same direction.

On Jan 21, 2024, an extraordinary woman got her heavenly wings after an over 50-year career dedicated to health and medical care. There will undoubtably be many tributes to her and her career accomplishments as we lay her to rest.

Dr Edith Peterson Mitchell MD, MACP, FCCP, FRCP(London), Physician-Scientist, Health Equity Champion and Brigadier General was truly a trailblazer in the United States Air Force and medical field. She was selected by Ebony Magazine as one of the most influential African Americans in the United States of America. In 2015, she was appointed to serve as the 116^th President of the National Medical Association. She was also the first woman to attain the rank of U.S Air Force Brigadier General by the Missouri Air National Guard.

With all these accomplishments to her name, she never forgot her Tennessee roots. She was a proud graduate of Tennessee State University where she served on their Board of Trustees and was an active member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority. She was a healthcare trailblazer who was committed to making the underserved communities her priority. Not only was she committed to healthcare, but she was committed to family. She was a force to be reckoned with in all areas of her life. Without making light of her accolades and accomplishments throughout the world, I wanted to shine a light on Aunt Fay the family woman born and raised in Brownsville, Tennessee during racial segregation.

Edith was a daughter, sister, wife, mother, cousin, aunt and a family historian for the Peterson family. Even though she was my dad’s younger sister, just like in her career she orchestrated many family get togethers and events. When Aunt Fay called, no one could turn her down. She would tell you when and where to be and what hotel you were staying.

My earliest memory of her was when she blew into town while was in 5^th grade and took me shopping. I was a slightly chubby child and remember she bought me some green bell bottom hip hugger pants with a purple and green flowing top that had bears on it that covered the fact that I was wearing hip hugger pants. She showed me how to dress fly but tastefully as a young lady. I loved the outfit so much that I took my 5^th grade school pictures in it.

That was her modus operandi. That was how she rolled. She would shoot into town, handle whatever the situation was then fly out on to her next venture. I always loved seeing her at family events but understood that she was a super busy lady. 

While in college, as I was deciding my career choices and what I wanted to be in life, I decided to reach out to her to spend time with her on my spring break. She and Uncle Del where to host me in their home in Columbia, Missouri.  Her daughters were very little, and I was excited to see my baby cousins. I boarded a bus in Bowling Green, Kentucky and started on my venture. After a long bus ride, I would spend the next few days shadowing her at the college and hospital. Afterward, we would come home to dinner and spend time with Uncle Del and the baby cousins.  After the kids were tucked into bed she would crack open a cold brew and sit up with me and tell me stories about my dad as a child and life growing up on a rural farm in Brownsville Tennessee. With Aunt Fay, I was able to see someone with an work-life balance while having a family. Needless to say, I was exhausted after spending a week following her around!

On another occasion we had a family get-together in Tennessee and Aunt Fay decided to take a trip to the commissary on the military base to get some food for the family.  She took along my cousin Jackie who was retired from the military. As they drove up to the security, she pulled out her identification. The young man at the post glanced at it and waved her on. She then said to him, “No baby, look at that I.D. again” He takes a closer look and immediately stands at attention. My cousin laughed so hard. She couldn’t wait to tell the family how everyone had to put some respect on her name. Sometimes our family would forget who she was out in these streets. Even though Dr. Mitchell was known throughout the world for her cancer research and Air Force duties she was just Aunt Fay to our family. 

We mostly knew that she loved to cook at family get-togethers. Often her and my dad and other aunts would compete for bragging rights at family cookouts. They were all amazing cooks, but everyone had to bow down when my dad would fix ribs on the grill. Our family knew that at every get together someone would pull out the music and we would all get a kick out of Aunt Fay dancing to the song “Shotgun” by JR Walker & the All Stars! I cannot think of a single family cookout where we did not pull out her favorite song and watch Aunt Fay let loose! We knew she was going to dance every time she heard that song.

Our family enjoyed cookouts with Aunt Fay, but that wasn’t the only side of her we knew. Sometimes when a family member fell ill, Dr. Mitchell would be the side of her that we would see. It did not matter where you lived in the country or what your ailment was, if you needed her Aunt Fay was instantly in touch with your doctors and was part of the medical team making decisions on your treatment plan. For me personally, I was living in Jersey City, New Jersey and was having major gastrointestinal issues. I had seen many doctors as my health had been declining. One day I got the call from Dr. Mitchell, who demanded my doctors information and permission for her to look over your medical records. She ended up supervising my treatments, and I was eventually diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease. She came with her family from Philadelphia where she was a clinical professor of medicine and medical oncology at Thomas Jefferson University. She had received the Jefferson Achievement Award and was the first Black woman to receive the Philly Life Science Award yet she put everything down to come to Jersey City just to see how I was doing and to know when I would be released from the hospital. I know that this treatment wasn’t anything special or particular to me. She would have moved the Earth for anyone in our family in need. My doctors in Jersey City had to take special care of me with Dr Mitchell supervising the case!

This trailblazing woman would invite the entire family to any and every event where she was being recognized or honored no matter where it was. She was extremely proud of her family and her family was proud to just call her Fay. As I close my tribute to Aunt Fay, I am encouraging other family members to chime in and share their stories of the amazing Dr. Edith Peterson Mitchell. She was an extraordinary doctor, General, professor and aunt all at the same time! We love you Aunt Fay and your presence here on this earth will truly be missed.

In recent years across social media, there has been a trend among people to declare the next identifiable generation of children, Generation Alpha, children born between 2010 and 2024, as a lost generation. Long gone is the Millennial bashing of my adolescence, or the generation war between Gen Z and the Baby Boomers. We have already moved on to condemn the legions of children aged 14 and under as a lost cause in society. Why is this? According to social media, it is because these children cannot read. And it’s not just a few children. It’s a lot of students. Testimonies from teachers across the internet seem to confirm this.

As is the nature of social media though, there is a tendency to catastrophize to a point that any semblance of a real world message can easily get lost. There is a reason why the act of “doom scrolling” has become so popular in today’s day and age. Bad news of course always sells and social media is no exception. So then what exactly is going on with Generation Alpha and why has this ballooned into condemning an entire generation of children?

Illiteracy is not an issue confined to Generation Alpha, but because of social media, it has become easy to see this issue grow and metastasize across society in real time. In fact, illiteracy and low levels of literacy are issues that affect a large portion of American adults. According to a Gallup analysis from the U.S. Department of Education, around 130 millions adults in the US have low literacy skills. This means that more than half of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 or 54 percent read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.

Given this reality, it is not productive nor fair to blame an entire generation yet to fully form, or to label them as “dumb” or “stupid” as some people have so gleefully jump to do. Given this generation has yet to come of age as adults, this issue is as much, if not more of our problem than it is theirs. By trivializing this issue affecting them, as will be shown, we are ourselves complicit in leading our youth into a future fraught with hardships and struggles. This issue is not as simple as a lack of education, or any specific failing in the education system, but a series of interlinked issues all bound together. Illiteracy and low literacy should not be seen as the main issue, but rather the symptom of systemic societal issues that affect us all and most importantly are negatively affecting our children. They are among the most vulnerable in society and are often an afterthought in political discourse, that is unless they are being used as the poster-child for some specific issue or agenda. In this article I will attempt to unravel at least small part of the puzzle and give some level of insight into the complexity of the issues that our education system faces as a whole.

The effects of poverty and high inequality on education

One of the most noticeable effects on the literacy of students today is poverty. From my conversations with my Aunts Bonita and Mary, and my sister Morgan, this was apparent. Students coming to school hungry and not being able to afford lunch was something that stuck out to me that all three of them have pointed out. These anecdotes were not isolated incidents but part of a larger issue their students were facing. Some students live in situations where their basic needs, such as hunger are not being met. In this light, it’s understandable to recognize that other more specific school related needs are not also being met. Basic necessities such as notebooks, backpacks, pencils, aren’t things children are being equipped with. Things such library fees, school trips, fees related to organized sports and after school activities are an afterthought in this context. Having a parent that is concerned with making ends meet in an economy that seeks to maximize their productivity at an optimal cost, means that there often isn’t energy or time to make sure their child has done their homework, or to find out that their child is struggling with reading and writing.

These issues are especially affecting minorities. As Bonita, Mary and Morgan can all attest to from their experience, black children are especially affected in this respect. A Household Pulse Survey from February of 2023 concluded that the black families with children surveyed were the most likely to report both that they “sometimes” and “often” did not have enough to eat. This is twice the rate of white families with children surveyed.

Though black children are severely affected, they are by no means the only children being affected by an overall trend in declining literacy rates in the United States. The 2022 NAEP reading assessment found that in eight grade reading scores from 2019-2022, there was an overall decrease in reading level, but there was no significant change in most ethnic groups. Despite not having a significant changes, American Indian, Alaskan native, Blacks, Hispanics, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, mixed race, and Whites, all performed below proficiency level on average. The only group that performed on average above proficiency were Asians. For perspective, despite Asians seeing a one point decline, the proficiency gap between them an all other groups widened between 2019 and 2022.

Some may blame the pandemic and remote schooling for this decline in literacy rates, especially throughout the years surveyed in the 2022 NAEP reading assessment. But one would be missing the forest for the trees by doing so. The pandemic was an event that was more of an intensifier than the cause of these issues, as it was for many issues. Declining literacy is actually part of an overall trend of the past two decades. People have been sounding the alarm for the past decade over this issue.

A study in 2013 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development surveying 166,000 teens and adults ranging in age from 16 to 65 years old in 24 countries, found that American adults performed below average on literacy and basic math. The study also found that American adults were far behind their counterparts in countries such as Japan, Finland, Australia, Canada and South Korea. It is interesting to note that the countries that scored lower than the United States such as France, Italy, Spain, and Ireland were countries that suffered severely from the Great Recession in Europe following the 2007 economic crash that persisted in some countries until as late as 2013.

Inequality seems to be a theme that could be interpreted from that survey. The inequality could be seen between nations, with countries such as Japan and Finland, who were not as hard hit by the global financial crisis, and were already wealthy countries, faired better than countries such as Italy, Spain, and Ireland, among the hardest hit in Europe by the crisis. These countries faced economic difficulties before the crisis and did not have the means to weather the storm as more wealthy countries did. Inequality can also be seen within the countries as well. Regarding this study the Associated Press noted the following:

"Not only did Americans score poorly compared to many international competitors, the findings reinforced just how large the gap is between the nation's high- and low-skilled workers and how hard it is to move ahead when your parents haven't…In both reading and math, for example, those with college-educated parents did better than those whose parents did not complete high school."

This brings us back to the United States. When looking at a distribution of states with low literacy levels among the adult population, several things stand out. The states with the highest percentage of adults with low literacy levels, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida are states, with the exception of California, located in the Deep South.

Historically the South has been a part of the country with high poverty and inequality, and low levels of education that date back to its days as an agrarian slave-owning society. Slave owning elites monopolized the wealth of the society at the expense of the poor and the enslaved. The entire economy was built around free labor of the enslaved and then cheap and exploitative labor following the end of slavery. This concentration of wealth and reliance upon exploitation concentrated opportunities and resources among a very small group of elites. In poor white and free black communities, this denied them any ability at economic mobility or opportunities for quality education. The system of racism built around this exploitative economic system further reinforced the rigidity of the class structures in the South. For enslaved blacks, lack education and illiteracy were used as a tool of oppression too keep them ignorant of the extent of their subjugation, and blind to the listened to them on why they were enslaved, often based on “interpretations” of passages from the Bible. Through great strides were made throughout the 20th century to remedy this high level of illiteracy in the Deep South, as evidenced literacy is still an issue.

Though these issues persist in this region of the South, the rest of the country isn’t far behind these states. New York’s literacy rate is only just in front of Florida’s with both of them having around 24 percent of their adult population with low levels of literacy. Not coincidentally both of these states have high levels of economic inequality with New York taking the second spot behind Puerto Rico, and just in front of Washington D.C., and Florida taking the eighth spot. The only states that had a percentage lower than fifteen percent, were Wyoming, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Montana which were all clustered around 13 and 14 percent. On the inequality index, these states hovered around the middle to the bottom.

But of course inequality is also relative. When looking at the US Gini coefficient, the number used to measure income distribution, the US had a coefficient of 41.1 placing the US in the upper middle of the pack. It’s not as high as South Africa’s index of 63, but it’s higher than its neighbor Canada which is at 32.9. Compare this to the countries in the literacy survey, with Australia’s at 34.3, Japan’s index of 32.9, Finland’s at 27.10. Though these statistical analyses are by no means perfect, and there are many other factors at play they do begin to paint a picture of inequality and how that can affect literacy.

Why this all matters

In a country like ours, that has a high level of income inequality, it doesn’t just mean that there is a large gap between those who make a lot of money and those that who do not. One has to look past the numbers to see the implications. Those who have the means of making in the society will do so, and those who do not won’t. In this respect we are bifurcating our society and its resources along these lines of haves and have-nots. With respect to education, those with money, capital, and resources will make sure that their children will receive a good education in someway shape or form either sending their child to the schools in the city that performs above average, or sending them to a private school. Those who don’t that have to rely upon public resources are subjected to chance depending on where they live. Not everyone has the good fortune of living in a district where their local public schools are of high quality. With students being separated in this way, it makes sense that this kind of educational inequality affected by income inequality would perpetuate itself. With inequality in the United States rising, the number of people who are falling into the ranks of the “have-nots” will only swell compounding the issue for many more people. If nothing is done to address this issue, in due time it may happen that the number of 130 million Americans who have low levels of literacy may swell and represent upwards of 60 to 70 percent of the country.

Bringing the subject back to literacy, low literacy levels have a great impact upon the lives of individuals. In terms of the students, when reading difficulties persist well into middle school and on to high school, reading morphs from a vital skill into a source of shame and frustration. This can lead to disengagement academically which can plague their lives well after their years of schooling. Finding employment can be difficult and the kinds of jobs available offer little in the way of social mobility. This can lead to a cycle of inequality that is perpetuated from generation to generation. Low levels of literacy are also linked to issues with mental health. Basic social interactions and socializing as a whole and basic economic interactions such as buying or ordering food are made all the more difficult. This results in aggregate in chronic health issues from mental health issues like alienation, anxiety, and depression leading to a lower life expectancy.

Just as the problems confronting students snowballs from the early learning years, into middle school and high school, it does not stop there. In this light, teaching is one of the most important professions in society. It should be an imperative for our societies to have great teacher in great numbers at every level of education. Teachers need to be valued as we value medical professionals and lawyers and their salaries should reflect this. Schools also need the resources to be able to support a healthy number of teachers with manageable classroom sizes. This brings the issues that students and teachers face out to a higher level of management. In future articles I will examine the issues facing school administrators and how their work contributes to the overall ecosystem of education.

“I show up because you need somebody to show up for you. I’m doing this, and I get paid to do this, but I’m not just here for a paycheck. I’m going to make sure that you know something and that you’re better than you were when I received you and you’re ready to go to high school and really show yourselves.”

Morgan Guess, 8th grade writing teacher and my younger sister, really stresses to her students the importance of preparing yourself to enter high school. As she says, this is the beginning of the rest of your life when you become the only person who will be accountable for you and your actions. Middle school is the last chance that someone will hold your hand. She says to her students that they can put in the hard work now to get it right and change to prepare for the responsibility of high school or spend years dealing with the consequences of not doing so, digging yourself out of the hole of failing at this stage.

Morgan has only been teaching for two years, and is midway through her third year of teaching in Houston, Texas. But from talking to her, you wouldn’t know it from the amount of wisdom she has to share about teaching and dealing with middle school students from all walks of life and addressing their specific needs. I had the pleasure of getting a glimpse of this in 2021, when I was visiting for winter break. I attended a basketball game and the gym was full of her students from the bleachers to the court to the bench and they all adored her. They expressed their admiration for her every chance they got. Even her colleagues were brimming with glowing remarks about her. It was very clear the care that she had as a teacher in building good relationships with her students, another way Morgan shows up for them.

Morgan’s route to teaching was a bit of an unexpected one. She attended undergraduate at Berea College where she majored in African American studies and Spanish. In fact, Berea was the college that historian and writer Carter G. Woodson graduated from. Woodson, the second black American after W.E.B. Dubois to earn a PhD from Harvard, was one of the first scholars to study the African diaspora and later went on to found the Association for the Study of African American Life and History earning him recognition as the “father of black history”. Berea college was the first integrated, co-educational college in the South and the Carter G. Woodson Center for Interracial Education at the college bears his name. Morgan was following in the legacy of Woodson at the African American studies program in Berea.

After graduating from Berea, during the pandemic Morgan had moved to Houston where her sister Kennedy also lived. While Morgan was studying for her master’s degree in psychology remotely, she decided to look into applying for jobs in California where her school was located for when they resumed in-person classes. She ended up applying to a network of charter schools dedicated to low-income students through out the country and it so happened that they also had a branch located in Houston in which a friend of Kennedy’s was already working.

Though Morgan did not have an official background in education, she worked at the writing resource center at Berea and was a teaching assistant for writing classes. On top of that her studies gave her a general framework that would prepare her for a job in education. She first began working as a teaching assistant for 6th grade in Houston but after three weeks, she ended up subbing as an 8th grade writing teacher full-time. It was at this moment, her baptism by fire, that she realized her passion. She would eventually drop out of her master’s program in psychology to dedicate herself to teaching.

One would think that this sudden jump to teaching in a middle school full-time would be a terrifying jump. Middle school is notorious for being a difficult stage of life for students. As Morgan says, there’s no amount of training of theory that will prepare you for that first day in a classroom setting. It’s one of those things you need to have experience with in order to understand exactly what you need to be doing. The only way to know what it’s like to teach is to teach. After you’ve gotten that experience you can start to integrate advice from other people and develop your own style.

For Morgan, what she learned was that consistency was the key. If she is holding students to a certain standard, that standard is for everyone. There is no bending to the whims and vagaries of the students. If the students know what is expected of them they will meet those expectations. Relationship building is also very important. As a middle school teacher, you are is preparing your students to be autonomous. She tries to prepare them for more responsibility in high school and give them the skills to enter adulthood.

From talking to Morgan the first thing you pick up about her and her teaching style is that she is very strict and stern as a teacher. As she says, in middle school the students are figuring themselves out. They think they’re grown and they think they can talk back to you and disrespect you. Because of her age they believe they can be her friend and get by on her. Setting standards and boundaries with them was key to establishing an environment of respect.

It also helps to have thick skin. Middle school students will throw around their thoughts and opinions on everything from your appearance that day to your teaching style. Letting them get under your skin is a easy path toward losing control of the classroom.

On the other end though, at this age, they may try to act like adults, but at heart they are still children. They want rewards for good work and attention from their teacher. As she emphasizes you aren’t given a grade, you earn a grade. The expectations and standards are not relative. You don’t get rewards for doing what is expected of you. But if you go above and beyond you can earn a reward. Stickers are some of the most frequent rewards Morgan gives out. Having a sticker from Ms. Guess is a badge of honor. A sign that reinforces to them that they are applying themselves. It is also a symbol that they are in the good graces of one of the most strict teachers. They’re at an age where they’re young enough to be molded but old enough to be held accountable.

When dealing with “troubled” children, Morgan addresses their issues on a case by case basis. Every child has their own personality and reasons for why they are acting out. Dealing with them has to be individualized. Once you learn about them and where their behavior is coming from you can figure out how to deal with them. Some kids are just simply attention seekers and it is important to try not to feed into that. Some kids just have a little bit of an attitude and are quick to react to things. Others are dealing with legitimate issues where their needs in their lives are not being met. Knowing the motivations behind their behavior and their individual personalities goes a long way to dealing with disruptive classroom behaviors.

When it comes to public education and assessing students and what they have learned, Morgan believes the overall approach today is too data-driven. It feels like it is being incentivized for teachers to teach to a standardized test, when practically, many students have serious needs when it comes to reading and writing. She believes that focusing on providing the students with skills is disrupted by the cycle of standardized testing.

This approach can be reductive as well, as students are often seen as a set of data points. There are many ways to test knowledge outside of multiple choice questions. The type of learning necessary to pass these kinds of tests can be repetitive and robotic. There should be multiple modes of assessment or ways students can demonstrate they have learned and internalized what they need to learn.

Testing is also too pass or fail oriented. There isn’t much attention paid to tracking the growth of individual students. A leap from a 40/100 to a 60/100 is a big jump and the students knowing that they have made such a jump can go a long way toward reinforcing their confidence in learning and helping them improve in the long run. But a pass or fail mode, the message that they have taken is that they have failed, yet again. They internalize that the effort that they have put in is not “good enough”, even if they are fully applying themselves. A testing method that accounts for measuring growth could be very constructive.

Morgan pours in a lot of her own resources into her classes. She buys decorations for the classroom, and sometimes she buys her students a small breakfast like donuts or cereal in the morning as she knows some of her students arrive to school without eating. Sometimes as a reward she buys her students lunch. The teachers at her school also sponsor students out of pocket, who cannot afford their end of the year trip.

In terms of classroom supplies, Morgan relies on donations from friends and family to keep her classroom fully stocked. She always keeps pencils, notebooks, and other supplies on hand, so students cannot use this as an excuse to not be able to complete their work. In extreme cases students will come to school without a backpack or anything for their school day. Students showing up to class without pencils has been such an issue that she has made it compulsory to have one and not coming to class with one will negatively impact their grade.

Morgan finds teaching a very rewarding experience. It is always fulfilling seeing the fruits of your labor and seeing your students succeed. She says that behind every great person is a favorite teacher. She believes that every one of her kids can go on to accomplish anything. There is endless potential if they apply themselves. If she invests herself in her students for them to be able to succeed, she can someday be that teacher for somebody.

Day to day though teaching is exhausting. It takes a lot of energy and the feedback for your work isn’t always immediate. You may not see it until the end of the year sometimes. It is compounded by effects from schooling during the pandemic. The level of preparedness of the students has declined. Because students were passed easily during the pandemic there has been less of a willingness to learn. Some students have taken a perfunctory attitude toward school.

Burnout is an issue with teachers. Breaks are necessary in order to deal with the exhausting work. In middle school the children are aware when they get under your skin and if you let them know they will seize upon that. It is easy to take their comments personally, or to take negativity from the difficulties of teaching them home with you after the day has ended.

Despite this though, Morgan has begun to receive positive feedback on her students that have gone on to high school. The principal of the high school that her school feeds into has commented that many of the students that have moved on are excelling in writing. He made it known that the writing teacher was doing a great job preparing them.

Morgan’s advice to parents for positively contributing to their child’s education is to simply be involved. There needs to be an interest in their child’s education such as what classes they are doing well in, and what classes they are having difficulty with. An awareness of these things can transfer over to the child’s performance in the classroom. Children need to be “seen” by their parents in this way. Sometimes there is not an interest from parents and the students do not get the attention they want from their parents in this regard. Students may experience consequences in school but these cannot be held up if there isn’t a level of expectations in the home environment.

From her experience so far in teaching, Morgan has realized that students don’t get consistency from their teachers throughout their academic careers. There are fewer people going into teaching today, and as a result teachers are routinely overburdened with large class sizes. Teachers quitting is an issue that has affected schools across the country and isn’t simply one school district’s problem. As a result the students feel that they themselves don’t need to show up or put in effort because that is the message they are receiving. Morgan communicates her care for her students through her consistency. She shows up for them everyday and puts in effort to demonstrate through actions that she will not quit on them.

Growing up as a young child, my Aunt Bonnie, as we affectionately call her, was the teacher in my life. As far as I had known she had been teaching since before I was born and she would still be teaching long after I’ve surpassed the age of her fourth grade students. I still hear her voice in my head whenever I’m spelling words out, “N-I-EEEEEE-C-E is how you spell niece”, or even the common adage as “i before e except after c”. They’re as ingrained in me as my dad’s voice I still remember constantly reinforcing to my 5 year old self, “A’int isn’t a word”, in trying to teach me to code switch.

One of my earliest memories was in Aunt Bonnie’s classroom. She loves to tell the story of when I was with her in her classroom, probably around the age of three, and another teacher had given me a banana, to which I thanked her. Apparently her class thought it was funny that I was so polite to an adult. But of course she reminded them that this is the standard to which they should be behaving not the other way around.

Timescale to a child is extremely dilated. To a small child, reaching fourth grade is an abstraction. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it was a milestone when I finally reached the fourth grade, the age of Aunt Bonita’s students. But of course, this was the year that she was moved to teaching fifth grade. I had to wait a year in order to finally reach the age of her classroom.

Bonita realized her passion for teaching very early on in life. When she was in kindergarten, her teacher had to step out of the classroom for a few minutes. Instead of leaving the class to the anarchy of five year olds, she asked Bonita to take over the class and continue the lesson. This wasn’t a completely random choice. The teacher knew of Bonita’s maturity and ability to lead from knowing her grandmother who worked in the cafeteria and lived across the street from the school.

As she got older, she used to play school with a chalkboard with her sister (my mother) and her cousins. Somehow she would always end up as the teacher.

Years later when Bonita was in college and had an undeclared major, an introductory to teaching course caught her eye. From being in that class she knew that she would become a teacher.

One can imagine that classroom management with elementary school children can be quite difficult, especially when one routinely ends up with the students that have given teachers a hard time in previous grades. From day one, Bonita establishes the class rules and atmosphere and discusses with the children the necessity for each rule. This creates a dialogue about the class rules rather than them being dictated and helps to set up expectations for the students.

“I see you, I hear you, I respect you, and I deserve the same”. This is the phrase she repeated every year to each classroom which served as the basis for mutual respect and the basis of her teaching philosophy. Students did not want to disrespect her as a teacher by misbehaving because they themselves did not want to be disrespected. Being in her classroom was of course an honor. Every student since kindergarten coveted a spot in her class. Even dealing with misbehavior, Bonita followed this creed. Instead of scolding the kids or singling them out in class in front of their peers, she made a mental note and she would talk to them around recess or lunch time to speak to them one on one.

Often times Bonita found that some of the students labeled “troubled children” were causing trouble because they were not being challenged enough in class. They acted out because they were bored. On some occasions she would ask for permission to put the child in the advanced classes for a week and if they could do the work, she would have them moved there for the remainder of the year.

Bonita’s classroom wasn’t all just about the rules though. If you talk to anyone who attended her class, you would always hear about how much fun she made learning. Children learn through play and making learning fun and engaging is one of the best ways for them to truly internalize a lesson.

Bonita says her way of doing this is to always try to teach in unexpected ways. When learning comes in different forms, students cannot get lulled into the rhythm of normalcy and potentially get bored from always having their expectations met. This keeps students excited for what will come tomorrow. Bonita’s students always looked forward to her classes.

Imagine if you will, you are a nine or ten year old student in her classroom. You’re sitting there talking with your friends, awaiting the teacher’s arrival. The door opens but there is a small delay. You wonder why the teacher didn’t just zoom into the room as she always does each day. Then you see a cane emerge as the teacher enters the room hunched over putting all her weight on the cane to the point her hand is shaking with glasses on the tip of her nose. Her hair is miraculously grey and she has somehow gone senile. This woman is not Ms. Peterson, but instead “Aunt Sally”. “Aunt Sally?!” the other children exclaim. Is this supposed to be a joke? Halloween has already passed! What is Ms. Peterson doing? All of a sudden one of your classmates, who unbeknownst to you is clued in on the joke, exclaims, “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally!”. Whenever Aunt Sally did anything silly or senile, this student would exclaim “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally!” You and your peers practically have the phrase seared into your memory. And then Ms. Peterson begins teaching about the order of operations: Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction. It suddenly clicks! Now whenever you see a math equation that looks difficult at first, you repeat to yourself ““Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally!” and you are able to solve it! This is a normal day in Ms. Peterson’s classroom.

Bonita today is currently retired, having taught her last class eight years ago. She still misses the experience of teaching children and occasionally helps out at her church with the after school study program. Teaching is a vocation that does not end when you leave the classroom.

At the end of her final year of teaching, her school planted a tree in her honor which bears her name. Her legacy lives on at the school as generations of successive students and faculty will know the name Bonita Peterson and her lasting influence, even if they never had the honor of knowing her personally. This tree honors the thirty-one years she spent teaching there. The roots of the tree portray the firm educational foundations she has left countless people.

Bonita routinely hears back from former students that either followed in her footsteps and became teachers themselves. Some of them even taught alongside her. One is even a principal. Others thank her for how much of a difference she made in their lives.

One former student had tried to reach out to Bonita after he had graduated from high school, but he was upset to hear that she had retired. A few days later Bonita was taking her aunt (no it’s not Aunt Sally!) to the grocery store and he recognized his former teacher. Lighting up upon seeing her, “It must be fate! I was looking for you,” he remarked as he recounted to her how much of an influence she had on him. Before being in her class, he had been given the label of a “troubled child”. He said that no one in the elementary school had believed in him and he was constantly reminded, whether overtly or unconsciously that he wouldn’t amount to anything. Well it turns out that he was the manager of the entire meat department and it was all thanks to Ms. Peterson, who was the only one who believed in him. She pushed him academically to levels he had never been pushed before and she constantly reinforced to him to block out the negative voices he heard about himself. She gave him the strength to keep moving, to believe in himself. When asked what she thought she did which really impacted that student, she simply stated, “I saw him, I heard him, and I respected him.”

In 2015, my aunt, Mary Kenzer was chosen to be a keynote speaker at Elevating & Celebrating Effective Teaching and Teachers organized by the Gates Foundation. In this address she spoke about what her calling to become a high school English teacher and her teaching philosophy.

The first thing she seeks to impart upon her students is an understanding of the power of words. The very first week of school for homework, she makes them log every activity that they do in their daily life that pertains to literacy. Whatever it is from texting, to homework to reading a McDonald’s menus, they have to log it. They have to interview at least four adults that are employed to find out how literacy impacts their jobs. They also have to research facts and statistics regarding literacy. Something that always sticks out to them is the relationship between literacy rates and the rates of incarceration and also how one out of five graduating high school students can’t even read what is written on their diploma.

She does all of this so they can understand how what they are learning in her classroom will affect them in the real world. That is one of the biggest questions students always have when learning something abstract to them as mathematics or chemistry and them understanding how they can apply their knowledge is one of the first steps for them to be able to fully buy in to the commitment of learning.

Mary believes that getting your students to buy in is one of the most important aspects of creating a good learning environment. The students also need to understand that you as the teacher are a normal and flawed human being just as they are, and should not be seen as an authority figure to be placed on a pedestal.

Mary’s road to teaching was a long and winding one that isn’t as inevitable as one would believe from knowing her. Initially in her undergraduate years, she aspired to be a medical technologist. In her junior year, there were a limited amount of spots available in the program. In order to apply, an interview before the entire medical board was required. After a colleague of hers was rejected following her interview, she developed cold feet and decided to major in biology instead, an easier route given the amount of biology courses she had already taken up to that point.

As most students encounter when choosing a path, people around them tend to inquire about the future employment prospects of that path. “What do you do with a biology degree?” A question that came up frequently was whether she wanted to teach after she graduated. At the moment her answer was a resounding “No!”.

Years down the road though, that answer would begin to change. As Mary worked as a supervisor at Kroger, many of the people she supervised at the time were high school students. She wouldn’t know it then but years down the line, she would come to learn the impact all her care and dedication she put into training and mentoring would have on these young people. It was then that she realized that she was missing her calling, teaching. Mary realized the kind of impact she had if she fully dedicated herself to that vocation. She would return to school in 2001 to get her master’s degree in order to do so.

In line with her philosophy of getting students to buy in, Mary emphasizes developing relationships with your students, as one of the keys to her classroom management. If you know and understand your students, it will lead to an atmosphere of mutual respect.

When approaching “troubled children”, developing relationships and knowing your students becomes especially important. There is almost always a root problem to bad behavior in the classroom. Being able to talk to students and find these root problems is the key to addressing them.

Mary also invests a lot of time and money into her classroom. Being an English teacher, books are one of her main investments. One year she said she spent around $300 on books for her students to read. The principal supplies books for her class every year but sometimes students become so invested in their reading that they will take books and not return them, so this is a supply that is always in need of replenishing.

Aside from books, she always keeps snacks on hand for various occasions, such as student birthdays. But this also has an important secondary effect. Students that unfortunately go hungry throughout the day know that she has snacks available. If they come to her, they will have something to eat.

Other investments include prom tickets and library fees for students that cannot afford them. Library fees are particularly pressing for students, as if they go unpaid, the student will not be able to graduate. It’s unfair for students to be denied the fruits of their hard work over their high school years simply because they cannot afford the fees they have accrued at the library for whatever reason.

Mary is a fixture at the high school sporting events. She tries to support her students that play on the basketball and football teams, but it’s the high school track meets where you’ll find her most often, usually with Gatorade and water in hand for her school’s team. Track and field is an often neglected sport as many people do not find it as glamorous or important as a sport like football, so she makes it a point to show up to these events to support. This support also extends to the soccer team.

Cooking for her students is another way she shows her appreciation. For senior’s night she brought chicken for all the students and parents. She also cooks for the dance team. As we were speaking to her, she was in the middle of preparing food for the custodian staff showing her appreciation for them!

When you invest this much of yourself into your students, teaching can be a fulfilling vocation. There’s nothing like seeing the fruits of your labor at the end of a year being able to visibly see how much your students have learned and grown as human beings. Just as they learn from her, Mary also learns from her students as well. Teaching always exposes you to different perspectives and points of view that often broaden your own horizons. As Mary tells her students, she is their teacher because she has had many more years of life experience, but that does not mean that she is any smarter or brighter than any of them. There’s always room to learn.

Unfortunately one cannot always reach or get through to every one. Because of how much she cares for and invests in her students, it’s especially difficult for Mary when there are students that don’t care or put in effort. She has had some truly gifted students fail her class simply due to a lack of effort and interest. This is one of the downsides of being a caring and engaged teacher.

Students today face a lot of difficulties in the education and sometimes their shortcomings extend beyond effort. Reading difficulties is unfortunately a more common issue than one would imagine for some high school students. This is an issue that Mary believes begins very early on in their education in elementary school. If the student does not have a dedicated teacher early on that recognizes the difficulties they are experiencing and takes it upon themselves to deal with it, these issue often go unaddressed. The resources available to teachers has also been dwindling. Teaching assistants have become a rarity and class sizes have grown making it difficult for a teacher to even recognize specific issues in individual children.

If a student is having difficulty with doing their work, and they are not receiving the proper help, they will often become disruptive. This leads to them being slapped with the “behavioral problem” label. It will happen that an issue that has its root in difficulty learning the material will be met with disciplinary measures instead. These labels can follow a student their entire academic life and further exacerbates the problem. By the time they get to Mary’s classroom, the learning issue has turned into a source of frustration and shame for the student and the “behavioral problem” label has become the primary lens through which these students are seen.

Students also face difficulties in preparedness for high school because of the years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Online learning at ages where in-person learning is a necessity has affected students. Socialization with other students in person has been affected by this. Students also face issues of overstimulation from smart phones and social media. Distraction from social media affects their ability to engage in the classroom.

One thing that Mary believes can go a long way with addressing classroom difficulties is reducing the class sizes It impacts the degree to which teachers can engage with their students and it limits the effectiveness of the attention they are able to give. Because of the amount of students, not every student’s needs can be addressed and this can be perpetuated onward from grade to grade until it snowballs into a severe issue such as illiteracy in high school.

Parental involvement and engagement with their child’s education is also another factor that could contribute to a better educational experience for children. Something as simple as parents knowing what subjects their children are struggling in, or what assignments they have and whether they have completed them or not can go a long way. Just as the negative things can snowball into something serious, these little positive reinforcements can also do the same. Mary definitely appreciates the parents that are proactive with their kids in school, and she keeps up with them and always show their appreciation for them.

With two decades of service in her vocation as a teacher, Mary Kenzer has followed her calling and has continued to make an impact on countless youth that have gone through her classroom, encountered her a school events or simply have had the pleasure of being the recipient of one of her famous home cooked meals. Even though retirement is starting to loom, she doesn’t think about that yet. Her kids help her stay current and stay sharp and she doesn’t know what she would do without them!

8 bars with, is a series on Educated Guesses where we offer up 8 questions to a special guest for them to ponder and freestyle on. The questions aren't necessarily questions as much as they are prompts or linguistic ink blots meant to stimulate thought. The responses can be short and pithy, long and loquacious or somewhere in between.

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Sheila Elaine Anderson, AKA “The Queen of Hang,” is one of the most ubiquitous and well-loved personalities on the jazz scene. She has been an on-air host at radio station WBGO-FM in Newark since 1995, where she’s conducted penetrating, in-depth on-air interviews with many jazz artists including Regina Carter, Monty Alexander and Benny Golson. She’s authored three books: The Quotable Musician: From Bach to Tupac (2003), The Little Red Book of Musicians Wisdom (2012) and How to Grow As A Musician, What All Musicians Must Know to Succeed (2019). Anderson is also a curator/producer, who has produced the Jazz in the Garden series at the Newark Museum, the Somerville Jazz Festival, the Jazzmobile Summerfest Series and the Harlem Jazz Shrines.

Born in Buffalo and based in Harlem, Anderson grew up in a politically active family, and in a thriving jazz scene. A graduate of Baruch College, Anderson worked in the publishing business in 1983 for Random House, Grove Press, John Wiley and Sons, and W.H. Freeman & Sons, Inc. She served as president of  the Bookbinders' Guild of New York from 1995-97, was a staff writer for the Caribbean-based Oceana magazine and was a columnist for Hot House Jazz Guide. Ms. Anderson also created The Art of Jazz, a weekly 30-minute TV program for Time Warner Cable in New York City from 1995-2003, which earned her a Manhattan Neighborhood Network (MNN) Award for Community Media.

1. Growing up in Buffalo

I am a proud Buffalonian. My great, great grandfather, Dr. Ben Taylor moved to Buffalo in 1832 (from where, we don't know). The 60's was a great decade to grow up in. I lived in a "segregated" middle class Black community called "Cold Springs" and was surrounded by artists, activists, politicians and other professionals who took an interest in us young people. We were raised to strive for excellence. Unfortunately during the 1970's, many of those people left the city (I moved in 1980). Buffalo produced radio legends; Frankie Crocker, Jerry Bledsoe, Gary Byrd as well as musicians; Grover Washington Jr., Ronnie Foster and Dr. Lonnie Smith.

2. The Buffalo jazz scene

Buffalo was on the chitlin circuit so all of the great jazz musicians came through town. There were several spots for them to perform. We had The Little Harlem, The Revilot, The Tralfamadore (where Spyro Gyra got their start) and others that had closed by the time I was of age to go. Unfortunately the jazz scene has greatly diminished but kept alive by various organizations who sponsor jazz festivals throughout the year.

3. NAACP

My aunt Amelia Anderson was the secretary of the Niagara Movement (she's in the iconic founder's picture) and my grandmother (mom's side) was a state officer in Indiana so becoming a member was in my DNA. At the age of 16, after being local youth chapter president for 3 months, I was elected New York State youth president. For three years I held that position, I was a member of the National Youth Work committee. At age 19, the same year that Benjamin L. Hooks took over as executive director,I was elected to the National Board of Directors as the Region II youth member. I came of age during those years. It was exciting and humbling to have met so many people who were civil rights leaders.

4. Jazz Radio in the digital age (WBGO)

Because WBGO is a public radio station that is member/listener supported we are working to adjust to the ways that people now consume radio. It's challenging. Public radio, in general, is struggling to survive. I grew up listening to WBFO that played the best jazz. They no longer feature any jazz and have become a news/talk station.

5. The art of the radio interview

LISTENING and preparation is key to conducting any interview. Ask direct questions. The second question should be a follow up to the person's answer. Allow the person to tell the story. 

6. Your favorite interviews

I have so many favorites, however, the top of my list are T.S. Monk, Monty Alexander, Oscar Brown, Jr., Ron Carter, Al Jarreau and Ruth Brown.

7. Writing books

Whew, it's not easy! I always begin with an outline. Two of my three books are interview based. In an odd way, once I begin writing, they write themselves.

8. The Origin of "The Queen of Hang."

On air host Michael Bourne gave me the moniker. My first WBGO shift (1995) was "Sunday Morning Harmony". I worked in the publishing industry before making my transition into jazz and I felt that I had a gap in my knowledge of the music and wanted to learn more from musicians. To immerse myself into the jazz community, on a weekly basis, I went to every jam session, clubs, and as many venues presenting jazz. One day I was driving and Michael had named the wrong artist playing at the Village Vanguard. I called to correct him. He got back on the mic and said, "I misspoke, Sheila Anderson, ‘The Queen of Hang’ called to tell me who was playing. If anyone would know it is her." Somehow the name stuck! LOL!

9. Bonus Question:

Arts & culture in Newark

The scene has changed so much in the years that I've been on air. There are fewer venues that present the Arts but with NJPAC and The Newark Museum of The Arts and other venues Newark still has a vibrant cultural community that continues to grow.

As children my sister Kennedy and I played t-ball in a local league at Shawnee Park in which all of the teams took their names from Negro League baseball teams. I played for the Baltimore Black Sox and she and our cousin Kalea played for the Newark Eagles. One can imagine when doing research on the Negro Leagues recently, when coming across Effa Manley the owner of the Newark Eagles, who won the 1946 Negro League World Series, I immediately was drawn to her. I had always associated the Eagles with my sister so it was thrilling to learn about how towering of a figure that franchise’s owner was in baseball history.

As I delved deeper into Manley and her contributions, the more interesting her story became as a very complex portrait began to emerge. Effa Manley wasn’t the first woman to own a Negro League team. That honor is owed to Olivia Taylor who became the owner of the Indianapolis Clowns after her husband C.I. Taylor passed away in 1922. Minnie Forbes became the youngest woman to run a franchise when she ran the Detroit Stars from 1956 to 1958 at the age of 24. Joan Whitney Payson co-founded and owned the New York Mets and the notoriously racist Marge Schott owned the Cincinnati Reds from 1984 to 1999. But Effa Manley to this day remains the only woman to be inducted to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Manley left a very complex but no less important legacy as an exceptional baseball franchise owner and as a civil rights advocate constantly challenging the status quo of a segregated society that systematically discriminated against black people. But as I learned in my research, she also challenged the status quo of our perception of race and privilege as she would reveal later in life that she was actually not black at all. Born to a mixed race mother as a result of an affair she had with her white boss, Effa Manley would find out from her mother of her true origins as a teenager. According to Manley, she did not know what her mother was actually mixed with. She knew she had German and American Indian ancestry, but that was as far as she knew. Despite this ambiguous racial and ethnic background, Manley existed as a chameleon in society. She was raised in a black community with her black siblings, and never once questioned her position within black culture. But when she would travel away from Harlem into Manhattan, she would for all intents and purposes be white.

Manley was somewhat of a mirror of American racial perception. Black people including all of her descendants considered her black and did not take very seriously her assertions that she was a white woman. They refer to her as a black woman to this day. But to whites, if she wanted to be perceived as such, she would be perceived as white. The one drop rule can’t apply to you if they don’t know about that one drop. Many whites simply assumed she was white. There is an anecdote from her childhood that I found particularly interesting.

When I was very young, in the first grade, the principal sent for me. At that time Negroes and whites just weren’t supposed to mix…And she sent for me to ask me why I was always with these colored children. And when I went back home and told — I didn’t know what to say to her, I went back and told Mother. I’ve always felt how stupidly Mother reacted. I feel she should have made some effort to talk to the principal or something, explain things. But Mother said to me, ‘You go back and tell her you’re just as white as she is.’ Well, that was ridiculous. But I’m saying — telling you this to say I have come up in this entirely Negro atmosphere.

One can gather a few things from this story. One can imagine how her mother felt raising her effectively as a black child with her siblings, that in that time, she would have had the best chance of getting ahead at life as passing for white. She understood that her daughter had white privilege and gave her a rudimentary lesson in how to use it. One can also gather that Manley at the very least considered herself culturally black. These two things are important in viewing her life and accomplishments because Manley took this lesson she learned from her mother and applied it to a life dedicated to civil rights, black baseball, and black people.

Manley never left this “entirely Negro atmosphere” as all of her husbands including Abe Manley, who would buy the Newark Eagles and gift her ownership and management, were all black men. In all of her census reports, she would be listed as “negro”. This presents interesting questions of how race is identified and perceived in the United States and what exactly does it mean to be black.

Throughout my life, I’ve been presented with this conundrum of racial and ethnic perception, especially since I have travelled abroad. As a child when I first moved to New Jersey, I found it rather shocking that my identity as black would constantly be questioned. In Kentucky I was black and that was that. But in New Jersey, Dominicans thought I was Dominican, Puerto Ricans thought I was Puerto Rican, black and white people thought I was biracial. Upon learning of my native Hawaiian paternal grandmother most people would chalk up the ambiguity to this part of my ancestry. But if one knew my grandmother, that notion would only complicate what they were perceiving. My grandmother, who spent her life raising and babysitting black children in a black neighborhood, was darker skinned than I am and used to brag that she passed as black and that even her doctor didn’t know she wasn’t black. On top of that, the feature that made black people consider me mixed race wasn’t my skin but my hair. My hair is actually most similar to my maternal grandfather who would unquestionably be considered as black.

As I lived abroad though, I began to realize that my race and ethnicity perception were contingent upon who I was speaking to. People from places in East Africa such as Ethiopia thought I was Ethiopian. In France, I was seen as black French, with Algerian coming as the top guess. I have had many people randomly speak French to me in places such as London under such assumptions. In Portugal where I currently live, people ask me if I am Cape Verdean most often, which in a funny irony isn’t fully incorrect as my Hawaiian grandmother had Cape Verdean ancestry, which we in the family had referred to as “Portuguese”. A funny wrinkle indicating how my Cape Verdean ancestor José da Silva probably identified. Even deeper down this rabbit hole is that he was considered “white” on his census reports despite him being from an island off the coast of West Africa and despite the few pictures I have of him appearing somewhat similar to how my family looks today. Because Cape Verde was part of the Portuguese empire and therefore considered part of Portugal proper, in the United States he was considered “Portuguese” which in those times seemed to be one of the few Southern European countries considered white by the Anglo-Saxon dominated consensus of whiteness.

Like Effa Manley my race was determined by who was perceiving me. What I realized tied me to blackness was not my features but rather the black culture my parents very consciously raised me in. Because of my upbringing, there was no question despite my lighter complexion, I was black. This rings especially true when I am in black areas of Lisbon and many of the people look like me, but yet I still feel like a foreigner. In these contexts my Americanness feels especially strong, but my black Americanness feels the strongest despite me not having lived in the United States since 2014. These questions of perception tend to dissipate once people have a conversation with me and see these cultural aspects come through. This is what Effa Manley meant by “this entirely Negro atmosphere”.

Regarding Manley though, this racial ambiguity and complication of self-identification is especially important to how her legacy understood. She was a staunch advocate for civil rights. In 1935 she launched a campaign aimed at businesses in New York that refused to hire black employees called “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work”. This kind of action is reminiscent of the actions that Dr. King and the Souther Christian Leadership Conference would take as part of Operation Breadbasket in Chicago some 3 decades later. She was an active part in fighting for the rights of Negro League teams during integration of the MLB confronting the Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey in person over his attempt to steal her best players out from under her. He famously called the integration of the Major Leagues as “emancipation” while she referred to it as thievery. “He didn’t give us five cents or say thank you.” She is also one of the main reasons we have the statistics we have of the Negro Leagues. She insisted that black newspapers record the statistics from each game. This alone is an invaluable contribution to the history of baseball. Many names may have been lost to history if it were not for this.

Think of how different this legacy comes across one her race is changed. The question many people would ask is why a white woman would involve herself so much with the plight of black people. Her identification with black culture could be perceived by some as akin to Rachel Dolezal, being some form of objectification and appropriation. Imagine the optics of her as a white woman calling all the Negro League owners “a bunch of handkerchief heads”, a term akin to “Uncle Tom” for their refusal to hire a black agent to book games at Yankees Stadium. Most importantly, black people cannot completely claim her for their own historical purposes. Her legacy is bolstered by the idea of her as a black woman achieving all of these things in a time where she would have dealt with both racial discrimination and sexism. In fact she did deal with sexist discrimination from the other black owners at the beginning of her ownership of the Eagles. Her husband Abe was told by Grays owner Cumberland Posey to keep his wife at home. She wasn’t take seriously until her proactive day-to-day ownership style translated to a winning team. She did all the player contracts and negotiations, ordered team equipment and managed the team’s finances. On top of that she spent time as the league treasurer. She forced the other owners to deal with the fact that a woman was indeed running a top baseball franchise. All of this from a woman with a high school education and a background in women’s hat making. She could be used as an inspiration for young black girls all throughout the country. “If she could have done this in the 1930s there’s nothing stopping you from doing this today.” But that simply cannot be asserted sincerely.

But the true question that this begs is how much this all actually matters. Effa Manley was raised in a black community, in black culture and dedicated her life to black causes and civil rights. Much of this was made possible by her racial and ethnic ambiguity. In parts of life and business where she was afforded white privilege she used it, not simply for her own advancement, but to further her agenda of advancing black causes and black people. For Manley, race in general was an intricate and strategic performance. She was very aware of where the color line existed and how to navigate it throughout her life. This ambiguity is what has come to define her racial identity as no one side can fully claim her as their own.

This issue of what defines blackness and what it means to identify as black will only become more complicated over time as we gain distance from the end of legally mandated segregation and legal discrimination. There will come a point where this legacy of slavery and discrimination will not be enough to bind the idea of black people together. Black culture is as mainstream as it has ever been, and black slang becomes predominant in youth of all races and ethnicities. In a world where black culture is integrated into and commodified by the capitalist American cultural paradigm, our diversity in terms of skin color and ethnicity only grows, what will it mean to be black? The complex legacy of someone like Effa Manley might help us begin to answer this question.

by Mark Ruffin

The big question of folks of my generation is do you want to enter that age feebly or with the strength and resilience to enjoy that time of life.  I can’t remember the comedian or raconteur who said it but many people who live long resemble this axiom; “If I had known I was going to live this long I would have taken better care of myself.”

I have never been part of that stereotype that says Black men don’t go to doctors.  Unfortunately, in my lifetime I’ve seen that there’s some validity to that notion as I have lost many friends who could’ve lived longer had they just had their colon checked. Or they could be more mobile had they had that hip or knee worked on years before they ended up crippled in their early 60’s or dead because they couldn’t control their appetite for bad food.

It’s true that genetics can determine how long you live no matter how badly you buck the odds, self-destruct and still live a long life.  And if you do things right with the right genes a healthy triple-digit birthday is very feasible nowadays.  

On December 5^th super arranger/producer Johnny Pate turned 100 years old. I could take a couple of pages to lay out all of his incredible accomplishments in his lifetime but here are a just a few:

• He was Curtis Mayfield’s personal arranger from the very first Impressions record on ABC-Paramount through the “Superfly” soundtrack

• He was Isaac Hayes’ shadow arranger on the “Shaft” and principal composer/arranger for every subsequent “Shaft” sequel and the television series which means when Jay-Z sampled “Shaft In Africa” a few years ago Johnny got a really big check.

• He was one of the first Black record executives at a major record label following Quincy Jones at Mercury and Carl Davis at Columbia/Okeh.  Working for ABC Paramount, Verve and MGM, Johnny gave Monty Alexander, Shirley Horn, Phil Woods and others their very first recording contracts.

• He produced and/or  arranged many classic albums including Wes Montgomery’s “Movin’ Wes” and “Live at the Cook County Jail” by B.B. King which is in the Grammy Hall of Fame.

I could go on but all I need you dear reader to know about his current state comes from  about a year ago when I was trying to get a podcast produced titled “Johnny Pate’s 100^th Birthday Party.”  I brought his name up to a Sirius XM executive named Lou Simon who exclaimed “Not the same Johnny Pate whose 1949 single on King I just brought?”

To impress him on Johnny’s clarity and to satisfy my own curiosity I picked up the phone and called him. After explaining the situation and that I didn’t know of his solo work on King Records Johnny replied with a question I’ve gotten a lot from him through the years.

“Mark, I never told you about that?” he said. “Actually it wasn’t on King Records but their subsidiary Federal.” 

His recall is still quite amazing which goes along with his fantastic mobility.

This year at 96, another friend of mine, guitarist George Freeman released “The Good Life.”  It turned into the biggest record of his career which started in Chicago in the mid 1940’s.  He was Charlie Parker’s Midwest guitarist, which is documented on the album “One Night In Chicago”.

With “The Good Life,” Freeman had national stories in print magazines and made two appearances on NBC-TV including a piece on “The Today Show”.  The irony of life with the recording was that it was made in 2022 with the great organist Joey DeFrancesco who shared George’s birthday of April 10^th.  By the following spring Joey was dead and George was planning his record release party in his hometown of Chicago.  He was 51, almost half George’s age.

These two friends of mine offer proof that nonagenarians, people in their 90’s, are the fastest growing segment of the American population. With the fast paced medical and nutritional advancements, even with the usual news that Black men have shorter lifespans than other races and gender, more men of color will be making it at least into our late 80’s. 

George Freeman may be 97 in April, but he still has almost six years before he can say he outlived his mother.  His brother, National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master saxophonist Von died at in 2012 two months shy of his 89^th birthday.  So, if I was Chico Freeman, the 74-year-old sax playing son of Von, and knew that my grandmother lived well past the century mark, I’d still have a 30-year plan on the books.

It’s also just the luck of the draw to go with your genetics and life circumstances, which may or may not explain why Sly Stone, George Clinton and Keith Richards are still walking the planet. Nowadays Keith, with unlimited resources seems to have wised up and is now actually looking healthy. Speaking of the Stones; explain Mick Jagger.  He and Mitch McConnell are the same age 80. One is Jumping Jack Flash and the other can’t see the bright lights in front of him. I could easily see Mick breaking a hundred. Mitch is already catatonic.

You don’t have to start young to get better at life.  Richard Pryor once said “There’s a lot of smart dead young mother fuckers.”

It’s never too late to get smart about striving to live longer.  On the other hand you can remain as decadent as possible, live a long life and look at restraining from vices as Redd Foxx did.  Paraphrasing, the great comedian, he said: “All them folks who quit drinking, quit smoking and quit eating fried food are gonna feel funny dying from nothing”.

For me I started thinking about my mortality about 15 years ago when I felt my memory slipping and came across a book by neurologist David Perlmutter called “The Better Brain Book: The Best Tools for Improving Memory and Sharpness and Preventing Aging of the Brain”.  Among the things I learned is that you can improve your memory and maybe stave off Parkinson’s and/or Alzheimer naturally. Part of the process includes trying either to learn a language, playing complicated word games and puzzles or taking up an instrument, which really is learning a language. Ever notice how long many drummers live?  They do aerobics every day.

I first started with word games but for the last seven or eight years I’ve been learning Portuguese on Duolingo and even took a class which can explain rules that the app doesn’t cover. After all this time I just really formed my first independent sentence a few weeks ago. However, I’m really strong with vocabulary and lately when I’m just going about my day, I’ve been surprised that I can come up with the right Portuguese word for an object or situation I’m in. That is, as I recall in Dr. Perlmutter’s book, building new synapses which is what you need to do to keep your brain waves healthy.

A meniscus tear about ten years ago made me pay more attention to my crumbling anatomical infrastructure.  I was getting to as close to 100% as I was going to get when I started developing arthritis in my right hip.  It got so bad that my brain had to ask my leg for permission to lift it.  Sometimes the leg said no and I had to use my hands to lift my leg.

Then I met a guy who has to be one of the best physical therapists in the world.  This guy helped me build stretching and strength routines that I honestly feel kept me from becoming a cripple.  He told me a long time ago that this was for the rest of my life because the older you get the quicker your body regresses.  I believe him so I have what is now a habit of a routine that again I believe has helped to keep me upright.  The exercises also give me the willpower to fight all the new aches and pains that show up daily. 

If you live in New York, his name is Steve Caronia and his office is on 48^th & 5^th.  Bonus if you’re a sport, music or general NYC nerd because he can keep you entertained with his vast but not necessarily expert knowledge on each subject. His grandfather was the general manager for Angel-EMI Records back in the day, so he gets that pretty impressive music nerdiness by osmosis.  What really makes him good is he’s also a PT nerd who remembers every patient and who says he can’t help but diagnose everybody he sees on the street not walking correctly.

I have several limping co-workers with bad knees or hips that I’ve told about Steve.  Two of these Black men, the last time I saw them were still limping.  The other one died. Me, I wanna live and walk.

About five years ago I was told I was approaching pre-Diabetes numbers.  Pardon my ignorance but that is when I found out that the kind of Diabetes that many Black men are diagnosed with was preventable. I was astounded. My doctor was surprised I didn’t know that.  I upped my exercise regimen, which really isn’t much.  I also began to only eat badly only on the weekends. Five years on and I’ve never had that problem again.

However, just a few weeks ago I was told my cholesterol numbers are starting to creep up.  In fact, the doctor told me that if a cardiologist saw my numbers they would probably start me on some kind of medication. Other than supplements and Flomax, I don’t want to start any drug regimen. Instead, I am going to a dietician and so much for eating what I want on weekends. 

Before I started though I went to New York to have the best French toast breakfast at the Union Square Café, lunch at my favorite Chicago beef sandwich place outside Chicago at Emmet’s on MacDougal Street in the Village, and dinner at Pomodoro’s  on the Upper West Side, one of the best Italian restaurants in the city.

Just my luck, while in New York I slept on a horrible mattress. The resultant back and hip pain made me feel like years of stretching and feeling better had regressed terribly in one weekend.  To live longer is going to take more willpower and more tolerance for those nagging  aches and pains that seem to show up more and more on parts of my body that I’d never noticed before.

Of course, I could take all the precautions in the world and have a heart attack or become a gun violence victim tomorrow. How long you live isn’t all about luck or the environment you’ve live in. It’s about the odds and chances you take.  The stress, physical and psychological harm I’ve done to my body could also take me out early.  It’s not all about luck or the environment you’ve live in but the bets and odds you make and take with your life.

While never a heavy smoker I smoked cigarettes well into my 50’s. Conversely, I quit drinking on my 19^th birthday.  Does that even my odds?  I don’t know.  I do know unless you’re the self-destructive type and you’re close to the age when I quit nicotine, if you’re not thinking about how you’re living and going to live in the future than you may not really be living right, right now.

I open up my life as fodder, inspiration, warning and maybe useful advice.

All of my life I’ve used lyrics as guideposts to how to survive.  That’s one of the reasons Smokey Robinson and Gil Scott-Heron are the first two people I thank in my book “Bebop Fairy Tales: An Historical Fiction Trilogy on Jazz, Intolerance and Baseball”.  I mention that now because Gil has a great line about advice from his song “Under The Hammer.”

“Good advice is sure enough hard to come by.  Bad advice surrounds you constantly. Good advice you just can’t put no price on.  Bad advice is easy cause it’s free.”

I urge not just Black men but anyone reading this to heed some of this advice and think of how you want the quality of your life when you’re 99.

Another great songwriting philosopher, Van McCoy wrote this line in “To Each His Own” for the group Faith, Hope & Charity.  “To each his own, that’s my philosophy.  I don’t know what’s right for you and you don’t know what’s right for me.”  I suggest you find what’s right for you because you could live to 105.

Some of the best advice on aging I’ve heard comes from a great movie on getting old titled “If You’re Not In The Obit, Eat Breakfast”.  The 2017 HBO documentary follows legendary humorist Carl Reiner as he asks other nonagenarians the secret of making it into your tenth decade.  Many of the people he asks are still with us including Mel Brooks, Norman Lear and Dick Van Dyke.  Others in the very funny movie include the recently departed Betty, White, Kirk Douglas and Tony Bennett.

Essentially, they boil down a longer life to three things; two of which can be very hard to obtain. But the third one could be the most vital and is the easiest to accomplish.

Number one is to have or at least have had the absolute love of your life. That’s really hard. Although I now have that, it was late in life and may have given me the strength to quit smoking. That proof, at least in this instance, that love has scientifically increased the years I have to live.

The second thing is to wake up every day and do whatever the fuck you want to do.  While that is also a hard goal to obtain for the majority of people, loving and being passionate about what living you do for a living does count.

The third thing is something simple that we can all do; stretching. Everyone after the age of 50 should develop a gym workout or at the very least a stretching routine that can easily be done at home. While those other two notions listed in the movie cannot scientifically be absolutely proven. It is a stone-cold fact that a body in motion tends to stay that way and staves off all kinds of aches, pains and maladies.

Funny, I’ve known both Johnny Pate and George Freeman for roughly half my life but only about a third of theirs. I submit this document as a celebration of two incredible, inspiring Black elders who know a lot about living life even if they can’t exactly detail how they’ve done it.

Optimism and having a healthy sense of humor has also been linked to better aging.  George has both in abundance.  I’ve seen it up close.

I’ve known George since the early 80’s.  I produced two of his albums “At Long Last George,” and “90 Going On Amazing,” and wrote the liner notes for another, “George Burns.”  Believe me it was a laugh a minute with him in completing our tasks.

George eschews genetics when asked about his longevity.  Instead, he invokes spirituality as the main factor to living long.

“All I ever wanted to be was thankful that I’m here,” he said “I pray a lot. Aging really got to do with God. Jazz is nothing but love.” jazz is supporting each other. If you can put the ego down, jazz is nothing but love.”

If we refer back to Mr. Reiner’s film, that’s two of the notions right there. George has always gotten up every day to do what he wants and that is to cuddle, crave and care for the love of his life; the bright red guitar he plays.

Other than having a relationship with his brother Von and his nephews Chico and Mark Freeman, I purposely know little of George’s personal life.  I don’t know if he’s had true love with a human. However, I’ve known Carolyn Pate almost as long as I’ve had a personal relationship with Johnny.

I’ve known who Johnny was since I was a wee tyke reading record labels in my parents record store. He was named as arranger was on the label of all the Impressions sides, and when I got a bit older on the 45’s by another all-time favorite from the 60’s, the Five Stairsteps.  I followed his musical exploits as a record executive, arranger and producer from then on including in the 70’s working on the monumental debut album from Peobo Bryson “Reaching For The Sky,” and working on the tapes that produced duets on the famed posthumous Minnie Riperton album “Love Lives Forever”

I first met Johnny in the early 90’s when he was for kicks broadcasting jazz under a pseudonym on KUNV/Las Vegas.  Then through our very close mutual friend, Ramsey Lewis, I was provided with one of the true highlights of my career in that I got to tell Nancy Wilson what to sing.  Johnny and I were thrown together to work A&R and provide a list of songs for the album “Meant To Be,” by Nancy and Ramsey. That was really the start of our friendship.

Using the three-pronged scale from the Carl Reiner movie, Johnny is the perfect example. As far as waking up every day and doing what he wants; astonishingly he retired nearly half a century ago.  And there’s no question Carolyn is Johnny’s soulmate.

One amazing way he is keeping his mind sharp is he has written at last count over 150 variations on a musical love theme about Carolyn titled “How Did I Get So Lucky”.  I’ve heard a lot of them and in them you can hear that his creativity is still very sharp.   Plus, his acumen for complicated jigsaw puzzles is simply astounding. Both are notions that are endorsed in Dr. Perlmutter’s book on aging.

Early in this century, by coincidence Johnny and Carolyn moved to Dallas around the same time that my mother did. The reverse migration continued as two sisters and a brother did the same. Another coincidence is that he was born exactly ten years and a day before my mom. So for many years during the holiday season, I would see them both even bringing her to the Pate’s residence a couple of times.   Every year he would relay the message “tell her if she keeps going, one day she’ll catch up.”  I don’t think any of us thought more than 15 years later the tradition would continue.

As it turns out it’s my mom who is having the big party.  She alone planned her 90^th birthday party with over a hundred family members coming to Texas from all over the country.  Did you know you can hire Uber for unlimited rides to a fixed destination?  It’s been amazing watching her do it from afar.  The big event is on for the 10^th a few days after their birthdays. 

My mom reaching 90 is encouraging. On the other hand, my dad died at 44.  Aging is so much more than the genetic and environmental roll of the dice. Most importantly I’ve come to realize that after a certain age, it’s mostly about being proactive with your health.

If I could help one person with these words, I am happy for my effort.  But really I wrote this for a chance to publicly wish a Happy 100^th birthday to Johnny Pate.

Today, well over 50 years removed from the height of the Civil Rights Movement, it may be hard for us to imagine the choices that our black foreparents faced back then and for the decades and centuries before. One foundational issue that they faced was that of integration. Removing the legal and social barriers that kept blacks from advancing in this country was one of the main goals of the Civil Rights Movement.

Many of those legal barriers have indeed been removed, and many blacks have successfully “integrated” into mainstream America. However, there still exists a significant number of blacks who have not been able to successfully integrate into America and all that it has to offer, which begs the question in hindsight, was wholesale integration the right strategy? Did an integration strategy forsake the development of a strong independent and interdependent black community with its own viable institutions?

This is the third in a series of articles where I will explore these questions in detail. In this article I will address the process of integration of Major League Baseball and the overall negative impact it had on the Negro League. Was integrating individual players into the MLB the only viable route or was there another path that could have been taken?

When the integration of baseball began, for Negro League teams the process immediately put them in position of precarity. Players that were selected to participate in the Major Leagues were often simply taken from their Negro League teams with little respect for their already existing contracts. In the middle of negotiating a contract with Don Newcombe, the owner of the Newark Eagles Effa Manley complained that owners were not given the opportunity to negotiate a way for these players to leave their teams to join Major League clubs. All they were given as compensation were platitudes about how their players were “pioneers” and “crusaders” in the effort to integrate Major League Baseball.

Ever outspoken, Manley wrote to the Dodgers manager Branch Rickey that Negro League owners would be more enthusiastic if “you had only (given) the owners of the Newark Eagles the courtesy of negotiating with us for the services of this valuable player.” She hoped for "a more friendly, ethical, and equitable handling of similar situations". She would eventually take her complaints to the commissioner of Major League Baseball, but unfortunately she nor any other Negro League players would be afforded this ethical and equitable handling.

Integration of the Major Leagues on these terms eventually led to the demise of Negro League Baseball in 1948 when the historically best team in the league, the Homestead Grays left the league to return to “barnstorming” or touring baseball rather than an organized league. Most other teams folded as a result and the Grays folded a year later from the money lost in barnstorming. With the destruction of the Negro League and its teams, much of the wealth generated by these owners was lost. Owners simply had no say in the continuation of their businesses. The message was simple: Integration will be done on Major League terms or it will not happen at all.

Aside from the players that were able to integrate into Major League baseball, black baseball as a whole did not benefit from this kind of integration. With the press generated from players such as Jackie Robinson, the black audience of the Negro Leagues abandoned the league for Major League Baseball to cheer on these few “pioneering” players. This was not integration, it was robbery.

Integration of players into the MLB was not the only form that an integration of leagues could have taken place, but it was the form that benefitted Major League clubs as they could have their pick at the best players in the Negro Leagues, sign them on their terms, and not have to deal with the rest of the players, staff, and owners that made up the rest of the league.

A more equitable way to facilitate integration could have been carried out in a similar fashion to how the National Basketball Association would merge with the American Basketball Association, several decades later. Four of the six teams in the ABA made the jump to the NBA. These teams included the Denver Nuggets, Indiana Pacers, New York Nets and San Antonio Spurs. As a result of the merger, the NBA adopted some of the rules and aspects of ABA basketball that proved popular in the league such as the three-point line.

But such a merger would presuppose a level of respect for the Negro Leagues by the Major Leagues that simply did not exist. Adopting any aspect of the Negro Leagues beyond its players would have been seen as diluting baseball. Judging from the hostile reception Jackie Robinson initially received, an entire team would have been untenable to baseball fans. White fans did not want to see black players and even white players didn’t want to play against black players. This was made evident in the lack of participation in exhibition matches between Negro League teams and Major League teams who would often field teams of minor leaguers to represent them.

Negro League players were often seen as inferior to their Major League counterparts. Upon integration many players outside of the greatest often struggled to adjust to Major League standards and their statistical drop was often used as evidence to compare them to AA minor league talent. The differences in how Negro League players fared in the Majors though can be boiled down to a difference in style of play and resources afforded to the Negro League.

In terms of statistical differences, several reasons can account for this. The statistics cannot be compared between the leagues due to differences in play and how statistics were kept. To add to this when statistics are compared the Negro League players often look inferior in talent to Major League players despite what anecdotal evidence and commentary from Major League players who played against them would suggest. Players who were considered great by their Major League contemporaries, did not always reflect this in the statistics.

On the website the Hall of Miller and Eric, a blog devoted to reevaluating the Baseball Hall of Fame they delve deep into the issues regarding this discrepancy between the Negro Leagues and Major Leagues . The writers overall scrutinize the process of the baseball hall of fame selection and make arguments for players who they feel were wrongfully excluded due to a biased and relatively arbitrary criteria. In this case they argue in favor of the many excluded Negro League players.

One reason many of the Negro League players struggled initially was due to their older age when they integrated into the Major League. Many of the greats of the league were past their prime when integration was facilitated. Still, even the best players regardless of age had an adjustment period.

The reason for this difficult adjustment period comes down to a difference in how the game was played. Major League baseball valued pitchers who had a strong command of their fastball and dictated the pace of every at bat with the fastball. Negro League pitches generally did not have a commanding fastball, but would compensate for this through more elusive types of pitches like spitballs, which were legal in the Negro Leagues. For this reason, Negro League hitters were more accustomed to hitting curveballs more than any other type of pitch. When integrating into a fastball dominated league, their expectations and perceptions of what a pitcher will throw them will have to be adjusted through experience.

Negro Leagues also took baseballs out of play less often. Essentially they were using the same balls for longer period of time, and these balls would degrade over the stretch of a game having a dampening effect on offense as the balls wouldn’t carry as much when being hit. The larger dimensions of Negro League parks also added to this dampening of offenses in the Negro Leagues. The Negro league also valued different positions as opposed to the Major Leagues. Pitchers were valued in the Majors while much more value was placed on Shortstops and Center Fielders where a lot of the talent was congregated. Catchers were also valued more in the Negro Leagues as a defensive position.

Team building as a result was very different in the Negro Leagues. The best athletes were placed “up-the middle” behind second base. Positions weren’t as fixed due to the smaller teams and a lack of a minor leagues meant that players weren’t specialized earlier in their careers. There was a lot more variability in how the teams were built. Once the major skilled positions were filled, a core would be built and shaped around them and their particular skillsets.

The small rosters and limited staff combined with the constant play of baseball would advantage hitters as pitching arms would not have time to fully recover in between starts. This could be a contributing factor as to why fastballs were not as refined in the Negro Leagues. The lack of parity in the league and lack of balanced schedules contributed to difference in talent between the leagues overall.

Overall the stars in the Negro Leagues were as much talented as their counterparts in the Major leagues, but the lower you get on the ladder, the standard becomes more skewed toward the majors. Despite this, the best Negro League teams such as the Homestead Grays, the Kansas City Monarchs, the Chicago American Giants, if given a fair chance to compete would have been able to do so in the Major Leagues.

Instead of giving players an adjustment window, imagine if this were afforded to entire teams being integrated into the Major Leagues. These franchises would have had an opportunity to build their teams around the Major League game and they would have benefited from an expanded pool of players and a minor league farm system. The factors such as the degrading quality of baseballs throughout a game and smaller teams adversely affecting pitchers would have been mitigated by a merger of this sort. After a few years of establishing themselves, it is no doubt that teams such as the Homestead Grays, Kansas City Monarchs, and Chicago American Giants, filled with hall of fame talent could have competed in the Major Leagues.

Imagine the impact Jackie Robinson could have had donning a Kansas City Monarchs jersey as opposed to a Los Angeles Dodgers jersey. Black viewership and support wouldn’t have simply followed Jackie Robinson. It would have followed the whole team to the league. With this boost in support from black people alone, the teams themselves would have benefited.

Importantly, the presence of black owners within the MLB would have had a trickle down effect upon the communities these owners resided. For example Dr. J.B. Martin was owner of the American Giants from 1937 until the team folded in 1956. He not only owned this team, he was heavily involved with his hometown team the Memphis Red Sox. He owned the stadium that the Red Sox occupied as well as the concessions within the stadium, and a nearby hotel. In addition, he ran a funeral parlor, invested in real estate, owned business on Beale Street, in downtown Memphis and was a political figure within the Republican party.

The wealth he generated from his involvement with baseball went much further than just solely enriching himself. He contributed to the economic well-being of his hometown of Memphis creating jobs doing so. His involvement in politics also gave him a wider platform to challenge the unjust status quo of his era. In Memphis, he received pushback from the white supremacist political machine operated by Edward Hull Crump when building his stadium for the Memphis Red Sox. Crump wielded power over Memphis through his political apparatus which oversaw the manipulation of the white and black vote within the city. Already an enemy of Crump, Martin used his political position to denounce Crump’s corrupt practices, which of course was met with retribution from the Memphis police who would frequently raid his businesses on Beale Street. Despite this, the capacity of Martin Stadium grew steadily in the ensuing years.

With the increase in revenue and resources, Dr. J.B. Martin could have increased his reach economically and politically, which in the environment of the segregated South, in which he mainly resided, would have gone a long way for black people within his city. Other owners such as Cumberland Posey of the Homestead Grays and J Leslie Wilkinson of the Kansas City Monarchs, and Effa Manley of the Newark Eagles would have also benefitted from having their teams integrated into the Major Leagues. Each one of these owners were considered savvy businesspeople and would no doubt have thrived in an integrated Major League.

With a longstanding presence of black owners and coaches in major league baseball, this might not have been a rarity of novelty much like it is viewed today. This would have predated Bill Russell becoming the head coach of the Boston Celtics by over a decade and a half. Currently there is not a single black majority owner in the NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, or NFL. We’re still at a point where even a black quarterback in the NFL is novel enough to be a selling point. If the MLB had taken a path where black owned teams was an institutional part of the league, what could have been possible in these other sports? Imagine the possibilities of those following in the footsteps of Dr. J.B. Martin and Effa Manley in a league like the NFL. Black owners would not be hypothetical but a veritable institution.