Multiplication Is For White People Quotes

A second reason African American students are not excelling is that we have all been affected by our society’s deeply ingrained bias of equating blackness with inferiority.

There is no achievement gap at birth.

If the curriculum we use to teach our children does not connect in positive ways to the culture young people bring to school, it is doomed to failure.

I was told that the disorder was not really in my eyes, but in my central nervous system. I might or might not experience symptoms of neural damage all my life. These symptoms, which might or might not appear, might or might not involve my eyes. They might or might not involve my arms or legs, they might or might not be disabling. Their effects might be lessened by cortisone injections, or they might not. It could not be predicted. The condition had a name, the kind of name usually associated with telethons, but the name meant nothing and the neurologist did not like to use it. The name was multiple sclerosis, but the name had no meaning. This was, the neurologist said, an exclusionary diagnosis, and meant nothing. I had, at this time, a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife. In a few lines of dialogue in a neurologist’s office in Beverly Hills, the improbable had become the probable, the norm: things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me. I could be struck by lightning, could dare to eat a peach and be poisoned by the cyanide in the stone. The startling fact was this: my body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind.

Teenagers are in the throes of learning the biggest lesson of all: life isn’t simple, it isn’t black and white. It’s multiple and varied shades of grey. If you mix these shades of grey you might end up getting close to black or white, but in the end, it’s the darkening of themselves around the edges and the ways in which they bend and break that will make them more wholesome people; people that others will want to be around and who will contribute greatly to society when given the awesome opportunity.

Assessment is a lot trickier than we think, especially if the children we are assessing are not from the same culture as the test makers.

Otherwise, as one New Orleans community activist told me, we are providing low-income schools with tourists rather than teachers.

As a result of this “racism smog,” many of our children have internalized all of the negative stereotypes inherent in our society’s views of black people. A student teacher at Southern University told me that she didn’t know what to say when an African American eighth-grade boy came up to her and said, “They made us the slaves because we were dumb, right, Ms. Summers?” Working with a middle schooler on her math, a tutor was admonished, “Why you trying to teach me to multiply, Ms. L.? Black people don’t multiply; black people just add and subtract. White people multiply.

The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling. And this sentiment is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way, never partially, or that kind of thing.

Kati Haycock has calculated that three to four weeks of effective, full-day literacy instruction would allow the average student to gain an entire year of academic growth.

Why do we punish our children with our inability to teach them?

No matter what the standards dictate, there is plenty of room for teachers working together to refine mandated instruction so that it is more appropriate for their students.

In other words, every human brain has the built-in capacity to become, over time, what we demand of it. No ability is fixed. Practice can even change the brain.

I write these words because what we need to know at a very deep level is that African American children do not come into this world at a deficit. There is no “achievement gap” at birth—at

I kind of was beginning to feel like I was being underutilized [as Teen Ambassador to the UN]. I mean, there were a lot more important issues out there for teens that I could have been bringing international attention to than what kids see out their windows. I mean, instead of sitting in the White House press office for three hours after school every Wednesday, or attending International Festival of the Child concerts, I could have been out there alerting the public to the fact that in some countries, it is still perfectly legal for men to take teen brides -- even multiple teen brides! What was that all about? And what about places like Sierra Leone, where teens and even younger kids routinely get their limbs chopped off as "warnings" against messing with the warring gangs that run groups of diamond traffickers? And hello, what about all those kids in countries with unexploded land mines buried in the fields where they'd like to play soccer, but can't because it's too dangerous? And how about a problem a little closer to home? How about all the teenagers right here in America who are taking guns to school and blowing people away? Where are they getting these guns, and how come they think shooting people is a viable solution to their problems? And why isn't anybody doing anything to alleviate some of the pressures that might lead someone to think bringing a gun to school is a good thing? How come nobody is teaching people like Kris Parks to be more tolerant of others, to stop torturing kids whose mothers make them wear long skirts to school?

Too often in schools, we either ask teachers to be lone rangers in trying to create better instruction, or we give them prescribed "teacher-proof" lessons that may or may not be appropriate for their students.

Los puentes colgantes / Floating Bridges" Oh what a crush of People Invisible, reborn Make their way to into this garden For their eternal rest Every step we take on earth Brings us to a new world Every foot supported On a floating bridge I know there is no straight road No straight road in this world Only a giant labyrinth Of intersecting crossroads And steadily our feet Keep walking and creating Like enormous fans These roads in embryo Oh garden of white Oh garden of all I am not All I could And should have been I know there is no straight road No straight road in this world Only a giant labyrinth Of intersecting crossroads Comprendo que no existe El camino derecho Solo un gran labertino De encrucijadas multiples

Cruz nodded. “In case you’re wondering, I have a dick.” That earned a sudden, single bark of laughter from Shade, which in turn raised a disturbing red-and-white smile from Cruz. “Is that a permanent condition?” Shade asked. Cruz shrugged. “I don’t have a short answer.” “Give me the long one. I’ll tell you if I get bored.” She flopped onto her bed. “Okay. Well . . . you know it’s all on a spectrum, right? I mean, there are people—most people—who are born either M or F and are perfectly fine with that. And some people are born with one body but a completely different mind, you know? They know from, like, toddler age that they are in the wrong body. Me, I’m . . . more kind of neither. Or both. Or something.” “You’re e), all of the above. You’re multiple choice, but on a true-false test.” That earned another blood-smeared grin from Cruz. “Can I use that line?” “I understand spectra, and I even get that sexuality and gender are different things,” Shade said, sitting up.

Successful teachers of children marginalized either by income-level or ethnicity—or both—have long understood that their charges not only need strong instruction in skills, but they need to know that it is skills, and not intelligence, that they lack.

The obstinacy of antiquated institutions in perpetuating themselves resembles the stubbornness of the rancid perfume which should claim our hair, the pretensions of the spoiled fish which should persist in being eaten, the persecution of the child's garment which should insist on clothing the man, the tenderness of corpses which should return to embrace the living. "Ingrates!" says the garment, "I protected you in inclement weather. Why will you have nothing to do with me?" "I have just come from the deep sea," says the fish. "I have been a rose," says the perfume. "I have loved you," says the corpse. "I have civilized you," says the convent. To this there is but one reply: "In former days." To dream of the indefinite prolongation of defunct things, and of the government of men by embalming, to restore dogmas in a bad condition, to regild shrines, to patch up cloisters, to rebless reliquaries, to refurnish superstitions, to revictual fanaticisms, to put new handles on holy water brushes and militarism, to reconstitute monasticism and militarism, to believe in the salvation of society by the multiplication of parasites, to force the past on the present, – this seems strange. Still, there are theorists who hold such theories. These theorists, who are in other respects people of intelligence, have a very simple process; they apply to the past a glazing which they call social order, divine right, morality, family, the respect of elders, antique authority, sacred tradition, legitimacy, religion; and they go about shouting, "Look! take this, honest people." This logic was known to the ancients. The soothsayers practise it. They rubbed a black heifer over with chalk, and said, "She is white, Bos cretatus." As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it. Superstitions, bigotries, affected devotion, prejudices, those forms all forms as they are, are tenacious of life; they have teeth and nails in their smoke, and they must be clasped close, body to body, and war must be made on them, and that without truce; for it is one of the fatalities of humanity to be condemned to eternal combat with phantoms. It is difficult to seize darkness by the throat, and to hurl it to the earth.

When students doubt their own competence, they typically respond with two behaviors: they either hide (hoods over faces, heads on desks) and try to become invisible, or they act out to prevent a scenario unfolding in which they will not be able to perform and will once again be proved "less than." Teachers frequently misinterpret both of these behaviors, usually inferring that the student is unmotivated, uninterested, or behavior disordered.

One of the most notorious slogans of ultra-nationalism in Turkey has been ‘Either love it or leave it!’ It is meant to block all kinds of fault-finding from within. The implication is that if you criticize your country or your state, you are showing disrespect, not to mention a lack of patriotism, in which case you had better take your leave. If you do stay, however, the implication is that you love your homeland, in which case you had better not voice any critical opinions. This black-and-white mentality is an obstacle to social progress. But it is not only Turkish ultra- nationalism that is fuelled by a dualistic mentality. All kinds of extremist, exclusivist discourses are similarly reductionist and sheathed in tautology. Either/or approaches ask us to make a choice, all the while spreading the fallacy that it is not possible to have multiple belongings, multiple roots, multiple loves.

Because middle-class home culture is so taken for granted, so "transparent," it often exists outside of conscious awareness for those who are members of that culture, especially in schools. It is assumed to be what "everyone knows," just the background of normal life—knowledge that does not need to be taught. Consequently, when this knowledge is not exhibited by children or adults, there is a sense that something is wrong, perhaps a lack of basic intelligence.

We should set an audacious goal of enacting policies to encourage the private sector to create 10 million new jobs. Enough for full recovery. Good, blue-collar jobs with strong wages and work with dignity. High-paying white-collar jobs in expanding technologies. Full-time jobs, not people trapped in endless part-time positions. Multiple, exciting job opportunities for young people coming out of school. Get government out of the way and unleash the creativity of millions of small businesses.

We have not thoroughly assessed the bodies snatched from dirt and sand to be chained in a cell. We have not reckoned with the horrendous, violent mass kidnapping that we call the Middle Passage. We have not been honest about all of America's complicity - about the wealth the South earned on the backs of the enslaved, or the wealth the North gained through the production of enslaved hands. We have not fully understood the status symbol that owning bodies offered. We have not confronted the humanity, the emotions, the heartbeats of the multiple generations who were born into slavery and died in it, who never tasted freedom on America's land. The same goes for the Civil War. We have refused to honestly confront the fact that so many were willing to die in order to hold the freedom of others in their hands. We have refused to acknowledge slavery's role at all, preferring to boil things down to the far more palatable "state's rights." We have not confessed that the end of slavery was so bitterly resented, the rise of Jim Crow became inevitable - and with it, a belief in Black inferiority that lives on in hearts and minds today. We have painted the hundred-year history of Jim Crow as little more than mean signage and the inconvenience that white people and Black people could not drink from the same fountain. But those signs weren't just "mean". They were perpetual reminders of the swift humiliation and brutal violence that could be suffered at any moment in the presence of whiteness. Jim Crow meant paying taxes for services one could not fully enjoy; working for meager wages; and owning nothing that couldn't be snatched away. For many black families, it meant never building wealth and never having legal recourse for injustice. The mob violence, the burned-down homes, the bombed churches and businesses, the Black bodies that were lynched every couple of days - Jim Crow was walking through life measuring every step. Even our celebrations of the Civil Rights Movement are sanitized, its victories accentuated while the battles are whitewashed. We have not come to grips with the spitting and shouting, the pulling and tugging, the clubs, dogs, bombs, and guns, the passion and vitriol with which the rights of Black Americans were fought against. We have not acknowledged the bloodshed that often preceded victory. We would rather focus on the beautiful words of Martin Luther King Jr. than on the terror he and protesters endured at marches, boycotts, and from behind jail doors. We don't want to acknowledge that for decades, whiteness fought against every civil right Black Americans sought - from sitting at lunch counters and in integrated classrooms to the right to vote and have a say in how our country was run. We like to pretend that all those white faces who carried protest signs and batons, who turned on their sprinklers and their fire hoses, who wrote against the demonstrations and preached against the changes, just disappeared. We like to pretend that they were won over, transformed, the moment King proclaimed, "I have a dream." We don't want to acknowledge that just as Black people who experienced Jim Crow are still alive, so are the white people who vehemently protected it - who drew red lines around Black neighborhoods and divested them of support given to average white citizens. We ignore that white people still avoid Black neighborhoods, still don't want their kids going to predominantly Black schools, still don't want to destroy segregation. The moment Black Americans achieved freedom from enslavement, America could have put to death the idea of Black inferiority. But whiteness was not prepared to sober up from the drunkenness of power over another people group. Whiteness was not ready to give up the ability to control, humiliate, or do violence to any Black body in the vicinity - all without consequence.

Why classify by skin color at all, unless you plan to invoke it in some way. If one group oppresses another, inadvertently or on purpose, you’d want good data on who’s oppressing whom so that you can redress the problem. With the same data, however, nefarious people in power might want to magnify inequality, which is just what happened in apartheid South Africa. The 1950 Population Registration Act codified skin color into White and Black, with multiple subcategories of Coloured, which included mixed race and Asian, enabling the White minority in power to establish laws that prescribed and stratified the social, political, educational, and economic freedoms of each population differently.

One unfortunate thing about Black Power is that it gives priority to race precisely at a time when the impact of automation and other forces have made the economic question fundamental for blacks and whites alike. In this context a slogan “Power for Poor People” would be much more appropriate than the slogan “Black Power.” However much we pool our resources and “buy black,” this cannot create the multiplicity of new jobs and provide the number of low-cost houses that will lift the Negro out of the economic depression caused by centuries of deprivation. Neither can our resources supply quality integrated education. All of this requires billions of dollars which only an alliance of liberal-labor-civil-rights forces can stimulate. In short, the Negroes’ problem cannot be solved unless the whole of American society takes a new turn toward greater economic justice.

A dizzying array of resources across multiple fields of human inquiry has been deployed to defend this belief. By far, the strongest were theological arguments that presented white supremacy as divine mandate. Particular readings of the Bible provided the scaffolding for these arguments. Black Americans, for example, were cast as descendants of Cain, whom the book of Genesis describes as physically marked by God after killing his brother, Abel, and then lying to God about the crime. In the white Christian version of this narrative, the original ancestor was a Black criminal, and modern-day dark-skinned people continue to bear the physical mark of this ancient transgression. This story implied that Blacks likely inherited both their purported ancestor’s physical distinctiveness and his inferior moral character. These teachings persisted in many white Christian circles well into the 20th century.

Treating Abuse Today 3(4) pp. 26-33 Freyd: The term "multiple personality" itself assumes that there is "single personality" and there is evidence that no one ever displays a single personality. TAT: The issue here is the extent of dissociation and amnesia and the extent to which these fragmentary aspects of personality can take executive control and control function. Sure, you and I have different parts to our mind, there's no doubt about that, but I don't lose time to mine they can't come out in the middle of a lecture and start acting 7 years old. I'm very much in the camp that says that we all are multi-minds, but the difference between you and me and a multiple is pretty tangible. Freyd: Those are clearly interesting questions, but that area and the clinical aspects of dissociation and multiple personalities is beyond anything the Foundation is actively... TAT: That's a real problem. Let me tell you why that's a problem. Many of the people that have been alleged to have "false memory syndrome" have diagnosed dissociative disorders. It seems to me the fact that you don't talk about dissociative disorders is a little dishonest, since many people whose lives have been impacted by this movement are MPD or have a dissociative disorder. To say, "Well, we ONLY know about repression but not about dissociation or multiple personalities" seems irresponsible. Freyd: Be that as it may, some of the scientific issues with memory are clear. So if we can just stick with some things for a moment; one is that memories are reconstructed and reinterpreted no matter how long ago or recent. TAT: You weigh the recollected testimony of an alleged perpetrator more than the alleged victim's. You're saying, basically, if the parents deny it, that's another notch for disbelief. Freyd: If it's denied, certainly one would want to check things. It would have to be one of many factors that are weighed -- and that's the problem with these issues -- they are not black and white, they're very complicated issues.

Among the Founders, Thomas Jefferson wrote about race at greatest length. He thought blacks were mentally inferior to whites and biologically distinct: “[They] secrete less by the kidnies [sic], and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a strong and disagreeable odor.” He hoped slavery would be abolished, but he did not want free blacks to remain in America: “When freed, [the Negro] is to be removed from beyond the reach of mixture.” Jefferson was one of the first and most influential advocates of “colonization,” or returning blacks to Africa. He also believed in the destiny of whites as a racially distinct people. In 1786 he wrote, “Our Confederacy [the United States] must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled.” In 1801 he looked forward to the day “when our rapid multiplication will expand itself . . . over the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface.

Nevertheless, in certain respects and in certain places, despite philosophy, despite progress, the spirit of the cloister lingers on, in the middle of the nineteenth century, and a bizarre new outbreak of asceticism now astounds the civilized world. The persistence of antiquated institutions in perpetuating themselves is like the stubbornness of stale scent clinging to your hair, the urgency of spoiled fish clamouring to be eaten, the oppression of childish garb expecting to clothe the adult, and the tenderness of corpses wanting to come back to kiss the living. 'Ungrateful wretch!' says the garment. 'I protected you in bad weather. Why will you have nothing more to do with me?' 'I come from the open sea,' says the fish. 'I was a rose,' says the perfume. 'I loved you,' says the corpse. 'I civilized you,' says the convent. There is only one answer to this: once upon a time. To dream of the indefinite protraction of defunct things and of embalmment as a way of governing mankind, to restore ravaged dogmas, regild shrines, patch up cloisters, re-bless reliquaries, revitalize superstitions, refuel fanaticisms, replace the handles on holy-water sprinklers and on sabres, recreate monasticism and militarism, to believe in the salvation of society by the multiplication of the parasites, to force the past on the present - this seems strange. Still, there are theorists who propound these theories. Such theorists, and they are intelligent people, have a very simple method: they put a gloss on the past, a gloss they call 'social order', 'divine right', 'morality', 'family', 'respect for elders', 'ancient authority', 'sacred tradition', 'legitimacy', 'religion', and they go about shouting, 'Look! Take this, honest people.' This logic was known to the ancients The haruspices practiced it. They rubbed a black heifer with chalk and said, 'It's white.' We ourselves respect the past in certain instances and in all cases grant it clemency, provided it consents to being dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack and try to kill it. Superstitions, bigotries, false pieties, prejudices, these spectres, for all that they are spectres, cling to life. They have teeth and nails in their vaporousness, and they must be tackled head-on, and war must be waged against them, and it must be waged constantly. For it is one of the fates of humanity to be doomed to eternal battle against phantoms. Shades are difficult to throttle and destroy.

Recognize the Value of Acting with Uncertainty Anxiety and uncertainty don’t always mean you should stay stuck on pause. If you’re currently stuck in pause mode, and have been for a while, taking some action is usually better than taking no action. When you can recognize the value of acting with uncertainty, you’ll help your brain start to interpret uncertainty as a positive or not-so-terrible state, rather than it causing your alarm bells to ring loudly. The following is a thought experiment that’s aimed at helping you recognize the value of acting even when you don’t feel 100% sure of what the outcome will be or the exact best way to proceed. Experiment: What are some circumstances in which acting with less than 100% certainty of success might be the best option? For example, submitting an application for a grant that will take four hours to prepare. You estimate the likelihood of obtaining the grant is only 10%, but it will be worth $5,000 if you’re successful. Or trying a $50-a-month service that multiple people you trust have recommended. Or spending $100 on paint and painting supplies to see if you like a new room color. You’ve been thinking for years that you want to break out of off-white. Try to come up with three examples of your own. If coming up with three examples is intimidating, come up with just one example. Remember: You can adapt these instructions to suit yourself.

Now, let me preface this story with the following: If you think that I am in any way endorsing cultural appropriation by writing this, you should just stop reading. I swear to Goddess,* if I hear about any one of you reading this passage and deciding, “Okay, yeah, great, the moral of this story is that Jacob thinks it’s awesome for white people to dress up as Native Americans for Halloween, so I’m gonna go do that,” I will use the power of the internet to find out where you live and throw so many eggs at your house that it becomes a giant omelet. Or if you’re vegan, I will throw so much tofu at your house that it becomes a giant tofu scramble. The point of this passage is not that white people should dress their children as Native Americans for Halloween. That’s basically the opposite of the point here. Capisce? All that being said, it was 1997. I was six years old and hadn’t quite developed my political consciousness about cultural appropriation or the colonization of the Americas and subsequent genocide of Native American people at the hands of white settlers yet. I also didn’t know multiplication, so I had some stuff to work on. What I did know was that Pocahontas was, by far, the most badass Disney princess. Keep in mind that Disney’s transgender-butch-lesbian masterpiece Mulan wasn’t released until a year later, or else I would’ve obviously gone with that (equally problematic) costume.

The persistence of superannuated institutions in striving to perpetuate themselves is like the obstinacy of a rancid odour clinging to the hair; the pretension of spoiled fish that insists on being eaten, the tenacious folly of a child's garment trying to clothe a man, or the tenderness of a corpse returning to embrace the living. "Ingrates!" exclaims the garment. "I shielded you in weakness. Why do you reject me now?" "I come from the depths of the sea," says the fish; "I was once a rose," cries the odour; "I loved you," murmurs the corpse; "I civilized you," says the convent. To this there is but one reply; "In the past." To dream of the indefinite prolongation of things dead and the government of mankind by embalming; to restore dilapidated dogmas, regild the shrines, replaster the cloisters, reconsecrate the reliquaries, revamp old superstitions, replenish fading fanaticism, put new handles in worn-out sprinkling brushes, reconstitute monasticism; to believe in the salvation of society by the multiplication of parasites; to foist the past upon the present, all this seems strange. There are, however, advocates for such theories as these. These theorists, men of mind too, in other things, have a very simple process; they apply to the past a coating of what they term divine right, respect for our forefathers, time-honored authority, sacred tradition, legitimacy; and they go about, shouting, "Here! take this, good people!" This logic was familiar to the ancients; their soothsayers practised it. Rubbing over a black heifer with chalk, they would exclaim, "She is white" Bos cretatus. As for ourselves, we distribute our respect, here and there, and spare the past entirely, provided it will but consent to be dead. But, if it insists upon being alive, we attack it and endeavor to kill it. Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, phantoms though they are, are tenacious of life; they have teeth and nails in their shadowy substance, and we must grapple with them, body to body, and make war upon them and that, too, without cessation; for it is one of the fatalities of humanity to be condemned to eternal struggle with phantoms. A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash upon the ground.

OBAMA WENT THROUGH STAGES. That first day, I was in multiple meetings where he tried to lift everyone’s spirits. That evening, he interrupted the senior staff meeting in Denis McDonough’s office and gave a version of the speech that I’d now heard three times as we all sat there at the table. He was the only one standing. It was both admirable and heartbreaking watching him take everything in stride, working—still—to lift people’s spirits. When he was done, I spoke first. “It says a lot about you,” I said, “that you’ve spent the whole day trying to buck the rest of us up.” People applauded. Obama looked down. On the Thursday after the election, he had a long, amiable meeting with Trump. It left him somewhat stupefied. Trump had repeatedly steered the conversation back to the size of his rallies, noting that he and Obama could draw big crowds but Hillary couldn’t. He’d expressed openness to Obama’s arguments about healthcare, the Iran deal, immigration. He’d asked for recommendations for staff. He’d praised Obama publicly when the press was there. Afterward, Obama called a few of us up to the Oval Office to recap. “I’m trying to place him,” he said, “in American history.” He told us Trump had been perfectly cordial, but he’d almost taken pride in not being attached to a firm position on anything. “He peddles bullshit. That character has always been a part of the American story,” I said. “You can see it right back to some of the characters in Huckleberry Finn.” Obama chuckled. “Maybe that’s the best we can hope for.” In breaks between meetings in the coming days, he expressed disbelief that the election had been lost. With unemployment at 5 percent. With the economy humming. With the Affordable Care Act working. With graduation rates up. With most of our troops back home. But then again, maybe that’s why Trump could win. People would never have voted for him in a crisis. He kept talking it out, trying on different theories. He chalked it up to multiple car crashes at once. There was the letter from Comey shortly before the election, reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email server. There was the steady release of Podesta emails from Wikileaks through October. There was a rabid right-wing propaganda machine and a mainstream press that gorged on the story of Hillary’s emails, feeding Trump’s narrative of corruption.

BUYING OFF THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS Where are the environmentalists? For fifty years, they’ve been carrying on about overpopulation; promoting family planning, birth control, abortion; and saying old people have a “duty to die and get out of the way”—in Colorado’s Democratic Governor Richard Lamm’s words. In 1971, Oregon governor and environmentalist Tom McCall told a CBS interviewer, “Come visit us again. . . . But for heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live.” How about another 30 million people coming here to live? The Sierra Club began sounding the alarm over the country’s expanding population in 1965—the very year Teddy Kennedy’s immigration act passed65—and in 1978, adopted a resolution expressly asking Congress to “conduct a thorough examination of U.S. immigration laws.” For a while, the Club talked about almost nothing else. “It is obvious,” the Club said two years later, “that the numbers of immigrants the United States accepts affects our population size and growth rate,” even more than “the number of children per family.”66 Over the next three decades, America took in tens of millions of legal immigrants and illegal aliens alike. But, suddenly, about ten years ago, the Sierra Club realized to its embarrassment that importing multiple millions of polluting, fire-setting, littering immigrants is actually fantastic for the environment! The advantages of overpopulation dawned on the Sierra Club right after it received a $100 million donation from hedge fund billionaire David Gelbaum with the express stipulation that—as he told the Los Angeles Times—“if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.”67 It would be as if someone offered the Catholic Church $100 million to be pro-abortion. But the Sierra Club said: Sure! Did you bring the check? Obviously, there’s no longer any reason to listen to them on anything. They want us to get all excited about some widening of a road that’s going to disturb a sandfly, but the Sierra Club is totally copasetic with our national parks being turned into garbage dumps. Not only did the Sierra Club never again say another word against immigration, but, in 2004, it went the extra mile, denouncing three actual environmentalists running for the Club’s board, by claiming they were racists who opposed mass immigration. The three “white supremacists” were Dick Lamm, the three-time Democratic governor of Colorado; Frank Morris, former head of the Black Congressional Caucus Foundation; and Cornell professor David Pimentel, who created the first ecology course at the university in 1957 and had no particular interest in immigration.68 But they couldn’t be bought off, so they were called racists.

A word of explanation about how the information in this book was obtained, evaluated and used. This book is designed to present, as best my reporting could determine, what really happened. The core of this book comes from the written record—National Security Council meeting notes, personal notes, memos, chronologies, letters, PowerPoint slides, e-mails, reports, government cables, calendars, transcripts, diaries and maps. Information in the book was supplied by more than 100 people involved in the Afghanistan War and national security during the first 18 months of President Barack Obama’s administration. Interviews were conducted on “background,” meaning the information could be used but the sources would not be identified by name. Many sources were interviewed five or more times. Most allowed me to record the interviews, which were then transcribed. For several sources, the combined interview transcripts run more than 300 pages. I have attempted to preserve the language of the main characters and sources as much as possible, using their words even when they are not directly quoted, reflecting the flavor of their speech and attitudes. Many key White House aides were interviewed in-depth. They shared meeting notes, important documents, recollections of what happened before, during and after meetings, and assisted extensively with their interpretations. Senior and well-placed military, intelligence and diplomatic officials also provided detailed recollections, read from notes or assisted with documents. Since the reporting was done over 18 months, many interviews were conducted within days or even hours after critical discussions. This often provided a fresher and less-calculated account. Dialogue comes mostly from the written record, but also from participants, usually more than one. Any attribution of thoughts, conclusions or feelings to a person was obtained directly from that person, from notes or from a colleague whom the person told. Occasionally, a source said mid-conversation that something was “off-the-record,” meaning it could not be used unless the information was obtained elsewhere. In many cases, I was able to get the information elsewhere so that it could be included in this book. Some people think they can lock up and prevent publication of information by declaring it “off-the-record” or that they don’t want to see it in the book. But inside any White House, nearly everyone’s business and attitudes become known to others. And in the course of multiple, extensive interviews with firsthand sources about key decision points in the war, the role of the players became clear. Given the diversity of sources, stakes and the lives involved, there is no way I could write a sterilized or laundered version of this story. I interviewed President Obama on-the-record in the Oval Office for one hour and 15 minutes on Saturday, July 10, 2

Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep blank space high up above many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman’s tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of dots. At length I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn’t find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn’t make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at that very moment with great emotion, in intricate, detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which wholly worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, “that was a good time then, a good time to be living.” And I began to remember our time. I recalled green fields with carrots growing, one by one, in slender rows. Men and women in bright vests and scarves came and pulled the carrots out of the soil and carried them in baskets to shaded kitchens, where they scrubbed them with yellow brushes under running water. I saw white-faced cattle lowing and wading in creeks. I saw May apples in forests, erupting through leaf-strewn paths. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores split and divided, and apples grew spotted and striped in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade. I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wild ducks flew with outstretched necks, and called, one by one, and flew on. All these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail before my eyes, and were replaced by ever more scenes, as I remember the life of my time with increasing feeling. At last I saw the earth as a globe in space, and I recalled the ocean’s shape and the form of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, “yes, that’s how it was then, that part there was called France.” I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes. We all ought to be able to conjure up sights like these at will, so that we can keep in mind the scope of texture’s motion in time.

ADDRESSING DIVERSITY The way to reach the sheer diversity of the city is through new churches. New churches are the single best way to reach (1) new generations, (2) new residents, and (3) new people groups. Young adults have always been disproportionately located in newer congregations. Long-established congregations develop traditions (such as time of worship, length of service, emotional responsiveness, sermon topics, leadership styles, emotional atmosphere, and dozens of other tiny customs and mores) that reflect the sensibilities of longtime leaders who have the influence and resources to control the church life. These sensibilities often do not reach the younger generations. THE 1 PERCENT RULE Lyle Schaller talks about the 1 percent rule: “Each year any association of churches should plant new congregations at the rate of 1 percent of their existing total; otherwise, that association is in maintenance and decline. If an association wants to grow 50 percent plus [in a generation], it must plant 2 to 3 percent per year.”6 In addition, new residents are typically better reached by new churches. In older congregations, it may require years of tenure in the city before a person is allowed into a place of influence, but in a new church, new residents tend to have equal power with longtime area residents. Finally, new sociocultural groups in a community are generally better reached by new congregations. For example, if white-collar commuters move into an area where the older residents were farmers, a new church will probably be more receptive to the multiple needs of the new residents, while older churches will continue to be oriented to the original social group. And a new church that is intentionally multiethnic from the start will best reach new racial groups in a community. For example, if an all-Anglo neighborhood becomes 33 percent Hispanic, a new, deliberately biracial church will be far more likely to create “cultural space” for newcomers than will an older church in town. Brand-new immigrant groups can normally only be reached by churches ministering in their own languages. If we wait until a new group is sufficiently assimilated into American culture to come to our church, we will wait for years without reaching out to them. Remember that a new congregation for a new people group can often be planted within the overall structure of an existing church — perhaps through a new Sunday service at another time or a new network of house churches connected to a larger existing congregation. Though it may technically not be a new independent congregation, it serves the same function.

Essential feminism suggests anger, humorlessness, militancy, unwavering principles, and a prescribed set of rules for how to be a proper feminist woman, or at least a proper white, heterosexual feminist woman—hate pornography, unilaterally decry the objectification of women, don’t cater to the male gaze, hate men, hate sex, focus on career, don’t shave. I kid, mostly, with that last one. This is nowhere near an accurate description of feminism, but the movement has been warped by misperception for so long that even people who should know better have bought into this essential image of feminism. Consider Elizabeth Wurtzel, who, in a June 2012 Atlantic article, says, “Real feminists earn a living, have money and means of their own.” By Wurtzel’s thinking, women who don’t “earn a living, have money and means of their own,” are fake feminists, undeserving of the label, a disappointment to the sisterhood. She takes the idea of essential feminism even further in a September 2012 Harper’s Bazaar article, where she suggests that a good feminist works hard to be beautiful. She says, “Looking great is a matter of feminism. No liberated woman would misrepresent the cause by appearing less than hale and happy.” It’s too easy to dissect the error of such thinking. She is suggesting that a woman’s worth is, in part, determined by her beauty, which is one of the very things feminism works against. The most significant problem with essential feminism is how it doesn’t allow for the complexities of human experience or individuality. There seems to be little room for multiple or discordant points of view. Essential feminism has, for example, led to the rise of the phrase “sex-positive feminism,” which creates a clear distinction between feminists who are positive about sex and feminists who aren’t—which, in turn, creates a self-fulfilling essentialist prophecy.

the research? “So many people, I did not know them all. They studied my work. They asked me questions. I told the ISI about it when I got home. A major like you, he was. You can check.” The major did not want to make more work for himself. And it was true, the story as it had been narrated and understood was all in the files. “Why did you go back to America?” he demanded, looking at a sheet of paper. “I was invited to present a paper at a conference that was cosponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. It was a great honor for me, and for my university. You can ask them.” He held out his cell phone again, so that Major Nadeem could make a call to verify, but the major shook his head. They spent several more hours like this, going through the major episodes of Dr. Omar’s career. When they came to his most recent work on computer-security algorithms, Dr. Omar apologized that he could not talk about this work in any detail because it had been classified as “top secret” by the Pakistani military. The major found nothing of interest. Dr. Omar was very careful, then and always. The major asked him to sign a paper, and to report any suspicious contacts, and Dr. Omar assured him that he would. The Pakistani authorities never came after him again. That was three years before his world went white.   Omar al-Wazir had multiple binary identities, it could be said. He was a Pakistani but also, in some sense, a man tied to the West. He was a Pashtun from the raw tribal area of South Waziristan, but he was also a modern man. He was a secular scientist and also a Muslim, if not quite a believer. His loyalties might indeed have been confused before the events of nearly two years ago, but not now. Sometimes Dr. Omar grounded himself by recalling the spirit of his father, Haji Mohammed. He remembered the old man shaking his head when Omar took wobbly practice shots with an Enfield rifle, missing the target nearly every time. The look on the father’s face asked: How can this be my oldest son, this boy who cannot shoot? But Haji Mohammed had taught him the code of manhood, just the same. Omar had learned the

Posts that get the most Number of Repins have the following Features: They are related to trending topics and so have a ninety four percent more chance of being clicked on and then repinned. They have multiple colors and get repinned at a faster pace than pins with a single dominant color. Medium light pins get pinned twenty times more frequently than dark images. It is better to stay natural than pin too light or too dark images. Smooth texture images are repinned seventeen more times than those images that have a rough texture. Images with fifty percent color saturation receive ten percent more repins as compared to those that are de-saturated. Images with a less than ten percent background are able to get two to four more repins than images that have more than forty percent of white space. The winning combination is red, brown and orange. Blue is beaten by red so these images receive two times the number of repins that the blue ones receive. Images without faces receive twenty five percent more repins. On Pinterest, only twenty percent of the whole number of images features faces.

Others burn out quickly from carrying the weight of salvation that has been piled upon their young shoulders. Several young Teach for America recruits have told me that their colleagues frequently run back home or off to graduate school with the belief that the children they went to save are unsalvageable—not because of poor teaching but because of their students’ parents, families, or communities.

Focusing solely on the minutiae of learning will not create educated people. But that is exactly what is happening too often, in too many of our schools.

Successful instruction is constant, rigorous, integrated across disciplines, connected to students’ lived cultures, connected to their intellectual legacies, engaging, and designed for critical thinking and problem solving that is useful beyond the classroom.

Consequently, a major part of Hazel’s skill development was to stress to her students that all people are smart, but that some of them have different skill levels. Skills, she would insist, are something that you develop over time. If some other individuals appeared smarter, it was because they put forth the effort and made the necessary sacrifices to increase their skills.

(W.E. Nagy found that students reading at grade level had about a one in twenty chance of learning the meaning of a word from context

Successful instruction is constant, rigorous, integrated across disciplines, connected to students’ lived cultures, connected to their intellectual legacies, engaging, and designed for problem solving that is useful beyond the classroom.

Now, because of the insertion of the “market model,” charter schools often shun the very students they were intended to help.

As a result, the education for mind and body was also linked to education for the spirit. Therefore, in the African tradition, it is the role of the teacher to appeal to the intellect, the humanity, and the spirituality in his or her student.

What follows is my attempt to fill in the blanks that I did not understand in real time. I started by revisiting my notes, as well as my public reporting, seeking to retrace my steps over two years. I pored through hundreds of pages of documents, obtained by myself and others, including NGOs doggedly filing public records requests. Still more files have been made publicly available through investigations by inspectors general and Congress. To contextualize these documents, I spoke with dozens of sources, from those responsible for considering, implementing, then unwinding the policy, to others who were caught in its crosshairs. I heard from people who participated in and experienced the policy on the border, and some of those who directed it from Washington, including, at times, from inside the White House itself. What I have now unequivocally learned is that the Trump administration’s family separation policy was an avoidable catastrophe made worse by people who could have made it better at multiple inflection points, which I’ll share with you here in a series of pivotal moments presented as scenes. The dialogue you’ll read in these pages is reconstructed, when I was present, to the best of my memory or using recordings made as part of my reporting.

Back in 2001, another study by The Washington Post found that police officers were more likely to be killed by black people, rather than vice versa. Specifically, it noted that blacks committed 43 percent of cop killings, despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. Data from ProPublica (a center-left organization) found that 62 percent of black people shot by police between 2005 and 2009 were either resisting arrest or assaulting an officer. David Klinger, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, studied more than three hundred cops to find that “multiple” officers were disinclined to use deadly force against a black suspect—even when it was permitted. Conversely, black offenders committed 52 percent of homicides in America between 1980 and 2008. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 93 percent of black victims were killed by other African Americans, while 84 percent of white victims were killed by other Caucasians.

New state decrees included provisions that the dead be unceremoniously disinfected, packed into double body bags, and hastily buried—normally in unmarked graves—by officially appointed gravediggers wearing protective equipment. This new regulation prevented family members and friends from honoring loved ones, and it negated religious observance. The discovery of a body by a search team thus furnished ample potential for physical confrontations, just as a similar decree had led to clashes in plague-stricken Bombay in 1897–1898. This tense atmosphere was inflamed by multiple conspiracy theories. One Canadian reporter wrote that people “tell me stories about witchcraft, Ebola witch guns, crazy nurses injecting neighbours with Ebola and government conspiracies.”29 Untori, or plague spreaders, were said to be at work, as in the days of the Black Death described by Alessandro Manzoni. Some regarded health-care workers as cannibals or harvesters of body parts for the black market in human organs. The state, rumor also held, had embarked on a secret plot to eliminate the poor. Ebola perhaps was not a disease but a mysterious and lethal chemical. Alternatively, the ongoing land grab was deemed to have found ingenious new methods. Perhaps whites were orchestrating a plan to kill African blacks, or mine owners had discovered a deep seam of ore nearby and wanted to clear the surrounding area.

We have to be willing to allow ourselves to be critiqued if we are to ensure that individual students of color feel that they are valuable additions to the college campus.

The ideas of privatization, charter schools, Teach for America, the extremes of the accountability movement, merit pay, increased standardized testing, free market competition—all are promulgated and financially supported by corporate foundations, which indeed have those funds because they can avoid paying the taxes that the rest of us must foot. Thus, educational policy has been virtually hijacked by the wealthiest citizens, whom no one elected and who are unlikely ever to have had a child in the public schools.

It is important to point out, however, that high expectations and strong demands are insufficient. The other necessary components are care and concern. When students believe that the teacher cares for them and is concerned about them, they will frequently rise to the expectations set. When students believe that teachers believe in their ability, when they see teachers willing to go the extra mile to meet their academic deficiencies, they are much more likely to try.

When a teacher expresses genuine emotion and a belief in a child’s ability to do better, that is a message that many children are eager to hear, regardless of the medium.

Someone’s opinion of you does not have to become your reality.

Goethe said, ‘Look at a man the way that he is and he only becomes worse, but look at him as if he were what he could be, then he becomes what he should be.

It is the quality of relationship that allows a teacher’s push for excellence. As I have previously written, many of our children of color don’t learn from a teacher, as much as for a teacher. They don’t want to disappoint a teacher who they feel believes in them. They may, especially if they are older, resist the teacher’s pushing initially, but they are disappointed if the teacher gives up, stops pushing.

They engage in conversations with disrupters outside of class to build the relationships that are the basis of cooperation. And these students know that if the teacher is strong enough to control them, then the teacher is strong enough to protect them.

What drives excellence, however, is not solely genes but a combination of innate ability, cultural environment, drive, and practice. And of these, practice and the belief that practicing hard will improve performance seem to top the list.

But this pure genius was nowhere to be found when Jordan was young. He was not even the best athlete in his family—older brother Larry was. He was not the hardest worker; he actually had the reputation of being the laziest of his five siblings. In fact, after attending summer basketball camp, Jordan didn’t even make the varsity basketball squad in high school.

When people contend that Black spaces do not represent reality, they are speaking from the White worldview of Black people in the minority. They are conceptualizing the real American world as White. To be antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as the “real world,” only real worlds, multiple worldviews.

For the remainder of his basketball career, no one ever practiced so long or played so hard. The rest is history. Jordan was not “born” with skills that he exhibited from childhood. He developed the skills through his drive and willingness to put in those countless hours of practice.

Musical ability is not an inborn talent but an ability which must be developed. Any child who is properly trained can develop musical ability, just as all children develop the ability to speak their mother tongue. The potential of every child is unlimited.

Education can un-silence dialogues that are critical for our mutual salvation.

J.C. High Eagle, a Native American leader, has said, if we live life right, we truly understand that we are but spokes on the great wheel of life and that which endangers one spoke endangers the entire wheel. Our work is to strengthen the wheel by strengthening each individual spoke.

If we want students who engage in the practice necessary to achieve, if we want students who persist in the face of failure, if we want students who want to come to school, then what do we need to do to make school more like basketball?

* Who do you think of when you hear the word “successful”? “The first people who come to mind are the real heroes of Task Unit Bruiser: Marc Lee, first SEAL killed in Iraq. Mike Monsoor, second SEAL killed in Iraq, posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor after he jumped on a grenade to save three of our other teammates. And finally, Ryan Job, one of my guys [who was] gravely wounded in Iraq, blinded in both eyes, but who made it back to America, was medically retired from the Navy, but who died from complications after the 22nd surgery to repair his wounds. Those guys, those men, those heroes, they lived, and fought, and died like warriors.” * Most-gifted or recommended books? “I think there’s only one book that I’ve ever given and I’ve only given it to a couple people. That’s a book called About Face, by Colonel David H. Hackworth. The other book that I’ve read multiple times is Blood Meridian [by Cormac McCarthy].” * Favorite documentaries? “Restrepo, which I’m sure you’ve seen. [TF: This was co-produced and co-filmed by Sebastian Junger, the next profile.] There is also an hour-long program called ‘A Chance in Hell: The Battle for Ramadi.’” Quick Takes * You walk into a bar. What do you order from the bartender? “Water.” * What does your diet generally look like? “It generally looks like steak.” * What kind of music does Jocko listen to? Two samples: For workouts—Black Flag, My War, side B In general—White Buffalo

(The Kushner position was not helped by the fact that the president had been gleefully telling multiple people that Jared could solve the Middle East problem because the Kushners knew all the crooks in Israel.)

Why do we punish our children with our inability to teach them? How can we live with the fact that in Miami—and I am certain in many other cities—ten-year-olds facing failure on the state-mandated FCAT test and being "left back" in third grade for the third time, have had to be restrained from committing suicide?

It is critical that we figure out the difference between culture and a response to oppression. Beating your wife is no one's culture. It is a response to a situation—in this case possibly the racism prevalent in Alaska against Native Alaskans and the minimal opportunities for Native Alaskan men to either maintain their traditional subsistence lifestyles or to find a place within the more recent cash economy. It is no more acceptable to condone such behavior than to blame poor academic performance on a "culture of poverty.

To expend so much of a teacher’s energy on keeping track of "points" related to noninstructional tasks, and to prevent any kind of deep instruction about what is being studied, can lead only to the lowest level of academic development. This is the reason we never see these prepackaged "teacher-proofed" programs in affluent schools, only in schools serving low-income children and children of color.

We are still managing to waste poor children's time on activities that have no real relationship to intellectual development. We are still driving great, creative teachers out of the field by proscribing their efforts to bring challenging, meaningful instruction to their charges. Kohl rightly says that the sham, the stupidity, is disheartening, but perhaps it can also be a call to resistance and the rebirth of teacher—and let's hope researcher—militancy. Rather than spending time on such "foolishness," what teachers should be doing is developing the knowledge of the outside world that children from less privileged families might lack.

For those who come to us knowing how to count to one hundred and to read, we need to teach them problem solving and how to tie their shoes. And for those who already know how to clean up spilled paint, tie their shoes, prepare meals, and comfort a crying sibling, we need to make sure that we teach them the school knowledge that they haven't learned at home. Unfortunately, though, different types of skills are not equally valued in the school setting.

I believe that the ideal teaching of "skills" should be intentional and explicit, as well as be: (1) situated within engaging activities; (2) embedded in real writing, reading, and communication or, if taught in isolation, put immediately into the context of real writing, reading, and communication; and (3) taught flexibly when needed, rather than as an unvarying curriculum.

Successful instruction is constant, rigorous, integrated across disciplines, connected to students' lived cultures, connected to their intellectual legacies, engaging, and designed for problem solving that is useful beyond the classroom.

Gloria Ladson-Billings says that successful teachers of low-income, culturally diverse children know that their students are "school dependent." What she means is that while children from more privileged backgrounds can manage to perform well in school and on high-stakes tests in spite of poor teachers, children who are not a part of the mainstream are dependent upon schools to teach them whatever they need to know to be successful.

While it is certainly true that inequity, family issues, poverty, crime, and so forth all affect poor children's learning opportunities, British educator Peter Mortimore found that the quality of teaching has six to ten times as much impact on achievement as all other factors combined.

Many researchers have identified successful teachers of African American students as "warm demanders." James Vasquez used the term to identify teachers whom students of color said did not lower their standards and were willing to help them. Warm demanders expect a great deal of their students, convince them of their own brilliance, and help them to reach their potential in a disciplined and structured environment.

In schools with high academic press and low social support, the resulting performance of students was almost as low as if neither academic press nor social support was present. In other words, having high academic standards without providing the necessary social support essentially wiped out all potential gain.

Since we are all on a continuum of performance, how can we identify one specific point that determines a "disability?" Why not instead just provide children with the additional assistance they need and forgo applying a questionable label?

We all mouth the mantra "All children can learn." I would modify the chant to "All children do learn." It’s just that some of them learn that we expect them to be successful, and some learn from us that they are dumb. Whatever we believe, they learn.

There are times when students, overexposed to worksheets and minimal thinking, resist being pushed to think. It is as if they have reached an agreement with their teachers—don't ask much of me and I won't make any problems for you. Thus, the "busyness" of seat work allows for the appearance of the "control" that many schools in poor communities ask of their teachers, whether any learning is occurring or not. Martin Haberman calls this agreement one aspect of the "pedagogy of poverty.

I will never forget my six-year-old student, many years ago, whom I could not get, despite all my efforts, to successfully complete worksheets on coins and their values. When I got to know this little boy better, I found out that he was perfectly knowledgeable about using coins, making change, and paying for items with ease. He could do money, he just couldn't do worksheets about money!

Accurately monitoring and assessing children means being able to go deep into their thinking, to figure out not only the "correctness" or "incorrectness" of an answer but the thinking that led to it.

One still-vivid example is when one of my professors asked me about my educational background. I explained to him that I grew up in an all-black neighborhood, had gone to segregated all-black schools, with all-black teachers until my last years in high school. With a smile of what I am sure he thought was encouragement, he asked, "How in the world did you ever learn how to write?" He had no clue that he had insulted my community, my family, and my teachers.

Another student told me that she couldn't shake the feeling that no one really knew who she was or cared about what she really wanted. She felt she was seen either as a member of a group who was there to "save the college" by increasing diversity, or she was there to be a part of the college's missionary-like efforts to "save black people.

You cannot value students as intellectual beings without being willing to challenge them, and if they don't feel valued, they will resist being challenged.

After years of participating in classes, meetings, and seminars, I have found that it is not sufficient to see who is there and listen to what is said. It is critical to look for who and what are not represented. Is there a group that is left out, either through not having been invited or through choosing not to come? When a marginalized group is not present, an important perspective is missing, and efforts should be made to get that perspective added.

The problem, as the great Asa Hilliard once wrote, is that there are two types of questions we could employ. The Type I question asks: "Do you know what I know?" The Type II question asks: "What do you know?" The first question, "Do you know what I know?" is the culturally charged question that is usually asked in our schools and colleges, the question that makes invisible the culture, the home, the knowledge of the young person in front of us. The very process of trying to find out if a child knows what the school values limits us greatly in seeing our students' abilities. The second question, "What do you know?" is the question we have to learn to ask. This is the question that will allow us to begin to see all that is invisible in the child before us. This is the question that will allow us to begin, with courage, humility, and cultural sensitivity the right educational journey.

With the military industrial complex and the prison industrial complex working together in these ways there is a continuous, intensifying coordination of power between Lockdown America at home and imperial Pax Americana abroad. We need to feel these connections conceptually and viscerally, as did W. E. B. Du Bois in his time, because it surfaces not only coordinated powers of domination but a network of shared suffering by those exploited at home and abroad. When in the 1930s Du Bois surveyed the way industrial classes had destroyed post-Civil War Black Reconstruction in America, indeed enabling white power to be resurgent again inside the U.S., Du Bois was able also to perceive (and feel) how it also consolidated a structural violence abroad. While lamenting the devastation at home he thus lifted a lament, too, for multiple peoples abroad, for those he termed “the darker nations.

What Marx considered a divisive ploy is now the avowed strategy of progressives and Democrats: to turn black and brown against white, female against male, gay and lesbian and transgender people against “heteronormativity.” In 2020, Democrats intend to use these multiple lines of division to create the majority coalition that will implement their new form of identity socialism across the economic and cultural landscape.

Compared to students at predominantly white schools, white students who attend diverse K–12 schools achieve better learning outcomes and even higher test scores, particularly in areas such as math and science. Why? Of course, white students at racially diverse schools develop more cultural competency—the ability to collaborate and feel at ease with people from different racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds—than students who attend segregated schools. But their minds are also improved when it comes to critical thinking and problem solving. Exposure to multiple viewpoints leads to more flexible and creative thinking and greater ability to solve problems.

In the voting booth, many people make an autonomic, subconscious assessment of their station, their needs and wishes, and the multiple identities they carry (working class, middle class, rich, poor, white, black, male, female, Asian, Latino). They often align themselves not with those whose plight they may share, but with those whose power and privilege intersect with a trait of their own.

One way that whites protect their positions when challenged on race is to invoke the discourse of self-defense. Through this discourse, whites characterize themselves as victimized, slammed, blamed, and attacked.5 Whites who describe the interactions in this way are responding to the articulation of counternarratives alone; no physical violence has ever occurred in any interracial discussion or training that I am aware of. These self-defense claims work on multiple levels. They identify the speakers as morally superior while obscuring the true power of their social positions. The claims blame others with less social power for their discomfort and falsely describe that discomfort as dangerous. The self-defense approach also reinscribes racist imagery. By positioning themselves as the victim of antiracist efforts, they cannot be the beneficiaries of whiteness. Claiming that it is they who have been unfairly treated—through a challenge to their position or an expectation that they listen to the perspectives and experiences of people of color—they can demand that more social resources (such as time and attention) be channeled in their direction to help them cope with this mistreatment.

Malia had been captivated by one of the tigers during the visit, and her auntie had bought her a small, stuffed version of the great cat at the gift shop. “Tiger” had fat paws, a round belly, and an inscrutable Mona Lisa smile, and he and Malia became inseparable—though by the time we got to the White House, his fur was a little worse for wear, having survived food spills, several near losses during sleepovers, multiple washings, and a brief kidnapping at the hands of a mischievous cousin. I had a soft spot for Tiger. “Well,” Malia continued, “I did a report about tigers for school, and they’re losing their habitat because people are cutting down the forests. And it’s getting worse, ’cause the planet’s getting warmer from pollution. Plus, people kill them and sell their fur and bones and stuff. So tigers are going extinct, which would be terrible. And since you’re the president, you should try to save them.” Sasha chimed in, “You should do something, Daddy.” I looked at Michelle, who shrugged. “You are the president,” she said. —

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We understand from multiple sources that Christian nationalists are more nationalist than Christian and that slightly over half of all Americans agree wholly or in part with their convictions. Christian evangelicalism has come to exist in a symbiotic relationship with right-wing political operatives. Both sides of this unholy alliance promote white supremacy, patriarchy, and a conservative theonomy that serves their interests. They are united around common targets: critical race theory, feminism, LGBTQ rights, communism, Islam, and more open immigration policies (even to the extent of opposing asylum for persecuted refugees).