The Trailing Edge

It's funny how you can learn new things. About 20 years ago in Northwest Atlanta, an apartment building burned flat. It was December, and the area was experiencing a cold snap. One man was especially cold because he hadn't paid his power bill and his heat was shut off. He had one heat source: a barbecue grill that sat outside on his balcony. He dragged it into the living room, tossed in half a bag of charcoal briquettes, and lit it. He was reasonably warm and comfortable for part of the night.  But then something happened. Perhaps the man got too close to the grill and tripped, or he kicked it in his sleep, or maybe a dog ran through the room too fast. Regardless, what happened was that the grill turned over. In a matter of seconds, the rug had caught fire. And the curtains, and the couch, and the walls, and the ceiling. The building had apartment units on both sides, and there was a firewall down the center, so that if one side of the building burned, the other side would be p

 I've been a "Yankee Transplant" to the South since the mid-1980s and am still having unexpected epiphanies about the sociological differences. The latest one has to do with the anxiety that Yankee-born parents feel when their kids don't seem to be excelling in the Southern schools they attend. Maybe we should call it YEAS -- Yankee Educational Anxiety Syndrome. My grandson (not quite age 6) is a bundle of neuroses. So is his father, my son. I don't get to spend that much time with them, so my occasional visits offer lots of revelations. What I witnessed this weekend was very concerning, and reminded me of some preceding generations (his, mine, and my parents'). I think Southerners are insecure about their educations, and so are Yankees, for entirely different reasons. Somewhere along the way, Yankees had it drilled into them that THEY are the standard-bearers for educational excellence, and most Southerners are pathetic, dimwitted, knuckle-dragging, barefoot,

  As a White person, my ability to speak about racism and related subjects comes up against some hard limits.* During my elementary school years (in a community that was 99% White, I might add), the Civil Rights movement was at its peak, and fortunately, many teachers and community members cared to be on the right side of history. Still, what it boiled down to was "Racism=bad! Slavery=bad! Now that we all agree on that, we can move on to other subjects."  Having read Robin DiAngelo's book White Fragility, I've come to understand how pathetically weak so much of that teaching was, however well-intentioned, and how it gave rise to so much ignorance and naive thinking that easily backfired, doing more harm than good. I'm relieved that so many activists have found their voices -- people who understand what racial justice means from the inside, rather than spectators watching from the sidelines, thinking they understand so much more than they actually do. The Washingto

  Back in the days of old (no cell phones, no email), I worked in a New York City sales office, for a guy who just could not stand confrontation. He told me once that he'd almost rather die than fire someone. But sometimes he had to. This is how he went about it. The occasion I best remember was the case of a woman named Pat. Ken (the boss) instructed me as follows. He wrote Pat a letter of dismissal, signed it, had me put it in a sealed envelope with her name on it. Then, he got hold of Pat on the phone and told her he'd gotten an appointment for her with a prospective client, for Thursday afternoon, around 3:30. This was a legitimate appointment; he had spoken to the prospect and it was set. However, just to cover himself, he kindly told Pat that if the prospect wasn't there or cancelled, she should "beat the rush-hour traffic" and just go home early. Who could resist such an offer? Meanwhile, Ken booked a flight for Thursday afternoon, when he expected Pat to b

  My parents were your basic lower middle class white people. They "meant well," and "tried" ... sort of. But conversing with them on the topics of race and class for five minutes made it very easy to discern their perspective. An example. One day we were watching the news and they ran a story about standardized testing (such as the SATs) and how these tests were often designed with implicit bias baked right in. They interviewed a student, who read from one of the tests she'd used as practice.  "Differentiate between the musical styles of Wagner and Beethoven." She got the standard pronunciation of "Beethoven" right, but rather than pronouncing "Wagner" in the German style ("Vogner"), she used the more standard English pronunciation. I remember how my parents jumped on that. They were huge when it came to spelling, grammar, usage and pronunciation.  "WAG-ner!" they scoffed, and turned away in dismissal. As if to

  In my blue-collar hometown, in the early 1970s, we had neighbors named the Vs. Kathy and Kenny V. were siblings; Kathy was a year younger than me, and Kenny was about a year younger than his sister. Their mom was an extremely anxious person, always worried and afraid. She once watched her kids go down our swimming pool slide, having a great time, and let out a loud gasp. The dad, from what we gathered, was a strict "no fun is best" type of parent. These were not carefree types.  I knew this. So it surprised me, at age 11 or 12, one day at the local park, to see Kathy run joyfully across the grass and throw herself into some guy's arms. That can't be right,  I thought. This is because in some ways, my parents weren't too different from Mr. and Mrs. V. My dad, in particular. He was a bit of a drama-lover. His recipe for instilling the "right values" in me was to overreact and characterize normal adolescent foibles as a gateway to Federal prison. So when