An Article Most White Americans Don't Want To Read

Anyone who believes that African-Americans are economically poorer than White Americans because they are somehow inferior to whites - don't work as hard, not as smart, whatever -  don't read this article.  It will disabuse you of your misconceptions.  It will force you to face the reality of how, even after slavery ended, after separate but equal ended, housing practices ensured that most African-Americans would live in ghettos and could not share in the economic benefits White Americans got through home ownership.

This is not an article for bigots.  Their hate isn't based on facts and won't be changed by facts.

It is an article for those who believe in freedom and equality and justice, but just don't know their history that well.  It's easy for them not to, because it wasn't taught in most schools.

It is an article for those who have a sense of the injustices and can always use supporting data for when they are talking to people who don't get it.   From The Atlantic.

The Case for Reparations

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. 

Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

This is not easy reading.  It hurts too much.  Some excerpts:

Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.”

Coates follows the life of Clyde Ross and explains the mechanics of how it was impossible for his family to get a fair deal for their crops and labor from the white dealers who set the prices and were backed up by the local power structure.  Blacks who protested the non-negotiable terms were Bilboed.  How despite Clyde Ross being recommended by one of his teachers to go to a special school set up to help Southern black kids, it was too far to walk and there were no busses for black kids.  How he gets drafted and shipped to California where he experiences a relatively open society, serves in Guam, and on returning moves north to Chicago.

Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought “on contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself.
The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay—taking their down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they’d bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat. “He loads them up with payments they can’t meet,” an office secretary told The Chicago Daily News of her boss, the speculator Lou Fushanis, in 1963. “Then he takes the property away from them. He’s sold some of the buildings three or four times.”

Why would he take a loan on such bad terms?  Well, he was denied the kind of education that might have helped prevent it.  And he was lied to by the agents - who were really the owners and who steered him (and countless others) to attorneys who worked with the agent/owners. And he couldn't get a legitimate loan.

Ross had tried to get a legitimate mortgage in another neighborhood, but was told by a loan officer that there was no financing available. The truth was that there was no financing for people like Clyde Ross. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.

Their efforts were buttressed by the federal government. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house. But an insured mortgage was not a possibility for Clyde Ross. The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated “D” and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.

We're still reaping the harvest of these evil practices.  This is an easy way to pick up on some of this history that doesn't normally get taught in school.  

I know that most Americans recoil at the idea of paying reparations to blacks.  It's not because terrible things didn't happen.  We know they did.  But how, some would ask, could we possible afford to make reparations?  And who would we pay?  The slaves have all died.

The fact that most White Americans oppose the idea reflects - whether they acknowledge this or not - they understand that African-Americans are owed so much.  But Germans have given reparations to holocaust survivors - and Germany is still one of the most prosperous nations on earth.  The US gave reparations to Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated during WW II simply for being of Japanese descent.  What they got was merely a token, but a big part of that payment included the explicit acknowledgment of the wrong committed.  There is no way that blacks would ever be justly compensated, but there are lots of possible ways of making some sort of reparations that acknowledge how much their people have contributed to America's prosperity while being denied their fair share.

The article, as it gets to the idea of reparations, says pretty much the same thing, only more brutally.

Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40 proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world.

The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer.

As I said, true bigots won't read this and if they did it wouldn't change anything for them.  But the rest of America should. And talk about it.

Here's the link again to The Atlantic article.

How To Stop Your Cottonwood Tree From Shedding Cotton

OK, this is a longshot.  But we had some wind yesterday and I found this on my deck.  I'd never actually paid attention to these before.

These are the young pods that will eventually grow into the big cotton puffs that will make a huge mess over the deck and the yard and, for some, make breathing hard.  I took this picture yesterday and today the pods had already started opening in the kitchen.  (Those little balls are about the side of very big peas.)  Why not just look through the tree and cut all these off before they ever open and spread their cotton?


So I went out today with the tree trimmer and I realize that I couldn't find them in the tree, and probably, if I could, they are so high up that I could never reach them.  Cleaning them up after the fact is probably easier.  But if anyone has a trained monkey, it could work. 

BTW, one of my posts that still gets lots of hits is on uses cottonwood cotton.

U of Alaska Joins Ranks of Top Universities - US Investigates How They Handle Sexual Assault

Harvard, Princeton, UC Berkeley, Columbia, and Michigan were among 55 colleges and universities listed by the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights on May 1, 2014, as under investigation for possible violations for how they handle sexual violence and harassment complaints.

The University of Alaska system was not on that list.  But not to worry.  Alaskans are as bad as the rest of the country, maybe even worse, in how we handle sexual assault and violence and Wednesday, May 28, the University of Alaska system and four other institutions were added to the list.  From the Huffington Post:

Since releasing the [original] list, the department has launched Title IX investigations at the University of Alaska system, the University of Delaware, Elmira College in New York, the University of Akron in Ohio and Cisco Junior College in Texas. This brings the total number of schools with federal probes to 60.  [emphasis added]
The department did not elaborate on whether the five new inquiries are proactive investigations or come in response to specific complaints.

Alaska is frequently not taken seriously, so I'm pleased that the Department of Education does recognize that in this area our University does deserve their attention, even if we got listed almost a month later than the others.

NOTE:  For folks who read my sarcasm as making a joke out of this, I'd point out that humor is one of the ways folks deal with serious problems.   In no way do I mean to make light of this situation.  I'm sorry that the US Department of Education has enough cause to include Alaska on the list.  But, given that we have the highest rates of rape in the country,  those fighting sexual assault in Alaska should be glad the Department will look into this.  Even our governor, who generally is opposed to federal intervention in Alaska.  But our governor has pledged

"that Alaska would take every step necessary to stop the epidemic of domestic violence, sexual assault, and child sexual abuse in Alaska. "

I hope that means supporting a federal investigation that adds resources to help fight domestic violence and sexual assault in Alaska. 

Maybe the Feds will review the dismissal of the complaint at UAF this year. The original issue of the student's name being published seems moot given she wanted it published, but how the University handled the case and the impact on the campus climate and students' feelings of safety should be reviewed.

If anyone wants information about those fighting intimate partner violence and sexual assault and/or need help, go to the website of ANDVSA (Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault)

Power Outage: Just Your House Or Whole Neighborhood?

At night, of course, you can just look out the window and see if the neighbors lights are out too.  But it’s summer in Alaska and we don’t have much night.  And the power went out in the middle of the morning. 

But as my wifi connection stopped, I realized I could check to see if any of the other 20 or so wifi signals that show up on my computer were there too.  Two were there for a little longer than the rest, then they disappeared too. 

Actually, it has been fairly windy, so I assumed it wasn’t just our house.  But the wifi signal check is something I hadn’t thought of before.  And now the outage is about two hours and my old Macbook battery is running low. 

So, I’ll post this when the power goes back on and I get reconnected to the wifi. 

It was out for just about three hours.  Got done a number of things that I've been trying to avoid. 

Gramping

My daughter and granddaughter came down to LA while we were visiting my mom there this past week.  Tuesday, while the mom and grandmother went for lunch, the grandfather and granddaughter went to the Santa Monica pier to check out the amusement park, the pier musicians, the magician, the fisherfolk, the merry-go-round, and the sea gulls and pelicans, the surf below, and other colorful distractions.  Then the mothers met up with us and we beached.

From the beginning I wondered about how well my granddaughter would recognize us since we live far away and don't see her weekly.  We did spend the first seven weeks with her - basically taken care of her during the day while our daughter recovered from being up much of the night.  I'm sure that played a role.  So, I've been googling things like "How do babies remember people?" to see what actual research there is.  This Baby Center post  supports my belief that the early daily contact probably worked:

"For infants, the degree of exposure really counts," says Lyuba Konopasek, assistant professor of pediatrics at the Weill Cornell Medical Center, based in New York City. If your child sees her grandparents once a week, she'll probably recognize them by the time she's 6 to 9 months old, but if she sees them daily, it may take only weeks.

Here are some other findings - but be warned.  It looks like we don't know a lot about this and the answers will be adjusted as more research is done.

1.  Babies remember more than adults think - though not necessarily consciously.

A recent Danish study tested babies at one year and then when they were three years old they were shown pictures of the two researchers - one whom they'd seen before and one they hadn't.  The three year olds spent more time looking at the image of the researcher they hadn't seen before.  They claim that it is normal for people to spend more time looking at new things than familiar ones and so this confirms the babies subconsciously remember the original researcher.

Another study showed 11 year-olds pictures of their friends when they were 3 and 4.  Most couldn't recognize them.  But a galvanic skin test showed that subconsciously they did remember.

2.  Different kinds of memory

This article says that first babies have procedural memory.  They can learn a sequence of actions - rolling over, using a spoon, riding a bicycle - and they can remember this for up to 2 years.  So perhaps they can't do it when they are first shown, but when they develop the needed motor skills, they can remember and do it. Reminders along the way help them remember. 
Then along comes semantic memory "which researchers define as knowledge about the world that extends beyond our bodies. Semantic memory allows us to make simple associations."

3.  Which senses work best?

Much of what I'm reading focuses on visual memory.  They test with visual cues.  But I'm guessing that audio is also important.  I'm pretty sure Z knows me both from visual and audio cues.  And I'd guess that smell plays an important role.  Here's a blog post that confirms the importance of smell with references to scientific research.

4.  Sign language can help babies communicate their needs sooner

My daughter taught Z sign language.  It's easier for babies to sign than to vocalize words.  So Z early on learned signs for things like milk, more, apple, hat, etc.  My guess is that this reduces frustration because babies can let parents know what they want specifically rather than crying and making the parents guess.  This video (which has a vested interest in our believing this) agrees with my conclusion. 


We did have a jolly good time.  And it's delightful seeing how much other people enjoy seeing babies.  When I thanked the magician on the pier for doing some tricks just for Z, he turned it around and thanked me for bringing her.  Babies are possibilities - still innocent, unselfconscious, and honest about how they feel.

Alaska Reporter Bob Tkacz Dies

Bob Tkacz was found dead Tuesday.  I met him briefly while I blogged about the legislature in 2010.   Here's Bob Tkacz's empty chair and desk in the press room of the Alaska Capitol Building from that time. 

I was blogging the legislature that session and dropped into the press room to check on the other folks who were covering the legislature.  Folks suggested that I apply for a press pass - which would allow me to get on the floor of the House and Senate chambers and allow me to ask questions at press conferences.  Bob, particularly, pushed that idea.  A blogger had recently been turned down for a pass.  While I was interested in the idea of a blogger getting a pass, I didn't see any great advantages - I could walk around at will and talk to folks except on the floors of the chambers - and wasn't sure how much extra work it would take to get.  The told me that such press passes hadn't been required before Palin was governor.  Then, apparently, there was concern that Outside media would cram the Capitol and that they'd need a way to control that.  That seems to have been an unnecessary fear.

I also was told to look up Bob's past, and found that earlier he'd been stabbed and been found at the bottom of the long outdoor stairs that go from near the City Museum down to Willoughby.  I looked it up, but didn't post about it in my post about meeting the press. 

Bot struck me as an interesting person who didn't sugar coat anything.  At only 61, he's gone way too soon.   A lot of Alaska legislative history that was stored in his brain is now now gone.  May he rest in peace. 

Mushroom Shaped Cloud Over Oregon

This was 12 minutes north of Crater Lake on Alaska Airlines from LA to Seattle almost 4pm PDT.  Actually, there were two of these clouds side by side.

 

The dark spots are dirt on the plane window.  I'm looking west.

This was the first one (southern) that we came to.

I couldn't find much about mushroom shaped clouds on line other than nuclear clouds.  There was an article in The Guardian that discussed non-nuclear mushroom shaped clouds.

However, mushroom clouds are not unique to atomic explosions. Any sufficiently powerful source of heat, such as a volcano or forest fire can produce one. The heat creates a powerful updraught, channelling dust and smoke from the ground into a narrow chimney, forming the stalk of the mushroom. This chimney continues to rise until it meets an obstruction in the form of a boundary layer in the atmosphere. The rising column then spreads out and forms the cap of the mushroom.

National Atlas has a map of potentially active volcanoes in Oregon, but I don't know that any created these.  

Wikipedia has a picture of a cumulusnimbus cloud which it calls an anvil cloud.  The stalk is a lot narrower than the two above. 
 
Wayne Flann Avalanche blog has a picture of a mushroom shaped cumulus cloud.

I expect that these two clouds would not have been as obvious, or even visible, from the ground.

BTW, here's a picture of Crater Lake which we passed 12 minutes before the clouds above. 

May In LA - Jacaranda Time

Trees lush with lavender flowers are one of the joys of Los Angeles.  I remember as a child I was always awed by how outrageously wonderful this color was for a tree.  And it still is.  And as you drive through LA this time of year, you can see them everywhere.

 

This one's from our walk to the Saturday market at Virginia St. Park in Santa Monica.  The sky's been greyish so I didn't take pictures of any whole trees.  I was also struck by these bright yellow flowers on another tree.  I asked a woman who was working in her yard who said she was told it was a golden medallion tree.

An October 2006 Pacific Horticulture article by Steve Brigham says these trees come from Brazil and have turned out to do well in Southern California.  The lady I talked to said they were terrible street trees.  They were fragile and branches broke off easily.  They were a mess to clean up after the flowers fall off, and later they have long dark pods that squirrels make a mess with.  She wasn't real happy about them being put in by the City on her street.  But the flowers are pretty spectacular.

The market had a nice array of fruits, vegetables, breads, dried fruit and nuts, honey, flowers, and more.

Fava beans

A bunch of three onions, including the big one, was $2.

The strawberries were sweet and delicious.  Not at all like the hard supermarket variety that are white inside.

Phillip King is still playing his natural style harp at the market.  He said he's just recorded a new CD.  Click the picture to get to Phillip's website for more information.



There's also a new library in the park.  I was worried it would mean that the Fairview library on Ocean Park - less than a mile away - would have to close.  It's the one I used to walk to as a kid and take piles of books home.  But I checked.  They will close for a couple of months - but only to remodel.  Then they'll be open again.

Having Daughters Makes Men More Liberal

There are several studies here that support this contention.  The most recent is February 14, 2014 paper, Identifying Judicial Empathy:  Does Having Daughters Cause Judges to Rule for Women's Issues?  by Adam Glynn and Maya Sen.

Abstract

In this paper, we ask whether personal relationships can affect the way that judges decide cases. To do so, we leverage the natural experiment of a child's gender to identify the effect of having daughters on the votes of judges. Using new data on the family lives of U.S. Courts of Appeals judges, we find that, conditional on the number of children a judge has, judges with daughters consistently vote in a more feminist fashion on gender issues than judges who have only sons. This result survives a number of robustness tests and appears to be driven primarily by Republican judges. More broadly, this result demonstrates that personal experiences influence how judges make decisions, and it is the first paper to show that empathy may indeed be a component in how judges decide cases.

This follows a 2008 study,  Daughters and Left-Wing Voting by  Andrew J. Oswald

and Nattavudh Powdthavee

What determines human beings’ political preferences? Using nationally representative longitudinal data, we show that having daughters makes people more likely to vote for left-wing political parties. Having sons leads people to favor right-wing parties. The paper checks that our result is not an artifact of family stopping-rules, discusses the predictions from a simple economic model, and tests for possible reverse causality.

 Oswald and Powdthavee reference two earlier studies.

Warner (1991) and Warner and Steel(1999) study American and Canadian mothers and fathers.  The authors’ key finding is that support for policies designed to address gender equity is greater among parents with daughters. This result emerges particularly strongly for fathers. Because parents invest a significant amount of themselves in their children, the authors argue, the anticipated and actual struggles that offspring face, and the public policies that tackle those, matter to those parents.

In the words of Warner and Steel (1999), “child rearing might provide a mechanism for social change whereby fathers' connection with their daughters undermines ...patriarchy”.

All this comes originally from a link to MetaFilter sent by a close relative.  The comments at MetaFilter offer lots of interesting follow up thoughts, particularly warnings that these are statistical predictions, and, of course, you will be able to find individual cases that don't seem to bear this out.  Someone pointed to Antonin Scalia who has four daughters.  But another pointed out that the study says the prediction doesn't work when there are more than five children. (Wikipedia says Scalia also has five sons.)

This makes sense in that when people know people in other conditions well, they are more likely to sympathize with their situation.  From a Harvard Magazine artilce on How Same-Sex Marriage Came to Be:

"Perhaps the most important was that the proportion of Americans who reported knowing someone gay increased from 25 percent in 1985 to 74 percent in 2000. Knowing gay people strongly predicts support for gay rights; a 2004 study found that 65 percent of those who reported knowing someone gay favored gay marriage or civil unions, versus just 35 percent of those who reported not knowing any gays."

 I couldn't find a citation in the article for the 2000 study, but here are some longitudinal data on the these questions from Gallup.

Food for thought.  Thanks to S

What's The Difference Between Memorial Day and Veterans Day ?

The Veterans Administration FAQ page answers the question this way:

A. Many people confuse Memorial Day and Veterans Day. Memorial Day is a day for remembering and honoring military personnel who died in the service of their country, particularly those who died in battle or as a result of wounds sustained in battle. While those who died are also remembered, Veterans Day is the day set aside to thank and honor ALL those who served honorably in the military - in wartime or peacetime. In fact, Veterans Day is largely intended to thank LIVING veterans for their service, to acknowledge that their contributions to our national security are appreciated, and to underscore the fact that all those who served - not only those who died - have sacrificed and done their duty.

Let's start with Memorial Day, since it's what is being celebrated today.  From another VA page:

Three years after the Civil War ended, on May 5, 1868, the head of an organization of Union veterans — the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) — established Decoration Day as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. Maj. Gen. John A. Logan declared that Decoration Day should be observed on May 30. It is believed that date was chosen because flowers would be in bloom all over the country.
The first large observance was held that year at Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. . .

. . .  By the end of the 19th century, Memorial Day ceremonies were being held on May 30 throughout the nation. State legislatures passed proclamations designating the day, and the Army and Navy adopted regulations for proper observance at their facilities.
It was not until after World War I, however, that the day was expanded to honor those who have died in all American wars. In 1971, Memorial Day was declared a national holiday by an act of Congress, though it is still often called Decoration Day. It was then also placed on the last Monday in May, as were some other federal holidays.

And now Veteran's Day.  Again, borrowing from the VA website:

World War I – known at the time as “The Great War” - officially ended when the Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, in the Palace of Versailles outside the town of Versailles, France. However, fighting ceased seven months earlier when an armistice, or temporary cessation of hostilities, between the Allied nations and Germany went into effect on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. For that reason, November 11, 1918, is generally regarded as the end of “the war to end all wars. . .”

. . . In November 1919, President Wilson proclaimed November 11 as the first commemoration of Armistice Day . . . 

. . . The original concept for the celebration was for a day observed with parades and public meetings and a brief suspension of business beginning at 11:00 a.m.

The United States Congress officially recognized the end of World War I when it passed a concurrent resolution on June 4, 1926 . . .

. . .An Act (52 Stat. 351; 5 U. S. Code, Sec. 87a) approved May 13, 1938, made the 11th of November in each year a legal holiday—a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as "Armistice Day." Armistice Day was primarily a day set aside to honor veterans of World War I, but in 1954, after World War II had required the greatest mobilization of soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen in the Nation’s history; after American forces had fought aggression in Korea, the 83rd Congress, at the urging of the veterans service organizations, amended the Act of 1938 by striking out the word "Armistice" and inserting in its place the word "Veterans." With the approval of this legislation (Public Law 380) on June 1, 1954, November 11th became a day to honor American veterans of all wars. . .

What happened to the part about being 'dedicated to world peace.'  Let's listen for that language next November.