On Twitter  @DrNacoste I left this thread:

1. Mike Ditka has spoken out against NFL players taking a knee because he says, what oppression? “There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of. Now maybe I’m not watching it as carefully as other people.”

2. One hundred years is a clear benchmark.  Remember, 100 years.

3. If I thought Mr. Ditka read books I would send him a copy of Tim Tyson’s Blood Done Sign My Name; a historical memoir written by a white man about the public killing of a black man in 1970 for which no person who people saw do the killing was ever punished by the law.  (Link)

4. Absent book reading, here Mr. Ditka is bit of my family’s personal black history.

5. My dark-skinned “Negro” father was born in 1918-My brown-skinned “Negro” mother was born in 1922… both born into hard legal racial segregation-Racism. Even if we now lived in 2018, Mr. Ditka’s 100 year mark would be woefully wrong and ignorant.

6. Myself born in 1951, I grew up in the Jim-Crow South of legally enforced racial segregation graduating high school in 1969 yet never having been to school with white kids because in 1969 it was still against state law to have racially mixed schooling.

7. Even if we were living in 2051, Mr. Ditka’s 100 year benchmark would be wrong and oblivious to history.

8. Football is just a frivolous game and one that I never played. But I did serve my country in the U.S. Navy (1972-1976) even though there was lingering racial discrimination in the fleet so much so that in 1973 I lived through a race-riot aboard a Navy aircraft carrier-USS Intrepid.

9. No isolated incident-there were 350 documented major racial incidents (including riots) in the Navy between 1970 and 1975 because of lingering and harsh racial discrimination against U.S. Navy sailors who were black. [see Sherwood, John D. (2006) Black Sailor, White Navy: Racial unrest in the fleet during the Vietnam War era. New York: New York University Press.

10. Even if we were living in 2075 Mr. Ditka’s 100 year benchmark would be stunningly without connection to our real American history.

11. We are where we are in American history because nothing in America has been so profound, and important as marginalized and discounted peoples pushing through, and defeating America’s too many intergroup bigotries in be able to live the American promise of “…the pursuit of happiness.”

12. That is why in 21st century America we arrive at a neo-diverse social environment in which too many Americans struggle with the idea and need to respect people from those many different groups. (see my book, Taking on Diversity: How we can move from anxiety to respect. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2015;  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22822943-taking-on-diversity)

13. In the midst of one part of that struggle against America’s still too many intergroup bigotries like many others Mr. Ditka has panicked psychologically and to calm himself has claimed that there has been no racial discrimination over the last 100 years.

14. My parents, my sister, my brothers and I have a personal black history that makes that claim look as ridiculous as it is.

15. Here endenth the lesson.

President Trump has called NFL players who kneel during the national anthem, SOBs.

I have never played sports.  A black man, I did grow up in the deep-South, in the time of Jim-Crow legal racial segregation. I did grow up in an activist household.  I did do voter registration of black people in 1968. I did march and protest, including sitting during the national anthem. I did, later, serve my country in the U. S. Navy during a time of racial turmoil and change in that branch of the military. And even while I served, I engaged in peaceful protest of ongoing racial inequities in the Navy.

Here’s my full essay, published in the News & Observer (September 26, 2017):

http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article175350526.html

President Trump did not serve. I served @Navy and am proud of Americans who kneel in protest of injustice/ https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/quiet-revolution/201609/colin-kaepernick-s-protest-is-patriotic-apple-pie

Listen up, young people. I am flabbergasted to read that any of you “…are tired” to have to still fight racism, heterosexism, and intergroup bigotry of all types.

I am a 65 year old, dark-skinned black man. I have lived through the horrific time of legal-racial segregation, riots and assassinations. I have fought many fights for equality and justice for our humanity…

I am not yet tired because I cannot afford to be.

I can still hear the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s words: “At a certain point in every struggle of great importance, a moment of doubt or hesitation develops. Some voices declare, “Let us stop here, we have gone far enough… [But]… Let nobody stop you; you are doing something that will ultimately save the soul of America. If you continue to struggle, there will be a new day in America.”

We are, we have always been, in a struggle for the soul of America.

No one ever told me that the struggle for a true America would be easy or short.

No one should have ever told you, no one should have ever implied that the struggle for a true America had an endpoint.

Tired, you say. I cannot afford for you to be tired. I need you to be motivated to work.

America cannot afford for you to be tired.

Morris Deeds (80 years old) who founded the Southern Poverty Law Center cannot afford for you to be tired.

Reverend William Barber (53 years old) founder and leader of the new “Moral Monday” movement cannot afford for you to be tired.

In 1968, with some of his last public words, Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We’ve got some difficult days ahead.”  And now in 2017 we see his prophecy come to dramatic life in Charlottesville, Va.

That is a call to gear up.

Tired? We need you to be disgusted and outraged about the bold display of white supremacists in Charlottesville. We must then turn that disgust and outrage into positive energy and motivation to get to work.

We still have some difficult days ahead. Sixty-five years old, but I am still not yet tired.

What are you prepared to do?

Excited my novella “Something That Didn’t Happen” was shortlisted as one the best of the 2016 Driftless Unsolicited Novella Contest.

 Of late, students of mine have asked me, here and there, “…what will you do when you retire Dr. Nacoste?” And that time does draw nigh.

 But I will have no problems staying busy. I will continue to be an advocate for social justice, speaking and writing, pushing and prodding our nation toward our goal of a more perfect union.

 Although everyone knows I am an activist-scholar, only a few know that I am also a writer of fiction (Logan.

 Not, of course, full time. I am not working on any new fiction right now. But in the past, I have taken a couple of summers to do so and one product is my 150 page novella, “Something That Didn’t Happen.”

  In my novella “Something That Didn’t Happen” Ro-bear travels back to his childhood home of Opelousas, Louisiana to try to recover and understand a vague memory of a mysterious event from his teenage years.

 ’He had a memory of something that didn’t happen.’

 Called back to Opelousas by his old Holy Ghost High School classmate Soothsayer, the memory, the event Ro-bear is traveling to confront occurred in 1965 Louisiana and is the centerpiece of the story; a story within the story.

 In that “story within the story,” we see the world of Louisiana Jim-Crow through the adolescent eyes of “The Seven,” Ro-bear, Ironhorse, Delores, Soothsayer, Dice, Kool-Aid and Ghost.  And we experience an alternate American history where there are actual, physical, giant walls of racial segregation.

 Called to a battle that will determine the direction of civil rights history, we see these seven black teenagers struggle to avoid a coming confrontation with dark supernatural forces that will arrive in the 1965 hurricane named Betsy.  But we also see the Seven helped to face their task by a classroom experience of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, along with Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions’ song “People Get Ready,” and by the guidance of Ro-bear’s grandfather Raphael Malveaux who is a Creole shaman. With that help “The Seven” grow strong enough to come together to fight the dark forces that try to keep people down and keep racial hate alive.

 Last June, I submitted my novella to the Driftless Unsolicited Novella Contest sponsored by Brain Mill Press. In the announcement of the 2016 contest results, Brain Mill Press has shortlisted my novella as one of the best submitted.

 With that strong encouragement, I’ll start looking for a publisher. This leads to me think that in my retirement, when that time does come maybe I will find some small success in writing fiction. Who knows?

 Here is the Brain Mill Press announcement of the winning and shortlisted novellas to 2016 Driftless Unsolicited Novella contest: http://www.brainmillpress.com/mainbrain/voices/news-from-the-publishers/driftless-unsolicited-novella-contest-winners-2/

 

I am sick and tired of hearing people through around stereotypes of today’s young adults; so called “millennials.” 

 Today’s young adults are not of poorer character, not weaker, than other generations have been. Those who say so are ignoring the fact that the social forces in today’s young adults’ lives are not the same as has been for other generations.

 In fact, I keep saying we are setting young people up. We are under preparing young people for the challenges of our nation’s neo-diversity, which includes the impact of new technologies. We are undermining young people’s ability to develop an adaptable skill set. 

 I have been saying all that for some time. Well, here is another voice saying some of the same things.  In a recent column, David Brooks wrote:

 “…one of the oddest phenomena of modern life [is] childhood is more structured than it has ever been, but then the great engine of the meritocracy spits people out into a young adulthood that is less structured than it has ever been.”

 Mr. Brooks goes on to say: “When I graduated from college, there was a finite number of career ladders in front of me… Now college graduates enter a world with 4 million footstools. There are many more places to perch…but few of the footstools pay a sustaining wage, seem connected with the others or lead to a clear ladder of rungs to climb upward.”

 Then Mr. Brooks makes his major point: “And how do we as a society prepare young people for this uncertain phase?  We pump them full of vapid but haunting praise about how talented they are and how their future is limitless.”

 And there you have it.  Limitless, you see, is a far greater truth that it used to be, and that is not all positive.  I have been pointing out, and Mr. Brooks seems to agree with me when he writes:

“Before there were social structures that could guide young adults as they gradually figured out the big questions of life. Now, those structures are gone.”

 Social structures?  I mean do people even remember “Blockbuster Videos,” “Borders Bookstores”?  And now Sears is fading away; whole malls are closing down all over America.

 That is the challenge young adults face today that no other generation has ever faced. No, Millennials are not whiny, weak, cry-babies. Today’s young adults are living in a new and newly unstructured work-life situation.  And Mr. Brooks is right about the psychology of that new work-life situation when he writes:

“Young people are confronted by the existential questions right away. They’re going to feel lost if they have no sense of what they’re pointing toward…”

 I say, it’s no wonder that all of a sudden a new word has been introduced to the American vocabulary and its, “adulting.”  And the given word is, “adulting is hard.”

 Look, to manage the new work-life situation, a more flexible and nimble skill-set will be required from here on. Psychologically, the first part of that skill set must be awareness of this new situation.  And that awareness must include understanding that much of what your well-meaning elders tell you is the answer doesn’t fit the shaky, wobbly, earth-quaking-with-change 21^st century situation of the world of work.

 And to be of any help to young people, those of my generation, the elders, must accept, admit and tell that truth.

 Reference: David Brooks (2017, June 25), “How today’s youth navigate their 20s.” News & Observer (p. 17A).

 New York Times (post): https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/opinion/mis-educating-the-young.html

 

 

No part of our history is untouched by the one-time American enslavement of African peoples.

 That thought flashed into my mind as I began to read “American Eclipse” by David Baron.

 From my summer book stack I picked up American Eclipse to break away (for a little while) from my summer reading of fiction.

 American Eclipse is a non-fiction book about early American astronomers and their attempt to observe and measure the effects of the total eclipse of the sun in 1898. Within two pages of reading, in setting the context for the lives of astronomers at that time, the author talks about the civil war ending and that end motivating scientists to get to work.

 Nothing in the psychology of American enterprise is uninfluenced by the one-time enslavement of African peoples, was the second flash of thought I had.

 To see, observe and measure the effects of the eclipse of 1898, meant heading to the then still somewhat untamed West where people yet remembered George Armstrong Custer’s attempt to eradicate Indians and people still talked about “Indian savages.” 

 No part of our history is untouched by the unfair, genocidal treatment of American Indians. Yep, that flashed through my mind as I read.

 I went on, learning the history of American astronomy, enjoying the writing, enjoying the well-written story that includes the inventor Thomas Edison, among other inventors and scientists interested in the eclipse.  That included a name I didn’t know because, well because this person was a “woman scientist”: Maria Mitchell

Another flash: Nothing in the psychology of the American enterprise is uninfluenced by the too long resistance to acknowledging the powerful intellect of women.

 If you are at all interested in early American scientific endeavors of astronomy (and a bit about early meteorology), “American Eclipse,” is a fun, five-star read. Stories of the real lives and motivations of a bunch of eclipse obsessed scientists; their technological challenges and human adventures leading up to their chance to observe the 1898 total eclipse that could be observed from America.

 You see, “American eclipse” is not about any of my flashes; not the enslavement of Africans, not the stealing of land and life from American Indians, not demeaning views of women. But those are part of the context of America even in a book about early American astronomy.

 In American Eclipse, there are statements people made in 1898 that are the same statements people make today about blacks, American Indians and women. That is why it is more than fair to say that nothing in the psychology of our 21^st century is uninfluenced by our histories of intergroup bigotries.

Yet, know this too: Nothing in our American psychology has been so profound, and important, as discounted peoples pushing through, and defeating, America’s too many intergroup bigotries.