Being decent

Since the May 25th murder of George Floyd, and the weeks-long protests that it (and so much other violence) has sparked, there has been an awakening in American culture to the long history of injustice that African Americans have endured. And this has led people to ask a series of questions. Why is there so much racism? How did it start? Am I a racist?

While these are indeed important questions, their answers can sometimes address only the symptoms rather than the causes of the problem.

Asking whether you are a racist seems a very low bar for our culture — yet, though of course, we have yet to meet this basic requirement. The even bigger question is, are you a decent human being?

If, when you look at a situation that involves injustice, you answer “no” to the question of “would I like that to happen to me?”, then speaking up and standing for what is right is the decent thing to do. We cannot all be perfect, but we can all be decent, we can all treat others in the way we would like to be treated.

The books below are for readers who want to be even more than not-racist, who want to be genuinely decent human beings, something a culture can be built on.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

“What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?”

“I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied”

“Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.”

1491 by Charles C. Mann

“When Columbus landed, Cook and Borah concluded, the central Mexican plateau alone had a population of 25.2 million. By contrast, Spain and Portugal together had fewer than ten million inhabitants. Central Mexico, they said, was the most densely populated place on the earth, with more than twice as many people per square mile as China or India.”

“After Cortes, the population of the entire region collapsed. By 1620–25, it was 750,000, “approximately 3 percent of its size at the time that he first landed. “ Cook and Borah calculate that the area did not recover its fifteenth-century population until the late 1960’s”

Contested City by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

“…these definitions [of community, collaboration, and public] are mutable, unfixed, and that making your own definitions clear and being clear about those of your collaborators, while seeing and making visible who has the power to set them, are at the center of this kind of work. It takes a specific kind of thinking and strength of will to question ideas that people think are simple or agreed upon. It takes a similar kind of thinking and strength to query or reject the premises, rules, and baselines of planning processes that city governments present to communities and neighborhoods as defining the realm of the possible. Without this kind of thinking and strength, our work isn’t worth doing.”

American Dreamer by John C. Culver

“Probably the most damaging indictment that can be made of the capitalistic system is the way in which its emphasis on unfettered individualism results in exploitation of natural resources in a manner to destroy the physical foundations of national longevity”

“More than four thousand committees had been set up to administer the farm programs at the local level, making it the most decentralized and democratically participatory federal program in the nation’s history”

The mismeasurement of man by Stephen Jay Gould

“But science’s potential as an instrument for identifying the cultural constraints upon it cannot be fully realized until scientists give up the twin myths of objectivity and inexorable march toward truth.”

“Yet, beyond this obvious desire to remove the superficial effects of clearly acquired knowledge, Binet declined to define and speculate upon the meaning of the score he assigned to each child. Intelligence, Binet proclaimed, is too complex to capture with a single number. This number, later called IQ, is only a rough, empirical guide constructed for a limited, practical purpose:”

“Not only did Binet decline to label IQ as inborn intelligence; he also refused to regard it as a general device for ranking all pupils according to mental worth. He devised his scale only for the limited purpose of his commission by the ministry of education: as a practical guide for identifying children whose poor performance indicated a need for special education — those who we would today call learning disabled or mildly retarded.”

Teaching As a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman

“The most common cause of infant mortality in the United States is parental beating.”

“As McLuhan has said, there is no inevitability so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

“as the number of messages increases, the amount of information carried decreases. We have more media to communicate fewer significant ideas.”

“Future shock occurs when you are confronted by the fact that the world you were educated to believe in doesn’t exist.”

“Once you have learned how to ask questions — relevant and appropriate and substantial questions — you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.”

Bind us Apart by Nicholas Guyatt

“Racial separation had become the most popular means of imagining a world after slavery… And Abraham Lincoln, in the first years of his presidency, did more to secure government support for black emigration than any politician since James Monroe.”

“In 1824, President James Monroe told Congress that Indian nations should move west of the Mississippi, where the federal government might more easily manage their journey toward “civilization.”

“Slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent.”

“From the seventeenth century, runaway slaves took refuge in Indian country, often becoming full members of Indian communities. This infuriated southern slaveholders and became the cause of considerable tension on the borders of white settlement. But as southern Indians adopted rudiments of the “civilizing” program around the turn of the nineteenth century, they borrowed one marker of respectability from the white planters rushing toward their lands: Native Americans began to practice forms of captivity that increasingly resembled the chattel slavery of the southern United States.”

The March of Folly by Barbara W. Tuchman

“The belief that the government knows best was voiced at this time by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who said on the resumption of the bombing ” we ought all to support the president. He is the man who has all the information and knowledge of what we are up against”. This is a comforting assumption that relieves people from taking a Stand. It is usually invalid, especially in foreign affairs. “foreign policy decisions,” concluded Gunnar Myrdal after two decades of study “are in general much more influenced by irrational motives” than are domestic ones.”

” no one is so sure of his premise as the man who knows too little”

Letter from a Birmingham jail cell by Martin Luther King Jr.

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

“I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

“Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.”