This is from a follow-up to Michael Luo's November 30 article about the racial disparity in unemployment among college graduates. In recent weeks I've been watching the Roots miniseries for the first time, and thinking a lot about naming in particular. The multiple scenes where Kunta Kinte struggles to keep his own name and identity make the sometimes-more-subtle question of who gets called what when and by whom impossible to ignore and, in the light of both past and present, troubling (if fascinating) to consider.

business, horizons of the possible., names, race, recession

Nate:

Nevertheless, the strategy of hiding race — in particular changing names — can be soul-piercing. It prompted one African-American reader of the article to write that he was reminded of the searing scene in the groundbreaking TV miniseries “Roots” when the runaway slave Kunta Kinte is whipped until he declares that his name is Toby, the name given to him by his master.

Black job seekers said the purpose of hiding racial markers extended beyond simply getting in the door for an interview. It was also part of making sure they appeared palatable to hiring managers once race was seen. Activism in black organizations, even majoring in African-American studies can be signals to employers. Removing such details is all part of what Ms. Orr described as “calming down on the blackness.”

In “Covering: the Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights,” Kenji Yoshino, a law professor at New York University, wrote about this phenomenon not just among blacks but also other minority groups. “My notion of covering is really about the idea that people can have stigmatized identities that either they can’t or won’t hide but nevertheless experience a huge amount of pressure to downplay those identities,” he said. Mr. Yoshino says that progress in hiring has meant that “the line originally was between whites and nonwhites, favoring whites; now it’s whites and nonwhites who are willing to act white.”

This is from a short story taken from David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel in progress, The Pale King. The whole story, an exploration of childlike faith, is worth reading and rereading—indeed, the emotion I most strongly associate with reading David Foster Wallace's work is a (generally somewhat frustrated) impulse to reread. But in this case the impulse comes gladly and with a touch of, and a feel for, grace.

children, faith, grace, horizons of the possible, literature

Nate:

At any rate, the best analogy for the experience of hearing these childhood “voices” of mine is that it was like going around with your own private masseur, who spent all his time giving you back—and shoulder—rubs (which my biological mother also used to do whenever I was sick in bed, using rubbing alcohol and baby powder and also changing the pillowcases, so that they were clean and cool; the experience of the voices was analogous to the feeling of turning a pillow over to the cool side). Sometimes the experience of the voices was ecstatic, sometimes so much so that it was almost too intense for me—as when you first bite into an apple or a confection that tastes so delicious and causes such a flood of oral juices that there is a moment of intense pain in your mouth and glands—particularly in the late afternoons of spring and summer, when the sunlight on sunny days achieved moments of immanence and became the color of beaten gold and was itself (the light, as if it were taste) so delicious that it was almost too much to stand, and I would lie on the pile of large pillows in our living room and roll back and forth in an agony of delight and tell my mother, who always read on the couch, that I felt so good and full and ecstatic that I could hardly bear it, and I remember her pursing her lips, trying not to laugh, and saying in the driest possible voice that she found it hard to feel too much sympathy or concern for this problem and was confident that I could survive this level of ecstasy, and that I probably didn’t need to be rushed to the emergency room, and at such moments my love and affection for my mother’s dry humor and love became, stacked atop the original ecstasy, so intense that I almost had to stifle a scream of pleasure as I rolled ecstatically between the pillows and the books on the floor. I do not have any real idea what my mother—an exceptional, truly lovable woman—made of having a child who sometimes suffered actual fits of ecstasy; and I do not know whether she herself had them. Nevertheless, the experience of the real but unobservable and unexplainable “voices” and the ecstatic feelings they often aroused doubtless contributed to my reverence for magic and my faith that magic not only permeated the everyday world but did so in a way that was thoroughly benign and altruistic and wished me well. I was never the sort of child who believed in “monsters under the bed” or vampires, or who needed a night-light in his bedroom; on the contrary, my father (who clearly “enjoyed” me and my eccentricities) once laughingly told my mother that he thought I might suffer from a type of benign psychosis called “antiparanoia,” in which I seemed to believe that I was the object of an intricate universal conspiracy to make me so happy I could hardly stand it.

Advent Conspiracy hardly falls into the too-pious trap described in the previous excerpt. In fact, they skillfully deploy the language of consumerism—website, youtube, dvds, books half off today!—to spur conversations about choices we can make to affirm Christmas as a celebration of creation as well as consumption—and to promote projects to bring clean water to those who lack it. I find the venue of this post, by my good friend Jonathan, especially pleasing. Maybe I don't need that $400 flashlight after all.

advent, christmas, consmption, creation, horizons of the possible

Nate:

[Advent Conspiracy’s] slogan was “Spend Less, Give More,” and the idea is to give gifts of time, things that you make yourself, things that require a little more thought but often less money. And maybe Advent, and Christmas, will be a little less miserable. Start some traditions that don’t make the holidays simply something that adds to the stress, and leave behind the lesson that the best thing to ask a kid about Christmas is “What do you want?”

I know, not all of our readers are Christians or celebrate Christmas: on behalf of those of us who have been in-your-face with our “Reason-for-the-Season” buttons (while elbowing you aside for the cheap foreign-made crap at the big box stores), I apologize, and I hope that this year maybe a small percentage of people will start a new holiday tradition for their families, making Christmas just a little more enjoyable for everyone—especially those who can’t stand it.

From a funny, oddly Grinch-like defense of Christmas consumption against its sometimes-too-pious critics.

christmas, consumerism, horizons of the possible

Nate:

Third of all, at Christmas, people spend a lot of time and money on getting together with other people to eat and celebrate together.  This is one of the healthiest things in the world to spend time and money on.  Again, people complain about the stress of putting together nice Christmas events.  But I would argue that love is usually costly- it isn’t easy to love well.  And there is nothing unspiritual about good hospitality and great times of being connected to friends and family. As far as all the commercial accouterments- well, it’s America.  I would simply suggest that attacking Christmas is attacking consumerism in the wrong place.  People dump tons of money on themselves ALL the time.  Christmas is the one shot we get at encouraging people to spend money to show love to other people and spend time being connected to the people that matter most.  If that means I have to listen to the Chipmunks Christmas album at the grocery store in October, so be it.

This article by New York Times foreign affairs columnist Nicholas Kristof is, like much of what he writes in covering global conflicts, both depressing and hopeful. Depressing: people don't care about global conflicts. Hopeful: they care about people—individual people, specifically—and they care about hope. The psychological truths here are unavoidable, though what is left unexamined in this short piece is a more basic question: whether the kind of emotionally charged aid that is given in response to hopeful, individual-centered appeals is the kind that really leads to sustainable change.

changing the world, charity, development, psychology, relief

Andy:

A classic experiment involved asking people to donate to help hungry children in West Africa. One group was asked to help a seven-year-old girl named Rokia, in the country of Mali. A second was asked to donate to help millions of hungry children. A third was asked to help Rokia but was provided with statistical information that gave them a larger context for her hunger. Not surprisingly, people donated more than twice as much to help Rokia as to help millions of children. But it turned out that even providing background information on African hunger diminished empathy, so people were much less willing to help Rokia when she represented a broader problem. Donors didn’t want to help ease a crisis personi fied by a child; they just wanted to help one person—and to hell with the crisis.

As we all vaguely know, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. As Mother Teresa said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” Professor Slovic calls the first reaction “psychic numbing.” But Slovic wanted to know at what point the number of victims triggers psychic numbing. He set out to find out, and his findings were deeply depressing.

In one of Slovic’s experiments, people were asked to donate to Rokia or, in other cases, to a similar hungry boy, Moussa. In each case, research subjects were quite willing to help and donated generously either to Rokia or to Moussa. But when people were asked to donate to Rokia and Moussa together, with their photographs side by side, donations decreased. Slovic found that our empathy begins to fade when the number of victims reaches just two. As he puts it: “The more who die, the less we care.”

A practical application of these concepts came during the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. The white government there had imprisoned many brave activists, and there was a global campaign focusing on freeing these political prisoners. It never gained traction, however, until the organizers had the idea of refocusing it on an individual and came up with the slogan “Free Mandela!” Once there was a face on the movement, it resonated far more widely—and, ultimately, helped topple apartheid.