33. James Baldwin on “Love"

Covid-19 started shining a bright light on racism in our country before the George Floyd killing; now it jumps at me from pictures, books, conversations and personal experience daily. It’s constant in my mind.

I read Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility, and immediately bought her basic premise, that whites have been and are decidedly on top in a power relationship with people of color; ours is a racist system and not just the work of a few “bad actors.” I readily acknowledge the unconscious biased racism—things said or left unsaid—that I’ve shown while embedded in this system. I am, however, left wanting in her call for continual self-examination as the main road to racial health.

Following Fragility, a friend recommended I read James Baldwin’s Fire Next Time. I found a copy at home, with my name and “March 1965” written on the title page. 

It didn’t take long, and its 141 pages blew me away. My 55 year-old pencil marks weren’t always in the right places or frequent enough; but in powerful prose and argument, Baldwin said or implied everything of value in White Fragility—and more. Here, in the opening “letter to his nephew”: 

“You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity… that you were a worthless human being… You were expected to make peace with mediocrity… remember that what  [white people] believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.”

I think DiAngelo would agree that white people must finally realize this, but  Baldwin goes one better: The raising of one race or one group of people over another invariably dehumanizes both groups. It gives us apartheid, Jim Crow, Nazi Germany. 

Baldwin says that the key for humanity lies with the American Negro; the white American treatment of the Negro and 400 year experience of slavery and subordination have trapped us in “a history we don’t understand, and until [we] understand it, [we] cannot be released from it.” Inadvertently, we have set up a laboratory for resolving a basic human problem—the dehumanizing of one group of humans by another. 

The most difficult corollary, he tells his nephew, is that “you must accept them, and accept them with love.” We—white Americans—must learn our history; Negroes—Black Americans—have the power to free us all. 

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32. Another Covid-19 strategy

Joseph E. Aoun, the President of Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. said this week in the Washington Post that “consulting with epidemiologists, biologists and network scientists on our faculty…. convinced us that bringing students back to the university would be crucial — not because the covid-19 virus isn’t a serious, highly transmissible threat, but because it is.”

My friend Bob Comeau went to Northeastern and graduated in time to be in the Peace Corps with me in 1965. It’s the first I’d heard of a college built on experiential, “coop” learning—all students worked half-time in jobs related to their academic majors. Bob commuted, worked, and played baseball. The home campus is now primarily residential and has become a full-on research university, but President Aoun still emphasizes experiential education and relations with the home campus neighborhood. 

Aoun and his university are not thinking in terms of getting through the fall semester and having things return to some kind of normal. They think that the Covid-19 is not going away quietly—or soon. It's at least a four-to-five-year problem, and  “Universities need to take control of the virus— and show our communities how to do the same.” 

Aoun marshals his arguments: 1. Even if a vaccine emerges in the next months, it will take time to produce and distribute it. 2. Only 62% of the population now says they will take the vaccine, and 70% is what science says is needed to grow the “herd immunity.” 3. Low income students were already in a pickle spring term taking online classes, often in bad living conditions without technology. 4. Students are returning to campuses across the country even when classes are online, and many are living in ill-monitored off-campus housing. 

Northeastern is now overhauling its campus, improving airflow systems, instituting a continuous cleaning and sanitizing regimen, reducing density in dorms and classrooms, developing strategies for fighting the virus.

The decision to open is “high stakes,” Aoun admits, but Northeastern is a research university, capable of frequent testing of students and faculty, monitoring and tracking disease outbreaks, continuing research on the virus itself. Agree or not—it looks like his student body and their parents are mostly onboard—Aoun and his school are looking for ways to live with and “take control of” Covid-19 way beyond this fall term.  

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31. Gut punched--or not

I don’t remember grade school or high school lessons about the impact of measles and smallpox on the Native Americans when the first Europeans arrived. I remember the picture of Squanto, the corn, beans, and pumpkins, but the stories after that were all about Indians hunting and gathering, not farming. Columbus “discovered” America, Cortez conquered Mexico, and Pizarro the Incas. 

My college textbook for the required “Western Civilization” class—which I still have—gives only a few sentences to the plague of the Middle Ages, an epidemic disease that killed a third of Europe’s population. 

I don’t remember learning that The Great Warming—950-1250—had anything to do with the Vikings settling Iceland and Greenland, or that the Little Ice Age—1300-1850—froze Greenland and its settlers in, and contributed to starvation in the British Isles and sent indentured servants to America.

History isn’t about weather and sickness, but about discoverers, kings and queens, presidents and prime ministers, generals and admirals…  Or was. 

But we are living in the middle of two incredible world events—global warming and a Pandemic—that are impacting the actions of presidents and prime ministers, popularly elected politicians and dictators, and the lives of people and families across the world. 

In her book on the Spanish Flu of 1918, Laura Spinny reminds that there are no monuments in London or Washington D.C. to that pandemic, that “Spanish flu is remembered personally, not collectively… as millions of discrete, private tragedies.” 

It strikes me that climate change and the current pandemic are such individual tragedies. If your island is sinking into the sea or your reindeer are dying, if you are a doctor in New York City or a member of the Navajo Nation, your world is crashing. 

The rest of us live in New Jersey or Idaho, wear masks or we don’t, eat out or not, watch the Johns Hopkins numbers of sick and the dead climb, and watch videos of melting icebergs. 

As surely as the plague or the Little Ice Age, these things affect us all; but we find it hard to come together with coherent attacks on things that haven’t gut-punched us personally. We’d better learn to.

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30. Parallels--with 1918

 America’s Forgotten Pandemic: the Influenza of 1918, by Alfred Crosby, was first published in 1976. A second edition was published in 2003, and I imagine the book has been given new life by the advent of Covid-19.

What seems certain from his account is that the 1918 flu got tangled up with WW I. The disease was carried back and forth across the seas with Navy ships and soldiers. It shared headlines—and often took a back seat to War news. The demand for troops was so high that military brass said that the deaths of soldiers in transit was a small price to pay when halting troop shipments might be seen as weakness by the Germans (who were dealing with the Pandemic themselves). 

Finally, General Pershing’s call for more troops could not be met; the draft call for 142,000 men in October, 1918 was cancelled, because the bases to which men would have to report were quarantined. Fortunately, the war ended and the country gave way to joy and celebration--which of course exacerbated the spread of disease. 

As war ground down in the fall of 1918, San Francisco was a hot spot, and Dr. William Hassler, Chief of the city’s Board of Health, was able to impose quarantines and a facemask ordinance on the population. In December, with war's end and incidences of disease dropping dramatically, the facemask ordinance was dropped and the City celebrated the end of the War and the holidays… and the flu raged again. 

This time the population, including city officials, the Christian Scientists, and many doctors, railed against re-imposition. Businesses were looking for holiday sales. Someone sent Hassler a bomb. He didn’t get his masks— “the dollar sign is exalted above the health sign,” he said. For reasons not much understood at the time, the Pandemic wound down on its own.

There are parallels here, with War and Pandemic linked in time and space, just as Pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and the election co-exist in a gnarly braid in our own time. 

And there are great hopes—maybe expectations?—for such a miraculous disappearance of our mysterious coronavirus.

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29. Surrounded

We’ve been feeling pretty smug and safe in Wallowa County; 18 Covid-19 cases, one death, but... 

Umatilla County, our next but one neighbor to the west, is now the hot spot in the state, with over 2100 cases and 26 deaths as of yesterday. Oregon Health says that testing in that county is running at 18% positive. The big outbreaks have been at a WalMart Distribution Center and at several food processing plants, and the daily tick-ups of 50-100 cases has caused the Governor to send Umatilla County all the way back to “Go”—that’s before stage 1 reopening!

Umatilla is just the other side of Union County, which had the Covid spotlight for a time when a church chose to ignore guidelines and spawned over 200 infected parishioners. Union has settled down, but we share State Highway 82 with them, and they are linked by Interstate 84 with Pendleton, and Portland, Umatilla, Morrow (more outbreaks), and Multnomah counties. 

If you head east from La Grande, you’ll hit Idaho. Blaine County (Sun Valley) was an early Idaho leader, but they’ve given way to Boise (a four-hour drive from us), now with over 8000 Covid cases, and to Lake Coeur d’Alene, four hours north of us in Kootenai County, which counts over 1600 cases. 

At home, we’ve learned that four people who do not list Wallowa County as their home have tested positive for Covid-19 this week. They are not included in the Oregon Health Authority’s Wallowa County count, because the Health Authority keeps track of these things by “county of residence.”

So here we are, tucked against the Snake River on the east, counting license and car dealer plates from Idaho and Washington north and south, and from Florida, Arizona, Texas, California, Georgia, and other Covid spots across the land. Our state and Forest Service campgrounds, Wallowa Lake beaches, and outdoor restaurants are full. We wonder when a disease that doesn’t worry about home addresses will jump from tourist to local, or will ride in with one of our own now visiting friends and family in Texas or Idaho.

Wear my mask. Keep my distance. Stay outside. My mantras.

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