Anthropology Times

Language Socialization
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 15: 163-191 (Volume publication date October 1986)
B B Schieffelin, and E Ochs
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to My Tutor….

My dearest Simone,

In reading “Language Socialization” and thinking about how language is used to instruct about culture, I thought more on the baby talk exercises in my extended family. Schieffelin and Ochs write about how some children’s early encounters with language are more one-on-one, mostly caregiver to child, and how others have an early immersion into multi-person conversations and how the latter learn early that conversations can be complicated and multi-layered. They also speak about how children “must learn how to appropriately convey their feelings to others as well as to recognize the moods and emotions that others display.” It seems the baby talk exercises in my family meant immersion from birth into multi-person conversations for the infant as well as early instruction on reading and interpreting emotions and affect. Here’s something I wrote earlier:

When I was younger, there was much baby talk on behalf of the fetus and on behalf of the infant. Older people would talk on behalf of infants (much the same way one might talk in place of a stuffed toy for a child) at least through a time at which the infant was aware that the talk/speech had to do with her. There was an expectation that the older speaker would pay attention to the facial expressions and body language of the infant when creating communication on behalf of the infant. Other would-be speakers might challenge poor interpretation and take up speaking for the infant with a “no, I don’t think that…” I remember these interaction being fun social experiences. Even very young children could give a go at speaking on behalf of the infant as long as the would-be speaker had the requisite language and observational skills.

I felt the whole experience helped communication between children in the family and between children and adults. I think it encouraged a wholistic approach to interpreting communications from children. The authors write of a divide between “child-centered communication” and “situation-centered communication,” and how adults with a child-centered orientation make a greater effort to decipher the verbal utterances of the child in an effort to understand what the child is trying to communicate,  and how those who were situation-centered paid less attention to or even ignored the verbal utterances of a child. I wonder whether it’s not so much that situation-centered adults were ignoring the verbal utterance, as much as it was that the verbal utterances were one of many clues used to decipher the desires of the child, along with facial expressions and body language and environmental cues.

Seems I’m pressing closer and closer to my Monday before midnight deadline for writing to you. Next week, I’ll post earlier.

Many warm thoughts,
S.

P. S.  It’s my grandmother’s birthday.  (Happy Birthday, Granny!)

Anthropology, Evolution, and “Scientific Creationism”
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 14: 103-133 (Volume publication date October 1985)
James N. Spuhler
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to my Tutor….

My dearest Simone,

I read “Anthropology, Evolution, and ‘Scientific Creationism’ and I feel at a loss for what to say.  I find it hard to believe that such a large percentage of Americans reject evolution.  The article was published in 1982 and quotes Gallup Poll numbers:  “44% of the population in the United States does not accept an evolutionary origin for the human species.”  Looking at a December 2010 Gallup  poll, 40% of Americans believe that “God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago.”

So looking around a little longer – with the concept phrased a little differently, it seems 25% reject evolution rather than the 40% implied by the other poll.  From a February 2011 poll…. “39% of Americans say they ‘believe in the theory of evolution,’ while a quarter say they do not believe in the theory, and another 36% don’t have an opinion either way.”

I found The Sensuous Curmudgeon a good read.  The site focuses on the “evolution vs. creationism” controversy in the U.S.  I’ve only poked around a little.  I don’t agree with all the viewpoints on the site, but the coverage and commentary seem extensive.  The writing is witty, funny and snarky.  I’ve bookmarked it to read more later.

I grew up in Mississippi, so I likely knew a lot of people with creationist beliefs.  I don’t think I ever had a science teacher who was willing to teach creationism in the classroom.  I specifically remember a junior high teacher (sometime in the 1980s) saying with passion that she would not teach creationism.  I don’t remember the details, but I think a local school board must have been considering forcing science teachers to teach creationism (didn’t happen).  I think many of the people in the area who believed in creationism, didn’t think it should be taught in schools — some of them believing that teachers couldn’t be trusted to teach creationism the right way.

I’ll leave it at that for now.

My heart to yours,

S.

Theories and Politics in African American English
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 23: 325-345 (Volume publication date October 1994)
Marcyliena Morgan
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

I read “Theories and Politics in African American English” shortly after reading “A Survey of Afro-American English.” I didn’t write down many of my thoughts at the time and at the moment I find myself not in the best mood to write anything, but I will. Marcyliena Morgan’s review was published over a decade after the one by John Baugh, but the discussion doesn’t seem much changed. Shall I bore you with my passing thoughts over the week? Morgan uses the term African-American English (AAE), so I’ll go with that.

Some of the discussions of AAE seem to describe speech elements that I tend to associate with Southern rural speech generally. I wonder whether some researchers and non-black residents outside the South associated certain speech elements more exclusively with AAE because they only encountered that speech from black people. I’m thinking of the large migrations of blacks from the South and how others may have taken certain elements of Southern speech to be AAE exclusively. It’s been a while since I’ve spent any significant amount of time in rural Mississippi, so my memory of distinctions between white speech and black speech in the area are a bit fuzzy. Morgan discusses the lack of third person singular verb agreement in AAE – this I remember to have been common in the region. I could imagine just about anyone saying, “Oh, he don’t mind…”

Growing up, the black people in the area referred to the local speech as talking “country,” while more standard English speech was deemed talking “proper.” There were country-talking white people and proper-talking black people. There were distinctions between black and white speech, but I’m hazy on what those were. I am left with the impression that the dividing line between black and white speech was not as clearly drawn in my rural Mississippi area (in the 70s and 80s) as I get the impression it may be in some of the academic literature, at least in regard to some of the basic grammar.

Morgan writes that African-American parents did not believe the differences between AAE and standard English were significant enough to create misunderstandings in the classroom and that instruction should be in standard English. This was the thinking where I grew up and I tend to agree. The most significant thing for me was having teachers who understood my experience as a black child. Several of the older teachers and the principal at my elementary school were more mindful of the fact that they were educating black children. Younger black teachers weren’t as much that way. I went to a different all-black elementary school for one year and the teachers there didn’t speech as much to the experience of a black child either.

The older teachers were more likely to speak directly and specifically about things being said about black children and black people in academia and in the general media. We got the rundown – This is what you will hear; This is how you might feel about it; Here is an alternative way to view things. As far as speaking standard English, they spoke about the possibility of being teased by peers and the wider black community; they spoke to black males as far as dealing with the perception that speaking standard English might be seen as being more effeminate; they spoke about dealing with negative responses from whites in the community; they spoke against the more negative and belittling characterizations of AAE.

The negativity from whites in the local community could be frightening at times. When my more “proper” speaking cousins from the North came to visit, they often got cold and mean stares from whites because of the way they spoke. Given that there was a certain amount of stigma attached to speaking with a Southern accent, black children speaking more standard English with a non-Southern accent were responded to as if they were being hostile, as if they were attacking whites by speaking in a certain manner.

My favorite elementary school teacher spoke in a manner very similar to that of Maya Angelou. I think of her whenever I hear Maya Angelou speak. This teacher greatly influenced how a I speak and how I think. I was so lucky to have that group of elementary school teachers. I may have some more follow-up on this later.

Ever true,
S.

A Survey of Afro-American English
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 12: 335-354 (Volume publication date October 1983)
J Baugh
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to my Tutor….

My dear Madame,

As is often the case, I have waited too late to write to you given the deadline I set for myself.  I’ve been ill, but the situation would mostly likely be the same if I weren’t.  Still, I will say a few things…

My rural Mississippi hometown was in a predominantly black county and it typified Baugh’s statement  that “urban and rural varieties of BVE [nonstandard black vernacular English] are maintained most by those individuals who have limited contact with nonblacks.”  While a great many of the adults in the area had the “ability to shift their speech styles depending on the social situation and their relative linguistic dexterity,” (Baugh), many of the older members of the community did not perform such shifts.  Because of the stigma associated with BVE, one sometimes had to be careful not to appear disrespectful when addressing these older members of the community in the sense of not subtly implying by use of “standard English” that one thought them stupid or less worthy of respect.  In these cases a fluidity in speech style came in handy.

Several of my elementary school teachers, including my favorite one, strongly encouraged the use of standard English.  What I took from these teachers was that speaking standard English gave “them” one less derogatory thing to say about “us.”  The thinking mentioned by Baugh was definitely floating around–that BVE indicated some genetic inferiority or that black children weren’t learning a real language or that black children were incapable of learning standard English.  My teachers emphasized that style of speech did not speak to intelligence or capability, no matter what “they” said.  We read black authors who used BVE deliberately in their writing because it communicated experience that couldn’t be related otherwise.  We read speeches by black orators, such as Sojourner Truth, that showed that use of BVE was not at odds with wit and intelligence.  I liked this approach by my teachers.

Recently, I’ve noticed on a social media site that black people from my hometown will often spell words in such a way as to make it clear that they are using BVE intentionally and without shame.  I wonder whether this is evidence that the same attitudes present when I was in elementary school are still around.

Ok, if I stop now, I will just make the deadline.  Still reading “America Day by Day.”  Hope to comment more on that soon.

Ever true,
S.

Marxist Approaches in Anthropology
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 4: 341-370 (Volume publication date October 1975)
B O’Laughlin
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to my Tutor…

Dearest Simone,

I may have just become a bit of a Bridget O’Laughlin groupie.  Her writing is so well-structured.  She gives clear definitions of terms, both directly and in context.  She writes such beautiful paragraphs that I couldn’t stop myself from taking notes.  I’m still working my way through the article.  I imagine that I will rework my notes in the background as I continue to read other articles.

As I read I am trying to decipher when, where, how certain Marxist-type thinking worked its way into my mind.  I feel my thinking is most Marx-like when I’m focused on day-to-day living, the things that I encounter as a person going through the world.  When I’m on that level where I read the newspaper or political commentary as though they were talking about real things about world, that’s the part of my thought that seems to be the most Marx-influenced.  When I’m thinking more about how the mind works and the nature of thought and the nature of existence, it seems my influences aren’t very Marx-like.

When O’Laughlin writes about Marxist views on individualism, I recognize a type of thinking that came to me by way of having read Eastern philosophies (particularly Advaita Vedanta) and American Transcendentalists at a very young age:

…people can individuate themselves only in society, and each individual is determined by a particular set of social relations. Society
cannot be understood as a population or aggregate of individuals, but only as a totality of social relations.

There’s not necessarily an exact correlation with the philosophies that I’ve read, but there is certainly a similar type of thinking about individualism.  The emphasis is on the whole, on the unity, on the Oversoul–individualism is an illusory construct best used to explore how our interactions with others can be a path to illuminating that we are actually one with the other.  I remember thinking as a teenager that rampant individualism in Western culture was having a destructive influence on the general understanding about the nature of the world and the nature of the relationship between people.

I believe that O’Lauglin’s article is one to be read slowly and savored.  And that’s not to say that the same isn’t true for other articles that I’ve read.  I just really love her writing.  Did I say that already?  Also, I feel that my ability to take good notes is coming back to me.

Many thanks for your kindness and attention,
S.

The Emerging Picture of Prehistoric Arabia
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 15: 461-490 (Volume publication date October 1986)
M Tosi
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to my Tutor….

My dearest Simone,

I was more consciously aware of holes in my knowledge when reading “The Emerging Picture of Prehistoric Arabia.”  A greater familiarity with the geography of the region, a very clear picture of the geological timeline and geological processes, a better understanding of non-Western history all would have helped.  Certainly I understand how to consult a map and appropriate reference materials, but I’m finding that I can no longer put off committing to memory a wider body of information.  I have too often told myself not to waste brain space on information that I could easily look up.

When I chose this article I didn’t immediately have in mind the fact that Arabia stands apart from the typical timeline of agricultural development.  Certainly I had been exposed to discussions of pastoralism, hunting and gathering and maritime economies, but I don’t know that I had given much thought to them in a prehistoric context in the sense discussed by Tosi, that study of the prehistory of the region could be used to complement “traditional focus on agricultural origins and early urbanism” and used to develop “a more comprehensive definition of economic evolution.”  It’s worthy of a bookmark.

As to the archaeology in the region, both the geographical and political climates in the region make establishing a prehistoric chronology difficult.  Erosion hampers the recovery of organic remains resulting in only a handful of radiocarbon dates; remains such as rock carvings and megaliths lack the contextual means of dating; passing of data from colonial authorities to local authorities and still more local authorities results in loss of context for the collected data.   Tosi’s discussion of all of these seemed interesting, but I wasn’t in a mind to digest it.

The author seemed to be an interesting sort.  Andrew Lawler wrote the following in a May 2010 article in Science:

“He told colleagues he was looking for ancient lapis lazuli mines. But when Maurizio Tosi crossed into Afghanistan at the height of the war between the Soviet Union and the mujahedin in 1984, his real goal was to locate wooden boxes that had once contained American-supplied Stinger missiles. Those missiles threatened Soviet helicopters, and Moscow was eager to trace the route they had taken into Pakistan. … ” (Link)

I should be able to locate the full text of this article soon.

Of late I have been distracted and uninspired.  Inspiration isn’t necessary for productivity, but it helps.  I hope that you do not grow tired of me.

Ever true,

S.

Letters to my Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

A copy of America Day by Day came in at my local library.  I’ve only grazed and skimmed so far, but I’m delightfully excited about the level of detail you share about your experience and observations traveling in America.  I have high hopes of gaining insight into my very American self.

When I lived in London, I loved being “that American girl,” no matter the tone in which it was said.  Something hit me in the face when there — I was American first and black second when it came to how others saw me.  I hadn’t noticed beforehand how much I had felt that in America, I was black first and American second when it came to how others saw me.  Perhaps, this has something to do with why it is that “foreigners” usually easily identify me as American no matter how I’m dressed or how I speak whereas other Americans have frequently thought me to be foreign since I was a teen.  I will reflect more on this as a read your travel journal.

I will save my comments on my regularly scheduled reading in anthropology for next week.  I won’t bore you with the details, unless you ask.

My warmest regards,
S.

Functional Analysis in Anthropology and Sociology: An Interpretative Essay
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 19: 243-260 (Volume publication date October 1990)
S N Eisenstadt
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to my Tutor….

My dearest Simone,

I’ve read enough in anthropology to be frustrated by my lack of basic knowledge of the discipline. I don’t know why exactly I haven’t been able to focus more on enjoying what I am learning no matter how little it feels or how confused I may be at times. I study anthropology because I enjoy it, because I think it will make me a better fiction writer, because I think it will make me a better a thinker, a better person. Maybe my American self demands that I tie study to some concrete and not-too-distant money-making goal? I think a bit of your commentary on American culture is on point. In “An Existentialist Looks at Americans” you write on the American obsession with concrete results, the lack of joy in doing a thing. You write also of how concrete results are often measured in dollar signs for Americans:

“…to cut the result from the human movement which engendered it, to deny it the dimension of time, is also to empty it of every sort of quality: only dry bones remain. With quality lacking, the only measure that remains with which to estimate the work and achievement of man is a quantitative one–money.”

Chris Rock spoke of this American obsession with money in a comedy routine. I believe it speaks directly to your writing on Americans:

As copied from Wikiquote (with edits) (Link):
The number one reason people hate America… the number one reason is because of our religion. Americans worship money; we worship money. Separate God from school; separate God from work; separate God from government; but on your money it says, “In God we trust.” All my life I’ve been looking for God, and he’s right in my pocket. Americans worship money, and we all go to the same church, the church of ATM. Everywhere you look there’s a new branch popping up … remind you about how much money you got and how much money you don’t got. And if you got less than twenty dollars, the machine won’t even talk to you.

OK, so that’s that. What do I have to say about “Functional Analysis in Anthropology and Sociology: An Interpretative Essay?” Eisenstadt writes about his analysis of bureaucratic empires. One thing in particular coincides with some of my recent thoughts on politics. He writes:

The rulers…attempted to limit the influence of the very aristocratic system of stratification and legitimation that made them rulers; meanwhile the lower strata of the population, to whom the rulers attempted to appeal, began to “aristocratize” themselves. Such contradictions generated struggle, change, and the eventual demise of these systems.

I’ve been thinking more of the second part of that statement, of how attempts to appeal to the “lower strata” can lead to demise. There’s this whole fiction of the “middle class” that’s grown up in the politics. As near as I can figure, the term “middle class” can only properly be applied to the children of nobles who aren’t in line to inherit a title. But these new middle class are repackaged peasantry desperate to identify as something else, desperate to “aristocratize” themselves; they seem to believe that they can somehow use existing social structures to limit or in some small way control the behavior of the ruling class, you know, democracy and all that. I do not believe it a sustainable thing for governments, for rulers, to appeal to this sentiment, at least not in the current fashion. I would be curious to read Eisenstadt’s work with a mind to how it speaks to more recent “democracy” movements. I believe this current cult of the middle class to be one of the more insidious movements against freedom and intellectual advancement. I believe you write about this very thing as well… the complacency and such of the petit bourgeois.

Perhaps we will pick this up later? I am constantly saying this, I know.

With all my heart,
S.

The Changing Role of Women in Models of Human Evolution
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 15: 25-66 (Volume publication date October 1986)
L M Fedigan
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to My Tutor…

My dear, kind Madame,

Reading Linda Marie Fedigan’s “The Changing Role of Women in Models of Human Evolution,” I was again struck with the thought that women in academia are more attuned to academic bias which is, I suppose, as one would expect.  Much the same as when reading the review for “Groups That Don’t Want In: Gypsies and Other Artisan, Trader, and Entertainer Minorities,” there was an undertone of “Here’s the state of the literature…such as it is,” and justifiably so.  In American schools there is this pretense that academia is more independent than it is; that there is some raison d‘être other than support of the state and the status quo.  There is a sense that new and innovative and pragmatic thinking will be appreciated, but it is a false sense for the most part.  It seems that many American academics like to believe that they love Plato Socrates when really they are just as Aristotelian as the rest of the Western world.

In an essay on Americans (Philosophical Writings (Beauvoir Series)), you write that the existentialists believe that the realness of freedom lies in pursuing some end and effecting some real change upon the world and this is why you “approve, to some extent, the American way of judging a man by what he has done.”  A man is not simply the product of his birthright, but more the product of his accomplishments.  I believe that your observation is true, that this is a real ideal in American culture.  And I believe that it is this ideal that requires the pretense of appreciation of the novel in American academia.  If a man is what he does, there is a different valuing and definition of “doing” than what one finds in other Western cultures.   Birth is given to the notion that hard work based on skill or knowledge or facts is always rewarded.  However, this ideal is much more real in American folklore than can be found in actual practice.  Conservatism in academia has a much longer and deeper history than American pragmatism.

As to some of the specifics of the review, there seemed to a consistent narrative in the literature reviewed that cast women’s reproductive abilities in a negative light.  The fact that women had babies held them back and made them dependent on men for protection and sustenance.  Fedigan writes that the prevailing ideology as far as who gets to reproduce is not only a matter of selecting for desirable male traits, but also a matter of men choosing which women should be so lucky as to serve as incubators for the genetic stuff of the superior males.  She writes: “…Darwin helped to pioneer what I call the ‘coat-tails’ theory of human evolution: traits are selected for in males and women evolve by clinging to the mean’s coat-tails.”  Female reproduction is a hindrance or at most an aside.  Male reproduction, on the other hand, is the stuff that builds and sustains.

Thinking more modernly, we have these notions of the world in crisis because women are having babies; overpopulation will be the death of us all.  Damn those women!!  I remember this being a particular gripe of my first anthropology professor, “Women having babies is not the problem,” she often cried out.  I didn’t love my first anthropology professor in that way that many women often love their first anthropology professors, but on this we agreed.  The world in crisis couldn’t have almost entirely to do with the consumption and output of modern societies, could it?  It seems these narratives of how women having babies is a problem for women, for cultural development, for the health of the planet are deeply embedded in modern human societies.  I think it would make for interesting study to look at them all.

Men laid claim to their own bloody and violent birthing schemes.  I think the popularity of “Man the Hunter” comes from a desire to take ownership of an ability natural to women.  The blood and guts and endurance and bonding that comes from hunting is much more important to how human cultures evolved and developed than any contribution of women.  Men can be tough, too!  I think the popularity of looking to other primates or modern day hunter-gatherer societies for clues into the development of early human cultures does much to support male-dominant schemes of early cultural development in that doing so limits the type and scope of questions asked even when those questions would tend to look more favorably on female contributions.  I think the focus on the tangible and easily measurable leads to significant shortcomings; it’s so easy to misinterpret or ignore significance in these comparisons.  Things that look the same across cultures may not have the same significance, may not have the same mind applied to the thing.

I’ve always thought that women giving birth was the key to understanding early human cultures and the development of cultures and the male desire to dominate in culture as well as the methods he uses to do so or claims to have done so.  I’ve always believed that early cultural traditions and rituals surrounding the importance of women giving birth are key to understanding the prevalence of misogyny across modern cultures.  I’m not sure of the influences that lead me to this place, but I’ve thought this since I was very young.  I believe there was much Marxist thinking floating around in rural Mississippi.

OK, it’s getting late again.  Reading Fedigan, I feel very encouraged to read more of Friedrich Engels.  I agree with him that it seems that women played a more significant role in early human cultures and that that role fell into decline.  I am interested to know more of the details of his thinking.

Yours in mind and spirit,
S.

Letters to my Tutor…

My dear, sweet Simone,

I haven’t finished reading the review scheduled for this week. Most of the reviews I’ve read have been around 20 pages; the latest one is around 40 pages and I didn’t schedule for that.  I could have finished the reading, but I decided that it might be better to stretch it over two weeks.  And plus, this leaves open the chance to write to you about something that has been playing in the back of my head for several weeks now.

Back in the 1990’s one of my African-American history professors asserted during class that all African-Americans were atheists…except for the odd few here or there.  I don’t have a clear memory of my understanding of his statements at the time, so my more recent thoughts might be a rehash of my thinking then.  I also don’t recall the professors exactly elaborations, but I do remember being more in agreement than not.  You’ve written of socializing with Richard Wright, a fellow Mississippian.  Did you two ever speak about religion?  I know he had strong feelings and beliefs about the matter. You’ve mentioned so far in one of your letters to Nelson that Richard might take unkindly to some of your opinions of him, but that you thought that this would be more due to a misinterpretation of your view. I hope to hear more about your conversations with Richard.

I’ve thought back on the subject due to more recent casual observations of an African-American who identifies as atheist.  His atheism is quite strange to me in that it seems to assume and be in reaction to a type of belief that I didn’t think existed in the African-American community.  It’s possible this gentleman grew up in more integrated community, but still it seems that he’s old enough that this should not have skewed his relationship with Christianity so far into the mainstream. He makes remarks along the lines of  this or that Christian belief isn’t true or that church officials will twists general statements in an effort to bamboozle congregants.  Now, my experience (and I think one that was shared by the professor) was that even in a community that was at least ostensibly filled with believers, statements like the above were considered an essential part of the education of the black child such that if an African-American identified as atheist the remarks would come from some place other than Christianity lacked truth.

Part of my early education was that religion, politics, science, society were all used to lie to me about who I was and what my potential was as a black child.  Out in the popular culture “blackness” was spoken of as a punishment from god; “scientific” studies showed that blackness and black culture were inherently inferior; political spin doctors never lacked plentiful justifications for laws now popularly considered to have been unjust.  In all-Black settings especially, there was strongly resistance to these types of things in popular culture.  Children were heavily encouraged to developed a sense of self that stood apart from religious truths and “scientific” truths and truths found in popular culture.  The tone of the statements of the African-American atheist I mentioned earlier suggests to me that he didn’t receive this early education that I thought was the norm.

One thing I do remember the professor saying is something along the lines that Christian religiosity in the black community was more or less a song and dance, a pageant, a play for the benefit of the powers that be.  During American slavery, religious meetings often served as a cover for other activities such as learning to read or planning escapes to freedom or other communications.  Religious singing during fieldwork and other group work was often used as a signal for secret meetings and plans.  Later, during the Civil Rights Movement, stressing the idea that we black people worshiped the same god as the wider population was often helpful in combating racism.  This last thought co-mingled with some of the general thinking about whether all African-Americans are atheist has lead me to reinterpret part of my elementary school education.

I went to a segregated elementary school.  My mother attended an integrated elementary school, at least for a short while, but that had fallen out of fashion by the time I was in school… and then back in fashion again before I had finished grade school.  Getting back to the point, there was prayer in my public school.  And when it was discovered that I did not know the Lord’s Prayer after I had been chosen to lead the class in prayer and failed, my teacher took me aside and taught it to me.  It’s recently dawned on me or perhaps re-dawned on me that prayer in the black school was part of a survival strategy. My teacher taught me the Lord’s Prayer because it was an essential tool for my health and safety as a black child in Mississippi.. this apart from whatever her personal beliefs may have been.  Calls to prayer could sometimes be effective in diffusing racially heated situations headed toward violence.

I’ve been trying to sort out what I was taught about religion as a child.  The same teacher who made sure that I knew the Lord’s Prayer also did a great job at teaching about the religions in other cultures; there was no condescension.  She did not teach in a tone that suggested that non-Christian religions were lesser or further away from some universal truth.  When my mother learned that I liked a Hindu boy she made remarks to my younger brother about maybe having to learn about a whole different religion in a tone that seemed open and accepting.  From many places, I got the sense that Christianity was local and practical.

Perhaps I will revisit this later?  My community service was canceled for tonight, but still I’m writing to you late in the day.  I’ve actually been more efficient this week, but my efforts have been spread across a wider variety of tasks.  I don’t care much for strict schedules generally speaking, but it seems having regularly scheduled chunks helps me get more done during “free” times.  I hope this is true.

Yours faithfully,
S.