This Week:

Quote of the Week

WTO

Guns and Knives

Minnesota (Too) White
Socialist of the Century
Racism, Waseca, and Major League Baseball

Greetings,

I am very glad to be back after my preposterously long 2-month hiatus. What was I doing all that time? You’ll see before too long. Suffice it to say that Nygaard Notes is here to stay.

Lots of new readers appeared during the hiatus, so welcome aboard. I wish I could tell you exactly what to expect from this publication, but since I myself don’t know, how the heck can I tell you?

Selected readers (who will be picked using arbitrary and difficult- to-fathom criteria) will soon be getting an email from me asking for a small bit ‘o help to make Nygaard Notes better. Watch your electronic mailboxes. If you don’t receive one of these messages, and you would like to be a member of this select group of supporters, please let me know. I’ll send you an email, too.

This week I offer a series of short notes, and a longer piece which I actually wrote back in October but couldn’t fit in before I took my break. Since I am getting serious about limiting each weekly edition to roughly 2,000 words, I had to bump a new piece that I had prepared for this week. So...that piece will appear next week. And so it goes. I’ll never catch up! But we’ll have fun, anyway, don’t ya think?

‘Til next week,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

Would-be President George Bush, speaking to a Texas newspaper:

“I saw the report that children in Texas are going hungry. Where? You’d think the governor would have heard if there were pockets of hunger in Texas.”

(New York Times, December 24 1999, Page A14)

WTO

Readers have told me they wondered what I would have to say about the World Trade Organization and the Battle of Seattle of early December. Not much, is the answer, because I think there is already plenty of information available on the subject, and Nygaard Notes is supposed to tell you things you can’t find elsewhere. I will say that I think the two best things available for a basic orientation to the subject are pieces by Peter Montague (“Making Sense out of the WTO”) and Doug Henwood (“What is Globalization, Anyway?”) They’re not available online, but I will send copies to you if you ask.

Guns and Knives

Ex-Beatle George Harrison was stabbed on December 30th by a deranged intruder who was reportedly “obsessed with the Beatles.” Reports are that George will be fine in a few days. The Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) reported that the attack brought to mind “echoes of John Lennon's murder nearly two decades ago.” I guess the main difference would be that John Lennon was attacked in the United States, with a gun, and died within hours, while George was attacked in England, a country with strict gun control laws (and a homicide rate about one-eighth that of the United States). The only mention of this relevant fact in the Star Trib came from reader Stephanie Sarich in a letter to the editor two days after the fact. Thank you, Ms. Sarich.

Minnesota (Too) White

The Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) published a 22- page special section on December 31st entitled “Reflections of a Century.” The special section “tells the stories of six families who lived in Minnesota this century.” I didn’t read it, choosing instead to just leaf through it and see what impression I got from gazing at the 100+ photos and captions. The impression I ended up getting was the impression that we have a long way to go in how we portray ourselves. Except for the photos that appeared in advertisements, there were no photos at all of anyone who appeared to be Latino, Somali, Vietnamese, Cambodian, or any other color besides “white.” There was one photo of a Hmong refugee, the first one to arrive in Minnesota in 1975.

The only image of an African-American person to be seen (unless you count a couple of blurry people in the background of a photo of a white guy) was a black man being hauled away by two white police officers. Sigh.

So, why are the images in advertisements more representative of the reality of our state than the editor’s choices are? That’s something to think about.

Socialist of the Century

TIME Magazine’s “Person of the Century” is Albert Einstein. I am not here to quibble about whether he is the best choice or not, but rather to fill in a serious void that was not included in the pop biography that appeared in TIME. After blathering on about Einstein being pretty darned smart (but not perfect!), TIME concluded with the following paragraph:

“Following World War II, Einstein became even more outspoken. Besides campaigning for a ban on nuclear weaponry, he denounced McCarthyism and pleaded for an end to bigotry and racism. Coming as they did at the height of the Cold War, the haloed professor's pronouncements seemed well meaning if naive; Life magazine listed Einstein as one of this country's 50 prominent ‘dupes and fellow travelers.’ Says science historian David Cassidy: ‘He had a straight moral sense that others could not always see, even other moral people.’ Harvard physicist and historian Gerald Holton adds, ‘If Einstein's ideas are really naive, the world is really in pretty bad shape.’ Rather it seems to him that Einstein's humane and democratic instincts are ‘an ideal political model for the 21st century,’ embodying the very best of this century as well as our highest hopes for the next. What more could we ask of a man to personify the past 100 years?”

If anyone cares to read the entire TIME bio of Einstein (and, yes, the writing in the first eight paragraphs is just as bad as the final paragraph), you can find it at: http://www.pathfinder.com/time/time100/poc/magazine/albert_einst ein5a.html

Besides painting Albert Einstein as “naive” and a “fellow traveler,” the TIME bio illustrates once again that there are some words that simply cannot be uttered in the mainstream. In this case, the word is “socialist.” For that is what Einstein was toward the end of his life. The excellent magazine Monthly Review, in it’s premier issue in 1949, published a wonderful essay by the Person-of-the-Century- to-be entitled “Why Socialism?” It is so good that I recommend you download it and read the whole thing right now. (Give him a break on his exclusive use of masculine pronouns; this was written in 1949.) Find it at: http://www.monthlyreview.org/598einst.htm

In case you don’t have time to do that, I’ll give you the final paragraph here and now. After discussing how our society suffers from excessive competition which tends to accentuate the negative aspects of human nature, Einstein concludes with:

“I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men, in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.”

Racism, Waseca, and Major League Baseball

When I was a child of 11 years in my small town of Waseca, Minnesota, I was a big fan of the Minnesota Twins baseball team. That was 1965, the year the Twins first went to the World Series. I believe I could still tell you the names of the starting players, and maybe even the batting order. Many a summer evening was spent working in the yard with my dad and listening to the Twins game on the radio. The Twins were important to me.

In many ways, I was a very average white kid from small-town Minnesota. One of the ways I was average is that I grew up in a community that was almost entirely populated by people whose ethnic background was similar to my own. Despite living on land that was stolen from its original inhabitants (the name “Waseca” is an anglicized version of a Dakota epithet for “thief”), like many of my race I was allowed to believe that race and racism never really affected my life all that much. How did I know that even my beloved Twins were brought to me as a result of racism?

In the 1950s, a man named Calvin Griffith owned a major-league baseball team in Washington D.C. called the Senators. In 1961 he moved the team to Minnesota and they became the Minnesota Twins. On October 20th Calvin Griffith died of a kidney infection at age 87. This was big news in Minnesota, and throughout the baseball world.

The banner headline in the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) read “A BIG LEAGUE LEGEND DIES: He brought not only the Twins to Minnesota, but also his own style.” The front page of the sports section read, “A MAJOR PLAYER: Call him stingy, but also call him this: the man who brought pro sports to the Twin Cities.” The front page of the St. Paul Pioneer Press headline read simply, “HE BROUGHT THE TWINS TO TOWN.” As the headlines indicate, numerous people in Minnesota feel gratitude toward Calvin Griffith for bringing the Twins to Minnesota. Indeed, he is seen by many as something of a hero. There was a time when I shared those sentiments, but now I know better.

I happen to remember when Calvin Griffith visited Waseca and told us exactly why he brought the Twins to Minnesota. The year was 1978, the Twins were doing pretty well, and he came down to Waseca to talk to the Lions Club. Unbeknownst to him, the older brother of a friend of mine, who had relatives in my hometown, was also present at the club. Nick Coleman, now a columnist for the St. Paul paper, was a reporter for the Star Trib at the time, and he wrote down what Calvin said. Too bad for Calvin.

Calvin apparently thought he was speaking to the typical white boys club in rural Minnesota, so he spoke freely, off-the-record and, I imagine, quite honestly. Here’s what he said, speaking of the decision for which he is now celebrated: “I’ll tell you why we came to Minnesota. It was when we found out you only had 15,000 blacks here. Black people don’t go to ballgames, but they’ll fill up a rassling ring and put up such a chant it’ll scare you to death...We came here because you’ve got good, hardworking white people here.”

Rod Carew, possibly the best player the Twins ever had, departed from the Twins after these remarks became public, saying “I’m not going to be another nigger on his plantation.”

This is a small story, but I think it tells us a lot about white privilege. I had no choice about where I was born or about the race of my parents. I never even saw an African-American person up close until I was a teenager, and I never thought about why. So I never had the chance to commit any individual acts of insensitivity or bigoted behavior. I just liked the Twins. I liked all the Twins, including black players like Earl Battey and Tony Oliva, which would have “proved” to me that I wasn’t bigoted if I had ever thought about it. Which I didn’t.

I got major-league baseball delivered to me for fundamentally racist reasons. I didn’t know this until 1978, but that’s how white privilege works. If you are “white,” you don’t have to know anything. That’s part of the privilege. White privilege is not about individual acts of insensitivity or bigoted behavior. It is about institutional forces that work to confer power and benefits to the dominant group.

For all you white people out there, I will say that it has been really liberating to bring into my consciousness how white privilege has affected, and continues to affect, my life. Why is it liberating? It’s liberating because solidarity is one of my key values. How can I be an effective ally, or be an ally at all, if I am bound up by invisible privilege? While I don’t believe that “the truth will set us free,” I do believe that the truth, combined with action, will set us free. This is the sense in which anti-racist work is truly liberating for a white guy from Waseca.

White people who have not done so already may wish to embark on a journey of liberation from the bonds of racism. I don’t think we can ever be totally free from it, but I am very happy to be engaged in the process. For starters, you may want to look at the work of Professor Peggy McIntosh, who is a professor of Women’s Studies at Wellesley College. I would start with her excellent piece called “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Find it at: http://www.utoronto.ca/acc/events/peggy1.htm An excellent group that works with people on the task of undoing racism is a group called the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, based in New Orleans. They offer trainings around the country; go to one if you get the chance.

And check out their anti- racist bibliography at: http://www.valdosta.edu/~asantas/Racism/Racebib.htm or contact Institute organizer David Billings at: 1119 Dauphine St., #5 New Orleans, La 70116 (504) 524-2688.