"EVERYBODY WELCOME AT THE SCIENCE TABLE"

 ”EVERYBODY AT THE SCIENCE TABLE!”

Caroline and I have been gifted with two great children, David and Susan.  They have moved in different directions vocationally, with David teaching science education at Michigan State and Susan teaching theater at UMBC and doing  theater in Baltimore.  There is more overlap, however, than one might imagine.  David prefers the acronym “STEAM” to “STEM” (“Science, technology, engineering, ART and math” instead of “Science, technology, engineering, and math), and Susan is quite the engineer!

Today I’m featuring David’s new book of essays on teacher preparation for science educators.  He was the main editor for the book “Preparing Science Teachers Through Practice-Based Teacher Education.”  It will be published by Harvard Education Press on November 10.  When I asked him what he would like me to say about it, he replied: “If we want teachers to enact equitable instruction, we can’t just hope they will figure it out.  We know what will happen if White teachers are not disrupted in how they think about Black and Brown students, as well as the purpose of school.

    As people who help teachers learn, we have to provide opportunities for them to rehearse equitable teaching, and to receive support as they keep learning.  The book is an example of the community effort needed to do good work.  America is a place that emphasizes individual competition, but that’s not how we will improve teaching and learning.  All of the chapter authors talk to each other, learn from each other, and try out teaching together.”

    David learned these great ideas from us (modesty aside), from the Oakhurst Presbyterian community, and from his own development.  He began his career as a teacher of middle school science in a very diverse school in Houston, and he was greatly angered and discouraged by the total lack of science equipment and the lack of commitment of the school and the school system to teaching the marginalized kids about the gifts and possibilities of science.  During that first year, he made a commitment to himself and to the world that he would find a way to ensure that all kids, no matter their racial or class or gender classification, would have access to a high quality public school education.  That has been his life work ever since, whether it was in getting his master’s degree at University of Houston or his doctorate degree at University of Washington, or his getting tenure at Michigan State.    

    He and a colleague (Niral Shah) were recently on a panel on STEM inequity for diverse students, sponsored by the US Department of Education (yes, that one, headed up by Betsy DeVos).  Despite "The Leader’s" recent order to not discuss crucial race theories or other justice-oriented work, David and Niral found ways around that order to talk about teacher education practices to excite students of all racial classifications, but especially BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) students about STEM and about all of learning.

    In typical David style, this book grew out of a proposal that was rejected for a workshop at a conference. David and his colleagues were determined to get these ideas before the pubic, so they went to a higher and broader authority.  The authors of the essays are all colleagues and friends, so it truly is a village-based work.  It calls leaders in education, but indeed all of us, to make a commitment that we have never really made in the history of our country: to show our intentionality to provide high quality education to all of our children.  We are so proud of David and his great work – we look forward to reading his new book, and you can do so too.  Here’s the link to ordering it 

https://www.hepg.org/.../preparing-science-teachers....  

"INDIGENOUS PEOPLES' DAY"

 “INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ DAY”

Last Sunday Caroline and I went down to the Decatur City Square to join in an Indigenous People’s Day Celebration and Call to Protest.  It was the day before “Columbus Day,” and it was sponsored by the Beacon Hill Black Alliance for Human Rights.  The Alliance is seeking to build a coalition of groups who have been oppressed and exploited by the continuing white supremacy of our history and our time.   The gathering was primarily driven by the passion and vision of Decatur High School students, a great sign!  We were standing on land previously occupied by Muscogee Creek people, and the city square at Decatur had previously served as an informal boundary and trading place between the Cherokees to the north and the Creek in Decatur and to the south.  We were gathered to celebrate the heritage of the Creek nation and the heritage of Indigenous People in general.

We were also gathered to protest the continuing presence of a monument in Decatur Square, a monument  to the killing and oppression of the Creek people.  It is a cannon on top of a small monument, put there in 1906 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, remembering the “Indian Wars of 1836.” These were not really wars at all – they were the genocide and removal of Indigenous People from the Southeast.    Over 21 million acres of Creek land had already been taken by the US government in 1814 to seek to open land for those classified as “white” to come in to get the land at little or no cost.  This past summer the Alliance had been instrumental in getting Dekalb County and the City of Decatur to remove the huge obelisk memorial to the Confederacy by the UDC in 19098, but the cannon celebrating the “Indian Wars” still remains. We were there that day to ask the City of Decatur and Dekalb County to remove it, as they had previously moved the Confederate monument.

We heard in Native American songs and stories a different kind of relationship to the land, to the earth, and to one another.  We heard about a reverence for the land, the air, the water, the living creatures (including human beings)which inhabit all of these areas.  We heard a sense of the power of the idea that the ancestors are inhabiting a different sphere of all of these areas.  Thus, the modern Anglo idea of pouring deadly chemicals into the air and land and water in order to get more “stuff” seemed to be the foreign and deadly process that we all now know it to be.  In these days of rapid climate change, it is vital to all of us that we recover and hear the truth of these Native American visions of our life together.

We also heard from John Winterhawk, a Muscogee Creek whose ancestors had been forced off the land in Georgia and forced to go on the “southern” leg of the Trail of Tears.  He is now a potter and a storyteller.  He noted the great suffering of that journey to Oklahoma, where the lands promised to the Creek and other Indigenous Peoples were dry and hostile to the agricultural life that the Creek had developed in Georgia and Alabama.  Some of the Creek made their way back to Alabama and Georgia, and his ancestors were among them.  He urged us work for justice for Indigenous Peoples and for all those who have been oppressed by the machinations of white supremacy.  He also gave thanks for those traditions and insights from Indigenous Peoples which continue to give us visions for a way out of the current destructive cycle that Anglo domination has imposed all of us.  

     The primary difficulty, of course, is our captivity to white supremacy, and especially for those of us classified as “white.”  We simply do not want to acknowledge or even imagine the truths that we heard on this day in Decatur Square.   A recent example may help us to understand the depth of our captivity.  I gave a lecture at Princeton Seminary in the summer of 2018 at the Karl Barth Pastors Conference.  In that lecture, I suggested that Barth had needed to emphasize the power of the neighbor as one of the primary sources of revelation from God.  I used my story and the power of race in my life and in the life of American culture as primary examples of God’s sending the neighbor to us to help us understand the depth of our captivity to sin as human beings.  

After the lecture a middle-aged white man from Canada came up to talk with me.  He indicated that he did not grow up in the white, racist culture of the American South, and because of that,  he was not sure that my examples applied to him or to Canadians.  I responded that some of the best writings and descriptions of encounters with race that I had heard came from First Nations peoples of Canada.  He then proceeded to tell me that one of his best friends was a person of native origin, and their friendship was evidence that he himself was not captured by race.  I replied that I had heard such disclaimers all of my adult life in America, whenever a white person was confronted by the power of race in our lives. 

 I then asked about the issues of the land in Canada and the need for reparations there.  He replied again that he thought that was a complicated issue, but that in the end, “God owns the land.”  I asked him if he had deeds to some of the land, and he replied that he did.  I said, “If God owns the land, why not give your deed to the church or some non-profit mission group to be used for God’s work?”  His reply was:  “I’m tired of feeling guilty about this kind of stuff.”  I urged him: “Then open your eyes and your heart to recognize your captivity and see where God takes you on this.”  He went away after that, but I hope that he begins to have the stuff of recognition.  Indeed, I hope that we all do.

'THE REST OF THE STORY - 50 YEARS OUT"

 

“THE REST OF THE STORY – 50 YEARS OUT”

I dropped out of Vanderbilt Divinity School at the end of May, 1970, and I joined the faculty of the Roses Creek Folk School, near LaFollette, Tennessee, for the summer.  It was an experimental idea based on the Danish model of folk schools, where people with formal education joined with locally educated people to develop one another and learn from one another.  In this case, it was college and graduate students joining with Appalachian Mountain people.  During the summer, I continued to wrestle with my options:  conscientious objector (CO), prison, or flight to Canada.  None of them were good options.  I did not think that I would survive prison, and my Southern rootedness would not allow me to imagine life in Canada, uprooted forever from my family and community.  So, I decided to seek CO status and serve the country in that capacity rather than going to kill people in Vietnam.

In September, 1970, I joined with my long-time Helena friend, David Billings, also in seminary, and several other seminarians, in informing our draft boards that we were giving up our 4-F draft exemptions and would seek alternative service as COs.  As I indicated last week, we were hoping to challenge the draft exemptions of ministers and seminary students – in doing so we had hoped to get churches to rise up against the war.  We learned, however, that not enough of us were doing these actions, and that the draft boards were only too glad to add more fodder to the grist mill of young men sent over to fight in an immoral war.  David and I both applied for CO status with our local draft board in Helena, Arkansas.  

I moved back to Helena to live with my mother, while I began to look for alternative service positions.  I had heard from CO counselors that it would be much better for me to find a position rather than allowing the draft board to assign me somewhere.  The draft board would still have to approve it, but I was told that they usually did because they already had their hands full with meeting quotas to send young men to fight in the war.   I checked into several places in Arkansas, but they were based in rural areas, and although I grew up in a small town, I could not see myself serving in such areas, especially given the hostility that I knew that I would find there with my CO status.  

I got a call from Don Beisswenger in late September, telling me that he had been talking with Father Jim Zralek in Nashville.  Jim was a Catholic priest in east Nashville, and he was very interested in prison ministry.  He wanted to start a halfway house in Nashville for men getting out of state prisons, and he was looking for a staff person who could direct such a venture at a cheap cost.  Don had recommended me for the job, and he wanted to know if I were interested in it.  My first reaction was that while I had rejected going to prison as an alternative to serving in the war, now I would be going in and out of prisons.  I said “yes,” and called Father Zralek, and he hired me over the phone.  I went to Nashville to start working there at Opportunity House as its first director.  I was waiting on the Helena draft board to respond to my request for the CO status.  

In the meantime, I was ordered to report for the physical for service in the army, but since I had applied for the CO status, I skipped it.  My mother called me to tell me that I had made the local paper with this headline:  “Two are sought,” and the article read in part:  “One man failed to show up yesterday at the local Draft Board to go to Memphis for induction, and another failed to appear for his pre-induction exams….Failing to report was Gibson Stroupe.  Both are asked to contact the Draft Board at once.”   I contacted the draft board to let them know that I would go to the Nashville draft board, but I never did it.  I wondered if the MP’s were coming for me, but I figured that they had bigger fish to fry.  

In late October, I heard from the draft board that my application for service as a CO had been approved and that my work at Opportunity House had also been approved.  My good friend David Billings was turned down by the draft board, however.  Much later I found out why from one of my mother’s friends, who had been on that draft board.  He indicated that all of them knew that I was always going to be a minister, so it was within the bounds that I would be a CO.  David, however, had a bad reputation in high school, so the friend indicated that they knew that he was just trying to get out of the draft.  As we all scrambled to assist him, he was almost drafted, but in the meantime, he was convicted of “malicious mischief” on trumped up charges (that word “trumped” has added meaning now) related to racial justice issues.  He was given probation and exiled from Mississippi for 5 years.  But, it was a felony, and his status as a felon made him ineligible for the draft!  I have written about this case in previous blog (June 11, 2018 – check it out if you want to know more of his story), but it made me think how arbitrary the draft was, and how many young men had been sent to their deaths because of such capriciousness – some of them who were killed were my friends.

The work at Opportunity House changed my life.  I got a first hand look at another system that ground up people:  the prison system, based on arresting and convicting and incarcerating people with no financial resources, especially people of color.  It was not quite the prison-industrial complex that it has become today, but the same root issues were there – poorer people and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) used as fodder  to make us all feel better and to keep control over those who feel the weight of injustice and inequity all their lives.  In my two years at Opportunity House, we never had anyone come through who had any material resources – those kinds of folk never made it into the state prison. From then on, I had a different view of race and of prisons, and I’ve tried to live out of that calling for justice and equity ever since.     

"CHANGING MY LIFE - 50 YEARS OUT"

 “CHANGING MY LIFE – 50 YEARS OUT”

This month marks the 50th anniversary of my becoming a conscientious objector (CO) to the Vietnam War.  I grew up in what John Hope Franklin called “the militant South,” the violent culture that emerged from white supremacy in order to maintain slavery and neo-slavery.  So, I had a winding path to travel, so I want to take a bit of time to get there.  

    Those were tumultuous days in 1970, a time similar to now.  The human rights gains of the 1960’s had been repudiated by the election of Richard Nixon as President in 1968.  Nixon had designed the “Southern Strategy,” by which the white supremacists had discerned that they could no longer use overt racist language to win elections.  So, he decided to use covert signals on race, using what are now called “dog whistles” to let those classified as “white” know that he was their man on race.  It is a strategy that the Republicans have continued to use on a covert level since then, until 2016 when Donald Trump made it much more overt that he was the white supremacist candidate.  

       Nixon had inherited a war begun secretly under President Kennedy, which had been significantly expanded in a huge act of hubris by President Johnson.  Nixon further expanded it, but the Vietnam War generated a huge protest in the country and around the world.  It became a lightning rod that divided the country, and many of us searched for ways to protest it and to end it.  

    I began to think about it on a personal level at a conference for seminarians in New Hampshire in the summer of 1969.  I had just completed my first year at Vanderbilt Divinity School, with the intentions of either going for a PHD in theology or becoming a minister.  As a seminary student, I was automatically exempt from the draft which fed the Vietnam War.  Seminarians and ministers were exempt by the nature of our calling.  Every man in my age bracket will have their own story of relating to the draft at that time. There was no way around it, because the war machine was eating young men up, especially poor men and men of color.  And, when I say ‘men,” I mean ‘males,” because women were not allowed as fighters in the military at that time and were not eligible for the draft.

      The leaders of the conference in New Hampshire challenged all of us to think about giving up our draft exempt status and challenging all ministers in religious bodies to do the same.  The idea was that if all ministers and seminarians could be drafted to fight the war, then the religious bodies such as churches and synagogues would rise up in opposition to the war and end it. Mosques were not yet on that radar, though there were certainly many of them, and some of the strongest opposition to the war came from them (e.g. Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali).  It sounded like good strategy to many of us, but few of us were willing to risk it.  If we gave up our draft exemptions, there were few options to keep us from going to try to kill Vietnamese in the war: a high lottery number for the draft, a conscientious objector status, a medical exemption, fleeing the country, or going to prison.  Of course, that was the point.  Would there be enough people willing to go into that risky status in order to end the war?  I was not one of them.

    My life changed, however, in early 1970 when my fiancée broke off our planned summer wedding and ended our relationship.  It shattered my world and made me think of suicide – thanks to my mother and to my housemate David Kidd, I entered the mental health unit on Vanderbilt’s campus for a two week stay.   My mother always gave thanks for David (who was in his last year of VDS), and so do I.  He is now a retired minister in Nashville.  

    I returned to Vanderbilt classes, but my heart was not in it.  I was uprooted, and I was deeply troubled by the Vietnam War.  The call from the 1969 conference began to resonate in me, and I began to consider the alternatives:  I had a low draft number, so a CO or prison or flight were the only options if I gave up my draft exemption.  I am so grateful to Don Beisswenger on the faculty at Vanderbilt and to Ed Loring, who was finishing up his PHD in American church history at Vanderbilt at that time.  Both of them were friends and counselors and assisted me in working out my thoughts.  The CO seemed to me to be only an “educated” man’s exemption, but they helped me find a rich tradition in American history, and I began to think about it.  Could I give up my draft exemption?  Did I have the courage and stamina to do it?

    Then, another set of events – the USA officially bombed and invaded Laos and Cambodia in May, 1970, and National Guard troops killed protesting students on Jackson State campus in Mississippi and Kent State campus in Ohio.  Those events did it for me and for other seminarians.  At a mass protest in DC (in which I joined others in being tear-gassed), some of us formed a pact and agreed to give up our draft exemption and to challenge the Vietnam War head on.  I had made my move.  

    I will pick up the rest of the story next week, and while I recognize that this may not be a cliffhanger, forming it and sharing it has been very helpful to me – thank you!  

 

“A BITTERNESS”

I must admit that I had mixed feelings when I saw the helicopter lift President Trump off to Walter Reed Hospital on Friday, as the President suffered from symptoms caused by Covid-19.  I was sad for him and for Melania Trump, for his family, for the institution of the Presidency and for us as a people.  It has been a rough week for him – the disaster at the debate, the release of his taxes, and now to be publicly humiliated by being taken to the hospital by the very virus that he named as a hoax and which has now caused the death of almost 210,000 Americans.  

But, on another level, there is cosmic justice here.  The leader who could have saved so many lives, spared so much sickness and despair, but made a calculated, political decision not to do so – he has now been taken down by that very virus, which is obviously no respecter of ideology or political preference:  a host is a host is a host.  I don’t know how Trump will react to this devastating event in his life.  Perhaps he will “macho” up and proclaim that he has beaten it – why couldn’t everyone else do it?  Perhaps he will be converted and see himself and his life in a different way. 

As I pondered these things, I recalled a powerful poem by Mary Oliver entitled “A Bitterness.”  It helps to explain the loss of humanity of Donald Trump, and it helps me to have some bit of sympathy for him, which I recognize is always exceedingly dangerous with despots like him.  But, here is the poem. 

“A Bitterness”

I believe you did not have a happy life.

I believe you were cheated. 

I believe your best friends were loneliness and misery.

I believe your busiest enemies were anger and depression.

I believe joy was a game that you could never play without stumbling.

I believe comfort, though you craved it, was forever a stranger.

I believe music had to be melancholy or not at all.

I believe no trinket, no precious metal, shone so bright as

     your bitterness.

I believe you lay down at last in your coffin none the wiser and

     unassuaged.

 Oh, cold and dreamless under the wild, amoral, reckless, peaceful

     flowers of the hillsides.

This poem helps explain to me the Donald Trump phenomenon.  He has bitterness as a deeply held core value, wound so tightly around his heart, that he has no room to grow, to use the great Grinch image.  Whether this explains Trump or not, the real question remains for us:  why did we elect such a man to be president?  The answer is that he was a white man – his only qualification – and that he projected a bullying, macho-heavy hand that would re-establish white, male supremacy in our land after we had the temerity to elect a Black man as President. The bitterness of race is similarly wound so deeply and tightly in us as a people and as a nation, that we would risk everything on a white man as bitter as Donald Trump.

I hope that we are in the death throes of white, male supremacy.  There are signs that we are, but this remains a very dangerous time.  Like Donald Trump’s life, the great experiment of the idea of equality – an idea which has fired so many people in so many ways – now hangs in the balance.  As John Lewis put it so well, voting is the only non-violent option for change in a democracy.  Let us exercise that right while we still can and seek to put us back on that path to a vision of equality and justice for all.