Sensory Deprivation: My Ipod, My Shield

I live in New York City. It is LOUD. I mean, really really loud. New York is also an extremely public city inasmuch as the majority of one’s life is lived in full view of the public. To someone who has spent most of her life in cities where peaceful isolation in the imagined privacy of a car is the norm, and where maintaining a respectful distance from strangers is expected, New York’s public transit stranger-press-fest is a new and jarring experience. Here, people of all ages, sizes and backgrounds sit, stand and climb on top of each other in an effort to get from place to place. Often, there are singers, musicians, children selling candy and panhandlers vying for your attention and money. Usually, there is a group of two or more people talking, laughing or even singing to each other in “outside voices.” Along the streets we are jostled by other pedestrians and assaulted by horns, sirens, construction and more loud conversation.

Enter the ipod, Apple’s portable, handy-dandy, fashion-conscious, uber-trendy mp3 music player. Armed with an ipod and a magazine, a New Yorker can reconstruct some of her lost privacy and access some of her drowned-out thoughts. My ipod provides auditory isolation and respite from a loud, invasive city. It also supplies a peppy soundtrack for a busy life spent hop-bopping down the street from one avenue to the next.

But the other day, my ipod gave me pause. I was sitting on the subway engrossed in a magazine and wrapped in “Pink Cashmere” by Prince. As the train pulled into the stop, I heard a faint cry over Prince’s sweet love song, “Please, have a heart…” Looking back over my shoulder as I stepped off the train, I saw a small forlorn-looking woman holding an empty cup pleading with passengers for change. I hadn’t noticed her because I had shut myself off from my surroundings in hope of finding some afterwork peace of mind.

I felt oddly guilty, like I had cut myself off from humanity. I can accept choosing not to give to every supplicant, but I could not accept that I had purposely walled myself off from the supplicants in an escapist sensory orgy. How can I purport to be someone who cares about the welfare of everyone if I cannot be bothered to hear them?

"I can't have a heart," I thought, "my song is on." Even a bleeding heart needs time to heal.

Civil Rights are Human Rights Too

In the summer of 1964, hundreds of young people from both the North and the South, descended on Mississippi to take part in Freedom Summer. Doctors set up “freedom clinics” to provide basic health care to poor blacks shut out of the mainstream health care system. Legal clinics helped to protect the basic constitutional rights of the largely exploited, share-cropping population of the Mississippi Delta. Freedom schools, though illegal, were set up to teach the undereducated black populace traditional academic subjects and black history. Photos from the time period show the majority white, college-age volunteers knocking on doors at wooden shacks, sitting on floors or on porches chatting with black residents and a young Bob Dylan singing flock songs with volunteers and Delta natives in a backyard.

Looking back, the activism of the civil rights movement appears idyllic, but we know better. Before the volunteers left their training sessions in Ohio to go to Mississippi, James Forman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was frank about the danger they all faced: “I may be killed. You may be killed. The whole staff may go.” And of course, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, none of whom had reached the age of 25, were killed by Klan members that summer in an attack that shook the nation.

Reading about those brave kids of yesterday reminds me of my contemporary friends and colleagues. They are deeply interested in and dedicate time and money to causes for worldwide human rights. I applaud the dedication to international human rights on the part of thousands of U.S. citizens. As our world becomes smaller, concern for our overseas neighbors is an important part of building a global village that allows all of its denizens to fully self-actualize free from government oppression.

Once my applause dies down, however, I am frustrated. The concerns of the rest of the world are pressing, but we’re not finished here yet! The battle for equality of opportunity, better education, housing, health care, access to employment and freedom from discrimination is hardly won. Our parents’ and grandparents’ generations did remarkably well pushing American along another step on its journey toward fulfilling its promise. The civil rights movement was step in a series of steps that began when the nation was in its infancy. It is unacceptable that the younger generations should now sit down on the job and turn its attention almost exclusively to injustice in other lands. Although the plight of minorities and the poor has improved since the late sixties, we have not arrived as a nation and I would appreciate it if we would stop acting as though we had. The status of the civil rights fought for so jealously are eroding in the areas of voting, protection from arbitrary and capricious police violence, access to equal housing and access to decent (dare I say “integrated”) education. So why do America’s young people largely ignore the status of civil rights to focus on international human rights? Civil rights are human rights.

International human rights are certainly glitzier. When I mention my desire to move to Montgomery, Alabama to work for the Southern Poverty Law Center (I do, and if you have an in, post a comment here), people turn up their noses and ask me why in heaven’s name would I want to move to Alabama. Yet, I have friends who have gone to Indonesia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Paraguay to do relief work and they are met with glittery-eyed oohs and ahhs. I suppose we prefer our poverty Third World style.

I don’t seek to set up a pecking order of rights-related work that makes one cause worthier than another. All humans are precious, regardless of the place of their birth. I do want to put America back on the map in the pantheon of places that need dedicated, energetic and idealistic human rights workers.

The people living in Appalachia hunting “nutrarats” for food need your energy and imagination to create a sustainable way of life. School-age children are in desperate need of tutors. Organizations that fight for a wide spectrum of civil rights would be deliriously happy for your time and selfless effort. If you want to adopt a child and you don’t mind that the child is not of your race, consider adopting a minority child. Since a study from U.C. Berkeley found that Caucasian children are five times more likely to be adopted that African-American children and 2.5 times more likely to find adoptive parents than Latino children, minority kids could use your love.

Please don't neglect the world's richest country; the world's poor are here too.

Black and Hispanic Students Evacuated at a Christian College

The New York Times ran an article on April 23, 2005 entitled “Christian College Secludes Students After Hate Letters.” In a nutshell, Trinity International University, a small Evangelical Christian college in Bannockburn, Illinois evacuated its African-American and Hispanic students to hotels and off-campus private housing after three students received very violent and very frightening hate mail through the campus mail over the space of three weeks. The authorities were not sure who sent the letters, but they considered them threatening enough to evacuate all of the approximately 200 African-American and Hispanic students on campus. Because the letters contained escalating threats of violence and were received with weeks of the anniversaries of Hitler’s birthday and the Columbine shootings, school authorities sought to take extra precautions. Besides the evacuations, Trinity employed extra security guards and police officers to patrol the campus and true to their Christian roots, they called on a higher power to protect them against racist violence through prayer sessions. The Rev. Jesse Jackson visited the school to meet and pray with students and he praised the students’ bravery and the school’s response to the threats.

Let me preface the following by stating that I have great respect for Rev. Jackson. It is my solemn belief that whatever little wrong he may have ever done springs solely from the fact that he is a fallible human and not from a moment of power drunkenness, equivocation or failure of his love for America and its people. BUT, I disagree with Jesse here. I say this: at least one person other than the sender of the hate mail knows who the sender is. Because of the company the racist author of the hate mail is likely to keep, the person who knows the identity of the author is probably white. Therefore, I think that all of the white students should have been evacuated from campus.

Before you close this blog in an egalitarian huff, hear me out. The Police Chief, Kevin Tracz, told reporters that the threats in the letters were specific to the individuals who received them and not to large groups, yet all students of African-American and Hispanic background were asked to evacuate the campus for the sake of safety. Although those students will be allowed to finish their classes at some later time, during the evacuation they are not staying in the on-campus dorms, nor are they attending the classes for which they have paid tuition. If you view evacuation as punishment for white evacuees, then it is punishment for these evacuees as well. So how do we decide who receives the punishment? The group of inconvenienced colored students (yes, I said ‘colored’) are the least likely to be able to identify the person whose capture will end the tension on campus and heal the rupture of the Trinity community. So why not evacuate the white students? Just as the police think that only three students are in actual jeopardy, the police also think that only one person sent those letters, therefore, it's no less fair to evacuate the racial group of the perpetrator versus that of the victims. In fact, evacuating and thus greatly inconveniencing the white students might have two important effects.

The first, and most pressing effect, is that the person or persons who know the identity of the perpetrator will be motivated to alert the authorities and end his or her own period of personal upheaval caused by having to evacuate. A quick tip that could end this entire affair is in the best interest of everyone involved regardless of race, and the best way to get that tip it is to rock the comfy boats of those who may have the information. Second, evacuating the white students would bring home to them, in a way that conversations and half-empty classrooms cannot, the severity of the situation and the helpless feelings of colored people when we are all grouped together and blamed collectively for the wrongs committed by one of our number.

Being treated as an individual where negative attributes are concerned is an amenity of racial privilege whites enjoy that darker Americans do not. I am going to take a moment to luxuriate in the image of white students being told to evacuate because while the school doesn’t know which of them participated in this horrendous, community-destroying affair, at least one of them did, and to protect the African-American and Hispanic students on campus, they would all have to be evacuated until the perpetrator is in police custody. Cries of “it’s not fair! I’m not a racist!” would soon morph into “when they find this guy, I’m going to throttle him. How dare he cast a shadow on all white Trinity International University students?! Now everyone will think we’re a bunch of racists!" and "making up all the classes I missed is going to eat into my summer break!” Sigh.

I return to reality. And I close with an update on the Trinity International University situation gleaned from Reuters.com. Apparently, the hate mail was a hoax perpetrated on the college community by an African-American female student who wanted her parents to think that the college was a dangerous place so that she could come home without having to admit that she simply didn’t want to be at Trinity. The young woman is being charged with disorderly conduct and a hate crime. Fine. Wag your tongue and “nannie-nannie-boo-boo” me. It turns out that applying my logic to expel the racial group of the perp would have gotten the African-American students evacuated anyway. Go figure. But do not deny me my luxurious imagination; and consider the truth of my argument.