So many people were stunned when he became President.  How did this happen?  How did we not see this coming?  Consider that, in this age of hundreds of television and radio channels, magazines, newspapers, and other news sources, many of us see and hear only the ones that validate or support our own points of view.  By having so many choices, we can choose to not see or hear the other side of the story.  Recently in the Times Sunday Magazine, one writer suggested that social media is helping us become more polarized by filtering our messages.

“We’ve heard about the power of social media to help us empathize with others.  But what if, instead, it’s just cocooning us with our friends?”

“Each time I liked an article, or clicked on a link, or hid another, the algorithms that curate my streams took notice and showed me only what they thought I wanted to see.”

“Everything I could want to see is available at my fingertips, and yet I didn’t look.”

“The…new messaging features work to bind private groups tighter together, by making it more fun to talk to one another than to engage with the world at large.”

“Social media seemed to promise a way to better connect with people; instead it seems to have made it easier to tune out the people we don’t agree with.”

The wonderful and lost art of debate taught us to study both sides of an argument to the point that we could effectively argue either side.  (Oh please see “The Great Debaters” with Denzel Washington.)  Debate taught us that we could not defeat what we do not understand.  Trump and his ilk walked away with this election because we could not imagine that a rational argument could be made for supporting him.  We couldn’t imagine it, so we didn’t look for it.  “Everything I could want to see is available at my fingertips, and yet I didn’t look.”

Another article that challenges what is difficult to imagine appeared on the front page of the Sunday Times Style section.

What Is the Color of Beauty?

“…Ghana’s new ban against certain skin-bleaching creams was unlikely to work…”

“…they are flooded with messages – and not even subliminal ones – that tell them that white is beautiful.”

Sad, right?  There was more to this article, but nothing new.  There is a case for understanding how American Blacks were bamboozled.  We took in the theory of white superiority with mother’s milk and were stripped of any alternative theory.  No other culture, language, religion or standard of beauty was allowed in this land of the free.  But how has this claptrap message been accepted internationally?  Has it all been money, media and power? Or maybe the message hasn’t been accepted.  Maybe the folks bleaching their skin are just the ones that made the news – like drug dealers in South America or gang members in Harlem – creating the perception that all Africans want to be white, all South Americans are criminals, and all of Harlem’s young people are in gangs.

I tell you, truth is seldom the first thing you see or hear.  If you want it, you have to work for it.  If you don’t work for it, your name is Complacent and your president's name is Donald Trump.    

Who Knew ?

And I quote Gregory Cowles of the New York Times quoting Margot Lee Shetterly:

"We all know what a scientist looks like," Shetterly writes on her website: "a wild-eyed person in a white lab coat and utilitarian eyeglasses, wearing a pocket protector and holding a test tube.  Mostly male.  Usually white."  But when Shetterly was growing up in Hampton, VA, she writes, "the face of science was brown like mine.  My dad was a NASA lifer, a career Langley Research Center scientist who became an internationally respected climate expert.  Five of my father's seven siblings were engineers or technologists.  My father's best friend was an aeronautical engineer.  Our next-door neighbor was a physics professor.  There were mathematicians at our church, sonic boom experts in my mother's sorority and electrical engineers in my parents' college alumni associations....I knew so many African-Americans working in science, math and engineering that I thought that's just what black folks did."

Huh.

Red and Yellow, Black and White

The Sunday New York Times had this huge two-page spread recently about the experience of Asians in movies and television.  It was interesting.  I take the liberty of sharing a few quotes:

    "It's never been easy for an Asian-American actor to get work in Hollywood."

They are pleased, of course, to be making progress -- and dissatisfied, as they should be.

     "Hollywood has been casting white actors in Asian roles for decades now, 
     and we can't keep pretending there isn't something deeper at work here."

Of course you can't and you shouldn't!

     "The mainstream Hollywood thinking still seems to be that movies and 
     stories about straight white people are universal and that anyone else is 
     more niche."

Yup.  Like it's their world and the rest of us are just taking up space until we can prove ourselves worth of access.

     "Everyone seems to be becoming slowly aware of how overwhelmingly white 
     everything is ... It's almost like the whole system is slowly being shamed 
     into diversity, but it's moving at a snail's pace....Just look at the movie 
     posters you see.  It's all white people."

Yes.  It was an interesting and comprehensive article.  There were lots of examples of white actors playing the part of Asians -- and scripts being rewritten to accommodate white casting.  

But in all those columns of newsprint, it struck me that there was no mention -- no mention! -- of any of the other populations that have suffered identical treatment.  I am hoping that it was the journalist who was responsible for such a glaring omission because it makes me a little nauseous to think that none of the Asian professionals quoted wanted to align themselves with all the Black, Brown, and Red peoples who plowed this ground before -- and along with -- them.