Ramblin' with Roger

In Our "Post-Racial" America

ITEM: I got this e-mail from one of my sisters about an incident at a Philadelphia-area swimming pool. Narrative courtesy of ColorOfChange.org:

[Three] weeks ago outside Philadelphia, 65 children from a summer camp tried to go swimming at a club that their camp had a contract to use. Apparently, the people at the club didn’t know that the group of kids was predominantly Black.

When the campers entered the pool, White parents allegedly took their kids out of the water, and the swimming club’s staff asked the campers to leave. The next day, the club told the summer camp that their membership would be canceled and that their payment would be refunded. When asked why, the club’s manager said that a lot of kids “would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club.”

A “Whites only” pool in 2009 should not be tolerated. The club’s actions appear to be a violation of section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act. Whether or not any laws were violated, a “Whites only” pool should be something every American condemns.

I get behind in my news reading, but I receive bulletins the local paper plus the New York Times. Yet I missed it. Was this merely a chain letter with the facts askew? Apparently not:
“60 Black Kids Booted from Philly Pool For Being Black — Speak Out,” Jill Tubman at Jack and Jill Politics, 07-08-09

VIDEO: “Please Don’t Change the Complexion of our Pool,” This Week in Blackness, 07-08-09

“Swim Club Accused of Discrimination,” FOX 29 Philadelphia, 07-08-09

“Valley Swim Club: Day Two,” Adam B at Daily Kos, 07-08-09

I did subsequently see a mention in SamauraiFrog’s blog, but I believe this story was underreported.

ITEM: A review of the new Michael Bay movie, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. From Clay Cane of BET.com

The hip-hop talking robots were borderline offensive. Is this the movie’s way of appealing to the African-American audience? I never knew that robots could shuck n’ jive.

This was not the only critic who made this point. The defense of the movie – and this box office hits has plenty of defenders despite critical panning (or perhaps because of critical panning: “Roger Ebert is a moron!”) – were 1) the robots weren’t specifically African-American and 2) it’s only a movie; lighten up.

Now, I didn’t see the movie. Heck, didn’t see its predecessor and wasn’t planning to. On point 1, a character can be offensive without being specifically black; some character named Jar Jar comes immediately to mind. As for point 2, that’s just rubbish. (I could expand about how movies reflect society and blah, blah, blah, but “rubbish” will do.)

ITEM: Sonia Sotomayor being grilled over, among other things, Ricci vs. DeStefano, the New Haven firefighters case, and her appellate court’s position holding in favor of the city. I believe her defense is in the Supreme Court dissent – uncharacteristically READ ALOUD from the bench – by Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Here’s just a section:

The Court’s recitation of the facts leaves out important parts of the story. Firefighting is a profession in which the legacy of racial discrimination casts an especially long shadow. In extending Title VII to state and local government employers in 1972, Congress took note of a U. S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) report finding racial discrimination in municipal employment even “more pervasive than in the private sector.”…According to the report, overt racism was partly to blame, but so too was a failure on the part of municipal employers to apply merit-based employment principles. In making hiring and promotion decisions, public employers often “rel[ied] on criteria unrelated to job performance,” including nepotism or political patronage…Such flawed selection methods served to entrench preexisting racial hierarchies. The USCCR report singled out police and fire departments for having “[b]arriers to equal employment . . . greater . . .than in any other area of State or local government,” with African-Americans “hold[ing] almost no positions in the officer ranks.” Ibid. See also National Commission on Fire Prevention and Control, America Burning 5 (1973) (“Racial minorities are under-represented in the fire departments in nearly every community in which they
live.”).
The city of New Haven (City) was no exception.

And in each of these disparate items, one thing is in common; Barack Obama is evoked in the commentary. “How could the swimming pool situation take place now that we have a black President?” “We should be past worrying about silly stereotypes anymore; Barack’s President.” “The Obama Presidency proves that issues of racial inequality are a thing of the past.” Meh.

Arthur and Jason noted an article by Eugene Robinson re: identity politics and Sotomayor. Arthur read this paragraph on their 2political podcast: Republicans’ outrage, both real and feigned, at Sotomayor’s musings about how her identity as a “wise Latina” might affect her judicial decisions is based on a flawed assumption: that whiteness and maleness are not themselves facets of a distinct identity. Being white and male is seen instead as a neutral condition, the natural order of things. Any “identity” — black, brown, female, gay, whatever — has to be judged against this supposedly “objective” standard. Well stated.

Keep the champagne on ice. The post-racial America celebration will just have to wait a little bit longer.

ROG

The JFK Jr. Plane Crash

I wasn’t watching all the time, but the TV was on ABC-TV for most of it. I had tuned in to watch something or other and figured they’d have some coverage of the breaking event, then return to regular broadcasting plus a scroll on the bottom.

ABC News reported that plane of John F. Kennedy Jr. was missing.
Then the fact that his wife was on the plane.
Then the fact that his sister-in-law was on the plane.
Then the airport he took off from.

“In case you just joined us, JFK Jr. ‘s Plane has gone missing”.

Maybe one useful snippet of information per half hour, such as his destination and his flying record, interrupting the whole who JFK Jr. is to us, from the four-year-old son saluting his father’s casket – did he do that on his own or was he prompted by his mother? – to magazine publisher.

“In case you just joined us, JFK Jr. ‘s Plane has gone missing. He is the son of our 35th President. His wife and sister-in-law are reportedly on board. No comment from the Kennedy clan.”

Then more blather about his sister Caroline, his late infant brother Patrick, his late mother Jackie, and basic Kennedy lore.

“In case you just joined us, JFK Jr.’s Plane has gone missing”.

Finally, they did find the plane. By then seven hours of not much news had been aired.

It’s not that I didn’t care. He was a kid when I was a bigger kid. I watched his dad’s funeral. He was charismatic, far more the natural politician than his quite reserved sister. But it was a LOT of time for relatively LITTLE said.

This coverage was on the mind of a colleague of mine when we’d heard that a “small” plane had apparently hit one of the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. The person said, “I hope that they don’t just show us hours and hours of a plane crash.”

Well, THAT didn’t happen…

ROG

The Wife’s Birthday

My wife has had a very busy year, and that busyness was contagious.

Last year, she had just returned from a grueling two-week-plus stint at a college working on her advanced certification in teaching administration. Before she even arrived, she had books to read and papers to write. The first week in particular included 12-and 13-hour days in classrooms and workshops; the subsequent time was was shorter only because the students needed more time to research and write MORE papers.

When she got back, four weeks of relative calm before she had her excruciating jaw (breaking) surgery, and had her jaw wired shut for the first four weeks of the semester, hardly optimal for a teacher, ESPECIALLY a teacher of English as a Second Language. Just making food was often a literal strain.

This meant she got started late on the 600 hours of internship she had to complete, sometimes trying to discern her assignments. Among other things, weeknights meant meetings and weekends were usually dedicated to to various projects. Then a less than perfect end-of-fall-semester evaluation spurred her on to a stellar evaluation at the conclusion of the spring semester, but through even MORE effort on her part (and greater cooperation, watching the child, e.g., on mine). But she did achieve her goal. She is FAR more disciplined in that way than I am.

In fact, her current schedule, reading books and writing papers for THIS summer’s classes, still forthcoming, has made it virtually impossible for me to even buy her birthday present, though I know what she wants, and I’ve had to enlist the assistance of a purchasing ally to pull it off. (I won’t mention it here, on the off-off-OFF chance she happens to read this.)

This summer will also mean I’ll be doing the single parent thing for a couple weeks. I left her with her grandparents for a week last year but she got all clingy and melancholy – crying on the phone almost every night. The daughter missing one parent is tough, but two was too hard (for me too) for more than a few days, especially not on her own turf. But we’ll metaphorically will leave the light on.

Anyway, happy birthday, Carol! Hope you have SOME fun on your day in the midst of all the school work and helping to feed the folks working on our church this week.
ROG

Z is for ZIP Codes

I’m old enough to remember when one mailed a letter to large cities in the United States, he or she would place a one- or two-digit number between the city and state. The oft-advertised Spiegel catalog was at Chicago 9, Illinois. (The postage for a one-ounce first-class letter was four or five cents.) I’ve since discovered that the United States Post Office Department (USPOD) implemented postal zones for large cities in 1943.

Then on July 1, 1963, the Post Office introduced the Zone Improvement Plan. The country was carved into 10 sections, 0 to 9. From there, 5-digit numbers (codes) were developed to identify each post office associated with an address. It was also the time that the two-letter state postal abbreviations were instituted.

I was fascinated as a kid by this. Just from the first digit in the ZIP Code, I knew where a letter came from. If it started with 0, it was from New England, New Jersey, US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and military addresses in the European theater; Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is 09360.

So, in New York State, 100-102 are Manhattan, 103 is Staten Island, 104 is the Bronx. 105 is suburban New York, with the places listed alphabetically, 106 is White Plains and so forth through 119, on the tip of Long Island. 120 and 121 are suburban Albany, 122 is Albany and 123 is Schenectady. Certain businesses or other institutions have their own ZIP Codes. 10048 is the zip code assigned to the former World Trade Center in New York City. The State University of New York in Albany is 12222, while the SUNY campus in Buffalo is 14222. ZIP Code 12345 is General Electric in Schenectady. And Spiegel is now ZIP Code 60609.

When I worked at a store in Albany in the 1980s, I decided to figure out where the orders for a horror film book was coming from. A decidedly large plurality of the requests, for some reason, were from 480 and 481, wealthy suburban Detroit.

In 1983, the US Postal Service began using an expanded ZIP Code called “ZIP+4.” “A ZIP+4 code consists of the original five digit ZIP Code plus a four digit add-on code. The four digit add-on number identifies a geographic segment within the five digit delivery area, such as a city block, office building, individual high-volume receiver of mail, or any other unit that would aid efficient mail sorting and delivery.” It is not mandated, but businesses use it often and there are savings to be had for bulk mailings.

On rare occasions, a place is assigned a ZIP code that does not match the rest of the state, e.g. the place is so remote that it is better served by a center in another state. “For example, Fishers Island, NY, which is off Long Island, NY, has ZIP code 06390 and is served from Connecticut, while all other New York ZIP codes begin with 1. Some Texas ZIP codes are served from New Mexico and have codes beginning with 8 rather than 7.” And something I only discovered recently: “returned government parcels from the District of Columbia are sent to ZIP codes beginning with 569, so that returned parcels are security checked at a remote facility, put into place after after the anthrax scare.”

The Census Bureau does not tabulate data by U.S. Postal Service ZIP Code. Instead, it created a new statistical entity called the ZIP Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA) to meet requests by data users for statistical data by ZIP Code. ZCTAs are close area approximations of USPS ZIP Codes service areas. For more information, go here.

Find a ZIP Code by entering an address here.

Hey, you ABC Wednesday folks from outside the U.S.: how do YOUR postal postscripts work? I know that Canada has an alphanumeric system, and the first letter is roughly alphabetical from east to west across the provinces, with the territories last (X and Y).
ROG

Ask Al Gore – or not

I got this e-mail recently: We’re hoping Ramblin With Roger will support our No Hunger campaign on July 13th. Thank you for your previous interest in our organization, Action Against Hunger, which you referred to in one of your articles. We would like to invite you to participate in our upcoming campaign.

And I do support them. To have hunger on this planet with the resources available is utterly insane. And the organization that wrote to me, Action Against Hunger, a/k/a Action Contre la Faim, or ACF is a fine, fine organization with an excellent record of using its resources wisely.

So, the next paragraphs:

The global humanitarian organization Action Against Hunger is launching No Hunger with a trailer to Al Gore’s next film—a film that doesn’t exist yet—about acute malnutrition, a disease that kills 5 million children each year. We’re asking people to view the trailer and sign the petition asking Gore to make the film. The petition will be presented to Al Gore this December at the climate change conference in Copenhagen.

You can view the movie trailer at www.AskAlGore.org

Just as An Inconvenient Truth helped reshape climate change, an Al Gore film called No Hunger could mobilize the support needed to end childhood deaths from malnutrition—a predictable, preventable condition that threatens 55 million children every year. We now have the tools to end acute malnutrition; we just need the support.

I guess my ambivalence is twofold: 1) the passion he has that showed up in An Inconvenient Truth about global warming goes back decades, long before he was in public service, and is not necessarily transferable to the issue of hunger, though there is a linkage between global warming and hunger; and 2) I don’t know that Al Gore even HAS another movie in him, and that in any case, I’m not inclined to badger him into making another film, however worthy the cause.

So, my message to Al Gore is more muted; if your heart is into making a film about global warming, then by all means, please do so.

All that said, please consider contributing to the organization. You can follow them on Facebook and and Change and YouTube.

ROG