My cousin was especially interested to bounce ideas about how to educate his children off of Carlos, who taught middle school for several years. Carlos confirmed some of his concerns about the American educational system and agreed that a couple of families pooling their resources to hire a private tutor for their children could be a viable solution.

The next morning Carlos slept through breakfast, a screaming baby, and the two older boys fighting with their mother as she tried to get them dressed and out the door before the oldest was late for school. I accompanied them on their walk, and Carlos said it was the sudden quiet in the house that finally woke him.

We lingered for about two hours, reading comic books and playing card games with Ollie. No poker, but when we played Go Fish, he consistently recognized that the player who held more cards was more likely to have the card he was looking for, so he’s well on his way to making +EV decisions under conditions of uncertainty.

My cousin’s wife lent Carlos, who was woefully ill-prepared for the mid-Atlantic cold snap, a hat, coat, and gloves. Then he and I packed up the car and hit the road.

Carlos told me he had a great time with my family, which I was glad to hear. I knew he and my cousin would hit it off, but I was glad that he enjoyed playing with the boys as well. It was something I was going to do either way, but I was anxious about whether he would be bored or uncomfortable or anything like that.

I was also a little worried about how comfortable he would feel in my cousin’s town, a small place in rural Maryland with a population in the low four figures. I couldn’t remember ever seeing any black people in the town, and as we drove through, I was hyper-conscious of all the white men in camouflage hats. I convinced myself I was just being a bigoted urbanite, though, assuming that a rural town with a largely white population would necessarily be full of racist hillbillies. The few people we met seemed perfectly nice and at ease around us.

About two hours into our drive, my cousin’s wife called, nearly hysterical with laughter. Apparently a local bank had been robbed not long after we left town, and one of her neighbors had called her to report seeing two young men in hoodies carrying duffel bags through her backyard. It was Carlos who pointed out just how suspicious we would have seemed if searched, since we were in fact carrying large amounts of cash to the casino. To be fair, no one mentioned race, so maybe I’m still reading too much into it.

Other than that, it was an uneventful drive. We mostly listened to the WTF with Marc Maron podcast – the Kevin Hart interview is hysterical and his story about letting early success go to your head should be required listening for any young poker player.

I misremembered which cheap hotel outside of town I’d booked for the night, but once we got that sorted out things went smoothly. I wanted to be fresh for the next day’s tournament, so instead of playing poker we drove down to the boardwalk. This is Carlos’ first trip to Atlantic City, and I’d never been to the boardwalk. A late-fall evening probably isn’t the best time to see it, but we were both underwhelmed. It didn’t feel especially dangerous to me, but maybe the sight of two young men in hoodies was enough to scare off the muggers.

This tournament has a unique structure. It is a multi-day tournament, and each player is assigned to either Group A or Group B. At the start of play today, Day 2, you will take over the stack of someone who played yesterday, as will everyone else who plays today. So not everyone will start with the same number of chips. The stack that you inherit will be determined by the group to which you are assigned. Players in Group A will inherit stacks played by other Group A players from Day 1, and it will be the same for Group B. You are assigned to Group B.

Shortly after the start of play, a pattern becomes apparent: almost all of the biggest stacks are in Group A, and almost all of the shortest stacks are in Group B. Everyone in Group A says nevermind that, let’s just play. You and some of the other people in Group B try to object, but the tournament administrators threaten to disqualify you without refund. This is no gaming review board to whom you can appeal. Finally you decide you might as well just do your best with the chips you have.

You manage to survive the day, though you are still short stacked, as of course are the majority of Group B players, though a few have played well, gotten lucky, and accumulated big stacks. On Day 3, another Group B player inherits your chips, and you explain the situation to him.

He and the other Group B players are outraged, and they organize a mass protest. Today’s administrators (they are mostly different people from either Day 2 or Day 1) are more sympathetic. They look into it and find out that there was systematic cheating. The dealers on Day 1, with the knowledge of the administrators, were deliberately cold-decking Group B players, helping the Group A players accumulate big stacks at the expense of Group B.

There is no dispute about this point. Everyone including the current administrators and Group A players admits that it happened.

However, they still don’t want to do anything about it. “We are going to run a fair tournament today,” the administrators promise. “The rules will apply equally to everyone, and everyone will have a fair shot. All you need is a chip and a chair. But stacks will stay the way that they are.”

“It’s not our fault,” say the Group A players. “The rules say we inherit stacks from yesterday’s Group A players, so that’s what we’re going to do. We aren’t the ones who cheated, why should we be punished? It wasn’t even the Day 2 players who cheated. By now it’s impossible to tell which chips were won fairly and which weren’t. We can’t sort it all out. Besides, it doesn’t matter. Look, there were Group A players who started Day 2 with big stacks and lost it all, and there were Group B players who started short and have big stacks now. If you play well, it doesn’t matter how many chips you start with, anyone can win.”

Sound fair? This is roughly the problem I have with people who say that slavery was in the past, racial discrimination was in the past, we have a level playing field now, so let’s just ignore it and get on with the game. Even if you think there is a perfectly level playing field in modern day America, a point that I would dispute, there’s still a case for government action to remedy inequality caused by indisputable crimes and inequities in the past.

The tricky part, of course, is coming up with what exactly that action should be. Every proposal I’m aware of (affirmative action, reparations, etc.) is flawed in some way. Yet it’s not sufficient to say, “that proposal is flawed, we can’t do that,” without offering some alternative of your own. The status quo is also deeply flawed. If you’re ready to admit that and participate genuinely in the search for an equitable solution to a problem that none of us asked for but all of us face, then by all means, criticize away. But those who criticize proposed solutions without offering any reasonable suggestions of their own, or who question the very need for a solution, come across as desperately trying to cling to advantages they didn’t earn, just like the players in Group A.

In the early to mid- twentieth century, millions of African-Americans departed the deep South, where many still worked as sharecroppers on the same plantations on which their ancestors slaved, to seek a better life in the metropolises of the North. The resulting demographic shifts were seismic: the black population in states like Mississippi and South Carolina decreased by more than a third, while that of Northern cities like Chicago and Detroit increased ten-fold in the space of a few decades. They sought better wages, equitable treatment, and the freedom to live and work where they pleased. What they found was a new set of hardships that, cold as their reception was, usually represented an improvement over the lynchings and Jim Crow culture of the South.

None of this is ground-breaking stuff, but it was always something that I vaguely knew without ever thinking much about. “The Great Migration” was never on the curriculum of any US history class I ever took… Read the full review.

I don’t much care for Sandra Bullock, but she’s exactly as good as everyone says she is as the loving, no-nonsense matriarch of a wealthy Southern family. And the movie in general is pretty much what you’d expect: cutesy, saccharine, uplifting, and formulaic. It’s good for what it is though, with a remarkable story, quick pace, witty dialogue, and genuinely likable characters.

As for the film’s racial politics, I can’t say that I entirely agree with most of the critiques I’ve seen, though I do have a few of my own. A. O. Scott’s review for the New York Times encapsulates the most common criticism of Blind Side:

To the extent that Michael represents a social problem (or maybe a whole bunch of them, including poverty, drug addiction and family dysfunction), the solution depicted is individual, charitable and, at least implicitly, faith based.

The fundamental problem with this critiques is that it expects entirely too much from a movie and from an individual. Granted there is a temptation to read more into it, but The Blind Side is a small movie about one person and one family. It is not a polemic, and it is not an overtly political documentary. It does not explicitly advocate anything. It simply tells the story of one extraordinary woman who welcomed a complete stranger into her home and loved and cared him as her own son.

I don’t think the film has to be interpreted as a statement about either the causes or or the solutions to social problems like poverty and drug-addiction, though I would certainly disagree with anyone who maintains that private charity is a sufficient solution. Granted, The Blind Side is all but silent regarding the circumstances of Michael’s youth and the complex web of forces, both social and individual, that dooms so many young men to the violent death that Bullock’s character, Leigh Anne Tuohy, realizes, via internal monologue voiceover, could easily have been the fate of her adopted son. But I don’t think that every artist who touches on a theme like poverty is obligated to explore every facet of the problem and offer a solution, and in fact I think all but the best art does well to steer clear of such overt politicism.

I also don’t think that Tuohy’s behavior is charity, precisely. Charity is fundamentally an economic relationship, not an emotional one. The vast majority of charitable dollars given in the US are donated in a disconnected way. People give money either directly to a panhandler they barely know and will probably never see again, or indirectly through a large organization that pools and distributes their money, again almost always to people they do not know and will never meet. Motivations for charity are varied and complex. They usually include good will, but they rarely include love, at least not the kind of emotional, interpersonal love that a mother has for a son.

This is the real limitation of charity, the reason why the critics rightfully consider it an insufficient solution. People will give enough to alleviate immediate suffering, but rarely enough to prevent future suffering or change underlying conditions. It is all well and good for the relatively wealthy to give their excess, to give what they have above and beyond what they feel they need, but few are willing to sacrifice for strangers in the ways that they would for their own children.

This is the remarkable thing that Leigh Anne Tuohy did, and while it is not a large-scale solution, it is as much as many individuals can accomplish and more than most, critics of The Blind Side included, will ever do. Private action is absolutely not a substitute for government action and institutional change, but too many people use their inability to accomplish the latter as an excuse not to attempt the former.

My own problem with the Blind Side is that it makes everything look so easy. This is both an artistic problem and a political one. As a film, Blind Side lacked conflict. I’m struggling to remember a single problem that occurred that wasn’t resolved within minutes of its introduction, and I couldn’t tell you what the central conflict of the film was supposed to be.

This is a political problem because Michael is too easy. He is a perfect son, easy to get along with and unfailingly polite and lovable from the moment the Tuohy’s take him in. Michael is easy to love, and this is what makes The Blind Side‘s message about the power of love so fundamentally weak. There are plenty of endangered children who have as much potential as Michael, who are as deserving of love and opportunity as Michael, but who are not such easy children. They fight, they steal, they use drugs, they join gangs. They need loving, caring adults in their lives at least as much as a “gentle giant” like Michael does, but they have far more trouble finding the support that they need.

It’s certainly unfair to compare a mainstream Hollywood production to a great American novel, but I’m reminded of Richard Wright’s introduction to his novel Native Son. Wright, who had previously written Black Boy, an autobiography about his own childhood experiences with poverty, racism, and hunger, chose a far more controversial protagonist for Native Son. The fictional Bigger Thomas is a thug, a thief, a murderer, and a rapist. Wright does not ask us to love him, but he does ask us to understand him and to see him as both a villain and a victim.

Wright realized, after Black Boy, that he needed to give his audience a challenge. Wright himself was too easy a young man to sympathize with. Bigger Thomas forces us to sympathize with a far less sympathetic character, and in so doing, makes a far stronger statement about the effects of racism and poverty.

The best indication that The Blind Side doesn’t advocate private charity as the be-all and end-call to social problems is that this solution is most explicitly proposed by Leigh Anne’s predictably patronizing and snobby country club friends, who seem willing enough to donate and host fundraisers if Leigh Anne is organizing a “Project for the Projects.” What these ladies lack is genuine concern of the sort that would compel them to pursue meaningful change or follow through on such an initiative. While it would have been nice to see Leigh Anne radicalized by her relationship with Michael, ready to invest her considerable resources in a larger-scale solution, her life and story are still an inspiring example of the love that is necessary to accomplish real social change.

What Leigh Anne will not accept for Michael, no parent, white or black, should accept for any child, white or black: no roof over his head, deteriorating clothes, ignorant teachers, and threats from drug dealers.  Yet these are exactly the outcomes that millions of American parents, white and black, would never tolerate for their own children but are willing enough to accept for other people’s children. Real improvements for children with troubled lives is going to require the relatively privileged to extend their circle of moral concern to include more than their immediate families, to care enough about all children, even and especially the most difficult cases, to protect and fight for them the way Leigh Anne does for Michael.

An aggressively friendly, if defensive and apologist, ranger explained that the all-black schools in mid-twentieth century Topeka actually provided an education on par with, if not superior to, that available at the all-white schools. I’m a little skeptical of that claim, for obvious reasons, but he did cite the fact that the black teachers were on the whole more highly educated than their white counterparts.

Apparently this was part of the reason that Topeka was chosen as one of the five cities in which the NAACP challenged segregation laws. Because there wasn’t a material inequality argument to be made (the NAACP’s own lawyers determined as much), Topeka enabled them to focus their suit on the very principle of separate schools, even when a seemingly equal education was available, which of course in many places it was not.

It was good that we met such an informative ranger, as the exhibit itself spoke broadly about segregation in America, its history, and the ongoing impact of the Brown decision, but not very much about the Brown case itself or its local context. Personally, the political and legal strategy that goes into such a campaign is what I’m most interested in.

Brown did not arise from a spontaneous incident, as the Montgomery bus boycott did from Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat. Rather, the cities and plaintiffs in the suit were carefully chosen by the NAACP for strategic reasons. Brown was an aspiring minister and an upstanding member of the community. He was also a unionized employee of a national railroad company, meaning he was less vulnerable to pressure from an employer unhappy with his participation in the suit. The twelve other plaintiffs in Topeka were all housewives, mothers of children in the public school system, with no jobs to lose.

According to one of the Supreme Court justices who decided the case, it was named for Topeka not because it was the first of the five cases appealed, as would be tradition, but because it was the only non-southern city in which the NAACP had brought litigation. He claimed that the Court wanted to avoid the perception of hostility towards the South, which already viewed civil rights as an imposition from the North, and so titled the case in the least alienating way possible.

I asked a few questions about how the Court’s decision was received in Topeka and what the school system looks like now, which is when the (white, though not necessarily local) ranger started to get defensive. We had introduced ourselves as being from Boston, though if the guy really knew his desegregation history, he’d know that that wouldn’t give us any room to look down our noses on Topeka (nor would our actual hometown of Baltimore, for that matter). He explained that although de facto segregation did continue to a considerable degree, Topeka did not take active efforts to encourage it. Whereas other cities closed schools or gerrymandered districts, Topeka apparently accepted the decision and what minimal integration its residential patterns produced.

From the exhibit, I later learned that black parents in Topeka had brought two more suits against the Board of Education since Brown, and that Topeka hadn’t been found to be in compliance with the decision until 1996. On the way out, I asked the ranger about this. He admitted as much but qualified that those cases were based on de facto segregation, which he didn’t seem to consider particularly significant. (Actually, he claimed he wasn’t going to give his opinion, only present the arguments made, but he’d already made his own stance pretty apparent.) Unlike when discussing the quality of education in segregated schools, he couldn’t point to any hard facts about the schools today and claimed only that “some are more integrated than others” and that “test scores are pretty good”.

The exhibit itself was small and fairly generic, but well-presented. The most innovative part was a dark, narrow corridor whose walls were comprised of four large television screens. The screens displayed old footage of white protesters waving racist signs and shouting insults and threats. Thus, walking through the corridor evoked, in some minor way, what it may have felt like to brave such crowds in a sit-in or freedom march, or even as a child just trying to go to school.

Naturally, Gates and the officer tell slightly different stories, but the general consensus seems to be that both overreacted. Gates, understandably upset by being accused of breaking into his own home, called the officer a racist and, to some extent, refused to cooperate. In all likelihood, simply stepping outside and explaining the situation would have prevented any escalation.

The officer could have ignored the comments and left after identifying Gates as the legitimate occupant of the home. Instead, he chose to escalate the situation by arresting him for “disorderly conduct”

The incident offers fuel to both sides of the racial divide. To some, it looks like blatant racial profiling, an upstanding black citizen treated like a common criminal by a racist white cop. To others, Gates is an overeducated black liberal playing the race card, looking for racist motives behind a simple misunderstanding.

Admittedly, I’m more inclined to one of those camps than the other. Also, Gates is an honorary member of Board of the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues, a cause which is near and dear to my heart. So I can’t claim total objectivity here.

That said, I’ve thought a lot about the incident, and I do think I have an interesting take on it. Just as a poker hand can sometimes look different when considered in the larger context of a match between two players, with all of the metagame considerations that that entails, I saw the Gates arrest in a different light when considering it strategically and as one among many encounters between a police officer and a black man (or actually any citizen, though I do think race gives such an interaction a particular context). I know it sounds weird, but bear with me.

My work in public education has given me the opportunity both to learn from young black men who have experienced racial profiling and police brutality and also to offer advice to other young black men about how they ought to respond to such situations. My understanding is that platitudes like “know your rights” are at best worthless and at worst dangerous. I once saw a class presentation by several young men, Hispanic in this case, about your rights when dealing with police. They’d done their homework and gave a nice little explanation of probable cause, consensual searches, and the like.

Afterwards, I asked one of them whether either had actually had the opportunity to assert his rights in a real-life situation. His face darkened and he looked away from me. When pressed, he told me he was once stopped by two white police officers based on what he believed was racial profiling. He cooperated and answered their questions, and they were about to leave without writing him a ticket or searching his car. Then he asked for their names and badge numbers, at which point they escorted him into a nearby alley and roughed him up.

My point is that although there are supposed to be limits on police power and checks against abuses of this power, many of those who interact with the police are not actually in a position to assert their rights. Naturally, the police as a whole have an interest in maintaining their power and discouraging tactics that challenge it or that would limit their options. Thus, individual police officers engage in acts of retaliation not only because they are individually racist or on a power trip but as part of a larger strategy to intimidate would-be challengers. Among many young black men, even those who have not directly experienced police brutality themselves, there is a belief that if one attempts to assert one’s rights during an encounter with the police, he risks provoking a violent response.

What does all of this have to do with poker? It reminds me of situations where I have all the power. Say I raise UTG, the BB calls, and the flop comes AK9. Regardless of my hand, it’s pretty likely that I’m going to win the pot. I have position, I have the betting impetus, and I have by far the stronger range on this flop. My cards are probably best, but even if they aren’t, I’ll usually bluff my way through.

There are two ways my opponent can try to combat this. He can make some thin call downs, though that will often end up being painful for him, or he can slowplay some big hands and occasionally show up with unexpected strength in a situation where I’m using to having the power.

Any time the police interact with a suspect, particularly a minority one, they are accustomed to having the power. They have plenty of legitimate authority, and, when they need it, they’ve got intimidation and brute force on their side as well. The average suspect can attempt to assert his rights, but he plays a dangerous game in doing so.

What I’m saying is that among black men encountering the police, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the pocket Aces, the rare citizen who actually has the upper hand in a confrontation with the police. Unlike the majority of black men who find themselves questioned by a police officer, he is wealthy, well-connected, and well-respected. He pointed out the racism inherent in the situation (more in that in a moment), and when the officer knowingly arrested him in his home, it drew national headlines. The police department quickly dropped the charges, the Mayor of Cambridge condemned the arrest, and even the President chimed in to say that the officer “acted stupidly.” Imagine the shitstorm that would have fallen on the officer had he decided to rough Gates up and accuse him of resisting arrest.

I do think Gates was mistaken to label the individual officer a racist, though. Like Gates’ own, the officer’s actions and reactions were largely determined for him. The whole situation was set into motion by a neighbor who called the police after seeing two black men attempting to force open the door of an expensive home in a largely white neighborhood. It’s hard to say for sure, but I wonder whether the call would have been made had Gates and his driver been white. Sadly, it may actually be a sign of progress that the white women did not recognize her neighbor. Forty years ago, it’s hard to imagine a black man living in an affluent white neighborhood without the whole town being well aware of it.

In any event, the officer had no choice but to respond to the report of a break-in, and, upon responding, to speak with the individual inside of the home. I don’t believe he would have turned around and left had he seen a white man inside instead.

Still, whether the officer himself was influenced by race, the situation as a whole clearly was. It is unfortunate that such situations as arise, but as President Obama also noted, it is not uncommon. The vast majority of the time, it is the police who have the upper hand. My advice to my students is always to cooperate and be respectful to the police officer, no matter how clearly they feel they have been targeted because of their race. I take no joy in counseling them to swallow their price and do nothing to combat racism, but at least during the encounter, I believe there is very little that they can safely do.

Gates, on the other hand, is the rare black man who can speak up. The officer is unlikely to retaliate severely against him, and if he does, it will provoke outrage nationwide. Imagine the shitstorm that would have rained down on him had he decided to rough Gates up and accuse him of resisting arrest. The officer, executing his authority in a seemingly routine situation, ran into the nuts.

Both Gates and the officer acted brashly and in ways that did not clearly benefit either of them individually. I think it’s a mistake to say that either overreacted though. On the officer’s part, the arrest was part of a larger strategy to protect police authority and discourage those who attempt to limit it by asserting their rights. On Gates’ part, it was part of a larger strategy to discourage police harassment. Even if their actions don’t appear optimal when considered in a vacuum, they take on new significance as part of a larger strategy. Gates’ “overreaction” may have created some hassle for him personally that could have been avoided, but it also brought national attention to an issue that, even in the “Age of Obama”, still merits discussion.

In the meantime, I’ve got a few suggestions to help you get your Wire fix:

1. Homicide: Life on the Street– Simon created but mostly did not write the critically-acclaimed NBC series. It’s a far more traditional crime drama than The Wire, but especially in it’s early seasons it epitomizes the best possibilities of the genre to explore psychology, philosophy, and sociology. Homicide‘s fantastic cast includes several faces that will be familiar from The Wire. Clayton LeBouef who plays strip club owner and wannabe drug dealer Orlando on The Wire but villainous police Colonel Barnfather on Homicide. McNulty’s ex-wife, played by Callie Thorne, appears as one of the lead detectives in Homicide’s later seasons. Most significantly, Clark Johnson, one of Homicide‘s stars from the very beginning, appears in season 5 of The Wire as Sun paper editor Gus Haynes. Also be on the lookout for guest appearances by Robin Williams, Chris Rock, John Waters, and many more!

2. Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets– The book that started it all. Sun reporter David Simon spent a year with the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit, ultimately producing a gripping and fascinating account of their work and the people who do it. Don’t be intimidated: it’s a long book but a quick read, and quite different from the Homicide series it spawned, though its influence on both that series and The Wire is clear. Wire fans will particularly enjoy getting to meet the real Jay Landsman, who actually did appear on the show in the guise of Western district Lieutenant Dennis Mello.

3. Clockers– The influence of this 1993 novel by The Wire co-writer Richard Price on the series is clear, as several popular scenes (including one of my personal favorites, when Herc asks where the kids buy the hats with the brims turned to the side) are lifted whole cloth from Price’s book. Clockers is fundamentally a character study of a young New Jersey drug dealer and the homicide detective investigating him. Price is an acclaimed and accomplished novelist- frankly, recruiting him to write for TV was a tremendous coup for Simon- with a sensitive eye for the complexitities of the urban drug trade and the humanity of those affected by it. I haven’t seen the Spike Lee film or read anything else by Price (though I just got Lush Life from the library), but I imagine they are good as well.

4. The Corner– This HBO miniseries is a very clear predecessor to The Wire. It follows a single family, based on the one Simon followed for his book of the same name, battling with drug addiction and poverty in their Baltimore neighborhood. Be warned: it’s a far darker series than The Wire, which does a brilliant job of finding humor and levity in a fundamentally tragic narrative. One might even call it crushingly depressing, though there is a little unintentional humor in seeing Lance “Lieutenant Daniels” Reddick as a drug addict and Clarke “Lester Freamon” Peters as a drug dealer (and addict). I haven’t read the book, but I’m sure it’s good too.

5. Generation Kill– This is the only thing that makes me skeptical about a new miniseries. I was really excited to see David Simon’s take on Iraq (the first war, mind you), but I found this miniseries to have a rambling, convoluted plot, bland, indistinguishable characters, and surprisingly little deviation from themes already well-explored in The Wire. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a bad series by any means, but I didn’t think it was up to the standards set by Simon’s other work. Once again, he reminds us that perverse incentives for institutional middle managers lead to inefficient and counterproductive missions for those at the bottom and on the ground.

One last, humorously troubling note. I was recommending The Wire to a friend who recently discovered The Sopranos. I told her that The Wire was overall a less violent show, but that it was maybe more disturbing because it was more realistic. She, a resident of Baltimore County, reassured me, “Oh, I don’t think that will bother me. I don’t get into that part of the city much anyway.”

I can’t bring myself to get as excited as I feel I should be about Obama’s victory. I was pulling for him- he was in fact the first major party candidate for whom I voted in a presidential election- but neither his victory nor the historic election of America’s first black president excites me the way they have others.

It’s nothing personal about Obama. He seems to be a smart and capable candidate and who may well prove a good president. But I just can’t imagine him deserving or living up to the incredible expectations that seem to be invested in him.

His victory is being celebrated as a mandate for change, a watershed moment for liberalism in America, and a civil rights milestone. I believe it is all of these things, but not to the extent so many people seem to think.

Not in the case of the latter two, anyway. With regard to the mandate for change, I think that expectations are hopelessly high. Much was made, in the days before the election, of the hope that voters, particularly black ones, had invested in Obama. There was talk of unprecedented engagement with the political process among African-Americans and speculation about the sense of disenfranchisement that might ensue if Obama were somehow to lose.

My worry is that a similar disappointment may be experienced not only despite but because of his victory. Obama will inherit a plummeting economy, an endless war, and spiraling debt. Whether his fault or not, things are likely to get worse before they get better, especially for the least advantaged Americans. If the poor still struggle to make rent, if black Americans remain over-incarcerated and under-educated by the machinery of government, in four years, will there not be an even greater sense of disenfranchisement? Will there not be a temptation, among the many who are not living the American dream, to conclude that if not even this president can advance their interests, then they are truly and irrevocably disenfranchised by the American political process?

There is also the danger that white America will rest on its laurels as it has after every major advance in civil rights. Reconstruction amendments called for equal rights and suffrage for former slaves, yet many remained disenfranchised and in a state of near-enslavement. The Brown decision declared segregation unconstitutional, yet public schools across America remain blatantly segregated. A black man has been elected president, yet he did so at a time when there was only one black Senator (Obama himself) and two black governors (Deval Patrick of Massachusetts and David Paterson of New York, though only the former was elected to the office).

The presidency is an historic landmark in the slow march towards equality, but it is hardly the final hurdle. Black representation in the highest political offices in America mirrors that in the executive offices of corporate America or on the campuses of elite educational institutions. It is far easier to promote a few exceptional candidates (and this son of a black African father and a white woman from Kansas, raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, is nothing if not exceptional) than to extend the fruits of opportunity, wealth, and success to the millions of Americans who need and deserve them.

I am probably being too hard on America. During the primary, I expressed deep skepticism about America’s ability to elect a black president. Even when victory seemed inevitable, I continued to reserve doubts. “I don’t bet against racism in America,” I told friends. I am tremendously glad to be proven wrong. Truthfully, I am more genuinely proud of my country today than I have ever been.

Yet soaring speeches and tearful faces on television failed to resonate with me. I wandered the streets of Boston, feeling lost in a sea of honking horns, cheering college students, and strangers embracing. The most incredible displays of raw emotion stirred envy in me but not excitement or joy. I fear that so much of this enthusiasm will prove misguided.

The only sentiment expressed last night to which I could relate came from a long-time civil rights activist commenting briefly on NBC. This black woman had marched with Martin Luther King and been beaten half to death for the cause. Choked with emotion, she proclaimed this an historic day for America.

The anchor, who was also black, asked if she would agree that this demonstrated that the US really was an exceptional country because of its ability to change and overcome the mistakes of its past. It was exactly the sort of hyperbole that worried me.

The woman’s demeanor changed quickly and dramatically, and she seemed almost hostile as she answered, “It proves that change is possible when people work for it. It doesn’t just happen automatically, by magic. People have to work, fight, struggle, and die to make this country change.”

The anchor turned to pose the same question to a white man, who eagerly agreed. “This proves that anything is possible in America,” he declared, voice heavy with self-satisfaction. There was nothing contradictory about their statements, but when it came to subtext the two interviewees were miles apart. He almost made it sound as though the work were finished. She insisted that it was only just beginning.

Obama’s victory does demonstrate America’s extraordinary potential. Hopefully it will revive the sense of boundless possibility that has been this country’s strength and which is sorely needed now. But, as his acceptance speech made clear, it demonstrates only potential. There is a tremendous amount of work and sacrifice ahead of us before we can even begin to realize that potential. I sincerely hope that our new president proves capable not only of inspiring but of leading, and that my countrymen prove willing to follow. I am certainly more hopeful about our prospects than I have been in a long time, and for that I offer my thanks and congratulations to Barack Obama.

After setting up our tent, our first stop was a scenic overlook at a nearby state park. As we were doing our best to point a camera at ourselves blindly with one hand, another couple arrived and offered to take our picture. They were a ‘classic’ Arkansas couple: he a straggly white guy sporting a goatee and a Home Depot polo, she a slender black woman with a pronounced posterior, and both exceedingly friendly and polite.

The man asked where we were from, and after I gave him a brief synopsis, I asked if they lived around here. He positively swelled with pride and drawled, “Why, yes sir, we do!”

“You’re lucky,” I told him, nodding at the sprawling, tree-covered delta spread out below us. They both smiled and offered some suggestions of things to see in the area, most notably the Big Dam Bridge.

I mention their races because it reinforces something I’ve noticed in my limited time in the American South. Despite northern stereotypes about racist hillbillies, Southern cities seem to be a lot more socially integrated than those in the North. I’ve seen many more inter-racial couples or even just groups of friends having dinner or coffee together than I do in places like Boston or Chicago.

Then again, that’s only half of the story. I’ve also heard it said that, “In the South, they don’t care how close you get, as long as you don’t get too big; in the North, they don’t care how big you get, as long as you don’t get too close.” It may be that opportunities for higher-level education, employment, and economic success are harder for many blacks to come by in the South; I’m really not in a position to say. And of course the Klan is still alive and well in many Southern states. But issues of racial equality, justice, and segregation are very important to me, and I’m always particularly mindful of them when traveling in a new region or culture.

On that note, we also visited Central High School in Little Rock, which in 1957 was the site of a riot that attracted international attention. The Supreme Court had recently declared the racial segregation of public schools to be illegal, but when nine black students attempted to enter Central High School in September, they were turned away by the Arkansas National Guard on the orders of Governor Orval Faubus.

A federal judge then ordered the school integrated. Faubus withdrew the National Guard, but a crowd of over a thousand angry whites gathered to prevent the Little Rock Nine from entering the school. The mayor of Little Rock wrote President Eisenhower for help, and he responded by federalizing the Guard and sending 100 members of the 101st Airborne Division to support the local police in maintaining order. A violent riot ensued. The students were threatened, and many reporters were beaten.

Eventually, the riot ended and the Little Rock Nine did attend school that year, with the only senior among them becoming the first black student to graduate from Central High School. The next year, however, Governor Faubus closed the state’s three high schools rather than proceed with their integration, and students of all colors were forced to find new schools.

It’s sad but important to realize that this was not the work of one misguided governor or a small but loud minority of virulent segregationists. Even after closing down the public high schools altogether, a Gallup poll found that Faubus was one of the ten men most admired by Americans in 1958.

One thing I find interesting about the civil rights movement is the role that pictures and other forms of media coverage have played in its successes. The style of nonviolent resistance popularized by Gandhi and King relies heavily on appealing to the conscience, not only of the oppressors, but of the world at large. You may have seen this powerful image from the Little Rock riot before:

It’s one thing to have a political disagreement about whether schools ought to be integrated. Personally, I don’t consider it a matter, like tax cuts, on which reasonable people can disagree. But especially in that era it kind of was, and regardless, there is such a world of difference between disagreeing with the decision of a judge or politician and cursing, spitting at, and attacking children.

Here we see a crowd of angry adults who are both older and far more numerous than the teenagers trying to do nothing more than attend a school that the highest court in the land has told them they have the right to attend. A lone girl walks calmly and bravely past a mob driven wild by hate, epitomized by the sneer on one woman’s face.

Images like these provoked a kind of moral crisis for white Americans. They were able to overlook or make excuses for the fear, mistrust, hatred, and racism that informed their own support for segregation. But an angry mob attacking children cannot be interpreted as anything but a moral failing of the highest order. Over time, images such as this forced many people to change their opinions and drop their support for many of the most overt forms of discrimination.

This creates an interesting phenomenon where a town like Little Rock, which once festered with racism, can in many ways end up being less racist, or at least more conscious of its enduring racism, than more progressive cities that never saw such a singularly explosive incident of racism.

The epilogue to the picture above is that the the two women, the black teenager and the sneering white woman, met at Central High forty years later to reconcile. There was another moving photo (I couldn’t find it online) of them standing arm in arm. The white woman was in tears.

When a woman, and more broadly a city, is so dramatically confronted with her own racism and forced to acknowledge their wrongdoings, they can ultimately end up more sensitive to the issue and conscious of the need to work actively to overcome it. For the millions who witnessed the Little Rock spectacle and others like it on television, however, it can have the opposite effect: they externalize racism as a belief held by redneck hillbillies who are not at all like themselves. They are inclined to think that if they are not burning crosses or shouting racial epithets, then they are not part of the problem.

Later the same day, we passed through Memphis, but didn’t have much time to spend there. That’s a shame, because I really would have liked to have visited some of the civil rights sites there. It’s a part of American culture that I find really interesting both historically and as a lesson for today. Despite the progress that has been made, so many of the problems targeted by the civil rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s, such as segregation and educational inequality, persist today. Yet there is no movement on the scale that there was 40-50 years ago. Why not? Which of those strategies can and should be revived? Which failed? Which need to be adapted for contemporary America?

If any of you have made it through this rant and want to hear yet more of what I have to say on the subject, you might be interested in my review of Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities.

I’ll start with the good news. My friend David Wiltz is garnering still more media attention for the work that he has done with youth in LA. He and one of his former debaters were interviewed in this National Public Radio segment.

There are nearly two dozen urban debate leagues in the US, and I’m more familiar with some than with others, but everything I’ve seen suggests that few leagues do as good a job as LA has done to reach young people already in gangs or at high risk of getting involved with one. To some extent, this is simply a matter of necessity. Gangs are such an omnipresent part of urban life in LA that it would be nearly impossible to work with the populations Dave does without addressing the issue.

But I also know that in some leagues, and unfortunately I must count my own Boston Debate League among these, coaches and administrators have not done everything they could to reach out to these students who may ultimately have the most to gain from an activity like debate. The temptation, especially for young leagues and teams, is to start with the “naturals”, students who are already, responsible, high-achieving, engaged with their schoolwork, and generally on a relatively good track. There’s certainly nothing wrong with this, as these students deserve opportunities as much as anyone and will often still have college access difficulties for economic reasons or because even the best students at their schools simply do not receive an education that is on par with that provided to their competitiors from wealthier areas.

But debate has the power to change lives, to interest students in academic subjects in a way that school does not, to engage them in a way that traditional pedagogy does not, and to imbue them with a sense of confidence and power that they sorely need. I’ve seen many seemingly unlikely students take a remarkable interest in debate and change the trajectory of their lives because of it. I really admire the work that Dave has done to reach students most in need, and he’s a constant reminder to me of what I could and should be doing in Boston.

On the flip side of the coin, however, I also came across a New York Times article entitled “The Wrong Approach to Gangs” that argues,

“No city has failed to control its street gangs more spectacularly than Los Angeles. The region has six times as many gangs and double the number of gang members as a quarter-century ago, even after spending countless billions on the problem. But unless Congress changes course quickly, the policies that seem to have made the gang problem worse in Los Angeles could become enshrined as national doctrine in a so-called gang control bill making its way through both the House and Senate.”

LA is a paradigmatic example of a city that over-invests in heavy-handed and punitive responses to drug- and gang-related problems and under-invests in prevention and avoidance measures, including educational initiatives like the LAUDL. The willingness of policy-makers to write off people as young as 11 or 12 as irredeemably criminal is both heartbreaking and self-fulfilling. As my namesake Michel Foucault observed in Discipline and Punish, nothing breeds crime like prisons. Handing out prison sentences for petty offenses serves only to harden the offender, limit his access to legal employment, and connect him to other criminals.

It is beyond disheartening to see the federal government on the brink of replicating LA’s preference for punishment over prevention.

The next time I was in Vegas, which was about a month later, however, I heard from cab drivers, poker dealers, and hotel employees (all white) about how bad that weekend was, not just in terms of crowds, but about how it was unsafe to walk outside, people were getting shot in the street, etc. Like I said, I had been walking around the Strip that weekend without seeing any of this, but I kept hearing the same thing from so many people that I started to think maybe there was some truth to it, even though my spidey sense was telling me this was mostly just racism talking, as there were so many more black tourists that weekend than there usually are in Vegas.

Anyway, I was glad to see that at least one Vegas cab driver felt the same way I did about all this fear-mongering. He reports overwhelmingly posititive experiences from that weekend and argues that the traffic and crime were not abnormal for a three-day weekend in Vegas. Best of all, he frames his anti-racist ethic in a classically Vegas way:

“Las Vegas needs to grow up and respect all races and cultures that visit and spend money.” (emphasis added)

“Since the NYPD took control of school safety in 1998, the number of police personnel in schools and the extent of their activity have skyrocketed. At the start of the 2005-2006 school year, the city employed a total of 4,625 School Safety Agents (SSAs) and at least 200 armed police officers assigned exclusively to schools. These numberswould make the NYPD’s School Safety Division alone the tenth largest police force in the country – larger than the police forces of Washington, D.C., Detroit, Boston, or Las Vegas.

Because these school-assigned police personnel are not directly subject to the supervisory authority of school administrators, and because they often have not been adequately trained to work in educational settings, SSAs and police officers often arrogate to themselves authority that extends well beyond the narrow mission of securing the safety of the students and teachers. They enforce school rules relating to dress and appearance. They make up their own rules regarding food or other objects that have nothing whatsoever to do with school safety. On occasion they subject educators who question the NYPD’s treatment of students to retaliatory arrests. More routinely, according to our interviews and survey, they subject students
to inappropriate treatment including:

• derogatory, abusive and discriminatory comments and conduct;
• intrusive searches;
• unauthorized confiscation of students’ personal items, including food, cameras and essential school supplies;
• inappropriate sexual attention;
• physical abuse; and
• arrest for minor non-criminal violations of school rules.

These types of police interventions create flashpoints for confrontations and divert students and teachers from invaluable classroom time. They make students feel diminished, and are wholly incompatible with a positive educational environment.

Statistical analysis shows that all students are not equally likely to bear the brunt of over-policing in New York City schools. The burden falls primarily on the schools with permanent metal detectors, which are attended by the city’s most vulnerable children. The students attending these high schools are disproportionately poor, Black, and Latino compared to citywide averages, and they are more often confronted by police personnel in school for “non-criminal” incidents than their peers citywide. These children receive grossly less per-pupil funding on direct educational services than city averages. Their schools are likely to be large and overcrowded, and to have unusually high suspension and drop-out rates. “

Having spent the last few years working around public schools in Chicago and Boston, I can’t say I’m shocked by anything that they’re reporting, either about the results of putting police officers in schools or the fact that schools in low-income, largely minority neighborhoods bear the brunt of the policing.

The obvious retort will be that those neighborhoods also have the highest crime rates and the most crime in the school, so of course that’s where the officers will go. Controlling the criminal element will help improve the school for the majority of law-abiding students, yada yada yada.

Well if you’re so fucking interested in improving the quality of education at the school, why not improve teacher pay, lower the size of the average classroom, buy up-to-date materials, or repair structural damage to the buildings? Even if police in the schools improves the quality of education for at least some students (and the NYCLU report suggests otherwise), there’s a reason why, of all the barriers to quality educaton at these schools, crime is the one on which the city chooses to focus.

The truth is that in many of this country’s largest cities (though thankfully I have not seen much of this trend in Boston), public schools are becoming terrifyingly similar to prisons. There are bars on the windows, metal detectors at the doors, police officers in the hallways, uniforms, randome searches, and security cameras.

These security measures take priority over such staples of education such as TEACHERS TO ACTUALLY TEACH THE FUCKING CLASSES. In Chicago, many of the most heavily securitized schools were so short in teachers that they would stick any warm body they could find in a classroom, and failing that, students would be herded into the cafeteria or somewhere else for an entire period where nothing was taught or expected of them.

A friend of mine who attended one such school in Chicago told me that her freshman year, her social studies class was without a teacher for SIX MONTHS! She was one of only about ten student, in a class of forty, to pass the test required for graduation. Thirty students were held back for failing a test on material they’d never been taught.

When the test results were announced, there was a small riot in the classroom, with students overturning desks and throwing chairs out of windows. This criminal behavior, of course, becomes a justification for all of the security. Anecdotes like this, and I’ve heard many, make it very clear to me that the purpose of some schools is not to educate but to warehouse the urban poor until they are old for prison, where many of them eventually end up.

Driving in the Boston area is something that I usually avoid, and with good reason. Streets rarely run in a straight line for more than a few blocks, and they are known to change names or make sudden turns such that by going straight, you might leave Cambridge Street and end up on Dorchester Avenue. If you were later to find a road called “Cambridge Street”, it might not be the same road you left, as you may have crossed into Cambridge, Somerville, Medford, or another neighboring city that re-uses street names Boston has already used for other streets. That, of course, assumes you find a sign at an intersection at all.

An intersection might well be the convergence of six roads, two of which come to an end, one of which changes names, and one of which doubles back on itself at a two hundred degree angle. Needless to say, when there are signs at all, they are a confusing maze of circles and arrows that cause motorists to slam on their breaks and veer suddenly across three roads of traffic. It’s a delight.

After picking up five dozen donuts, twenty-five Munchkins, and three Boxes o’ Joe from the local Dunkin’ Donuts, I began what should have been a twenty-minute drive to the Dorchester Education Complex. Armed only with Google Maps directions, I arrived forty-five minutes later to find a handful of students, one volunteer judge, and one of the teachers from the Academy of Public Service (our host school), standing around outside. “I take it you aren’t just enjoying the fresh air?” I asked them.

Dan, the teacher, shook his head mournfully. “I just called the headmaster, he’s going to be here in a few minutes.” Fortunately, it was a nice day, already in the fifties at 8AM and sunny. I broke out the coffee and donuts, only to find that Dunkin’ Donuts had not given me cups, cream, sugar, or napkins. A lot of coffee was about to go to waste.

A few minutes later, Zac, the headmaster, showed up to let us in the building. In my five years of working around urban education, I’ve rarely met anyone as capable and dynamic as Zac. He took over as headmaster when Dorchester High School, with the help of a Gates Foundation grant, broke down into three small schools inside the same building. One of those schools, the Academy of Public Service, got off the ground just one year before the Boston Debate League, and was still searching for its identity. To my delight, I learned that Zac wanted to build the school around forensics and public speaking, and we had several conversations about how debate might fit into that vision.

I’ve never seen a headmaster as committed to his school’s debate team. Despite working what are probably sixty hour weeks, he comes to all of our competitions, walks around to watch all of our students debate, stops to talk to me about his school and the direction of the League, and as a member of the Boston Debate League’s Advisory Board, does what he can to advocate for and promote our organization.

The results of his commitment and dedication are plain to see. The Academy of Public Service, despite its geographical location in what is derogatorily known as ‘Dumbchester’ among Boston youth, has the largest and one of the most competitive teams in the League. They’ve got a great coaching staff who certainly deserve a lot of the credit, but Zac’s fingerprints can be seen as well. He treats the debate team as a component of the school culture that is every bit as important as the football or basketball teams. He buys embroidered vests for the team, prominently displays their trophies in a case in the hallway and in his office, and meets with them all individually every week.

This isn’t necessarily a replicable model. Zac is a young, charismatic, deeply caring black man. All of those characteristics help him to relate to his students in ways that other headmasters, no matter how competent and well-intentioned, might not be able to do. But what he does works, and his team is better off for it.

Once I’m inside the building, it’s time to tackle the next problem. The coach of each team submits to me on the Wednesday prior to a tournament the names of the students who will be competing for her school. As you might guess, however, there’s quite a bit of variation between the students registered on Wednesday and the students who show up on Saturday morning. For instance, I was still trying to find the school when I got a call from a coach telling me not one of the five students she had registered would be competing today.

Then there are other students who don’t show up, or show up late, or show up but were not registered on Wednesday. Technically, I am supposed to turn all of these students away. But our participation has been low enough this year that I can’t afford to do that, so I delay the start of the first round (our schedule has time built into it for just such delays) and redo the schedule that I put together last night. The only reason I bother doing it the night before is so that I will have something to work with in the event that my computer breaks or we’re locked out of the building for over an hour in the morning or anything else catastrophic happens.

We finally get the first of three debate rounds underway about fifteen minutes after their scheduled start time. A debate round consists of two students from one school arguing against two students from another school for nearly ninety minutes while a volunteer evaluates their efforts and chooses a winner at the end. Many of our volunteers are college debaters or former high school debaters now in college, which presented a problem, as many universities are on Spring Break this weekend.

There was a silver lining, however, in that this forced me to reach out to some new sources of volunteers who had not worked with the League before. In particular, we got two black students from Boston University Law School, one of whom had eight years of debate experience between high school and college! Of course we appreciate any volunteers we get, but I’m always conscious of the fact that so many of the coaches, judges, and administrators, myself included, are white, while so many of the debaters are not. It definitely helps to dispel common myths and stereotypes about debate when we have more diversity among our adult employees and volunteers.

On a similar note, I was glad to have back as a volunteer judge an alumnus from the very first season of the Boston Debate League. Two years after graduating from high school, Chris is pursuing a BS in Culinary Arts at Johnson and Wales College. I called him largely out of the blue because Zac had invited some important people from Boston Public Schools to the tournament and wanted to have some alumni from the League for them to meet. In particular, he said, they would want to meet young black males, a key demographic in urban politics.

I hadn’t seen Chris in two years, and frankly one thing I’ve learned from putting this League together over the last few years is that even people whom you’d expect to be very reliable often fail to come through for you in crucial ways. So I was happily surprised when he immediately agreed to drive up from Rhode Island for the afternoon. Although in my opinion a former debater in the League ought to feel some responsibility to help out after graduating, this has generally not been the case, and in fact I’ve had a lot of difficulty staying in touch with our alumni. I was really touched that Chris was willing to go to such great effort with so little prompting. It’s so rare that you find people who really will come through in a pinch, and I have great respect for anyone who does.

Chris wasn’t able to make it in time for the first round, but was happy to judge the second and then be on hand to speak with any dignitaries who came. The only guest we ended up having was a woman invited by me, not Zac, but because she was the vice-president of the Boston Schools Committee, she was quite an important guest. I told Chris she was around and he told me he’d seek her out and schmooze her.

I found the two of them watching the same debate and went to introduce them. Before I could say anything, Chris blatantly pointed at her and said, “Is this that lady you wanted me to talk to?” Subtle. They seemed to hit it off well, though, and I think she was generally impressed with what she saw. She stuck around for the awards ceremony and announced some of our winners, so we were able to get a lot of good pictures of her with our debaters.

The event was a little bittersweet for me because, since I won’t be at the City Championships (I need to take two of our debaters to a national competition in Atlanta the same weekend), this was the last time I may see some of the debaters there. I didn’t make a big deal out of it, because that’s not my style, but I did wish them all well and tell them how proud I was.

That’s no exaggeration, either. There are few things that people fear more than public speaking. Jerry Seinfeld tells a joke that, since public speaking is America’s number one fear and death is number two, most people, if at a funeral, would prefer to be in the coffin than giving the eulogy. I’m thoroughly impressed by any high school student, especially one from a school, home, and/or neighborhood culture where academic pursuits are sometimes discouraged, who is willing to join her school’s debate team and share her opinions in public.

I’m on my way out the door when my phone rings. I’m terrified that this will be someone canceling on me at the last minute, but it’s just Ho asking for directions by public transportation.

When I get to Faneuil Hall, I’m relieved to see that Carla, who I am expecting to be the least prepared, is first to arrive. Better yet, she tells me she’s got her whole first speech written and wants me to look at it.

It turns out to be a very detailed and dry history of Supreme Court litigation concerning school segregation. A lot of it does not appear to be in her words, though there are no quotes or citations. (By the way, I hesitate to call this plagiarism, though I guess technically it is, because I don’t believe it was her intent to pass off the work as her own. When I pointed out that she needed to cite her sources, she was happy to do so, and in general I’ve noticed a lack of knowledge about proper research and citation among the students I’ve worked with. Once teacher showed me papers he was grading where bibliographies included sources such as “termpapers.com”.)

I explain to Carla that she needs to cut out a lot of the history and focus more on making arguments about the current state of affairs. She’s surprisingly calm about the fact that I’ve just told her to rewrite her speech two hours before show time. Conveniently enough, the volunteer I wanted to have work with her shows up just then, so I introduce the two of them and then get to work preparing the stage for the public debates.

The good folks at Faneuil Hall have provided us with two long tables and a beautifully carved wooden podium. I ask if it’s alright to move the podium, and the property manager tells me, “Just be careful, it’s only held together by wooden pegs.” I shove it gingerly across the stage, all the while worrying that with my luck, I’ll be the one to destroy Samuel Adams’ lectern.

Surveying the stage now, it occurs to me that a single high school student might get pretty nervous sitting at the long table all by herself with dozens of people staring at her. So even though these debates will be one on one (unlike most of our competitions, which are two on two), I decide to suggest that each debater invite another student from her school to sit at the table with her during her debate for moral support. Carla in particular looks relieved when I suggest this.

It’s now 9:15, and nine of my ten debaters are here. The only one missing is Ho. His teacher is here, but she hasn’t heard from him. Just then, my phone rings again, and I answer to hear Ho tell me, “I just want to tell you, I am going to be fifteen minutes late.”

“You’re fifteen minutes late now, Ho.”

He’s silent for a minute. “I am going to be thirty minutes late.”

“Alright,” I can’t help but laugh. I know he’s plenty prepared already, so I’m not too worried about it, though Carla is really antsy to meet him and find out what exactly he’ll be arguing. Unlike the regular debate tournaments our students attend, this event is intended to be more about drama than debate. I don’t want the students worrying about who wins or trying to make each other look stupid on stage, so I’m giving them a chance to meet their opponents and run through their debates ahead of time. This proves very popular, as everyone is nervous and quite willing to strike a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” deal with her opponent.

When Ho finally arrives (nearly an hour late), he is looking very sharp in a dark suit and handsome tie. I’m wearing a Brooks Brothers that set me back a couple hundred dollars at 50% off, but I can’t disagree when he looks me up and down, straightens his tie, smiles, and says, “Ah ha, now I show you up!”

With about a half hour to go, I take all the students up on stage with me to show them where they’ll sit and stand and when. The sound guy we hired gives them a quick tutorial on how to adjust the height of the microphones, how close to put their mouths to them, etc., which is a great idea and something that hadn’t occurred to me. As he pointed out, it’s one less thing for them to be nervous about when they’re up there.

The last thing I explain is how to handle the audience. They are accustomed to being cross-examined by their opponents after a speech. For the public debate, however, the audience will also have the opportunity to ask questions, which means they could be asked pretty much anything. We go over some strategies for dealing with off-the-wall questions or things they just don’t know how to answer.

“First off, don’t be afraid to say you don’t know. If a question is really tangential, everyone will realize that, and you won’t look bad for saying, ‘I’m not prepared to answer that,’ or, ‘I’m afraid I don’t have that information,’ or something along those lines.

The other thing you can do is have some talking points. Have you ever seen politicians answer questions? “

“They don’t,” Ho interjects.

“Exactly. They smile, nod, say ‘Very good question,’ and then just say whatever they want to say, even if it has nothing to do with the question. So I’d suggest that you each think about important points you want to emphasize during cross-examination, and then if you get any questions out of left field, you can just brush it off and go to your talking points.”

As of 11AM, our scheduled start time, we still don’t have much of an audience. I take a look outside, and heavy winds are gusting heavy snowflakes through the crisp Boston air. Nothing’s sticking on the ground, but it looks and feels like a blizzard. No wonder so few people have chosen to come out. Oh well.

The emcee for the event, the headmaster of one of the schools in the League, thanks everyone for coming and then introduces the guest moderator for the first debate. As much preparation as we’ve done with the students in the debate, we’ve done very little with the guest moderators, and it shows. Despite my wild gesticulating from the back of the room, she lets the cross-examination of the first speaker go on for way too long, then thanks the students for a great debate and starts giving her closing remarks.

I run over to the foot of the stage and wait for an opportunity to interrupt her and tell her there are still three more speeches left. She blushes a bit and introduces the second speaker, who gives her four minute speech and then takes some questions from the audience. Now, with two speeches left to go, the moderator says, “Sorry about trying to cut you off prematurely before, now thank you both for a great debate,” and starts to leave the stage. I don’t have the heart to embarrass her again, and we’re already behind schedule, so I just mouth, “Don’t worry about it,” to the students on stage, who are shooting me confuzzled looks. Neither seems too disappointed to leave the stage without delivering a rebuttal speech, though.

After that things go smoothly, and the audience fills out a bit more. Mostly they are friends and family of the people in the debate, but occasionally some tourists come in and sit for a speech or two, which is very cool. Faneuil Hall is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Boston, and though it’s technically closed to them for our event today, we told the officers outside to invite anyone who came to see the building to come in and watch a bit of the debates. Faneuil Hall is, after all, of interest to the tourists precisely because it was a public forum where issues of pressing national importance were debated.

As the fourth debate is drawing to a close, I pull Carla and Ho out of the audience and line them up at the foot of the stage, ready to be introduced. Ho is fine about going up on stage alone, but Carla, even with a friend at her side, is shaking like a leaf. “Andrew, I don’t know this!” she whines. It’s very, very tempting to make a comment about she maybe could have started preparing before last night, but that’s not going to make a difference now, so I just tell her she’ll be fine. She looks less than reassured as the guest moderator for her debate announces her name and she takes the stage, clutching at her friend’s hand.

Ho is the first to speak, and he does a great job. We worked together on a brief opening, but he’s revised it since Thursday, and it’s better than ever. He introduces himself and his school, provides some quick background on the desegregation cases now before the Supreme Court, and dives right into his arguments against forced integration.

“Although forced integration schemes were intended to desegregate schools, the have ironically caused more segregation by driving students out of urban school systems,” he begins, and I smile. “Take my school, for example. In the 1970’s it was a white school, like 90%. Now, only 7% of students are white.”

This is killer stuff. For these debates, I tried to choose topics that were of national interest and importance but still personal and relevant to the students. Frankly, there’s nothing all that special about getting some people to talk about a random issue. This event is supposed to be a celebration of the voices and opinions of Boston’s young people, and it’s really, really good to hear some personal experiences brought into the debate.

When his four minutes are up, Ho confidently announces, “I am open for cross-examination.” Carla lobs him a few softball questions, and I can see immediately that his answers are scripted. Fine by me, but as soon as the floor is opened to the audience, things get rough. One of Ho’s teachers is in attendance, and with an impish grin, he rises from his seat.

“You argue that as America becomes more diverse, schools will naturally become more integrated. But the country is much more diverse than it was in 1954, yet schools have not been as segregated as they are now since the Brown decision. How can you be sure that this trend will change in the next fifty years?”

“Could you repeat that please?” I know damn well that Ho understood the question the first time, and I can see the wheels spinning in his head as his teacher struggles to rephrase.

“What assurance do you have that more diversity in the country will mean more integration in schools? Haven’t we seen just the opposite in the last fifty years?”

“Ah! That is a very good question. But I feel it is better to let integration happen naturally, because when you force it, you can actually make schools more segregated.”

With a knowing smile, the teacher sits back down, seemingly satisfied with his student’s stalling and evasion tactics.

Now it’s Carla’s turn to speak, and there’s an awkward silence as she fumbles to adjust the microphone. Once she starts talking, though, she sounds good, real good. Remnants of the history lesson, with proper citation, remain, but her speech is now chock full of strong arguments as well. The only indication of her nervousness is some slightly excessive pausing between sentences, and I’m confident that 75% of the audience doesn’t even notice.

Carla handles her cross-examination gracefully, turns over the floor to Ho for his rebuttal, and then concludes the debate with a strong rebuttal of her own. Now it’s my turn to take the stage for the first time all day to join Alan Khazei, co-founder of City Year and keynote speaker at the event, in handing out medals to all of the participants. “Nice job,” I tell Carla as I shake her hand and Dr. Khazei drapes a medal around her neck.

“Shut up, I sucked,” she smiles, taking her place alongside the others.

Afterwards, there is a lot of milling around and picture taking. As a way of reassuring them, I had promised the debaters that they’d have a sympathetic audience, since everyone would be there because they were interested in the debates. That turned out to be not entirely true, as Ho’s teacher had offered extra credit to her students if they came to the event. About half a dozen of them showed up and were (understandably) completely disinterested in the debates, sleeping or whispering quietly to each other the entire time. I didn’t really care since they filled out the audience and weren’t disruptive.

What was surprising was the way they treated Ho afterwards. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought he was a rock star: they all wanted to have their picture taken with him, shake his hand, congratulate him, etc. To the best of my knowledge, these were not friends of Ho’s or members of the debate team or even honors students, they were just random kids who knew him from school.

It’s a common assumption, one that I’ll admit to harboring when I first started working with the Chicago Debate League, that urban public schools students would have no interest in a debate team. In an environment where kids are supposed to be ‘hard’ and show no interest in academics or education, who would want to join a debate team? Even other nerds at my suburban high school poked fun at me on occasion.

But the truth is that you’ll find as many bright, articulate, outgoing, and/or intellectual students as you would anywhere else. And unlike at schools in more affluent areas, where college-bound students are offered multiple AP courses and a bevy of academically-oriented after-school activities, these students have fewer outlets. Sometimes you get these kids, sometimes even ones who have never done well in school before, who just fall in love to with debate because it is so different from anything that’s been available to them before. It’s tough and rigorous but it also very open-ended, so they can pursue arguments they are interested in and really be in control of what they are learning and doing in ways that they can’t in a classroom.

OK, tangent over. Bottom line: the event went well in a lot of ways, and the students surprised me by demonstrating some skills that I wasn’t sure they had acquired. I wish there was more of an audience, but now that we’ve done it once and ironed out the kinks, hopefully in future years we can put more effort into publicizing it.

After graduating from college, I turned down an offer of a full-time job with benefits (not a wise thing for a kid with a degree in philosophy to do) in the urban debate field so that I could be with my girlfriend in Boston. I missed the debate league, though, and so along with a friend of mine, I started a similar one in Boston. Two years later, six schools and about sixty students participate in our debate competitions.

Anyway, last Saturday we put on a series of public debates at Faneuil Hall, an historic building in Boston where Samuel Adams argued for revolution, William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass argued for abolition, and Susan B. Anthony argued for women’s suffrage. I was obviously very excited to have my students become a part of the tradition of great debate at Faneuil Hall, but there was a lot of preparation to be done getting them ready to debate in front of an audience (generally, a single judge is the only witness to their debating).

Ten students from four different schools debated five different topics in a series of one-on-one debates. Although I provided them with background reading and some advice about how to prepare more than a month ago, I’ve worked with high schoolers long enough to know better than to expect that they will have done much of anything until I sit down with them and make them do it. So in the weeks before the event, I visited all of their schools to talk to the participants in person and explain what they would be doing and how they should prepare.

Two weeks before show time, I visited South Boston high school to meet with three of the public debaters. Although I recognize the faces of most of my debaters, I’m more of an administrator than a teacher or coach these days, so I don’t know them personally as well as I would like. It’s something I miss a lot. So although I knew who Carla (not her real name) was, it was almost like I was meeting her for the first time on this particular Wednesday.

Carla is in her first year of debate, and with only two competitions under her belt, is one of the least experienced students participating in the public debate. However, her coach, a wiry, balding, middle-aged history teacher who is also a boxer, ice hockey player, and lawyer, described her to me, in this thick Boston accent, as a “wookhaas” [workhorse] and assured me she’d be ready.

As I expected, she knew virtually nothing about her assigned topic, which was to argue that the Supreme Court should not prevent school districts from taking a student’s race into consideration when assigning her to a school. (For those who don’t know, two separate cases, one originating in Louisville and one in Seattle, are before the Supreme Court this term. In both cases, the school districts were seeking actively to integrate their schools by prohibiting, for instance, more black students from attending public schools that were already disproportionately black.)

When the Supreme Court first ruled in Brown v Board of Education that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional, it provoked massive conflict in the American South, where the only thing keeping black and white students separate were the laws prohibiting them from attending the same schools. In the North, however, neighborhoods were sufficiently segregated that the ruling had little effect, and with or without laws enforcing segregation, white students went to white schools and black students to black schools.

In the 1970’s, the Court started pursuing integration more actively, ordering the busing of students across major cities from white neighborhoods to black schools and vice versa. There were protests and riots akin to those seen two decades ago in the South, and in few places was the rioting worse than in South Boston, a working class white neighborhood.

Carla and I discussed this history a bit but talked mostly about the continued segregation of public schools in the US. Boston abandoned its controversial busing in favor of an “open enrollment” scheme where any Boston public high school student could end up at any high school in the city as a result of a complex preferencing system, similar in many ways to those in Louisville in Seattle, but with the important distinction that race is not a factor in the final assignment. Though the neighborhood of South Boston remains largely white, whites are now a minority at South Boston High. At least once year to this day, a teacher at the school tells me, students arrive at their school one morning to find graffiti reading, “Niggers go home. Keep Southie white.”

Carla is a pretty Hispanic girl, clearly very intelligent. She was flattered to be chosen as a participant in the event and blushed when I told her all the reasons she was selected (this to make her less nervous about speaking in front of an audience.) I don’t know how long her family has been in the US, but I’m guessing she is not first generation, given how well she speaks English.

I ask if anyone has any more questions, and Carla asks if I will be back next week. I wasn’t planning on it, but when she promises to have a draft of her speech typed up for me to review, I can’t say no. “I want to have everything finished by Monday, so I won’t have to worry about it,” she tells me. Add responsibility to her list of character traits.

On Friday, I realize that Monday is Martin Luther King day, and schools are closed. I call Carla’s coach and arrange to visit the school on Wednesday instead. On Tuesday night, I get a call from a reporter interested in doing a story on the public debate. I invite her to come with me to South Boston the next day, and she agrees.

When I arrive on Wednesday, two of the three students in Saturday’s debate, including Carla, are absent. Her coach tells me Carla hasn’t been in school all week. “What are the odds that she won’t show up on Saturday?”

“She’ll be thah,” he assures me.

I promised the reporter, who is from a local NPR affiliate, a chance to hear run-throughs of Saturday’s speeches. The only public debater present is Nina (not her real name), who is going to be advocating for guest worker legislation. I ask if she is ready to practice her first, four minute speech.

“Um, not quite.”

“Just give it your best.”

She stares at the reporter’s gigantic boom mic. “I have a question first.”

I walk over to stand next to Nina and look over her shoulder at her notes. “What’s up?”

“What’s guest worker legislation?”

Thankfully, as a radio reporter, our guest has no video camera to record the look of horror that flashes across my face. Not wanting to panic Nina, I do my best to explain the issue to her calmly and emphasize the importance of reading up on it in the next two days.

Although she didn’t get to hear as much public debate preparation as I’d promised, the reporter seemed really impressed with what she saw anyway. While I worked with some other students on the team, she interviewed Nina and the coach, and then when the students left, she interviewed me.

My philosophy is that the students make the best salespeople for the Boston Debate League. It’s virtually impossible to speak to them without being impressed by how smart, articulate, and outgoing they are. Consequently, I do what I can to encourage media coverage to focus on them rather than on me.

The story of a kid who plays poker to support a debate league for inner city youth seems like it might be a bit too enticing, so when she asks if running the League is a full-time job for me, I just tell her, “It feels that way sometimes.” Thankfully she laughs and moves on.

To be continued