Of course I'm not racist. Now what's so bad about segregated proms?

The New York Times Magazine has a fascinating (if way too short) article in today's edition on the segregated proms at a rural Georgia public school.

What amazes me about the story is the nonchalant dichotomy in the white students' attitudes toward their white-only prom. (How is a white-only prom legal, you ask? Well, both proms are organized privately by parents, not by the school.)

On the one hand, it seems the students aren't particularly enthusiastic about the idea of splitting their proms by race. Interracial friendships and even a few interracial dating relationships are common, and it sounds like the kids have engaged in a few half-hearted attempts to end the practice in the past. "I don't think anybody at our school is racist," says one white student who calls the practice "awkward."

But when asked why the school still has segregated proms, the student gets all meh on us. "It's a tradition," he says, echoing the rationale many of his classmates apparently also gave.

This response, of course, leads to the maddeningly obvious question: If you don't like your segregated prom, then why don't you just do anything about it? Tell your parents you refuse to go any prom at which your black friends aren't allowed, and things will change in hurry.

So here we have the paradox: These white students have black friends, significant others and claim not to be racist in any way. Yet they don't care enough about the fact that these friends and significant others can't go to their prom by virtue of the color of their skin to do anything to change it. Are they just liars, or are the social pressures of the status quo greater than we're led to believe?

My guess: They don't really think their segregated proms are racist. They also don't think their black friends are hurt by the fact that they can't come to same prom as them ("After all, they get their own prom, and some of them even come to our prom entrance to cheer us on!"). So they see it as a minor inconvenience, a bow to tradition, something they have to do to oblige their parents, but nothing more significant than that. If everything's hunky dory between black and white students for the other 363 days of the year, these two days can't mess much up, can they?

Dead wrong, of course. By the time the more enlightened students realize that holding segregated proms (anytime, really, but especially in the 21st century!) is ridiculous and absolutely unacceptable, they're off in college and well beyond the point of caring about what their high school does anymore. I don't know much about how issues of race play out in the modern-day South (I've read this eye-opening book, but that's about it), but my initial guess is that the values behind this segregation are rooted so deep in the local culture that students have a difficult time realizing that there's anything wrong with them, even as they fervently disavow racism by name. 

Podcast #2: Get to know ... The Band

Back by popular demand (umm ... I think my sister said she listened to it) comes my second podcast. Same format as the first, but the recording quality is much better, thanks to a new computer.

I had fun putting this one together. Hope you enjoy it too.

Get to know ... The Band

Maybe we should be a little more discriminating in choosing our subculture's leaders.

My fellow Wheaton grad Sarah Pulliam had an entertaining Q&A with America's favorite plumber, Samuel Wurzelbacher (who is neither Joe nor Plumber. Discuss.) for Christianity Today. Most of it was the standard "the Republican Party has deserted true conservatism--let's get even more conservative and take back this country!!!1!" that we've been hearing from the Limbaugh crowd since November 5. Move on, nothing to see here.

But it did contain a few nuggets that were genuinely entertaining in their absurdity. The first was this gem toward the end of Joe's answer to the question, "What do you think about same-sex marriage at a state level?"

"I've had some friends that are actually homosexual. And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn't have them anywhere near my children. But at the same time, they're people, and they're going to do their thing."

Joe's definition of "friend" must be reeeeeaaaalllly broad. Let's try a thought experiment: Think of all the people you're in reasonably regular contact with. Friends, acquaintances, mild annoyances, serious annoyances, enemies. How many of those people would you not let anywhere near your children? We're not talking about baby-sitting or even being left alone with your children; we're just talking about going near your children. Can you think of anyone who would fit this criterion? I sure couldn't (if I had children, that is).

What kind of level of distrust and loathing would you have to have to be at that point with such a person? Yet Joe calls people with whom he has this type of relationship "friends."* I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you won't let them anywhere near your children, they're not your friends. In fact, they're much closer to being your mortal enemy.

*Another question: Why exactly is Joe so afraid of letting his children even be in the vicinity of a gay person? Because they'll spread their gay germs? I'd love to hear Joe parse his reasoning out on this one.

Second, we have this question and response:

Who do you see as emerging Christian leaders?

James Dobson. I love Dobson. I love John Eldridge's [sic] Wild at Heart. The last book I read was The Five Love Languages [by Gary Chapman].

James Dobson?!? James Dobson is a lot of things (incendiary, influential, intelligent, old), but emerging is not even close to being one of them. The man's 73 years old, for crying out loud! It's been 32 years since broke into the Christian subculture with Dare to Discipline. He's already stepped down as president, CEO and chairman of the board of Focus on the Family. He's now essentially a figurehead who's preparing to retire. That's about as far from emerging as you can get.

Joe concludes by answering the question, "What are a couple of Christian books you like?" which, incidentally, was not any of the questions that were put to him. My guess: He really doesn't keep up with who's who among Christian leaders, so he named the only two he could think of off the top of his head, plus another Christian book he had read recently. And that's fine for a random plumber from Ohio, but if you're aiming to become a prominent Christian leader,* you sure as heck had better know whom you're inheriting that mantel from. This is what happens when we thrust uninformed Joe Blows into undeserved positions of prominence and influence, and when they insist, against their better judgment, on staying there.

*Guess why Joe was giving this interview in the first place? He's traveling the country on a book tour.

Adding value in a crowded media ecosystem

Jeff Jarvis, a professor at the City University of New York's journalism school and prominent media critic, had a fantastic post yesterday asking journalists a crucial question about the way they do their jobs: "Where do you add value?"

Here's the meat of it:

Journalism can’t afford repetition and production anymore.

Every minute of a journalist’s time will need to go to adding unique value to the news ecosystem: reporting, curating, organizing. This efficiency is necessitated by the reduction of resources. But it is also a product of the link and search economy: The only way to stand out is to add unique value and quality. My advice in the past has been: If you can’t imagine why someone would link to what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. And: Do what you do best and link to the rest. The link economy is ruthless in judging value.

The question every journalist must ask is: Am I adding value?

I've tried to let that question guide my reporting for the last three years (and I'm pretty sure I've asked some version of it in a newsroom meeting at some point), and I think Jarvis is spot-on: We have less time and fewer resources to do our jobs than ever before, so there's less leeway than ever for the mindless, repetitive fluff that has made up so much of the daily grind of journalism since time immemorial.

I've been troubled at times by how much of my time at work is spent on stories in which my added value is minimal at best. I mean the stories that the local weekly is going to cover just as well as we will; the ones where I'm just retracing another paper's steps because I've been beaten on a story; the quick-turnaround, one-or-two-source stories that are there literally to fill space over the weekend cycle.

There's a reason we do these kinds of stories. As a small daily newspaper with just five news reporters, we need these stories just to reach that critical mass of news that keeps readers from opening their papers and saying, "There's nothing in here." And many of these stories are news to our readers: Just because we aren't the first or only outlet to cover them doesn't mean they aren't still newsworthy. (This is a fallacy to which I'm especially prone; I regularly have to remind myself of the previous sentence when deciding whether to follow on a previously reported story that I know I still need to cover.)

Here's where I think Jarvis' flaw lies: He seems to be operating on the assumption that if a story is out there, people will find it. That makes sense for much big-issue national coverage. No one wants to read the AP's summary of the State of the Union; they want to watch the speech itself and then read some trenchant analysis of it. (And no one wants to read the Washington Post's summary of the New York Times' warrantless wiretapping scoops; they want to read the Times' original.)

But on the local news level, that's simply not the way things work. A local TV station might be the first ones to report a kidnapping arrest last night and I might not have much to add to their account, but that doesn't mean the story is at the level of "commodity knowledge," as Jarvis calls it. I can't assume that most of our readers are voracious news consumers who will find a story soon after it's reported, no matter where. People have lives; they don't watch the news every night, and they don't constantly check the websites of several area newspapers throughout the day to spot the first iteration of every news story. Isn't that part of what we're learning in this new media ecosystem--that the news now has to find consumers, rather than vice versa? I think that's exactly what we're doing with some of these less "value-intensive" stories.

That said, I wholeheartedly agree with Jarvis that we simply can't afford repetition and stenography anymore. The shift is going to take a lot of tough concessions and inspire quite a few "But that's the way we've always done it!" objections. But it absolutely must be done. If old media institutions (or any media outlets, for that matter) want to play a role in the new media ecosystem, every inch of type and every second of video needs to add some value to the consumer. Anything less is not only bad business; it's a dereliction of duty.

Way to represent, Larry.

I love Slate as much the next guy, but let's be honest, their operative worldview--East Coast, liberal, urban, secular, upper-middle-class (at least), very culturally hip--is a couple thousand miles from mine.

So it's always a refreshing surprise to see a legitimately Christian viewpoint there, let alone an argument for orthodox Christianity. But that's what I found this morning with a short essay by Larry Hurtado, head of the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, called "Why Was Jesus crucified?"

It's just a good, simple, something-to-think-about essay outlining some of the historical context of Jesus' death. And Hurtado's right: "Crucifiability" needs to be made a big part of the "historical Jesus" discussion, stat.

A good-movie overload--not a bad problem to have.

Dana and I have been busy watching Mad Men on our Netflix, so we've seen approximately two movies (Doubt and Benjamin Button) since Christmas. That changed last week, when Slumdog Millionaire and Gran Torino played at our town's wonderful historic, volunteer-run theater on consecutive weekends. (You'll have to excuse our town. It's a little slow when it comes to getting good movies.)*

*Of course, both movies were playing at the mall theater a month ago, but we're cheap. And we love seeing movies at a historic theater.

So when I've gone from seeing two movies in three months to watching the two best movies I've seen in at least a year within the span of a week, you know I've got to write about it. I'll avoid spoilers, so have no fear and read on.

Slumdog: I couldn't help but compare Slumdog with the 2002 Brazilian film City of God. Both chronicle life in the slums, both are coming-of-age films, and both follow two boys as they take morally diverging paths from their roots in a makeshift childhood gang ("The Tender Trio" in City of God, "The Three Musketeers" in Slumdog). Slumdog took off a ton of the harder edges of City of God--an absolutely brutal film--and with the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" conceit and occasional humor, tinges the entire thing with a latent sunshiny glow. In doing so, I think Slumdog loses a little bit of City of God's epic scope, but it also makes the film much more accessible to mainstream audiences. Sure, it's comparatively whitewashed, but I had the strong impression that Slumdog is essentially City of God with some significantly redemptive qualities--a reward that's more than worth sitting through the brutality for. And that is most definitely a good thing.

The one thing that troubled me about this otherwise fantastic film--and it may be more my fault than the movie's--was the simplicity of its theme. I like to come away from movies that bill themselves as substantive thinking about difficult moral decisions, ambiguities and conundrums, and just generally pondering the meaning of life. I didn't really have anything like that to think about as I left Slumdog. I came away with an incredible affirmation of life itself, but I didn't see much more there thematically than "love conquers all" and the moral purity of Jamal. (The game show bathroom scene and the one that followed were an indelible illustration of the latter.) It was an epic love and rags-to-riches story--two of the classic themes in movie history--extremely well told. Is a familiar story told incredibly well enough to make a movie an elite one? Or are my expectations outrageous?

I talked about this with my friend Matt, and he suggested that the main theme was instead redemption--that out of the most horrible circumstances, Jamal's family, his love relationship, his place in life are redeemed through his honesty, loyalty and moral purity. Oh, right--that's probably the "redemptive element" City of God was missing. On second thought, I'll take that as a theme. Ain't nothing wrong with that.

Gran Torino: An absolute gem of a film. This may have been one of the most Christian movies I've ever seen. In fact, the Christ-imagery almost reaches the point of overkill at the end, but it still remains a profound, complex, fully alive example of just what atonement, grace and freedom truly mean.* The problem for most evangelicals is that this wonderful explanation comes wrapped up in an R-rated stream of f-bombs and racial slurs--"many of which, quite frankly, [Focus on the Family had] never heard before." (Spoiler alert on that link). It's a shame, really, that that will keep many Christians from seeing such a fantastic movie. A few friends of ours said folks from our church were arguing with them this week that Gran Torino was an awful, anti-Christian movie. They hadn't even seen it. I'm not saying the flood of racial epithets aren't disturbing--they're ridiculously offensive, and I'm not sure I'd recommend this movie to my mother--but let's look past the f-word count and focus on the more substantive values of this film, shall we? If we avoid it as typical Hollywood corruption, it's our loss.

*I'd love to go into a deeper examination of that imagery, but it's really tough to do without spoilers. And you should all go see it, so I'm not going to ruin it for you.

Podcast #1: Get to know ... Led Zeppelin

The first-ever Feel The Funk, Y'all podcast is here! I had all but given up hope of ever finding someplace that would allow me to host a 23-minute podcast online for free, when, thanks to Twitter, Omaha wedding photographer Lane Hickenbottom came to the rescue with some leftover space he wasn't using. So I guess I was wrong: There's probably no way to host a 23-minute podcast online for free--unless you have an exceptionally generous former co-worker who's willing to bail you out. Thanks, Lane!

This first podcast is essentially a "Get to know..." post in audio form (where it belongs) on Led Zeppelin. As you listen, you may think to yourself, "Between the boring host, occasional background fuzz and sloppy editing, I would rate this podcast somewhere between mediocre and downright horrid." And you might be right. But remember these facts, dear listener, as you issue your silent judgment:

1. I'm just producing these as a way to learn a skill that I'll probably find necessary at some point over the next several years. Public consumption isn't a primary aim.

2. In fact, I realized while editing this podcast that it may not be legal by copyright law, so I finished it not expecting to make it public at all. But my paper's web editor assured me that I'm probably on the right side of the law on this one, so I decided to throw it up there, haphazard production quality and all.

3. I have bigger plans for a few future podcasts. I still like the idea of more "Get to know ..." podcasts, but I also want to have guests so you can listen to someone more interesting than me.

4. Come on, it's my first try!

Enjoy.

Get to know ... Led Zeppelin