Dave Badtke’s Blog

When we get together during the holidays with family and friends, one thing naturally leads to another — generational catching up, drink, food, song, games, photos, long walks — until we arrive at discussions that involve the state of affairs, which can be challenging, for we try to focus on things we want to explore while navigating around stressful deep pits that wreak havoc.

No matter how these discussions worked for you — my hope is that they were pleasant and thoughtful — you, like I, were probably exposed to a range of intelligences that made the holidays more memorable.

Gardner's Multiple Intelligence Model

And when thinking of multiple intelligences, Howard Gardner is our go-to psychologist who has long been recognized as the person who can help us understand the complexity of intelligence, which, by his definition, consists of the ability to create, solve and discover:

• the ability to create an effective product or offer a service that is valued in a culture;
• a set of skills that make it possible for a person to solve problems in life;
• the potential for finding or creating solutions for problems, which involves gathering new knowledge.

With this as his foundation, Gardner, who started with seven intelligences in his 1993 Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice, believes now that there were nine different intelligences on display during our Thanksgiving holiday:

HOWARD GARDNER’S NINE MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES:

1. Linguistic Intelligence: the capacity to use language to express what’s on your mind and to understand other people. Any kind of writer, orator, speaker, lawyer, or other person for whom language is an important stock in trade has great linguistic intelligence.

2. Logical/Mathematical Intelligence: the capacity to understand the underlying principles of some kind of causal system, the way a scientist or a logician does; or to manipulate numbers, quantities, and operations, the way a mathematician does.

3. Musical Rhythmic Intelligence: the capacity to think in music; to be able to hear patterns, recognize them, and perhaps manipulate them. People who have strong musical intelligence don’t just remember music easily, they can’t get it out of their minds, it’s so omnipresent.

4. Bodily/Kinesthetic Intelligence: the capacity to use your whole body or parts of your body (your hands, your fingers, your arms) to solve a problem, make something, or put on some kind of production. The most evident examples are people in athletics or the performing arts, particularly dancing or acting.

5. Spatial Intelligence: the ability to represent the spatial world internally in your mind — the way a sailor or airplane pilot navigates the large spatial world, or the way a chess player or sculptor represents a more circumscribed spatial world. Spatial intelligence can be used in the arts or in the sciences.

6. Naturalist Intelligence: the ability to discriminate among living things (plants, animals) and sensitivity to other features of the natural world (clouds, rock configurations). This ability was clearly of value in our evolutionary past as hunters, gatherers, and farmers; it continues to be central in such roles as botanist or chef.

7. Intrapersonal Intelligence: having an understanding of yourself; knowing who you are, what you can do, what you want to do, how you react to things, which things to avoid, and which things to gravitate toward. We are drawn to people who have a good understanding of themselves. They tend to know what they can and can’t do, and to know where to go if they need help.

8. Interpersonal Intelligence: the ability to understand other people. It’s an ability we all need, but is especially important for teachers, clinicians, salespersons, or politicians — anybody who deals with other people.

9. Existential Intelligence: the ability and proclivity to pose (and ponder) questions about life, death, and ultimate realities.

"Just a Family: A multiracial family gathers to talk about being mixed race in America."

. . . or as the French say, plus ça change, plus ça reste la même: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Those of us who don’t experience discrimination tend to forget, since we believe our society has moved past racism and bigotry, that others do not share our experience. When we go to the store, no one notices us one way or another.

Susan Saulny writing in the  New York Times last Thursday finds that some multiracial couples are too-often explaining their family’s complexions to strangers who should, at a minimum, think empathically before speaking. Take, e.g., Heather Greenwood’s experience:

“How come she’s so white and you’re so dark?”

The question tore through Heather Greenwood as she was about to check out at a store here one afternoon this summer. Her brown hands were pushing the shopping cart that held her babbling toddler, Noelle, all platinum curls, fair skin and ice-blue eyes.

The woman behind Mrs. Greenwood, who was white, asked once she realized, by the way they were talking, that they were mother and child. “It’s just not possible,” she charged indignantly. “You’re so…dark!”

After my older son Luke earned his degree at UC Santa Cruz, he went to Japan where he has been ever since. That was almost two decades ago. He created Knee High Media in 1996, and my younger son Joe went to work for Luke after Joe graduated from Haverford College in 2002.

Luke is married to Kaori, whose family lives in Yaizu, south of Tokyo. Joe is married to Mina, who is also Japanese though she grew up in Germany. While Joe and Mina now live in New York City, they also have strong ties to Japan.

Shorty after the quake and tsunami in Japan, Joe sent me a link to an article in Japan Times, a publication for which both Luke and Joe wrote. In his email Joe wrote,

It is an interesting piece, and for me, strangely, one of the most strongly emotional of any I have read so far. Ssomething about the use of the language, so incredibly Japanese, brings out the strength of will and spirit that we are seeing in people. I’m not sure if it will come through for you, too, but I found myself very struck by it.

In the article by Kaori Shoji, you’ll discover that  tensai means heavenly disaster.

October 1 marked the 50th anniversary of Nigeria’s independence from England, and the journey from an exploited colony to a democratic nation has been anything but smooth. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, during her 2009 visit, that the World Bank reported that Nigeria lost over $300 billion, almost 1/3 of a trillion dollars, over the past 30 years as a result of corrupt practices. For a country with a population of 155 million and a per-capita income of just $1,160,  losing this kind of money to exploitation and corruption is especially damaging because of the inequality it creates.

Graduate student Adegbola Ojo at the University of Sheffield is trying to make this inequality graphically visible on his website:

The main findings from the atlas include:

• More than 70 percent of children within Toiling Country Dwellings and Middle-class Country Dwellings are unlikely to be enrolled in school

• Out of every 100 households in most areas, there are less than 10 where females own either land or a home.

• The pattern of inequality among women who receive assistance from doctors during childbirth suggests that almost half of the country´s potential mothers will have to relocate from their current residences to other areas for a state of national equilibrium to be attained.

Take a look at the various maps that are available. Go to the help file to understand how the indices are calculated.

One longs to have the kinds of maps that one can peruse on Dr. Ojo’s website available for the U.S. as well. Do they perhaps exist already?

I’m now writing for a new online publication, Benicia.Patch.com. My columns, Quiddities: Musings Essential and Frivolous, appear on Tuesdays.

In the past I wrote for the Benicia Herald, the Vallejo Times-Herald, and a early adopter of the online-news approach, BeniciaNews.com. Unfortunately BeniciaNews.com eventually failed, so it’s good to see another publication delivering local news sans newsprint, which can be more convenient in certain venues where it can be left lying about, but which is expensive and wasteful of natural resources.

If my English students would like the opportunity to critique my columns, now’s your chance. Of course, I hope you’ll be nice, and should you find grammatical or logic errors, please be gentle.

In today’s Washington Post Ted Koppel captures so much of why we have struggled to live up to our ideals since 9/11/2001, suggesting that Osama bin Laden couldn’t have hoped for a more damaging response on our part: two wars that have cost us so dearly in lives, ours, our allies, Iraqis and Afghanis; over a trillion spent on these wars; and a growing meanness that has included the reification of fear in terms like evil-doers, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and now, in its latest manifestation, the Qu’ran and Islamic mosques.  As Koppel concludes:

We have raced to Afghanistan and Iraq, and more recently to Yemen and Somalia; we have created a swollen national security apparatus; and we are so absorbed in our own fury and so oblivious to our enemy’s intentions that we inflate the building of an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan into a national debate and watch, helpless, while a minister in Florida outrages even our friends in the Islamic world by threatening to burn copies of the Koran.

If bin Laden did not foresee all this, then he quickly came to understand it. In a 2004 video message, he boasted about leading America on the path to self-destruction. “All we have to do is send two mujaheddin . . . to raise a small piece of cloth on which is written ‘al-Qaeda’ in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses.”

Through the initial spending of a few hundred thousand dollars, training and then sacrificing 19 of his foot soldiers, bin Laden has watched his relatively tiny and all but anonymous organization of a few hundred zealots turn into the most recognized international franchise since McDonald’s. Could any enemy of the United States have achieved more with less?

Could bin Laden, in his wildest imaginings, have hoped to provoke greater chaos? It is past time to reflect on what our enemy sought, and still seeks, to accomplish — and how we have accommodated him.

The third-world threat I’m referring to is our own as we slowly become a nation with unequal education, unequal job prospects and unequal wealth. Recently in the NY Times, Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration and now a Berkeley professor, wrote that the amount of money going to the top 1% has more than doubled since 1970:

The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty examined tax returns from 1913 to 2008. They discovered an interesting pattern. In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation’s total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income.

Increasingly we’re becoming a society divided by money, education and ideology. Find out more and what we might do to turn back towards being a first-world nation by following this link.

Recent picture from "The New York Times." See the April 27, 2010 article by Deborah Sontag: "Despair Grows on Devastated Street in Haiti."

The people of Haiti freed themselves from slavery more than 200 years ago, on New Year’s Day, 1804, but they remain slaves to a cataclysmic history.

In 1825 France demanded 100 million francs in return for granting Haiti’s freedom. One can imagine that the French argument centered on payments for investments they had made to develop the island, an island that was founded on exploitation of its land and people, most of whom were slaves. In 1789, e.g., it is estimated that of the 556,000 people on the island, 500,000 were slaves, and almost all of these had been transported from West Africa. (This and other historical information is from “Haiti.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Standard Edition. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2010.)

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former president who fled Haiti in 2004 in the face of internal revolution and the withdrawal of U.S. and French support, has estimated that the current-dollar equivalent of those reparation payments is 21 billion dollars. In a country of some nine and a half million people, this would amount to approximately $2200 per person. While this doesn’t sound like much in a country ravaged by corrupt governments, poverty, disease and natural disasters, including the recent earthquake that killed more than 100,000, it’s important to remember that the per-capita income is ~$1,200 per year.

During Haiti’s 200 years of independence, presidents have named themselves kings and emperors, have been assassinated, have committed suicide, and have generally served themselves more than their people. Between 1843 and 1915, there were 20 rulers, 16 of whom were overthrown by revolution or were assassinated (“Haiti” 12).

And then U.S. Marines occupied Haiti for 19 years, from 1915 to 1934, ostensibly to provide relief, though Haitians tend to believe the Marines were there to protect American interests, among them them Panama Canal, since Haiti could be used as a base of operations to protect access to the canal.

But the U.S. occupation brought a racial attitude in addition to force, for the U.S. during this period was a highly segregated society. The aftermath of a failed reconstruction had intensified southern racism, and the diaspora of African-Americans north heightened racial tensions in urban areas like Chicago, Detroit and New York City. And because the armed services weren’t integrated by President Truman until after WWII, the Marines who occupied Haiti were white.

As a result, Americans favored Haitian’s of mixed race, who seemed more “white,” over their darker brothers, worsening a color divide that was a legacy of French rule.

One effect of the Marine occupation was the nominal reestablishment of the mulatto elite’s control of the government. Black Haitians, in contrast, felt that they were excluded from public office and subjected to racist indignities at the hands of the Marines, including the corvée, an old law permitting forced labour for road construction; in response, peasant cacos (guerrillas) carried out a series of attacks. The Marines’ public works program also included building new health clinics and sewerage systems, but most Haitians felt the effort inadequate.

A Dominican massacre along the border followed in 1937 as did repressive rulers like François Duvalier, “Papa Doc,” and his son, Jean-Claude, “Baby Doc,” who created a paramilitary group, the Tonton Macoutes, the “Bogeymen,” to control and terrorize in their police state.

But nature has had a hand in the disasters as well. AIDs affects 2.2% of the population, which is almost three times the world average. And hurricane Gustav flooded much of the deforested island in 2008, followed by the recent earthquake in an area of substandard housing where the last major earthquake struck in 1842. Since Haiti’s name derives from the Arawak word Ayti, mountainous land, perhaps one might expect some seismic activity, but really, going from nothing to a magnitude 7.0 quake on January 12 of this year is, to say the least, unexpected.

And so the question becomes, can Haiti’s future be changed and how might this happen? Ethics plays a role in analyzing the alternatives, but ethics may not make our decision much easier since resources limit our options whereas the ethical dilemmas presented by Haiti cry out for simultaneous actions on so many fronts.

My English 1 students will recognize something familiar in Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us since Brent Staples whistles exactly this to put people at ease. We learn this about Staples, a friend of Steele’s, in Staples’ “Black Men in Public Space,” an essay that has been anthologized in most introductory English texts.

What distinguishes Staples, who’s an adjunct professor at several colleges and who writes occasional columns for The New York Times, is the empathy he expresses when he’s stereotyped by those who fear him. “Black Men in Public Space” relates how when he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1970s, his skin color and size — he was a young, 6′2″ African-American man who tended to wear fatigues and an Afro — defined him more than his intellect.

Brent Staples

Instead of getting angry for being treated unfairly, however, he empathized with those who feared him and used coping strategies, like whistling Vivaldi, to put strangers at ease. Some might object that one shouldn’t modify one’s identity to please others. This strategy, it would seem, runs so counter to the American libertarian ethos that some believe so strongly — I own myself and so do you, so leave me alone — that empathy, like liberal, is becoming an epithet for some.

It’s important to remember that empathy is a state of mind. It’s the ability for someone to walk in someone else’s shoes, to understand his or her needs, her impediments, her turning points, her resolutions. Empathy should be the precursor to action. Only after understanding another’s point of view should we decide what action to take at which point we might decide to express sympathy or antipathy, kindness or anger. While empathy doesn’t predetermine what action we’ll take, it does encourage us to step outside our too-often self-serving opinions before taking action.

This is the ideal, but Staples understood that if a young woman walking in Hyde Park at night encountered him, not knowing anything more about him besides his appearance, she might well run for her life because we’re not always able to do a proper assessment if we are fearful. And so he developed a coping strategy that put others at their ease.

While I’ve just started reading Steele’s book and won’t really have time to continue until the semester is finished, final papers are graded, and grades are in, Steele seems to suggest, based on psychological studies, that stereotypes have a significant effect on how we behave and, that teachers, who can affect students in subtle ways, need to understand how easily they can discourage students when they intend just the opposite.

Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire by Robert Perkinson, reviewed today by Daniel Bergner in the New York Times Book Review, claims that, and here Bergner is paraphrasing,

Not only do we incarcerate at some six times the rate that Britain does . . . or around seven times the rate of Canada, but, Perkinson relates, African-Americans are seven times as likely to be locked up as whites, and African-American men today go to prison at twice the rate they go to college.” (Emphasis mine)

Perkinson claims that America moved from “the age of slavery to the age of incarceration.” And Texas is the worst. From the 1960s until 2000 the number of prisoners has increased 600 percent nationally, that’s a factor of 6, but in Texas the number has increased by 1200 percent, a factor of 12.

See the review for more on Perkinson’s proposed causes for this horrible state, but the fact that there are approximately 2 million in prison is more than a reason to be concerned: it’s an indication that we don’t seem to care much about the least well-off in our society. And shouldn’t we measure the health of a society by the way in which it treats the least well-off, not the most well-off, since the latter, by definition, fare well even in the most totalitarian, unjust societies?

Here it’s good to remember John Rawls’ difference principle, one part of which states that we can tolerate inequality as long as the least well-off benefit (the following is from the Stanford philosophy website):

The most widely discussed theory of distributive justice in the past three decades has been that proposed by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, (Rawls 1971), and Political Liberalism, (Rawls 1993). Rawls proposes the following two principles of justice:

1. Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair value.

2. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: (a) They are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and (b), they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. (Rawls 1993, pp. 5-6. The principles are numbered as they were in Rawls’ original A Theory of Justice.)

In brief, rights and liberties should be equally available and social and economic inequalities, which can never be fully eliminated, “are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.”

If the nation’s financial deficit is one measure of our economic health, perhaps the percent in prison is one measure of our ethical health. The graph at left is from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Note the steep increase in the number of adults on probation between 1980, when it was approximately 1/2 percent of the population to 2008, when the number had more than doubled to approximately 1.3 percent of the population.

The BJS statistics are shocking:

Summary findings

• In 2008, over 7.3 million people were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole, 3.2% of all U.S. adult residents or 1 in every 31 adults.
• About 70 percent of the persons under correctional supervision at yearend 2008 were supervised in the community, either on probation or parole, while 30 percent were incarcerated in the nation’s prisons or jails.
• At yearend 2008 a total of 4,270,917 adult men and women were on probation and 828,169 were on parole or mandatory conditional release following a prison term.
• State and federal prison authorities had jurisdiction over 1,610,446 prisoners at midyear 2008: 1,409,166 in state jurisdiction and 201,280 in federal jurisdiction.
• Local jails held 785,556 persons awaiting trial or serving a sentence at midyear 2008. An additional 72,852 persons under jail supervision were serving their sentence in the community.

If all this seems as though it’s too much to fathom, remember above all that an African-American male is twice as likely to go to prison than college.