by Rupe | Dec 19, 2005 | Mad Musings
By BRENT STAPLES
Published: December 15, 2005
Americans typically grow up believing that slavery was confined to the cotton fields of the South and that the North was always made up of free states. The fact that slavery was practiced all over the early United States often comes as a shock to people in places like New York, where the myth of the free North has been surprisingly durable. The truth is that New York was at one time a center of the slave trade, with more black people enslaved than any other city in the country, with the possible exception of Charleston, S.C.
The New-York Historical Society in Manhattan has set out to make all this clear in its pathbreaking “Slavery in New York” exhibition, which ends in March. It is being described as the first exhibition by a major museum that focuses on the long-neglected issue of slavery in the North.
New York’s central position in the slave trade was partially exposed in 1991, when workers excavating for an office tower in Lower Manhattan uncovered a long-forgotten burial ground that may have originally spread for as much as a mile. It served as the final resting place for thousands of enslaved New Yorkers.
Among the bodies exhumed and examined, about 40 percent were of children under the age of 15; the most common cause of death was malnutrition. Some enslaved mothers appear to have committed infanticide, rather than bringing their children into what was clearly a hellish environment. Adults typically died of hard labor, dumped into their graves by owners who simply went out and bought more slaves.
Slavery was no less brutal in New York than in the South – and just as pervasive. At one point, about four in 10 New York households owned human beings. The free human labor that ran the city’s most gracious homes also helped to build its early infrastructure and supplied the muscle needed by the beef, grain and shipping interests, which forestalled emancipation until 1827 – making New York among the last Northern states to abolish slavery.
Judging from the videotaped responses of visitors to the historical society, people who thought they knew New York’s history well have been badly shaken to learn about the depth and breadth of human bondage in the city. As one distraught patron put it, “The ground we touch, every institution, is affected by slavery.”
Historians who had expected to find early 18th-century slave masters agonizing over the moral questions associated with slavery were surprised in a different way. One researcher said the record before the Revolutionary War held not a single scrap of paper to support the notion of guilt among the slaveholding classes.
By conveniently “forgetting” slavery, Northerners have historically absolved themselves of complicity while heaping blame onto the shoulders of the plantation South. This cultural amnesia will no longer be plausible after the country absorbs the New-York Historical Society’s eye-opening exhibition, which vigorously debunks the myth of the “free” North. BRENT STAPLES
by Rupe | Dec 17, 2005 | Mad Musings
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Scientists said yesterday that they have discovered a tiny genetic mutation that largely explains the first appearance of white skin in humans tens of thousands of years ago, a finding that helps solve one of biology’s most enduring mysteries and illuminates one of humanity’s greatest sources of strife.
The work suggests that the skin-whitening mutation occurred by chance in a single individual after the first human exodus from Africa, when all people were brown-skinned. That person’s offspring apparently thrived as humans moved northward into what is now Europe, helping to give rise to the lightest of the world’s races.
Leaders of the study, at Penn State University, warned against interpreting the finding as a discovery of “the race gene.” Race is a vaguely defined biological, social and political concept, they noted, and skin color is only part of what race is — and is not.
In fact, several scientists said, the new work shows just how small a biological difference is reflected by skin color. The newly found mutation involves a change of just one letter of DNA code out of the 3.1 billion letters in the human genome — the complete instructions for making a human being.
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by Rupe | Dec 14, 2005 | Mad Musings
Minorities Are Willing to Volunteer but Often Are Not AskedBy Rick Weiss
It is a truism that black people do not trust the medical establishment and are reluctant to volunteer for experiments.
And why should they volunteer, the story goes, given the widely known history of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, where for decades doctors withheld medical treatment from several hundred black men with advanced syphilis as part of a sordid federal study?
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by Rupe | Dec 14, 2005 | Mad Musings
Few Athletes and Celebrities Have Given
By Darryl Fears
LOUISVILLE — The glamour, the popping camera lights of the paparazzi, and an impressive lineup of movie stars such as Jim Carrey, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and Chris Tucker gave a glitzy Hollywood feel to the grand opening of the Muhammad Ali Center in this horse-racing town.
Lonnie Ali, the boxing champ’s wife, could barely hold back tears as she stood in the shadow of the $75 million center, with its soaring butterfly roof and its dozens of exhibits, replete with LeRoy Nieman paintings of “the Greatest” in his glory days
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by Rupe | Nov 24, 2005 | Mad Musings
By BRENT STAPLES
Published: November 21, 2005
The United States will become a second-rate economic power unless it can match the educational performance of its rivals abroad and get more of its students to achieve at the highest levels in math, science and literacy. Virtually every politician, business leader and educator understands this, yet the country has no national plan for reaching the goal. To make matters worse, Americans have remained openly hostile to the idea of importing strategies from the countries that are beating the pants off us in the educational arena.
The No Child Left Behind Act, passed four years ago, was supposed to put this problem on the national agenda. Instead, the country has gotten bogged down in a squabble about a part of the law that requires annual testing in the early grades to ensure that the states are closing the achievement gap. The testing debate heated up last month when national math and reading scores showed dismal performance across the board.
Lurking behind these test scores, however, are two profoundly important and closely intertwined topics that the United States has yet to even approach: how teachers are trained and how they teach what they teach. These issues get a great deal of attention in high-performing systems abroad – especially in Japan, which stands light years ahead of us in international comparisons.
Americans tend to roll their eyes when researchers raise the Japanese comparison. The most common response is that Japanese culture is “nothing like ours.” Nevertheless, the Japanese system has features that could be fruitfully imitated here, as the education reformers James Stigler and James Hiebert pointed out in their book “The Teaching Gap,” published in 1999.
The book has spawned growing interest in the Japanese teacher-development strategy in which teachers work cooperatively and intensively to improve their methods. This process, known as “lesson study,” allows teachers to revise and refine lessons that are then shared with others, sometimes through video and sometimes at conventions. In addition to helping novices, this system builds a publicly accessible body of knowledge about what works in the classroom.
The lesson-study groups focus on refining methods that improve student understanding. In doing so, the groups go step by step, laying out successful strategies for teaching specific lessons. This reflects the Japanese view that successful teaching is the product of intensive teacher development and self-scrutiny. In America, by contrast, novice teachers are often presumed competent on Day One. They have few opportunities in their careers to watch successful colleagues in action. We also tend to believe that educational change would happen overnight – if only we could find the right formula. This often leaves us prey to fads that put schools on the wrong track.
There are two other things that set this country apart from its high-performing peers abroad. One is the American sense that teaching is a skill that people come by naturally. We also have a curriculum that varies widely by region. The countries that are leaving us behind in math and science decide at the national level what students should learn and when. The schools are typically overseen by ministries of education that spend a great deal of time on what might be called educational quality control.
The United States, by contrast, has 50 different sets of standards for 50 different states – and within states, the quality of education depends largely on the neighborhood where the student lives. No Child Left Behind was meant to cure this problem by penalizing states that failed to improve student performance, as measured by annual tests.
The states have gotten around the new law by setting state standards as low as possible and making state tests easy. This strategy was exposed as fraudulent just last month, when states that had performed so well on their own exams performed dismally on the alternative and more rigorous test known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
No Child Left Behind was based on the premise that embarrassing test scores and government sanctions would simply force schools to improve educational outcomes for all students. What has become clear, however, is that school systems and colleges of education have no idea how to generate changes in teaching that would allow students to learn more effectively. Indeed, state systems that have typically filled teaching positions by grabbing any warm body they could find are only just beginning to think about the issue at all.
Faced with lagging test scores and pressure from the federal government, some school officials have embraced the dangerous but all-too-common view that millions of children are incapable of high-level learning. This would be seen as heresy in Japan. But it is fundamental to the American system, which was designed in the 19th century to provide rigorous education for only about a fifth of the students, while channeling the rest into farm and factory jobs that no longer exist.
The United States will need a radically different mind set to catch up with high-performing competitors. For starters we will need to focus as never before on the process through which teachers are taught to teach. We will also need to drop the arrogance and xenophobia that have blinded us to successful models developed abroad.
My thoughts: Pretty lousy approach to education we have. All things lead by to racism in my mind….sorry.
by Rupe | Nov 24, 2005 | Mad Musings
By Marilynn Marchione
Associated Press
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Children who are overweight face more than future health problems. They appear to have broken bones and joint problems more often during childhood than kids of normal weight, research suggests.
“A lot of people think that if you’re an overweight kid . . . that later on in life you’re going to run into having heart disease or Type 2 diabetes,” said Susan Yanovski, director of the obesity and eating disorders program at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
“But kids and adults who are overweight are already having problems with their mobility, fractures and joint pain.”
A study led by her husband, obesity researcher Jack Yanovski, found that children and teenagers who are overweight are far more likely to have had a fracture than their ideal-weight peers. They also have more bone and hip joint abnormalities, which can lead to permanent deformities.
The research involved 227 overweight children and adolescents and 128 who were not overweight. The children had an average age of 12. All were enrolled in various federal health studies between 1996 and 2004 and were considered overweight if they were in the 95th percentile of weight and height for their age and sex.
A review of their medical history revealed that 13 percent of overweight kids had had at least one broken bone at some point in their lives, compared with less than 4 percent of ideal-weight children. Similar results were found for how many had muscle, bone or joint pain, and restricted movement.
“The combination of musculoskeletal pain and poor mobility may possibly lead to less physical activity . . . and perpetuate the vicious cycle,” said Jack Yanovski, head of the growth and obesity program at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. He presented results of the study at a recent meeting of the Obesity Society in Vancouver, B.C.
Children often say their knees hurt, but the real problem is the malformation that is starting to occur in the joint, said Junichi Tamai, a pediatric orthopedic surgeon at Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati. Being unable to exercise makes the situation worse.
“If a child is very active, chances are the bones are very strong,” because weight-bearing exercise promotes bone density, Tamai said.
