Some of my Thoughts on the Crisis of Police and Racial Injustice

Today is June 8th, and amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020, we in the United States are now seeing massive expressions of frustration and anger at racist injustice (and, I assume, economic unfairness mixed in with that, since racist injustice and economic exploitation are intertwined). We’re also seeing extremists who have lost all interest in preserving American society attempt to hijack the protests to further their own agendas (grabbing consumer goods, sparking a race war, sparking a class war, provoking more chaos so that “their side” can gain respect or the “other side” can be discredited).  My understanding of what goes on comes from various newspapers and websites, NPR, and the posts friends and family and colleagues and former students are making on Facebook and Instagram. There is a great deal of strong emotion, as there should be, when such injustices are brought to our attention. 

One of my concerns is the lack of good quality information. When people I have known for years report on what they are seeing and experiencing, I generally trust that pretty well. When people I know and trust report what they hear as second-hand reports of what has happened, I don’t always assume the sources they are using are giving me a fair or complete picture.  And when it comes to journalism, I’m especially dismayed by the lack of journalistic integrity and the difficulty journalists have in giving their audiences some understanding of scope or context. Journalists are especially interested in reporting extraordinary and sensational stories, so I suspect the violence and looting are exaggerated, but perhaps the opposite is so: perhaps police brutality and looting are even worse than reported. I don’t know, and the information I'm getting doesn’t allow me to form a clear impression of the degree or quantity of horrible things happening. As part of my training as a social scientist when I was earning a doctorate, I was encourage to not waste my time on bad information, and so I have not been reading much of the journalism about protests and riots and COVID-19 because I am aware that much of what is provided is bad information, and reading it converts my time into increased confusion and ignorance. I do not want to increase my ignorance or misunderstanding.  

Here is what I know.  In local law enforcement in the United States there is a persistent problem  of persons who are not psychologically suited to wielding lethal force on behalf of the public gaining authority and misusing it. No one who studies law enforcement can have any doubts about this. Some police and some prosecutors routinely violate the civil rights of the persons whose rights they are entrusted to protect. Many police forces use psychological screening to reduce the number of sadistic and corrupt police, but despite these attempts, there are still too many abusive and cruel psychopaths over-represented in law enforcement. Another problem is racism, where police have a bias against African-Americans or Hispanics, and it can be worse than mere “bias” in many cases, with actual hatred/contempt/fear being part of how police respond to people who are non-white. 

I am seeing many video clips showing police behaving in criminally incompetent ways, firing rubber bullets directly at peaceful protestors from short-range rather than shooting at the ground to hit people in the legs with ricochet from a greater distance. Police are using excessive force and violence on persons who are exercising their civil rights and not threatening any property or persons.  Police who behave this way are proving the point of the demonstrators and protestors; we have a serious problem with many police in our society. One example is the case from Buffalo, New York, where video captured an image of two police knocking down an elderly man who was out after the curfew order (but was clearly not actively looting or rioting). The man fell to the ground and started to bleed, and in addition to the assault on this man, none of the officers in the rather large group of police offered him first aid as his blood pooled under his head. This event was already bad, but what makes it worse is that the police involved lied in their report, and mischaracterized the interaction as it was caught on film. And, even worse, when the two officers who illegally assaulted the man were suspended, all 57 members of this unit (a specially-trained riot team) resigned from their special riot control duties to return to the force as regular police. This mass action of loyalty to the two colleagues who behaved in a criminal manner demonstrates to me that every single member of that riot team puts more loyalty to their colleagues than they give to the Constitution or their duties to protect the rights of their fellow citizens. None of them should be allowed to work in law enforcement. The suggestion that most police are good and only a minority of them are bad is clearly false in the case of the Buffalo police riot team, where 100% of them failed to give aid to the elderly man who had been assaulted by two of their colleagues, and 100% failed to object to a false report being filed about the incident, and 100% of them put their loyalty to the Constitution and their duty to society at a lower priority than their loyalty to members of their team. That’s misplaced loyalty, and it’s a form of corruption.

The federal government has sometimes drawn attention to the problem of police corruption and criminal behavior. The Department of Justice investigated the police department in Fergusson, Missouri, and came out with a scathing report (which I assign my students to read, in part, when we study issues around justice and crime in my policy class). We do have federal marshals who occasionally arrest local police when corruption comes to their attention. I had students work in East St. Louis in the early 2000s when I believe some police were running a prostitution ring and engaging in other corrupt practices, and as I recall, the FBI had to blow their cover as they were doing a secret surveillance and arrest police who were under investigation when they intercepted a call (they were wire-tapping local police department phones) in which a police officer ordered a hit (an assassination) of someone. There are websites devoted to collecting stories of police misconduct.  There is a website devoted to covering stories of persons killed by police. As you read the stories in the killed-by-police websites, you realize that police really are doing dangerous work, over half of those killed by police were threatening the lives of police or others. And of many who weren’t actively threatening anyone when they were killed, several did legitimately seem to be a threat.  But as you read the stories, what you’ll notice is that a large minority percentage of the cases involve questionable shootings. My sense is that about 20% to 30% of the killings seem like they didn’t need to happen. And, about half of those that didn’t need to happen seem egregiously horrific. With about 900 to 1,000 persons killed by police each year, this a number of police killings that might be around 100 or slightly less each year, where the killing was bad enough that it seems to me that the police involved deserve criminal investigations, and in many cases, criminal charges. 

Yet, despite the investigation of the Fergusson, Missouri police, or the evidence from that team of specialized police in Buffalo, New York, I doubt that most police departments have corruption and illegal behavior that is so universal.  I understand that in research on complaints about police behavior in large police departments (e.g., Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, etc.) a pattern emerges where a tiny fraction of officers get almost half of all the complaints, and a larger minority get most of the remaining complaints, and a slightly larger minority gets most of the remainder of complaints.  So, it seems in many large departments, a tiny percentage (maybe 2% to 5%) are really horrible, and about 10% to 15% are sort of bad, and 20% to 30% are just not very good, but 68% to 50% of officers seem to be doing fine, and not getting any complaints from the public about their behavior. But even police in that good half to two-thirds are responsible for the behavior of the horrible 2% if they are not actively reporting and intervening to stop the behavior of the bad police. Most professions have ethical codes where professionals must intervene if they notice incompetence or unethical behavior by colleagues, and police should have the same ethical duty.

One problem I noticed in discussions I saw in social media comes from people who know and love people who work in law enforcement (I have friends and have had family members who worked in law enforcement). Some of them seem extremely defensive or scared, worried that characterizations of the police as “racist” or “bad” are unfair to the people they know. What I suspect is going on in those situations is that someone has a self-concept or identity that involves their respect and admiration for police, so when there are complaints about the sadism or racism or corruption or criminal activity of police, these people can’t dispassionately consider the facts and think about solutions; instead, they take the criticisms as personal attacks on their identity, and the fear this triggers elicits anger and hostility, and they argue back instead of accepting that the problem exists and thinking about what might work to solve it. Also, the problem is one of systems and institutions, and a police culture that has toxic aspects to it. So, when people want to talk about individual police who are good, or individuals they know in police work, they are missing the point that we have a pervasive cultural problem, and trying to keep the focus on the individual character of persons involved. Take, for example, the case of wartime atrocities and the acts of Lt. Calley in the village of My Lai. I once heard Seymour Hersh give a talk about Calley and Hersh described how the journalist Peter Ross Range got to know “Rusty” Calley, and described him as a person you would never expect to be a mass murderer. He was a “nice guy” who killed (directly or indirectly) 109 villagers, many of them children. The problem wasn’t so much that Calley was a depraved monster (he certainly was that for at least one day in My Lai), but that the war put him in an atrocity-inducing environment. The culture is now putting good guys (police) in an environment where some of them are committing atrocities. And, just like many Americans were enraged at Seymour Hersh for telling the story of the My Lai massacre, people are now very angry at the protesters and critics of police brutality.  It’s pretty much the same dynamic. 

Another point I have seen made in these discussions, and even heard made at a demonstration, is that the 100-or-so police killings of innocent persons each year are very small and nearly insignificant in comparison to the many Black Americans who are killed in regular community and family violence each year. There are about 14,000 homicide deaths in the USA each year, and very approximately half of all those murders are committed by African-Americans (with African-American victims almost always). African-Americans make up 12-14 percent of our population (depending on how you count persons identifying as mixed-race or bi-racial African-Americans), so clearly the homicide rates are disproportionately representing violence in the African-American community. But, if you control for poverty and living in high-crime neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, African-Americans aren’t really more violent than any other group.  That is to say, what we have a problem of high levels of violence among the poorest Americans who live in socially isolated communities with high violence and poverty all around them, and it so happens that about half of the Americans who live in those conditions are African-Americans. The “black-on-black” crime is actually a manifestation of “socially isolated impoverished persons committing violence against other poor persons” crime, and the racial backgrounds don’t contribute much (if anything at all) to the rates of violence or murder. To the extent that race plays a role, I imagine internalized racism may lead some African-Americans to devalue the lives of other Blacks; certainly this seems so in the lyrics of violent rap music songs.  But anyway, people are pointing out that there is much anger and many protests about a score or a few dozen of police murders of Black people each year, but nothing like this for the approximately 7,000 Black men murdered by non-police each year. Well, they’re right that we don’t make enough of a fuss about violence in impoverished communities (and thus, in Black communities), and there is also a factual correctness about the difference in scale: maybe 30-50 innocent or only mildly-criminal Blacks murdered by police each year compared to 7,000 murdered by associates and neighbors and friends. Persons emphasizing this critique, however, are missing the point that we expect a certain degree of homicidal anger among marginalized persons who live in poverty, and murderers are expected to do murderous things; but police have a monopoly on state-sanctioned violence, and their whole purpose is to defend and protect us, and so we naturally hold them to a higher standard than what we expect from the outcasts and pariahs who engage in violent crime and murders. It’s this difference in roles and expectations that makes people upset, because of the betrayal.  And also, along with the betrayal that makes police killing so outrageous, there is added to this the problem of the system and culture that makes this killing go on, with police seldom adequately punished when they murder or harm people, and the fact that this has been going on with police used as an instrument of oppression and harassment against African-Americans and other non-white Americans. The police represent the worst aspects of the power structure, and the power structure is habitually harming African-Americans, and has been doing so for 400 years; so yes, there is more anger directed at police and authorities for the rare killings (although 20-40 per year isn’t really all that rare, and such a count is only police killing of innocent and unarmed Blacks, and doesn’t count the tens of thousands of degrading and dehumanizing interactions African-Americans regularly have with the racist or insensitive police). 

Oddly enough, it’s probably racism that is at work in both the relatively high rates of violent crime and murder among African-American men and the widespread discourtesy and contempt directed by police toward African-Americans. In both cases, the perpetrator (either a police officer of whatever race, or a hot-headed young man or youth) is perceiving the victim as less valuable and less human. If we really had the culture that valued and celebrated life, police would be less likely to abuse African-Americans, and marginalized people would be less murderous toward other marginalized people, so there would be less violent crime (especially crime against African-Americans).

Some people seem to be confusing the protests with the looting. I think almost everyone agrees that the looting and rioting is wrong and bad; only a tiny fringe speaks out to defend or justify looting, and those who do so are undermining their credibility.  That said, as a social scientist, I could explain why people loot and riot, and I could even point to historical evidence that violence and the destruction of property may be effective in pushing the powerful and community leaders to make necessary changes. Likewise, everyone ought to agree that in the face of terrible injustice, the protests are justified and ought to be supported. It should be only a tiny fringe that opposes the protests or tries to blame protestors for the looting—a fringe of weak-minded critics just as small as the fringe that defends of the looting as necessary. But, of course, it's not. There are quite a large number of Americans who blame the protestors and associate looting and lawlessness with the protests. That's unfortunate, but to be expected when the class that owns so much property controls so much of the media that reports on the crisis, and so few media outlets are controlled by the sort of persons who are regularly victimized by police brutality. Also, while what I get from the media confuses me and is probably misleading, it does seem to me that the police are introducing the lawlessness and rioting.  I've seen many, many videos and read several articles describing unlawful behavior instigated by police or police operatives. And there are credible reports that some of the rioting and looting is initiated by persons who want to stir up hatred against the protestors or gain sympathy for the police.  I'm sure that happens, but I don't know how widespread it is.

Police have to deal with too many traumatic issues. They are mental health workers, although they don’t want to be, because we have inadequate services for persons with mental illnesses.  They are dispute arbitrators, although they don’t want to be, because we do not teach people in schools some basics of psychology or human relationships so they can avoid escalation of disputes. They are grief counselors, although they don’t want to be, because they deal with people who have been traumatized by crimes against their property or persons, or persons who are learning about, or have recently witnessed, terrible injuries or deaths in accidents or disasters. And, don’t forget that police are widely hated. Just as African-Americans must suffer (and do suffer, and give up, on average, many years of healthy life because of it) through the experience of living in a society where maybe 20%-30% actively dislike them because of their race, Police too must live and work in a society where many, many people actively dislike or hate them. At least police and African-Americans have that in common.

There are two problems here, and I know a lot about one, but very little about the other.  Racism is the primary problem, and I know that a couple things work to reduce prejudice and racism.  The practical implications of those two “technologies” that reduce prejudice is that we need to have Americans spend more time cultivating empathic friendships with people who are different from them, and the burden for this is primarily on European-Americans. People need to make an intentional effort to reach out to people who are unlike them to develop some rapport and empathy and establish some sort of collaboration with people who are from different backgrounds.  This is actually a very pleasant thing to do, involving going out to socialize with people, having them over to your home, visiting their home, going places together with them, and that sort of thing. If people really understood what it feels like to do this sort of anti-racism work, they would embrace it eagerly. The other implication is that we need to be mindful of our thoughts, aware of racist or prejudicial thoughts that intrude into our feelings and perceptions, and develop skills in calming and dispassionately noting those prejudiced thoughts or fears and countering them with factual non-prejudiced counter-thoughts, and recognizing each time we do this that we are resisting the disease of racism, which permeates to some degree our culture. Again, it’s not so terrible to do a little bit of thought about our culture and some of the flaws in our society, and then work on resisting how these pervasive toxicities try to invade our minds. The same discipline used to struggle against racist indoctrination can be used in other forms of mental discipline to resist intrusive thoughts. So, anti-racist work of this nature will probably help people develop many other healthy mental habits.  

Aside from these two approaches to addressing racism in ourselves and among our circle of close acquaintances, there are also those institutions that may perpetuate inequalities and unfair advantages/disadvantages.  Here again, it can be easy and fun to work on these problems. At the very least, we can vote only for candidate who are proposing realistic and concrete plans to dismantle institutional racism (not simply those who agree that they are bad). With a bit more effort, we can work in cooperation with friends and allies to point out which practices and systems are perpetuating injustices, and tell those in authority to take our warning and change those systems. 

So it goes with racism and race-prejudice-based injustices. The tougher problem is what to do about police forces and police behavior. I don’t really have the answer for that problem. I agree that police culture is generally very bad in our society, and I’m not just basing that on the riot squad in Buffalo, New York or the Department of Justice’s report on Fergusson, Missouri, or the 100-200 highly questionable or outright murderous killings committed by police each year. I suspect that the answer will include some change in the way police culture is shaped, and go beyond improved training. Police in some other societies are more well-regarded than our police are, and we should certainly look at what works in other cultures. But, American culture is somewhat unique in our individualism and our gun-fetish sub-cultures, as well as our violence. So, even more than looking abroad for models of what might work, I expect criminologists and sociologists are looking around the United States to find cities or counties where relationships between police and the community are extremely good.  What is working there, and could we replace what we have in the worst police forces with what works in our best police forces? 

Reviewing letters from the National Spiritual Assembly from the past few years

I was recently asked to study letters from American National Spiritual Assembly that touched on the the issue of racism and justice. Among these was a letter from February 25, 2017.  This post includes notes I took to record my thoughts as I studied that letter and some other letters from 2018 and 2019.

The American NSA starts the letter by saying there are two key areas where Baha’is can/should contribute most: 1) “affirm the true of the oneness of humanity” and 2) "remove the stains of prejudice and injustice from the fabric of our society."

So far, research on anti-racism efforts has confirmed that cooperative efforts between people of different groups helps diminish their prejudice.  More broadly, if people will establish and sustain lasting connections in their personal or work relationships with persons of different backgrounds, their prejudices against persons of those backgrounds will (generally speaking, as a rule) tend to decrease.  The mechanism for this is probably some enhancement of empathy and love for individuals of the “outsider" group tends to influence a broader perspective that is less prejudiced against all persons of that group. We’ve known about this since the late 1950s, and it's been replicated many times. The emphasis on “oneness of humanity” will therefore work, if it is built around helping people establish collaborative or affective relationships with persons of other backgrounds.

The other method for diminishing prejudice came after the technology of measuring implicit racism by studying differences in reaction times between identifying matches or mis-matches between words and images. Reactions tend to be quicker when preferred group images or words were paired with positive words or images and oppressed group images or words were paired with negative words or images. These measures of “implicit bias” revealed in a quantitative way how brains found it easier to associate African-American faces or names with negative words or images. The technology that seems to work against this (in addition to the old standard of establishing collaborative and affective relationships with persons from the oppressed group) is a sort of hybrid mindfulness and cognitive-behavioral therapy.  Persons must become mindful of prejudicial thoughts, and learn to monitor their own thinking to detect prejudicial assumptions or thoughts or fears, and then learn to replace such prejudicial thoughts with correct non-prejudicial thoughts in a matter-of-fact and non-fearful or guilty manner. That is, if people are horrified or ashamed to recognize their prejudicial thoughts or feelings, it becomes more difficult to diminish those intrusive thoughts.  People have to be accepting of their “racism" as a natural consequence of living in our society, and simply commit to working at replacing the racist thoughts with corrected non-racist thinking, recognizing that this is a project that will take time and effort and constant vigilance, but that it’s something everyone has to do, because the racist narratives in our society that produce these intrusive racist assumptions in our minds infect everyone (not just European-Americans or persons comfortable in their racist prejudices). 

Since the "fabric of our society” includes the mental habits of Americans, the NSA may also be calling for this sort of anti-racist cognitive work among the Baha’is.  

Beyond the problems of racist thinking or prejudices in the minds of individuals, we also have policies and behaviors that perpetuate oppression, and it’s likely that the NSA is also referring to these institutionalized racism aspects of American society when they refer to “stains" on the fabric of our society. Policies and laws that perpetuate inequality or oppression are more often solved by political practice (but not necessarily partisan practice, of course, although our popular culture and media tend to depict political practice as partisan, although it need not be, and in fact often isn’t).

The NSA uses the metaphor of a medical disorder to describe problems in American society. The symptoms (manifestations) of this disorder are, according to them:

1. Rampant materialism
2. Widespread moral decay
3. Deeply ingrained racial prejudice 

Those are rhetorically good points to make. I doubt the second point is technically true, or quite what the NSA (or the UHJ) think it is, but moral depravity is widespread, and a problem, so I don’t make much of a fuss about whether it's increasing or decreasing or steady (I doubt it’s increasing much).

Materialistic philosophy, and the dominance of the physicalist paradigm in popular culture and academic culture (including scientific culture) certainly feeds some of the nihilism, and the consequent emphasis on climbing the unending “hedonic ladder” trying to accumulate more and better stuff hoping it will enhance one's mood, or in contrast, despairing that life is pointless or without moral significance, and therefore we can make up anything we like to guide us. The NSA chose to blame “materialism” rather than “capitalism" because, I suppose, the toxic sort of capitalism that dominates our society and devalues life and spiritual qualities is itself a manifestation of the materialism at its root. We Baha’is are in some sense (a very limited sense) reactionary “paleo conservative” in our critique of society, because the emphasis on material development, economic growth, and the flourishing of consumer culture is something we do not favor (or oppose—we're essentially neutral to such things), while both the traditional liberal/radicals and conservative/libertarians in America take these things to be the highest good and the greatest aim of all their policies. In voicing our opposition to materialism (and as a consequence, objecting to some of the fundamental values of American economic conservatism, liberalism, and socialism) Baha’is are in a group with the paleo-conservatives, Greens, Christian socialists, and others who suggest that having more free time for sharing good experiences with family and friends, pursuing recreation and hobbies, improving the quality of our relationships to other people or the natural environment, connecting with others in more meaningful and supportive ways, or cultivating the mind or soul should be the aim of our policies and values, rather than economic growth or military power or higher levels of purchasing power, or whatever the dominant ideologies are extolling as the ultimate ends or the most effective means for achieving human happiness.

The third point is correct, I think. However, one must be a little cautious about it.  Back in the days of Abdu’l-Baha some Baha'is and friends of the Baha’i Community (such as Alaine Locke, a Baha’i, and W. E. B. DuBois, a friend of the Baha’is who attended some Baha’i events and published essays in Baha’i publications) were aware that the Baha’i Faith identified racial prejudice as a foundational problem in American society. This was even more true in the days of Shoghi Effendi, who was rather more explicit and vocal about America’s racism being one of our fundamental or central problems. In those days, the Baha’is stood apart from most other elements of society in our emphasis on racism as a problem (I think the Father Divine cult-like movement and the American Communist Party were two of the other groups framing racism as a problem in those days). So, up until recently, when Baha’is continued to say what we have been saying since the 1910s about American racism, no one could hear that message and think the Baha’is had jumped on some sort of bandwagon about racism.  In the past fifty years, however, anti-racist work and political action exploded, and the voices joined in emphasizing the problem of racism have included diverse opinions and perspectives, including some unsavory ones. Among Americans who are skeptical about anti-racist work there are of course the 10% to 20% who are traditional straight-out racists who openly believe in the idea that humanity is not one and African-Americans (or mixed-race, or American Indians, or whatever) are inferior. There are also a greater number (perhaps 25% to 33%) who do agree that humanity is one, but generally are skeptical of anti-racists because much of the anti-racist movement has become associated (in their minds, at least) with many other things, and some of those other things seem repugnant to this group of a quarter-to-a-third of the population that is not blatantly racist, but is cautious or opposed to some anti-racist work. To simplify too much, these are the people who don’t like David Duke, but voted for Trump. They know that sometimes people who call out racism are just virtue-signaling. They see that sometimes accusations of racism are just used to bully people and shut down a discussion. They are concerned that efforts to make our language less supportive of racism and prejudices are sometimes exerted in ways that are disrespectful or hurtful or ridiculous (“thought-police” and absurd “political correctness”). They point out that one can have principled opposition to affirmative reaction without being racist, and measures of racial prejudice that include opposition to affirmative action as measures of “bias” are unfair to those who have principled reasons, lumping them together with the people who oppose affirmative action simply because “it hurts whites and helps blacks”. That is to say, there is overlap between some conservative policy views and racist views, and to the extent that liberal or radical anti-racists are willing to perceive those areas of overlap as a manifestation of racism, they are failing to distinguish between ignorant racism and well-informed and principled conservative premises and values that are not racist, but lead to the same position. 

If we already have 30%-40% of the population firmly in agreement that racism is a fundamental problem, then we need to mainly work on the undecideds and the 25% to 33% who agree that humanity is one, but don't see the necessity for prioritizing anti-racism work. We may also need to work on trying to convert some of those 10% hard-core old fashioned racists, but that’s not my priority, because that’s an inefficient use of efforts.

But anyway, I agree that materialism is one of the central problems.  It is the root of nihilism (and the moral depravity that is fairly common in personal behavior and political policies and practice). Materialism guides our resistance to making necessary changes to prevent climate catastrophe. Materialism guides our inability to eliminate extremes of poverty. Materialism infects human relationships and diminishes the quality of friendships and family relations. Materialism supports the acceptance of people devoting so much time to frivolous pursuits and clownish rejection of idealism and sincerity, in a celebration of irony and cynicism. 

Likewise racism is one of the central problems. American racism with its specific dynamic of putting down African-Americans and other persons who aren’t identified with the hegemonic European-American majority causes health problems on a massive scale, and deprives African-Americans (on average) of several years of life and good health. To the extent that European-Americans gain advantages from it, it deprives them of moral innocence in all their successes, and diminishes the quality of their triumphs and accomplishments. The high levels of violent crime in America are rooted in racism.  The mass incarceration of Americans is rooted in racism.  The gross inequalities in wealth (and to a lesser extent, in income) are rooted in racism.  Our failure to live up to our ideals of being an efficient meritocracy where the virtue and ability of people corresponds to their life satisfaction, emotional security, and material comfort is rooted in racism. More broadly, the American racism that manifests in American fear or contempt for persons who come from lands beyond our borders may cause untold human misery in the long-run as we fail to promote good government and education and health care systems around the world, and fail to cooperate to maintain a peaceful world order and adjust our lives to avoid a climate disaster. 

The NSA says that we are all suffer from the effects of the maladies.  Yes. And that is the realization that makes the mindfulness/cognitive-behavioral approach to intrusive prejudicial thoughts work; people need to realize that every individual is responsible for their little part of the wide problem, but that doesn't mean each person should feel especially guilty or ashamed, because the problem is pervasive and nearly universal, and rooted in society and culture and history, so no single person can or should take responsibility (or blame or guilt) for the whole toxic thing, we each have the responsibility to do our little part to make ourselves and the world close to us a bit better.

According to the NSA's letter, the response to the challenge “lies in recognizing and embracing the truth… that humanity is one.” 

And who is not already embracing that truth?

Maybe the persons denying that truth are the 42% of European-Americans who say African-Americans are “about as well-off as” or “better off than”  European-Americans; or the 41% of European-Americans who say “too much attention” is paid to race and racial issues in the U.S. today.  Would it include the 32% of European-Americans who believed that Obama made race relations worse in the United States?  Maybe it's the 60% of European-Americans who did not "somewhat” or “strongly” support the Black Lives Matter movement? These are all figures from a 2016 Pew Research Center poll on race relations, and I’m trying to point out that the people who responded with these sorts of answers are probably more ignorant or prejudiced, but even among them, many might agree in the unity of humanity, and see their opinions as merely disagreements about tactics or strategies in achieving unity and justice in our society. In other words, the people who reject the unity of humanity are a minority in our society, and possibly a minority of fewer than a third of us.

So, does recognizing the unity of humanity mean something else, and something deeper?  Perhaps the majority of the country that would answer a survey with an agreement that “humanity is one” don’t really fully and deeply believe in the unity of humanity. That is, they may superficially agree, but they haven’t thought through the implications of that belief and incorporated their professed belief into some sort of action plan in their personal lives to promote unity.  Or, maybe it really is the case that it's that 20% to 30% who haven’t accepted the unity of humanity that is holding us back.  Clearly, to end the racial prejudices that people tolerate or lament-without-doing-much-to-solve-the-problem we do need that shared value about the unity of humanity, but how do we expect this acceptance to manifest, and how do we expect “sharing Baha’u’llah’s message” to encourage more people to accept the value?

The NSA reminds Baha’is that our methods are supposed to not divide people into contending groups.  We are instead supposed to bring people together in earnest and honest searches for answers.  That is true, and it’s a point I make when I teach my students about promoting social change. The human tendency toward tribalism and creating conceptual barriers between “in-group” (deserving of our loyalty) and “out-group” (enemies or potential enemies) undermines many attempts to solve social problems. And yet, of course, it’s a fact that sometimes when you are trying to improve society there really are “enemies” who (at least on that issue you’re working on) are opposed to you and trying to discredit or attack you. You may be able to bring people of good-will together to promote an intervention or technology that is likely to reduce racism, but there will be people of ill-will opposing you, and those people will see themselves as virtuous and good.  

When the NSA characterizes “current approaches that tend to divide people into contending groups” do they mean “those sort of current approaches" that tend to divide, meaning that there are some current techniques that fail because they lack love, inclusiveness, and reciprocity?  Or, does the NSA intend to characterize “current approaches” in general as usually having that flaw of being divisive and “tribal" in targeting enemies rather than being loving and inclusive?  The way the letter is written, it seems to me the NSA is characterizing “current techniques” in general as being divisive.  I disagree. Some current techniques are divisive. Partisan political processes, in particular, have become divisive, with Democrats claiming anti-racism as their cause and Republicans to some degree rejecting anti-racism because it is associated with their rivals the Democrats. But as someone who actually researches and studies efforts to reduce prejudice and racism, it seems to me that most of the work actually being done in this area is just as the NSA promotes: inclusive and non-divisive.  Well, the mass media may be emphasizing the divisive and partisan political nature of the issue, as that sort of controversy seems more attractive to the general reading audience, and advertisers want more of an audience, so commercial media promotes narratives that accentuate divisiveness.  But, really, within the realm of law and policy and anti-racism work in schools and communities, the leadership often comes from interfaith groups and idealistic people from across the political spectrum who are eager to collaborate on addressing the problem in inclusive ways.  At least, these are the people are thinking about how to be effective and actually get some measurable accomplishments. But even the divisive activists may have some measurable accomplishments they are aiming toward, and if they achieve those policy objectives, even if they do so through divisive means, they may yet have a net benefit to our society. Anyway, I hope the NSA doesn’t promote a narrative that “Baha’is know how to do this work because we emphasize unity and love and inclusiveness and most current activists are failing because they are divisive and partisan” because such a narrative is not going to go over well, especially if it comes in the same letter that says we shouldn’t be divisive. Actually, putting down people who are trying their best because their techniques have flaws and claiming that you could or are doing a better job because you don’t have those flaws is itself a sort of divisive behavior in which Baha’is are promoting their own “in-group” over the out-group of non-Baha’i activists.

When a letter says that Baha’i ideals challenge current assumptions I always try to understand what those current assumptions (the wrong assumptions, I guess) are. Also, if we are going to “revolutionize our conceptions of the relationships that should exist between individuals, society, and institutions”  I wonder what the NSA is talking about. Which “conceptions of the relationships that should exist between individuals, society, and institutions” are currently so off-base and wrong that we need revolutionary rethinking and change?  Which conceptualizations? Name one. If they asked me to think of some, I could come up with a few, but they aren’t uniquely recognized by Baha’is or through the specific Baha’i Revelation.  Is there some value statement or mission statement of some group, or some opinion expressed in an editorial or implicit in some legislation that the NSA could point to and say, “see, that is the sort of conception of ideal relationships between individuals and society/institutions that has become outmoded and needs revolutionary change because of the fact that humanity is one,” or are they just writing essentially that “things are very bad now, and we’re misguided, so we need revolutionary rethinking of how society ought to be” and expressing that in the vague language of “conceptions of the relationships that should exist between individuals, society, and institutions”?  I just have trouble believing that this has been carefully thought out, but perhaps it has been, and some Baha'is have written about it, and I just haven't been exposed to their thinking.

The NSA does offer the insight that there is a spiritual reality to human beings, and perhaps they mean to claim that current institutions are ignoring that fact. They also claim that there is a moral requirement that “all be given every opportunity to fulfill their potential and contribute…” and yet this is in fact an underlying moral value of American liberal thinking, according to Berkeley scholars such as George Lakoff (who says that liberal Americans approach morality in policy by using a metaphor of a nurturing family that provides what children need so they can achieve their potential) or Robert Reich (who says that liberals should frame their arguments for their policies with an argument that the public has a moral duty to offer everyone, including the children of poor and oppressed minorities, an opportunity to fulfill their potential as human beings). The idea expressed by the NSA that we need a recognition that there is a moral duty to give people the means to meet their potential in terms of growth and making contributions is also pretty fundamental to economist-philosopher Amartya Sen, or the late philosophers John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, who sort of provide the moral philosophical bedrock for mainstream American liberalism. 

Although I identify as a “Baha’i” or an “independent seeker of truth" rather than as a radical or liberal or green, and I do find the tendencies toward group-think and partisanship among self-professed radicals, liberals, and greens to be sometimes tedious, it is pretty clear to me that the moral philosophy at the foundation of most of their policy ideals is pretty much the same as what Baha’u’llah teaches, and in fact many of the artifacts of the western democratic liberal tradition, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent conventions on human rights, as well as the social welfare safety nets that reduce the misery of poverty and the regulatory regimes that constrain the worst excesses of the wealthy power-elite and capitalists by protecting workers and consumers and the environment all seem to be manifestations of the spirit of the Baha’i Revelation in human government. When I was young, most conservatives shared in these beliefs, and the difference between conservatives and liberals was a matter of to what degree we ought to regulate and constrain, or redistribute and provide security, or promote human rights. It has only been since the 1990s that American conservatives have dropped out of that consensus, and really only since the Trump take-over of the Republican Party that most conservatives are rejecting the value of human rights, or a social welfare safety net, or constraints on the power of capitalists. 

I don't think the NSA means to attack all these things, but when one is pointing out that there are serious flaws in the existing social order, and we need revolutionary thinking about what should replace what we have now, it’s sometimes worthwhile to constrain your rhetoric to critiques of those aspects of society that are rotten and harmful. If you criticize everything, you risk failure when you attempt to bring together people in a loving and inclusive way. Some of what we have in society today is working or attempting to work, and much of what we have is informed by a conception of human beings as spiritual beings.  

At the top of page 2, the NSA says that Baha’i community knows how to be a force for progress. They point to the Five Year Plan and the work of community-building and personal-and-social transformation. They are, I suppose, referring to the practice of small-group study of scripture and pilgrim’s notes incorporated into books (the "Ruhi" books) that emphasize engagement with the ideas and the practical expression of those ideas through activities, with an emphasis on devotions and children's moral education classes. I read The American Baha'i and follow Baha’i news online, and I'm aware that there are indeed many anecdotal examples of very good development associated with such a process. Small and intimate groups in which people discuss issues of great personal meaning (like values or spiritual reality and one's own personal struggle to be a better person) have been powerful tools for mobilization and transformation for centuries. The United Method Church was established out of a reform movement in the Anglican Church and spread widely, probably because of John Wesley's use of small groups like these.  Small groups have been key to the growth of the so-called “mega-churches”.  Small group study circles were an important tool in the spread of Maoist and Leninist ideology in China and the Soviet Union. Yes, small groups can be extremely effective technologies.  

Likewise, efforts to focus on values and ideals and goals, and then translate those values into action, is a fundamental process in the entire community organizing or political action strategy. Every decent textbook on community organizing or community activism will devote significant attention to the importance of finding shared values, common visions, and a mission or purpose that all members of a group can embrace and use to guide their activities and the processes in which they attempt to achieve their goals. So, study groups that focus on values and ideals and then work cohesively to implement those values in some sort of service activity are going to have a far better chance of success than groups that do not take their values as seriously or groups that only talk about values and goals without thinking and doing things that implement those values in observable and measurable actions. The Baha’is offer some particular examples of how these techniques can work with materials drawn from Baha’i scripture and associated community writings, and it’s important to share our example, but our methods aren’t especially revolutionary or innovative.  The fact that we use Baha’i materials is perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of our processes.  But, to some extent, our actions will be held suspect by outside observers to the extent that our efforts are seen as having a priority of proselytizing and gaining more visibility and support for our own religion, rather than purely serving the community simply for the sake of improving the world. It’s sort of an unfair criticism, since any belief system, whether religion or ideology, will naturally seek to show its advantages and attract more adherents, so any effort by any religious or ideological group will have mixed motives, and along with the goals of service and helping humanity will be mixed goals of winning more followers and allies and and cultivating a sympathetic public. 

The NSA says there must be a “many-faceted approach” to changing society. For Baha'is, there are three general types of approaches that seem most relevant to the UHJ.  One of these is “teaching" (expansion and consolidation) so that there will be more Baha’is; more Baha’is with capacity to help us achieve our goals of creating a better world though an understanding of the Revelation brought to humanity by Baha’u’llah. Another of these is social action.  These are essentially activities of service, but they may also be engagement in non-partisan political practice (trying to get persons with power to pass and implement laws and policies that benefit people and promote justice and peace and human rights and well-being). The third is "engagement in the discourses of society” and that essentially means to listen to others and learn from them, and when a receptive audience is found, sharing any insights from the Baha’i scriptures or community practices that might be useful or helpful. The NSA is saying that the three types of approaches are all needed, and they are implying that we ought not neglect any one or two of the approaches by over-emphasizing one or two of the favored approaches. 

This seems to me a new thing; expansion and consolidation is now equal to social action and engaging in public discourse. This is a good development.  When expansion and consolidation were emphasized over the other aspects, sometimes Baha’is would act insincerely, pretending friendship or genuine interests in the lives of others, but dropping people when it became clear that they did not have much interest in joining the Baha’i Faith.  That was a problem, and pointing out that you can engage in social action and public discourse to complement expansion and consolidation should validate a more genuine and sincere outreach by Baha'is, where they establish lasting friendships and alliances with persons of other faiths or no faith who share most of our values and want to work with us on some aspects of transforming society. 

The NSA then offers a paragraph about “core activities” and briefly summarizes what these are, characterizing these as “profound and revolutionary”.  I think they correctly suggest that genuine friendships that result from such activities will help destroy prejudice and racism. I think that there must be a very large set of combinations of activities that would work, and the current “core activities” are just one sub-set among many that would do a reasonably good job of creating an orientation toward serving humanity and developing deeper lasting friendships, given the material at hand (Baha’i scriptures and associated writings by Baha’is and their allies or like-minded persons combined with the minds of humans living in this time). The emphasis on friendships and service in Baha’i “core activities” brings benefits that are just what we should expect based on the long-known empathy increases and prejudice decreases following efforts by people of different backgrounds to cooperate together so they can to achieve something good. 

In a paragraph where the NSA writes about the “spirit of learning" they are evidently referring mainly (or perhaps exclusively?) to learning about what we are accomplishing in our Baha’i communities.  Baha’is incorporate into their “core activities” a consistent practice of evaluation and reflection so that they can learn what works and what doesn't work, and the “spirit of learning” is an attitude that processes can be improved if we pay attention to what is making us feel good and what is achieving the sort of result we want, and likewise recognize what seems to be involved with our failures or lack of successes. I think there ought to also be a spirit of learning that pushed Baha’is to look at what others outside the Baha’i Faith are doing. Some people are achieving good results in community development or anti-racism work, and Baha’is ought to take notice.  When groups are not succeeding, Baha’is also ought to take notice.  Sometimes failures may be consequences of groups not having a perspective that humans are spiritual beings, or lacking a moral perspective that emphasizes the necessity of helping people live up to their potentials. But there may be other problems faced by groups that are not-Baha’i, and some of these may offer us lessons.  Learning can work both ways, if Baha'is are to take a role as “teachers” to the world, we should remember that teachers can learn from their students, and secular groups or groups identifying as Christian or Islamic or Buddhist may have valuable lessons for us.

It's worth remembering that ‘Abdu’l-Baha used the term “Baha’i” to describe three different groups of persons.  At its broadest, He described Baha’is as persons who generally agreed with the teaching of Baha’u’llah and worked to implement the teachings of this Revelation.  By that definition, many persons of other faith traditions and even some persons professing no faith tradition are Baha’is, and may sometimes be doing far more for the Baha’i Revelation than the Baha'is themselves. He also used “Baha’i” as a term for persons who identified with the Baha’i Faith in their self-concept. In that sense, Americans who call themselves “Baha’is" when asked about their religious identity are the Baha’is.  But also, there was a habit in the first decades of the 20th century to use the term “Baha’i” or “True Baha’i” to refer to an idealized sense of how a Baha’i ought to live and behave, and by that sense, very few, and perhaps none of us could claim to be Baha’is. In this sense we aspire to be Baha’is or we hope to become Baha'is and work at being Baha’is. I sometimes think our faith community has lost something by seemingly forgetting the first and third ideas of what “being a Baha’i" means, and simply using the prosaic sense of “officially belonging to the religion headquartered in Haifa” as the only meaning of the label. 

The NSA draws our attention to the example of ‘Abdu’l-Baha, although they do not specifically mention anecdotes like his insistence that he not reside in a hotel that served only European-Americans and excluded African-Americans, or that he insisted that African-American Baha’is sit closest to him in venues that had traditionally excluded all African-Americans. Anyway, it would be good if someone would produce a book full of examples of how ‘Abdu’l-Baha manifested in his “smallest gestures” and his boldest acts that humanity was one. The NSA letter just refers to “His shining example” and I hope the readers are all familiar with some of those activities and actions.

The NSA then reminds us that most Americans want what we do.  They mostly yearn for spirituality.  They mostly want genuine justice and prosperity for everyone. 

 Later, in December (the 8th) of 2017, the NSA congratulated the American Baha’i Community for its successes in promoting awareness of Baha’u’llah in the Bicentenary of His birth. The letter reminded Baha’is to be welcoming and flexible.  They reminded us to use wisdom, in the Arabic sense of Hikmat, I think, meaning: give what is wanted, and not too much, and withhold what isn’t wanted until someone is ready.  That is, listen to people and know them as they really are, and respond to who they are with attention to their specific needs, rather than just broadcasting your own ideas as you like, regardless of your audience.

On January 31, 2018 the NSA wrote another letter, reminding the Baha’is that we have useful solutions to problems in the world, and we must give society action so that we can make a difference. This letter also described the qualities of a good teacher, and recommended that Baha’i communities try to have these qualities, and they mentioned one quality as genuine love for all people, similar to God's love for people. They also mentioned humility and a concern for common well-being.

The letter of December 25, 2018 written by the NSA, used Shoghi Effendi's characterization of American political life (deceitful and corrupt) and his recommendation that the American Baha’i community “first… regenerate the inward life of their own community, and next… assail the long-standing evils… in the life of [our] nation” to illustrate their point that American Baha’is ought to be putting time and effort into their religious community life and then also working to transform the broader American culture.  

In a letter to participants in an African-American-themed Baha’i conference from November 27, 2019 the NSA reminded Black Baha’is of their duties to try to make the community great, and mentioned some of the African-American Baha’is who worked to promote the Faith. 

Perhaps the NSA hoped that these letters would make the audience (Baha'is) feel more committed to working to make their communities better, and then also working to make the wider society better. I do feel that after studying all these letters, I'm more motivated to contribute more time to helping my Baha'i Community and my wider community.  I'm already volunteering significant quantities of time in some efforts outside the Baha'is community, or with some Baha'i friends, and I my professional life already requires me to work on some of these issues as well. Anyway, the letters has passages that were inspiring, and that is one of the uses of organized religion; it inspires us to act with virtue and find meaning and purpose in activities directed toward service. So, that was time well-spent.

A Very Brief Outline of My Early Pioneer Life

Flora May Randle McMahan wrote this in 1930

I was born in the year of 1874, in the state of Tennessee. My father, J. L. Randle, and mother Dicy C. Randle moved to Washington Territory in the fall of 1886, with their family of three children: Matt, May, and Charlie. One sister Minnie, and one brother Walter, and died before this. In 1887 my sister Stella was born, near Mossyrock. In October of 1887 we moved to the Big Bottom country, just across the [Cowlitz] river from what is now Randle. Father had come on ahead and taken his homestead and built a log cabin for us.

We had to go most of the way over a rough, winding Indian trail. The ponies had to jump and climb over logs and fallen trees and go full length around them.  When we got to what was called Fulton then, on the Cowlitz river, the ponies were unpacked, the packs taken across the river in dugout Indian canoes. Then we had to swim the ponies, repack and go on. That was the second day. That night we stayed with a bachelor, a Mr. Carlisle in a one room log shack.  Next day, the third day, we arrived at our future home. Had to unpack and swim the horses again. I can never forget the first impression I had as a child, of that home, which consisted of a log cabin 10x10 feet with a mud and stick chimney and a fireplace. There was an addition of split cedar started, but not finished so we could use it for a while after we put part of our belongings in it. In the one room we had one home-made bed, with slats for springs, then made the other beds on the floor at night. 

The trail was so bad, and winter came so early, with snow between three and four feet deep, bending and breaking over the brush and into the trail, that it was impossible to get our cook stove, sewing machine and so many things that winter; that was so hard to get along without. There were three months at one time that we did not get any mail. An Indian on snowshoes then brought our letters in. 

When we moved in, there were about half-a-dozen bachelors, a Mr. and Mrs. Chilocoat with two small children 1/2 mile from us, Mr. and Mrs. R. T. Siler, who were married and moved there in the spring of the same year, one mile from us. 

I was the only girl within twenty miles. Of course there were no schools, no churches, no stores or post offices; just a poor trail through the rushes, brush, and woods between these homesteads.

Mother got very sick, I believe it was the following January.  Will Davis went horseback to Chehalis after a doctor who would not come, as it took a week to make the trip.  She was spared to her family, but what agony to me, while she lay there, not knowing whether she would live or not. I had to learn to cook on the old fireplace and to bake in the Dutch oven—cared for my baby sister, did the washing, mending, sewing, etc.

The next winter I had the most terrible toothache in my back teeth. I could neither eat nor sleep as I should. I suffered so. In the month of March, father went to Mossyrock after some cows, which Mr. Doss let him have to keep for half of the increase. I went along to get my teeth out, as we heard there was a man nine miles below there who had a pair of forceps. I rode the nine miles alone. He broke one off and all to pieces, and left the roots in. I came back home with it in that condition and suffered every minute on the way. 

Dode Doss helped father take the cows back. It took three days. I led three pack horses, one of which had only been packed a few times. They were a way ahead with the cattle. The wild, foolish pony got scared as we were going through a slough in a swampy place. The water being half-way on their sides; he got his feet over the rope and bucked and reared, run up to my side and would strike my knees with his feet and nose, until I felt sure he would get me under their feet. To make matters worse, my horse balked, and I could not make it go at all. It was pouring rain with snow mixed in, and with the horses splashing the water over me, I was drenched to the skin. I was getting so cold and numb that I could hardly stay on. I tried to call for help, but they could not hear. 

I was so long out of sight that father came back to see what was the matter. He had to wade in to get me. I was almost frozen and could not stand up when he got me off the horse. He rubbed me and put his raincoat on me. We went on to find a place to stay all night. We had to stay with two or three bachelors, in a small one-room shack. I had no clothes to change, so slept in my wet underwear. I didn’t even catch cold, but suffered until the next February with toothache. Then we went to Tacoma, and I kept house there for father, while he worked in the mill and I went to school. While there, of course I had my teeth out. 

You will wonder why I have told you this. Just because it was one of many, many instances of the hardships we had to pass through. I worked for my board and went to school in Winlock one term. Mother took us to Mossyrock and sent us to school three months. 

My ambition from childhood was to get a good education and to make something of myself, and because I could not, and because of awful loneliness, I used to cry myself to sleep almost every night. Through the day when I had time I would go into the woods and lie down to think and cry. I had no girlhood days. Finally the old timers organized a Sunday School. We would meet in the different cabins in bad weather, and out under the trees in nice weather. Later a local preacher and wife came and took a homestead. So then a Methodist church was organized, which I joined, and the few faithful ones kept it going until it has grown to serve the whole community. 

We raised good gardens, and always had good food. The only girls that I ever got to see in those days were Mr. and Mrs. Siler’s sisters, when they came in to visit them. Why! But didn’t we have good times together!

Gradually, of course, more settlers came in. They all had to slash, burn, and grub out a little at a time to make a home. Father kept adding to our house until it was 10x40 feet. All split out of cedar except the first room, 10x10. 

There was a happy day, especially for mothers, when the first doctor came with his wife and two children. There was still just a trail. He took a homestead and lived there for several years. The game, especially bear and deer, were plentiful. We had plenty of fresh meat without going far away from the house for it. 

When I was about sixteen years old, a talkative, jolly, “happy-go-lucky” young man, Jim McMahan came and took up a homestead just across the river from us. He came to our place quite often. I was so hungry for friends and someone to talk to that we became real friends, and when I was 17-years-and-two-months old we were married, then of course I moved to his home. I didn't want to marry so young, but I was just desperate. I thought if I got married, then I would know I could not go to school any more; I would have to take care of my home and help make a home.  Jim carried the mail to and from Mossyrock and packed grub and anything else anyone wanted. First, once a week; and then twice a week. I was alone so much and tried hard to do my part in making our new home. We surely have earned the land we now have many times over. After a few years there was a little school started, which has gradually grown to the wonderful school we now have. Then a little log church was built, from that, the beautiful little church we now have, and a parsonage has been built. 

When we were married thirteen months, our son, Clarence was born. Seven years later our other son, Neil, was born. During that time and long after, we only had Indian canoes to cross the [Cowlitz] river in. I could paddle the canoes as good as any man. Many, many times I’ve paddled the canoe while the men held the horses by the side of the canoe to swim them across the river. Sometimes they would rear, plunge, strike, and struggle until they would almost fill the canoe with water, or almost tip it over. I know I am safe in saying that I have ferried people, men mostly of course, hundreds of times, and never received a penny for it. Occasionally one would thank me. 

When I had the one boy, I would sit down and hold him between my knees to keep him from falling in the water. After I had the two, Clarence would sit flat in the bottom of the canoe and I would hold Neil between my knees and paddle across. It didn’t matter how high the river, or how much drift was running.  My folks living just across the Cowlitz River, I would cross to go there almost every day, too. Many, many times all alone, I've paddled across and back of nights going to church and prayer meetings, when it was so dark I could not see my hand before me. God must have been with me to take care of me.

We worked hard and finally got enough land opened that we raised quite a crop of timothy and oat hay among the stumps, which had to be cut with a scythe.  Then, oats and wheats, which had to be cut with a cradle. 

Eventually, a wagon road was opened up. The settlers volunteered and slashed it out. The stumps and roots were in it, and it was so muddy that the horses were down every little while. It would take from six to ten days to go to Chehalis, 65 miles for a load of whatever groceries, clothing, etc., we would have to have for at least six months ahead. My father carried the first chairs in the valley, strapped upside down on his back with the best breakable things packed in them.

He owned and brought in the first mowing machine. Mr. R. T. Siler packed the first wagon in on horses; father, the second. After a while we had cattle and hogs to sell, and had to drive them to Tacoma, taking a week to get them there. My dear mother had all the hardships of a woman’s pioneer life, and I believe I did, too. 

When we first began to take wagons over the road, there were no ferry boats. So they would unload them, ferry the load over, and then tie two canoes together, put two wheels in each canoe, and take the wagon over, load up, then swim the horses, hitch up, and try it again. Gradually the roads were improved, very gradually until the autos came. Now we can go to Chehalis and back in three hours instead of from six to ten days. 

I often wonder what the girls of today [1930] would do if they had to live as we lived. Good boxes for chairs, cupboards, and dressers. The rough walls were papered with newspapers. Maybe one fairly nice dress, and two calico or gingham dresses. But really, with all the hardship there was something fascinating, something satisfying, about the pioneer life. We never worried about what we didn't have or couldn’t have, or what we could or would wear. One felt so free and easy out in God’s great outdoors, with all the beauties of nature. It was inspiring and uplifting. 

I feel now that I could not possibly go through it again. But I am proud to know I have had a part in helping to develop this little part of the world from a wilderness to a beautiful little valley, blessed with all the blessings of civilization. Good houses, good roads, good people, schools, churches, etc.. How slowly and gradually it has all come about. I could write a whole book telling of the hardships and thrilling incidents we all went through and had, but I hardly think it is necessary. Just read between the lines; think what would, could, and did happen in all those years. There were many joys, also heartaches and disappointments. We, the old timers, will soon al be gone, and I hope to a better land. We trust our children and grandchildren will appreciate the heritage we leave them. 

This is from an essay Flora May Randle McMahan wrote in 1930. She lived from May 19, 1874 to September 1, 1955. Her father was James Lawson Randle (1843-1920) and her mother was Dicy Caroline Erwin Randle (1846-1930). J. L. Randle served in a unit of the Union army in the war against the Rebellion of the Southern Slaveholders, and was part of a unit that chased Morgan’s Raiders through Indiana. 

May Randle McMahan’s younger son, Neil (1899-1972) was my Grandma Dorothy’s dad, and my father’s grandfather. I met him briefly when I was not even yet two years old, but I have a vague memory of him, and there is a photograph of me sitting upon his lap, which confirmed that I had met him years later when my parents had forgotten our visit to Randle and I insisted that we had been there when he was alive and I had met him. My grandma Dorthy (Dorothy May, 1922-1998) told me about him, and it seems my dad had a good and close relationship with him (I think my dad’s relationship with his father, my grandfather, was not especially close, but I heard that he spent a lot of time with his Uncle Bob and Grandad Neil).  I knew Great Granddad Neil’s wife, my great-grandmother Pearl (1901-1995) very well. She was born in 1901, and so was only in her late 70s and early 80s when I spent a week or two in Randle in the summers of 1978, 1980, and 1981. I learned to drive a car and tractor on the farm that Flora May and her mom (Dicy) and dad (J.L.) settled when they arrived as founders of the town of Randle, and I baled hay on that land about fifty years after May wrote the story.  I am glad we had a reaper and baler machine hitched to a tractor, and did not have to do the work with scythe and cradle and pitchfork. 

(Neil and Eric, 1969)

The “Big Bottom” area of the Cowlitz River valley is a wide and long flat area that must have been a lake thousands of years ago, and it filled up with silt until it became the lovely valley it now is, full of fairly rich and somewhat sandy soil. The Upper Cowlitz tribe that lived in the valley mostly died off in epidemics and malarial fevers in the 1820 and 30s, with survivors fleeing to the Washington coastal region, and the land was left nearly vacant for a few decades until European-Americans settled. In the 1880s when settlers arrived, there were two native families left in the area, and evidently (from May's story above) one of them worked in mail delivery. The settlers tended to be persons (like my Randle ancestors) from Appalachia (especially eastern Kentucky and Tennessee and the Virginia highlands). You may detect some of the eastern Tennessee folkways in my great-great-grandmother's writing as she uses phrases like “I’ve paddled across and back of nights” or the use of “grub” as a verb to mean “work hard under difficult circumstances” when people had to “grub out a little at at time.” 

Uncle Bob’s car, 1980 

(the first car I drove)

  As May’s story shows, Dicy and J.L. weren’t the first European-Americans to settle the valley. In addition to Carlisle and the Chilocoats and Silers, there were bachelors living in shacks. These early immigrants to the Cowlitz River Big Bottom might have been living from a mix of hunting and trapping and working in tree-felling and lumber, as there was a sawmill established in the Randle area as early at 1866.  Actually, that's one of my earliest memories; the smell of sawdust and the loud sound of the saw, and my father trying to help me see bats up in the sawmill building. That first visit of mine to Randle must have been late in 1969, when I was about 22-23 months old.  Anyway, she doesn’t mention the German August W. Joerk, who made a land claim in 1883, probably two years before J.L. Randle made the cabin for his family, and three years before they arrived. 

I remember hearing one story about the notorious James brothers (the criminal insurrectionists gang) in connection with family emigrating out Appalachia on their way to the Midwest, and then from there on to the Washington Territory. The story goes that the family was in a wagon with their belongings, and a wheel had broken or become mired in the mud, and some men rode up on their horses and helped the family fix the wagon and get it back on the road. The men were Jesse and Frank James, and possibly some others, and the oral history in the family was that they were kindly and polite. This must have been in the mid-to-late 1870s, before the family headed out to Washington and before the James Gang met their demise.  Of course in those days the trains would have been carrying wealthy persons around, and the fact that my ancestors were migrating by wagon may say something about their class status, and I believe that the James Gang was motivated not just out of resentment against the Union, but also out of some class animosity against wealthy persons.  Oddly enough, coming down from my mom’s side of the family there was also oral history about the James gang, as my grandmother’s step-father’s grandfather was an engineer on one of the trains robbed by the gang, and his story was that that Frank and the other men were polite and calm and friendly as they robbed the passengers and crew, but that Jesse was nervous and rude, and seemed like he needed his older brother Frank to calm him down. 

Anyway, the families that settled the Big Bottom of the Cowlitz River Valley (Randle and Packwood) were mostly farming folk from highlands of the eastern mountains, and they enjoyed hunting, fishing, and being independent and free from interference of urbanized white-collar America. I remember such attitudes being expressed by my great-grandmother and her younger son, my dad’s youngest uncle (my Uncle Bob, who when I was twelve taught me on the farm how to drive and how to run a tractor). There was an endearing parochialism to my great-grandmother’s views of people outside her little corner of the world.  I remember her wondering with amazement why anyone would want to go out of the region and end up in a big city like Chehalis or Tacoma, and god-forbid, Seattle. And going out of Washington State seemed to her about as wild and reckless as riding a rocket to the moon. I think she expressed her misgivings about people going away from Randle or Washington State in a good-natured way, but that sort of parochialism is something I’ve noticed about the Pacific Northwest. Consider that by car it’s more than a single day's journey to drive to any large city outside of the Pacific Northwest; leaving Portland, Seattle, or Vancouver you can’t get to Salt Lake City, San Francisco / Sacramento, or Calgary in a single day’s comfortable drive. So, there is a bit of isolation up there. 

Another issue that may have made my great-grandmother skeptical of the idea that anyone should leave Randle was her own personal story. Her mom and dad came to the Big Bottom from Iowa, I believe, in the first decade of the 20th century, when she was a young girl. Her parents divorced, which was almost unheard of in those days, and as she told me, most of her siblings went back to Iowa with their mom, and she stayed in Randle with her dad (and I think also perhaps her younger brother, Warren Earl). Great-Grandma Pearl told me with some sadness in her voice about her dad’s misery at the end of the summer when her older siblings would come to visit, and then leave in August to go back to Iowa to stay with their mother, Sarah Alice Pixler (1864-1919).  She said her dad (Milton Thomas Moriarty, 1858-1925) would become despondent and mope around (sounds in retrospect like he was prone to major depressive episodes), and say that it hurt so much when the other children left and went back to Iowa that he might wish they never came at all. So, such impressions might have given my great-grandmother a bias against people leaving Randle, I guess.

Reading this narrative by my great-grandmother’s mother-in-law I notice something else; I get the impression that my great-great-grandmother was an excellent story-teller and a decent writer. Her aspirations to make something of herself, and her sense that her isolated childhood and early marriage may have thwarted her educational ambitions, may have been increased by her being an especially talented or intelligent person. I had a similar feeling about her daughter-in-law, my great-grandmother, as she impressed my mind (seeing her as a 10-year-old or 12-year-old boy) as a woman with significant intellectual power, but who lived with no particular venue beyond her family for expressing her talents or intellect, and no particular help in developing her abilities. My grandmother was like this as well; an avid reader and a fairly well-informed person with opinions on many topics, and some of those opinions were quite progressive and well-informed; she was a short-order cook, and quite good at her work, but if she had been born in 2002 instead of 1922, no doubt she would be in college now, perhaps studying at the University of Washington in Seattle. And while I think being a short-order cook is just as admirable as any other occupation, and a good deal more admirable than many vocations, at least with more opportunities for her, or her mom, or her grandmother, I think they could have had lives even more enriched. Each could have shared their abilities in a wider field. 

 I’m often aware of this situation with my students, as my university receives many transfer students coming out of Chicago or small Illinois schools who have gone to third-rate public schools and second-rate community colleges (the students who go to the best Illinois K-12 schools—and there are many good ones—tend to prefer the U of I at Urbana or perhaps Northwestern in Evanston or some other private out-of-state school if not Bradley in Peoria).  The thing is, in any cohort of 20-30 students making it through the social work program, there are always a few who are intellectually my peers, and several more who could, I’m convinced, have gone to a more prestigious school if they had received the proper preparation in K-12 or if their families had the money it takes to get a better education (UIS may be the most affordable university in Illinois). My university is not bad, but it’s “one of the best small public universities in the Midwest” and accepts about half of all those who apply to attend. We're selective, but not that selective.  Sometimes in these students there is that same spark of awareness that they could have done better if life had given them the opportunity. If not for the barriers placed in their way, they would have attended classes without balancing their studies with part-time (or even full-time) jobs, family responsibilities, and the distractions of worrying about whether I will cut their grades because they missed a class when their boss told them to come in to work or face getting fired. 

Around the same time my dad's ancestors were settling the town of Randle, my mom had ancestors who were relocating to Port Townsend, Washington, and their lives were quite different. As I read Flora May's account of the settler life in the Cascades of the 1880s and 1890s I marvel at the contrast between the lives of these ancestors of mine, one family in Port Townsend living a middle-class life (my great-great grandfather in that family was a hotel manager), with a background in the German intellectual tradition (they were Ifflands, allegedly related, although not by direct descent, to their great uncle August William Iffland, the German playwright). Every one of the six girls in that family in Port Townsend went to college or nursing school (in fact, the eldest daughter, Louise, who was born just three years after Flora May Randle, was the first woman in Jefferson County, Washington, to earn a college degree at the University of Washington). But of course the value in life doesn't come from education or whether one lives in material ease or difficulty. As Flora May expresses it, "we never worried about what we didn't have or couldn't have" and "there was something fascinating, something satisfying" about that life along the Cowlitz.