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Found in the archives: A 1997 chat with Ed Bullins

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Ed Bullins – Photo credit James Cagney, Dirtyratattack.com

In 1997, I had an opportunity to interview Ed Bullins, a prominent playwright of the Black Arts era. He was on the TCNJ campus for a production of his award-winning 1974 play, “The Taking of Miss Janie,” which Bullins has described as an allegory about race relations in the US. In a review of a 2008 revival of the the play, the New York Times said the message appears to be that, “The failure of the ideals of the ’60s, it seems, is just about everybody’s fault.”

The campus production was directed by fellow award-winning playwright Don Evans, who taught creative writing at TCNJ and Princeton University for three decades before his death in 2003. This interview was videotaped at the TCNJ campus studio. Perhaps this summer, I’ll digitize the video and post a clip of Bullins’ riveting reading at the end of this interview. In the meantime, here is a video clip from the play.

A Conversation with Ed Bullins

2/17/97

KP: Good afternoon, I’m Kim Pearson, Assistant Professor of Journalism at The College of New Jersey. We’re pleased to be having a few minutes to chat with Professor Ed Bullins from Northeastern University. He is best known as a major force in American theater over the last 30 years and a seminal force in black theater. His work includes such plays as “The Duplex” and “The Taking of Miss Janie,” which was performed here this weekend at The College of New Jersey. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us, Professor Bullins.

EB: You’re welcome.

KP: Well, “The Taking of Miss Janie” is a play about life in America during the 1960’s. Tell us a bit about Monty and Janie and the force behind the characters.

EB: Well, Monty and Janie, the two antagonistic characters in – particularly Miss Janie – antagonistic, yes, but a loving, friendly relationship up to a point – is actually a metaphor for race relations, group antagonism, conditions that happen between people and groups during the 60’s civil rights integrationists/black power era.

KP: What is it that you were saying about that period of time and those relationships?

EB: Well, each of the characters, Janie in her own way and Monty in his own way, were not realistic. Janie felt that she could use Monty as a surrogate symbol of friendship which only goes so far, a symbol of – for her liberalness.

KP: Okay —

EB: Monty, on the other hand, he wanted to complete the relationship sexually, and never made any bones about that he wanted into the system. And Janie withheld that from him until he took the opportunity some decade or so into their relationship where he took advantage of her by force, physically. Each of them have their own friends, each of them have their own acquaintances in the play, and they are two camps that clash frequently – ideologically, relationship-wise, and even at the end, physically. And so consequently the false pretenses of the liberal whites and the, I would say, false desires and expectations of integrationist minded – misinformed – or liberals, you know, those two characters personify those two extremes in society.

KP: In “Miss Janie” it isn’t only Monty, the integrationist character, who is disappointed but also Rick, the black nationalist character.

EB: Well, Rick is like the consciousness of some – some sense in the play. But, actually, if you scratch Rick, under Rick is Monty.

KP: Okay.

EB: You know, Monty you could say grew up to be O. J. Simpson – could have been O. J. Simpson, and Janie could have been O. J. Simpson’s wife, if Monty’s dreams had been fulfilled. But they weren’t. They weren’t, but Rick is in his embryonic stage of becoming a radical black nationalist who speaks out for his race and against the abuses that society has done to blacks. And so he has a strong voice, but he is not perfect either. No one is perfect in this story.

KP: In the program notes about the play the 60’s are described as a time of self-delusion and a time in which Americans lost their sense of identity. Is that your take on the 60’s?

EB: I didn’t write the program notes. I feel America, in a great sense, found a lot of their identity during the 60’s. From 1955 to 1965 was the Civil Rights movement. Of course, it’s a pivotal point, a watershed period which went on to make American what it has been for the last 30 years. Since that time America has been feeling better about itself increasingly. We haven’t had the type of huge social upheavals. It’s been a time of mending, a time of trying to get it together. And, of course, we’re not completely there, but there’s no threat on the horizon of huge, cataclysmic war – doesn’t seem to be. There doesn’t – I mean, long time prosperity – relatively long time prosperity first – you know, one of the few periods in the last hundred years. So, there’s a lot of good things, a lot of good things. Of course, there’s a lot of bad things too, but not to the degree where it looks like society might be torn apart and destroyed through, you know, clashing of whites and blacks and the withholding of human rights from a large mass of people.

KP: Many Americans are worried about race relations in light of such things as the O. J. Simpson trial, the Rodney King rebellion and other kinds of events – the rise of the militia movement, for example. You seem surprisingly optimistic.

EB: Sure, I mean, I think society has changed to a degree. Of course, we have those things that you mentioned, but I think they’re sort of a spice to keep the news media and other things fed, keep people concerned with these things. I mean, over the years they’re important, I guess, but they’re less important. You don’t have wholesale lynchings in the street or armed camps of people, you know, assaulting one another, killing one another. So, consequently, I think more importance publicly and media-wise is placed on those things than they deserve.

KP: Okay.

EB: I think the alarmists of our society play on those things. They put it on the 6 o’clock news and say, “Oh, yes, blacks might be crawling across the fence to get my daughter,” or “The white man is going to do this or do that.” No such thing. You know, I think it will be – it’s just the opposite of that.

KP: Twenty-five years ago you wrote about the role of black theater and talked about its mission being one of raising consciousness, altering consciousness for its audience. Could you talk a little bit about that, and talk about the role of black theater today?

EB: Alright. We who began in black theater in the mid 60’s into the 70’s, we felt like we were lending our energies, voices, artistic minds and everything else to the struggle for physical liberation called the Civil Right movement, then the Black Power movement, and so consequently we felt like it was very important to do – and to do that, to achieve that, we had to raise the consciousness of the, for lack of a better word, the black masses or whatever. Alright. Through television their consciousness has, if not raised, at least been put to sleep in a way with the Fox Network and the new minstrel shows and all that. So, consequently, it is questionable what is meant by now raising the consciousness of the people. So, you – So, the mission changes, the mission changes. It becomes doing art, doing culture as an adjunct to education and to understanding, to cultural identity, to cultural understanding about self worth. And so it changes our field. So, the work that we did, if we haven’t completed it, at least it’s been usurped by the mass media or put to sleep by educational TV or, you know, it left.

KP: What are you referring to when you talk about the “new minstrel shows”? And why do you call them that?

EB: The Wayans [Brothers], the stereotypes, the caricatures. You know, the same caricatures of the coons, the Sambos, the Jezebels, the mammies and all that. They’re just played outrageously to the mass audience. The minstrel show was a mass media a hundred years ago – a hundred and fifty years ago. Now, shows of that type are like the mass media minstrel show.

KP: Is there a role, then, for an art that would challenge or would get black audiences or black artists to understand the danger of that kind of stereotype?

EB: No, it’s entertainment. As long as it’s entertainment certain people seeking entertainment are going to look at it, so – this is a democracy. I mean, in a democracy – it’s dangerous having a democracy in that you can’t legislate all the time or control the choices that people will make.

KP: Do you feel that these kinds of shows are damaging?

EB: Damaging? I think so. I think they’re damaging. You have kids aspiring to be a Sambo, you know, to be this kind of figure that’s working on stereotypes and makes people laugh. You know, what kind of future is that for a black or any other kid?

KP: So what kind of arts – what kind of portrayal should there be?

EB: Should? I’m not dogmatic, so I wouldn’t say “should”. If I say “should”, it’d be all kinds of portrayals, all kinds of portrayals. You know –

KP: What would you rather see?

EB: What would I rather see? I would rather see truthful, realistic, believable, human, uplifting, responsible, challenging stuff.

KP: Are there works out there that fit that mission?

EB: Yes, of course, of course, but they’re sort of, many times, submerged or covered over by the, you know, the general low level of regular media stuff.

KP: What kind of works have you seen that you feel provide that kind of complexity and intelligence and truthfulness?

EB: I didn’t bring my list along. Let’s see if I can pull some out of my memory. There have been some. Let me think of – I can’t recall offhand, but there are some.

KP: Okay. In a recent –

EB: Oh, no, no, no-no –

KP: Please.

EB: No, it would just muddy the water.

KP: Alright. In recent weeks there has been a considerable amount of controversy over a speech and some subsequent articles written by August Wilson, the Pulitzer- Prize-winning playwright whose plays, “Fences,” “The Piano Lesson,” “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” –

EB: Okay, so, plays like that.

KP: Right, okay.

EB: I mean, but not exclusively like that. So, something that Danny Glover was in not so long ago, took place in South Africa – he and Alfre Woodard, and I can’t even pronounce the name of it. I forget the name of it, but it was really moving to me. On a South African family, he was a policeman, and he, at the beginning of this sort of rebellion. He stood up with his family against the racist, brutal South African regime, and his own people killed him because he was identified with the police forces. This was very moving to me, and I think it was a very, very – that was very on, you know, on, you know. Some other things, but I don’t have that list in the forefront of my mind.

KP: Okay

EB: You see them every once in a while.

KP: I was mentioning August Wilson because, as you know, last year he gave a speech and published some subsequent articles in which he criticized the American theater establishment and called for funding for separate black theater. He was taken on by Robert Brustein, who is a well-known critic, and there was a discussion or debate that took place a couple of weeks ago in New York that’s received a lot of coverage in which they exchanged views. I was wondering, Brustein accused Wilson of being a separatist; Wilson talked about both the necessity of funding for black theater and seemed to be critical of the policy of colorblind casting; and I was wondering how you felt about – if you could talk a little about that controversy and tell me –

EB: Okay. It’s a historical problem…, I guess, on both sides. But Brustein, he headed the theater at Yale, alright, and he was fired and replaced by Lloyd –

KP: Lloyd Richards?

EB: Yeah, Lloyd Richards. Lloyd Richards took August Wilson under his wing and introduced him to the public through doing his plays. And so consequently that was followed by a series of very vicious attacks in the so-called critical pages of the New Republic by Brustein. Brustein was extremely resentful about what happened to him at Yale. Brustein hated Lloyd Richards for replacing him, and he was going to take out his spite and his venom on August Wilson, who became – who eclipsed him and became a major playwright through the efforts of Lloyd Richards. So, in Boston August Wilson was down at the Huntington, which is in Boston. Across the river, Brustein heads up the American Repertory Theater, rivals in the same place. Nothing good came out of – from the pen of Brustein in regard to August Wilson – just the opposite.

KP: Okay.

EB: Just the opposite. So, August, in defense, came out against the prejudicial practices the Brustein has been practicing for years. I remember 20 years ago we had a – he and I had a running battle in –

KP: You and Brustein?

EB: Yeah, in, you know – a minor running battle, writing letters, et cetera, et cetera, over my plays. John Simon also, who’s an ally of Brustein, and I have had some of these same battles 20 years ago. John Simon supports Brustein in saying how knowledgeable he is of what he says about black theater. When Brustein at that town hall conference confused Robert Hooks with one of the principals in the new Lafayette theater – and actually Robert Hooks was a rival through the Negro Ensemble Company of the new Lafayette theater. And some other missions of intelligence that Brustein made on that evening, and John Simon said, “Yes, Brustein, he’s knowledgeable, and he knows what he’s talking about,” but the man doesn’t know what he’s talking about, especially concerning black theater. So, there’s a history going on. Alright.

What do I believe in regard to August Wilson? Number one, I recently published an open letter to the New Yorker because I was mentioned in an article published by – written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. It might seem that I was on the side of or being critical of August, but I’m not critical. August is a friend of mine. I believe in his work, and I believe in how he feels about black theater, black art, et cetera, et cetera. He’s – didn’t come out of nowhere. He was in community theater, black theater. He was doing my plays and other black playwrights year ago, you know. You can go to reactionaries like Shelby –

KP: Shelby Steele.

EB: Shelby Steele, who made his career out of writing about black theater before he turned right – and seen documented proof of some of that work. And, in any case, on the one hand, I side with – fully – with August Wilson as in regards to his defense against the prejudicial attacks by Brustein. As far as colorblind casting, it’s used like affirmative action. It’s used as a hoax and as a device for whites to get money – whites to get money. White theater – the Sharon Otts of the world –

KP: Who?

EB: Sharon Otts, she used to work – she used to run the Berkeley Rep, now she’s up in Seattle. Then her model was played out across America. These regional theaters are saying, “Well, we want audience development,” and so …. They’ll have a couple of programs with some blacks or ship in Asians or some other population. Whether you use a tenth of the money and then they go on and keep the money and nothing is done. The black theater – and there is a number of theaters, you know, in each of the areas of the country – they’re starved because the minority money has gone to the white theaters. And the white theater have gone and grabbed all the actors that the black theater has developed for the last 30 years and given them one job and gone on about their business. And the money’s sucked up like affirmative action contractors. And where’s black theater? But, you know, still trying to live on the undernourished vine.

But, artistically and critically, outside of the economics and how the government and the Sharpies (?) practice the game before the money showed up, I’ve enjoyed some multicultural productions. The “Coriolanus” production at the New York Shakespeare Festival Joseph Papp’s theater did. I thought it was a wonderful production. “The Cherry Orchard” with Gloria Foster and Raul Julia and a black cast and a Hispanic cast, you know, I liked that. “Long Day’s Journey into Night” with Earle Hyman or – was it Earle Hyman? – and Gloria Foster and then – I enjoyed that, so I use it in my teaching and other things. I sometimes use colorblind casting, so it’s a device that can be used in an experimental sense or a sense to make a statement, but not completely disregard the ethnic believability and racial-specific truth of life.

And then, you know, don’t say that, you know, “Take this money and do great things in the black community,” when, if you’re white, you’re going to take the money and keep it, you know, and maybe even bring in another kind of black company, an African company, or some other kind. I mean, I think the African companies should be done, outside of Athol Fugard, also, but to do it at the expense of African-Americans all the time and then leave them high and dry without money, that’s another matter. I do not agree.

KP: Is the problem just that there isn’t enough support for theater anymore, and that makes it increasingly difficult to make sure that the money that’s there gets distributed fairly?

EB: Fairly? I mean, they’re gangsters. I mean, there’s nothing fair in gangsterism. I mean, they pack these boards and these panels. They divide up the money and say they’re doing something great for the arts. That’s not fair.

KP: Well, now, as opposed to 30 years ago, there’s an increasing number of wealthy African-Americans. Is there enough support for the arts coming from them and from other wealthy Americans of color?

EB: Well, the wealthy Americans of color, you know, they buy into the middle class and bourgeois system, and they feel that when they need some art, they’ll buy some art. And if it’s not properly art, they’re not worth it. So, I don’t expect too much help from them. I mean, because many times the artists and theaters is at odds on the values of these so-called people who make money — you know, black people who make money and say you should be given money. I mean, why should they give money to be criticized? I hope – I hope the black – well, the black theaters exist. Go down to North Carolina, Winston-Salem, from August 4th to 8th this coming year, and you’ll see 30, 40 more black theater companies from all over the world – I mean, all over the country – coming there, doing things. They survive, you know, I mean, I guess they exist like churches. They haven’t been able to stamp out black churches just because you burn them. I mean, they’re still coming at you. So, black theater would do more of that, and hopefully they’ll do more – they’ll learn to do more things in a marketing/business/fund-raising way to keep existing.

But, look, 30 years ago you didn’t have a NEA, a National Endowment for the Arts. That’s because in the art subsidies – the government arts subsidies – was killed off at the end of the Depression in 1938. The WPA, the Works Projects Administration is because the Helmses of then – right? – saw it was a threat. It put ideas in the black heads such as integration, such as voting, such as, “You’re as good as any other man or woman on the face of the planet.” You know, whether you be black, white, or whatever. And some of these same forces are in the NEA. The Republicans, wholesale, want to extinguish the arts. I mean, to them, their art is fine – the opera, the symphony, the ballet, the Metropolitan and one or two other institutional entities – and they don’t need the rest.

KP: Just to provide a little bit of historical background, can you talk about some of the contributions that black theater has made over the last 30 years to American theater and to popular culture? Some of the people that have come out of theater companies such as the Negro Ensemble Company?

EB: Well, I’d have to go back further than 30 years. Why don’t we go back to – well, we could go back further than that, but why don’t we go back – the only original and popular form of theater in America is the minstrels, and that was created caricaturing or stereotyping the black image, saying that blacks are not human enough to be full citizens or free. They’re following a chain of being that’s God up in heaven, the animals below. Blacks are below the whites and are like semi-human. And this was played out on stages by whites blacking their faces and acting like monkeys.

That was around the 1840’s when that arrived in America. I mean, it developed from the 1820’s. And that existed for the most part of the 19th century, and then blacks rebelled and took over the minstrels. They eclipsed the white players. And you say, “Why would they want to do that? Why would they want to play parts that was like negative images?” Because that’s the way, after they got out of slavery in 1865, they could feed their families and send their kids to school and earn enough for some property beside working 14/16 hour days all their life. So – but then they rebelled in the 1890’s. They started – they took off the black face. They began doing a type of show called the coon show. I know the negative images, but a coon show – mixed in with that was some uplift things too. They developed a chorus line of women that became the Rockettes later on. They, you know – the American musical form was taken from the British libretto and little else, some folk singing, and they transformed that into a form of theater called the musical theater, which is very much with us today. They revitalized the structure of theater by creating the blackout, where the lights would come on and then would go out, delineating the scenes.

And this show went into the 20’s, and it would help fuel the Harlem Renaissance – the musical period and the work of the Johnson brothers and Flournoy Miller and many of them with the politics of Marcus Garvey, black nationalism, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, that got sidetracked a bit in the 1930’s with the Depression, but then the government subsidized the arts through the Works Projects Administration, the WPA, and there was a black unit that did great work with Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Theodore Ward and many others. But, some racist southern white senators stopped the program, just like they’re trying to stop the NEA now. So, this isn’t Europe. In Europe they have uniform cultures, you know, with a much lower percentage of minorities. And so consequently a country like Germany or some other country like that will have national theaters all over the country. That’s not – I don’t think if it’s possible, at least in this century, to have that in American because the blacks will be getting it, they’ll say, or the whites will be getting it, or somebody else will be getting it. It won’t be uniform, and consequently some senator or some government entity will come in and shut it down.

KP: In the time that we have left, could you tell me what your hopes are for – not only for American theater – but for the way that your work is going to be understood in the future, in American theater?

EB: Well, I don’t know if my work will be understood completely, not in this time, not that I’m saying that I’m so way out there or this total prophet or anything like that. But, some of my work is kind of harsh and upsetting, and people don’t want to be upset. I mean, they don’t want to understand it. They don’t wish to understand it.

KP: Why?

EB: Because you don’t want to see what’s obvious and is truthful but is painful. Let me read something from a play of mine, if I may.

KP: Certainly.

EB: Do we have time?

KP: Um-hm.

EB: Alright, this is a play called “Salaam, Huey Newton, Salaam”. Much of the text was taken from the journals of a fellow playwright, Marvin X, but I took it and made a play out of it. And Marvin tells a story in this monologue. “Salaam, Huey Newton, Salaam”, the play is taken from a book “New/Lost Plays” by Ed Bullins. And it goes like this:

“In 1984, I became addicted to crack cocaine. Many people, especially members of my family, found my addiction difficult to understand. ‘You’re too strong,’ they would say. ‘How could you become a weak, pitiful dope fiend?’ But I did.

“My addiction came in my 40th year, for many people a time of disillusionment with life, and certainly it was for me. I was burned out, tired of revolution, tired of family life, sex, and women, tired of working in the educational system, tired of the black middle class, the grass roots, tired of religious sectarianism, Christian and Muslim alike, tired! Maybe this is what happens when one lives too fast. You not only get burned out, but you run out of ideas. What mountain should I conquer next?

“And a voice came to me and said, ‘You shall become Sisyphus! You shall roll a rock up a mountain, and it shall fall to earth, and you shall begin again each day for eternity since you won’t figure out anything else to do, you big dummy!’ So, I was a sitting duck for an addiction.

“That is, a new addiction, especially when I became an entrepreneur and had large sums of cash on a daily basis. Yeah, I sold incense and perfume oils and lots of stuff on the corner at Market and Powell in San Francisco. I made a lot of quick, easy money. The money added to my problem because I hated making money. I actually felt guilty about it and had to do something with all that money I had.

“So, my friends, including my so-called Muslim brothers, introduced me to crack. I didn’t like sniffing cocaine. For one reason, my mind is naturally speedy, so I did not want anything to speed it up more. I wanted to slow down, relax.

“My thing was weed. I admit I abused weed because I smoked it from morning to night for over 20 years. My things was weed, wine, and women. I always said I wanted to die from an overdose of weed, wine, and women.

“But along came crack, and soon I had no desire for wine, weed, or women. With all my knowledge, I had forgotten the simple rules of life: For every blues, there is a happy song. Sing a happy song, it takes just the same energy as the blues.

“Even before my addiction to crack, why couldn’t I think of all the good in my life? Why couldn’t I sing a song of praise to Allah, my god, for the beautiful parents he had blessed me with, for my beautiful brothers and sisters, for the beautiful, intelligent woman I had had, for the most beautiful children any man could imagine? Why? Why? Why?

“Yes, I know now. Because I thought I was self-sufficient. I had sat and watched my friends smoking crack, but at first it didn’t interest me. I did not like they way they behaved. I’d come into the room, and they wouldn’t even look up and acknowledge my presence. They were all staring at whoever had the pipe.

“But finally, the devil caught me, only because I forgot Allah.

(in a keening voice)

“I lost —

my wife

behind the pipe.

I lost —

my children

behind the pipe.

I lost–

my money

behind the pipe.

I lost–

my house

behind the pipe.

I lost–

my mind

behind the pipe.

I lost–

my life

behind the pipe.

“Yes, crack sent me to the mental hospital four times. Many times I put crack in my pipe and took a big, 747 hit. I could feel death coming, feel my body surrounded by the strangest sensation. I would run to the window for air. I’d run outside for air. But after the moment of death had passed, I’d return to my room and continue smoking.

“Once, I accidentally cut my wrist, cut an artery. I dropped one of my pipes and grabbed at the broken pieces, cutting me critically, but I was unaware. I thought the bleeding would stop, but I didn’t. I found my backup pipe and fired up. My friend tried to get me to a hospital, but I thought the blood would stop. Dripping from my wrists, it didn’t. My new pipe became covered in blood. My dope had turned the color of blood. My clothes, the rug, the bed, the curtains were all covered with blood, but I didn’t stop. I kept on smoking. Finally, my friend got the hotel manager, and he came in with a baseball bat and forced me out the room. The paramedics came and took me to the hospital. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. After the emergency room crew stitched my wounds, I got the bus and returned to my room to finish smoking. Hell, I still had 60 bucks! Fuck it!”

I don’t think a lot of people are ready for that right now, maybe never will be in the next hundred years.

KP: But is seems to me that you think there is an important role for the artist in telling those kinds of difficult truths.

EB: Sure. That’s what we are sent here for. That’s what you get. You know, that’s why you get fed to the lions. You know – (laughs)

KP: So, as long as there is an Ed Bullins to tell these truths, then there’ll be an audience somewhere to listen?

EB: Somewhere.

KP: So, the point is to try to keep persistent?

EB: To do your work, yes.

KP: Okay, well, is it difficult, then – do you see a new generation of black artists or other artists coming along?

EB: Yes, there’s always a new generation, so far.

KP: Is there anyone whose work you’re watching in particular?

EB: In particular – I’m watching many people, hopefully.

KP: Well, I’m sure that as those artists are developing they will continue to look to you as a model, as a teacher, and as an inspiration. Thank you very much for joining us this afternoon and for sharing some of your work with us.

EB: Thank you.

copyright 2001. Kim Pearson and The College of New Jersey. All Rights
Reserved.

Story idea: How well do municipal online tax collection websites work?

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There’s a story in this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer about the local government’s failure to collect delinquent real estate taxes:

“Between 2008 and 2011 – the last year for which complete data are available – Philadelphia’s one-year property-tax collection rate has averaged just 85.5 percent. That average is lower than that of any other any big city in the nation, including Detroit, and a full 10 percentage points below the average collection rate of the 20 biggest cities in the same period. Some cities, including Boston, Baltimore, and San Jose, Calif., routinely collect 99 percent to 100 percent.”

The story goes on to detail that while the administration of Mayor Michael Nutter insists that it has improved collections over the course of that time, collections continue to be below its own announced goals. Lagging property tax collections especially hurt the cash-strapped city public schools, which rely on these funds as a major source of income.

I have to wonder whether part of the problem is the city’s own outdated and confusing website. I don’t own property in Philadelphia, but I know many people who do, and I also know people who live in the city, work outside of it, and therefore have to make quarterly estimated wage tax payments. Despite the fact that millions of Americans have become accustomed to paying taxes online, the city of Philadelphia’s tax revenue website has basic usability problems, including the fact that unless you have a delinquent tax bill, the online payment link directs you to print out a payment coupon and mail in a paper check.

This is what you get when you follow the online payment link on the City of Philadelphia website.
This is what you get when you follow the online payment link on the City of Philadelphia website.

 

It is possible to pay delinquent taxes online, and it is also possible to pay some taxes by credit card. And there has been some improvement – I was able to access the payment section of the website in Safari today. Some months ago, I was told by a city employee that one could only view it in Internet Explorer.

But it takes a fair amount of time to sort through the site documentation to figure out what can be done where, and I have to wonder how much money and time is being lost as people try to comply with an unwieldy online system.

I would love to see follow-up stories exploring the challenge of modernizing and streamlining online revenue collection systems in Philadelphia and other large cities.

Inaugurations, Civil Rights Anniversaries and Newsroom Diversity: A Reflection

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As I write this, the United States is re-enacting the second inauguration of Pres. Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. In a nod to the Civil Rights Movement that did so much to make an African-American possible, Myrlie Evers-Williams will give the invocation. Her first husband, Medgar Evers, was martyred nearly 50 years ago for registering black people to vote in Mississippi. Evers was a colleague and of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday is being marked today as a national holiday.

Tomorrow, I begin teaching the latest version of my Race, Gender and News class, which is cross-listed between TCNJ’s journalism/professional writing major and our African-American Studies minor. At this moment, I happen to chair the African-American Studies Department while teaching in journalism and interactive multimedia. I watch this moment as a child and student of the Civil Rights movement, an American, a journalist and educator committed to building structures for peaceful change through civic dialog. My friend and college classmate, legal scholar Adrien Wing, articulated the challenge of synthesizing and acting upon through the prism of these multiple perspectives in her insightful and poignant 1990 essay for the Berkeley Women’s Law Journal, “Brief Reflections Toward a Multiplicative Theory and Praxis of Being.”

As Wing says, ” [F]eeling is first,” so I’ll begin there. The President is a man of my generation, with a personal narrative that bears some similarities with my own. His wife is one degree of separation from me, many times over, because we share the same undergraduate alma mater. I knew her brother there, as well one of their closest friends and supporters. As an undergraduate, I knew Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who administered the oath to VP Biden. I have grown more used to seeing these friends of my youth on the national stage in the last four years, but part of me is still awestruck. Their ascendance represent impossibilities that became possible in my lifetime.

And yet, they also represent something else that we Civil RIghts children used to repeat to each other during our undergraduate years — that human progress does not come through the actions of charismatic leaders, but through the concerted efforts of many people over time, most of whom will only be known to those who loved them. Feeling and inspiration have their place, but clear-eyed assessments are what matters.

Both the power and limits of charisma, smarts and inspiring personal narrative have been evident during the Obama years, and have been the focus of contentious and sometimes mean-spirited debate. Whether one loved or loathed Pres. Obama in January, 2009, he has defied easy categorization. The president who extended an open hand to Iran also gave the order for the drones that regularly strafe outposts in Yemen and Pakistan thought to harbor terrorists. Those up in arms about his recent executive orders on guns might do well to remember that one of his first acts after his 2009 inauguration was to order the closure of the notorious prison at Guantanamo Bay. That hasn’t happened, although administration officials reportedly say they will keep trying. According to Politifact, Obama kept about half of his campaign promises during this first term, compromised on another 20 percent, and broke about 25 percent.

Some of this, of course, is the reality of ordinary politics. No president fulfills all of his promises. And perhaps it is predictable that a president who prepared for his first term by studying Lincoln and FDR would, like them, endure accusations that he was overstepping his bounds and trampling on liberty. But  race is inevitably part of the equation. Ta-Nehesi Coates and William Jelani Cobb have provocatively written on this; I need say little more here than to urge a reading of their words for those who haven’t. But I will note this –   students of the Civil Rights movement note with concern the fact that, as Dr. King once said of Alabama’s pro-segregationist governor,  the lips of some gun-rights advocates and Obamacare opponents are, “dripping with words of interposition and nullification.” Nor have they lost sight of the pro-segregation lineage of some Obama opponents, such as the Council of Conservative Citizens.

We’ll be using Eric Deggan’s new book Race Baiter: How the Media Uses Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation as one of core texts. As Deggans puts it:

“This book is an attempt to decode the ways media outlets profit by segmenting Americans. I call it the Tyranny of the Broad Niche; what happens as the biggest pieces of an increasingly fragmented audience are courted at the expense of many others.”

In communities such as Mercer County, New Jersey, where our journalism undergraduates and alumni play a critical role in news coverage, progress during the Obama administration’s second term will likely be gauged by personal measures of well-being: whether the capital city of Trenton’s long economic decline can be stemmed, whether the states’ above-average unemployment rate can be reversed, whether something can be done about the almost-daily deadly shootings and abysmal graduation rates. While much of the Trenton news media’s focus in 2013 will likely be consumed with the pending corruption prosecutions of Mayor Tony Mack, et. al. and the latest sound-byte from the blustering, contrarian Governor Chris Christie, I’ll strive to keep my students focused on the processes and dynamics that affect people’s lives but don’t readily lend themselves to twitpic or SEO-optimised clickbait accompanied by top-dollar contextual ads.

The world is watching, and not just in obvious places, such as London, Jerusalem, Nairobi or Caracas. This past September, I was privileged toFICHAR Nepal spend a week in Nepal at the behest of the US State Department, where I participated in conversations with students, human rights advocates, legal experts, journalists, educators and government officials about building democracy through a strong and inclusive civil society. Many of our conversations were about the applicability of the US Civil Rights and feminist movements to Nepal’s very challenging and complex political situation, and I was asked more than once to opine on the role of racism in the opposition to Obama. As the International Crisis Group notes, Nepal is at an impasse in its efforts to adopt a new Constitution largely because, “Nepali actors are deeply divided on the role of identity politics in the proposed federal set-up.”  In the face of these divisions, activists groups such as Fichar Nepal wage a valiant campaign for peaceful and inclusive change.

Conversing with civil society leaders in Biratnagar, Nepal.
Conversing with civil society leaders in Biratnagar, Nepal.

As a journalist and educator, my job is to seek and encourage that broader, richer understanding of moments such as these. That’s akin to asking a chef to deliver a multi-course banquet to diners conditioned to the microwaved info-snacks continuously served up by cable news and its social media extensions. I plan to try some new things in the classroom and with class projects to encourage healthier news production and consumption; we’ll see how it goes.

In the meantime, here are a two story angles that I do find interesting in relation to today’s events that probably won’t get much press attention:

  • Robert Moses’ birthday. The key architect of Freedom Summer and founder of the Algebra Project turns 78 on January 23. It’s a perfect occasion to finally focus attention on what 30 years of research and civic action around math education can teach us, as well as his contention that making quality education a constitutional right is the logical extension of the Civil Rights movement today.
  • The impact of Michelle Obama’s healthy-eating initiatives. According to a recent Washington Post article, feminists are “divided” over Obama’s characterization of herself as “Mom-in-chief,” and find her focus on childhood obesity “trivial,” especially compared to former First Lady Hillary Clinton’s prominent role in her husband’s administration. (As is too often the case with such political stories, the story appeared in the Style section, with and referred to her ‘work’ in literal quotation marks.) One might have hoped for some investigation of the actual impact of her Let’s Move  initiative, given the importance of childhood obesity as a public health issue, and the considerable effort being expended by advocates, non-profits and local governments to improve healthy food access.  In fact, I’ve only seen one such investigation: an October, 2012 article by Bridget Huber of the Food and Environment Reporting Network judging the results of her strategy of forging public-private partnerships to be modest and controversial among activists. More local follow-up on this matter would be welcome, especially pared with analyses of the impact of the Administration’s 2010 $400 million Healthy Food Financing Initiative.

And so we all begin again.

As we change journalism education, we need to study journalism learners

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After years of exhortation and industry convulsions, journalism education is changing. The argument for infusing digital  media education – even programming — into the journalism curriculum is over. The questions are mostly logistical – what type, in what sequence, how much and to what ends? Driven largely by business needs, college newspapers are becoming sites of experimentation with new business and management models. Professional news organizations are expanding their relationships with journalism schools beyond their traditional roles as providers of internships and first employers. In some cases, they are collaborating on beat coverage and special investigations. In at least one instance, the local professional news outlets have physically moved on campus.

At the graduate level, Medill’s Innovation program helped spawn Narrative Science, a company that programs robots to generate stories. We faculty at small programs, who have thinking through what these changes mean for institutions like ours, finally have our own journal, Teaching Journalism and Mass Communications. The 2013 edition of Georgia Tech’s groundbreaking Computation + Journalism Symposium will likely drive the conversation even further.

All signs of progress, but something important is being lost amid the frenzy.

As former President George W. Bush famously put it, “Rarely is the question asked, ‘Is our children learning?'” Mindy McAdams speaks for many of us who have spent years looking for ways to infuse digital skills into the journalism curriculum:

“We can offer a course that focuses on Web technologies — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. But there is no data journalism in that class. And a lot of the students are going to hate typing those little brackets and so on. They’ll be so happy when that course is done and they never have to do that again.

“Moreover, they won’t practice what they learned, and very soon, they will forget all of it.

“We can offer a course about scraping and doing stuff with large data sets. We can teach students how to find stories in data. Students who like this, who learn how to do it and want to continue doing it, are probably among those most likely to get a journalism job. Like the Web technologies course, though, this is a class that many students will either avoid like the plague or take and then count the minutes until it’s over.”

Please, please read the whole post. She points to a real challenge that we haven’t yet cracked: how to engage students who think that journalism is about writing, not math or technology. Students who have convinced themselves that writing is something they are inherently “good” at, while math and tech are something they are inherently “bad” at. Students who don’t see why they need to understand html when they can just use a wysiwyg platform to build a website.

And my colleague and friend Michelle Johnson adds another layer: too often, the students who are least successful in adapting to journalism’s digital evolution are students of color, apparently another manifestation of the racial achievement gap. She writes:

“[F]or the past 20 years, I’ve read literally hundreds of applications for journalism training programs and scholarships, as well as for admission to journalism school. And sadly, I’m seeing some troubling signs.
“This isn’t just hand-wringing about a decline in writing skills among young people with short attention spans who communicate via texting abbreviations — I’ve noticed that among all the students.
“Simply put, I’m seeing that many of the students of color lack experience with the tools and technologies that will be fundamental to journalism innovation going forward. And this comes at a time when funding for training programs for students of color has shrunk, along with the bottom lines of the news industry and professional associations.”

These are exactly the concerns that keep me awake at night, even as I champion interactive journalism as a way of bringing members of under-represented groups into computing fields. (I’d also add working-class students to Michelle’s list, by the way.)

I would submit that amid our frenzy to learn and then incorporate all the skills that our graduates need into our curricula, we need a better understanding of what students absorb, and what affects their sense of self-efficacy as they confront the unexpected skills and content we are asking them to learn. That’s part of what I’m hoping to better understand with the new research project that I’ve embarked upon with Dr. S. Monisha Pulimood, of TCNJ’s Computer Science Department. The formal title is TUES: Collaborating Across Boundaries to Engage Undergraduates in Computational Thinking.(NSF Award #1141170). As we state in our abstract:

“To adequately prepare a workforce for the changing economic and global landscape, the project is developing a model that enables students with diverse perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds to learn how to collaborate and integrate concepts from their respective fields to develop technology-based solutions for complex real-world problems.”

It’s a tall order that we’ve set ourselves, and we are grateful to have Diane Bates, our independent evaluator, on board to help us assess what we are doing.

I’ll share more specific information about our project as it develops, but for now, I want to share some specific questions that I’m working through about integrating computational thinking and integrate it into journalism classes.

What’s the right learning environment to support computational thinking in journalism?  One of the posts that I wrote for a 2010 series about my own early exposure to skills that are currently classed as computational thinking began with this prologue:

“There are, at least, two approaches to education: the mimetic approach and the mathetic approach. The mimetic approach emphasizes memorization and drill exercises and is most efficient in inculcating facts and developing basic skills [Gar89, p. 6]. The mathetic approach stresses learning by doing and self exploration; it encourages independent and creative thinking [Pap80, p. 120]. In the mimetic framework, creativity comes after the mastery of basic skills. On the other hand, proponents of the mathetic school believe that self discovery is the best, if not the only, way to learn…”

“Educational Outlook,”

Sugih Jamin, Associate Professor, EECS, University of Michigan

Whether taught in a classroom or newsroom, journalism education tends to be mimetic, while approaches to engaging novices in computing tend to be mathetic. We introduce students to specific routines and rigors of reporting, emphasizing adherence to rules of attribution, AP style, divisions of genre and structure (hard news, features, inverted pyramids, nut grafs, and so on.)  We stress the importance of getting the story right the first time, and then admit that there will likely be corrections and emendations as a breaking news story develops. We do these things for good reason: flubbing the fundamentals can not only get a reporter fired, it can lead to lawsuits, or in extreme cases, endanger innocent lives and reputations. Consequently, journalism students and professionals learn to think of every thing they do in highly instrumental terms, especially when it comes to learning what they need to know to ensure that they will get or keep a job.

By contrast, programming environments for novices such as Scratch or Alice are very successful at making introductory programming concepts more accessible. However, their strategy for engaging learners emphasizes play in ways that can be off-putting to journalism students who feel a need to quickly learn how to assemble a professional product. In the past, I’ve used Scratch in two ways – as a first step in learning Flash (something I’ve abandoned since Adobe made Mindy McAdams’ Flash Journalism text obsolete, and experts such as Mark  Luckie began pooh-poohing it as an important skill for journalists.) I’ve had some success teaching Scratch in game design courses, and I may think about using Alice for this purpose in the future, since its most recent iteration is specifically designed to give students a leg up Java, and that can be useful to aspiring app developers.

Do we need a journalism-specific programming environment to engage novice journalism students?

There are other, more mimetic, web-based learning environments for learning to code, such as Udacity.com’s CS `101 course, which focuses on Python and teaches students how to build a web scraper. There is an appeal to that approach because it has students build something that has obvious practical use in journalism. However, that course is arguably vulnerable to the criticism made by Bret Victor of platforms such as Khan Academy and CodeAcademy – that is, that they emphasize rote skills, while programming is “a way of thinking.”

Might it make sense to create a hybrid learning environment that combines the low barriers to entry of Scratch or Alice, with the goal orientation of something like Udacity? Will we begin to succeed at teaching programming as a way of thinking if we can more closely articulate between these learning environments and our broader journalism education curricula? (Here I am speaking of curricula not only for the classroom, but also for professional training.) Will novice programmer journalists be more motivated to learn in an environment where they can see direct connections between what their growing computing knowledge, the specific journalism artifacts they are learning to create, and the marketable skills they are developing? If so, what is the best way to create these linkages?

Is learning scripting really a gateway to computational thinking? The notion that journalism students should learn to “code” has gained increasing acceptance, but what that means and how one learns to do it are not universally understood. For several years, I’ve taken a position similar to the one that Miranda Mulligan took in a September 5, 2012 essay for NiemanLab:

I am not arguing that every single writer/editor/publisher who learns some programming should end up becoming a software engineer or a refined web designer. The end goal here is not programming fluency. However, there’s a lot of value in understanding how browsers read and render our stories. Reporting and writing a story, writing some code (HTML, CSS, Javascript), and programming complex applications and services are all collections of skills. A fundamental knowledge of code allows for:

  • More significant conversations about digital presentation, ultimately leading to better, more meaningful, online storytelling. Understanding your medium makes you better at your craft.
  • Deeper thought and understanding of data. Learning more about what goes into writing and programming software teaches you to think in terms of abstractions, functions, parameters, components, frameworks, object classes, templates, and more.

What Mulligan is referring to here as code (html, css, javascript – or more likely, jquery) is not programming, but web scripting, and as Mindy McAdams noted earlier, doesn’t get students digging into data. Having taught html and css for several years in our Writing for Interactive Multimedia class, my TCNJ colleagues and I can attest to all of the challenges that McAdams cites.

But there may be an additional unexamined assumption here, that learning scripting leads to the kind of computational fluency that, as Mulligan puts it, “teaches you to think in terms of abstractions, functions, parameters, components…”  I would submit that we need data to support this hypothesis. I certainly agree with her intuitively, but we need to know. These are some of the things we hope to learn in our research project, but there is lots of good work to be done to understand what, if any correlations exist between learning to script and learning to think computationally about the creation of journalism artifacts.

What do we know about the success of CAR courses that teach Excel,  SPSS, Access and SQL? The one place in the journalism curriculum that has come closest to teaching something like computational thinking has been in Computer Assisted Reporting classes (which these days, of course, is arguably a redundant term.)  A syllabus repository for some of these courses is here. We’ve had a required CAR course at TCNJ for 10 years. Many of these classes required that students minimally learn to use Microsoft Excel and Access (something I required when I taught it in the early 2000s). Some also incorporated SPSS and SQL. I don’t know of anyone who has studied these courses to assess the degree to which they affect students’ computing efficacy, programming skill, or acquisition of computational thinking concepts such as abstraction, decomposition, data structures, etc.

We could also use some research on the viability of such classes as points of articulation with emerging computational journalism curricula in computer science. One hopeful example is the work done by my TCNJ colleagues Donna Shaw and Emilie Lounsberry on the development of a database manager, GUMSHOE, that tracked the  disposition of gun-related arrests through the Philadelphia courts, ultimately contributing to an award winning story package on endemic problems in the Philadelphia court system.

These are just some of the questions that I think could lead to fruitful education research. I have others, such as questions about the possible role of stereotype threat on the achievement gap issues that Michelle Johnson cited, and whether learning science might help us better illuminate the real gaps in understanding and engagement that have many of us classroom teachers worried. As I’ve learned from talking to learning scientist  Deborah Tatar, making assumptions about why whole groups of people aren’t grasping particular concepts is often a big mistake.

Much, much more to be learned. I’m hoping that what has been, until now, an understandably ad hoc and organic effort develops into an area of systematic study.