MacArthur seeds change with `genius grants' -- Sept. 30, 2021 column

By MARSHA MERCER

An acid attack when he was just 4 years old disfigured and blinded Joshua A. Miele for life.

A deranged neighbor came to the Miele family’s door in Brooklyn, N.Y., and threw sulfuric acid in the child’s face.

Miele, 52, didn’t let the tragedy stop him. He earned a Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley and became a designer of adaptive technology. He currently works at Amazon, helping blind and visually impaired people use everyday technologies.

“I want to be famous for the right reasons, for the work I’ve done, and not for some stupid thing that happened to me 40 years ago,” Miele told The New York Times in 2013. And now he is.

Miele is one of the 25 exceptionally creative people the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced would receive $625,000, no strings attached, paid out in quarterly installments over five years.

The awards are popularly known as “genius grants,” but the foundation does not use the term as it connotes intelligence, but not creativity or originality. The foundation calls the winners fellows.

“As we emerge from the shadows of the past two years, this class of 25 Fellows helps us reimagine what’s possible,” Cecilia Conrad, managing director of the fellows program, said in a statement on macfound.org.

This year’s group includes historians, scientists, economists, artists, poets, performers, filmmakers and activists. Many have devoted their careers to raising consciousness about systemic racism, inequality and social injustice, and almost all challenge the existing state of affairs in one way or another.

Proving there are second acts in life, two recipients are former prison inmates.

Reginald Dwayne Betts, 40, is a poet and lawyer at Yale Law School who served nearly nine years in prison for carjacking when he was 16. He turned his life around with books, reading and writing in his cell every day.

A practicing lawyer, he represents incarcerated clients on issues of clemency, cash bail and lengthy prison terms and recently started building libraries in prisons.

Desmond Meade, 54, a civil rights activist, triumphed over addiction, homelessness and a 15-year prison sentence for possession of a firearm as a felon. He is executive director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, working to restore voting rights to formerly incarcerated persons.

Historian and writer Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor of African American Studies at Princeton, writes extensively about race issues and has argued that Black elected officials are often complicit in perpetuating systemic racism by supporting policies that maintain the status quo.

Among the better-known winners is Ibram X. Kendi, author of the 2019 bestseller book “How to be an Antiracist,” which sold 2 million copies.

Safiya Noble, an internet studies and digital media scholar at UCLA, is author of “Algorithms of Oppression,” which contends search engines are biased, not neutral, and magnify racism, sexism and harmful stereotypes.

Monica Munoz Martinez, a public historian, studies and writes about cases of racial violence along the Texas-Mexico border in the 20^th century.

Filmmakers Cristine Ibarra and her partner Alex Rivera each won grants for their work exploring the immigrant experience. Ibarra describes herself as coming from “a long line of border crossers,” and Rivera has long been interested in “society that needs work but rejects workers.”

No one can apply for a MacArthur grant, and winners are nominated and chosen in a confidential process that can take years. Recipients must either live in the United States or be U.S. citizens. Elected officials or anyone who holds a high government office are ineligible.

The grants are designed to liberate recipients to pursue their creative instincts “for the benefit of human society.”

An additional benefit is that the grants program resonates with the rest of us. A 2012 study found it “inspires members of the general public to pursue their own personal creative activities and to think about how they can use their own skills and ideas to make the world a better place.”

Now more than ever, we need our best minds to tackle the persistent problems facing our country and the world. Although popular culture encourages and rewards the lowest common denominator, the MacArthur grants remind each of us to use our talents to challenge the status quo.

©2021 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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There is something we can do -- June 11, 2020 column

By MARSHA MERCER

The police killing of George Floyd and worldwide Black Lives Matter protests raise many questions. Chief among them, what can anyone do?

Vote, yes, but the general election is more than four months away.

On Capitol Hill, House Democrats are pressing a police reform bill that, among other things, would ban the use of chokeholds by police. A House vote is expected by the end of the month.

But the bill’s future is uncertain in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch 

McConnell tapped the only black Republican senator, Tim Scott of South Carolina, to lead a group in crafting a Senate version of police reform.

Republicans are also urging the White House to step up federal reviews of police departments.

OK, what else? Americans are still searching for ways to make their voices heard. 

Crowds of demonstrators have thinned, but a big, new March on Washington is being planned for late August.

Not everyone can march in the time of COVID-19, but those who want to do something can use their time at home to learn about racism – both conscious and unconscious -- and how to combat it.

It appears many people are doing just that.

Five of the top 15 books on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for June 14 tackle tough subjects: white privilege, how to be an antiracist, how to talk about race, the new Jim Crow era, and white supremacy.

None of these is a light beach read, yet several are sold out. Fortunately, some local libraries have copies available for downloading.

That’s how I was able to put on my Kindle “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism” by Robin DiAngelo.

DiAngelo, a sociologist with more than 20 years’ experience as a diversity trainer for companies, writes as one white person to another. She argues “we” often become angry and defensive when confronted with the privileges of being white and resist even talking about them. She calls that defensive process white fragility.

Her book, published in 2018, soared to No. 2 on the latest Times list. I chose it after watching a video of DiAngelo give a talk on the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s new web portal Talking About Race.

The portal, launched May 31, is a tremendous resource -- a trove of videos, interactive exercises, scholarly papers and other materials aimed at helping people  start difficult conversations about race and racism. The portal is free and does not require registration or sign up.

It is broken up into eight topics – being antiracist, bias, community building, historical foundations of race, race and racial identity, self-care, social identities and systems of oppression, and whiteness.

Being antiracist, for example, is defined as making choices to fight racism in daily life, which might lead you to watch a short video featuring Ibram X. Kendi, whose “How to be an Antiracist” is a bestseller.

Being antiracist requires action, such as uncovering and overcoming one’s biases. In a clip from “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,” the host interviews Jennifer L. Eberhardt, a social psychologist, about her book, “Biased.”

As extensive as the portal is, the Smithsonian has another project on race in the works, thanks to a $25 million grant from Bank of America.

The “Race, Community and Our Shared Future” initiative will explore race and policy with panel discussions, in-person and virtual collection efforts and oral history archives, the Smithsonian announced June 8. Specifics have not been announced.

And so, for many of us, the current moment is hopeful.

We could be at “a tipping point where people come together and recognize that the past should give you some hope,” Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III said in a video conversation with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden June 5 on the library’s site.

Visiting the “Talking About Race” portal is bracing. It’s meant to challenge attitudes and change our perspectives.

Racism is insidious, learned over a lifetime from family members, friends, others we encounter, the society at large.

“We are all swimming in the same racial water,” DiAngelo writes.

Reading by itself won’t solve America’s social inequities, but it can make us more aware of our unconscious biases and the policies that support them. Then change can be possible.

©2020 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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