The Gift of Failure

Nearly all of the parents that I deal with as a high school teacher are great to work with. They are highly supportive of teachers and education in general.  Every once-in-a-while though, I come across a real piece of work. In this case, the “work” in question came to advocate for her son.  On the spectrum of kids I have taught, I would put this kid squarely in the “good” category. Also like most fourteen-year-olds I have taught, given the chance, he will sell future success in exchange for short term gratification faster than a doughnut disappears at a weightwatchers meeting. When given the prospect of working on an assignment and chatting it up with some pretty young thing, he is going to choose the PYT every time. Actually, that would be his ideal distraction but he will actually take just about any distraction that will keep him from bearing down and working something challenging.

In my class, assignments involve making observations about maps, charts or graphs. I ask students to turn their observation into a question that begins with “why,” venture an answer and then try to find evidence to support or disprove their tentative conclusion. Whatever they don’t complete in class, has to be done at home. Given the number of missing assignments this kid had, he is not getting much done in class. With thirty to thirty-five students in the room working on such a task, you can imagine that I can’t monitor this poster child for Ritalin every second. But that is exactly what this mother wanted. She apparently thought I would be a willing enlistee in her corps of hovering helicopter pilots.

I explained that there are things that I can and will do but “sit down with him” and “make sure he does the work” was not one of them.  I also declined when she offered to come to class and “sit with him.” Now comes the delicate balancing act of giving parenting advice without passing judgement, though I have to admit that judgement had been passed and a verdict rendered. I just don’t want her to know that.

I am interested in learning about the conditions behind optimal human performance so I have done a lot of reading on motivation and behavior modification. I draw on the work of Jessika LaHey (the author of the book that I stole the title of this article from) Carol Dweck, Angela Duckworth, Mihayli Chicsentmihayli, Stephen Covey, Daniel Pink, Daniel Kahneman, Paul Tough, Liz Wizeman and Tony Wagner, to name a few. Some of these are scholars and researchers while others have reported on the work of scholars and researchers. So, there is my bibliography, I hope you weren’t expecting parenthetical references. These are all compelling authors of compelling books. If you haven’t read them, you should. They will help you with all of your endeavors where humans are involved. 

Over the years, I have distilled the words of these writers and researchers into a kind of formula for motivation and eventual achievement. Here it is:

1.      Set high standards- The standard must stretch the individual beyond their current abilities but is within the “zone of proximal development.” In other words, meet them where they’re at (where else would we meet them?) and set a standard just beyond what they can currently do.  

2.      Allow the student, child, worker or whoever to figure out how they want to reach the standard. It is tempting to want to step in and offer help and advice when you see the inevitable flaws in the plan but it is important that you don’t. If you do, they won’t own it and they must own it.

3.      Provide reasonable support to help accomplish the plan. You can play a role but the principal architect of the plan has to be the principal player.

4.      Hold them accountable for the results. This usually means they will get something they want for meeting the standard or have something withheld if they don’t. This is where the process usually breaks down. Think about how often you are truly held accountable for your performance and how much more freakin awesome you would be if you had to account for your performance in the areas that matter most.

5.      Regroup and retry- Old dogs can learn new tricks but change is hard and we feel compelled to gravitate back to what we are comfortable and familiar with. That is when the accountability and support are the double-edged sword of justice and mercy. This is where you and your protégé look at what worked and what didn’t. This is where the steward accounts for the learning, growth, pain and struggles. This is where plan B is created and the process starts over until the standard is reached.

As I explained this to the snowplow parent, I could see that I was beginning to lose her at two, her eyes begin to gloss over at number three and she interrupted at four. She said, “I think what he needs is to just have someone sit down with him and make sure he is getting these things done.” I got the feeling that this mysterious “someone” she was talking about was me! So, in the spirit of misdirection and the aforementioned metaphor, I plowed on to number 4. “What does he love?” I asked? Her immediate and unequivocal response was “soccer.” I actually knew that. The various professional and club soccer jerseys he sports was the evidence I was going on. “So what if his participation in soccer was contingent on his performance in school?” I asked. She looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. Then she said, “Oh, I couldn’t take that away from him. I don’t want to set him up for failure. I am looking for  a win-win.” Now how do you like that?! Not only was she using Stephen R. Covey’s words against me (albeit, incorrectly-poor Stephen R. is probably rolling over in his grave), she had the audacity to refute my wisdom.  That usually doesn’t happen until after the parent leaves my classroom.

I tried to press my point by saying that the reason she feels like parenting is a game of Whac-A-Mole, is that her son is not being held accountable for his work. I asked her if there were any consequence for his poor academic performance. Her consequence was taking away his devices temporarily but she said she gave them back after a short time. Probably after he made some measly effort and conned her into believing he had actually done something. I suggested that he wouldn’t comply until he had the desire and that wouldn’t come until he had something to work for. He shouldn’t get what he wants until he has met the standard. I bet she has no qualms making her husband do her bidding before he gets what he wants. It’s the same idea minus the Oedipus Complex.

Instead she is making her son into a pansy. Have you ever wondered why pansies, the toughest of flowers, are given as an emasculating label for men? I digress. From where I stand, this woman’s problem is that she doesn’t trust her son. She is afraid that if he fails, irreparable damage will be done to his precious psyche and quickly emerging ego. The seeming paradox of wanting him supervised yet not wanting to hold him accountable are two sides of the same coin. She doesn’t think he can handle failure. She, therefore, feels like she has to control all of the circumstances in his life and fight his battles for him. This is the definition of the helicopter parent or the snowplow parent who goes ahead of the child, clearing the path so they don’t have to encounter any hardship or difficulty.

It is natural for a parent to want to protect a child. But is my attempt to protect my child actually making him weak? In the book “David and Goliath” Malcolm Gladwell addresses this paradox. He cites one study of 699 “great” people. Over one third of them had lost a parent before the age of ten. Nearly half had lost a parent before the age of twenty. I am not advocating the we knock off a parent to facilitate the growth of our children. I think that applying the principles above will foster the grit we are looking for and no one has to die in the process. So, good luck with this parents everywhere. I am counting on you so that I don’t have to have many more conversations like the one described above.  

Outcasts United: Hierarchical Diffusion

Here I am going to use the examples of the Clarkston Baptist Church the concept of hierarchical diffusion. In the last blog post (chapter 19), I mentioned that the Clarkston Baptist Church changed to meet the needs and tastes of the immigrants. This could not have happened if the church were the Catholic or Mormon churches. The geographic concept of hierarchical diffusion explains why.

First, a hierarchy is any idea or organization where information, authority or power moves in an orderly fashion from a few people at the top, down through a system of people that gets wider the further down it goes. The Catholic and Mormon churches are both hierarchical. In the case of the Catholics, authority goes from the Pope to Cardinals to Bishops to Priests. The Pope governs from Vatican City (the smallest sovereign government on earth), Cardinals minster from large cities that have a cathedral. Salt Lake City has the Cathedral of the Madeline. From there the church is organized into diocese that are overseen by Bishops. Each diocese is divided into a number of parishes that are care for by a priest. It is actually a little more complicated than that, but I think you get the point. Some of you will be familiar with the hierachy of the Mormon Church: Prophet, Apostle, Seventy, Stake President, Bishop. Each has authority over those below and responsibility for an increasingly larger area. Because the administration of these churches is so tight, they are able to keep the doctrines and activities of the entire hierarchy pretty consistent. In other words, things don't change unless it comes from the top-down.

The Baptist Church and the religion of Islam (a follower of Islam is a Muslim) are not hierachical. A leader of a congregation might have someone over him but each minister or imam has a great deal of flexibility to adapt their message to their parish. That is why the Baptist Church became the dominant sect in the southern United States. It was able to adapt, in particular to poor whites and blacks who were not allowed into more hierarchical Christian churches. As evidenced in Outcasts United The Baptist church that had been the religious choice of middle and lower-middle class whites since 1883 changed to become more attractive to Christians of African ethnicity. Thus, there was more singing, dancing and other activities that catered to those who identified with the culture of Africa.
This also explains, in part, why there is so much difference in the teachings and attitudes of Muslims towards people in the United States and Europe. Because Islam does not have a set hierarchy like that of Catholics or Mormons, there is great diversity in the way the Koran and the Sharia law that comes from it is interpreted and administered. That is why you can have countries such as Afghanistan where the interpretation and administration of the teachings of the Koran are extremely strict and places like Jordan and even the United States where the same Koran has a much, much more liberal interpretation and application. You recall that Luma did not wear a Burkah or even a head scarf but she still practiced aspects of Islam like abstaining from Pork. Since the religion is not hierarchical, these interpretations can vary greatly from congregation to congregation within a country.
Probably of more interest to you are the many examples of hierarchical diffusion in reverse. This is where some aspect of culture comes from the lower classes and moves upward to become popular among the mainstream population. Aspects of African American culture such as rap and hip-hop, ebonics (the speech of African Americans) and clothing styles became popular among a large number of Americans. The same goes with each of the different clothing types, Levi's (including all brands of denim), cargo shorts, t-shirts, carpenter pants, Dickies and Vans. All these and more started as a type of clothing used for a specific purpose, and then moved upward to become popular.

Outcasts United: Chapter 19

This chapter is directly connected to chapter 12 of our textbook. That chapter is about services. The specific services spoken of in the book are the Thriftown supermarket, The Clarkston Baptist Church and the Clarkston Police Department.

When I first bring up the concept of "service" in class, a lot of students get confused with the time they spend helping another person without expectation of payment. That is not the kind of service we are talking about here.

Every economy, no matter how big or small, is divided into three parts: agriculture, industry and service. Agriculture (also known as primary industries) includes any job that grows plants, raises animals or extracts resources from the ground. Industry (also known as secondary industries) are those jobs that use the materials from primary industries to make/manufacture some product. Services (also known as, you guessed it, tertiary industries) are all the jobs that take place after a product is manufactured. If you use this definition to find out which of these three categories your parent's job(s) fall into, you will probably find that they fall into the service category. Everything from hairstylist to mechanic, cashier to accountant, day care to college professor or salesperson to scientist are service type jobs. Think about it; none of these jobs grow plants, raise animals, extract minerals or manufacture products.
The more developed a country becomes, the more advanted their economy is. That means that jobs go from basic to very, very specialized. I heard a story in NPR the other day about people in China who play video games on-line to acquire credits for certain weapons or tools that can be used to gain advantage over other players. After they gain these tools, they sell them for actual cash to American's and Europeans so they can use them in their own on-line games. Tell me that isn't a super specialized job.
In Outcasts United each of the services listed in the first paragraph had to adapt to a changing demographic base in order to survive. Thriftown was probably a lot like Day's or Smith's. They sold foods that the typical white American wanted. The problem is that Clarkston had changed so much that the typical resident of Clarkston was not a typical American. Their sales begin to fall to the point where they were about to go out of business. One of the workers at the store happened to be a Vietnamese woman by the name of Hong Diep Vo. She knew a lot of Vietnamese people who would buy the foods they wanted from Thriftown because Thriftown was much closer to their homes than the stores (probably in Atlanta) where they had to go to get these foods. When sales improved, the owned started looking for other kinds of ethnic foods that would cater to people from the Middle East, Africa, Southern Europe and Asia. As they did so, not only did the store survive, it thrived!

There are many concepts from this example that can be explained by geography. The first is actually a principle of economics. That is supply and demand. If there is something everybody want but there isn't much of it, the price will go up. If not many people want a product and there is a lot of it, the price will go down. In the case of Thriftown, they had a lot of foods that people in Clarkston didn't want.
The other concepts are threshold and range. Threshold is the number of people living in an area need to support a certain business. Range is the distance a person is willing to travel to buy something. This also varies by product or service. The average distance (range) people are willing to travel to go to McDonald's is about 3 miles. However, how far would you travel to see your favorite pop-artist perform? Maybe you would travel hundreds of miles. While both of these businesses are considered to be non-basic, that is, they are not necessary for survival, they have a very different range. Generally speaking, the easier something is to get the shorter the range will be. Also, the range can get longer if there is something a person really wants but it is not close. If, in the case of ethnic foods at Thriftway, the food they want is suddendly closer, they will go to the closest place. Since, McDonald's food (or fast food in general) is not that important to most people, they are not willing to travel very far to get it. Therefore, in order for McDonalds to survive, their threshold (number people within range of the desired service) has to have a lot of people in not a pretty small area. The Mumford and Son's concert, on the other hand has a much larger threshold and much longer range. There aren't enough people within the threshold of your typical McDonalds to sell the number of tickets need to make the concert a success. People will come from all over the state and maybe even parts of Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming to see the show. Lucky for them, seeing their concert is more important to their fans than eating a Big Mac.
I hope you can see that a service that could find the best location for some other service could be very valuable and make a lot of money. That is a type of service that would be performed by a geographer or someone who understood these geographic concepts and has the means to apply them.
I also hope you can see how these concepts help explain why the local Baptist church and police station changed to cater to Clarkston's changing population.

Outcasts United: popular verses folk culture

Except for one of the remaining chapters of Outcasts United , all of the remaining chapters in the book focus mostly on the story of the Fugees with many of the geography-related concepts mixed in. For this blog post, therefore, I will discuss several concepts that were found in several different chapters.

Have you ever wondered how soccer became the world's most popular sport? In order to understand how this happened, we need to understand the basics of cultural diffusion (the spread of culture). The concept that I will start with first is the difference between folk and popular cultures. In a nutshell, folk culture is local and unique; whereas, popular culture is global and generic. Folk cultural traits are almost always tied to the local environment. That means that material culture is influenced by the climate, vegetation and landscape of a place. People eat foods, wear clothes and have customs (like music, dance and sports) that are connected to their immediate surroundings. People who live in cool climates eat foods like apples and potatoses, wear clothes with fur and do sports like hockey and skiing.
In addition to things that people do, there are customs that are forbidden to do. These are called cultural taboos. One example of a tabboo from chapter 7 is the taboo of eating pork. You may remember that Luma was with Jeremiah in a grocery store. She told him that she did not eat pork, so out of respect for her, he gave up eating pork too. Neither, Muslims nor jews eat pork. The explanation given in the Bible is that pigs are an unclean animal. This might be based on the idea of pigs rolling in mud or because they don't have sweat glands like other animals. Actually, if pigs roll in mud, it is too cool themselves down because they can't do so by sweating. A geographical (environmental) explanation for why Jews and Muslims don't eat pork is that pigs are not well adapted to living in a dry environment. Herding cows and sheep is the most common agricultural activity in the desert. Von Thunen's agricultural theory says that those types of agriculture that require the most land will be located the farthest from cities because the land is cheaper and animals don't spoil until after they are killed. Things like milk, fruits and vegetables that do spoil quickly must be located nearer to cities. Incidently, these types of agriculture do not reaquire as mush land, which is good, because the closer you get to the city, the more expensive land is. So, since grass grows easily, even in dry places (like Utah), grazing these animals over large tracts of land makes sense. Pigs, on the other hand, do not graze on grass over large areas of land. They would be impractical to keep in a desert environment. A geographer would say that is why they are taboo.

You might remember the explanation from chapter twenty-five that many of the poor immigrants to the United States work in pork or poultry processing plants.  The Southern United States does have an environment suited to the raising of these kinds of livestock. Chicken, pigs and more recently cows are fed corn. Places that raise chickens and pigs are usually located near places where corn is grown. Where there is a type of environment that leads to producing certain kinds of food, there must be a large supply of workers to process all of the chickens and pigs that are slaughtered. Going back to a previous post where I talked about the idea of core-perephery, you can understand that those with less skill and education are those on the periphery (margins) that are consigned to the dirtiest, lowest paying jobs. It was said that refugees were desirable to employers at these plants because they needed a steady job and since they were in the United States legally they were attractive to employers. As you know immigration is a big issue in the United States. States along the border, with the demand for these kinds of workers have recently, passed really strict immigration laws. They have increased the penalty for workers and employers who are caught working illegally. Employers are having a hard time finding agricultural workers in states like Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi because many have left for states with less-strict laws about illegal (non-documented) immigrants.

To this point I have explained the parts of the book that deal with culture on a local scale. Cultural traits that are dependent on the natural environment will not spread beyond that environment. On the flip side, cultural traits that are not tied to the local environment are often adopted by other people in far away places. Soccer, is a globally popular sport because there are no environmental contraints that limit its spread. It can be played anywhere. You can use just about anything for a ball. The book talked about how the boys would use rolled up rags or paper bags as a ball. There isn't any expensive equipment. All of these factors lead to a sport that can spread to any country and be played by almost anyone anywhere. You may recall that Luma stumbled upon refugees playing soccer in a parking lot. So whether you think soccer is the best sport ever, that is really not why it is the most popular. It is the most popular sport because it was able to spread easier to every part of the world.
It is the same with American culture. Because the United States has the means to connect to more parts of the world than any other. We not only have the technology (computers, phones and satellite etc) we also, thanks to British Imperialism, can connect to more parts of the world because we speak a language that is understand by more people in more places. (I know, I know Mandarin, Chinese is the first language of more people than any other but English is not only the primary but also the second language of more people than any other). Language is important for the spread of culture because that is how culture is transmitted. As mentioned at the beginning, popular culture is global and generic. You may not think that soccer and American food, clothing and music are generic but when you break it down, the elements of fast food (burgers and fries), clothing (jeans and t-shirts) and music (love songs) are all really very similar. There is not a lot of variety. It has to be that way because in order to be popular it has to appeal to a lot of people and it won't appeal to a lot of people unless it has characteristics that everyone around the world can identify with. That's what makes popular culture popular.

Outcasts United Chapter 9

By now you have read about the experience of the families of three or four of the members of the Fugees. It probably seems hard to imagine the kind of hatred that would lead people to systematically kill entire groups just because they belong to a different group. What must be going on in a person's mind to motivate them to kill someone or drive them from their home?

Culture does not explain individual act of violence as well as it explains acts of genocide such as in those committed in Rwanda, Burundi and Germany during World War II. Everyone on earth belongs to a culture. On the surface, culture includes things like clothing, food and music. These are  known as material culture. Below the surface, lurks non-material culture. Non-material culture includes the values and beliefs that are taught to individuals who belong to groups. That group could be a religion, a nationality or even a group as small as a school, family, team or group of friends. The values that are passed on by these groups can be as large as men's views about women or as subtle as the belief that walking under a ladder or breaking a mirror will bring bad luck.  
I have a metaphor that helps understand how culture shapes the way we all think and act. Culture is like a lens that we see the world through. Our values and beliefs are what create the lens. Every person's unique beliefs, values, customs and behaviors makes a unique lens. The lens is unique but it is also blurry/distorted. It is distorted because, your values and beliefs conflict with the values of other people. This could be as harmless as thinking people that like country music or sport mullets are wierd. It also occurs when you root for an American in the Olympics. If your lens weren't blurry, you would choose who to root for based on a picture that included as much information as possible about each athlete. However, we rarely have time to gather a complete set of information about the people that we make judgements about. Thus, we identify most closely with those who share appearance, values and behaviors that are similar to ours.
The less familiar we are with a person's appearance, actions and behaviors, the more distorted our view of those people. To the extent that these beliefs blurr the way groups see members of other groups, the tendency for those groups to cause harm to the members of those groups increases. When a person grows up being taught negative beliefs about members of another race, religion, gender, ethnicity etc.the easier it will be for them to act against them in some harmful way. Then, if we feel that group means us harm, we might look the other way while bad things happen to them or feel like we have to act to protect ourselves, or even act upon them first. This is the case with Islamic terrorists. They are often taught strict religious teachings in their school. In the case where women's modesty is concerned, the dress and behavior of women in America, as portrayed in popular media, prompt them to think that our culture is evil and corrupt. Add this one example to the many others that blurr the views of many Muslims towards America, and you can see how they might come to believe that American culture is like a cancer that is spreading across the face of the earth. If you believe this, then you might want to kill it. This how Islamic Jihad leads to terrorist acts. It also explains all of the acts of genocide explained in Outcasts United.
It also explains how, to a lesser degree, the residents of Clarkston, Georgia; including the mayor and members of the police force might act against the many refugees who had moved to their community. The book explains how much Clarkston had changed in just a few years. People's beliefs and views change very slowly. In the case of the mayor, a combination of factors led him to prohibit the Fugees  and older Sudanese refugees from practicing on an otherwise empty field. First, being a white resident of the South, he would have been raised during an era of strong racial prejudice against blacks. The community that elected him undoubtedly shared his views. He even used his belief in the suprmacy of baseball as a reason why the Fugees couldn't use the fields.

The first chief of police represented in the book and many of the officers also saw refugees with distorted lenses. The instance of a policeman beating an upstanding member of the community and throwing him in jail  for simply asking why the officer pulled him over shows how distorted his views of black people were. There was also an instance when another officer began to issue a citation to a refugee just arriving in Clarkstaon, who, in his excitement to see his relatives did not park his vehicle according to the Clarkston ordinances.

In addition to the idea of a distorted cultural lens, geography offers another theory that helps us understand why some people/groups/countries are more powerful than others. It is called the Core-Periphery Model. The Core-Periphery Model says that the dominant group will favor those who share their values and marginalize (push away from the center) those who are not like them. The more dis-similar a person is, the further away they will get pushed. This can happen on a large scale; rich countries like the U.S. Japan, Australia at the core and poor countries like Burundi, Liberia, Sudan on the periphery. As explained in the last blog, the countries of Europe exploited the African countries on the periphery. It can also happen on a local scale; the mayor denying access to the fields and the police targeting non-whities. The author, Warren St. John, also explains how the players on the Fugees were continually seeking favor from Luma. Players who could speak Arabic tried to use it to move closer to the core (Luma). Others felt more important when Luma would spend time at their home.
This model can be used in almost any social situation to identify and explain the status of different members of the group in relations to each other. It explains the conflict of the Liberian youth who are easier targets for gangs. As poor refugees with dark skin, poor English skills and little education, they were pretty far out on the periphery. By wearing their hair in braids and wearing baggy pants they could be accepted by gangs and thereby move closer to the core than before. Power is one of the goals of gangs. That is why they fight over territory. The irony is that they don't play by the rules established by those in the core. In the U.S., any person can end up in the core through hard work and education. The further out on the periphery you are the harder it is, but it can be done.

Too often, following the rules established by the core feels like selling out and betraying your racial or ethnic group. It is easier to get angry and fight against them. The problem is, this usually backfires and leaves a person further out than before. The group in power resists those that they perceive as a threat, thereby pushing them away. The more a group is pushed away the harder they fight back. This has worked on occasion. Gandhi's efforts in India led to independence. Martin Luther King learned from the methods used by Gandhi to help Blacks in America gain more equal rights. The key here is that their efforts were non-violent. The revolutions in the Tunisia and Egypt were mostly non-violent. Those in Libya and Syria have been very bloody. Usually, the more blood that is shed, the more difficult it is to establish peace after the ruling core is thrown out. Often, those who were on the periphery end up marginalizing those groups that oppressed them and the cycle starts all over again.

I hope this explanation of the cultural lens and core-periphery model are helpful to you in understanding the society is organized. We have all been on the periphery at some point in our lives. Hopefully, this explanation will help you to understand where you stand in any given group. If you don't like where you are, rather than following our basic animal fight or flight instincts, we can use the rules of the majority to gain power. This does not mean that you have to sell out and lose your identity. All you have to do is to seek learning and understanding. This will not only make you more capable and valuable, it will also make your culture lens clearer so you can see the course that you need to take to become the person that you are capable of.

Outcasts United: Chapters 4-7

In these chapters, author Warren St. John writes how events over one hundred years in the past affect the lives of people today. Tribal rivalries are one of the biggest obstacles in the development of African countries. Just like on the American continent before the arrival of Europeans, Africa was comprised of hundreds of tribes. Each tribe had an area that they controlled and neighboring tribes, with whom, they competed with for land and resources. Over the course of time and space, these tribes evolved into separate and distinct ethnicities. An ethnicity is more than race. Race is a person's genetic/biological make up. It is an important part of identity but unlike places like North America and Europe where there is great racial diversity, Africa has very subtle racial differences. Ethnicity is a what divides people there. Language and religion are the two main elements of ethnicity. Scholars disagree over exactly how many languages there are in Africa. It is safe to say that there are over 1,000 separate languages and 7,000 dialects. Later this year you will learn more about how languages change, but suffice it to say that if culture is a body, language is the blood. People can't form a sense of national identity (American, Mexican, French)  unless they understand each other. It is hard to understand a person if you don't speak the same language.
Europeans came to Africa for the same reasons they went to the Americas: god, glory and gold (but mostly gold or resources). Since natural resources was their main goal, European countries rushed to carve out boundaries that would secure these resources for themselves and water transportation routes to get those resources to the ocean where they could be transported back to Europe. Tribal boundaries were not taken into consideration. If they were tribes like the Tutsi and Hutu would not have ended up fighting for control over Rwanda (have you seen the movie Hotel Rwanda?), Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. Chapter 7 tells the story of Generose Ntwari (mother of Bienvenue), a Tutsi like Paula Balegamite who was forced to flee when, in 1993, a democratically elected leader was assisinated, inciting genocide by Hutus against Tutsis. In the course of one year 100,000 people died. In all 300,000 lost their lives with causing millions like Generose to flee to Tanzania and Mozambique.

The books Things Fall Apart and Heart of Darkness were written to detail the problems that resulted from European rule of Africa. Why is Europe, which also had a history of conflict is now peaceful because the boundaries of almost all European countries are now based on language and Ethnicity rather than on artificial boundaries. The exception is the Balkan Peninsula in southern Europe where fighting also occurred over control over areas by competing ethnic groups.

Outcasts United talks about how over one hundred years after Belgium's colonization of the Congo Basin, Paula Belagamite had to leave the country with her children while her husband was in prison for being a member of the  minority Tutsi tribe.  In 1884, King Leopold created the Congo Free State as a corporation in order to exploit the Congo Basin for its rubber, ivory and other resources. After enslaving the people and killing between 5 and 10 million people for refusing to work, attempting to escape or simply working them to death he was forced to yield the colony to the state of Belgium. While I said earlier that, in Africa, race was not as important as ethnicity, Europeans who didn't understand the ethnic differences between tribes, used race to bestow favor upon the Tutsi tribe whose skin was lighter and features more narrow than the more numerous Hutu tribe. The Tutsi, were given positions of power and authority to help the Belgians rule.

In the blog post for chapter 3, I talked about how supranationalism is an important movement among countries to cooperate with each other in solving problems. I cited the United Nations as an example. An opposite force is also occurring around the world. It is called devolution. Devolution is the break up of large regions into smaller ones. There are many reasons why a country will break up into smaller political bodies. For Belgium in Africa, it was part of a larger movement of European countries to give colonies their independence. 1960 was actually quite late for Belgium to give up rule. In countries where there is a lot of ethnic diversity, fighting usually occurs when different ethnic groups compete for control of land. I explained above how this happened in southern Europe. It also happened in India after the British left and it continues in Iraq after the U.S. removed Saddam Hussein from power.
So now you understand that the Tutsi who were favored by the Belgians now found themselves persecuted by rulers like Joseph Mobutu and Laurent Kabila.

As stated in the book, dictators often incite ethnic conflict to distract people from the corruption that is rampant within their governments. Mobutu owned yachts, jets and mansions. He diverted millions of dollars into Swiss banks. He used the military to scare civilians into submission. He was able to use these tactics to keep control. It was this country the he renamed Zaire, where the famous fight between Muhammed Ali and George Foreman known as "The Rumble in the Jungle" took place. Ultimately, enough people were unhappy with his rule and in 1996 he was overthrown by Laurent Kabila and the country was renamed The Democratic Republic of the Congo. This change did not however, lead to peace. It was the turmoil following Kabila's assasination and the retribution sought by his son that got Paula Balegamite's husband thrown into prison and cause her to flee the country for safety. The war known as the second Congo war is also refered to as the African World War because it involved nine African nations, resulting in more deaths (6 million) since World War II. Millions of refugees also fled the countries where conflict erupted.

Outcasts United: Chapter 3

Chapter 3 of Outcasts United explains many of the factors that brought so many refugees to the small town of Clarkston, Georgia. I will review some of the factors explained in the book and explain some new concepts as explained from a human geography perspective.

explains the change in Clarkston from a small town of 7,200 mostly white residents to a muli-ethnic community with over one-third of the population being foriegn born, represented by over 50 different nationalities. Specifically, the confluence of improvements in transportation and cheap housing are responsible for the changes. Transportation of all types has led to increasing urbanization of the United States. First, in the 1948 the Federal Aid Highway Act created the freeways such as I-15, I-80 and I-84 that run, in most cases,run border to border from north to south and east to west. This freeway system made it possible for Americans to live further away from where they worked but get to their jobs relatively quickly. This change is shown in the Disney movie Cars. The movie laments the demise of small towns in the U.S. that were connected by state roads. The most famous of these was Route 66. Route 66 was a lot like our own Highway 40 that runs through main street in Heber City and connects to I-80. Interstate highways bypassed these small towns, thereby taking much needed business away from small towns. As many small towns shrank in size, suburbs popped up all around big cities. The ability to drive 65 miles per hour (or faster) with no required stops allowed people to live fifty or sixty ( in my wife's case 70 miles) from where they work. Thus, places like Clarkston that are only 13 miles from Atlanta became destinations for people who worked in Atlanta but wanted to live in a smaller community. Ironically, it was the airplane and communications that had the biggest impact on Atlanta. In the 1970's Atlanta became an international airport. International airports are also important hubs for connecting to domestic flights (Salt Lake City is also an important hub. Althogh it is not mentioned in the book, in the 1980's Ted Turner established a communications/media company that includes CNN and TNT in Atlanta.

Both transportation and communications are basic industries. A basic industry is one that provides jobs for people who make something or provide a service for people who don't live in the area where they live. The more basic industries a place has, the more jobs are created. People move to these places for these jobs. All of these new people create a demand for more new services in these places. Services such as hospitals, schools, gas stations, restaurants etc. These jobs are called non-basic industries because they are dependent on some basic industry. Since Atlanta was adding basic industries, it also created a lot of jobs in non-basic industries. Thus, the population grew.

As more people moved to Atlanta, the population spread further and further out from Atlanta. Places that were formerly part of a county became incorporated as independent cities. You can see this around Salt Lake City. When we think of Salt Lake City, we usually think of the whole valley from the oil refineries in the north end of the valley, to the state prison at the south end of the valley and from Kennecott Copper in the west to the Wasatch Mountains on the east. Actually, Salt Lake City is much smaller than that. The valley just described includes places like Draper, Sandy, Murray, Holiday, West Jordan, West Valley, Magna, North Salt Lake and more. These were all once part of Salt Lake County. A place usually chooses to incorporate to keep their tax dollars close to home rather than being used in other parts of the county. Someday, maybe the resdients east of Heber City, the entire area east of Mill Road will want to incorporate as a separate city so that their tax dollars will work to create a separate police, fire, water and parks district that will serve just the people on the east half of the valley rather than go to residents of Wallsberg, Jordanelle, Daniel, Charleston and other parts of Wasatch County. Even though it is not an example of the incorporation of a city, Park City created a school district separate from the rest of Summit County so that their tax dollars would only go to Park City schools instead of students in Kamas, Oakley and Coalville. The process that I just described happened over and over again in the Altanta metropolitan area.

Clarkston was already incorporated as a city before all the growth started in Atlanta. Originally it was a place where middle class whites moved to get away from the hustle and bustle of Atlanta. When a beltway (a freeway that goes around the outside of the city) was added around Atlanta (simialr to I-215) this created more growth around the off-ramps of the belt-way. These new cities (called edge cities) were further out from Atlanta than Clarkston. As these suburbs appeared, white middle-class residents with cars moved further out from Atlanta, leaving vacancies in homes and apartment buildings that needed to be filled. The move of middle and upper middle-class whites is known as "white flight." Landlords who wanted to fill these vacancies dropped rents to make them more affordable but also cut the money they formerly spent on maintainence. This brought in low-income minorities to Clarkston. The reduction in maintainence led to the deterioration of the apartments. This is a simple explanation of urban decay (aka ghettoization).

At this point, there still weren't many refugees in Clarkston. While cheap rent was something that international organizations that found homes for refugees looked for places they could afford, they also needed to be able to get to work without a car. As mentioned in the book, refugees were given enough money to get started in a new place. After that, they were on their own. They almost never had enough money for a car. So, one of the factors that relief agencies looked for was easy access to cheap transportation into Atlanta's central business district where there were many jobs working as maids, cooks and janitors in hotels, restaurants and as workers in factories and agriculture. So, when MARTA made Clarkston the end of the rail line that connected the outlying area to Atlanta, this was the factor that made Clarekston an ideal location for a refugee. Clarkston, is obviously not the only place the refugees are sent. Clarkston was one of several places in the Atlanta area where some 19,000 refugees were sent. There were obviously many other places around the U.S. and the world where refugees migrate. You may be aware that just recently, dozens of refugees from Myanmar (aka Burma) recently arrived in Heber from a refugee camp in Thailand where they had been living for many years.

Needless to say, refugees in far-away places such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Liberia, Congo, Burundi, Sudan, Somalia or Ethiopia have no idea about the best places to make a new start in a new country. None of this would have been possible without the assistance of international organizations.  The increasing importance international organizations is covered in chapter 8 of our textbook. Any organization that works beyond the borders of any one country is called a supranational organization. The book talks a lot about how refugees begin the process of moving to a new country by applying for refugee status with the United Nations High Commisioner for Refugees. The United Nations is confederation of countries that seeks to solve many of the world's problems through the cooperation of its members. In the case of refugees, the United Nations will have representatives at refugee camps. People will apply for refugee status. The United Nations will verify that the person/family was indeed forced to leave their home and then work with member nations to get permission for them to enter their borders. The U.S. office of refugees is the organization that would approve the application and work with other organization to find a place for a refugee to live. The International Rescue Committee, World Relief and Lutheran Family Services are some of the non-profit organization mentioned in the book that help refugees get settled and offer support after they are established. Because of the many organizations involved in this process is the reason it could take so long from the time a family first arrived at a refugee camp until they actually made the move to a new country. People who work for these organizations are the ones that worked with the families described in this book. Without their help, all of the people in the book would either still be living in refugee camps or dead.  As the world becomes increasingly globalized, the need for international organizations to help coordinate the efforts of countries, corporations and other supranational organizations working in nearly every aspect of human life immaginable will surely increase.