Washington National Cathedral

William Raspberry May 18, 2008

Sam Lloyd: Good morning, and welcome to the Sunday Forum, with our weekly conversation at the intersection of faith and public life. It’s wonderful to have with us today a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist. William Raspberry was for a great many years a columnist for the Washington Post. He started off, interestingly enough, in Mississippi, in Okolona, Mississippi, which happens to be my wife Marguerite’s hometown as well, so their families go way back. Came to the Washington Post in the 1960s, and for four decades wrote thoughtful columns week after week, known for their non-doctrinaire approach to things, for the clarity of their thought, for his willingness to call things just as he sees them.

Time magazine called him the Lone Ranger of Columnists in America. In addition, for the last thirteen years, Bill Raspberry has been a journalist, teaching journalism at Duke University, and combined for many years doing both of those things. Exactly how he did it I’m not sure, and we’ll hear some today about his new project. A project called Baby Steps, an educational program focusing on helping parents of preschoolers to prepare their children of school and life. Bill, it’s a great joy to have you with us today.

William Raspberry: It’s a joy, Sam. Thank you.

Lloyd: Great. Well, let’s jump in. For four decades, you wrote columns. And now you don’t have that gripping feeling of waking up in the morning, knowing you’ve got to produce one before the day is out. Do you miss the daily column grind, or do you wake up in the morning with things to say and no place to say it?

Raspberry: What happened for me is that for many, many years, the column was my way of organizing my world, of thinking about what was happening, and what I was seeing and hearing, and learning. The column was a way of sorting stuff out, and when I stopped doing the column, I missed it terribly for that reason.

But then I found that the teaching was also an excellent way of organizing my world. I’ve just retired from the teaching so I think I’ll have a fair amount of disorganization in my life. I’ll have to find another way of putting things together. But, yes, I do miss that. I’ve had the great luck of having two really, really terrific careers.

Lloyd: You had a pretty steady set of themes in your columns through the years. You wrote a lot about economic inequality, a lot about race in America, a lot about family dynamics within the black community, about public education, health care. Do you think, if you were writing columns today, the subjects would have changed at all? Does it seem like the same issues are still at work?

Raspberry: Certainly the specific subject matter would be different. I remember being asked by a Methodist bishop of some note, we’re talking, and he said, “Roughly how many columns did you say you’ve written over your career?” and I thought for a minute and said, “Three.”

And he laughed because he understood precisely what I was saying. The subject matter changes as with ministers, the text changes, but there are few themes that seem overridingly important to any columnist, I think, and you keep coming back to those with embarrassing frequency. But you hope you put sufficient new clothes on them so that people don’t recognize them as the same old ideas they saw two weeks ago.

Lloyd: One new phenomenon on the scene certainly in terms of looking at race in America is the fact that there is a presidential candidate who is African American. Is that something you might have predicted just a few years ago when you were still writing your columns?

Raspberry: Well, absolutely! No! I would have had no clue— (laughter) Last year I had no clue! It’s… it is quite amazing how we get these huge shifts that… I mean, time doesn’t happen in nice even increments. It comes in huge gulps of time, and we’re never quite ready for it.

We are in an extraordinary period… you keep remarking that, you know, the Democrats are either going to have the first woman ever as a party nominee or the first black ever. We’ve said that so it stops seeming so remarkable. It is quite remarkable and yet… and yet somebody will find a way to say nothing’s changed.

I marvel at how quickly people can accept the new and the different then embrace it and then swallow it as though nothing happened. I think there’s some extraordinary things happening, and we’d be well to be aware of the extraordinary times we are in, because I think it helps us take advantage of the new opportunities and to make ourselves feel more… whatever—

Lloyd: Hopeful—

Raspberry: —there’s a word for that.

Lloyd: Yeah, let’s stay with that for a minute, because one of the things that I’m sure strikes just about all of this in this time is just, as you’re saying, a sense of something absolutely surprising happening, with a possibility of an African American nominee and maybe even president. At the same time that we’d want to say that there is a lot that is going very badly in the black community now, and having read through a whole stack of your final columns, one of the things you come back to again and again is this crisis facing the lower economic black community in particular ,and especially the black family. And something you talk a lot about is that maybe the critical issue for black families, and for the wellbeing certainly of African American males, is father absence, and what that has done. You point back to the 1960s, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan talking about the unraveling of the family back in the Sixties, and how that pattern has continued and gotten worse. Do you see anything happening to mitigate that now?

Raspberry: I’m afraid I don’t. I’ve looked for it with great hopefulness, but don’t see very much to make me believe that our move toward fatherlessness is changing. It’s virtually the norm now in lower-income African American communities. It’s getting to be the norm in lower-income communities that are not African American—

Lloyd: That’s right.

Raspberry: —and there’s a kind of feedback loop that’s happening, that the more it happens the more it will happen, and it’s possible, I suppose, to talk about it in terms of new lifestyle options, but it seems to me that it’s more than just an option.

It seems to me that there are positive dangers that come with father absence. It shows up in all kinds of ways—social, criminal, academic—and I really, really wish we could find a way to get focused again on the importance of families—complete families—for children. We’ve always had incomplete families around, but we’ve for the first time got whole communities now that are fatherless and the results are not good.

Lloyd: You talk about, increasingly, people are meeting young people in the black community who have never been to a wedding. Weddings are dropping out of the culture in a lot of cases. One statistic you cited that struck me when Daniel Moynihan wrote his article in the Sixties about the unraveling of the black family, and what that was doing, he was accused of being a racist for saying such things as being a cause. At that point it was about a quarter of the black families were fatherless. It is now seventy percent and, as you say, it’s happening in the lower-income white community rapidly as well. So something significant is going wrong here.

Raspberry: Something really significant has gone on. As you say, when he said it back in the Sixties, about a quarter of black children were born out of wedlock, and he was alarmed by that. Now it’s about a quarter of white children born out of wedlock.

The trend… the phrase “the miner’s canary” rings very, very true for that. When there is toxins in the social environment, those weakest organisms are the first to fall over, to succumb, and the black families went early. But those same toxins now are affecting families right across the board, and somehow we’ve left it to what we are pleased to call the religious right to pay any attention at all to what’s happening with those families, and to the absence of marriage.

And I think we’d be very smart to try to figure ways to make marriage a part of our ordinary narrative again. Because it has to do with the stories that we tell ourselves. Even the youngsters who don’t get married now say they like the idea of marriage. They plan to do it. But, you know, maybe after they’ve got their house and they’ve got a couple of kids and then maybe they’ll be secure enough to consider marriage. I mean, they want to do all the right things, but out of sequence.

Lloyd: And you say that the absence of father, you’re citing this somewhere, is a stronger predictor of criminal behavior than family income or education or race. It’s that unraveling of that dynamic that seems to have a great deal to do with what becomes of children.

Raspberry: It is absolutely true. And a part of what goes on is that marriage and fatherhood was a part of the narrative that we had for ourselves. We knew what our place in the community would be. If we were male, we would be defenders of communities and protectors of families, which is why the natural male aggressiveness turns out to be a good thing when socially harnessed.

We’ve still got the aggressiveness, but the pattern of protecting communities and defending families is what’s gone. So the aggressiveness turns into antisocial behavior, and guys who ought to be protectors and defenders of their home turf turn out to be liabilities even to their own families.

Lloyd: You tell a story about elephants in South Africa. Tell us that story.

Raspberry: There was an extraordinary event, true story, I first saw it on “60 Minutes.” The elephant herd at Kruger Game Park in South Africa had grown too large to sustain itself, and the games keepers came up with a really clever idea. If they could transport some of the elephants to another game park at Pilanesberg, they would be able to draw the new game park and sustain the old one, and it seemed like a terrific idea.

The problem was that, at the time, while they were able to move the younger elephants, they didn’t have anything big enough to transport the big fully grown bull elephants, and they didn’t know what to do about that. So they wound up sadly killing off several of these huge beasts, but they moved the youngsters to Pilanesberg.

And then, when these youngsters that they had moved reached adolescence, strange things started to happen. White rhinos—a rare breed and also at the Pilanesberg Park—started to turn up dead. At first people thought, you know, they were being killed by poachers for their horns, but the horns were intact. They set up cameras and found out that these young teenage boy elephants were attacking, chasing, and often killing the rhinos for no apparent reason and that their testosterone levels were up, and they couldn’t figure out what to do about it, and they wound up deciding on plan to kill off some of the worst offending juveniles and, in fact, proceeded to do so.

Then somebody got a really bright idea. By then they had the means for transporting the big bulls, and they said, why don’t we bring in some of these guys from Kruger? And they did. And almost instantly the bad behavior of the young juvenile males stopped. Not because the big guys were beating up on them. In fact, they were following the big guys around, trying to learn how to be proper male elephants. And it occurred to me that what the gamekeepers did for what seemed to them to be really good reasons, that is, to get rid of the male when they couldn’t transport, we have done in many ways in our own society.

I go back to the 1960s when we had what was then called the man-in-the-house rule. If there was evidence that there was an adult male in the household—employed or not—the presence rendered the family ineligible for welfare assistance. So we forced these bulls out of the park.

A number of things happened most recently—the stiff penalties for crack cocaine and also the three-strikes rules, which has a record number of nonviolent offenders behind bars absent from their human game parks, absent from their families and from their communities. And we’ve left a bunch of juveniles behind to sort of raise themselves with the help from their mothers. And it turns out in our own society, as in the elephant society, that the father absence is important and not just the absence of adults, you know, generic adults. Women are still very much present in our communities, but male absence turns out to have its own detrimental outcomes and—I’m not suggesting that we open the doors on the prisons in the world, but we certainly need to rethink the alacrity with which we put nonviolent offenders behind bars, and in the process denude entire communities of their male adults.

Lloyd: You’ve given a lot of thought to what’s happening with education and why is it that education hasn’t been… public education has not been able to get traction and do what it needs to do. You said it, as best anyone can tell, integration has not really contributed to the quality of education for our young people. What do you think education, particularly public education, particularly for our youngest students, what do you think education should be doing these days? I know you’re starting a nonprofit to work on one piece of that, but why have we been stuck and unable to move anything forward very much?

Raspberry: One of the things we’ve found it difficult to think about, and therefore difficult to speak about, is something we all know. We know that good schools are schools that have a critical mass of kids from good homes. Good homes we define for these purposes as homes where learning is valued and stressed. We’re not talking about money, but we’re… the importance of learning and proper behavior is stressed.

When kids come from such homes in sufficient numbers, schools turn out to be doing okay. As it happens, America’s public schools are doing a reasonably decent job educating children who come to school ready for learning. They are not doing at all well with kids who don’t. And we have tried to fix that by forcing the schools to do more for children who come to school unready for learning, when it seems to be that we ought to be spending at least some of our time and attention dealing with the homes that produce the kids who are not ready for learning.

Teachers are hard pressed enough. They are not miracle workers, most of them, and we can’t expect them to undo what happens at too many of our homes. But the homes that don’t work very well for children are not headed by parents who don’t care about those children. They’re headed by parents who don’t know what to do about those children, and they can be taught to do what’s necessary. And, in some cases, are being taught to do what’s necessary.

Lloyd: Tell us about Baby Steps, which is your new enterprise.

Raspberry: That is a nice commercial lead-in. Exactly what we hope to do with the project I’ve started in my hometown of Okolona, Mississippi, that is, to give the public schools more children who come to school ready for learning and to do it by teaching the parents of preschoolers, parents of children birth to age five, what they can do at home with our help and support to get their children ready for learning and for life?

And what I find is that we proceed from the same analysis actually that motivated Bill Cosby, except Bill has the idea that parents don’t… that parents need to be yelled at somehow, and made to do the right thing. We proceed from the premise that parents tend to do about the best they know how to do. And so our job is to see to it that they know how to do better.

We don’t say it out loud. What we’re trying to do is to teach parents to instill in their kids some fundamental middle-class values and practices. The love of learning, the love of conversation, the love of words. Because kids who speak a lot find reading so much easier. Kids who read find testing easier and kids who delight in learning find learning comes that much easier, and most children start off prepared to do that. If their parents knew enough to step in and kind of help them.

Lloyd: So this is a program focused on the parents.

Raspberry: We focus on the parents, and as I said, we focus on parents of young children, birth to age five. What we’re discovering—and I’ve just started the program in August of ’03—when the kids start into the public schools, we obviously are not going to be able to walk away from them. So we’ll stay with those children as they go into the grades.

What I’m finding, to my delight, is that parents are eager to help their children to become smarter, more competent students. Once they believe, they believe it can happen, Sam, the hardest thing to do, and I’ve discovered it’s the first thing we have to do, is to change some of the beliefs that the parents bring with them. We’re talking about parents for whom schools didn’t work, and who, they are mostly dropouts, and who don’t believe that school will work for their children either. And it takes a little doing, but they slowly come to realize that, yes, we and they working together can change the trajectory of their children’s lives. And once they start to believe that, they are willing to invest in it.

You know what I tell them, I know you love your kids, I look at those Weeboks you put on their feet and those fancy things you buy them. We’ve got something that will be more permanent, and do your kid a lot more good than those designer things you’re buying for them. And they are prepared to listen.

Lloyd: I want to ask you one more personal question, give you a breather from all this policy talk I’m putting you through, and then open this up to everyone else. You’re from a small town in Mississippi, and you speak warmly still that that is your hometown, you still have deep roots there and family there. You also are an Episcopalian, which is quite an anomaly in any town in Mississippi, and certainly in little Okolona. Say a little bit about how you think you’ve been shaped by your roots, coming from Okolona itself and the Episcopal Church which you’ve stayed with through the years.

Raspberry: Let me see if I can give the condensed version of that aspect of my life. I was born and grew up on the campus of a little junior college, Okolona College, that was run by the Episcopal Church. It was a high school, four-year high school, and a two-year college, and it existed during the days of rigid absolute segregation. It existed without any notable geniuses for teachers, and yet they raised up a few generations of young African Americans who felt protected and guided and loved and cared for. There were people at that school who saw it as their duty to prepare us to prosper in a very hostile environment, and they did an incredible job of that.

The Episcopal Church in the early 1960s decided that is shouldn’t have been involved in the maintenance and perpetuation of a segregated institution, and decided to let the school close. My argument was that yes, Okolona College and some other schools around the South were conceived in sin, in the sin of segregation, but they were here, and it didn’t serve any purpose to let the children of sin starve to death. I mean, that didn’t cure anything.

Well, in fact, the schools did starve to death, but before they did, they taught some of us some things. And one of the lessons I learned from that was that, even in dark, segregated, low-income Okolona, Mississippi, it was possible to create a community of learning, and that happened at that school from 1902 when Dr. Wallace Battle founded the school until 1964 when it closed.

That’s what happened in that town, and I have presumed to take on the task, among others, of restoring in Okolona, Mississippi, the sense that this can be a learning community again. Not by reestablishing the junior college. It’s not needed anymore and it’s not possible for me to do it anymore. But I think that the attitude toward learning that was manifestly present at that little school can be restored, and I think is being restored, and I think when that happens we will see once again people of ordinary gifts and ordinary backgrounds assuming again the magic of education.

People in my town have lost the sense of the magicality of education. They think nothing good can happen, and I am here as a witness that it can, and we’re going to make it happen.

Lloyd: Wonderful. Let’s go to questions from the audience. Questions.

Davis: If you would come forward to us here, to one of the microphones for questions.

Question 1: Thank you, Mr. Raspberry, and I have missed your columns. I have a question about social integration. By way of background, you and I live in upper Northwest Washington, D.C., in an area that fifty years ago an organization, Neighbors Incorporated, helped retain and foster and maintain social integration in those communities, and it has remained successful to this day.

We live in an integrated neighborhood, yet all over D.C. and all over the country, it seems that racial segregation in the neighborhoods still remains and, in fact, we not only don’t live near each other, we don’t pray together usually—there are some exceptions—we don’t socialize much, although up in our neighborhood, we do. I wonder what your thoughts are on this, and what can we do in the next fifty years? Neighbors Inc. is now fifty years old this year. What can we do so that fifty years from now maybe the situation is improved?

Raspberry: It’s true that in the past couple of decades we’ve lost, white and black, I think, lost a lot of the interest we used to have in racial integration. We don’t believe in segregation anymore, but integration has become not much of a priority for most of us, for a lot of reasons. I guess I find myself not thinking of integration as a means of solving lots of problems.

Integration is what ought to happen as we solve problems, it’s not how we solve problems. There may be more integration than meets the eye. It happens at work sites, it happens in social organizations, it happens even occasionally in churches. But there are not many programs that directly promote it anymore. Maybe, maybe this political season will help us to get over that hump a little bit. I hope so.

Lloyd: Question.

Question 2: Good afternoon, if it is afternoon. Thank you so much for your ministry. Your ministry is exactly similar to mine. I didn’t hear what the title of yours, so far as mentoring the parents, but I’ve been an evangelist for some fifteen years, and the Lord gave me the ministry, it’s called Leave and Cleave, and that helps the parents. We mentor the parents to help the children to prepare them to leave their parents and go out into the world in society as a functional human being, and God found and told me that to best prepare the parents is to give the parents something also to look forward to by telling them and allowing them to know that it is profitable to them also to help the children rewards from God and it seems to work a little better—

Lloyd: We need a question.

Question 2:—in the interest of the parents.

Lloyd: Can we have a question?

Question 2: My question, is don’t you think it’s great that God is the major function in the parents’ and the children’s lives that afford them to do right?

Raspberry: Amen. I think we all agree with that. The trick is to figure out ways to do it. I think God’s willing. The rest of us need to get our act together.

Lloyd: Thank you. Question?

Question 3: Do you see a pathway by which organized religion could play a more effective role in strengthening family ties?

Raspberry: I’m sorry, I missed the first part of the question.

Question 3: Do you see a pathway by which organized religion could play a more effective role in strengthening family ties?

Raspberry: There are any number of pathways by which organized religion can do what you suggest. And many congregations, I must say, are doing it. I wish organized religion could find a way to help us restore the importance of marriage, though. Organized religion may be in a better position than any of our other institutions to do that. There are lots of institutions that can help us on the educational end of it. But I’d like the church to do those things which only the church can do, or which the church can do best. But…

Lloyd: I want to pick up. Before we go from the floor, I have a question that came in over the website, and it picks up on something that Bill Raspberry has mentioned just a bit, and that’s Bill Cosby. Question says, this is from Jeffery in Arlington. Bill Cosby’s been vilified for trying to persuade blacks to modify their self-destructive behavior by taking greater responsibility for themselves and their families. Which aspects of his campaign do you find valuable, and which if any are not so useful?

Raspberry: Bill Cosby’s analysis, I think, is dead on. There are things that need to happen in our community that only parents can make happen. Where Bill misses the mark, in my view, is in his assumption that all we need to do is to grab parents by the collar and shake them a couple of times and they will then become good parents.

That’s no a peculiar notion in our society. Major aspects of No Child Left Behind operate on the premise that you can punish adult people into good behavior. That if you threaten teachers loudly enough and forcibly enough they will become wonderful teachers. Bill thinks if you yell at them loudly enough and publicly enough they will become wonderful parents. They know how to do it and all we need to do is wake them up.

My position is they simply don’t know how to do what we want them to do, and they need to be taught. It’s as useful to yell at them as it is yelling at me for using the wrong fork when I’m having tea with the queen of England. I don’t do it out of perversity. I haven’t been taught which fork to use when. Teach me.

Question 4: Good morning. The question I have relates to the fact that you’ve been talking about systemic problems. So there have been a couple of ideas put forth here already, but I’d be interested in your position, or your ideas, on what can individuals do to address the situation that you’ve identified?

[stopped here]

Raspberry: There are… there seems to be two categories of behavior. One is the one I’ve sort of reluctantly but now enthusiastically taken, and that is to see a problem and figure out where I can grab hold of it and go and do what I can to resolve it.

That way doesn’t work for everybody. It happens I had some resources, including the resource of confidence that came from having the career I’ve had. There are other people who don’t have those resources, and the alternative for them, it seems to me, is to look for those individuals and small organizations that are trying to something and help them. They can always use another body or two, another pair of hands and another couple of dollars. And people are encouraged, people who are trying to do things are encouraged well beyond the value of those dollars, when outsiders say what you’re doing makes sense to me, show me how to help. So I think those are the two ways.

Question 5: Good morning, Mr. Raspberry. Your story is very encouraging. When we recognize that your career really reflects that fact that the word became flesh, and I think that’s very dynamic, that you move from just words and you get into works, and we have to juxtapose that with the church, with the right situation, the Hagee situation, the religious right, the president, you know, espousing his religious beliefs, that we have people of faith who fail to do work. What advice would you give to those of us who, like you, want to become engaged in a struggle of transformation, so that we can be faithful as servants of our faith?

Raspberry: That’s really a profound question, and I’m hesitant to try to give advice on it. I spent a long and relatively happy career, successful career, some 43 years at the Washington Post, working with words. And I did not think, and do not now think, that my practice with words was insignificant. I think words also can serve.

But I reached a point in my life where I thought, in addition to words, one ought to undertake to do some deeds, especially if you see things that you think need to be done that nobody seems to be doing. You can cajole, you can scream, you can accuse, but at some point you may feel yourself called to actually put your hand to the plow, and I think that’s a very good thing. It doesn’t… the opportunity doesn’t always occur to us. When it does, I say, accept it with joy and humility, and do what you can. What I’m doing now with my life will not make me as famous as what I did with the other forty years, but in many ways it’s much more rewarding. Thank you for the question.

Question 6: Mr. Raspberry, thank you for your presence and words. On thing that this election period has shown many of us, and is very cogent to me, is that there is a generational shift in what’s happening in this country, and I would say for the better. The younger elements of society are actually much further ahead than those of us older folks in terms of better relations and integration of society.

I have younger children, and when I try to find out why a major part of it, in my opinion is the media, particularly the television medium. Now, do you think—and Rev. Lloyd can add to this as well—do you think the church and the media should really promote for what’s already happening, so that we can have better society through better relations among various groups in the country? Our children are already doing it. We adults also need to do so too.

Raspberry: It’s a very difficult question. When we as individuals decide what things society ought to be doing, we find it perfectly easy to assign the doing of those things to other individuals and to other organizations. And it’s very natural for us to say that organized religion ought to be doing what we take to be God’s work, and I do believe that.

But I hesitate to think of organized religion as separate somehow from those of us who are churchgoers and templegoers and mosquegoers and who are a part of organized religion. Organized religion must mean more than what the pastorate does. It must mean also what we do because we believe what we believe, and it must be because we take seriously the admonition, “Feed my sheep.” That’s what we’re called upon to do, and if we do it through organized religion, so much the better. But the important thing is to do it.

Lloyd: I would just add to that, since I was invited into this one, that it is at the heart of what we call organized religion that people get organized to do things. And happily it’s not just the work of the pastor, but it’s the work of worshiping congregations and Christians and people of faith everywhere. If we’re going to enter into the kind of transformation of our society that you’re describing, it’s going to take a lot of people working, a lot of organizing, a lot of political pressure, and a lot of hands on the wheel. All of those things going on at the same time.

Question 7: You’ve had a great ministry, Mr. Raspberry, and we are grateful for it. I come from California. The two greatest power brokers in California are the Indian gambling interest and the prison interests. It makes so when you talk about a third of black men in prison, it affects every dimension of society. So think with us a little bit about how we can go about changing the prison system. It is so hard to do that in California and, I’m sure, throughout the country. The prison system is central to the problem of black males, so I would appreciate your engaging that.

Raspberry: To speak of changing the prison system takes us in two directions. One is that, since we’ve got lots of people in prison, especially young men, what can we do with them while they are there to make them better members of their communities. That’s kind of an old thing. That’s why we used to call them penitentiaries. You know, we thought we were going… we had penitentiaries and reformatories; we were going to make people better.

We now have a much too quick recourse to imprisonment, incarceration, as a cure for the crime that frightens us. In particular, the drastic penalties for the use of crack cocaine, and the unanticipated way in which such rules as three strikes you’re out have worked, and where our attempts to take away the discretion of judges that we think are too soft. The use of mandatory sentences. The result of all those things is to create an overcrowded prison system.

You mentioned California. California… I remember remarking the time, I try to pin down the day when California started to spend more on prisons than it was then spending on education.

California used to be the national leader in expenditures for education. It no longer is. It’s spending much too much of its resources now on prisons, and we haven’t figured out how to empty the prisons. But I think we know how to stop the inflow, or at least to slow it appreciably. We’re putting lots of people in prison not who are innocent, but who are nonviolent, and who could serve their sentences, their penalties, in ways and in places that would be helpful to communities, rather than harmful to them. And we, my guess is that we’ll get around to doing that, not because we’ve had a change of heart, but because we’ve had a change of wallet. We’ll find it’s simply too expensive to go on doing things the way we are now doing them, and we’ll look for alternative ways. And it’s a shame that it should come to that, but I think that’s where we are.

Question 7: Thank you.

Lloyd: Two more very brief questions and then we have to stop.

Question 8: Hi, Mr. Raspberry. You were a professor of mine at Duke about eight years ago, so it’s very exciting to be here. My question for you is this: I wanted to follow up with your comment around parents’ need to know what their doing, they want to know… sorry… they want to be taught, or they need to be taught, that they’re doing the best they can. And I manage an after-school program here in D.C., and one of the issues that I’ve run into with parents is that when I, as a white person, talk to them, trying to tell them or give them advice about what to do as a parent, it’s kind of perceived as, here I am as a white person telling you as an African American what you should do. And in a way, I kind of feel like its perpetuating racism, and it’s perceived that way by them as well, so I wanted to get your feed back on that.

Raspberry: First, you may be talking to the wrong person. I thought Paris Hilton was a hotel on the Seine, but where you have white people talking to… white adults talking to black children, you introduce the very problem you’re talking about. Where you have people talking to people, where you have adults who care about children, talking to children about their lives from a point of view of helping those children to achieve, and where it’s done out of love, the color of the participants in this conversation become less important than before. What becomes profoundly important is the relationship between you and the children you talk to. If they come to understand that you are for them, you’ll be surprised at how much they will listen to you, and indeed defend your presence against their peers who think you shouldn’t be there. The important thing, though, is the relationship you are able to establish with them. If you can’t do that, nothing’s going to work. If you can, the color won’t be an impediment.

Lloyd: Final question.

Question 9: Mr. Raspberry, I too miss you columns, and I thank you for all of them. My morning coffee doesn’t taste quite as good without them.

Lloyd: Could you speak up just a bit, please?

Question 9: I clipped one of your columns years ago, in which you spoke about educational policy, and you said that there are two ways that you could organize education. You could have constant rate at which children preceded through the schools in lockstep and you allowed people to fail. Or you could have constant expectations and allow children as much time as they need, but with the expectation that all would succeed. I wonder if you would speak to the fact that we can use educational policy as an instrument of social inequality, and is there any thing we can do about it?

Raspberry: Your memory is too good. I remember the column you speak of and I’ll tell you how it came to be. The Washington Post had just introduced a new computer system, and we were all required to learn to use it. It was necessary, and I suppose if we couldn’t, they’d have to find something else to do with us. But because the Post needed us to learn the system, they set up training classes and gave us materials and let us help one another in ways which, if this had been school, would have been cheating. I would find myself with a problem, and it was perfectly all right to ask my colleague, how do you do this?

In school, I would be expected to remember how to do it from the instruction. And if I was caught asking a fellow student, I would be sent out of the room for cheating. The schools have been organized in a way where they find it more useful to distribute the children than to education them. The Post needed all of us to learn the system, so they saw to it that we did, each at our own pace, with whatever reinforcement was required.

They didn’t find any value to themselves in grading us on how well we learned the system. That was not important. What was important is that we do it and learn it because they needed it. If we… I understand that, when you’re dealing with large numbers of children, as you must in schools, you have to do some other kinds of things. But I wish we could keep in mind that the important thing, even for children in our schools, is not to distribute them along some curve, but to teach them what they need to know to make our society work. And I think you’re dead on on that one, and I’ll have to think about that some more.

Lloyd: This has been a wonderful and inspiring conversation. I want to invite people to be back next week as we look at another dimension of the connection between faith and life, as Dr. Charles Marsh from the University of Virginia comes, who has looked at how faith has had such a powerful effect in the civil rights movement, but faith had a problematic and questionable affect over about the last ten years of the interrelation between faith and public life. So come join us next week.

In the meantime, please join us for the 11:15 service here. And there is coffee available just now in the back of the church, back and to your left, and our guest today will be joining you all for some coffee back there for a few minutes. Please thank Bill Raspberry. (applause)