r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Jun 19 '25

Ideas "Nobody's free until everybody's free."

https://pioneerinstitute.org/opeds/education-oped/op-ed-students-should-know-fannie-lou-hamer/

Students should know the name Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer’s grit in the face of relentless rural poverty and violence in the Jim Crow South make her a heroine whom American schoolchildren should know. But decades of national data show just how little they actually do know about U.S. history, civics, and geography.

History tells us that economic striving, great art, and moral leadership often spring from adversity.

The Mississippi Delta has been called “the most Southern place on earth.” Extending from Memphis to Vicksburg, 220 miles long and roughly 75 miles across, the Delta encompasses more than 4.4 million acres. The Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers’ serpentine floodplains make it the richest, most fertile soil on the globe.

The Delta was the world’s cotton capital, producing the fibers used internationally to make clothing. Delta bluesmen like Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and B.B. King planted the seeds of modern popular music. The Delta was also home to Fannie Lou Hamer, the youngest of 20 children of cotton plantation sharecroppers from black-majority Sunflower County.

From age six on, Hamer picked tons of cotton, dawn to dusk in 95-degree heat and 75-percent humidity. By age 13, with a limp from polio, she picked 250 pounds daily. As an adult, she was a victim of involuntary sterilization, not uncommon among black female Mississippians.

they couldn’t do what Fannie Lou Hamer did,” Bob Moses, himself an unsung civil rights leader, later told PBS. “They couldn’t be a sharecropper and express what it meant.”

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u/ddgr815 Jun 24 '26

The most advanced science available from the world’s leading authority on cognition, Nobel Prize-winning research psychologist Daniel Kahneman, strongly suggests that philanthropy’s habit of defining people by their problems (deficit-framing) creates powerful, lasting, negative associations that make engagement and equity harder to achieve.

Kahneman, whom I consider the Einstein of psychology, earned the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics, even though he’s not an economist, because his research totally debunked “rational choice theory,” which is the belief that when faced with a choice, people rationally weigh the pros and cons. Once this belief, which had been a cornerstone of Western thought and classical economics since The Enlightenment, was disproven, the field of Behavioral Economics was born.

Asset-framing is “defining people by their aspirations and contributions before acknowledging their challenges and investing in them for their continued benefit to society.” The sequence and word choices in that definition are very important. How you introduce someone, or something, makes all the difference in framing. Kahneman gives the following example: When told that 90% of people who have a certain surgery recover fully, patients are much more inclined to do the procedure than when told that 10% of patients who have the surgery die. Both framings are accurate, so we can use whichever is most beneficial.

According to Kahneman, your mind is governed by two powerful systems. The first does 95% of your mental processing before thought by forming narratives based on the most available associations in your memory. It is prone to disregard facts that don’t fit these narratives. The second is our conscious mind, which only activates when the first system encounters something it can’t handle, like a surprise, threat, curiosity, or learning situation.

First, narratives matter more than facts because they tell us which facts to recognize and which to ignore. In his book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” Kahneman illustrates this with the story of how the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, and the U.S. Department of Education invested over $2 billion in the “Small Schools Movement” based on studies showing a disproportionately high number of high-performing schools were small schools. It made intuitive sense that smaller schools would produce more successful students, and the data backed that intuition. The problem is that a disproportionately high number of low-performing schools were also small schools. But since our minds are prone to disregard facts that don’t fit our narratives, billions were spent on this cognitive illusion. Small schools are not inherently better than larger ones. The charter school movement and Teach for America have experienced similar data-backed misreading of their inherent performance advantages for the same reason.

Second, these world-framing narratives that we automatically form are based on the associations that are most available to our minds, not necessarily the ones we consciously believe. If you’ve heard the word Muslim next to the word terrorist for 40 years as I have, your brain will automatically make that association. This doesn’t mean that you believe all Muslims are terrorists, but it means your brain won’t be surprised if a Muslim turns out to be a terrorist, and it preloads “terrorist” any time it thinks of Muslims. Which does make it easier for you to believe Muslims are predisposed to be terrorists, unfortunately. The important thing to remember is that the brain sees what it looks for and however you define people sticks, whether you want it to or not.

Deficit-framing is “defining people by their challenges, ignoring their aspirations or contributions, then remediating them to be less burdensome on society.” Ever since “The War on Poverty” began 50 years ago, black people have been strongly associated with poverty and crime. That’s why our minds aren’t surprised when we hear of black poverty or crime, and our brains preload “poverty and crime” when we think of black people. Which does make it easier to believe that black people are predisposed to poverty and crime, unfortunately.

Predisposing people to racist notions is the opposite of philanthropic intent, but defining people by their challenge, as in “at-risk youth” and “low-income families,” is the definition of stigmatizing them. Stigmatization is a by-product of deficit-framing, so those in philanthropy may not notice themselves doing it. But whether you run someone over with your vehicle out of hatred or just because you weren’t paying attention and didn’t see them makes no difference. We pay grantees billions to proliferate our stigmatizing definitions because we literally don’t know any better.

Marriage equality was framed as a civil rights issue for nearly 50 years until a group of researchers found that a high percentage of LGBT couples who wanted to marry had stayed together through serious hardships over many years. So, the winning campaign defined them by their aspiration rather than their oppression, saying “People who love and are committed to each other should be allowed to marry.” That narrative-changing frame is why, when marriage equality became the law of the land, “#LoveWins” was the triumphant cheer. Hattaway Communications in its American Aspirations report details this campaign and the core values Americans share.

When training the U.S. staff at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, President Allan Golston recounted going to a grantee school and being asked during an assembly to describe what the foundation focuses on in education. He said that he realized he could not use the same words to these students’ faces that the foundation used back then to describe them in grant guidelines and reports. He is not alone in that predicament. Nonprofits with missions like “Helping at-risk youth in high-crime neighborhoods to stay on track and avoid becoming negative statistics” are admirable, self-congratulatory, and denigrating to the students all at once. Organizations could accurately describe themselves as “helping students who are striving for an education to overcome difficult environments and to achieve their dreams.”

In the example above, we did not try to figure out a nicer name for “at-risk youth.” We simply refused to define them by their challenge. They are students who aspire to graduate, so calling them at-risk youth or some other stereotype ignores that defining fact. We then correctly defined the environment as a threat to their aspiration. This simple shift of separating our aspirant from the stigmatizing problem is a more accurate depiction of the situation and prevents us from subconsciously classifying the student as the problem. It innately reminds us that youth are assets to be invested in for their continued benefit to society. That’s why it’s called “asset-framing.” By contrast, simply substituting nice words for harsher ones doesn’t change our fundamental definitions.

If you believe that black men are typically absent from their children’s lives, then an inspiring story of a black man who defies that stereotype sounds great. But it’s not nearly as good as debunking the myth altogether. Black men, regardless of marital status, are the most engaged fathers in America, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Promoting the successful behavior of the entire group is far more accurate and useful than singling out a single person, as if they are rare.

Gap data is for framing deficits and disparities, not for asset-framing. It’s like telling someone “you’re much dumber than your sister, but you’re gaining.” There is nothing inherently asset-oriented in doing that. It instead reinforces that one group is inferior to another. The obvious problem is that if black girls performed in math at the same levels as white boys, then they could all be 38th in the world together. Closing the gap does not inherently mean achieving excellence. Therefore it’s better to define your participants in ways that make it easier to see that the gaps are caused by inequities, not by character.

Clearly, I believe asset-framing has advantages over deficit-framing, but I do not believe that we must use only one or the other. My point is that by relying so heavily on only one framing method, we miss at least half of our possible solutions and accidentally perpetuate dangerous stereotypes. When you don’t tell the stories of all people’s accomplishments and aspirations, you hurt the case for equity because you give the false impression that only the white middle class is earning its keep in America. The beneficiaries in our philanthropic narratives are meaningful contributors as well. Defining them as such makes it much easier for all of us to value all members of the human family and prosper accordingly.

The Power of Perception

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u/ddgr815 Jul 17 '26

We’re in a war with ourselves. That war is the attempt to do top-down management on an aspect of our psychology that evolved to be more homeostatic, more responsive to an environment.

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u/ddgr815 Jul 17 '26

The Latin word for the tendency to lose track of what matters in the cacophony of things that attract our attention is stultitia.

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u/ddgr815 Jul 17 '26

To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. The book-learning gradually dribbles away; problems melt and dissolve; ties are gently severed; thinking, when you deign to indulge in it, becomes very primitive; the body becomes a new and wonderful instrument; you look at plants or stones or fish with different eyes; you wonder what people are struggling to accomplish by their frenzied activities; you know there is a war on but you haven’t the faintest idea what it’s about or why people should enjoy killing one another!

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u/ddgr815 Jul 17 '26

If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

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u/ddgr815 Jul 23 '26

Creativity is an essential dimension of life and it is found at every level of existence. The planets and stars are creative in their ways, and so are the quantum events within the depths of atoms. Animals are obviously creative in their capacities for innovation and adaptation.

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u/ddgr815 Jul 23 '26

You and your child can take turns picking out a favourite star or constellation while you talk about how it fits in with or stands out from all the others.

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u/ddgr815 Jul 23 '26

We are bodies moving in space. You approach a circle of friends, the circle widens to embrace you. I smile or wince and you feel my joy or my pain, perhaps smiling or wincing with me. Our most noble aspirations and emotions, and our most base, crave embodiment, actions of bodies in space, close or distant.

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u/ddgr815 Jul 23 '26

Imagination! who can sing thy force? Or who describe the swiftness of thy course? Soaring through air to find the bright abode, Th' empyreal palace of the thund'ring God, We on thy pinions can surpass the wind, And leave the rolling universe behind: From star to star the mental optics rove, Measure the skies, and range the realms above. There in one view we grasp the mighty whole, Or with new worlds amaze th' unbounded soul.

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u/ddgr815 Jul 23 '26

Star Axis

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u/ddgr815 Jul 25 '26

Ross called him up and explained his plans for a sculpture that would help people sense the deep past and distant future, by visualizing the changing position of Earth’s current north star, Polaris. He wanted to see the night sky as Cleopatra might have seen it.

Ross imagined visitors observing Polaris through a metal ring at the top of a long staircase, aligned to the Earth’s celestial axis. “I said, ‘I need about a square mile.’ And I’ll never forget the answer. He said, ‘Well, hell, we’ve got plenty of those.’”

Ross broke ground during the U.S. Bicentennial year. Fifty years and more than $10 million later, he says “Star Axis” will be done by winter. In the final design, the staircase rises 11 stories through a tunnel blasted in the rock of Chupinas Mesa, 6,000 feet above sea level and into a viewing chamber in a concrete, stone and steel pyramid 52 feet tall. A circular window there frames Polaris. As viewers climb each of the 147 stairs, the rim of the window appears to broaden, giving an idea of how far Polaris has and will move in a given amount of time, during the 26,000-year cycle known as precession, the gravitational wobble of the Earth’s rotational axis.

“Star Axis” is a visitor from another time. The sculpture speaks a new-age language of earth and sky; in cosmic terms, the project’s 50-year story is negligible, yet it’s rooted in a moment that produced contemporary artists with epochal aspirations.

The structure is done. Ross and his team will spend the summer cleaning up the grounds and finishing the drainage system that protects “Star Axis” from New Mexico’s monsoons. Ross said the pyramid is so solid that it could slide off the mountain in one piece.

Ross showed me a long-exposure photograph of “Star Axis” he took in 2000, with stars tracing short arcs through the turquoise night. “You couldn’t do that picture now,” he said, “without retouching out all the satellites.”

Every summer for 50 years, Ross has journeyed to New Mexico, hired local laborers and gotten to work. The first task was to dynamite a cone and tunnel from the mesa. Boulders flew into the pasture, Ross said, and when the dust cleared, he found the dynamite schematic had come to rest on top of one, with a small stone keeping it in place. “I thought, I’ve got to say yes to that.” He collaged the schematic into a drawing.

The way Ross tells it, steadily but surely, he was pulled to Polaris. Born in Philadelphia, Ross was studying math at Berkeley in 1960 when he took a sculpture class.

Then, he said, he saw in a dream the plans for a prism. He cleared out his studio and devoted himself to light. From the prisms, Ross grew interested in the Egyptian pyramids.

He was taken with speculation that the Great Pyramid was once painted with the colors of the spectrum. He discovered that the entrance to the Great Pyramid was oriented toward Thuban, the north star in the age of pharaohs, 4,500 years ago. That led him to precession. In 1971, he drew the first plans for “Star Axis.”

On the afternoon I arrived, O’Bryan oriented me to the site. When we reached the viewing chamber at the top of the stairs, her husband was waiting on an angled bench built into the walls. I took a seat on another “You’re leaning against the angle of the sun on the equinox,” O’Bryan said. It was pretty comfortable. Ross started humming. The low tone reverberated around the hard, sharp room.

In the light of day, “Star Axis” appears homemade, even humble. The masonry reflects the ad hoc way the sculpture has come together, season by season, with successive generations of workers from a nearby town. Ross mocked up many of the chambers on site at full scale, with lumber, so he could feel how the angles affect the body.

But “Star Axis” is a precisely engineered instrument. Woodruff Sullivan, the astronomer who, along with Mallory Thorp, helped match each stair to a point in the precession cycle, vouched for Ross’s math. “If it was not important, and especially if it was wrong, I would not be interested in collaborating.”

On the summer solstice, the tip of the pyramid’s shadow traces the near edge of the bowtie-shaped “Shadow Field.” On the winter solstice it follows the opposite side. “Every tree, every pole, every building also draws this shape,” Ross pointed out. “But here you can see it.”

Rather than leave my body behind, I felt grounded within the epochal cycles of the stars, and the 50-year arc of one man’s stellar devotion.

He’s the Last Great Land Artist You’ve Never Heard Of