Question writing

MALCOLM GLADWELL (B. 1963)

SMALL CHANGE: WHY THEREVOLUTION WILL NOT BETWEETED 2010

At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away.

“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.

“We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.

The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said.

By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teenagers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.

By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade — and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.

The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns. When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy,” Mark Pfeifle, a former national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors go online to push for change. “You are the best hope for us all,” James K. Glassman, a former senior State Department official, told a crowd of cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A. T. & T., Howcast, MTV, and Google. Sites like Facebook, Glassman said, “give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the Internet.’ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation.”

These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist. Nor does it seem to have been a revolution, not least because the protests — as Anne Applebaum suggested in the Washington Post — may well have been a bit of stagecraft cooked up by the government. (In a country paranoid about Romanian revanchism, 18  the protesters flew a Romanian flag over the Parliament building.) In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach — or didn’t bother reaching? — people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model. As the historian Robert Darnton has written, “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past — even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.” But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.

Greensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the kind of place where racial insubordination was routinely met with violence. The four students who first sat down at the lunch counter were terrified. “I suppose if anyone had come up behind me and yelled ‘Boo,’ I think I would have fallen off my seat,” one of them said later. On the first day, the store manager notified the police chief, who immediately sent two officers to the store. On the third day, a gang of white toughs showed up at the lunch counter and stood ostentatiously behind the protesters, ominously muttering epithets such as “burr-head nigger.” A local Ku Klux Klan leader made an appearance. On Saturday, as tensions grew, someone called in a bomb threat, and the entire store had to be evacuated.

The dangers were even clearer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, another of the sentinel campaigns of the civil-rights movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee recruited hundreds of Northern, largely white unpaid volunteers to run Freedom Schools, register black voters, and raise civil-rights awareness in the Deep South. “No one should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in an automobile and certainly not at night,” they were instructed. Within days of arriving in Mississippi, three volunteers — Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman — were kidnapped and killed, and, during the rest of the summer, thirty-seven black churches were set on fire and dozens of safe houses were bombed; volunteers were beaten, shot at, arrested, and trailed by pickup trucks full of armed men. A quarter of those in the program dropped out. Activism that challenges the status quo — that attacks deeply rooted problems — is not for the faint of heart.

What makes people capable of this kind of activism? The Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam compared the Freedom Summer dropouts with the participants who stayed, and discovered that the key difference wasn’t, as might be expected, ideological fervor. “All of the applicants — participants and withdrawals alike — emerge as highly committed, articulate supporters of the goals and values of the summer program,” he concluded. What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement. All the volunteers were required to provide a list of personal contacts — the people they wanted kept apprised of their activities — and participants were far more likely than dropouts to have close friends who were also going to Mississippi. High-risk activism, McAdam concluded, is a “strong-tie” phenomenon.

This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy percent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are, at core, strong-tie phenomena. The opposition movement in East Germany consisted of several hundred groups, each with roughly a dozen members. Each group was in limited contact with the others: at the time, only thirteen percent of East Germans even had a phone. All they knew was that on Monday nights, outside St. Nicholas Church in downtown Leipzig, people gathered to voice their anger at the state. And the primary determinant of who showed up was “critical friends” — the more friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely you were to join the protest.

So one crucial fact about the four freshmen at the Greensboro lunch counter — David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil — was their relationship with one another. McNeil was a roommate of Blair’s in A. & T.’s Scott Hall dormitory. Richmond roomed with McCain one floor up, and Blair, Richmond, and McCain had all gone to Dudley High School. The four would smuggle beer into the dorm and talk late into the night in Blair and McNeil’s room. They would all have remembered the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott that same year, and the showdown in Little Rock in 1957. It was McNeil who brought up the idea of a sit-in at Woolworth’s. They’d discussed it for nearly a month. Then McNeil came into the dorm room and asked the others if they were ready. There was a pause, and McCain said, in a way that works only with people who talk late into the night with one another, “Are you guys chicken or not?” Ezell Blair worked up the courage the next day to ask for a cup of coffee because he was flanked by his roommate and two good friends from high school.

The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances — not our friends — are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

In a new book called The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change, the business consultant Andy Smith and the Stanford Business School professor Jennifer Aaker tell the story of Sameer Bhatia, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came down with acute myelogenous leukemia. It’s a perfect illustration of social media’s strengths. Bhatia needed a bone-marrow transplant, but he could not find a match among his relatives and friends. The odds were best with a donor of his ethnicity, and there were few South Asians in the national bone-marrow database. So Bhatia’s business partner sent out an e-mail explaining Bhatia’s plight to more than four hundred of their acquaintances, who forwarded the e-mail to their personal contacts; Facebook pages and You-Tube videos were devoted to the Help Sameer campaign. Eventually, nearly twenty-five thousand new people were registered in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia found a match.

But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up? By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something on your behalf. You can get thousands of people to sign up for a donor registry, because doing so is pretty easy. You have to send in a cheek swab and — in the highly unlikely event that your bone marrow is a good match for someone in need — spend a few hours at the hospital. Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation — by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece. The next biggest Darfur charity on Facebook has 22,073 members, who have donated an average of thirty-five cents. Help Save Darfur has 2,797 members, who have given, on average, fifteen cents. A spokesperson for the Save Darfur Coalition told Newsweek, “We wouldn’t necessarily gauge someone’s value to the advocacy movement based on what they’ve given. This is a powerful mechanism to engage this critical population. They inform their community, attend events, volunteer. It’s not something you can measure by looking at a ledger.” In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

* * *

The students who joined the sit-ins across the South during the winter of 1960 described the movement as a “fever.” But the civil-rights movement was more like a military campaign than like a contagion. In the late nineteen-fifties, there had been sixteen sit-ins in various cities throughout the South, fifteen of which were formally organized by civil-rights organizations like the NAACP and CORE. Possible locations for activism were scouted. Plans were drawn up. Movement activists held training sessions and retreats for would-be protesters. The Greensboro Four were a product of this groundwork: all were members of the NAACP Youth Council. They had close ties with the head of the local NAACP chapter. They had been briefed on the earlier wave of sit-ins in Durham, and had been part of a series of movement meetings in activist churches. When the sit-in movement spread from Greensboro throughout the South, it did not spread indiscriminately. It spread to those cities which had preexisting “movement centers” — a core of dedicated and trained activists ready to turn the “fever” into action.

The civil-rights movement was high-risk activism. It was also, crucially, strategic activism: a challenge to the establishment mounted with precision and discipline. The NAACP was a centralized organization, run from New York according to highly formalized operating procedures. At the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the unquestioned authority. At the center of the movement was the black church, which had, as Aldon D. Morris points out in his superb 1984 study, “The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement,” a carefully demarcated division of labor, with various standing committees and disciplined groups. “Each group was task-oriented and coordinated its activities through authority structures,” Morris writes. “Individuals were held accountable for their assigned duties, and important conflicts were resolved by the minister, who usually exercised ultimate authority over the congregation.”

This is the second crucial distinction between traditional activism and its online variant: social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose.

This structure makes networks enormously resilient and adaptable in low-risk situations. Wikipedia is a perfect example. It doesn’t have an editor, sitting in New York, who directs and corrects each entry. The effort of putting together each entry is self-organized. If every entry in Wikipedia were to be erased tomorrow, the content would swiftly be restored, because that’s what happens when a network of thousands spontaneously devote their time to a task.

There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars. No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?

The Palestine Liberation Organization originated as a network, and the international-relations scholars Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Calvert Jones argue in a recent essay in International Security that this is why it ran into such trouble as it grew: “Structural features typical of networks — the absence of central authority, the unchecked autonomy of rival groups, and the inability to arbitrate quarrels through formal mechanisms — made the P.L.O. excessively vulnerable to outside manipulation and internal strife.”

In Germany in the nineteen-seventies, they go on, “the far more unified and successful left-wing terrorists tended to organize hierarchically, with professional management and clear divisions of labor. They were concentrated geographically in universities, where they could establish central leadership, trust, and camaraderie through regular, face-to-face meetings.” They seldom betrayed their comrades in arms during police interrogations. Their counterparts on the right were organized as decentralized networks, and had no such discipline. These groups were regularly infiltrated, and members, once arrested, easily gave up their comrades. Similarly, Al Qaeda was most dangerous when it was a unified hierarchy. Now that it has dissipated into a network, it has proved far less effective.

The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn’t interested in systemic change — if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash — or if it doesn’t need to think strategically. But if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy. The Montgomery bus boycott required the participation of tens of thousands of people who depended on public transit to get to and from work each day. It lasted a year. In order to persuade those people to stay true to the cause, the boycott’s organizers tasked each local black church with maintaining morale, and put together a free alternative private carpool service, with forty-eight dispatchers and forty-two pickup stations. Even the White Citizens Council, King later said, conceded that the carpool system moved with “military precision.” By the time King came to Birmingham, for the climactic showdown with Police Commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor, he had a budget of a million dollars, and a hundred full-time staff members on the ground, divided into operational units. The operation itself was divided into steadily escalating phases, mapped out in advance. Support was maintained through consecutive mass meetings rotating from church to church around the city.

Boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations — which were the weapons of choice for the civil-rights movement — are high-risk strategies. They leave little room for conflict and error. The moment even one protester deviates from the script and responds to provocation, the moral legitimacy of the entire protest is compromised. Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail. But networks are messy: think of the ceaseless pattern of correction and revision, amendment and debate, that characterizes Wikipedia. If Martin Luther King, Jr., had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the white power structure. And of what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight percent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church? The things that King needed in Birmingham — discipline and strategy — were things that online social media cannot provide.

The bible of the social-media movement is Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. Shirky, who teaches at New York University, sets out to demonstrate the organizing power of the Internet, and he begins with the story of Evan, who worked on Wall Street, and his friend Ivanna, after she left her smart phone, an expensive Sidekick, on the back seat of a New York City taxicab. The telephone company transferred the data on Ivanna’s lost phone to a new phone, whereupon she and Evan discovered that the Sidekick was now in the hands of a teenager from Queens, who was using it to take photographs of herself and her friends.

When Evan e-mailed the teenager, Sasha, asking for the phone back, she replied that his “white ass” didn’t deserve to have it back. Miffed, he set up a Web page with her picture and a description of what had happened. He forwarded the link to his friends, and they forwarded it to their friends. Someone found the MySpace page of Sasha’s boyfriend, and a link to it found its way onto the site. Someone found her address online and took a video of her home while driving by; Evan posted the video on the site. The story was picked up by the news filter Digg. Evan was now up to ten e-mails a minute. He created a bulletin board for his readers to share their stories, but it crashed under the weight of responses. Evan and Ivanna went to the police, but the police filed the report under “lost,” rather than “stolen,” which essentially closed the case. “By this point millions of readers were watching,” Shirky writes, “and dozens of mainstream news outlets had covered the story.” Bowing to the pressure, the NYPD reclassified the item as “stolen.” Sasha was arrested, and Evan got his friend’s Sidekick back.

Shirky’s argument is that this is the kind of thing that could never have happened in the pre-Internet age — and he’s right. Evan could never have tracked down Sasha. The story of the Sidekick would never have been publicized. An army of people could never have been assembled to wage this fight. The police wouldn’t have bowed to the pressure of a lone person who had misplaced something as trivial as a cell phone. The story, to Shirky, illustrates “the ease and speed with which a group can be mobilized for the right kind of cause” in the Internet age.

Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

Shirky ends the story of the lost Sidekick by asking, portentously, “What happens next?” — no doubt imagining future waves of digital protesters. But he has already answered the question. What happens next is more of the same. A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teenage girls. Viva la revolución.

LACY M. JOHNSON (B. 1978)

WHITE TRASH PRIMER 2009

You live with your mama and daddy, your two sisters, three dogs, two horses and exactly twelve cats on a farm so far from town you barely see the street lights’ bright white tossed over the horizon. Your mama grows a garden of fresh green vegetables right outside your back door and you and your sisters pick peas and tomatoes in the afternoon while mama hangs clean white sheets on the clothesline and the hot sun freckles your shoulders with small brown spots. When your daddy comes up to the house all sweating and covered in hayseed you set the table and make sure the silverware’s in all the right places or you have to drink water with your dinner instead of tea.

You attend second service every Sunday since the day you are born and Brother Dan or Brother Darrell preach about the glory and grace of Jesus Christ and you accept Him as your Lord and Savior or you burn in hell and this is why you’ve been baptized twice and saved exactly twenty-seven times. Every week your mama and you and your sisters get real dressed up in the pretty cotton dresses she makes special for wearing to church. Your mama’s always made all your clothes special with her own two hands and you are grateful for each hem until the rich kids in your Sunday School don’t look at you even when you sit right next to them. Your daddy says vanity’s an expensive sin but sometimes your mama drives you and your sisters to Wal-Mart anyway and she buys you underwear and socks and a pair of Lee jeans that are exactly two inches shorter than your legs and she presses her lips real tight together the whole time. One day she stops making pretty cotton dresses but the rich kids still don’t look at you. They never look at you.

You and your sisters have always got on real good together. On hot summer days you pack peanut-butter sandwiches in a napkin your sister ties to your belt loop and you spend all day wandering the woods along the farm. Your daddy cuts a path with the brush hog and builds a square fort with sixteen knotty black logs instead of dragging them up to the house for firewood. You stop there every day to eat your lunch and you go skinny dipping in the creek and splash your little sister with the cold cold water and sometimes she tells your daddy and all three of you get spanked. Sometimes at night your sister comes to sleep in your bed and you stay up late talking real soft together with your heads under the covers like two peas in a pod and your daddy has to get on you for staying up past your bedtime. One night after mama and daddy are in bed your sister tells you she’s moving to an apartment above the Five and Dime downtown and you pull the covers back to see her face in the dark and she says you can come to her place to see her anytime you like. The next day she takes all of her clothes out of her closet and packs them up in a big black trash bag and carries them over her shoulder out the door. Your mama and daddy holler real loud when they find out your sister is living in sin with a black man and you don’t get to see her for some time.

Your daddy lets you drive his pickup truck on the gravel road to your house when he’s real tired even if you’re not old enough because he says it’s something you need to know how to do. When you’re driving he turns on the radio and listens to Paul Harvey. Sometimes he disagrees with Paul Harvey and explains to you why he is right instead of resting. Sometimes he listens with his eyes closed and his head leaned back against the window. You know he’s worrying over money because when your daddy worries over money his forehead gets to looking like tilled soil, mounded in rows like the creek bottom. He works real hard on the farm but the soybeans aren’t selling and neither is the corn and the fence needs repairs and the plow’s all busted so you take the truck into town without asking and you apply for a job at the fancy Wal-Mart but they don’t call you to come in for an INTERVIEW. You apply six times and when they do call you pack peanut-butter sandwiches every day for lunch and every time you get a paycheck you put it in your daddy’s bank and sometimes his eyes get to watering and you think he might be going soft. You save every penny you earn, but disappointment’s what you get for dreaming because every penny ain’t enough. Your daddy’s a proud man and his eyes water the hardest you’ve ever seen when he signs the papers that sell the farm but this time you don’t think it’s cause he’s soft.

You move into a white house with blue shutters and a yard with exactly thirteen trees on a paved street in town and your daddy tears down all the walls and puts up new ones cause black mold spreads where you can’t see. He works at the power plant and drops his yellow hard hat by the front door and your mama waits on rich folks at the restaurant and gets real dressed up for work every night and you don’t have to set the table anymore cause you and your sister eat peanut-butter sandwiches for dinner and watch cable television before you go to bed. Sometimes you cut the sandwiches into circles with the mouth of a glass and sometimes you add pink and white candy sprinkles mama keeps in the cupboard for cupcakes and you tell your sister you’ve made her a SURPRISE. You walk to high school every day and you smoke cigarettes and cough down the peach schnapps your mama keeps hidden in the very back of the highest kitchen cabinet and even though it burns your stomach like hell fire you follow the kids to the one-block downtown and drive your truck in circles cause it’s the only thing to do. You make friends with a girl your same age and she lets you spend the night at her place sometimes and you sleep real soundly in the AIR CONDITIONING. Sometimes she sneaks her boyfriend in and they have sex in the bed right next to you. One night he brings his friend over and he kisses you and claws your clothes off and you just want to sleep but his breath is stale and sweet like the beer your daddy drinks and when you try to push him off and tell him to stop he puts a pillow over your face and jams himself right up inside you and you can hardly breathe it burns so bad but there is nothing God will do.

You try real hard to get good grades in college cause you know exactly how much it cost but you work forty hours a week at Wal-Mart and sometimes you’re so damn tired you can’t read the PSYCHOLOGY open in front of you. Sometimes you don’t know the words in front of you but you don’t have a dictionary and if you fake it your teachers always know that you are faking. Your mama calls and asks how you’re doing and you tell her you’re doing great, mama, just great and one day she calls to tell you she has CANCER. Your hands sweat and your knees tremble together with sixteen of your cousins and your aunts and uncles and grandparents on both sides and both of your sisters in your mama’s hospital room holding hands around her bed while your daddy asks the good Lord for STRENGTH. You don’t even breathe until she’s waking up from surgery with her mouth pawing open and each time you look she is weaker and smaller and closer to dying and each time your daddy palms his forehead he leaves tracks like the old creek bottom, but now you know it’s not just money he worries over, so you tell him you’ll drop out of school just till she’s better but you don’t plan to go back for some time.

You ask your mama how she feels when she picks you up from your apartment to take you to TACO BELLand she pushes you into the bathroom to show you where her breast used to be and hands you the silicon fist she keeps in her bra. You hold it with both hands. You order food. You sit down and when she’s half-way through with her second SOFT TACO SUPREME you show her the pink flower tattoo your older sister bought you for your eighteenth birthday. Your mama doesn’t say anything but her lips pressed real tight together tell you she is mad. Before she walks out the door and drives away she meets your eyes with hers and you know exactly what she means.

You hide that you are poor. You save up for a pair of LEVI’S jeans and put shirts on layaway. You take furniture from your neighbor’s dumpster and thank your luck that they are wasteful. You fog your apartment for roaches and clean with bleach so they don’t come out when you have company. You wash your car in the driveway with a hose and dishsoap. Your sister comes to visit and colors your hair NICE AND EASY 98 LIGHTEST BLONDE and paints your fingernails and toenails FIRE ENGINE RED. You make friends with a girl at work who is the same size as you and she gives you things she doesn’t like anymore: a blue dress from the mall, a pair of black pumps, a pretty barrette with fake red crystals for your hair. She sets you up on dates with men and at dinner you order steaks and alcoholic drinks even if you’re not old enough to drink. Sometimes you let them take you back to the fancy places where they live and if you have sex with them they take you shopping or to Springfield for the weekend and you thank your luck that they are gullible.

You act real tough but you’ve got a weak spot for HARLEY DAVIDSON motorcycles and a tall man in a leather coat with a broad chest and long black hair makes you want to ride. He takes you down a blacktop road clear out into nowhere and the whole time you’ve got that great big machine growling right under you, you’re reeling in the smell of pine trees and wide green fields. So your fingers tighten on his arm. And your blond hair blows from underneath your helmet and all you can think about with the wind keeping your eyes closed tight is going and staying gone. When he stops his bike on the side of the road and turns around to hold your face real gentle between his hands you let him kiss you. And he takes you home without asking you for anything.

Your mama puts your picture in the paper when you go back to school. You take classes with black folks and brown folks and yellow folks and make friends with who you like. Your parents take you out to dinner with your sisters and when your daddy is half-way through with his second beer and his cheeks are glowing with the red blood rushing to his face he lifts his glass and says that he is proud of you. When he finishes his third beer he goes out to sleep in the car and your mama gives you three brand new black pens and a pad of POSTITS from her purse. You study real damn hard this time cause you know this is your last earthly chance to make something of yourself and you buy a dictionary at a yard sale and think you might learn every word if you have DETERMINATIONand RESOLVE. When Wal-Mart doesn’t let you off to study for a test you tell them to kiss your poor white ass and you apply for student loans and when they give out credit cards on campus you accept exactly three. Your English professor says you have POTENTIAL and you hold this real close to your heart when you’re walking up to get your diploma and sixteen of your cousins and your aunts and uncles and grandparents on both sides and your two sisters are hooting and hollering from the stands and your mama blows an air horn and your daddy yells your name so loud and true it’s like he’s calling you to come up from the creek bottom. And you hear him calling for some time.

Uncensored by Orchowski, Margaret .

A few months after taking office, President Trump met with a group of African-American educators to extol Historic Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). He promised to increase their funding (so far unfulfilled). There was a lot of hoopla in the press. But other higher education programs serving minorities including Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) have not been highlighted by the Trump administration nor the media. In fact, many in the administration and the press don't seem to really know about HSIs. They remain under the radar. That may be a good thing. Former Trump CEOs have been known to revel in the hands-off freedom Trump gives them as long as they prosper and stay out of the news. For now, HSIs are thriving. In fact, at this point the number of HSIs are growing at a faster rate than funds are growing to cover them. New specialty medical and STEM HSIs are increasing. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has so far not threatened to cut back on programs serving minorities; she mainly seems to want to diversify and broaden them to include all students. That may mean not only new sources of funding for HSIs but also a wider dispersal of funds to non-Hispanics. But that may not happen - as long as HSIs stay out of the Trump spotlight.

AMERICAN APPRENTICESHIPS NOT LIKE GERMAN

This summer, President Trumps brightest post-secondary education spotlight has shone on apprenticeship programs. This is not a new idea to many Democrats. "Our model is Germany" Chicago Mayor and former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanual declared in a June address to the National Press Club about education. But, in fact, American apprenticeship programs will probably not be anything like German ones. For one thing in Germany apprenticeships begin at age 15 and cover hundreds of blue and white color careers such as bank tellers. In the U.S. the college vehicle will most likely be our unique community college system with its insistence on new tech, academic certificates and degrees but adjunct professors. The German tradition of retraining and retaining long- term employees and former apprentices is also not the American way.

AS LATINO VOTE FADES FROM NEWS, IMMIGRATION REFORM CHANGES

Tire silence has become deafening. Two weeks before the Nov. 8 presidential election, TV pundits covering the

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election campaign rarely failed to mention the significance of the growing Latino Vote that would propel candidate Hillary Clinton to victory. Nuances however were lacking, such as the uneven distribution of the Latino electorate - where in only 10 states, almost all of them in the West, are Latino voters over 10 percent; and its diversity where, unlike the black electorate, some 27-30 percent of Latinos regularly vote Republican. More significandy, almost no one pointed out that close to 50 percent of 2016 potential Latino voters - U.S. citizens over the age of 18 - were millennials known for their ardent support of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, as well as an unreliable pattern of turning out to vote.

Since the election, mention of the Latino Vote in the press is almost non-existent. Perhaps it is now viewed as too defuse. But the silence could impact the politics of immigration reform. Until recently, immigration issues in the United States were seen as being mainly about Latinos - with good and bad consequences. But now the need for Trumps southern border wall has been challenged by an almost net neutral influx of Mexican crossers. The growing percentage of illegal immigrants (now almost half, increasingly of Asian heritage) who overstay their visas also diminishes the Latino impact. Even more significant, the refugee crisis in Europe has shifted concerns about immigration to refugees from the Middle East and to high skilled workers. As the immigration debate shifts away from Latinos, so may the power of the Latino Vote.

DACA REMAINS, DAPA ENDS, PARENTS IN LIMBO; DREAMERS CONFUSED

There's a lot of confusion about DACA, DAPA, DREAMers and their and undocumented parents and siblings. Trump engenders confusion it's true, but even most Congressional representatives are confused about DREAMers. By definition DREAMers are millennials ages 18-32 or so who came into the country illegally before the age of 16; graduated from high school or obtained a GED and have lived in the country without authorization and without committing a serious felony for at last five years. In June of 2012, President Obama ordered a prosecutorial discretion program called DACA (Deferred Action [from deportation] for Childhood Arrivals) for DREAMers who applied and qualified individually. By 2016 more than 700,000 had been given two-year work permits and a second extension on the program.

President Trump announced in June 2017 that he would retain the program - for now. But it does not protect participants from deportation if they have been involved with serious misdemeanors or felonies. And parents of DREAMers (adults who knowingly came into and stayed in the country illegally) were never included. "Undocumented" parents whose children are citizens - naturalized or born in the U.S. - were to be given a waiver under DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans). But that program was stopped before it began by court order and terminated by President Trump this June. The future? DREAMers probably will continue to be used as a political wedge by both parties for piecemeal immigration reform negotiations up to the next election, maybe beyond. ?

Margaret (Peggy Sands) Orchowski was a reporter for AP South America and for the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. She earned a doctorate in international educational administration from the University of California- Santa Barbara. She lives in Washington, D. C., where she was an editor at Congressional Quarterly and now is a freelancejournalist and columnist covering Congress and higher education.

Answer 2 questions from the above article.

1.Did the use of social media by the four colleague students in North Carolina during the winter of 1960 cause their movement to fail? ( small change by gladwell)

2. Explain the Author's tone?( white trash primer by jhonson)