A Prophet Is Heard In Chicago

Diane Latiker with Bethany Mauger, Kids Off the Block: the Inspiring True Story of One Woman's Quest to Protect Chicago's Most Vulnerable Youth

Diane Latiker, ex-construction worker, ex-hairdresser, didn’t go to college to study community organizing or teen outreach. She didn’t have burnished credentials or experience working with at-risk teens. She simply felt a calling, one day, to invite some teenagers into her house from the crime-stricken streets of Roseland, Chicago. When they started telling their life stories, she listened. That’s when she felt her life beginning to change.

Latiker’s memoir of her program for Chicago’s most precarious tenagers reads like a combination of inspirational devotion and political thriller. What started as an informal gathering of kids playing tag and doing their homework, soon became something more. Her house became a gathering place for kids who never knew safety or stability at home. Soon, the kids she gathered, some from violent backgrounds, started talking like they had a future.

In a neighborhood almost synonymous with gangs, Latiker, called “Miss Diane” by her kids, provided a guaranteed peaceful space to simply be young. More than schools, intervention, or closely designed curricula, peace proved to be what her kids needed. Freed from the fear of poverty and violence, Miss Diane’s kids started doing homework, writing songs, and playing three-on-three basketball. Some even started talking about college.

This transition faced impediments. Latiker’s husband and kids resisted first. Having dozens of neighborhood kids, some known gang members, passing through their house at all hours created tension with her family. They couldn’t see what she saw, that these kids were, underneath their learned street swagger, still kids. Her marriage, and her relationship with her kids and grandkids, went through an extreme rocky patch.

Then Latiker encountered problems when she went looking for financial help for her kids’ growing needs. Philanthropists and churches offered moral support, but when they discovered she didn’t require kids to renounce gang membership to receive her mentorship, they turned squeamish. Nobody would support her unless she cut gang-bangers loose. That is, they demanded she stop helping those kids who most needed help, before they’d support her.

Miss Diane remained faithful to her vision, though. And “faithful” is definitely the word: her narrative is explicitly Christian. She believes God called her to support these children, and God’s plan guides her successes. She doesn’t offer a portable checklist of tools community organizers can use to resist gang violence; Kids Off the Block is her unique Christian vocation, and when she heeds God’s call, things go well. Thick or thin, events happen on God’s schedule.

Diane Latiker

Though Latiker describes Kids Off the Block as a “program,” it initially lacked structure. She simply offered ten kids a surrogate home, free from judgement and shame. Kids started inviting their similarly at-risk friends, though. Soon, the Latiker household became the neighborhood’s home. Her husband, an auto mechanic and amateur builder, turned the spare bedroom into a recording studio. Together, they turned a vacant lot into a basketball court.

Guided by trust in Christian providence, Latiker’s movement gained momentum. Kids found the love their parents were unable to provide, and that gangs promised but never delivered. Kids began thinking long-term, saving money, getting jobs. And outsiders took notice. First local venues, like the Chicago Tribune, began showing Latiker’s movement respect. Soon, she found herself featured, in glowing terms, on CNN and BET, venues that mean something in Roseland.

Nevertheless, Latiker reminds us, not everything ended well. This isn’t a moral parable, it’s a memoir. She admits forcing herself to accept that she couldn’t save kids who didn’t want saving. And as the mostly Black kids passing through her door started behaving like a community, she describes drawing hostile attention from the neighboring Hispanic neighborhood. She struggles to accept her losses alongside her victories.

Throughout, Latiker reminds readers of her two Christian principles: listen to God’s calling, even when it sounds odd, and don’t judge others. Non-judgement, to Latiker, doesn’t mean not telling others they’re doing wrong. She describes frequently scolding her proteges, and occasionally calling the police when kids can’t leave gang affiliations at the door. Rather, non-judgement means meeting kids where they are, even when it makes our adult sensibilities uncomfortable.

Latiker’s memoir isn’t a progress from triumph to triumph. Though she sees improvement among her kids, and eyes lighting up and seeing the future for the first time, she can’t make others’ hurts and traumas go away. In an environment defined by generational poverty and street violence, Latiker simply followed Christ’s injunction to open her door to “the least of these.” I hope, someday, to live up to her example.

The Atlanta Shooter Almost Had a Point... Almost

One of the targeted Atlanta massage parlors (via Newsweek)

As a rule, I don’t use mass shooters’ names. Many of them want fame and notoriety, and I refuse to participate in giving it to them. Therefore, you’ll never see me share the accused Atlanta massage parlor murderer’s name or photograph. Some people deserve to return to the undergrowth from which they emerged.

If you don’t already know, earlier this week, a 21-year-old White male shot up three Atlanta, Georgia, massage parlors, killing eight people, seven of them women, six Asian-American. Police caught him dead to rights and, according to press releases, he confessed unreservedly. He blamed women generally, and Asian-American women particularly, for somehow causing his unresolved sexual compulsions. He thought his problems would go away if they all died.

Authorities remain undecided whether to classify the shootings as a hate crime. They’re apparently arguing about whether race or sex more proximately motivated the violence, as if that matters. I’d assert that he also targeted sex workers, a field occupied overwhelmingly by poor women, immigrants, and other marginalized groups. Therefore it’s way too soon to take economics off the table.

In one of reality’s less subtle twists, the day after the Atlanta shooting spree, the broader American South experienced a mammoth outbreak of storms, tornadoes, and other destructive weather. The worst damage occurred in Mississippi and Alabama, which, locals will assert, is not Georgia. For our purposes, though, the distinction matters little. Very close to where a petulant child lashed out violently against women even poorer than him, nature did likewise.

We can debate how seriously to consider the Atlanta shooter’s self-reported narrative. Like every youth becoming an adult, he realized factors of race, sex, and economics existed outside his control, and he was powerless against massive forces. Most people don’t throw the tactically armed equivalent of a tantrum, of course. But the pressures life exerted upon him are intimately familiar to anybody who’s ever had a job and a libido.

Although I loathe and excoriate his behavior, the storms prove his motivations aren’t entirely wrong. Recent extreme weather outbreaks, many focused on areas with conservative social mores, demonstrate for millions that they have remarkably little control over their circumstances. You can do everything right, follow every rule your parents taught you, and still lose everything. We’re all, on some level, powerless.

Traditional “work ethic” values teach that we have control. In schools, churches, and workplaces, young Americans hear the mantra that hard work and obsessive honesty create prosperity and security. It has the pervasiveness that hymns and prayers once had, and that isn’t coincidental. Capitalism, and its earthly messiah, “success,” have become America’s shared religion. It defines our politics, our morals, and our shared language.

Yet as a god, Capitalism (separate from “the market”) proves disappointing. While America is the richest nation in history, in the aggregate, that prosperity isn’t justly distributed. Young White men, the supposed beneficiaries of American abundance, don’t see it happening in their lives. Youth whose parents and grandparents could afford to start families in their twenties, now frequently can’t afford a starter apartment in their thirties.

This week’s Mississippi weather devastation is a metaphor for the American economy. The individuals who saw their homes destroyed probably didn’t “deserve” such treatment. Yet the heating of our carbon-fueled economy is literally heating the Earth and, like a fever patient, the overheated body is turning against itself. Hard work and individual responsibility can’t stop this trend. It’s literally beyond individual control.

Young men, like the Atlanta shooter, see this happening. But instead of banding together to challenge the wealthy, abusive minority, they respond individually. And as individuals do, they don’t challenge anyone who could actually fight back; they direct their dick-swinging vacuity against those even poorer and more defenseless than themselves. Kicking the poor is a response born from existential loneliness.

This kid came so close. The truth was right there: he understood his powerlessness against a massive force, and the need to stage a resistance. But because he’d internalized a secular eschatology of individualism, he instead performed an action from which no good, anywhere, ever, will emerge. He knew half the truth, and it couldn’t set him free.

More tragedies like this will probably occur. As young Americans see their promised mobility slipping further away, and natural disasters and “acts of God” becoming more frequent, they’ll fail to unify against those who actually oppress them. They understand the need to act against the encroaching wall of powerlessness. But they’ll inevitably pick the defenseless, low-risk enemy.

Black Christianity in a Divided America: a Primer

Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise In Hope

During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, people of faith landed on both sides of the controversy. Some people believed Christianity requires the faithful to uphold the law and resist uprisings and anarchy; others believed Christianity requires us to challenge powerful people in high places for their injustice. But what does the Black Christian tradition, a distinct texture of American Christianity, say on the issue?

Reverend Dr. Esau McCaulley, an Episcopal priest and educator born in Mississippi, grew up on the mixed influences of hip-hop and gospel music. He knows what it means to serve others with a heart for Christ, and also what it means to get stopped by police for being “suspicious” for his skin color. As a professor of New Testament theology at Wheaton College, he has made a life of answering questions. Now he turns that background to contemporary issues.

From the beginning, Rev. McCaulley anticipates the most common mainstream (that is, White) objections to antiestablishment Christianity. Doesn’t the Apostle Paul call on Christians to pray for leaders? Of course, but praying for leaders doesn’t mean we can’t also hold them accountable for their injustices. Doesn’t Paul say God put all governments in place? Yes, but Paul also says God raised Pharaoh up specifically to knock him down, for God’s glory.

McCaulley admits coming into formal theology during a time when Christian leadership had split along an all-or-nothing axis. His professors, mostly White, thought either that the entire Bible must be read literally and applied verbatim, or amended or discarded according to their majoritarian ethical whims. McCaulley contrasts this with his mother, whose Bible reading gave her great comfort. How, he wondered, to contrast these two seemingly contradictory impulses?

The answer, he believes, comes from reading the Bible from the position of the underclass for whom it was originally written. What solace did Jews, occupied by Roman military who served as both police force and foreign conquerors, take from Christ’s and Paul’s message? To them, Rev. McCaulley believes, the whole Bible, including the parts which make White people cringe, gave a sense of purpose that human power structures couldn’t undermine.

Throughout, Rev. McCaulley’s theological interest is in Christians’ relationship with power, not their relationship with narrowly defined morality. How do we relate to earthly powers which would arrogate to themselves the authority which belongs exclusively to God? How do we responsibly apply the power which God has entrusted to us? Sexual purity, the favored moral concern of noisy media-friendly Evangelicals, doesn’t concern McCaulley.

Rev. Dr. Esau McCaulley

As a professor at Wheaton College, McCaulley’s explanations sometimes tend toward both technical precision and intellectual conservatism. Wheaton, a Calvinist institution, leans toward the conventional in its theology, and though founded by Abolitionists, has avoided taking political positions in living memory. McCaulley studiously avoids endorsing parties or protests, at least explicitly. Biblical accuracy matters more to him here than political activism.

This concise, plain-English book aims for an audience that is Biblically literate, but perhaps not versed in the cultural implications of Black experience. Rev. McCaulley uses Biblical citations generously, walking readers through his reasoning step-by-step. He assumes readers are familiar with Biblical themes and language, but not necessarily familiar with Black Christian culture and Black theology. He explains everything painstakingly.

In this quality, Rev. McCaulley choses a particular audience. Because he assumes his audience reads their Bible, but has no prior familiarity with Black Christianity, his content operates at a fairly intermediate level. I’ve been attending an AME church (when I can) since 2017, and have already read Howard Thurman and James H. Cone. Therefore, though I find nothing wrong with McCaulley’s exegesis, I feel I’m not part of his intended audience.

Don’t mistake me, this isn’t a condemnation. Remember what Dr. King said about “the most segregated hour in America.” The lack of communication between Black and White Christians, or anyway White Chrstians’ unwillingness to listen, remains a major impediment to Christian witness on American racial issues. It’s only accidentally that I discovered Black theology. Sadly, that same accident drove me to this book; I might not have read it five years ago.

I recommend this book primarily for adult Bible study in mainline American churches. Because many White Christians have limited opportunities to discuss faith and Scripture with Black Christians, this book may provide the guidance for more open-minded Bible reading that many churches have sought recently. Many well-meaning Christians need an opportunity to see faith through others’ eyes. This may provide the chance their churches have been looking for.

For the Love of Roseanne Cash and William Shakespeare

Remember this classic from one year ago?

Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote King Lear.

— rosanne cash (@rosannecash) March 14, 2020

Roseanne Cash

I wasn’t the only one to retweet this well-meaning but deeply misguided message. It got rapid traction, as artistic souls sought to remain optimistic diving into a quarantine we thought might last weeks. Almost immediately, Cash got pushback from netroots scolds accusing her of shaming anybody who couldn’t knuckle down. In that beloved interwebs tradition, a single tweet spiraled into massive contention.

One year later, who proved right? I ask, knowing that, in the last twelve months, my attention span has dwindled so much that I have difficulty sticking with one-hour TV dramas, much less reading and writing. These tasks, once easy for me, have become laborious; even writing and editing this blog essay has felt gruelling. Superficially, I feel inclined to blame myself for having accomplished little this year.

Thinking about it, though, I realize Roseanne Cash and I have made a fundamental attribution error. Shakespeare didn’t write King Lear during lockdown because everything was locked down; he wrote it because he was William Shakespeare. That may seem oblique, so follow me.

Cash, and by extension I, assume we all could be Shakespeare. We assumedly could shake off the circumstances in which we exist, immune to pressures like family and economy. But Shakespeare didn’t write in a vacuum. King Lear probably debuted in 1606; Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre became the official royal company, the King’s Men, in 1603. While writing King Lear, Shakespeare was part of the royal household.

Centuries of literature teachers tacitly presumed Shakespeare wrote for the sheer moral pleasure of writing. We’ve learned to assume that Shakespeare didn’t write for money, that he didn’t have rent or groceries, that he lived in a glassed-in world of pure art. Roseanne Cash, daughter of a country music legend, maybe assumes everyone has that same freedom, and could hypothetically just be free by thinking it. Maybe she doesn’t realize not everyone can.

These presumptions are, partially, economic. I don’t want to get quasi-Marxist, but Roseanne Cash has never lacked a safety net. She’s certainly had pressures: she has children, and house payments, and her own career. But I question whether she’s ever needed to see art, and the time required to create art, as a commodity. That is, has she ever needed to see art, and time, as scarce resources we purchase by trading away other opportunities?

William Shakespeare

Don’t mistake me, I don’t resent Cash the liberty to take pleasure in her work. Our go-go economic structure denies many people that liberty. We should aspire to, not resent, Cash’s ability to take pleasure in her work. Too many hard-working citizens today lack liberty to worry about nothing, go to museums and concerts, and enjoy their families. The world should have more, not fewer, Roseanne Cashes in it.

My point is, art arises from its context. Shakespeare wrote to get paid, because Tudor-Stuart theatre was a lucrative business. Groundlings didn’t do theatre as high art; Shakespeare made his living as a producer, and wrote so his company would have content. King Lear was a growth industry, the Marvel Cinematic Universe of its day. That matters, because our bodies and brains adapt to the stimuli we give them.

Working in the factory, I initially struggled. Assembly line work involves strenuous multi-part operations which only seem straightforward. But over months and years, tasks formerly difficult and painful became second nature; my brain adapted to assembly-line stimuli. Teachers make teaching look easy because they’ve spent years teaching. Same with carpenters, comedians, and chefs. Their brains and bodies have adapted to the stimuli.

The defining stimulus of quarantine-era America is hard work for vague, distant reward. Those like me, privileged to avoid furloughs, adapt to returning home knowing we’re stuck inside. No concerts, theatre, museums, or art. Others don’t even receive the reprieve of work, trapped with the unchanging stimuli of households, screen time, and ennui. Because we lack expectation of reward other than not dying, our brains lose significant creative ability.

Shakespeare wrote King Lear during lockdown, and Roseanne Cash probably wrote some damned fine songs, because their circumstances rewarded such productivity. Most of us don’t have that. We’re doing okay to keep our utilities paid and kids alive. And we’ve adapted to that, in ways capitalist enthusiasm can’t account for. For months, I reprimanded myself for this, because ingrained capitalist morality insisted I had to.

Therefore the question I have to ask myself is: what stimuli am I allowing into quarantine? And how can I improve them?

Dr. Potato le Pew's Cancel Culture Extravaganza

A cross-marketed Potato Head family, based on the Toy Story franchise

“Cancel Culture” is the new “Politically Correct”: an insignificant, half-joking leftist meme which fuddy-duddies have blown way out of proportion. Under ideal circumstances, I would consider both buzzwords frustrating annoyances by petty people who want to generate controversy where none exists. I haven’t written about it previously, because I consider it a gadfly issue: annoying, but harmless. But things changed this week.

When members of the House of Representatives used their allotted floor time, a resource so finite that it’s allocated in the Constitution, to inveigh against recent changes in Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head. During a time of national crisis unmatched since World War II, with pending bills regarding COVID relief and the January 6th insurgency, elected Republicans preferred to waste taxpayer-funded time bellyaching about reading primers and plastic toys.

Smarter writers have already bled ink explaining these accusations have no foundation. I care more about which objects have become emblems of hard-right outrage. These wastrels consume our limited time and attention on books written for preschool children struggling with rudimentary phonics, and a toy potato labeled “Age 2+.” They’ve literally redirected the national discourse to complain about products targeted at kids just learning how to understand words and faces.

Two explanations readily avail themselves. First, maybe top-level Republicans are operating at a level of rudimentary object-impermanence that makes Dr. Seuss illustrations and Mr. Potato Head face-recognition exercises necessary—or maybe they assume their voting base operates at that level. I’d rather not entertain this argument, because it feels like name-calling, and will only poison the well. But it needs acknowledged.

A second, more likely explanation arose this week, when Fox News and its acolytes spotted another supposed victim of “Cancel Culture”: Looney Tunes. With the revelation that lecherous skunk Pepé le Pew was written out of the Space Jam sequel, right-wingers latched onto another supposedly hatcheted figure of their past. This comes eight months after the brouhaha over a mooted Looney Tunes relaunch that disarms Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam.

Do people understand that Pepé le Pew is the villain of his story?

Watching elected officials soil themselves over anthropomorphic potatoes, pre-K primers, and Looney Tunes, I put it together: these numbskulls are trying to protect their childhoods. They see things they loved as grade-schoolers, possibly the last time their lives felt stable and unwavering, and they panic. Because their lives seem volatile enough, without their treasured memories being attacked as “problematic.” They believe they’re defending their own past selves.

Back in 1980, Professor Thomas Goodnight identified the overarching presumptions of Left and Right in American politics. Where “liberals” (an often misused term) perceive change as inevitable, and want to manage it, conservatives see all change as decline. I've written about this before. Conservatives believe, incorrectly, that the changes they see happening are new, and want to halt them, before they destabilize the homogenous world they think they grew up in.

I have trouble accepting the argument that Pepé le Pew normalizes sexual assault, or that Elmer Fudd normalizes guns. These characters’ entire role is premised on them being too stupid to understand themselves and their circumstances. Pepé receives repeated, glaring indications that his intended wants no part of him, and apparently never sees them. And I don’t recall Elmer Fudd’s blunderbuss ever hurting anyone but himself.

Notwithstanding my disbelief regarding the logic, we face a problem: this isn’t censorship. No official body made a preemptive decision to make Republicans’ childhood toys go away. Three private corporations made self-interested decisions on how to utilize their own properties, in ways to maximize their profits. Isn’t that what we’ve been told capitalism is? Would they really hijack private property to protect their… their… whatever they’re trying to protect?

Yes, apparently, they would.

Thinking about it, I realized, despite their Cold War-influenced rhetoric, capitalism isn’t a First Principle for conservatives. Fundamentally, they like capitalism, not for itself, but because it’s what they know. Capitalism comes second to their first love, continuity. Ultimately, their fear of racial justice, economic reform, and “Cancel Culture” boils down to distrust of change. They don’t want justice, they want continuity. And they’ll sacrifice everything else to get it.

Sudden, market-driven change has grown-ass men clutching their blankies and calling for their mamas. Because change terrifies them, or at least, they assume change terrifies their voters. I can’t entirely blame them; change always produces unanticipated consequences, and nobody knows where they’ll end up on the other side. But we’re watching what happens when people resist change:

They can’t save the already broken system. The system will just break them.