Pride prompts us to think we know more than we do. Since there is no one who knows everything: most of us aren’t even close to being able to sort the important from the chaff in the world (and who could days, given the daily avalanche of information, the factual equivalent of white noise?).

Still, my thirst for knowledge and understanding continues. Occasionally, amazement and wonder accompany one of these runs down a rabbit hole. The end result is new information, and yet another reminder that I need to remain humble, because I know so little.

With the change in another season comes colder days. I seem to have misplaced my zest for outdoor activities. The early fall bike rides I made along roads lined with brilliant foliage have been replaced. Now, you’re more likely to find me on the inside of the glass on those days that are even too cold for a brisk walk around the “loop.” That’s when I’m not standing in front of a classroom of young students, doing my best imitation of the JBE to keep them on-task. Thankfully, the Bath YMCA is close and I remain committed to my two-days-a-week in the pool.

Winter means I’m now spending time on my stationary bike again. The reward is that there is an uptick in podcast-listening. In addition to Rich Roll (someone I’ve mentioned before), I’ve added Chris Hayes and his excellent Why Is This Happening?

Hayes,who also hosts All In With Chris Hayes on MSNBC, a show I rarely get to catch “live” during tutoring season, has a penchant for erudite and thoughtful podcast guests. Hayes is just friggin’ smart. And because he’s like that, so are his guests. Like Ta-Nehisi Coates, writer, journalist, public intellectual, and someone who is a “must read” when it comes to understanding race and racial politics in America.

In a similar vein, fellow MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, good friend of Hayes, is also a podcaster-par-excellence in her own right. You should definitely check out her series, Bagman. Both Hayes and Maddow refuse to dumb down their content for the sake of pulling listeners, and never resort to pandering (like so many broadcasters on the right do, like Rush Limbaugh). I cannot imagine dumb asses gravitating to the kind of topics both Hayes and Maddow unpack on their podcasts.Hayes actually took up the topic of “parallel universes” to explain the divide between those on the right and the left. Maybe I’ll debrief that topic in a future blog post.

*****

I came across Coates as a writer a number of years ago. At the time, he was blogging for The Atlantic and it seemed like everything he posted made me want to just give up on my craft because these posts and arguments were so damn good and so well developed. Good writers do that to me at times.

After hearing Coates and Hayes do their thing on his podcast, I picked up Coates’ latest book of essays, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. The book consists of a series of collected essays Coates wrote during the two terms of President Barack Obama. It includes what is arguably the book’s tour-de-force, “The Case for Reparations,” an essay he wrote while he was still blogging/writing regularly for The Atlantic. The essay actually first appeared online and then ran as a feature in the print magazine in June, 2014. It was probably the piece of writing that finally put Coates “on the map” as a writer. He shares a bit about how each of the book’s essays came to be written, and I was fascinated with the back story on this essay in particular, but all the personal detail included with the other essays in his book are welcome.

I’ve had the book for close to two weeks now. I first thought it was one of those books I’d plow through in two or three days. I haven’t, but my reason for taking longer has much less to do with the highly-readable and mind-blowing content than to the fact I’ve been busy on several fronts. First, there was the family Christmas gathering in the western mountains with Mary’s family. Then, winding down tutoring prior to the holiday break, I was coming home around 10:00 each night and simply reading for 20 minutes and following Coates’ arguments for racial re-appraisement was all I could handle before shutting the light off and drifting off to sleep. I’m sure drafting and completing our recent Mark Baumer Sustainability Fund newsletter while also being in the midst of a difficult season of anniversaries has helped to take the starch out of this dad. All of this has me reading less this December than I’d like to be doing.

I returned to the book over the weekend with renewed focus. My goal was to complete the essay on reparations, and I did. For those who have been living under a rock in terms of understanding race—which would be a good portion of white America, I think—reparations, to quote Coates, are “the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely.”

“Reparations,”he continues, “beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sinsof the future.”

I didn’t know that former Representative John Conyers (R-Michigan), a ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, has repeatedly (since 1989) introduced HR. 40—which is a bill that simply seeks to establish a commission to examine slavery in the U.S. and it’s early colonies—while recommending appropriate remedies. Each year, it never makes it out of committee.

Conyers, now 89, has retired from the House. No House member has re-introduced his bill this session.

There are many things we do not know. Often, we choose not to know these things. For instance, things that there are actually historical precedents for reparations in America (I hadn’t known that). Back in 1988, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act. This act allocated more than $2 billion for survivors of Japanese-American internment camps during WWII. Interestingly, Conyers first introduced HR. 40 the year following this allocation. The U.S. government has also allotted billions to members of Native American tribes due to the theft of their lands.

*****

I once had a friend who fashioned himself to be a guru on almost any subject. Whatever you decided to talk or write about, he always knew more than you: education, history, culture. He always had to one-up me on everything.

On race, he knew everything, because in his own life, he’d been burned by a nationality that has been scapegoated frequently, including by our current president. He decided that being wronged meant it was okay to be racist.

This friend ought to have known better. He is well-educated. I should have been more diligent than I was because I allowed him to serve up his racist potions in pleasing portions until I was affected by them.

The spring prior to Mark leaving on his final walk, he came home for a visit and found me reading a book by a woman who is a racist and a hater. Mark was horrified. He called me out on it and I got mad at him. I didn’t like being corrected by my son, but he was right (as he usually was). Mary told me I needed to “figure it out and fix it!” and that she wasn’t going to be party to a rift opening up between Mark and me.

To Mark’s credit, he waited me out until I came to my senses. When he met up with us in Omaha in August, we talked about it. I was ashamed of myself. I should have known better, especially given the work I’ve done since leaving fundamentalist Christianity, to avoid falling prey to binary mindsets and false ideologies.

During this brief period—the intellectual equivalent of falling off my bike and landing on my head—something I actually wondered about and told Mark that perhaps that had happened and I didn’t recall it, this is the only explanation that makes any sense to me. I’m still troubled by this blip, to this day. Of course during that time, the racists in my life took great pleasure to learn that I was sympathetic to their positions.

This interlude is another reminder that as much as I try in my quest for cosmic understanding, simply trying to take in this house of mirrors that is our life in this country is sometimes too much! Then, there is the daily reminder of how systematic and encapsulating American mind-fuckery is. No matter how much you work at trying to avoid being indoctrinated, as soon as you let your guard down,lies manage to worm their way into your brain and thinking.

I’d never heard of historian Tony Judt until I read Coates’ book of essays. He referenced Judt at the end of his essay on reparations. Judt, who died in 2010 at the age to 62, wrote a book called Postwar,which was a finalist for a Pulitzer the year it came out in 2005. Judt takes abroad view of Europe, following WWII. Granted, it’s not about America, so Americans probably don’t give a shit about books that don’t allow them their daily allotment of national navel-gazing. But hell, I’m interested in reading it after seeing this blurb about the book:

“Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world’s most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling inits scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy.”

Coates draws from Judt’s book in revealing that West Germany actually made reparations to Israel for Jews who’d been resettled after the Holocaust during WWI. These payments totaled $7 billion in today’s dollars. This is something I didn’t know. The money helped settle individual reparations claims. They also went towards upgrades in Israel’s power grid, tripling its capacity, and in other infrastructure in the country.

What if America did something similar in addressing its institutional racist policies (Reconstruction, Jim Crow, exclusion of blacks from New Deal programs and the GI Bill benefits, housing covenants, redlining, mass incarceration—the list goes on and on) that have decimated black culture dating back to slavery? Thereare precedents that I now know about.

I didn’t know that before, however. I bet you didn’t, either.