#32 comments from friends, square dancing & white supremacy, jobs and college graduates

Good morning, my friends.

            I'm shortening these messages somewhat.  Just because.

            A friend wrote back to me about attending church services even though one may not give any credence to the beliefs reflected in the service.  I opined that the services are rewarding nonetheless. 

I heartily agree.  For me, the extreme case was visiting Strasbourg, France, last summer.  At [my wife's] behest (she was raised Catholic) we not only visited the Strasbourg Cathedral, but stayed around for the service.  It was mostly in French, with a little bit in German, and I couldn't understand a word of it.  So I could focus on the surroundings, the ritual, the symbolism, etc.  Afterward, [she] apologized for "making" me go.  All I could respond was that I would gladly do it again.

My inference is that most humans like attractive and artistic rituals and ceremonies no matter their foundation.

            A friend also chimed in on the virtues of quitting.  "I quit the Boy Scouts once.  Our troop was ordered to line up against a cinder-block wall and stand at attention.  The assistant scoutmaster's officious son thought I was slouching (he was probably right), so he put his palm on my forehead and banged my head against the wall.  I explained, briefly but loudly, what I thought of that, left the building and never went back.  Yes, sometimes quitting is the right thing to do."

            Elliott offered a rebuttal to my rant about walking—but made an appurtenant observation as well. 

As someone who has done a LOT of solitary walking both in and out of the gym while listening to music, I can say it does not have an effect on one's ability to think and daydream, etc.  Or rather it does, but there is a point at which the music simply becomes background, the lyrics, if present, become more of a cadence, and maybe the atmosphere of the music on the whole sets a mood for your thoughts.  But it does not inhibit them.

I do however generally agree with your point of the importance of letting your mind wander.  People rarely allow themselves to be unstimulated, and instead reach for their phone as soon as the activity level around them drops below a very high threshold.  Part of why I got rid of my Facebook.  I didn't like how often I absentmindedly pulled out my phone and opened it before I even thought of why.

I concede his point about music.  I should have thought of it.  I listen to music around the house and when driving, and in neither case does it prevent me from daydreaming or musing about anything.

* * *

            I haven't thought about square dancing for years.  We learned it in elementary school, in the 1950s, and I knew that friends of my parents (who have been dead for over a decade) belonged to a square dance club.  Those are my only connections with square dancing.   Now I read that it has an unsavory history—sort of.  Robyn Pennacchia wrote a piece about that history in Quartz.

            Before I abstract her article, I can tell a story about why it caught my attention.  I can vividly remember an episode in the gym at my elementary school, Elizabeth Kenny, in south Minneapolis, probably 5^th or 6^th grade.  We were choosing partners for square dancing and I wanted Beth B for mine.  So did Ron S.  The two of us (guys) were both gently tugging Beth to be our partner.  She picked Ron and I was devastated.  Well, not devastated, but disappointed.

            It seems that square dancing was taught across the country when the Baby Boomer generation was in elementary or secondary education.  I learned that 28 of 50 states have made square dancing the official dance and advocates want it made the official dance of the United States.  (Wikipedia says 19 states, JSTOR says 31 states.)  The reasons for the growth of square dancing in the 20^th century, however, are an aspect of white supremacy.

            There seems to be little quarrel with the proposition that square dancing came to the country with European settlers.  It evolved from dances such as "English Country Dance, Caledonians and the quadrille" as well as other folk dances, and the earliest documented version of the square dance was in England in the 1400s.

            Henry Ford was a vehement anti-Semite.  He also "hated jazz; he hated the Charleston.  He also really hated Jewish people, and believed that Jewish people invented jazz as part of a nefarious plot to corrupt the masses and take over the world—a theory that might come as a surprise to the black people who actually did invent it."  In language that, for me, is reminiscent of many of my parents' generation's reaction to the Beatles and rock and roll in general, Ford wrote that jazz and other popular music was "slush" that "set the young people of this generation imitating the drivel of morons."  Jews were engaged in plot to control the world and were using music to control Blacks (who Ford didn't see as evil, although he didn't see them as equal to whites—but he did pay Black and White workers the same).  Jazz was a precursor to "liquor, tobacco, sex, and all kinds of other sins."

            So Ford hired a dance instructor to teach square dancing to him (Ford), his wife, and guests at a hotel he bought in Massachusetts.  Even at the time, in the early 1920s, square dancing was being overtaken in popularity by jazz and swing. 

By bringing back square dancing, as well as other primarily Anglo-Saxon dances like waltzes and quadrilles, Ford believed he would be able to counteract what he saw as the unwholesome influence of jazz on America.  People, he imagined, would leave the dance halls and cabarets in droves to swing their partners round and round at liquor-free square dance clubs.  If jazz was the cause of America's moral decay, he reasoned, the road to repair it could be as simple as replacing it with fiddles and square dances.

In pursuit of his goal, Ford put a lot money into the revival of square dancing.

In 1926, he published an instruction manual for aspiring square dancing instructors titled "Good Morning: After a Sleep of Twenty-Five Years, Old-Fashioned Dancing is Being Revived by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford."  He also required his employees to attend the square dancing events he created for them, funded fiddling contests and radio shows promoting "old time dancing music," as well as the creation of square dancing clubs across the US—where modern, Western-style square dancing as we know it now was really created.

An ironic twist of history, Pennacchia points out, is that one aspect of square dancing originally came out of slaves performing for whites; the slaves relied on the call-and-response because they weren't trained to dance.  Erin Blakemore in JSTOR, summarizing an article in the Journal of Appalachian Studies by Philip Jamison, reports that

as white colonists learned new dances and modified old ones, many relied on black slaves to perform their music. . . .  At first, these performers did not call out dance figures; rather, dancers memorized them with the help of dance masters. . . .  Slaves also started to adapt these popular dances themselves [and] soon they were dancing and calling out dance figures to one another, perhaps as an alternative way to organize the dances in the absence of formal dance instruction. . . .  At some point, Jamison writes, slaves began to call out to white dancers too, eliminating the need for a dance instructor. . . .  The practice soon spread from South to North and as America expanded, so did its square dancing tradition. . . . Today, few people know about the pivotal role black people once played in helping develop American dance traditions—in part because white square dance callers eventually edged out black ones.

 Ford didn't care about this history—or didn't know about it—and worked to introduce square dancing to gym classes—"believing it would teach children 'social training, courtesy, good citizenship, along with rhythm.'  The schools agreed, and by 1928, almost half the schools in America were teaching square dancing and other forms of old-fashioned dancing to students."

            There have been sporadic efforts ever since to designate square dancing as the national dance.  Congress has seen 30 bills proposed to do so.  Ronald Reagan signed a bill adopted by Congress that made it the national folk dance—but only in 1982 and 1993.  Pennacchia observes that the U.S. is generally reluctant to official declare national symbols (there are only four of them—bird, tree, flower, and mammal), so the movement for square dancing faced an uphill struggle.

            Pennacchia makes the excellent point that "there's nothing inherently wrong with square dancing—but there is something wrong with declaring it to be more valuable than any other form of dance."  Why is it to be deemed superior to ballet, tap dancing, the polka, folk dancing, swing, American Indian dancing, or the waltz? 

            Pennacchia concludes.

As innocuous as state-sponsored square dancing may seem, it's just one of the many small ways that oppression has shaped the history and culture of the US.  If Henry Ford hadn't been a racist and anti-Semite who believed jazz would be the ruin of our country, square dancing would probably not be a state dance anywhere.  And you almost definitely would not have had to do it in gym class.

            The things we don't know about history when we're in school. 

* * *

Perhaps you noticed the jobs data discussed by the Brookings Institution.  Drawing on a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Robert Shapiro points out that all net new jobs in the last decade went to college graduates.  All.  Net. New. Jobs.  That's amazing.  It's also ominous for those without college degrees.  "In stark contrast, the number of Americans with high school degrees or less who are employed, in this ninth year of economic expansion, has fallen by 2,995,000."  I assume the population of Americans with high school degrees or less has grown over the last decade; jobs have not.

            In December 2017, college graduates with jobs increased by 305,000.  The number of people with no high school degree dropped 132,000.  Jobs for high-school-only graduates declined by 38,000, and even for those with some college (but no degree), the number employed declined by 45,000.  Those statistics summarize the last decade.

            Shapiro reports that the economic cycle from January 2008 to December 2017 followed a predictable pattern.  Millions of jobs disappeared in the first part of the recession, through 2010, "but by January 2013, the number of employed Americans had recovered to nearly the same level as in January 2008."  Since then there's been a steady improvement in the economy.  The key point, however, is that "from January 2008 to January 2013, millions of people without college degrees lost jobs and never regained them, while all of the job gains went to the one-third of the labor force (as of January 2008) with at least a B.A. degree."

As job opportunities have increased for college-educated Americans, their share of the U.S. labor force climbed from 33.6 percent in January 2008 to 36.5 percent in 2013 to 39.9 percent in December 2017.  Similarly, as job opportunities narrowed for non-college educated people, more became discouraged and bailed out of the labor force.  Over the last decade, the share of the U.S. labor force comprised of people without high school diplomas fell from 9.3 percent to 7.3 percent, the share with no more than a high school degree fell from 28.9 percent to 25.7 percent, and the share with some college training but no B.A. fell from 28.2 percent to 27.1 percent. . . .  Americans without college degrees, who continue to comprise 60 percent of the labor force, are now effectively penalized in every phase of the business cycle.

            Shapiro points out that there are severe consequences from this shift in the composition of the job market.  People who lose their jobs can get into a life cycle that kills them, such as opioid use.   "On a county-by-county basis, each percentage-point increase in unemployment is now accompanied by a 7.0 percent increase in hospitalizations for opioid overdoses and a 3.6 percent increase in opioid-related deaths."

            There are also political implications.  For these people, that 60%, the stock market increases and the low unemployment rate are irrelevant.  They don't own stocks and they aren't getting the jobs.  Nor, Shapiro argues, will the changes in the tax laws help them.  "The success of those changes rests on their spurring a capital investment boom, but the technologies that dominate capital investment today are typically used and operated by college-educated workers.  And when the current business cycle finally ends next year or the year after, workers without college degrees will dominate the jobs losses."  Many of Mr. Trump's supporters came from the 60%; will they continue to support as the economy continues to take a toll on them?

            It also has to be noted that just because one has a college degree doesn't mean you'll get a job—or get a job that actually requires a college degree.  But the numbers do suggest that without a degree, your prospects are dismal.  Nor do the numbers say that those without a college degree won't get a job; if nothing else, there is turnover in existing jobs.

            The question occurs to me:  are college-educated people even taking the jobs that don't require a college education?  If Kathy's and my sons are any indication, that might be part of the answer.  Both of them had/have jobs that did not require a degree—but both of them have degrees.  To what extent, I wonder, are the non-college-educated being edged out of jobs for which they are qualified because, even for those jobs, employers are preferring college grads when they apply?

            I'm just glad I'm not looking for a job, college degree or not. 

Gary