Happy Belated Thanksgiving! 2021 Edition

Hi friends,

I hope you all enjoyed a happy, healthy holiday last week.  

Husband, Child, and I were really lucky this year: we got to spend the holiday with some of our family, because of vaccines, pre-travel and home testing, and honest communication around precautions.  The time together was immeasurably precious in no small part because my Child got to meet one aunt and uncle for the first time, and he got to see my brother and his new wife for the first time since before the pandemic.  I have wished for this time together for almost two years, and I am so grateful it could actually happen.

This is therefore a particularly timely opportunity to reflect upon the things for which I am grateful.

(And now I'm going to be cryptic for a moment for a bunch of legitimate reasons, so vaguery ahoy.)  

Looking back over the entire year this has also been an inconceivably emotionally challenging year for me--and I don't say that lightly after how difficult last year was, when I wasn't even confident about writing a post on gratitude because things seemed so bleak.  In the past year, the pandemic has honed and clarified some patterns in parts of my life to the point that they have required my attention, introspection and deep, committed, persistent labor.  I've had moments of revelation that have been excruciating.  It has been truly humbling how overwhelmed and destabilized I've felt at those times; it felt like the world was bending around me to the point of being unrecognizable.  As my head swam and my heart reeled, I finally had to accept that my narrative of these parts of my world was not true, was no longer serving me, and that it never had.

With that said, this year I am thankful for:

• Seeing things more clearly now, and accepting clarifying truths about my life that earlier versions of myself could not.  As I let go of my denial, I am liberated in ways I could not have previously appreciated.  I feel lighter, more grounded, and more available to the relationships that make me feel loved and happy.  
• Having relationships to turn and return to.  I am so fortunate and grateful that so many people were waiting for me once I finally woke up, like:
• My Husband, my refuge and stalwart ally.
• My Child, who brings me limitless joy just by existing.
• My best friend, who loves me generously and in ways I still don't know how to love myself.
• The friends and family, many of whom have shown up for me, almost miraculously, exactly when I needed them and have been lighting my way to greater health and happiness when I have had no idea how to find it myself.
• The friends and family who have simply reached out to check on me because they know I've been in pain.
• My hard-won understanding that love is not only a feeling, it's actions.  If a person is not capable of loving you through consistent action, their love serves them and not you.

I'm also thankful for:

• Gorgeous beaches with laughing gulls overhead and little birds that run in the surf.  My Child screaming with thrilled joy on sight of the giant, rolling ocean.
• Walks through every corner my infinitely beautiful neighborhood as the seasons change.
• The community pool just down the street with a baby pool and almost no one using it in the middle of the day on work days, where my Child could roam freely and start learning how to play in water bigger than a bathtub.
• Storm King.

• Reading board books with my Child.
• Returning to the classroom with a new set of kind, thoughtful students.
• My cats, my dog, and my sweet little bird.
• Anyone who laughs at my jokes.  There are few better feelings.
• Halloween, including spooky movies, spooky books, and jack-o'-lanterns.
• Discovering new music and, per my Child's request, listening to it over and over.
• Garbage television that is actually incredibly humanizing and also a much-needed diversion.
• Reruns of my beloved favorite show, even when the series finale still makes me sob.
• Despite another impossible pandemic year almost coming to a close, still managing to be on track to watch at least 52 movies this year.
• The future.
• Anyone who reads this blog.

No matter how hard this year has been, I hope it has also contained things that have given you comfort, purpose, and hope for tomorrow.

{Heart}

A Successful Trek Through "Dune"

 Hi team,

Today I'll write a quick post about the new "Dune" (2021) movie.

I was incredulous about this new version of the science fiction classic, given that the source material is notoriously difficult to successfully transition into film.  I was also put off by the 2 hours and 35 minutes runtime, not wanting to sink that kind of time into a movie that might not pay off.  However, I heard enough positive responses from multiple people that I ultimately decided to give it a try.

Honestly, this is a pretty great movie!  The performances are great; while everyone is deeply watchable and wields gravitas commensurate with this rich and meaty story, Rebecca Ferguson often holds the emotional heart of the movie as Lady Jessica.  The set design is absolutely arresting and engrossing, including the vast, empty brutalist architecture that houses much of the film complemented by the even more vast and brutal landscape of Arrakis.  Hans Zimmer's (as usual) moody, bleak score is an excellent partner to the scenery.  Most impressively, the pace is neither plodding and overly perseverative nor noisily frenetic in a scrambling attempt to fill the time, which means spending slightly over 2 1/2 hours with this film feels like time completely well-spent.

I gave it a 4.5.

{Heart}

Antiracist Accountability: Two Inspiring Black Psychologists

Hey friends,

Despite being very down to the wire this month, I want to squeeze in an Antiracist Accountability post.  This one will piggyback on last month's post on how psychological research transacts with race.

So here we go!

This month, I want to highlight the trailblazing and revolutionary impact of two Black psychologists: Mamie Phipps Clark and Kenneth Clark.

The Clarks may best be remembered for the pivotal role their research played in the 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision in the Supreme Court, where they demonstrated that, at a very young age, Black children internalized harmful and racist stereotypes under-valuing and demeaning Black people compared to white people.  This was demonstrated in part through their series of studies evaluating Black children's preferences for and attitudes toward white and Black dolls.

Photo credit: Gordon Parks.

While their legal impact was perhaps most felt through that Supreme Court decision, the Clarks were expert witnesses in several earlier trials over school desegregation.

The Drs. Clark earned their bachelor's degrees at Howard University before becoming the first Black people to earn doctorates in psychology from Columbia University.  Kenneth Clark later became the first Black tenured full professor at the City College of New York and the first Black person to be president of the American Psychological Association.

As if all of these contributions and accomplishments weren't enough, almost a decade before their seminal Supreme Court testimony, Mamie Phipps Clark and Kenneth Clark opened the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem in 1946.  As a sibling institution to the Lafargue Clinic, which primarily served Black adults in Harlem, the Northside Center served the community's children.

Long may they be remembered.

{Heart}

A Halloween Sampler for All Souls: 2021 Edition!

 Halloooo!

Happy Halloween, everyone!

I am very behind in writing this month, so I will get straight to it: It is time for a medley of the scary films I've watched in the last year, in the hopes of offering some great, fun, and spooky options for anyone looking to punctuate the holiday with a creepy movie.

As always, each of the following films will be accompanied by the usual 1 - 5 rating scale for overall quality, as well as a scary/intense rating of 1 - 5 exclamation points, to be interpreted as follows:

! = not at all scary 

!!!!! = so scary!

This year's movies are:

"The Vast of Night" (2019)

Rating: 3.5 Scary Rating: !!!!

This year's scary scifi entry!  With seemingly era-consistent dialogue and slang reminiscent of 2005's "Brick", "The Vast of Night" transports you back to 1950s New Mexico in what is an effectively creepy UFO-chasing film.  While in some ways I found the film as a film a bit disappointing, its increasingly frantic pursuit of the mystery behind bizarre radio and phone line disruptions coupled with some memorably chilling moments make it worth watching.

"His House" (2020)

Rating: 5 Scary Rating: !!!!!

I considered "His House" a close best movie runner up in last year's end-of-year movie round-up, and I stand by that strong endorsement of this riveting, frightening, and ultimately devastating movie.  It is exquisite in its gut-wrenching, multi-tiered horror.  It is simultaneously a righteous examination of the systemic dehumanization of immigrants, a mercilessly unflinching study of the egregious acts people can commit when they have to fight tooth and nail for a chance at survival, and a sincerely terrifying supernatural and haunted house story.  This one is definitely the strongest of this year's Halloween medley offerings!

"Winchester" (2018)

Rating: 4 Scary Rating: !!!

I am so. mad. that this movie has a catastrophically low 13% on Rotten Tomatoes.  I sincerely don't know what the almost universal panning is about.  I'm not going to pretend this is among the greatest scary movies of all time, but it is definitely a competent and solidly entertaining haunted house story.  It includes strong performances, a basis in a real place and real events, and a passable attempt at a deeper psychological discussion of the nature of grief.  Maybe I'm just biased by the inclusion of a psychologist as one of the main characters, but I had a lot of fun watching this movie.  It deserves a second chance.

"Black Narcissus" (1947)

Rating: 3.5 Scary Rating: !!!

This year's throw-backy entry!  I'm not sure how much "Black Narcissus" was originally intended to be a horror movie, but it certainly reads that way today: a small cohort of nuns are sent far into the mountains in a foreign land where they grapple with extreme isolation in an unforgiving terrain, fighting (at times unsuccessfully) the encroaching madness that results.  Intriguingly, this is ultimately a movie about the dangers of colonialism--to the colonizers.  

A note: As you might expect, the portrayal of Indian people in this film is at best dated and at worst super problematic.

"The Nun" (2018)

Rating: 1 Scary Rating: !!

At the recommendation of a dear friend, Husband and I have been working our way through "The Conjuring" series of horror movies in chronological order.  This seems like a worthwhile endeavor, especially because I really liked "The Conjuring" (2013) when I saw it in theaters.  Obediently following directions, we began with "The Nun"... 

...and it was pretty awful.  Perhaps ironically, it seems like it could have been an interesting, more supernatural version of "Black Narcissus", but instead it is too ridiculous to be sincerely scary.  Truly, it makes some utterly bizarre choices.  For example:

• Why is there a French guy randomly in the middle of 1950s Romania?  
• Why is some of the signage in English?  
• Why do the priest and novice nun sent to investigate the suspicious death of a nun at this spooky convent only seem to conduct their investigation at night?
• Why do the aforementioned priest and novice seem NOT to understand that they do NOT have to follow every spooky apparition they see?
• Are we seriously meant to believe that bombardment during World War II is enough to unleash basically literally the devil, that the Catholic church knew that World War II bombardment unleashed basically literally the devil, and all they did to contain basically literally the devil was to have a small isolated convent deal with it by praying 24/7??
• Why is demon hellspawn able to touch someone literally wearing the blood of Christ?  
• How is the blood of Christ still liquid in the 1950s???  

The questions all but blot out the potential scare factor of this movie.  If you're in the mood for some real camp, this is your movie.

Happy spooky movie watching!  I wish you a wonderful Halloween filled with exactly as much creepiness as your heart desires!

{Heart}

Antiracist Accountability: When Research Goes Wrong

 Hey friends,

I can't remember if I've mentioned this already, but one of the several professional roles I currently inhabit is the role of professor.  For the last few years, I have taught a course once a year that I got to write from scratch.  It's such an incredible opportunity that is a ton of work, but is also very rewarding.

One of the reasons it's so rewarding is I get to include whatever I want (within reason, of course--"reason" being "content that is technically relevant to the major themes of the course").  This year, one of the tweaks I've made to the course contents is to increase my emphasis on ways in which students planning to pursue careers in psychology need to develop their research evaluation skills, including evaluating who is missing and what is being missed in the research base.

With that in mind, I'd love to share one example of a study that really got it wrong, the consequences thereof, and the research that subsequently got it right.

In 1992, a study by researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley of the University of Kansas was published that claimed that young children from low socioeconomic status families were exposed to 30 million fewer words by age 3 than their counterparts in wealthier, higher SES families.

This study had a massive impact on research and academic institutions.  It was cited over 8,000 times in other articles, and was a clarion call to concerned educators, administrators, and families nationwide.  The researchers claimed their findings that lower SES children were exposed to less language could be directly linked to poorer academic outcomes later in childhood, including overall readiness to learn in school and specific skills like recognizing letters and numbers.

The trouble is, there were a multitude of flaws in the original study.  It had a tiny sample (under 50 families).  The study's small sample clearly conflated socioeconomic status with race and ethnicity: All of the “welfare families” (the researchers' term) were Black, 7 of the 10 of working class families were Black, and 9 of the 10 professional families were white.  Despite the possibly complicating factor of race and ethnicity, the researchers failed to examine the role of race in the outcomes of their study.

Credit: https://www.alsc.ala.org/blog/2015/11/is-the-30-million-word-gap-a-stat-we-should-be-using/

And yet, that factor was very likely impactful, given the study's methods: Researchers physically went to families' homes with a tape recorder, stopwatch, and clipboard, spending 1 hour per month for 2 years observing young children interacting with their families.   These researchers, most of whom were white, clearly did not take into consideration how being observed in person would actively transact with race and class, including how privileged families might take being observed as a cue to perform, while underprivileged families might become more inhibited under the watchful gaze of a stranger.

Upon replication years later with more rigorous research protocols, it has been estimated that the actual "word gap" is 4 million words, meaning that children from lower SES families are exposed to 4 million fewer words by age 4 years compared to children from higher SES family--quite the shortfall compared to the original estimate.

So what are the lingering questions and consequences of this research?

The biggest question to me is: Prompted by the original research, who were we holding accountable for closing the "word gap", and why?  It would be so easy to hold lower SES families accountable for the perceived shortfall in language to which their children are exposed.  But what this facile conclusion overlooks is the opportunity to examine what public schooling is really meant to accomplish, and who it is really meant to serve.

The pedagogical practices of public schooling, as implemented in the United States, are rooted in the dominant culture.  Perhaps the reason the higher SES kids in the original study seemed to perform better in their later academic lives is that they were already at a profound advantage: many of them were being raised in the dominant culture that their future educations were fine-tuned to resonate with.  By comparison, students not raised in the dominant culture are at a disadvantage--in a sometimes literal sense, they are learning more than one language as they enter the public school system.  The racial and socioeconomic achievement gap in American schools is very real, but the responsibility for that arguably lies more with academic institutions themselves than with students and their families.  Schools should ensure their curricula are equally accessible to all of the students they serve rather than demanding that underprivileged students struggle with the inequitably distributed burden of acculturating themselves to their schools.

At its worst, the original research could have been, and likely was, used to perpetuate already-existing societal messages that poor families and Black families are inherently inferior to wealthy, white families and that their inferiority is their problem to solve, rather than recognizing that the education system and academic research institutions are active creators of and contributors to discrepancies in achievement.  Because of the immense power those institutions wield, they bear much of the responsibility for neutralizing those discrepancies.

To learn more about this--as I originally did!--check out Code Switch's excellent episode on this topic!

{Heart}