Merry Christmas! Today's show is on tape because of the holiday: College students urge their universities to divest from fossil fuels; How to teach your kids about race and tolerance; Alan Sepinwall explains why we're currently living in the golden age of television; A new album collects some of the most classic Christmas and Hanukkah songs, plus much more.
College students urge universities to divest from fossil fuels
An Associated Press poll out today finds nearly 80 percent of Americans believe temperatures are rising and that global warming will be a serious problem for the United States if nothing is done to combat it.
There's not nearly as much agreement when it comes to what should be done. Lately, some college students across the country are taking a new approach: asking their schools to divest from fossil fuel stocks.
Bryan Walsh, senior writer with Time Magazine joins the show to explain this strategy. Plus, we speak with 20-year-old Ali Roseberry Polier is one of the students organizing a new environmental campaign at her school, Swarthmore College, the first campus with a fossil fuel divestment campaign.
Talking to toddlers about race and tolerance
Heather Juergensen was raised in an all-black neighborhood in Brooklyn. Growing up her first boyfriend was black, her best friend was black. When her 4-year-old daughter, Sophie, declared one day that she didn’t like a TV character because he was “brown,” she was horrified.
Juergensen had never talked about issues of race or difference with Sophie. Her first reaction was that Sophie was making a “purely aesthetic” statement because she was surely too young to understand the complexities of race. “She likes pink better than blue” says Juergensen in her Studio City home, “and she’s white,” so Juergensen assumed Sophie was just displaying an in-group preference.
One year later, when Sophie was five, Juergensen says she pointed to a black person in a book and said “I don’t like this one, he’s too dark.” At this point Juergensen, mortified, sat her daughter down for a conversation about not judging others based on skin color.
“And that was the first I realized that children develop ideas about race beyond what you as a parent say about race or do about race,” she said.
What happened to Juergensen is common, said Ashley Merryman, who explored the phenomenon of why white parents don’t talk about race with their small children for the book Nurture Shock.
“What I hear from a bunch of parents is that they didn’t think it was an issue until suddenly their child burst out with what they thought was a completely socially inappropriate remark, and they hurt the other person’s feeling, and huge drama ensues,” she said.
Merryman posits that parents are “afraid of saying the wrong thing."
The trouble with that approach is that it leaves very young children to figure it out for themselves said veteran educator Louise Derman Sparks.
"The reality, which is backed up by many years of research, is that babies, even in their first year of life are noticing differences," she said. "That’s how children learn.”
Sparks, who is white and adopted black sons, said it's imperative for famlies to have conversations about race when children are very young. A retired college professor, she has written volumes of "anti-bias" curriculum for preschoolers. She said it's “normal and fine” for kids to notice difference but that adults must help them understand that differences don’t make some people better than others. Those teachings help children learn “say no to prejudice,” according to Sparks.
She said children pick up on messages, such as Thanksgiving greeting cards with stereotypes of Native Americans. They also notice when the race of those in positions of power, like a preschool director or pediatrician, is different from that of the school custodian. Children become sensitive to status as young as four, she said.
Infant Mental Health specialist Barbara Stroud says parents should be careful how they talk to their children about comments they make about race. When children are scolded by adults for saying something they might not know is wrong, “there is an emotional response of embarrassment or disappointment or sometimes shame,” she said. As a result, they will not have the capacity to understand what they said or did was wrong.
According to Sparks, a conversation or play-activity can help children use the moment of the hurtful comment or action to learn why it was wrong.
“We need to give honest answers in simple language," she said. "If it makes us uncomfortable to answer those questions we need to work out being uncomfortable becuse when we’re uncomfortable, even if we say the right words, we’re also communicating to our children that there’s something wrong.”
Sparks advises that parents have to seek out opportunities to teach kids about how we are the same and different and equal. She advises parents to counter stereotypes and cues given off by a segregated environment that subtly reinforces that “white-is-best.”
Trista Schroeder actively talks to her adopted Ethiopian daughter Luli about race. Luli is three and a half. Once in ballet class, two white girls refused to hold her hand because she's black. The mother of one of girls was mortified and told Schroeder she had never talked about race with her daughter. In the radio feature, Schroeder explains how she navigated this difficult situation.
Social science research has found that while white parents rarely talk about race with children, parents of color and mixed families often do. In a survey conducted by the Journal of Marriage and Family white parents of kindergartners reported overwhelmingly that they had never talked to their kids about race, while the vast majority the minorities had, according to Merryman.
A very unscientific poll of parents belonging to the popular L.A. listserv Booby Brigade confirmed the experts' point of view. White parents still feel uncomfortable talking about race while parents of color said they routinely talk about issues of race and have books with diverse characters and plenty of dolls of color. Families of mixed race said they also routinely talk about issues of race because they are constantly confronted with it.
Alan Sepinwall on how shows like 'The Wire' revolutionized TV storytelling
According to HitFix.com TV critic Alan Sepinwall, we're currently living in a golden era of television.
His new book is called "The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever," describes how a dozen high-profile dramas from "The Wire" to "Breaking Bad" have redefined the way television is used to tell stories.
These shows broke the mold of traditional one-hour drama by extending storylines over entire seasons. They also introduced us to morally ambiguous characters: a gangster in therapy, a teacher-turned meth dealer.
Journalist Celia Walden's new book chronicles her stint 'Babysitting George' Best
In 2003 Celia Walden was a 25-year-old journalist in England and given one of her first assignments: To make sure one of her paper's star columnists didn't talk to any rival newspapers.
But this wasn't just your average columnist. This columnist was George Best, an alcoholic writer who also happened to be one of the greatest soccer players ever.
In her new book, Walden "Babysitting George".
Babysitting George by Celia Walden
New Music Tuesday: Holiday tunes from 'Twas The Night Before Hanukkah'
Hanukkah begins this weekend, and if you are looking for some holiday listening that goes beyond the Dreidel Song, you're in luck.
Josh Kun, one of the founders of the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, has released a new two-CD collection called "Twas The Night Before Hanukkah," an eclectic collection of songs about the Festival of Lights and Christmas songs, written and sung by Jewish performers.
“We started this because we thought that the world needed the ultimate musical history of Hanukkah. So we wanted to do a kind of Hanukkah record that was an anthology of Hanukkah songs," said Kun. "A couple things happened, we realized there weren’t as many Hanukkah songs as we thought there were, the ones there were weren’t so amazing, but then we realized that the most Jewish of all Hanukkah songs are actually Christmas songs."
There are, however, a pretty good number of Hanukkah songs, without including the Adam Sandler one.
Rock of Ages
“The lyrics for this song are fairly old. The Hebrew version is really the main Hanukkah song in terms of a traditional Hanukkah song for the candle lighting. This was one of the first songs in the United States to enter in to the America Hanukkah pop cannon. We have the original 1938 version on the compilation…but also a version of it in Hebrew that is more of a disco-funk from the 1970’s."
Hanukkah quiz
“Its like Jewish musical ad-libs. It’s from a children’s record on the Menorah label part of post war Hanukkah records that were part of the growing musical archive of American Jews in the suburbs. Jews were figuring out post World War two their relationship to religion and identity. So a lot of Hanukkah records in the 1950s had an instructional tone, how to teach your kids what Hanukkah is all about. And it is really a minor holiday so one of the stories the CD tells is how it was sort of built up and imagined to be much bigger than it actually is and these records are a big part of that.”
Hanukkah Dance
“One of many that Woody wrote, in part in collaboration with his mother in-law the Yiddish poet. He was very active in Brooklyn being influence by the Jewish folk scene. It is a good reminder of the folk scene in both preserving and changing the sounds of American Jewish identity.”
The second disc is a compilation of Christmas songs by Jewish composers and singers.
The Christmas Song
“It’s almost a parody of the secularization of Christmas, you know chestnuts, Jack Frost, Yule tide, all this stuff that has nothing to do with Jesus and this is what you see in all these pop songs… this is what they do, these songs “de-Christ” Christmas all the way back to ‘White Christmas’ which is kind of the Godfather of Christmas songs written by Jews.”
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
“This is a very famous Jewish cantor who became even more famous as an opera singer, doing this song, on a compilation of Christmas songs put out by the Good Year tire company as a promotional sale, like a quarter of the singers on their are Jewish. Good Year did about 10 of these compilations, and that just goes to show the relationship between the Holiday as a secular event but also a consumer event.”
El Dia De La Navidad
“Larry Harlow, one of the giants of New York salsa music, was someone who was central to the shaping of the New York salsa sound. This is from a Latin rock opera that he spear headed that is kind of a salsa version of the ‘Who’s Tommy.’ This is about the Tommy figure that is being ridiculed on Christmas day. And Larry Harlow is a Jew from Brooklyn. This is not officially a Jewish Christmas song but this is as close as he got to doing a Jewish Christmas tune."