Out On a Limb of Your Own Choosing

Last night I went to a lecture by Tukufu Zuberi, from PBS' History Detectives.  This guy isn't just a t.v. personality. He's a professor of sociology at University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school.  A smart guy.  His lecture was entitled "Taking A Look Back at Negro League Baseball."

I was excited, because I'm a huge baseball fan and I've read a lot about Negro League baseball.  Unfortunately, Professor Zuberi cannot say the same.  I'll post the more baseball oriented portions of this rant over on my baseball blog, but my point in this post relates to speakers, lecturers and teachers generally.

It seems to me that if Professor Zuberi is uninformed about baseball he either (a) should not be giving a 100 minute lecture about baseball or (b) he ought to get up to speed before he gives such a speech.  Instead, he used baseball as a hook to draw an audience.  If you combined everything he said about baseball in this lecture, it might (might) add up to 5 minutes.  And much of what he said about baseball was generic references about "those men playing on the field".  There was little-to-nothing about baseball's special place in history and race relations. His baseball knowledge was below average for even a casual fan.  (Don't most of you know that Babe Ruth hit a lot of home runs?  Professor Zuberi thinks he had 700 hits.)

And he knew that he didn't know what he was talking about.  Twenty five minutes into the lecture he had yet to mention baseball.  He said to the audience "What does this have to do with baseball?"  He laughed.  He said the baseball stuff was coming, but he wanted to orient us to history so we could understand where he was coming from.  Yet he never got to baseball, simply meandering along about racism and "re-remembering history."  He knew baseball was not part of the lecture, and he knew we were wondering when he was going to get to it. 

Occasionally he'd take a stab at something baseball-related, almost always got it wrong and looked uncomfortable doing it.  When someone in the audience would correct his errors, he'd say "I told you I don't play baseball; I'm just a fan."  Uh-huh.  What does playing baseball have to do with analyzing its place in history?  That doesn't make sense.  It's the fans and other observers who understand baseball's special status.  It's the fans who know the player's names, the stats, the history!

There was exactly one reference to Negro League Baseball in 100 minutes, and that was near the end.  It was a reference to Pop Lloyd, and the reason Professor Zuberi knew that name was because he had done an episode of the History Detectives about a field named after Pop Lloyd.  I found it strange that he didn't pick up a few baseball things in the course of doing that story.

I'm a faculty member at a graduate school, and sometimes when we hire new faculty members, they will ask me if I have any advice for the classroom.  I always start with this:  Never pretend to know the answer to something you don't know.  The students will figure it out.  Always.  Your credibility will be shot.  And that reputation will stay with you as long as you are here, and perhaps at your next institution too.

So too Professor Zuberi. He is obviously a smart man, a good speaker, and a talented sociologist.  He made some good points about the perspective of the various wars, depending on which lenses you were wearing at the time.  And he was undoubtedly inspirational to the audience with respect to the way we should think about race.

Yet in a lecture about baseball, he clearly did not know his baseball stuff, and he tried to hide it with generic references and by practically avoiding baseball altogether.  His errors were obvious and were caught by the audience quickly.  A true baseball fan could mark him as an imposter very early on.  The way he talked about the game is the way people talk about it when they don't watch it and never played it and haven't studied it.  The last of those is his greatest crime in the context of this lecture. 

As smart as he may be on sociological matters, I would not read anything he writes, nor listen to anything he says, because for me his credibility is shot.  Had his lecture been called "Re-remembering African American History" I would have been happy about the lecture, and he would have been in his element.  Instead, he lured people (including a few former Negro League players) with the promise of baseball, and then not only neglected it, but undermined his own status by fumbling around in an area he does not understand.

Think about that, the next time you have to give a speech of your own.  Talk about what you know.  And if you are required to speak on a topic that you are underinformed about, get up to speed. 

Is It The Bear's Fault?

An 8-year old boy hiking with his father in the Great Smokies was attacked by an 86 pound black bear. There was no evidence the boy taunted or threatened the bear, but the bear tossed him around a bit, giving the boy some cuts, bruises and a tremendous scare.

The boy's father chased the bear off by pelting it with rocks and sticks.

All very unfortunate, but luckily, the child is largely unharmed. And he has a great story to tell.

Here's the problem: "Park rangers caught a young bear soon afterward in the same area and killed it when it charged them. Smokies spokeswoman Nancy Gray said rangers were sure it was the same bear."

Why was the bear killed? "Park officials said the attack along the popular Rainbow Falls trail was unprovoked. In most cases, bears attack people while trying to poach their food, but none was present during the attack Monday. John Pala said their clothes might have smelled like fried chicken from a meal an hour earlier."

Doesn't the bear have as much right to those woods as the people do? From our perspective it may appear to be unprovoked, but from the bear's perspective? We are encroaching on his territory.

Why can't human beings just say, "Wow, that's scary. I better look out for bears in the Smokies." No kidding.

Why is the answer that we have to destroy the animal, who was doing what only came naturally to it? Neither the boy nor the father were seriously harmed.

Is it because we have to punish the bear for daring to try and harm a person, particularly a child? Or is it because we want to establish our dominion over the Smokey Mountains, ensuring that others can traipse around in the woods without fearing anything from wildlife?

I think it's both. People are happy to walk in the woods where squirrels scramble around, birds chirp and deer panic at the crack of a twig. God forbid they see real honest to goodness wild animals in the woods. That's what zoos are for, right?

Let's not forget that bears don't eat people. While Black Bears are technically carnivores, their subsistence is largely plant based: twigs, buds, leaves, nuts, fruit, berries and honey; supplemented by insects, fish and small vertebrates. Bears attack people because they have become familiar with people, and the food they carry around. That seems as much our fault as the bears'.

By the way, this must have been a relatively young, or starving bear, because an 86 pound Black Bear is not very big at all. According to the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mammals, Black Bears average between 203-587 pounds. In fact, he probably weighed little more than the 8 year old boy he attacked.