Friday 7.9.21

Those "Friends" Again, Summer Soul... and Schoolyards

Friday greetings and happy-weekend from newShrink.

North Carolina and its history, both light and shadow, feature in so many ways in this week’s news, reader comments and themes that I’ve been revisiting my native state’s seal, symbols and stated principles. Our state motto, esse quam videri—”to be, rather than to seem”—as a standard for character and citizenship has struck a chord since at least 7th-grade state history or Latin class.

From the NC General Assembly website

And from a depth-/soul-psychology perspective the motto elegantly expresses the innate stamped-character image of Hillman’s “soul’s code,” Nabokov’s “certain intricate watermark… made to shine through life’s foolscap” and Jung’s “animating force of reality” of the (“capital S”) soul-Self. The state has literally sealed its defining principle as a soul-engaged aspiration. (More below on this in relation to news stories and about the seal.)

🦋💙

Meanwhile, thanks for all of the comments, discussion-thread responses and story ideas in texts, emails to me here and on my Facebook post. (You’re such a welcome boost that I may need one of these…)

summer fare

First, following up on last week’s discussion thread here and on Facebook about the film “Summer of Soul,” both reader responses and material from the film itself merit more of a solo spotlight and deeper dives next week. That means I still welcome hearing from you if you see it or have ideas you haven’t shared about it. (And going forward I’ll put out similar watch-and-comment kinds of discussion threads soon, one on mental health in elite sports and another comparing a couple of comedians through a particular psych lens.)

Also with reader input and more material than time or space, this week I’ll try more of a list-format and will return in later posts to develop more.

Some attribution and shout-out here to fellow psychologist and writer Justin Perry of Charlotte as I borrow his numbered-list-riff format I like a lot. A contributing editorial columnist for The Charlotte Observer, Justin writes and posts eloquently and deeply on social-justice issues that include and transcend race. He’s become for me a favorite and motivating thinker, writer and human. And we’ve actually never met IRL; we’ve been Facebook friends-of-friends awhile now. Do look Justin up and meet him either way, if the opportunity presents.

those popular “friends”

Lots of you wrote to say you enjoyed and learned from last week’s spotlight on Abigail Adams’ pre-Independence Day letter. (As it turns out, in my probe of NC historic symbols I’ve stumbled on other like-minded writers and thinkers on this dating back to classical Rome and Greece.) As you may recall, in the letter Abigail implores her husband (and mutually declared “Dearest Friend”) John to include and base citizenship in the Declaration and new nation’s government on fundamental equality and mutual regard between men and women. She suggests it follow the example embodied in their own cherished relationship: Friend.

1. My favorite quote of the week in response to my Facebook post is from veteran journalist, teacher and friend David Vest who now lives in Florida. His wordplay weaves together two dominant news threads of the last week:

   “Abigail Adams’ letter is a thought-provoking slice of critical gender theory.”

   (Must add here my humble gratitude for David’s friendship and willingness to read anything at all from me, here or on Facebook. He spent years as a patient and gifted copy editor and editor at The Charlotte News and The Charlotte Observer, charged with wrestling my stories into printable copy.)

2. Meanwhile, Abigail Adams in 1776 was far from the first, or the last, to place such high and serious regard on the character and relationship of Friend as a model for citizenry in shared life public and private. For example, the North Carolina state motto described above, esse quam videri (to be, rather than to seem), was adopted in 1893 by jurist Walter Clark. The phrase comes from the Roman Cicero’s essay De Amicata—”Friendship”—in 44 BCE. Even earlier Greeks, poet Aeschylus and philosopher Socrates, wrote on similar themes.

3. So it seems Abigail Adams’ letter was pretty much an amicus curiae brief to John as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress! (OK, groans are more than fair here for a corny pun… in Latin, no less. This one came to mind during a run, accompanied by equally corny ear-worm song lyric, “that’s what friends are for”. The psyche works in mysterious ways… that often include silliness.) Seriously, however, these classical thinkers, national founding families, and historic state leaders put great and noble value on this deep and complex view of Friend as a standard to live by. Perhaps we can benefit by doing so, as well.

4. For the several who expressed interest in more on Abigail and John Adams, I highly recommend the David McCullough biography of John Adams and the excellent multi-part 2008 HBO miniseries based on it. The latter is streamable on Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, YouTube TV and other venues.

5. Among future story ideas, psychotherapist, former nurse and friend Linda Bird of Lake Norman, NC, suggests this column “How to Destroy Truth,” by David Brooks. From a depth psychology standpoint he presents an excellent example of the factual (“outside-in”) and the shared-story (“inside-out/felt-experience phenomenal”) realities and how both are essential to healthy society and individuals. Of special interest with his quotes from David Hume regarding emotional reactivity and public life, Brooks touches on themes I’ll revisit. That will be the returning focus on all we know from neuroscience about how our brains and nervous systems work in response to emotional arousal—and why this is important in how we consider crisis situations in the news and public policy.

🦋💙

race, shadow and UNC

This week the aftermath of the Nikole Hannah-Jones/UNC controversy merits appropriate and needed deepening and broadening of the focus on race, light and shadow from the individual case to the UNC institutional, state government and broader systemic levels. Both the UNC racial-history and the soul-music stories also tap into much larger questions worth continuing pursuit about soul, the South and Southernness. (In full disclosure, both, particularly the UNC issues, have deeply personal resonance for me as a third-generation UNC alum and lifelong NC-Southerner.)

1. First, the news announcements that Nikole Hannah-Jones chooses Howard University, rejects UNC. (Stories from NPR station WFAE and The New York Times.)

2. Hannah-Jones presents compelling details about behind-the-scenes political machinations between UNC trustees, board of governors and state legislators, that ultimately led her to reject her alma mater in favor of premier HBCU Howard University, in this exclusive interview with Joe Killian of NC Policy Watch.

   “Once the news broke and I started to see the extent of the political interference, particularly the reporting on Walter Hussman, it became really clear to me that I just could not work at a school named after Walter Hussman,” Hannah-Jones said. “To be a person who has stood for what I stand for and have any integrity whatsoever, I just couldn’t see how I could do that.” (This full article link with her direct comments is well worth the read.)

3. The juxtaposition of the statement and action from Hannah-Jones with this editorial’s mention of the state motto and stated values led to my exploration of such state symbols for North Carolina: “The lessons Nikole Hannah-Jones left for UNC”.

4. Here is an editorial supporting Hannah-Jones by faculty at the UNC journalism school: “Hussman faculty: Racism and reactionary politics kept Nikole Hannah-Jones from joining UNC”.

5. Shared on Facebook by veteran journalist friend Fannie Flono, from the publication Facing South: A Voice for the Changing South, is a thought-provoking piece on the forthcoming book by UNC alumna, civil rights attorney and lead-lawyer for Moral Mondays in Durham, NC, Geeta N. Kapur. Her book, To Drink from the Well: The Struggle for Racial Equality at the Nation's Oldest Public University, will be released Aug. 31.

   Along with a thoroughly researched and scathing close-up probe of the darkest shadow-contradictions of UNC’s pride as the nation’s first state university, Kapur details an account heartbreaking in its rarity:

   “What is surprising is that President Frank Porter Graham, the first president of the consolidated University of North Carolina system, agreed with Nikole Hannah-Jones that Black people are the "perfecters of democracy." (The full link to more of these examples is compelling.)

   From the depth psychology perspective the very irony of these stark contrasts of stated purpose with unconscious shadow within the same systems—and also within an individual—demonstrates how consciousness and shadow occur.

6. Here’s more I found about those state symbols, first on classical origins of esse quam videri.

   Interesting in light of the botched and delayed UNC response and action on the Hannah-Jones tenure issue, on the earlier Colonial Seal appeared the phrase qual sera tamen respexit. Referring to the figure of Liberty, the phrase is translated as:

   “Which, though late, looked upon me.”

   State seal details, most recently updated in 1983, include the female figure on the left, Liberty (modeled on the Greek goddess Athena) and on the right, Plenty. Liberty holds in her hand the state Constitution and on her stick the Phrygean cap or Pileus, as worn by the freed slaves of the Roman Empire.

a different frame

Today I close this sad dimension of my alma mater, whose deeper examination is much needed and only beginning, with a personal family image on which I am, similarly, only beginning to ponder and reflect.

This small oil portrait is by a long-ago student of my paternal grandfather Wiley A. Stoker (February 1882-December 1982). Below are some facts, other than his birth during early post-Reconstruction, longevity and having once been an oldest-living UNC alumni who had to have been living in Old East during the rising tides of Jim Crow and white supremacy.

1. His wife, my grandmother Sallie, was also a college-educated schoolteacher who delayed their marriage and beginning what would be their family of three children more than a decade while financially helping educate multiple younger siblings (in a time when female teachers who married lost their jobs.) Thus both were much older, by a generation, than my other grandparents. She lived a lot of history, too, until the mid-1970s.

2. Both were active in church and community. At his 100th birthday party dozens of former students over more than a half-century described him as patient, endlessly supportive, a fierce believer in academic freedom and teaching how, not what, to think.

3. She had marched for women’s suffrage in her youth and was an early and vocal supporter of Martin Luther King, Jr. when I knew her. She taught me long division and love of much literature and music.

4. Neither used or allowed overtly racist terms or language. Yet, all of the children in the portrait and all at the later birthday party were, of course, white. Among the books she read to me, without hesitation in heavily mimicked dialect, was the overtly racist Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings, at the time considered a “classic.”

The picture, then and now, has much of both light and soul-shadow. I would like to be able to ask and hear their views and awareness of that in this ongoing conversation about soul—and whether the South and Southerners even have one, as I hear people seriously ask—today.

…….

And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week

🦋💙tish

… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/opinion/patriotism-misinformation.html?referringSource=articleShare

2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/animal-welfare-sentient-uk-parliament/2021/07/04/44593460-d8df-11eb-8c87-ad6f27918c78_story.html?outputType=amp

3. https://www.wfae.org/education/2021-07-06/nikole-hannah-jones-chooses-howard-over-unc-chapel-hill

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/06/business/nikole-hannah-jones-howard-university.html

5. http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2021/07/06/nikole-hannah-jones-declines-unc-tenure-offer-heads-to-howard-university/

6. https://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/article252596588.html

7. https://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/article252592248.html

8. https://www.facingsouth.org/2021/07/voices-uncs-troubled-racial-past-and-present?fbclid=IwAR1kDizysEzEiUsnpeLSgYyDTf-_NqAWgUhxOISojQOa-FK_pC7C_85tWSo

9. https://www.ncdcr.gov/blog/2016/02/21/classical-origins-of-the-states-motto https://www.ncdcr.gov/blog/2016/02/21/classical-origins-of-the-states-motto 

10. https://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/the-great-seal-of-the-state-of-north-carolina/