Listen. You will be enlightened and entertained; you don’t get a chance like that often.

Here’s a selection of photos from our walk:

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The picture for today (yesterday, actually; the pix will be posted the next day) is at the end of the following story, which sets the scene.

After Alex’s wedding in August, Joan and I went to Rochester to spend the night with the Wilsons. The next morning, we were sitting around the kitchen table, and the talk turned, for some reason that I don’t remember, to the deep roots of our white American racism; no matter how liberal we are or how hard we work to free ourselves from instinctively racist responses to events, those responses occur, and the best we can do is recognize them quickly, recognize them for what they are—harmful and delusional vestiges of our cultural upbringing—and try not to act on them but to act rationally instead.

Paul told the story of an incident that happened to him more than 40 years ago, when he was a grad student at the University of Illinois. He had been driving back to Cincinnati alone; it was evening; he’d stopped for gas in Lafayette, and in talking with the gas station attendant, revealed that he was on his way to Cincinnati. There were three other people in the station—as Paul described them, a very large black man with a powerful husky voice, a white woman, and another black man, smaller, lighter, wearing shades and a dashiki. The big guy approached Paul, told him that they’d heard he was on his way to Cincinnati. “Our car broke down,” the guy told Paul. “We’re musicians, and we have to get to a gig in Cincinnati; can you give us a ride.”

That’s when the culturally inculcated racism kicked in; first, with Paul’s instinctive fear; then, with his recognition that he couldn’t refuse without revealing the racism; and, finally, with his consequent decision: “Sure, I’ll give you a ride.”

Paul went on to describe the ride home; his diminishing terror as his passenger (the guy who had asked for the ride; the woman and the other guy sat in the back and, according to Paul, remained silent throughout the trip) proved to be a smart, entertaining traveling companion: knowledgeable, experienced, a good raconteur. Paul wound up, later that night, going with a friend to the club where his passenger and his group were playing. Paul’s friend left early, but Paul stayed until the club closed, and then went with his new friend to an after hours club for a little more music before the guy drove him home; Paul realized, as he was being driven home, that the black guy was just as frightened driving into a white neighborhood at 3:00AM as Paul had been driving into the musician’s black neighborhood earlier in the evening.

They never saw one another again; Paul had no idea what happened to the guy. But he remembered the guy’s name: Leroy something. Not Leroy Brown. “Leroy Jones, that was his name. And his band, I think, was Leroy and the Drifters, or something like that.”

“Not Leroy,” I said. “Lee Roi. And the band was Lee Roi and the Drivers.”

Here we are, two white guys sitting in a kitchen in Rochester, New York, and Paul’s telling me about this accidental meeting 40 years earlier, that had taught him a memorable lesson about his own racism. And I knew the guy in the story!

Lee Roi Jones is a pretty prominent guy in Cincinnati these days, with an insurance agency, a bail bonding business, multiple real estate properties, and a solid reputation as a nightclub operator. And he’s a lunch time regular at the Brew House, as am I. We’ve known each other casually for some years now. When I saw Lee Roi a few days later, I told him about my conversation with Paul. As my story unfolded, Lee Roi began to realize that the guy in the story was, in fact, him. And his jaw dropped. He remembered the evening vividly; it was, no doubt, as odd an experience for him as it had been for Paul. Lee Roi gave me his card and made me promise to give his number to Paul and ask Paul to call him.

I did that, and Paul did that, and they had a good conversation. Paul called Lee Roi again last week to tell him that he was coming to town for a baby shower that his ex-wife was giving for their daughter, and he and Lee Roi arranged to meet for lunch at the Brew House. Joan and I joined Paul and his wife Jo, and met Lee Roi and his old friend Kenny, and we had a spectacularly interesting and enjoyable lunch. Lee Roi and Kenny both tell great stories, and so does Paul, and we all laughed uproariously. And when the talk turned to where it all began, to the pervasive racism of our culture and its pernicious effects, Lee Roi and Kenny, once again, helped us white people understand that, while things have, indeed, changed since the sixties, the changes have not made things much better, and, in fact, have made some things worse. Kenny described being stopped, recently, in a rural county in Southern Michigan, for no other reason than that there were “zero blacks” in the county, and his mere presence on the road was sufficient cause for the police officer’s suspicion.

Lee Roi, for his part, had understood Paul’s fear on that long-ago evening. He had known, as Paul, had not, that Paul had nothing to fear from him. But he’d also known, as Paul, again, had not, that Paul did have a very legitimate cause for fear, which is that he was driving on Indiana state highways with two black men and a white woman in his car.That simple fact would have been more than enough cause for any state trooper, in that state, at that time, to stop them, throw them all in jail, and probably knock them around a bit to show them the error of their ways. Stupid white kid.

Lee Roi treated us all to lunch; it was payback to Paul for the ride, and it was my birthday treat.

So thanks, Lee Roi. Thanks for lunch, and for your friendship, and for your courage and your good stories and your good humor, and for hanging in there and making a good place for yourself in a society that doesn’t go out of its way to make any place at all for you, and for your patient teaching.

And here’s the picture I promised at the beginning, of the six of us at the Brew House. From left to right, Joan, Jo, Kenny, Lee Roi, Paul, and me.

Thanks, Danielle, for snapping such a great picture.

David’s current post is on IQ; he does a cogent and well-deserved smackdown of Charles Murray’s skanky recent WSJ op-ed, in which Murray basically suggests that we might as well write off stupid kids.

IQ is weird. There’s a lot of data, but I have the uncomfortable feeling that it may not have been collected on the right populations, and that the Intelligence Quotient, despite its obvious success at correlating whatever it is that its instruments measure with various metrics of success in life, may not, in fact, measure anything particularly significant or maybe even real.

My IQ was measured when I was a kid in grammar school; my parents were probably interested in figuring out what to do about my underachievement in school (or perhaps, as Joan points out, determining whether I was, in fact, an underachiever or just a stupid kid.) I don’t know what it was, except that it was high enough to place me solidly in the underachiever category. Joan doesn’t think her IQ was ever measured. If Alex and Kate had their IQs measured somewhere along the way, nobody told us, or we didn’t think it important enough to note or remember.

I have two problems with IQ. First, I think that most people are a lot smarter than their IQ scores would indicate; my experience with people at the Brew House, for example, convinces me that most of them are smarter than they would appear to be on an IQ test, and that they’re smarter than their teachers and parents told them they are, and they’re smarter than they think they are. I’m not sure what I mean by smart, but it has a lot to do with being articulate, imaginative, original, and more than a little clever.

My second problem with IQ is that I believe that the data on how IQ can change with time is probably a lot more suspect than other data describing the IQ story. I know that I’m a lot smarter now than I was back when I was determined to be something other than a stupid kid, and if my IQ score failed to measure that increase in smartness, then it couldn’t be measuring anything very important. And it’s not just increases in smarts. A lot of the kids I went to high school with had IQs as high or higher than mine; that’s the kind of school it was. But a striking number of them, on the evidence of our 50th reunion, have become pretty stupid in the years since then. Again, that’s based on their lack of imagination, curiosity, original thinking, and ability to penetrate the kind of vapid rhetoric they get from their political leaders.

So, I guess what I’m saying is that IQ, whatever it is, is different from smart, whatever that is. And smart is more important.

Some folks over at ScienceBlogs are conducting a web experiment, dealing with “viral marketing”. I’m not sure I understand it, but I’m willing to play along.

So, here you will find truth. Go for it.

Many good people hold that abortion is an act that is filled with sin. It may be so. Any act may be filled with sin. And abortion is, at best, a sad necessity.

Sin separates—one person from another, humankind from all that is divine. Sadness need not separate; indeed, sadness shared may lift somewhat, and one who shares another’s sadness, with sorrow and care, elevates humanity with the sacrifice.

So we may begin to agree. Abortion is sad, and we may share, with sorrow and care, the sadness of anyone who must endeavor such an act.

Many of those actors are, otherwise than this, good people. If their sad act is filled with sin and stains their souls in some way, then you must pray for those souls and grieve with the good people on their loss.

But must you cry “Murder!” and call in the state to punish and deny? Murder is not of the human realm where sin and grace reside, but of the Law, which numbers murder by degrees and considers circumstance in which degrees are blurred extenuating only, not vital to the case.

Please do not. Do not deliver sad humanity so carelessly to the blunt decree of law. Do not make a criminal of this good woman if at some sad time she must, for reasons that I may not know and must not question, abort a life that quickens within her.

If you do condemn her so, as well as those who helped her with compassion and with skillful care; if you make of her a criminal, who was not one before, deny her liberty, and bring more harm into her life to devil her—if you do so challenge her, you must also challenge those of us who love her, and we are many, and many among us whom you hold dear, or would hold dear if you but knew us.

I know this good woman and know that, challenged, she will respond as her humanity commands, respond with courage and mighty determination. If you would force her to bear a life to term against her chosen course—a course informed by all that is divine in this one woman’s life, all that inspires her goodness and her friends to love her—then you must crush her spirit, brutally. You must destroy her.

That would be a sin indeed. Pray for her rather, and for me, and for your own humanity, that we may all grow in goodness to the best of our powers and care for one another.