In August 1970 James Baldwin and Margaret Mead sat down to talk about race, culture, history, and the United States of America.

Mead, 68 years old, white, and liberal, was the most famous anthropologist on the planet. Baldwin, 46, black, living in exile in France, was one of the most prominent novelists of his era. The two had never met before. Their conversation, carried out in three long sessions over two long days, was tape recorded, transcribed, edited, and published as a book:  A Rap on Race.

I recently finished A Rap on Race, and it’s a weird and fascinating document. The early pages read like a slightly demented graduate seminar, or the opening hours of the best first date ever — all jousting and empathy and audacity.

It bogs down later, as our heroes start getting irritated with each other. They gradually stop interpreting each others’ statements generously, start nitpicking, start interrupting. As they each struggle to synthesize what’s come before, they drift farther away from discussing lived experience and begin to retreat into metaphor and platitude.

But these are two very sharp people, and when they’re on, they’re on. The book exasperated some readers at the time, and subsequent academic assessments have dismantled many of its arguments, but I was mesmerized. Forty years after A Rap on Race was first published, I read it not as a weighty intervention in the world’s problems or as a serious addition to scholarly literature but as an artifact of its moment — a conversation between an aging white observer of world cultures and a middle-aged black expatriate, both struggling to make sense of their own histories and the country that was changing around them.

Here in 2011, we Americans have a pretty settled narrative of the civil rights era. What Betsy Ross and George Washington were to older generations, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King are to us. We know the stories by heart, and we tell them again and again. But it’s easy to forget how short that era really was — just twelve years passed between Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus and the gunshot that took King’s life. Twelve years, four months, and three days.

Mead and Baldwin were both adults when Rosa Parks took her stand — Mead an acclaimed scholar, Baldwin an established author. Both came of age in the time of Jim Crow, and they met well after the movement that ended it had run its course.

And so the civil rights movement is not a central concern of their discussion. When Medgar Evers’ name comes up, it’s in the telling of a story about white supremacy’s stifling, deadly grip on the South. King is mentioned in passing, but Huey Newton (for instance) is a much more immediate presence.

This is a book, in other words, not about civil rights but about two subjects Americans don’t talk much about at all — what came before, and what came after. It’s a window into two eras in American history that we rarely contemplate today, two eras which together did more to construct the one we now live in than did the brief moment that separated them.

Over the next few months, I’m going to be posting a series of weekly excerpts from A Rap on Race. Some of those passages I agree with, some I find ridiculous, some I’m not sure what to think about. Sometimes I’ll share my own thoughts in the original post, sometimes not. In all cases, I welcome questions and comments and disputation.

Hope you enjoy it all, and I hope you feel moved to bring the conversation forward. This should be fun.

(And yes, if you’re a longtime reader, you’ve seen this before.  I started this series last summer, and I’m rebooting it now. Look for the latest installment every Wednesday morning.)

I took a great trip out to Rutgers on Saturday for their “Practical Guide to Changing the World” conference — a really sharp, really well-conceived, really well-executed daylong event.

If you’re a student activist or a student government type looking to kickstart organizing on your campus, you could do far worse than to follow the “Practical Guide” model. They started with a keynote and Q&A (your humble servant, in this case) over lunch, then broke for four one-hour workshop sessions. There were about a dozen workshops in all, with five slots per hour, so almost all of the workshops were offered twice.

And that was it. A rousing speech, a slate of practical trainings — everything from how to run a meeting to legal rights of demonstrators to using social media in organizing (me again) — and done. Six hours in all, everyone still fresh at the end, very little flakeout at the end of the day. It really was a model of a one-day, campus-based organizing training conference, and if anyone would like to hear more from the folks who put it together — or bring me out to your campus do my thing — just let me know. I’d be happy to hook you up.

But the conference itself, as it turns out, was just the beginning. Afterwards I was invited to tag along to an organizing meeting with Rutgers folks and various organizers from other NJ public campuses, and without giving too much away I can definitely say that spring 2012 is going to be an interesting season for higher ed organizing in the Garden State.

Also, New Jersey students have been in the process of setting up a statewide student association (SSA) for a while now, and they’ve just received a major grant through the United States Student Association to fund a full-time staffer for the next two years. SSAs are a crucial part of the student activist infrastructure in the United States, and this one seems to be off to a great start.

Oh, and that grant? It’s one of three. Similar projects are underway in Michigan and Colorado as well.

Twenty-two years ago today 14 women — 13 students and a staff member — were murdered on the campus of Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique. Their killer, Marc Lepine, targeted female students in an engineering class and claimed to be “fighting feminism.”

The fourteen who died were Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault, Annie Turcotte, and Barbara Klucznick-Widajewicz.

The 20th anniversary of the killings drew a lot of attention in the Canadian media and blogosphere, and I collected a number of links then:

• A look back at the shootings, their aftermath, and the larger struggle against misogynist violence.
• A survivor of the massacre — then an engineering student, now a government official and a mother of four — comes to terms with her feminism.
• An essay on the impact of the killings on Canadian society.
• Another collection of links from the blog Spare Candy.

“So what is going to be taught to our people in health class in our schools? What is going to be taught to our children about who in our stories, even to little children — what are married couples? What families look like in America? So, you are going to have in our curriculum, spread throughout our curriculum, worldview that is fundamentally different than what is taught in schools today? Is that not a consequence of gay marriage?”—Rick Santorum, chatting with a young Iowa voter yesterday.

Two things, Rick.

First: Yes. That’s what’s going to happen. In fact, it’s happening already, even in states without marriage equality.

And second, if you think that prospect is likely to send shivers down the spine of any American 23-year-old in 2011, you’re deeply misreading the electorate.

Young people today know “what families look like in America.” They know that loving families are raising kids in all sorts of configurations. They see it every day. Denying those families legal recognition won’t keep kids from seeing them as families, and it won’t stop decent, moral, respectful teachers from referring to them in decent, moral, respectful ways. That battle has been lost. It was lost years ago.

Yes, you can harm these families by denying them legal equality. But that harm, even by your own degraded standards, does nobody any good.

Today’s young voters are disgusted by you, as are their younger sisters and brothers. They will not soon forget what you did to their families and their friends.

“We were told the following: If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn’t he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received — from a well-meaning liberal — was the following: He said, ‘Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his Board of Directors?’ That’s the answer.

“Well I ask you to consider — if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be — have any process upon us. Don’t mean to be made into any product! Don’t mean — Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings!

“And that — that brings me to the second mode of civil disobedience. There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

–Mario Savio