Linda's Blogspot

  James Baldwin: The Making of an Extraordinary Mind Before James Baldwin became famous, he was already becoming James Baldwin James Baldwin is often introduced as a novelist, essayist, playwright and one of the great literary voices of twentieth-century America. That is true—but it doesn't quite tell us how James Baldwin became James Baldwin. Read the usual biography and the facts can seem to line up like newspaper clippings: Harlem. A strict preacher father. A teenage preacher. DeWitt Clinton High School. Greenwich Village. Paris. Go Tell It on the Mountain. Civil rights. Race. Sexuality. Exile. But there was something happening underneath all of those events. A remarkably gifted young Black boy was developing an extraordinary command of language, religion, literature, argument and human observation. And he was doing it long before the world knew his name. The preacher's son who became a preacher himself James Baldwin was born in Harlem on August 2, 1924. His mother, Emma Ber...

  Who Gets to Tell the Story? James Baldwin, Wikipedia, and the Age of AI As I Wonder Reflections I recently returned to James Baldwin's A Talk to Teachers, and something about it feels very current. Baldwin was speaking to teachers in 1963, during the Civil Rights Movement. He was asking teachers to think seriously about what they were teaching children—and, perhaps even more importantly, what kind of thinkers they were helping children become. His concern was not simply whether children could memorize facts. He wanted them to be able to look at the world they had inherited and ask: Who made it this way? Whose story am I being told? What has been left out? And perhaps the question underneath all of these questions: Who gets to create knowledge? That question takes me directly to Wikipedia. And from Wikipedia, it takes me directly into the age of artificial intelligence. Baldwin and the Problem of the Official Story Baldwin understood something that I think every generation has to ...

James Baldwin: A Talk to Teachers What Is Education Supposed to Do? In 1963, at the height of the American Civil Rights Movement, James Baldwin delivered a powerful talk to teachers about one of the most important questions we can ask: What is the purpose of education? Baldwin was not simply talking about reading, writing, mathematics, or passing examinations. He was talking about something much larger—the ability of a young person to understand the world, recognize injustice, and think for themselves. His ideas remain remarkably relevant today. Education Is More Than Information Baldwin believed that education should not simply teach children to accept the world as it is. A truly educated person should be able to look at society and ask: Why is it this way? Who created these rules? Who benefits from them? Who has been left out? What does history tell us? And what might we change? For Baldwin, this kind of questioning was not a failure of education. It was the purpose of education. A t...

   Who gets to tell our stories—and who gets the bag to help tell them? That doesn't mean suggesting that Wikimedia Foundation grants buy editorial control. The Foundation explicitly says its grants do not determine Wikipedia's content. But funding can influence who has time, travel, technology, organizational support, training, research capacity and opportunities to participate. That  Who Gets to Tell Our Stories—and Who Gets the Bag? The other day I was thinking about James Baldwin and Wikipedia. I began with a simple question: Who gets to tell our stories? But the more I thought about it, the more another question came to me. In today's language, we might say: Who gets the bag? Who gets the money? Who gets the funding? Who gets the institutional support to research, document, photograph, organize, travel, teach, edit and preserve knowledge? Because telling stories takes more than having a story to tell. It takes resources. James Baldwin and the Story Behind the Story W...