The New York Times - USA (2020-11-15)

24 N THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALSUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020

When the coronavirus pan-
demic brought New York City to
a standstill, New York Communi-
ty Trust, a foundation that sup-
ports local nonprofits, had many
concerns.
Among them was that an
aggressive response to the virus
would spell a blow to the econ-
omy — and also to public
schools, which had a record $447
million investment in arts educa-
tion for the 2018-19 school year.
When the city announced its
2021 budget in April, cuts includ-
ed a $15.5 million reduction for
the Education Department’s
planned $23 million to expand
arts education.
To help fill that gap, Leigh
Ross, a program officer at New
York Community Trust, reached
out to a team at the department’s
Office of Arts and Special
Projects. Together, they outlined
a plan to provide free and remote
arts programming to New York
City’s 1,800 public schools — the
country’s largest school system.
“We created the project to
respond to what we saw as an
emergency in arts education,”
Ms. Ross said. “But I think it’s
turned into something that could
be used and could be benefiting
kids for years to come.”
New York Community Trust,
one of 10 organizations sup-
ported by The New York Times
Neediest Cases Fund, allocated a
$680,000 grant to the project,
most of which is funding four
artistic nonprofits that are craft-
ing curriculums under specific
disciplines: Carnegie Hall for
music, 92nd Street Y for dance,
Roundabout Theater Company
for theater and Studio in a School
for fine arts.
Maria Palma, the deputy direc-
tor of the Office of Arts and Spe-

cial Projects, said that delivering high-quality cultural education is often made possible by connect- ing students with professional artists. “It really does take a village for us to educate our children,” she said. “This grant was really just in time.” The programming is tailored for kindergarten through 12th grade and, starting this month, will gradually be uploaded to an online portal administered by the Department of Education, mak- ing it available to the city’s roughly 75,000 teachers. It amounts to more than 170 hours of instruction, including videos, as well as resources to help teachers — and caregivers who have had to take on the roles of teachers — use the lesson plans in a variety of settings. The Dance Education Labora- tory at 92nd Street Y is highlight- ing dance traditions in New York City, with a focus on “three groups of people who have been marginalized, ignored or com- pletely decimated from Ameri- can history books,” said Ann Biddle, a founder of the laboratory. Its modules will look at Na- tive American dance and culture, the evolution of tap dance in New York and the work of the chore- ographer H.T. Chen, which ex- plores Chinese-American history. While teaching an inherently physical art form through a screen can be challenging, Erin Lally, the director of the Dance Education Laboratory, believes the impact of the programming will overcome that barrier. “As soon as you are engaging children in an embodied way,” she said, “they are hooked.” Theater is also typically a live collaboration. That being ruled out during the pandemic, Round- about created lessons by focus- ing on theatrical design and the use of voice. Students will be encouraged to create their own pieces — in- spired by personal and social

issues of importance to them — and perform them. Roundabout wants to emphasize the physical voice, said LaTonya Borsay, a master teaching artist at the theater company, as well as “the voice in terms of perspective and point of view.” The initiative is designed to support multiple beneficiaries: the teachers, their students, the nonprofits and other collabora- tors, like videographers and artists, who were employed to help shape the content. Paul Brewster McGinley, the director of teaching and learning at Roundabout, emphasized that teachers have been “the unsung heroes” of the pandemic response. “Our overall goal here is to provide resources for those educators to lighten the load.” Ms. Ross, of New York Com- munity Trust, believes children need the arts now more than ever. “Many young people are feeling isolated,” she said. “When kids engage in the arts, they have opportunities to express themselves, to connect with other people.” That healing ability has been a key motivator for Mylo Martinez. About a year ago, Mr. Mar- tinez, 19, felt like he had come up against a wall. He had dropped out of a community college in East Los Angeles, where he was studying animation, and had lost his part-time job as a fast-food worker. He also learned he was going to be evicted. Ready for a change, in Janu-

ary, Mr. Martinez packed and boarded a Greyhound bus to New York. “I just felt like there was really nothing to lose,” he said. His dreams of becoming an animator took a back seat to his desire for a fresh start. “I want to develop this whole new person,” he recalled thinking, “even if that means that I have to kill something that I genuinely love to do.” Mr. Martinez entered the city’s shelter system and, soon after, discovered an I.T. job-training program run by Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow, a benefi- ciary agency of Community Service Society, another organi- zation supported by The Fund. The program was scheduled to begin in March, but it was post- poned after the city went under lockdown. In May, Mr. Martinez started classes virtually. Commu- nity Service Society used roughly $220 from The Fund to buy him a tablet and other supplies he needed for his coursework. He is also using the tablet to document his journey of self-discovery through cartooning, capturing who he was and envisioning who he aspires to be. Mr. Martinez graduated from the program in October and is now studying for certification exams and preparing to re-enter the work force. Though he often puts himself down, Mr. Martinez said, he is also his main source of inspira- tion: He creates art to find “val- ue in myself.”

THE NEEDIEST CASES FUND

Keeping Young Minds

On a Creative Path,

Remotely for Now

By SARA ARIDI

SARA NAOMI LEWKOWICZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES EMON HASSAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES From left: Mylo Martinez, 19, who hopes to become an animator; and LaTonya Borsay of the Roundabout Theater Company and Ann Biddle of the 92nd Street Y’s Dance Education Laboratory, part of a program offering free arts education to New York City students.

ADAM GLANZMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

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The most audacious thing about
Barack Obama’s new memoir, “A
Promised Land,” is the beaming
portrait on its cover: There he is,
the 44th president, looking so se-
renely confident that it’s as if the
book weren’t arriving on the heels
of a bitter election, amid a crater-
ing economy and a raging pan-
demic.
The ebullient image also stands
at odds with the narrative inside —
700 pages that are as deliberative,
measured and methodical as the
author himself. Obama says that
he initially planned to write a 500-
page memoir and be done in a

year; what he ended up with in-
stead is a hefty volume (now the
first of an anticipated two) that
stops in May 2011, shortly after his
roasting of Donald J. Trump at the
White House Correspondents’
Dinner on April 30 and the killing
of Osama bin Laden the day after.
Obama’s extraordinary first
book, “Dreams From My Father,”
was published in 1995, a year be-
fore he was elected to the Illinois
Senate, and traced his family his-
tory alongside his own coming-of-
age. “A Promised Land” is neces-
sarily less intimate and more polit-
ical, offering close-up views of the
major issues that Obama faced
during his first term, including the
economic stimulus, health care,
immigration, the environment and
the forever war in Afghanistan.
Presumably left for the future
volume are, among other fraught
subjects: the 2016 election, his ab-
dication of his own “red line” in
Syria, the entrenchment of the sur-
veillance state and a discussion of
drone strikes. This isn’t to say that
“A Promised Land” reads like a
dodge; if anything, its length testi-
fies to what seems to be a consis-
tently held faith on the part of the
former president — that if he just
describes his thinking in sufficient
detail, and clearly lays out the con-
stellation of obstacles and con-
straints he faced, any reasonable
American would have to under-

stand why he governed as he did. Nearly every president since Theodore Roosevelt has written a memoir that covers his years in office; this one contains some inev- itable moments of reputation-bur- nishing and legacy-shaping, though the narrative hews so closely to Obama’s own discursive habits of thought that any victories he depicts feel both hard-won and tenuous. An adverb he likes to use is “still” — placed at the beginning of a sentence, to qualify and counter whatever he said just before. Another favorite is “maybe,” as he reflects on alternatives to what happened, offering frank confessions of his own uncertain- ties and doubts. At a time of grandi- ose mythologizing, he marshals his considerable storytelling skills to demythologize himself. He ad- dresses the book to the “next gen- eration,” to young people who seek to “remake the world,” but the story he tells is less about unbri- dled possibility and more about the forces inhibiting it. He periodically reminds us how he inherited a state of emergency. As one of his friends said after Oba- ma’s historic win in 2008, when the economy was getting devoured by the Great Recession: “Two hundred and thirty-two years and they wait until the country’s falling apart before they turn it over to the brother!” Once in office, Obama sought the help of experienced insiders in- stead of “fresh talent,” deciding that the dire circumstances “de- manded it.” Obama says he had ambitious ideas for structural change, but that his team insisted that any attempts to mete out some “Old Testament justice” to the banks whose avarice and reckless- ness had pushed the financial system to the brink would send skit- tish markets into a full-blown panic. But quelling markets did little to quell anger and fear — something that conservatives, Obama no- ticed, were quick to seize on and use to their advantage, while the president deemed it perilous to tap into such incendiary emotions. (This seemed to be an ingrained sensibility: David Maraniss’s 2012 biography of Obama has one of his mentors recalling with a touch of exasperation how even when they were doing community organizing in Chicago, Obama was “reluctant to do confrontation, to push the

other side because it might blow up.”) What could have been politi- cally beneficial to him, Obama takes pains to spell out, would have risked degrading the institutions that needed to be repaired, not de- molished. There’s a dynamic that Obama describes again and again in “A Promised Land”: establishment Republicans shrewdly finding ways to appropriate and exploit the feelings of helplessness and re- sentment that their own deregula- tory policies had helped to bring about in the first place. “If all this seems obvious to me now, it wasn’t at the time,” Obama writes. “My team and I were too busy.” He re- calls a Republican senator telling him, “I hate to say it, but the worse people feel right now, the better it is for us.” (This senator may have hated to say it, but he loved to see it.) The result was a drubbing in the 2010 midterms, when Demo- crats lost an astounding 63 seats in the House. About the substance of those first two years in office, Obama ex- presses few regrets. “We had saved the economy,” he writes. “We hadstabilized the global financial system and yanked the U.S. auto industry from the brink of collapse.” The Affordable Care Act made health care available to an-

other 20 million Americans. The midterms “didn’t prove that our agenda had been wrong. It just proved that — whether for lack of talent, cunning, charm or good for- tune — I’d failed to rally the nation, as F.D.R. had once done, behind what I knew to be right.” The tone that Obama strikes in lines like these is almost mournful. He shows how a certain kind of blunt candor seemed all but un- available to him as the first Black president. After he offered the mildest rebuke of the police officer who arrested the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. on his own front porch, saying that the officer acted “stupidly,” his support among white voters plunged. In public, Obama was unfailingly concilia- tory, telling reporters he “could have calibrated my original com- ments more carefully,” even as he began to realize that the issue of Black people and the police was a reminder “that the basis of our nation’s social order had never been simply about consent; that it was also about centuries of state-spon- sored violence by whites against Black and brown people.” As much as he knew this, he couldn’t say it. His almost zealous commitment to moderation ran- kled some progressives, who had assumed that his soaring cam-

paign rhetoric meant he was a vi- sionary bent on overturning the status quo. Whenever he felt stuck, he fell back on empathy and “process.” They sound like incom- mensurate traits — one is inven- tive and literary, the other is bland and technocratic. But for Obama — who in this book demonstrates an almost compulsive tendency to imagine himself into the lives of others (whether it’s Hillary Clin- ton, John McCain, or, in one pas- sage, a Somali pirate) — a sound process “was born of necessity.” Decisions that were made after taking into account a variety of perspectives reassured him that he wasn’t blinkered by his own. “A Promised Land” isn’t entirely about the presidency. The first 200 pages move (comparatively) briskly through Obama’s early years to his life in Chicago, when his burgeoning political career put a strain on his marriage to Mi- chelle, who had curtailed some of her own ambitions so that one of them would be present for the cou- ple’s daughters. Of course, becoming president didn’t yield anything that resembled a work-life bal- ance, though it did mean that rather than commute between Chi- cago and Springfield, Ill., or between Chicago and Washington, he could usually be home for dinner

by 6:30 before returning to the Oval Office. He would receive his President’s Daily Brief (or, as Mi- chelle called it, “The Death, De- struction and Horrible Things Book”) at the breakfast table. He happened to be at home in April 2010 when he first got word that an explosion had torn through the Deepwater Horizon, a drilling rig off the Louisiana coast, belch- ing fire and smoke and gushing oil — the worst oil spill in the country’s history. An underwater video feed showed “the oil pulsing in thick columns from the surround- ing wreckage,” Obama writes, “like emanations from hell.” The novelty and enormity of the disaster shook him. (The technol- ogy for ultradeep underwater drilling made the Exxon Valdez look like a Tinkertoy by compari- son.) Until then, Obama had main- tained a “fundamental confidence” that he “could always come up with a solution through sound process and smart choices.” But those “plumes of oil rushing out of a cracked earth and into the sea’s ghostly depths” seemed of another order, unassimilable to his general- ly imperturbable worldview. Even after the hole was plugged and the cleanup was proceeding apace, something awful had been un- leashed, with the true extent of the poisoning not yet known. A hundred pages later, Obama remembers how Republicans seemed to get increasingly petu- lant at the prospect of working with his administration. “It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic,” he writes, “a sense that the natural order had been disrupted.” Trump had been peddling a birtherist conspiracy theory that some conservatives seemed eager to accept. Obama doesn’t force the meta- phor, but the events described in “A Promised Land” suggest that something very old and toxic in American politics had been un- leashed too. It was as if the Repub- lican Party, having sidled up to the jagged shores of white grievance, was starting to founder on them. As he writes of the Deepwater disaster: “Where the rest of the oil ended up, what gruesome toll it took on wildlife, how much oil would eventually settle back onto the ocean floor, and what long- term effect that might have on the entire Gulf ecosystem — it would be years before we’d have the full picture.”

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

Obama Thinks (and Thinks Some More) About His First Term

By JENNIFER SZALAI

Barack Obama in Grant Park in Chicago after his historic victory in the 2008 presidential election.

DAMON WINTER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

A Promised Land By Barack Obama Illustrated. 768 pages. Crown. $45.

The New York Times - USA (2020-11-15)

THE NEEDIEST CASES FUND

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

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