Embrace change by improving our little corner of the world

I wasn't exactly grasping for straws when I entered the opulent Eastside home to celebrate Kwanzaa, the African-themed holiday sandwiched between Christmas and New Year's.

But I was looking for a little advice.

The recent historic election has jammed my brain with the mantra of change. Not just because Barack Obama turned the word into an edict reminiscent of President Kennedy's request that we help government, rather than asking it to help us. It is more than that.

I'm looking around me fully aware that 2009 cannot be lived quite like 2008 and 2007 before it. For those who agree, we're not alone. Detroit must change or turn into a ghost town. Wall Street has been exposed. The tight economy, lack of jobs and state budgets stripping us of all but the barest priorities is proof change is coming to where we live, whether we open the door or bar it. Every shoulder will eventually lean into the yoke.

It fit then that the third night of Kwanzaa's weeklong celebration was themed collective work and responsibility. An interesting concept, considering the roomful of well-to-do African Americans, the kind whose economic and political clout propelled Barack Obama from the statehouse to the White House. Most of us will weather the hard economic times ahead, having invested in our education, professions and economic stability. But the theme widens the equation beyond how we'll manage the recession to how we'll help others manage.

A widescreen television showed 300 years of African-American experience condensed into fleeting minutes so weighted with emotion I could feel history's exertion: First appeared an image of a slave ship crammed hellishly tight with humans chained together in the rank darkness; Frederick Douglass exposing the immorality of slavery, and Martin Luther King, Jr., preparing the nation for victory and for his death; many more images, including Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, rigid arms and clenched fists searing their way into America's collective memory.

Then a question was passed like a gourd around the room. In 2009, what will you do to improve your corner of the world? Doing nothing is out of the question. Particularly if you're African American, where the blessing of a black family moving into the White House is weighted with the reality that being black remains this strange health hazard.

The FBI reports that nationwide, violent crime is dropping after increases in 2005 and 2006. Good news, except murders are on the rise — an 8 percent increase between 2000 and 2007 — and the victims are mostly black teenagers and young men shot to death. Many of those who managed to avoid the morgue ended up in prison. One in nine black men between the ages of 20-34 are in prison, compared with one in 30 other men of the same age, according to the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.

It would be plain stupid to dismiss the uptick as just black kids killing one another. They are doing that, true. But according to the annual data compiled by the FBI, the number of young white men who committed gun-related homicides also rose over the same period, just not as dramatically as for black men. Both statistics are unbearable if they threaten your child.

If that was all, I — we — could compartmentalize it and move on. But in so many ways, this nation is failing its citizens. For the wealthiest nation on Earth, our infant-mortality rates are embarrassingly high. Our public schools are good, depending on your race and socioeconomic status.

About seven of every 10 public-school fourth-graders cannot read at grade level. That's 86 percent of black fourth-graders. But it isn't a black thing. 58 percent of white fourth-graders also aren't reading at grade level. The wealthiest nation on Earth cannot teach its children how to read? With a second-grader at home, I grasp now that reading stands sentinel at the doorway leading to everything else. Those who can't read can't grow.

Since the nation is all about change right now, it's a good time to gauge if we truly mean it. If so, we ought to send more people to school than prison. Funding for the federal No Child Left Behind education law ought to be as strong as the law's unapologetic demand to educate every child, no excuses. Time for us to put up, not continue to shut up.

I was thinking hard while celebrating Kwanzaa about what I could possibly do to improve my tiny corner of the world. I ended up not answering the question. I'm answering now.

Lynne K. Varner's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is lvarner@seattletimes.com; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to www.seattletimes.com/edcetera