823: The Question Trap
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeaten ed in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, this american life at org. The question started right of the toben and his husband moved to the bay area, got a house together.

Tobin's families is pretty excited about this. They will live within an hour. And the bad news over weeks, his mom, about the shades. But this question popped up.

And the first time I noticed that happening, IT was with my ann kinda know he was like, oh, which one of you is handy? Is one of you handy? And I was just like, why do you want to know that? Like, why does he care? Yeah I and I had I had like feelings about IT and I couldn't tell why um and then I just kind of kept happening with other family members like they would be talking about like go you guys moved together into this house one which one of these handy and on its face IT was kind of like, oh, we know when you're in a house there's a lot of things to fix and a lot of things to do. But I felt like there was something else happening there and I kind of bothered me something else .

there like there was a question underneath the question that they were trying to get the answer to yeah.

like there was something else trying to be figured out. And I don't know. Like the more I thought about IT and why I was having feelings about IT, IT was kindly this weird, a hot moment of flag oh, I think you're asking who the man is in my relationship.

right? Your both man, yes. So one of you is really the man.

Yes, yes.

Then what everyone would tell them that he was his husband, who was the handy one, the body he was just giving the man in die about a picture of their relationship that just bugged them like they were being sized up and different your categories, which you use the husband, would you use the wife .

like IT was weird, because whenever they would ask that, I could feel myself getting defensive. I didn't want to give them that picture. And I think part of my defensiveness came from, I think, well, of man, not to take us in a whole of the direction. But if you spend any amount of time in the closet .

for for dobin, that means middle in high school.

I think you're afraid of being found out at all as being a feminine in any way. But I know for me, I was very conscious of if anyone could detect, quote and quote, you know, feminine traits about me and then figure out if I was gay or not. And so I do think that like myself and a lot of game, and I Carry that around for the kind of the rest of your life. And so I think that comes up in having to answer a question like this .

also yeah yeah it's funny because it's like this innocent question and and then really like underneath it's like there's a bomb wanting to go off actually like .

there's so many feelings yeah IT feels like IT hits on a thing, at least for me, that I spent a lot of time as a kid running from or spend a lot of time trying to not have to answer yeah like how masculine M. I, and is somebody else more masculine than I am?

And like, I do want to make room for the idea that they could have meant none of this, like, absolutely none of this.

Did you address IT directly with any of them?

No, because I would be bunkers. Just say, oh, you ask me who's handy. You're trying to say i'm not a man like that. The leap in logic to say that alright is so huge there on a program.

questions that contain other secret questions inside of them, questions that are wolves in sheeps clothing in all kinds of situations that we've all been in, in dating and talking with strangers, in dealing with the sad thing that ever happened to us. And more, do you be in chicago with this american life? AmErica glass, say with us.

okay. So instead of four different acts today, what we're gonna go to present the show as four questions. Here's the first one question. Tell me how you feel about this. So tobin, who you just heard, is one of the editor terada show and really the idea for today's program came out of a conversation that happened to the staff meeting.

And what happened? I was, we all got talking about this kind of question traps, where IT seems somebody he's asking about one thing, but the question is a proxy for trying to figure out something else. Tobin, uh, will explain in more. The conversation .

was about the questions people ask on first states, the kind that force who someone really is out into the open, maybe even without them realizing one such question. I didn't even knows a thing, but a few of my coworkers said that for black women of a certain age is having a kind of renaissance in manual. Our executive editor asks IT, this way.

what do you think of beyond? IT was a question that I found myself trying to ask specially about on first states, because IT told me a lot about them is a question that tells you one, in some ways, how they feel about a powerful black woman is a question that tells you, and how they .

think about .

black women in general, kind of a little bit to me. And that, like, if you feel the need to like put her down or like say something negative about her, it's like a real turn off. It's like a red flag basically is they describe her singing style as kind of like cattle walling, like SHE is just creating bm.

Another producer has also asked this question on many date.

all these that sort of like have double meanings if you are women and also if you're a black woman. I'm just like eric. So you don't like a loud people. Kk means you don't like me.

Could you tell me about some like specific times that you've asked the bianca question and what the guy's response was? What I told .

you first day bar date, pretty standard beyond I actually came on in the bar in the background ago what you think about beyonce and he was like, I don't I don't understand what the big deal is about her like you like women act, they're in a culture or something and it's like they seemed like crazy. I was like all I really like her and like, I don't really think i'm going to cold a .

manual watch the guy through all the reasons b and say is in fact pretty great, but the guy didn't budge.

No, he he did not didn't care to and maybe didn't care to hear me talk to the general is what that seems playing good.

So they didn't not go out again because, well, you could say he was unapologetic when he fucked up the night. That's a play on to b on c lery, by the way, sorry, couldn't help myself anyway. B, A, Parker, who's also been on the show, he said for her, IT doesn't even have to be bion's say, and you well known black woman does .

the track he says through in the Williams and they say and she's overnight or if you say jay to pin out like all she's too masculine or she's run in both life control .

with him or .

I feel about this like actually to cover, as I bring up like a black female celebrity, to get their opinion on them. And IT usually becomes like the latter, test for how they would treat me as a partner, how they would view me as a person.

But the beyond question, he agrees, is the most content, because the answer can really tell you if you should be crazy in love or putting everything he owns at a box to the left. Again, I am so sorry. The thing about a bunch of people using the same trick though, is that eventually, people, in this case, man, my catch on. Are you aware of the bond? Say, question.

yes, I am the beyond. Say, question.

manual duty producer and man at the show, have you experienced?

Yeah, I experience IT many times.

He told me about a date resign, where they started talking about musicals and the movie version of dream girls came up and thinking he was just answering a question about the movie manual was honest. He said beyonce was just okay in that ah he didn't realized he was .

answering the wrong question and I was taking a whole so SHE was just like the only answer to being about about the Young day is that yet she's fantastic. He's amazing. People can do what he does.

IT was only later that he learned from another guy friend why he is a black man should really only .

answer one way. I remember my friend saying, basically, that is the question black women will ask you to determent if you really like black women you want that would explain, like I told me, understood where people were coming from and I understood what the how the that question was.

In some cases, the beyond a question is like an agreed upon farce where both parties know they're talking in code. Parker was recently on a date SHE mentioned. Beyond says black as .

king film and he's like. He was like, I don't know what to say here, because I, I, I like this. I like talking to you, but I don't love bear say, and I don't wish you to be mad at me.

He knew he was a trap.

He did know that was a trap .

and how did you respond?

I was like, what you talking about? What do you and he was like, like, I know girls to do this and was like.

you're, you're pray and I am sorry, I apologize.

And I was like, well, I guess that's kind of the right answer. So we have call my needs.

Of course, there are other questions like to be on, say, one little traps. We SAT on dates, hoping the other person doesn't fall in, or hoping they do one that made the news recently, in which may may not be true, according to an old classmate, govern iron to scientists with us states, if they like to thai food. But, and this is key, he pronounced at five food.

And if they said, no, it's thai food, not five. He dished the day he was his way of testing if they correct him, which he did not want. No, no.

Sounds like a test. I be grateful to fail, but that's just me. Anyway, I talk to a bunch of other people about their question traps.

Cali in minnesota asked her dates about their favorite tom hanks movies. He said he's been in so many movies across multiple genres. The answer is kind of like a personality test.

Toy story, for example, tells her there is a stunted adolescence thing going on, Sarah in tampa said. When he started to get a weird vibe, SHE asked, what's your favorite conspiracy theory? Most people would keep their answers light harder, but occasionally someone would go all in.

One guy started talking all about not sea separatists, she's jewish. So you know kind of a deal break er but not all question traps are subtle. There's another genera that I was surprised anyone fell for the kind of question that seemed covered in yellow caution tape, a sign that said, this is a trap.

This one comes from vian and IOS. After her husband died in twenty sixteen, SHE found herself back out on the dating scene. A question on a date was, if you're x walked by right now with our new partner, what would you do? Which was her way of asking a much more interesting question, how fucked up with your last relationship first?

Then I did IT. The guy said I would punch him and give her a piece of my march.

Oh my god.

We had just shut down to have a nice lunch on a sunday afternoon. So i'm like, do I get up and go? Um and that's when the story came out of how he was still about a couple weeks away from going to court of finalizing his the horse and IT had been a thirty eight year relationship and he found out he had been cheating for most of the time in a completely serendipitous way SHE gave him an old phone and that he had wiped when SHE downadup the cloud IT down't to his song to, and that we found out.

wow, you got so much information from that .

one question. You gotto make IT efficient to wine, draw IT out.

I was shocked. This question is so clearly, how bad was your last break up? Do I have anything to worry about but something about turning IT into a fun? The license aker made these guys open up.

there was another guy that said, well, we would have to leave immediately because I don't want to see them. And my reply was, you don't want to see them or you don't want them to see us.

And I was .

his response. He never answered directly, but I knew then that he was still in a relationship .

with her now husband. They met at a wide support group. He talked about his loneliness in being a single parent. They kind of just got each other and SHE knew the question, what would you do for your x showed up would not be right for this nice guy who had just lost his wife. SHE .

wasn't to ask that.

The last person I talked to was Jessica SHE teaches the sl classes in atlantic. Must go to .

question ah, do you believe in ghosts?

ghosts? I bet you didn't see that one coming. Did you? Do you believe in ghosts? Here's a Jessica says that works.

There is no one great answer IT just matters that you and your partner have the same answer essentially and its core, your minds kind of working .

a similar way was there over a time that you ask the ghost question, the person answer differently than you and you when I hadn't did that person anyway and how did that go .

yeah um yeah I was engaged before I married my husson now um and the goes question really should have been my get the fuck out really yeah her .

answered to the question .

is I don't .

really believe in ghosts but if there was evidence to the contrary, I could be convinced i'm open to changing my mind .

and his response was no and there is no information that you could give me to change my mind and I just won't see my anyone would really think .

that at the time.

SHE didn't think much about the difference in their answers, but then SHE got to know him Better. Other things would come up.

And I was frustrated about the fact, like everything with you was so black and light, I not, everything is black and light. Sometimes they are greg, and then I kind of thought back to answered to this question.

His rigidity was one of the big things that broke them up. Now SHE tells everyone he knows you're seeing someone new. Ask them the goes question. He can save you a lot of time.

The thing about any trap, of course, is there are ways to decide, step IT, disarm IT. And then the person who laid the trap has to decide what to do. Manual had to make such a decision.

Ironically enough, my current boyfriend had no idea who V, C was. Who's the only person who had that response. What did that tell you that he just needed like some education? He's older and he's not from this country and like doesn't listen to music really and like, uh, by the second day he had read the entire recomposition hage for me and he knew beyonce is birthday and that SHE was married to J. Z. And he knew about the .

elevator fight. Yes, he listened to your opinion. Yes.

ended up being a Green flag. Now I talked him about bianca e all the time. And I don't necessarily think he's lake. He's done going out to like bianca concerns or anything, but he understands to how important he is and important he is to me and lets me rant about her. So let's all you ever really want, right?

IT is only think anyone wants with someone you don't feel like you have to set a trap for someone who you can look at them and say, you're everything I need and more it's written all over your face baby, I can feel your halo pray IT won't fade away. Sorry, i'm going to stop now.

Open well is an editor on our program question to how old are your kids. So there's a particular piece small talk that happens all the time that for some people is like the most Normal thing in the world and for others is a super delicate minefield.

This a story that you're d to hear is about a couple for whom IT is a mind field and how one day a question like this comes up and IT goes completely differently from how it's ever gone before for them. In a spectacularly wild way, you will hear what i'm talking about. Christena a tells the story.

Stacy suburb is the real estate agent southern california. And she's well sited to the job because she's excEllent at making conversation with strangers to bed anything. But for the past six and a half years, there's been this classic genre of get to know you vent her that's become a lot more complicated for her and her husband, Michael, and that's questions about their children.

Um yes, all the time talking to people getting introductions is always asking about our kids how many kids do you have? lovable. How older they?

The answers to these questions are complicated for stay c, because their older child, max, died in twenty seventeen.

So IT has been six and half hours because I have a dot tattoo for every six months.

This is this. His husband, Michael max, is dead. He's a cpa straightness st kind of guy for the most part.

Max always wanted just to get tattoo and we never did.

And I feel like had some. He had .

wonderful sleeve, lots of tattoos, but uh, so i'm covered in tattoos in my right. ARM is an entire memorial for maxi. I've got, uh, kids tattoo up here on my right shoulders. Song.

did you have tatoes before he got?

no. But you know, it's tattoo is a very interesting thing. It's less than the least I can do. But that does help me through the pain and tattoo. I really how I see IT from my perspective is just, uh, socially acceptable.

Cutting max was a funny kid, always like playing pranks, who by fifteen was strugling with drug addiction, going in an out of treatment he overdose to. He was twenty five in his parents house, and after he died for a while, Michael and stay, he were when friends and family who knew what had happened. So nobody asked to those, do you have kids sort of questions? But then cc travel to a conference in alboher key.

SHE was sitting down for a lunch next to a couple friendly born woman in her husband. They began asking to see where he was from and what he did. And then finally, those questions.

do you have kids how older they and woman was? You know, a kind of southern, very sweet, very bubble. And when people are like that with me, and i'm pretty open, and so I felt like being authentic, and I told her, you know, one of my children died of an overtime two years ago, and now I have one.

This did not go over. Well.

this woman and her husband, IT IT really upset them. They couldn't. They just couldn't handle the conversation. I just saw this major pity face with the open mouth and the.

哦， okay. And there's the .

conversation .

with them kind of stall out at that point. And then they kind of totally .

stalled that they never talked to me again.

Of course, over time, this happened again and again. Strangers would ask them these sorts of questions, and when they answer, IT suck all the area of the room, which made Michael especially uncomfortable. He never like sharing the stuff of strangers. He's more of a private person, but together he, and today he came up with a strategy for how to .

handle things we're out about. And the question comes up. We started to love each other just a little imperceptibly cells, and nobody could really pick up what's going on and usually stay simple answer. However shi answers, and I support her unreservedly.

a lot of the time to actually lie. We have two kids, so this is their ages. Talk you later and keep IT short and sweet. Because sometimes the White lie is Better for that person, because they're at a party, they're out having fun and they definitely don't wanted hear about your dead child and so on.

They went answering some questions about their kids and bobbing and weaving around others for six and a half years until this one day last november, when they ve got themselves into a situation that was very different for many that he'd been in before and very public.

One thing to know that they see, and Michael, is they both spend a lot of time working at a recovery center for people struggling with addiction. Sometimes they hang out with the other staff and clients there.

And so I saw that they were going to a show at the holly's improve, where series silverman was performing. And I like all my god, I love series silver men. I want to go.

I want to go. And I said, when we got there go, I want to a sit front rose center. I wanted get hacked.

I I wanted be right under government. I wanted to like, hackle me, if possible, or me. I D guess we hackle them. I don't know. I just wanted to be a part of IT.

They get seats front rose center. But before Sarah, seven man came on stage that night, the hollowed wood improve, there was this opener, kind of adam ray, early forties, wearing the mariners cap. And he's got this backing band, drums, keyboard.

backup singers. And the ends is set with .

a song about how all his friends with kids are miserable.

and. Boring now. For you are good for. You OK OK。

But then the song shifts. Adam ray says things that he and his wife are still deciding about having kids. Suddenly he turns to the crowd, wants to find someone with kids who can make an argument for having them. Adam starts in the front row. What the guy a few sets away from stayed in, Michael.

No, yes, of the minute .

the word kids came up, I went on high alert and I just had a feeling, oh my god, we're sit in the front row. Is he going to come to us?

You have. kids.

So i'm i'm nervous because I don't know what i'm going to say. I don't not going to deal that. And remember, ring a company of conscious ly in one.

We can't do that here in this venue and look at each other and get an idea know what do you think? What do you think? But not talking.

So i'm there sort of in a desert waiting. And then I saw him coming to me, of course, so he comes to me, you know, do you have any kids? They are right?

I do. That's what talking prety assertive for the .

guy who doesn't like talking about this.

I was, think of what you fucking you don't have kids and that you pretty like should shut the book up and get up, right? You know. So there probably was a little attitude, perhaps you think. And I figured that would be that.

but the comedian is not done with them.

How many can you help you to my day day? The best kids. can.

And he's still not done.

one. Is your favorite one? 白银 色 有。 Which one, which one do more than the other? Not here.

So you can say, so you can say which one? You forget the birthday. Would find out the bus to tonight first. simple. How old are you can?

So he finally comes down to me, but the microphone held your kids. And that's where I was having difficult culture, because nobody asks me how old they are typically. So the first thing that went through my mind was, well, supreme is twenty six. And by that time I was fucked because there was no time to figure out some excess what that didn't happen.

While Michael thinking, add on the comedian and keep told the microphone waiting, this dad is taking too longer answer. And finally.

oh god. Down the energy of the show log of I felt .

protective over him in that moment like, that's a loaded question and ask why you can answer you.

Then the comic turns to space. Y hem.

mom, how would other his mom? M, do you know if you have kids that does not know how all his children?

And I thought to myself, oh, now i've gotten, tell the truth. And and so in a split second, very impulsive moment, I said, i'm started, tell you this, but one of our kids is actually dead. I arted tell you about one is.

One, two, one. already。

我的 爸。

On stage, no one quite knows what to do. One of the back up singers puts her hands over her face. The keyboard player just shakes his head like, no.

And then I realized, like, oh, I just screw the show.

我要 受伤。 Wow, all right, the song has ten.

This moment for the comedian seems pretty insurance table right, like, what could he possibly do to save his set? After that, I called them up adam ray, and he said he considered changing the subject, but chose not to.

So too well, don't have kids, do not, ok. With this. we.

And finally, it's actually stay see who saves the day SHE motions for ad in the comedian. He events down and points as make .

at her and then he says, I said our dead son would think this was malarious.

IT wasn't a lie at all. Our dead son would have thought this was hilarious. He would have been like, oh my god, of course, my mom stepped in a big pilot.

Then, adam.

get an idea. And he was nice, but give you for back right now.

The video of atoms said actually .

made the rounds on tiktok and instagram afterward, states, says he read every last comment all these people were joining for and remembering her son.

I've listened that thing like a hundred times. I think as I keep in enjoying IT.

I mean, I was like was incredible, just was an incredible long in a time.

Lots of people have asked them questions, putting them in this complicated spot. But this time, in front of all those people that ended with a room pool of strangers cheering for max, this time is their favorite.

Crisped der is one of the producers on a show coming up the question about a four hundred year old play and the personal question underneath that question just a minute, chicago o on the program continues. This american live from marigold, today's program, the question trap. What we're talking about today is a those questions that can see benefon innocent harm.

But underneath they really asking something else, or quietly making a point about something else. We've arrived to question three of our program, question three as your mom. So we part of this next thing, we want to play you in an academic journal, which was reasonable, a paper in medical antipope gy quarterly written by an ethnologist name, gene Taylor, who are adapted IT to read here on the radio.

This one question that, you know, tell writing about IT kept showing up all the time and a personal alive, and he says, is the nanny pologies? He knows when lots of people are asking the same question over and over, he means something. And you're about to say, say the thing through what is underneath.

My mother is living with progressive dementia because i'm reading these words on the radio. I can't hear your response, but i'm listening for the question that, as i've learned, always comes everyone, almost without exception, response with some version of the same question, does SHE recognize you.

They're .

variance, of course. Do you still know who you are, but does he still know your name?

However, IT may be phrase.

The question is always whether my mother recognizes me, meaning, can SHE recite the facts of who I am, what my name is and how i'm related to her. When everyone keeps asking me, does he recognize you? I find myself thinking, that is the wrong question.

I believe the question really is. Or should we do you, do we recognize her as a person who's still here? Does SHE recognize you? The weirdly of the question becomes more obvious if you think about what would be required to answer IT.

Let's say, I ask my mother, what's my name? Who am I? How old my? How do we know each other, testing her that way? What is IT proof? What is IT actually accomplish? I read books by a journalist named laun castle. Er SHE wrote about how he would correct her own mother when her mother called her by the wrong name.

Every time he would visit her mother, SHE take framed photos from the dresses and point to them and quiz her mother, you know who this is, don't you, mom? Of course he didn't castle rights. So I told her again and again, each visit who is who, and then quiz again, thinking back on this.

Now I am appalled at my insensitivity. What did I think I was doing? I managed to accomplish only two things. I made myself miserable and I made my mother irritable. I don't need my mother to tell me my name or how i'm related to her already know these things, and I know that he has dementia. So why then what I make a point of asking her these questions that I know SHE can't possibly answer IT seems rude or just mean, I can't bring myself to do IT I guess you could say that my mother raised me Better than that.

Does SHE recognize you.

I'm not so convinced .

that the inability to remember names necessarily means that a person with dementia can recognize or care about other people. But very often IT does mean that other people stop recognizing and caring about them. My mother was close to lots of people, but only one friend remains present in her life.

Every month, two ill David s. Drives an hour half from her home to seattle to visit mom, bringing treats and hugs, and are always cheerful self. I love her dearly for IT, and I wonder, where are the others? Where are the couples with my parents socialized? The women with her mom spent hours and hours on the phone all through my childhood.

This shouldn't surprise me as much as IT has. Maybe it's not fair to expect friends to step up, even close family drop off. Friendships in amErica are not usually expected to survive dementia. Friendships are often more like pleasure craft than life rafts, not built to brave the really rough waters.

Does SHE recognize you. When people ask me whether my mother still recognize me, they're often expressing concern for me, asking me how i'm bearing up under the burden of suffering that our dementia must place on me. And they're quite ready to hear about my burden of my suffering.

What they find harder to hear, I think, is that being around my mother is not a nightmare or a horror. It's not like any of that. Here's what IT is in a cafe.

As we share a gone mom and I make what passes for conversation, i've learned to ask only the sort of question that doesn't require any specific information to answer. So things going okay with you these days. How's my favorite mom doing? You're doing all right.

I tell her funny little stories about my kids. Times we leave through a magazine looking at the pictures and commenting on them. Sometimes we look out the window, and I make general observations that require no specific response.

Looks like spring is coming. Look at those leaves coming out on the trees. That guys hair is really curly. With each exchange, mom smiles of me, beaming affectionately, and that familiar, slightly conspirator oral way, as if were both in on the same joke. So our conversations go nowhere.

But IT doesn't matter what we say really, or whether we set up before or whether it's accurate or interesting or even comprehensible, the exchange is the point. Mom and I are playing catch with touches, smiles and gestures, as well as words, lobbing them back and forth to each other in slow, easy, underhand arks. The fact that he drops the ball more and more often doesn't stop the game from being enjoyable.

It's a way of being together. Does SHE recognise you SHE may not recognize me in a narrower cognitive sense, but my mom does recognise me as someone who's there with her, someone familiar perhaps. And SHE doesn't need to have all the details sort IT out in order to care for me.

The impulse to care, the habit of Carrying these are things that run deep in my mother, someone who, foremost of her life, was very engaged in caring for other people, her children or her husband, her grandchildren, her friends. Even some of the behavioral quirks that my mom is develop make sense to me in those terms as expressions of care. Here's an example.

People with dementia often engage in repetitive behaviours, and mom is no exception. When I take out to a cafe, I usually get a cup of black coffee for myself in order a cup of hot chocolate for her, not too hot. And don't forget the whip cream on top as we drink them.

SHE checks constantly to see whether my up and hers are even whether the liquids have been drunk down to the same level. And if not, sh'll hurry up and drink more to catch up or else stop and wait for me. Or if we share a cookie, she's concerned to make sure that they have be the same size and then we eat them at the same rate.

I think keeping track of whether our drinks and cookies are even comes naturally to my mother, a woman who has always had to carefully divide quite limited resources, first with their own brothers, later one of four children. She's cared about such details all her life, and caring about them was also away in which he cared for other people. Mom also does still take care of meat in some small but important ways.

One time, a little more than a year ago, I stopped by the assisted living facility where he was living. At the end of a very busy day, and in especially hectic week, I had stayed up very late the night before trying to finish grading student papers, then spent the whole day teaching in in meetings. I went with her up to room.

I turned on the T, V, and we SAT down together on the couch. I was exhausted. I leaned back, and you aren't mom, pat of my hand, and said to me, you're tired to go head and sleep.

You can just lay down right here. And so I SAT there next to my mom, holding her hand, feeling her warmth against me, all long one side of my body. And I lean my head on her shoulder and slept. ed.

Does SHE recognize you .

for a while after .

we first move my mother into an assisted living facility, SHE often said that he wanted to go home. I understood this to mean that he wanted to move back to the house where he had lived for forty years until my father's death, the house in which I grew up.

Usually I responded with my own mild version of reality orientation, explaining as gently as possible that that house was all empty and cold now, and nobody was there to keep our company or help produce stuff. So was probably Better to stay here. One time, though, I asked her a question.

Instead, you mean home to the house up in advance? no. On the farm. SHE answered, you go down with a raised ARM.

SHE traced out the curve of a long ago road for the first few years of life, my mother had lived on a small farm in southern aho before her father moved the family to seattle t during world war two to seek work on the docks. They are inside there, he added, who I asked my mom and my dad, my mothers in her seventies. Her parents are not waiting for her inside an idaho farm house.

You could use that evidence to draw a clear line between us, me here, on the side of reality, competence, personhood, recognition. Her over there, on the side of delusion, incapacity. Not quite fully human, but what he was longing for was her childhood home.

SHE missed her mom and dad. She's trying, in her own way, told onto them, just as I was trying against the odds to hold on to her. Our predicate is exactly the same.

Now, Taylor SHE is professor, the university of toronto teaching medical atropos gy. Her mom, Shirley n. Taylor died in two and nineteen. You know, closing this, I say, and others bad dementia into a book. You can find a link to the original academic article that .

you wrote at .

our website for can I help you? okay. Here's one nice example of a question. That is another question working behind IT. Question goes like this.

A matter, scored an average of fifteen points per basket about game and play twenty of our games in one season. How many points to score in the season? That's a question from the S H S A T, which is a standards test.

Given middle school students in new york city. A high score on the S H S A T will get you into one of the eight tap public schools in the city, wonderful schools. A low score will keep tween the regular public school system, where your school may be assigned by artery.

So the question working behind that math question is, are you good enough? Are you good enough to go to the best schools and maybe from the the best colleges and from there to all the advantage you get from that kind of education, including a higher income, maybe Better job? All of the show to stuff kind of a big scary casm opening up in the earth behind that innocent little mouth problem .

in two thousand seventeen .

provide years my crime actuated kids wanted to leap over that casm and into those eight to eat high schools.

The first made me feel good because I thought I was helping children. And I only gradually came to understand that I was really just a fucked up cog in a larger fucked up system.

This recording is from a one person show that I did this fall about the kids say, tude. I were a little that I can be hard to get across over the radio. What's so special about the show? Most of IT is songs, songs about the kids at my tude, these very funny and heartbreaking portraits of these middle school, high school kids and miles relationship to them, like a example of the boy who takes a lot of pleasure dance in god and the democrats.

Jason, sixteen, and he proudly notified as varian, his are sixteen year old berrian. I'm kind of a ferid of him.

My o is not a great singer. They will tell you that themselves or scope musician. But the written songs and secrets since that were the age that these kids are, they are writing about, and there's just something in the intentional of roughness and sincere of what they're doing.

I kind of matches the wrongs of these kids and their feelings. And and if I was reactions to them when a girl from queens named dinner, there was Better at math than milo, and probably should be a scientist or engineer someday, tells my way that if he does end up in college, he wants to study theater. My low, whose broke and struggling and wanting to do .

theater things, I want to tell her not to. I want to tell her not to you cannot study theater, you have to study math, your good mouth, you're fAiling map, you want to study doesn't matter.

The song in the show about the kids anxiety about school and the test, and not the pressure they feel from their parents. And they're about milo trying to figure out not just how to teach them, but what they possibly could say to comfort them. Faith, for example, is a terrible .

reader says, I think i'm stupid. I can't read IT. I guess i'm stupid.

I get bees. I must be stupid I say, I don't think you're stupid. Face repeats, i'm sure. I D if you think can smart, please prove that. I tell her intelligence is.

Face just looks at me and says, no. I say, yes, he is no. He said, no, no, no.

When I was your edge, my mom hit all my report cards from me. When I asked her what my grades were, SHE always told me, you're right where you should be. You're right where you should be.

I reduce delays about questions and to cause of the show, just complete you one more thing. This is one full song from my own show about a question that student faced to an essay.

Question via has to respond to the question. Is shakespeare though, that racist in a five paragraphs, say, for her White teacher by monday? And SHE says, just tell me the answer, please.

I have so much homework this week. I need to get this done as fast as possible. Is oslo racist yes or no? I like, have you read the play? She's like, yes, and I watched the Lawrence fishburn movie.

I like, so what do you think she's like? I don't know. I'm sixteen. I'm afraid to say the wrong thing. I'm like, same.

This stuff is hard to talk about, but you've gotten trust yourself, even though you ve also got ta constantly question and interrogate yourself. Either way, you've gotten try. You've got to try.

You've got to try, try.

try, try. I'm desperate to do a good job to the mom can hear us in the next room. I do not know what to do. If you looks at the assignment room brick to see how shall be graded, SHE needs a clear defense, three unique. I can tell she's overwhelmed.

I say, remember, grades don't matter if learning can be measured, just trust how you feel you did SHE says, maybe grades don't matter if you're rich, but in my family, grades are so per. I think I thought at first that davia didn't have the word to talk about the play in any new once way, but now I started to think that her understanding is deeper than my own, and SHE might never talk to me about ostler honestly and shouldn't have to. Finally, I decide you just want me to provide her with some easy answer to satisfy her teacher and get her through that a measter und so i'm like, okay.

Your teacher is either looking for N S. A. That's like, yes, a hello is very racist. The story of the play is there is the super professionally and romantically successful black man. All of these White guys are jealous and cannot handle that.

Tension is resolved when the White guys trick us alone into murdering his wife, thereby turning him into the british stereotype they wanted him to be all along. That the title role was performed in black face for centuries underscores this. Moreover, that's a good that's kind of a transition word davia.

Moreover, I need my next body paragraph will be about. Moreover, deston's waiters, in contrast, is repeatedly presented as a nately, good, innocent and desirable. That's one I say you could write that would get an, a.

The other, I say you could write that would also get an, a goes, no, a fellow is not super racist. A fellow is a flawed attempt at anti racism in that its shakespeare only play to center a dynamic black protagonist. The play was banned in apartheid south africa for depicting and interaction al relationship.

Moreover, the plays, most prejudice characters are always presented as either stupid rodi go or evil iago IT would be a mistake to conflate the perspectives of these characters with the meanings of the work as a whole. Either of those essays would get a diva. But what your teacher's reductive, yes, no prompt, does not allow for is an essay that's like what I think, I think, which is something like, athlone is a product and reflection of another culture.

Elizabeth in england, four hundred years old, written at a time when race was just being invented as a system of power. The play later became a cultural export of the british empire, which colonized black and Brown people around the world. The plane remains the best sheller of the shakespeare industrial complex. In other way, idiv A A fellow and racism are so indelibly linked that the question is a fellow racist seems to confuse both what racism is and what artworks are, in my opinion, was really racist. Stevia is that we are required to read a fellow for the billions time that is on the curriculum at your brook in public high school, even though the play is boring.

When we could be reading any number of contemporary black pyrates.

Do via response. Don't hate me, but I kind of like reading all the one. The story is really crazy and the language, it's really pretty.

And the one person shows school pictures recorded to play, raise horizons in new york, to hear more songs for the show, or to book them to come to your town. Go to milo crime dot com. That's cream with the sea milo cream dot com.

And when I speak more. street.

我 police .

today by the chase the people put together today show and put gender I band shang com icon Peter that have a walk from my moto suva prince and chrystal maria rots and text mattering Nancy R。 N. Dian woo are managing editor of the minor senior editors David caston bomb.

Our executive editor is a manual berry original music for the comedian story by one rumi, who also helps mix the show. Special thanks today to earn caller or book is finding life in the land of alzheimer's also thanks to got your world, Michael rosen, thought daa T R. David Johnson, Rachel Jackson and job american life at org you have can stream our archive over over eight hundred episodes for absolutely free.

This american life is to go with the public radio stations by P, R X, the public radio exchange. thanks. There's always a programs cofounder.

Miss, I maltee know you kind of hurt my feelings this morning, right to each other. He asked, how am I doing? I started to answer, and he was like.

I'm in a glass back next week. There's more stories of this american life.