This isn’t over, not by a long shot. America’s cities are still in turmoil, as are hearts and minds across the world, after we watched the horrifying death by suffocation of George Floyd, an African American man whose life was snuffed out under the knee of a police officer over 526 seconds. He pleaded for his life, asked for his mother. Onlookers begged the officers holding Floyd’s neck and body to the ground to stop—to have mercy.

It’s not over. It’s not even just begun. This is yet one more in a long line of deaths: pointless, painful, final. One man died by jogging. A woman by opening her door. A boy by playing in a park. And the crisis that has in America brought forth bloody flowers and strange fruit (the blistering language used to describe lynchings sprung from trees across my country) has spread.

Protests rock the world: in London, Mexico City, Amsterdam, Nairobi, Haifa, Lagos, Buenos Aires, Tokyo and beyond. Meanwhile, nations that are nearly paralyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and particularly the minority communities within them who are hard-hit by medical and financial inequalities, are facing choices. What do we do? How do we express outrage? Most importantly, how do we make change?

Many people ask me these questions, and as an academic, and now president at a small liberal arts college in California, I seek answers. I’m the mother of two children, both Black like me. The terror I feel for them sometimes leaves me gasping for breath. Yet I know there is a road I must walk if any of this is to change for them, and for children across the U.S. and around the world.

The hatred delivered to Black people wasn’t born on America’s streets. It runs so deep in our history and can rear its head anywhere. This is revealed in the protests around the world. The name for this systemic hatred is simple: ugly. It is the ideology of white supremacy, an ideology born of the need to control populations across the world as Europe expanded its empires. It was born, equally, of the need for those who perpetuated it to feel morally just.

I recall coming across a 400-year-old poem attributed to John Cleveland while carrying out dissertation research in the British Library two decades ago: a dialogue between “a fair Nymph” and “a black boy.” The boy pursues the nymph; the irremediable darkness of his skin threatens the proclaimed purity of hers. A solution is suggested through the metaphor of a printer’s press. The nymph says, “Thy ink, my paper, make me guess/ Our nuptial bed will make a press.” The boy’s ink will ultimately be written on her body, leaving a message for others to find.

The author must have thought himself a wit, while keeping a safe distance from the blood, brutality, murder, abuse, rape and fundamental degradation of the realities of slavery. But I can’t—won’t—keep my distance from the reality of racial hate and the necessity of making change happen today.

Each morning I must stand up and acknowledge my Black heritage for what I know it to be—a sign of strength, and a commitment to life even in the face of dark days. Then, I must straighten my back and return to a life of finely honed, severely tested optimism, in which education is held to be our last, best hope.

Thus, I work to make it possible for students to learn, research to advance, professors to teach. I work to enable the transmission, and even expansion, of the shared inheritance of humanity, the long, hard-fought knowledge we on this planet have gained, husbanded and promised to preserve. This has never been more crucial: By one estimate earlier this spring, more than 1.5 billion children had lost access to all education. Such students could fall as much as two years behind their peers.

Perhaps there is a slight opening in this moment, where the slowdown and solitude of the pandemic meets the crowds and cameras on the streets. A chance to be truly heard? We know we need far more than a fleeting “teaching moment.”

I tell my children, college students, anyone who will hear: Whatever you do to address the inequality, the brutality, the hatred and pain of racism, you must realize you cannot fight without knowledge. So spend the coming months and years as you prepare for adulthood doing just that. Study policies that help reduce the use of force, mitigate poverty, cure those who need healing. Learn the tools of justice and the history of their uses and failures. Indeed, the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was passed, in part, to stop deadly harassment by “lawful” authorities of African Americans in the antebellum period.

Help your generation and mine, and those between us and beyond, to see past the misdirection, to rebut the lies and half-truths and to find a path together. It isn’t over.

This essay was originally published in The Financial Times under the title “What to tell young people about systemic hatred in our society.” It is reprinted with permission.

Remembering Bob Mezey

The first time I met Bob Mezey, I was 16 years old and visiting Pomona College; I had no training as a poet. Bob had a reputation for being difficult—he was widely considered to be a master poet, but rumors swirled about his sharp tongue, frank opinions and habit of publicly renouncing poets that didn’t pay homage to the tradition of meter and form. I was a sensitive kid, and the slightest cruel word might have crushed me. Years later, I learned that Bob himself was also just 16 when he first sent his poems to John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College. Perhaps this had something to do with how he handled our first meeting. I gave him my poems and eagerly awaited his response. “Well,” he said, “you don’t really know what you’re doing, but I see talent. I hope you come here.” Even before I began as a student at Pomona College, Bob sent me poems in the mail, photocopies of the works of Borges, Frost, Justice, along with instructions to read them carefully, listen to the sound and see if I could imitate the meter.

Later as a student at Pomona College, Bob and I frequently met for breakfast at Walter’s in Claremont. He always arrived early, and I’d find him drinking coffee, reading poetry. More than once he looked at my work and said, “This is not poetry; write something in verse. Keep the meter; use your ear.” Bob would bring in scanned versions of Larkin, Frost and Wilbur. He’d point out the ionics and spondees and explain how the poetic masters could rough up the verse, but only after years of practice. Once, while reading Wilbur’s “The House,” I saw his eyes brimming with tears. It was clear to me then that poetry was not just Bob Mezey’s profession; it was something much deeper than that.

Bob had a promising start to his career: He’d won the Lamont Prize, and many people expected him to be the next big thing in poetry. Over the next few decades, Bob garnered further success for his translations, introductions to important poets and poems appearing in major journals. But during the last 20 years, it became increasingly difficult to find his work, even in the formalist journals. What happened? Had he offended one too many people, or was his style of writing simply out of fashion?

Years later, I began to expand my own poetic repertoire to include free verse. Bob cautioned me that writing a good free verse poem was far more difficult than people thought. “But in good free verse,” he’d say, “you’ll still hear the ghost of the meter.” Bob rarely spoke of his own work in free forms. When I asked about Naked Poetry, he said, “Wish I’d never been part of the damn thing.” Somewhat ironically, just as the momentum of the poetry world was swinging in the direction of Naked Poetry, Bob was making a sharp turn back to formalism, back to the original teachings of Ransom.

In late April, I called Bob to say I finally had a draft of a poem I’d been working on since 2009—would he look at it? “Send it along,” he said. Bob was 85. On a Sunday morning, I woke early, and made coffee, eager to see if he’d written back—he had a habit of working late. But there was no response from Bob—only an email from his daughter, sharing the news that he had caught pneumonia, or possibly the virus, and passed during the night. What did he think of that final poem? “Not bad,” I imagine him saying, “only a few lines in here I might quarrel with.”

—Jodie Hollander ’99
Minturn, CO

Remembering Richard Elderkin

The loss of Richard Elderkin is very sad news. Professor Elderkin was on the admissions committee in 1985 that admitted me. When I arrived he told me he hand-picked me as an advisee because I was majoring in math, and he was intrigued and interested in the young man who wrote my admissions essay. I told him I could introduce him to the guy if he gave me a couple days. We hit it off immediately, and he spent the next four years supporting, encouraging and guiding me.

Brilliant, kind, thoughtful, caring, curious, loyal, engaged and Buckminster Fuller(!) are words that come immediately to mind when I think of Professor Elderkin. I find comfort in knowing the very large positive impact he and his wife had on Pomona College, Claremont and, in turn, the world for more than three decades. I am a wiser, better teacher because of his example, and I reflect and tell stories about our interactions regularly because of his concern for me while I was a student at Pomona.

May his memory continue to grow as a blessing to all who know and care for Richard.

—Donald Collins ’89
San Diego, CA

Athletic Mentors

Looking back, I don’t think I appreciated the quality of the staff nearly enough when I was at Pomona. I spent at lot of time around the athletics department. I realize now how much those people shaped my life and who I am today. Bill Swartz, Curt Tong, Pat Mulcahy, Gregg Popovich, Lisa Beckett, Motts Thomas, Charlie Katsiaficas and Mike Riskas. All great people and great educators, setting examples and teaching valuable lessons, whether you played for them or not. I wish I had realized how special they were at the time.

—Richard Wunderle ’91
University Place, WA

Alumni, parents and friends are invited to email letters to pcm@pomona.edu or “snail-mail” them to Pomona College Magazine, 550 North College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Letters may be edited for length, style and clarity.

About a dozen years ago, on an ordinary workday morning, as I was following my ordinary workday routine, something inexplicable happened. My wife, a teacher, had already left for school. After dressing, I felt a bit odd, so instead of going straight to work, I sat down for a moment and opened my laptop. And discovered that I no longer knew how to open a file.

My mind had become a hopeless jumble. I couldn’t recall the names of the people I worked with, couldn’t formulate a clear thought or even hold a murky one in my head for more than a few seconds at a time. Out of all that confusion, one terrible conviction emerged. This must be what it feels like to have a stroke.

It never occurred to me to dial 911. All I could think of was phoning my wife, but I couldn’t remember the name of the school where she worked. I pawed through our file cabinet, searching through drawers for old pay stubs. Finding a number for the school’s front office, I left what must have been a strange and alarming message for my wife.

I don’t remember how long it took her to come to my rescue or what I did in the meantime or what she said to me when she arrived. All of my recollections from that day are sketchy and disjointed. I remember the emergency room and the neurologist questioning me. I vaguely remember various tests and scans. I recall becoming fixated on the initials “TIA,” which stand for “transient ischemic attack”—a kind of mini-stroke that my father had suffered on a couple of occasions—telling my wife about them over and over, each time the first for my muddled brain.

And I remember the comic relief of the day—the man in the next bed, who looked and sounded like a character right out of The Godfather, asking me what was wrong. I said I was having trouble remembering things, to which he replied with a wise-guy grin, “Well, do you remember the $200 you owe me?”

Eventually, the neurologist returned with a diagnosis and a smile. I hadn’t had a stroke. All my results were normal. The diagnosis: a rare and poorly understood condition with no known cause, called “transient global amnesia.” (I thought at the time—and still think—that “transient global amnesia” sounds like something invented for a soap opera plot. “Now we know why Bryan disappeared. He was suffering from transient global amnesia.”)

The good news, the doctor said, was that I would almost certainly be back to my usual self within a day and never have a relapse. And he was right. By lunchtime, I felt better, and by the time I left the emergency room, mid-afternoon, I was back to normal. And I’ve stayed that way, more or less—so far, anyway.

But I doubt that I’ll ever again have quite the same confidence in my own “normal” cognitive functioning. Since that day, whenever I feel a bit odd or have trouble remembering a word or a name, I go through a careful litany of friends’ and family members’ names and phone numbers in my mind, just to reassure myself that it’s not happening again.

It would be comforting to believe that everything that can go wrong with us has both a label and a clear explanation, but what I learned that day—something every doctor knows, I suppose—is that a disorder can have a name and still be a mystery.

Medical mysteries abound, and not just in the headlines about emerging diseases like Ebola. As you’ll read in Kate Becker’s “The Face of a Pandemic,” a century after the Spanish flu swept away something like 5 percent of the total world population, we’re still trying to figure out why it was so lethal. And almost everyone knows someone suffering from some chronic illness that seems to defy diagnosis and effective treatment.

As I learned later, my own diagnosis that day was made purely by process of elimination. It wasn’t a stroke or a tumor or anything else the doctors could pinpoint, so it must be transient global amnesia—a mystery with a name, but no less a mystery for that.

Revelle and Gore

I read with some dismay your editorial introducing the article about Roger Revelle. While I am glad you appreciate the immense impact that Roger had in his scientific career, you have perpetuated a myth that Roger was “somehow persuaded to lend his name to an article he reportedly had no hand in authoring.” This myth was created and propagated by Al Gore, who was upset that Roger, whom he had heard lecture in Ashok Khosla’s introductory science class that Gore took at Harvard, about carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, was not supporting Gore’s political position. Gore received a D in that class, one of only two science classes he ever took in college (he received a C– in the other one). Fred Singer was co-author on the referenced paper published by the Cosmos Club in April 1991. I have attached his account of the incident, including the libel suit which he filed successfully against Dr. Justin Lancaster for suggesting, as you have, that Roger was not mentally alert during his last years and that Singer had “used” him.

I am a graduate of Pomona’s Department of Geology, as was Roger. I, like Roger, went into oceanography, and I knew him pretty well both professionally and through geology alumni activities. You can see my website for additional information on my scientific qualifications. I have worked on these ocean-atmosphere systems most of my professional life and believe I have, after a lifetime at sea, gained some understanding of how they work. I can assure you that nothing in nature is as simple as Mr. Gore seems to think it is. He is, after all, a politician, not a scientist. His entire academic background in science amounts to the two required science courses he took at Harvard. He likes to say, in his book and in his movie, that anyone who disagrees with his simplistic assessment of climate change is just like the “scientists” who killed his sister. His sister was a smoker and died of lung cancer, but the “scientists” who denied the connection killed his sister. Never mind that he—and his father before him—gew tobacco for decades in Tennessee. He says that anyone who questions his overly simplistic views about climate change is just like those scientists who killed his sister.

For the record, I still sail to the Arctic, as I have since 1967, and have personally observed that the ice is indeed melting due to the Arctic amplification, which is causing the Arctic to warm four times faster than the rest of the Northern Hemisphere. This does not explain why sea ice in Antarctica is increasing at about the same rate that we are losing ice in the Arctic. Perhaps you or Mr. Gore can explain that and the other myriad examples of complexity in the ocean-atmosphere system. Your quotes from Dr. Lancaster that say, “You had what was an insidious example of what I would call a lack of ethics in science and the use of scientists as hired guns by the industry” would seem to conflict with his statement, dated April 29,1994, which resulted from his losing Dr. Singer’s defamation suit. There he says, “I fully and unequivocally retract and disclaim those statements and their implications about the conduct, character and ethics of Professor Singer…” It was Gore who tried to use Roger as a “hired gun,” not Fred Singer.

—Jim Kelley ’63
Loyalton, CA

EDITOR’S NOTE: I guess in cases like these we all must decide whom to believe. I’ve chosen to believe Roger’s family and close associates. As for the libel settlement, in my experience, lawsuits aren’t a dependable barometer for truth. They’re often won by those with the deepest pockets.

Aspirants, Not Victims

I read the letter titled “Korematsu in Context,” in the Winter 2019 PCM, with deep personal interest.  Four now-young men, former high school students of mine, came over the border “uninvited.” I have been deeply involved with them for eight years.  Two I adopted as adults; the other two are “mine” by affection.

The letter describes people like them as “victims,” but I would not.  They are aspirants.  They all came here for many of the reasons our forefathers came:  for safety and opportunity. The letter’s author would describe them as “illegals.”  Is that how we would describe our forefathers?  (Note: Those seeking asylum are engaged in a legal activity.)

The “crisis” the letter refers to is political theatre. The real crisis is with our values:  Are we no longer a destination of hope, the hope that brought our families here?

—David Lyman, ’66
South Pasadena, CA

No More Plastic, Please

I truly enjoy Pomona College Magazine, but was disheartened to find the latest edition arrived wrapped in plastic. With all of the programs and policies being implemented worldwide to reduce plastic usage, both to reduce fossil fuel use and to reduce plastic pollution, why, oh, why wrap the magazine?  Was this only so that you could enclose the letter asking for monetary support?  Not acceptable.  It would be far better to communicate with the target audience by email, and to make an online-only edition of PCM an option to reduce paper use/waste as well.

But seriously: no more plastic!

—Mary Stanton-Anderson ’75
University Place, WA

Dear PCM Reader

Your “Dear PCM Reader” letter prompted lots of Pomona conversation and reminiscences between my wife (Marilyn Hendrickson ’55) and me. We appreciate your letter’s approach to the reality of cost vs. your mission of connecting and a sense of pride as part of the college family. Your mission succeeded with us—many fond and proud memories.

Thank you for reminding us of the many good things Pomona College has contributed to our lives, both in the past and continuing today. The Winter 2019 issue was impressive and especially connected with us, since we are Southern California natives and lived in fire-prone Ventura three times and in the Sierra foothills for about 20 years.

—Dave Holton ’53
Pleasanton, CA

Kudos for PCM

I just want to thank you for this magazine [PCM Winter 2019]. I love geology! About 30 years ago I wrote a fictional story about the Cambrian and the Burgess Shale incident—for children and their parents and grandparents. I never got around to publishing it, but my family are now anxious to visit the exhibit in B.C.

—Barbara J. Sanders ’54
Santa Barbara, CA

PCM is an outstanding magazine, and the “Fire and Water” issue was an ideal fundraiser.

—Helena Zinkham ’75
Arlington, VA

Bravo, PCM Winter edition. The cover should be framed on a wall at MOMA.

—Marshall Hutchason ’52
Glen Head, NY

Alumni, parents and friends are invited to email letters to pcm@pomona.edu or “snail-mail” them to Pomona College Magazine, 550 North College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Letters may be edited for length, style and clarity.