Read the review and find information on the video and podcast links, here.
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Hello, my name is Lindsay corrina, and I'm an associate professor of dance in the Department of music, theater and dance at solving Virginia University today.
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I am here with my colleague,
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Timothy Neary,
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professor of history and coordinator of American history at salvage Virginia University,
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and I'm looking forward to talking to him about his book crossing parish boundaries.
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Thank you, Tim for having this conversation today. Hi, Lindsay. Thanks. So much in these covet nineteen times, I wish we could be in the same room, but I appreciate you taking the time.
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I know with your busy schedule it, you're working on a book of your own to speak with me. So I really appreciate it. Thank you.
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Well,
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I'm grateful for all of the conversations that we've been engaged in and recent months,
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especially at severe Regina how we are talking about race quite often in our mercy cohort and I'm grateful to get deeper into your work and your own
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way that you kind of navigate these difficult social times that we're in right now,
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in regards to race relations,
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and the black lives matter movement and I know that that's not your research,
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but obviously it ties into where you've been invested in your own work.
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So, I'm wondering if you can maybe start by him just telling me a little bit about the inspiration for your book crossing parish boundaries. Yeah.
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You know,
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it's hard not to talk about almost any topic right now and think about George Floyd and the protest that are not only so being in the United States,
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but the whole role that's really quite an amazing moment right now and hopefully some good things will come out of it,
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so my experience.
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You know,
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most directly we're coming up with this book was beginning,
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graduate school and looking for a dissertation topic and,
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like,
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many a grad student and a lot of the scholarship that I was studying,
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I was doing twentieth century urban history at loyally University in Chicago.
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And Chicago a very well studied city and there was a lot of scholarship,
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social history on white European immigrants,
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coming to the country,
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and setting up neighborhoods and schools and how their families and young people lived in community.
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And a lot of that was also looking at specifically Roman Catholics, because a lot of the immigrants, whether they be Irish, Polish, Chad, Jeremy, and a lot of them were Catholic, and Chicago is a very Catholic city. On the same hand.
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On the other hand,
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I should say there was a lot of scholarship on the great migration and the rich history of African Americans and Chicago,
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particularly the twenty th century but I didn't see a lot on the intersection of those two and so that interested me.
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And right when I was starting graduate school, a book by John mcgreavy, who's a professor at? The University of Notre Dame came out.
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Its title is called parish boundaries, the Catholic encounter with race to the twenty th, century urban North, and we read it and graduate seminars and I was really fascinated by it.
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And it talked a lot about the conflict between white Catholics and African Americans, which there certainly was, and sometimes continues to be up into the twenty first century.
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But I was interested in examples of collaboration and cooperation.
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I had before going to grad school,
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worked in Baltimore at a Catholic Jesuit middle school for under privileged boys,
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where the boys wore white dress shirts with black ties,
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and I taught Latin and and language arts to them and,
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you know,
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so I had this kind of experience of Catholic church and Catholic education some,
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in some cases being a positive for us for education.
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A lot of African Americans were attracted to the educational opportunities and.
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When I was an undergraduate at Georgetown University in Washington D. C. I wrote my American studies senior thesis on the oldest black parish in D. C.
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and sometimes called the other church of Catholic of black Catholic churches in the United States.
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And so I kinda realized,
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you know,
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when you get into a topic,
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you realize,
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oh,
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maybe this has been with me longer than,
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I thought and I thought even further back when I was in second grade in Omaha,
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Nebraska,
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which a lot of people don't think of the African American community in Omaha,
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but it is significant.
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Malcolm little who became Malcolm X was born in North Omaha, like, many cities very racially segregated when I was in second grade in the late nineteen seventies.
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I actually, because of mandated bussing the bussing experiment in America.
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Got on a bus in my all white neighborhood and went across town about six miles to an all black neighborhood and had that experience in second grade. And so I think it's been kinda with me.
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I'm a white male, Irish, Catholic raised, but also then ended up marrying a black woman and my kids are international now. So it is like a lot of our scholarship professional, but personal as well.
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Right,
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well,
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I love this idea that there's regional conflict that's known within these Catholic parishes,
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but your own personal edge was defined the positive,
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and to look at the,
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the anti racist things that were happening within the the Catholic organizations.
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How do you feel like this specifically?
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Contributes to your field as a historian, did you feel like that was a departure from the existing literature or where are you kind of spring wording off of that book that you mentioned that you would previously read? Yeah, exactly.
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So,
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you know,
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it's clear that they were a lot of examples of racial resistance among white in general,
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in cities in the North,
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particularly Catholics,
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because often times mainstream white Protestants or Jewish congregations may have been a little bit more comfortable with.
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Picking up and moving to the suburbs, there's a certain territory reality with Catholics that actually goes all the way back to the council trend hundreds of years ago. When we talk about parish boundaries.
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And I think that's why mcgreavy titled his book that this neighborhood is my church. You know, and if we think of places like South Boston sometimes referred to as South the or South Side of Chicago, you know, we have these we see in the movies.
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We see it, you know, and TV, and there's a reality to it and we see these Catholic churches that are huge. They're, they are the size of cathedrals where people really felt invested in those neighborhoods. And so that's a positive thing.
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But the negative was when they felt threatened by so called, quote, unquote invasion of African Americans, they could be quite horrible and resisting that. And so definitely didn't want to deny that history at all.
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I was just trying to add some nuance and complexity.
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So, that's why I titled my book crossing parish boundaries, race, sports, and Catholic youth in Chicago, nineteen, fourteen and nineteen fifty four and I'm really looking at one specific organization.
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That's the real focus of the book called the C. Y. O. which stands for the Catholic youth organization.
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It became a nationwide phenomena, and there's still programs in the United States today, but it was founded originally in Chicago during the depths of the Great Depression.
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And nineteen thirty, its founder was the auxillary bishop of the Catholic taxis of Chicago, who was kind of the number two man in charge and his name was bishop.
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She'll and he had been an athlete as a young person played baseball at the University of Illinois.
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Actually had been recruited by the Chicago White Sox and so really love sports but, like many young Catholic man, at the time, felt felt felt the calling to the priest.
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It became a priest, and I kind of paint him in the book, or characterize him in the book as I use the phrase muscular Catholic.
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Some of the listeners might be familiar with the term muscular Christianity, which is usually associated with Protestant organizations.
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Like, the Y, MCA coming out of England and eighteen hundreds or the Salvation Army, this idea that.
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Because in eighteen hundreds religions started to be seen as very feminine,
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and it was,
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mostly the women were going to church and muscular Christianity he tried to say,
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no,
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like manly man can be followers of Jesus Christ to the Catholics were behind on that and so muscular Christianity for Protestants,
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the whimsy and movement and so forth was in the late eighteen,
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hundreds,
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early,
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nineteen hundreds.
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But by the Depression era, Catholics were kind of coming into their own. They had a political alliance with Franklin Roosevelt in so many ways. She kinda copies the wives.
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And says, this is gonna be the Catholic version of that and it becomes wildly popular. It takes off and dices cities across the country copy it.
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And it's remains decentralized even though, we think of the Catholic church is being very centralized. Each sees each city around their own program ironically.
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I look at the twenty five year, period, like, nineteen, thirteen, nineteen, fifty four. She'll resigns and fifty four and and see why it kinda goes on the Wayne in Chicago.
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But other cities like nearby, because we're here in Rhode Island, Providence, since nineteen, thirty five has run its own and continues to do.
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So, Cleveland still has, there's Philadelphia other cities have kept it up, but it's looking at the experience of young people.
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And I kind of kind of pulled on labor history and labor historian, by the name of Liz Cohen wrote a book making the New deal about Chicago.
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And she talked about the labor union, the, if you think of the and the Congress of industrial organizations, and her argument was yes. Neighborhoods originally segregated. And I agree with that.
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And Catholic parish is a regular, racially segregated. So, I look at these three all black Catholic parishes on the South side, and look at White parishes that they interacted with during sports and homes.
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Certainly families and marriages remain very racially segregated to the point. That kind of joke, you know, at that time, Irish, Catholic and Italian, Catholic, or to Mary, it was considered generational marriage from us.
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But there were places like.
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Workplaces like labor unions or blacks and whites to work together the that Liz Cohen talks about in her book and I kinda make the same argument about the,
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that,
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you know,
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obviously didn't overcome racism in Chicago.
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It's still in Chicago and American cities, but it gave a place for kids to encounter people from different backgrounds from them. And I did a lot of oral history interviews.
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And that was the word that kept coming up with people interviewed was exposure,
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kind of kept me out of my neighborhood out of my parish and made me realize that,
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you know,
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sports,
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which is supposed to have it even playing field is supposed to,
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you know,
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the equal if you're the fastest run here,
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the fastest runner,
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right?
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If you score the most baskets, you win the basketball game and boxing, which was the, the glamorous sport for the was wildly popular in the thirties.
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I mean, this resonates with me so deeply, because through dance, I feel like, when we bring together races and religions, we can heal so much because you become more human.
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You become you see each other for who they are, rather than your race, or your religion.
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And it sounds like maybe so much of that is coming through where you put together these different races and religions, and it's out of this feeling of community and love for the sport or the game. And then it's not about race anymore.
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And hopefully, that brings people together. I'm wondering what kinds of challenges did you encounter as you were doing this research.
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I'm always, really intrigued with doing historical research, because as so many of the sources that we used are, are framed through that person's lens.
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So,
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I'm wondering if,
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if you've found,
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especially in your work,
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which deals with race,
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if you're seeing people's biases come through or if that's really challenging work to dig through I'm just curious a little bit about your own unique challenges in regards to race and racism and the way that that
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is the way you navigate through that in your research.
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Yeah, thank you for asking. And I just before I answer, I just wanted to add. I totally I love that comparison with dance again, not to over romanticize sports or dance. Every human institution is imperfect, but there's something about just.
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Kind of doing it,
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you know,
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just having a shared experience that,
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you know,
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I would talk to some of these folks that we're now elderly African Americans and doing these oral histories in their in their seventies and eighties and recounting back,
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you know,
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you know,
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sixty,
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seventy years earlier,
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and some of them ended up going on to Catholic high schools and would get into places like University of Notre Dame or Mark CAD in Milwaukee or loyal in Chicago.
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And because Chicago is such a Irish Catholic bastion of power, the mayor daily, and all the Irish Catholic political folks, some of these people sports was able for these African Americans.
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It was able to kind of get them in the clubs. So to speak. They couldn't change the color of their skin, but they could be seen as kind of. Alright, because they had that shared experience. Now there's a lot of negative with that. That's very condescending.
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And by the nineteen seventies, it was sometimes referred to as plantation politics.
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And I even follow one congressman, Ralph, who was in the nineteen thirty two and nineteen, thirty six Olympics ran with Jesse Owens and he was follow that model of kind of.
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You know, basically, being a black version of the average Catholic political machine, and then by the nineteen seventies, he finally spoke out quite appropriately as we're talking about George Floyd and all these issues police brutality.
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You know, he finally said, I'm, I'm a black man, and I need to speak out so that maturing process had happened, but in terms of challenges, you know, historians are kind of like detectives we have to work with the clues.
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We're given, you know, we don't have all the materials like a someone building a house would have. So in this case bishop shield who's a fascinating guy who was in Time magazine the Newsweek he was really known on the radio.
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I compare him to father.
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Charles Conklin from Detroit who was known as the radio priest to the father of am angry a talk radio and was a very parochial and then turned into anti semitic
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version of Catholicism.
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And I feel sheila's is kind of an alter ego to him. So Shields. Fascinating. He and Carter underline his boss.
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We're friends with President Roosevelt when they go to Washington D. C. they would lunch at the White House and so forth. But fascinating guy.
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He left virtually no papers in the archives because he basically had this falling out with the archdiocese of Chicago.
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It's kind of a persona non grata and there's rumors that he burnt his pay periods that he took him. He left in nineteen sixty six for retirement, and spent the last three years of his life in Tucson, Arizona that he took them with them.
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So, I didn't have that, so he used a lot of journalistic accounts, oral histories. There were papers at the archives papers of other folks. So that was a challenge meeting people and talking to them.
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It's funny how, as a social story, I was interested in every day regular people and wanting to find out what their experiences were as young people.
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You know, we're, we're doing this podcast for the, the Society for the history of youth and children and, you know, a lot of those folks that generation, their sense of history.
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Was history is about presidents of United States. You know, history is about generals, history is about Henry Ford and an important people.
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And so, sometimes they would be reticent to talk, because they're like, well, I'm not that important and then they would, you turn the tape recorder on they started talking and you're like, oh, my gosh. This is wonderful. And then they would say, well, you know, I've got some scrapbooks up in the attic.
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Maybe you wanna see those. And I would say, of course, I'm going to see those. So, that was one issue. My own racial identity, not so much with the oral history interviews.
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But it's interesting, even in the nineteen nineties, going to do one of these oral history interviews and African American neighborhoods people with see me and they oftentimes don't see why people those neighborhoods. It would be.
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Like, are you, are you with the police? Are you are you like a priest? Are you a, you know, or you're your social worker? And I had some names called ambience, things like that.
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So it was humbling about some of the great progress that was made during the depression, or what were two with the I'll be the head inter, racial swim meets in the nineteen thirties.
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This is generation before brown versus board of education a generation before the second Vatican Council.
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But then how things hadn't changed, and I think that's to go back to your original thought about what we are right now, with the issues about racial inequality, racial injustice.
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An event happened as I was working on the dissertation in two thousand and one there was a C. Y, I really kind of more or less disbanded, or wasn't really active in the second half of the twenty th, century.
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But in its place, different sports leagues, spring up, and there was one called the Southside Catholic conference, and it was made up of a almost exclusively white, Catholic parishes.
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Some of them made up of people whose parents or grandparents had fled neighborhoods. That turned over African American.
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And the nineteen twenties or the nineteen fifties,
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and a pretty well known black Catholic Paris called is in Chicago applied in the summer of two thousand and one to join this sports league.
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And they were just as close as a mile away, you know, from one of the participants, they had a Catholic parish in good standing with the school that was full, ran a really well run sports league.
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And when the parents ran the sell side Catholics.
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Conference who are the kind of the athletic directors, so to speak, took a vote in the summer of two thousand one they voted against accepting this Catholic parish. This kind of was an explosive thing.
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This is essentially looking back now because it was a few months before nine eleven, and was before the two thousand two, Boston, Catholic church abuse scandal. And so it sometimes seems like an earlier time before things that change our world.
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But this was front page news. The cardinal Francis, George, at the time, had to tell the parents go back in that room, come back with a different response.
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This one case where the, the kind of hierarchical top down approach that the Catholic church is good. Because he said, you can't you have to accept these folks and what they were saying was there wasn't gonna be safe to go to that neighborhood.
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Even though the Chicago, a police chief lived on the block, where was and literally a lot of their, their, their ancestors, you know, just a generation before had played at St. but it was a horrible event as a person.
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I felt.
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You know, so bad about it, but it did kind of give me a sense of why my work was important. I was able to write an op, Ed, and the Chicago Tribune. And so it's it's like a lot of things in life.
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I think I've seen progress.
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I mean,
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I think it's so wonderful when young people,
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whether it's through sports or dance,
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or at schools or camps can interact with each other because,
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you know,
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often times they don't have the baggage that we older people have.
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And they can, that can have a lasting impact, you know, to to meet someone is different than you and find out the differences that are there and also see the similarities.
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And I'm pretty idealistic about what programs like this can do.
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And,
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you know,
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Michael for the book was to really show just a different slice because the story the literature had really emphasized conflict,
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which is natural where the newspaper you write stories about fires.
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You don't see today was a good day at the, at the Neary household.
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You right, when problems, but also to give a fuller picture to, to say, there were these, these pockets of interaction and, and also that history doesn't go.
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In a straight line up,
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you know,
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because when I was arguing in two thousand,
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and one was actually Chicago with all,
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its problems was doing a better job at least within the Catholic context of bringing young people together in the thirties and forties then they were in the two thousand,
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which is,
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which is amazing.
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Yeah. And part of that is, I think the organization, you know, you think of how cities are spread out, is people are just geographically further apart.
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So even though neighborhoods, a very segregated and thirties and forties people might still write on the same street car, or, you know, still be within the same boundaries of the city limits.
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And what has happened a lot with, you know, interstate highways and Super urbanization is just we physically have gotten farther and farther apart. Right it's so interesting.
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The controversy that you just described to, you said that was in two thousand one. Yes.
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And it's amazing that we have these examples over and over systemic racism in our in our institutions and over and over again,
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we're forced to this these moments of,
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I guess,
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social reckoning and this heightened awareness about what our role is and undoing racism.
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And again, it feels like we're at this pivotal moment right now, and we have to believe that we are moving forward. So going back to your point that it is that you are taking this kind of.
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Look at something positive and sometimes I feel like,
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if we have more examples of the positive events,
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then maybe progress will feel a little bit more attainable at least identify these pockets of authentic community where races are coming together.
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And and we see that sense of humanity through community through just shared activity, then then maybe the progress doesn't feel like work is just so beautiful.
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I agree. And and I think it's important for us to acknowledge where progress has been made, you know, we're not in nineteen thirties and there is so much progress, but with that progress comes greater expectations.
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And I'm heartened, you know, we both worked with young people in this and this podcast is about the history of childhood in youth that there's a, there's a certain regeneration that comes with young people. There's a certain inpatients.
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I think that comes with young people that ask the obvious question, you know, the elephant in the room like, why is it like this?
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And I feel that they're leading us at this point and hopefully That'll be the case. I think the other thing we learned in history is that when progress does happen, we can't take it for granted. Right? There's nothing that says.
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Things can't slide backwards. Right? You know, and that there's up and down times so it will continue to be work but I hope through things like sports and dance and other things.
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Even as we do the work we can have fun to think young people, you know, remind us about having fun. And hopefully what's important.
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So, you and I are both parents so just keep you on your toes. That's the truth. I mean, there's this at this balance, I think where the work happens so much of the work has to happen internally, right.
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To really see racism and especially our role as white people because of the way we've been socialized and how to, I guess, see, clearly through our own whiteness. So you have to go in internally to do the work.
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But then to also cross boundaries as you're saying.
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And just live in authentic community again,
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I'm wondering in doing all of this research,
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but also,
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in our current social climate,
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what unanswered questions might you have right now or or future pathways that you see,
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from for inquiry down the road?
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Thanks. Great question. I think, I mean, you sports in general.
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Is a pretty under studied topic as as biggest sports is our society. Now, you know, E. S. P. N. which I know they're having a hard time right now because there's no live sports sports hungry.
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Your, your husband works and and a venue. That normally has lots of sporting events in management of that venue in Providence.
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So, you know, we, we, we've all, we're young people one time like, you know, youth is like a hundred percent of the human population. Right?
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So the youth in general, sometimes just gets under studied along professional historians, even though it's so important and it shapes us in such important ways, that we don't spend a lifetime, trying to figure out how our childhood shaped us.
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And then sports are just such a huge part of our society. So I think there's a lot of unanswered.
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I think there's a lot of opportunity for case studies studies of, of examples where sports at a positive influence and what I was trying to talk about.
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But also cases where, you know, people.
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Ran into roadblocks with,
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with sports and what the implications of that were as well and I think a lot of the sports history is done with professional sports,
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and maybe at the collegiate level and professional level but I think there's a whole rich area of high school sports and youth sports that are really important and raise really important issues.
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I was at a conference, a give a keynote address a few years ago at the University of Dana.
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Actually,
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where I met with John mcgreavy,
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which was a great pleasure and the people that attended this conference were people that were running programs and people who were athletic directors of Catholic sports programs in different
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cities,
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all over the country from Seattle to San Antonio to,
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you know,
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Philadelphia,
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and they talked about the economic divide.
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We're seeing so much in sports today. You know, we have the elite travel teams, and the special camps, and so forth and how, you know, that's overstated.
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But I think something like sports an education in general and experience of youth can be a really big part of our democracy and participatory democracy.
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But if the, you know, the public park leagues are not being used and if you need to.
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Spend hundreds of dollars to get the equipment to get on the hockey team or whatever. It really creates a divide there as well. So, I think there was something going on in our country during the Great Depression with the New deal.
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Franklin Roosevelt and World War two, where on the downside obviously, there wasn't economic growth, but it kind of almost forced to kinda civic engagement and civic participation.
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And I think sports can play really positive role in that area. And I think it still does, but I think part of it is, we need to process boundaries.
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We need to have the suburban kids interacting with this kids from the central city, and having the parents interact as well.
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You know, so, and in terms of the field, I think there's a lot to learn about that history. And then hopefully I'm a big believer that, you know, when we learned something in history that we can apply it to the present.
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Absolutely,
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I mean,
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there's so much that resonates with me deeply and everything you're saying,
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because I see so many similarities in the field of Dan's just and where we kind of invest our efforts and especially in regards to what is worth while of education and scholarly pursuits and we often kind
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of dismiss what is recreational or what is entertaining and gravitate towards things that are already professional,
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or are deemed artistic.
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And it sounds like you're saying, the same thing where we see the great benefits of these sports that maybe aren't professional.
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But they're changing lives and they're changing communities that's really worth investigation and documentation of positive things. Like, on the surface any will run.
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I mean, technically, well, run dance program is positive, right?
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Any technically,
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well,
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run sports program is positive,
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but if you,
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you know,
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scrape a little bit below the surface and you come to see,
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well,
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there's some baked in structural racism in that dance program or that sports program,
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that has to do with economic class or racial class that's excluding a part of our society,
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then we're realizing,
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you know,
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while we're,
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we're excluding folks or we're not.
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Being open to being influenced by different people are having basically different people at the table.
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And so when a lot of the conversations de, you know, with the protest and with the marches and the, and the National international discussion talks about structural, a racism and institutional racism.
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And I think we do need to study those institutions and in the case of youth history institutions like schools school districts, like sports programs, like programs in the fine arts.
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And, I mean, we've had this discussion too about, you know, ballet versus jazz and what is considered legitimate, legitimate or less legitimate I guess.
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And so understanding that history where how we got to where we are and then deciding what do we want to keep. And what do we want to shape different in a positive way I think can be.
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So, as well, yeah, do you have any thoughts or closing anything lingering that we didn't touch upon? We'll just just a big thank you for taking the time.
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I know you're working on your own book project,
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which is a part of a textbook that Lindsay has been working on,
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on jazz dance what with colleagues and collaborators all over the country and,
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you know,
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I think you may not have thought of yourself as a youth scholar either,
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and I'm not sure I necessarily thought of myself as a history of youth person,
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but I think I think we both are right because both of these fields started a young age and they,
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you know,
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we,
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they revealed the values of a society.
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Right?
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And they're both social and interactive,
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and in some ways kind of intimate within the family,
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they're not within a,
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a parent child or husband wife type of relationship.
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But there.
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You know, it's different than the workplace, or it's different than other institutions when you are in a dance troupe together, or if you're on a basketball team together there's a, a shared camaraderie.
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There's a shared there's a level of Ness to it and if it's done right.
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It's inclusive and so I do hope we can learn from that and that our scholarship and some small ways are helping advance us moving to a better place. I hope so, too.
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Thank you so much for sharing all of these really wonderful scenes from your research and from your book crossing crossing, perished on these thanks so much, Jim, I appreciate it. Take care. Okay.