Last week, author Kyle Lukoff spoke to middle school students via Zoom about his 2021 novel, “Too Bright to See.” Using the book as a reference point, Lukoff discussed some of the many important aspects of novel writing, such as world building.
“You have to make a lot of decisions about the world your characters live in and the kinds of rules … that your characters have to follow,” he said. As an exercise, he asked to students to think about the kinds of rules for a story that takes place underwater, such as how to move about the world and how to breathe.
“Too Bright to See,” which is a ghost story, also has rules that its ghost must follow. The main character and the reader, Lukoff explained, are left to interpret what the novel’s ghost is trying to communicate by interacting with objects, since it cannot speak. If the ghost was able to explain itself clearly, “the story would be one chapter long and I wouldn’t have won any of these cool awards.”
Lukoff also stressed the importance of research, referencing his own experience writing “Too Bright to See,” which takes place in rural Vermont, a place he had never lived. “I was very worried about getting details wrong,” he said. “So far that hasn’t happened.”
Toward the end of the talk, Lukoff briefly talked about his next novel, which he said will be another middle-grade work that is “a little bit more advanced.” Like “Too Bright to See,” the main character will again be a transgender boy, drawing on Lukoff’s own existence as a transgender man. He also plans to include his experience as a Jewish person, incorporating Jewish folklore and history.
Last week, a special middle school assembly featured author and historian Jan Batiste Adkins, who shared the history of African Americans in the Bay Area and Santa Clara County area. “I think that understanding each other’s history … is crucial,” said Adkins, who has taught community college for 15 years. “We have to learn from each other. We have to live and experience each other’s experiences and that’s what history does for us.”
Adkins’ most recent book covers African American history in San Jose and Santa Clara County. Her talk began with the record of the first Africans making their way to what was once called New Spain in the 1500s. After the establishment of Puebla de San Jose de Guadalupe in 1777, people of African descent, Adkins explained, mingled and intermarried with Mexican, Spanish and indigenous people of the area.
Mexico later achieved independence from Spain and until 1850 controlled the territory known as Alta California, the last governor of which was Pío Pico, a politician and entrepreneur of mixed African and Native American-Spanish ancestry. Numerous locations in California are named for him, including Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles and the city of Pico Rivera in Los Angeles County.
Following California’s statehood in 1850, plantation owners took their enslaved workers west to seek gold and encountered resistance from the local population, who contended that the enslaved laborers unpaid work amounted to unfair competition. As a result, the sale or purchase of enslaved labor became prohibited in the state. California’s abolitionist movement also helped many of these workers free themselves of slavery by providing them funds to hire lawyers. One such landmark case was that of Sampson Gleaves, who was released from bondage in 1854. Gleaves’ manumission papers are still preserved and maintained by History San Jose.
Another enslaved man named James Williams was taken to California in the 1840s to help search for gold. He was allowed to work at night for other miners and eventually purchased his freedom. The descendants of Williams’ former owner still live in San Jose, Adkins said, and in order to retrieve Williams’ photo for her book, she had to first contact this family, who requested anonymity.
In 1861, Rev. Peter Cassey established the first Black secondary school in San Jose, which was also the first in the state. It also admitted Asian American and indigenous students. The First AME Zion Church was founded just a few years later in 1864, and still exists today on 20th Street in San Jose, where it has resided since 1972.
Black-owned businesses also became increasingly common, Adkins explained, including San Jose’s first Black barber shop, which was established in the 1860s by the White brothers, who also founded the Afro League to address the ongoing problems of racial inequality.
One artist who rose to prominence around this time was Edmonia Lewis, a sculptor who arrived in California in 1873 and the first Black American sculptor to achieve widespread renown. Her work is still viewable today at the Martin Luther King Jr. Public Library in San Jose. Lewis came to California at the invitation of Sarah Knox, whose husband owned the Knox-Goodrich building in San Jose.
During the latter half of the 20th century, San Jose State College (now known as San Jose State University) became known for its athletic dominance, and two of its track and field athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, became famous for raising their fists in a Black Power salute during the medals ceremony at the 1968 Summer Olympic games in Mexico City, where Smith won gold and Carlos won silver. At the time, Adkins explained, San Jose State did now allow Black students to stay in the campus dorms, forcing them to find housing options off-campus.
Toward the end, Adkins briefly discussed recent figures such as Maynard Holliday, the robotics engineer who attended graduate school at Stanford University and later worked at Livermore National Laboratory and the Pentagon, designing robotic and positioning systems. While working as an engineer in Santa Clara County in the 1970s, Jerry Lawson led the team that developed the video game cartridge, which became the most widely used format for the video game industry for decades, popularized by platforms such as the Atari 2600. Francine Bellson, educated at MIT, also worked at Fairchild and later in research and development at IBM.
On Oct. 21, the 2022 installment of TEDx Harker School took place at Nichols Hall, attended by hundreds of students. In addition to listening to the lineup of speakers, students enjoyed refreshments, vendor and activity booths, and socializing both before and after the speaker appearances.
The evening’s first speaker was veteran tech evangelist Guy Kawasaki, formerly of Apple and now of Canva. Kawasaki shared several important lessons he learned over his long career, such as not to worry too early on about discovering a passion. “I’m 68 years old. Three years ago, I discovered podcasts,” he said. “Now podcasts are my passion.” Other important lessons he imparted to the students were to build things they would want to use and break into a chosen field any way they can, using the example of Jane Goodall, who began working at the Leakey Foundation due to her secretarial skills.
Up next was Harker speech and debate teacher Scott Odekirk, who talked about society’s relationship to death and how it should be improved to become a “full, empathetic and community-based relationship,” he said after the event. Odekirk shared his own experience being in close proximity to this unique trauma with the death of his first wife. While in support groups, he met others who had similar experiences, including armed services veterans and health care workers. He then asked the audience to reflect on the ways mourning, as well as mourners, are treated. “My ultimate ask is for everyone to think about the way that we can make mourning more central to our community relationships,” he said.
Senior Arissa Huda, the final speaker for the evening, spoke on what she believed to be ineffective uses of empathy and how it could also be used to improve quality and length of life. Huda explained that “empathy in the mainstream is ineffective and our progress is stagnated as a result through performative activism, for example,” she said after the event. She also used health care as an example of how empathy can be effective, noting that doctors’ enactment of empathy results in better patient care plans, which in turn leads to improved quality and length of life for their patients. In closing, Huda shared how the community “could implement genuine and authentic empathy into our lives,” she said.
Last week, the middle school marked the start of National Hispanic Heritage Month by inviting East Palo Alto City Councilmember Antonio López to speak at a special morning assembly. A passionate and energetic speaker, López talked about his upbringing in the mostly Latinx city of East Palo Alto. “It’s a community mostly of immigrants, a community where English may not be the first language,” he said.
He also described it as a “city that nobody cared about,” recalling a story about a music class with 30 students but only six recorders, each of which had to be sanitized after every use. Quality groceries were also out of reach for many people, including López’s family. As a child, he walked 45 minutes each way with his mother to the grocery store.
A major believer in the importance of quality education, López thought of school as his “sanctuary” growing up. “For a lot of us growing up in East Palo Alto … education was a thing that changed my life and I’m sure your parents’ lives,” he said.
The son of Mexican immigrants, López talked about his familiarity with the pressures of having parents with high expectations due to the risks they took moving to another country. While attending Duke University, he informed his parents that he wanted to be a poet, which did not get a positive reaction. He nevertheless pursued and earned a Marshall Scholarship to attend the University of Cambridge and went on to win the 2019 Levis Prize from Four Way Books.
Upon returning home near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, López saw that East Palo Alto was still experiencing many of the same problems he had seen growing up, and decided to take action. With the help of his young cousin Adolfo, he organized a campaign for councilmember and began knocking on doors. “He didn’t have a passion for civic engagement, but he was open to learning about it,” López said of Adolfo, who set out learning about local issues, budgets and infrastructure. His platform of equal opportunities for youth won him the councilmember seat in December 2020.
“I want you all to have interests. I want you all to have passions. I want you all to guard those passions,” he said. “And I want you to be open to all the different ways that you can be inspired, that you can be pushed, that you can be encouraged.”
On Tuesday, upper school jazz band members attended an impromptu master class by pianist Dalton Ridenhour in the Patil Theater. A specialist in stride piano, the style that developed from ragtime, Ridenhour talked about the history of ragtime, which was influenced largely by classical and folk music, and its influence on jazz piano. Ragtime became popular with people who played the piano in their homes and purchased sheet music of ragtime pieces to perform for their families and friends. In New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, Ridenhour explained, residents would host “rent parties,” where musicians were hired to perform and attendees would pay admission in order to help tenants pay their rent. James P. Johnson, an early notable stride pianist, was a frequent performer at such parties. Ridenhour performed pieces by both Johnson and influential ragtime composer Scott Joplin to demonstrate both the differences and similarities between the two styles.
On Tuesday, Zoom CEO and Harker parent Eric Yuan made a special Q&A appearance for the Harker community. In a conversation with Brian Yager, Harker’s head of school, Yuan covered a range of topics, including how Zoom handled the sudden massive increase of users last year, the importance of a healthy company culture and lessons he has found helpful in his career.
Zoom, founded in 2011, was envisioned as a company primarily for enterprise and government customers. When the COVID-19 pandemic made working at home the new normal, Zoom was faced with a mass influx of new “consumer use” cases, Yuan said. The company suddenly faced an increase of 30 times the normal number of users, and employees worked tirelessly to prevent outages and improve the user experience.
“The usage is coming from all over the world, so that’s why our team, we were working extremely hard,” Yuan said. He recalled having as many as 19 Zoom meetings a day, and enduring “more sleepless nights than at any time in my career.”
Adapting Zoom to non-enterprise and non-government use also meant dealing with new security challenges. Inexperienced Zoom users, for instance, would sometimes mistakenly post Zoom meeting IDs to their social media accounts, inadvertently bringing in malicious users. “But we learned from that,” Yuan said. We doubled down, tripled down on privacy and security.”
He credited Zoom’s ability to weather these storms to the company’s culture. “As the CEO of the company, my number one priority is to think about everyday how to make sure our employees are happy,” he said. To this end, employees volunteer to organize events and initiatives, including reimbursements for employees who purchase books for themselves and their families. Investing in company culture, Yuan said, helped Zoom greatly when the company was at its busiest during the pandemic. “I did not receive any complaints,” he said. “All of our employees worked so hard around the clock, every day.”
In considering lessons that proved important over the course of his career, Yuan remembered his father’s advice to work hard and remain humble. He also recalled how important gratitude was to his grandmother. “That’s probably the number one thing that really matters from my perspective,” he said, adding that a lack of gratitude can lead to arrogance, which inhibits progress. “We’re all working very hard, and whenever we make progress, first of all we are so grateful for our customers’ support. I’m so grateful for our employees’ hard work. I think gratitude is extremely important for any leader, for any company, to make progress.”
Love noted the importance of designating February as Black History Month “to honor the history and creativity and brilliance and love of Black people,” adding that “This is a very interesting time to be having a conversation about Black history and justice in a pandemic after the summer we’ve had,” referencing the massive wave of protests and unrest that took place following the police killing of George Floyd in May of last year.
One part of Love’s presentation displayed Norman Rockwell’s famous painting of Ruby Bridges on her way to school after the passing of school integration in New Orleans, escorted by U.S. Marshals, with a racial slur scrawled on the wall next to her. “What we don’t talk about is that Ruby Bridges is 66 years old,” Love said, illustrating the point that images of the racial segregation and oppression do not represent ancient history. “This is not a long, long, long time ago. This is one generation removed.”
Love used the example to show that racism is a structure still alive and well in American society, and that Black Americans continue the fight to make Americans realize their humanity. As examples, she pointed out that white medical students believe Black patients have greater resistance to pain, and that students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) pay more for student loans, a situation she called “educational redlining.” Black COVID-19 patients are also dying at higher rates, which some have attributed to pre-existing conditions. “What if I told you that racism is a preexisting condition, and your country makes you the most vulnerable?” Love countered, citing that Black Americans have had their access to well-paying jobs, education, housing and other aspects of what she called the “social safety net” severely limited.
“When there’s a global pandemic and you need all of those institutions to work … if you are not allowed all of those things, you are not allowed a social safety net,” she said. Love also recapped Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s fight to redistribute wealth and political power in his multiethnic Poor People’s Campaign. “What we have done is not only try to free ourselves but try to free everybody else as well,” she said.
Repeated exposure to incidents of vicious racism being visited on Black people can be very traumatic. “We are living in a world where every solution is punishment,” she said. “We are murdering children’s spirits.”
Love also emphasized the importance of realizing that “Black folks’ lives are more than just trauma, more than just oppression,” and to recognize “how we try, how we get knocked down, how we get back up, with swag.”
Black Americans have learned to adapt and innovate largely because “we’ve studied this place so well. [As a Black person], you know you can’t go through the front door and you can’t go through the back door. You have to know every angle.”
To reinforce her point, she quoted poet Nikki Giovanni, who said, “Style has a profound meaning to Black Americans. If we can’t drive, we will invent walks and the world will envy the dexterity of our feet … if given scraps, we will make quilts … take away our drums, and we will clap our hands. We prove the human spirit will prevail.”
In order to create a just society, Love proposed that a radical transformation is necessary and not just a reforming of the current system. Her concept of abolition involves first instilling “an imagination to create a world without oppression. It is a radical framework that asks us to look deeply at our institutions, and not try to reform them, but to build something new,” she said. “We are trying to go to the very root of oppressions. We have to look at the very structures that create prisons, the very idea of jobs and education.”
Love ended her talk by communicating the importance of being a co-conspirator instead of an ally, by calling out forms of oppression and actively working to avoid creating systems of injustice, imploring people to “live your everyday life trying to make this world better.”
Ron McCurdy, a professor of music at the University of Southern California, gave a presentation Tuesday on the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. His appearance was the first in a series of four planned for the upper school’s spring semester. McCurdy, who previously served as a professor of music and chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Minnesota, is also the creator of the Langston Hughes Project, a live multimedia performance of Langston Hughes’ “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz,” which will be performed during McCurdy’s fourth appearance in April.
The presentation began with a brief history of the arrival of the first Africans on the American continent in the 17th century, their enslavement by European settlers (at the persuasion of rich European landowners), the Emancipation Proclamation (which McCurdy said was an act of “economic and political expediency”) and the 13th Amendment, which formally abolished slavery but contained a massive loophole: that people guilty of criminal behavior could be placed back into bondage.
“So we know that with the 13th Amendment being enacted, that almost any aspect of African-American life was somehow criminalized,” McCurdy said. One of the most flagrant abuses of the loophole involved the crime of vagrancy, in which a person was unable to produce papers proving they were employed. This criminalization of Black life, McCurdy said, continues today. “It is no accident … that even though African-Americans make up less than 30 percent of the population, we represent more than 50 percent of the population in prison,” he noted.
During the migration of Black Americans from the South to the North and Midwest, “an amalgamation of doctors, lawyers, teachers, dentists, gangsters … you name it,” arrived in Harlem, McCurdy said. This also included a great number of artists and intellectuals, resulting in what has become known as the Harlem Renaissance. “The Harlem Renaissance was probably one of the first times in our country where white America began to take notice of African-American culture,” said McCurdy. Before then, Black Americans were judged only by the amount of labor they performed.
Artists from many disciplines – including music, poetry, painting and literature – created works that chronicled Black life in the 1920s. McCurdy covered several of the key figures during this period, including Hughes, whose work delved into the contradiction of the idea of America as “land of the free.”
Harlem also had its own successful baseball and basketball teams. The New York Renaissance basketball team (often shortened to Rens), was based in Harlem and would play exhibition games against the Boston Celtics, who they frequently defeated. The Rens were paid in checks, which would often bounce. The two teams befriended one another, and the Celtics later demanded that the Rens be paid in cash.
Black musicians in the 1920s, many trained at top American musical schools, had difficulty finding opportunities in America and frequently performed in Europe. These included singer Marian Anderson, who toured successfully in Europe before returning to America. After being denied the opportunity to sing at Washington D.C.’s Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, she gave a now-famous concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Singer and actor Paul Robeson also became popular for his theater performances, particularly of the song “Ol’ Man River,” which he repurposed later in his life as an anthem against oppression. In the 1940s he was blacklisted for his sympathies for the Soviet Union and stances against American imperialism and could no longer travel abroad to perform.
The Cotton Club began operation in Harlem in 1923, employing Black entertainers whose performances at the whites-only venue helped launch their careers. Due to the popularity of minstrelsy and later vaudeville in the early 20th century, African-American performers “were expected to comport themselves in a very subservient way.” McCurdy recalled a conversation he had with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who held little respect for Louis Armstrong as a boy “until he understood the history. And that way of comporting yourself was a defense mechanism. It was a survival technique,” McCurdy said. “Because if you came across as an African-American man with any degree of arrogance or too much confidence, that could get you killed.”
The growing popularity of jazz brought with it new dances such as the Lindy Hop and the Big Apple. As an art, dance began “moving away from the Victorian style of living, where everything was pristine and carefully done,” McCurdy said. “Now many of the Black dances … these were all dances that found their genesis in the Black community.” This style became popular with white youths, who were “having themselves a ball, much to the chagrin of their parents,” McCurdy remarked.
McCurdy’s next appearance will take place in late February, in which he will examine jazz performance practices and how they are similar to leadership, using examples by Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Benny Goodman.
The Harker Civic Tech Club hosted a special Q&A session with Congresswoman Anna Eshoo on Tuesday ahead of next week’s general election. Eshoo, who represents California’s 18th congressional district, talked about the importance of young people getting more civically involved in light of how technology and social media may be used to compromise the electoral process. “You are the generation that is the most tech-savvy and you’re going to continue down that path,” she said. “What I worry about is what chisels away at our democracy.”
Due to the heavy amount of misinformation present online, Eshoo cautioned students to “think hard and think well about the information you’re receiving. You really need to go to trusted sources, because there is so much that is not only misleading, it’s damaging.”
On the topic of cyberbullying, Eshoo said she regards it as a serious safety issue. “In my day and time, it would have been called stalking,” she said. “It’s dangerous and it can lead to some really dark things.” She said that young people mobilizing would be key to making progress on cyberbullying. “Just as young people have taken to the streets on gun violence, I think your generation has … moved the American people to a new sense of conscience on that issue,” she said.
She added that while several companies have created policies against cyberbullying, not enough has been done to detect it. “I appreciate that recognizing bullying isn’t always easy. There are a lot of grey areas, including inside jokes between friends,” she said. “I think teams of students weighing in with the companies could be very effective.”
Eshoo also touched on the topic of online voting, which could allow far more people to take part in the voting process. “To be able to vote online has to be absolutely 1000 percent secure,” she said, deferring to the late Congressman John Lewis. “He always used to say that the vote is so sacred and that it is the most powerful non-violent tool for change in our country.” While she expressed support for the idea of online voting, there is currently not enough of a guarantee against vote tampering for it to be viable. Supporting improvements to the current voting process, the congresswoman said, “The idea that there are thousands of people standing in lines today, that shouldn’t be the case in the United States of America. Some of our systems are like horse and buggy in comparison to what they should be.”
On Tuesday, Harker’s LIFE (Living with Intent, Focus and Enthusiasm) organization held a special assembly featuring speaker, singer and author Justin Michael Williams, who shared with students and staff his life story and offered insight on how meditation could help people “start living life on [their] terms.”
Originally from the East Bay city of Pittsburg, Williams recalled growing up in a poor neighborhood “in a home with gunshot holes on the outside of my house,” and frequently being teased for being Black and gay. Inspired by his grandmother, whom he called “Baca,” he worked hard to pursue his dreams of becoming a recording artist and attending UCLA.
Williams talked about dealing with his childhood traumas by becoming a “chronic overachiever,” becoming the class president, valedictorian and drumline captain at his high school on his way to earning a full-ride scholarship to UCLA. These achievements were impressive on the outside, he said, “but on the inside what’s happening is we don’t know to separate our self-worth and our self-confidence and our self-love from our achievements, what we do and our validation.” This in turn leads to people constantly comparing themselves to others and relentless self-criticism.
After a visit to a therapist, Williams was advised to try meditating. He was skeptical at first, but later found the practice to be transformative. Within a few years of practicing meditation, he had one of the Top 20 albums on iTunes.
Williams’ initial skepticism of meditation – practiced for centuries by indigenous people from across the world – was partly the result of it being “colonized, demonized, corporatized and sold back to us,” he said. In response, he released his own book on meditation earlier this year. He explained that one of many misconceptions about meditation is that it requires practitioners to stop thinking, which he countered. “We don’t want the mind to stop thinking,” he said. “What we want is to get our thoughts to work for us instead of against us.”
He then led the attendees in a well-received meditation exercise in which they visualized a future they wanted to see. This, he said, helped people find out for themselves who they needed to be instead of the steps they need to take. “You can check every box on your list,” he said, “but if you haven’t changed at your level of being, of who you are, then you cannot show up for the world differently and you cannot show up for your life differently and you’ll end up in the same cycles over and over and over.”
Key to the practice of meditation, Williams said, is to spread the energy captured in the self to other people to effect change in the world, highlighting the relegation of Black people in America to that of lower class citizens. “If we’re just focusing on ourselves, we’re missing the point,” he said, “because we’re all connected, we’re all responsible for being a good ancestor on this planet.”