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KAREN BARTA: Good morning. I'm Karen Barta with news from Minnesota Public Radio. The son of state Senator Florian Chmielewski goes on trial today in Ramsey County District Court for allegedly using his father's Senate telephone account. The trial of Jeffrey Chmielewski comes after his father was sentenced to two years' probation and ordered to repay the state more than $3,800 for personal phone calls that family members made on his Senate phone account.

Twin Cities bus drivers may be as young as 19 now that the Metropolitan Council Transit Operations has lowered the minimum age from 21. The MCTO was forced to lower the minimum age to attract applicants for 86 part time positions at a time when Twin Cities employment is high. MCTO spokesman Bob Gibbons predicts riders will have confidence in the younger drivers.

BOB GIBBONS: I think so. I think they have confidence in our ability as an agency to screen and hire the best applicants. There's a pretty significant battery of tests that go along with this job. Skills, inventory, map reading skills, drug and alcohol testing.

KAREN BARTA: Gibbons says the agency hopes the new jobs will lure college students looking to help pay for their education. A group of Saint Cloud business leaders will ask state corrections officials to build a new prison in Saint Cloud rather than Rush City. Republican Senator Dave Kleis will lead the delegation to a meeting tomorrow in the governor's office.

The state forecast today. Variable clouds in the south, with a chance of rain in the far southeast. Mostly sunny in the north, highs from the upper 40s to the lower 60s. For the Twin Cities, mostly cloudy with a high near 55. Around the region in Duluth, it's fair and 48 degrees. Light rain in Rochester and 42. It's fair and 49 in Saint Cloud, and in the Twin Cities it's cloudy and 49. That's news from Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Karen Barta.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Six minutes past 10 o'clock. I'm Paula Schroeder. Midmorning continues here on Minnesota Public Radio. Well, Judy, Mahle Luter is a self-confessed fat kid who lost confidence in the fourth grade but who grew up to run marathons and to be a nationally known proponent of the importance of physical activity for women and girls. We hear from Judy Luter today on Midmorning as part of our interview series Voices of Minnesota, heard nearly every Monday at this time.

Judy Mahle Luter co-founded the Melpomene Institute for Women's Health Research in 1982 to conduct research into the effects of physical activity on the health of women and girls. It was named after a Greek woman who defied the ban on women in the 1896 Olympic trials and ran the marathon, finishing in four hours and 30 minutes. As Judy Luter says in the introduction to her book Of Heroes, Hopes and Level Playing Fields, "When I was a kid, I had no idea. I would end up being who I am or doing what I do."

JUDY LUTER: I was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, not very far from where we live now. The oldest of three kids, with parents who spent a lot of time with us, with a mom who was ahead of her time in terms of physical activity. She was my Girl Scout leader and really encouraged me. I played ball. I was the oldest kid in the neighborhood as well, and I played ball in the alley. And as a matter of fact, I was always a welcome player because I owned the bat.

But as I grew older and more boys in particular of moved into the neighborhood, it became less of a thing for a girl to play ball. And then I was a fat kid, not grossly fat, but certainly not skinny, and so that was something that was really one of my memories through grade school was that starting in fourth or fifth grade, girls couldn't play baseball at school. I was no longer as welcome. Someone else probably got a bat at home, and I really then retreated to books, which was something that I also loved.

But probably the biggest impact during those years were my mom, who, again, really never made me feel bad about my body size, and who also encouraged me to do the things that Girl Scouting provided. So I knew I was a good canoer. I learned to swim at camp. So I knew that physically I could do some things.

But in terms of school, all that was often undermined. And I remember eighth grade as being particularly painful because we did social dance, and there were two girls who never got picked, and I was one of those, one of those two. So it's sort of unusual, I guess, or at least unpredictable that I'm doing Melpomene Institute at this point, because my background, while it involved physical activity, sport was pretty far from my mind.

PAULA SCHROEDER: You mentioned that by the time you got to fourth or fifth grade, you couldn't play sports anymore. What era was this? What time period?

JUDY LUTER: I was born in 1939, so this is probably 1946, 1947, and I went to the neighborhood grade school, and boys played baseball and the girls sat around and traded trading cards and occasionally jump roped. But I remember only vaguely my mother, again, being upset about that and going up and talking to the PE teacher, and she said there wasn't enough room for girls. And I'm sure there was one or two fields empty, but it was definitely not something that we were allowed to do.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Do you remember having any resentment about that or wishing that you could do it, or was it just part of growing up?

JUDY LUTER: It's kind of far back, unfortunately, but I think I was unhappy about it. I followed pro baseball, and the first time I went to Girl Scout camp, I wanted my mother to send me the box scores. And now that I write for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press on the sports pages, I find that curious too, because then there was a period of probably 30 years when I never read the sports pages or skimmed them because I never found myself or any other women in them. So I think that there-- I don't know that I was verbal about it, but I think I did realize that I was missing something.

PAULA SCHROEDER: You said that you yourself are surprised that you're doing what you're doing now, but there must have been somebody along the way, who was a role model for you, who demonstrated that women could be physically active. You mentioned your mother as one.

JUDY LUTER: And I think she was probably the, the primary person. When I started running when I was 33, there were really almost no other women out running, and I didn't see myself as breaking any barriers. I just really needed to get away from my kids, and I knew my husband found that to be very refreshing and stress reducing.

So now I have many role models of women who participate in sport. Women older than myself, women younger than myself. But I think at the time, I probably didn't have many.

PAULA SCHROEDER: There are a lot of women from your generation, particularly college-educated women, who say that they really didn't have the opportunity to pursue a career, that it just wasn't societally expected of them. Do you fall in that category too?

JUDY LUTER: Definitely. And it was interesting, one of the women who lived on the floor of my dormitory was a very good swimmer and just below Olympic level, and she asked if she could train with the men's team, and they told her no, she could join the synchronized swimming club. And she was really, really angry about that, and I didn't understand her anger, which again, I look back and think, ooh, something changed.

I was actually a member of the Women's Honor G, which was the women's athletic honor society. I still don't know why they had such a thing, and I was not selected on my athletic ability because that never came out in college. But we sold apples at the boys' football games. And my husband, who went to the same college and is an excellent athlete was on Men's Honer G because he earned it. But the women, it was more of a leader's popularity kind of thing. And it wasn't a negative, but it had no meaning.

PAULA SCHROEDER: How did you get into running? You mentioned that you ran to get away from your kids, and I think a lot of women can understand that, certainly of just being cooped up with small children. It gets to be very wearing. Is that really what drove you outside?

JUDY LUTER: It really is. I was in graduate school and had three young kids. My husband was at the start of his orthopedic surgery practice and his hours were very, very long, and yet when he came home in the evening, usually about 7:30 or so, he would dash out for a run. And my daughter still, who's now 29, said to me when she was an old teenager, weren't you totally pissed? I don't know if we can use that on the air, but at the fact that Dad would come home and go for a run.

And I said, well, no, I wasn't. And the reason I wasn't is that he was often tense from the kinds of stress he'd been under at work, and if he went out for 20 minutes, he came back the man I know and love, and so it was a self-preservation thing. And knowing that, it wasn't hard at all for me to encourage him to go out for that 20 minutes.

But on a particular night, I had really had it with the kids and studying and who knows what else, and so I announced I was going out for a run, with my tongue very securely in my cheek. I was very thankful to get from the door to the front steps and maybe another 100 yards before my block curved, and then I walked. But when I got back 20 minutes later, and my children say this story has gotten very old, but it is true, I was much more relaxed and the kids were already in bed, and they had their first drink and I really ran out the door every night at the same time for the next year or so.

And that's all the further I went. And I wasn't out to prove anything. It was really just my escape. But I think it became quickly apparent to both my husband and myself that it changed our relationship for the better.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Obviously Melpomene didn't grow out of that first run immediately, but what gave the impetus to the founding of Melpomene?

JUDY LUTER: It actually was probably nine years later that Melpomene actually was incorporated as a non-profit. But within three or four years, I was doing research at the University of Minnesota, had finished my graduate work, and was one of the few women who was actually starting to race and do distance running. And so I started getting phone calls-- not very many at first, maybe a couple of month-- from women who would introduce themselves, often somewhat hesitantly, and say that they had been experiencing menstrual cycle change, and did I know anything about that?

They were mostly runners, although there were some dancers and some ice skaters, and I didn't know anything about it. My own menstrual cycle had always been irregular and running hadn't changed that at all. So I asked a friend who was the athletic director at Macalester College, a woman named Pat Wiesner, who had worked with young athletes, and the research suggested that younger women would experience it more than I, who was probably 37 or 38 by then.

And so she and I agreed to put together a questionnaire. And in putting together the questionnaire and then presenting it to some friends for review, we discovered that it couldn't just be one page, which we had hoped, but there were a few more questions that needed to be asked. And so we turned the paper over and added a couple of questions and left probably 7/8 of the page blank.

This was 1977. The running boom for women really didn't exist, and yet it went to running sort of communities primarily, and we got 422 responses in a matter of six or seven weeks. Very few people had trouble with their menstrual cycle, but the back page, our mistake, as it were, was filled with comments and questions. And so that was really the impetus, and it took us another four and a half or five years, with a great deal of encouragement from a variety of friends, to actually quit my other job and start Melpomene in our attic.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Judy Mahle Luter, the co-founder of the Melpomene Institute for Women's Health Research, based in Minneapolis. You're listening to Voices of Minnesota on Midmorning. I'm Paula Schroeder. We'll continue our conversation with Judy Luter in just a moment.

It's 17 minutes past 10 o'clock. In the weather today, we're looking for high temperatures from the upper 40s in the north to the low 60s in the southwest. Programming on Minnesota Public Radio is supported by Bendix, a front loading washer-dryer combination with water and energy conserving capabilities, new at independent appliance dealers.

Coming up at 10:30 this morning, we'll be talking with Anthony Appiah, one of the directors of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard University. But now we continue with Voices of Minnesota. Judy Luter talks of hiding in the closet when recruiters for her college field hockey team came knocking, but after she began running and talking to other active women, she realized how important physical activity is. Melpomene's research has documented the importance of exercise to prevent osteoporosis and to raise the self-esteem of girls. But as with any non-profit enterprise, money was a problem.

JUDY LUTER: In the early days, for the first four years, we were in our attic. It was a totally volunteer staff, and we really scrounged by with very small dollars. We learned early on that people were interested in our work, and so, actually, our lawyer to incorporate, suggested becoming a membership organization, and we started publishing a journal in our first year. And so the educational pieces just sort of kept coming up as being not only maybe more important, or something that we could do more effectively with fewer dollars, and we also always wanted to conduct the kind of research that would be usable.

PAULA SCHROEDER: I know that one of the things that you are very proud of is getting into the sports pages, those sports pages that you didn't read for 30 years, and now you're published in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press. How did that come about?

JUDY LUTER: Well, it was the result of some discussions where actually, at the time there, was some thought of putting it in the features or the sports pages. And because Melpomene really looks at all of women's lives and physical activity, focuses on that more than actual sport, because I think for many women, that's not what they do, so it was kind of mixed. But it turned out that features hired someone full time, so it kind of landed in sports, and that's been mostly positive.

I think one of the negatives about it is that not very many women still read the sports pages, so getting them published in a book form was a chance for maybe more people to read about women in physical activity and sport. In general, we need to continue to let the sports pages know that both men and women, amateur athletes, are interested in reading about themselves and they're interested in reading about others. A lot of my columns are about individuals, and they get some of the most positive response.

PAULA SCHROEDER: What are some of the other things that you're proud of that Melpomene has done?

JUDY LUTER: About five years ago, we have a very active and effective board of directors and we do strategic planning and think about what we can do on our limited dollars, and in 1990 we decided that girls really should be a priority, and that actually grew out of something that is called Melpomene Conversations, where we invite members and friends to come in and just dream and talk to us, offer constructive criticisms, but also tell us what they would like us to do.

And our first groups were of our members older than 60. And actually, we have a lot of those. And we thought they would be interested in osteoporosis and aging and whatever. And almost to a person, they said, we're concerned about our daughters or our granddaughters.

We were more physically active than they are. We could play in our backyards. We could ride our bikes. There wasn't concern about safety. They're too worried about being thin. And so with that kind of advice from these women and saying, if we have any say, and they do, about how we spend their contributions, they'd like us to look at girls.

So that became a major study in 1990, and we're just sort of wrapping up. But we've done girls and body image, girls and self-image with the help of Jane Helmcke at [INAUDIBLE]. We produced, I think, a wonderful video called Of Heroes, and we have the educational distribution rights.

That's going nationwide still, and I was at a conference over the weekend in Atlanta and was walking by a booth and happened to see Anne Bancroft on the screen, and I said, that's our video. And it was someone I had no idea had it, and an organization called National Girls and Women in Sport. And they said, oh, yes, we love it. So they were playing it continuously through the conference. But I think that has been a very good tool for teachers and parents to help their girls look at the issues of self confidence and self esteem and how physical activity figures into that.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Your daughter is now 29 and when you look back at how you raised her and what now, do you wish you could start over again at all?

JUDY LUTER: No. And you maybe should ask her, but I think she would agree. Hap and I ran quite a few races when the kids were fairly small. I mean, one a month or something. And in the first year or two, we took them to the races. They quickly became bored, and so we figured out other arrangements. I think there were times when they were embarrassed, particularly as they got into their teen years, that their parents were physically active and were competitive.

I think that we provided an example, but we were very careful not to push the kids in terms of saying, you need to be in athletics. But I was envious of Wendy's opportunities as a high school student. Again, she went to Saint Paul Central. She was recruited, and I was there when she was signing up for her classes by the swim coach, who asked if she had ever swum. And she said, well, yes, but not competitively.

So she was on the swim team for four years and the track team for four years and loved it. And then when she went to college, she was also on the track team for four years. Reed is a super cross-country skier, is still involved with cross country skiing, starting his own nonprofit, and our youngest son Park was a gymnast and then a diver. And to all of them, physical activity remains an important part of who they are.

I'm sure that I made mistakes, but in general-- my mom raised me to feel confident. I didn't sort of resist the pressures of society, and the pressures of society. I think were more severe. But I think that experience was such that I wanted as much as possible to raise my kid to be confident and competent.

She went to an all women's college, to Smith College, and I think that was kind of the icing on the cake. She's a very strong woman. I'm pleased she's my friend.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Where do you see Judy in the next 10 or 20 years when it comes to running? Do you want to be one of these 90-year-olds who runs a marathon?

JUDY LUTER: Well, I don't know. I've sort of changed. I had switched from running long distances and really hadn't run a marathon for the last nine years, and then the 100th Boston loomed. And because I'd run seven or eight Bostons previously, Hap and I decided that that could be a challenge for the 50s. Neither of us had run a marathon in our 50s.

And so I qualified at Twin Cities last fall, and he'd been injured and qualified in Memphis a couple of months later. And I must admit that when I crossed the finish line-- and it was very hard for me to do it, I used to be pretty fast, but I made the qualifying time with maybe six or seven minutes to spare, and it was really a struggle.

And when I crossed the finish line, I couldn't find anyone in my family. I mean, it was all kind of iffy about where we would meet. And I just stood there and grinned like an idiot for probably 20 minutes. I mean, I was so excited that physically I had trained and I had done it.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Judy Mahle Luter, co-founder of the Melpomene Institute for Women's Health Research in Minneapolis. Of Heroes, Hopes, and Level Playing Fields, a collection of her columns, is available from Melpomene. A 5K run walk benefiting Melpomene Institute will be held this Saturday, May 4th. You can call Melpomene for information on either of those at 642-1951. Voices of Minnesota is heard every Monday at this time. The producer is Dan Olson.

PAUL MCDONNELL: Hi, I'm Paul McDonnell. I just want to talk about what autism is like for me.

SPEAKER 1: Autistic children and adults find it hard to understand that other people might have a totally different mental life from their own.

SPEAKER 2: As you could tell, most of my friends are pretty noisy.

SPEAKER 3: Fit in with a general crowd, be like everyone else, set my autism aside.

PAUL MCDONNELL: An audio letter from across the border of autism. Tuesday's All Things Considered here on Minnesota Public Radio, KNOW FM 91.1 in the Twin Cities.

PAULA SCHROEDER: And All Things Considered gets underway at 3 o'clock every afternoon. Today's programming is sponsored in part by Steve Goldfine in honor of his wife Eileen Levin, whose birthday is today. It's 28 minutes past 10 o'clock, I'm Paula Schroeder, and this is Midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio. Thanks for being with us today.

Well, race in America is like the elephant sitting in the middle of a dysfunctional family's living room. Everyone knows it's a problem, but not many people want to talk about it. Anthony Appiah does. He's one of the triumvirate of Black scholars who direct the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard University. He, Henry Louis Gates, and Cornel West are among the most influential voices in the country in the area of race relations. Dr. Appiah was in the Twin Cities recently, and stopped in our studios for a conversation about the role of race in the United States.

ANTHONY APPIAH: I think that it's still very widely believed in this country and in much of the Western world, perhaps much of the world now, that race is this kind of objective property of people. That it's sitting in there, that it's something that biologists can study, and that it must have some significance. It must have some importance.

Last year, a book was published, The Bell Curve, which argued that it must be important for-- part of the argument of the book, by no means the focus of the book, though it was the focus of the response to the book, was the claim that race must be important for questions of intelligence, for example.

Now what's interesting is that that conviction, which is very widespread, and I hear this when I go around the country, is completely not supported by anything inside the academy. The biologists will tell you that race isn't a biological category. The consensus view, the overwhelming consensus view in social psychology and in cognitive psychology about the significance of race is that it's-- insofar as there are differences, they're caused by social behavior and by our attitudes and by things we do. They're not caused by our natures, our inherited natures.

So one of the things I think we need to do if we're to move ahead is just to get the facts clear, as clear as we can, as much as we know. And I think that part of what I was trying to do in some lectures I just gave at Hamlin here was to go through what we now think we know about these questions and to see how different that is from what people normally assume.

Now, even when you've done all that, even when you've sort of got these things clear, it doesn't tell you immediately what you should do next. It doesn't tell you whether you should have racial affirmative action in education or employment. It doesn't tell you whether Black people are owed reparations. It doesn't answer those questions directly, but I think that it moves you into a different place to think about those questions.

PAULA SCHROEDER: I think that race, certainly in this country, defines where we live, who we socialize with, what is expected of us. Are those the kinds of questions that we need to be asking?

ANTHONY APPIAH: Well, I think we need to move on then from these questions about what the facts are to these moral questions. I mean, do we really think that it's right that we should have such strong expectations about how people should behave that depend on their race? And, I mean, these sorts of things.

For example, here's a public policy question. People talk about the problems of Black neighborhoods in inner cities, and they say, well, there's now a Black middle class. Why aren't they doing anything about it? Well, question, these are Americans, these poor people in these cities.

Is it really true that some Americans, in virtue of their race, have more responsibility for dealing with them than others? Do we really want it to-- do we really want to say that people should take responsibility for their fellow citizens only when they are of the same race or especially when they are of the same race, and why? So I think we do need to think about those questions.

I remember when I first came to this country, which was 15 years ago now, I was teaching at Yale University, and there was this kid in the class who was very hostile towards me, and I couldn't understand why. And eventually I found out from somebody else that he thought I was a very, very pretentious person, because he thought that if you were a Black person in America and you talk like me, you must be some incredible phony.

So when he was told that I was in fact not from this country, that I grew up and was educated in Britain, that I talked like this because where I grew up, everybody talked like this, where I was educated, he forgave me. My question is, suppose I were an African-American? Suppose I did talk like this because I identified with British culture? Many people would think that was worse than if a white American did it, especially a white American who could claim some British ancestry. But why?

I mean, I think it is pretentious to talk like this if you're an American, and I'm not encouraging it, but I'm pointing out that people treat you differently if you do this depending on your race. And that's another example, I think, where I think we just need to just sort of hang back a bit from our immediate assumptions, our moral assumptions in that case, and say, well, can we defend this? And if we can't, maybe we should stop.

PAULA SCHROEDER: As an academic, you have certainly run into that. You and your colleagues at Harvard, Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates. There are people in the academic community, particularly in the Afro-American studies area, who say there should be much more emphasis in that area of study on what the African culture has contributed, rather than just taking that distant, scholarly look at what happened in Africa over the centuries. Is that the kind of thing that you're talking about that exacerbates the role of race?

ANTHONY APPIAH: I think that you mentioned, in your last question, I think, one of the things, if I were trying to make a list of the really key things in explaining why race continues to be such enormous significance in this country, you said that where you live is determined by race.

Segregation is no longer legally enforced in anywhere in the United states, and that's obviously an improvement. But de facto, our cities and our schools, therefore, because we have local education mostly in this country, very local, are enormously segregated still, some of them are more segregated than they were when we had legal segregation in some cities.

You can't but think that fact by itself, which, by the way, has enormous economic consequences, which are also very important you can't but think that this fact is of enormous social importance too. The way you think about people depends on how much you know them, how many contacts you have with them in childhood and in adolescence and youth, and how easy it is to mix socially, what your shared understandings are, and so on. And if you're separated racially, then your race is going to persist as a kind of barrier in people's meetings with each other in the public world.

I would like to stress that it seems to me, those are the fundamental background conditions which explain Afrocentrism as a response. And I'm not at all intellectually in sympathy with a great deal of Afrocentrism, but I think we have to understand that in the roster of our racial problems in America, the fact that there are a few professors in the few institutions who are advocating Afrocentrism probably isn't too high. It's a problem for me, because in my business, they're significant and they affect my students and they affect-- but in terms of the country, I think they're wrong about many things.

PAULA SCHROEDER: People who want to educate American Indian children in the traditions that they have. Chicano and Latino and Hispanic children, the same thing. Asian children. We'll say, all we are trying to do is give our children a sense of self esteem, a confidence, a pride in their heritage.

ANTHONY APPIAH: Yes well, that all sounds terrific, doesn't it? Self esteem sounds good, and pride, at least where it's not false pride seems good. And I'm afraid, however, that when you start unpacking that package, it doesn't-- it turns out not to really deliver. And let me just break down some of the issues here.

First of all, on the question of self esteem, there are two ways that self esteem is important in education. One is, I think, that it's desirable for us to educate young people, and I mean education in the broad sense that families and schools and communities too, not just what goes on in the classroom, it's desirable that at the end of education, you should feel entitled to self respect. You should have been brought up to grow into a self-respecting individual because you should be the kind of person who is entitled to respect him or herself.

So, obviously, it's true that one of the goals of education is to produce people who have self respect and who esteem themselves, and that's an intrinsically desirable thing. But it's not desirable, first of all, to produce people who have good feelings about themselves to which they're not entitled.

We do a lot of massaging of kids' egos in this society. Instead of letting them get self esteem by succeeding, by being good at math or languages or history, we try and make them feel good about themselves, even though we aren't doing a good job of making them masters and mistresses of these skills.

I say self esteem is great if you get self esteem by learning, by mastering things, but giving people self esteem as a substitute for learning things simply means that they end up feeling good about themselves when they shouldn't. They should be feeling dissatisfied with themselves. They should be saying, you've done a lousy job of educating me. I'm angry with you. Why didn't you teach me these things?

And the third thing is that there's a sort of instrumental argument about self esteem in the literature of educational psychology. People say, well, if children have self esteem, they'll learn better. It sounds very plausible. There's absolutely no evidence that this is true. There's a strongish-- not as strong as you would expect-- but there is a strong correlation between self esteem and achievement.

But it's consistent. The evidence is all consistent, with the reason for that correlation, being that children who have done well respect themselves, not that children who respect themselves do well. And there is actually very little evidence for thinking that if you just build up children's self esteem, they'll do better. And finally, the evidence is that if you use the standard psychological measures of self esteem, actually Black children don't suffer from poor self esteem.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Particularly Black girls.

ANTHONY APPIAH: Yes. There's just no evidence that, in fact, it's a major problem. Well-intentioned, liberal-minded people think it's a problem. But if you actually go in and talk to them and investigate them and use perfectly standard social psychological measures of self esteem, it's not the problem. The problem is that they aren't being taught properly, that they don't have home environments where they're being encouraged and supported in their learning, where they can read, and a whole host of other things.

And none of those things is going to be solved by making the kids feel better about themselves. I don't want kids not to feel good about themselves, but I think that making kids feel good about themselves as a substitute for educating them, for making them able to master the world and make their own decisions, is a betrayal of the children.

PAULA SCHROEDER: We're talking with Anthony Appiah, who is professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy at Harvard University.

What about the pride in cultural heritage, ethnic heritage?

ANTHONY APPIAH: I think that, again, if the alternatives are self hatred or ethnic pride, I'm for ethnic pride or racial pride. But the question is whether those are the alternatives. I mean, as a reaction to a society that is constantly telling you that you and your kind are worthless, I think we have to build up people's response and their right to respond with, well, that's not right. Here are the things that we are. Here are the things that our community has achieved. That seems to me a perfectly healthy response.

I don't happen to favor the particular way in which much Afrocentric education does this, and for two reasons. First of all, in the long run, you weaken people if you build their response in terms of self of ethnic pride on falsehoods. If you're going to build people's ethnic or racial pride around historical narratives, let's get the history right.

Let's not invent a fantasy of ancient Africa or a fantasy of Africa. Let's talk about what Africa really was like. There's enough in African history that's true, that you can build your stories on of pride. You don't have to invent some of the stuff that we hear.

Second, a lot of what people choose to stress in stressing African history, they stress ancient Egypt. Highly hierarchical society with kingship. They talk about African kings and queens in West Africa. This is a democracy.

What are we doing building people's sense of what's valuable in their tradition, of their kind around the idea that what makes a tradition valuable is the fact that you have a boss class of kings and queens who have tremendous outfits sitting on top of an underclass of people who are building the pyramids? I don't know. It seems to me the values implicit in this way of thinking about what's actually of importance in African history are all wrong.

And finally, it's a way of ignoring America. African-Americans, I think, it's one of the reasons I came to this country to do African-American studies, have an extraordinary history of achievement here. Now, I'm an African. My father's African. I grew up in Africa. I love Africa. I go there every year, and I'm very interested in African history. I'm chairman of African Studies at Harvard University.

I think Africa is very important, but so is African-American stuff. And to root a sense of pride for African-Americans in something somewhere else seems to me to invite the thought, well, why don't you go there? I mean, that is to say African-Americans have as much if not more right, if anybody gets rights to anything through ancestry, have as much or if not more right to what's going on in this country, to the inheritance of this country as anybody.

What many people in the world understand now, the good side of America to stand for, is the idea of freedom. Our understanding of freedom, the American understanding of freedom is crucially the understanding of Frederick Douglass. It's crucially the understanding of African-Americans, who knew what the opposite of freedom was, who understood slavery and who articulated in fabulous language and with great clarity and power from before Frederick Douglass through to Martin Luther King, the real meaning of freedom.

PAULA SCHROEDER: I was in a rather large group of people a couple of weeks ago, and we were going around and talking about we think of ourselves as being. In other words, most people were saying, well, my ancestors were from Germany or from Mexico or wherever the people happened to come from, and this one woman said, I've just always thought of myself as American. And it took me aback somewhat to hear her say that, because we don't think of ourselves, no matter what race we are, as American.

ANTHONY APPIAH: I think one of the reasons why I'd like more American kids to be able to travel abroad, and I'm meaning white kids and Black kids and yellow and brown kids, is that it's one of the ways in which the young Americans that I know have learned, of all groups, to recognize that they are Americans is by going to places where the first thing everybody says about you isn't, oh, you're Black or you're Asian, but you're American.

My good buddy, Skip Gates, took his children, my godchildren, to Africa last summer, and they made a travel program about the BBC, which I think is going to-- with the BBC about traveling on a train through Zimbabwe and Tanzania, which will be shown on PBS, I believe, this fall.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Oh, great.

ANTHONY APPIAH: And my godchildren, as one of them said-- as Liza, the youngest of them said, she said, well, I left as an African-American. I think I came back as an American, she said. And she had a good time. She was glad she went, but going there as a young African-American, she learned something about her Americanness and about the things that she, in fact, shares with-- the assumptions that she shares with many other Americans.

If I were to pick the thing that I think of as the central thing that in our education of K through 12 right through we should be stressing, it is the political arrangements. It is the constitution and its values, the values, the liberties, and also the responsibilities associated with those liberties.

That is why immigrants come here, because of what freedom makes possible. That is what Americans increasingly have available to them since the end of desegregation, since the Civil Rights Act, and since attempts in relation to gender to try and make this a society in which citizenship is genuinely equal.

But all this draws out of this tradition, this constitutional tradition, and the history of its interpretation and the history of the challenges to it. I mean, the history of the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement, anti-lynching campaigns. All of these are part of the history that defines, I think, the things that Americans do share, which is this amazing framework, this political framework, which is now, really, the oldest written constitutional democracy in history.

And you can share that and value that without wanting everybody in America to be Lutheran or to be Catholic or to be Afrocentric or to be this or that or the other, because part of the point of this structure is that within it, through these liberties, we're supposed to be able to experience choice, make our own communities with our own options, and to respect the choices and communities of others.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Anthony Appiah, the director of African Studies at Harvard University.

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It's 12 minutes before 11 o'clock. I'm Paula Schroeder. This is Midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio. We have just received word that a bomb exploded today at the city hall in Spokane, Washington, and apparently, just all we know is that a lot of people are at the scene right now, but we have no information yet about any injuries that may have occurred at that bomb explosion at city hall in the city of Spokane, Washington.

We'll have details as they become available coming up on Midday today, and we'll also have details on the ongoing search for former CIA Director Williams Colby. He told his wife that he wasn't feeling well yesterday, but was still going out canoeing. His capsized canoe was found in the water, but no sign of William Colby yet at this point. Well, this morning in our Odd Jobs segment, we meet a coffin maker.

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SPEAKER 4: (SINGING) Minimum wage. Yah!

[WHIP CRACKS]

PAULA SCHROEDER: Every Monday at this time, we introduce you to somebody who has an odd job, and I think anyone would admit that making coffins is fairly odd. Mark Hagberg built his first wooden coffin at the request of a friend who was dying of cancer. The Fergus Falls man says the experience convinced him people would buy hand-crafted wooden coffins. He's now building coffins to order in his small garage, and building several prototypes to display in a showroom he hopes to open soon. Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Gunderson visited Hagberg's workshop and the coffin showroom in the dining room of his home.

[SAW BUZZING]

DAN GUNDERSON: Now, what kind of what is this you're working with?

MARK HAGBERG: That's red elm. It's got a real different smell to it when it's been cut. I like it.

DAN GUNDERSON: How much time would you say it takes you typically?

MARK HAGBERG: Like a new prototype or a different style? I think about 100 hours to get everything. After that, then the time is cut down quite a bit.

[BUZZING]

DAN GUNDERSON: I'm guessing you probably have taken a little bit of joshing from your friends over this choice of a business.

MARK HAGBERG: Yes, they've wondered about my sanity. But it's not a joke to me. It's not a joke. But I get a lot of jokes.

DAN GUNDERSON: What are some of the things you hear most often?

MARK HAGBERG: Well, questions are asked. Do you test it out? How do you know? How do the length and things like that? Well, yes, I have gotten in and made sure that they're sound, they're study. I've put them up on sawhorses and actually jumped. I want to make sure.

DAN GUNDERSON: Spending a day in the shop working on a casket, does that lend itself at all to any unusual dreams at night or is it something that kind of sticks in your mind?

MARK HAGBERG: Well, since I started, I had only one bad dream, that the dearly departed fell out of the bottom on the way to the gravesite. And it was very strange. Very strange indeed. It made me come out to the shop in the middle of the night and take care of it. So I never had the dream again.

DAN GUNDERSON: Now, are these parts? Are these parts you use too?

MARK HAGBERG: Yeah, this is hardware. Hinges and the screws for the bed.

DAN GUNDERSON: So can you just get a catalog to order casket parts?

MARK HAGBERG: No, no. You can get telephone numbers to contact people, and it's taken me a long time to find these people. They're not just out there. When I've called these people, they tell me things like, maybe you should build cabinets for pots and pans or something. Why do you want to build caskets?

And this is from people who make it on a full time basis. I thought it was kind of funny. You don't want to build caskets. That's one of the first things they told me. You don't want to do it.

It's hard. It's hard getting the product known to the people except when they absolutely need it. I think there's people who want hand-built caskets. I remember as a kid, farmers around my area, up in the rafters, there was caskets covered with the tarp. When a family member needed one, one was provided.

DAN GUNDERSON: And here we have it looks like a casket sitting on the dining room table.

MARK HAGBERG: Yes, but it's about the only place I had to make a good showing area, I guess. I don't really know how to market what I have, but I'm learning. I'm learning. You've just got to jump in and hold on. I believe it'll take off.

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GARY EICHTEN: There's a fair amount of consternation among journalists these days about how they are doing their job. For that matter, there's a fair amount talk about what that job is. Hello, this is Gary Eichten inviting you to join us for Midday. We'll hear what one of the best in the business, the Washington Post's David Broder, has to say about the quality of the news coverage you hear and read and see, and I hope you can join us. Midday begins weekday mornings at 11:00 on Minnesota Public Radio, KNOW FM 91.1 in the Twin Cities.

PAULA SCHROEDER: And during the 11 o'clock hour of Midday, of course, all the latest updates on news and weather, and also look at the history of the taconite industry on Minnesota's Iron Range. Gary will talk with UMD economist Gerald Peterson about the diversification of the area's economy. We'll also look into the campaign of Republican Senate contender Bert McAssey and preview the second season of horse racing at Canterbury Park in Shakopee. That and more coming up on Midday today at 11 o'clock.

In the weather, we're looking for a variable cloudiness in the south today. There is a chance of rain in the far southeastern part of Minnesota. Mostly sunny skies in the north, with highs from the upper 40s in the north to the low 60s in the southwest. In the Twin Cities today, it'll be mostly cloudy with a high around 53 degrees. Tomorrow, partly to mostly sunny, but still cool with highs, mainly in the 50s all across the state, probably getting up into the upper 50s in the Twin Cities tomorrow. It's five minutes before 11 o'clock. Time for Writer's Almanac and Garrison Keillor.

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GARRISON KEILLOR: And here is the Writer's Almanac for Monday. It's the 29 of April, 1996. It's the feast day of Saint Catherine of Sienna, the patron saint of Italy, who died on this day in 1380. She was among those who helped return the pope from Avignon, France, to Rome.

It's the anniversary of the day in 1429 when Joan of Arc entered the city of Orleans and led the victory over the English. And today is the anniversary of the zipper. It was patented on this day in 1913 by Gideon Sundback of Hoboken, New Jersey, who called it the separable fastener. Here's a poem by Hayden Carruth entitled "Little Citizen, Little Survivor".

A brown rat has taken up residence with me.

A little brown rat with pinkish ears and lovely

Almond-shaped eyes. He and his wife live

In the woodpile by my back door, and they are

So equal, I cannot tell which is which when they

Poke their noses out of the crevices among

The sticks of firewood and then venture farther

In search of sunflower seeds spilled from the feeder.

I can't tell you, my friend, how glad I am to see them.

I haven't seen a fox for years, or a mink, or

A fisher cat, or an eagle, or a porcupine. I haven't

Seen any of my old company of the woods

In the fields, we who used to live in such

Close affection and admiration. Well, I remember

When the coons would tap on my window, when

The ravens would speak to me from the edge of their

Little precipice. Where are they now? Everyone knows.

Gone. Scattered in this terrible dispersal. But at least

The brown rat that most people so revile and fear

And castigate has brought his wife to live with me

Again. Welcome, little citizen, little survivor.

Lend me your presence, and I will lend you mine.

A poem by Hayden Carruth, "Little Citizen, Little Survivor", from Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey Poems, 1991 to 1995, published by Copper Canyon Press and used by permission on the Writer's Almanac, Monday, April 29, made possible by Cowles Enthusiast Media, publishers of Southwest Art and other magazines. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

PAULA SCHROEDER: That's Midmorning for today. Thanks a lot for joining us. Tomorrow, we are going to be talking about a concept called restorative justice. A lot of jails and prisons are becoming overcrowded, and a lot of victims say that they don't get a lot of satisfaction out of seeing an offender go to jail either, so there has been this approach of getting victims and their offenders face to face and deciding what kinds of consequences there should be for a crime.

We'll find out more about that tomorrow morning on Midmorning. We'll also be wrapping up our series on child abuse, talking with prosecutors about how they go about prosecuting child abuse cases. That's tomorrow here on Minnesota Public Radio's Midmorning at 9:00 AM I'm Paula Schroeder. See you then.

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JOHN RABE: I'm John Rabe. On Monday's All Things Considered, All Things Considered commentator Marion Winik on her book First Comes Love. It's All Things Considered, weekdays at 3:00 on Minnesota Public Radio, KNOW FM 91.1.

PAULA SCHROEDER: 49 degrees under cloudy skies at KNOW FM 91.1. In the Twin Cities-- or Minneapolis, Saint Paul. In the Twin Cities today, we are expecting a high temperature right around 53 degrees under mostly cloudy skies. Tomorrow, it'll be mostly sunny, with a high near 60 degrees.

GARY EICHTEN: Good morning. It's 11 o'clock and this is Midday on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Gary Eichten. In the news this morning, President Clinton is calling for a stepped up anti-drug effort. Clinton is calling today for a 10-year initiative, one that would focus on methamphetamines, a drug that is growing in popularity. Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres says that Israel may help Lebanon rebuild after two weeks of Israeli attacks in Lebanon killed hundreds of civilians and caused $1 billion in damage.

US Supreme Court says abortion laws requiring minors to notify their parents are unconstitutional unless minors can also get permission from a judge. Minnesota seniors are busing to Canada today as part of their campaign to try to drive down prescription drug costs in Minnesota. And the search continues for former CIA Director Williams Colby, who turned up missing after going out canoeing last night. Those are some of the stories in the news today. Coming up over the noon hour, we'll hear from syndicated political columnist David Broder on the state of the news media.