C. Edwin Baker s Eulogy. By Nancy Baker

Transcription

1 1 C. Edwin Baker s Eulogy By Nancy Baker My mantra since my brother died has been to remind myself that I am incredibly privileged to be so horribly bereft. Not every little sister has as close and caring a relationship with their brother as I had with mine, and even fewer have a brother who was as exceptionally brilliant, generous, kind, and good as my brother, Ed Baker, was. Someday I know I will be able to focus on my great good fortune. But, not yet. I have dreaded the day of Ed s death for decades. As many of you know, he was diagnosed with Juvenile Diabetes when he was five, at a time when they were still handing out medals to Type I diabetics for living 5 years. Ed lived with diabetes for 57 years, and died without suffering the serious complications often associated that disease. He managed his diabetes and the threats that it carried with a combination of intelligence, discipline, and a refusal to let diabetes define him. A great deal of what did define Ed were our family values. Right-wing forces have perverted that phrase family values -- into code for narrow-minded bigotry and intolerance. But, when I think about my brother, I think of him as the best shining example of our family s values; values transmitted by our remarkable parent s Falcon O. and Ernestine Magagna Baker.

2 2 Valuing family is one of the core Baker family values. And, family are, or can be, more than just as they might say in our native Kentucky blood kin or even the relationships that are recognized by law. The ties of family connection are the bonds of love, forged by care, confidences, concern, and time. My brother had those family ties with his chosen family, mostly in New York but also here in California; and of course some of you here today are part of my chosen family as well. But, our family s values were never about just valuing our own family. Loving, valuing, and honoring one s own family was just what a person does, like breathing. In the Baker framework, caring for one s own family was simply the expectation for a decent human being, not the mark of an exceptional person. In our family, what matters or now perhaps I should say mattered -- most about a person is/was does a person do good, do they speak out against injustice and do what they can to make the world a better place? Those values were part of the fabric of our childhood. We were entertained in our childhood by stories made up for us. Those stories, our mother s Eddie and Nancy with Quacky and Wacky, our foster brother Sam s Eddie and Nancy with Dolphy the Dolphin, and our cousin Jay s the Baker Brigade with the Lone Ranger and Tonto, were filled with efforts to do good and right wrongs. I should note that one of the few arguments Ed and I had as adults was over which of us

3 3 had Quaky as a sidekick/alter ego and which of us was partnered with Wacky in retrospect I would like to suggest that the reason we couldn t remember was because Mother left it vague, wanting us both to embrace the ability to speak up that Quacky represented and the ability to look at things in usual and creative ways that Wacky carried. But, I can hear my brother saying, Ha, that s what you say, obviously the law professor must be Quacky and the psychologist Wacky. Our parents also taught us that the point of doing good and righting or trying to right wrongs was in the action, not the attention, doing the good not garnering praise. Despite his many achievements, Ed was modest and unpretentious not just when it was irrelevant, but even when a little self-promotion would have served him well. I remember a few years ago when I accompanied Ed to a pre-op meeting before an angiogram. Ed went to the meeting dressed in his trademark blue jeans, with his hair particularly long and in its normal state of disarray certainly not a look that exuded I am an important person, a world class scholar. Now, having worked in a hospital, I would say that anybody who believes that everybody gets cared for equally, that being an important person doesn t help you stay alive, also believes in Santa Clause. Yet, when the resident asked my brother his occupation, he didn t reply law professor or even college professor. He simply replied, teacher. Now there is nothing wrong with being a teacher, and my brother cared deeply about his teaching. But, to describe Ed Baker as a teacher is like describing Barach Obama as an elected official. As one of his colleagues put it, in a world full of people whose egos are

4 4 bigger than their accomplishments, Ed was one of those rare people whose accomplishments were greater than his ego. Paradoxically, our father would have been proud to have raised such a son. My brother Ed had a life-long passion for liberty and justice that I believe was served at our family s kitchen table, as basic a part of the nourishment we were provided as the food placed on that table. Long before Martin Luther King, Jr. gave voice to it, our parents taught us that people should be judged, if judged at all, by the content of their character and the nature of their actions, not by the color of their skin, the nation of their birth, their occupation or social standing, or any other extraneous factor. Growing up in the segregated South, our parents imbued us with the awareness that racism is a repugnant moral stain on the face of this nation and that it is the duty of those who have been privileged by racism to do what we can to right the historic injustice of slavery, an injustice that still corrupts the fabric of American society. As with the values we got from the stories created for our entertainment, these values were communicated not by pontification but by the lived examples of our parents actions in the world. Activism was also a reflection of our family s values. Last October, when he came to California to take my partner Cathy and me to dinner in celebration of my 60 th birthday, Ed and I reminisced about an incident when our father was disappointed because our cousin Randy got suspended from high school for protesting while Ed did not. Now Ed had been a protest organizer, but had gone

5 5 back to class to give the school principal a chance to make good on his promise to fix the problem. That incident reflected one of my brother s relatively unique ways of being he was willing to give people in authority the opportunity to make things right and correct mistakes. He believed that when good arguments had been made, decision makers ought to be given a chance to reverse themselves. I sometimes thought that quirk, believing that reason would triumph, was one of the few problematic lessons Ed absorbed from our parents, because in our childhood, temper tantrums and sulking were never rewarded, but making a good argument could get us just about anything. Although he was active in the student movements of the 60 s, in later years Ed s activism took the form of scholarship. My brother believed in the power of ideas to change the world. His scholarship and teaching were how he sought to do good. I think Ed believed that legal scholars have an obligation, a moral duty, to preserve and extend the promise of freedom and democracy outlined in the US Constitution, the promises of democracy and equality it carries, rather than simply functioning as apologists for whatever group of judges and justices are currently empowered to interpret that constitution. There are other values I could elaborate including a distain for hypocrisy, especially the hypocrisy of those who profess to operate for good but are actually seeking their own advantage or petty self-interest, a respect for the importance of curiosity and creativity, and the love of nature, art, music, and history. But, the

6 6 value that I want to highlight is perseverance. Our parents faced significant hardships as children, but they persevered, and so did Ed. Ed faced two significant challenges. The first was his diabetes. We never spoke about it as children, but Ed and I talked on multiple occasions as adults about how his being diabetic had affected our lives. He once said that aside from meaning that he probably would not have a long life, being diabetic only prevented him from doing two things. One was that our parents wouldn t let him play high school football. The other was that our father, despite his own deep support for the civil rights movement, talked Ed out of going to Mississippi to help with voter registration in Ed reported that our father had convinced him that the need to get Ed to food or insulin might place others in the untenable position of either getting back on the road when it was too dangerous to be there because the Klan was roaming or letting Ed die due to complications of diabetes for which they might also be blamed. As Dad knew, my sometimes-stubborn brother would not have viewed risks to his own life as a reason not to go to Mississippi. However, Ed was not willing to place others in danger for his personal satisfaction in helping to change history. It was concern for the safety or well being of others and not for himself that could motivate my brother to change course. It is telling, I believe, that once my brother was out of our parent s home, being diabetic never stopped him from doing what he wanted to do. He traveled the

7 7 world. He went hiking, camping, and canoeing in backcountry wilderness. He lived and he loved his life. Diabetes was not my brother s only struggle. Although he grew up at a time when it was not recognized, I am quite certain that my brilliant and well-read brother was dyslexic. In first grade, he had such difficulty learning to read that they wanted to hold him back a year or place him in special education. All his life he read slowly, no more than 30 to 60 words per minute. As with diabetes, Ed didn t complained, he developed strategies that allowed him to do what he wanted despite the difficulty. Unable to read quickly, Ed compensated by reading well. I have often wondered if some of Ed s insightful scholarly contributions were the result of the concentration he developed as a tool to compensate for his reading difficulty. In addition to reading well, he read constantly. I challenge anybody who knew Ed well to think of a time you saw him (except perhaps in the gym or on a back country hike) when he didn t have something to read with him. Ed s probable dyslexia was the reason he became a law professor rather than a political science scholar. As difficult as reading, spelling, and pronunciation in English were for Ed, foreign languages were a virtual impossibility. When he was considering graduate education top universities all required a foreign language for a Ph.D., but law schools had no such requirement. Ed wanted to be a

8 8 scholar of political philosophy and saw law school as a means to do so without the impediment that learning a foreign language would create. I mention this now because parents, educators, and individuals with reading disabilities should know that the sky is the limit for their intellectual achievement. Not only was my brother the smartest man I have ever known, but also his four books, 70 plus articles and book chapters, hundreds of paper presentations, and international reputation reflect the highest levels of scholarly achievement. I conclude with a few thoughts about Ed first that he truly was a man who walked his talk. He was thoughtful and by that I do not mean considerate or kind, although he was both of those I mean he was full of thought. He thought about what he did and what he said, evaluating his proposed actions and words through the lenses of his values. My brother rarely acted impetuously or impulsively. His girlfriend Jennifer tells the story of a time this past fall when they were trying to decide which of two movies to see. She suggested that they just flip a coin, but Ed refused saying that they should make a decision. When she countered that they could flip a coin because they didn t know what movie they wanted to see, he replied, No, we just don t know yet. Of course, it is also difficult to evaluate just how much of my brother s remarkable self-discipline and intensely deliberate manner of living was the result of his need to control diabetes and how much his ability to control diabetes was the result of

9 9 his self-discipline and deliberate manner of living. It is a conundrum that may demonstrate the limits of cause and effect thinking. However, one of the oft-told stories in our family was about an incident that occurred when Ed was only five. We were living in Iowa City while our father was associated with the Journalism School there. Mother needed something at Woolworth s in town and took us with her, straight from muddy play, dirty and disheveled. Ed was standing staring wistfully at the huge candy counter while Mother searched for whatever it was she needed in some other part of the store. When she returned my brother was clutching a dime. He earnestly explained that a woman had come up and given him a dime to buy candy. Ed said he tried to explain to the woman that he couldn t have candy, but she kept insisting that he could, that was what the dime was for. Ed said to our mother, she didn t understand that I really can t have candy anymore, I know I can t, but can I keep the dime? As a lesbian who came of age before Stonewall, I feel particularly lucky to have had the love and support of my extraordinary brother. Not too many lesbians have heterosexual brothers who published Op Ed pieces in the New York Times supporting Lesbian and Gay rights, donate to lesbian charities, and join in legal briefs supporting gay marriage. My brother did all of that and more. Years ago he joined my parents in welcoming my partner Cathy into our family. During that brief period in 2008 when Cathy and I could legally marry, he not only served as best brother at our wedding, signing as witness and making a loving toast, he also stepped in to pay for the wedding, remarking that if our father had been

10 10 there he would have done so. This is one more example of the remarkable consistency between his values and his actions that marked Ed s life. I once tried to tell Ed how much it meant to me that he was so accepting and supportive. He responded modestly that in the circles he ran in he got points for having a lesbian sister. No, I replied, you get points for having a lesbian sister you are proud of. Our cousin Jeanne Magagna wrote me shortly after Ed s death about an exchange she had been having with the widow of one of India s former attorney s general about how to evaluate a man s character. The woman had written, Where a man's excellence is in issue, where the whole man is being evaluated, only a holistic view is appropriate. An excellent singer, golfer, even thinker, is not necessarily an excellent man ---- he may be also a habitual liar, a man of cruelty, an unreliable person. An integrated and self consistent man is the man of "personal excellence". By that standard, my brother was indeed an excellent man. He was kind, generous, and good. He was an excellent son, brother, nephew, cousin, friend, teacher, and scholar. He had great integrity. He was an integrated, disciplined and self-consistent man. With his death, I lost my beloved big brother, but the world lost a rare gem. Neither Ed nor I were particularly religious in our adult lives. But, I at least believe that as long as a person s memory is cherished, his

11 11 name spoken, and his work continued, he lives on. Thank you to all of you for helping my brother live on.