People ask me directions. All the time. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I have a friendly face, maybe because I’m the most unmenacing man ever: 5’9”, almost, gray and balding, wearing glasses and an REI fleece that can’t go out of style because it never was in.
I’m glad they do. Because I like giving directions. Makes me feel useful. My favorite moment came when standing at the corner of Michigan and Chestnut. A couple approached, clutching a guidebook, asking, in heavily French-accented English, if I would be so kind as to direct them to zee Hancock Building. I slowly lifted my finger to point at the brownish black, criss-crossed tower looming directly in front of us, smiled and said, “Voila.“
Which, forgive me, I feel obligated to do now that the Trump administration is turning up their racism to 11 in the final sprint to Tuesday’s election. Particularly the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who said:
“There’s 500 million Arabs in the world. And yet they don’t produce science. They don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.”
He’s wrong in all particulars, as usual. I count three Muslims who’ve won the Fields Medal — not “prize,” doofus — the top award in mathematics. Several have won a Wolf Prize.
I understand I’m shifting populations here — Arabs and Muslims overlap, but are not the same group. “Arab” is an ethnic identity, which RFK Jr. is using as code for “Muslim,” a religious designation. There are Arab Christians and, while they don’t get much press, Arab Jews. (H.L. Mencken, in his epic “The American Language,” lists “arab” as a slur for Jews.)
Before we get completely off track, pause to savor the head-spinning hypocrisy of RFK Jr. invoking the Fields Medal and the Wolf Prize, for excellence in science. In the mouth of a man who disgraced himself through vigorous anti-science, whose unwavering devotion to nutty folk belief has literally killed children.
It’s such an uncharacteristic pivot, this sudden passion for achievement. You’ll never hear Trump lecture his torch-wielding nationalist buddies, “You know, you’re kinda hard on Jews, considering they’ve won Nobel Prizes up the wazoo.”
Consistency isn’t their strong suit.
If I addressed the fabrications (to use the word favored by the New York Times) and lies (shorter, more to the point, but a buzz kill, apparently, for those committed to not grasping what is going on) it’s all I’d ever do. But this particular bigotry is being so strongly directed at surging Muslim politicians like Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (whose position on Israel will matter to me once we secure democracy at home) that I have to address it, especially since I know many readers share RFK Jr.’s mistaken notions.
So you blunder up to me downtown, drawn by my open, honest, inviting mug, and ask, “But they really haven’t made many contributions since Arabic numbers, right?”
And I smile, making eye contract, while slowly lifting both arms, one finger pointing at the former Hancock Building (now, shiver, 875 N. Michigan) the other at the Willis Tower, and say: “Fazlur Rahman Khan, ‘the Einstein of structural engineering,’ did the design work on both buildings, partnering with architect Bruce Graham at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
Chicagoans hurry past every day, and don’t know the story. They don’t know that Khan never even saw a skyscraper until he was 21; no building in the city, Dhaka, Bangladesh, where he grew up was more than three stories. He probably couldn’t get into the United States today — too brown, too Muslim — but came to the University of Illinois in 1952, earning two masters degrees in three years, one in structural engineering, another in theoretical and applied mechanics.
At the time, the height of skyscrapers was limited by the weight of steel beams — the higher the building, the heavier the steel, the more wind force working against it. Inspired by the hollow bamboo common in his homeland, Khan devised the tubular system that allowed the Sears Tower to rise to 110 stories. He also convinced Skidmore to buy an expensive mainframe computer to try this new computer-aided design, which he felt had a future.
Maybe the next time RFK Jr. is listing awards he imagines “arabs” don’t win, he can mention the Fazlur Khan Lifetime Achievement Medal, awarded by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat to individuals who have “demonstrated excellence in technical design and/or research that has made a significant contribution to a discipline for the design of tall buildings and the built urban environment.” Khan never won, the award being created in his honor in 2004, 22 years after his death at age 52 in 1982.