Category Archives: Justice

Black k Klansman

05 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Justice, Movies, Politics, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

BlacKkKlansman.pngThere are moments (mostly the innocent ones) in Black Klansman where the movie seems to be telling us something about the 70s. There are other moments (as in references to “America First” or allusions to the Trump administration) when the movie is clearly telling us something about today. Most of the time, however, the movie seems to be telling us about both at the same time. What’s missing from this movie is the period in between, a good three or four decades, depending on how you count them, when many of us might have thought race relations were getting better. Perhaps that thought was never more than naiveté, a mere fantasy, but if so the fantasy was certainly a part of the world erased in this film. I’d like to think Spike Lee is wrong to erase those years in this film, but he isn’t.

That erasure, it seems, is precisely the point.

The hope of those intervening years between the end of segregation in America and the present rise of white nationaism is in fact well well represented in Black Klansman. It’s repreented by Ron Stalworth (played by John David Washington), the central character in Black Klansman, a story inspired by events in the career of a real life police officer. We meet Stalworth as he becomes the first black officer on the Colorado Springs police force. It’s a step forward, some might have said back in the day. “Selling out” might be how others would have put it. Stalworth lives in the tension between these two ways of looking at his career, one which envisions police authority as consistent, at least in theory with the possibility or racial justice, and one which sees it as an explicit tool of white supremacy. For his own part, Stalworth is clearly trying to make the former outlook work, but he’s torn from all sides, both by racism within the police force and by those who see police as an essentially racist institution.

To hear him talk, Stalworth could pass for white, which probably says as much about those in the movie (and those of us watching it) who think he sounds white as it does about the man himself. Whatever the reason, this feature of Stalworth’s character has an obvious utility; it will enable him to pass, at least on the phone. Stalworth is also willing to cut his fro if the Police Chief wants him to, but no, that’s not necessary, The Chief likes it. At the same time, Stalworth fights a never ending battle against the casual racism of his fellow officers. What to do about the overt bigots whose racism is far from casual, he isn’t sure, at least not at the outset of the film. Stalworth is picking his battles. Fair enough! But is the trade-off equitable? One gets the impression no-one is quite happy with the arrangement, least of all Stalworth himself.

It’s this awkward effort to find an acceptable accommodation between social justice and institutions which have historically enforced racism that makes Stalworth a great symbol for the intervening years between the seventies and the modern era. He is a back man trying to make America work. for his own people along with the rest of us. Some might consider that a fools errand, but Stalworth lived in an era when it seemed almost possible.

The Police Chief takes Stalworth’s discomfort up a notch by asking him to go undercover to attend a speech by Stokely Carmichael so he can keep track of the radical students who sponsored the event. There Carmichael is known by his new name of Kwame Ture. Ture speaks of police abuse, even the murder of African-Americans. He also urges his audience to prepare for violent revolution. Stalworth is surprised to find that he likes Ture’s speech, and the fact that he likes the speech is a big problem. It’s a problem because Stalwort is there to spy on the man and the black radicals listening to him. From the snadpoint of the police department, he’s not supposed to like the speech at all. From the standpoint of the student radicals, he isn’t supposed to be there at all, at least not for the reasons he has come.

…and certainly not wearing a mic.

It doesn’t help matters that Stalworth knows people in his own police department guilty of the very racism Ture was talking about. It also doesn’t help that he is falling rapidly in love with Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier), President of the Black Student Union. She is arguably the main subject of his investigation, and she herself certainly would not approve of his undercover work. It REALLY doesn’t help that she was pulled over by racist police officers after the speech and sexually assaulted during the stop, confirming everything Ture said in his speech while underscoring Stalworth’s inability to do anything about it.

So, how is he going to explain Ture’s promotion of revolution to the Police Chief? How will he explain his role in the police department to the love interest who sees police as the enemy? It’s a problem.

All of this comes before Stalworth’s infiltration into the Ku Klux Klan.

If there is any ray of hope to found in these initial scenes, it comes in the form of a night spent dancing in the wake of Ture’s presentation. Whatever Ture’s rhetoric, the radicals who brought him were content to spend the evening peacefully enjoying themselves on the dance floor. This gives Stalworth an angle, so to speak. He decides that these radicals are just talking about the violent revolution. They aren’t actually planning to kill anybody. It’s not the easiest message to sell. The Police Chief doesn’t buy it any more than Patrice and her companions buy the notion that police are meant to serve the community.

If there is a way to make police-work consistent with racial justice, Stalworth hasn’t found it when the larger plot kicks off, when Stalworth stumbles upon the opportunity to open up an investigation into the Klan with the help of Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver). If the black radicals he’d been investigating at the start of this film weren’t really violent, the Klansman certainly were, at least enough of them to pose a threat. Of course this investigation is the real focus on the film. It’s also where the film departs most from the actual events of the real events in question. The real investigation led to the transfer of Klansmen within the military away from sensitive security positions; the movie investigation leads to a real crime.

What interests me about the story most is the larger racial politics of the film itself, and of the society it comments upon. One gets the impression Stalworth isn’t in the most tenable position to begin with. He knows very well the laws he is charged with enforcing hurt his own people, and he also knows anyone seeking to change that poses a real threat to the institutions he represents. Stalworth is caught in the middle of many forces he cannot controle; he has set himself up for a life-time of pushing back in all directions. The main plot seems almost to rescue him from the ambivalence of his position at the outset of the film.

…which brings us back to the political history of the film. Its final moments aren’t about the tricky life Stalworth has set up for himself so much as the rise of violent white nationalism with the advent of the Trump administration. Here Spike Lee drops the fictional story-line entirely and shows us real footage of  real white nationalists at work today. It’s a fitting shift, of course. Like the Klan in this story, Trump’s America has fallen on the nation like a great big old boot stomp on the many conflicts that used to plague our politics, conflicts that now seem subtle by comparison. Like the Klansmen in this film, the present administration and its supporters aren’t really all that interested in figuring out the details of social justice; they are happy to promote a clear and obvious vision of white supremacy. If the crime Stalworth thwarts in this move is fictional, the threats posed by a political regime wedded to the likes of the Klan is real. If justice eludes us, the present regime certainly ought to inject a degree of clarity into political questions of our own day.

If it isn’t entirely clear how we should handle racism in police practice, the sort of problem Stalworth is dealing with at the beginning of this film, it ought to be very clear that the present President couldn’t care less. Neither could those who support him. If it isn’t entirely clear how the rest of us should live together, it ought to be very clear that a good number of Americans no longer mean to do so at all, and that they have help at the highest levels, help they are using to undermine every means at our disposal for forking out any equitable solutions to the nations problems. The nation as a whole seems ripped away, like Stalworth, from the tricky problems about racial justice. What we have now is a problem much like that he faced in this film; how to stop those consciously working to ensure no such answers will ever be found.

 

Special Spooky Halloween Post: When a Hungry Historical Context Gobbles Up Your Text

31 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by in History, Justice, Politics

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

45282907_10217765362510862_2935286808793055232_oOkay, so by now everyone knows, right? Donald Trump has recently said he wants to change the Fourteenth Amendment so as to eliminate birthright citizenship, and he wants to do it without another amendment. The problem according to the idiot in the White House is that some scholars (he assures us) say the prevailing interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment is just wrong. Changing it, according to this view, is not a case of rewriting the rules so much as it is a case of just changing the way we interpret them. Therefore, the Cheeto and its enablers think he can do this with just an executive order. Nevermind that Obama’s use of executive orders was proof positive that he himself was a demon from a special Muslim Hell sent to personally devour the Constitution right along with all the babies and pizzas ever served in Tea Party Hell, Donald Trump is thinking he’s just gonna do it.

And the deplorables sing, doot, doot doot, da doot, doot doot doot…

***

Some folks tell me that this is a distraction from bomb scares and right wing shooters, or maybe some other legal decision that Donald is going to quietly sign into being while we stand aghast at the orange Hell that has become of our sweet country, but then again, maybe some of those are distractions from this, or maybe someone is distracting us from a election. I dunno. I give up on trying to sort out what’s supposed to be a distraction from what. The problem with all the distraction talk is it assumes that Donald and the deplorables are focused enough to have clear priorities in the first place. That notion is about as plausible as a degree from Trump University.

***

But all of this does raise an interesting question; what is the case for saying the 14th Amendment doesn’t actually make the children of foreign nationals into U.S. citizens if they born on U.S. soil?

Let’s start with the text itself. Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment reads as follows:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The first line contains the case for birthright citizenship, and that case is commonly accepted by most people with any professional responsibility to handle such matters or argue them in a courtroom.

So, why would anyone think they are wrong?

***

The quick and dirty version of this argument is to simply say that this doesn’t apply to foreigners, because they are loyal to another country and another set of laws, so they aren’t subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S.

The quick and dirty version of this argument is also very stupid, but yes, I have met people who make precisely that argument, as stated above, and without adding anything else to the argument.

Anyway, the quick and dirty response to the quick and dirty version of this argument is to point out that foreign nationals, undocumented immigrants, modern secessionists, and full-on fugitives from the law are all subject to U.S. law whether they like it or not. If that’s just a matter of opinion, it’s an opinion likely shared by those with the power to make it so.

***

The quick and dirtier argument is that the 14th Amendment was written to protect the freedman from Jim Crow laws passed in the wake of the civil war. — You know what, let’s all just take a moment here to appreciate the fact that those now reminding us of this fact as a means of denying citizenship to Latinos contain a lot of the same neo-Confederates whose sympathies clearly aren’t with those recently freed slaves anyway, …or their descendants. The 14th Amendment has always been a great big thorn in the side of the bigots who want to resurrect the old South. There is a clear pattern here, and it sure as Hell isn’t defined by careful attention to historical facts and details of Constitutional law. — Anyway, the point in this quick and dirtier version of the argument against birthright citizenship is that the law was always mean to protect a specific class of people, newly freed slaves, and that our nation’s present habit of applying it to just about anyone born in our country extends the application of that law beyond its original purpose.

And here, history gobbles up law. Context eats text, and the whole nation let’s out a big fat bigoted burp in celebration.

…if Donnie and the deplorables get their way anyway.

The problem here is that the context doesn’t in itself elucidate the text, it just gobbles it up. (Yep, I’m sticking with that imagery.) If you go back up and read the text above, it simply doesn’t say; “Hey southerners, black people are citizens, so stop treating them like shit!” No, it doesn’t. Instead, it presents us with a perfectly general principle, and that principle is not limited in scope to the specific historical context in which it was written. Those who wrote it could well have defined its scope more narrowly if they wanted to. They didn’t.

Far from helping us to understand the meaning of the text, this pseudo-historicism invites us to ignore the text on account of an historical factoid.

Neo-confederates iz the cwaziest peopowz!

So, the quick and dirtier argument is also stupid, but I really must insist, I have met people who have made precisely this argument, without adding anything else to it. It’s unimpressive. It really isn’t all that clear that Donald Trump or the vast majority of his supporters have anything more going for them than this simple sleight-of-hand gimmick, not withstanding that we can all see them palming the cards even as they congratulate themselves on a winning hand.

***

But is there more to it?

Yeah, well, kinda. If you aren’t too particular, there is an argument to be made that goes a little beyond this kind of idiocy. It takes us back to the clause “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Some folks would have us believe that there is specific reason to think this clause was not intended by those who wrote it, debated it, and voted on it to apply to foreign nationals. If that’s the case, they maintain, the children of those nationals would not be made citizens by simple birth here in the U.S.

What is that reason?

Well it isn’t a question of legal versus illegal immigration, because America wasn’t really trying to control immigration at that point in our history. So, don’t let any deplorables take you down that dumb-ass dead-end either.

No, the argument rests on the possibility that the framers, so to speak, of the Fourteenth Amendment specifically said that its protections did not apply to non-nationals. If we can find people involved in writing the law who said it shouldn’t apply to foreign nationals, so the argument goes, then we should assume that the phrase invoking jurisdiction was always meant to exclude them. The Supreme Court has already ruled that children of legal immigrants are entitled to birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment, and no doubt the anti-birthers consider that a mistake, but more importantly, they will insist the court has never applied this standard to the children of illegal immigrants.

…which once again, is a distinction that wasn’t made when the 14th Amendment was drafted and ratified.

That really should be QED right there, but these are strange days indeed, so I guess we’ll have to go a couple extra rounds on the topic.

***

One of the most idiotic versions of this argument comes from a misquoting of the principle author of the 14th Amendment Senator Jacob Howard who stated:

…[E]very person born within the limits of the United State, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the government of the United States, but will include every other class of person

Those using this passage to argue against birthright citizenship typically make one minor alteration the text. They add an ‘or’ before the clause saying “who belong to the families of ambassadors…” This transforms the original text, taking what is in effect an elaboration on a single concept and makes it something of a list. The ambassadors become one more class of people in addition to aliens, whereas the original text is simply spelling out the same concept with a variety of different phrases. Michael Anton, a former aid in the Trump administration pulled this stunt. He still insists that the ‘or’ just spells out the actual intent better for the audience. He is lying of course.

Yes, lying.

***

The argument isn’t always made on such disingenuous grounds. Not surprisingly, the Congressional debates over the 14th Amendment contain an extensive discussion of the range of people covered under the provision. There were many questions about how this might or might not apply to Indians, and in particular to Indians who retained connections to their own tribal communities. There were questions about how it might apply to Chinese immigrants and gypsies, etc.

Far from a clear concept, citizenship itself emerges as a tangled mess of a idea in these discussions. One gets a general sense that while many of the participants assumed that anyone in the United States was entitled to the legal protections in the Bill of Rights (which puts them at odds with much of the right wing today), they also recognized that the right to vote among other things was in fact limited to people who were not loyal to a foreign nation. They also distinguished the basic rights that might go with simply living in America from the right to hold property and/or the obligation to serve in the military if drafted, and all of this was discussed under the banner of ‘citizenship’. One gets the impression that those debating the 14th Amendment weren’t all that certain as to just what citizenship entailed. A few had definite opinions to be sure, but as a group, they are not all on the same page.

***

The whole issue is further complicated by the precedent set by the Civil Rights Act of 1866 which contains explicit language excluding those loyal to a different nation, and an assumption by some participants that the 14th Amendment really does the same thing. In effect, people looking at two different documents containing very different language seemed to treat them as though they meant the same thing.

…which is a problem.

Here is the relevant text from the Civil Rights Act with the relevant section in bold:

To protect all Persons in the United States in their Civil Rights, and furnish the Means of their Vindication

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

That all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens, of every race and color, without regard to any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall have the same right, in every State and Territory in the United States, to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens, and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, and penalties, and to none other, any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, to the contrary notwithstanding.

You can see that this doesn’t match the text of the 14th Amendment. Simply put; those who now assume that the 14th Amendment was always intended to exclude children of foreign nationals born in the United States would be right if they were talking about the Civil Rights Act. When talking about the 14th Amendment, however, they are talking about a very different text, and the relevant clause is simply lacking. Instead, such people must look for commentary from supporters in the Congressional record or some source of comparable value.

***

When they aren’t deliberately misrepresenting Jacob Howard, opponents of birthright citizenship usually reference Sen. Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, who maintains in the Congressional Record that the passage only applies to ‘complete’ citizens of the U.S. and goes on to argue that Navajos, for example are not complete citizens because, being still separate in some sense from the rest of the  U.S., they do not vote and maintain their own separate jurisdiction.

(Don’t get your hopes up, racists! This fact has changed.)

Of course one problem with the Navajo example is that it applies to people who actively maintain a separate jurisdiction within the U.S., thus being yet another instance of the degree to which the legal framework for Indian tribes emerges haphazardly within the case history of the Supreme Court. The role that Indian tribal governments play in the legal framework of the United States has never been clear, and that has always complicated the rights of the nation’s indigenous peoples. So, the example is troublesome, to say the least.That said, the example is hardly beside the point. A good portion of the discussion about exemptions to the jurisdiction of the U.S. is driven by the very explicit question of whether or not it would make the entire native population into citizens. Those using comments about that debate are in fact exploiting the vagaries of of Federal Indian law to generalize an exemption from citizenship for non-nationals.

Yes, that’s right. People who want to keep Latinos from becoming American citizens are trying to remind us that the 14th Amendment was only supposed to protect blacks (another group these bigots are not too fond of), and they are resting their argument on efforts to keep Native Americans from voting.

Irony abounds. At last it would, if it weren’t dead already.

***

How Trumbuell’s point relates to the children of foreign nationals is another question. But if we take Trumbull’s claims in terms of the most general implications possible, the notion here is that full citizenship includes those who can vote and who re subject to the draft, etc., not those who, while entitled to protections of citizens, remain separate from the general population. Again, he is talking about the members Indian tribes, and again, this sense of the issue would match the text of the Civil Right Act; it does not match the text of the 14th Amendment.

The distinction between full citizenship and something slightly less did not escape these people; it is all over their discussion, and yet they did not write it into the text of the 14th Amendment. So, what do Trumbull’s comments amount to? Likely as not, a degree of confusion on his part, but those who use him to suggest a new reading of the 14th Amendment do more to show us that people don’t always understand the rules they advocate than they do to show us that the rule in question was clearly meant to exclude the children of foreign nationals.

***

This is one of the big problems with Constitutional originalism; its advocates continually present us with a case for following the rules as America’s founders (or at least those framing particular laws and constitutional provisions) would have understood them, but the understanding of such people is often as shifty as that of anyone we know today. This is one of the reasons we write things down folks; to fix what we mean in a static form, so that you can’t just keep changing your mind. Constitutional originalism effectively enables modern legal scholars to take that fixity out of the equation and cherry pick the past for the most convenient quotes possible. In this case it substitutes a general sense of how some proponents of the 14th Amendment might have understood it at the time (at least when debating the rights of Indian peoples), for the language of the text itself. When the language contradicts its interpretation by their preferred historical sources, they urge us to go with the sources instead of the text.

In effect, those reading birthright citizenship out of the 14th Amendment seek to see the text of the amendment itself swallowed up in a historical narrative. That this narrative itself is quite debatable is an objection in itself, but as a contextualization strategy for reading the 14th Amendment, it is utter bullshit.

This is a version of context suitable for Halloween, because this kind of context swallows up the very text it is intended to shed light on. No, these people aren’t upholding great constitutional principles, no matter how much they would wish we believed that; they are simply weaponizing obscure historical details, and they are doing so for the clear purpose of hurting some of the most powerless people on U.S. soil, the children of undocumented immigrants.

Of course the central irony here is that those pushing a reading of the 14th Amendment that excludes birthright citizenship are not acting in the spirit of the provision in any sense. Whatever else may be said of the 14th Amendment, it was certainly meant to protect people badly in need of help from the violence of racists intent on oppressing them. Historical obfuscation aside, those pushing this narrative today are seeking to empower racists Hell-bent on scapegoating immigrants from Latin America for our nations many problems. As much as these people may tell stories of standing up to great bastions of power and fighting a liberal establishment, these people really are punching down. They are punching down with a vengeance, and summoning a vision of historical context well suited to that purpose. Their argument fails as a point of principle. As a political agenda, it’s monstrous.

…and as far as Halloween monsters go, this one is pretty lame.

Kavanaugh, Young and Old

01 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by in atheism, Justice, Politics, Religion

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

270px-Brett_Kavanaugh_Yale_Yearbook_(cropped)330px-Judge_Brett_Kavanaugh

Is it still hypocrisy if your contradictions are separated from one another by decades of your own life? If a moment of ‘yes’ and another moment of ‘no’ have enough time between them, does that mean your off the hook for the difference between them? Could life changing decisions be sufficient to ensue the past doesn’t count against the present? Might someone be excused for having it both ways if they do so in very different chapters of their own biography? Alternatively, supposing time and transformation could be enough to excuse great inconsistencies, might other matters prove sufficient to counteract them? Is it at least possible that time makes the difference in some instances and not others?

It’s common enough to hold moral contradictions against people; it’s also common enough to excuse them when the contradictions can be explained as a clear change of heart. But what if that change is a little too pat? What if it follows a course that’s just a little too obvious?

I am of course thinking about Brett Kavanaugh.

Again.

Watching Brett Kavanaugh struggle to explain his conduct in high school to an audience tasked with judging his fitness for office, I couldn’t help thinking about this very question. If his appointment is confirmed, Kavanaugh will take his place among the many conservative Catholics to hold a position on the Supreme Court of the United States. He will take his place in a judicial voting block that has consistently re-enforced the authority of the state over moral and spiritual matters and the role of Christianity in defining that authority. We can expect him to minimize gay rights and to hammer the final nail in the coffin for women’s reproductive rights as we know them today. If Kavanaugh takes a seat on that court, this will happen regardless of any transformations coming to Congress, even regardless of any possible changes in the White House. This man is poised to impose the moral order of a conservative Christian world view on us all, all of which makes it more than a little ironic to see Kavanaugh sitting there trying to explain the sins of his youth, the very sins he was once proud to proclaim.

I really do wonder what the teenage Kavanaugh would make of the old man now denying all the sexual conquests he was so proud to put in his yearbook?

To say that Kavanaugh partied a lot is to completely miss the point. His high school yearbook alone gives us plenty of evidence that Kavanaugh didn’t just drink and have sex, but that he approached these activities in terms of a toxic masculinity all-too pervasive in some circles. Kavanaugh may have told the world that he refrained some sex until well after high school, but in his yearbook, he wanted the world to know that he’d gotten laid. The story he told in that yearbook didn’t merely recount a sexual encounter, it did so in a manner degrading to the young woman in question. This isn’t merely the excess of a boy enjoying his own life; it’s the cruelty of a young man for whom at least a part of that joy seems to have come from his ability to hurt others, to dominate them.

The problem is plain enough. This is a man who will assert moral authority over our own lives. Make no mistake, that is what he has been put foreword to do! He will assert this authority amidst a number of important questions about his own personal morality.

At least one important defense of Kavanaugh’s character has been the notion that this occurred so long ago that it just isn’t relevant now. Is it really fair, his defenders ask, to impose consequences on the career of a man for things he did so many years ago? There is of course a trace of irony here in that Kavanaugh will almost certainly use the power of the Supreme Court to impose consequences well into the distant future on women for things they’ve done (or in some cases, things done to them) early in life. That’s a problem for Kavanaugh and those who support him. One of many.

The question I mean to raise here is this; is really a clean break here?

If Kavanaugh really had made a clean break with his predatory past, (and let’s be clear, the conduct contained in the yearbook alone is sufficiently predatory in itself to raise questions about his character), …if Kavanaugh really had made such a clean break with his past, then I for one would expect a more honest account for it in the present. When Kavanaugh pretends that his reference to Renate Alumnus was a gesture of respect (a gesture that neither he nor his buddies bothered to convey directly to her), he is lying. When Kavanaugh pretended the notion that this was a reference to sexual conquest is all in the minds of left-wing critics, he dismisses her own reaction to those very words. When he suggested this was all in the imagination of sick critics on the left, he implicated her own reaction to his words. He blamed her too for getting the actual point of his yearbook entry. In effect, Kavanaugh’s testimony in the hearing last Thursday carries foreword the very cruelty that put those words in his yearbook to begin with. When Kavanaugh feigns disgust at the imagination of senators questioning him about the meaning of this and other comments in his yearbook, Kavanaugh shows us that he isn’t at all prepared to own up to the man he once was. Which is one very good reason to question the notion that he is now someone very different.

A different man wouldn’t be afraid to own up to the actions of a childish former self, but a man still caught up in that very childish mindset might.

Of course we can see already ties to the Kavanaugh we see today in the one that wrote all those things in his yearbook. That wasn’t just a young man looking to have fun; that was a rich kid and a star athlete who attended Georgetown Prep, and who would later attend Yale as a legacy student. This kid had a Hell of a head-start in the world and he knew it. You can’t tell me the kid then sowing his oats and bragging about it in his yearbook didn’t have some sense of the future that lay before him, some sense of the role that his faith would play in that future and the potential power that lay within his grasp. Kavanaugh was going places, and his role in the Catholic Church would play a strong role in getting him to those places.

If Kavanaugh really did go to church back in 1982, as he assured us all during the hearing he did, he doesn’t seem to have made much of an effort to live the life envisioned in that church. Still, he had the good sense not to burn his bridges. That faith would serve him well one day, even if he wasn’t all that worried about it while working his way through those 100 kegs he also bragged about.

I can’t say how much of this Kavanaugh consciously thought out, but it’s an awfully common story-line. It’s taken for granted at some ages that some people will not live the life of the faith they profess, and that others won’t expect them to. It’s taken for granted that some people needn’t show common decency to others, let alone great piety, but that doesn’t stop them from endorsing either virtue when doing so won’t obligate them in any real manner. The day sometimes comes when such folks put away their excesses and take up a more conventional role in society, perhaps even a powerful one. In Kavanaugh’s case, this has meant (and will continue to mean) that he will enforce the terms of his own faith on others. It would be easy enough to say that he simply changed; decent enough to say that we should give him the benefit of the doubt as to the matter. And yet, the story remains just a little too pat. A little too convenient.

…and the inconsistently just a little too meaningful.

It would be one thing if the difference between the teenage version of Kavanaugh and the middle-aged man of today held no common thread between them. But is it really that hard to see in a boy who regards a sexual encounter as cause to humiliate the woman he had it with and one who would tell women everywhere that they must simply live with the consequences of their own sexual activity? Is it really that hard to see the connection between a young man for whom an accident of his birth played a key role in his education and one who would insist we should end affirmative action out of concerns over its fairness? Is it really too hard to see in a young man who brags up his party-life the same sense of entitlement shown in an older man who would lie to Congress about his role in the Bush administration or refuse to answer the questions of the opposition party at his most recent hearing? Is it so hard to see the sense of untouchable self-worth in both actions?

Kavanaugh may not be the party boy of his of yearbook, but his sense of his own power doesn’t seem to have much changed. He is still an elitist, and he is still happy to impose his will on others. If conventional (Catholic) morality now guides his actions more than it did back in his high school days, that morality is also now far more critical to the power he would wield over others. What Kavanaugh might once have taken through his own physical strength, he now takes by right of high office and pretense of moral purpose.

In the end, this isn’t even a story about hypocrisy; it is a story about a life blessed with privilege, and a man fully prepared to abuse it.

***

Both pictures were taken from the Wikopeadia page on Kavanaugh, 10/1/18:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett_Kavanaugh

Just Say ‘No’ to Kavanaugh!

28 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by in Justice, Politics

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

X1rEUuwxIs Brett Kavanaugh guilty of sexual assault?

I don’t know.

I just watched an entire day of Senate Testimony on that very topic and I still don’t know one way or the other.

Should Brett Kavanaugh be on the U.S. Supreme Court?

No.

If ever I had any doubts as to that judgement, today’s testimony was certainly enough to alleviate them. Of course, the man is a real threat to liberal politics, and I knew that before today. With a Republican President (even a complete lunatic of a Republican President), I would expect no less. But being opposed to someone’s politics, and thinking them unqualified for office aren’t exactly the same thing. After watching him today, however, I am convinced this man has neither the character nor the professionalism that one ought to expect of a Supreme Court Justice, regardless of his political persuasion.

Why?

Well, let me tell ya!

First, let me say that there are a couple variants of political hard-ball to which I do not really object, at least not on principle. Frankly, I think the Democrats would be well within their rights to reject any and all nominees the Trump administration puts forward at this point. The Republican Party made it damned clear that they weren’t going to work with Democrats when Barack Obama was in power, and I see no reason why the Democrats should be any more accommodating now that the Republicans dominate every branch of government. With a Supreme Court already tilted far to the right, this next appointment could well close quite a few doors for liberals and even moderates well into the foreseeable future. So, if Democrats want to fight about it, I’m on board to support them. Their prospects for victory are another question. What tactics are permissible, or even practical? That too is another question.

So, if the Democrats had wanted to just say ‘no’ and stick with that without even providing an argument on the merits of this particular nominee, that would be fine by me. The problem is of course, that they don’t presently have the numbers to win such a battle. The Republicans will beat them in a vote, and there is only so much you can do with procedural gambits. Even the filibuster will only accomplish just so much these days.

So, what’s to stop the Republicans from just ramming the whole nomination through? Apparently nothing. And why not? I may not like it. Other liberals may not like it. By I’m not sure they owe us any real seat at the table. As I mentioned, I think it’s Republicans that broke the goodwill necessary to negotiate these things in good faith, but the fact is that no such good faith exists at this time. Republicans and Democrats are no longer simply parties likely to disagree; they are enemies Hell-bent on each others’ destruction. There is no use crying about it or pretending otherwise. The bottom line is neither side here can be expected to make any effort to work with the other. Democrats were bound to say ‘Hell no’ going into this, and Republicans were bound to say “go fuck yourselves!” Anyone who was surprised by the vicious nature of this process has not been paying attention.

Our country is broken, folks. That’s a fact.

So how did things stand going into this? Right wingers assure us that Kavanaugh is an upstanding jurist with impeccable credentials. Having spent the last decade as a circuit court Judge, Kavanaugh is certainly qualified to handle important questions of constitutional law. Critics point to history of political extremism, much of it stemming from his work on the Starr investigation and later in the Bush administration. Kavanaugh may be an accomplished Judge, but he is also a judge with a history of highly partisan brinksmanship behind him.

One of the more serious (and odd) questions about Kavanaugh’s fitness to serve as a judge stems from his purchase of baseball tickets which led him to amass anywhere from $60,000-$200,000 in debt, which was paid off quite suddenly and without any clear explanation as to how. (It’s not likely the money could have come from his own salary.) That’s hardly enough evidence to convict the man of a crime, but it’s certainly cause for concern about the ability of a judge to do his job without undue influence by outside parties.

…outside creditors?

Perhaps the most serious questions about Kavanaugh’s professional conduct stem from the 2004 and 2006 confirmation hearings in which critics allege Kavanaugh misled the Senate on his role in the hiring process for several parties, and in the adoption of warrantless wiretapping procedures after 9-11. In the confirmation hearings of the time, Kavanaugh adopted the practice is answering questions about his involvement in these politically touchy matters with hedging statements about whether or not he ‘handled’ a case or took a lead role, etc. He may or may not have maintained this word-game consistently throughout the process, but it certainly had the effect of misleading the Senate into the impression the he played little or no role in decisions over which subsequent revelations have shown clear involvement on his part.  Whether or not this amounts to perjury, depends on who you ask. However you might answer that question, it certainly reveals a pattern of deceitful conduct in the confirmation process, and that alone could be a deal breaker for some folks thinking about his present nomination.

It should be.

And then there are the allegations of sexual misconduct.

Pardon me, predatory sexual misconduct.

It’s important to remember that Kavanaugh is not merely accused of doing something sexually inappropriate; he is accused to doing so against the will of the women involved. Whether or not there is any evidence to support these accusations, it is important to recognize the gravity of the accusations themselves. Kavanaugh is accused to consciously and willfully hurting the women in question, not merely getting fresh, but of taking steps to thwart their efforts to fend him off. That’s not just inappropriate; its predatory.

For purposes of brevity (lost hope that that is) I shall stick with the one accusation at issue in today’s hearings. This accusation comes from Christine Blasey Ford, who maintains that Kavanaugh and a friend, Mark Judge, pulled her into a room during a party back in high school, closed and locked the door, and sexually assaulted her. (More detail is just a google away.)

Many find Ford’s accusation in itself troublesome, partly because of the length of time between the event in question and the moment at which she went public, and partly because Senator Diane Feinstein had been aware of it for sometime before presenting it to the committee reviewing Kavanaugh’s nomination. Why did Feinstein wait so long? Many feel it was because this is an obvious ploy to delay the Senate’s confirmation vote. She maintains that Ford had asked her to keep the accusation confidential until the late date. So, which is it? Both is certainly an option. As to the length of time it took Ford to come forward, this does put a Hell of a strain on the effort to establish the facts of the case. Nevethertheless efforts to cast this delay as obvious proof that Ford is lying fall flat. Far from unusual, such delays are common among subject to sexual abuse. They often face serious backlash and stigma, and the accused often go unpunished. Not surprisingly, such victims often try to live with it themselves. This sort of thing may throw a wrench in the conceits of critical thinker hoping to sort the whole matter out with an honest debate, but it remains the task of committees like this to do their best.

It is worth bearing in mind that this is not a criminal trial. Kavanaugh will not go to prison on account of today’s events, but he might lose a job over it (maybe two). The question here is not whether or not he has been proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Quite the contrary; it is whether or not the Senate can say with confidence that he belongs on the highest court in the land.

Watching today’s hearing, I saw little in the way of objective evidence telling us whether or not Kavanaugh did the things Ford said he did. There are several angles that could be taken to find out more, one of them of course being the possibility of asking the FBI to investigate the charges. Other options may exist, to be sure, but that is one with a degree of promise, not because the FBI will make any decisions on the matter, but because they can help to sort out many of the details at issue in the case. In any event, that would take some time. How much time, nobody can say, but it’s a fair bet they wouldn’t have a decision ready by tomorrow, which is when the Senate plans to vote on the matter. In the interim, there just isn’t much factual information to go on, certainly none that points conclusively one way or another.

This is certainly a problem. It may even be a problem for which Ford and/or Feinstein bear some responsibility. Were this a criminal trial, it would probably be enough of a problem to get the whole case tossed out, but this is not a trial, it is a political decision, and that decision is about whether or not Kavanaugh is worthy of a seat on the court.

Luckily, today’s proceedings did give us plenty of information to help answer that question. Simply put, Kavanaugh’s approach to the hearing was beyond reprehensible. No, I am not talking about his anger. It might be fair to suggest a nominee for such a high position ought to be more composed than he was, but I think the nature of the accusations make an emotional response understandable. There may even have been an element of an conscious choice to it, one perhaps urged by the idiots currently occupying the White House. Still, I think it best to give Kavanaugh the benefit of the doubt as to his emotions. No. What bothers me isn’t his combativeness it’s the pattern of deceit he revealed in his answers to the Democratic Senators.

First, there is the whole matter of whether or not Kavanaugh would support asking the FBI to investigate the case. Asked this question repeatedly, Kavanaugh dodged it every time. He blamed the Democrats for delaying the investigation themselves. He lectured people on the limits of such an investigation as if literally every person in the room and a good number of us watching on television didn’t already know those limitations. He tried all manner of ways to explain why such a request might not be necessary. What he didn’t do, couldn’t bring himself to do, was simply answer the question. Hell, I could have done it for him; “No sir. I want this over. The vote is scheduled for tomorrow, and I want this concluded at that time. Full stop.” …I really think that was the answer (unless the real answer had something to do with fears of what the FBI could find). However he might have explained his response, Kavanaugh’s failure to answer a simple yes or no question is a index of insincerity.

Kavanaugh’s refusal to support inclusion of Mark Judge directly in the hearings was similarly evasive. Kavanaugh kept telling us that Judge had already spoken on the matter, but a simple question from Leahy very quickly demonstrated the value of questioning Judge directly in a hearing. Neither Kavanaugh, nor the Republican Senators ever acknowledged this fact, and their excuses grew increasingly disingenuous over the course of the hearing.

Kavanaugh was also asked to explain several comments in his High School, yearbook. Here is a copy of the text as produced by Vox.com (the relevant quotes are in red):

Varsity Football 3, 4; J. V. Football 2; Freshman Football 1; Varsity Basketball 3, 4 (Captain); Frosh Basketball (Captain); J. V. Basketball (Captain); Varsity Spring Track 3; Little Hoya 3, 4*** Landon Rocks and Bowling Alley Assault — What a Night; Georgetown vs. Louisville — Who Won That Game Anyway?; Extinguisher; Summer of ‘82 — Total Spins (Rehobeth 10, 9…); Orioles vs. Red Sox — Who Won, Anyway?; Keg City Club (Treasurer) — 100 Kegs or Bust; [redacted] — I Survived the FFFFFFFourth of July; Renate Alumnius; Malibu Fan Club; Ow, Neatness 2, 3; Devil’s Triangle; Down Geezer, Easy, Spike, How ya’ doin’, Errr Ah; Rehobeth Police Fan Club (with Shorty); St. Michael’s…This is a Whack; [redacted] Fan Club; Judge — Have You Boofed Yet?; Beach Week Ralph Club — Biggest Contributor; [redacted] — Tainted Whack; [redacted]; Beach Week 3-107th Street; Those Prep Guys are the Biggest…; GONZAGA YOU’RE LUCKY.

Michael Avenatti suggests that the FFFFFFourth reference is slang for “Find them, French them, Feel them, Finger them, F*ck them, Forget them.”

Others have suggested that the Devil’s Triangle was a reference to sex involving two boys and a girl.

Some have suggested that boofing is either sex in general or anal sex in particular.

According to Kavanaugh, the first was a joke about the way a friend pronounced the F-word, the second is a drinking game like quarters, and the third refers to farting. If Kavanaugh is telling the truth, these comments might be crude, but they are essentially consistent with his own self-presentation as a man who retained his virginity for several years after high school. If he is wrong, then these are lies, as is his earlier effort to present himself as a virgin at the time this was published.

More importantly, Kavanaugh’s response to the phrase “Renate Alumnius” suggests genuine malice. In today’s hearing, he suggested that this was merely a way to show that he and his classmates wanted to include a young lady, Renate Schroeder (now Renate Schroeder Dolphin) from a nearby school in their yearbook. In was not, he stated, a reference to sexual conquest as others have suggested. The problem is that she herself was unaware of these comments made by Kavanaugh and several of his male classmates. If the point was to include her, they forgot the most important part, which was actually talking about it with her. Still more to the point, when she herself learned about this, Renate was angry (even withdrawing her name from the list of 65 women supporting his character in the wake of Ford’s accusations). When Senator Blumenthal asked Kavanaugh about Dolphin’s reaction in today’s hearing, Kavanaugh feigned outrage, suggesting that Blumenthal was inappropriately sexualizing the comment.

That Dolphin herself interpreted the comment in question to be a sexual reference is clear enough from her own comments on the matter, but Kavanaugh pretends the implication has been fabricated by others. And thus he projects his own thinking in the yearbook onto those trying to call him out for it.

If the other denials are lies, Kavanaugh’s response to questions about Renate Dolphin amount to gaslighting.

Then of course, there is Kavanaugh’s repeated claims that all four people who were supposedly present at the party in Ford’s accusation have said it didn’t happen. At some point in the hearing, Kavanaugh was content to suggest that they didn’t remember it, which would be accurate, but by the end of the hearing, he kept telling everyone that the others had said it didn’t happen. ‘That didn’t happen’ and ‘I don’t remember it’ are not the same thing. There is a world of difference between those two claims, and I for one would expect anyone on the United States Supreme Court to know the difference between them. If this was a conscious deceit, then it was one worthy of a slow-witted sophomore; it isn’t a gambit worthy of an accomplished judge.

So there it is!

This is an awful lot of deceit for someone looking to be named a judge for life, let alone a justice on the highest court of the land. In the heat of the arguments, questions about these claims might have seemed a little suspicious, but upon reflection, they become a lot more important. Like Kavanaugh’s comments in his 2004 and 2006 confirmation hearings, his responses demonstrate a consistent effort to mislead the Senate regarding the matters at hand. Some of these deceits simply aren’t even necessary, or at least they wouldn’t have been if Kavanaugh hadn’t committed himself to a certain narrative about his sexual history. Whatever his reasons for producing them, these lies tell us a great deal about Kavanaugh’s character and his approach to legal matters.

Contrast this with Christine Blasey Ford, who conducted herself admirably throughout the hearing. She too had trouble handling her emotions, but she sure as Hell did a better job of it than Kavanaugh. Rachel Mitchel, the prosecutor who questioned Ford in this hearing brought out some inconsistencies in Ford’s overall story (her fear of flying, for example), but none of these proved central to the claims at hand. Significantly, Ford answered the questions in a straight-forward manner, conceded points and even corrected errors herself. We can say of Ford that she doesn’t have a lot of evidence proving that her accusations are true. What we can’t say of Ford is that she lied her way through the hearing.  Kavanaugh definitely did. So, if I have nothing else to go on than the credibility of the two people in question, then I know damned well which one to go with. Simply put, Ford proved herself to be a more trustworthy witness.

Would I want to see a man locked up with so little to go on?

No.

Am I comfortable denying someone a seat on the Supreme Court on that basis alone.

Hell yes!

At the end of the day, this confirmation hearing still leaves us with an image of a political process so broken it taints everyone who touches it. Today’s hearing was a disaster. Something about America just doesn’t work anymore, and this hearing (like the other disaster unfolding in the White House) is just one symptom of it. But if we Americans really must charge right off a cliff, as we seem to be doing these days, then let us do it without this particular judge!

Kavanaugh does not belong on the Supreme Court. He doesn’t belong on a Circuit Court Either.

 

 

Also Not a Contest: Slavery

29 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by in History, Justice, Politics

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

It’s always been odd to me, seeing how the history of American slavery makes some of my fellow white people uncomfortable. You can see their discomfort in the various ways folks try to minimize the significance of slavery. Sometimes, it’s enough to put slavery in the past, to grant that it was an horrible crime, but to imagine that crime taking place so far in the remote past and so completely resolved with the official end of slavery in that remote past as to be completely free of any political implications today. It’s a bit like the gambit, folks often play with the history of Indian-white relations – all the horrors of the past can be acknowledged, at least in the abstract, so long as you can contain their significance within the history books (and preferably kept well away from any of the more recent chapters). At other times, folks seem to come up with more elaborate schemes to pare down the topic of slavery until it fits into their personal comfort zones.

When I was in college, this kind of pop-racism generally took the form of an argument that Africans started slavery. They did it too, maybe even first, so the argument would go, and of course there was (and is) an element of truth to these claims, but it’s a truth poorly served by its rhetorical packaging. It would be fair to say that slavery existed in Africa (as it did Europe, and indeed most of the world) prior to the founding of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Just how much those prior-forms of slavery explain the booming industry that would come is another question. All too often I used to hear people pushing this narrative and think they wanted far too much from the point than it would bear. What they wanted was a kind of absolution, a story that diminished the responsibility of Euro-American peoples for the tragedy of the slave trade. At the very least, they wanted to share the blame with some other groups.

And I always wondered why some of these people seemed to feel personally implicated in the matter? What do you get out of this, I would find myself asking? How does it help you if this story goes to the discredit of someone else’s ancestors? The answer, I think, is (predictably enough) racism. For those who see the world through the lens of race, the disgrace of their ancestors is a disgrace to them personally, and a case against the moral character of their own kind is a direct personal attack. I think this is also the key to common refrains about ‘white guilt’ and ‘liberal guilt’. I’ve never seen liberal politics as an expression of personal shame, but I do think some of our critics are incapable of seeing liberal politics in any other terms.  Such people cannot right the wrongs of the past or work to overcome inequalities in the present; they must instead demolish their own consciousness of those wrongs and rationalize any inequalities they see in the present. It’s the just world hypothesis at work in a racist mind.

In recent years, the pop-racist response to the history of American slavery seems to have evolved a bit. The latest trend seems to be countering stories about the enslavement of Africans with those about the enslavement of Irish men and women, but I should say the trend isn’t even that focused. Time and again you can see people show up with stories about Irish slavery in response to contemporary concerns about African-Americans. Write a blog post or tweet a quick message about police abuse of African-Americans in the present-day and somebody may well just show up to tell you about the history of Irish slavery. It’s as if the prospect of Irish slavery isn’t just a stock answer to any questions about the enslavement of Africans; some folks find it useful as an answer to questions about literally any injustice experienced by African-Americans today. Once again, there is a grain of truth to the narrative, and once again, those producing it clearly want more from the story than the facts of the matter will furnish them.

What proponents of the Irish slavery narratives are talking about is the practice of sending Irish men and women to the Americas under terms imposing temporary servitude upon them. Most of these were indentured servants who agreed to a term of service in exchange for passage, but at least some were prisoners whose terms of service were imposed upon them as a means of punishment.

Okay, so we know all this.

There was a time when perfectly liberal college professors were happy to spell out the horrible conditions of indentured servitude, along with the abuse of Irish in this and other contexts. I used to work with a professor who made quite a point to ensure students learned just how terribly indentured servants could be treated. None of this was part of a racist agenda, and none of it was leveraged against the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Far from fielding a rationale for minimizing the horrors of that slave trade, this was like the opening chapter of a long sequence on the horrors of the full slave trade that would come. Acknowledging both horrors (and many others) used to work just fine.

But that was then, this is now.

What is new? On the surface, what is new here is the use of the word ‘slavery’ to describe what was done to the Irish, but here as always the devil resides in the details. No, I am not linking to any of this literature, but proponents of the Irish slave narrative have worked hard to embellish every embelishible point; inflating numbers, adding stories about the defilement of white women forced to breed with African men, and of course complaining that liberals have hidden the trials of the Irish while pushing the trans-Atlantic narrative in order to keep African-Americans at the forefront of identity politics. With support from racist corners of the internet, some maintain the Irish story is greater in all respects. Who would deny it? Only a liberal, right?

Okay, I deny it.

More importantly, so do vast majority of historians doing work on the subject. Scholars have questioned many of the details put forward in the Irish slave narrative, but the central theme seems to be this, that at its heart, the Irish story really is a story about indentured servitude. Indentured servitude was by no means a benign institution, but it simply isn’t comparable to the chattel slavery associated with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Most simply would not use the term ‘slavery’ at all to describe indentured servitude, even when it is imposed as a criminal sanction. And of course a good deal of the push-back of these narratives consists of efforts to unmask the clearly racist agendas of key proponents. This isn’t just a mistake, it’s a mistake a lot of committed white racists want people to make.

…which leaves me feeling all somehow.

I’m happy as Hell to see the comparison between indentured servitude and the trans-Atlantic slave trade shredded, and then shredded again. What does somewhat concern me is the equation of ‘slavery’ with the specific form of chattel slavery that took place in the trans-Atlantic trade. Simply put, we do commonly use the word ‘slavery’ in contexts that do not compare in the numbers or the horrors of that specific history. History books often speak of slaves in ancient civilizations many of which fell into that status through financial ruin, or debt. The literature on Indian-white relations is full of stories of ‘slaves’ captured and trade about through raiding practices, and of course the Spanish systems of the encomienda were never described as slavery. When in 1850 California passed a law enabling others to press California Natives into forced labor, that law was actually written up as if it were meant to protect those very Natives. And of course the system of debt peonage found in the post-war south (among many other places) could in practice pass for slavery.

Hell, that was often the point!

…to say nothing of the use of prison systems for purposes of reducing free blacks to forced laborers under the pretext of punishment for crimes, real or imagined.

The subject of slavery has always been broader than the specific history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. We should not allow malicious people to equate every instance of forced labor with the scale of atrocity behind that trade, but neither should we restrict our own use of the word ‘slavery’ to that very trade. Abusive labor practices shade easily into forced labor, and once that threshold is crossed, real atrocities become much easier.

What specifically doesn’t work about Irish slave narratives is the direct comparison with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It doesn’t match the scale of atrocity in that trade, either in numbers, or in the quality of treatment for the majority of those involved. This doesn’t mean that indentured servants, Irish or otherwise, were treated well, and it certainly doesn’t mean that people captured or pressed into forced labor in other times and places shouldn’t be a concern. What it does mean is that we shouldn’t let people use the suffering of their own ancestors as a means of diverting attention from that of others.

 

Killers of the Flower Moon: A Book Review

05 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by in Books, History, Justice, Narrative VIolence, Native American Themes

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

Regarding his own documentary work, Joshua Oppenheimer once wrote of modern Indonesia; “…I felt I’d wandered into Germany 40 years after the holocaust, only to find the Nazis still in power.” I thought about this line as I read Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann. It’s a different time and a different place, perhaps even a different scale of atrocity (at least if you are counting bodies), but each of these stories raised for me the same haunting thought; what must it be like to live one’s life among those that have murdered your loved ones. Oppenheimer’s movies, the Act of Killing and The Look of Silence are set in Indonesia nearly half a century after genocidal policies resulted in the loss of at least half a million lives. Grann’s work is set in Oklahoma, closer to a century century after a wave of killings struck the Osage community, leaving generations to wonder about what really happened? Both stories recount the details of gruesome murder, and both raise questions about life in the wake of atrocity.

I’m also reminded of Anna Rosmus, whose work on the resistance fighters of her hometown uncovered a sordid history of Nazi collaborators well hidden in the town’s oral narratives. She asked enough questions to draw up a violent response from those still tied to that history. I wouldn’t say this was Grann’s focus, but stories like the one he tells have a particularly reflexive quality. Murder on the scale of his story doesn’t rest neatly in past; it haunts the present.

SPOILER ALERTS!

This book is the story of a series of murders carried out in the Osage community of Oklahoma during the 1920s. Grann begins the story by concentrating on a little over 20 murders which would become the focus of an investigation by the FBI. As this was one of the first big cases to be carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the book provides insights into the early years of Hoover’s budding new empire. At the same time, the book helps to shed light on one of the darker chapters of Indian-White relations, the long slow looting of Native American communities by outsiders under the policies of General Allotment.

To grasp the events unfolding in this book, you must understand two things: the Osage community had come into control of vast oil fields, and many had been declared incompetent to manage their own estates. To resolve the second of these problems, various white businessmen had been named as trustees and put in charge of the private fortunes belonging to various Osage members. As individual Osage accumulated the proceeds of oil money. It seems that some people found the notion of wealthy natives rather objectionable (a theme often echoed today by those who resent Indian casinos). More importantly, a certain quantity of non-natives found ways of doing something about it, ways of acquiring that wealth for themselves.

At first, the killings seem a bit random, a pair of shootings here, a few mysterious illnesses there. Someone seemed to be killing off a number of Osage, but why? It didn’t help that the first couple investigators to get somewhere were themselves brutally murdered. It helped even less when a bomb was used to kill an Osage couple and their white servant living in the middle of town. Most of the victims knew each other. They had plenty of connections between them. But which ones were the key to the case?

In the end, it was the mysterious ‘wasting’ illnesses that seemed to provide the most representative cases. The medical science necessary to detect poison was not yet widely available, and it certainly wasn’t standard procedure to test for poison in the event of every death. In the midst of the prohibition era, moreover, it was easy enough to attribute poisoning to bad moonshine. So, poisoning could provide a very effective means of killing someone without raising too many suspicions. It was particularly useful for relatives, trustees, and other beneficiaries of life insurance or inheritance policies eager to acquire an Osage headright. Such killings were not only difficult to detect in the day, they are difficult to detect now in the historical record, but as Grann shows, Osage died at an extraordinarily high rate in the 1920s, a rate not fully explained by any other known factors. The FBI wrapped up an investigation of a little over 20 murders. If Grann is right, the number of Osage actually killed in this era is more likely in the hundreds.

Most were killed by relatives, or at least those who’d been hired by them.

I have to admit the specter of so many white marrying into the tribe making friends with Osage for the clear purpose of killing them fills me with a sense of shame. The feeling will pass, of course, for me, but one of the most haunting features of the book is the number of people for whom such feelings clearly will not pass. The final chapters of this book are filled with personal stories those who grew up in the wake of these murders. It’s been nearly a century, yes, but in family terms these are stories about (great) grandparents, great aunts and uncles. These are stories about children who went on to live their own lives and raise their own families knowing that their own parents had been killed by loved ones or trusted neighbors. …and in some cases wondering just who might have been involved?

…or what local businessmen might have profited from these murders?

This kind of violence isn’t contained in one generation, or even two. It haunts a community long after those who participated have passed away. I can’t help thinking part of the horror might lie in the fear that the truth will never be known, that someone’s death could be forever buried in falsehood, which is why books like this are important. They are one means of countering that horror, however inadequate they may be. Grann didn’t stop at the FBI cases. He went on to study murders left unsolved and to explore the causes of deaths that never caught the attention of authorities. He couldn’t always find an explanation, but he does manage to reveal something of the  extent of these crimes.

It’s evident that some folks entrusted Grann with the hopes of finding out the truth behind their family tragedies. That must have been quite a weight to carry.

It must have been a far greater weight for those to carry such stories their whole lives.

***

Postscript: I just wanted to make a couple additional remarks here, regarding the writing style. While Grann is relating a historical narrative, he does so through the lens of a particular woman, Mollie Burkhart, who lost most of her family in ‘reign of terror’, and of the FBI agent, Tom White, who was put in charge of the case. By following the lives of these two people into the story, Grann is able to provide a historical narrative that reads like a murder mystery. Those familiar with the story may know where it’s going, and I’ve shared a portion of that here myself (minus severl significant details), but most of the time this approach leaves the reader to wonder how the pieces will fall together, and to expect that will happen when the main characters put those pieces together themselves. Again, tis is history, but it reads a bit like a murder mystery.

This is an interesting approach to historical narrative, one that should prove helpful in the rather likely event that this is made into a movie.

Grann also fills in a lot of detail as he writes the story. He relates the physical features and demeanor of his characters in this book, much as a fiction writer would. When reading such material, I often find myself wondering where that came from? Is this how someone else described the person in question? Is it the impression Grann gets from looking at their pictures? Some combination? Hard to tell!

I can never decide how I feel about that approach to historical writing. A part of me would like to keep closer to identifiable records, to have the option of checking specific claims about specific source material. Another part of me is just happy to get the story. I can file away the fluffy details and focus on the main story line if the information is worth reading.

…which is definitely the case here.

White Privilege? Let Me Whitesplain it to Ya!

15 Friday Dec 2017

Posted by in Justice, Politics

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

If white privilege is a problem, then it stands to reason that I can only see that problem through the lens of white privilege, and if whitesplaining is a problem, then any account I might give of it carries a real danger of becoming yet another instance of whitesplaining. I don’t always handle these issues well. (Seriously, I think about some of my past comments and cringe.) It’s a tricky issue. Still, I don’t think it’s one I can avoid any more than the next guy or gal with a keyboard and a penchant for social commentary, and I will make one (possibly gratuitous) assumption here, which is that there must be some reasonable way for a guy like me to approach the subject. Whether or not I find that approach in this post?

Well, let’s see…

What has me thinking about this? Well I just happened upon a Youtube clip from another white guy who took it upon himself to present a reasonable approach to this issue. Suffice to say, that I don’t think he managed it, and again, I don’t know that I’ll do much better myself. Still, I think the problems with his approach make a nice springboard for tackling the issue.

…or at least for addressing some of the problems frequently arising when those of us on the pale end of the privilege spectrum try to address the issue.

The video in question was produced by Eric Post, a military veteran also famous for this response to a flag burning protest. He has other posts, but these two seem to particularly resonate with the sentiments of quite a few people. In both cases, Post adopts what seems to be a fairly reasonable response to a (probably left-wing) challenge to the social order. In both cases, Post seems to dismiss the challenge altogether. He prefers constructive engagement to insults and (thankfully) violence, but the impact of both these videos would seem to be a clear rejection of the concerns and problems in question. It’s tempting to see his approach as positive, given the man’s general tone, but I think the most important thing here is to pay attention to the story he is telling. In both cases, he generates a rather one-sided narrative, and in both cases the appearance of reasonability provides him with a moral high ground denied to those he claims to be responding to.

Anyway, here is the video:

 

The first thing I want address here is the way Post frames the problem, the context he generates within which to discuss the issue. We don’t encounter the case for white privilege here in any direct sense. What we get in the video is Post telling us a story about a black guy who said something to him about ‘white privilege’. What we learn of the black man’s thoughts on the subject is what Post chooses to tell us. So, his own white privilege here gets a solid boost from the privilege he acquires as the narrator of this story. But how reliable is Post as a narrator? For all we know, he made the whole thing up, though I think it more likely he is taking more subtle liberties with the story-line.

As Post would have it, this is the story of him setting a man straight on the issue before they hug it out and wind up with a hopeful ending. That’s the kind of ending I would expect from a Disney movie or a television sitcom. Most verbal confrontations don’t follow such a neat pattern. People interrupt each other. In the rush of rapidly phrased arguments, points don’t quite get made the way you would want to make them. The other guy scores a good point or three as well, and some really important stuff just gets dropped while tangents take people into all manner of foolish places. Moreover, there is always a genuine prospect that each side in an argument will just end up talking past the other without engaging them in any meaningful way. The prospect that Post really did just have a nice conversation with a guy who took all his points with grace, and without rejoinder, before agreeing with him in the end strikes me as about as likely as any other happily-ever-after ending in any other story. Suffice to say that he’s asking his viewers to take an awful lot on faith.

It’s a bit much to ask.

More to the point, consider the nature of the encounter. This began at least as a petty insult, followed by at least the beginnings of a pissing contest (Post does tell us he got in the guy’s face). So, right away, the case for the existence of white privilege gets off to poor footing in this video. It enters the story as petty insult, an expression of personal animosity cast at a complete stranger. In effect, the issue emerges here as a sort of game piece played in a petty conflict over personal status.

Social justice, this ain’t.

Now, I have no doubt there are people who would do that, people for whom ‘white privilege’ is little more than an insult to be thrown at random white people, or at least those of us who get in their way. Whether or not Post’s account of the man’s behavior is accurate is one thing, but I think I’ve met a few people like that myself. The thing is that I’ve also met folks for whom this issue is NOT about humiliating anybody, and for whom this issue is an important obstacle to social justice.

… or as I like to call it, justice.

The notion of ‘white privilege’ connects to a broad range of other controversial topics associated with social justice, inequality, and all manner of things deep and divisive. I probably won’t be solving any of them in this blog post, and wouldn’t expect Post to solve them in his short video, but perhaps, that’s the problem. Post does solve these issues, or at least he pretends to solve them insofar as he explains them away and replaces the whole issue with a quick motivational lesson shaped for the benefit of black people and liberals everywhere. This would be an impressive accomplishment, but it isn’t, because the problems he pretend to solve never amount to much more than a dirty story about an asshole he met on the street. If this isn’t a straw man, it’s certainly a whipping boy. Just an easy set up easily smacked down, and narrative easily applied to all those complex issues Post hasn’t really addressed at all.

The problem here isn’t entirely contained in the video. If folks would treat this as a random encounter with a random jerk whose particular flavor of jerkitude just happened to be racial politics, then perhaps we could file the whole thing under guilty pleasures of little or no consequence. But that isn’t happening. No, this is one of many videos out there which  circulate around the net under the guise of substantive commentary about the notion of white privilege. A white guy whitesplains away the whole issue through a dirty story about an asshole he met on the street and a good chunk of the internet says ‘huzzah’!

This isn’t solution. It’s avoidance.

So, how does Post dispense with the issue? He begins by telling us he has had some problems of his own in life, and yes, these do seem like serious problems. He goes on to lecture the man from his story on the need to be realistic about his job prospects and to educate himself properly for the kind of job he hopes to do. In effect, Post is saying that white privilege is a myth, and that the difference between a successful person and an unsuccessful one is a function of the effort they put into life.

As an answer to the problem of white privilege, this seems to be equal parts straw man and false dichotomy. Simply put, success isn’t either race or effort. It’s a function of both (and a lot of other things).  If the black man in Post’s story is wrong, then so is Post, bearing in mind, of course that this whole thing is Post’s story. In effect, it is a story about the choice between two different kinds of mistake, and that is all that Post seems capable of understanding about the matter.

This brings us back to the concept of ‘white privilege’ itself. What does the phrase mean? I’ve heard people use it in at least three different ways. Some clearly use the phrase to suggest that white people are categorically better off than others, that we all have a better shot at success (through no credit of our own) simply by being white. This approach would seem to dismiss the significance of any mere white-people-problems and sweep any advantages enjoyed by any particular non-whites under the rug. If mileage may vary, this way of talking about white privilege doesn’t acknowledge any variance outside the boundaries of a clear case that some people (white ones) have it better than all the others. I don’t think this way of talking about the issue stands up to scrutiny all that well, but it’s a sense of the phrase that is well suited to insult contests and generally morbid reflections about personal status, hence it’s appearance in Post’s story, and hence the ease with which he dispatches it.

A second approach would be to suggest that white people enjoy an advantage on account of being white. How this particular privilege stacks up against the other advantages and disadvantages that individuals experience in life is another question altogether. One needn’t deny that white people have our own problems or that some individual minorities may have some clear benefits in their own personal lives. Hell, we don’t even need to deny that there may be contexts in which being a member of a minority could actually be an advantage. It is enough to say that being white can help out in some ways. This approach seems more reasonable, but it achieves the reasonability at the expense of weakening the proposition quite a bit. It’s particularly attractive to white liberals such as myself, who may want to acknowledge privilege while minimizing its importance in our lives. “…yeah, I caught a break by being white, but let me tell you about this other personal hardship, and look at you, you got all this.”

…which is why most who talk about white privilege would step the whole thing up a notch and insist that in the grand scheme of things whiteness weighs rather heavily against those other factors. It still may be that particular white people have real problems and particular non-white people may have real privileges of their own, but in the grand scheme of things race is more likely than not to play a significant role in determining one’s status in life. In other words, whiteness may be one of many variables, but it is often the decisive variable in getting a job, getting a house, talking to a police officer, or any number of things that affect peoples wealth and well-being (not to mention their lives). This third approach is, I think the more serious of the three. It isn’t really all that different from the second approach, except insofar as it insists on the relative importance of whiteness in relation to other variables.

Suffice to say that Post’s argument wouldn’t touch either of the last two approaches to the subject of ‘white privilege’. Whether real or imagined, his adversary in the story isn’t up to the task of clarifying the issue, or if the real person did do that, suffice to say that it didn’t make it into Post’s own version of the story. It couldn’t, because Post’s story was always a story about a pissing contest, about a conflict over personal dignity. The antagonist in Post’s story was never going to accomplish anything more than gain a smug sense of satisfaction out of his insult, and so nothing rides on the ‘white privilege’ message but personal vindictiveness. Post is the only one with a dignified goal in the story, and that is true regardless of the (de-)merits of anyone’s thoughts about white privilege.

The reasonability with which Post approaches the issue is illusory; it’s simply a function of the story-line. Notice how he takes it upon himself to lecture the other man about the nature of taxes. Because of course the man he is talking to wouldn’t understand that his government check is paid for by private citizens. This is a common theme among ‘conservatives’ and radical right wingers these days. They like to imagine liberals and minorities in the form of the unemployed demanding government aid. The prospect that a gainfully employed person might advocate the social safety net is a possibility increasingly escaping their own narratives about government and economics. This story facilitates that trend by telling us about an individual who literally occupies that very place in life, and of course it compounds that narrative by enabling Post to explain the nature of taxes to the man as though he’d never thought about it himself. Post is reasonable in the story, because that’s how he tells the story, but in effect it is a story about a black man who doesn’t understand his own situation at all. The cherry on top of this condescending pie is the fact that it’s a white guy explaining it all; in effect whitesplaining white privilege to the clueless minority who hasn’t the faintest idea how to take care of himself.

Of course it is possible that the whole encounter is real and that Post’s account of it is essentially accurate, but once again we have to consider the larger presentation. What makes this video powerful is precisely the way it fits in with the larger narratives of right politics in America. Post winds up the theme by telling the man (or telling us that he told the man) to stop lying to himself. In telling the narrated man to stop lying to himself about his own welfare, Post is effectively telling anyone who supports aid to the poor and/or concerns about social justice to stop lying to ourselves. In effect, this is but another story about lazy minorities who blame others for their own lack of effort along with the foolishness of anyone who would humor them. Reasonable tone aside, Post is pushing an explicitly racist message here.

Which brings me to another point, a larger one about the nature of privilege. One of the reasons the notion of  ‘white privilege’ is so threatening to so many is because it undermines the meaning of success in a meritocracy. It runs contrary to the norms about success and failure in both mainstream liberalism and conservatism Whatever any of us has in America, we typically want to believe we have earned it. That goes without saying. It’s what the money in our bank accounts a little more meaningful than they would be for practical reasons. It’s what makes the houses we live in personal statements and the televisions we watch measures of personal merit. We have these things because we earned them.

But what if we haven’t?

What if our success (in whatever way we define it) is due in part to some break we didn’t earn? That’s a damning prospect. It stings a little, even for hose not so very adverse to messages about social justice. But for the true believers in their own success, for the fundamentalists of the free market this is outright heresy. We cannot admit of anything like white privilege or any number of social factors that might play a significant role in determining our lot in life. For the true believers amongst us, that way lies madness! Hence, the initial problem of this story!

…not the insult.

…the car.

Post begins this story, sitting (as many of his posts do) in a car, telling us about his favorite car. Presumably, he is proud of his seat in this car. Presumably, he feels he has earned that seat. I don’t think that’s an accident. Whatever the significance of white privilege for African-Americans or any other minority, in this story, it is the threat to the moral significance of a nice car that is really at stake.

This is the real threat to acknowledging white privilege. for Post. It could mean, he hasn’t really earned that car, or perhaps anything else in life.The issue isn’t whether or not white privilege can explain any measure of social inequality, it is whether or not it leaves intact the moral value of consumer products.

So, it’s rather fitting that Post takes time to provide the man in his story with a kind of motivational lesson. According to Post, the central lie that both he and the man in his story were told (by whom he doesn’t say) is the notion that one must work to achieve happiness. The truth, he says is just the reverse. In this respect, he isn’t all that far from the Puritans of old, worrying about the apparent elect (also a class defined in part by worldly possessions in elation to some imagined moral characteristic). Post is just one among many to suggest that wealth is somehow a function of character.

The problem of course is that it’s not that simple. Personal resilience can explain a lot, but it doesn’t explain everything. Time and again, studies have shown that minorities and women (among other groups) face real obstacles to success in the work place, the housing market, and any number of contexts affecting their economic well-being. Some flourish anyway, and that’s a damned good things. But it’s an insidious logic that turns this into an argument to be used against those that don’t. It’s all well and good to tell people they should do whatever it takes to overcome those obstacles in their personal lives (although doing so often assumes an air of unearned authority on the topic), but I can’t help feeling that one of the many things people ought to do toward overcoming those obstacles is address them on a larger scale. This doesn’t mean spitting insults at white people who drive nice cars, but it does mean challenging white privilege as it plays out in various contexts of modern life.

And no, that doesn’t mean anybody should be ashamed of any privilege they may enjoy in life. It does mean we ought to be careful how we use it. If Post, for example, really does help an unemployed black man get ahead in life, I’d say that’s a damned good use of his own position. Putting out a video demeaning to the status of minorities for the benefit of right-wing consumers isn’t. I’m not suggesting that those of us born into any kind of privilege ought to spend every moment of every waking day trying to figure out how to make it right for others, but we ought to be open at least to the prospect that there are real problems with the way identity shapes the prospects for success in life. Perhaps, we ought also to look for ways to change that.

It isn’t the universe, as Post suggests, whose justice is at stake; it is the communities in which we live. The universe may not owe anyone, but for those of us living in societies committed at least to equality in rights (if not wealth), I reckon we do owe others an even chance at earning a living.

Far from denying the importance of hard work and honest sweat; the point is to ensure that such things really do matter.

For everyone.

Triggers

27 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by in Justice, Politics

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

The first time I recall reading a trigger warning it was in the off-topic sub-forum on a gaming discussion board. If I remember correctly, it was in the title for a thread about sexual abuse. That usage struck me then, as it does now, as a perfectly appropriate warning to some that the ensuing discussion was going to cover issues which some might find intensely stressful. I also understood the likely reason for this to be that some people might have had direct personal experience with the realities of such abuse. It has ever since struck me as a reasonable and positive thing to provide that warning in advance. It also serves as a good reminder to the rest of us that something we may regard as grist for the mill could have serious personal significance for others. I know that reminder has helped me to appreciate the weight of some issues. I can’t say that I’m always happy with my performance in dealing with these things, but I do think I handle these issues with more care now than I did in earlier days, and I credit that first encounter with a trigger warning with producing the difference.

Within a couple years on that same discussion the trigger warnings in the off-topic forum had multiplied beyond my wildest imagination. Countless variations of trigger warnings could be found in the title of one thread after another. I found it increasingly difficult to take them seriously, not because I couldn’t imagine someone getting upset at this or that topic, but because there comes a point where the likelihood that someone will become upset ceases to be a function of the topic and becomes an abstract possibility that is simply always there. People get upset, but it isn’t always because the discussion at hand is intrinsically dangerous subject matter. As I read the increasingly common little warning symbols, placed conveniently in square brackets, I couldn’t help but think the point was far more likely to be a statement about the values of the person employing the hashtag. Right wingers like to call this ‘virtue signaling’, and I don’t necessarily dispute the appropriateness of the label, though I do suspect the convenience of that buzz-term is a vice of its own. Whatever the purpose of the growing trigger-warning craze, I couldn’t help thinking then, as I do now, that the concept is subject to inflationary pressures.

As in, increased usage leads to decreased significance.

Where do you draw the line? I don’t know, but somewhere between a trigger warning fr sexual abuse and the many seemingly trivial uses I have seen over the years, the significance of these warnings does seem to change. Moreover, the expectation that someone ought to use trigger warnings, or that they must use them introduces a level of coercive authority into the equation. It wasn’t that long ago that a Dean at the University of Chicago denounced trigger warnings. In so doing, he clearly took them to be a mechanism for silencing those with whom one disagrees. But what about those who choose to use such warnings, some argued. Is that not permitted? And thus the renunciation of authority came  itself to be viewed as an assertion of authority, one itself worthy of denial. Who is oppressing whom and how is, it turns out, a bit more complicated than some would have it.

I guess I’m enough of an old fashioned liberal to want to have my free speech and use it too. I don’t like seeing efforts to silence speakers at public universities in the name of safe spaces, and that isn’t because I’m a fan of people like Milo Yiannopoulos. What I really don’t like is watching the careers people like that flourish as a direct result of the explosive outrage they specialize in …triggering. People like that have nothing to say, and they need the spectacle of outrage to provide the illusion of substance. I’d rather answer them. I would rather make the case against them, at least when that case can be made without fear and intimidation coming from the other side. I have seen right wingers drown out their critics, and I wouldn’t tolerate it. Lately though, a number of right wing sources have come to relish moments in which the left appears to be doing the same thing.

…is doing the same thing.

That too should not be tolerated, not the least of reasons being that it’s exactly what some of these hacks want from us.

This brings me back to the whole inflationary pressures thing. If the left wing over-uses trigger warnings, I think the same can be said of the right.

…well the ‘trigger’ part anyway, not so much the ‘warning’ part.

Time and again, I see folks respond to an argument for social justice by claiming its proponent has been triggered. Hell, I’ve gotten the response myself a time or ten, sometimes when I am more amused than agry. It’s fascinating to me, to see this cry of victory. As often as not, the signs of stress just aren’t there, or if they are, they are present to exactly the degree that one might expect from anyone else upon expressing disagreement. Yet, those proclaiming their opponents have been ‘triggered’ seem to hope those opponents are wallowing in distress, or at least they seem to enjoy pretending that is the case.

This is of course the hope of a troll, and it isn’t much worthy of anyone who claims to be advancing a serious point of view on any subject. But I suppose it does help to confound the issues, to ensure that no-one ever does take a trigger warning seriously. Still, I can’t help thinking for some it appears to be an end in itself, the prospect of making someone else feel bad.

If the notion of a trigger has lost some of its value in overuse by those on the left, it’s losing even more value as playground conservatives transform the term into a trophy of sorts. If they have their way, the public will be incapable of distinguishing between the psychological traumas experienced by some when dealing with sensitive issues and the irritation others feel upon realizing someone is wrong on the internet. This isn’t really conservatism, of course. There is nothing conservative about mocking women over their looks, disabled persons, victims of crime, or even minorities for pleading their own case in the public eye. Conservative politics may be resistant to a number of efforts at correcting social harms, but the growing orgy of right wing schadenfreude is an altogether different animal. Some people really do hope to inflict suffering on others.

To them a trigger warning is a symbol of hope.

It’s a hope I would see them denied.

A Troubled Tale of Two Racisms and the Floundering Efforts to Oppose Them

12 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by in Justice, Native American Themes

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

lThis wasn’t the first time I felt unwelcome at the mutton stand. In fact, it was the second time this server had ignored me while serving other customers. Just like the first instance, I initially assumed it was an accident, or at least that she had some other reasons for avoiding me, but slowly I started to wonder if it was my color. White people were not entirely foreign to these markets, but the vast majority of folks frequenting these stands were certainly Navajo. And it was beginning to look increasingly like this particular woman had no intention of doing business with me at all.

…which really sucked, because these guys made the best roast mutton in Window Rock!

What to do about it? In my younger days, my social tool kit was long on hammers and short on other options. I had enough sense to realize vocal complaints about unfair treatment of a bilagáana might go down poorly, but not enough subtlety to think of alternative ways to address the matter. As it happens, I didn’t need to think of anything to say. The other customers did it for me. A chorus of “He’s next!” greeted the woman’s next efforts to pass me by, some of their voices tinged with a sense of real irritation. I got my roast mutton that day. More than that, I felt a sense of reassurance. Although resentment of whites could be found in many varieties out on the Navajo Nation, so could a certain sense of fairness. On this day that sense of fairness won out and I got my mutton.

***

Let me start by admitting up front that I could have been wrong about the motivations of the woman who didn’t seem to want to serve me. Perhaps I read the whole thing wrong, and maybe my own behavior had somehow triggered her actions. Hell, maybe I really shouldn’t have been eating there in the first place. All this is quite possible, but I am going to ask you, dear reader, to accept for purposes of argument, that this was an instance of a Navajo woman treating me different (a little bit badly) because of my ethnicity. I think it is also an instance in which the members of her own community found this to be unacceptable behavior.

So here is the question, did I experience racism?

No, that’s not the question.

My real question is how do you go about answering that first question?

It seems to me that at least two radically different approaches to answering that question have become rather common these days, and it is getting more and more difficult for people using these different approaches to talk to each other about the matter. One way of going about it, which I will call the conventional approach (perhaps for no better reason than that it is the approach I grew up with) would be to raise questions about the motives and attitude of the woman who didn’t seem to want to serve me. Granting a certain range of answers about what she had in mind, someone taking this approach would say ‘yes’ I had been subject to racism. Another approach (let’s call it the social constructivist approach) is more common these days in academia and left wing politics in general. From this standpoint, it is best to inquire into the social power of the parties involved and then see how they use that power in respect of one another. Those adopting this approach might also want to expand consideration beyond the mutton stand to the larger patterns of history and contemporary politics. In most cases this approach would lead to an answer of ‘no’ to my first question, or even a ‘hell no’, perhaps with an additional lecture on the privilege of living in a world where slow service at a mutton stand is a moral outrage worthy of remembering nearly two decades later.

***

Okay, so let’s do this…

In the conventional approach, racism is a question of personal judgement and motivation. Racism consists in treating someone different on account of their race, and since all manner of people can do this, anyone can clearly be racist. The possibility of ‘reverse racism’ as it is commonly called is obvious enough with the only real questions being about whether or not this or that particular event illustrates some variety of reverse discrimination. Using this approach (and assuming I wasn’t missing something important), it is quite possible to affirm that I was subjected to racism on that day.

On it’s face, the conventional approach seems a perfectly reasonable take on the subject. People often use it to advance a genuine sense of moral obligation regarding how one ought to treat others, and by people here I do mean all kinds of people. Folks from all sorts of different backgrounds can and do frequently advance the notion that one ought not to treat people differently (or at least badly) on account of their race. This does strike me as a good thing, but the question is whether or not this is an adequate response to the problem of racism.

First and I think foremost, the problem with this approach is that it flattens the significance of discriminatory behavior, putting the denial of a mutton sandwich in much the same boat with minstrel shows, segregated schools, legacy contracts, Japanese internment, involuntary sterilization, lynching. and even the Holocaust. Hell, I  felt a little nausea myself putting my mutton-stand story in the same sentence with all those things, but the absurdity of that comparison is precisely my point. Addressing racism as an issue of personal motivation doesn’t do much to help us understand the difference between petty gestures and genuine atrocities. It isn’t that people can’t understand that there is a difference, but this approach to countering racism creates a fashion of speaking about them which tends to put them all on equal footing, at least for a moment. If we then want to talk about the differences between a simple affront and something that genuinely oppresses whole groups of people, then that talk falls somewhere over and above the problem of racism.

Unfortunately, there is ample evidence that large numbers of people never get out of that fashion of speaking about racism, that large numbers of people never really get the difference between a lynching and an expression of petty personal bias. Indeed, some folks seem prepared to recognize racism only if it is first prefaced with ‘reverse’. Time and again, advocates of social justice find their concerns drowned out by talk of reverse racism and stories in which the under-privileged prove themselves ironically capable of being the bad guys too.

…and in the ultimate poetic injustice, being discriminated against too, becomes the exclusive cultural capital of the privileged.

Don’t laugh. A few pundits have become filthy rich working that very angle.

It is no wonder that persons of color and their political allies often want to do away with this fashion of speaking about racism altogether. The conventional approach to racism is, as many seem to suggest, a well far too poisoned with all this talk of reverse discrimination to be of any real use for understanding the larger issues of oppression and injustice  in the world today. So, many of those interested in such issues have chosen to define racism as something that requires not merely prejudice but the social capital to put that prejudice into play with real and devastating consequences. Racism is from this point of view an expression of power, not merely an individual act, whatever its motivation. This is what I mean by a Social Constructivist approach. It’s a clunky phrase, and a grad-school cliché, but what the hell!?! It works.

It isn’t that people advocating the social constructivist approach don’t think minorities can be jerks; but they don’t see the myriad stories minority jerkitry as a meaningful part of the story of racism. From this standpoint, my mutton-stand story is simple a non-starter. The problem isn’t just the scale of harm (or the lack thereof); such stories are from this point of view a genuine distraction from the central issues of oppression that should be the focus of concerns about racism. It’s easy enough to get the problem with such stories in this kind of loose narrative; the problem comes in when people start trying to explain why such stories are as a matter of principle unimportant to the issue of racism.

Often folks taking the constructivist approach will say something to the effect that racism is about power and since minorities don’t have the power, they can’t be racist. This has always struck me as a terrible oversimplification, and I could only wish it were a straw man, or that its use were limited to less educated circles. But it isn’t.

To me, the core problem here is that the argument uses an awfully ham-handed sense of social power. We can talk of people having more or less power, but the notion that whites have all the power and minorities absolutely none of it is bordering caricature. For one thing, it doesn’t take a lot of power to hurt someone, and it is one of the perversities of racism that it may from time to time offer those whom it keeps from real opportunity the consolation of petty revenge against some unlucky fellow. Whether it is a personal punch in the mouth, a petty decision by a  boss, or a politician playing to his own base, there are plenty of persons of color quite capable of harming those of another ethnicity. One must also consider the possibilities of scape-goating other minorities, or even minority groups within their own community. And finally, there is no reason to expect that racism must always mean hurting those belonging to the race that someone hates. Often as not resentments directed at whole groups of other people precedes a shot to one’s own foot, so to speak. The kind of social power which makes racism a problem simply doesn’t rest only at one end of the spectrum, even if acknowledging that fact let’s an unwelcome foot in the door. Acknowledging the possibility that someone other than a white person might have the means to hurt people on the basis of race should not be difficult, but in short-hand politics, it seems many are happy to simply discount that possibility.

…which is definitely taking liberties with the facts.

It isn’t that an emphasis on social power means abrogation of minority responsibility to others, and I don’t think many people mean to suggest that; it’s that one of the aims of an emphasis on the social construction of power is to put harm to the underprivileged back in the center-spot of opposition to racism.

***

All of this leaves us with one very big problem as I see it. Speaking of racism as something that is by definition an expression of the privileged cuts so far against conventional approaches to the subject that it amounts to quitting the field in a sense, abandoning the larger public discourse. Unless I am underestimating the extent to which social construction has reached the popular consciousness, that approach (with its complete disclaimer of the possibilities of minority racism) is a bit too foreign for most people to comprehend. The reasons for such an approach are well known in academia, and in many circles of left-wing politics, but they aren’t sufficiently well known to guide public perceptions. So while those adopting a social constructivist approach can talk in limited circles as though only the ignorant or malicious would even think of describing racism as something a minority could do, large parts of the public take it for granted that it most certainly is, and that lunacy or at least dishonesty are the only reasons anyone would deny it.

The notion that minorities simply cannot be racist leaves a silence in the space where one would normally raise questions about rude, cruel, or even genuinely harmful actions by minorities. Often, advocates of the social constructivist approach will concede that sundry examples of such behavior are terrible; they might even suggest alternative words to describe them. I hear it time and again, the notion that racism just isn’t the right word for it, but what that word would be isn’t so clear. So, the more reasonable folks taking the social constructivist approach are not really trying to insulate minorities from criticism, but they are working hard to ensure that criticism is divorced from an important source of moral value, opposition to racism. Arguably, what is lost in this approach is simply too valuable, and like it or not, there are legitimate reasons for addressing questions about racially motivated behavior by minorities, reasons that cannot be reduced to the effort to drown pro-minority politics in a deluge of petty complaints by the well privileged.

In the end, denying the possibility of minority racism does not just silence those milking the reverse-racism angle for more than its worth, it also silences people with real concerns and sincere questions about ethnic relations. All too often, the right wing pundits are happy to fill that silence with the suggestion that lefties are just bigots in their on right and that this whole fashion of speaking is just another attack on white people. That may seem a cop-out to many advocates of the constructivist approach, but unfortunately the cop-out is mutual. An awful lot of folks are finding more and more ways to avoid talk to each other about this subject, and even to find ways of speaking really loudly while not really talking to each other about it.

It is extremely important to make a strong case for the significance of social power in the history and politics of racism, but that case poorly served by word games. As certain voices work very hard to ensure the public can’t tell the difference between affirmative action and Jim Crow, a large part of the public is unsure what to make of the issues. The difference must be explained, and yes, perhaps explained again, because those working reverse-racism molehills into great mountains will go right on doing so. They aren’t the  least bit phased to find that lefty scholars have adopted a way of speaking about the issue that side-steps their own gambit.

Far from it.

***

So, was I exposed to racism on that day so many years ago? Meh, …who cares? My real point is that I hear and read people talking about such questions in two very different ways, and more and more I meet people who seem completely incapable of bridging the gap between those ways of speaking.

It’s a problem.

***

Roast Mutton provided by a review of Sacred Hogan.

 

Won’t Someone Please Think of the Dan Snyders?

04 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by in Justice, Native American Themes

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

DanSnyderSomeone really ought to take donations for the Washington Redskins. I hear they are in desperate need of team gear that isn’t racist or demeaning to Native Americans. Mind you, I say ‘Native Americans’ because I think that’s what Redskins owner Dan Snyder would want me to say. Dan clearly doesn’t think it prudent to go around calling real people ‘Redskins‘, but he does seem to think it’s appropriate to use that label for his football team. So, why on earth would Snyder continue using the name? I mean he cares, right? He cares enough to visit 26 tribes and start a charity for Native Americans, and he certainly cares enough not to call anyone this term to their face. So, why would he continue using the name for his team? I can only conclude that he and his organization can’t afford the costs incurred by the change of gear.

The conclusion is inescapable.

I know, I know, a lot of people might think rather poorly of Snyder at this point, but perhaps we are getting it all wrong. We don’t understand the scale of the problem Snyder faces. As Ross Tucker points out, the term ‘Redskins’ is so very divisive that the team name really must be kept. Hell, Tucker assures us that a lot of people would criticize Dan Snyder now regardless of any other consideration, just because he is Dan Snyder. Cause apparently there aren’t any real reasons to be concerned about Snyder’s team name or any of his efforts to defend that name in the public eye. People are just after Dan.

Man, that poor guy!

If Tucker’s point doesn’t show you just what a crazy pickle our poor man Dan has got himself into, then just consider the stories of Chief Dodson, Peter MacDonald, and now Gary Edwards, all figures Dan Snyder has promoted or honored through his organization. I mean Dan’s whole effort to establish relations with indigenous leaders seems to suffer from a bad case of fractal wrongness, because error raises its ugly head at every scale of the project. A more cynical person might suggest that Snyder has been cherry picking cooperative indigenous leaders for the purpose of misleading the public about indigenous support for his team. A more cynical person might suggest that Snyder’s charity was a straight forward bribe, and that he wasn’t all that serious about helping anyone. A really cynical person might even suggest that this kind of thing was part of a time-dishonored tradition of manipulating native leadership, and that such stunts could add real injury to the insult of the team name. A more cynical person might see in Dan Snyder’s efforts to sell his team name a message that he knows and cares even less about Native Americans than the simple racism of his actual team name would seem to suggest. But, well, that’s what a cynical person might think.

Bad cynical person!

For myself, I say the pattern here is obvious. Dan Snyder and his tiny understaffed organization are clearly struggling to keep up with events. Hell, they can hardly vet their people, and frankly, I think a few indigenous folks have taken advantage of Dan’s big heart. If that doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, then focus on the fact that struggling as they are Snyder has taken it upon himself to form a charity to help Native American communities. He and his charity even assisted with the purchase of a backhoe for Pete’s sake! A whole backh…, well part of a backhoe anyway! It’s a giving man that gives part of a backhoe when he can’t even properly vet a PR stunt.

Think about that and try not to get a great big old lump in your throat!

BYtx3CdIcAE8tVTWe know one thing for sure, and that’s that Dan Snyder understands just how insulting the term ‘Redskins’ really is. I think it’s safe to say that he would do something about this if he could. I did a whole fact finding mission about this sometime ago, or maybe I just thought about doing it, but anyway I’m pretty sure I know at least 26 Redskins fans that can live with a change of names. Hell, I’m quite certain I bought a burger for one of them, or at least assisted in its purchase. I’ll send Dan a postcard about all this and we’ll call the whole matter confirmed. It’s definitely time to change the name folks. But the Redskins need your help. They just can’t do this on their own. They can’t afford to change their stationary.

So, please folks, won’t you help Dan Snyder and his unfortunately named football franchise? Send them sports gear that doesn’t suck. Send them helmets, jerseys, shoes, and used mouthpieces. Hell, send them a hockey stick if that’s what you have. After all, it’s the thought that counts, isn’t it? I mean Dan has obviously put a lot of thought into his efforts to help others so it’s only fair that the rest of us ought to help him. So, seriously folks, just dig into that old closet or rifle through the boxes in your garage and see what’s left from your high school days. Somewhere in that dusty attic, you know you have what Dan Snyder and his people need. Send them pair of sensible socks if that’s what you have. Every little bit counts.

Please help Dan!

Please!