Author Archive
I may be old-fashioned on this but any stand you take on an issue should be based on knowledge of the facts, a review of other opinions, the history of the situation or situations like it, and a consideration of what consequences you are agreeing to. To this end I want to review the decision we are about to make in Syria. As with most countries in the Middle East and Africa, Syria as a nation state was created by the West.  Colonial powers simply drew lines on maps to fit their convenience. In so doing they linked the fate of many ethnic groups and religions together with little concern about how they would work it out. So it was with Syria. The result in many other parts of the world has been secessions,  internal ethnic strife, and even civil wars. So it is with Syria. It has taken brutal dictators like the Assad’s father and son to hold the Syrian state together. The strains are showing in the current civil war both in the splintered-ness of the opposition, the heavy handed-ness of the government crackdown and the absence of any foreseeable end.
It also makes any foreign attempts to achieve a solution difficult if not impossible. Nevertheless the U.S. is now considering three options which for convenience I will label no military action, limited military action and extensive military action. Some advocates for no military action cite Martin Luther King Jr.s pacifism over Vietnam embodied in Marvin Gaye’s song “What’s Goin’ On”: war is not the answer for only love can conquer hate. For these advocates this is a moral and ethical issue about the use of violence to settle disputes. Others cite international precedent in saying we have no business intervening in what is a civil war no matter how many people are killed. The U.S. is not nor should not be the policeman to the world. Still others say that there is no clear impact that this civil war has on U.S. national interests so we should stay clear of it.
The advocates for a limited military action, like President Obama, say the issue which justifies foreign intervention is the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. Obama drew a line in the sand solely about this issue. Any military intervention should be missiles strikes either to destroy Assad’s chemical weapons capability or at least to punish him so severely that he and future leaders will not feel they can use such weapons which are against international law. The goal here is not to intervene in the civil war or to remove Assad from power, but to take action on the use of chemical weapons.
The argument for a more extensive military action is being made by hawks like John McCain and Lindsey Graham.  They have argued since March that the U.S. goal should be to remove the Assad regime and intervene militarily to  end this civil war.  They argue that on humanitarian grounds as the “city on the hill” we should indeed be the world’s policeman and end a tragedy that has resulted in over 100,000 deaths and the displacement of a third of Syria’s population fleeing as refugees.
There are of course critiques that one could bring against any of these positions. Â For example who has the high moral ground the folks who say no to violence or the ones who want military action to end the war and therefore to curtail needless civilian suffering? What is the real national interest here: discouraging the use of chemical weapons, preventing instability in the region or minding our own domestic business? What are the consequences we are willing to put up with: allowing more civilians to die as the civil war continues, the continued use of chemical weapons, a long term commitment that will inevitably see American boots on the ground and stirring up anti- Americanism or terrorism?
I would like to come at this a different way. I don’t think any of these choices will achieve their goals certainly within a year, maybe longer, maybe never. Max Fisher writing in the Washington Post bleakly concludes:
The killing will continue, probably for years. There’s no one to sign a peace treaty on the rebel side, even if the regime side were interested, and there’s no foreseeable victory for either. Refugees will continue fleeing into neighboring countries, causing instability and an entire other humanitarian crisis as conditions in the camps worsen. Syria as we know it, an ancient place with a rich and celebrated culture and history, will be a broken, failed society, probably for a generation or more. It’s very hard to see how you rebuild a functioning state after this. Maybe worse, it’s hard to see how you get back to a working social contract where everyone agrees to get along.
If none of these options will help Syria in the short run how are we to decide which one to choose if we have to choose? If Syria is damned if we do and damned if we don’t we should make the decision based on what is right for us. The fact of the matter is that the continued warfare of the last decade has had an enormous effect on our country. Â Not only has it cost billions if not trillions of dollars and hundreds of lives, it has ruined the lives of of many of the people we have sent to fight. Â They return home physically or mentally broken, have trouble finding jobs and fitting back into the lives they left behind. There is always a silent cost of war, of depending upon violence to solve problems. Â Should we incur it in Syria? Â I think not. I too go back to Martin Luther King Jr. who said:
A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Having to make a speech from the same spot as MLK Jr. is a daunting task. Â Did Obama pull it off at the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington? Well, not quite. To be sure the speech had its moments and his focus on the real lesson of the civil rights movement: it was the accomplishment of ordinary people, is an important point. Â Although the history books may list the leaders it was that not leaders but ordinary people who marched, demonstrated and worked who made the difference. Obama’s speech may have politely urged people to take action but when it came to rousing them it was something of a dud. Continue Reading
The massive security infrastructure, the unconstitutionality and the sheer overwhelming cost of the security state can be questioned once someone recognizes it for what it is: security theater. I am not saying that there haven’t been true security threats stopped by the security state, but that this is the most expensive and inefficient way to do it. It calls for us to do more damage to more people’s constitutional rights than the terrorists could ever do
There is an old African American proverb that was born in the mists of time: “White people be crazy”. This is less a statement about mental health and more a statement about lack of understanding motivation. It is used to account for foolish and otherwise inexplicable behavior of white folks that goes against reality, common sense, decent conduct or  proper upbringing. If for example one looks at horror films in which the white protagonists do something that furthers the plot but otherwise makes no sense, then the catch-all explanation is that “white people be crazy.” That lone man who stood in front of the tank in Tienanmen Square might be explained by “Asian people be crazy” but making him into a hero in white mainstream media is another example of “white people be crazy.” Tea Party statements especially anything Michele Bachman says are full of “white people be crazy” examples. Continue Reading
NPR reports that a poll shows a wide difference between blacks and whites about whether the Trayvon Martin case was about race. This is not new. Â The wide difference between blacks and whites about the existence of racism or its presence in a given situation has shown up for all of the sixty plus years I’ve been alive. Â Whites believe that without the intent of racism the act was not racist. Â Setting aside for the moment whether an intent is racial or not, most African Americans decide whether an act is racist by the consequences rather than the intent. Even if the intent is not racial (or more commonly whites have rationalized the intent into the delusion that it is not racial) if the consequences affect blacks negatively they would label it as racial.
African Americans have a simple test.  If the races of the protagonists in the actions had been different would the consequences have been different? If they would then the act was indeed racist. Would Trayvon Martin have been pursued by George Zimmerman if Trayvon had been white?  Would Zimmerman  have felt in fear of his life if Trayvon had been white?  Would Zimmerman have shot Trayvon if Trayvon had been white? To the whites who support Zimmerman the answer would have been yes to all these questions.  They would argue that he was simply protecting his community and then himself. For blacks and some whites who condemn Zimmerman the answer to these questions would be no. They would argue that Zimmerman was himself responding to a picture of black youth as potentially criminal that permeates the media and popular culture. This is the image of Trayvon that his defense team apparently successfully conveyed to the jury.
The process of rationalizing intent as non racial is the subject of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s book Racism without Racists: Color Blind Racism and the persistence of Racial Inequality in America, which I recommend to all interested in this subject. In the book Bonilla-Silva shows that many whites believe unless someone shows personal prejudice holding racist views of the difference between whites and other groups (and many do) their actions cannot be called racist. Â The fact that most objective studies verify the existence of racial inequality is attributed to history, failures on the part of African Americans, Latino or other non whites to get over historic racism, and systematic or structural racism for which no one is to blame. Any complicity (and most complicity is denied) they may have in these inequalities is rationalized away by attributing them to non racial motives.
I want to be fair here. To white America if the intent of an action can be shown to be racial the penalty is quite high. Paula Deen’s admission that she used the n word made the intent of her actions racial and brought down the wrath of corporate America upon her. The crime of which she was actually accused became secondary to her use of the word many years ago. Â Conversely the Supreme Court in striking down part of the Voting Rights Law ruled that Congress had to provide a more recent proof that the criteria for proving the intent of voting restrictions was indeed racial in order to invoke the law. This is indeed consistent with the color blind racism that Bonilla-Silva discusses.
I will certainly defer to my colleagues in the legal profession as to the role intent or consequences play in the law. My layman’s view is that sometimes intent does as in the distinctions between first degree murder, second degree murder or manslaughter and in cases of libel. However most times it doesn’t. Lack of intent may mitigate the punishment for breaking the law but it doesn’t always show that no law was broken. So let it be with racism. If an action has the consequence of racial inequity whether intentional or not, that action is racist. Â That applies to racial profiling, following innocent blacks around in stores, populating our jails with inordinate numbers of non whites, or treating non whites differently in our legal system. If the effects are racially unequal or disproportionate we should be alerted that something racial is going on. Blaming the victim is not enough. Â Whites rationalize their actions as with the cop who says “most crimes are committed by blacks just look at our jails” or the store owner who follows blacks because he assumes they are most likely to shoplift from him (hello Winona Ryder.) Just as rationalizing the surveillance of non whites to fight terrorism allows the Tim McVeigh’s and Tsarnov brothers to have a clear path, the racial “assumptions” in other parts of our criminal “justice” system allow whites to get away with things while we are over-pursuing blacks. This cannot be in our best interests.
I have to admit that my expectations of a Hollywood movie actually doing a decent job explaining the United States’ racial history are pretty low. Â In that sense Lee Daniels’ The Butler did not disappoint. Â If I understand the movie correctly white people raped, murdered, kept African Americans ignorant and subservient just because they could. Â Why? I have no idea. Â Kenneth Tynan writing in the Los Angeles Times finds this one dimensional view of whites insulting but welcome to our world. Hollywood has a lot to do to even the scales of one-dimensionality that African Americans have suffered for a century. The movie tells us that black folks on their part had two strategies. Â They could be bullied into accepting a life of house Negro, smile and wear the mask in order to eke out a living for sixty or more years. Or they could become heroic resistors fighting through sit-ins, freedom rides and demonstrations. I don’t know why one path was chosen over the other or whether there were alternatives, but I have learned through this movie that both paths were noble. Hollywood production values made the re-enactments of the sit-ins, demonstrations and freedom rides riveting although the actual pictures of those events actually had more power. Â Although it moved too fast to actually comprehend, the history of the civil rights movement was on track until it reached the Black Panther Party. Mainstream accounts of black history have a hard time with black radicalism and this movie was no exception.
Perhaps these reminders that there was a reality to the civil rights movement beyond the sanitized versions now taught in schools will be helpful for generations that did not experience them even vicariously through television. At least some of the backlash against African Americans and the resurgence of racism comes from a rebellion against the nostalgia-fication and mainstreaming of the civil rights movement. The one note caricatures of white presidents and first ladies do not help as they speed by. It is interesting to note that the president who helped the “the help” most was Ronald Reagan although he admits he is on the wrong side of civil rights in most things. Otherwise, Eisenhower is confused and strains to comprehend, Kennedy eventually comes around until he is shot, Nixon is slimy, Carter is skipped over as a blip in history, and Nancy Reagan is a cold, manipulative bitch, all things we knew before. The least convincing part of the history is the butler’s conversion to a more activist role in his seventies over South Africa in the 1980’s(!?) All of a sudden he decides that the other path of resistance is the correct one and his son was a hero rather than the sullen, self righteous pain he had believed him (with good reason) to be.
The movie does better when it is depicting lower middle class black life. Â They try to grab whatever happiness they can in the little spaces left to them but the role of house Negro creates strains on the butler’s marriage and family. Alcoholism, adultery and estrangement are the results although be assured that all is overcome by the end in good Hollywood fashion. The portrait of a loving, two parent family which sends one son off to college and the other off to the Army is a too rare moment in American film. The generational divide between an older generation that had learned to go along as a way of getting along and a younger generation of heroic resisters, is effectively incarnated as a family divide. The metaphor goes on about a decade too long but at least it shows that the civil rights movement was not a monolithic thing.
The acting is solid with some nice touches among the black actors.  Forest Whitaker is earnest and long suffering as he is meant to be.  Oprah never makes us forget that she is Oprah but her character touches on sides of her (dancing, drunk and lecherous) we never see.  Terence Howard does a good job as an oily neighbor and the rest of the cast does what they are asked to do. Nelsan Ellis is wasted in a small cameo as Martin Luther King Jr. after he does so well as the flauntingly gay cook in True Blood. He does get to voice the movie’s main message that subservience is subversive and those who merely served also contributed to the movement.  It is hard to make a “hero” out of someone whose major role is to stand around “so that the room seems empty” when they are there. These butlers were often the only black people the presidents knew and on several occasions the movie wants us to believe the conceit that presidents changed their minds about civil rights because of the butler. If the film’s message was that black folks should remain subservient until white America’s conscience is awakened by African American noble suffering, I would be even more critical of it.  By the end however the butler eventually is convinced that heroic and active resistance is the way to go.  I hope this isn’t lost on those who see it.
I just came back from viewing the new movie Fruitvale Station and I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts while it’s fresh in my mind. First of all I saw it in the middle of the day at a small art house theater within a gigantic cineplex where it was tucked away in the back. Â We probably didn’t have to leave a popcorn trail to find our way back, but I did anyway. There was only one other couple in the theater with us. In short it wasn’t the type of movie that Hollywood has rallied around and didn’t have much media push behind it. It is an excellent movie nonetheless. Â Forest Whitaker and Octavia Spencer (black Academy Award nominees) are listed as producers and it was probably because of any clout they have that the film was made at all. You wish more black Hollywood insiders would find a way to have these small movies made.
The movie itself is the story of 22 year old Oscar Grant whose “murder” at the hands of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police set off protests in Oakland back in 2009. The first 75 minutes or so is spent establishing his life by tracing his last  day. To its credit the movie doesn’t whitewash the immaturity and bad decisions that Oscar continues to make.  However the movie also shows the acts of kindness towards strangers, his love for his daughter, his mother and his long suffering girlfriend, and his attempts to do better as well as the charm that makes him beloved among his friends. A chance meeting with a white fellow whose early life in some ways mirrors Oscar’s gives us a glimpse of how else it could have been. The movie humanizes and rounds out the black youth stereotypes that assail us and shows the obstacles he faces in living a better life. This could have been a heavy slog, but the movie is enlivened by scenes of family love and interaction as these people steal moments of happiness while enduring their circumstances.  The scenes of friends or family horseplay have an unexpected energy and shows the common decency that buoys their lives. The film demonstrates the humanity they share with others.  All this is juxtaposed against the intense final 15 minutes in which many of the strands of his life come together in a devastating way.
There are excellent performances by Michael B. Jordan (young “veteran” of the Wire and Friday Night Lights)  as Oscar, Melonie Diaz as his long suffering but loyal girlfriend, and especially Octavia Spencer as his mother. The director is a graduate of University of Southern California’s film school.  Although he has been bitten by the handheld camera disease, he does know where to place the camera and to draw Academy award worthy performances from his actors. It is not that I have sympathy for the devil here, but I wish there was more about the poor training, nervousness and racial profiling that led to BART police’s final actions. They were also victims as well as dispensers of  American racism but that seems to be beyond the movie’s scope.
All in all an excellent depiction of a slice of life rarely examined on the screen and a brilliant film.
An economist, one of my former colleagues, challenged one of the central tenets of economics.  Much like physics intro teachers ignored “friction” to produced examples  to focus on what they want you to learn, economists include free choice in the lessons they want to teach. My friend wanted to argue that there is never free choice in economic decisions because there is differential access to information.  People are making their choices not in a free and unconstrained manner but because of the information available to them.  Those with superior information are more likely to make better choices while those with poor information will make less informed and more likely poor economic decisions.
I was reminded of the general question of un-free choice after I watched this CNN black host’s agreement with conservative Fox News about what is wrong in the black community: Don Lemon. Both he and the conservative folks trace the breakdowns in family, education and income among African Americans to decisions that black folks made themselves. The upshot is that black folks themselves can solve these problems if they make the right choices as they are free to do. Depending on which side of the coin you look at this is “blaming the victim” by rooting the cause of their failures in their own character or saying “they have the agency” to cure what ails them. Both of these positions depend on the fiction that they have unconstrained choice in making their decisions. Continue Reading
A Facebook friend recently asked me what I thought about Anthony Weiner’s attempted political comeback from sexting scandals as a mayoral candidate in NYC and the San Diego mayor being accused of sexual harassment. Â In the last few weeks I have also been sent this article about the University of Southern California being investigated for policies that condoned rape and this one about sexual abuse at a well known prep school. I thought therefore I would make public my thoughts on sexual harassment and abuse particularly in politics and education. I was at different times a member of the board to advise on sexual harassment cases at my former institution, a sexual harassment adviser to students, a dean of students, an associate dean of the faculty and through it all a faculty member. In all of these various roles I have received training in the legal issues and institutional concerns that arise in these situations as well as the human costs, concerns and likely actions of those involved. I also should mention that my wife is a social worker so through discussion, osmosis and inclination I have developed an understanding of the personal issues surrounding harassment and abuse.
At this point we only have allegations about the San Diego mayor and the full story has yet to come out. Â I therefore do not feel I can comment on that one. Â Weiner is another story. Â He has confessed to the allegations and the media has, pardon the expression, exposed the content of his inappropriate sexual texts. He says that they were indiscretions and bad judgments so he should be forgiven. Â His wife says she has forgiven him thus implying that the voters should too. If my training and experience have taught me one thing about these complex cases it is that harassment and abuse are more about power than sex. To me Weiner’s sin is not about minor indiscretions but about abuses of power. Â He has used his political positions, celebrity and employer status to force his sexual presence upon women who had less power. I will never know the psychological roots of his urges toward exhibitionism but I don’t care. When given political power he abused it and now is asking that he be given it again. Â Fool me twice shame on me. I would not vote for him if I were still a voter in NYC.
The same concerns inform my take on sexual harassment and abuse in education. I have known several teachers who met their wives when they were students either taught by them or at least at their institutions.  Some of these have produced committed or long-lasting partnerships that have survived their teacher-student beginnings. Some have cooled to become nostalgic memories of young peoples’ sexual awakening both straight and gay as the partners moved on. Some of the relationships have been consensual while others have been predatory. Most of the abuse and harassment incidents have been student to student rather than faculty to student. Alcohol has been a player in many of the situations as has peer pressure and student culture. While all of these things need to be considered when counselling students and helping students cope with the aftermath of these situations, for me they do not play a role in the ethics of the situation, what is right or wrong. Let me be crystal clear on this. a) Forcing sexual practices or attentions on others beyond their consent or when their ability to consent becomes curtailed, is wrong; b) sexual attentions between people of holding different power positions particularly within the same hierarchy whether that be student/teacher, employer or supervisor/employee, minister/worshiper, older relative/younger relative  or officer/soldier, is wrong because consent is meaningless in these situations.
To take the last situation first in the case of unequal power positions consent cannot be disengaged from the power relations at work here. Is the person of lesser power giving consent because of the attraction to the greater power in the other or because the greater power curtails their ability to object? Either way the power relations have entangled and ensnared any romantic or sexual attraction that may have occurred. In the first situation I believe that no is clearly no and that consent when one’s judgment is impaired e.g. by alcohol or peer pressure is no consent at all. The presence of alcohol should not be used to condone sexual activity but as a warning that any sexual activity in those situations has a high likelihood of being sexual harassment or assault.
All of this gets us back to the two articles that I have linked to above. In the first story University of Southern California is alleged to encourage or at least allow its employees (deans, safety officers and counselors) tell students not to press charges of rape particularly if they had imbibed alcohol at the time of their sexual encounters. I emphasize that these are but allegations at the present and an investigation will I hope determine if they are true. If they are true and even if these are some employees acting on their own, some serious retraining and examination of campus culture are in order. If it takes a judgment that hurts the deep pockets of USC to bring about change then so be it. If I were still a parent of a USC student I would be concerned and think twice about sending my child there. The bad publicity alone should prompt USC to re-examine itself and I hope it leads to an amelioration of the situation rather than a cover-up.
Deerfield is in a similar situation. I think the Catholic Church has provided us with an excellent example of how not to handle sexual abuse in its ranks. Rather than covering it up it must face it head on and institute policies and procedures to prevent its happening again. Most of the time abusers rationalize their abuse as not hurting the people they abuse. This is of course nonsense but it means that the abusers will continue their abuse as long as they can because they see little or nothing wrong with it. The institution has a moral, parental and legal obligation to prevent it happening and to investigate (to fire if necessary) any abusers. This will involve training the students, administrators and faculty to spot the signs of abuse, informing students, staff and faculty of what abuse/harassment is as well as what their rights are, counselling and increased vigilance. All of this need be age appropriate to protect students and faculty alike.
President Obama’s administration has been nothing if not controversial. His impromptu statement on Trayvon Martin is a good example. In it he is articulate, reasonable, aware and pragmatic as has been his hallmark. In the end however it is more rhetoric than action and even that has kicked up dust. The right would have us believe that there is no racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, access to voting, education, life chances or health care when the statistics tell us otherwise. Â Yet they maintain that this discrimination is not racism but calling America on its discrimination is racism. Â It is an Orwellian world in which the word is what the deed is not.
The right hates Obama with a passion that not only opposes his policies but demonstrates a personal animosity that may be unprecedented for any president. The Republican party opposes not only his policies but those of their own that he supports and parrots back to them, simply because he says them. Progressives on the left  oppose him because many of his policies (drone strikes, firm support of Wall Street, looking for compromises with the right wing) break campaign promises or are at best centrist and at worst moderately conservative themselves. Black progressives point to his failure to address issues in the black community where the last recession has wiped out black wealth and structural changes in the economy have produced greater, still growing inequality. African Americans gave him over 90% of their vote yet he has done little specifically for the black community. He has rarely gotten his moderate agenda passed let alone a progressive one. He did get some health care reform passed but even that is a bastardization that is far from the single payer health service that most progressives would endorse. Even so the Republicans keep trying to repeal it when even the health insurers should endorse it. The modest gun control measures he introduced went down to failure at a time when an overwhelming  majority of people, outside the NRA and Republicans in Congress, were in favor of it.
What makes progressives believe that even if Obama heeded the better angels of his nature to advocate a progressive agenda, that he could get it passed by a right wing Congress?  Whether the right wing conservatives have a majority or not such an agenda has a snowball’s chance in hell of even getting heard let alone passage. Even when the right wingers are in the minority they use filibusters, cloture and demagoguery to stop that agenda cold. So let’s be clear: Obama is not a progressive.  In the good old days he would have been a pragmatic moderate Republican.  Hoping he will be more is hoping frogs fly. His modest proposals even though kowtowing to the right are difficult if not impossible to get passed.  He has drunk the balanced budget Kool-Aid and though he wants to balance it at a higher level of spending and taxation, his is still a budget that doesn’t put people, let alone the black community, first. Conservative Republicans will  continue to try to tie Obama in knots over molehill scandals when they have no ideas other than opposing everything Obama does. They shout about  lower taxes or balanced budgets while the middle class goes to hell, infrastructure collapses, and inequality increases.
We should look at Obama not as a failed progressive but as the lesser of two evils or a defensive gesture to prevent the crazies from winning. One can look at the glass as nine tenths empty or one tenth full.  He can be a step along the way if we learn the lesson his campaign taught us.  There is a hidden power in grassroots organization as the election demographics change. Criticism from the left will never make Obama into something that he’s not.  I am not calling for it to stop because it does influence him on things he can change by executive order or through the power of his presidential pulpit e.g. don’t ask, don’t tell in the military.  His endorsement of gay marriage does signal that his opinion can change. He will not however lead us to the promised land.  We have to get there for ourselves with grass roots organizing to finally get a Congress that represents the will of the people. I know it’s an uphill battle.  If Elizabeth Warren has to fight like hell in a liberal state like Massachusetts then we know it’s going to be harder in other states and almost impossible in conservative states. Actions that shape the 2014 and subsequent Congressional elections will decide if even moderate reforms can become law. I do not know or even care to speculate on who the next president will be although I would doubt that such a person would have support and Teflon within the black community like Obama. Regardless of who it is we need to have more progressives like Bernie Sanders, Barney Frank and Elizabeth Warren in Congress.  We need to have the Congressional Black Caucus taken seriously by their peers, and we need to have an effective coalition with Latino and women members to offset the old boy’s club that is Congress.  That however is where the real battle is, not the battle over Obama.