What’s So Bad About Doing Good?

Or, for that matter, about feeling good? Or even doing good in order to feel good? These questions, of course, are directed at the authors and devotees of “Stuff White People Like.” Admittedly, I’ve only read bits and pieces of SWPL itself, mostly as quoted in other people’s blogs. But SWPL is only the most coherent popularization of a strain of thought that has afflicted our culture for nearly a century now. It has its origins in a kind of pop Calvinism that has by now forgotten its origins, but is still basic to the American psyche.

Jean Calvin (no relation to the tiger’s pal), who brought us the Pilgrims and the Presbyterian Church, believed that people are inherently sinful, and can’t “save” themselves by doing good works. We are “saved” if and only if God chooses to save us. We have no way of knowing who is saved and who is damned, and we shouldn’t care. We should, of course, do good, but not to save ourselves from damnation. We should do good purely because that’s what God wants. We must do everything possible to guard against ulterior motives. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is no better than not doing it at all.

There are, Calvin tells us, lots of wrong reasons. Earthly rewards, like money and status and power. Heavenly rewards, like not going to hell. And psychological rewards, like feeling good about ourselves. Ideally, we should do good as secretly as possible*, and in ever-present uncertainty about our eternal destination. Calvin didn’t, so far as I know, have any helpful advice on how to keep from feeling good about having done good. Presumably, if we are all sinners, awareness of that fact should be enough.

Well, these days, it isn’t. Unlike Calvin and his ideological descendants, today’s Americans believe deeply in their inalienable right to feel good about themselves. We bump up our self-esteem for our skills, our temperaments, and our sheer lovability. As Senator Franken, in his earlier incarnation as Stuart Smalley, used to say, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and—doggone it!—the Minnesota Supreme Court likes me.” Or something like that.

We are entitled to feel good about every aspect of our selves except—oddly enough—our attempts to improve the world we live in and the lot of its inhabitants. Not only are we not allowed to feel good about doing good, we are not allowed to feel good about being good, except in the sense denoting excellence of worldly skills. We still believe we are all sinners. But we also believe that, as Smalley would say, “that’s o-kay.” We don’t need to feel bad about being sinners, we just shouldn’t feel good about being do-gooders. That would imply that we do good for ulterior motives—namely, in order to feel good.

This at least provides us with a solution to the eternal conundrum of how to bad-mouth people we don’t like but about whom we don’t actually know anything discrediting—just say they’re only buying Fair Trade coffee/living in integrated neighborhoods/going to church regularly/sending their children to public schools/buying hybrid cars/etc. to feel good. It’s even neater than calling them hypocrites, which was the ploy before we discovered feelgood.

Admittedly, I come from the Jewish tradition, which is mostly profoundly behaviorist. With some rather esoteric exceptions, we don’t much mind if you do the right thing for the wrong reason—even reasons a lot wronger than mere self-esteem, like looking good to the neighbors, improving the image of your business, impressing eligible members of the opposite sex, or even intimidating potential opponents—so long as you do it. We figure the world will still be a better place than if you don’t do it.

For the same reason, we aren’t keen on doing good secretly. If your neighbors don’t know you donate to charity, they may feel they live in a world in which most people don’t donate. This may lead them to stop donating. It may also lead them not to bother asking for help when they really need it, because they don’t know anybody to ask. At the very least, it is likely to lead them to depression and even despair.

Moreover, as St. Augustine figured out a long time ago, it is just about impossible to delete selfish motives from our actions. Either we deceive ourselves about our motives, or we get paralyzed into not acting at all. This is not worth the trouble.

So, please, spare me the Stuff White Liberals Who Aspire to a Moral Code Loftier Than Al Capone’s Like. Nice people feel good about nice things. Nasty people feel good about nasty things. Pat yourself on the back and go on your way. Make the world a better place.

*This was the whole point of Magnificent Obsession, a very popular edifying novel of the 1950s.

Red Emma

Magical Thinking, Al Queda, and Aliens

The origin of Guantánamo is pure magical thinking, as is the current mainland US resistance to bringing Gitmo defendants onto our soil for trial before federal courts. Perhaps the ancient Hindu practice of untouchability is the clearest analog. A person who can pollute places and people by his very presence in a room, or by casting his shadow upon a Brahmin’s food, is, on one hand, the lowest of the low. On the other hand, he also has a kind of super-power. Remember cooties? Back when we were fifth-graders and the boys had decided that girls had cooties, the girls could chase the boys halfway across the playground threatening to pollute them. Oh, to have that kind of power again!

Well, Al Quaeda, and anybody even remotely suspected of being connected with Al Quaeda, has that power. If any of them are allowed onto US soil, we will instantly dissolve into terror and anarchy. The super-max prisons that now securely hold the worst of our worst home-grown criminals are presumed to be utterly ineffectual against these Muslim super-criminals. Never mind that the latter’s accents and looks make them a lot easier to spot and retrieve than our home-grown murderers and rapists. Never mind that many of them have probably been deprived of most of their physical and mental competence by their treatment at Gitmo. Once their feet touch US soil, they will gain 100 pounds, get a foot taller, and turn green and even meaner than, say, Ted Bundy, Ted Kosinski, and Brian Dugan.

We knew that back in 2001, of course, which is why we created Gitmo in the first place. Those of you familiar with pagan magick know about wards and circles, which create places outside normal space and time to which the most dangerous forces can be restricted. Well, that was Gitmo. The detention facility there was created to be a legal black hole, under no one’s jurisdiction for purposes of legal review, but under the absolute control of the US government for purposes of keeping the Bad Guys from our shores. Of course, as anyone who saw “A Few Good Men” well knows, there is legal US jurisdiction at Gitmo. That’s why the US military servicemembers stationed there can be disciplined and even court-martialed, right there on the base, if they violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If they don’t like the result, they can even appeal, first up the military chain of command all the way to the Pentagon, and then to the civilian federal court system on the mainland. But, apparently, the US public can’t handle that truth either. They/we can accept the novel concept of an “unlawful combatant” who is in a different category from prisoners of war, spies and irregulars subject to being shot on sight, and criminal defendants. Such a person therefore cannot be granted any of the legal rights of POWs or criminal defendants. But by reason of some strange compunction, he cannot be shot on sight either (perhaps because many of them were never encountered by US authorities on the battlefield in the first place, but were picked up from local bounty hunters.) Presumably that’s one of the three impossible things a good American is required to believe before breakfast. But we can’t imagine allowing these people to touch our sacred soil, lest they pollute it, and us, with deadly weakness.

Which is closely related to what happens to our sacred soil when the wrong kind of alien touches it. And also what happens to the right kind of alien (ie anti-communists and especially Cubans) touches that same soil—they are immediately free and legal. The soil that renders anti-communist Cubans free and legal is itself rendered vulnerable and polluted by capitalist-wannabe Mexicans. Does Hogwarts know about this?

Red Emma

Bigotry and Low Expectations

No, this isn’t about the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” I just did that to catch the eye. There is no heat in my office, my hands are cold, and the only way to keep myself typing is to start with something eye-grabbing. This is actually about the state of Maine (with which I have family connections) and the results of their referendum on same-sex marriage.

1) Why a referendum at all? Since when do we put constitutional rights to a popular vote? The fact that we have done it, in California and Maine, begs the question. Holding a referendum (regardless of its outcome) presumes that we don’t consider marriage a constitutional right, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in the marvelously-named Loving vs. Virginia case 40 years ago. Foo.

2) Does that mean that those who voted to repeal same-sex marriage in those states were bigoted?

3) Or does it mean that the supporters of same-sex marriage in those states were bigoted when they called their opponents bigots? Or that they were interfering with their opponents’ First Amendment rights by advocating boycotts and other non-violent demonstrations of opposition to the repealers? Conservatives seem to consider being labeled as bigots to be a fate worse than, say, Matthew Shepard’s death. Whatever happened to “sticks and stones”?

The word “bigot,” BTW, is believed to come from some Germanic sort of root meaning “by God.” There is a literal equivalent in Spanish, referring to little old ladies in black crepe who spend most of their time in churches: pordiosera. For more etymological information, see the Wikipedia entry.

Now that we’ve explicated the word as well as one can these days, let’s scrap it. It’s not useful for this discussion. Let’s, instead, use “prejudice” and “discrimination.” Mr. Wired draws a very useful distinction between them. “Prejudice” is what everybody has a bunch of, just by virtue of having been born and raised in a particular context. Most of them we don’t even notice most of the time. They’re as close to original sin as I can allow myself to believe in. But as a practical matter they’re morally neutral. It is useful to be aware of one’s own prejudices, because that enables us to avoid discrimination.

Discrimination is not morally neutral. It involves acting on one’s prejudices, to the detriment of the well-being of others. It’s a real sin. Not serving people in restaurants. Not letting them hold certain jobs. Beating them up. Hate crimes.

Very often, the way we become aware of our prejudices is by somehow associating their object with our children. Desegregating schools unveiled a lot of parental bigotry after the promulgation of Brown vs. Board of Education. White people who were willing to work with, or even for, African-Americans, or to vote for them, or to recognize the legal authority of people who had been elected mainly by the Black vote, found themselves drawing the line at the schoolhouse door.

The campaign against same-sex marriage in Maine apparently owes its success to the claim that schoolchildren would have to be taught that same-sex marriage was no different from the usual kind. So far as anybody can tell, that claim was utter hogwash, but, as other bloggers have already pointed out, it served as a proxy for the Bigotry That Dares Not Speak Its Name, opposition to allowing our children to be aware of otherwise normal people being gay. How we want to raise our children (as opposed to how we live our own lives) is often an expression of both our highest values and our lowest prejudices.

Many otherwise very decent opponents of same-sex marriage are perfectly okay with civil unions. As a practical matter, that keeps them mostly on the right side of the prejudice-discrimination line. Most same-sex couples will not suffer unduly from having civil unions rather than marriages, given proper legal drafting. Until we think about why these decent anti-same-sex-marriage opponents want to take that position. It’s really the same reason that classical and medieval authorities required prostitutes, and Jews, to wear distinctive dress. Not because Those People were so utterly different from The Rest of Us, but precisely because they weren’t. Without the yellow hat or the blond wig or the six-pointed star, they could easily be mistaken for, and treated like, Real People. We wouldn’t know whom to discriminate against.

When one of my colleagues tells me he frequents gay bars because he is “husband-hunting” (and I respond, as gently as possible, by telling him that bars are not usually great places to meet spouses), the very normality of this exchange puts any eavesdropping adolescent at the risk of concluding that gay people are just like the rest of us. For that matter, what happens when your kid’s high school class does a field trip to the local court and hears the judge, in the course of jury selection, ask a member of the panel, “Are you married or do you have a domestic partner?” (Yes, here in Cook County, they do that.) We can’t have that, can we?

Many sincere and religious people believe that homosexual behavior is a sin. Most of them also believe that adultery is a sin (one which is usually condemned in the same biblical paragraphs as homosexuality, and sentenced to the same punishment, by the way.) Many of them even believe that remarriage after divorce is a sin. But they somehow survive their children interacting with, or at least becoming very aware of, the public adulterers and remarried divorcés around them. So apparently their religiously-based discomfort with those classes of sinners does not get translated into discrimination, maybe not even into prejudice. One has to conclude that homosexuality is different for reasons that have nothing to do with biblical morality. The yuck factor, as some religious bloggers have termed it.

So, okay, I’m willing not to call same-sex-marriage opponents bigots if they’re willing to allow civil unions (or, for that matter, religious marriages) with all of the privileges that go with civil marriage in this society—so long as they don’t treat people in civil unions, and gay people in general, any differently than they treat public adulterers and remarried divorcés. Which means allowing their kids to interact with and be aware of and be taught in school by all, or none, of these public sinners.

CynThesis

Groups upset man wouldn’t marry interracial couple

“By MARY FOSTER, Associated Press Writer Mary Foster, Associated Press Writer – 6 mins ago

“NEW ORLEANS – At least two civil and constitutional rights groups in Louisiana are calling for a justice of the peace to resign after he refused to issue a marriage license for an interracial couple.

“The head of the American Civil Liberties Union in Louisiana and the Center for Constitutional Rights and Justice said Keith Bardwell should quit immediately.

“Bardwell is a white justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish in southeastern Louisiana. He refused earlier this month to issue a license or marry Beth Humphrey, who is white, and Terence McKay, who is black.

“Bardwell said he always asks if a couple is interracial and, if they are, refers them to another justice of the peace.

“He says children of such unions face troubling futures.”

Umm, like the President of the United States? Or Tiger Woods? Oh, never mind.

Red Emma

Back Down the Rabbit Hole

I guess I must have repressed my memories of the Republican opposition to the Clinton administration. It required too much suspension of disbelief even for a long-time Coleridge fan. Reminds me of the time I tried to turn my experiences running a legal aid office in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in Chicago into a series of short stories. The one that finally ended that career detour was the two kids I interviewed about their juvenile court case, who told me they had run away from home because their parents were practicing black magic.* I realized, as I reviewed my notes, that there was no way I was going to be able to make truth as believable as fiction, and I might as well go back to writing briefs and memoranda.

So here we go again, with the MSM trying to make the opposition loonies as believable as the Mad Hatter and the Red Queen. Lewis Carroll, thou shouldst be living at this hour. Remember poor Vince Foster, supposedly murdered by White House operatives because he Knew Too Much? Nobody could ever enunciate just what he knew too much about, but si non é vero, é ben trovato. And the apocryphal Secret Service agent whose job was to recruit lesbian bimbos for Hillary? Lesbian bimbos? Gimme a break. The scandalized reporters who discovered that Hillary, in her brief forays into the investment market, had actually made money? Omigod. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria! (sorry, I know I’ve used that before, I just can’t find anything more apt.)

Some saner conservatives are pointing out that the loonies are raising some valid points, such as the proper role and size of government, which deserve a serious debate. Some liberals have pointed out that we just had that debate, which, in this great country of ours, is called an election, and our guy won. Some other liberal commentators suspect that the reason the loonies can’t accept the legitimacy of the Obama presidency is that he’s Black. Obviously, they have the same trouble I did remembering the Clinton administration, which the loonies also never accepted as legitimate, even though Bill is at least as pale as I am, and Hillary is a good deal more so. They just started with the axiom that the Clintons had somehow snuck in under cover of darkness and then changed the locks on the White House. Color was never an issue. The issue is, and has always been, who qualifies as a Real American. A few Blacks and Hispanics (especially Cubans**) actually do. But anybody who believes the government has a valid role providing help for non-rich Americans really doesn’t qualify.

Remember the New Deal?*** FDR made it happen by making a deal with the Devil, or rather, the Dixiecrats, that would guarantee that none of its benefits would extend to Black people. Social Security and Unemployment Compensation specifically didn’t cover agricultural and domestic workers, who made up the majority of employed African-Americans at the time. Black sharecroppers didn’t count as “farmers” for purposes of the New Deal agricultural programs. Aid to Dependent Families was off limits for Black single mothers, because it was too easy to prove them “morally unfit,” unlike White widows, or to show that, unlike White women, they could never qualify because they always had a way to support their children, namely domestic labor. And so on. Well, what the loonies are looking for this time around is a guarantee that Obama’s health care reform won’t just exclude illegal immigrants from coverage, but will guarantee that they can never, ever, get treatment for any medical problem in any medical facility that receives federal funds, or from any doctor or nurse whose education was paid for with federal grants and loans. Anything less than that will forfeit all support from that side of the aisle.

But everybody in this particular controversy, on all sides, seems to have forgotten that, unlike FDR, Obama doesn’t need the support of the loonies to get his program passed. Yes, it would be nice to end the LaRouchie/teabagger/loony-sponsored sniping and become One Nation. But every time Obama extends a hand across the aisle, somebody cuts off one of his fingers. Now, apparently, he has only one left. Let’s hope it’s the one he needs for the appropriate gesture.

Red Emma

* In fact, what the parents were doing was Santeria, which most people at the time didn’t know about, and which the kids didn’t know about because their parents had always told them “We’re Catholic,” until the kids came home from school early one day and found their parents and some friends in the basement doing stuff Sister had never taught them. The solution, as in most juvenile runaway cases, was to encourage better parent-child communication.

** In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m Cuban, but like many second or third generation Cuban- Americans, I do not consider Castro the AntiChrist.

*** See Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White for the best historical treatment of this era.

The Flabby Arm of the Law

Some of our colleagues are disturbed that the US government seems lackluster in its enforcement of immigration law.  If we were paying attention, this would surprise no one.  It is only a special case of a reality so long-established and widespread in this country that it isn’t even a “problem,” it’s just an essential component of our culture. Americans don’t like law enforcement roughly 50% of the time.  Or, as our daughter puts it, every American law includes one invisible clause: “except me.”

Our various ancestors came here in the first place to get away from onerous economic and legal systems in the Old Country.  Sure, the Puritans immediately set up what seemed like an equally onerous system here.  But read Perry Miller and George Demos on how it actually worked out.  The Puritans anti-sex?  Not if you count the number of public rebukes for fornication and adultery, and the number of “premature” births.  In the era before TV and central heating, the Puritans did what they had to to keep warm and entertained.  Anti-violence? Anti-theft?  Read the stats.

More important, consider what our ancestors, like our own legislators today, used the law for.  First, (Wired’s First Law) nobody legislates against what nobody does.  The existence of a law against fornication isn’t evidence of a society’s high regard for chastity.  It is precisely the opposite.  The people whose lawmakers pass such legislation know their constituents screw around (as, a fortiori, do the lawmakers themselves.)  They just want to get on the record, when they have the time to get out of that unsanctified bed, that they know it’s wrong.

Same goes for drunk driving, indoor smoking, drug use, and exceeding the speed limit.  We use these statutes mainly to proclaim that We Are Nice People.  Not that we are people who don’t drive drunk, smoke indoors, use drugs, and speed.

That’s purpose #1 of American laws. Purpose #2 is the control of “undesirables.”  We are also a thrifty lot, who don’t like to let useful stuff go to waste.  Now that we have all those laws lying around on the books, why not use them to keep Those Other People in line?  Prohibition, clearly, was a Protestant movement to keep those wine-bibbing, beer-guzzling Italian and German Catholics from having too much fun.  The War on Drugs began as a war on African-Americans and graduated to a war on hippies.  The only prosecution for fornication in an egregiously well-known Southern state in the 1960s involved two African-American honor students who were active in the Civil Rights movement.  You get the picture.  Once the statute books are full of laws everybody violates, everybody is vulnerable to prosecution.  We can pick and choose among our potential defendants.  Should anyone be surprised if those who do the choosing concentrate on Those Other People?

Every now and then, some court finds this bias too blatant to be acceptable.  That was what happened in San Francisco, roughly a century ago, in Yick Wo vs. Hopkins, the grandmother of all discriminatory prosecution cases, in which Mayor Mark Hopkins decided to close down all wood-frame buildings used as laundries, which—surprise!—included almost all Chinese laundries and almost no non-Chinese laundries.  Even the US Supreme Court of that era, hardly a bastion of equal protection (the same guys who brought us “separate but equal” Plessy vs. Ferguson and “three generations of imbeciles is enough” Buck vs. Bell,) thought that was too much.*  Every now and then the courts still follow that precedent, though mostly they just nibble away at it like ducks at a pizza, and hope for it to disappear entirely some day.

Legislators get lots of good publicity out of designating a Serious Problem and then passing a law against it.  Occasionally, they run into embarrassed staffers who, having been assigned to research The Problem and draft the law, discover there already is such a law.  Legislators do not get good publicity from merely proposing to enforce a law that has been on the books for a century.  That’s just “the nanny state.”  The laws that actually get enforced are a small proportion of those on the books, and the proportion of violations of those laws that actually generate prosecutions is even smaller.

Every now and then, one of Us gets busted for breaking a law clearly aimed at Them, and complains about it.  “The only reason I got stopped for speeding was that it was easier for the cops to catch me because I was only going five miles over the limit when everybody else was going fifteen miles over the limit. It isn’t fair.”  Most of the time, as noted earlier, the courts disregard this argument, unless it seems to have really blatant racial, ethnic, or religious implications.  Being the slowest-moving lawbreaker on the road is a bad idea.  Most people know better. OTOH, prosecutions for Driving While Black are actually attracting lots of negative publicity these days, and many jurisdictions are cracking down on them. (For more information, check this out http://www.jmls.edu/facultypubs/oneill/oneill_column_04b08.shtml)

But most of the time, even local judges are not too bashful to say, of a defendant who is about to catch an unexpected break from the criminal justice system, that s/he “is not a member of the criminal class.”  (I’ve heard it myself, and probably many of you gentle readers have too.)  At heart, we are all Aristotelians.  We believe character determines fate, what you are determines what should happen to you, and what you have done in the past is our best guide to what you are.  So if you are a high school dropout with no visible means of support and a record of minor misdemeanors, we have no trouble concluding you must be more guilty of buying or selling cocaine than the solid, middle-class citizen next to you.  This is common sense, and tends to be accurate more often than not.  As long as we don’t really feel obliged to determine whether the high school dropout etc. actually made the drug sale/purchase in question, we figure he will get what’s coming to him more often than not, and that’s close enough for government work.

In conclusion, the reason “the Sixties” are still a hissing and a byword among hard-line conservatives is not that people actually became less law-abiding, but that they became less willing to accept the American deal—act like a solid citizen most of the time, don’t flaunt your lawbreaking, and we will treat you like a solid citizen unless you are Black or poor or Indian or Mexican or gay.  People who were not any of those things suddenly began breaking laws in public, and worse still, objecting to laws against sex, drugs, and harmless recreation, proclaiming that We Are Not Necessarily Nice People, and shouldn’t have to be.  That way lies Armageddon, Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes… The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!

So the immigration laws are a relatively minor casualty of something a lot bigger and a lot harder to clean up.  God’s Own Party has, wisely for their purposes, chosen to go about enforcing those laws by turning all illegal immigrants, and most legal immigrants, into Those Other People, unlettered Hispanics sneaking in here to take jobs and welfare benefits from good Amurricans.  It seems to be working.  Maybe it shouldn’t be.

Red Emma

More About Health Care, or Grist for the Ill

First of all, some senator, whose name now escapes me, says the “death panels” are a bad thing because doctors shouldn’t be doing end-of-life counseling anyway, that’s the job of Jesus Christ and your minister.  Well, aside from the fact that there ARE no “death panels,” and that many Americans are not Christian and therefore do not look to Jesus Christ for anything connected to the end of their lives, he actually has a point.  We SHOULD be making these decisions in conjunction with our imam, rabbi, high priestess, or pastor, if at all possible.  These guys may not know exactly what kind of life-extending treatment is available, but they certainly know their way through an ethical conundrum. That’s what they DO.  My father, of blessed memory, wrote a living will with the help of his pastor, who witnessed the document.  I relied on it during Dad’s final illness.  Despite the intrinsic sadness of the situation, I was enormously glad to have the document in front of me while dealing with the hospital.  Dad was, admittedly, much better than most people at advance planning in all areas of his life, which made life a whole lot easier for me and my brother.  But note that he didn’t ask his doctor about this stuff; he asked his pastor. And the pastor, relying on the “no heroic measures” language of the pre-Vatican II Catholic church, advised no resuscitation and no artificial ventilation, more than twenty years ago, long before it was a hot topic in political circles.

I think ALL religious organizations should be educating their clergy (and laity, for that matter) about their particular views on end-of-life care, and encouraging people to consult their clergy about these issues.  If they’re not good for that, whatthefrack ARE they good for?

Jane Grey

The Wise-*ss Latina Woman, and Other “Racists”

Full disclosure: I guess I’m a Latina woman, sort of.  My parents were both born in Cuba. They told their secrets in Spanish, which is a great way to raise a bilingual kid without working at it.  Wise?  Dunno, let the reader decide.

Anyway, I’m fascinated by the latest tactic of the Radical Right:  calling any person of color or member of a minority group “racist” when s/he suggests that colorless people may in a particular instance be behaving in a prejudiced manner, or that race may still be a significant factor in current social conditions.

Sonia Sotomayor mentioned (in 4 or 5 different versions of the “wise Latina” speech) that the experience of being a double minority might enrich her judicial perspective, and the Republicans glommed onto the remark as if it were their last hope of salvation. In fact, it was more like their last chance at having anything at all to say in her confirmation hearings, in light of her 14 years of impeccably straight arrow judicial decisions.  Maybe if her paper trail had looked more like Robert Bork’s, they wouldn’t have bothered with the “wise Latina” stuff.  But her Republican opponents and several other critics have called her a racist for using the phrase.

And then the President called the behavior of the Cambridge cops “stupid” when they arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for having broken into his own house. He started out by admitting he didn’t have all the facts yet.  In fact, he never will, and neither will the rest of us. The facts will undoubtedly never be completely clarified, since so far we have 4 different (and discordant) accounts, and there are a number of participants who have not yet been heard from.  Does that mean nobody is allowed to express an opinion, or just that POTUS should have kept his highly influential and controversial mouth shut?  Anyway, despite his diligent efforts at trying to cool things down with the aid of a Bud Lite, the “stupid” remark got him called a racist by several conservative types.

Apparently the reasoning of the Hard Right is that we are, or at least should be aspiring to become, a color-blind society.  Anyone who reminds us that race is still a significant social reality is obstructing this effort.  Anyone who obstructs our progress toward color-blindness by definition is a racist.

Some of my best friends espouse the ideal of a color-blind society.  They refuse to check the white/black/other boxes on the various forms everybody has to fill out these days. I can see why that’s attractive.  It would be nice to just cast off the shackles of our old errors and move on into a bright future for all of us, without regard to race, creed, color, or gender or………………….

Hey, wait a minute!  Would that mean we shouldn’t notice any difference between men and women?  Ummm, words fail me.  The species could be seriously disadvantaged in its chances for survival if the two sexes couldn’t even recognize each other.

And, assuming that there is some serious metaphysical difference between distinguishing characteristics people are born with and those they choose, does that mean that we should stop noticing race, but it’s okay to discriminate against Unitarians or anybody else who chooses a minority religion?  The gay rights movement has in some quarters gotten bogged down in a dispute over whether sexual orientation is inborn or chosen.  Are we sure we want that to matter?

Okay, I don’t want race to matter, when it comes to distributing social goodies, like the right to vote or move into a neighborhood or go to school or get a decent job.  I also don’t want religion, gender, or sexual orientation to matter for those purposes.  Does that mean I don’t want to KNOW about those things? Or that I don’t want the people distributing the social goodies to know about them?

Sometimes we do set up blinding mechanisms to screen out possible discriminatory effects.  It’s how we do reputable laboratory research—divide our subjects into two groups, without letting anybody know which group any individual subject is in, and experiment on one group while leaving the other along except for placebo tinkering.  It’s how the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra does its auditions—the musician plays from behind a screen, so the judges cannot ascertain his/her race, gender, age, or physical appearance.  They start with the premise that none of those things matter for their purposes.  All they need to know, and therefore all they want to know, is how good the candidate sounds.  Some academic journals do peer review by removing the author’s name and other identifying details from the article before distributing it to reviewers, to keep them from being blinded by gender, past reputation, or academic affiliations.  They don’t need to know any of those things to know whether the article is any good.  It should stand on its own anonymous merits. Same goes for juried art exhibits.

And it’s how the civil service system and the union seniority system are supposed to operate. Individuals get “points” for seniority and test scores, and if your points put you at the top of the list, you get the next job.  But as a practical matter, you don’t get into the seniority system until you get into the union, and until fairly recently, that often required a recommendation from a friend or relative.  As a practical matter, the civil service points awarded to military veterans are essentially an affirmative action program for men, since the military sets limits on both the number and the proportion of women admitted into the service.  Civil service doesn’t screen out as many high-scoring women as it used to, since there are a lot more women veterans than there used to be.  But the system still favors males.

Mr. Wired had a brilliant suggestion some years ago:  why don’t employers get serious about deciding what the real qualifications are for doing a particular job, advertise the job opening and qualifications to the general public, and then just hire the first qualified person who walks through the door?  These days, most employment discrimination doesn’t involve hiring unqualified people in preference to qualified people, but in choosing one qualified person over another for reasons having nothing to do with qualifications.  So let’s eliminate that step from the process.

I don’t know anybody other than Mr. Wired and us who likes that idea.  Most employers think they want to hire the most qualified person available for a particular job.  Of course, a lot of things get in the way of doing that, like figuring out what the qualifications really are for a particular job, and deciding how much they’re willing to pay for stellar qualifications, and dealing with candidates whose wage demands may be as high as their qualifications.

And of course, there are the intangible qualifications. “Character.”  “Fit.”  “Comfort level.”  How the candidate comes across in an interview (which, of course, is never conducted from behind a screen.)  All the things that serve as proxies for whether the candidate reminds the interviewer of his/her best friend.  All the areas into which considerations of race, religion, class, age, gender, and sexual orientation can creep unrecognized, especially if one isn’t even allowed to notice how they affect the total employee mix that results from these decisions.

I would love to live in a society in which none of this stuff mattered to a person’s chance at the Good Life.  Gandhi says “we must live the change we wish to see,” and a lot of the time I think he’s right.  But living as if we had already overcome racism and other forms of discrimination will not actually overcome them.  It will merely blind us, not to color, but to its effect on the world we live in.  No doubt some of the people obsessed with race and discrimination are racists, or maybe just politically savvy race card players.  But most of them, I suspect, are just trying to avoid being blinded to the racist realities that still surround us.

Watch This Space for a further examination of such questions as:

Do we presume that the unspoken basic job qualification for most decent jobs is white middle class culture?  Are we willing to treat people of color, women, GLBT types, and people with disabilities like white middle-classniks only to the extent that they can disguise themselves as white middle-classniks?

If we do admit these outgroups to the white middle class, do they become fully qualified members of the Tribe, or only a cheap knockoff (I was going to say “pale imitation,” but that obviously won’t work) of the real thing?

Are we willing to accept people we recognize as different from ourselves as nonetheless entitled to be treated like ourselves?  That is, is equality possible without sameness?

CynThesis

Child-Rearing in Public

One of the commenters on That Other Blog has problems with other people’s over-indulged kids acting up in public, and their parents standing ineffectually by.  I guess I’ve seen that once or twice in my life.  It may reflect the kinds of neighborhood I frequent that I see abusive parents and their kids in public places a lot more often.  It annoys me just as much, and in addition sometimes puts me in a moral quandary.

I was brought up in Florida, which was still pretty Southern at the time. That may account for the fact that it wasn’t until I moved up North for college that I first heard a parent tell her child, “I’m going to kill you.”  I heard it fairly often after that.  These were white, more or less blue-collar parents in New England.  When I moved out to Chicago, I saw a somewhat different pattern: African-American parents telling their kids, “Sit down and shut up, stop crying, sit still!!”  And sometimes reinforcing words with slaps.  The kids, in all the instances I saw, were doing nothing worse than crying. Most of them weren’t even doing that. They were just squirming or waving their arms or trying to get up and walk around. The thing that bothered me most was that most of these parents (in fairness, some of them were undoubtedly grandparents) seemed to take absolutely no joy from their children. No, this is not a function of poverty, as nearly as I can tell.  Hispanic and Asian parents in what appears to be the same income bracket generally look really happy with their kids, even when the kids are acting up.

The more middle-class parents I see usually don’t pick on their kids by yelling at them and slapping them. They are more subtle and more annoying about it.  The ones who tell their kids, “If you don’t stop [whatever], I’m going to call the policeman and he’ll put you in jail” (how on earth are the kids supposed to know that the policeman is who you go to for help?) The ones who tell the kid to stop [whatever] because “you’re bothering that lady”, meaning me.  (I am not the least bit bothered, except by being used as a club to beat up on a helpless child.)

Obviously I’m not the only person who sees this kind of thing. People write to advice columnists all the time about it.  The columnists, who are probably nicer people than I am, generally say that the way to respond to these situations is to offer sympathy or even help to the abusive parent, who is probably just really overwhelmed.  Maybe so, but on the rare occasions when I have tried to talk to a mother in this situation, I generally get told to mind my own business.

Which I can sort of understand, from the other side.  From the first instant a woman starts to look pregnant, until the last day she appears in public with anybody too young to vote, her parenting skills and the conduct of the said young person are fair game for the entire world of total strangers to comment on and advise.  It may or may not take a village to raise a child, but the village certainly feels entitled to kibitz on the process whenever they get the chance.  Unless I see abuse rising to a level that would interest the official child welfare establishment (which so far I haven’t, and having worked in the Juvenile Court system for many years I’m quite familiar with the standards), I figure everybody is better off if I keep my mouth shut.  I do give occasional “know-your-law” talks in the community, which gives me the chance to talk about the official standards for child abuse and neglect to people who are actually interested in listening or they wouldn’t be there.

But these issues seem to make a lot of parents feel that their children simply don’t belong in the public realm at all until they’re old enough to go to the mall by themselves.  Of course, keeping kids at home in front of the television until they are teenagers who can be dropped off at the mall means that they will probably behave really obnoxiously at the mall, since they have so far had no chance to practice proper public behavior.  This is not a solution.

The solution, I think, lies in all of us—parents, non-parents, ex-parents, future parents—accepting our obligation toward the next generation, who will after all be paying the Social Security and maintaining the economy of childless people in this generation.  They need us, and ultimately we will need them.  So in the meantime, parents need to be willing to bring their children out in public without feeling either embarrassed or belligerent about how the kids behave, and willing to accept kibitzing from strangers, and non-parents need to be willing to tolerate and even encourage small people who are not yet very good at sitting still and shutting up.  Any society that is not willing to share in accommodating the next generation doesn’t deserve to have one.

CynThesis

Miscellaneous Meanderings

There is, somewhere in one of “Official Rules” books, a Law which states, “Any organization founded to unite a proliferation of splinter groups invariably becomes one more splinter group.”  By the same token, any attempt to sum up everybody’s wide-ranging opinions on a particularly controversial subject invariably becomes yet another wide-ranging opinion.  But whattheheck, I’m going to try anyway.

There seem to be two repeating themes in the Gates-gate discussion:

 the police are entitled to be treated with respect or even deference, and are also entitled to use their power to enforce that right; anybody who mouths off to a cop deserves what s/he gets.
and
 there is a persistent disparity in the way different racial groups are treated by the law enforcement system, which cannot be completely explained by the behavior of those groups and their members.

These two propositions are not mutually inconsistent. They could both be true.  My sister Red appears to think that the former proposition is just plain dead wrong and is responsible (perhaps as part of a larger pattern of the male sense of entitlement and willingness to enforce it by the most direct means available) for a lot of serious violence between police and people of color.  I haven’t talked to Jane about this yet, but, being something of a statistical wonk, she probably accepts the latter proposition without boggling, and would be willing to go along with the former just for the sake of everybody getting along.

Everybody getting along is, in fact, a laudable goal.  When the major cause of death among the 16 – to – 35-year-old males of a particular group is homicide, mostly committed within that group (let’s leave the cops out of this for a moment), maybe the male sense of entitlement is a particular problem within that group.  As Jane would say, this needs more thought.

But, on the perennial other hand, unlike such cultural subgroups, the police are not “them.” They are “us.” They are acting in our name, on our behalf, and on our money. We cannot dismiss their behavior as “men will be boys.”  We cannot merely advise them to talk amongst themselves to come up with a better method for achieving their goals. Their goals, after all, are our goals.  They are doing the job we have assigned them to. If that job gets innocent people killed, that blood is on our hands.  We need to decide, as a society, whether we want the police to be able to protect the authority they wield in our name by arresting people, or worse, merely for transgressing social boundaries.  Maybe we do.  If so, the Constitution and the legal system we live by require that we put it in writing, and set written limits to the power we confer.

And, by the way, our mother always told us that “you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”  We have recently discovered that flies—at least the ones that frequent the Wired residence—like vinegar.  Haven’t tried them with honey yet, but this casts doubt on all the old verities.  As Jane would say, this needs more thought.

CynThesis