important distinction regarding books and ebooks

At [publishing] More on the Amazon vs Macmillan problem, Jay Lake says, "Books are a product. Ebooks are a service." In the comments, John Chu beat me to pointing out the error in that:

Books are a product. Ebooks with DRM are a service. Ebooks without DRM are a product.

As for the Amazon-Macmillan War, elephants are fighting, and I'm the grass.

what title this is I think I know

Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows.

Attention, multitaskers (if you can pay attention, that is): Your brain may be in trouble.

People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time.

I'm tempted to move: The Secessionist Campaign for the Republic of Vermont

Phys Ed: How Exercising Keeps Your Cells Young

Metafilter post of the day:

great teaching takes true grit

What makes a great teacher? Analyzing more than twenty years of data, Teach for America has found that great teachers had trained in their subject areas rather than in education, and had high "life satisfaction." They also demonstrated five tendencies: they

"constantly reevaluate what they are doing... they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls."

This last trait is measured by the Grit Scale, which has been shown to predict good outcomes in both teachers and West Point cadets. (Do you have grit?)

Not everyone agrees:
The Problem with Teach for America: 1, 2
True Grit
Why I Hate Teach for America

posted by anotherpanacea

this is the title you're reading now

My "Blogging break" now means "links only, and only links that may be useful for years." And, okay, brief commentary. And, uh, whatever I damn well feel like. Like this realization:

I need to stop saying "but" and start saying "and." Too often, I say "Yes, but—" or just "But—" and I'm heard as denying what the other has said when I actually mean that the other's point is valid, so far as it goes, and there are more, and possibly greater, factors to consider as well. The 4-Hour Work Week (which I decided was not worthless, but was not for me) mentioned the "criticism sandwich": give praise, then criticism, then more praise. When I was a kid, the technique was called "sugar-coating." I think my metaphor will be "trick the cat," because when we've had to give medicine to cats, adding salmon or tuna flavor made a huge difference.

Ulysses Grant: Our Greatest President?

...it was only anti-democratic racist violence and a rightwing court system that frustrated that American ideal. Too many liberals buy into a myth that Jim Crow was democratically supported in this nation which just feeds its historic legitimacy.

What we should honor and remember by honoring Ulysses Grant is that his vision of racial justice was the will of the American people-- all its people -- and that the following hundred years of segregation was an illegitimate betrayal of that democratic will.

Italics mine. Link via Making Light.

via rialian (thanks!), a site I may follow: Front Porch Republic. rialian pointed out The Politics of Ingratitude; I found a great selection of songs in Lookin’ Out My Back Door; Or Sounds From Boo Radley’s Porch, and this quote:

"Property in the hands of labor is freedom. Labor in the hands of property is slavery." –Dmitri Kleiner

And, for fans of recursive art, The Turtles perform the theme to It's Garry Shandling's Show:

how long will this blogging break last?

Too often, my blogging seems like writing with nothing to say. My tepid defense of Chris Matthews is a fine example: he's a rich old white liberal. Why should I care if folks call him a racist because he praised Obama using rhetoric from the '70s and '80s? I'm too often powerless in the face of SIWOTI.

I'm sure there are loose ends in my blogging that should be wrapped up. The only one that occurs to me just now is that I finished Jim Goad's The Redneck Manifesto. It had one surprise for me: when he mentioned realizing his parents were embarrassing because they were lower class, I remembered the same thing. For me, that happened in sixth grade, when we moved from the country to the nearest city, Gainesville. At first, I thought our new house was a big step up in life, because my brother and I no longer had to share a room with our sister, but sometime during that school year, I realized we lived in a small house in a blue-collar neighborhood, and the rich kids at school--meaning the middle-class kids--had very different lives than mine.

The problem with the The Redneck Manifesto is it should be called The Redneck Rant. It's not going to convince anyone, partly because Goad's love of the gross-out will offend a lot of the "nicer" people who might've been receptive to it. If I could edit it to about a third its size, I would have a booklet that I would force on everyone I met. I think if Goad and I sat down with a drink, we'd either have a fine time or he'd think I'm a damn fool for trying to get privileged people to understand the nature of privilege.

I'd agree with him, but I'll still keep trying.

I've been trying to write fiction lately, but that's not happening. I need to change my life. I've started that. I'll provide an update when I know more. (Apologies for sounding cryptic. So far as I know, no bad things are happening in my life. My need for change comes from within, not without. Jesus and Rilke would understand.)

If this break lasts longer than usual, happy trails!

ETA: On Facebook, discussing the way people are responding to Chris Matthews' blunder, I wrote this:

The old-school activists say, "But we're all part of the human race!" while the anti-racists say, "But we're different races and we're proud of that!" It's heard as an either/or proposition when the answer should be "Both--we're the same, and we're different, and neither cancels the other so long as we treat each other with love and respect."

JON STEWART SLAMS CHRIS MATTHEWS

Wyatt Cenac's bit in the middle is great.

I hadn't known much about Matthews before. Now I think he's interesting, as confused old white liberals go. In the '60s, he did the Peace Corps in Swaziland. He admires Saul Alinsky. When Obama and Clinton were competing, he got a lot of flak for saying the truth about Clinton: "I'll be brutal, the reason she's a U.S. senator, the reason she's a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around. That's how she got to be senator from New York. We keep forgetting it. She didn't win there on her merit." He's been a longtime Obama supporter; during the campaign, he said, "I have to tell you, you know, it's part of reporting this case, this election, the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama's speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often." Conservatives got all over his ass and NBC's for bias because of that.

On the other hand, at Matthews Rips Dem Congressman: 'You're Pandering to the Netroots' he sounds like a typical clueless old liberal.

today's grab bag

via DairyState Dad: Charlie Brooker - How To Report The News


via madrobins: "What Teachers Make," by TAYLOR MALI


This will probably be the tablet computer I'll buy.

Are The Rich Damned? From The Mormon Worker. The Book of Mormon has strongly commie bits, too.

Selling Poor Steven: The struggles and torments of a forgotten class in antebellum America: black slaveowners

linkies

Why I won't be getting an iPad, even though I crave one. (But it's okay. There are going to be a lot of tablets coming out this year.)

Auschwitz survivor: ‘Israel acts like Nazis’

Dr Meyer also insisted the definition of “anti-Semitic” had now changed, saying: “Formerly an anti-Semite was somebody who hated Jews because they were Jews and had a Jewish soul. But nowadays an anti-Semite is somebody who is hated by Jews.”

kind of defending Chris Matthews

After Obama's State of the Union, Chris Matthews said, “I forgot he was black tonight for an hour." Immediately, race-not-class liberals began mocking the old guy for speaking about race in ways that're dated.

Apparently, Matthews was supposed to be watching Obama while thinking, "Black. He's black. He's so black. Damn, but that is one black man. Black, black, blackittyblack. Wait? Did he just say something about gays in the military? He must've meant black gays in the military. 'Cause he is B-L-A-C-K, that's for damn sure."

For an hour, Matthews was seeing a US president, not a black man. Maybe for the first hour in his life, he actually wasn't seeing through racist eyes. If you can't give him credit for that, at least cut him slack.

ETA: Just to be clear, when I heard what Matthews said, I rolled my eyes, too. First Harry Reid uses terminology from the '60s, then Chris Matthews uses the color-blind metaphor that was popular in the '70s. But for all his sins, Chris Matthews should not be fired just because he was praising Obama in an old-fashioned way.

Zinn's advice about Obama

"I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president — which means, in our time, a dangerous president — unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction." --Howard Zinn

via Kim Antieau

Danceland

Here's Danceland, a collaboration by Emma and me from the Bordertown anthology.

ETA: Most of Wolfboy's half of the story was retold in Nevernever, but Orient's half is only available here.

copyediting and book pirates

The Book Pirates of Peru:

There is one problem with the myth about pirates bringing literature to the masses: street-level vendors tend to congregate in the same middle and upper-class neighborhoods where you find the bookstores. Their clients are people with money. One critic calls it a cultural problem: “The same people who would never consider buying fake whisky think nothing of buying a pirated book. There’s no respect for intellectual production in this country.” Here, an upper-class woman buys a copy of Orhan Pamuk’s most recent novel The Museum of Innocence

Some useful questions to try on people who claim to be copy editors (via Making Light). Regarding #3, Emma's favorite stylebook for decades has been the Chicago Manual of Style. My usual solution is to defer to Emma, but sometimes I just go with my quirks, because as e. e. cummings knew, it's okay to make up your own style. But if you do, it's nice to be consistent with your quirks. Readers can tell the difference between quirkiness and carelessness.

Related funnies: How to use a semicolon: The most feared punctuation on Earth

girls with slingshots

linkies

Sex and booze figured in Egyptian rites. (thanks, Bill C!)

No Gender Gap in Math: A worldwide study of nearly half a million boys and girls found no significant gender gap in math ability

5 Jokes About The Apparent Eagerness Of Certain Democratic Members Of Congress To Abandon Health Care Reform In Light Of Scott Brown’s Electoral Victory

Here. I first saw this link on BoingBoing or Metafilter and didn't bother to click through because a commenter said the joke quoted there was the only funny one. Then Chris McLaren linked to it, I clicked, and I snorted at all five. They work for me because (1) I'm really thirteen, and (2) I gave up on the Democrats during Bill Clinton's first term.

truth checking: Chavez and Haiti

Truth over delusion: Hugo Chavez did not accuse the U.S. of causing the Haitian earthquake (via Chris McLaren)

ETA: Danny Glover did not say that the Haitian earthquake was caused by global warming.

best post about corporate personhood

Strike the root.

linkies

Secret Handshakes (thanks for the link, rialian!):

...most Monday evenings you’ll find me helping to preserve one of the few survivals from an all-but-forgotten world, as I don one of the few neckties I own and head over to the old brick Masonic lodge here in Cumberland.

Yes, I’m a Freemason. Some years back a series of accidents clued me in to the huge role that the old fraternal orders had in structuring American communities a century ago, and in the process I also learned that the handful of fraternal orders that still survive are rapidly going under for lack of new members. The obvious response was to apply for membership in a lodge, which I did.

Should the Census Be Asking People if They Are Negro?

...in a 2006 study of 138 censuses from around the world, New York University sociologist Ann Morning found that only 15% of those asking about ancestry or national origin used the term race. Almost all of those that did were former slave economies.

things anti-racists don't understand: class and race traitors matter

Anti-racist ideologues frequently complain that Hollywood doesn't show oppressed people solving their problems by themselves. This is because anti-racists don't understand systemic oppression: systems are designed so that minorities can't change things by themselves. That's especially true of the US civil rights struggle; the US was determined that Haiti's revolution would be the last successful uprising by the oppressed. Any honest history has to include the whites who risked their lives for the cause.

I was reminded of this reading the 1950's "Montgomery Story" comic book about the struggle led by Martin Luther King, Jr. It includes this panel:

According to Wikipedia's Robert Graetz entry, "Bombs were planted at his home on three occasions; the largest did not explode."

US feudalism

via Wall Street’s Bonus Binge in Perspective, a snapshot of income in the USA: 0.6% of the population gets more than the bottom half:

Martin Luther King quote, & linkies

"Been a lot of applauding over the last few years. They applauded our total movement; they've applauded me. America and most of its newspapers applauded me in Montgomery. And I stood before thousands of Negroes getting ready to riot when my home was bombed and said, "We can't do it this way." They applauded us in the sit-in movement--we non-violently decided to sit in at lunch counters. The applauded us on the Freedom Rides when we accepted blows without retaliation. They praised us in Albany and Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Oh, the press was so noble in its applause, and so noble in its praise when I was saying, "Be non-violent toward Bull Connor"; when I was saying, "Be non-violent toward [Selma, Alabama segregationist sheriff] Jim Clark." There's something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, "Be non-violent toward Jim Clark," but will curse and damn you when you say, "Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children." There's something wrong with that press!" —Martin Luther King

For 'Liberal' NYT, Taxing the Rich Is a Fringe Idea: "...taxing the rich is not an idea that has "a chance of winning broad public support"--it already has broad public support."

Language structure is partly determined by social structure, says psychology study: sychologists at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Memphis have released a new study on linguistic evolution that challenges the prominent hypothesis for why languages differ throughout the world. (Thanks, Bill C.!)

Cleopatra's Eyeliner: Peeper Health Keeper

A Q. for birthers

If our Secret Masters decided the US should be ruled by a right-of-center black guy, do you really think they couldn't find one who was born in the USA?

medievalist funny

Here.

reading The Redneck Manifesto

The dumb white bumpkin has always been a stock figure in the American dramatis personae. But fifty years ago the depictions tended toward the benign and comical, from Li'l Abner to Ma and Pa Kettle. As our perceptions of a lily-fisted white hegemony started to fracture, the caricatures became meaner, yieldging the murderous crackers in Easy Rider and the ass-fucking genetic disasters from Deliverance.

Cartoon people. These days, we hardly ever see the redneck as anything but a caricature. A whole vein of human experience, of potential literature, is dismissed as a joke, much as America's popular notions of black culture were relegated to lawn jockeys and Sambo caricatures of a generation or two ago. The redneck is the only cardboard figure left standing in our ethnic shooting gallery. All other targets have been quietly removed in deference to unwritten laws of cultural sensitivity. Instead of Amos-n-Andy, we have Beavis and Butthead. The trailer park has become the media's cultural toilet, the only acceptable place to dump one's racist inclinations.

—Jim Goad, The Redneck Manifesto

I dunno if Goad will address this later, but this reminds me that the redneck is white America's scapegoat. For centuries, rich whites promoted racism, first to separate slaves and indentured servants, then to separate workers. Jim Crow laws were not a demand of poor whites—they were promoted and enacted by the South's defeated rich who still wanted to justify the "peculiar institution" and thereby escape their responsibility for the nature of their wealth.

Anti-racists, was Deep Space Nine racist? (or, more on Avatar)

I was agreeing that Avatar took a racist turn when Sully became the savior of the Na'vi by doing something no Na'vi could do. But now I'm remembering Sisko becoming the Special One in Deep Space Nine. Was that racist? Imperialist? Speciesist? If so, are all stories about outsiders becoming leaders inherently racist? If so, are the stories of Benjamin Disraeli and Barack Obama racist?

I do believe that stories have implications. But I think anyone who says Avatar is the story of the superior white man is missing the point. It's the story of a person who finds himself by joining another culture.

P.S. Another point for anti-racists: Avatar's romantic plot is not Pocahontas. That story ended with the whites and the Indians making peace, not war. Avatar's romance is the story underlying Pocahontas, the story we usually call a Romeo and Juliet story for its most famous example, the story of people from competing tribes who fall in love.

ETA: But Pocahontas would've been awesome if Captain John Smith had switched sides and helped drive the Europeans out of the Americas.

ETA 2: Since I've been poking at both sides of the "Is Avatar racist?" divide, I should make this clear: I would've been a lot happier if Sully hadn't been a white guy.

Also, the "Is it racist?" question sidesteps another question: "Is Avatar stupid science fiction?" The answer is yes, and you can see that right at the beginning: robotics are cheap in that future, yet Sully has to use a wheelchair instead of robolegs?

Understanding Democrats

From Obama Still Doesn't Get It:

A majority of Obama voters who switched to Brown said that "Democratic policies were doing more to help Wall Street than Main Street." A full 95 percent said the economy was important or very important when it came to deciding their vote. Surprise, surprise, policies do matter.

But what was the President’s reaction? ABC News reported, "President Obama said today that he feels he lost a direct connection to the American people in his first year in office because he focused too heavily on policy-making."

From the Weimar Democrats:

The currently prescribed role of the Dems is to be the "Party of the People." But they can’t attain or retain office without cash flow from the very corporations that are the people’s worst enemy.

They are thus politically bi-polar. They can never offer meaningful cures for any of America’s real problems because they must always return to the trough of the corporations that cause the bulk of them.

From Class Clowns:

Obama has not betrayed his passionate supporters so much as he has faithfully represented rather well the class he supports, the same wealthy group of capitalists his party represents. Perhaps he may even believe the illusion, as many do, that there are shared basic interests between the rich and the poor.

...As Huffington concedes, Presidents enacted most of this country’s major reforms as a result of movements being organized independently of the two-party Congressional caucuses. She cites the example of Martin Luther King and writes that he “showed that no real change can be accomplished without a movement demanding it.”

The powerful social movements in American history of trade unions, civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights were people organizing around their real class interests even if not openly acknowledged as such. Certainly the record of reforms vindicates the correctness of Huffington’s own personal awakening from her experience in the last twelve months: “the realization that our system is too broken to be fixed by politicians, however well intentioned -- that change is going to have to come from outside Washington.”

on Avatar

I'm a bit depressed after seeing Avatar, not because I'm not Na'vi, but because it could've been a great story if Cameron had been willing to work with a smart friend. Nothing surprises you, the human clothes all look like they were bought in 2008, there's dialogue where silence would've been more powerful, and there's one of my monster peeves, gratuitous voice-over.

On the other hand, he didn't make it for me. He made it for people who are new to science fiction.

It is sexist and racist, but anti-racists exaggerate the white guy hero's role (he's plucky and lucky, but not superior) while missing the bigger lie about the nature of power: Cameron said he conceived of this decades ago. Since then, we've had Margaret Thatcher, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Barack Obama, and a number of black Fortune 500 CEOs, including Ursula Burns, the first Fortune 500 black woman CEO. Making all the villains white males does not reflect the way evil corporations and imperialists value diversity today.

As for Sully as great savior, my hopes took a dive when he earned his Na'vi title. I wanted him to stay the equal of the blue folk, riding the same critters, etc.

Trying to stay spoiler-free here: the critters are never developed in the heart-rending way they could've been because Cameron tends to think "How do I top that?" when he should be thinking "How do I develop that?"

Still, it's mighty pretty on the big screen. Will-Bob says check it out—but don't pay full price.

ETA: I still think pastabagel's comment at MetaFilter is the best critique of the movie I've seen.

ETA 2: To clarify, I don't think the movie's racist because it's about a white guy. I think it moves into Tarzan/Phantom territory when the white guy is the only person who can do the special thing and unite the tribes. Given the movie's explicit race traitor theme, I forgive it for that, because telling more white men to join the other side in opposing imperialism is a mighty fine message.

ETA 3: See also Anti-racists, was Deep Space Nine racist? (or, more on Avatar).

selective ignorance

I am often amazed...

Hmm. Could end the sentence there.

I'm often amazed at the limits of the knowledge of successful people. I now know the phrase that explains it: selective ignorance. It helps you do what you want, and it helps you ignore things that trouble you.

My problem with selective ignorance is I'm sure many of the people surrounding Hitler (yes, I will go for a full Godwin) were masters of selective ignorance. They were just doing their job, or their art, or focusing on their families. Why should they concern themselves with things that don't harm them? And especially why should they concern themselves with things that help them? (I think I'll start calling this Sinclair's Law: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!")

But I think I have to master selective ignorance. I just hope I can be selective about my selective ignorance.

I'm reading Timothy Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek now. I'm amazed (yeah, yeah) at how much I respect and despise him. Here's the "despise" part: His advice seems to boil down to "exploit poor folks" and "lie to avoid people who don't make you richer."

But he's mastered that thing princes and priests must learn to be rich without provoking revolution: he's damn charming in a psychopathic* way.

And here's the respect part: he knows a truth that I must master: Address what matters and ignore the rest.

So I'm going to be selectively ignorant for a week. Part of what that means is no daytime blogging, cutting way back on newsreading, and only checking email twice, at noon and day's end.

* See What "Psychopath" Means: It is not quite what you may think

Jesus on giving money instead of stuff, plus donor of the day

Jesus answered, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor...

I used to wonder about the middle step of selling your possessions. But recently, I realized that all the major charities prefer to get money, because that lets them buy what's needed and saves them from storing or discarding things that aren't.

Donors of the day: Why We Gave Away Our Home. The title's misleading, because they did something wiser than giving a mansion to someone with the income to take care of it. They "decided to sell our house and move to one that was half its size and price --and donate the difference to charity."

Food, Sex, and Giving

From Our Basic Human Pleasures: Food, Sex, and Giving:

“Brain scans by neuroscientists confirm that altruism carries its own rewards. A team including Dr. Jorge Moll of the National Institutes of Health found that when a research subject was encouraged to think of giving money to a charity, parts of the brain lit up that are normally associated with selfish pleasures like eating or sex.”

via Sex, food, and giving money away

linkies

Publisher Says Robert B. Parker, Author Of 'Spenser' Mysteries, Has Died. I quit reading him after he settled into a formula, but I learned a lot from Looking for Rachel Wallace and Early Autumn. RIP.

This is how to introduce your female love interest: Diana Palmer's first appearance in The Phantom.

Health Discovery: More Coffee, Less Cancer Risk.

GoodSearch and Goodshop:

GoodSearch is a search engine which donates 50-percent of its revenue to the charities and schools designated by its users. ...it's powered by Yahoo!... The money GoodSearch donates to your cause comes from its advertisers — the users and the organizations do not spend a dime!

In 2007, GoodSearch was expanded to include GoodShop, an online shopping mall of world-class merchants dedicated to helping fund worthy causes across the country. Each purchase made via the GoodShop mall results in a donation to the user's designated charity or school – averaging approximately 3% of the sale, but going up to 20% or even more.

The Blackout on Cuban Aid to Haiti

FBI broke law to get call records

The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact to justify their actions.

two Martin Luther King Jr. quotes

"...capitalism has often left a gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, has created conditions permitting necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few, and has encouraged small-hearted men to become cold and conscienceless so that, like Dives before Lazarus, they are unmoved by suffering, poverty-stricken humanity." —Martin Luther King

"Today the poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our consciences by being branded as inferior or incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty. The problem indicates that our emphasis must be twofold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available." —Martin Luther King

ETA: another criticism of capitalism via nuadha_prime:

"We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered." — Martin Luther King Jr.

that Howard Cruse panel

I moved the update on the Howard Cruse panel into the original post here.

sports teams and class

Cubs-Sox Feud: Healthy Competition or Class War?

Tim Minchin- Censorship and Confessions

Tim Minchin- Censorship


Tim Minchin- Confessions

Did Ronald Reagan destroy California and the USA?

It looks like his policies as governor may result in California becoming the US's first failed state. Crash State: California as the Ruins of the Unsustainable is scary. But almost all of the US's current problems can be traced to Reagan, who took Jimmy Carter's solar panels off the White House and began changing tax laws to benefit the rich.

looking for a Howard Cruse panel

There was a Howard Cruse comic that I still remember, maybe written in the '70s before he came out in his comics work, in which a character talks about fantasizing about naked women chained to trees. I went looking for it online but couldn't find it, maybe because my google fu is weak. Anyone know where a copy might be?

I was reminded of it because someone emailed me saying women writers from the racefail community who write slashfic and erotica with male characters are being told by gay men that they don't like being objectified.

ETA: I emailed him, and he replied:

Here's the panel you're remembering. It's from a 1976 2-pager of mine called "Big Marvy's Tips on Tooth Care," which appeared (if memory serves) in an early Snarf.

Sorry the quality of this image isn't so great. The original art was purchased by a collector long, long ago, and I lost track of the photostat of the art that I must have saved at the time I sold it. What you see here was scanned a while back from the original comic's version printed on yellowing newsprint.

I still find the panel funny, too, as did the editor of a feminist newsletter who asked to reprint it a few years ago, forever disproving the old canard about feminists not having a sense of humor. Her request was what occasioned the scan I'm sending to you.

Enjoy—and thanks for remembering.

Because it's NSFW, you'll have to click here to see it.

Howard Cruse is, quite simply, one of the US's great cartoonists. You'll find more of his work at his web site. Try That Night at the Stonewall for something autobiographical, or A Zoo of Our Own for an amusing take on identity politics.

another take on the problem with "Racism = Prejudice + Power"

In Why "Racism = Prejudice + Power" Is The Wrong Way to Approach the Problems of Racism, J F Quackenbush makes a number of good points about both power and meaning. I wish I'd spotted his post earlier.

Also, he may've found Judith H. Katz's source for the equation:

As near as I can tell, the formulation "Racism = Prejudice + Power" originated in a book by Pat Bidol in 1970. Titled "Developing New Perspectives on Race," in it Bidol explicitly makes the formulation as stated and then uses this definition as the basis for an argument that in the United States Blacks cannot be racist against whites, they can only be racially prejudiced against them. This makes an important connection that matters as far as this particular nonsense is concerned, which is that this stipulated definition exists as an excuse to defend members of racial minorities against accusations of racism and it has always existed for this reason. The definition was largely popularized by Judy Katz...

I'm a bit amused that Patricia Bidol is yet another white whose ideas shaped modern anti-racist theory.

Brendan O’Neill in 2007 on classist anti-racists, and fword commenter

One form of prejudice reveals another: The coverage of racism in the Big Brother house has highlighted commentators' own ignorant opinions about the working class.

The Shilpa Shetty vs Jade Goody story may be the Gunfight at the OK Corral for anti-racism vs. anti-classism. (As usual, the lower class lost.) On the one hand, you have Shilpa Shetty, about as privileged as anyone could be. On the other, you have Jade Goody— Well, v, a commenter at Sexism in the house: Celebrity Big Brother 2009, sums it up well:

Jade was inarguably the person of least privilege in that house (except for maybe her mum who could add 'one armed lesbian muslim ex heroin addict' to her marginalisation list) and she was mocked and prodded and patronised and insulted for it from the second she got there. She eventually reacted to it by doing some minor bitching and then finally she blew her lid. She lasted longer than i would have in her position.

She makes another point I admire:

Jade was used as an example of how low our country had sunk, and Indias own class problems were deliberately ignored. As it is - given the choice of classy Shilpa and scum Jade - well I dont think the ruling class in either country took more than a nanosecond to work out who was the politically whitest of the two.

I agree with you though - if Shilpa didnt behave like the lady she was supposed to, if she had raised her voice or voiced approval for sex or children outside of marriage or whatever - then yeh she wouldve been seen as uppity and etc. But thats kind of my point - the great 'Anti Racist' establishment took the opportunity to celebrate the olde english values they claim she represents, *values which are racist and sexist and classist and imperialist in themselves.*

ETA: Wikipedia's article is probably as good as any for folks who're wondering who the heck she is: Jade Goody.

Brendan O’Neill, Libertarian Marxist

I'm sure I read some of his earlier writing, but I just became aware of him when I found Jade and the tyranny of ‘anti-racism’. He writes:

The Second Witch-Hunting of Jade Goody exposed the poisonous nature of official ‘anti-racism’. Top-down ‘anti-racism’ has nothing whatsoever to do with ensuring equality of opportunity for all (if it did, then it might focus on doing something meaningful, like overhauling the government’s all-powerful immigration controls, rather than witch-hunting a powerless woman from the wrong side of the tracks); rather it is about policing people’s behaviour and etiquette, especially amongst the lower classes. The witch hunt showed how the meaning of the word ‘racist’ has mutated in recent years. Accusations of ‘racism’ are no longer about indicting someone for their views on ethnic minorities but rather have become a snobbish judgment on their lack of breeding. ‘Racist’ has largely become code for ‘underclass’: uneducated, uncouth, thick, fat, ‘not one of us’. Racism is no longer seen as something that springs from the unequal structures of society, but rather as a dark, unwitting thing, a sort of virus, which lurks in the minds of the poor, the piggy-eyed, the pathetic.

Thus, the impact of official ‘anti-racism’ is not to make society more free and equal, but more authoritarian and censorious. In the elite witch-hunting of Jade Goody – in the unabated snobbery, the demands that she be re-educated, the threats of violence – we could glimpse the deeply negative impact of official ‘anti-racism’, which paralyses society and speech and makes people less certain of how to relate to one another.

Also:

Can we have our Voltaire back please? Voltaire’s belief in freedom of speech has been so spectacularly abandoned by mainstream society that it can now be co-opted by radical Islamists.

Planet Gore: Save the Planet by Preventing African Births

Disturbing the Peace: On the inalienable right to "excessively noisy sex"

Wyclef Jean and Yele Haiti warning

If you're thinking of donating, first read More on Why Donating to Wyclef Jean's Charity Might Not Be the Best Way to Help Haitians Right Now.

Punch Brothers: Rye Whiskey (not the trad song)

Punch Brothers: Rye Whiskey


The audio's out of sync, but this is more to hear than watch.

letter from Satan (by Lilly Coyle)

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has Lilly Coyle’s letter from Satan to Pat Robertson:

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action.

But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished.

Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"?

If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox -- that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it -- I'm just saying: Not how I roll.

You're doing great work, Pat, and I don't want to clip your wings -- just, come on, you're making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That's working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan

ETA: I got this via NPR; someone there broke it into paragraphs to make it easier to read.

links especially for fans of anonymity and pseudonymity

Afghan Civilians and the Value of Anonymity

Nameless Sources and the Crisis of Accountability

Good morning, class!

"So we must see that peace represents a sweeter music, a cosmic melody that is far superior to the discords of war. Somehow we must transform the dynamics of the world power struggle from the nuclear arms race, which no one can win, to a creative contest to harness man's genius for the purpose of making peace and prosperity a reality for all the nations of the world. In short, we must shift the arms race into a "peace race." If we have the will and determination to mount such a peace offensive, we will unlock hitherto tightly sealed doors of hope and bring new light into the dark chambers of pessimism." —Martin Luther King

via Brave New World: "On top of a record $708 billion request for Defense Department funds for next year, President Obama wants another $33 billion for the unpopular Iraq and Afghanistan wars."

The Death of the Slush Pile

The Scam of Private Label Articles

No Devil Pact in Haiti includes the text of the prayer which Robertson thinks was a pact with a devil:

The good Lord who created the earth; who created the sun that gives us light.The Good Lord who holds up the ocean; who makes the thunder roar. Our Good Lord who has ears to hear. You who are hidden in the clouds; who watch us from where you are. You see all that the white has made us suffer. The white man's god asks him to commit crimes. But the god within us wants to do good. Our god, who is so good, so just, He orders us to revenge our wrongs. It's He who will direct our arms and bring us the victory. It's He who will assist us. We all should throw away the image of the white men's god who is so pitiless. Listen to the voice for liberty that sings in all our hearts.

Now, apparently there was a pig sacrificed, but no Christian fan of barbecue should object to that.

Nation's Largest Black Bookstore Faces Foreclosure

Marcus Books, the nation's oldest African American bookstore, could be in its final chapter.
The Bay Area landmark, based in Oakland, has provided a wealth of resources on African American history and culture since 1960. But it's now in deep financial trouble, its future in jeopardy.
The store's manager says a Ponzi scheme and a subprime loan have landed the family-run business in foreclosure.

(Thanks, JB!)

Good morning, class!

The best Avatar review I've read is pastabagel's comment in MetaFilter. (No, I haven't seen the movie yet. Emma thinks Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr. are hotter than 3D blue people. But we'll catch it soon.)

Insurers Helped Pay for TV Attack Ads:

Five big health insurance companies funneled millions of dollars to the United States Chamber of Commerce for television commercials attacking Congressional efforts to overhaul the health care system, the National Journal reported Tuesday.

In separate statements Tuesday night, the insurers’ trade association and the chamber did not take issue with the article.

The article said that the insurers wanted to disguise their contributions because they had received bad publicity in the early 1990s when they opposed the Clinton health care overhaul with their memorable “Harry and Louise” commercials.

Even as it funded the negative commercials, the insurers’ trade association, America’s Health Insurance Plans, has generally been professing support for the idea of an overhaul, while opposing some specific provisions, like a government-run health insurance plan.

The companies: Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Kaiser Foundation Health Plans, UnitedHealth Group and Wellpoint.

The Author Speaks: Abused by the Boss?

Q. Give me the worst example of a firing you know.

A. The most blatantly wrong instance would have to be Lynne Gobbell, who was fired for her bumper sticker. During the 2000 presidential election, she pulled into work with a Kerry sticker on her car. When her boss ordered her to pull it off, she said no, and he fired her. She didn’t have a legal leg to stand on if she wanted to dispute it. That’s because the Constitution generally doesn’t apply to your rights at work.

Chronic sleep loss hampers performance

On average, a person needs about eight hours a night to preserve performance... Acute sleep loss is being awake for more than 24 hours in a row and chronic sleep loss is getting only about four to seven hours of sleep per night...

Cohen's team tracked nine healthy volunteers -- five men and four women -- to see what effect a combination of acute sleep loss, chronic sleep loss and biological sleep rhythm might have on their ability to function.

The researchers found that while most participants caught up on acute sleep loss with a single night of 10 hours sleep, those with chronic sleep loss showed deteriorating performance for each hour spent awake.

...people may not realize that they have a chronic sleep debt because it slowly builds over weeks.

Haiti: the Big Picture

Haiti: send money, not stuff

Haiti: Help with money, not stuff: After every major disaster, misguided donations actually worsen the suffering.

We're Not The Jet Set

Joe Bageant's latest rant, "Bass Boats and Queer Marriage" sent me looking for this song by John Prine:

Iris Dement & John Prine - We're Not The Jet Set


Tammy Wynette and George Jones - We're not the Jet Set

Pat Robertson, most despicable person of the day (decade?)

Pat Robertson: Haiti "Cursed" After "Pact to the Devil" (via DairyStateDad)

more anti-racist insanity: Keith John Sampson's "racial harassment nightmare"

When I was young, banning and censorship and speech codes belonged to the country's right wing, but times have changed, and "power corrupts" applies to everyone. I just came across P.C. Never Died: Think campus censorship disappeared in the 1990s? Guess again. It's a rightwing source that focuses on rightwing examples, but there's a good section pointing out that anti-racist ideology in action hurts leftists, too. Some snippets:

Hindley, the Brandeis professor who was punished for his instructional use of 'wetback', is a liberal. Sampson, the student who read a book about the Klan, is an Obama voter, and some of the most vocal students opposing the Delaware residence program were liberals....

Free speech zones...disproportionately affect left-wing protests. In November, for example, three professors were banned from campus at Southwestern College in California after they supported students whose protest against budget cuts took place outside--I am not making this up--the "free speech patio."

The part I've researched most thoroughly is its opening, because I couldn't believe it was true:

In 2007 a student working his way through college was found guilty of racial harassment for reading a book in public. Some of his co-workers had been offended by the book’s cover, which included pictures of men in white robes and peaked hoods along with the tome’s title, Notre Dame vs. the Klan. The student desperately explained that it was an ordinary history book, not a racist tract, and that it in fact celebrated the defeat of the Klan in a 1924 street fight. Nonetheless, the school, without even bothering to hold a hearing, found the student guilty of “openly reading [a] book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject.”

But it is true. Keith John Sampson's account: MY 'RACIAL HARASSMENT' NIGHTMARE.

From American Politics Aren't 'Post-Racial':

Mr. Sampson was in short order visited by his union representative, who informed him he must not bring this book to the break room, and that he could be fired. Taking the book to the campus, Mr. Sampson says he was told, was "like bringing pornography to work." That it was a history of the battle students waged against the Klan in the 1920s in no way impressed the union rep.

The assistant affirmative action officer who next summoned the student was similarly unimpressed. Indeed she was, Mr. Sampson says, irate at his explanation that he was, after all, reading a scholarly book. "The Klan still rules Indiana," Marguerite Watkins told him – didn't he know that? Mr. Sampson, by now dazed, pointed out that this book was carried in the university library. Yes, she retorted, you can get Klan propaganda in the library.

The right wing of the blogosphere has more details than the left. That's where I found Chancellor Charles Bantz & The Hero Keith John Sampson Sampson's response to a commenter who wrote, in response to one account of what happened, “I hope he is a racist now”:

NO! You hope wrong. Why would I become a racist because of the incompetence of a bureucratic office? That is silly. Besides, the first person to reproach me, over my reading the history book, was an obtuse AFSCME Union official. Dale Basey is a ignorant foolish white man. Should I hate whites? Of course not.

I do have a deep distrust of mindless bureucratic idiots who would use a union or the A.A.O. to show their ignorance by ignoring my Constitutional Rights. But I do detest the Klan still and I would proudly stand with any Black person, Jewish person or any other minority if the Klan ever showed up at IUPUI.

Chancellor Banz, who will not acknowledge the wrong to me, is white and the IUPUI Media office is run by whites and they are still attempting to smear me by claiming it was not the book but my actions that were the problem. What? I quess if I had been reading a comic book that would have still been offensive to the un-educated Nakea Vinson and the IUPUI media office.

No, I will NOT become hateful because of the asinine actions of a few. After all hate and ignorance comes in all colors. So if you hoping I’ll join the hateful Klan keep hoping cause I believe that we are all human beings and no one race is better than another.

Lillian Charleston was the chief affirmative action officer then. If you wonder what she earned for doing her work, someone here says it was $106,000.00 a year.

Divorce Rates Higher in States with Gay Marriage Bans

Divorce Rates Higher in States with Gay Marriage Bans:

...those states which have tended to take more liberal policies toward gay marriage have tended also to have larger declines in their divorce rates. In Massachusetts, which legalized gay marriage in 2004, the divorce rate has declined by 21 percent and is the lowest in the country by some margin. It is joined at the top of the list by Rhode Island and New Mexico, which do not perform same-sex marriages but idiosyncratically also have no statute or constitutional provision expressly forbidding them, as well as Maine, whose legislature approved same-sex marriage only to have it overturned (although not banned constitutionally) by its voters.

On the other hand, the seven states at the bottom of the chart all had constitutional prohibitions on same-sex marriage in place throughout 2008. The state which experienced the highest increase in its divorce rate over the period (Alaska, at 17.2 percent) also happens to be the first one to have altered its constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage, in 1998.

via Another argument against gay marriage disproved

when you have lived through hard times

I've been in the habit of deleting old posts that (a) have no comments on them and (b) seem like they'll no longer be relevant after a few days. I'll stop that now, because Scott Wells just linked to one that I'd deleted, and I feel a bit bad for screwing up the chain of accountability.

At HOW YOU’VE LEARNED TO COPE WITH LESS, he quotes this bit from Rich People Things, with Chris Lehmann: A Steady Diet of Nothing, then muses on it:

While there’s little data this early in our present calamity to track the formation of durable attitudes toward saving, spending and government intervention in the economy, the general rule of thumb is that “even one really tough year experienced in early adulthood is enough to fundamentally change people’s core values and behaviors,” according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. And as Foroohar goes on to explain, “there’s an entire body of research to show that recession babies not only invest more conservatively, they tend to make less money, choose safer jobs, and believe in wealth redistribution and more government intervention.”

That's become true for Emma and me. It's certainly true for our parents, who were children of the Great Depression. I can't say I'm grateful for the current recession, but the socialist in me is pleased this generation won't be as spoiled as so many baby boomers and Gen Xers were. It's a hard way for humanity to progress, but maybe hard lessons are the only lessons we truly learn.

P.S. The second link from my deleted post was America’s Low-Wage Future.

Damn cell phones

Twenty-eight percent of traffic accidents occur when people talk on cellphones or send text messages while driving.

the Harry Reid statement they're not mentioning

Sunday Talk Shows Botch Race Discussion quotes this, from the book in which Harry Reid said he thought Obama's light skin and mainstream dialect would help him in his quest for the Presidency: "Reid was convinced, in fact, that Obama's race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination.'

So he said "Negro dialect" instead of "black dialect" or "African American dialect"? He's an old guy using an old standard of racial politeness. When the NAACP changes its name to NAABP or NAAAAP, get back to me.

Blacks Upbeat about Black Progress, Prospects

A new Pew report on the state of race in the USA: Blacks Upbeat about Black Progress, Prospects.

a hunter-gatherer life

heresiarch said, "...the image of hunter-gatherers living on the brink of death is a fantasy of its own. The !Kung--actual, modern hunter-gatherers--spend an average of 12-19 hours per week gathering food. Something to think about next time you wake up early for an eight-, ten-hour work day."

the class education of US Presidents since 1900, a list

I'm starting in 1900 because the public high school movement was in full force by then. In researching this, I found a great quote from Theodore Roosevelt:

All this individual morality I was taught by the books I read at home and the books I studied at Harvard. But there was almost no teaching of the need for collective action, and of the fact that in addition to, not as a substitute for, individual responsibility, there is a collective responsibility....The teaching which I received was genuinely democratic in one way. It was not so democratic in another. I grew into manhood thoroughly imbued with the feeling that a man must be respected for what he made of himself. But I had also, consciously or unconsciously, been taught that socially and industrially pretty much the whole duty of the man lay in thus making the best of himself; that he should be honest in his dealings with others and charitable in the old-fashioned way to the unfortunate; but that it was no part of his business to join with others in trying to make things better for the many by curbing the abnormal and excessive development of individualism in a few. Now I do not mean that this training was by any means all bad. On the contrary, the insistence upon individual responsibility was, and is, and always will be, a prime necessity.... But such teaching, if not corrected by other teaching, means acquiescence in a riot of lawless business individualism which would be quite as destructive to real civilization as the lawless military individualism of the Dark Ages. I left college and entered the big world owing more than I can express to the training I had received, especially in my own home; but with much else also to learn if I were to become really fitted to do my part in the work that lay ahead for the generation of Americans to which I belonged.

An asterisk indicates a public institution.

Theodore Roosevelt. Private tutors. Harvard University.

William Howard Taft. Woodward High School*. Yale University.

Woodrow Wilson. Private schools in Augusta, GA and Columbia, SC. Princeton University.

Warren G. Harding. Ohio Central College (later acquired by Muskingum College).

Calvin Coolidge. Black River Academy, Amherst College.

Herbert Hoover. Friends Pacific Academy, Stanford University.

Franklin D. Roosevelt. Groton School, Harvard University.

Harry S. Truman. Independence High School*, "the only president who served after 1897 not to earn a college degree."

Dwight D. Eisenhower. Abilene High School*, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point*.

John F. Kennedy. Choate School, Harvard University.

Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson City High School*, Southwest Texas State Teachers' College (now Texas State University-San Marcos)*. As president, Johnson said, "I shall never forget the faces of the boys and the girls in that little Welhausen Mexican School, and I remember even yet the pain of realizing and knowing then that college was closed to practically every one of those children because they were too poor. And I think it was then that I made up my mind that this nation could never rest while the door to knowledge remained closed to any American."

Richard Nixon. Whittier High School*, Whittier College. ("Financial concerns forced him to decline scholarships to Harvard and Yale universities.")

Gerald Ford. Grand Rapids South High School*, University of Michigan*, Yale Law.

Jimmy Carter. Plains High School*, United States Naval Academy*.

Ronald Reagan. Dixon High School*, Eureka College.

George H. W. Bush. Phillips Academy, Yale University.

Bill Clinton. Hot Springs High School*, Georgetown University, Oxford, Yale Law.

George W. Bush, Phillips Academy, Yale University.

Barack Obama, Punahou School ("the largest independent school in the United States"), Columbia University, Harvard Law.

Of course class still matters

Remembering that class mobility in the US is about identical to that in the UK, some bits from Of course class still matters:

...the middle and upper classes are becoming increasingly effective at ensuring that their children have the capabilities and qualifications to populate the upper echelons of the economy and society, what the great sociologist Charles Tilly called opportunity hoarding.

....Alan Milburn's lethal report on social mobility showed that, despite only 7% of children being privately educated, 75% of judges, 70% of finance directors, 45% of top civil servants and 32% of MPs were independently schooled. And if current trends continue, tomorrow's professionals will come wholly from the better-off 30% of families.

those who see both class and race

The best analysts of race in the USA never lose track of the role of class. Two examples from Thandeka's The Whiting of Euro-Americans: A Divide and Conquer Strategy:

"...we must not forget that white racism was from the start a vehicle for classism; its primary goal was not to elevate a race but to denigrate a class. White racism was thus a means to an end, and the end was the defense of Virginia’s class structure and the further subjugation of the poor of all "racial" colors."

"The white southern elite also established the "extraordinary rule" of allowing slave owners to exercise the vote of all or at least three-fifths of their black slaves. This concentration of political power not only degraded, in theory, the personhood of people with African ancestry by counting many such persons as only three-fifths human, but it effectively disenfranchised virtually all white southerners except for the biggest slaveholders."

And from Sharon Smith's Race, class, and "whiteness theory":

"When the racist poll tax was passed in the South, imposing property and other requirements designed to shut out Black voters, many poor whites also lost the right to vote. After Mississippi passed its poll tax law, the number of qualified white voters fell from 130,000 to 68,000."

"...the historically nonunion South has not only depressed the wages of Black workers, but also lowered the wages of Southern white workers overall."

anti-racism excess: the "anti-gypsy" email

Businessman arrested over 'anti-gypsy' email he did not even write: A businessman became the subject of a £12,000 police investigation after council officials accused him of being “offensive” to gypsies in an email he had not even written.

Maybe it's like an April Fools Day joke that I don't get because I'm not a local. But it appears to be real. The Daily Mail covered the story also.

I hope the gypsies get to keep their home. But I also hope someone changes the law that came into play there, because freedom of speech includes the freedom to be a rude idiot.

ETA: Brits may not have a constitutional right to free speech, but many of them do get the concept: We all have the right to be offensive.

Good morning, class!

The current federal minimum wage is $7.25. According to The Poverty Epidemic in America, by the Numbers, "The minimum wage used to be 50 percent of the average wage." If it was half the average wage in 2007, the minimum wage would be $8.40.

Which provokes two thoughts: Should the minimum wage be tied to the average wage as a percentage updated every year? If so, what's a fair percentage? My thought? At least 75%.

When Will the White House Wake Up? offers this picture of how the economy is doing for folks under age 50:




And they note,

President Obama’s “kid-gloves treatment of the bankers,” as economist Paul Krugman observed last week, has placed “Democrats on the wrong side” of the “populist rage” now building throughout the country.

Now, in a two-party system, populist rage will always favor the party out of power because there's nowhere else for the rage to go, so Democrats have no one to blame but themselves. If Obama wanted to be a populist leader, he would be doing far more. For example:

...the President doesn’t have to wait on Congress. His federal agencies, right now, have the authority and the capacity to start clamping down on executive pay excess, even without congressional action.

...Up until now, the FDIC has never considered excessive bank executive compensation a practice that endangers bank stability. But the FDIC, according to news reports, may be about to change course and define pay excess as a reckless practice.

The IRS, argues an analysis forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal, could take a considerably more sweeping step against that pay excess — just by treating publicly traded companies “the same as their privately held counterparts.”

...The U.S. tax code, the analysis author Aaron Zelinsky points out, currently lets businesses deduct off their taxes “a reasonable allowance for salaries or other compensation.” But the IRS has essentially only applied this reasonableness standard to privately held companies.The White House could make all this happen, without any action needed from Congress. The White House, in short, has the wherewithal for attacking the windfalls at the top that so anger average-income Americans. Does the White House have the will? That may prove this year’s most important political question.

6 essential points from Thandeka's "Why Anti-Racism Will Fail"

I suspect some readers miss the brilliance of Thandeka's Why Anti-Racism Will Fail because of its theological points, so here's a pocket secular version with quotes from her speech:

1. Absence of oppression is not privilege.

Imagine that business and government leaders decreed that all left-handed people must have their left hand amputated. Special police forces and armies are established to find such persons and oversee the procedure. University professors and theologians begin to write tracts to justify this new policy. Soon right-handed persons begin to think of themselves as having right-hand privilege. The actual content of this privilege, of course, is negative: it's the privilege of not having one's left hand cut off. The privilege, in short, is the avoidance of being tortured by the ruling elite. To speak of such a privilege -- if we must call it that -- is not to speak of power but rather of powerlessness in the midst of a pervasive system of abuse -- and to admit that the best we can do in the face of injustice is duck and thus avoid being a target.

2. Privilege comes from wealth.

80 percent of the wealth in this country is owned by 20 percent of the population. The top 1 percent owns 47% of this wealth. These facts describe an American oligarchy that rules not as a right of race but as a right of class. One historical counterpart to this contemporary story of extreme economic imbalance is found in the fact that at the beginning of the Civil War, seven per cent of the total white population in the South owned almost three quarters (three million) of all the slaves in this country. In other words, in 1860, an oligarchy of 8,000 persons actually ruled the South. This small planter class ruled over the slaves and controlled the five million whites too poor to own slaves. To make sense of this class fact, we must remember that the core motivation for slavery was not race but economics, which is why at its inception, both blacks and whites were enslaved.

3. Anti-racism misinterprets actions resulting from feelings of shame and powerlessness.

...a minister I will call Dan...is much like the many goodhearted liberal white UU's I have met who are neither white supremacists nor racists.

One day, over lunch, Dan recounted an experience that helped shape his racial identity as a white. In college during the late 1950s, Dan joined a fraternity. With his prompting, his chapter pledged a black student.

When the chapter's national headquarters learned of this first step toward integration its ranks, headquarters threatened to rescind the local chapter's charter unless the black student was expelled. The local chapter caved in to the pressure and Dan was elected to tell the black student member he would have to leave. Dan did it. "I felt so ashamed of what I did," he told me, and he began to cry. "I have carried this burden for forty years," he said. "I will carry it to my grave."

The couple at the next table tried not to notice Dan's breakdown. The waiter avoided our table. As Dan regained his composure, I retained mine. I could see his pain. I felt empathy for his suffering but was troubled by his lack of courage. Dan's tears revealed the depth of the compromise he had made with himself rather than risk venturing beyond the socially mandated strictures of whiteness.

I realized that being white for Dan was not a matter of racist conviction but a matter of survival, not a privilege but a penalty: the pound of flesh exacted for the right to be excluded from the excluded. Dan's tears revealed the emotional price of his ongoing membership in the "white" race.

Although he is not a racist, Dan might make a confession of racism to a UUA anti-racism trainer because this would be the only way to mollify the trainer and also because racism is the only category he would have to express a far deeper loss and regret: his stifled feelings and blunted desires for a more inclusive community. But Dan did not cry during our lunch together in the restaurant because he was a racist. He cried because his impulses to moral action had been slain by his own fear of racial exile.

The anti-racist charge of white racism gives persons like Dan a way of addressing their moral failure of nerve without having to face a harder truth that they acted in racist ways not because they were racist but because they were afraid of being rejected. The charge of racism does not heal this condition or even describe it. It simply punishes a person for being broken.

4. Anti-racist rhetoric divides people.

...the silent majority...know that the anti-racist rhetoric ... runs counter to the economic realities of this country and their own lives. I believe that these persons simply dismiss the rhetoric as insulting to their intelligence and walk away. ... This is the way in which our community is broken. One withdrawal at a time.

5. Anti-racism does not offer solutions.

When it comes to specifics, [anti-racists] call for no other action on the part of the white sinner except confession.

6. The true solutions are to talk about class and race, to empathize, and to organize.

Katherine Kersten and the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative

Joel Monka asked what I thought of At U, future teachers may be reeducated, a response to Minnesota's Teacher Education Redesign Initiative Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group (pdf) preliminary report. Katherine Kersten (whose middle initial I would love to know) is a Michelle Bachman apologist, the sort of rightwinger who would argue in earlier times that freedom means slaveowners should be free to own people and the state should be free to prevent citizens of different races from marrying.

But no one is ever completely wrong about everything. The Minnesota report has problems. Its writers accept the ideology that Thandeka critiques so well in Why Anti-Racism Will Fail. Some examples of their goals: "Our future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression." "Future teachers will recognize & demonstrate understanding of white privilege." "Future teachers are able to explain how institutional racism works in schools." They promote the artificial social construction of race by recommending Janet Helms' A race is a nice thing to have: a guide to being a white person or understanding the white persons in your life. They speak of "white, middle-class, Christian meanings and values" as though middle-class Jews and blacks don't share those values.

The report makes token mentions of class, but its writers seem to assume the word refers to poor people of color. To them, the world is divided between white suburban schools and urban schools "of color" rather than schools in poor districts and schools in wealthy ones. They seem to have no idea that black and white middle class students have more in common with each other than with black and white lower class students. (I suspect they would have the usual anti-racist indifference to that facts that almost 40% of black Americans believe there are now two black races, a poor one and a richer one, and that in the US today, poverty is approximately 3% Asian, 25% black, 23% Hispanic, and 49% white.)

On the positive side, they recommend Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, a book that I would happily make required reading in every high school. They're right that people need to learn about the cultures they encounter—that's not political correctness, that's common courtesy. The USA has a problem. Unfortunately, ideological anti-racists have the wrong answer.

Next post: In praise of Thandeka's Why Anti-Racism Will Fail.

The Bankruptcy Decade: 10 Years of Failure

inspired by Stephanie Zvan's insight into District Nine...

In the comments on my post about Race Traitor movies, Stephanie Zvan said...

It's also worth noting that one of the themes of District 9 is the construction of criminality. I found it very hard to look at the aliens, who were clearly shown being pushed in their status as criminals, and not see the Nigerian criminals (who were never seen outside the same ghetto to which the aliens were restricted) as a commentary on the modern situation in South Africa. I can't tell you whether that was how it was intended, but that's how I saw it.

Hollywood sometimes depicts urban gangs as white or multi-cultural for fear of being called racist. The result is a lie about the geography of class and race in the US: Gangs reflect the regional nature of poverty. The Nigerian gang in District Nine is troubling to Americans who focus on race. But the writer, clumsily or not, was telling a truth: gangs exploit whatever they can, and if the new market is space aliens addicted to cat food, they'll supply that need. If District Nine was remade with an American setting, the gang should be black or Hispanic if the ship stops over a city, but if it stops in the country, the gang could be whites who found a more profitable product than meth or marijuana.

the unbearable whiteness and upper class privilege of anti-racism

Wondering why anti-racists don't like to talk about class issues, I finally took advice that's always good if you want to understand anything in a capitalist society: Follow the money.

What I found: Modern anti-racism is a commercial movement driven by graduates of the most expensive private colleges and universities in the US. That may explain why Thandeka, author of Learning To Be White, says anti-racists “make an erroneous assumption about the nature and structure of power in America.”

Though whiteness studies is a racially diverse field, three of anti-racism's most influential promoters, based on how often they're cited by the anti-racists I encounter on the web, are white:

Peggy McIntosh wrote “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” She's the associate director of the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College, one of the fifty most expensive colleges in the US.

Judith H. Katz first defined racism as “prejudice plus power.” She's the Executive Vice President and “Client Brand Lead” of the Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, a business that prospers by teaching anti-racism.

Tim Wise, a graduate of Tulane University, has lectured about anti-racism at “over 400 college campuses, including Harvard, Stanford, and the Law Schools at Yale, Columbia, and Vanderbilt.” I watched a little of one of his youtube videos, then turned it off when he claimed he was doing what black speakers could not. I was a teenager when my father went to a university in the late 1960s—black speakers were very popular on college campuses then. The idea that someone like Ralph Abernathy or Fannie Lou Hamer could not speak at a college campus today is as silly as the title of one of Wise's books, Speaking Treason Fluently. When the majority of a nation supports diversity, a better title would be Speaking Truisms Fluently.

So far as I can tell, Wise, Katz, and McIntosh are all very good people. That they content themselves with a superficial understanding of injustice in the US— Well, my favorite Sinclair Lewis quote applies yet again: “It's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

ETA: Most Expensive Colleges for 2009-2010

The Most Expensive U.S. Colleges

Walk Away From Your Mortgage!

Walk Away From Your Mortgage!

anti-racism excess: KFC ad, or the intersection of anti-racism and US cultural imperialism

Via KFC ad: Placate threatening black people with fried chicken…:


Racist KFC advertisement?

I wondered if this was like the Aussies in blackface performing in front of Harry Connick, Jr. Nope. Maybe it's just because I recognize Australia's national colors, but it seemed obvious to me this was about two different sports teams. Which it turns out it is. Australia's playing the West Indies team soon.

But American anti-racists are imposing US racism on other nations now. As any number of Australians have pointed out, Aussies didn't have a clue that in the US, black people liking fried chicken is racist.

Which, frankly, is one of the weirder bits of US racist code. I grew up in the South, and everybody down there liked fried chicken. We owned a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant for a while, and were one of the few places in the county that served whites and blacks. Mom and Dad were told by some black families that they came out of their way to support us. By eating fried chicken...

But I digress.

speed review: Sherlock Holmes

Liked it. Needed an edgier actress for Irene Adler--Claudia Black? Diana Rigg via time travel? Could've used more Watson. And this might be the hardest to explain: it needed an ordinary person for a client, an individual whose life would be transformed by Holmes and Watson. It wasn't as exciting as Iron Man, but I'm more likely to see this again than Iron Man. The important part commercially: I'll be there for the next one.

in support of race traitor stories (regarding Cameron's Avatar)

I had been thinking about discussing Avatar and the merits of stories about race traitors, but I didn't want to see Avatar, not because I suspected, as its antiracist critics claim, that it was racist, but because I suspected it was stupid science fiction (as opposed to the smart stuff).

Roz Kaveny has saved me the trouble: Avatar. She makes me want to see it. She reminds me that for all that I hated Titanic, I enjoyed Terminator 1 and 2 enormously. My only quibble with her discussion is that in mentioning District 9, she says it was racist. Is it racist to depict all the members of a criminal gang as having no redeeming qualities? Simplistic, yes, but racist?

ETA: Just remembered that he did True Lies, which I hated so much more than Titanic that I forgot it existed. But I still want to see Avatar now.