I'm Speechless

Holy christ.

If You've Just Come To This Blog From The Guardian

I'm always pleased when the Guardian's online blog includes me in a recap of one of the theater-sphere's rolicking debates. Earlier today, they posted a recap of the debate around race sparked off by Thomas Garvey's response to RVCBard.

I just wanted to say two things, if you're just arriving now and missed it:

1. I responded to Isaac's charge, quoted at the end of the piece, that I was taking Thomas Garvey in good faith here.
2. One odd omission from the Guardian piece is RVCBard's stance on the issue, since after all it was her comments that Garvey latched onto and started the whole thing, and without her the issue would probably have died away much quicker and been less interesting. Anyways, this is her biggest response to the debate, and this is her last one. They're crucial to understanding what happened.

In Context Of Our Latest Discussion

I don't have much to add to this post from the incomparable Ta-Nehisi Coates. The focus is on systems, which I always find to be more useful than focusing on individuals. The lines that really struck me:

The point isn't that all white people are somehow guilty. The point is that a choice between guilt/innocence wasn't really present. It had to be created and it carried with it significant social costs.

Diversity XXI: Race in the Theater. Or rather, Race in Conversation

Not much I can say on the subject except:

Part 1 - RVCBard

Part 2 - Thomas Garvey

Part 3 - 99 Seats

There's a lot of rage out there. A few brief thoughts:

1. Thomas Garvey says: "But please, try to skip the temptation to continue the "ongoing dialogue." Let's not "dialogue" anymore - let's just bring city services to Roxbury instead, okay? Let's just pass national healthcare. Let's improve education. Let's move forward."
   
   
   Sorry - you can't stop a dialogue, unfortunately. There will always be a dialogue about race. That's just the way it goes.
   
   
2. 99 Seats says: "Did I mention fuck you? Because, if I didn't, hey, pal, fuck you."
   
   
   It's a tough conversation we're having, and I believe you're pissed. And you make some good criticisms of Mr. Garvey. Imagine how much more powerful that post would be if it wasn't lost in a sea of fucking.
   
   
3. The part of RVCBard's original post that start all of this: "In contrast, my experiences with White people have been confusing, uncomfortable, frustrating, and exhausting in this regard. I can't quite put my finger on why, but I always feel a kind of pressure to perform around White people. It's like I have to prove I'm worthy of their presence. It's proven very difficult to get a White person's attention, especially a White man's. It's even harder to maintain it for more than about 15 minutes. And if you're White, and you met me in person, I'm probably talking about you."
   
   Time for some carefully chosen words.
   
   Well, as someone who I guess is white (half-African doesn't count for me because it's Jewish African... anyways) sometimes it is confusing, uncomfortable, frustrating, and exhausting for the White People too. That's what Chris Matthews was talking about. NOT THAT I AGREE WITH WHAT HE IS SAYING. But Matthews has been told a lot that he's racist (because sometimes he is), and he doesn't want to be, so he's relieved for a moment to escape that confusing, uncomfortable, frustrating, and exhausting feeling.
   
   If you've read good books on this subject like Blink or a million others, you understand that there's a difference between what I usually call hard racism, where like Strom Thurmond you actually believe that one race is better than all others and it should be raised to the top, or soft racism, which can either be stupidity/ignorance like Chris Matthews or institutional and unconscious.
   
   There's a study that shows that blind auditions can greatly improve the diversity of an orchestra. This is not a proof of hard racism -- it's a proof of soft racism. The problem is that seemingly open-minded people may, inadvertently, through tricks of their own unconscious mind, wind up mis-evaluating different applicants based on their race.
   
   The point is, we White Americans want to bridge this gap. But sometimes, we're going to screw up the way we screw up at a lot of things we want to do.
   
   Why am I rambling on this way?
   
   Well, from our half of the conversation, RVCBard, here's what happens. We show up to a meeting with someone who says that this is a White Supremacist country and is clearly on her guard to smell us out: are we the White man who's playing fair, or are we in the category of racists? And we know that we're open-minded, but we also know that
   
   So we want to be on our best behavior. We're nervous, and self-conscious. Like in sex, the more nervous we get, the less pleasant the experience is, and the more likely we are to screw up. It is, as you put it, "confusing, uncomfortable, frustrating, and exhausting." Then it becomes a Catch-22 -- we're confused, uncomfortable, frustrated, and you're confused, uncomfortable, and frustrated, and the chances we'll try it again are low.
   
   Does this mean I agree with Thomas Garvey, then, that it's Black people's fault, and y'all need to move on?
   
   NO.
   
   Thomas Garvey thinks the way to solve the difficulty of this conversation is to avoid it. It's irritating, and as all three players have demonstrated it can lead to incredible anger. But we can't avoid the conversation. I'm not so concerned about the frustrated/uncomfortable quality of the conversation as I am by the people who get up after 15 minutes.
   
   Part of it is we like to pretend that we're not having the conversation. White people meet Black people but they don't want to be talking about race. I don't like talking about it. And nobody wants our only dialogue to be "hey I'm black you're white let's talk about that" / "hey I'm white I don't really know what you're experience is like." And yet it may be necessary.
   
   

I don't know if I made the point I was trying to make (I thought I only had a few thoughts but it turned out to take a lot of words). I'm nervous to hit "Publish Post" because, well, it's so much easier for me not to post this and for me not to weigh in on this issue.

At least I'm not the only Jew who feels this way:

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Benjamin Button?

I saw The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button today, and... well, I really liked it. I have seen various reviews from people whose opinions I respect alleging things about bad philosophical undertones regarding race relations, and a dislike of the use of Hurricane Katrina in the movie.

As to the first point, this is always a difficult thing to judge. I am an Israeli-American from Orange County--I can count on one finger the amount of black kids who were in my elementary school, and I didn't exactly wind up with a lot more. I wound up open-minded, I hope, but... well, okay. There's two kinds of racism. The first is actually believing one race to be inferior--hard racism.

Recently, I saw David Mamet's play Edmond performed. The ideological undergirding of that play appeared to be that... well, that black people are genetically predisposed to avoiding responsibility and doing stupid, short-term-enjoyment-oriented sinful activity, which ends them up in jail. I'm not kidding. White man decides to live like a black man for a day, and therefore winds up picking up hookers, killing a waitress, and going to jail. There he finds his true home, because he realizes that's where he was meant to be--because he wasn't born like all those other white folks. Again: I'm not kidding.

So, that's clearly over-the-top racist. My impression of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is not that. The black characters are shown to be no more or less caring, kind, gentle (maybe more so).

But there might be a case to be made about the second type of racism, soft racism. Does it portray accurately how black people lived in New Orleans over the span of the film, or does it fall into two dimensional Gone With The Wind stereotypes? The answer is somewhere in the middle. I winced when, early on, a black woman (whose identity was never properly explained to me) referred to "Miss Daisy" while trying to make her feel comfortable--if not a deliberate reference to Driving Miss Daisy, then a huge oversight by the director. But I didn't feel I was looking at watermelon eating, "what is I gonna do," minstrel blacks.

Did I notice that in the "modern day" period, blacks were still mostly serving the whites, and that this wasn't questioned? Yes. But this, like it or not, has been my personal experience. I went to the Irvine Train Station for the first time a week ago, and was surprised to find that all of the ticket staff were African-American. This in a town in which I have not met an African-American resident.

But I am not in a position to judge, seeing as I haven't lived in New Orleans, among either communities. I don't feel the movie was disrespectful to African-Americans deliberately, but it may have had some elements that were offensive (I have not read a nuanced argument detailing what exactly the qualms might be). Still, if they exist, they probably are the victim of either the original short story (F. Scott Fitzgerald is still a product of his times) or modern day ignorance--or even just clumsy storytelling.

As to the second point, I do feel more strongly that using Hurricane Katrina was actually the right choice. It actually reminds me of the way that 9/11 is used in 25th Hour. It's part of the fabric of New Orleans now, a historical moment. But more than that: it's part of why we're telling the story.

See, the fascinating aspect (for me, at least--but I think it's central to the story) is how we deal with death. Each of the character confronts more than one close personal death, whether from old age or war, whether alone or all together on the tugboat. Some of the death is metaphorical--Daisy's dancing life dies after the car accident, Benjamin's affair dies with WWII. But it's about coping with death (and with aging, the sign of looming death).

What was most overpowering about Hurricane Katrina was facing up to death, just as it was the hardest part of 9/11, and remains the hardest part of Iraq. People, en masse, are stripped of even the right to die with dignity, with purpose--they die suddenly, without preparation, without knowledge of what is going on. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is told as a story to that younger woman who is about to lose her mother. Now, her mother doesn't die from Hurricane Katrina, but the fact remains that after the Hurricane there will be many people who want to know things from their parents, who want the story of their lives, and may have lost it.

Whether or not the story could have been told better is a matter of debate. I was not perturbed by the length of the movie, although it was pushing it, because it earned the length from me the same way Marquez' Hundred Years of Solitude did: by offering me a world, not just a story, and letting me watch that entire world unfold.

I think this movie has gotten a bit of a bad shake. I liked it a lot.

Speaking of Race...

Indicted Congressman William Jefferson was defeated by a little-known Republican lawyer. Good news, although it irritates me when the incumbent is such an easy mark that the opponent doesn't even appear to try hard--and therefore isn't properly vetted. I don't want this to be like Mark Foley's seat being replaced by another inethical Congressperson.

Something bothers me a little about the Times coverage:

The upset victory by the lawyer, Anh Cao, was thought by analysts to be the result of a strong turnout by white voters angered over federal corruption charges against Mr. Jefferson, a black Democrat who was counting on a loyal base to return him to Congress for a 10th term.

A majority of the district’s voters are African-American, and analysts said lower turnout in the majority black precincts on Saturday meant victory for the Republican.

There's something under the surface of the way this is written that bothers me. It seems a little like the implication is that Jefferson expected black voters to forgive corruption, and white voters came out because a black man had cheated them out of money. Isn't it possible that black voters were equally upset by the indictment, but didn't want to vote for Anh Cao? I know many black voters who simply will not ever vote Republican; but can't vote for a man like William Jefferson.

The implication here seems to be that everyone was voting based on race. I mean, the article does say that the "White voters" were "angered over federal corruption charges", but was it really just white voters? I mean, Anh Cao is a Vietnamese name. The article ignores Asians, as it does Hispanics and other demographics. If they had dropped that word 'white,' it would have greatly improved the race relations in this paragraph.

Conversationalism + 2008: Palin And The End of the Line

I take the injunction of the AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer and it must be. I have to say it.

Required reading for the post.

Sarah Palin and John McCain have officially embarked on a campaign of discrimination.

Now, I'm not saying it's necessarily a racist campaign; Sarah Palin's remark that Obama "doesn't see America the way we do" could be equally anti-Democrat, anti-Elitist, anti-black, anti-Liberal, etc. The point, however, is that Sarah Palin is claiming to have a monopoly on America.

I want to talk about one of the most crucial point of the Vice Presidential Debate for me. In terms of our culture, and our cultural dialogue, there was a clear choice that was presented at one point. Ifill asked the two about how to turn around the partisanship in Washington.

Here's Joe Biden:

Mike Mansfield, a former leader of the Senate, said to me one day -- he -- I made a criticism of Jesse Helms. He said, "What would you do if I told you Jesse Helms and Dot Helms had adopted a child who had braces and was in real need?" I said, "I'd feel like a jerk."

He said, "Joe, understand one thing. Everyone's sent here for a reason, because there's something in them that their folks like. Don't question their motive."

Here's Sarah Palin:

But the policies and the proposals have got to speak for themselves, also. And, again, voters on November 4th are going to have that choice to either support a ticket that supports policies that create jobs.

You do that by lowering taxes on American workers and on our businesses. And you build up infrastructure, and you rein in government spending, and you make our -- our nation energy independent.

Or you support a ticket that supports policies that will kill jobs by increasing taxes. And that's what the track record shows, is a desire to increase taxes, increase spending, a trillion-dollar spending proposal that's on the table. That's going to hurt our country, and saying no to energy independence. Clear choices on November 4th.

In other words, in terms of bipartisanship, Biden says we shouldn't slander each other's motives, and Sarah Palin says you should pick the party that isn't out to "kill jobs," "hurt the country," and "say no to energy independence."



This is ludicrous.

So, a few days later, seeing that the polls still aren't backing her ridiculous brand of folksy anti-elitism, she has decided to kick it into gear, and make the heart of their campaign an attempt to question Barack Obama's motives. Because yes, clearly, a Hawaiian born Christian who was a civil rights lawyer, a professor, and has been two years in the Senate, doesn't see America the way 'the rest of us' do. He sees it the way terrorists do. Oh, and by the way: nobody has spoken as much about the exceptionalism of America as Barack Obama--it's the heart of his Yes We Can campaign. I wish he'd truck that out.

But this is unacceptable. Whatever McCain or Palin are trying to do, this is an unacceptable move in the campaign. I cannot repeat this enough. This is unacceptable.



I wanted McCain to be the end of the Republican Party as partisan hackery. I wanted him to show that two parties could both decide to stand a little taller and live up to America a little better. Where has McCain gone?


This is unacceptable.

Conversationalism + 2008: Conversations About Race

Required Reading. For this post, and for Life.

That gentleman is the Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO. I mean, if we're talking about the "blue-collar white man" that allegedly hasn't been out to back Obama in the polls, this is the guy.

But I don't want to talk politics. I want to talk conversation.

Back in the Primary Season, Barack Obama was called to respond to a scandal brewing over Reverend Wright. And he did. But he did something more profound than disavowing Reverend Wright. He talked about our relationship to race in this country.

He summed up his speech in this part of the text, I think:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. ...

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time."

He was calling on this nation to begin a dialogue, a true conversation about race. That's kind of my gig, and I was thrilled when I saw it. I was going to write something about it, but time slipped away and I let it fall.

And then nothing happened.

There was no discussion of race. We had blundered through a few minor but painful racial gaffes (Geraldine Ferraro, for instance). And at the end of the day, we went back to pretending that there was nothing different about Barack Obama, and that nobody was going to treat him any differently. And that race would not be an issue in this election. For the most part, it won't be. We have advanced a long way, and from the electoral maps I'm seeing right now, it seems fairly likely that Obama will still win.

But the question remains: what about our racial dialogue?

Although the speech I posted at the beginning from the AFL-CIO chief was mostly a stump speech for Obama, I have to tease out two major, major points he made.

• We Cannot Stand By While Racism Happens
  
• Getting Involved Doesn't Mean Accusing People Of Racism; It Means Engaging Them

That's a fantastic basis for the beginning to our conversation about race.

I'm very proud of our country tonight. I'm very proud that we have a man who can make that speech. He is winning no easy medals by bringing up a topic that most people have a much easier time avoiding.

More, America. We need more discussion.

Hard Racism vs. Soft Racism

Our language has simplified over the last generation. Simplified language often leads to simplified thought: thought is, after all, encoded in the logic of language.

So when two phenomenon share the same word, confusion may arise when multiple people misinterpret the same word to mean different things.

This applies to various "isms;" racism, sexisim, ageism, and homophobia (it doesn't end in ism but it's the same sort of sentiment). We use the term racism carefully in this country. But we also throw it around a lot. We have a lot of anxiety about what's termed "racist" and what is not termed "racist." People who use it too much devalue the word; people who use it too little let racists get away with defamation. I'm going to focus on racism right now because Barack Obama invited this nation to have a dialog about race (which has not been followed up on), but this can be applied to sexism as well--that installment is coming soon.

So let me begin by splitting the term 'racism' into two categories: "hard" racism and "soft" racism. Hard racism is a very plain sort of racism, and thus we don't hear it spoken aloud anymore. Ever since the Civil Rights Movement, our culture has decided, as a majority, that it is unacceptable to be a hard racist aloud anymore. This isn't to say that there aren't hard racists; but whenever a statement that is hard racism is heard aloud, that person is pretty much chased out of any public position they might hold.

"Hard" racism is an extreme form of racism. "Hard" racism is holding the belief that one or more races are inferior to one or more races. Adolf Hitler was a hard racist. Racial eugenicists are hard racists. Jim Crow Laws are hard racist laws. They codify the notion that one race of people is objectively (in their eyes) worse than another race of people. People who speak hard racism aloud are tagged, unequivocally, as bigots.

Today, we don't see nearly as much of that. But what we do see is a lot more of "soft" racism. "Soft" racism is hard to define. "Soft" racism is non-absolute; it does not hold that one race is absolutely worse than another. But it has a lot of negative connections with a race. One type of soft racism is ignorance. Another sort of soft racism is resentment.

Barack Obama, in his speech about race, talked about "white resentment," caused by pro-minority actions such as Affirmative Action. It is unsurprising that if one group gets preferential treatment, there will be resentment by the other. And these resentful emotions will spill over into negative attitudes. A hostility; an avoidance.

Now, these people who feel resentment toward African Americans may say that they do not think African Americans are worse, as race. Most probably genuinely believe that. But they do still feel a racial tension which cannot be dismissed as being completely non-racist. And this racial tension, or negative attitude toward African Americans may manifest itself in negative action. And that negative action will be racist, no matter how you dice it.

If both "soft" and "hard" racism are still racisms, why is it important to distinguish? Because soft racism can usually be bridged by better communication, more cooperation, and more information. For instance: affirmative action is only necessary in a community which acknowledges that all of its poor will not get opportunities to education. If a leader brings the white community and the black and latino and asian and etc. communities to work together to improve the opportunities of college education to everyone, then the resentment will decrease.

Hard racism has to be fought. I remain highly doubtful that the Jim Crow laws and segregation could have been ended simply by having Martin Luther King Jr. and Strom Thurmond sitting at a table discussion solutions. Strom Thurmond's belief that the black man was inferior was an ideology; it was entrenched in how he approached the world. And we have no need to give that any time or respect.

The reason is because "hard" racism is an ideology of racism and "soft" racism are facets or actions of racism; the latter being bad, but not as all-encompassing as the first.

Another reason "soft" racism needs to be addressed is that it often causes subconscious soft racism. People who are nervous when black men approach them in the street are exhibiting racism in a way, but it would be ridiculous to put that in the same class as joining the Klu Klux Klan. The imagery and the stereotypes and the cultures which give rise to these soft racisms need to be addressed. They cannot be ignored.

For instance, in the Amadu Dialo case, the officers involved had an ingrained soft-racism; their assumptions were that a black man of a certain age might be violent. And because of it, their reflexes (in under seven seconds; a core part of Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink) led them to shoot a man over 40 times before they could accurately and dispassionately appraise the situation. Do I think they were hard racist--that they think the black man is inferior? No, I don't believe that. But I do believe that they were soft racists; taught to expect trouble from men of a certain description. And although I have only met a few hard racists, I have barely met anyone who doesn't exhibit the occasional sign of "soft-racism" (Exhibit A: "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist" from Avenue Q).

It is important to confront these soft-racisms and make everyone aware when they are going on. Because the conscious mind can overcome subconscious soft-racism, and the conscious mind can address the causes of soft-racism. Unquestioned, they might simply fester, and lead to those cases of hard racism that we want to avoid.

And one last notice: hard racism nowadays masquerades as soft racism; sometimes it is barely detectable. This makes it hard to point to. For instance, I personally detect a hint of hard racism about the McCain campaign's allegation of Obama as "presumptuous" (David Gergen, a Southerner, called it a code-word that everyone in the South would recognize as standing in for uppity). But of course I wouldn't be able to prove it, any more than I can prove that Obama's "out of touch" ad is ageist, the way the McCain campaign alleges it is. When Trent Lott famously said that if they'd elected Strom Thurmond, we wouldn't be in "this mess," did he actually mean that we should have a segregationalist country? It seems pretty clear to me and to most people, but because of this conflation of hard and soft racism, it loses its impact.

Be on the lookout, America.