Where we stand

I have been something of a Black partisan for most of my life. My understanding of things comes from many years of independent study and I find myself explaining my political positions because my observations are rather standard but what I see as the repercussions of those observations differ greatly from what I hear day to day. It's difficult to explain a couple of decades of thought in a single conversation, and extended conversations aren't always possible so I have a few books I recommend that hew closely to my understanding of things.
A book I regularly recommend is The Shaping of Black America by Lerone Bennett, Jr. It's the story of the United States of America…as opposed to a history…told from the perspective of the Africans in America and the African Americans they became.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine was asked in a Black history course she was teaching how the construct of race came into existence. In response I suggested chapter three of The Shaping of Black America, titled "The Road Not Taken." It documents the reasoning behind enslaving Africans as opposed to Amerinds or European indentured servants, and the steps taken to make it legally and socially acceptable. Recently I added the chapter as a permanent piece of my web site for discussion and documentation purposes. It's an important chapter because it documents how legitimizing slavery damaged both Africans and Europeans in ways that survive to this day.

The reasoning behind the institution of slavery tends to be ignored or misrepresented by historians. From The Shaping of Black America:

To say there is a natural or cultural bias toward domination in all Europeans is an ugly thing. Especially since there is proof that Europeans at the time (they weren't "White people" yet any more than Africans were "Black people") worked together, intermarried to some degree, escaped bondage together and on the whole held common cause against an oppressive land-owning class.

Until the advent of African slavery. At that point a society was built that automatically enforced and invisibly rewarded differences which, up until that time, were seen as purely cosmetic. Even religion was turned to this purpose. So now we are the recipients of over 350 years of programming. Again, from The Shaping of Black America (emphasis added):

Black people had to be broken to be slaves, and White people had to be broken to be masters. How else can you explain slave owners who allowed slaves to buy their own freedom when by law anything the slave owned already belonged to his master?

It is critical for Black people and White people to recognize this, that it is not natural for us to be divided. It is not natural for us to consider our differences to be more than cosmetic. A society was built that trained us to see these differences as significant. The result of that training is ugly.

Now Black people aspire to become all that White people are…never understanding that White people are no more what they should have been than Black people are.

Black people have only been free for two generations. White people have only had free people of other races around them for two generations. Neither group has mastered their situation yet, and who can blame either? Because this society still gives racialized feedback so clearly and strongly that the honorable efforts made by many on both sides of the veil are simply overwhelmed. Consider this (posted at Crooked Timber by Kieran Healy):

How can a Black person not feel anger, be filled with distrust in such a society?

And there are many, many White people who consciously attempt to bridge the gap. But because they believe the problem is one of individual belief their efforts are flawed. Seeing Black people are still angry and wondering why their openness has no effect, they naturally take the rejection of their personal gestures as a personal rejection…it's almost impossible for a person not to.

So this is where we stand, Black and White folks. At the dawn of an age neither has been prepared for, believing in a society geared to change people into exactly that which we all declare we don't want to be.

I don't have the final answer. I don't think anyone does. But I do know this much—both sides must remember that we were all broken by this. Though the normal assumption is that Black folks alone were the ones that were broken, in fact White people in general were just as programmed as Black people. We were broken in different ways though, and therefore need different messages…we all need to understand that trying to get Black folks to where White folks are isn't going to work any more than getting White folks to where Black folks are will. We all need to get to a new place.

The Promethean Position Paper or As Much as Necessary, But No More

The other day I said the short story on my political outlook would place me slightly left of center-left. I believe it might be a good thing to go into the long story. Not all the way in; the complexity of "slightly left of center-left" is a clue that might take a while.

One reason I decided to write about this is that recently my daughter told me I'm a libertarian. I said something about a thought I had, and not talking about it out loud because people might think I'm a libertarian and she calmly said, "But you are a libertarian."

This is the second time in my life I was told this, and it's not true. I'm not a libertarian, I'm just not. Even though stuff like this:

… strike me as the result of a reasonable thought process.

I also favor eliminating laws against victimless crimes. Sex and drugs have occupied a major portion of humanity's time since there was a humanity. People who want to get high or feel up girls in dark corners of the topless bar can do so pretty freely. Sure you risk your health, but if you take yourself out of the gene pool I have no problem with that. I don't like it when someone else takes you out of it. And by making them illegal you make them so profitable that you can fund wars, will shoot up the block, beat someone down for standing on "my corner."

Basically, I don't want the Procrustean Problem, where you have to make yourself fit in the bed you MUST lie in, even if it means losing fragments of yourself. The cookie-cutter Conservatism rampant in the national government has this effect, and sadly a lot of people are loving the hell out of giving up the outer edges of their nature because it makes them fit in so snugly.

Glen Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan have recently discovered the limits of the bed they've been laying in. Now, I'm neither a fan or a big consumer of either man's writing. They were, of course, among the first bloggers I ran across and among the first I left behind as ideologically incompatible with me (this is pretty typical of my reaction). Sullivan, in particular, I found confusing. I find ALL Log Cabin Republicans confusing, even more so than Black Republicans. I mean, aren't these the guys that contributed money to the Dole campaign and he returned it? Aren't Republicans the guys who owe so much to the Religious Right^TM, which group thinks they are an evil influence, a threat to our bodily fluids and damned to perdition for all eternity? I can't read the work of so deeply deluded a person. It makes my head hurt.

But you couldn't avoid noticing the reports that Reynolds and Sullivan got savaged by Freepers for suggesting Bush's theatrics aboard the Abraham Lincoln this weekend were ever so slightly beyond the pale. Even as I couldn't help noticing a bit of an I-told-you-so attitude by many who posted that amazing statement of Sullivan's:

These men made the classic mistake many civil rights leaders have made: they confused being a spokesman with being a leader, having access with having influence. Sullivan in particular has to keep a very tight grip on the wolf's ears.

Speak as much as necessary … but no more.

This sort of behavior repulses the libertarian aspect of my political soul.

I'm not a full libertarian though, because I do not believe the government is the enemy. I believe the government is a very stupid, clumsy, sometimes overzealous friend, sort of like Marmaduke. There are collective needs that should be addressed collectively, and a government is the requisite instrument to do so. There are services needed, materials required to be a full participant in what the society can offer and I think a government is the means to establish the standard. Yes there should be a ground floor that no one should be able to fall through. Yes, it sounds like socialism, yes it's expensive, but 15% of our military budget is spend on outdated technology and plans that military experts say can be scrapped with no loss to our national security. TrueMajority suggests that vast sum be spent on:

• Provide basic health and food to the world's poor: $12 billion
• Rebuild America's public schools over 10 years: $12 billion
• Reduce class size for grades 1-3 to 15 students per class: $11 billion
• Reduce debts of impoverished nations: $10 billion
• Provide health insurance to all uninsured American kids: $6 billion
• Increase federal funding for clean energy and energy efficiency: $6 billion
• Public financing of all federal elections: $1 billion
• Fully fund Head Start: $2 billion

I'm selfish enough to let the impoverished nations thing and the world hunger thing wait until we have the poverty and hunger dealt with here. But other than that, I think it's an excellent list of priorities. Education, insurance, energy, free elections … all things the right are, irrespective of their propaganda to the contrary, trying to undermine the same way they've underminded civil rights, reproductive rights and all the other rights the Bill of Rights was referrings to in Amendment IX:

Take that, strict constructionists.

And right now, coasting on the rhetoric of the Contract on America, the Libertarian Party (and because of them, individual libertarians) are aligned for the most part with
the fully-co-opted Republican party.

That's why I'm so dead set against being called a Libertarian^TM. Just as dead set as against being called Republican^TM, Conservative^TM or a Fundamentalist^TM. That's why I'm liberal, and changing my party affiliation from independent (meaning no party, not the Independent Party^TM) to Democratic^TM.

But notice the trademark sign is next to the Democratic Party's name too. I haven't forgotten what the party has been. I still feel the pangs of neglect. I am at the point of accepting "there are only permanent interests." I'll ride the tiger … but I'll have a knife at it's throat.

posted by Prometheus 6 at 5/4/2003 01:14:21 PM |

An email conversation with my daughter

We really talk like this. It's sick.

Her:

Okay, so recently I asked a bunch of people what they think their flaws and strengths are in writing, and I have noticed something (which I always knew, actually, but this time for some reason I thought about it more.) Specifically, I have noticed that the good, talented writers tend to have these very long lists of bitches about their own work and much shorter lists of things they actually like, whereas the crappy writers tend to have the reverse.

Further, the good writers tend to have deeper concerns: they write about how bad their characterization, dialogue, plotting, structure, etc is, whereas the notsogreat writers tend to say things like "I use too many commas" or "I'm weak on my research."

Now, what I'm wondering is this: Is it that the better writers are better because they perceive their own flaws whereas the others are kinda clueless? Or is it that the better writers perceive their own flaws because they're better, whereas the others don't have the skill to recognize the flaws? And what about talent? Does having a natural talent for writing tend to make you notice your own flaws more than someone who doesn't have that instinct?

At the moment, I'm tending toward the latter (they see the flaws because they're better) and "yes, it does." I'm thinking that people who are less talented don't have a knack for noticing the problems in their writing, therefore they cannot improve because they don't see what's wrong to begin with?

Me:

Here's the deal. If you are aware of things like theme and rhythm of the voice in your head when you read (that's poetry concerns, but you get the drift) you will hone them and learn and get better at it as you focus on it. Like any skill, right? Now, some folks do have an easier time with perceiving patterns in specific materials. But if a person can be taught to recognize the patterns and convinced of their importance suddenly they are a talented beginner. But conferring talent on someone is hard because you have to do it backward-they have to be convinced the patterns are important before they can learn to recognize them. And the person who sees into the material directly has a huge head start...but if they slop off they can be surpassed.

Going against type (two): The 0w3n3rship S0ci3ty

The discussion of Class War Strategies on The NewsHour feature an economist and a salesman posing as an economist.

William Spriggs is an economist and senior fellow at the Economic Policy Institute here in Washington. And Brian Wesbury is the chief economist at Griffin, Kubik, Stephens and Thompson, an investment bank in Chicago.

Long term readers know I refer to these professions as Type One and Type Two Economists, respectively. And they know I have no respect for Type Two economics pronouncements, and that I love folks that come to the same conclusions I have.

WILLIAM SPRIGGS: Well, I think there are some things that we would like to see people have greater ownership of. We certainly want to see home ownership increase in this country. But there are a lot of things that the government does today, which are in place because the market is not a good allocator of resources or because what the government is really doing is serving as an insurer; and in that role the government does best when we include everyone, and that's best done as a government program.

So the president talked about health insurance as an example. And we see from our current system of health insurance that that doesn't work when you make it an ownership society, because if I want to sell you health insurance, then I want to have the low risk population. I'd love to sell health insurance to a work force that's 20 something and very healthy. I don't want to sell insurance to people who are low income, more likely to be ill, and we see that there are gaps in who has health insurance because of that.

The thing you must remember is, the market is a system that determines the allocation of goods and services exclusively on the basis of wealth. People would like to think wealth is based on the value one produces, but being born in a position to inherit wealth, or to get wealth by maintaining the entropy puts the lie to that thought.

BRIAN WESBURY: Well, I think the ownership society is a very good thing. We have to remember that the more people have a skin in the game, have a stake in society, have assets built up over time, the less difficulty society will have withstanding bad times.

Bullshit, of course. Or, more precisely, salesmanship.

Every person in the country already has a stake in society. We live here, we depend on society for survival the same way an antelope depends on the savannah.

You also should keep in mind what it means to own something. It doesn't mean you can use something so much as that you can prevent others from using it.

And I believe what this does is it allows the government's spending to be put toward a use that will build assets and build ownership and build personal responsibility over time

Two things: the government doing what it is allowed to do rather than what it contracted to do is the problem, and "personal responsibility" means "your grief is your problem, regardless of its cause."

WILLIAM SPRIGGS: Well, I think Social Security is a key example. And again the example of what happens in an insurance system like health insurance where we see that's just falling apart; it doesn't work. In the case of Social Security, we know that if you let individuals assess the risk of the economy and then start saving, when they think things are going to go bad, we get the behavior we don't want. We get reinforcing and exacerbating business cycles so people will think that the economy is more risky when it starts to turn down. They'll save more and we learned from the Great Depression, that's not a good thing.

Not all of us learned, apparently.

So we socialize these risks. And in the case of Social Security, what we're doing is we are insuring everybody from the three things which will happen to you as a worker. You may, God forbid, become disabled and can't continue to support your family. You may die young and your family again needs some support or God willing, you'll live a long life and you'll need to retire because you are not competitive in the labor market. And so by having it universal, you have a risk pool which ensures that the program will hold together to ensure against those risks. When people talk about the retirement program, that's not what Social Security is. It really is an insurance against these downturns.

Hey, didn't say something like that the other day?

Going against type (two): Deciding who to tax

That other stuff wasn't the only nonsense spouted by our economic salesman Brian Wesbury.

And then one last point about that and it is that these systems are in trouble; the Social Security system is under funded by $10 trillion. Taxes have to go up to pay for it or benefits have to be cut to make it work. Something has to be done. And what the president is trying to do is say look, let's not raise taxes. Let's not cut benefits, let's find a third way, a way through this hole that allows people to build ownership, build a stake in the economy, to build a cushion for their future, and so that we don't have to change the system as it exists for those people that are in retirement or very close to it but gives the youth of America a way to build assets, a way to become owners and a way to become more personally responsible in the future.

Can we kill this "personally responsible" incantation? What the hell has it to do with the discussion?

Mr. Wesbury is as full of it as those who want to claim the output of pharmaceutical companies' opportunity cost calculations are to be added in when accounting for the cost of developing a new drug…and for the same reason.

Right now, Social Security is not in debt. At all.

THE GREENSPAN BAIT-AND-SWITCH:
In 1983, as chairman of the bipartisan Social Security commission, Greenspan said that the way to ensure that Social Security remains on sound financial footing in the future is to make baby boomers pay their benefits in advance. That is why, to this day, people pay more in Social Security taxes than is paid to beneficiaries – 50 percent more in 2004. But, in large part to make up the shortfall caused by the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, this money (more than $1.8 trillion) has been used to finance other aspects of government. In other words, Social Security has been transformed from a retirement
program to a regressive income redistribution program. Lower- and middle-class workers are not paying for their retirement benefits in advance, they are paying for tax cuts for those making more than $300,000. For more, read this American Progress column by Harry J. Holzer.

There seems to be a limit to Wesbury's mendacity though. He says you must raise taxes or cut benefits, but BUSH says math doesn't matter. Nowhere does he say he believes Bush's third way exists.

And when Mr. Spriggs applies a corrective dose of reality:

WILLIAM SPRIGGS: Well, it is not going to achieve the goal. We've already seen his economic stimulus in place for these four years. We still have fewer people employed today than when he took office and when he gets sworn in in January, we will have fewer people than when he got sworn in, in January four years ago. So the direction in which he has put the tax cuts have not been the stimulus the economy needed, not from the perspective of the American worker.

But in the case of Social Security, again, what you see is now the president has created this own problem himself. His tax cuts have made permanent are far bigger than the problem that we face in Social Security. If we just said we are not going to make the tax cut to the top 1 percent of the country permanent, that solves the whole Social Security program as it is currently conceived. You could say you are going to keep the benefits. You are going to keep everything the way it is, just say we are not going to make permanent that top 1 percent, so he has created his own problem. He exacerbates it because if you want to privatize, you are going to take money out of the system, which exacerbates the need to have money put into the system.

And many people who talk about privatization of course really don't put together how are you going to not cut benefits if you are not going to raise taxes? It doesn't solve itself simply through privatization. And you can't really privatize the risk of a disability and the insurance program which are integral to the program. And it is a family-based program. It is not an individual program at the moment.

Wesbury's response is basically, "You lost so shut up."

BRIAN WESBURY: Right. Right. Well, I personally think that's a real good idea. Let me go back one step here and just remind Mr. Spriggs that the election is over, the president won. The debate on the tax cut is done. People do not want higher taxes. That's not going to happen. In fact, we are going to be debating making these tax cuts permanent and tax reform in the future....

GWEN IFILL: Excuse me. Were you advocating higher taxes, Mr. Spriggs?

WILLIAM SPRIGGS: I was saying that we shouldn't make a tax cut permanent which is not necessarily higher taxes.

GWEN IFILL: We don't want to really re-debate that issue. We should get back to legal reform --

BRIAN WESBURY: That's my whole point. It's over.

Notice this statement:

The debate on the tax cut is done.

and this one

In fact, we are going to be debating making these tax cuts permanent and tax reform in the future....

were made without so much as a breath taken in between.

Going against type (two): Typecasting

Type Two: The salesman

BRIAN WESBURY: The tort reform issue... the whole idea about creating more growth in the economy is that we always need to lower risk and increase rewards in the economy and that's the way you encourage more entrepreneurial activity.

Risk is tied to reward isn't it? This is a fantasy, not an economic plan.

And to lower risk and raise rewards you have to attack a number of things. Number one: Taxes are a punishment to those who are successful very often. So what we have to do is move to lower after tax - or, excuse me higher after tax returns. And I think that's what the tax cut last year did.

Interesting. Taxes aren't the means of funding collective needs and obligation. They are punishment to the wealthy.

I wonder if this is the guy who wrote that "Lucky Duckies" tripe in the Wall Street Journal.

We need to lower risks for investors, part of that is fighting the war on terror and making the world a safer place.

WHAT THE FUCK??

But another part of that is reforming the tort system, the litigious society we have because there are so many risks to businesses in this country coming from the legal sector, which raises costs and lowers returns and I think that becomes an important part of making sure this economy stays strong for the long run.

So we are lowering the risk of getting sued if you screw up.

WILLIAM SPRIGGS: Well, I would say this, that we have set up a system in which litigation plays a role in correcting bad behavior for businesses because the cost of their errors are not borne by the company itself. So if you think of tobacco and what damage that did to our economy in terms of needless people-- needless numbers of people dying from tuberculosis, from lung cancer, et cetera.

So if you think about that and then look at the recent withdrawal of an arthritis pain reliever, because the company understood that they were going to face litigation, meaning that we wouldn't have needless doubts in that case, but tax reform has to be fair. We heard that word before about making it fairer. The economy has worked the way the president wanted it and that is that the returns of all of the growth in the economy has been to capital income, not to American workers. To shift the tax burden further on to the American worker means that we are putting even more burden on the American worker.

I guess it's time to get Juliette angry at me again

Throwing Away The Crutches

What have Republicans/conservatives done for black Americans? I hear that question constantly when I disclose that I am a conservative Republican. Often I will provide the usual facts that seem to be missing from the historical lexicon these days: freed the slaves, were 90%+ in the majority in the votes for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. However, something about the question sets steel to my nerves and I’ve been meaning to articulate the reasons for it here for some time now.

Implied in the question is that a political party must “do something” for blacks. Not merely the usual “something” that a government entity does for all of its constituents, e.g. provide utilities, regulate commerce, etc., but something special.

That word ‘special’ has taken on a new meaning in recent years and I think that it applies to the special items that liberals/leftists believe that the government should provide for the ‘special’ people, the “congenitally retarded” folk.

Yes, we ‘special’ people--with ‘special’ needs--require special handling: special education and special employment. You can’t expect black people to live up to the standards of ‘normal’ people. Like paraplegics or the blind or the deaf or those afflicted with Down’s syndrome, singular accommodations must be made for the great handicap of being born with black skin. To liberals/leftists, black people are a crippled class that can never be made whole just as long as they can never be made not-black. What’s this notion called?

And if anyone tries to treat us as full, competent adults, the liberals/leftists will scream in righteous anger and protest about the unfairness of it all. And if some of us ‘handicapped’ verbally express the desire to be treated like full, competent adults and act in a manner that demonstrates that desire, we are deemed as traitors by those who share the same racial makeup, but buy into the ‘handicap’ philosophy. Yes, we are “traitors,” because if some of us refuse to take advantage of the special needs offered and succeed anyway, the vast majority of America will begin to think that we don’t really require the “handicap slot.”

You have to go back 40 years to find something "Republicans" have done for Black folks. And "Republican" is in quotes because the party is as different now from what it was then as the NBA is now from what it was in 1965. Let's not even talk about going back to Reconstruction…especially since Republicans oversaw the rape of the Freedmens Bank.

All this empty crap sets steel to MY nerves. So I'm just going to repeat myself.

Black people have ALWAYS wanted integration, ALWAYS wanted to be full citizens, ALWAYS wanted to to the right thing.

Think. Why was the first executive order directing the government to act affirmatively to bring Black Americans into the economy issued? What was the order intended to accomplish?

It was intended to change the behavior of white Americans.

You see, at the time there were plenty of educated Black folks, college degreed janitors, because of racism. It certainly wasn't because Black folks didn't want the work. The order was intended to override white racism.

The response to the order was along the lines of, "I'd love to hire a niggra if I could find a qualified one." And when the underemployed college graduates stepped up, it because, "Oh, but he didn't got to THAT college like HE did. HE is more qualified that the niggra." And the niggra takes a lesser position because he's more qualified than any white person willing to take a job on that level.

Or the response was to just hire a colored person and show him as proof they were integrated.

Or the response was to drop someone into a slot totally unprepared and shake your head sadly when he fails.

Or a lawsuit, almost all of which were settled out of court, all such settlements saying there's no admission of guilt it's cheaper to buy you off.

And to set aside record numbers of civil rights complaints, so you can be rewarded with a federal judgeship…and who knows where that could take you…

And scapegoating.

And every time a Black person mentions there's still racism to be dealt with, he's reminded of how many Blacks are in the middle class, how much closer we've gotten to equal pay for equal work, like white people had a damn thing to do with it. Collectively, I mean. Some of y'all individually are da bomb. Most of you ain't bad and I really feel most of you mean no harm. But collectively "White People" have fought tooth and nail against leveling the playing field and everyone has been too fucking polite to just say it like that, to put the pattern together under everyone's nose.

And you want to know the truth, I'm tired of all the denial and all the weak-ass excuses folks make for it.

I knew the Washington Post wouldn't publish it

George Will, Too, Is Unchanged By Welfare Reform
Copyright © 2004
Earl Dunovant

Let me get this out of the way. I’m a progressive, a
liberal, whatever you want to call it. I’m one of those
people that think about public policy. As such, I’ve had to
find conservatives whose basic integrity I could respect. George
Will has been in that group of representatives of the right for
some time. Today, though, I find myself disheartened by his
editorial, "http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35656-2004Dec29.html?nav=rss_opinion/opeds">
Unchanged by Welfare Reform. It purports to be about Jason
DeParle's book, "American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids and a
Nation's Drive to End Welfare." He calls it a “riveting
drama”…perhaps he got so engrossed in the drama of
those everyday lives he missed the point of the book.

NPR presented two shows on this book, both available online.
If you have the time, please listen to "http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3927552">The
Fresh Air broadcast of September 20, 2004…it’s
about 30 minutes. Listen to Mr. DeParle describe his own work.
Then listen to "http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4202600">The
Weekend Edition broadcast of December 4, 2004, a joint
interview with DeParle and Angela Jobe, one of the women he
writes about. You will come away with a far different picture of
the book and Ms. Jobe than the one planted by Mr. Will.

Beyond the misrepresentation of the book, there are other
disturbing things about the editorial. He writes:

After the liberalization of welfare in the mid-1960s, the percentage of black children born to unmarried mothers reached 50 by 1976 (it is almost 70 today), and within a generation the welfare rolls quadrupled. But DeParle says people mistakenly thought people like Jobe were organizing their lives around having babies to get a check. Actually, he says, their lives were too disorganized for that.

You cannot read this paragraph without coming away feeling Mr.
Will is implying the entire quadrupling of welfare rolls was due
to the increase in Black children born out of wedlock. If asked
was this his intent I'm sure he would say no. And yet you cannot
read this paragraph without coming away feeling Mr. Will is
implying the entire quadrupling of welfare rolls was due to the
increase in Black children born out of wedlock. And Mr. Will is a
skilled writer.

DeParle started his project with all the same assumptions Mr.
Will’s editorial promotes and came away rather
disillusioned with them. No planned parenthood. No sense of
entitlement. Each projected benefit realized had serious
trade-offs. And a major point of the book is that, even given an
ideal candidate like Ms. Jobe, their situation improves only
marginally, barely visibly.

I understand Conservatives feel welfare encourages dependency
but as a graduate of the program I assure you it is not the
lifestyle you aspire to as a child. But if the hardest working
person you know is at 102% of the poverty level and you’re
at 98%, what is your motivation? Consider the possibility the
bottom is not so much attractive as sticky…that
getting off the bottom when you’re poorly equipped is
difficult enough to make one adapt in the name of efficiency. Or
realism. Or fatalism.

In addition, what Mr. Will calls disorganization is a lack of
resources. I understand his confusion; “people like
Jobe” organize things differently than a person that is
comfortably ensconced in the mainstream, to deal with things a
person who has been essentially comfortable all their lives can't
even see. I can imagine someone who has never lived such a life
thinking, "What the hell is that about?"

Mr. Will also says:

What can help organize lives, at least those that are organizable, is work. The requirements of work -- mundane matters such as punctuality, politeness and hygiene -- are essential to the culture of freedom.

…which says a lot about what he thinks of “people
like Jobe,” I would say. (Hygiene?)

And may explain why he so badly misrepresented the book.

Physics

And so it begins...again

I think I need to start over. Not that I've written anything here that is incorrect, it's that I want to use the correct metaphors at the correct levels. That's what I meant the other day about working in mythic mode.

A mythos, to me, provides a framework, a set of assumptions, from which you can reason or on which you can base your decisions or within which your decisions make sense. A myth is a specific story or narrative that communicates or supports specific elements of a mythos. Unsupported elements of the mythos I call beliefs. Now, I could tell you about the unsupported elements of my personal mythos because there are very, very few. And I could tell you my personal mythology is organized around metaphors of physics and geometry. But my mythos...that's a tough one. It would sound like the recitation of a set of rules.

Any mythos sounds like a set of rules and baldly stated mythos is entirely unconvincing to those who have any grip on any other mythos at all. You don't learn a mythos that way. You learn through stories, parallels and examples. For instance, I use gravity as a metaphor for social structures in general. It's seeped into the general consciousness that space (spacetime, actually) "bends around" mass and energy. I don't know if it's so widely known that gravity is that very curvature of spacetime, that falling into a gravity well is simply the path that uses the least energy. The more mass in one place, the greater the curvature and the stronger the gravity.

In my metaphor, humans are mass and space is the world (I need to say right here I see a difference between the world and the planet). When a bunch of humans get together they change what is necessary to fulfill any need by their very presence. They affect what is available to solve problems, providing some tools, depleting others and making some impossible by their behavior. You can see that, right?

It's all much messier than physics though, because the bending of spacetime only "produces" gravity. The bending of social structures produce a panoply of effects, pretty much one for every behavior impacted, all feeding back into each other in fractal fashion. Still, it gives me a handle I can use to consider many things.

Let's take slavery.

The world has always had humans held as chattel, but in general that chattel had rights of a sort. Much as you can be punished for cruelty to animals, most societies with a slave component would punish masters for excessive abuse of a slave. More, when slaves were freed they had no stigma. They were full members of society. In the North American colonies, the thing closest to that condition was not known as slavery. It was known as indentured servitude and differed from "traditional" slavery by having a fixed term. The Peculiar Institution differed from slavery in that one could never actually escape the stigma and in being hereditary. And by pulling so many Africans into the condition, the social space was warped, bent, and social institutions adapted accordingly. Best example of the adaptation? The myth that white women need protection from the depraved lusts of Africans.

In order to preserve domestic tranquillity, the leading groups in the colonies made it a matter of public policy to destroy the solidarity of the laborers. Laws were passed requiring different groups to keep to themselves, and the seeds of dissension were artfully and systematically sown. Indians were offered bounties for betraying black runaways; blacks were given minor rewards for fighting Indians; and poor whites were used as fodder in the disciplining of both reds and blacks. At the same time masters used Draconian measures to stop the mingling and mating of blacks and whites. From the last quarter of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, policy-makers legislated against these practices. In the process white women were whipped, banished, and enslaved to keep them from marrying black men. "The increasing number of mulattoes, through intermarriage and illicit relationships," Lorenzo J. Greene writes, "soon caused alarm among Puritan advocates of racial purity and white domination. Sensing a deterioration of slavery, if the barriers between master and slaves were dissolved in the equalitarian crucible of sexual intimacy, they sought to stop racial crossing by statute." In this instance, as in so many others, it was necessary to teach whites the value of whiteness.

Under the ground rules of the time, a master could virtually enslave a white woman who married a black man and could hold in extended servitude all the issue of such a marriage. In this situation, as might have been expected, Puritan greed triumphed over Puritan morals, and many masters encouraged or forced white women to marry black men. It finally became necessary to pass laws penalizing masters for forcing white women to marry black men. The Maryland law of 1681 said:

Forasmuch as, divers free-born English, or white women, sometimes by the instigation, procurement or connivance of their masters, m's-tresses, or dames, and always to the satisfaction of their lascivious and lustful desires, and to the disgrace not only of the English, but also of many other Christian nations, do intermarry with Negroes and slaves, by which means, divers inconveniences, controversies, and suits may arise for the prevention whereof for the future, Be it enacted: That if the marriage of any woman-servant with any slave shall take place by the procurement or permission of the master, such woman and her issue shall be free.

That "always to the satisfaction of their lascivious and lustful desires" is kind of denied by the "sometimes by the instigation, procurement or connivance of their masters, m's-tresses, or dames" part to my way of thinking. Also telling is that the punishment is economic. Slaves were the major repository of wealth in the South in those days…the amount of land you were allocated was determined by the number of servants (indentured and slave) you had. Your political leverage was increased by 3/5ths of a vote for each slave you owned as well when the USofA struck out on its own. And all that was self regenerating as long as you owned the children of your slaves. That means "miscegenation" had to be prevented because before this point it was just going on all the time.

Just one of the panoply of effects that followed the bending of society to accomodate hereditary slavery. And like the gravitic effects of mass on spacetime, the social distortion is such that you will either orbit it, fall in or your trajectory will take you outside the system entirely.

Promethian Principles 1

In no particular order:

• ya damn skippy, I'm a liberal
• I'm a Capitalist because I can't see Bell Laboratory scientists creating the transistor in exchange for a couple of loaves of bread, a bag of salt and a hunting knife each
• people aren't so much stupid or lazy as comfortable
• Nazis is as Nazis does. Look up the history on how they manipulated public opinion and came to power. Too lazy . . . um, comfortable to read? Check out The Nazis: Warning from History set from The History Channel. Do the math--draw a conclusion.
• Good Germans is as Good Germans does. See the previous point.

Race Problems

In May 1997, The Atlantic Monthly published an article by Randall Kennedy titled, "My Race Problem -- And Ours." In it he sought to explain why he feels the entire idea of racial solidarity is absurd.

WHAT is the proper role of race in determining how I, an American black, should feel toward others? One response is that although I should not dislike people because of their race, there is nothing wrong with having a special -- a racial -- affection for other black people. Indeed, many would go further and maintain that something would be wrong with me if I did not sense and express racial pride, racial kinship, racial patriotism, racial loyalty, racial solidarity -- synonyms for that amalgam of belief, intuition, and commitment that manifests itself when blacks treat blacks with more solicitude than they do those who are not black.

Some conduct animated by these sentiments has blended into the background of daily routine, as when blacks who are strangers nonetheless speak to each other -- "Hello," "Hey," "Yo" -- or hug or give each other a soul handshake or refer to each other as "brother" or "sister." Other manifestations are more dramatic. For example, the Million Man March, which brought at least 500,000 black men to Washington, D.C., in 1995, was a demonstration predicated on the notion that blackness gives rise to racial obligation and that black people should have a special, closer, more affectionate relationship with their fellow blacks than with others in America's diverse society.

At the time I was active on their discussion board, and the article generated quite a bit of talk. Professor Kennedy was to join the forum. I posted the following in response to his article and he never showed up…can't say whether or not there's a connection there.

Your Race Problem - And Mine
Copyright 1997 Earl Dunovant

I am a Black partisan--one of those people that actively choose to accept racial kinship. My position is simple and straightforward-every event that affects Black people affects me. Therefore there is a connection between myself and other Black people that I must respond to in some fashion. What the mainstream thinks of Black people in general becomes my starting point in any new situation. My feelings of kinship with Black folks represents my recognition that my fate is linked to that of everyone else of visible African descent and my feelings of loyalty represents my recognition that the fate of everyone else of visible African descent is linked to mine.

In mainstream examinations of African-American issues, I expect to see the "-American" part acknowledged and the "African" part downplayed, or given a curt nod at best. This is a distinct improvement from the days where Black people lost their lives for trying to claim a small part of the "-American," but still frustrating at times. So when I saw Randall Kennedy's article "My Race Problem-And Ours", I approached it with what I hope was an open mind. I hoped a Yale law professor would be able, at last, to coherently explain to the mainstream the what and why of Black people's recent tendency to aggregate.

In a way I was impressed with the article. The message of the article, far more than the weak justification for his position, demonstrated in an almost self-referential way that he does indeed eschew pride in, and reject kinship with Black people. Unfortunately, for the Black people under discussion he misses the point entirely. Also, I don't find his argument rigorous enough.

The first problem is the critical one. Mr. Kennedy says:

"Neither racial pride nor racial kinship offers guidance that is intellectually, morally or politically satisfactory."

I grant that. They are not guides. They are platforms to stand on. Consider Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of motivations: 1. physiological 2. security and safety 3. love and feelings of belonging 4. competence, prestige, and esteem 5. self-fulfillment According to Maslow, one must be substantially secure in each stage in order to successfully begin work on the next because each stage builds on the previous one. I submit that the quest for intellectual, moral or political satisfaction is a stage four motivation that one can only indulge in after achieving a certain amount of physical and psychological security. Getting past level three is difficult for everyone, but Black people get stuck more frequently due to the emotional impact of environmental factors. When you're the Black person everyone is surprised to see, when your mere presence makes folks nervous, each startled expression can chip away at your feelings of belonging.

The current social attitude toward Black people, translated into Maslow's terms, seems to be "If you embrace America as it is, you'll have your stage three needs satisfied and can move on to stage four." The problem with this is that feelings of belonging are not self generated-America would have to embrace Black people back. Until America is ready to do this, it is fruitless at best and foolish at worst to expect Black people to release the things that do embrace them. At any rate, this missing of the point was the first strike against my personally accepting his argument as valid.

Mr. Kennedy also says:

"I eschew racial pride because of my conception of what should properly be the object of pride for an individual"

Had it rested here, I would have accepted his statement as a postulate of his system of thought. However, he invoked a historical Black leader by scissoring a few words out of the context of his life (common practice since it was so effective using Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 's words).

I confess that my reaction to his invoking Frederick Douglass in this way was a bit emotional, as Douglass is among my personal heroes. Still, it is as difficult for me to imagine someone familiar with his life and work doubting Frederick Douglass' pride in what and who he was, as it is to imagine Dr. King as a mere dreamer of peace.

His next point, that inherited status is often a substitute for personal achievement, is unfortunately positioned--in the midst of an article about the attitude that Black people should take toward each other, the jibe strikes one as specifically targeting Black people. However, judicious reading shows that he makes reference to "people" without racial delimiters. Therefore the implied insult to those that "made inherited group status an honorific credential" applies as well to The Daughters of the Confederacy, B'nai B'rith, the snobby country club set, everyone who ever wanted their daughter to marry someone of the same religion and/or ethnic background, any college admission board that gives any benefit whatsoever to children of alumni, every participant in a St. Patrick's Day or Columbus Day parade, and everyone survives off inherited wealth. At any rate, I enjoyed reading the paragraph, even though as an unnecessary aside it did nothing to advance to point of the article. It showed the brother can still play the dozens.

Unfortunately, by attempting in the last paragraph of the section to justify his eschewal of racial pride, Mr. Kennedy returns it to the realm of things one must judge rather than simply accept. He says he recognizes "an important virtue in this assertion of the value of black life," but cannot support it because:

"within some of the forms this assertiveness has taken are important vices-including the belief that because of racial kinship blacks ought to value blacks more highly than others."

Even assuming, as Mr. Kennedy does, this belief to be a vice, the possibility of the vice developing is not reason to abandon racial pride but merely those forms of it that are subject to the problem.

I must also weigh vice against virtue, and let me be clear that it will be a partisan judgment. America is, and always has been, a pastiche of cultures. Assuming Black people's pride, kinship and loyalty caused them to aggregate in the fashion of other ethnics, America should survive. Black people are dealt with in that fashion now anyway. For Black people in particular, it makes it simpler to resolve stage four issues (competence, prestige, and esteem) if positive ideas are associated with the group through which they resolve our stage three issues. Though my judgment will change if conditions change, on balance I must judge racial pride to be less damaging to Black people, and therefore to America, than the lack of it. Strike two.

Mr. Kennedy begins the section "Racial Kinship" with:

"I reject the notion of racial kinship. I do so in order to avoid its burdens and to be free to claim… the unencumbered self."

He then quotes Michael Sandel's description of unencumbered self as "unencumbered by aims and attachments it does not choose for itself," and "[f]reed from the sanctions of custom and tradition and inherited status, unbound by moral ties antecedent to choice… installed as sovereign, cast as the author of the only obligations that constrain."

As a Black man I can certainly feel the attraction of this unencumbered self. It is a goal in keeping with the American worship of the individual. However, as a rational man, I must question the possibility of the self so described. Humans… or at least the bodies we live in… are social animals. As such, we must have socially defined aims and attractions, no matter what our personal desires on the issue. And as a practical matter as long as one lives in a society, what one chooses, not to mention what one chooses from, is largely determined by culture and tradition. Sadly, I must relegate the unencumbered self to the same category as the unicorn-a fabulous beast with magical powers that looks like it ought to be able to exist.

It is true that often we receive unexpected gain from attempting the impossible, so perhaps pursuit of the unencumbered self could result in some benefit. I find it difficult, however, to be sanguine about freedom from "moral ties antecedent to choice." When you choose your morality, on what is the choice based? If choice is made based on desire (which it must be, as needs are not optional and therefore not a choice) and given freedom from "moral ties antecedent to choice," I can see no way of avoiding the conclusion that fulfilling one's desire is the highest moral act possible. All your morals will be bent to that end. That idea flies in the face of almost every religious and philosophical teaching in human history… though it's totally in keeping with the market philosophy at the heart of American (hence, world) culture.

Therefore, I do not need to further defend my feelings of racial kinship because of Mr. Kennedy's analysis. Instead, I find on rational grounds that rejecting racial kinship does not achieve the goal Mr. Kennedy set forth. Only one of Mr. Kennedy's two stated requirements (personal absolution from the burdens such kinship brings) is achieved, as the other goal (the unencumbered self) is impossible for a social animal to attain. I also reject it on visceral grounds: my distaste for the necessary elevation of desire over morality to which the unencumbered self must lead. Strike three.

I will not, however, comment on the moral judgments Mr. Kennedy uses to rout the subsequent array of straw men without knowing the nature of the desire that led him to this morality. I am willing to suspend moral judgment on those conclusions because in the end Mr. Kennedy seems quite the reasonable man. He makes a number of fair observations. For instance, the fact that "black problems" are actually "our problems" is a message that needs to be heard correctly by everyone who suddenly found themselves included when we changed "black" to "our". The behaviors he models based on his principles are quite acceptable in their net effect, so far as they go. The problem is that a person that rejects morality antecedent to choice cannot logically object to any choice on moral grounds.

I suspect Mr. Kennedy, a self-avowed liberal intellectual, of noble intentions in writing the article. I believe he intended to build a case for a viewpoint that does not specify race yet renders racial justice. But to suggest Black people should actually hold these positions is, I believe, a bad idea… telling people that Black folks need to do something no other ethnic group has been called on to do, i.e., become a nation of unencumbered selves, is not the way to convince them Black people are just like them, only darker.

In the final section of the article, "Beyond Racial Loyalty," Mr. Kennedy anticipates in response to his position a statement that Black people must stand together because all the other ethnic groups are doing so. And rightly so, as he conceded earlier in the article:

"currently the dominant form of racial kinship in American life, the racial kinship that has been the best organized and most destructive, is the racial kinship mobilized in behalf of whites"

it is difficult to dispute the idea. Such a concession begs the question, is it not just to assist those who are victim of this irrational condition? In the end, Mr. Kennedy responds to the challenge he foresees to his thesis with a simple statement of faith, justified by

• his fear of a stultifying effect within the race (as, by his observation, racial pride tends to stunt intellectual development). The calls for loyalty made by Black nationalists (and he names Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan) implies to him a threat of punishment against those Blacks who don't toe the line. Yet I don't think a single case of either these men or their organizations initiating violence can be documented. And the hyperbole of Mr. Kennedy's phrasing not withstanding, all groups have the concept of group loyalty. Though one may object to the reason these groups assembled, logically one can not object to their acting like all other groups once they have assembled. Finally, as a point of personal curiosity, I would like to know which white purveyors of racial pride he would point out as stunted intellects.
• his observation that the most admirable efforts to overcome racial oppression in the United States did not "merely" seek the advancement of a particular group. Assuming he is correct, that does not mean that the most effective efforts to overcome racial oppression in the United States did not "merely" seek the advancement of a particular group. By way of example, I direct your attention to the Irish, the Jewish and Chinese peoples. It also disregards the tremendous efforts of Black people before the Civil War to secure their own freedom, to buy the freedom of their spouses and relatives, to escape, to write and teach and explain the evils of slavery, often at the risk of identifying themselves well enough that they could legally be pressed back into slavery.

Since the response Mr. Kennedy anticipates is the starting point from which his argument was unable to dissuade me, I too will close with a simple statement of faith based on several observations. He made two observations and one statement of faith; I will make four observations and two statements of faith:

• In the USofA, one has power to the extent that one has a constituency (Ralph Reed has discovered both edges of that particular sword).
• Among self-identified social groups, only Black people have inoffensiveness and support of other social groups as a requirement for official representatives of the group.
• As long as Africans and their descendants have been on this continent, all they have ever sought was freedom to join the cultural and political body of the mainstream. They have never sought to take that which others claimed, but merely to participate in decisions that affect their property and seek their own destiny unobstructed.
• So far, every time an identifiable group of Black people has made significant progress toward that goal, there was a backlash from some other group.

Based on these observations, I do not believe ending race loyalty in the mainstream has been made to seem attractive to the mainstream (in fact, I don't believe it has been discussed), so I do not believe it will happen. And I believe ending race loyalty would be attractive to Black people… as long as we don't have to go first, because we can least afford to be wrong.

Relativity of Perception

This is a deep peep into my thought processes, if anyone cares

I was recently told that I'm kind of hard on folks. After reflection, I have to agree. I have to keep it in mind. I've taken people to task for saying the right thing in the wrong way many times, and I wouldn't want to be hoist by my own petard.

Not that I'm changing, mind you. I've found many ways to say the same things and I don't want to keep adjusting my idiom. . . the things I want to say are more precise, in my mind, said the way I think them. But for folks to appreciate it that way, they'd have to forget some of their assumptions and assume some of mine.

Mo' Metaphors

This is not a "relativity of truth" thing. It's a "relativity of perception, and mistaking perception for truth" thing. This is how it works:

For any blind websurfers and folks like me who surf with the graphics shut off, this is a picture of a red square with a green diagonal line, from the upper left to the lower right. There are observers in the pictures as well, one looking at the square from the corner on the left and the other from the base.

This, on the other hand, is a picture of a red diamond with a green line running from right to left. There are observers in this pictures too, one looking at the diamond from the corner at the base of the diamond and the other from the lower right side.

Now, having draw these startlingly realistic pictures myself, I can guarantee they are identical except for their rotation. In fact, I made the second one by copying and rotating the first one. Yet I, an observer from the outside, am able to describe these pictures in ways that, were you not looking directly at them, would make you assume they had no connection.

Now picture the two guys who watched the line crossing the square ("Square? It was a diamond!") They each describe what happened… the guy on the base of the square says he saw a green point extend to the right and downward. The guy at the corner of the diamond says he saw a line following a level path from right to left (he was behind the square, you see…you didn't know that because you have a two dimensional view).

What does that have to do with anything?

I'm glad you asked.

If the red quadrilateral is the world, and the green ray is the things going on in the world, these little cartoons are a fair representation of all our problems in dealing with the mainstream. The only way those two guys will agree on what happened is if one or both of them rotates his viewpoint, translates his terms into the other guy's. This is not necessary just for discussion, if you enjoy arguing. But to come to terms, it's vital.

I've been discussing things in terms of race, class, culture, all that. I think I have to let you know that I don't believe in any of it. I don't even believe in the terms in which I conceive of the issues internally. I mean, is it a square or a diamond? Does the line slope downward to the right? Upward to the left? Is it level, without slope?

Answer to all the above: depends on your frame of reference.

My real concern is finding a way to translate between the many frames of reference which the various folks I care about use. See, I pretty much understand how things look from my perspective, and I understand it don't look that way to other folks. So if folks want to do what I've done I need to understand what it is they see when they watch me. And they need to see the work I put in before they became aware of me (I've seen several folks hurt themselves bad by trying to do what I do without laying the proper groundwork first). Some folks have to become aware that they are only seeing an aspect of the planet.

Seeing as how most folks believe in race, I've been used race as a frame of reference. So things sound certain ways that don't strike me as the absolute truth. It's more like those gospels "according to"…the same story, told differently because each teller's frame of reference makes a different aspect seem to be the most important, or even the sole, message. And though I wouldn't classify my writings as a "gospel" (particularly since 'gospel' means 'good news', and I haven't really given out much of that), in casting my understanding in terms common to most folks, it looks like I'm a lot more concerned about this race thing than I am.

Revisiting an old topic

This is going to be long, because I'm prefacing the actual post with a previous posts. I need you to encounter a few concepts first so it was this or post things backward. Please note that all text contained within the brown borders is quoted, and not originally written by me. The links are still live, so you can read them in their original context if you wish

Later, at Mac Diva's suggestion, I rewrote it to say the same thing in a way that was a bit more palatable to the mainstream, but this is the version that Ampersand linked to, and the version that came straight from my head and gut.

This is all still rather polite but it's been my experience that it rubs a lot of folks the wrong way, talking about niggers and racists. That's my intent here, to rub folks the wrong way. I want y'all raw. It's the first, necessary step in my plan, which is to install a Negro in everyone's head.

Black folks, of course, already have a Negro in their head, so y'all can check me if you think I go off track.

Let's examine the facts here. According to the Census Bureau's Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin [PDF], six out of eight people in this country classify themselves as white. Black people are approximately 12% of the population; that's roughly every eigth person..

What I want to do is reverse the situation.

Imagine that of every eight people you see in public spaces, six are Black. Your bosses are Black. Your kid's teachers are Black. You go to the newsstand and see Ebony and Savoy but not Time and People.

Now, imagine that roughly one third of these Black people, that's one out of every four people you encounter lets you know, through body language, shying away or even sometimes a direct statement, that they think you are a racist bastard.

These are people who don't know you and never will. But it's pretty clear—not blatantly obvious, but pretty clear—that they are uncomfortable around you. They visibly relax when you say something that indicates you're not going to invoke white privilege. A few that do know you will ask your opinion with the inflection that indicates the collective "you." A few others will occasionally squeeze their butt-cheeks tight and add a nasal twang to their voice as a sign of solidarity with you. And you know if you, even accidentally, validate those assumptions in any way you will be ostracized to some degree, even by other white people.

You with me? Really?

Good. You now have your own personal Negro. Feed it well and ask it questions once in a while.