Recently in Race Category

Consider a man named Jim in the 1960s who does what people sometimes call "passing for white". His family is black, but there's enough white ancestry for him to appear white. Someone looking at him without knowing his family would think he's white. He talks in a way that no one would know his family is black. His employers would never discriminate against him because of his being black, even if they normally did such a thing, because they wouldn't know that he is black.

Jim decides to apply for college late in life, after the civil rights era is long over. There's a checkbox to indicate if he is black, which will be used for affirmative action purposes. Some people think affirmative action is immoral, and some people think it's immoral to ask or report one's race. Ignore those issues for this example, since what I want to get at is a different issue, and I don't want those as distractions. Assuming people should normally report their race accurately on such forms, should he check the box indicating that he is black? If you think he is black-passing-as-white, but you think he shouldn't check the box, exactly why is that (because it seems as if such an action constitutes a lie)?

Now consider a man in our day named Tom who has three white grandparents. His fourth grandparent is Jim. So he has two great-grandparents who are indisputably black and a grandparent who many people would consider black-passing-as-white. But Tom grew up in a white suburb in a family considered by everyone around them to be white, and almost no one he comes into contact with ever learns of or suspects that he has pretty recent black ancestors.

Tom applies for college. Again, ignoring issues about the moral status of affirmative action and assuming people should normally report the race on such forms, should Tom check the box indicating that he is black, knowing that it will qualify him for affirmative action? If not, but Jim should, what is the difference between the two that justifies a different moral result? If you think they both should not check it, is it for the same reason in both cases?

If a couple in Africa with no European ancestry somehow naturally conceived and gave birth to someone who grew up to look just like Sarah Michelle (Gellar) Prinze, would she be white? If a couple in Norway with no recent African ancestry naturally conceived and gave birth to a child who grew up to look just like James Earl Jones, would the child be black? If you think the cases aren't parallel, and one is yes but the other no, why is that?

In C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew, Aslan modifies a normal horse to make him a talking horse and then later gives him wings and makes him a flying, talking horse. What if he transformed him further so that he looked and acted just like a human? Would he be a horse still? Would he be human?

If God miraculously modified a chicken to make it lay walnuts instead of eggs, and those walnuts grew into what looked like normal walnut trees, would you think the offspring was a chicken?

Update: It occurs to me that the second question I asked is really a separate issue, so I'll save that for post #6.

What if God created the universe not with the slow development most of us believe to have happened and even without the "memories" of such a slow development? Yet on the surface people look like what they look like in the actual world, and they relate to each other socially in the same ways. They just don't have the long history we have, and they don't have false memories of such a history either.

Would there be any races? If there are, would they be the same groups as or very similar groups to our races (i.e. would the lines of demarcation for races be the same as what they now are)?

If God created the universe not with the slow development most of us believe to have happened but pretty much as it is now, with all the "memories" and seeming causes that give signs of the past, would the racial groups we now identify still count as races? Would they be the same groups (i.e. would the lines of demarcation for races be the same as what they now are)?

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) has come under fire for some race-related comments he made a while back about President Obama's election that have recently come to light:

He [Reid] was wowed by Obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama -- a 'light-skinned' African American 'with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,'

I wouldn't say that there's no problem with Reid's words, but I'm wondering how it amounts to what a lot of critics have been saying. The comments from a number of politicians make fascinating reading. Republicans want to say that the remarks are racist or at least inappropriate, and they point to a double standard by Democrats, who find little problem with Reid but were calling for Trent Lott's resignation for speaking off-the-cuff at a birthday party for Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC) to say that if he'd been elected president we wouldn't have some of the problems we have. Of course, the same could be said for those who defended Lott but have now attacked Reid.

What Trent Lott said was totally unproblematic in its actual content. It's the context that made people think he meant something more. He was talking about someone who has long been hailed as a stalwart conservative, and if he'd been president we surely would have had more conservative policies than the ones we actually got with President Truman. So a conservative senator could indeed have said what he said and not meant anything even racially-related.

But he was also talking about someone with a history of supporting segregation, who was actually running with a segregationist party on the occasion Lott was referring to. He was speaking at an event in the South, and there were almost certainly people present who fully agreed with Thurmond's former views who would have heard such a statement as support for such views. I doubt Lott was even thinking of that. He was probably just trying to be nice to a very elderly colleague celebrating a birthday, and I find it unlikely that the racial issue was even on his mind. It doesn't amount to racism, but it amounts to racial insensitivity and ignorance, and it perpetuates patterns of such behavior that are worth calling attention to and seeking to undermine. So I do think it was good for people to call attention to it, even if it does seem a bit much to me to insist that he resign from a Senate leadership position over it.

On the other hand, Harry Reid's problem is not in the content of what he said but in his choice of actual words. What he said is actually either true or at least certainly arguably so. He made two claims: (1) that Obama couldn't have been elected as easily if he seemed "more black" to more people and (2) the reason he seems "less black" to some people is that he has lighter skin and doesn't naturally speak the way a lot of black people do.

The second claim is certainly true. Linguists study the language patterns of sub-communities with particular dialects, and one common dialect occurs among black people across the country, with similar traits no matter what part of the country they're in. This isn't another language. It's English. But it has some different grammatical rules and pronunciations from standard American English. It's usually associated with inner city or poor and very rural blacks. A lot of black Americans speak more standard English most of the time and occasionally take on an affect of what some linguists call Black English. The rest of the time their grammar and pronunciation are pretty standard. There is also a southern-like element to some word pronunciations for a lot of black Americans even if they don't ever use the dialectical elements unique to Black English, and this is true no matter what region of the country the person is from. That accent is sometimes detectable over the phone, and people often associate it with race, sometimes looking down on people for speaking that way. This is all just a matter of linguistic and sociological fact. Acknowledging it is neither racist nor succumbing to pressure to cater to racists. Knowing the facts about how race works in this country does not amount to liking those facts or wanting them to be that way. It seems to me to be simply true that President Obama does not speak the way a lot of people who have negative stereotypes about how black people speak would expect a black man to speak, except when he chooses to do so.

As for the first claim, I think it's at least arguable that Obama would have had a harder time getting elected if people with negative stereotypes about black people had seen him as "more black". With a white mother, lighter than average skin for a black man, and speech patterns that are more ambiguous, a lot of people who might hesitate to identify with him could more easily do so. A lot of people who might have a harder time respecting him might more easily do so. I don't want to minimize how far this country has come with race in being able to elect him. Nevertheless, interviews showed that people with racial animus or some resistance to voting for a black candidate were able to pull the lever for Obama. One possible explanation that's certainly not obviously false is that they saw him as "less black". Would someone who looks and talks like Chris Rock have as easy a time getting elected president? I don't think so. Could someone who looks and talks like Chris Rock do it? Maybe. I'm not as sure as Reid. But the claim he was making doesn't seem ridiculous. I've heard a number of black academics make exactly that claim in meetings at the American Philosophical Association where his becoming president has come up.

The only thing I see that's seriously wrong with Reid's statement is the expression "Negro dialect". I haven't encountered that exact expression before ever, but I suspect it's a relic of Reid's growing up with "Negro" as the preferred term for black people, and he's not so heavily involved with the black community or racial issues to have gotten the immediate sense of its inappropriateness the way anyone with any racial sensitivity nowadays would have. So, like Lott, it shows that he's racially out of touch. It's not about referencing a racist or racially-harmful ideology as good, which I think Lott did unintentionally and lots of people claimed he did intentionally. It's about overt language that's usually offensive nowadays but used to be fine. The result is the same, though. He showed some racial insensitivity, even if the Democrats defending him are right that he's voted the right way all along. Voting the right way is compatible with being extremely insensitive. Democrats generally take Ted Kennedy to have voted the right way with women's issues, but there's no arguing that his attitude toward women was always wonderful. The same goes for Bill Clinton.

So that makes me conclude the following two things. First, the nature of the offense is different in the two cases. One involves overt language without ill intent in one case and potential implicatures that probably weren't but could have been meant in the other. Second, the real problem this analysis reveals is that both senators showed serious insensitivity and ignorance about race issues. So I do wonder if calls for Lott to resign should consistently be made against Reid and if those who thought Lott's statement shouldn't require a resignation should apply the same reasoning to Reid. I don't think either requires a resignation, but both should lead us to consider how ignorant and insensitive those who lead us are about race issues, and the most important fact about racial ignorance is that it's an unknown unknown. You don't know you have it until someone points it out. We should use moments like this to raise understanding to a higher level, not for political points or to try to remove someone in an influential position from that position merely because the person's ignorance is now known (as if the ones who haven't happened to reveal it are just fine). I'm therefore much more inclined to direct my criticism to those who don't recognize the parity between these cases than I am to direct it toward the two senators in question.

If someone appeared out of nowhere who was an exact duplicate of Chris Rock, would he be black? Would he be a memer of the same race as Chris Rock? Why or why not?

Would you say the same if it was a duplicate of Britney Spears? Would her duplicate be white? Why or why not?

Would a duplicate of Dwayne Johnson have the same racial status (whatever you think that is) as Dwayne Johnson? Why or why not?

If you answer any of these questions differently, what makes the difference between the different cases and why would that be?

If some really smart aliens contaminated the world's water supply with some powerful transformative agent so that within three months everyone would come to look just like Chris Rock, would there be any races left (or maybe just one)? Would it still make sense to say that I'm white? Would I be black?

How should you change any of your answers if everyone was made to look like Britney Spears? Dwayne Johnson?

President Obama is putting aside politics-as-usual to honor a black Republican former senator today. Edward Brooke was the first popularly-elected black Senator (Reconstruction doesn't count) and the only black Senator since Reconstruction from a state other than Illinois (the others have been Carol Mosely-Braun, Barack Obama, and Roland Burris). He was elected as a black Republican in an overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly Democratic state and was reelected to a second term, allowing him to serve in the Senate for over a decade. Today he's receiving the Congressional Gold Medal.

Redistricting in favor of majority-black districts has effectively created an environment that makes black senators much more rare than we would expect, since it tends to produce candidates who are focused on issues that energize black voters but who seem out of the mainstream enough to be much harder to win elections in statewide races. Democratic redistricting that relies on artificial lines to ensure majority black districts has ironically made it much more difficult for black politicians who are more electable statewide (and thus get into the Senate) from getting into the positions that very much help you to make such a statewide run. I've even seen conservative pundits (e.g. Abigail Thernstrom) claim that Republicans have gone along with this kind of gerrymandering because they knew it would ultimately favor their own party.

See Nate Silver's Why Are There No Black Senators? for a more substantial argument for the claim that gerrymandering of this sort is counterproductive to racial progress in the U.S. Senate. I think he's right.

It occurred to me while teaching Nietzsche yesterday that the use of Nietzsche to motivate antisemitism by the Nazi regime is pretty much the opposite of contemporary antisemitism, at least in one key respect. Hitler's use of Nietzsche capitalized on the idea of Jewish inferiority. If it's perfectly fine for the strong to trample the weak, then all it takes is finding a group that can be taken to be weak, and then you can trample away.

The problem Nietzsche would have is that you can't really demonstrate that Jews are the weak. In fact, the history of Jews in the United States seems to demonstrate otherwise. Before Hitler's time, Jews in the United States tended to do worse on IQ tests than the majority population. After WWII, they tended to do noticeably higher than average. The best explanation for that seems to be that Jews were sidelined more often and had become mainstreamed in a way that allowed them to develop the cognitive skills that they already had potential for but hadn't been developing as strongly. Even with the problems in using IQ tests to identify intelligence plain-and-simple, it's certainly true that there are skills that IQ tests measure, and the Nazis would have been happy to accept IQ scores anyway. So it seems as if the facts are just against their claim.

Contemporary antisemitism has to take a different stance. Not only is it ludicrous to take Jews to be inferior in terms of any important skill set for success in life, but Jews have in fact been much more successful in most of the ways people who make such judgments would actually care about than the average for the non-Jewish population. So the narrative is no longer that Jews are inferior and thus need to be trampled because of some Nietzschean mission to lift oneself up by taking advantage of the weak. Now it's almost a reversal. Jews have assumed control of society in some massive conspiracy, and the rest of us are the victims who need to resist the collective strength of the Jewish conspiracy.

Now I guess the two views are compatible. Someone could think that Jewish success is merely due to conspiratorial measures implemented by idiots who succeed only because a few of the relatively smart ones have gotten enough Jews into influential positions to prevent anyone from overcoming their collective strength. But I don't think the idea of Jewish inferiority among such conspiracy theorists is really about intellectual inferiority anymore. It's not clear to me exactly what kind of inferiority it's supposed to be, though. It clearly has some normative element, but I'm not sure it's even thought-out enough for there to be a real answer to that question.

Last night I was catching up on PEA Soup, and this excellent post by Jussi Suikkanen caught my attention. It's about the harm of rape (in particular of men raping women), not just to the woman being raped or even to all women but even to all men, including the rapist himself. One thing I appreciate about the post is a pretty clear listing of ways that rape causes harm in a much broader way in society than it might seem if you just focus on the act of rape itself.

One key element is missing, though. The most significant way that a man harms himself by raping a woman is the harm caused to himself merely by doing such an immoral thing. By committing such a terrible act, he diminishes his well-being in unmeasurable ways. A crucial element of experiencing the good of this life is being a good person. Without good moral character expressed through good actions, no one can live the best life available to us in this life. It would be much better to lack all the kinds of goods that Suikkanen focuses on if having them meant being an evil person.

On a different note, I want to affirm Suikkanen's overall point and expand it a bit. I appreciate Suikkanen's resistance to the common treatment among some feminists of rape as a zero-sum game that sets up social structures to benefit men at women's expense. I have similar resistance to the parallel reasoning that treats anti-black racism as benefiting white people at the expense of black people. There certainly are social structures that harm black people in ways that few white people experience. If you want to call this white privilege, I have no objection to that, as long as it's clear that the racist structure isn't giving whites a boost. Even if there's some boost from it in one respect, the harm to everyone from the existence of such racist structures has become so obvious to me that I can't see privilege of this sort as a real privilege.

If I have an easier time getting a certain kind of job compared with black applicants because of unconscious anti-black bias on the part of the hiring committee (e.g. they have lower expectations for black applicants without having an explicit view that black people are less intelligent or less capable), then I guess there's some sense in which I can benefit from white privilege. But the existence of that sort of privilege is itself a negative, not just for the black people who have a harder time getting a job because of it. It's a harm to me too (and not just because my wife is white and my kids mixed race). It's a harm because it diminishes my interaction with those who might resent me because of my race. It's a harm because the kinds of cooperation and mutual trust among members of the same society is weakened. It's a harm because it makes it takes more work and more thought to be a good person with respect to those of other races. It's a harm because "keeping blacks down" in any sense and to any degree will weaken the good contributions of black people to society as a whole, of which I'm a part. Much will slip through (e.g. much of what some call "white culture" has been so strongly influenced by black culture over more than a century of mass media that has included black entertainers that there's really no such thing as white culture). But the fact that it's still seen as "white culture" and therefore "other" by many black Americans is not just unfortunate for people who have that attitude but for the enrichment of all Americans. I could go on and on.

This is at least one reason for resisting the narrative that paints white privilege as almost a conscious cause of all structural and institutional racism in society. It's common, especially among this influenced by Marxian analyses, to think of power structures in society that perpetuate themselves. I have no problem with this. It seems obvious to me on reflection that there are such self-perpetuating structures. The key objection I have is that many who hold such a view attribute a rational character to these structures, as if white privilege is perpetuated by deliberate choices by those in power (which in this case might not just be heads of corporations or politicians but in some cases might be every white person who benefits), with the goal simply of maintaining that power.

This was true enough with Jim Crow, and it makes the best sense of some really crazy historical moments (like the Supreme Court definition of Mexicans as white that allowed systematic exlusion of Mexican-Americans from juries even though it was already accepted as unconstitutional to exclude blacks from juries systematically). But does it explain why generational welfare inheritance is more common among blacks than whites? Did the white liberals who concocted welfare intend it to be a way to keep black people dependent on the government in order to preserve white privilege? Even my most cynical moments don't go that far. (They only go as far as suspecting that politicians knowingly put band-aids on problems that they know will not solve them in order to appear to be doing something, but the goal there isn't to keep black people down and preserve white privilege but rather a very different selfish motive -- an individual motive to maintain one's political position, completely independently of race.)

Most of the time I'm not so jaded about people's motivations, though. Welfare was never really seen as a political move to try to gain points while doing nothing. Most supporters of particular welfare policies have genuinely seen it to be a good thing, something to help those who are less fortunate and could use a leg up. It wasn't until the Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform that we had a distinction between (1) those who rely on welfare because they can't work or are temporarily needing assistance while they seek a job or seek education for a job and (2) those who seek assistance merely to avoid working. That welfare reform brough some problems with it, but it fixed something the original creation of welfare created that was probably unintentional but was an unfortunate consequence. When welfare was massively expanded in the 1960s in a way that got self-sufficient black Americans to become generationally dependent on welfare, which in turn caused many of the more serious inner city problems in many predominantly-black neighborhoods, I don't think many if any of its original supporters had any clue what kind of serious consequences the program would lead to. They just rightly saw that some people in need would be helped (and probably wrongly saw that some who didn't need help should be ushered into that help as well).

There's no need to impugn the motives of such people. But I think it's that kind of inference that the usual narrative of white privilege often involves. It doesn't follow from the facts about how these self-perpetuating social structures work, even apart from its dependence on false judgments about harm and benefit.

The following two claims are clearly and obviously compatible:

(1) There are people who oppose President Obama and everything he does, in part because they can't stand the idea of a black president.
(2) The vast majority of opposition to President Obama's policies is because people simply oppose his policies.

I'm not entirely sure why so many people, including a former President of the United States and the current Speaker of the House, should think the first fact implies the denial of the second.

I've long argued that it's counter-productive for those who oppose racism to throw racism charges around when there's no good evidence of racism, especially when there's plenty of reason against it. If a particular racism charge is incorrect, it does no good to make it and causes much harm. People who regularly get accused of racism when they know full well that it's not remotely true are right to get upset and to think those who are making the charge have no good reasons to make it. They will tend to assume, then, that whenever there's a racism charge it must be manufactured. They'll be likely to think genuine charges of racism are similarly invented. They'll think we've moved beyond racism and that we no longer need to worry about racial problems.

This is in fact what many conservatives have wrongly concluded from the election of President Obama. If Democratic leaders insist on making obviously false charges of racism against a very large group of people (those who oppose the president's policies, when something like 46% of voters voted against him), it won't be surprising if it just feeds into the false picture many are trying to present that there's no more racism to fight against except the racism of the left accusing so many white people of being racists merely because they happen to be white but oppose someone who happens to be black. In other words, it feeds into the false narrative that the only racism that remains is anti-white racism.

People who voted for President Obama who have since decided that they did not get what they thought they were going to get (as is true of many of the protesters) are not the sort of racist who will oppose him for his being black, no matter what he does. Yet that's exactly what's being claimed by President Carter and Speaker Pelosi.

There are plenty of people who would oppose anyone who would expand the federal government at such massive levels and at a cost that will be impossible to pay for who then attempts to transform the health insurance industry in significant ways that will have unpredictable effects while denying that the effects reasonable people might worry about are at all possible. Yet President Carter and Speaker Pelosi are again insistent that there cannot be such people, because the only motivation anyone could possibly have for resisting such a reworking of the private enterprise of health insurance is because of racist opposition to the person proposing it, who happens to be black.

I've been minimizing the discussion of race in my most recent posts about Judge Sotomayor's cases and statements about race, because I wanted to treat those issues together in one place, and it does involve both her speeches and her decisions, which would have required splitting up the discussion if I included it in those posts. So here are some thoughts on her speeches, judicial decisions, and recent statements about race and related issues.

As I've said before, I don't think there's any problem with thinking different people bring different things to interpretation of the law, and I don't think ethnic and racial differences are exempt from this. Someone who has been followed around in the store because of race understands discrimination and racism in different ways from how I do, since that hasn't happened to me that I'm aware of (and it hasn't happened to Sam when I've been around). But to assume that such a person will be a better judge goes too far, and that's exactly what the Sotomayor of the speeches claimed, even if she distanced herself from this in her testimony. What's odd about that is that she seems obviously right about some of the things she distanced herself from and yet wasn't willing to defend herself despite several senators attempting to do so.

There are ways she understands race and racism better than I do, because she's experienced it more from the perspective of someone being discriminated against or who has been followed around in a store. That might impact judging, because it allows someone to have a better understanding than someone who hasn't experienced such things. But what isn't often acknowledged by those making this point is that there are ways I understand racism and discrimination that someone who has more often been discriminated against might not understand. (I've made this kind of point before in a different context here.) For one thing, I've been around white people sometimes when no black people are around, and I know what white people talk about when only white people are around (it usually has nothing to do with race, but occasionally I have heard white people tell racist jokes and such things that they wouldn't say if they thought a black person might overhear). That's part of my experience, and it affects how I see racism and discrimination. Someone who is not white doesn't have that experience and has no first-hand knowledge of such facts.

I also have a third kind of experience from being in a mixed-race family, which includes experiences that most people of only one race don't have. For example, most same-race couples aren't going to have grocery store clerks assume they're not with each other. Most white people don't have family who aren't white, and thus they lack experiences of non-whites that I might have some understanding of. They don't have much experience attending black churches as family of one of the pastors, for instance. There are certain racial experiences that some white people can have that most white people don't have. That makes it hard to assume certain experiences just because of someone's race, which her statement does.

Which set of facts makes someone a better judge? The answer is neither. Both sets of facts could inform judges more about what our society is like, and a good, well-informed judge would welcome both sets of data. So I don't find her claim problematic when she says that a Latina judge's experience would provide experience relevant to judging and thus improve her judging in some ways from what it might otherwise be. I would also go as far as saying that, when a certain qualified judge comes from an underrepresented background, that background is likely to increase the quality of judging by adding the experiences of that underrepresented group to the data set the judges will consider. So having more Latina judges will make the judiciary better in one respect as compared with having one more white man on the judiciary, whose experiences may not (at least insofar as the person is a white man) add any further diversity to the pool of relevant experiences to inform interpretation of the facts that judges will hear.

But I don't think it follows that a Latina judge will be a better judge as an individual than a white man, merely because she is Latina, even holding all other things constant. That's what Sotomayor's statement actually says. I do find that inference troubling.

One of the problems with Facebook's latest version is that it's no longer possible to import blog posts and keep them comment-free while directing comments to the actual blog. So I've got Facebook friends who comment in Facebook on my blog posts, and those comment threads never appear on my actual blog. One recent comment thread on the Facebook import of this post led to my observing something that hadn't occurred to me before about some of the strange new dynamics of developments in how affirmative action is practiced.

There's an interesting phenomenon now of colleges having higher standards for Asian applicants than they do for white applicants in order to keep the numbers closer to where they want them to be. The diversity argument for affirmative action is now being used to justify discrimination against Asians. Since the diversity argument is the only one the Supreme Court has been willing to recognize as constitutional, none of the other arguments for affirmative action can be used to make this unconstitutional (e.g. remedying past discrimination, counterbalancing current discrimination at other levels of society, reparations for past mistreatment). That makes this perfectly constitutional in its justification, as far as the Supreme Court is concerned.

But I'm wondering if it's against the spirit of the Supreme Court's official stance. The diversity justification is supposed to support the favoring of sufficient diversity in the academic environment, not to ensure exact representation of each group according to any prejudged percentages. Unless the number of Asian students at the higher levels of higher education is so high that it's hindering diversity, I suspect the architects of current case law (Justices O'Connor and Breyer) would frown on admitting Asians at lower rates. It might look a lot more like the quota system that the Supreme Court has declared unconstitutional rather than giving underrepresented groups a leg up to make sure they have a seat at the table. They're already doing that with non-Asian non-white groups, and it's not as if whites need a leg up to have a seat at the table.

I'm thinking the same thing is true about the schools that are lowering standards to admit more male students, given that women are becoming a noticeable majority in higher education. It's not as if men are in danger of losing a seat at the table or as if diversity is really threatened at this point by some lower numbers of men in higher education. This seems to be motivated by a desire to have the number of each sex be closer to their representation in society at large. Doesn't that seem to be the spirit of quotas that the Supreme Court has consistently affirmed as unconstitutional? I'm pretty sure at least six of the current members of the Supreme Court would take that view, given what I've seen from them on previous opinions. But I've never heard of anyone even suggesting that someone initiate a lawsuit to challenge these practices on these grounds.

I came across a pretty good discussion of several of the bad arguments for and against Judge Sotomayor's nomination by Jonathan Turley. I recommend the whole thing, but one statement by him got my attention.

He says something that led me to compare an interesting phenomenon that arises with both Justice Thomas and Judge Sotomayor involving race. There are those who are happy that Judge Sotomayor is a Latina and will support her nomination for that reason alone, ignoring anything else. Then there are those on the left like Turley who would have preferred someone with more intellectual heft. On the right, there are those like me who are happy enough that Obama has nominated someone who by most reports will do little to move the Court to the left from where it currently is (and on some issues may well move it somewhat to the right, although on some issues we don't have any clue, and she could be far left for all we know). Then there are those on the right who have also pointed out that she's gotten some negative reviews in terms of her intellect, claiming that she's an affirmative action pick who is being chosen not because she's qualified but because she's Latina, sometimes even with the suggestion that she's unqualified.

So on both sides of the political spectrum we get objections that she's not an intellectual heavyweight. Turley is right to point out that this is not the same as saying she's stupid, as some have claimed these critics to be saying. Maybe some of them are, but Turley thinks she's quite smart but just not an intellectual heavyweight whose depth of understanding of the law and the historical background of the legal questions would shift legal opinion in significant ways, e.g. as Justice Scalia has done on the right and as Justice Brennan did on the left in the latter half of the 20th century. Such a statement is consistent with recognizing her intelligence as pretty high.

Then there's a third category. There are those who claim the statements about her intelligence are due to racism. She's Latina, so they must be assuming she's dumb. You find this on the right too, particularly when people criticize Justice Thomas. Senator Harry Reid, for instance, despite admitting to never having read an opinion by Jusice Thomas, was happy to spout off the general wisdom of the left that his opinions aren't very well-written, and I regularly see and hear comments about how he's not all that smart and just looks to Justice Scalia for guidance about what to do. Anyone who has spent much time looking at his opinions and anyone who has heard him speak would never hesitate to consider him to be a pretty intelligent person.

So what about the racist charge? Is it racist to say that someone is dumb when the person happens to be non-white? Of course not. Your reasons for thinking someone is unintelligent may be despite great reluctance to say such a thing of a non-white person in the public eye. You might genuinely think the evidence supports it, or you may trust the opinion of someone else who reported to you that someone is unintelligent. I think it's pretty immoral to call someone a racist merely because they happen to think someone who is non-white isn't very bright. There are, after all, people who aren't white who aren't that bright. I've tutored for some of the athletic teams at my university. Some of the students on those teams are very good academically, and others should never have made it into college. Some of those who never should have been accepted happen not to be white. They struggle to understand pretty basic philosophical concepts that most freshmen pick up pretty readily. It's racist to assume someone is dumb just because the person is black or Hispanic, but it isn't racist to conclude that someone who happens to be black or Hispanic is of low intelligence after becoming aware of actual evidence that the person is of low intellifence.

Nevertheless, I think there's something that these critics have right. I think there's a very strong presumption in individual cases of not accusing someone of wrongdoing or evil motives when there isn't strong evidence that they are ill-intentioned or doing wrong. Therefore, I think it's wrong to throw around racism charges for everyone who, for all you know, might be operating based on racist assumptions. Racist assumptions would explain how someone might conclude that someone who managed to graduate top of her class at Princeton University might be stupid. Racist assumptions similarly would explain how someone might say the same about the justice who managed to convince Justice Scalia to become more judicially conservative than he already was because of some pretty innovative and out-of-favor reasons that it hadn't even occurred to Scalia to consider. But to assume that racism is at work in any particular case violates the principle of charity that we ought to take in cases where we don't really know if someone is being downright evil in the way we're inclined to accuse them of being.

Such a strong presumption is for individual cases when we're ignorant of the details, perhaps even relevant ones about a person's inner life. That's consistent with recognizing that a claim is too ludicrous to be perpetuated so easily and frequently by people who should know better when we rarely see such claims about men who are nominated or serving on the Supreme Court. That might lead us to wonder if there is some kind of racist stereotype being perpetuated. In this case, I don't think it would be that Judge Sotomayor is being assumed by anyone to be unintelligent because she's Latina, but I wonder if some people among those who say this are more likely to believe such a claim when made about a Latina than they would if it were made about a man, especially a white man.

It's not all that common that I find myself agreeing with Peter Singer on a controversial ethical issue, but I was reading a section of his book on the moral status of animals and came across a passage where he discusses racial differences, and I found his discussion refreshingly honest in a way that would come across as politically incorrect in many circles.

He complains that the primary opposition most people have toward racism seems to come from being able to see that people in different races aren't all that different, and thus discrimination against people of a certain race merely because of their race is arbitrary and morally unfounded. I've just started reading one of his articles directly on that topic, and I may well have something further to blog about it once I'm done, but in the animals discussion Singer registers some worries about this approach that I've long had myself, worries I don't see very many people expressing.

A great number of trees have been killed to try to defend the claim that there are no racial differences that might be remotely connected to anything morally significant. At any suggestion that part of the cause of the IQ gap has to do with something besides current racism, sociologists and psychologists do all sorts of empirical work trying to show that black students score lower when they know their race is being recorded with their score and such things. It's as if everything anti-racist hangs on being able to establish that the only possible cause of racial differences in test scores might be racism itself.

Singer points out that this assumption is actually the problem. If you assume that overcoming racism requires it to be a fact that there are no significant differences in intelligence between two given races, then the racist with some reason to see a difference will seem more excusable. If anti-racism rests on the assumption that there will never be a gap in intelligence between two races, what happens if you discover that, at least with respect to one method of registering differences, there is such a gap? What if part of the intelligence test gap actually comes from some biological differences in brain capacity that might make it harder to do certain tasks? Would that then make it all right to discriminate against people of that race? So basing the argument on empirical facts that might turn out to be false isn't the best idea.

The further thought that I've had is that, whenever you take an average on anything, you're bound to have averages that differ. It's almost overwhelmingly guaranteed that one of the averages will turn out to be closer than the other to the goal in question, even once you adjust for environmental factors. You're simply not going to be able to establish the view that there are no differences that lead to slightly higher averages on some measure with white people than with some non-white group. Such a result isn't just some remote possibility that we hope isn't true. It's almost certainly going to be true statistically speaking. If you manage to get a test that does fairly well at testing for skills of a certain sort, it's overwhelmingly likely that some racial groups will test better at it, because those people who happen to belong to certain races are not likely to have exactly the same average than those of every other race. One will turn out to be better on average, and that result would be a pretty poor excuse if someone wanted to use it to justify racism. If you took any random sampling of humanity and tested them, then took a different random sampling and tested them, it's extremely unlikely that they'd have the same average. If the average for blacks turned out to be lower than the average for whites, what would that tell us? Absolutely nothing of any consequence, since we would expect that the numbers couldn't be the same, and when you're talking large numbers of people with variable scores it might be reason to suspect divine intervention if you got exactly the same result for each group.

So I'm in full agreement with Singer about those who resist tooth and nail any possibility that there might be a lower average among one race when it comes to a particular measure of intelligence. It's a fruitless quest, and the factual discovery such people so strongly want to resist isn't really going to lead to enough of a morally-significant difference to justify the strong resistance.

I have to agree with Ilya Solin about this. I've yet to put together my thoughts on the Sotomayor nomination fully, but this is an important point that I wanted to say something about separately. Regardless of your view of the correctness of Sotomayor's statement that a Latina just should be a better judge than a while male judge, such a view is not racism.

I tire of making this point on the left-leaning race blogs that I sometimes check in on. Racism, in its primary sense, is a negative attitude toward people of another race. Other things that might be called racist are so in a derivative way because those things are connected with racist attitudes. Thus certain acts are racist because they typically stem from such attitudes, and certain institutions are racist because they have a lot of such atittudes and acts woven into their very fabric. Jorge Garcia has an excellent philosophical defense of this approach in "The Heart of Racism".

When you call someone a racist, it doesn't mean they have innocent motives but participate in social practices that inadvertently cause racial harm. It doesn't mean they merely have false views about race or about races other than their own. It doesn't mean you can get away with ignoring race the many white people can much of the time. It doesn't mean you avoid some of the difficulties some others face because of race. The most immediatel thing converyed when someone is accused of being a racist is that the person has a deep-seated racial animosity or opposition to those of another race or that the person has views that those of another race are inferior, and these views have a negative emotional or attitudinal component. There are certainly things that can be called racism that don't fall into that category, but they're derivative of this fundamental meaning, and when you call someone a racist it sends entirely the wrong message if what you mean is something other than the primary meaning, because that's what people hear in such an accusation.

So it irks me when I hear conservatives making exactly the same blunder. It's not reverse racism to have the view that a Latina judge is likely to have experiences that influence her judging in positive ways, experiences that a white male judge wouldn't have. Calling someone a racist for thinking experiences common to the women of one ethnic group might make someone a better judge than people not in that category is as bad as calling someone a racist for opposing affirmative action or for claiming that the Democratic Senators at Clarence Thomas' nomination hearing were racists because they were willing to do anything, even smear his name with accusations that they had plenty of evidence against, if that's what it would take to prevent his confirmation. Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich have violated their own principles on this one. Limbaugh is a regular complainer about how the left issues racism charges in cases when such charges are not warranted. Yet that's exactly what he's doing here. I'm pretty sure Gingich shares that view, and yet he's also apparently called her a racist. Regardless of whether her view is true (and I encourage you to look at Tom Goldstein's analysis of her discrimination rulings, a post I'll try to comment on in more detail as soon as I can, before you come to a final judgment on her ability to be fair on such matters), it's certainly ridiculous to say that she's a racist for holding it.

One or several of the following are now apparently racist:

1. Unwillingness to accept funding that is supposed to stimulate the economy but won't stimulate much of anything.
2. Unwillingness to accept funding that mandates further expenses to your state after the temporary federal funding providing for those expenses expires.
3. Unwillingness to accept funding that might have strings attached that will prevent campus religious groups from finding meeting space on campuses
4. Unwillingness to accept funding from a bill that was rushed overnight without giving any of the legislators who voted for it or the President who signed for it a chance even to read the thing, never mind decide whether it's morally responsible.
5. Unwillingness to accept funding that sets welfare back to what it was before the reforms instituted by President Clinton and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich that had wide bi-partisan support and a significant movement of welfare recipients back into the
6. Unwillingness to accept funding that will increase the budget deficit during a time when it's already too high and the President who initiated it is also complaining about the very thing he's contributing to at record levels.

I've heard all of the above motivations for governors resisting some of the funding coming from the stimulus package, and they all seem like pretty good arguments to me based on what I know (but I haven't read the bill; it takes most people a year to read the Bible, and that's not much longer). It may well be that some of the funding might help some people, and some of those people might be black. But the opposition from these governors is mostly to funding that isn't going to help people or would help them at too much cost, cost that might well mean in the long run that it isn't a help after all. So how is it an insult to black people in the states that are refusing this money? It could just as easily be argued that it's an insult to black people to support this disastrous bill that will almost certainly make life worse off in the long run for most Americans, black Americans included.

Does Rep. Clyburn honestly think a governor of a state is going to do something bad for the state purely out of spite for the black people in the state? I can't see how he can say what he does unless he thinks these governors are at least slighting blacks in some way. Otherwise he shouldn't count it as an insult. That assumes that these governors are ignoring the best interest of a major portion of their electorate. It's one thing to have a different view about what's in someonee's best interest and thus take a policy that the other side takes to be harmful or negligent. It's quite another to think this is being done with enough deliberateness or contempt that you could count it as an insult, which presumes that these governors understand that the stimulus bill really is in the best interest of their black population but somehow don't care. Isn't it much more likely that the governor in question really thinks it would be bad to do what Rep. Clyburn thinks would be good? But that doesn't justify being insulted, and his psychological dependence on being insulted is strong enough that he needs some way to justify it, even if it means slandering people who probably really do have the best of intentions.

There are a lot of black politicians who can say what they want with impunity, without having to face election in a district with a racial population spread closer to the mainstream of society. Such politicians will probably never move to higher levels of elected office than in a gerrymandered district in the House of Representatives, so they remain there and get committee chair spots whenever the Democrats are in control. Rep. Clyburn is in that category. Some hoped that electing Barack Obama to the presidency would put an end to the kind of unfair misrepresentation and ridiculous posturing that partisan gerrymandering along race lines has caused. It hasn't yet, and it's still early in Obama's term, but I don't think it will easily have that effect. The ironic result of race-based district gerrymandering is the election of cranks into the Unites States House of Representatives who wouldn't have a chance at statewide office given their extremist view and wllingness to spout them off whenever anyone does something they disagree with, even if it labels that person in a way that has little to do with the facts. I can't see how it helps black America to have people like this serving as their main elected representatives. I do hope having Obama in as visible a role as President will change this sort of thing. It doesn't seem like it's going to happen quickly, though.

The outstanding revival of Doctor Who will soon be retiring another incarnation of the Doctor. David Tennant, who I think has been the best Doctor of the whole franchise, is going to move on to other things after several TV movies that also finish off the tenure of head writer Russell T. Davies, the man behind the series' revival. Steven Moffat, who is taking over the head writer's spot, happens to be my favorite writer of the bunch, having written three episodes that I'd put in the top ten of all time and one that unquestionably occupies the top spot. But there's been a bit of worry about who would become the eleventh Doctor. Rumors circulated that they might pick a woman or a black man. I'd be very surprised if they picked a woman, but I wouldn't have been surprised at all if they'd found a black man who could capture the essentials of the Doctor very well. They've certainly made great efforts to be racially inclusive in the revived show, marking a stark contrast with the very white casting of the original episodes.

It's strange, however, to see some of the response that I've seen now that they've finally chosen the eleventh Doctor, and he turns out to be white. It strikes me as affirmative action absolutism. To be clear what I mean, here are a number of different things people call affirmative action:

It can mean (1) outright quotas, where you guarantee a certain number of spots for whatever group you're extending affirmative action toward. This was originally what happened at the college and university level until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional for state and federal funding to be used that way.

It can mean (2) idealized quotas, where you lower the usual standards to try to reach a ballpark figure, but you don't do it by the numbers. It's effectively a quota, but because you're not an absolutist about an exact number of spots, the Supreme Court allowed it in 2003 as long as you don't use strict numerical criteria in letting race affect your calculations.

Then there's (3) what George W. Bush calls affirmative access, which is to go out of your way to find qualified candidates but not to lower your usual standards very much, and if there aren't qualified candidates in the target group or aren't as many as you'd like, then you don't lower the standards more to fill up the spots more.

The third policy has always struck me as the best, particularly for this sort of situation. You're casting for an iconic character with a history dating back over 40 years. You want to produce the best artistic product you can, and the choice of the lead role on such a show is huge. It would do a lot of good in the world to cast a black actor for the part. However, there are considerations more important than race, and those should never be put aside if it turns out all the black actors who audition are enough away from what you think the role needs to be like compared with a candidate who just stands out as perfect. According to all reports from the producers, they chose someone who does exactly that. He seemed exactly what they wanted. If they had a black actor who'd auditioned who could do the job passably, it seems to me that it would be immoral to hire him instead of the guy they went with. If they had someone who would have been great for the job if the guy they hired had never appeared, who perhaps might have otherwise been their first choice, then it becomes a harder question. It depends entirely on how much better their first choice is. It didn't sound like anyone was close from the way the producers were talking, though.

So it seems like this sort of complaint relies on a very strange moral premise, which I'll call affirmative action absolutism, a view that becomes very strange when applied to the case of there being only one spot. Somehow the idea is that whenever you've got an ongoing role where the actor can be replaced and not have to look anything like the previous actor, and all the previous actors were white, you've done something bad by not choosing a black one at the next opportunity. Such a view strikes me as completely crazy. Race is an important consideration, but it's not the only one, and there are other ones that can be more important. You have to know that none of the more important considerations are determining the decision to complain that something bad has gone on in the selection of a white actor to play the Doctor.

I can't see how anyone but the producers can flatly say that they've failed at some moral responsibility by choosing a white actor, because only those present at the auditions and casting decision meetings can know enough to assert that the producers are lying when they said Matt Smith stood out so far above the other auditioners that it was hard to consider anyone else. I very much doubt they're lying, though. Steve Moffat isn't out to cater to higher-ups in the BBC. He's a long-time fan who has a very good understanding of the essence of the character. He's a storyteller who wants to tell the best story he can with the best cast he can. Why would he choose someone and then lie about the reasons? It's extremely implausible. Besides, claiming that you know they're lying is stronger than wondering if it's true. Claiming you know it requires having been at the auditions and knowing that there are black actors who tried out who would have done just as good a job or almost as good a job as the Doctor. I very much doubt that's true of the complainers, since they almost certainly weren't present for any of that.

X-Men and Philosophy: Astonishing Insight and Uncanny Argument in the Mutant X-Verse will be published in about two months, at the end of March. You can see the table of contents to see the range of topics covered (and here is the Amazon entry). My chapter, "Mutants and the Metaphysics of Race", will be my first publication besides a book review on the InterVarsity four views volume on God and time, so I'm looking forward to getting a copy to hold in my hands rather than having to look at it in PDF form.

The chapter on destiny and prophecy I wrote for the forthcoming volume in the same series on Harry Potter will not be surfacing anywhere near as quickly. The publisher decided they wanted it to come out at the same time as the final movie. Since they haven't released movie six yet, and there will be eight movies, we'll have a while to wait. The current expectation for the second Deathly Hallows movie is May 2011. The book is pretty much done, but they're going to sit on it for two and a half years rather than releasing it with the sixth movie and then allowing themselves the opportunity to do a second one with the final film.

Barack Obama resigned from the U.S. Senate on November 16. Roland Burris was sworn in as his replacement yesterday. In the intervening time, there were no black U.S. Senators.There have been relatively few black Senators at all. The first was Hiram Rhodes Revels, elected by the Reconstruction-era Mississippi legislature (state legislatures chose U.S. Senators at that time) in 1870. He resigned to become a college president before serving a full term, but not long afterward Blanche Bruce became the second black senator in Mississippi's other U.S. Senate seat.

After the Reconstruction period until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, there were no blacks in Congress at all. The black population in the South was de facto disenfranchised because of literacy requirements, poll taxes, and other legal measures that in practice kept black voters from voting. Once the Voting Rights Act took effect, majority-black districts began electing black members to the U.S. House of Representatives, but until 1992 these were mostly from only nine cities. After the 1990 census, a lot more majority-black districts were gerrymandered to allow for majority-black populations, often from several disconnected communities, to elect black representatives in the House.

Four Senators since Reconstruction have been black. Edward Brooke, a Rockefeller Republican, was elected as the third black senator in U.S. history, this time from Massachusetts during the Civil Rights era. He served two terms, leaving office in 1979 when he was beaten by Paul Tsongas. Carol Mosely Braun served one term from Illinois from 199-1999. She was a moderate liberal on economic issues but very liberal on social issues. She was beaten by Peter Fitzgerald, a rare Republican win in that state. Barack Obama was elected, also from Illinois, in a bad year for Republicans given several GOP scandals in that state, when he had no serious contender as an opponent. Roland Burris was just appointed to replace him, with no electoral process at all. It's fair to say that even the few black Senators in the modern period have largely not gotten there with hard electoral victories and have had a hard time remaining there.

The vast majority of blacks in the House of Representatives have come from majority-black districts, which seems to reflect a general fact that black legislators can't seem to get elected easily from majority-white populations. There have also been few black governors. In 1972, P.B.S. Pinchback served as governor of Louisiana for 35 days at the end of a gubernatorial term that had been vacated due to corruption charges. In the modern period, Douglas Wilder was elected in the 1980s to only one term in Virginia as a moderate and libertarian-leaning Democrat who promised to implement policies contrary to union dogma. Deval Patrick is in his first term in Massachusetss. He ran as a business-friendly Democrat. David Paterson is filling out the remainder of Eliot Spitzer's term as governor of New York. He's governing as a fiscal conservative but is very socially liberal, and many political experts think he's going to have a hard time maintaining his governorship, probably losing in a primary contest to Andrew Cuomo if Cuomo doesn't take Hillary Clinton's Senate spot or possibly losing to someone Rudy Giuliani if he runs for governor. Those are the only four black governors. Only two of them managed to get elected, and both ran as moderates in typically liberal states.

What's the explanation for this, and why is it still true in an age when the nation can elect Barack Obama to the officer of President of the U.S. and Colin Powell can have such high bi-partisan popularity ratings among white voters, even after his association with the Bush Administration and the argument for a very unpopular war (even if he later has distanced himself from that process)? Does Obama's victory not show what so many people think it shows? Does it mean Obama is more the exception and that white people just don't want to elect black people to public office but will occasionally do so if they want to replace an unpopular party and don't want to do so by setting up a Democratic legacy for the Clintons? Is there something about Obama himself that explains why he's different, something that must be true in some sense for these other exceptions? Or is there a different explanation for why so few black politicians can manage to get elected by a mainstream voting public? I think the correct answer to all of the above questions is actually a qualified "yes", but the qualifications are pretty important.

Since President George W. Bush has, by some measures, had the most diverse cabinet in U.S. history, I thought it would be interesting to compare President-elect Obama's picks for the cabinet to see how they compare just on this one measure. I'm not talking ideological diversity here. I intend to reflect on that at some point. I'm simply talking about the standard kinds of diversity usually intended when people use the word, and the only ones I've ever heard people discuss with the cabinet are race/ethnicity and sex/gender. I'll go position by position. I'm only including full appointments with Senate confirmation, not acting secretaries. I'm also only counting cabinet secretaries, since the precise list of which other positions are in the cabinet varies with each president.

Madeleine Albright was the first woman to hold the position of Secretary of State, under President Clinton. Colin Powell replaced her and was the first black in the office. His replacement, Condoleeza Rice, was the first black woman. Obama chose not to go with a new first here, appointing Hillary Clinton, another woman.

As far as I can tell, there has never been anyone but a white man to hold the office of Secretary of the Treasury. That will not change under President Obama, at least not at the start of his term. Timothy Geithner certainly has a diversity of experience, but he's another white man. Diversity isn't the only consideration Obama should have factored in, but it's fair to say that he did miss an opportunity here to appoint the first person to this office who isn't a white man. If he appoints another person to this officer later, that might be a strong consideration.

The same goes for Secretary of Defense. The difference here is that Obama is just continuing the current occupant of that position in the interest of smoother transition in time of war.

Bill Clinton appointed Janet Reno as the first woman Attorney General. George W. Bush appointed Alberto Gonzales as the first Hispanic Attorney General. Obama has nominated Eric Holder to be the first black Attorney General. In his case, I have slightly more doubt that he'll be confirmed when compared with most of Obama's picks, because even if you ignore ideology there are excellent reasons not to confirm him given his leading role in Clinton's most unconscionable pardons (not just Marc Rich but a group of domestic terrorists who should never have been considered, never mind approved, for pardon) and his defense of pointing guns at small children by calling it respectful (in the Elian Gonzalez affair). Either is sufficient grounds to wonder if he's qualified to be the nation's chief law enforcement officer. But the Senate will probably roll over for Obama and confirm him anyway.

George W. Bush appointed the first woman Interior Secretary, Gale Norton. I'm not 100% sure of this, but I believe Obama's nomination of Ken Salazar would make him the first Hispanic Interior Secretary.

Mike Espy, Clinton's Secretary of Agriculture, was the first black person in that position. Ann Veneman, under George W. Bush, was the first woman to hold the office. Obama's nominee is a white man.

Update: Joseph Celucien has posted this at Christ, My Righteousness as part of a series on racial reconciliation, so it might be worth looking at the comments there as well.

Bob Jones University, founded in 1927 in the nexus of racial segregationism and the religious separatism of the early fundamentalist movement, took until 2000 to revoke their ban on interracial dating. Eight years later, they've issued a Statement about Race at Bob Jones University that reflects a fairly healthy view of race, admits to having based their policies on the surrounding cultural norms rather than the Bible, and admits to the wrongness of their institutional policies on race. I was glad in 2000 when they revoked their ban on interracial dating, and I'm glad to see this statement today.

Not everyone is happy about it, though, and I'm not talking about white supremacists. There are some people who simply refuse to accept this as genuine repentance. See the comments at Justin Taylor's post on this for some examples.

The reactions in that comment thread led me to think about a set of related concepts that people often don't distinguish, sometimes to the point of philosophical confusion on important issues. I've sometimes used a paper by Jeffrie Murphy on forgiveness that draws a four-fold distinction between justification, excuse, mercy, and reconciliation. I would now add to the list mitigating factors, explanations, and what Laurence Thomas calls moral deference. Justification is an an explanation why an action isn't wrong (presumably when someone is assuming or arguing that it is). A justification for killing someone, which is normally wrong, might be that I'm defending my son from a vicious murderer. It's a defense of the rightness of something that would otherwise be wrong. An excuse is an explanation of why we shouldn't blame someone who did something wrong. Someone who does something that's wrong but couldn't understand the relevant moral issues because of a diminished capacity to engage in moral reasoning would be excused. Mercy is the removal or diminishment of punishment. If a judge reduces a sentence or a governor or president commutes a sentence, it's mercy. Reconciliation is the restoration of normal relations, for instance if a divorced couple reinstated their marriage or two estranged friends resumed a relationship of friendship. Murphy distinguishes all of these from forgiveness, which is the willingness to put aside one's resentment.

Two related but yet distinct concepts that occurred to me in reading this discussion are mitigating factors, explanations, and moral deference. Mitigating factors can be the basis for some of the original list. A mitigating factor may explain why something normal wrong is right, or it might explain why someone shouldn't be held responsible for doing the wrong thing. It might make it right to reduce a sentence, or it could be the grounds for forgiveness. But the mitigating factor itself is just a condition that makes it worth considering a situation as more complex than the straightforward case of wrongdoing that deserves a certain simple response. An explanation of someone's behavior is simply an account of what led to it. Sometimes it's helpful to understand what led someone to do something wrong. Sometimes the explanation includes mitigating factors. Sometimes it provides some level of justification or excuse. Sometimes it's an attempt to justify or excuse but one that's not entirely successful. But sometimes when someone offers an explanation all they want is for you to understand how they could have ended up in that position, and it might be useful to know about in order to help prevent the person being in the situation that occasioned their wrong act. So I think this is a distinct category, and it's good to be able to think of it as separate. Someone can offer an explanation without necessarily seeing that explanation as an excuse, justification, or call for mercy. Finally, moral deference is when you admit that you don't have a good grasp of what it's like to be in someone else's situation, which leads you therefore to extend them some level of mercy, forgiveness, excuse, justification, or reconciliation. It's a particular reason for doing one of those things, namely that you can't put yourself in a position to judge as easily because you haven't experienced what they've experienced.

One justification for disallowing bans on same-sex marriage is that it's seen as discrimination to prevent same-sex couples from marrying. [In this post I'm not considering under what circumstances discrimination is wrong and when it's perfectly ok. The moral issue isn't my interest here. I'm just looking at whether it's discrimination, leaving aside the moral issue of whether such discrimination is ok. It's ok to discriminate against black people when casting a part in a play for a character that was written as a white racist. But it's still discrimination, just a perfectly legitimate kind. I'm interested in the legal implications here, not the moral ones.]

Whether a practice or act counts as discrimination depends on some assumptions. Two key issues are (a) who is being discriminated against and (b) on what basis.

Consider Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that overturned bans on interracial marriage. The Supreme Court ruled that the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment prevents states from treating individuals of different races differently when it comes to who they can marry. If a man is black, he couldn't marry a white woman in Virginia, but if he'd been white then he could have. That's discrimination against individuals along race lines.

Restricting marriage to same-sex couples isn't quite parallel. It doesn't discriminate against individuals according to sexual orientation. A gay man has the same rights as a straight man. He can marry an unmarried woman who is of age or who otherwise satisfies the requirements for marriage (parental consent or whatever). Both can marry women, and neither can marry men. Similarly, a lesbian has the same rights as a heterosexual woman. Both can marry men, and neither can marry women. That's not discrimination according to sexual orientation, since people of both sexual orientations (holding sex constant) have exactly the same restrictions. The law is equally applied to gays and straights.

But it is discrimination against couples. Same-sex couples are not allowed something that opposite-sex couples are allowed. Does a couple have the kind of legal status to serve as a party in this kind of legal question? My suspicion is that it would be a major innovation in our legal system to treat a couple as a legal entity. I'm not sure that's the best strategy for same-sex couples to try if they want to make headway on this issue, but it is the easiest way to end up with a discrimination claim on the basis of sexual orientation.

I've long thought that the most promising case that bans on same-sex marriage are discrimination is to ignore sexual orientation entirely and to focus on a different basis of discrimination. Men are being discriminated against on the basis of their sex by not being allowed to marry people women are allowed to marry, and women are being discriminated against on the basis of their sex by not being allowed to marry people men can marry. If you ignore sexual orientation, as many social conservatives want to do, then this complaint gets a footing. Of course you have to think any discrimination on the basis of sex is wrong or explain why this particular one is if others aren't, which puts you back to square one if you want to draw a negative moral conclusion, but I'm ignoring that in this post.

It's one thing to invent all manner of conspiracy theories about how you lost an election (see 2000 and 2004). Thankfully, the Republicans don't seem to be doing anything on the same order as that in 2008. Pretty much the only questions being raised by mainstream Republicans involve an organization that's actually under investigation by the FBI on the issue in question, and hardly anyone is claiming that the election was stolen or that McCain would have won easily if not for illegal vote-stealing of some sort.

I think part of that might have been that McCain was doing so well in the polls until the financial meltdown, and then Obama clearly had that crisis to thank for his win and for McCain's inability to get back in the game. If it had been closer, maybe things would be different, and there might be more charges that voter fraud actually affected the outcome. Nevertheless, I think it's noteworthy that Republicans largely aren't pushing it to that point, and I'm glad for that. I can't honestly say that I'm sure Democrats would do the same thing were the tables reversed, and we have history to support my doubts on that.

What amazes me, though, is all the sore winners in the 2008 election. It isn't enough just for a Democrat to take the popular vote for the first time since Jimmy Carter and to win the electoral college handily [clarification: I meant winning a majority, not simply a plurality; Clinton obviously won a plurality twice]. People have to complain about the states that did go for McCain, claiming that all the white Southerners who voted for McCain were doing so merely because of racism rather than because they think Obama's policies would be awful. See Sam's post on that. Today we heard some caller on NPR's Talk of the Nation talking about how she's glad she doesn't have to listen to Palin's voice anymore, and I thought it was perhaps some preference against the pitch of her voice, but it turned out she really meant her regional accent. She was talking as if someone is ignorant for dropping the 'g' in words ending in '-ing' and several other colloquialisms.

After hearing this woman's snotty bigotry against the kind of accent you can hear not just in Alaska but across the Midwest, Sam wondered out loud why people like that caller think it's a good idea to alienate such a large swathe of voters. People did it with Bush, but he'd won, and they needed some outlet to express their frustration. So they tried to feel better than him by pretending his accent was equivalent with being an ignorant dolt. I'm not sure what people think they're accomplishing by complaining about those on the losing side, though, with these exaggerations of racism in all anti-Obama voters and by making fun of a quite common accent in a large stretch of this country. It certainly does feel like sore winning. What's the motivation for that?

Update: I was originally planning to link to this in the post, but I reworked it enough times that I forgot to put it in the final version somewhere. I did want to give Senator McCain credit for what is absolutely and indisputably the best and most honorable concession speech I have ever heard from a political candidate. He knows how to lose gracefully and respectfully.

Latoya Peterson at Racialicious is, to my mind, one of the more insightful and fair-minded of commentators on race from a left-of-center perspective. I often find myself disagreeing with her on politics, and I don't think she always represents conservative views or Republican politicians as charitably as I'd like, but I usually find her discussions of race to be more nuanced than most left, center, or right commentators can achieve. I even recognize elements in her analysis that strike me as the sort of thing I'd expect out of moderate conservatives on race, which I regard as outstanding intellectual honesty on her part, because a lot of the people she associates with on such matters would be very resistant to such conclusions (and certainly would be if I were the one presenting them).

But sometimes I see something from her that I just can't accept, and I've just found one. She speaks favorably of Adriel Luis' diatribe on McCain's use of "that one" to refer to Obama as racist in what it "really means". I watcher the video of Luis, and I just don't see any argument there for why McCain must have meant it in a racist way, none at all. The "that one" comment reminded me more of John Kerry's continued use of "this president" when speaking directly at George W. Bush in their debates. It's insulting, but it's quite a reach to claim (without argument) that it's even racial, never mind racist. It may well be that McCain is a
racist. Some people have seen his use of 'gook' for his Vietnamese captors as a sign of racism, but see Katie Hong's better explanation of what's going on there (and her critique of why it's still bad to use the term in that way but isn't necessarily racist). But even if he's at least racially insensitive in some troubling ways, it's just crazy even to suggest that "that one" is racist without giving a shred of evidence that other interpretations are impossible or unlikely, including my own thought that it was just like Kerry's indirect way of referring to Bush as an intended slight without racial connotations.

Now I said Luis gave no argument for why McCain must have meant this in a racist way. I didn't say he gave no argument for making such a claim. He does give a very interesting argument for why it's perfectly ok to throw around charges of racism with no shred of evidence. He says that as long as we brush off each potentially racist claim as not being clearly racist then people won't see any racism as being there. I suppose that might be true if we did that with absolutely every case, even ones where there's evidence (and there are plenty, including some that can't be interpreted charitably, such as Michael Richards' big fiasco with the N-word). But remember that we're talking about particular cases that we don't really know about. There's a reason we don't (at least we're not supposed to) find someone guilty unless guilt can be established beyond a reasonable doubt. We could use the argument that such a policy would mean that we'd never catch killers and that people would deny the reality of murders, thinking deaths were all accidental. But it doesn't have that effect, and the policy of giving the people of the benefit of the doubt with accusations of racism need not have such an effect.

For the same reason that we don't assume guilt with crimes, we should also not assume guilt with moral accusations that aren't crimes. It's basic human decency, and I find it sorely lacking among people who throw racism charges around without strong evidence. Being hesitant in particular cases when you don't know for sure is not the same thing as denying that racism is real. No, it's just being unsure about particular cases when you don't know for sure. I can't count how many times I've been accused of justifying racism when I've pointed out that a racism charge is unwarranted. Only if you don't know the distinction between being true and being proved to be true can you make such a charge. You don't need to deny that racism is real or even that it's widespread and so deep-seated that it's hard to spot in order to point out that a particular case is not clearly racist and thus unfair to call racist, and this will be true no matter how many such particular cases you find.

I've given a moral argument for my policy of giving people the benefit of the doubt in cases of potential but unestablished racism. I don't think it should have to bring any negative racial effects as long as those who question racist accusations in particular cases are willing to acknowledge it when it's clear and insist that there are probably plenty of cases of real racism where we unfortunately can't be sure and thus be able to call them on it. My sense is that conservatives on race are sorely lacking in that sort of thing, and that's why every attempt to follow a policy like mine gets seen as an attempt to justify actual racism. But I don't see how that mistake on the part of people who follow a policy like mine can justify the accusation of trying to justify racism, as has been said about me many times in the comments at Racialicious whenever I've said that a charge of racism is going beyond what we can be sure of. But people prone to leap to racism charges without enough evidence are also prone to leap to racism-justifying charges without reason.

I maintain that we do need to give particular people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to racism charges. Leaping to accusations of racism fuels the sense that every charge of racism is just a political ploy to get more power for a black hegemony that has taken great joy in gaining power by making racism charges. There's no way conservatives on race are going to back down from that narrative as long as a significant number of people follow a policy like Luis'. His strategy is therefore counterproductive, because he's just adding fuel to the fire among those who think racism charges are all or mostly false. Consistently repeating such charges without evidence isn't going to undermine such a narrative. It will further it. A more widespread recognition of the fact that racism is more widespread and deeply-seated among everyday white experiences will only come if those who seek to find racism under every rock and tree are a little more willing to express skepticism in particular cases when racism isn't all that well established.

Avery Tooley has posted a response to an argument that the high incidence of low birth weight among black Americans is a sign that slavery's legacy still has a biological impact. There are places the argument isn't careful enough. Avery points out one. It would be more helpful to figure out what's different between cases of blacks with low birth weight and blacks with more normal birth weight than simply to notice a difference on average between blacks and whites. The details of the particular cases might make all the difference.

But there are other problems with the argument also. [What follows comes from a comment I left on Avery's post.] They notice that blacks in the U.S. have lower birth weight than blacks born in Africa living in the U.S. But that's the same comparison used in the IQ debate, and it's still a debated comparison. Thomas Sowell, John McWhorter, and others cite it to show that black kids in the U.S. don't have as high a cultural expectation to develop their natural potential in certain kinds of intelligence. But those on the other side of the issue point out that the immigrants to the U.S. are self-selecting. They're more inclined to be smarter and harder-working to begin with. Perhaps they're more inclined to be healthier too, since healthier people are more likely to be positive and looking to improve their lot in life. Perhaps.

Where that response fails with IQ is that second-generation studies show that the drive to do well falls rapidly among immigrants' children and especially grandchildren if the children weren't themselves born here). That means it's cultural in some way, but that cultural impact could be because racism gets them down, from cultural opposition to acting white, or some combination of those and maybe other things too. But it's clearly not entirely a biological thing, even one resulting from the effects of slavery. So the question is whether birth weight falls rapidly in the second generation of black immigrants. Then we'd have some sense of whether it's a biological effect that continues to the next generation or a cultural effect, which could again have several explanations, perhaps many of which contribute to a larger story. I'd have to say that I'm skeptical of this proposed biological effect myself.

Conservatives need to understand the language of the left if they're going to criticize what people on the left say. William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn have a new book coming out. Here is the publisher's blurb about the book:

Race Course Against White Supremacy By: William C. Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn

White supremacy and its troubling endurance in American life is debated in these personal essays by two veteran political activists. Arguing that white supremacy has been the dominant political system in the United States since its earliest days--and that it is still very much with us--the discussion points to unexamined bigotry in the criminal justice system, election processes, war policy, and education. The book draws upon the authors' own confrontations with authorities during the Vietnam era, reasserts their belief that racism and war are interwoven issues, and offers personal stories about their lives today as parents, teachers, and reformers.

Tommy Oliver summarizes Ayers as saying, "we are a nation of white supremacists". He then quotes an LGF post that says Ayers claims, "the dominant political system in the United States is white supremacism". Both of these claims are gross misunderstandings of what that blurb says, and it takes only the little familiarity I have with Marxian-style racial critiques to see this.

White supremacy, according to the Marx-style critique, consists of two things. First, the social structure of race relations is such that white people do in fact dominate much of the time. Second, there are structures in place that serve to perpetuate that dominance. Such a view can range from the most radical end to a much more minimal version. The radical extreme claims that white people have set up such a system deliberately and intentionally perpetuate it to serve their own interests. A much more minimal version, in my view, is very close to the truth, and that claims only that there are factors in place that, often unintentionally or at least for motivations other than race, have the effect of continuing the influence that white people disproportionally still have most of the time.

White supremacism is an ideology. It holds that white people ought to be in power because white people are better than those of other races. It claims that any structures in place that might be called white supremacy are good and worth extending to make white control even stronger. It's not hard to see, then, that white supremacy is not the same thing as white supremacism. One is a set of social structures. The other is an ideology.

What the blurb for the Ayers/Dohrn book actually says is "that white supremacy has been the dominant political system in the United States since its earliest days--and that it is still very much with us". That simply is not a claim that white supremacism is dominant in any respect, as the LGF post says. It is not a statement about the prevalence of white supremacism among Americans, as Tommy Oliver's post asserts. It is a statement that white supremacy, the fact of white predominance and structures that continue it, has been more influential in American history than any other political structure. I think it's a highly questionable claim, and I'm sure there's a great deal in this book that I'd disagree with, but it doesn't do to pretend the claim is something much crazier than it really is. There's enough to criticize about the book that there's no need to make it out to be making an accusation that's much more serious than what the blurb actually attributes to the book.

There are some interesting moral issues related to the use of expressions that are perfectly ordinary and inoffensive in most situations but are used offensively within a small subset of the population, particularly when there are some among those on the receiving end of such expressions who don't know of the ordinary, inoffensive use of the term in question. It's usually good to show moral deference to the ignorant, if we haven't been in their position of ignorance, giving them the benefit of the doubt. But the ignorant in these cases include both (a) those who use the expression without knowing or the offensive connotation that it has in certain contexts and (b) those offended but its ordinary usage because they don't know about anything other than its offensive use. At the same time, there's always the questions of (c) whether those in (a) ought to have been more aware of what offends people and (d) whether those in (b) ought to have be willing to throw out such serious moral charges based on an ignorance that many might not easily excuse.

I've defended the use of such expressions in many contexts, emphasizing (a) and (d) above while perhaps too easily dismissing (b) and (c), or at least not explicitly laying out the reasoning for why I tend to favor (a) and (d) as more decisive in these kinds of cases. One example that came up in my post was the old expression "call a spade a spade". This one actually goes back to Plutarch in the second century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, although he used a different metaphor that was later mistranslated by Erasmus in 1542. (It's not generally accessible online except with a password to get through a university firewall, or I'd link to it.)

When I was talking about these cases with my friend and colleague Chuck, who occasionally comments here, he decided to go check the OED to get the history of the expression. He noticed a particularly funny quote that the OED used to exemplify "call a spade a spade".

1647 TRAPP Marrow Gd. Authors in Comm. Ep. 641 Gods people shall not spare to call a spade a spade, a niggard a niggard.

Those who have followed the recent history of offense over normally-inoffensive terms will remember that the black mayor of the District of Columbia fired one of his white aides for using the term 'niggardly', a word that only sounds like a racial epithet if you aren't listening very carefully. Even the NAACP chair, Julian Bond, thought it was crazy to criticize someone for using that word. But I suppose we've now got solid proof that 'niggard' does refer to black people, since Trapp in 1647 used it in parallel with "call a spade a spade". Or does this show that "call a spade a spade" is tied to offensive language because its connection with niggards goes back at least to 1647?

Rep. Lynn Westmoreland represents a Georgia district in the U.S. House. He's recently come under fire for a very puzzling comment:

Just from what little I've seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they're a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they're uppity

As might be expected, he's been criticized for using the word 'uppity' when he was talking about a successful black couple. But then there's his defense:

I've never heard that term used in a racially derogatory sense. It is important to note that the dictionary definition of 'uppity' is 'affecting an air of inflated self-esteem -- snobbish.'

I've certainly heard it used in that sense, although it's never been from the mouth of someone who meant it. It's always been someone describing someone else's negative attitude toward "uppity Negroes". I'm not sure it's in common use anymore among genuine racists, but I wouldn't know, since I don't run in those circles. But I can imagine someone who doesn't travel in racist circles who also doesn't travel in very racially aware circles, where people might put it in the mouths of racists they're discussing. Such a person may have never heard the expression "uppity Negro". Sure, it's possible.

But there are two problems even if he really hasn't heard of that expression. The first is his claim that 'uppity' and 'elitist' are synonymous. I don't think that's true. To be uppity is to extend yourself above your place, which assumes there's a proper place you're supposed to remain in. To be elitist is to think oneself higher than others, which assumes you think you're better than others. The former is an attitude toward a place that someone else has judged fit for you. The latter is an attitude toward people you yourself have judged lower than you. So the elitist charge reflects badly on the views of the elitist. Saying someone is uppity reflects badly on the views of the person saying it. That's an important difference. Westmoreland may well not know that difference, but that would just show that he doesn't understand how the words are used.

If he's going to give this defense, he has to say not just that he was ignorant of a way of putting Negroes in their place that was very common in the place he represents in Congress, certainly during his own lifetime (he was born in 1950). He also has to admit to being pretty ignorant about the word's basic meaning even in a non-racial context.

But there's something even more puzzling about his statement. Read it carefully. He doesn't say that the Obamas are uppity, as a racist would. He says they think they're uppity. That means (if he understands the word, anyway) that he thinks they think they're rising above a place that they themselves would describe as their proper place, something they shouldn't rise above. Does he really think the Obamas think that's true of themelves? I doubt it. And that means there's yet another aspect of how the word 'uppity' is used that he doesn't understand. I'm beginning to think he just doesn't know much about the word at all. Perhaps he's heard it once or twice and somehow formed some false beliefs about how the word functions. I know I've found out real meanings of words that I had thought meant something else, usually inferred from a few occurrences in books I've read when I've used context clues to figure out the term but never bothered to look it up. It's possible that's what's happened here.

If that's right, he probably isn't lying when he says he's never heard it in a racial context. Someone familiar with that context isn't likely to misuse it in both of the ways that he does. But it's hard to say that it's not an ignorant statement. It's (at the very least) ignorant about what the word itself means and how it functions syntactically. I've only seen two news stories, a blog post, and a very long comment thread on this, but it's a little disturbing that I didn't see anyone making either of these points. Is the American public at large that ignorant of how this word is used? Maybe it's just left our national vocabulary except when referring to how racists talk, and that isn't enough to clue people in to how the word functions. Can that really be?

Eugene Volokh uses scare quotes to refer to The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy and The Jewish Conspiracy, both of which he then goes on to admit to being a member of (along with most of the contributors to his blog). Scare quotes usually indicate that you believe there's no such thing, and I'm sure that's actually his view. But then he says he's a member of both. This is an interesting set of views.

He must think these terms refer to the groups that Hillary Clinton and anti-semitists (respectively) call by those names, and those groups really exist (because a group is just a group of people), but the groups don't have the features believed to be true of them (among other things, being a conspiracy). If that's right, then he's taking the names as proper names (and not definite descriptions, which wouldn't refer to anything) and taking them refer to exactly the groups the people whose false beliefs generated the existence of those groups (or at least generated their social relevance if the group exists simply because the members exist).

It struck me that this is almost exactly what the majority view in philosophy of race says about races. Races are social kinds whose existence (or at least social relevance if the group exists merely because its members exist) was caused by false beliefs by those doing the classifying. But the difference is that everyone uses race-terms, even those who pretend there aren't any races. Most people, on the other hand, don't believe in either of these so-called conspiracies. That's why his speaking this way sounded funny to me in this case, almost as if it requires saying it tongue-in-cheek.

In the Mutants and Race piece that I'm trying to get into its final form, I'm trying to figure out a good way to avoid using a certain word. Philosophers sometimes use the word 'categorical' to refer to terms that denote categories of various sorts. But there's also the meaning of the word that Kant means when he talks about the categorical imperative, which is opposed to hypothetical imperatives. A categorical imperative is universal (applying to everyone) and absolute (applying in every case). A hypothetical imperative applies only in certain cases, given certain hypotheticals that may not always apply. So the term can mean "absolute/universal" or "having to do with categories".

I explain some problems with thinking of mutants as a race, even if there are analogous features. It really is an analogy, which means it can be pushed too far if you assume the category mutant is an actual example of the kinds of categories that we call races. Yet characters in the various X-Media regularly speak of mutants with racial language? I then try to capture how sometimes this sort of thing can be perfectly fine as long as we don't take the language too strictly. Here's the sentence as most recently returned to me by the editors (with the following sentence for a little context):

On the other hand, we often speak loosely and use certain categorical terms in an extended or even metaphorical sense. For example, people sometimes refer to co-workers as family.

The word 'categorical' was inserted by an editor, and I removed it in my next draft. I'm not entirely sure whether it's supposed to mean that some terms that are normally absolute are sometimes used in an extended sense, i.e. not absolutely, or whether it means that some terms for categories can be used to include things not technically in those categories. Either one is consistent with what I meant. But it's ambiguous, and good philosophical writing removes ambiguities. Also, it's a technical term, and this is a popular-level work that's supposed to explain technical terms. I thought it best to avoid it, so I rewrote several sentences to say what I meant without needing it. A later draft then came back with the word inserted once again. So I'm not sure what I want to do to avoid the word and yet also express what I mean and whatever the editors thought was unclear without that word.

One thought is just to replace 'categorical' with 'category', but I suspect whichever editor keeps inserting this term doesn't approve of that word as an adjective. They obviously didn't like it the way I had it without adjectives, though. I haven't been able to think of a good word instead of 'categorical' if I don't change it much. I'll put the two paragraphs discussing this issue below the fold. I've love any suggestions.

Remember that ad used against Harold Ford that portrayed him as a philanderer in the 2006 Senate elections? Since Ford is black and the woman in the ad was white, a lot of people concluded that Tennessee voters were intended to draw the connection that this black boy was fooling around with their white womenfolk. I don't think there's any way to prove it in that case, but it sure was a lot more plausible as a possible play on racist sentiment than this current one.

So the McCain campaign comes along and compares Barack Obama to the substanceless Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Criticize the McCain all you want for its insinuation that Obama is like them, but please don't pretend that it's like the Harold Ford ad, as the New York Times editorial board does. The comparison is revealing, about those making it anyway, but it's logically invalid. I knew some people were touting it about, because someone on NPR mentioned it only to give a pretty decisive argument against it. Nevertheless, I'm a bit surprised to see it being endorsed by the NYT editors on their blog. That's pretty prominent for what I had thought was a position on the extremes.

There was no insinuation whatsoever in the ad that Obama is getting it on with these women. There was no suggestion at all that he's after white women. The ad compared Obama with these women, suggesting that he himself is like them, not that he's doing something with them. Even granting the premise that the anti-Ford ad is playing on racist fears of intermarriage, there simply is no argument that the McCain ad is remotely in the same ballpark. The ad criticizes Obama, but being black should not make remove someone from the possibility of criticism, even unfair criticism, especially in politics at this level. Criticism, even unfair criticism, is not the same thing as racism, and it's not the same thing as attempts to make use of others' racism. This is, in effect, the NYT editors' argument:

1. The anti-Ford ad had a black man and a hot white woman in it, and that was playing on racist fears of intermarriage.
2. The anti-Obama ad has a black man and hot white women in it.
3. Therefore, the anti-Obama ad is playing on racist fears of intermarriage.

It's not hard to see that the argument is logically invalid. There are any number of explanations for why an ad can have a black man and hot white women. The one offered in premise 1, even if it's true, is not the only one or even a remotely plausible one in this case. The ad portrays these white women as moronic celebrities, not as potential lovers for Obama. The point is absolutely clear to anyone with any political sense, and many pundits have criticized the ad in a way that recognizes its point without adding nonsense to it.

So why is the New York Times editorial board making it out to be racism? I have two theories. Either may be false, but I can't think of another, so I'm assuming one is true. Either (a) they're really, really stupid and can't see how fallacious this comparison is or (b) really, really immoral and want to make McCain look like a racist when they know there's no evidence in this ad that he or anyone in his campaign is. The first is uncharitable about their intelligence, and the second is uncharitable about their motivations, so the principle of charity can't help us out. There is no charitable explanation of their behavior.

If it's the latter explanation, then we have good reason to think this constitutes criminal defamation of character. If they know full well that they're lying to make him look like a racist, then it's legally prosecutable as libel. Perhaps they're not directly motivated by wanting him to look bad so much as to defend Obama's recent claims that the McCain campaign would use racist attacks by pointing out just such an attack, but I don't think that matters legally. They know they're lying about something that they know will defame his character. As I understand the law, that's sufficient for criminal defamation, and Wikipedia seems to confirm that judgment. On the other hand, they could believe the above argument is actually a good one, but then they'd be much dumber than you'd expect for people as highly educated as they are.

I don't understand what it is to play the race card, so I don't use that expression. Race is fine to bring in when it's relevant and not ok to bring in when it's not, but such an expression seems to me to assume that it's always inappropriate. But I did want to say something about the following remarks (taken from here):

Nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have [sic] a real answer for the challenges we face. So what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he's not patriotic enough. He's got a funny name. You know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He's risky.

Notice that there's no explicit mention of race here. He also doesn't reference his middle name 'Hussein'. He just refers to it obliquely (or perhaps he's referring to his whole name, but it's his middle name that people have used against him). He also makes a veiled reference to his dark complexion with the comment about presidents on dollar bills. But he doesn't use any race terms. Further, when McCain called him out for playing the race card, his campaign denied that the dollar bill reference had anything to do with race. It was about his not being a Washington insider. (I sure hope he continues this line of defense, because if it becomes clear that he sees the founders of this country as evil Washington insiders whose government we need to do away with, then he's not going to be getting very far.) It seems as if he's dancing around the issues he wants to get across without saying anything about them. It makes it sound as if he's trying to engage in the politics of racial fear without losing his appearance of being a post-racial candidate of hope.

Compare his very similar speech from June 20:

The choice is clear. Most of all we can choose between hope and fear. It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy. We know what kind of campaign they're going to run. They're going to try to make you afraid. They're going to try to make you afraid of me. 'He's young and inexperienced and he's got a funny name. And did I mention he's black?'

Then the previous day (from the same source):

They're going to try to make me into a scary guy. They're even trying to make Michelle into a scary person. Right? I don't know, before I wasn't black enough. 'Now he might be too black. We don't know whether he's going to socialize - well, who knows what.'

My mutants and race piece is in its second draft now, which I'll be sending off tomorrow. I do have some questions that I hope some familiar with recent X-Men occurrences might be able to help with. One of the comments I got back from the editors is that I was taking mutants to be literal mutants, which would mean genes mutated and led to their powers, and these genes would be different genes, genes having something to do with the abilities they end up getting. Nightcrawler's fur would be related to the kinds of genes that produce body hair. Cyclops' force beams would have some connection to genes that affect the eyes. Wolverine's healing factor would come from mutated genes that ordinarily relate to the immune system.

Well, the problem with this, according to my editor, is that the third X-Men movie has a completely different explanation of mutants. They're aren't literal mutants in the sense the term is usually used in biology. Instead, they have this one gene in common. In the movie, they call it the Mutant-X gene. At least that's how it sounds. I later found out this actually does appear in the comic books after I stopped reading them in the mid-90s, and they call it the X-Gene. So maybe it's not the Mutant-X gene in the movie but the mutant X-Gene.

This explanation is just downright stupid. How is it that this one gene explains the variety of powers across all mutants? Also, how did one gene just suddenly appear in all these unrelated people? Whoever came up with this idea knows pretty much nothing about genetics. I did some looking around in Wikipedia, and I found some blog posts about the mutant gene (including this one, which was somewhat helpful). Apparently the Beast, in House of M #2, says the X-Gene is technically a cluster of genes. That's a little better, I suppose, because it allows for different genes to be part of the cluster. Also, the X-Gene was supposed to be scattered throughout humanity but only activated in certain people, and those are the mutants. That's how humans can produce mutant children.

Given that mutants sometimes produce children with the same powers and sometimes end up with children with different or no powers, it seems to me that the X-Gene must not guarantee any particular powers but simply means there's a potential for powers. Without the X-Gene, there will be no powers. When the Scarlet Witch removes the X-Gene from the majority of mutants and the entirety of non-mutants, all the mutants without the gene end up becoming normal humans. So my suspicion is that this would have to be an activator gene (or cluster of genes), and what determines the specific powers is something else. The X-Gene itself is simply an activator, one that probably just isn't turned on in normal humans but is turned on in mutants.

If this is the official explanation in the comic books and the movies, then it changes significantly how my argument in this chapter will work. I think my conclusion still holds, but the argument for it is completely different from what it was in the first draft. So what I'm wondering is if this seems to fit with the recent comic books, since I haven't read any of them. I may have some of them, since I continued to buy them for a little while after I stopped reading them, and I did inherit some more even later from my brother that I haven't read. I don't think I have any House of M, though. I just looked and didn't see any, even though I thought I had some. So what I'd love is if someone could direct me to specific issues where this stuff is discussed, and then I can see if I might have them or if someone could confirm that this is pretty much the official explanation of mutants at this point. If it is, I need to focus on this. If it's not, and it's still sort of up in the air with the more traditional explanation still possible, then I can keep most of what I've written and just add some more on the new explanation.

Update: Someone else has arrived at a similar view, but it assumes one X-gene. If we trust the Beast's analysis, you could make it much more complex, with several genes contributing to activation of the powers, and perhaps all or a certain number of them need to be present. Also, the Celestials, in seeding the human populace with the necessary genetic material for mutations of this sort, might not have included anything like the latent genes to be activated or the activation genes but might simply have placed the necessary genetic materials, with the necessary factors for those eventually to reach a point where they do what happens later on. This would explain a few isolated mutants throughout history and a much more concentrated appearance of mutants in the late 20th century. I like the suggestion that mutates (who get powers later in life due to some stimulus like radiation) have something else activate their latent powers in the way that the X-Gene does with mutants.

In his section on the so-called curse of Ham (which is really the curse on Canaan, Ham's son), Daniel Hays [in From every People and Nation: A biblical theology of race] presents a little bit of information on biblical mmentators and scholars whose works are still available who present outdated and exegetically-unsound positions about that passage. He wants to make the point that it's easy to walk into a Christian bookstore and come out with a book that furthers ridiculous claims about the passage in question, and I'm glad to see someone complaining about that.

One author he picks on is A.W. Pink, whose Gleanings in Genesis offers one such outdated and exegetically-unsupportable interpretation. Pink assumes the traditional view and then tries to explain how the curse on Ham has indeed been fulfilled in some ways, thus defending the statement as a true prophecy:

The whole of Africa was peopled by the descendants of Ham, and for many centuries the greater part of that continent lay under the domination of the Romans, Saracens, and Turks. And, as is well known, the Negroes who were for so long the slaves of Europeans and Americans also claim Ham as their progenitor.[from 1950 Moody edition, p.126, as quoted in Hays, p.53]

He goes on to discuss C.F. Keil's comments (but attributes them to Keil and Delitzsch even though the Genesis commentary in the Keil-Delitzsch series was written just by Keil; Delitzsch did write a commentary on Genesis, but it's not included in that series):

In the sin of Ham there lies the great stain of the whole Hamitic race, whose chief characteristic is sexual sin; and the curse which Noah pronounced upon this sin still rests upon the race ... the remainder of the Hamitic tribes either shared the same fate, or sigh still, like the Negroes, for example, and other African tribes, beneath the yoke of the most crushing slavery.

Hays notes in a footnote that this statement is even worse, since it takes the peoples who most significantly dominated the ancient near east to have been slaves. I would have thought that the main reason it's worse is that it seems to attribute sexual sin as the chief characteristic of the whole Hamitic race. That is indeed racist in the extreme. Hays then cites a third, multi-author commentary that explains the curse as being fulfilled by the European trade in African slaves. He then says something that doesn't seem at all to be justified about Pink or the third commentary:

We recently finished listening to Harlan Ellison's reading of Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea. This novel is often thought of as one of the great fantasy novels of our time (well, the time of the people saying it; I wasn't around yet). It was difficult going to such a sparse story, with very little character development and hardly any dialogue (and Ellison, while very expressive in prose narrative, reads dialogue like it's the phone book). My sense is that Le Guin is appreciated for the world she created rather than for her storytelling, which simply didn't impress me, not after coming off of listening to the whole Harry Potter series. Rowling is a much more entertaining writer. Her characters are much more fully developed. The world is much more developed, even in the first book. It's much more imaginative. There's a richer, more complex plot. There's nothing to latch onto in Le Guin's book. It's like a short story extended over a whole novel.

So it surprised me to see Le Guin's derisive comments about J.K. Rowling:

Her credit to JK Rowling for giving the "whole fantasy field a boost" is tinged with regret. "I didn't feel she ripped me off, as some people did," she says quietly, "though she could have been more gracious about her predecessors. My incredulity was at the critics who found the first book wonderfully original. She has many virtues, but originality isn't one of them. That hurt."

She doesn't think Rowling ripped her off. Yet she is hurt that people think Rowling was original. I'm guessing she thinks there's a level of borrowing between ripping her off and being original and that the Harry Potter books are in that area. I don't see it. The way magic works is very different in the two worlds. The general storyline is very different. I don't see much similarity at all, actually. Wikipedia's reference to the above quote offers some explanation, however:

The basic premise of Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), in which a boy with unusual aptitude for magic is recognised, and sent to a special school for wizards, resembles that of Harry Potter. The hero encounters Jasper, a typically unpleasant Draco-like rival, in the Flashman tradition.

The way Harry Potter's unusual aptitude for magic is recognized is nothing like Ged's. It's a completely different kind of magic that gets discovered in a different way, and the way he ends up at the school isn't remotely similar. The school itself is nothing like Hogwarts and occupies only a fairly brief section of the book. The rival Jasper appears for maybe one chapter. If that's the best they can do, then I think they're grasping at straws. If that's what Le Guin really had in mind, then it doesn't reflect well on her to have said this.

This isn't the only time I've seen Le Guin overreacting to something and taking it way out of proportion, to the point of almost ignoring more important things. Her response to the by-all-accounts awful pseudo-adaptation of her novels has an introductory paragraph mentioning that the story of the miniseries doesn't resemble the novels at all, four paragraphs on her role, or lack thereof, in the process of producing the miniseries, nine paragraphs on the issue of race, and one final condemnation those who produced the miniseries. She says the miniseries changes her story almost entirely, using some scenes from her books but putting them together in a very different overall plot and removing the important context. That's a significant claim. Yet she doesn't substantiate it, at all.

The one thing she does complain about in detail really is worth complaining about. I would have been very upset if I'd written something like what she wrote, and they had done this to it. She explicitly made most of her characters something like darker natives of the Americas in look. There's a small minority of brown-skinned characters (with straight hair, so more like Indians than Africans) and a small minority of Viking-like pale, blond, blue-eyed barbarians. Most of Earthsea is dominated by people she describes as reddish. She's deliberately playing with people's sense of race and the assumption of whiteness as a norm. She doesn't make a big deal of it in the books, but it's noticeable just because she mentions it offhand as if it's normal.

So it would have been nice if the miniseries had gotten that aspect of her world. But it's far from being central to the storyline itself, as she says it is, and it's certainly not worth nine significant paragraphs when absolutely nothing in her complaint surfaces about any specific things they changed about the storyline. I have no sense, since I haven't seen it, of what specifically they did to change the plot, and I couldn't evaluate it other than the racial issue, which again is relatively minor to the plot of the book, without actually seeing the thing. The way she deals with race in her books is very important for her world and for one of the points she wanted to get across with her novel. But it's simply not central to the novel itself, which is a story that race hardly enters into in the course of the events that take place in it. She deliberately made it non-central, so it's strange that she sees it as so central that she can spend all her time complaining about it without even a quick mention of what they got wrong on more significant matters.

I have a few requests in case anyone reading this blog can help. If you've been following my recent submissions and approvals for the Blackwell philosophy and pop culture series, you might have some idea of why I want some of the following information if anyone has it readily available. If you have exact quotes or specific scenes from the movies or issue numbers in the comics, that would be wonderful. I have a large number of X-Men comic books (mostly from the mid-late 80s until the early 90s, but I have reprints of older stuff too), but if it's easy for anyone to find some then it will make my work much easier in two weeks once I'm done grading and begin writing, so I can focus on the philosophy.

1. I'm looking for any instances in X-Men movies or comic books where any character or the narrator uses race-language or species-language to refer to mutants as distinct from humans. This includes when it's morally loaded but also when it's not. I'm interested both in Magneto's elevated view of the rights of mutants as superior beings but also in the factual claim that mutants are a separate race, sub-species, or species.

2. I'm also looking for instances where Magneto has given moral justifications for his questionable or immoral actions, again from the movies or the comic books. (I have no cartoon episodes to verify the information.) I'm interested in his attitude toward humans and the moral difference he sees between mutants and humans. I'm also interested in any general moral principles he might state in the process of explaining his reasons for doing things. Any specific descriptions of Magneto's actions as terrorist would also be nice or descriptions of particular actions he's taken that are morally questionable or outright immoral would also help me.

3. For those more wizard-inclined, I'm hoping to compile a list of seemingly-chance occurrences in Harry Potter, where something not under the conscious control of any character, i.e. lucky occurrences, are absolutely crucial for the major plot of the book to move along, particularly if Harry's success or the bad guys' defeat or frustration in their purposes hinges on it. I'm also looking for specific instances where any characters talk about issues related to destiny, the various prophecies, time travel and changing the past, free will, and so on. If you can give page numbers in the American paperback editions (hardcover for Deathly Hallows) or chapter numbers otherwise, that would be great. But even just mention of the events and how important they are could help me if it's something I haven't thought of yet, especially if it's a really big deal.

Whatever help anyone can offer is appreciated.

I've been reading J. Daniel Hays, From every People and Nation: A biblical theology of race. I'm really enjoying it so far. Occasionally something puzzles me a little. Consider the following passage:

The Bible does not begin with the creation of a special race of people. When the first human is introduced into the story, he was called adam [special characters removed because I have no idea how to do them], which means 'humankind'. As mentioned in Chapter 2, Adam and Eve are not Hebrews or Egyptians or Canaanites. It is incorrect for the White church to view them as White or for the Black church to view them as Black. Their 'race' is not identifiable; they are neither Negroid nor Caucasian, nor even Semitic. They become the mother and father of all peoples. The division of humankind into peoples and races is not even mentioned until Genesis 10. Adam and Eve, as well as Noah, is non-ethnic and non-national. They represent all people and not some people. [Hays, pp.48-49]

After the word 'Semitic', he places a footnote number, which leads to the following footnote:

[W.D.] McKissic [in Beyond Roots: In Search of Blacks in the Bible, 1990] disagrees, raising the issue of genetics, both for Adam and Eve and for Noah and his wife. The genetic pattern for all the races of humankind, argues McKissic, had to be present in both these sets of people. Thus they had to carry the genetic pattern for the Negroid race. If they carried these genes then one of them at least, according to McKissic, would have had Negroid features.

I'm not sure there's any real disagreement here, though, at least in substance. Hays seems to be thinking of race as some later subdivision of people, and of course Adam and Eve couldn't be of any race if it necessarily involves that. McKissic, on the other hand, is thinking of race in a very different way. If at one point you had two people who became the ancestors of every human being, including those who would be parts of pretty diverse races, then you must have had the genetic material necessary for those races to exist later. One thing McKissic doesn't take into account, at least in this quote (although I think he might in the book; it's been many years since I read his book, and I don't have it in front of me at the moment) is that mutations can explain changes in skin color, hair type, and so on. It doesn't have to stem from just genetic information present in the ancestors.

I seem to remember McKissic making the argument that darker skin color genes tend to be dominant, which means at least one of the ancestor-pair would have to be black. Using the term this way clearly does not indicate species sub-division into races, as Hays seems to be treating it. All it means is that we in our day have identified various characteristics that we associate with various races. Someone is identified as being in a certain race according to such characteristics. An earlier ancestor with those characteristics would rightly, as the English words are now used, be called black or white (or whatever) according to the criteria we now use to assign such terms. So if Adam, say, looked enough like the typical African or black American today that were he seen today he'd be so classified, then he was black by the meaning of the current term. That, as far as I can tell, is what McKissic means. He's simply talking about something different from what Hays is talking about.

Now there's actually been a DNA discovery since McKissic's book (and since Hays's book, for that matter) that shows that light skin color is a mutation and that the ancestors of white people were black by the current definition (as McKissic is using the term), so I think his view is pretty much scientifically confirmed at this point. Hays doesn't want to acknowledge that as Adam and Eve belonging to the black race, because his notion of race is defined as a sub-division that later occurs. But racialized terms aren't always used that way, as the meaningfulness of McKissic's claim shows. I think it's perfectly ok (at least linguistically) to say that Adam and Eve were black. It doesn't seem to me to involve any misuse of the terms involved. If this is right, then it has an interesting consequence for those who claim race terms involve an ancestry component. It doesn't remove an ancestry component, but it does allow someone with no ancestry (or no human ancestry, depending on how you view Adam and Eve) to have a race under one important concept of what it is to be a member of a race.

I've long wondered what idiot first came up with the idea that a curse on Canaan in Genesis 9 someone was supposed to justify mistreatment of black Africans, who have little association with Canaan anywhere in the Bible. Most scholars today don't see Genesis 10's table of nations as showing geneaological connections to begin with, given how such language is often used in ancient near eastern cultures for political and cultural connections of vassalship without geneaological connections (and most of the names are place names and ethnic groups without the usual indications that appear with proper names). However, even if you do take it the way it sounds if you take what's in the English translations literally, the curse is on Ham's son Canaan, not on Ham himself. Black Africans are connected with other sons of Ham, not the one who was cursed. The view is completely at odds with what the text actually says.

So I've long wondered who first came up with the view this curse on Canaan justified enslaving the descendants of Canaan's brothers, Ham's other sons. I'm wondering no longer. It turns out that it wasn't a Jewish or Christian interpreter at all, and the view is actually a lot older than I thought. I figured it appeared at the earliest in the late medieval period. It actually doesn't appear in Europe until the slave trade was well under way, so I was partly right. Medieval Europe (Spain and other Muslim-influenced parts aside) was actually opposed to slavery for the most part (at least if you don't count serfdom as slavery; I do, but I also consider modern employment a kind of slavery, and that's not the kind of slavery this view was trying to justify).

The people who first came up with this justification for slavery of Africans were very early Muslims, and that view was dominant within the Islamic world (but not outside it) for 100 years until it spread to Europeans via contact with the Spanish and their treatment of Moors. Then Europeans and eventually colonial Americans began to adopt it. So it wasn't even initially a misreading of the Bible. The relevant parts of the Qur'an don't mention Ham at all, so it's not even a misreading of the Qur'an. It's simply a fabrication in order to justify the kind of slavery Muslims had been imposing on black Africans.

It was an early Muslims who first (as far as we know) developed the idea that Ham was cursed. I found a quote in Edwin Yamauchi's Africa and the Bible from a Muslim who wrote in the late 7th to early 8th centuries, and the whole view is right there. Noah cursed Ham (not Canaan) by imposing slavery on Africans whenever the descendants of Shem would come across them. It attributes their hair type to the curse as well (but not, interestingly, their skin color, though it does mention their skin color). A 9th century Muslim does bring in a change of skin color because of the curse, and Yamauchi mentions other sources attributing natural slavery to black Africans because of this curse, a view that I'm pretty sure doesn't become entrenched in Europe or the Americas until the slave trade was well under way.

Its first appearance in the colonies isn't long after the British occupied American territory and started importing slaves, but it had been in Europe before that. Various versions of it appear even before the Reformation, as early as the mid-15th century, but that was in formerly-Muslim Portugal regarding the now-enslaved Moors. European theologians generally resisted the idea, and it probably didn't take serious hold until the modern concept of race came into existence through the work of Immanuel Kant and his contemporaries who sought to explain differences in physical features by means of biological essences of different races.

So Muslims, a very dominant form of which has an awful lot of problems with human rights even today, seem to be the initial impetus behind one of the key justifications of European and American slavery of blacks. This doesn't excuse the Europeans and Americans who did it, but Muslim writers were originally responsible for the idea, and it came to the colonies and Europeans via the cotton trade. I think it's time to stop blaming this on Christianity even if there were plenty of Christians who have held this view that originated in Islamic slavery. It's silly enough to blame Christianity for a view that hasn't held sway for most of Christian history but only appeared late and lasted only a couple hundred years before going the way of the dodo except in offshoot groups like Mormons. But if the view originally came from another religion entirely and has been dominant in the members of that religion's justification of slavery, while Christians steadfastly resisted it for centuries before falling sway to it for a few hundred years, I think it's justifiable to claim that those who blame this on Christianity are relying on historical ignorance.

One of the things I'm suggesting in my dissertation is that the one-drop rule for determining race in the United States is on the wane, or at least that it's more complicated when it applies than just the usual view that it always does. One piece of evidence I think is somewhat compelling is the linguistic fact that a lot of people feel perfectly comfortable referring to a set of twins with different skin colors as if one is black and the other white. I've also got some more outlandish intuition pumps that I think help the case a little.

But there's another way of departing from the one-drop rule that a lot of people I know seem to exhibit, one that a lot of race scholars seem to me to treat as at best marginal. A lot of people will talk about mixed-race people as if they are both races. Barack Obama is sometimes referred to as both black and white, for example. James Collier, a mixed black-white man, speaks this way. I think a lot of people we know see our kids as either both black and white or as neither black nor white. If someone can be both black and white, then it clearly contradicts the one-drop rule.

I discussed some of my work with a leading scholar of African-American philosophy a few months ago. He took me to task for a lot of assumptions that he refused to recognize as anything but ignorance. He spent a lot of time explaining that Plessy of Plessy v. Ferguson was 7/8 white, I suppose in order to show how significantly the one-drop rule has affected policy. What that ignores is that things are changing, however. That case was a long time ago. I think he may have thought I was denying that the one-drop rule ever operates, which is not only way beyond the evidence I've presented but almost certainly very easy to prove false. But that's not the view I was defending. I was simply arguing that it's more complicated than it was several decades ago, with some people at some times no longer relying on such a rule.

I don't know many non-blacks of my generation whose racial judgments rely on the one-drop rule, and I've discussed race issues with a lot of people of my generation from a broad range of backgrounds. The one place it still persists very strongly in the circles I've run in is among black people. I know of at least two black conservatives who have claimed that black Americans have a lot invested in the one-drop rule, although I haven't seen enough to figure out what they might be. It's a provocative claim, one I want to think about more. But I'm sure of one thing. At least in the northeast of the U.S., people of my generation are at the very least not consistently using the one-drop rule. I say good riddance. It's unfortunate that some scholars are a little more reluctant to acknowledge that than there seems to be evidence for.

Kevin Drum had a very helpful discussion of the charges the Obama campaign and its surrogates have been leveling against Hillary Clinton. I'm not sure I agree with him in every case, but it's one of the best things I've seen on the subject. Any claim that it's Hillary who's really driving the racial overtones of the Democratic race is just ignoring a lot of what's out there. Some on her side have surely said things intended to be taken in a racially-negative way. But the examples he gives (and see the discussions he links to for arguments why the criticisms are indeed over-the-top) show that it's not simply an example of the Hillary side raising racial issues and the Obama side ignoring them and not making anything of race.

I had to take interest in the first two comments mentioning Geraldine Ferraro, who didn't come up in the post. What interested me most about their appearance is the assumption that that's a genuine case of racism that they must be taking to undermine his whole argument. First of all, if it's genuine racism that doesn't undermine his argument. His point is that many of the accusations of racism are going way too far. One case that is racism doesn't undermine that claim.

Second, I don't think it's fair to describe that as racist. If the same person who says Barack Obama's race has helped raise interest from the media and the Democratic higher-ups to jump-start his campaign also says of herself that the same is true from her being a woman, it strikes me as very unlikely that she's saying the former out of racism but is rather just acknowledging that the Democratic party is more likely to use affirmative action considerations for selecting presidential and vice-presidential candidates, something Democrats aren't generally opposed to and don't generally consider racist. (It's Republicans who are more likely to level that charge.) So why is it racist to point out that affirmative action techniques on that level might put someone in a position to get more attention than they could have gotten otherwise?

[I do realize that some people think Ferraro was saying more. According to them, she was claiming that no one would now support Obama if he weren't black. But I think that's a very unlikely interpretation. It's so radically at odds with the exit polls that I don't know how she could have thought she'd get away with saying something so empirically false.]

Update March 29: Is it racist for Obama to say the things of himself that Ferraro said of him?

One of the most irksome things about the fascination in cable news with certain missing persons cases is that virtually all of the cases they pay any attention to are of blond, white girls or young women, and they pay absolutely no attention to the vast majority of missing persons cases, and yet the few they can find with an attractive blond girl will get hours a day for months. It's such a clear example of a kind of white racism that isn't what most white people think of when they hear the word 'racism'. White people think of negative, overt, conscious attitudes against non-whites when they hear that word. This is clearly not that, and yet there's no way it's not a kind of racism.

In light of that, see this interesting poster campaign. [hat tip: Racialicious]

A janitor at the University of Indiana at Purdue is in their continuing education program, trying to improve his lot in life on the side. He reads during his break time. One book he reads is called Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan. It's not exactly favorable to the KKK, but it does include their name in the title.

Somehow the university thought it was ok to ban him from reading this book during his breaks [hat tip: David Bernstein], because there were black people around him, and they were offended that the book mentions the KKK. Here is the statement from the affirmative action office on why this counts as racial harassment:

"You demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your coworkers who repeatedly requested that you refrain from reading the book which has such an inflammatory and offensive topic in their presence...you used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black coworkers."

First of all, how could someone possibly think that it's immoral to read a book that's highly critical of the KKK while in the presence of a black person? Second, it's not as if he was reading it aloud. All they had any access to was the fact that he was reading it. Third, even if it's immoral to read something in the presence of someone else, how does that give the university a good reason to ban it. It's not as if he was waving the book around and saying anything to anyone else about it. He merely had the book and was reading it. Fourth, why would they want to give the appearance that they're hindering a janitor, who does some of the dirtiest jobs at the university, from getting his education? It doesn't reflect all that well on them. Fifth, they accuse him of being insensitive and expressing disdain for his co-workers, when he's the one who tried to explain the book's content to several people who refused to listen to him and insisted that anything even remotely discussing the KKK is offensive. How backwards is that?

Well, they recanted while pretending to clarify their position. Some higher-up must have realized how silly the whole thing was.

I don't spend a lot of time harping on this point, but this is a pretty good instance of something I've tried to motivate a few times before. There is certainly plenty of room for improvement in how sensitive white people are to black people's experiences, and a lot of offense can occur that isn't intended. Nevertheless, it only hurts that cause to insist on offense over stupid things like this. The guy was reading a book whose very title shows that it's not in support of the KKK. It's not a good idea to try to get your employer to ban someone from becoming educated about the realities of race relations, something white people certainly need more of.

John McWhorter's stuff on victimology is often dismissed among those on the left who recognize real racial problems (not that McWhorter ever denies those, of course). But he's surely right that there's a culture of complaint about relatively trivial offenses and in many cases immoral complaints about non-offenses like this one. This kind of reaction only fosters the attitude among many on the right that racial problems are caused by black (or in general non-white) people who won't learn to get over it, because it confirms that at least in some cases there's some truth to that.

For an interesting take on all this talk of Senator Barack Obama transcending race, see this post by Too Sense. One Drop argues that those speaking of Senator Obama transcending race are actually exhibiting a kind of racism. The way some people speak of transcending race, you get the idea that Obama is making headway with white voters because he's somehow risen above the fact that he's black.

I very much appreciate One Drop's affirmation that black people who have "made it", such as Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, are still as black as they ever were and as black as anyone else who is black. Colin Powell, who occupied high positions both in the military and the civilian government, is black. He didn't transcend his race. It's insulting to them and to all black people to speak as if these people did.

I must note that it isn't just white people who think this way. Black people can operate from the same assumption. They don't usually say Colin Powell transcends race, though, as white people operating under this assumption will. They say he's not really black and that he's sold out to the white power structure by his willingness to hold a position in it. It's a pretty negative attitude toward the person, whereas this idea of transcending race is at least on the surface positive. But both come from the same false assumption, that blackness is incompatible with success in a world dominated by white people (and most often white men).

On the other hand, as I commented at One Drop's post, there's something very different that someone might mean by the expression "transcending race". Rather than seeing Obama as somehow beyond his race, as if his race doesn't matter at all, some people (I am convinced) are seeing him as standing for more than the issues that are particularly associated with being black. They see most blacks who have run for president in the past, most notably Al Sharpton, Carol Moseley-Braun, Jesse Jackson, and Shirley Chisholm (but most definitely not Alan Keyes) as being too focused on concerns that are black, in a way that white people who haven't adopted those concerns would be less attracted to their candidacy. In other words, Obama has a wider attraction because he deals with wider issues, and he presents the issues that are specifically related to black people in a way that white people can see that they support them too.

Now there's a different danger with this kind of "transcending race". If it assumes (or gives the impression) that so-called black issues aren't important for non-blacks to be concerned about or that what's bad for blacks isn't bad for everyone, then I think that's bad. It displays a real insensitivity to race issues. But I don't think it's quite as bad as the kind of "transcending race" talk One Drop points to. I'd say that it's a pretty unfortunate feature of the Obama campaign but one that he can do little about at this point (and I suspect wasn't responsible for in the first place). But those who participate in it are perpetuating something racially harmful.

There's actually a third group of people talking about Obama as transcending race who do neither of the above. They see him as transcending race but see that as negative. They're well aware of the fact that, for many, transcending race can be one or both of the above two things. Then they accuse Obama of inappropriately trying to transcend race (or perhaps being used by others to do so) in order to appeal to white people. Those who make this complaint will thus see him as a sort of race traitor. I don't think it's fair to go that far with it, but I do think a lot of the reason why he's got the support he's got from white people is that they see Obama as a safe black. Talking about someone as transcending race in that sense can be perfectly legitimate when it informs us about a real racial dynamic, one that can be dangerous. So it's not clear to me that all talk of transcending race is bad, even if the first kind is very bad and the second is at least unfortunate.

Ron Paul is indisputably the presidential candidate who most attracts the support of white supremacists, and he has come under a lot of fire recently for not taking a strong enough stand against his racist supporters. What's worried me even more is his inability to show even a minimally decent understanding of what racism even is when he's declared himself not to be a racist.

So it's a bit surprising that Paul is also the Republican candidate with the greatest traction among black voters. Does this mean he'll be a uniter and not a divider?

I was discussing a piece of my dissertation with a group of other people from my department at a dissertation workshop last night, and some of the attendees raised some interesting cases that I'm curious how people would respond to.

Case A: Suppose an evil geneticist decides to play around with people's racial intuitions. One way to do that would be to modify the DNA of a human embryo who is the product of two white parents to give the genetic characteristics that would typically cause the visible characteristics commonly associated with black people. Would the child be black? This isn't a case of egg-switching, baby-switching, or anything like that. The child's biological parents are both white. Is the child therefore white?

Case B: God decides it would be fun to have two versions of Michael Jordan in the world and thus creates an exact duplicate of him. Is the duplicate black?

If the answer in either case is that the resulting person is black, then descent from black people isn't necessary for being black. One has only white ancestors, and the other has no ancestors. I think that would be pretty significant given that most people working in the philosophy of race think descent is a necessary condition (and many think it's even a sufficient condition).

Racialicious links to a post asking how racism harms white people. It's a good question that I think whites and non-whites should spend a lot of time thinking about, and I don't think most of the comments on that post have really gotten to the most fundamental issues. The question does assume that there is never any anti-white racism, which would be a mistake. A question that would better express the original intent is "How does white racism harm white people?"

I would think that the primary way racism of any sort harms the racist themself is that it is bad to be a racist. It's just bad to be bad. It's bad for you, not just because it has bad consequences but merely because it's bad to be bad. You harm yourself intrinsically by being a bad person.

But there are all sorts of bad consequences of racism on those who are exhibiting it. One is that much of what's excellent in the culture that surrounds us, including things racists appreciate and rely on, is due to those racism harms and victimizes. So there's a kind of inconsistency in any kind of racism that names things as bad in the person one isolates as "other" while recognizing any of those good effects as good. It's bad to be inconsistent, because it's irrational. So that's another negative impact of racism on racists themselves.

We need to distinguish between racists as evil people with evil intent and other kinds of racism, which don't all involve racists. Lots of people contribute to institutional or structural racism by taking part in practices that in effect harm people along racial lines, even if the people involved aren't racists. Also, virtually all white people are affected by residual racism, which affects our unconscious responses and attitudes to non-whites, all the while not constituting what it is to be a racist. Both of these have similar characteristics with being a racist, in that it's bad to take part in bad practices and to have bad unconscious responses to people, even if such things don't make someone a racist.

More generally, and perhaps most fundamentally, we're all morally and socially interconnected, and harm toward an entire community of people is thus harm toward an entire segment of humanity, and we're all part of humanity. Thus harm toward other human beings of any sort (including racism) is thus harm to ourselves inasmuch as we are all human. Crimes against humanity are crimes against ourselves. So even any racism that I have nothing to do with causing or perpetuating is a harm to me, even if I'm not the immediate victim. All racism is harmful to all human beings.

It's only after all that that I'd bring in things like how our lives will be better off externally when we interact in a moral way with those who are different. It seemed to me that most of the comments on the post that started this were focusing on those questions, and I thought it was worth taking some time to reflect on some deeper reasons.

I'm trying to figure out if aboriginal Australians count as black. I'm not asking if Australians call them black. Australians call people from India black. Aborigines are actually more closely related to Asians than they are to Africans, so even though some Australians, including other aborigines, are happy to use the word 'black' to refer to them, it doesn't tell us if aborigines are black in terms of what Americans mean by the term. I want to know if the word 'black' as it is used in the United States (or perhaps Canada, the U.K., or other places) includes aboriginal Australians among the group it refers to. (In case it turns out that people from different geographical locations would respond differently, it would be nice to know where you're from if you're going to leave a comment.)

In response to a question a couple days ago about whether he expects to be Swift-Boated, presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama said the following:

I have no doubt there will be some of that — trying to make me into this foreign, odd, clearly black person and to scare people," he said. "When people try to Swift Boat you, you have to respond forcefully, you have to respond immediately and you have to respond truthfully. ... We are prepared for whatever they will throw at us.

I know what I think he means by "clearly black person", and I know what I think he's trying to say. I'm curious what other people think, though. Can you paraphrase what you think he's saying? I'm not so interested at this point in whether this is accurate, appropriate, insulting, or offensive. (If what he's saying is what I think he's saying, it's possible that it's all four.) I'm simply curious what people think he means. What exactly was he trying to say?

Jae Ran Kim writes about why she doesn't feel welcomed among groups of white moms. Some of this may well be bias against newcomers (despite official views that newcomes are welcomed) rather than racial bias. After all, white newcomers often experience the same sort of thing. I've certainly seen it happen many times among people who officially want to welcome and accept new people but are not comfortable doing so when they've already got their friends. But I doubt it all is that, since many people are a little intimidating by the prospect of doing all the work to initiate relationships across racial lines (particularly with certain racial groups).

But whether it is actual racial bias or just perceived racial bias isn't really the point. If it can even come across as racial bias, and it shouldn't be there to begin with, it's worth taking stock of that and seeking to avoid sending such signals.

Christians should pay special attention to her advice to those who say they want to reach out to non-whites but can't seem to do so successfully. I know a lot of congregations and Christian ministries that say such things without, to my mind, having a clue that many of the people they're trying to reach out to have exactly the kind of response she's describing here.

Thabiti Anyabwile has responded to my critique of his discussion of race. In several places, I think he has misunderstood my view or gone beyond my argument to attribute to me a view that I do not hold and that does not follow from what I said. In some places I think we just disagree about something fairly fundamental. I'll address each of his points in order

1. The issue of the image of God is largely irrelevant to the main issues. I just thought some of the way Thabiti was speaking had implications that I didn't think he would welcome. That seems to be a correct assessment. He doesn't welcome the suggestion that God has a body, but he wants to say that some of what the image of God constitutes is manifested in our bodily reality (both male and female). I don't have any problem with the idea that God worked into us certain capacities to carry out the mission of representing him, and some of those capacities have to do with our physical being. I do in fact think that's the case. I'm skeptical whether those capacities constitute being made in the image of God, however. I certainly would agree, however, that there are no people who are more in the image of God than others, as if white people represent God more fully. But I don't think you need to see the image of God as partially reflected in our bodies to say that. So I think this issue is largely a distraction from the issues we really do disagree about.

2. Thabiti clarifies that he presents his argument against the reality of races as a way of getting to the sections of his article that I agree with, not as a way to respond to the wider literature on race. I though I already knew that, so I'm not sure how this is a corrective to my understanding. He also says that once you accept race, you cannot get out of that trap. He doesn't want to enter it to begin with. I disagree. It depends on what you take race to be. I can acknowledge the existence of what I think race to be without falling into the trap of admitting to the reality of what he thinks race is supposed to be, because what I think race is isn't the same thing as what he thinks race is supposed to be. But that issue comes out in his subsequent points, so I'll look at the details further there.

3. I never claimed that races are like refrigerators in every sense. I simply claimed that the principles that something doesn't exist just because it isn't talked about in the Bible is false. It's no argument against something's existence just because it isn't in the Bible. I did give other examples of social categories that are more analogous to race, e.g. political conservatives or university students. Nothing biological determines whether you are a university student. Social practices determine that. But the category exists nonetheless. Since races are socially-determined categories, they are more like that. The difference is that people are classified according to characteristics at least some of which are biological, and that is not true of all socially-constructed categories.

There is a big difference between races and leprechauns. Leprechauns are people with some very strange properties, and no one actually has the properties of leprechauns. But they are concrete individuals. There just aren't any of them. Races aren't concrete individuals. They are categories based on classification schemes. Even if the criteria used for determining who is in what category are biologically arbitrary, there does exist a set of classification practices, and the people who are members of the races do exist. The criteria that are used rely on realities, and those realities include some biological differences (even if they are somewhat arbitrarily chosen in terms of the biology). Those realities include real social and historical facts, including severe mistreatment of entire populations of people. Those realities include somewhat reliably-identifiable properties that people do in fact use to categorize people.

Justin Taylor sent me an email asking me to comment on Many Ethnicities, One Race by Thabiti Anyabwile, author of the forthcoming The Decline of African-American Theology: From Biblical Faith to Cultural Accomodation. This article is a Christian argument for an increasingly-common view today that races are not real, following by a biblical theology lying behind a call to end segregated congregations.

When I saw the links to a bunch of pieces on race on Justin's blog, I looked at a number of them and got a sense of what they were about, but I didn't pursue most of them (with John Piper's as a key exception). This was one I didn't look at in much detail, largely because what I initially saw seemed to me to be pretty far from what I think is the correct way to look at these issues. I must say (now that I've read the whole thing) that the second half of his piece was much more in line with my own thinking, but his initial arguments are very much not. Since Justin asked for my thoughts, here they are, and perhaps they will be helpful to others besides Justin. I'm not going to repeat the arguments in the article but will assume you have read it.

One worry I have is that I see no biblical warrant for taking the image of God to be anything more than being given a mission to represent God (which is what an image does for a god in the ancient near east). It is thus the same as being given the mandate to steward creation as God's representative on earth. Anyabwile rests a lot on his more expansive view of what the image of God is. all the while complaining that people's views of race go way beyond what the Bible actually says about race.

I'm a bit disturbed at the idea that our bodies could have something to do with being in the image of God to begin with. The only reason God has a body is because he incarnated himself in his second person as a human being. But that is in time after the creation of Adam, who is nonetheless made in the image of God. Even if being in the image of God is more substantive than the view I hold, it cannot have anything to do with having a body, since God does not have a body in any sense other than in the second person's incarnation, which is to reflect what human beings are like and not the other way around (although the new creation does reflect what Christ is like, but that's another step removed).

I think his general argument form is fallacious. It basically notes that the modern notion of race isn't in the Bible and thereby dismisses it. But the modern notion of a mailman isn't in the Bible. The modern notion of a refrigerator isn't either, nor is the modern notion of a university or the modern notion of a conservative. But all those things exist.

Another problem I have is that he keeps speaking of "races rooted in biological difference". Most race theorists who accept the existence of races do not think that races are a necessary implication of biological facts. They think social and historical factors have produced racial categories that rely on biological features in terms of how we classify people, but the root is in social and historical factors, not in biology. The fact that they are not rooted in biology doesn't mean they're nonexistent any more than the fact that categories like "conservative" or "university student" aren't rooted in biology doesn't make them unreal.

I was going to link to this a while ago, but I never got around to it. Someone who goes by the online name "tstorm" has put together an excellent short documentrary on race and humor, which you can find at Racialicious. It's been broken up nicely into small components in case you don't have a lot of time at once to watch it. It explores what factors go into evaluating whether a particular instance of racial humor is morally acceptable or offensive. I don't agree with everything he says in evaluating the instances in popular culture that he picks out, and a philosopher might want a more systematic treatment of some of the theoretical issues about what constitutes racism, whether causing offense is automatically immoral, and so on, but I think it's largely an excellent effort that's worth watching and thinking about. He says a lot of things that you might not have thought of, and he's done a good job of sorting through a wide range of issues that come to bear on this question. It's the sort of thing I'd show my students in class or assign for them to watch on their own.

Carmen Van Kerckove and Jae Ran Kim are criticizing a fairly common kind of statement among white parents who adopt non-white kids. It's not that uncommon to hear parents in such situations saying that they love their kids no matter what race they are, and it sometimes takes the form of "I don't care if they're black, white, green, or purple."

Carmen doesn't indicate why such a statement is offensive, but she quotes something from Jae Ran that is a reason. However, her reason seems wholly inadequate to me. She says it's merely because there are no green or purple kids. But there's nothing problematic about saying you would love your kids even if something were true of them that isn't true of any actual kid. There's no actual kid with six arms, but I don't think it's offensive to say that you'd love your kids even if they had six arms. So something more needs to be said to explain why this kind of statement is offensive. I have two suggestions, but at the same time I wonder if Carmen and Jae Ran are nonetheless being too critical.

1. There’s an ignorant assumption behind this well-meaning expression. It’s ignorant to speak as if color doesn’t matter at all. Color does have an impact. If this statement is supposed to be indicating that the parent thinks race doesn't matter in any sense, that is simply ignorance speaking. Also, it's going to be a rare white parent who is not in some way affected by having children who are not white. Most people imagine what their kids might look like long before they have any, and if that involves imagining white kids who look like them, then there will be at least some level of unmet expectations. If the statement is doing that, then it's a lie.

2. Another ignorant assumption seems to me to lie behind the statement. It treats any racial issues that might be raised by the race of their kids as if they are merely a matter of what color the kids' skin is. Why would it be relevant that the kids could be green or purple unless the mere fact of a different skin color is what might be problematic about race. But skin color itself is only our way of identifying and classifying people according to race. It isn't what causes any actual racial problems. So it's profoundly ignorant to speak as if red or purple skin color, which would be weird but doesn't bring any actual racially-loaded issues with it, is anything remotely like having kids of another race.

3. Some who say this may well be saying something that could be more explicitly put as follows. “I know it’s weird for white parents to have kids who are black or Asian or whatever, but I'd be ok with that weirdness. I don’t even care if their coloring is so weird that no other kid has ever had that coloring, e.g. if they had green or purple skin instead. I’d still love them.” The problem is that such a speech demeans the kids who aren’t white by treating them as ok despite not being white, and that does have a troublesome assumption. I can see how some who say this sort of thing really are assuming something like that. That reveals at the very least a kind of residual racism that sees non-white kids, even their own, as something they have to make an effort to love more than they might be expected to.

Tiffany Pridgen has a nice post about the tendency among some black kids to see being smart or caring about learning as a "white" trait that "real" black kids shouldn't have anything to do with. This is one of the more insidious anti-black narratives within black culture, because it masquerades itself as anti-white racism (because it sees a supposedly white characteristic as bad) while actually directing its harm toward blacks. It's really sad when it keeps smart kids from doing well in school.

Black conservatives have been quick to recognize this problem. See here for my summary of some of what they say about it. Liberals on race issues have tended to downplay this phenomenon. It amazes me that so many people will insist that something like this can't be part of the explanation for why black kids don't do as well on SATs and don't have as good grades. Just read some reviews of John McWhorter's books by liberals on race issues to see people denying that there's any significant peer pressure of this sort. I can't help but think that they're assuming such an admission would mean that white racism isn't the immediate cause of every problem within the black community, which would then undermine one of the reasons for affirmative action. But almost every black person I've talked to who cared about learning and grades before college has told me that the phenomenon is real and that it does lead kids to do less well.

There will surely be differences of opinion over how much of the SAT and grade gap is explained just by this. I myself don't think it's the only cause. For one thing, affirmative action itself is one further explanation, since it lessens the need for black kids to do as well if they want to get into a good college, and only the best students are doing well purely for the sake of doing well. But the traditional liberal "white racism" explanation for the racial grade/SAT gap is compatible with this as an additional contributing factor, so it's kind of lame to dismiss it out of a desire to maintain support for affirmative action.

Carmen Van Kerckhove has some helpful reflections on how to respond to racist jokes. She gives some good reasons why some responses that you might be inclined toward wouldn't be so good. She suggests of how to respond instead: play dumb to get them to explain it, which will require bringing the racist assumptions into the open, which you can then be puzzled about, asking them to explain why they think that, and they won't be able to defend the assumptions. I kind of like that.

I've just finished Jorge Gracia's Surviving Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality: A Challenge for the Twenty-first Century, which I've blogged about briefly before. Overall, it's an excellent treatment of the metaphysical issues about race, ethnicity, and nationality. Gracia's primary focus is defending the existence of all three, explaining what they all are, distinguishing amongst them, and responding to objections against using such categories.

It's carefully argued and very clear. I can't see how someone can think through the ethical and political issues involving these three categories without having first thought about these more fundamental issues, and this is the best treatment of them that I've seen. It's treating an issue usually covered by continental philosophers but with the tools of analytic metaphysics, which is a breath of fresh air for me, since I'm trying to do the same thing.

I'm actually a little worried about what sort of positive view I'm going to end up with in my dissertation, because he's already come up with a similar enough view, and I think he's basically right. I'm sure I'll come up with something distinctive as I go, but this is the best discussion of the metaphysical status of race that I've seen yet, and I've been immersed in this literature for some time now. The other issues aren't my area, but I found his discussions of them helpful, particularly his arguments for what the differences are and why it's important to distinguish them.

I came across a nice little quote near the end that doesn't relate at all to my dissertation, but I found it both insightful and intriguing, and I thought readers of this blog might find it interesting as well:

The common idea that colonialism is responsible for the conflicts that afflict some parts of the Third World because colonial powers carved out states without regard to racial and ethnic differences assumes that it is a good thing to have states that are ethnically and racially homogeneous and divided along ethnic and racial lines. I am not going to defend colonialism, or the way colonial powers created states in the territories that once they controlled. I do not believe these are defensible causes, and their defense appears to be morally repugnant. It is quite clear that colonial powers created artificial states without nations. But their mistake was not neglecting ethnic or racial boundaries, but rather forming states without regard for nationality. Instead of helping to develop nations out of disparate ethnic and racial groups based on a common will to live under a system of laws with the aims of justice and the good of their members, they mostly drew lines on a map based on expediency and their own national or state interests.

I've always just accepted this argument whenever I've heard it. There really have been all manner of problems appearing in parts of the world where the boundary lines have been redrawn by colonial powers, separating ethnic groups down the middle and forcing them into states with other ethnic groups. But the solution wouldn't be making ethnic groups line up exactly with nations. That's a recipe for making every ethnic disagreement an international disagreement, and it makes outsiders of anyone who happens not to be in that ethnic group who is in the state. But as Gracia notes, the problem isn't arbitrary dividing lines, as if different ethnic groups couldn't form a nation and thrive. The problem is that those who colonized and drew the lines didn't engage in nation-building, i.e. they didn't work toward bringing these people to be part of a nation seeking a common system of laws to govern them for their own best interests.

What an interesting argument! Laurence Thomas argues that there is a black American imperialism. [Note: Laurence's site doesn't like the server this blog resides on. You usually have to click on the link, wait until you get a rejection message, click in the URL box, and hit enter. I've never seen it fail to work that way.]

Blacks in the U.S. tend to see blackness as something they have a monopoly on, such that Barack Obama isn't really black due to his father being from Africa and his mother being white. You might hear things like, "Immigrant blacks don't have our heritage, so they must not really be black." At the same time, hip-hop is one of the biggest cultural exports from the U.S., and blacks in the U.S. are having a huge impact on blacks elsewhere, while ignoring that Africa is a continent and not a country, smoothing over the huge differences throughout Africa to act as if all blacks are just from Africa (appropriating half-customs with no meaning in the process). A number of elements in this process resemble the cultural imperialism that larger American culture regularly engages in, so it's interesting to see him identifying some ways that the black subculture in the U.S. does similar things.

It's not on the genetic issues with nature favoring interracial reproduction, but Sam's been reflecting on other aspects of interracial relationships.

Undercover Black Man has a nice post outlining the genetic advantages to race-mixing, something I've always thought should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about genetics. You don't even need to know about genetics. Just look at the hereditary problems in close-knit and inbred populations. The post details quite a few of those. It's a nice, inconvenient fact for those who think race-mixing is unnatural. Even aside from the difficulty such views face in identifying exactly which populations are the races that can't be mixed, it does seem as if nature prefers combinations of genes that are less closely-related than combinations that are too closely-related.

I do think, however, that it's worth acknowledging that some effects of combining the DNA of very distantly related people could be more harmful. If a trait requires gene coordination from both parents, and the coordination requires more closely-related DNA, then such a crossbreeding could lead to a loss of those kinds of traits, even if it's more likely to preserve traits one of the populations has lost (because those traits are usually simpler).

So it's not purely a matter of race-mixing being healthier and monoracial reproduction being less healthy. There are benefits and disadvantages either way. But the most common opposition to race-mixing in the U.S. context is the racist idea that white genes shouldn't be polluted with black genes, and blacks and whites in the U.S. at this point are much more closely related than most other interracial pairings, largely due to race-mixing in the past (ironically caused mostly by white slaveowners raping or seducing their slaves). Given that, I would expect these negative effects to be significantly reduced in black-white pairings than would have been true in the time of slavery.

So I do think the conclusion is correct. If anything, interracial relationships are at least in one respect more natural than same-race pairings.

What would you describe as the typical Disney family model? Jae Ran Kim points out how frequently the main character of Disney movies has either an absent or dead parent (or two absent or dead parents), among other unusual anomalies that should be surprising for a line of children's entertainment. I think the only one in her pretty long list to have both parents raise her ends up a cross-dresser.

This isn't necessarily a criticism. This particular story device often simply makes for a good story. But doesn't it seem excessive for Disney to be so overwhelmingly like this? Or is this more common in children's stories in general than we notice? Since we generally don't notice it with Disney, maybe that's so. But why don't we notice it, if we don't?

There is always the stray race story, but lately it seems as if there have been far more than usual.

NPR had a story called "The Multiracial Identity" that I still haven't had a chance to listen to, and I'm not sure if I'll have any thoughts on it when I do, but I thought I'd link to Sam's post on it for now.

Someone is offering evidence for racial bias among NBA refs (NYT registration or Bugmenot required). They found much higher calls for black players when there are more white refs and somewhat higher for white players when there are more black refs. I'll hold my judgment until the study can be subjected to peer review. I haven't had a chance to look at it, but the first thing I'd want to rule out is whether black players are more likely to foul more often than white players. This gap, if it turns out to be real, might be partially explained by black refs going too easy on black players as much as it could be white refs being too hard on black players, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some unconscious bias from residual racism also or instead.

There's also Lee Epstein's post at Balkinization, which says that panels of judges are more likely to be swayed toward a black plaintiff suing for discrimination if there's a black judge on the panel (and the same is true of women with women judges on the panel). As I commented there, the question is whether the presence of a woman or black makes other judges more likely to see discrimination that is present or whether it makes them more likely to find discrimination that isn't present. I suppose it's possible that both are true. I can't see how the study itself shows that having more women and minority judges improves things, though. You need to have a prior judgment about whether the finding of discrimination in the particular cases is the correct judgment if you're going to see this as good, bad, or neutral (or mixed). I'm not sure you can get an independent judgment on that.

Then there's this weird story, which says that interracial couples spend more time and resources with/on their kids than monoracial couples, except if the father is black and the mother white, and then it's less than monoracial couples. I have no idea what might explain any of that.

Finally, everyone's been making a big deal about a new study that shows that black students at elite colleges and universities are overwhelmingly more likely to be non-citizens, immigrants, or children of immigrants than descendants of slaves in the U.S. Why is this surprising? If you'd asked me ahead of time which one I would have expected to occupy more slots in the top schools, I would have without hesitation said the immigrants and children of immigrants. This isn't just from experience at an Ivy League institution (whose black community did seem to me to be over-represented by immigrants and children of immigrants in terms of percentages) but because scholars have long known this. Black conservatives and other opponents of affirmative action (or those who seek affirmative action reform) have been using this fact for quite a while as a piece of evidence in their argument against affirmative action policies as they currently stand. Many people, both in major news media and in race-specific specialty blogs, are reporting this study as major and surprising news. I think this raises some very interesting issues that I won't get into at the moment, but I'll say one thing. That people are surprised by this confirms my suspicion that most people don't have much of a clue what the arguments against affirmative action really are. If you knew them then you'd probably be aware of this fact. Maybe I'll have to get back to my affirmative action series to do my part to remedy that.

Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy has some interesting observations about interracial dating. It turns out that there's more resistance to interracial dating even when it comes to online dating, which means it doesn't just have to do with who you associate with in daily life within your local community (although that's got to be a factor, because groups who tend to live in areas where they are the majority are less likely to take part in interracial dating than groups that typically find themselves in the majority wherever they live).

One factor that he includes that I hadn't connected with this is that people with higher or more specific standards in non-racial ways might be more open to interracial dating simply because their pool is already much smaller than other people's. He includes religious standards such as refusal to date someone of another religion. This may well be one explanation why, in my own observation, evangelical Christians (at least in the circles I run in) are far more open to interracial dating than most any other group I can think of. It may well be partly because evangelicals have a smaller pool to pick from because many evangelicals will date only other evangelicals, and being open to interracial dating helps widen the pool from what it would be if they looked only at people within their own racial group.

Nonetheless, I don't think such an explanation undermines what I've long thought to be the explanation for evangelicals' greater openness to interracial dating. I've generally taken it to be because evangelicals have a heightened sense of the oneness of all genuine followers of Jesus, who evangelicals typically see as including mainly those who have put their allegiance to Christ above all other allegiances. Identity in Christ is primary, and other sources of identity are at best secondary. Thus when I think about who I'm most closely aligned with, I'm going to think of black evangelicals as much closer to the heart of my identity than I will white non-believers.

This isn't just not in conflict with Somin's point, as if they are two compatible explanations. It's actually the same fact under two different descriptions. On the one hand, evangelicals who have this restriction do indeed have a smaller pool to pick from, and they are thus more likely to be willing to include others in the pool than just those of their own race. But the philosophical justification for restricting the pool to like-minded believers is the same justification for expanding it to include like-minded believers regardless of race. After all, it's the sense of closer identity with fellow believers that leads both to the restriction to only believers and to openness to believers of other races.

One more voice enters the fray to support the minority report that Don Imus' primary offense is against women, with his offense against blacks only secondary. Roland Martin (who it is worth recognizing is black) argues that, while the nappy-haired qualifier restricted Imus' comment to black women, it's very clear that calling them hos made it an attack on women.

I wouldn't say some of what he says, and I'd word some more of it very differently than he does. I think you could be critical of Hillary Clinton as an opportunist without basing it on her violation of gender stereotypes that we'd prefer her to conform to. But I do think enough of the criticism she receives comes from what he's getting at. The same is true of Condi Rice. People can criticize her views or even slander her character without necessarily being sexist. After all, they do the same to other members of the Bush Administration, most of whom are not women. But sometimes it takes on a particular flavor with her in ways that you couldn't see if the attack were against a man. The same is true of Janet Reno. Just consider the SNL parodies of all three of these women, especially Will Ferrell's Reno.

Compare someone who refers to some black people (sex unspecified) as nappy-headed and someone who refers to some women (race unspecified) as hos. The former makes fun of someone's physical characteristics, deriding a distinctive characteristic of the appearance of black people. The latter invokes a double standard (men who are promiscuous have no similar negative term) and usually involves a moral judgment about sexual behavior based on evidence that often isn't closely (or isn't at all) tied to sexual behavior. It is a particular insult against women to take part in that game, regardless of whether the insult in a particular case is restricted to a particular sub-group of women, even if the context also insults that sub-group.

Both are immoral, but the second seems much worse to me. So when both are done together, why is it that people focus just on the former? Is it that we're just incapable of seeing an insult against black women as being an insult against women? Or is it that we've got a heightened sensibility toward seeing slights against black people that we don't have toward seeing slights against women? Or is it some combination of the two?

Don Imus' recent racist and misgynist comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team have gotten him suspended from his MSNBC morning show and the CBS radio network for two weeks. Two weeks? Forget the nappy-haired bit. How many people do you think could call some college students hos on a major cable news network and not be fired permanently on the spot? Not very many. All Imus gets is two weeks of presumably unpaid vacation. ABC and CBS are basically collaborating to let him get away with this with minimal impact on his career.

Isn't it interesting that the people who have been bearing the burden of responding to this are black people who have been offended by the racist connotations of his "nappy-haired hos" comment (and the more explicit epithet of his conversation partner)? Why aren't we hearing as much of a response from feminists about the misogyny of calling college women hos, even aside from the race issue? I wonder if it's got something to do with the fact that most feminist don't consider themselves-as-women insulted when it's only black women who have been spoken of this way. The lack of feminist response itself is an interesting example of hidden racism.

A friend of mine overheard some university students yesterday morning talking about this in Starbucks. They were actually defending Imus on the grounds that the people he was talking about really do have nappy hair. Even aside from the racial issues some might raise about such a statement (which I'm guessing people will disagree about), isn't it kind of silly to defend someone who called some people "nappy-haired hos" by saying they do have nappy hair? It's kind of like defending someone calling a Jewish person a "Jew-nosed liar" by saying that since the person really is Jewish then it sort of follows that they have a Jewish nose and then not even mentioning that they accused the person of lying too.

Update: I didn't hear about this today, but some are comparing this incident with a similar one in 2003 when Michael Savage called someone a Sodomite and wished he'd get AIDS and die. MSNBC fired him on the spot. Now wishing someone's death on the air is much worse than what Imus said, but does one justify immediate firing and the other just a two-week vacation'? I have no idea if this piece is trustworthy, but it suggests that Imus is just too connected to influential people for this to affect him long-term.

Update 2: Apparently MSNBC has fired him now. See the comments. I'm curious how they're going to spin their change of mind. They very clearly had not wanted to do that and were hoping a slap on the wrist would pacify any outrage.

This time it's about whose house is greener. Guess who wins? This thing has been circulating around blogs and through email, the latter of which is usually a good indication that something in it is inaccurate or misleading, but according to snopes.com it's pretty much on the level. The Texas Bush home is actually extremely energy-conserving, while Al Gore's house in Tennessee is extremely energy-consuming.

It actually doesn't surprise me that Bush's Texas residence is very energy-conserving. He strikes me as having tried several times (unsuccessfully in most of his attempts) to get his party more interested in environmental issues without adopting economically unfeasible plans like Kyoto or doing something that would trickle down as a burden on the average person the way price controls, additional taxes, or further regulations generally do. One might question whether his proposals would be good, but I think he genuinely wanted his energy pill to pass and then to succeed. He just couldn't get enough Republicans in Congress to go for it.

I've been trying to find somewhat favorable ways to think about what this means for Gore. Is it an inconsistency? It seems so. He has the resources to have a pretty energy-efficient house. Is he a hypocrite? Not necessarily. Hypocrisy requires understanding that your lifestyle doesn't accord with what you preach. Maybe he's just got some kind of intellectual disconnect. But I don't think that's the issue. I suspect he's got the same general view that I find common among those who allow government policies to count as The Solution to any problem that individuals, if they would just live a little more responsibly, could do something about collectively. Let some policy absolve your conscience. Don't worry therefore about how you live your life. As long as you support the right policies, you don't need to live your life in a responsible manner. So I think there's a way to make Gore's lifestyle consistent with his moral views, if his assumption is what I'm suggesting. The only problem is that it just makes the view so ridiculously implausible that it seems tantamount to coming up with a bad excuse for not living in a morally decent manner.

(I should note for the record that this is a standard way for some white liberals to appease their conscience on race issues. Support affirmative action, and then you don't have to worry if your daily actions are perpetuating racist narratives and social structures that harm people of less-advantaged groups. This is by far the most common complaint against liberals from the far left. I notice it regularly in the critical race literature. It can be true of conservatives as well, but the people I'm talking about are much more reluctant to concede that conservatives have any decent bone in their body, never mind a conscience, so they focus their criticism on liberals, who they're more optimistic about possibly changing their ways.)

In a post about how white evangelicals often do but should not assume what he calls a "white presumptive" perspective (something I wholeheartedly agree with and have discussed in the past under the term 'normative whiteness'), Mark Dever says something in passing that I'm not sure I agree with.

African-American Christian history is more fundamentally Christian than it is African-American. I realize that may be a controversial statement, but inside the body of Christ, we must realize that our racial identities (while seeming in Revelation to last into eternity) are not as fundamental as our Christian identity.

Again, his main statement there is something I wholeheartedly agree with. Black evangelicals, in my experience, are more likely to resist this biblical truth than white evangelicals, at least in their explicit beliefs. But white evangelicals can often give it lip service to it without realizing how much they are in fact tied to their white identity, as instanced by the very occasion of Mark's post. Whiteness is invisible to most white people, and the fact that white people affirm this statement doesn't mean they really understand what it amounts to and how their lives would have to change were they really to incorporate its truth into their lives.

But the disagreement I have with this statement is not in what it says overall but in what he says in passing in parentheses. He says racial identities seem in Revelation to last into eternity. Is that true? Now it may be that the things that inform our identities racially do last into eternity. Does that mean we will still have races in eternity? I don't think that follows, but I think the question of whether we will have racial identities in eternity is separate from the question of whether the book of Revelation includes anything that should seem to indicate that racial identities will continue in eternity. There are strong indications that the believers gathered around God's throne is a united body of people from every tongue and nation.

But two things make me think it is not teaching that racial identities continue into eternity. First, these descriptions are not just about eternity. They are about the gathered people of God, who are spiritually speaking around the throne of God in heaven. This isn't a resurrection scene. It's a teaching about the nature of the church now. Second, it doesn't say that these are people defined in terms of racial identities. It says that there are people there from every tongue, tribe, and nation. These are people called out of the world and into the people of God. It doesn't mean racial identities are wiped out, but it doesn't say they're not. It simply says that people who were of all the tongues, tribes, and nations are gathered together as one.

Some black Americans are convinced that Senator Barack Obama is not black or not black enough Stanley Crouch is a good example of someone holding such a view. The reasoning seems to me to be not so much that he's mixed race (which is compatible with being black) but more that he is not descended from West African slaves in the U.S. What that has to do with the concept of blackness in the U.S. is something I can't understand. Most Americans treat Barack Obama as black, and thus he is black by the operational concepts of race at work in this context. But it's certainly true that some components of what some black Americans see as crucial to their black identity are not part of his life at all (or at least not naturally; when he puts on a Southern black accent to speak at the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, that doesn't count as normally speaking that way), and being descended from West African slaves in the U.S. is one of those elements.

But now it turns out that Obama's white mother is descended from white slaveowners. It's sort of ironically funny, but what serious import does this revelation have? It's worth thinking about what significance people might find in this. The same is true of every black American descended from white slaveowners who raped their slaves, which produced mixed race offpspring who were then labeled as black. That ancestry is fairly common among black Americans today. There is one difference in this case, though. Senator Obama's maternal ancestors who were the beneficiaries of white anti-black racism (whether intentional or not) are much closer in his line than is the case with those the eventual result of slave rape. In fact, the victims of white anti-black racism are not at all in his line, at least until him, since he of course is treated as black in a society that still manifests racism. But it is the latter fact that would make him black, not the former.

Perhaps justice issues related to ancestry from slaves that some black people will have and he won't (or won't as much). But that issue is a problem for those who think certain kinds of justice are due to all black people. Trying to get around that problem by defining those who would not benefit from such proposed measures aren't really black seems to me to be illegitimate.

But this does (technically) lay to rest the claim that Senator Obama's ancestry didn't have anything to do with American slavery. For some fun video, see this Racialicious post, which contains Debra Dickerson's appearance on The Colbert Report (defending the same position as Crouch) and then a Saturday Night Live parody of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton discussing how black Obama is.

I've been reading Tommie Shelby's We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity. After an excellent Ralph Ellison quote about how much mainstream American culture is influenced and produced by black people, Shelby raises an interesting question about a common enough attitude among many black Americans. Enough people think that anyone who is black, merely from being black, has a positive duty to embrace black culture as one's own culture. Part of Shelby's critique lies in questioning whether someone, by being black, automatically ought to embrace black culture. But along the way, in the context of Ellison's point, he raises a difficulty about what even counts as black culture:

Moreover, there are aspects of black culture that whites have played a constructive role in maintaining and developing -- such as musical forms and literary traditions. Do their efforts make the culture any less black? Or are we operating, absurdly, with a reverse "one-drop rule" of culture -- with a criterion that holds that a cultural trait is black if and only if blacks alone had a hand in its creation?

This point is very close some of what John McWhorter simply calls separatism, although Shelby probably disagrees with McWhorter on some of that larger phenomenon. But Shelby and McWhorter are coming from very different places politically. McWhorter, while no Republican (he donated $3000 to John Kerry's campaign for the presidency), tends to have more conservative views on race than most blacks in the public light (although I myself consider him fairly moderate compared to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas or libertarian economist Thomas Sowell). Shelby, on the other hand, is a Marxist, and his views on political policies that will help black people are very left-wing in the American political scene. His aim in this book is to appeal more to a much broader political base, so it's unsurprising to find some arguments that moderates and even some conservatives might go for, but this isn't some pragmatic argument on the basis of premises he doesn't accept. He thinks the position he's critiquing is truly absurd, and his reasons aren't that far from McWhorter's.

What struck me most about his statement, however, was not its appeal to more moderate and conservative views but its rhetorical move comparing this tendency among some blacks to the racist one-drop rule that classifies people as black merely for having one black ancestor several generations back. Blackness is like an infection of impurity, according to the one-drop rule, and it can't be removed no matter how you dilute it. According to the reverse one-drop rule for culture, it's (cultural) whiteness that's an impurity infecting black culture. Even aside from the issues of mainstream culture vs. black culture (see my separatism post linked to above), there's something disturbing about seeing white cultural elements as impurities, even if whiteness as a concept stems from evil ideology. That doesn't mean cultural traits white people happen to have should always be bad and can never be adopted by black people willingly and as good things.

Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) has gotten into trouble over the following statement he made about Senator Barack Obama's (D-IL) run for the presidency:

I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy

There have been all sorts of reactions to this. I agree that it's racially insensitive, for most of the reasons people have given. It's a typical example of Senator Biden shooting his mouth off without thinking how it would be heard, and he may be right that people are taking it in ways he didn't intend. Whether that excuses him depends on if their way of taking it is more reasonable than his expectation of how they'd take it.

There is the problem with 'articulate', which hasn't received as much of the focus from what I've heard. I think there might be a way for him to say what he meant without using that word, but it would be difficult to be very widely-read on race issues in this country without knowing that many black people find that word offensive, for the reasons I discussed here. That puts him in the same category as Trent Lott. While he almost certainly did not intend anything negative by it, he is way out of step with the black community and their perceptions of how people describe them.

I also don't think his explanation of what he meant by 'clean' is very plausible. You don't refer someone's being fresh in terms of a clean start by saying that person is clean. I'm not sure what he was thinking, but that's almost certainly not it. It may not necessarily reflect any negative views about black people, but I have to hear a more plausible account of what he was thinking to be satisfied. James Joyner suggests that Biden had intended to say "clean-cut" or something similar. If so, I want to hear it from him. It's not what he said he meant. I do think Biden is excited about Obama's campaign and thinks he'd be an excellent president, and I don't think he intended to suggest that Al Sharpton doesn't take regular showers. But I'm not sure what he said he meant is very likely to be what he meant. His response thus sounds a little strange.

I just found this old Freakonomics post, but it raises an interesting enough question that I thought it worth posting. It used to be that blacks and whites had very different TV viewing habits. According to recent data, these different viewing habits have begun to converge. I can't think of any good reasons why that might be. Any thoughts? Is it because the particular shows that are on now have something that appeals to both audiences when nothing before did? If so, what would that be? Or is it because something has changed in one or the other audience? If so, what would that be? The explanations offered in the comments don't seem very convincing to me.

It's very interesting to me that I could leave a comment on a left-of-center blog about race, a comment that's very sympathetic to a Marx-like perspective in critical race theory (here for those who want to see it in context), followed by a comment clarifying something that has virtually no value-laden component, only to have someone respond the following way:

Jeremy, I say what I’m about to say because I care.

The fact that you have a black wife fills me with dread. I wont go further because I don’t, as they say, “know you like that,” but let’s just say there’ll be a new family on my prayer-list tonight.

This is someone who has admitted in the past to be the sort of person who makes accusations about my views without actually reading what I said, which is particularly evil when the view being attributed to me is nothing at all like the view I'm actually defending. I'm not normally one to be upset when people pray for me, but I think I understand a little better now something of how gay people feel when Christians tell them they're praying for them to stop being gay.

So I'll say for the record right here: Those who would like to pray for me and Sam are very welcome to do so. We would genuinely appreciate it. Like all married couples, we do encounter difficulties in our relationship, and it's a real struggle dealing with three very active children five and under, two of them autistic. That doesn't make our life easy. But one things seems obvious to me, and that's that this person's prayers will likely be about nothing that actually goes on in our lives.

Before telling Sam of this comment and its context, I asked her, "if we were to list all of the problems we've had in our relationship and in our family, how far down the list do you think we'd have to go before we got to something related to race?" I was expecting maybe she'd say that it wouldn't be in the top 100 or that it wouldn't be in the top 500. She instead said something like, "I don't think it would be on it at all." Now maybe some ridiculously radical conspiracy theory about race is true, and interracial couples can have all sorts of devastating race-related problems in their relationship without ever knowing about them, but I think that's what it would take for us to be the sort of people whose relationship could justify the dread this commenter (who knows virtually nothing about us) has.

Jan Crawford Greenburg has a fascinating piece in the Wall Street Journal called The Truth About Clarence Thomas [hat tip: SCOTUSblog]. It recounts some of what she learned about his first term or two on the Supreme Court from the records of other justices, especially Justice Harry Blackmun. I think this pretty much destroys the last vestiges of several of the common myths about Justice Thomas, e.g. "Justice Thomas is stupid", "Justice Thomas is simply Justice Scalia's lackey" (some would even call him his slave), "Justice Thomas doesn't have any original thoughts", "Justice Thomas' opinions aren't intelligent or well-written", "Justice Thomas isn't smart enough to ask questions during oral arguments", and so on. I've long wondered how much of this is buried racism that isn't allowed to come out with political liberals but is tolerated when it comes to conservatives, but I'm sure that even if it is it's not the sort of racism the person is aware of. I've blogged about some of these issues before here, here, and a series I started here but regrettably haven't gotten around to finishing yet. [Update: See also here.]

It turns out that, according to Justice Blackmun's notes, the first year with Justice Thomas on the court changed things drastically. He'd vote in conference as a lone dissenter, but then when the other justices saw his opinions several of them would change their vote and sign on to his dissent. This is especially true of Justice Scalia, which means it's more true that he was Justice Thomas' lapdog than the reverse, although neither is really true, and a more accurate description would just be that Thomas had just convinced Scalia with arguments that Scalia's original vote was wrong.

Oh, and as for oral arguments, apparently he's got a philosophical conviction against asking questions during oral arguments. He thinks it's the lawyer's job to present the case without much interruption. He considers it a violation of his oath to do otherwise. I simply thought he was the sort of person who takes a while to digest things over the long term but not quickly on his feet, something true of some of the best philosophers I know. But he's actually deliberately holding back for principled reasons.

Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log has an interesting post about his dislike of the term 'people of color'. I've never been taken with the term myself, but I don't think there are any very strong objections to it that don't also apply to other terms that I readily use. For example, it seems funny to act as if white people have no color, but we do speak that way when we call white people white and non-white people non-white. If it's bad to speak of people of color, then it's bad to speak of people who are non-white. In terms of economy of words, it's awkward to say "people of color" as opposed to "colored people", but the former doesn't have the negative connotations now usually associated with the latter, and if grammatical sleight-of-hand allows for a good result without changing the actual terms much is that so bad? There's no really strong linguistic or moral reason against it. So why not?

Well, Pullum just doesn't like the term. That's it. He doesn't judge anyone as linguistically or morally on the wrong side for using it. He just doesn't like it and doesn't use it himself. I'm not sure I dislike it as strongly as he does, but I've never been especially excited about it, and it has nothing to do with the reasons he gives in his slightly unfair characterization of conservative views on race. (I say slightly unfair, because I think what he's describing does happen, but he doesn't seem to allow for people who have views very similar to his on the moral questions but different views on the political ones, which is exactly where I stand.)

I first encountered the term during orientation in my first year of college, and it struck me as very strange. I can't say I've taken to it more over the years, but I don't have any reason I can think of why I shouldn't like it except ones that rely on bad arguments. I suppose it's better than 'non-white' in one way, because it's not defining people in terms of what they aren't.

On the other hand, I'm not sure I can think of a way that 'people of color' makes any sense to refer exactly to the people it refers to except in the sense that they aren't white. So maybe I just find it deceptive as a way to avoid saying something else that might offend some people. In other words, maybe it avoids overt offense by relying on offensive assumptions that aren't immediately discernible without reflection. But I think this might take more argument than I'm prepared to give at this point.

For those who don't know, Michael Richards has gotten in trouble recently for making some pretty racist comments in his stand-up act. His apology on Letterman is also worth watching. There's a bit of it out of context at the end of the first clip, but it's worth watching the whole thing for the full context. The press has been selecting clips from it out of context, in a way that I think masks his general tenor. It takes some offhand comments as if they are the main thrust of his apology.

Now what he did was thoroughly despicable, and to his credit he admits that and has apologized. Some people have been claiming that it's not really an apology, but it most certainly is. He apologized for his actions. John McWhorter thinks it's just a case of his being sorry that it happened rather than the sincere apology that I thought it came across as. Carmen Van Kerckhove at Racialicious thinks the fact that it's just an apology for his actions without reference to what underlying attitudes the words expressed shows that he must have a deep attitude of resentment against black people for having achieved equality, thus preventing him from getting away with lynching them. I'm not sure I agree with either of these claims.

Here's a possible interpretation of his actions and what motivated them that doesn't involve the kind of racist attitudes assumed in those two responses (although it's not free from racism of a different sort). Isn't it possible that he was just willing to use a racial dynamic in a pretty immoral way to say hurtful things whose content he doesn't actually agree with? People do often say hurtful things they don't agree with when they're mad at someone and want the person to feel hurt. I'm not sure how we can rule out that possibility here by assuming that he really does long for the days of segregation and lynching. Maybe he does, but the fact that he said these things doesn't show that he does. It just shows that he's willing to speak as if he does, but that may just be to achieve a hurtful effect in others by relying on a racial power dynamic.

It still makes what he did pretty evil, and it does show that he's able to think of racist words and references at the slightest sign of black people disrespecting his comedy routine. But I don't think it shows that he's literally longing for the days of segregation and lynchings, as I keep seeing people assert (see Carmen's post, the comments there, and the links to other commentary on race blogs). I just think it's a bad idea to attribute certain emotions or views to him that may or may not be true, when there are alternative interpretations that are pretty plausible.

Update: See also Laurence Thomas' comments on this.

Update 2: Laurence has another post, this time comparing Michael Richards with Mel Gibson.

Jason Sperber has some thoughts worth considering about when Halloween costumes are offensive and worth avoiding. Jason and I weren't close friends ourselves, but we had several friends in common during college, and we often sat at the same table in the dining hall. I don't think either one of us expected to have much if any contact with each other after we graduated, but I recently discovered that he's blogging in several locations, mostly in the context of race, and I found enough of it intriguing to add his blogs to my RSS reader. I've put up links some of the places he blogs in the sidebar, but I've been waiting for a post by him that I wanted to say something about so I could mention him in a post.

I think a lot of people who claim certain kinds of costumes to be offensive do an absolutely awful job of explaining why, and those who don't understand the reasons usually just write them off as being too over-sensitive. Sometimes maybe people can be over-sensitive and get offended at something they shouldn't. Other times maybe there is cause for offense, but it's not a grave enough concern to justify the kind of outrage you sometimes see, and besides there might be more productive ways to address such issues than complaining about one's rights being violated simply because one has been offended. Still, there are good reasons to avoid certain kinds of Halloween costumes, and Jason provides some good explanations (taken from tolerance.org) for why it might be bad to use a variety of different kinds of costumes. The reasons vary in kind and in degree of importance. I want to try to make the moral reasoning more explicit, since some of them go a little too quickly for my philosophically-trained ethical thought processes.

Three years ago Brown University President Ruth Simmons commissioned the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice "to investigate and to prepare a report about the University’s historical relationship to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade". Simmons describes their purpose more broadly, however:

In addition, in view of the often confusing and contentious discussion of reparations, we wanted to move the examination away from a focus on reparations to learn more about the many ways in which societies past and present have dealt with retrospective justice following human rights violations such as genocide, internment, and certain forms of discrimination. We thought that our students would benefit from an understanding of those histories and experiences. Finally, we hoped that such an effort, rooted in our particular history, would excite interest among students and help them appreciate and accept meaningful discourse on even the most troubling subjects.

The steering committee has now released its report, and I'm impressed at its comprehensiveness and balanced perspective. Much of it is just chronicling historical events, including the role of slavery in New England in general, in the families involved with starting Brown, and in money that has gone into making the university what it is. The report includes reasons why understanding this history is a part of understanding the full legacy of the university, without at that point drawing any moral or political conclusions. As such, it is an excellent historical study much worth looking at.

Then they examine most of the important arguments for and against reparations, looking more broadly at other contexts in which some kinds of apologies, reparations, and similar actions have been given. They present some of the better reasons for thinking in terms of group responsibility and not individualizing so that those who identify with a group but aren't the culprits of past group activities still are heirs to the bad of the past if they can identify with the good of the tradition and be proud of it. They discuss the reasons given by proponents and opponents of reparations why certain kinds of reparations (especially monetary) would be a very bad idea and move on to other ways reparations could occur, concluding eventually with some recommendations that I almost entirely agree with. (See my post on reparations for my general perspective on this issue.)

It's very long, but I enjoyed skimming through it over breakfast yesterday morning. I was impressed at their command of the arguments on both sides of the issue and the ease with which they moved toward a very reasonable middle ground that captures what is good about both sides without getting unreasonable in the ways that I think both sides often get. When I first heard about this, I was worried that it might turn into a ridiculous undertaking, and that no longer looks like a real possibility.

Senator George Allen (R, VA) has come under a lot of fire recently for being unwilling to say that he had Jewish ancestry. He he may have been just respecting his mother's wishes, considering his obligation to her saying this in confidence to outweigh the interest of the public in knowing his ancestry (and I can see how people might disagree over which moral issues are more decisive there). He also used the word 'macaca' to describe an Indian American. He called it a term of endearment that had no meaning, but it's known in some places as a racial epithet, including in French North Africa, where Allen's mother is from, although she claims never to have heard it. Allen has been slipping in the polls for his reelection to the Senate, and I think this is might end his chances at a potential presidential run for 2008.

But the latest news is that anyone switching their vote from Allen to his opponent, James Webb, had better not be doing it out of an expectation that Webb is more racially sensitive. Webb has been unwilling to say whether he has ever used the N-word. [hat tip: Racialicious] People who knew him in his youth have said that he did use it in those days, and his unwillingness to own up to it is ruffling some feathers. He says he knows he's never used it as a racial epithet but can't recall if he's used it in another way. I had first thought that he might just be confusing use and mention, and he wasn't willing to say that he'd never used it, thinking that just mentioning the word to talk about the word counts as using it (which it doesn't), but the allegations do not involve simply mentioning the word. They involve using it as a racial epithet (which is what he says he knows he never did).

Dahlia Lithwick seems to think Justice Scalia's comments in the following quote offensive. Interestingly, there's no explanation at all of what is supposed to be offensive. Here is his comment (via Orin Kerr, who gives the broader context and says some similar things to what I'm about to say):

We have a case involving standing which says that -- you know, the doctrine of standing is more than an exercise in the conceivable. And this seem to me an exercise in the conceivable. Nobody thinks your client is really, you know, abstaining from tequila down in Mexico because he is on supervised release in the United States, or is going -- is going to apply having been deported from the country for criminal offenses, he is going to apply to come back -- and look, these are ingenious exercises in the conceivable. This is just not the real world.

I can think of several reasons someone reading this quote out of context might think it offensive, but I'm having trouble seeing how any of them is both (1) a good interpretation of the justice's words and (2) offensive in the right sort of way to justify the way Lithwick describes the offense.

Devon Carbado at blackprof.com raises some interesting questions about race on the Grey's Anatomy show. [hat tip: Racialicious] I've never watched the show, but these issues come up with quite a number of shows that I have seen. Some people have called the show colorblind because it has non-white characters playing a prominent role without ever making an issue of their race. Many who say this are thinking of colorblindness as a good thing. Racial ways of thinking involve thinking of the less privileged races as lesser or as not part of the mainstream. This kind of colorblindness is often thought of as good. It mainstreams the marginalized. On the other hand, it does mask genuine racial issues when they might be lurking beneath the surface, unnoticed by those who aren't tuned into them, ignored due to no one's willingness to talk about them for fear of being seen as cooperating with the unfortunate implications of a good deal of the negative racialized thinking that colorblindness wants to avoid.

Carbado steps into this with a claim that I think shows some great insight.

I don't think the show is colorblind at all. It is color conscious in a particular way -- namely, it presents non-white actors in roles that do not explicitly invoke race. That is neither colorblind nor race neutral.

It didn't occur to me to call this approach color-conscious at all, but I think this is right. The producers of this show are surely aware of what they are doing. The writers may not be addressing race issues, but what is color-conscious is the placing of non-white actors into these parts, and I suspect they are consciously not referencing the characters' races very much.

It's clear that it's color-conscious in at least that way, then. The question is whether this is a good or bad thing to do. Carbado worries about one aspect of it:

The latest factcheck.org entry by Emi Kolawole points out some misleading and inaccurate information in a recent ad for Michael Steele, a black Republican running for Senate in Maryland. Most of the writeup is the standard fact-checking of misleading or inaccurate information of the sort most political ads have that the site generally does well at. But one thing about Ms. Kolawole's writeup strikes me as unusual. She makes a big deal out of the fact that Lt. Gov. Steele doesn't say that he's a Republican. She says it's pretty clear from his opponent's ads that Steele is a Republican (though what she points to is not about political party but about some conservative views he has, an important distinction). But she seems to think he has an obligation to identify his party affiliation.

I wonder about Ms. Kolawole's emphasis on Steele's party. After all, most political ads I've seen this year do not mention the candidate's party. This isn't something just Republicans are doing. In the current divisive environment, candidates appreciate the opportunity to associate their name with positions they hold that might win them support, and if they can do that without the potential of a party name turning people off immediately, they often will. This seems to me to be a pretty standard practice. I don't see factcheck.org pointing it out every time other candidates do this. So why spend so much time emphasizing it in Steele's case?

The only reason I can think of is because he's one of those somewhat rare black Republicans. Perhaps Ms. Kolawole thinks black Republicans have some special obligation to point out that they don't think and vote the way black people are "supposed" to think and vote. I hope this isn't what's driving this, but I really can't think of any other reason. It doesn't make me very confident of her ability to write for a non-partisan fact-checking site if a political agenda could lead her to do this sort of thing. I'd have no problem with emphasizing someone's party when the candidate doesn't say it. It's just that Steele seems to have been singled out especially for this. I can't think of any motivation to do that unless it's out of some immoral desire to take black politicans at face value only if they are liberal Democrats, and otherwise they must make their party affiliation clear in a way that other candidates regularly do not. Non-partisan websites should not be operating by that kind of double standard. Is there some explanation for why his party affiliation would be so important to her when the factcheck.org site doesn't normally complain about this sort of thing?

Some people think the immoral origins of the development of racial terms should count as a reason to abandon racial terms altogether. I don't want to get into the issue of whether racial terms refer to anything, which is one of the major subjects of my dissertation, but I thought it might be nice to run through some thoughts on this secondary issue. I'll begin by asserting that I think this is an extremely poor argument for abandoning racial terms, and it's partly because I think some similar ethical arguments with very different subject matter also fail. These might take different forms, however, so I want to consider three different cases before bringing it back to race.

First, after World War II, scientists among the Allies rejected the use of the results of Nazi war crime experimentation on the grounds that the information had its origins in immoral acts. I think this argument is unfounded, relying on a confusion between two things: actions and the information that those actions happen to provide. The actions were surely wrong. But what can make the information itself bad? There is no plausible notion of moral pollution that can infect mere information without positing some spooky property Moral Pollution that somehow transfers from actions to information. I don't accept any such property. Thus this argument fails.

I want to note that it's a very different argument to say that retaining the information encourages others to do such experimentation. That doesn't rely on the magical property in question. However, it seems implausible that people will think they can get away with such awful experimentation just because information like this doesn't get burned. The scientists themselves were convicted of war crimes.

Here's a really stupid argument:

1. Term X can be used in a racist way.
2. Other uses of Term X are therefore racist.

It's got to be one of the poorest excuses to call someone a racist I've ever seen. Yet people insist on doing it to unsuspecting politicians or other public figures. It's for this reason that Governor Mitt Romney of Massachussetts has been bamboozled into apologizing for an action that is in no way wrong. Tony Snow has also been criticized for using the same expression in its original, non-racial sense. A tar baby is generally a sticky situation, and nothing about race is implied by this use of the term. It's origins come from an African folk tale, and its function in accounts of sticky situations has continued undisturbed by those who ignorantly coopted it for racist purposes. In the northeast, where Romney is governor, most people have probably never even heard of the racist use of the expression, and those who do encounter it might easily forget it as so far out of their vocabulary that it doesn't enter long-term memory.

Another example I've encountered (in this case only very recently) is "call a spade a spade", which simply means to identify something for what it is. Some racists in the South have apparently called black people spades as a derogatory term. Since I've never hung out with those people, it never would have occurred to me that someone would do so. Why should an uncommon use of a term in a localized region, a use I've never even heard of, make my use of a perfectly normal idiom somehow immoral? Those who treat such statements as racist seem to me to be linguistically unaware at best and incapable of moral reasoning at worst.

I recently got a hit from someone searching for "reverse interracial". I've gotten this one before. I'm curious how many people think this is sexist, how many think it is racist, how many think it is both, and how many think it is neither. Please support your answer. I know what I think, and I know why I think it, but I'm wondering what others would think and why.

Look at the two girls in the picture. Would you say that one is black and the other white? Would you change your answer if you learned that they are twins?

If you want to read up on the story behind this, see the snopes.com entry on them. This newspaper story has some information on the science involved, but it actually gets several things wrong, particularly in calaculating the probabilities. This Mixed Media Watch post and the ensuing discussion had some good analysis. There are more pictures in all three places, including a picture with both parents.

I'm seriously interested in what people think of these girls, not because of some morbid fascination with classifying people but because people's instinctive reactions to this are directly related to my dissertation. Are people instinctively inclined to treat one girl as black and the other as white (rather than both as black, both as white, neither as black or white, or whatever other combinations might be possible)? Is your answer one thing if you don't know they're related and another if you find out that they're twins?

I'm trying to work out a taxonomy of the various views someone might hold regarding the nature of racial groups. One of the views, sometimes called racial realism, takes races to be natural kinds something like species in biology. On this view, their basis lies in biological facts completely independently of any historical origins of racial groups, social facts about how we treat each other, or lingustic facts about how we use racial language. I'm not interested for the moment in whether this view is true. I'm interested in various forms it might take.

One element of this sort of view that virtually all the scholars who work in this area ignore is that the natural kinds of race may not involve anything particularly insidious. This view could hold that racial groupings are based on skin color, bone structure, hair type, and virtually nothing else. As long as its proponents insist that such characteristics would be enough to constitute a natural kind, then it's a realist view. This isn't the most historically influential racial realist view. That view holds that certain intellectual, moral, and probably several other characteristics must follow from being part of a certain racial group. But it is a kind of racial realism.

What I've been puzzling through for the last two or three hours is what some people mean by calling this sort of view "racial essentialism". First off, I'm not sure if that term is supposed to apply to the milder kind of racial realism that most people who work in this area ignore. Second, I'm not sure what it means even if it's just supposed to apply to the more extreme view that was used for so long (and still is in some quarters) to legitimate white supremacism and other forms of racism.

Something most white people would never pick up on without help is that it's sometimes insulting to compliment black people. In particular, it's insulting to say something nice about someone who is black that you wouldn't say about someone who is white. Such a compliment assumes that it's surprising that this would be true of someone who is black. A good example is the common practice among media types to speak of certain black people as articulate (see Mixed Media Watch for an example). How often do you hear white people being called articulate? I don't think it's all that common. Pay attention, and you'll discover that it's a good deal more common with black people, especially young black men. I've never heard a young white politician being called articulate, except I think in the case of one who happened to be a teenager, where there might be less expectation for such a thing. But Barack Obama, J.C. Watts, and Harold Ford, Jr. get it all the time. You don't generally hear it of professors of linguistics, unless it's John McWhorter. You won't hear about economics professors being articulate, except when it's Thomas Sowell.

Now I'm loath to call this racism without explaining more carefully how I'm using that word. Such a statement would be received as nonsense by most white people, because most white people (indeed, most English speakers) use the word 'racism' to refer to a deliberately negative attitude, and that's not what's going on here. This is why academics who specialize in race matters have come up with terms to describe this sort of thing to distinguish it from the more standard and obvious cases of racists. This is unintentional racism. It involves racist structures in society. It involves residual effects on the attitudes and actions of well-meaning non-blacks. But I think this is a case of that sort of racism, at least generally. See MW's comment in the Mixed Media Watch post for good reasons to think this is often a kind of racism even when you don't think it is.

This is something I've been aware of since reading John McWhorter's Losing the Race. As I said, it's not the sort of thing that most white people would notice otherwise, even ones who are more sensitized to these general sorts of issues. I paid attention to when I heard the word after I read McWhorter's discussion of the issue. What few occurrences I encountered did seem to fit the mold. But then a few weeks ago I heard someone call Ann Coulter articulate. Does this refute the claim that calling young black men articulate stems from some kind of racism?

Laurence Thomas has a thoughtful post on one particular assumption in the mindset often associated with what sometimes is called political correctness [note: the post might not load up; if not, then just click in the URL line at the top of your browser and hit the Enter key manually to reload]. This assumption underlies the claim that men have no right to comment on abortion and that white people can have no insight into racial issues. Now I understand the view that people who experience something will have special insight into that experience that others will not have. There are things men just don't understand about what it's like to be a woman, and thus there are insights into womanhood that men will not appreciate as well as women can. There are things about being gay in mainstream American culture that a straight person will not understand. Even though I'm married to a black woman, I will never quite understand what it's like to grow up black in the U.S. That's something that black people can know in a way that I never could. Philosophers call this being epistemically privileged. (For non-philosophers, 'epistemic' just means relating to knowledge.) I have no problem with the thesis that those who have certain experiences are epistemically privileged in exactly the sort of way that this general mindset says is true of people who are gay, Asian American, female, etc.

Now what Laurence questions is not this thesis itself but its use in certain political contexts. For instance, some act as if only women can comment on abortion because men don't have access to what women alone can know from their unique experience. It would then be immoral for white people to comment on racial issues because of their not having experienced any form of racism against them. Laurence particularly wonders why it's mostly experiences of suffering that give this special kind of insight, when it seems that suffering can just as easily blind someone to the truth. For example, people who are seriously abused as children sometimes end up thinking they are worthless people who are to blame for their abuser's actions. He also suggests that political correctness is often just an attempt to get people to cower through accusations of racism, misogyny, heterosexism, or some other crime of thought, and its result is to perpetuate a lack of trust on both sides of the accusation. I think he's pretty much right on his diagnosis of many cases of political correctness (which isn't to say that it's right about all charges of racism, just the p.c. ones).

But there are a few other things going on that I'd like to reflect on for a little bit. Some of this derives from my comment on his post, and some of it is further thought on the issue.

In the Blac(k)ademic discussion on Tawana Brawley (see my post on that if you didn't read it already), one interesting question came up. The rest of the discussion reminded me eerily of several others I've had on other matters. What is it that many anti-ID people, the racists Kinists at Little Geneva, many radical leftists on race and gender, and some of the hyper-fundamentalists who comment at WorldMag have in common that leads to this same result?

Anyway, this post isn't about the unwillingness to treat your intellectual opposition respectfully and fairly. It's about an interesting question raised by one of the people on that thread. She wondered why it is that white men who marry black women get very upset when they're called racists and often mention that their wife is black in response to charges of racism. She says white women in interracial marriages never think to refer to their marriage as evidence that they're not racist. I have not idea if this generalization is true (though I do find it deeply ironic that I wasn't allowed to make any statements about any tendencies even about small groups of black people I've known -- see the exact statement below -- without being called racist, but she can make all sorts of generalizations about white men married to black women, not to mention all the references to white oppressors overall in that conversation). But suppose the generalization is true, and white men are more likely to say this sort of thing in response to the racism charge than white women would in similar circumstances. As I thought about it, I thought there might be an explanation for this fact if indeed she's correct (which I have no idea about) that it's a fact. At least I might have some explanation in my own case. What follows is a development of a part of a comment I left there.

Nubian at blac(k)ademic is complaining about people invoking the name of Tawana Brawley with the Duke University Lacrosse rape case [hat tip: Mixed Media Watch ]. If you're not up to speed on Brawley or the Duke case, see this post by La Shawn Barber for the requisite background and this one for more details on the current case. My understanding is that she's the sort of person Nubia means. (Maybe she's the only one Nubia is referring to. I'm actually unaware of anyone else bringing up Brawley's name, and Sam is unaware of anyone else bringing her into the discussion either.)

Nubia's argument is that comparing these two cases promotes the sense that black women are lying when they say they've been raped, that black women's rape claims are always about sticking it to the white man. She also notes that these discussions tend to ignore various other racial phenomena, such as the often innocent black men who were lynched for having been framed for raping white women. These are cases of white women lying about black men raping them. I agree that there are serious worries with both issues, but I can't agree that bringing up Tawana Brawley is wrong for either reason. There's a moral purpose behind bringing her up, and it's one that ought to be furthered when the opportunity strikes. Recasting people's motives for bringing her up as if they are about something else does not change that moral purpose. What follows is an expansion of a comment I left on the post.

One common but bad argument against interracial marriage stems from the fear that it destroys cultures. Mixed Media Watch has a good response to this argument. I would add that racial interaction of any sort, especially intermarriage, should create culture as much as destroying it. Once you stop assuming that culture is the same thing as race, it becomes pretty clear that kids of mixed race can have a culture, and this is so even if both parents avoid continuing cultural traditions of their families. We all have a culture, and every culture is changing. In the U.S., there used to be a black culture and a white culture. Now there's still something to black culture, but there really isn't much of a white culture anymore, just a mainstream culture that includes many historically white elements but has many elements from non-white ethnic groups. If black people were to give up the remaining distinctives (which isn't what I'm recommending; I would recommend giving up only bad elements of any culture), it still wouldn't mean black culture is lost. It would mean some (but only some) of those distinctives would be lost. Many of them would remain on in the continuing culture that contains those and some of the original mainstream features.

But what's really silly about this argument is the idea that mixed race children are being robbed of their own culture if they are not raised in ways that the culture of one side of their ancestry had. Whatever you're going to say about what they're being denied, they're not being denied their culture. It's not their culture unless they once had it. Those who were taken from Africa and made slaves were robbed of their culture. If Sam and I adopt a Korean girl, we're not robbing her of her culture just because her parents would be of two very different ethnic groups that are not her own. That Korean culture was never hers, so no one could claim that she would be robbed of her culture. At best she would be robbed of a culture that might otherwise have been hers, but that's not the same thing. We might say there's some kind of ancestral heritage that she has, but it's not her culture. Her culture is what she's raised with.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine dealt with this issue nicely in the second season episode "Cardassians". A Cardassian child was raised by Bajorans. I've used that episode with good results in my classes when I've talked about race. A Cardassian child was raised by Bajoran parents. The Cardassians had been the oppressors of the Bajorans, until the Bajorans freed themselves. Some Cardassian children were left behind, and this kid was one of them. The Bajorans took them in. His culture was clearly Bajoran, but his father wanted him raised as a proper Cardassian to appreciate Cardassian things. Sometimes thinking about these things with a no-stakes context like science fiction really helps put things into perspective when you return to the real-life cases.

Sheila Jackson Lee's attempt to get hurricanes named things like Jamal or Chamiqua isn't new to me, but it was surprising to see it turn up on snopes.com. I'm not surprised that someone might be offended at the particular email that they're confirming the basic facts behind, given the nature of the speech used in the email's last paragraph. (I'm not going to quote it here. Go read it for yourself.) I'm a little surprised that what's offensive is supposed to be that it's racist. It seems to be quoting a general tendency within a certain subset of African-Americans (and not exclusively among African-Americans either). Can it be racist to put words together that accurately reflect how the mainstream of the hip-hop community actually speaks? How is accurate representation of real people supposed to be racism? Unless it insinuates that all black people are like this, which it doesn't, I can't see how it's racist. It's certainly an offensive way of speaking, but the offensiveness is not something the email author came up with. It's something the email author is simply representing accurately. The most famous hip-hop artists speak in such an offensive way, and they are represented as major moral leaders by many African-Americans.

This is uncharacteristically uncareful for Barbara Mikkelson, who usually does an excellent job with the snopes.com site in sorting through what is accurate and what is not. She just seems to have a strange sense of what counts as racist.

Eugene Volokh has a good post about my wife. I'm not sure why he keeps referring to her as "he", though.

I think he's a little too unwilling to focus on how many black conservatives have been convinced by real arguments that liberal policies are worse for black people than conservative policies are. But his point about those not convinced by such arguments that they aren't race traitors still stands. I particularly like his last paragraph. Some people, even if they wrongly think Republicans and conservative policies are anti-black, might still put aside identity politics and concern themselves more with issues that aren't as self-focused.

It hadn't occurred to me until this afternoon that the term 'race traitor' originally arose in the context of white racists calling white liberals race traitors when they sought to promote liberal social policies with the goal of greater equality. Now it's being used to refer to black people who think conservative policies promote greater equality. Some say the charge is appropriate because this time the policies don't promote greater equality. I think that's wrong, because I think conservative policies do have better effects racially speaking (and I think it's demonstrable that liberal policies that were supposed to promote equality had mixed results, e.g. the mass expansion of welfare to include most black urbanites, thus creating generations of dependency). But two things even apart from that strike me as inappropriate about the traitor metaphor.

I have little sympathy for one line of argument currently being advanced [hat tip: SCOTUSblog] against the Texas redistricting that the Supreme Court is currently considering. This argument takes it to be an unconstitutional maneuver because it silences voters. It gives those who vote Democratic less voice by lumping them in with a larger group that turns out to be more Republican-leaning. Mark Veasey, in the above-linked article, complains that his district, which is majority black and majority Democratic, was moved to a district that is largely white and largely Republican. He wants his district back so that all the people in the district that happen to be inclined to vote Democratic won't be drowned out by those who vote the other way.

I grew up in RI. Voting Republican in RI in most elections is equivalent to not voting. I now live in a city in NY, where it's much the same. Most of the state of NY is red. If you look at the county map, you'd think it's a red state. I'd love for New York City to join northern New Jersey and Philadelphia as some new state that will always vote blue, so that the rest of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York can have their votes counted for a change. If every single voter in New York outside New York City voted one way, I'm pretty sure it would have no effect if everyone in the city voted the other way. Maybe that's wrong. I'm not checking populations. But if you add in Buffalo, Syracuse, and Rochester I think it's clearly going to be true. That means the collective total of the rest of the state has no vote, effectively. And this isn't just pointing out that lots of people live in New York City and posing a potential issue if there were going to be a political split between the city and everyone else. There is such a split. To use Veasey's language, the political views and values of residents in most of New York are remarkably different from those who live in the the cities and overwhelmingly vote Democratic. Under the current plan, our voting strength has been destroyed and our voices silenced.

Some would argue, and Veasey does, that it's different when it comes to a racial minority. How? Voting considerations directed toward minorities are for the purpose of restoring a balance, toward bringing minorities who had been denied the vote to a place where they have as much right to vote as others, toward vote-counting that treats each black vote as important as any vote from anyone else. Well, these problems occur for largely white populations, so not being allowed to have a vote in the same way that certain largely white populations don't have their votes counting doesn't mean that we haven't achieved equality in voting. It means we have indeed achieved it. So welcome to the club. Your votes now count enough that political machinations and arbitary lines will affect you too. They've been affecting me all my life, and they've been affecting white voters for long before I've been around. That they affect black voters who live in communities that tend to vote one way but are part of a region that tends to vote another way just means black voters have arrived at the same place white voters have been for a long time. Maybe there are problems with redistricting, and maybe there are issues unrelated to race that have a bearing on this, but I just can't see how this argument can even get started without revising every voting district so that it reflects voting blocs much more exactly. Even then those who are the minority within their district will be silenced, but even without that problem I very much doubt this is what Veasey wants to propose.

If this isn't evidence of at least a kind of residual racism among a readership who is usually fairly intelligent, I don't know what is. Tyler Cowen posts at the Volokh Conspiracy (a high quality legal blog, for those who don't read it) that Mexican-Americans tend to lower the crime rate in cities where they have a high presence. From the very beginning of the comments, almost every comment tries to respond by changing the subject to illegal immigration, as if Mexican-Americans are somehow illegal immigrants. When did we ever pass any laws that prevented Mexicans from immigrating legally? How did they get to be Americans if they were illegal. Last I knew, the Bush plan hadn't been implemented, and that would take years before anyone who entered illegally could restore themselves to good faith to be considered for citizenship anyway.

This reveals something about the gut assumptions of the primarily libertarian and libertarian-grounded conservative audience of a high-powered intellectual blog (or at least about those most motivated to comment). American law-abiding citizens are being assumed to be criminals merely because they were born in Mexico. So Mexicans are apparently criminals just because of their country of origin, even if they're legal immigrants to this country. The only thing I can think of to explain that is some sort of racism, even if it's unintentional and unconscious. I've seen this phenomenon before, but it was particulary obvious, especially given the site it was taking place at. I don't think this is something inherent to libertarianism or to intellectualism, but I wonder if there is something attractive about libertarianism and libertarian-like conservatism among those who are really irrational about things like this.

It amazes me that the so-called black leaders who can see racism in the flight patterns of airplanes and the constellation of snowflakes cannot see the damage that celebrating a song like "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" is doing to young black minds, female and male alike.

From Laurence Thomas, Pimps, Blacks, and Racial Equality: Who is Zooming Whom?.

His observation about feminist leaders' silence reminds me of their similar silence after the President of the United States committed the most serious abuse of authority with regard to sexual matters according to standard feminist thinking. It makes you wonder whether it's really the stated concerns of feminism that drive them.

It's pretty funny seeing Dr. Seuss artwork in political cartoons. Explore the links to the cartoons. There's some interesting stuff there. Some of the issues he's dealing with are old enough that I have no clue what he's getting at, and some were probably really controversial for their time but now seem amazing that they were an issue to begin with. But what struck me as especially strange was the comment thread.

The very first comment links to a cartoon related to Japanese internment. I find it absolutely astounding that everyone in the discussion would just assume that what Geisel is portraying in that cartoon is an endorsement of internment rather than a portrayal of how strange the policy was, showing the paranoia in thinking every single Japanese American is all lined up ready to betray this country. Given his thoroughly liberal (for the time) views on racially-related policies, why would people simply assume that the cartoon endorses internment? Even leaving aside what we know about Ted Geisel, I look at the cartoon and can see how someone with either view might have created such a portrayal. This is a political cartoon. People do things like that all the time. I seem to remember a Eugene Volokh at the very same blog about someone who produced three political cartoons intended to portray three very different and in fact contradictory views of the same incident (but unfortunately I couldn't find it when I just looked). Yet on the same blog, people completely ignore that and assume that a cartoon portrays the literal views of the person doing it. Has the possibility of satire completely left our political consciousness?

how does Vin Diesel's prefer to be ethnically classified
Everything I've seen suggests that he doesn't.

why interracial people so pretty
Well, they are less inbred than everyone else. Facial features resulting from infrequent gene combinations can turn out to be very striking. Supermodels can, in comparison, look downright boring.

many celebrities identified as white have non white ancestry
Everyone identified as white has non-white ancestry! Why would celebrities be exempt?

Harry at Little Geneva has been blogging about me again. (Do a Google search. I'm not linking to it.) Well, it's more throwing links around in a derogatory manner than any serious discussion of anything in my post, but that's standard procedure over there. I even responded in a comment, only to receive insults in response (oh, and what seems to be an admission that he refuses to handle the level of argumentation required to engage in reasoned discussion). It's kind of sad that Harry should have such a huge following at a blog that promotes such a reprehensible view as what he calls Kinism, which is really just racism, despite all his insistence to the contrary. Just read some of his statements all over his main page about the moral character of various ethnic groups. Whenever he links to me, I get a flurry of hits, with no one either at my end or in the comments of his post actually interacting in an intelligent way with anything I said. For a while Little Geneva was near the top of the Blogdom of God simply because so many Christian blogs link to it, until Adrian Warnock noticed it and decided that there should be limits on what sort of blog can be in the Blogdom. [I'm not sure if this is the best place to put this, but I noticed after I wrote most of this post that someone unrelatedly found my blog last night by searching for badlands little geneva. This search was performed on a computer on the house.gov network. I'm not sure what to think of that.]

But occasionally I'll see an interesting argument at Little Geneva. I noticed one yesterday in a different post lower on the page (Feb 2). He notices that many of the people who promote miscegenation (which for Harry doesn't really mean promoting it as better than anything else but simply means acknowledging that there's nothing wrong with it) will point to Gal 3:28, where Paul says that the divisions of Jew, Greek, male, female, slave, and free are broken down in Christ. Harry notes that many conservatives will insist that this doesn't mean the male-female distinction is completely broken down to the point of irrelevance. Paul was simply saying that in Christ all have the same access to salvation. It doesn't mean men and women have to be treated as if they are the same gender or as if they have no gender. I agree in large measure with all that, so it's interesting to see what Harry then concludes. He says someone who says that then has no right to use Gal 3:28 as a basis for thinking there are no morally relevant race distinctions because it mentions the Jew-Greek barrier broken down in Christ. Now I think this is a very interesting argument, even if it ultimately misunderstands what Paul is saying (and what those who think there's nothing wrong with miscegenation are saying), so I wanted to record my thoughts on the matter.

I had a few dry weeks for interesting searches, and now they're accumulating much more rapidly. Here are the least recent of the bunch:

author hebrews letter fake
Don't you need some claim of authorship to begin with for it to be fake? Hebrews never claims an author.

is ron moore a republican? galactica
I'm pretty sure Ron Moore is on the other end of the political spectrum. His few comments on politics that I've seen suggest to me that he thinks what he's writing is relevant to issues going on right now, and he thinks he's raising questions that also count as being against current U.S. policy. I think he underestimates how different the questions he's raising in the Galactica context really are, but what I've read from him suggests to me that he thinks he's putting forth considerations that might be taken as a critique of the Bush Administration, though he does insist that it's merely raising questions and that people need to make up their own minds.

reverse interracial
Wouldn't that be monoracial? I have the sneaking suspicion that you mean white man, black woman. But isn't it a little sexist to assume that one combination is interracial but the opposite is reverse interracial? Might it even be arguably racist?

if someone is light skinned does it mean they are mixed
Norwegians have very light skin. Does that mean they're mixed?

Those who opposed invading Iraq in 2003 have often been accused of not being patriotic. I think it's a slimy complaint. Some of them surely are not patriotic. Some have demonstrated by their actions and statements that they prefer al Qaeda to succeed if that's what it takes for Bush to fail. I'm convinced that such a view is much more mainstream than some people think. But many people opposed the war because they considered it immoral and didn't want their country doing immoral things. That's patriotism. This is all old news, though. Why am I talking about it now?

Well, it occurred to me recently that this is the same general phenomenon that I've also talked about a number of times on this blog with respect to accusations of anti-semitism in the gospels (and in Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ). I've elsewhere argued that the gospels are Jewish works engaging in self-criticism of their own culture, much as the Hebrew prophets were. Jesus was particularly hard on his own people, but that didn't make him anti-semitic, and it doesn't make the recordings of his life and sayings in the gospels anti-semitic. They do indeed record harsh statements against the Jewish leaders, and John even directs these statements to what he calls the Jews (which careful scholars realize amounts to exactly the same thing). What was funny to me was realizing that those who are so inflamed at those who claim anti-war demonstrators to be undemocratic might well be exactly the same people accusing the gospels or Mel Gibson's use of them (which amounted pretty much to direct quotes of them) as being anti-semitic. It's the same error in reasoning in both cases. (Incidentally, it occurred to me after writing this post that this probably also applies to those who say someone is self-hating for criticizing the behavior of a contingent of their own ethnic or racial group, e.g. Bill Cosby.)

If you can be patriotic while engaging in self-criticism of your own culture, then it isn't anti-semitic to engage in self-criticism of your own culture if you're Jewish. But that's exactly what the gospels do when making the sorts of claims about the Jews of the time that the Jewish Anti-Defamation League and a few more liberal contemporary gospel scholars declare to be anti-semitic. People on the left make this sort of blunder as easily as people on the right do.

Avery Tooley has some good thoughts on racism, or perhaps it would be better to say racisms. I agree with a lot of what he says (but not about the N-word; he's right that whether the word is bad depends on context, but I don't think anyone in this country is in a context where it's robbed of its demeaning implications). What struck me especially was his suggestion that our language is just impoverished. We don't have a fine-grained enough sense of the different sorts of things that people will call racism so that we can easily distinguish them. He gives various examples, and I could give lots more. I think people have tried to remedy this by coming up with terms like 'institutional racism'. Mainstream academics who work on this issue insist on calling something racism when they know full well that no malice is meant and no lower view of anyone is involved, but then when they have to clarify they say it's institutional rather than atittudinal racism.

So the vocabulary is there. They just don't make such distinctions when saying things in the moment, and many of the people seen as civil rights leaders by the black community make the same mistake. They call structures in society racist. They call innocent but racially harmful practices racist. They just don't usually clarify what they mean, and the way it's usually heard seems obviously false to most white people listening to them. But what's striking to me is that you can use the same sort of linguistic practice to declare racist what Avery describes as the assumption "that Black people should be some monolithic entity and all hold identical ideological positions, or be in the same political party". This assumption is common enough within the black community and especially fundamental for many liberal whites, at least in my experience.

But there's this standard linguistic practice in calling the hiring of one's friends racist, on the grounds that if whites have fewer black friends they'll hire fewer blacks, which is a negative effect even if it's innocently done. Why, then, do so many people who take more liberal views on race issues get so upset when conservatives say that it's racist to call black conservatives House Negroes or to say that Clarence Thomas isn't really black? [Hat tip: Sam] It seems to me that a good argument can be made that it involves the same sorts of institutional and social assumptions that involve racially harmful consequences, and if that's what it takes to be institutionally racist then these things are institutional racist. If it's ok to abbreviate that as racism, then it's racism. You can't have it both ways. I understand Avery's point. He thinks we should stop calling both things racism and come up with a new term (or perhaps just insist on using the modifier 'institutional'). That would be fine. Given that it doesn't take place, I'll happily say that the suggestion that my wife is a House Negro a racist suggestion, even if it's held from a heartfelt conviction that she's harming her own people by voting Republican.

Christian Carnival XCIII is up at White Ribbon Warriors.

GetReligion explains why Catholics proposing withholding communion from politicians who allow abortion and euthanasia need not say the same about Catholics who support the death penalty or war.

Bush hates rich people too!

He's gay, Jim! From what I've heard about Rick Berman's attitudes toward homosexuality, this might ruin the chances of a Sulu series or even a Sulu appearance in any further stories. [Evidence: See this from 2000, which interestingly points out that one TOS actor and one or two TNG actors are gay. There's a lot more here, but much of that goes way beyond evidence presented. See the Wikipedia entry on this subject for more. Ron Moore confirms that someone in charge explicitly didn't want gay characters, and Kate Mulgrew says it was Berman.]

Tim Challies gives an excellent argument for Christians' participation in Halloween. I think he concedes way too much to those who think the current practice of Halloween has anything to do with paganism in the religious sense, but that's what makes his argument so strong. Even if you concede that, he thinks Christians shouldn't just see it as ok to participate. He thinks it's more like a moral obligation.

Jonathan Ichikawa thinks a proposed amendment to the Texas constitution intended to ban gay marriage is going to invalidate marriage of any kind. He first pointed this out five months ago and raised the issue again recently. His latest volley sort of responds to people taking alternative views, including my comments on both those posts (to the effect that an originalist won't take the conclusion he thinks follows) and the discussion at Orin Kerr's Volokh Conspiracy post. He thinks everyone questioning his view is underestimating how serious this is. I'm not sure he's really dealt with my argument, though. Either way, it's a really funny issue, because if he's right then those opposing gay marriage on the grounds that it will harm marriage as an institution will be fully destroying marriage as a legal institution while getting rid of the possibility of gay marriage.

Marty Lederman has a post at Balkinization arguing that originalism is inconsistent with colorblindness. Justices Scalia and Thomas, for instance, think it's always unconstitutional for the government to use race as a basis for giving someone more favor in hiring or college admissions (and private organizations receiving government funding are subject to this as well). I think they have the wrong view, both constitutionally and morally. Affirmative action is not in principle wrong, even if in our current setting it's more harmful than helpful to those it's intended to help.

Lederman and Balkin argue that originalism is inconsistent with colorblindness. The primary argument for this is that the Congress that passed the Fourteenth Amendment wasn't colorblind in outlook. Some of them went only as far as they did with "equal protection of the laws" and "privileges and immunities" because they didn't want to give blacks the right to vote. It wasn't until the 15th Amendment that blacks were guaranteed the right to vote, and the 14th Amendment even says how to handle states that did deny blacks the right to vote, assuming it could be done. Balkin also says that many of the people voting for the 14th Amendment did not intend to remove bans against racial intermarriage, which I don't think is really surprising given predominant views at the time.

Now Balkin and Lederman seem to me to overstate the conclusion we should draw from this. They say that this shows the original understanding of the 14th Amendment did not include these additional rights that colorblindness requires. I don't think it's quite so simple. What this shows is that some of the people voting for this language didn't intend it to mean colorblindness, though others who voted for this language did intend it that way. That means there are (at least) two intended meanings of the amendment. On Justice Thomas' view, original intent is what determines the Constitution's meaning, but we don't have just one original intent. We have an underdetermined original intent. It could mean either. What's common to both, however, is certainly intended. So the original intent of the amendment does include the things both factions agreed upon. The original intent of the group of all voters does not. That seems to me to be the most plausible way to go with this if you hold to original intent (which I don't). So the conclusion does seem to me to follow from original intent, but it's not as straightforward as saying that the original intent of Congress conflicted with colorblindness. That was true of some of them but not all, and you have to take a further step to recognize that the intent of the language chosen cannot be something not intended by a large enough portion of the people voting for it.

Rosa Parks is dead. See discussions by some of the Conservative Brotherhood: Sam, La Shawn Barber, Baldilocks, and Booker Rising [technically, La Shawn is now for some reason listed as emeritus in the Brotherhood, but she was a founding member].

I just have one question. I know she's an icon, and she's really respected for standing up for something that really was a good cause, but can a Christian really condone what she did? I can't see how. God can use immoral acts for his will. This certainly isn't as bad as some of the horrendous acts God has chosen to work through for good. I just can't see how it can be morally justified given what the Bible says about how we should relate governments that persecute Christians. How should it be any different for governments that allow people to mistreat whole ethnic groups? Jesus even says to give someone your shirt if they ask for your coat and to go an extra mile when a soldier asks you to carry his gear for a mile. So why can it be morally justified to refuse to give someone your seat when he asks, given a Christian ethic? That's something I've never understood about Christians' support of this woman's actions. It seems to me to be contrary to the direct teaching of Jesus, Paul, Peter, and the general thrust of Christian ethics.

I've pointed out numerous times in the past how black conservatives have moved conservatives in a new direction from where white conservatives had gone in the past. The primary difference is that black conservatives seek to remedy problems in the black community through conservative values and policies, or in many cases the removal of certan liberal attitudes and policies. A good example of that is John McWhorter's article last month in the London Sunday Times, arguing that liberals are right that white people are responsible for the fact that poor people in New Orleans are predominantly black, and white people are indeed responsible for the particular kind of poverty black people in New Orleans have been living in.

Yet it would be misleading to stop there. It's not white people per se who are responsible for this. It's the white people who crafted the proposal to expand welfare massively in the 1960s to take black people from jobs and make them dependent on government doles for generations. It's the white people who were convinced by those people that they would be promoting racial harmony and helping out people they felt guilty about. It's the white people who continue to vote for people who promote such policies due to the rhetoric that it's the decent thing to do. I think it's unfair to portray white conservatives as opposing things like welfare simply because they don't care about black people or poor people. But it's certainly evil to portray black conservatives who make this sort of argument that way. What's amazing to me is that McWhorter gets that sort of critique all the time from people who don't even bother to hear what he's saying.

McWhorter's more recent National Review piece on race and the government response to the hurricane is even more telling, and I think more obviously correct. His closing comments on identity politics are apt. I agree with them fully, but it's sort of old hat for him. This is nothing new, and I've talked about it many times. What caught my eye in this piece is the first part. His response to Kanye West's "it's been five days because most of the people are black. George Bush doesn't care about black people" is hilarious, if you can put aside the fact that we're talking about people suffering here (and that West is using these people's suffering merely to score political points):

I do not agree with the president on everything, though I've often defended some of his less popular statements and policies, against liberals who think his views are too conservative and against conservatives who think his policies are simply not conservative. It should never be said that I defend him no matter what he does. I happen to agree with him more than any liberal or moderate would, and I also happen to agree with him more than most conservatives would. That's not because I agree with whatever he would say but because I simply think he has the right views on many things that I don't think either major party gets quite as right. That being said, I wanted to disagree with something he did that I suspect most people I know would agree with him on. Last Friday, he made a statement criticizing Bill Bennett's infamous comments Wednesday morning about abortion and its social effects. I don't think the president was right in declaring Bennett's comments "not appropriate". I've seen two complaints against what Bennett said, one completely stupid and the other based on a genuine but misguided worry, indeed a logical fallacy. This second sort of issue comes in two forms, the more prominent and more misguided one and the less prominent and a little more reasonable one that I think ultimately is still not a good reason to criticize Bennett.

What Bennett said was pretty clear and straightforward. He was responding to a caller who thought you could argue against abortion on social consequences grounds. In particular, the caller wanted to say that abortion is wrong because if we didn't have it we'd have more taxpayers, and the GNP would be higher. Society would be more productive. Regardless of whether such a claim is true, if abortion is wrong it's for much deeper reasons than that. Bennett wanted to distinguish between the mere consequences of an action and what makes it wrong, thus siding squarely on the non-consequentialist side of ethical theory (which is the right view). He wanted to make this point by showing that an action can have good consequences without being a good action. So he picked an example that most everyone would consider horrendous with consequences that, independent of other factors, would be good. Since the original example was just like that, his point would be made, and it would be a very effective way of making the point. So he chose the example of aborting all black babies, which no one in their right mind would consider a good thing, not only for the horrific element of killing a whole generation of kids (presumably without consent of either parent). What's even worse is that it singles out just black babies to kill, which is verging in the direction of genocide. Yet surely such an action would reduce crime, Bennett points out. This is thus a very good example of the sort of argument Bennett wanted to make his point. He could have made it raceless and just had every fetus being killed regardless of race, but that wouldn't have been as bad a case, and he wanted it to be very bad.

Michael Eric Dyson is on C-SPAN2 right now at the Harlem Book Fair. Someone just asked him if you can simultaneously say that we need to work on structures in society and work on attitudes within the black community. He didn't really answer the question at first but spent a long time complaining about Bill Cosby's steretypes of what counts as attitudes worth changing. He picked out the names Bill Cosby made fun of, names typically found among black Americans that were made up to sound African but with no basis in Africa (and one Islamic name, Muhammad). He picked out styles of dress that count as illegitimate, seeing one style of dress as superior. The only example Dyson mentioned, though, is the unwillingness to pull pants up high enough to cover underwear, which I think does have a moral element. Flashing people just isn't socially appropriate, and that's not a racist attitude.

This is part ten of an ongoing series on affirmative action that I've been continuing sporadically. The first post is here. It introduces the series and provides links to each post in the series. This is my final post on the arguments in favor of affirmative action, and I've saved the one I think is best for last. One common objection to affirmative action is that it's in principle ruled out by the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court hasn't been willing as a body to go along with this, but three justices (Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas) do seem to me to think it's a good argument. If it's unconstitutional to discriminate on the basis of race, then why is it ok to discriminate in admissions on the basis of race?

I don't ultimately think that's a good argument, for one reason. Race can be used as the basis of discrimination when race is relevant. If a government-funded performing arts company decided to stage a perfomance about Malcolm X, they are well within their rights to discriminate against white or Asian actors for the part of the lead character. They'll want someone black. If they were doing a perfomance about President Bush, they won't select a black lead unless they want to do some weird sort of parody. [People sometimes do this. Othello has been done with the races of characters all reversed.] Most of the time it's perfectly ok to see being black or being white as a qualification to play a character who is specified as black or white. It's technically discrimination, but it's not legally discrimination, because race properly counts as a qualification for the position in question. Some have argued that affirmative action can be justified on similar grounds. If race counts as a qualification, then affirmative action is merely treating qualifications as what they are. Not using affirmative action would then be ignoring real qualifications.

I'm way behind on this, but I had some thoughts on this that I hadn't seen anyone else saying, so now that I have a moment I'd like to say them. Nicholas Kristof's column in The New York Times a week and a half ago was on interracial couples in American culture and particular in popular media. This generated quite a bit of discussion.

Thomas Sowell has been insisting for years that what causes lower performance levels by blacks in school and on intelligence and aptitude tests is cultural. His latest column summarizes his arguments that it's not racism or inherent genetic unintelligence at root. What I haven't seen in his work until now is much of a positive story besides simply saying that it's cultural. [hat tip: truegrit] This column gives a more detailed answer. The cause is the redneck culture that blacks absorbed that is now concentrated among what he calls black rednecks in today's ghettos. According to Joanne Jacobs [hat tip: Sam], his argument is not to demean black culture but to say that this redneck black culture is not authentic black culture. His book-length treatment will discuss that aspect, apparently. I didn't see it in the column.

Laurence Thomas points out a piece of evidence for one element of victimology. His main thesis is that vocal black media types (he mentions no names, but I imagine he has Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton at the front of his mind) will justifiably complain and urge change when white people's behavior toward black people is quite atrocious. Yet the same people will be up in arms at any relatively minor slight by white people, and they'll say little to nothing about such gross offenses against black people as the recent case of four black teenagers raping a disabled black girl. This displays a misplaced sense of moral outrage. Laurence says it better than I could:

Sam points out one counter-productive and truly discriminatory consequence of the absolute colorblindness view that most pundits won't notice because they're mostly men. The view that it's immoral to recognize racial differences requires that we don't pay attention to skin color when dealing with things like makeup or hair care. It's a completely unworkable view in the light of basic biological realities, never mind in light of harmful social processes that need to be talked about and can only be talked about in terms of the racial categories that gave rise to those social problems.

New member of The Conservative Brotherhood Joseph C. Phillips writes about the ban on felons' being allowed to vote. The following quote stood out to me as showing genuine insight into something I think it's easy to ignore if you don't look at it from the proper perspective:

Confronting a party that is suffering due to its own lack of vision is discouraging enough, but it is truly disheartening to witness a party so cynical that it would look to criminals to shore up its base, particularly when the overwhelming majority of the victims of this new interest group were other black people.

Now that's the kind of argument you won't see from most white conservatives, who tend to give general arguments that they expect most people to follow. What distinguishes black conservatives is that they will tend to argue for what's best for black people, from the perspective of black people, since they are themselves black. If you want to convince white people of conservative views on this issue, tell them to read George Will. Black conservatives tend to come up with arguments that black people will hear, at least if they're not tuning someone out from the outset as an Uncle Tom merely for being conservative. Joseph has provided just such an argument here.

The Conservative Brotherhood recently accepted some new members, and apparently this has drawn some attention to them. Wizbang highlights the group (mistakenly calling it a blog), and a commenter decided to make the impossible to defend claim that it's immoral to form such a group. I first thought that he was claiming it was racist to make these distinctions, but he doesn't go quite that far. It's a dangerous enough attitude anyway. Chapomatic expresses a pretty similar worry, but he's not as firm about it and considers it a more minor issue among people he greatly respects. You can see other responses to this at Conservative Brotherhood members Baldilocks, Cobb, Michael King, Sam, Ambra Nykola, and Booker Rising. I've left comments on a few of the sites so far, but I'd like to organize all of what I've been thinking and writing together in one post.

The primary issue that keeps coming up is colorblindness. I've addressed this issue before. There's a kind of colorblindness that's good. When you get to know someone, you see them in terms of being a person and not in terms of being a person defined by color. At the same time, there's something very insulting when a white person says to a black person, "Well I don't really think of you as black." It's as if you're saying "You don't fit my picture of what black people are supposed to be like." This kind of colorblindness is just plain racist, albeit a kind of residual and unintentional racism that you might not blame someone for.

I've been struggling with the idea that we have no shorthand for the view that homosexuality is abnormal and morally aberrant. Most who hate such a view call it homophobia, but there's a clear distinction between those who have this view and those who truly don't like people who are gay, are uncomfortable with gay people being involved in their life in any way, etc. Well, now I've seen a term that sounds to me as if it's just simply descriptive of the view in question. Someone who considers heterosexuality normal and/or normative is heteronormative. I think there are already a few ambiguities in the term, but it's better than anything else I've seen so far. The biggest problem is that the people who coined it seem to rule out the possibility that it could be ok to be heteronormative, as evidences by those of the Harvard-Radcliffe Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Supporters Alliance (BGLTSA) who are criticizing Jada Pinkett Smith's comments last week at a Harvard multi-culturalist event, a criticism that itself raises some interesting moral questions.

This is the 9th part of an ongoing series that I've been letting lie dormant for a few months. The series starts here. The links to all the other parts are in the inaugural post. I've been working through the arguments in favor of affirmative action before turning to the arguments against such policies. In this post, I'm considering the argument that gave the name 'affirmative action' to the policy. According to this argument, affirmative action gives approval, support, etc. to those who are too often not given it, and that provides a moral justification for affirmative action.

Jonathan Ichikawa has been complaining (actually starting with this post) that some on the right are talking about the high percentage of abortions among black women as genocide. He's not disputing any of the facts they cite. He just thinks it's too much to call it genocide, particularly given that the people who are making the decisions to kill their fetuses are themselves black. I'm not sure that self-originated genocide is impossible. Why couldn't a race commit genocide against themselves? Even so, I think a number of other factors make abortion less the matter of choice that pro-choicers want it to be a more in the direction of coercion. Most of the post that follows develops from a comment I left on his post.

Outside the Beltway notes that Senate Republicans will indeed change filibustering rules for presidential nominations that have made it past a committee vote. They've targeted Judge Janice Rogers Brown. Two moral issues are raised by this. First, if Republicans chose Judge Brown as the first to do this with simply because she's a black woman, as a number of liberals are claiming, is that immoral? Second, is the removal of this rule a bad idea, as even a number of conservatives have argued?

Pseudo-Polymath has challenged Christian bloggers to defend whatever divisions among followers of Christ are justified (and I assume to explain which ones not are justified and why). He's been chronicling the responses so far.

I'm going to try to do something independent of what people have said so far, almost without referring to the other posts. If I focused on getting into everything the others have talked about, I don't think I would be focusing on the things I consider to be most important about this sort of issue. The one post I do want to mention is Jollyblogger's post. It's not in the roundup above, but I want something he says to be in the background as I move through what I want to say, so I'll start with a quick comment on what he says and then move into the more controversial claims I'm going to defend.

My list of things to blog about has gotten too long and contains a number of things that are too old for me to want to bother with extended comments, so here are some of them that I'm giving up on, along with some more recent ones that I've decided not to comment on but thought were worth a link.

This is the fourth part of what will be at least a seven-part series on Justice Clarence Thomas. The first post is here, introducing the series and explaining the 98-page paper from which I'm taking the content of posts 2-6 (at least) of this series. In "Just Another Brother on the SCT?: What Justice Clarence Thomas Teaches Us About the Influence of Racial Identity", Angela Onwuachi-Willig argues that Justice Thomas' conservatism is a distinctively black conservatism with a rich history in black conservative tradition. I've already looked at that history and the general themes of contemporary black conservatism. This post focuses on how those themes lead to today's black conservatives' positions in three particular issues: education, affirmative action, and crime.

This is the second part of what will be at least a seven-part series on Justice Clarence Thomas. The first post is here, introducing the series and explaining the 98-page paper from which I'm taking the content of posts 2-6 (at least) of this series. In "Just Another Brother on the SCT?: What Justice Clarence Thomas Teaches Us About the Influence of Racial Identity", Angela Onwuachi-Willig argues that Justice Thomas' conservatism is a distinctively black conservatism with a rich history in black conservative tradition. This tradition will be the focus on this post. The first of three sections of her paper details the long history of black conservatism in the United States, going back to the 18th century. Booker T. Washington, of course, was one of the major figures in this great tradition, but he was well over 100 years into it (late 19th/early 20th century). The liberal orthodoxy sees black conservatives as sellouts who seek to accomodate to whites to gain benefits that others aren't willing to seek if it requires giving up too much of blackness. The black conservative tradition, however, has always been the exact opposite. From the very beginning, it was an attempt to accomodate whites to the concerns of black people. Booker T. Washington states this in terms of showing blacks' worthiness by the standards of white people so that white people will accomodate black people. He even uses the word 'accomodate'.

Stuart Buck links to an article by Angela Onwuachi-Willig, published by the Iowa Law Review, that makes some interesting claims. The title is "Just Another Brother on the SCT?: What Justice Clarence Thomas Teaches Us About the Influence of Racial Identity".

According to this paper, Justice Thomas' brand of conservatism is unlike that of many other people who take similar positions. Contrary to the claims of many on the left that he's a sellout and a puppet, a good deal of his conservatism derives from his being black. The author considers herself a liberal black womanist, so there's obviously little political baggage driving this paper. She just thinks he's an interesting public figure with an interesting intellectual resume. Oh, and she thinks the liberal jeering that paints him as a puppet of Justice Scalia is a result of the same racism that led to the same connection between Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan that similarly ignored the actual facts.

It's a 98-page paper that I don't expect very many, if any, of my readers to bother reading, so I'll give some highlights in subsequent posts:

Part 2: The Black Conservative Tradition
Part 3: Contemporary Black Conservatism
Part 4: Particular Issues in Black Conservatism
Part 5: Justice Thomas' History and Background
Part 6: Justice Thomas on the Particular Issues
Part 7: Justice Thomas' Judicial Philosophy

I haven't updated my Favorite Posts section of my blogroll in a very long time, and I'm finally getting around to that tedious task. As part of that process, I'm collecting all the race posts currently in the list into this post so that I'll end up with a much smaller list to start with. Otherwise I'm not going to have enough room to keep the list on one page, one of my guidelines for any section of my blogroll. Since there's nothing really new here but just a bunch of summaries of and links to old posts, I'm going to put it all in the extended entry. I should also mention before going on that my similar Theology Posts, Apologetics Posts, and Posts on Homosexuality should be getting updated through this process. I'm not going to move them forward in time at this point.

Update (11-26-04): Somehow I forgot to include October, so I've added one more.

John McWhorter voted for Kerry (which is good evidence that calling him a black conservative is at best inaccurate), but he's urging black voters not to stay monolithic in their exclusive loyalty to Democrats. One thing I really appreciate about McWhorter is his willingness to say what he likes about Bush while disagreeing with him on important issues. He does the same about Republicans in general, and he thinks Republicans favor policies at some times and with some issues that should lead black voters to vote for them now and then. He's insisting that the black voice will not be heard by Democrats if they can rely on the black vote every time without doing anything to earn it, and even liberal black leaders like Al Sharpton repeatedly make the point that Democrats don't have black concerns at heart most of the time.

As a result, black voters are merely the mascot of the Democratic party, as evangelicals have been with Republicans, though if you believe the pundits that might change. One reason why it might be changing is that evangelicals who are hardline conservatives threatened to bolt if Bush went too soft of gay marriage, and many of them did anyway. McWhorter is saying that black voters need to consider Republicans and then vote for them when they have good things to offer, regardless of the racist past of the Republican party (not that the Southern Democrats are any better). I think he's right. The only way black voters' concerns will be listened to and acted on is if their vote is at stake. If black voters were swing voters, as all the other minority groups are, then parties would have to give the dominant mindset of black voters a place at the table.

The same might be true of evangelicals. The issues many evangelicals care about that more moderate Republicans have avoided have now come front and center for the Republican leadership, but there's a catch. If the Republican leadership continues to ignore the biblical concerns for things that conservative Republicans tend not to care about, then many evangelicals will still feel ignored within the Republican hierarchy. Some evangelicals care more about gay marriage and abortion than caring for the world God has given to any government to steward, both in terms of the environment or in terms of the people. Many don't see a hierarchy and want someone who will value all their principles. Since that's harder to come by, picking and choosing will always go by what seems more important at the moment, and gay marriage judicial and mayoral activism and the likelihood of Supreme Court vacancies on a court favoring abortion 5-4 have decided the vote this time around. That may not be so next time.

I've said this before about him, but I'm incredibly impressed by Senator Russ Feingold from Wisconsin as a man of character. I strongly disagree with a number of his views, but he knows when a political manuever by his colleagues or those who support his views is just downright evil. He stood against the Borking attempt on John Ashcroft, with only one other Democrat voting alongside him. Now he's attacking those who demean Condi Rice with their racist language about her being an Aunt Jemima, calling them racially insensitive. This guy is not conservative in any way, and he admits that this kind of language is racist. Why is it that so many other liberals won't see how close to the bottom of the barrel this sort of thing is? Feingold has no political reason to say such things. I'm not sure I'd vote for him, but I'd be glad to shake his hand and tell him I appreciate what he's done in standing up for what's right.

I was waiting until the final post in this series showed up, but it was supposed to be Monday and hasn't appeared, so I'll just go ahead and post links to all the posts so far. Rick Sander has been blogging about his research on affirmative action at law schools at The Volokh Conspiracy. A lot of it matches up with things I already knew, but I picked up some interesting facts from his observations and arguments.

The opening post explains where he's going and points out that he's politically liberal with a strong history of supporting civil rights. I get the sense that this recent work of his converted him to the view that affirmative action is harmful and that he hadn't thought so earlier. Part 1 argues that three common views (and statements by practitioners of it) are just plain false: "(a) the preferences are small and not automatic, (b) race is one of a myriad of factors taken into account to create a diverse class, and (c) everyone admitted is fully qualified to do well at the school". Part 2 discusses the negative effect of affirmative action in law schools in terms of grades, graduation rates, and acceptance into the bar. Part 3 looks at the negative impact of all the prior effects in the job market. Part 4 predicts, with real numbers as the basis, what would happen if affirmative action would be removed. I already believed a lot of these arguments in the general case, but the way he's done this with law schools in particular and with hard data seems to me as if it should be pretty convincing even to those who start out believing these policies are overall helpful. Read on for more detailed analysis.

I haven't done anything further in my series on affirmative action in a while (see the introductory post to links to the rest of the series), but I hope to be putting together a few more entries in the next week or so because I'm about to cover the issue in my classes again. I've just done some more reading on the reparations issue, which I first covered in Part V of this series. There are actually two separate and unrelated arguments for reparations, and I now think the issue is much more complicated than I did before, so I wanted to say some things about that.

The main argument I'm considering come from Bernard Boxill's paper "A Lockean Argument for Black Reparations" in The Journal of Ethics 7 (2003):63-91. If you have universty or other access to the internet, you can find this at the Kluwer site for online papers, but you'll probably need to access it through you're library's website. The main objections I'm considering are all available online without academica access of need for registration. Thomas Sowell: Reparations for Slavery?, The Reparation Fraud, and The Reparations Fraud: II and then John McWhorter, The Reparations Racket. McWhorter later develops this argument in a chapter of his Authentically Black, but the key points are in this piece.

Volokh had a nice discussion last week about the race of Bush's judge appointees. I was going to post it before the election, but somehow it got buried in my list that I was unable to read carefully through in the last days of being alternately completely exhausted or completely absorbed in grading, in both cases leading to not much blogging.

The interesting result of what Volokh says is that a higher percentage of Bush judge appointees are black than the percentage of lawyers who are black. His appointment rate is higher than the proportional level of the entire available pool of black lawyers. Given that he has a smaller selection pool to pick from if he wants conservative judges, that means he's had to go much further out of his way to find them than Clinton did to get his much higher percentage of black appointees. The NAACP is mad at Bush because his judge appointments are not proportional to the percentage of blacks in society as a whole. This is why the quota version of affirmative action was rendered unconstitutional in 1978 (not that the spirit of quotas is completely gone, but it's technically illegal now to reserve a certain number of spots for people of a certain racial classification). The NAACP thinking here is exactly along quota lines, as absurd as the consequence turns out to be.

I received the following email this morning:

To all Syracuse University students:

We take pride in working together to make Syracuse University a welcoming, safe and respectful living and learning environment. The efforts of students, faculty and staff to promote and develop the appreciation of differences and similarities on this campus are numerous and ongoing. To continue promoting a safe and secure community free of crime and/or policy violations that are motivated by discrimination, sexual and bias-related harassment, and other violations of rights, we must work together every day! At this time of year, we especially need your assistance.

Halloween-related activities can be fun, but they are not an opportunity for carelessness, insensitivity and disrespect toward others. Incidents here and on other campuses have drawn attention to bias-related incidents, and we ask that everyone in the Syracuse University community become engaged in making this
campus safe, secure and bias-free.

The student organizations listed below and I ask that everyone who chooses to wear a Halloween costume please take a minute to think about what kind of response your costume may elicit from others, and make a mature and responsible decision as to whether your costume is appropriate. Portrayals of ethnicity and race, gender, class, religions, cultures or sexual orientations, just
to name a few, may be considered in poor taste or offensive.

As members of a university community, we ask you to think about how others may be impacted by the costume you choose to wear. These portrayals, while sometimes considered harmless, tend to reinforce stereotypes, inaccurately represent cultures, demean groups or individuals, or make a mockery of Syracuse University values and beliefs. While the intent may be harmless, in many instances the end result may be unintentionally yet unfortunately damaging. If you choose to take part in any Halloween-related festivities this year, please be respectful and responsible. Thank you.

This is the 6th part of an ongoing series, beginning here. The links to all the other parts are in the inaugural post. I've looked at a few arguments in favor of affirmative action so far, and we're now up to the argument based on equal opportunity. Affirmative action opponents insist that affirmative action leads to less equal opportunity for those who are not intended to benefit from it (i.e. white people for the most part, also Asians at many elite schools, and men for gender-based affirmative action). There's something to that, because someone in that position has to meet higher standards to be accepted than someone in an under-represented group, and something similar occurs in workplace affirmative action cases. However, those who argue for affirmative action on equal opportunity grounds want to make a case that those in the underrepresented groups don't really have equal opportunities. Many of them are in a demographic group that has a higher instance of being impoverished, though most of those who apply to college are not in that group as it turns out and are thus not representative of their group. One problem has to do with less access to necessary tools for doing well in school, including computers, though most public libraries have those now, and SAT preparation classes, which aren't necessary to doing well on the SAT but do give a distinct advantage, and only the upper end of the middle class will want to shell out the money for them, but once that's clear it's not longer a racial issue but a financial issue, and poor white people will need to be given the benefit of lower standards also. No current policy I know of does that. If there is indeed discrimination that's harmful enough to people in these groups, then there's less opportunity to succeed. That was the subject of the first argument I considered. I could spend some time listing the ways there might not be equal opportunities, but that's not so much the point. I don't think any conservative on the issue of affirmative action will insist that there are no ways in which underrepresented groups will in general turn out to have a lower level of opportunity to achieve as high scores and grades as others. As a group, they have a lower level of opportunity.

I pulled this definition of 'racism' off the Oxford English Dictionary website. Most people can't access it unless they have access through a university or other academic organization, so I'll quote the whole thing here. My question is: what's wrong with this definition?

[f. RACE n.2 + -ISM; cf. F. racisme (Robert 1935).]

a. The theory that distinctive human characteristics and abilities are determined by race. b. = RACIALISM.

1936 L. DENNIS Coming Amer. Fascism 109 If..it be assumed that one of our values should be a type of racism which excludes certain races from citizenship, then the plan of execution should provide for the annihilation, deportation, or sterilization of the excluded races. 1938 E. & C. PAUL tr. Hirschfeld's Racism xx. 260 The apostles and energumens of racism can in all good faith give free rein to impulses of which they would be ashamed did they realise their true nature. 1940 R. BENEDICT Race: Science & Politics i. 7 Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed. 1952 M. BERGER Equality by Statute 236 Racism, tension in industrial, urban areas. 1952 Theology LV. 283 The idolatry of our timeits setting up of nationalism, racism, vulgar materialism. 1960 New Left Rev. Jan./Feb. 21/2 George Rogers saw fit to kow-tow to the incipient racism of his electorate by including a line about getting rid of ‘undesirable elements’. 1964 GOULD & KOLB Dict. Social Sci. 571/2 Racism is a newer term for the word racialism... There is virtual agreement that it refers to a doctrine of racial supremacy. 1971 Ceylon Daily News (Colombo) 18 Sept. 8/5 Mr. Seneviratne is welcome to his ideal of inter-racial marriages as panacea for Racism. 1972 J. L. DILLARD Black English iii. 90 In the British sailors' reactions to the slaves.., the very early existence of racism is as well documented as the difference in language. 1974 M. FIDO R. Kipling 50/2 In The Story of Muhammad Din he wrote one of the most economical and bitter attacks on British racism ever penned. 1976 Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio) 4 Mar. A2/4 The Vatican radio said,..‘Racism might have different faces but it will always be reprehensible.’ 1977 M. WALKER National Front vi. 155 A strike of the Asian workers against racism in the factory.

This is Part 5 of an ongoing series that started here, and you can find links to all the other posts there as well. [Update: I've restated some of this with a more careful presentation of the argument for reparations here, in Part 7 of the series. My conclusion is unaltered, but I've realized the argument for reparations had far more to be said in favor of it.]

I'm in the process of discussing the arguments in favor of affirmative action before moving on the the arguments against it, and we're up to the reparations argument now. As I summarized it in the inaugural post of the series, the argument says affirmative action is a worthy practice on the grounds that it provides compensation or reparation to underrepresented minority groups who have been harmed in the past (and perhaps still in the present) by injustices that favor the well-represented groups.

Most people I've known, upon hearing this argument, immediately object that no one today is responsible for the fact that anyone enslaved anyone else well over a hundred years ago. But the argument doesn't really assume the moral responsibility of any individual today for any actions of long-dead people. It's probably most helpful to think of this via an analogy. Suppose I grow up in a fairly wealthy family who die and leave all their money to me. I've been living a fairly comfortable life, and I haven't had to work hard to keep it that way. Then I discover something. My great-grandfather came into all this money by stealing it from another family, and I start to wonder what became of that other family. I investigate and discover that they've been living in extreme poverty since then, to the point where survival was even difficult. The last remaining member of the family is in dire straits now. I've clearly benefited greatly at the extreme expense of this last remaining family member, and it was because of a wrong that was done. I didn't do it, but isn't it at least worth considering whether I owe this person something?

How do you extend this to slavery? It seems to me that we can get a plausible moral premise for reparations by saying that, to the extent I've benefited from the existence of slavery in the past and to the extent that any have been harmed by it, I owe something to those who were harmed by it. That's the principle behind this, and it seems plausible if my conclusion in the analogy is plausible (which I think it is). What's not so clear is how to develop this specifically.

La Shawn posts the results of a new survey on whether Native Americans are offended by the name of the Washington Redskins. I'd like to know the numbers on how many are offended by the term 'Native Americans', since almost every single Native American I have known prefers to be called Indian. Maybe that offends people from India or of Indian descent, but that just shows the complicated waters politically correct sailor must navigate. (I suggest that it can't really be done.)

According to the poll, 90% of Native Americans said the team's name is acceptable, and 9% considered it offensive. What was interesting to me was that the percentage considering it offensive goes up at higher levels of education. Here are more details on the breakdown:

Whatever else may be true of the Republicans' choice of Alan Keyes for the Senate race in Illinois (and his acceptance of it) and whether it's carpetbagging or tokenism, this Thomas Sowell quote about the two parties and how they've treated their candidates in this race seems dead right:

While Democrats are quick to accuse Republicans of tokenism whenever they put someone black in any prominent position, it is hard to imagine that an obscure member of the Illinois legislature would have been featured at a national convention if he were white.

He goes on to argue that Obama's public face in this campaign is at odds with his record and some passionate speeches he's made in the past. When I commented on this in passing a while back, Wink called me on it for not praising him for his moderate message at the convention. I indeed liked about half of what he was saying at the convention, and the next day I put it up on the board for my students to show them that it isn't just black conservatives that say this sort of thing. It's internal criticism within black America, and one liberal black entertainer (Bill Cosby) and one up-and-coming black Democratic politician have been saying it. I do appreciate that. It not only shows that the claims of self-hating racism against those who say such things and are conservative are idiotic unless the people saying them also say them about these guys (which I know some do, at least about Cosby), but these are people who will more easily be listened to. So I do appreciate that he's saying these things. My problem is that I see his whole record as being at odds with the conservative-sounding parts of his message in that convention speech. That's why I have really mixed feelings about him, and as cranky and idiosyncratic as Alan Keyes is I'm sure I'd vote for him over Obama.

His final complaint worries me, though. He fears that people won't see the clear choice on issues in this race and in others, including the presidential election, and just vote according to image and hype. That's the problem with a media-driven election, and this country seems to want those more than an issue-driven election. That's scarier than any of the rest of the issues he raises.

John McWhorter has changed his policy on what words to use to describe his racial group. He has used 'African American' and 'black' almost interchangeably, but now he's decided not to use 'African American' anymore and only to use 'Black'. He gives his reasons in the article why he won't use 'African American' anymore. I wonder what his reason for the change from 'b' to 'B' is. He doesn't say that. I've heard other people's, but he's a linguist, so I really want to hear his reason.

This post is an interlude, so it sort of doesn't fit into the schedule I set up with the six arguments for affirmative action and six against (see the first post in the series, which also has links to parts II and III). I assume I'll pick up with the third argument for affirmative action in part V.

For now I wanted to record a thought I had while hearing an argument for a minimalist kind of racial profiling, in particular with regard to terrorists since 9/11. If airline screening is completely random, it seems as if it will be far less effective than if they take into account characteristics that are more common among terrorists. Racial profiling is stupid if it doesn't involve any reason to single out the people being singled out, as with the case of stopping black people on the New Jersey Turnpike, when it turned out black motorists weren't any more likely in that context to be doing anything illegal. Even those who would resist using race as the basis for finding terrorists (which it may be a good idea to resist, since al Qaeda has been reported to be using European-looking operatives) should acknowledge that it is a factor that seems relevant enough to consider it. The discussion I heard the tail end of on one of the cable news networks a few minutes ago ended with someone arguing that race or ethnicity should at least be considered as a tie-breaker between two people who might be considered for a screening. All of this language sounded remarkably like the language used in affirmative action discussions.

Note: This is Part III, in case you didn't read the title. Read Part I for links to the rest of the series.

The second argument for affirmative action is that it provides role models for people in underrepresented groups. If young black students see a black physics professor, they'll more likely see that physics is "for black people" instead of just thinking of it as white, and the racial disparity among physics professors will decrease. If having black physics professors takes going out of your way to encourage black physics professors by being more willing to hire a professor who is black, if it takes being more willing to accept a black student to a Ph.D. program in physics, if it takes being more willing to accept black undergraduates interested in science, then affirmative action can play a role in providing physics professor role models to young black students.

Additionally, a black professor has some sort of role model effect on white students. If white students see a black professor who is really good at abstract math, it will help overcome a stereotype that black people aren't good at that sort of thing. If white students see a black professor of ancient Greek, they'll come to see that black people are not just isolative separatists who are only interested in a subject because of immediate practical concerns but can be interested in a subject simply because it's interesting. Mostly, though, having a black professor means having a black person in an authority relationship. It's always important when a group is overcoming being viewed as lower on some hierarchy of social relationships to have people in positions that are higher on the social hierarchy. It means having a reversal of the more common relationship many white middle-class Americans have with many black people they have any relation with. It means a different dynamic of affirmation and respect from what some people are used to, and it transforms how they view people. Those are all excellent effects of choices to go out of our way to select underrepresented people for positions they would less likely be chosen for otherwise.

Note: See Part I for some context on this series.

The first argument for affirmative action is based on seeing it as a remedy for discrimination. Affirmative action can be implemented to prevent qualified applicants from being passed over because of race. I don't think anyone in the debate disagrees with affirmative action for this purpose. Even Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice Scalia, and Justice Thomas, who think it's always wrong to lower standards based on race, think it's ok to use affirmative action to require people not to raise standards based on race. The problem with using this argument to support affirmative action in higher education is that no one in college admissions discriminates against underrepresented minorities. Current policies go the other way, and those in positions to influence who will be hired in admissions offices would prefer to hire people who approve of affirmative action. So this could be a good argument for affirmative action in hiring but not for college admissions.

One of the topics I've been teaching for the past year or so is affirmative action. I reviewed a lot more material on it during the spring semester in a short period of time than any previous time teaching it, and I've had the opportunity to teach on it this summer after having done all that. As a result, I think I've got a good presentation now of the various considerations offered for and against it, and I think I've figured out that a balanced presentation should conclude with a choice between two options. Either the arguments for affirmative action are strong enough that the negatives get outweighed, or the negatives are so serious that the reasons for affirmative action aren't good enough. It really does seem to me that those are the only two reasonable positions. Some think affirmative action is always wrong by its very nature. Others think that our history and current circumstances don't just make it a good idea but make it essential to racial justice. Those two absolute positions don't seem to me to hold water, even though at times in the past I've held both of them (not at the same time, of course).

In the case of hiring, choosing people for positions of influence, etc., I can see some forms of affirmative action as worthwhile and even sometimes necessary. This can't involve lowering standards a lot, since the people selected must be qualified, but it can involve lowering them enough to find qualified people of underrepresented races if having them there is worthwhile enough. If you see race as a qualification, this argument is easier to make, but I think that's harder to do than someone people make it sound. I also think it's easier to do than some people would like. So I'll end up taking an unusually complicated view on hiring and qualifications, which in the end will probably offend conservatives and liberals alike. When it comes to college and university admissions, however, I think the negatives are so bad that I think the Universtity of California system did the right thing to cancel race-based affirmative action in favor of income-based policies. It will take some great effort to explain why I think both these things, so you'll have to bear with me as I work through a number of different issues. In this post, I want to deal with a couple more preliminary issues and then list the arguments for and against affirmative action that I'll analyze fully in forthcoming posts.

Eugene Volokh has a nice response to those who like to throw around the term 'self-hating' for those who criticize groups they belong to. People call Michelle Malkin a self-hater for her surprising defense of WWII Japanese interment camps. I can't agree with her stance on that issue, but Volokh is right. Nothing about this counts as self-hating. Clarence Thomas and other black conservatives frequently receive the same sort of criticism.

The argument for using such a label seems to me to go like this:

1. X person belongs to group G.
2. X says some things that are critical against G.
3. X must therefore hate G.
4. Therefore, X hates X's own group.
5. Therefore, X hates X.

This is such a poor argument that Volokh is right to take it apart piece by piece.

Eugene Volokh makes some insightful comparisons between different kinds of discrimination. Many people create an analogy between sexual orientation discrimination (e.g. in the Boy Scouts) and race discrimination. The argument is that we outlaw race discrimination because people have no control over their race, and therefore we have to outlaw discrimination along any other lines caused by things outside people's control. Aside from the assumption that sexual orientation is entirely outside one's control (which I would say is at best only partly and sometimes true), there are too many kinds of discrimination that we don't have laws against that involve things outside a person's control for this sort of argument to work without raising the objection that such a principle would require changing too many laws to apply consistently. Discrimination according to height, age, sex, ugliness, and many other factors might be morally wrong, but we don't have universal laws against such practices. If we did, Hollywood would be put out of business, but so many other things we do would require serious revision, such as good things like men's and women's bathrooms, unenforceable things including how people vote for president (which tends to favor the taller candidate), and bad things that no one wants to outlaw such as wanting to marry someone attractive. What's worse is the fact that some of the areas where we really want to stop discrimination involve choice, such as religion or ideology, so whether someone really can change something is neither necessary nor sufficient for whether we should have laws against discriminating on that basis. A more careful and honest argument is necessary for the case of sexual orientation discrimination, one that acknowledges this.

President Bush has revealed that his opposition to what's commonly called affirmative action (but not what he calls affirmative action, which is simply seeking out more candidates from unrepresented groups) is firmly consistent. One fallacious argument against removing affirmative action is that people are given a boost in admissions processes if they have family members who attended the institution. (It's fallacious because the existence of one practice you don't agree with doesn't necessarily mean another one is ok. If they're both wrong for the same reasons, then the existence of legacy admissions doesn't mean we should retain affirmative action. It might simply mean getting rid of both.)

Now I think it's in a university's best interests to consider this sort of factor, as much as it is to consider someone's soccer or French horn abilities. I think some occasions of considering race are a good idea. But Bush's view on these matters is merit only, and that requires getting rid of legacies. It's nice to see that he's saying that publicly. Anyone who takes his stance on race preferences should, to be fair, give reasons why legacy preferences are ok if they aren't also going to oppose both. He's taken the more straightforward approach in opposing both. Of course, this won't be publicized much. So far the only place I've seen it is at Jon Mandle's post at Crooked Timber three days after the CNN story and two days ago.

Oprah just had a segment on black people in Nova Scotia. Like most black people in the U.S., they have their own community, including their own churches. They're descendants of slaves from the U.S. Nova Scotia was a stop on the underground railroad. Canada outlawed slavery before the U.S. did. What was shocking to me was how these people talked. They sounded just like any other Canadian would. There was absolutely nothing I could detect of standard Black English inflections.

Why might this be? I have no easy explanation. Black English is to be found in any large enough community of black Americans, with regional differ