Black Skin, White Masks: Intro

 I read the intro. I don't have a lot of time, but I do want to summarize it. Basically, he argues that it is unhealthy to be a person defined by a race, either via pride or shame regarding that race, and it is similarly unhealthy to be a person seeking to masquerade culturally as another race. It is healthy to be simply a person who eschews racial identification.

So he says that black men and white men are unhealthy, but men are fine. Since this was a book written in French in the 1950's, there may be nuances missing in the translation, things that don't carry over well to how we speak about race in 2021. And the gendered language is even more complicated, given the differences between the 1950's and 2020's, and also the differences between French and English. Take it for what it's worth.

Do not take him as someone deliberately obtuse about race and color. He makes it clear that the book will discuss how living as a subject of colonialism screws people up. He sees racism as real and a problem, and will address it unapologetically.

Let's see how the book unfolds.

Latest book: 'A Dream Deferred' by Shelby Steele

I recently read A Dream Deferred by Shelby Steele, a book which argues that post-60's liberalism has focused on social policy as a means of redemption from shame. His basic thesis is that once white Americans fully came to grips with the enormity of America's racial crimes, they sought redemption and hence lowered standards for African-Americans.  He critiques welfare and affirmative action, both of which have changed between 1998 (the publication date of his book) and 2020. Welfare is no longer the open-ended subsistence bestowed in the 1990's (Clinton and Gingrich passed welfare reform), and while diversity programs run as strong as ever, explicit quotas and set-asides are mostly gone. Implicit, hidden quotas, fudged evaluations, etc., all of these things still exist, more than ever. But good luck getting somebody to lay it out in a document that could be subpoenaed.

Steele says that this is all about white people seeking redemption from shame. He says that this is why educators lurch from one fad to another, because they desperately need to be seen doing something. It is less important that African Americans improve than that white people be seen trying. As a black conservative, he despises this, both for what it does to black people (it forces them into dependent roles so that white liberals can feel better) and for what it doesn't do (it doesn't actually raise performance).  I think he over-simplifies somewhat, but that's inevitable in a book that's 180 pages.  Either you should state your thesis in a more succinct essay, or write a tome of nuance and documentation.  He's an excellent writer, and packs in as much nuance as 180 pages will allow (his prose is magnificent, and I doubt I could ever write an essay as good as his), but it's still light on documentation.  (Then again, he came up as a literary scholar, not a social scientist.)

Lest you think he's too harsh on his own people, he has no shortage of praise for his culture. He praises areas of African-American endeavor, and argues that they have been most successful in areas (art, literature, music, entertainment, sports) where competition cannot be easily manipulated by do-gooders. Of course, reality is more complex than that, but he brings an important consideration to the table.

He keeps revisiting the point about unbearable shame, and I think that does explain the restlessness I see among educators. We have been told that we are THE solution to the unbearable shame, and when it doesn't puff us up with pride it fills us with desperation to fix something that we cannot fix on our own, neither for the benefit of the intended recipients (an underclass) nor the desperately guilty upper class. We can only do our part, but we need to be seen doing as much as possible, lest we be called to account by either the underclass (who will tell us we did too little) or the upper class (who will tell us that we failed to discharge the guilt that they transferred to us).

One thing I wonder about is why Germany doesn't display the same restlessness, despite having a terrible crime on their record.  I suspect it's 4 things:
1) I'm too far removed to see it clearly.
2) The descendants of their victims mostly live elsewhere, so they don't need to discharge their debt via domestic social policy.
3) Their crime, as terrible as it was, was one episode in a much longer history, so it doesn't stain every single thing in the way that racism stains our entire history. (Indeed, their neighbors have plenty of pogroms on their own ledgers.)
4) After WWII they immediately confronted a new problem (division between two outside powers, and the oppression of half of their people by one of those powers) so they had a different set of considerations.

Anyway, I'm off to read some books that I'm currently not motivated to blog.  Maybe that will change.

Latest Book: First Class by Alison Stewart

I just read First Class by Alison Stewart, a history of what was once America's finest high school for African American students.  It is a rather tragic story:  During segregation, African American students in DC were limited to just a few high schools (the number depending on the era), and the "academic" school (to contrast with a nearby vocational school) was Dunbar high school.

Admission was selective, so only the best African American students got in, and the results were exactly what you'd expect when you have selective admission from a pool of students whose parents wanted them to be there:  Absolutely outstanding.  Over several decades, Dunbar's students frequently out-performed white kids (from a similarly selective high school) on academic measures. Dunbar alumni went to elite colleges, became doctors and lawyers and professors, broke barriers at military academies, and rose to the top of the arts.  In short, they proved that talent and motivation know no color, and that excellent students of any group can hold their own against any other group, even groups that enjoy substantial advantages.  It shows the cruel hollowness in systems of privilege, the way that such systems artificially elevate the mediocre while suppressing the excellence of human ability that is abundant in every group.

Perversely, Dunbar's excellence was destroyed at the same time that school segregation ended (thanks, in part, to lawyers who had graduated from Dunbar).  The problem was not desegregation, but rather an effort to circumvent desegregation:  Dunbar became a "neighborhood school."  Desegregating schools didn't desegregate housing, and most neighborhoods remained either primarily black or primarily white.  Consequently, making all schools serve their local neighborhood ensured that most schools would remain either primarily black or primarily white.  Had Dunbar (and its white counterpart) remained selective then talented students of all races could have mixed, to the benefit of all.

Instead, schools remained racially segregated in practice, and the only integration that actually occurred was integration of the motivated and unmotivated into the same classroom, to the downfall of excellence.  That's pretty much what you'd expect from the society that went on to make Donald Trump President (albeit several decades later).  We Americans are a fiercely anti-intellectual bunch.

Since then, Dunbar has been exactly like any other school in DC, and as communities have deteriorated so has Dunbar. Later chapters describe the school with narratives that we hear for every troubled urban high school:  A faculty with a mix of earnest and disenchanted people, an underachieving student body, and periodic attempts to "reform" (to little effect).  There are people who keep their spirits up by focusing on the "diamonds in the rough", which is an ironic contrast with the era when selective admissions made it a well-stocked jewelry store of talent.

Sadly, this wasn't solely the doing of white people who wanted to avoid mixing talented white and black students.  Apparently many African Americans resented Dunbar students and parents, seeing them as rich and elite.  Some certainly were well-off by the standards of black people in DC several decades ago, but most were of modest means and just happened to have some mix of good brains and good upbringing.  The book talks about this a bit, and one gets the sense that these resentments may have played a role in keeping Dunbar from returning to selective (albeit race-neutral) admissions.  American anti-intellectualism knows no color, and Americans of every background resent smarty-pants types.  Maybe our best hope for racial understanding is for people of all races to come together and discover that they all hate smart people.

Is "The Good Person of Szechwan" racist?

In November it was reported that Knox College, a private institution in Illinois, was canceling a production of "The Good Person of Szechwan", a play by Bertolt Brecht, on the grounds that the play (which is set in China) is offensive to Chinese people.  I decided that I should read this play, so I did.  Before I weigh in on the criticism, let me acknowledge three points:

1) The play was originally written in German, and I am reading it in English.  (Specifically, I am reading a 1962 translation by John Willett.)  I cannot assume that whatever I find/don't find in this English translation would also be present/absent in the original, or in other translations.

2) There are severe limits to what you can conclude about a play from just the text.  Everything about the staging, whether the actors' mannerisms and accents and gestures and other dramatic decisions, or the set, costumes, props, lights, make-up, etc., can help convey a message. These elements of the staging can accentuate or de-emphasize something that is present on the page.  Moreover, a play could be inoffensive on the page but be offensively staged, or even be problematic on the page but be staged in a way that wrestles with the problem rather than embracing and endorsing what is problematic.  Thus, there may be good reasons to oppose a staging of a play that is inoffensive on the page, and good reasons to stage a play that is problematic on the page.

3) When I read this play, I'm seeing it through the lenses of whatever stereotypes I hold about China and Chinese people.  Those may be different from the stereotypes that Brecht and the audiences of his time brought to the play.  They may also be different from the stereotypes that other audiences in the US would bring to the play (though I have to suspect that I have a reasonable understanding of the stereotypes that people at a college in the Midwest would bring, seeing as how I'm a college professor from the Midwest). A play could be perfectly innocuous in most settings, but happen to conjure up offensive stereotypes in some other setting. That, however, raises the interesting question of whether a play should be judged on the understandings of past audiences, as opposed to the words on the page, the intent of the playwright, the intent of the present director and other artists involved in the staging, the actual work presented by performers in the present, the interpretations of a modern audience to said performance, or the interpretations of people who declined to join the audience to avoid pain.  (Or all of the above.)

Finally, in the interests of disclosure, I haven't come across much description of Brecht's views on race and Asia, but I also haven't searched very thoroughly.  Brecht was an exile from Nazi Germany, and he wrote the play in 1938-1941, while in Sweden and the US.  He cleared the minimum moral threshold of not being a Nazi, for whatever that's worth.  So, while I can't assume Brecht to be free of racist contamination, I also can't use the Nazis and their views to make any inferences about Brecht.

With all that out of the way, let's analyze the play itself:

The play reads very much as a fable, one that could have been set in almost any society.  Of course, fables often work best when set very far away, to strip away the mundane and focus on the dramatic interplay of a few key elements.  China was clearly chosen as the setting because it is a distant land, not because Brecht wanted to explore China on its own terms.  Thus, the relevant question here is not whether China is portrayed accurately, but whether it is portrayed through the lens of offensive stereotypes. 

Honestly, the generic nature of the setting, the fact that it is a fable about general human dilemmas rather than a meditation on Chinese culture, weighs against any reading in terms of offensive stereotypes.  It could have been set in any distant city instead of Sichuan, and as long as the time was in the modern world the various mentions of modern amenities (e.g. airports) would not strike the audience as strange.  It is very clearly a fable of human nature.  Indeed, one could set it in another country without even changing many of the characters' names.  A few characters have Chinese names*, but the rest have names like "The Unemployed Man" or "Mother-in-Law."

I'm actually surprised that the students were offended by the racial aspects of the play rather than the gendered aspects.  Shen Teh, the prostitute and main character, often struggles to defend herself against people trying to take advantage of her kind nature and help themselves to her money, so she often puts on a mask to pose as her invented cousin Shui Ta. Shui Ta is able to stand up to people and even prosper in business. The fact that her simple disguise is so convincing clearly shows that the play is a fable, a contemplation of how people react to other people in different stations, rather than a dramatic portrayal of plausible events and actions, which reinforces my point about how this play is not attempting to dissect Chinese culture from a Eurocentric perspective.  However, in showing how she only gets respect when posing as a man (and sometimes takes actions as a man that she regrets when reverting to feminine presentation), this play definitely takes up the topic of gender.  I will leave it to people better-versed in feminist theory to take up the question of whether Brecht treats gender with proper sensitivity, but gender is surely more salient to this fable than anything specific to China and Chinese people.

One criticism of the play, according to the article linked above, is that the main character is a prostitute, and thus the play is portraying Asian women negatively.  Honestly, though, just about everyone in the play is terrible and greedy and takes advantage of poor Shen Teh. It's hard to read the play as portraying Asian women, en masse, as being of loose** sexual morals.  Indeed, Shen Teh actually quits prostitution when she has the financial means to do so.  She's one of the few characters to try to adhere to a standard of morality that involves helping everyone no matter how outrageous their demands and how little they do to help themselves.  Were it not for the fact that Brecht was anti-capitalist (even going so far as to voluntarily live in East Germany after the war) I would read it as an allegory about the unworkability of socialism.  Instead, given that the Gods appear as a trio, I assume it's a critique of Christianity's proffered foundation for a compassionate society.  The play acknowledges the challenges of being good (according to a particular moral compass) while living in this world; if one wanted to reconcile this play with socialist sympathies I suppose the answer would be (1) even (especially?) good things can be hard to achieve in this world and (2) socialism would require a system with enforcement mechanisms rather than reliance on individual adherence to Christian ethics.

Anyway, having only read the play once, and mostly with an eye searching for racial/ethnic factors rather than matters of gender or socialism, I am loathe to delve much farther into those topics.  What I will say is that it's really hard for me to read this as anything but a fable set "far, far away" rather than some sort of attempt at portraying Chinese society as such.  I suppose that one could take offense at that indifference to setting, but then it still strikes me more as a literary device with strengths and weaknesses to be weighed, not as anything over which a reasonable person might experience pain.  Yes, the staging could still make or break this play, but isn't that in the nature of all plays?  As it stands, what's on the page is hardly worth taking offense over (at least in regards to matters of race and ethnicity).

The kids at Knox College should lighten up.

*I cannot judge whether the names are commonplace, inoffensive Chinese names, but I know a lot of Chinese people and these names don't seem terribly unusual.

**To the extent that one chooses to view this as a bad thing.  Sex work is a complicated topic, and those who have thought deeply about gender issues have come to a variety of complex conclusions on the matter.  I offer no negative judgment on Shen Teh for having worked as a prostitute, but I see why it is a delicate matter, and why some might prefer that the play not focus on a prostitute as the representative of Asian women.  However, Shen Teh does not spend most of the story as a prostitute, and there's nothing to suggest that she is offered specifically as a representative of Asian women as opposed to simply women in general.  Or, more accurately, women trying to adhere to a particular type of moral code that is very much the subject of the play's exploration.

Higher Superstition, chapter 5: Gender

Chapter 5 is about feminist critiques of science.  To the extent that feminists critique the culture of scientific workplaces I freely agree that there is much that is worthy of criticism, much to work on, and much more to be done.

To the extent that feminist critics have gone after scientific knowledge, I would say the following:
1) When people like Sandra Harding offer up essentialist arguments for why some particular idea in the basic sciences is more "masculine" or more "feminine", I think they are not only wrong but dangerous.  There's no distinct female perspective on chemical bonding or thermodynamics or electromagnetic waves.  To argue that there is risks bringing in the idea that women and men have different comparative advantages in the basic sciences.  That idea is not only devoid of empirical support, it is also an open door to justifying gaps and discrimination.  Many feminists have thus rejected essentialist arguments, and justifiably so.

2) When feminist critics raise concerns about the topics chosen by applied scientists, I think they have a better argument, at least in some fields.  There's no distinctly feminine viewpoint on quality control in chemical synthesis or optimizing the design of fiber-optic networks, but perhaps if there had been more women in biomedical research sooner then it wouldn't have taken so long for the medical community to recognize that heart attack symptoms in women are often (not always) different from those that are most common in men.  It's not about whether women or men are more qualified to analyze the data or perform the medical procedures (it's obvious that women and men are equally qualified to work in medical research), it's that much research begins with an anecdote (since every hypothesis lacks proper support before it's tested) and female clinical researchers might notice certain patterns in anecdotes from patients.  (Just as male clinical researchers might notice certain patterns in anecdotes.)

Similar things could be said about other areas of medical and behavioral research.  Female engineers working on consumer products might pay a bit more attention to, say, differences in average body size, differences in typical user experiences, etc.

A harder issue is the tendency to favor the use of male mice in biomedical research.  I've heard many female biomedical researchers defend this practice, on the grounds that the reproductive cycle in female mice lasts only 4 days, so there's much more variability in their physiology over the course of a study.  If one takes seriously the notion that female physiology matters, then it matters that female mice are more variable so the data will be noisier.  With resources being finite (raising and handling mice takes time and money, as does tracking their reproductive cycles so the data can be properly analyzed) it makes sense that many studies should be done first with male mice to get some preliminary data.  But if you really want to generalize to humans, and you aren't studying a male-specific question, then at some point you need to study female mice.  There's a difference between justifying greater use of male mice and justifying exclusive use of male mice.

But, of course, this is something where the funding agencies need to get more blame than the people working in the trenches with limited budgets.

So my take on this chapter is that Gross and Levitt start off strong but go too far in rejecting feminist critiques.  They need to keep in mind the distinction between pure and applied research.  There's no distinct feminine perspective on arterial plaque, or even a female perspective on molecular mechanisms of cervical cancer, but life experiences will matter when evaluating clinical anecdotes that might lead to the formulation of working hypotheses, and certainly the technology used in cervical cancer treatment should be designed with input from women who actually undergo such procedures.

Similar things can be said about race.  There's no distinct ethnic/racial perspective on statistical analysis in a clinical study, but one's experiences might affect whether one notices certain lifestyle patterns in different racial/ethnic/economic groups, and that matters when formulating hypotheses.  Ethnic diversity surely matters on an engineering team working on facial recognition software, as shown by some unfortunate examples with consumer products.

Mind you, there's a difference between research and practice.  I've been examined by competent female health professionals for some male-specific problems, and if I had a skin disease I'd be happy to go to a dermatologist of any ethnic/racial background.  Race and gender need not affect a conscientious professional's competence to apply existing knowledge in practice, but life experiences might affect the hypotheses that one frames in research. The testing of hypotheses is or ought to be an objective matter, but the choice of a hypothesis is highly subjective, and perspective matters.

Re-examine privilege: Not the concept, the word. And its usage.

The concept of "privilege", the idea that some people don't have to deal with shit that other people have to deal with, is an important one with great relevance to many aspects of life.  As I have said before, if I were pulled over by the cops I'd rather be a poor white person than a rich black person.  I think we can pretty much take it as a given that--all else being equal--in America it's better to be white than non-white.

Many educated people use the word "privilege" to describe this relative advantage.  I've said before that I'm not much interested in telling sociologists what sort of jargon they should use when sociologizing.  If "privilege" is the technical term, so be it.  But this word has escaped beyond the confines of sociology and ethnic studies, and into the wider world of the scribbling classes, of think-pieces and op-eds and essays written and read by many educated and managerial professionals.  It's in the zeitgeist.  I doubt that your average swing voter in rural Ohio read the full catalog of privilege think-pieces at Slate, Huffpo, and Medium, but I suspect that many have been made at least somewhat aware that there's a cottage industry of educated desk-workers who think that lower-middle-class white men doing manual labor are "privileged" by dint of their gender and color.

That is so stupid that it verges on being a hanging offense.  In colloquial usage, "privileged" is a word for kids whose parents have money and/or connections.  The white kid whose father lost his job at the steel mill and now works at Wal-Mart is NOT privileged in the conventional usage of the term.  Yes, yes, that kid is privileged in the sense of sociological jargon, but who the fuck gave you the idea that ordinary conversation should be conducted in sociological jargon?  What made you think that the jargon of a social science field would work constructively in the wider political arena?

If the chattering classes describe enough lower-middle-class whites with a word for rich kids, eventually word is going to get out and there will be a backlash.  I believe that the timing of that backlash can be pinpointed to November 8, 2016.

And my complaint here is about more than just connotations and jargon.  Describing the same concept with some word less hackle-raising than "privileged" would be an improvement, but not by much.  Why are liberals spending so much time talking about the advantages of the lower-middle class?  On what planet does that make sense?  It makes sense for conservatives to say "See, the lower-middle class doesn't have it so bad" when arguing against redistribution, but on what planet does it make sense for liberals to talk about the advantages of the lower-middle class?

Finally, even if liberals stopped using the word privilege, and stopped dissecting the alleged advantages of lower-middle-class white people, there's an additional problem with all of the discussion about lower-middle-class Trump voters:  The fact that everyone trying to understand "what went wrong" is mostly talking about lower-middle-class Trump voters.  The lower-middle-class wasn't the only group that voted for Trump--in fact, Trump's strongest support was in the upper-middle class (although I suspect that numbers would look very different if I could find exit polls disaggregated by race and income).  Nonetheless, regardless of how things would look on a finer-grained scale, the undeniable fact is that Trump got support from many different sectors of American society, yet almost all of the post-election analysis has been focused on either blaming or excusing the lower-middle class.  The clear message is that the lower-middle class is some mixture of culpable for what went wrong and pitiable victims who made excusable errors.  Not much dignity in that picture.  People higher on the socioeconomic ladder are spared the indignity of post-election dissection.

I never thought I'd say this, but I kind of want the Marxists back.  I mean, say what you want about the tenets of revolutionary socialism, dude; at least they don't describe unemployed factory workers as "privileged."  In light of everything that's happening right now, I'd give anything for academics to abandon their tedious dissection of intersections of race, gender, sexuality, disability, etc., and go back to tedious dissections of class.  A left that cares about class can build solidarity between lower-middle-class whites and the rest of their coalition; a left that cares about identity will splinter.  (I should emphasize that I'm not much of a leftist, but I'm even less of a Trumpista.)

There's a lot of blame to go around here, but certainly much of it belongs in academia. We need to ask ourselves what our implicit assumptions are when socioeconomic diversity gets far less attention than race, gender, etc.

Legitimacy, authority, and diversity

One theme of this blog is pondering why educational elites are disproportionately interested in dimensions of diversity that don't relate to social or economic class.  Certainly there are sound moral reasons for attaching high significance to ethnic diversity (frankly, if I were pulled over by the police I'd sooner be a poor white man than a black man of any class, even a politician).  Then again, there are also valid moral reasons for treating class more seriously than it's currently treated in many academic environments.  Ultimately, it's a value judgment, and the question is why people judge it the way they do.  (I should be clear that treating it as a value judgment rather than a matter of objective fact is not to trivialize it.  Some of the most important issues in human society are value judgments, and the fact that values are ultimately just, like, your opinion, man, does not make the stakes any lower or the moral significance any lesser.)

America's educational institutions are institutions dependent on the patronage of the state and the upper classes (via donations), and a large part of their task is to train people for public service, whether we're talking about people studying criminal justice before going on to law enforcement careers, ROTC students, or Ivy League schools training future Cabinet Secretaries and Supreme Court Justices.  The United States government has many sins to answer for, but in two crucial political conflicts the US government came down on the better of the two sides.  Both of those conflicts involved race, and both involved existential questions for the government's power:  The Civil War and the Civil Rights Era.

In the Civil War the authority of the federal government was challenged in the starkest terms possible, and the root of the controversy was slavery.  Say what you will about state power, or economics, or whatever else, but the state prerogatives in play concerned slavery, and the economic issues concerned the needs of a slave-dependent economy.  The federal government was on the better side there.  There's much to be said about the federal government's failures regarding the rights of African-Americans after Reconstruction, but it is ingrained into the institutional and cultural memory that the starkest challenge to our political institutions concerned race.

The next starkest internal challenge to the authority of our political institutions concerned the ending of de jure segregation (not to be confused with de facto segregation).  Southern states tried to openly defy the feds, resulting in National Guard troops being deployed to desegregate schools, and numerous federal court cases and Department of Justice civil rights actions starting in the 50's and continuing to the present.

Race in America is thus an issue where the existential imperatives of public institutions are intimately entwined with moral imperatives. Seen in that light, it makes sense that institutions that exist to serve (in part) the workforce needs of public institution would prize racial and ethnic diversity over class diversity.  We thus have a mix of sound moral concerns (like I said, a case can be made that race is rightly more important), institutional imperatives (at its core, the state will preserve its own authority), and somewhat hypocritical class sympathies.  Like any cultural fact on the ground, it is neither wholly pure nor wholly tainted.  It is tied into the good and bad of human history.

I said a few weeks ago that in the era of Donaldik Fydorvich Trump academia will no doubt damp down some of its internal political tensions in order to unite against a common outside threat.  While I hope that some sort of sincere effort to improve the lot of the working class in the Rust Belt and small towns might emerge from the post-election soul-searching, this is me recognizing that there are deeper historical reasons for our focus on race, and in the era of an unabashed bigot in the White House it is appropriate for reasons of past, present, and value judgments that racial and ethnic diversity not exist our moral calculus.