Pleasantville

[This essay originally appeared in my newsgroup on Feb. 25, 2007. I'm uploading it here because I'm about to post an essay on Rick Nelson, whose early life appeared on a sitcom.

Note: the first couple of times I began this essay, it dissolved into failure, mostly because I was attempting to synopsize portions of the movie. Big mistake. Movies are experiential, Pleasantville even more than most; if you haven’t seen it, you should might want to skip this essay, not so much because of “spoilers” but simply because what I’m saying may not make much sense. If you have seen it, but need some reminders, there is a pretty good synopsis on the Wikipedia.

Also, Roger Ebert wrote a decent review.

My take differs, of course.]

Old black-and-white sitcoms do tend to blur together in memory. I can locate the episode of “Father Knows Best” where Mr. Anderson gives Bud a $10 a week allowance (quite a sum in those days) with the stipulation that Bud can only spend the money on himself. He soon finds that it alienates him from all his friends, so he goes back to doing chores for a smaller allowance that has no strings. It was an interesting little parable on the downside of wealth, among other things, and I pinched the seed of the idea for my story “Heart’s Desire/Anything You Want.”

I remember the next one also as being “Father Knows Best,” but it could have been “My Three Sons.” The teenage son (Bud? Chip?) is experimenting with ham radio and talking to his friends, when a mysterious (and sultry) female voice shows up, teasing them etc. They rig up a direction finder and track her down—discovering that she’s the shy girl they all know with the bad stammer. She’s mortified, and can’t talk in person without the stutter—until they ask her about her radio rig, and suddenly the speech impediment disappears. Yet another bit of proto-nerd chic.

I can easily remember a dozen 50s-early 60s sitcom plots that could never have appeared on the imaginary Pleasantville. But that’s because Pleasantville isn’t about 1950s sitcoms, any more than it’s really about suburbia, or the 1950s generally, or even about childhood and adolescence. It’s about memory, memory and its bastard cousin, nostalgia.

Current nostalgia for the suburban 1950s targets the memories of boomers such as myself, but it depends upon the coincidence of those memories with the more general phenomenon of childhood memories. “Those were simpler times,” is how it is often put, but they were simpler only to children, because children are simpler beings. In truth, the 50s were no more simple to those who had to struggle for their lives and livelihoods than any other era. It’s simpler only if you had no responsibilities to bear.

Moreover, the suburbs themselves reflected a sort of nostalgic longing for something that never existed: the idealized remembrance of small town, rural America. Some suburbanites came directly from the rural towns and tried to reproduce their own histories in that way. Others came from the cities, fleeing modern life, with all its temptations, temptations they themselves had already sampled, but, well, best to protect the kids from them. Kids do all sorts of crazy things.

As indeed we did, as we were bored beyond imagining, hoping to get the hell out of there so our lives could “begin.” Jean Shepherd used to start up his college gigs by asking his audience, “How many of you out there believe that your life hasn’t started yet?” He mocked the raised hands as being naïve, or worse. Life is life; if you haven’t figured out that it’s already begun, then you’re doomed to be waiting for a long, long time.

So the outsiders show up in Pleasantville and things begin to change. Jennifer/Mary Sue is rebellious from the start, introducing her first date, Skip, to sex, and bringing the first bit of color to the scenery (a single red rose). Skip misses a basket during basketball practice and everyone treats the ball as if it were radioactive; no one had ever missed a basket before, nor had they ever lost a game. But sex spreads and saps the energy from the hitherto perfectly sublimated athletes, and they lose a game, again, a first.

Then Mary Sue teaches her Mother about sex (a deliberately ironic role reversal), including how to masturbate, which turns Mom technicolored and lights the tree outside afire.

But it’s David/Bud who turns out to be the real subversive, despite his love of the television show, though maybe because he likes the characters. He introduces his soda fountain boss to Art, and the boss’s artistic tendencies blossom. Bud has read the books that have previously been blank, and as he recounts the stories, the pages fill in with text. He shows the fire department how to put out the fire that his Mother has caused (yeah, yeah, “burning bush” joke) and in doing so, becomes a town hero and gets the cookies that Margaret was supposed to bake for another boy. He he helps his mother cover up her color change with makeup. Bud is the really dangerous one.

The color change is the central visual conceit of the movie, and various notions have been argued for what causes it. “Epiphany” is offered. “Change” is another theory. “Strong emotion,” yet one more.

Mary Sue changes color not when she has sex, she’s done that plenty of times in the “real world.” She changes when she dons her Pleasantville glasses and begins to read (D. H. Lawrence, it’s true). She breaks stereotype. Bud changes color when he slugs Whitey (who then bleeds a bit of red blood). Again, when he acts against type.

It’s not just the violence or strong emotion. The crowd that throws rocks through the painted window of the soda shop doesn’t change color; the scene is taken from news footage of civil right riots. It may not be “pleasant,” but it’s entirely within the character of those character types in the 1950s. The book burners are also in black and white; the scene has been compared to 1930s Germany, but burning Beatle albums are just as good a comparison.

The Mayor never gets angry; when he does, he loses his shades of gray, and loses control of the town as well.

As they lean about sex, the soundtrack spouts rock-and-roll. When Bud explains that there are places where the roads don’t just run in a circle, “Take Five” begins, a late night radio piece that promises a road to the Great Beyond. They’re all looking for a way out, and they finally find it, in sex, in art, in the act of becoming more than what they are supposed to be.

So we were children and our world was small, narrowly circumscribed. Then it became larger as we grew. It was several concerted accidents of history that made it all seem of-a-piece. In fact, everyone has that journey offered to them; each of us takes it to varying degrees. Pleasantville should be a reminder of that journey. I hope it has resonance for a broader group than us aging Boomers. It seems more universal than that.

But I do so wish, given the wry ironies about Bud’s “colored girlfriend,” and the use of images that obviously emanate from civil rights marches and sit-ins, that there had been some actual black people in Pleasantville at the end. Try as I might, however, I couldn’t think of a way to do that without it seeming forced. There were no black families living in Donelson when I was young. It was only my thrice weekly trips to downtown Nashville that let me view the world in black and white, and not just white.

The Preacher

"Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad." – Malcolm X, on the assassination of John Kennedy

"I meant that the death of Kennedy was the result of a long line of violent acts, the culmination of hate and suspicion and doubt in this country. You see, Lomax, this country has allowed white people to kill and brutalize those they don't like. The assassination of Kennedy is a result of that way of life and thinking. The chickens came home to roost; that's all there is to it. America—at the death of the President—just reaped what it had been sowing." –Malcolm X, in an interview with Louis Lomax, explaining his earlier remark.


"I was in school in Arkansas when Kennedy was assassinated. When the teacher announced the assassination to the class, practically the entire class stood up and cheered. They stood up and cheered." – a college friend of mine (who is white).

"Store closed due to assassination of nigger-loving President. (Will reopen at 2)" – from newsreel footage seen in recent ESPN documentary "Black Magic" about professional basketball players from historically black colleges.

Could a novelist have come up with a better name than Reverend Jeremiah Wright?

I've been thinking that I should write something about "The Speech," Barack Obama's speech on race and racism in the U.S., given in response to the furor over statements made by his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. It was a speech that had some heft to it, and one that took some courage to make, when he could have said the platitudes, had a "Sister Soulja" moment, and maybe slid by that way. It took away some of my concern that Obama was a lightweight, running as a blank slate upon whom people could project their hopes and dreamy wishes that things could be better without effort, without confrontation, without recognizing that the past produces the future.

But it is Wright that draws attention, does he not? That is what a spiritual leader should do, after all. Wright does not say, as some/many on the Religious Right have said, that God smites us with supernatural intervention, sending hurricanes to lay waste to the modern day Sodom of New Orleans, or visiting a plague upon homosexuals for their sins, though Wright apparently does speak of HIV as a government plot, which is merely incorrect. But then people do tend to grant too much imagined power to those they perceive as enemies.

Wright vents an anger that many have felt, an anger that is hardly confined to the black community. Indeed, the anger is nigh unto universal, it's only the object of the anger that varies from place to place and person to person. The Republican Revolution has been attributed to the "angry white male," but that anger is supposedly not directed at "America," merely certain Americans, certain American laws and freedoms, specific American government officials and programs, plus assorted foreigners, ethnic groups, and, as nearly as I can tell various trees, other flora, and wildlife.

It's also been directed at me from time to time, but big deal. I'm better able to take care of myself than most, and I'm a white male myself. And, I do have my own angers.

So perhaps Wright is one of those "blame America first" people we hear so much about, though he has worn the uniforms of both the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Navy. It doesn't really sound like the "blame America" part was really topmost on his life agenda, nor the first thing that occurred to him.

I have a friend in Tennessee who has actually changed congregations over political and moral disagreements with a pastor or the congregation. My friend's support of Barack Obama has been tarnished, and may be withdrawn over this incident, to my dismay.

I said to my friend, "You're a Christian. If you find Pastor Wright's statements to be offensive, try forgiving him first. That is what Christians do, after all. And forgive Obama for perhaps thinking that this was a point of view he needed to hear, regardless of his own personal opinions.

I don't know how much good my suggestion did. In truth, it's harder to make an argument that one does not support with one's own mind. And I am not a Christian, nor do I think that Wright said anything that needs forgiveness.

But see for yourself.



Remember, whatever happens should not be a surprise. The entire nation is built upon an Indian burial ground. -- overheard on the street

Chain Gang

It's oddly difficult to get information about the chain gang system that existed in the South until the 1950s and 60s. There are a few famous exposes, plus the pop culture images of "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang," or "The Defiant Ones," or "Cool Hand Luke." There are an awful lot of white faces in these movies.

I was in our back yard in Tennessee sometime in the mid-50s when I saw a work gang in leg irons working on Emory Drive across the vacant lot that abutted our back yard. There were no white faces in that crowd.

The convict labor system was the way that southern states kept their roads repaired for most of the first half of the 20th Century. I've seen claims that the chain gangs were integrated, despite a fully segregated prison system, but I'm bound to wonder how much of that integrated chain gang image came from ignorance and poetic license. There was no mystery about how the prison labor system worked: whenever a road contractor needed labor, the local constabulary rounded up all the "vagrants" in the area, and vagrants were almost invariably black. Putting a white man in a largely black work gang would have been considered appalling.

Perhaps the gangs that were made up of prison inmates, rather than local "pick up" labor were different, but again, how and why would there be a mixing of populations that were not even in the same prisons? The logistics alone make the idea dubious; it would have been a lot like "forced busing," wouldn't it?

As for the pop culture images, there's no question about the dynamic at work there. There would have been no audiences for a film that featured only black characters, whereas adding black men to the mix either allows a statement about racial issues, or it emphasizes the degradation of the main (white) character.

In any case, I've just spent some time on Google Images, looking for a photo of a real chain gang with both black and white men in it, and I couldn't find any. I never saw one in real life, either.

The movie, "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang," was based on a book, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang. The State of Georgia banned the movie. I don't think they did it because it showed chain gangs; I think they banned it because it showed one that was integrated.

Privation Morality

Every profession has its crosses to bear, and I think that academic philosophy has a particular burden of attracting guys who want nothing more from life than to win arguments.

I remember one particular philosophy lecture I once heard, where the guy was talking about the problems of artificial intelligence, specifically, how would one know if one succeeded? By one measure, this is just an extension of the old conundrum of how does one tell that other people are actually feeling, thinking, existing as conscious beings. Since we can only experience our own consciousness directly, we have to infer that others have it, etc. etc. BFD.

But the “artificial” part of artificial intelligence had the guy going. He’d read a paper by someone who had suggested that what you could do was build a robot that could only tell the truth and then ask it if it was conscious. Ha! Problem solved.

I observed that while we had pretty good evidence that it was possible to create beings that were conscious (I’m willing to offer myself as an example), we’ve never, ever encountered a being who could only tell the truth. Actually, it’s worse than that, since Gödel’s proof insists that such a thing is a logical impossibility, but I was just offering the sort of argument that can be followed by a bright high school student, which apparently ruled out its use by editors of whatever journal my professor had read.

Well, maybe he was just “trying to get us to think.” Yeah, that’s the ticket.

In moral philosophy you regularly run into the “lifeboat model,” where various groups of people are put into a lifeboat with limited food, or that will sink with too many people in it, etc. and you’re supposed to figure out what the ethical and moral choices are. The unreality of the model tends to make for unreal arguments, with people actually mapping the artificial situation into something more familiar and realistic, thereby confusing the issue sufficiently that the professor can win the argument. (That last part is me being snarky, of course).

There’s a much more meaningful question that I’ve been thinking about lately; one that I think clarifies matters rather than obscures them. The question is, “What would or wouldn’t you do to keep your children from starving?”

This isn’t an artificial question at all; throughout history, people have had to answer it on a regular basis, and we have some pretty reliable answers. Would you steal? Of course. Lie, cheat, break the law, poach the King’s game, kill a fellow human being? All of these have been done (sometimes for less worthy cause than feeding children, too, but we’re working at the margins here).

In times of dire privation, the real questions are about what won’t/can’t/shouldn’t be done. You shouldn’t eat your seed corn, for example, because that just insures greater privation later. According to Marvin Harris, you shouldn’t kill the sacred cows, because they are the equivalent of seed corn, without them, no next generation of oxen and no way to plow the fields. So you get the grand taboos, the ones that will kill your society if you break them. But absent the grand taboo, all bets are off.

In the recent North Korean famine, grandparents stopped eating to give their grandchildren enough food to live, slowly starving themselves in order to allow life to continue. The Inuit supposedly took the grandparents out onto an ice floe and left them there, to exactly the same purpose. In other times and places, some of the babies were taken to the hilltop and left to die of exposure.

I’ve seen commentary on the movie version of The Cider House Rules that indicated that pro-life conservatives found its morality acceptable, because the abortions weren’t just for “convenience” but rather out of necessity. Privation morality is part of the well-spring of the conservative world view, and the desperation narrative is one that conservative know well.

And realize this. If you must rob, and loot, and kill for your children’s lives, then it’s best not to do the deeds near to home, and not to take from your own family or tribe. Best to go farther afield, where the “others” live, those who don’t look like you, or speak the same language, or follow your customs. So privation morality makes sense of racism in that way. It also informs the blood feud, the vendetta, the holy war.

It’s the men who leave home in the desperate attempt to gather enough to feed their families, and it’s the women who stay behind, to tend the young, to make whatever compromises and sacrifices that are made in the near field. Privation morality is thus both patriarchal and matriarchal; patriarchal when the men have found the bounty, after the hunt, after the war, after the pillage, but matriarchal when the men are gone, when the times are toughest, holding together what must be held together if the family – and society – is to survive.

I’ve watched privation morality at work, in rural America, in low rent urban districts, and at a distance, by reportage, in parts of the world where grinding poverty is the norm. I recognize that the sheer opulence of our land allows us to at least contemplate such things as generosity, kindness, and the fellowship of all men. And I sometimes despair that, despite the immense wealth that has been created in the last three centuries, despite the vast riches of a continent that we occupy, there are still many among us who feel that privation morality is an absolute law, and that even too much is never enough.

And the agricultural fertility of the land in the Middle East has been in decline for the last three thousand years.

Color Blind Spot

On January 2, 2003, Allen Newsome, 17, attempted to rob what he thought was a pizza delivery man who had come to his apartment building in Harlem, New York City. He used what has been described in various reports as a “pellet gun,” a “BB gun,” or a “toy gun.” It looked, however, like a “real gun,” just as an undercover police officer apparently looked like a “real pizza delivery man.” Newsome was shot and killed.

The news reports on Newsome’s death were used by Brooklyn councilman Albert Vann, and Queens councilman David Weprin to garner support for a bill they had introduced to the NYC City Council to ban toy guns from the city. Obviously they weren’t prescient; they were basing their advocacy on previous cases, such as the August 1998 case of a 16-year-old New York boy bearing a submachine gun water pistol who was shot six times in the legs by polic or the 1994 case of another boy, this one 13, who was shot and killed by a police officer who mistook his toy gun for the real thing.

The Libertarian Party sprung into action. Sensing a threat to our constitutional rights to keep and bear toy guns, Jim Lesczynski, spokesman for the Manhattan Libertarian Party announced a “Guns for Tots” program, to collect and distribute toy guns to the kids of P.S. 72 in Harlem before the ban could take hold.

The Daily Show had a good chuckle. The “Guns for Tots” program itself was not very successful, given that the Principal of P.S. 72 told the students to keep away from those strange white men, and some parents came and denounced the Libertarians as racists.

I bought up the “Guns for Tots” matter to my Libertarian college buddy Jeff, as part of a conversation about the extent to which racism plays a part in Libertarian politics, and in the politics of “self-identified” libertarians. The latter group, to my certain knowledge and from direct observation, includes some outright bigots, and White Supremacists.

Jeff told me, “But I know Jim Lesczynski, and he’s not a racist. He was just making fun of some politicians that he thought were pushing a stupid idea.”

Let’s consider that proposition for a bit. Let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that somehow Jim Lesczynski has managed to grow up in America without a shred of racism in his entire being, a true example of what another Comedy Central guru, Stephen Colbert says: “I don’t see race. People tell me that I’m white.” Let’s, for the purposes of analysis, grant the hypothetical.

Even granting that extreme unlikelihood, how clueless do you have to be to not understand that, in the context of a discussion about how the police are mistaking toy guns for real guns and killing the holders thereof, that handing out toy guns to young children in Harlem is going to result in the perception that you are in favor of having the police kill young children in Harlem? And Harlem children are the very emblem of “not white.” They may not be all “black” any more, given immigration and such, but there aren’t very many of them who are going to be put in the same racial group as Stephen Colbert.

Moreover, this was a PR stunt. There are about a million issues that are more important to the cause of liberty, however you want to define that term, than whether or not children in a particular city get to have super-soakers. This entire thing was a media event attracting media moths, and the Libertarians went for the flame. And if you are going to go after publicity, if you are trying to make points for your cause, whatever that cause might be, it is up to you to make sure that the right message gets across. Whining about how people “misunderstood” just means that you’ve screwed up.

When I was researching this, my favorite argument against the toy gun ban was that “there aren’t many cases” where children had been killed by police who thought the gun was real. Not “none,” you understand. Just “not many.”

There is absolutely no cannibalism in this navy, and when I say absolutely none I mean there is a certain amount. - Monty Python

Enough hypotheticals. Do I think that Jim Lesczynski and the Manhattan Libertarian Party was being racist? Damn right I do. They could have made their point by handing out toy guns to white kids (and maybe made the point that white kids aren’t so much at risk of being shot by the police for holding a toy gun). They could have kept their mouths shut on this one and kept issuing press releases about medical marijuana and other issues where they’re on the side of the angels. But instead, I’ll bet anything that some of them chuckled and grinned at how “daring” and “politically incorrect” they were being, and how they could really make “liberals” fume, and how cool that made them.

I am also absolutely sure that the idea that they were being racist never entered their minds, because, like so many people, they think that you have to be a Nazi or a segregationist, or some other sort of obvious bigot to be a racist. The idea that there can be unconscious racism, that it can affect the way you perceive others or even yourself and your own actions, never enters their minds.

Libertarians, I think, and I’m thinking here of the real-deal Libertarians, the ones who believe in reason, and individual action and responsibility, and the entire philosophical hook, line, and sinker, are particularly vulnerable to this failing. The problem with a blind spot is not just that you can’t see what’s in it, but also because you can’t see the blind spot either.

Cowboys and Indians

Hey, man! Don’t let him bring you down, now. There’s a lot of young people in this country, just like myself, who really know where the Indian’s at. And don’t worry. Soon we’re all gonna be out here on the Reservation, livin’ like Indians, ‘n’ dressin’ like Indians and doing all the simple, Beautiful Things that you Indians do. Hey - got any peyote?

–Temporarily Humbolt County, Firesign Theater

In my recent essay False Positives, I mentioned several racial/ethnic groups for which I have a “slight positive bias,” a tendency to look upon favorably, give benefit of doubt, and so forth. It might be said that this comes at the expense of my own ethnic group, i.e. middle-class white guys, but the fact is that I know my own group well enough so that other factors come into play almost immediately. Notice, for example, that there would be separate entries for “female” and “non-middle class,” if I’d just started with the group, “white folk,” but that barely begins to cover it. We all automatically respond to such things as accents, use of language, height, weight, perceived intelligence, and all the rest, so the “white guy” part gets lost in the mix pretty quickly. Truth to tell, the “slight positive bias” doesn’t go very far either if I’m confronted with someone who is pushing some of my other buttons. And yes, I have plenty of buttons, some of which are still unknown to me, I’m sure.

The racial/ethnics groups I mentioned were African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanics, and Jews. There was another one that I considered, but left off the list: Native Americans. The “racial bias” test is actually one for skin tone, so there’s some probability that my bias would extend to them. For that matter, Hispanics, primarily Mexicans and other Latin Americans, have a high percentage of persons having pre-Colombian ancestry, and the dark-skinned thing may explain some of the good will there.

So why didn’t I include Native Americans in my bias group? Let’s see where this introspection trail leads.

Notice that, in the above paragraph, I used the phrase “pre-Columbian ancestry.” There’s one of the problems. I have, in fact, some problem with the term “Native American,” and it’s related to the same problem that I have with “Indian,” which was the term used when I was young.

I generally use “Native American” because that seems to be the preferred term used by those who “self-identify” as the jargon goes, and I like to use the names that people wish to go by. I will call a guy “her” if she insists on it, (unless he pisses me off in the right sort of way). African-American, black, or “person of color,” yes, I’ll go along, fair enough. I might have a mild objection to the term “Native American” because it’s a bit jargonesque, since, by ordinary usage, anyone born here is a “native American.” Then, if you dig deeper, it gets worse. The word “America” isn’t itself native; it’s a word applied originally by Europeans to a newly discovered (by them) continent.

I’d like to use the word the pre-Columbian natives used for the continent, but they didn’t have such a word. Indeed, they had no idea that they were living on a “continent” because that’s another external invention.

So, as you can see, what I’d like to do is to use the original names of self-identification, but there we run into a wall. There is no group name, because the grouping itself is a racial group, imposed by outsiders. The actual pre-Columbian tribes and nations had separate names for themselves, Cherokee, Inca, Mohawk, Seneca, Shoshone, and yes, I know that these are imperfect transliterations, but it’s a step towards politeness, and back from racialism, so I take it when I can.

And this is just the trouble I have with the names. What the hell do you do about the stereotypes?

There have always been both positive and negative stereotypes about the native American peoples. Noble savage. Blood-thirsty redskin. Pocahontas, Sacagawea, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. Tonto and Kemo Sabe. Cowboys and Indians. Ah, Jeez, I could keep this up for far too long. Davy Crockett, “Indian Fighter,” but he broke with Jackson over the Trail of Tears.

There are very few ways of repelling the stereotypes. From the very beginning, there were stories of “Good Indians” and “Bad Indians,” with the difference between good and bad always being a matter of how they related to white immigrants. Ultimately, however, both kinds mostly wound up as “dead Indians,” in one of the greatest population declines in human history. There are libraries of scholarly arguments about the size of the native population of North America pre-Columbus, with estimates ranging from less than ten million to over one hundred million. There are debates as to whether the European occupation amounted to “genocide” or “democide.”

What is not really open to debate is that the native cultures were virtually obliterated. Sociology is now history and archeology. Anything other than scholarship becomes stereotype.

Where I grew up, there were more than a few people who claimed at least some Native American ancestry. My mother’s family claims some, and there’s at least some evidence of the truth of it.

But that’s just genetics. It’s essentially racialism to hold that somehow the survival of the genes negates the destruction of cultures and peoples. I can take a little comfort in the belief that, over the centuries, some cultural diffusion occurred, that Philip Rahv’s distinction of writers as “redskins” or “palefaces” might have some deeper taproot into the American psyche. Certainly there were hundreds of years of cultural contact, before the final—and largely successful—attempt to herd all remaining tribes onto reservations, teach them English, and inculcate them with the self-loathing that can only exist in someone who has been told, and shown, from birth that they are second-rate, not even citizens really, but some lower form of life. So God knows I’d like to think that some of the original native cultural influences still survive, if only to hold the hope that it wasn’t all lost or reduced to pop culture crap.

I’ve known several “professional Native Americans” over the years, individuals who found a way to make a living by playing on all that was really left to them, stereotypes of their history and nature. There’s some money to be made from liberal guilt and I won’t scorn anyone who chooses to scoop up some of it.

But I’m stuck with the pity of it, and there’s not a lot of money in pity, not mine anyway, and besides, they don’t want or need that sort of thing from the likes of me. I like the fact that some tribes have figured out how to get some of that paleface gambling cash, and good on them. I hope they manage to keep it more of it than was the case with the Oklahoma oil money. I expect they will, as they aren’t dumb, and not quite as many are out to take it away from them this time around, or so I hope.

I don’t really have a conclusion here. That’s the reason for the omission in the previous essay: confusion and bewilderment. I hope that this is largely a product of my own ignorance; that somewhere there are native tribes that maintain a deep culture, or who have managed to re-invent themselves for the modern world, the way that so many others have done. I imagine that there are some such, and I have absolutely no doubt that there are admirable and amazing individuals who self-identify as Native American. That I have none as personal acquaintances is my failing and my loss, yes, absolutely.

So hey, man. Got any peyote?

False Positives

A person of my acquaintance (note: I’m removing as many of the serial numbers as I can, since this involves a private confidence) recently spent several weeks in court, as part of a wrongful death suit that my acquaintance’s family had filed against a trucking company. Several family members had been in an automobile that a truck had run off the road, the car had hit gravel, and the driver, an older member of the family, had lost control of the vehicle. It flipped, killing the driver, and injuring other family members.

The trial took place in a town in the Central Valley of California, near where the small trucking firm was based. The result of the trial was that the family lost, and the trucking firm won. Since it was a civil case, unanimity was not required of the jury, and indeed, there were several dissenting jurors.

The family in question is African-American. This turns out to have mattered quite a bit. After the trial, one of the dissenting jurors contacted the family’s attorney and told him that there was never any possibility that the family would win the case. From the very beginning, they were viewed as attempting to ring up a liability suit “jackpot” at the expense of the trucking company, and that the sentiments had been based on their race. Just a bunch of black folks trying to hit up a poor innocent businessman was the majority view.

It also happened that during the trial, the juror had heard another of the jurors talking to the head of the trucking company about some business dealings, which is also pretty rank, but the bailiff claimed to have heard and seen nothing. Yet another tribute to small town America, and yes, I absolutely do have some prejudices there. I will note that there is one upside; the information provided by the honorable juror makes it very unlikely that there will be a countersuit for legal fees and court costs.

My acquaintance noted that the family had gotten some of the “vibe” that the juror had noted, but had tried to discount it. Nobody wants to see racism everywhere, or to make false accusations, but there you are.

I hope that nobody who has been reading any of these essays thinks that I hold myself out as some sort of color-blind paragon, or exemplar of racial tolerance and understanding. I believe that race exists, not as a valid biological concept mind you, but certainly as a real social and perceptual construct, and if you want to function in human society, you need to be aware of the lines that divide the various types of “us’s” and “thems.” Moreover, I grew up here and I’m in no way immune to the various images, fables, and stereotypes that get implanted in our minds without our approval or even knowledge.

What I will say is that, owing to various circumstances of upbringing, experience, and personal proclivities, for several of the most important racial and ethnic groupings in U.S. society, the positive and negative biases have mostly cancelled out. Sometimes, if I’m paying attention, I can even feel the process at work, bad, good, yes, no, up, down, hmm…I think I might like this guy or gal. Cool.

Introspection also tells me that some of the positive comes from a rejection of the negative and some bit of pride at not getting sucked into the stereotypical view. For example, one of the reasons why I really liked actress Maggie Han in the short-lived TV series “Murphy’s Law” (with George Seagal), was the great juxtaposition of Asian features and a New Jersey accent. I thought that was just adorable.

The net result of all this is that I come up as showing a “small implicit bias” in favor of several major U.S. minority groups, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Hispanics on certain sorts of personality tests. I also have a history of getting along pretty well with Jews. On the other hand, (and this is the product of more introspection), there are several racial and ethnic groups that I’ll admit at least a small prejudice against, though not publicly, partly because I think that sort of thing is shameful, and partly because I don’t think that public discussion would be productive. I will admit that I’m more likely to have my knees jerking about religion than race, however, though there are some nationalities thrown in there too.

Now it’s possible that I’m overestimating some of my own prejudices, and overcompensating as a result. Part of living in a society where certain divisions according to perceived race both exist and matter, is that people develop detectors for race. And if one believes that racism is a bad thing, one also develops detectors for racism, which also creates the potential for errors.

Detectors give both false positives and false negatives. There are also “indeterminate readings” if one calibrates the meter in such a fashion as to create a “dead zone” of indeterminacy. That is, after all, what happened to my acquaintance and the trial thing: an indeterminate reading when there was actually a positive showing on the racism meter. The meter “dead zone” had been set too broadly.

One thing I’ve noticed in the ongoing conversation about race in America is this: in most venues, a false positive reading for racism is considered more of a problem than a false negative. Noting that someone is showing a racist sentiment creates far more problems than simply letting the matter pass. And that too is another aspect of racism. I will certainly cop to the fact that my own racism detector is much more sensitive than most other folks, and I know of at least once, in Mexico City, when it was definitely showing a false positive. I expect there have been other times as well. But let’s be honest here, having some say you are exhibiting racist behavior in our society does not carry anything like the downside of being, for example, black. You pretty much have to wear a swastika armband or a white hood to get shunned in our society.

I once asked another friend of mine, who is a member of a minority that isn’t African-American, how often he felt singled out as being a member of his race, how often he encountered racism, in other words. “Every single day,” he told me. Yet I’ve heard other members of his race/ethnic group claim that they seldom encountered racial discrimination or prejudice.

Perhaps they are using a different level of behavior to trigger their “racism meter.” Maybe they have a very broad “dead zone.” More likely, I think, they’ve just learned that mentioning it brings you nothing but grief. They may admit this in private, or they may have internalized it to such an extent that they are now blind to all but egregious examples.

It’s even barely conceivable that they live is some wonderful part of the country where racism has vanished.

But I doubt it.

The Crime of Thomas Jefferson

One way of looking at high energy particle physics is that it consists of hitting some stuff with the biggest hammer you can get, then making up stories about the resulting fragments. In human affairs, we do something similar, but the penetrating radiation consists of ideas and facts, and people’s reaction to them. In the United States, one of the big hammers is the Founding Fathers, their ideas and the facts about their lives. Modern Americans project all sorts of things on those guys, which tends to reveal more about modern Americans than the Founding Fathers.

The most recent furor about Thomas Jefferson is a pretty good experimental smashup in that regard, though the first result is one I’ve mentioned a while ago: when sex enters a narrative, the narrative becomes all about the sex. In Jefferson’s case, the burning issue of the day was whether or not he had a child by his slave Sally Hemings. DNA testing of Hemings’ descendents put the debate into the realm of the truly bizarre. The testing was “inconclusive” in that it could only say that someone in Jefferson’s immediate family was the progenitor, so it could have been either Thomas or his brother Randolf. Naturally, a lot of Jefferson scholars immediately set out to prove that it was Randolf, because otherwise, Thomas Jefferson would have had to have had sex with his slave Sally, who, it should be noted was his deceased wife’s half-sister. That would have made Jefferson no better than…his father-in-law.

Sally was also Jefferson’s property, and it’s hard for us to really grasp what that means. A southern slave owner could certainly legally have sex with his slaves. He could also beat them, mutilate them, force them to mate with anyone he chose, or kill them for any or no reason, all without any repercussion other than financial. Do you own a dog or a cat? Your pets have more legal rights now than did a slave in the Old South.

On the other hand, for Jefferson’s brother to have had sex with Sally Hemings without Thomas’ permission, would have been a serious breach of manners and ethics. If it were done with Jefferson’s permission, then, well, which is worse, sleeping with your wife’s half sister or pimping her out to your brother?

As I say, sex in the narrative tends to muddy the waters and muddle the thinking. In any case, Annette Gordon-Reed, in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy pretty clearly demonstrates that Thomas Jefferson was the only possible father of Hemings' seven children. More importantly Gordon-Reed addresses the issue of how it is that the fairly clear and compelling evidence of the relationship was ignored or explained away by scholars who were basically devaluing the evidence provided by historical sources who were black. Not to put too fine a point on it, implicit racist assumptions led to false conclusions.

Jefferson, of course, was a paragon in the founding of America. His was the language of the Declaration of Independence. As President, he arranged the Louisiana Purchase. He was the prime mover behind the founding of the University of Virginia, the first secular university in America. His is the spirit behind the First Amendment, and his aphorisms in favor of freedom of speech, press, and religion are part of the discourse to this day. He was also a major scholar and scientist. As John Kennedy once quipped at a White House dinner for Nobel Prize winners "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." Jefferson’s library formed the basis of the Library of Congress. He was probably, after Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Thompson, (later Count Rumford) the most internationally famous scientist and intellectual in America at the time.

So then, how to react when confronted by something like this:

I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people. --Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia”

Jefferson’s ownership of slaves made him a part of his culture, and his racist views were also part of that culture. This is that “cultural relativism” we hear so much about. Those who decry cultural relativism must then decide whether Jefferson was an evil man, or whether slavery wasn’t so bad as all that. Since I have no quarrel with cultural relativism per se, I’m willing to give Jefferson a pass on the slave owning, though not a full pardon. Washington gets a full pardon; he freed his slaves at his death. Jefferson supposedly wanted to do the same, but he’d ran up so many debts that his estate couldn’t afford the gesture, so his slaves got sold off, families split, the whole horror show, all because Jefferson just had to add that extra staircase onto Montecello and import a few more varieties of plants for his experiments.

But those sorts of moral transgressions are transient, personal, and local. The same cannot be said for the scientific racialism that he expounded as a whitewash to his own personal good fortune of having been born white and rich in a society whose wealth depended upon slave labor. It may be asking a lot for someone to give up all those benefits of position and privilege. But to use one of the finest minds of his era to rationalize that situation, that is crime that continues to this day. Certainly scientific racism would have existed without Jefferson, but he was one of its originators in this country. And that was a crime against both free society and against science.

Follow the Money

For some reason, I know several people who might be considered academics without portfolio, or, more precisely, without academic positions. These are people who regularly behave as scholars, scientists, or mathematicians, even to the point of publishing papers in academic journals, but who nevertheless do not have positions at any university or similar scholarly institution. I grant you, this is a little weird, to publish without the prod of “publish or perish,” or really, any of the other usual incentives. But there you go.

In some cases, the lack of apparent incentive is just that, appearance, which is to say that they are still keeping their C.V.s polished in the hope of some future connection. Others, by contrast, do it just because they can, and they got into the habit of doing so at some time or another. I think I’m probably in this latter group, in that I’ve got a few unpublished papers that I update from time to time, and every now and then I begin another. Maybe I’ll get around to publishing them someday, maybe not. It all depends on how I feel about it, I suppose.

Anyway, long introduction out of the way, one such friend of mine once had a paper that he wanted to publish in the Journal of Indo-European Studies. For those in the know, this publication was long associated with Marija Gimbutas, the originator of the “Kurgan hypothesis” connecting the archeology of Neolithic burial mounds in southern Europe with the linguistics of the “proto-Indo-European” languages, to some acclaim (from Joseph Campbell among others) and considerable skepticism. Both the acclaim and the skepticism were linked to some pretty spectacular leaps she made in the formulation of “The Goddess hypothesis,” suggesting that Neolithic European cultures were matriarchal, later to be overwhelmed by invasions of patriarchal Indo-Europeans.

My scholar friend is a “Red diaper baby” and sometimes referred to Gimbutas’s “impeccable leftist credentials,” for reasons that will soon become evident.

The Journal of Indo-European Studies has a “sister journal,” Mankind Quarterly. Both were founded by a fellow named Roger Pearson. I forget whether it was Pearson or his co-editor who suggested to my friend that his paper might be published in Mankind Quarterly. It may have been the co-editor, J. P. Mallory.

My friend had never heard of Mankind Quarterly, but I had. Why? Because a large number of the citations given in The Bell Curve are from Mankind Quarterly. And the reason for that is that Mankind Quarterly is the go-to journal for papers dealing with the scientific basis of race, or, put another way, the primary purveyor of scientific racism in U.S. academia.

I’m going to get lazy here and just quote the Wikipedia entry:

Pearson was brought to the United States in 1965 by Willis Carto of the Liberty Lobby, and contributed to some of Carto's publications, such as Western Destiny and at Noontide Press. At the end of the 1960s, he parted with Carto, and successively taught at Queens University, the University of Southern Mississippi and Montana Tech. During his tenure as dean at Montana Tech, Pearson received $60,000 from the Pioneer Fund.

In 1975, he left academics and moved to Washington, D.C., where he founded the Council on American Affairs. He also joined the editorial board of Policy Review, the monthly Heritage Foundation publication in 1977, but was forced to resign in 1978, after the Washington Post exposed Pearson's background following the 11th Conference of the World Anti-Communist League — which he chaired.

Pearson also held the directorship of the Institute for the Study of Man, a group which was alleged by Searchlight magazine to have received $869,500 between 1981 and 1996 from the Pioneer Fund (Mehler 1998) and which under Pearson acquired the peer-reviewed journal Mankind Quarterly in 1978. Pearson simultaneously took over as editor and has remained editor through to the present day, though his name has never appeared on the masthead...Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele's advisor, Otmar von Verschuer, was on the editorial advisory board of this journal before his death in 1970.

Pearson is a former officer in the British Army, serving in India when it was still a colony. He’s also a member of the Eugenics Society. I knew of maybe half the stuff mentioned in the Wikipedia article, having seen a piece on The Bell Curve in The Skeptic magazine. I conveyed all this to my friend.

So my friend had run across the fact that Marija Gimbutas, one of the patron saints of the neo-Pagan movement, was academically in bed with a guy promoting eugenics and scientific racism. More to the point, my Jewish, Red-diaper baby friend, was being asked to publish in a journal that had once had a Nazi on its board.

He was in a quandary. My opinion was basically, a publication is a publication. Both journals were academically respectable, despite everything, and neither would be a blot on his C.V. He did ask other opinions, and, interestingly his African-American colleague in the anthropology department of a nearby university was perhaps the most telling. Said colleague opined that anthropology journals were all so racist anyway that it barely made any difference. Not exactly confirmation of my opinion, but pithy nonetheless.

My friend finally made the decision to hold out for his first choice and his paper appeared in the Journal of Indo-European Studies, not Mankind Quarterly. Fair enough, but it got me thinking.

Roger Pearson, whatever his vices or virtues, pulled in a lot of money from various sources, sources that I personally find more than a tad “icky.” Is there such a thing as “tainted money?” One might ask a neo-Pagan about that. I have no idea what sort of strings were attached to the money Pearson got; most likely there were none, at least not in the sense of quid pro quo. It’s just that Pearson is who he is, and the people with the money thought he was a good person to spend some of theirs. I doubt he disappointed them.

There’s a saying about politics: “If you can't take their money, drink their booze, eat their food, screw their women, and still look them in the eye and vote against them in the morning, you don't belong here.” I’ve always thought more or less the same thing about science and academia, but the fact is that if you play it that way, you don’t necessarily get to have a long career, not unless you get tenure, and the early plays in that game separate a lot of sheep from goats. There’s a lot of money out there for anyone who genuinely believes that tobacco is harmless, that global warming isn’t caused by fossil fuels, or that rich people are rich because of virtue and intrinsic worth.

But there’s just as much money for anyone who doesn’t believe those things, provided they’re just as able at making the case as those who believe them. And cynics don’t have any problem jumping from one funding source to another. The ones who are really committed to the King are the courtiers, and many of them don’t care who’s the King, so long as there is one.

Magic Market Fairy Dust

As nearly as I can tell, the basic position of the Conservative Movement about racism in America is derived from two propositions, 1) There isn’t any racism in America any more, (except the liberal racism that is exemplified by affirmative action) and 2) What racial discrimination exists today is a rational response to market forces.

The Conservative Movement’s assault on affirmative action is pretty obvious, and is predicated on proposition 1, that there is no racist discrimination against African Americans anymore. That allows the framing of the debate about affirmative action in the same terms as the debate about “reparations” for slavery. Do past injustices require present remedies? That is a classic example of begging the question, in this case, the question of current racial discrimination. Given the fact of current racist discrimination against minorities, affirmative action would be more sensibly viewed as a not very good attempt to compensate for that discrimination in some way.

But the market argument is more pernicious, since it relies on what I’ve come to call “magic market fairy dust.” This is the generally unexamined assumption that whatever happens when “the market decides” is good and true and beautiful. Conversely, any attempt to “interfere” with the market must produce results that are bad, false, and ugly.

One notable dispenser of magic market fairy dust is Dinesh D'souza, a fellow at the Hoover Institution whose books include Illiberal Education, about how intolerant American universities are of conservatives, and The End of Racism, about how there isn’t any racism in America anymore, except among blacks and liberals.

D’souza’s work on racism is almost entirely a matter of seeking mechanisms for individual racist attitudes, then claiming, because there is a mechanism involved, it doesn’t represent racism. For example, he notes that in the rebellion against slavery, the “bad nigger” became a symbol of defiance and a hero to his people (see, for example, the legend of Stagolee). This rebellious attitude then became part of the norm, to the detriment of black integration into (now without racism, remember) white society.

Of course, rebellion against authority is a generally attribute of American culture generally, and suburban white kids are big fans of Ice T and 50 Cent. But the suburban white kid can simply put on a suit and tie and speak normally at the job interview. No matter what the black kid does, he’s still going to be black.

D’souza’s argument becomes even more stark when he writes about cab drivers failing to pick up blacks, a “rational” judgment, he suggests, given the higher crime rates among blacks.
Here is the magic market fairy dust in its starkest form. Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Suppose someone were to take a dislike to some author/speaker, Dinesh D’souza, for example. Suppose that someone were a handy sort of fellow, maybe like Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and this fellow set about planting bombs in places like bookstores that carried D’souza’s books, auditoriums where D’souza would speak, maybe even the Hoover Institution.

Would D’souza still get $10,000 per speaking engagement, and would he get as many as he gets now? Let’s assume that he would not, that bookstores and speakers bureaus would make the “rational” judgment that it was not worth the risk, so some bookstores wouldn’t stock the book, and some speaking engagements would simply go away.

Would this be okay with D’souza? Would he consider it fine because the market was the one making those decisions? Or would he, just possibly blame the guy who was setting the bombs?

The market takes all available information and converts it into prices. If some group of people undervalues black employees, then that will be reflected in the market price for blacks. “Rational” or not, it is unjust, and to pretend otherwise is also unjust.

I believe that economics is a science, and that “the market” is a phenomenon that is described by economics. In that sense it is like gravity. One doesn’t look at a crashed aircraft and say, “That’s gravity in action.” One doesn’t step off a balcony and say, “Let gravity decide.” So why should one look at poverty and say, “The market in action.” Why should one point our horribly inefficient and baroque health care system and say, “Let the market decide?” Why would you look at someone lumping people into a group by skin color and say, “That’s rational.”

At its core, the Conservative Movement is very clear about what it wants, more money for corporations and rich people, criminal penalties for certain drugs and sexual behavior, control of information and the public discourse. Movement conservatives seem to have no problem gimmicking markets whenever is necessary to advance those goals. But whenever there is some attempt to do something that is inconsistent with the Movement agenda, the market becomes inviolate, and the “problem,” like racism, poverty, health care, is made to vanish by sprinkling it with magic market fairy dust, which is pretty potent stuff, provided you want to trudge along the same old path and call it flying.