Brown Girl in the Ring (Show Me Your Motion, Not Your Papers)

Brown girl in the ring  

Tra la la la la

There's a brown girl in the ring

Tra la la la la la la

Brown girl in the ring

Tra la la la la

She looks like a sugar in a plum

Plum plum

Show me your motion

Tra la la la la

Come on show me your motion

Tra la la la la la la

Show me your motion

Tra la la la la

She looks like a sugar in a plum

--Traditional Caribbean children’s song and game

 A recent news article has me pondering national belonging in a big way.

A then 14-year-old United States born, non-Spanish speaking African American girl named Jakadrien Turner was erroneously deported to Colombia in 2010.   Ms. Turner was, according to news accounts, arrested for shoplifting in Houston, Texas. Though the facts are unclear, U.S. authorities assert that Turner identified herself as an undocumented alien from Colombia. Turner pled guilty to the shoplifting charges and was turned over to federal immigration authorities who sent her before an immigration magistrate where she was ordered deported.  Immigration and Customs Enforcement then asked the Colombian consulate to issue travel documents, which the consulate issued after interviewing the teenager.  Turner was then transported to Bogotá. Once in Colombia Turner was apparently given a work permit and released.  After an odyssey of over a year, Turner was recently reunited with her family in the United States. 

In their defense, United States officials have suggested that Turner’s case is rare. However, the fact is that wrongful deportations are not as rare as is often asserted. It is probably the case that many hundreds of people, mostly people of color, are erroneously deported every year. Many of these deportations are of non-citizens whose deportations were based on improper grounds.  For many of these people, there is no remedy once they have been removed. There is no such barrier to return for American citizens who have been wrongfully deported, thankfully.  Still, wrongful deportation can be the source of numerous harms, and U.S. citizens are victims far more often than is typically imagined. According to an amicus brief filed by the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild in Castro v. United States, “the problem of detention and deportation of U.S. Citizens is so widespread that citizens may even be detained and deported on a daily basis.” According to a recent article by Jacqueline Stevens of Northwestern University, data suggests that since 2003 more than 20,000 United States citizens have been detained or deported as aliens. 

While there may be more to the Turner story than meets the eye, one wonders how in the world something like this could happen.  Aren’t there numerous safeguards? Just offering the name of someone who apparently belongs elsewhere is enough to be removed to that place? There is something odd about that logic, especially when, very frequently, it is “foreign-looking” or “dark” American citizens who are erroneously deported.   Such people often look or sound to officials as if they came from “somewhere else,” or, at minimum, as if they belong anywhere else but here.  As one commenter in the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo archly suggested about Turner's situtation: “si ella hubiese dado el nombre de una de las hijas del Presidente Obama la habrían enviado a la Casa Blanca porque el nombre coincidía” (if she had given the name of one of President Obama’s daughters, they would have sent her to the White House because the name coincided.) 

Another commenter in El Tiempo opined that U.S. officials “no hicieron el mas minimo esfuerzo de proteger o al menos revisar la situacion de la menor cuando supieron que era colombiana (officials didn’t even make the most minimal effort to protect or at least review the minor’s situation once they knew [believed] her to be Colombian). Perhaps much of the problem lay not just in the fact that Turner didn’t seem to belong to us but that she apparently belonged a very undesirable them. 

Of Jazz and Double-Dutch Jump Rope: Serena Mayeri’s Reasoning from Race

There has been a long history of reasoning from race--acknowledging the significant analogies between racist, especially anti-black practices, and sexist practices. Mayeri’s Reasoning from Race plumbs the depths of this strategy.  I review the book in a recent article in Texas Law Review Dicta.  I use metaphors from popular culture-- jazz and double-dutch jump rope-- to frame my discussion.  

Women and blacks have often been said to have lesser faculties than white men. It has been observed that, unlike other some social outsiders, women and blacks frequently possess physical and social characteristics that function to systematically and explicitly exclude them from opportunities to which members of other groups might aspire. These shared characteristics of women and blacks have been summarized as falling into several typologies such as high social visibility because of appearance and experiencing social, legal, economic and educational disparities that result from discrimination. Given these shared typologies, it would seem that reasoning from race would play an even larger role in theorizing the way that gender oppression works. That there are not more discussions of this nature speaks not only to the barriers themselves but also to the way in which members of oppressed groups articulate their goals and the differences between themselves and others.  

There is frequently a process of convergence and divergence as groups shape their identities. This is especially evident in the context of law. While race-sex congruence often framed the legal strategy of many feminist advocates as they struggled to bring the gains of the civil rights movement to women’s quest for equality, feminism's embrace of civil rights norms was sometimes a hesitant embrace. This hesitance was born of the need for women to forge their own road, even if that road was sometimes cut with borrowed tools and in some parts parallel to or intersecting with the swath blazed by the civil rights movement.

Knight Watch: Cain’s Gage and Disengagement

It looks as if Ginger White has picked up the gage thrown by Herman Cain’s lawyer, according to a New York Times news report alleging that Republican hopeful Cain was involved in a 13-year affair with Ms. White.

That’s gage as in the token, such as a glove, thrown down by medieval knights to signify a willingness or desire to enter into combat to gain satisfaction in a dispute.  Several weeks ago when some women came forward with allegations of Cain’s sexual misconduct, Cain’s lawyer warned other potential accusers to “think twice” before coming forward with additional allegations.  

I cringed when I read that—“think twice”?  Really? Where I come from we were taught not to try people with such language.  Such challenges are an invitation for someone to come in and try to knock your block completely off. Even people who had no opinion whatsoever about Cain’s innocence or guilt of the allegations were animated by such talk. Such talk takes us back to the medieval judicial duel or trial by combat in which accusations were settled by tossing a gage followed by a battle between the accuser and the accused, or their stand-ins. Lorenzo Sabine’s Notes on Duels and Dueling, published over 150 years ago and detailing the history of the duel, tells us that early Western notions of the judicial duel were founded on the belief that “a brave man did not deserve to suffer, and that a coward did not deserve to live.” 

Speaking of medieval times, knights and gages, the recent turn of events reminded me that our political process bears more than a passing similarity to a medieval tournament.

Consider this language from a website on medieval tournaments: 

A Medieval Tournament was a series of mounted and armoured combats, fought as contests, in which a number of combatants compete and the one that prevails through the final round or that finishes with the best record is declared the winner and is awarded the prize.

Gee, sounds like a major party presidential primary leading up to the nomination, doesn’t it?

Tournaments were imported from France during the 12th century and formed an important element of Medieval military and social life…. The contests in the tournament were fought with blunted swords or lances. However there were still many casualties, as many as 10% were injured, and there were also fatalities. The number of fatalities dropped as the tournaments became better regulated…. Knights would fight as individuals but there would also be team events. There were many different types of Medieval Tournaments which each had a different type of combat method. The events of the tournament were the joust, the melee, and fighting on foot.

Opponents in same-party political primaries usually favor blunted weapons.  After all, it doesn’t pay to try to maul your opponent—if you play nicely, you might be his or her vice presidential choice.  And while all three forms of fighting are in evidence in presidential primaries, the melee is probably the least favored—everybody could get hurt that way.

According to Sabine, combatants always fought in a just cause, at least theoretically.  However, at times even the combatants knew that they had entered into combat when they were in fact in the wrong. This could lead to “evasive shifts” in which the reason for fighting changed in the middle of the battle in order to  create an actual duel-worthy besmirchment of honor. Consider the following story from Sabine:

These evasive shifts are well illustrated in the story of a knight 

who entered the lists upon a case which he knew 

was wrong, and who, to change the issue, fled at the 

first onset." Turn, coward !" exclaimed his 

antagonist. "Thou liest!" retorted the knight: 

"coward I am none, and in this quarrel will I fight 

to the death; but my first cause of combat was 

unjust, and I abandon it."

It remains to be seen if Cain will make like the knight in the story.

The Polyandrous Neo-Office Wife

An article in a recent issue of the ABA Journal may help to shed some light on how women partners fare at larger law firms in terms of office support.  The article describes how, in a survey of 142 legal secretaries at larger law firms in 2009 conducted by Chicago-Kent law professor Felice Batlan, not a single secretary expressed a preference for working with a female partner.

The article detailed some of the explanations given by survey respondents: 

• “Females are harder on their female assistants, more detail oriented, and they have to try harder to prove themselves, so they put that on you. And they are passive aggressive where a guy will just tell you the task and not get emotionally involved and make it personal.”

• “I just feel that men are a little more flexible and less emotional than women. This could be because the female partners feel more pressure to perform.”

• “Female attorneys have a tendency to downgrade a legal secretary.”

• “I am a female legal secretary, but I avoid working for women because [they are] such a pain in the ass! They are too emotional and demeaning.”

• “Female attorneys are either mean because they're trying to be like their male counterparts or too nice/too emotional because they can't handle the stress. Either way, their attitude/lack of maturity somehow involves you being a punching bag.”

• Women lawyers have “an air about them.”

According to the article, Professor Batlan wrote that some legal secretaries indicated that they did not like working for women because women are too independent. One respondent in the survey wrote of her male boss: “My partner in particular tends to forget the little things. I often find myself tailing him as he's walking out the door to a meeting going down a list of things he may need. Oddly, I don't feel like my female attorneys need that kind of attention.”

This last comment is a reminder that while women’s participation in the work world over the last several decades has allowed women greater social, economic, and sometimes even sexual autonomy,  women’s move to the work world did not always herald a decrease in dependence.  Instead, there may sometimes be a displacement of dependence.  This is because women employed in workplaces alongside men, especially male bosses, sometimes became “office wives” to such men. The phrase "office wife" has been common in the United States and Canada since at least the 1930s, popularized by Faith Baldwin’s 1930 novel The Office Wife and its 1930 movie adaptation. 


The notion of the “office wife” has been rendered more gender neutral via “office spouse” (or the addition of “cubicle hubby”). Some modern renditions view such relationships as reciprocally beneficial for men and women. However, many commentators have observed that notwithstanding a move toward gender neutrality, women are still often expected to be subservient to men in office settings. In even modern times women secretaries and assistants are often constructed as office wives who are “deferential and ladylike” and who act as “loyal, trustworthy and devoted” extensions of their usually male bosses, according to Rosemary Pringle’s iconic essay “What is a Secretary?” “Office wife” is a phrase that conveys mixed notions of work, domesticity, and sexual promise, even in some modern contexts. For instance, some relatively recent court case have involved women claiming to have served as “office wives" to men in workplaces; not all of the claims were by way of complaint. Even in modern times , women employees have often been expected to serve as helpmates in office settings.

Although the notion of the “office wife” or “second wife” was apparently discounted by some survey respondents as an explanation of the phenomenon seen in Batlan’s survey since modern secretaries often work for more than one boss, I think it may be too soon to discard the idea. Instead I fear that we could be facing neo-office wife syndrome: the office wife is not gone; she is, as the results in the survey may suggest, still fiercely heterosexual in her choice of boss, with the twist that she is now also sometimes polyandrous because she has more than one husband-boss.

[Some of this discussion is drawn from my unpublished PhD dissertation, "Sisters Underneath Their Skins," a qualitative analysis of legal discourses produced in court decisions concerning white mothers involved in intimate relationships with black men while seeking custody of their white children. ]

Their Eyes Were Watching God as a “Legal” Novel

The discussion on Dee Perry's Around Noon today was Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.   You can hear all of the show at the link above. The book is  a timeless classic that, in broad brush summary, is about hierarchy and race, gender and class.  The novel begins where it ends, and ends where it begins, telling the story of  Janie Crawford and her journey from late girlhood to womanhood.  It is often read in literature courses and especially in African-American literature courses.  It combines its gritty realism, black dialect and lofty poetic language to depict the black South of over 70 years ago.  It is not typically thought of as a legal novel.  There is, of course, chapter 19, which depicts Janie’s trial for murder. But that chapter seemingly stands alone in offering explicit language about law.  

There is, however, much more about law in the novel.  Their Eyes Were Watching God is, in large measure, a book about laws, rules and norms.  It is a book about the way that social regulatory regimes shape society.  It is a book about the way that law is and is not created. There is a very apt quote about this in chapter 5 of the book where the author writes, in describing the town's feeling about Joe Starks, its self-appointed, well-to-do mayor:  “The town had a basketful of feelings good and bad about Joe's position and possessions, but none had the temerity to challenge him. They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down." If allusions to Joe are replaced with the word law, then we can get a very clear sense of how norms, whether formal or informal, work, both within the novel and outside of it.   This is because even formal law is often said to be organic—it is molded and remolded at regular intervals, even if that re-molding is slow.  More importantly, we reflect those changes back into the face of law. Law can't happen if we turn away.  To a great extent, law is only law because we allow it to be. That we allow law to be speaks much about our vision for ourselves and for our world.

Dangerous Random Stereotypes of Presumed Difference and Sameness

Today’s New York Times featured two back-to-back Op-eds that made seemingly two different points but had much in common. In one piece, the author decried the way that “digital technologies” have reduced the likelihood that students arriving at colleges will live with a randomly chosen roommate. Thanks to the Internet, some students are able to connect with and arrange housing shares with like-minded students before arriving on campus. In the other Op-ed an author discusses the “The Help,” a film about black Southern domestics and their white employers. The Op-ed shows how the film tends to suggest that only “bad people” (mostly white housewives in the film) are racist. This perpetuates, the author suggests, a “dangerous” white stereotype—that “good” white people are not racist.

While both Op-eds resonated with me, I found myself disagreeing with both in significant ways. First, I think that even in the pre-digital, pre-social media age, roommates were anything but random in the true sense of the word. This is chiefly because most students who attended college over 25 years ago, especially at selective schools, were remarkably alike. They came from similar schools in similar neighborhoods and had similar racial, class and social backgrounds. This is not to say that differences did not exist in the past (the author of the piece on roommates cites for instance political differences and differences in musical taste between himself and his “random” roommate of a few decades ago.) But I would counter that students at selective schools, in the past and perhaps especially now, are more alike than dissimilar; this has been shown in a number of recent studies. This is perhaps not surprising given the self-selecting nature of the college application process. The author’s reference to room sharing as a preparation for marriage is instructive in a way perhaps not intended by the author. While people increasingly marry across all sorts of social boundaries, most marriages, and certainly most lasting marriages, are typically endogamous (the partners come from the same social group) or deemed endogamous (the partners accept that the social capital being exchanged between them is, even if distinct, closely equivalent in value). In short, many of the students about whom the author is writing are not all that different except in relatively superficial, mutually acceptable ways. I think therefore that it scarcely matters if they choose each other before arriving on campus.

If positing significantly socially dissimilar students, in order for students to truly have the potential to benefit from associating with each other, there must be an assumption of social parity operating such that the attributes, beliefs and values of one person are deemed as good as the other. Where students are very dissimilar, there are sometimes no such assumptions; it is a case of “mainstreamer” versus “outsider.” When students from such different backgrounds are compelled to form close associations, it may result in what some scholars have called “social energy drain” for the person deemed an outsider: the outsider has to work hard at showing that he is “just as good as” or “just like” the mainstreamer. It’s exhausting for the outsider and may be only slightly (or not at all) enlightening for the mainstreamer. Social energy drain and the resulting fatigue is a substantial part of the reason why, at colleges and universities across the United States, even in the new millennium, “all the black kids are sitting together in the cafeteria.” For the well-meaning mainstreamer it may be equally as tiring as the mainstreamer works hard at showing that she is “not racist” and at treating “everyone the same” no matter the context. Sometimes uncritical equal-treatment schemes lead to absurd inabilities to make contextual distinctions. Can people really not see that it might be racist to assert "free choice" to avoid sitting next to a black person on a public bus who, besides skin color, is much like the other riders, but it might not be racist to avoid a violent, delusional black person who accosts them on the street, and that even if the latter avoidance is racist, it's still probably a good idea under the circumstances? We are so taken with "racist" as an epithet that we sometimes forget that at the core of anti-racism are values of common sense and rationality. We are in a sadly paradoxical age of reasonable racists and irrational anti-racists.

In the Op-ed about “The Help,” the author is concerned that we may forget that "good" people were sometimes racist, too. I have much more to say about the film, but, in direct response to the Op-ed, I think that the larger problem is the way that being "racist" or "not racist" seems to consume so much social space in discussing relations between people. I didn't find it particularly surprising or offensive that the black "help" would be treated as social inferiors by the affluent white people for whom they worked. That was, and, indeed, despite denials by some, is often the way of things. I would have been more surprised and offended if the film had depicted an absence of racial and class bias (see my post on The Princess and the Frog). I don't think that we are in any more danger of forgetting that "good" or ostensibly discerning people can be racist than we are of forgetting that "bad" (or undiscerning ) people can be distinctly anti-racist. At the end of the day, it is about how we treat each other on the most fundamental levels.

My mother used to say that most day-to-day problems of racism, those numerous, cumulative slights that people of color often endure, would be solved if people actually learned and practiced good manners and basic human kindness toward everyone. I think she was right in some respects; on an individual, instrumental level (it may be quite different at an institutional level, but that is another discussion) I see racism as just one more deeply unpleasant form of human misbehavior that, like most such behaviors, can be forgiven or overcome. Whether at the individual or institutional level, however, tempering racism or other biased behavior requires a clear acceptance of the fact that people of diverse racial, social, or class backgrounds are different sometimes and that we accord varying values to those differences for a multitude of fair and unfair, legitimate and illegitimate reasons. We must equally as well accept that seemingly dissimilar people may be closely alike in all the ways that matter in a particular context. Effecting change becomes impossible, however, in a climate that posits differences where there are none of which to speak and denies differences where they do exist.

SlutWalk, Women, Talk! Taking Back Public Spaces

From a Ms. magazine blog on a planned slutwalk in Delhi, India:

Delhi women aren’t marching for the right to walk down the street dressed in barely-there clothes, as critics suggest. They’re fighting for the right to walk down the street. Period…“Women can wear whatever they want [when marching]. … The point we’re trying to make is that it is not the clothes you wear that cause harassment,” said SlutWalk Delhi organizer Umang Sabarwal to The New York Times.

Many of you are familiar with the slutwalk concept. Slutwalk was triggered by the comments of a Toronto police officer. According to the Toronto Star, the officer commented at a public safety meeting at Osgoode Hall (one of my alma maters!) in early 2011 that "women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.” The officer later apologized, but his comments were something of a watershed event.Women in cities the world over have gathered and walked (sometimes dressed in provocative clothing) to protest against the notion that sexual assault is caused by the victims’ clothing or appearance. In part, protesters want to reclaim the word slut, in much the same way that other groups have attempted to reclaim slurs that have been wielded against them (see e.g. the n-word, which is not entirely rehabilitated, or queer).

Slut, however, has perhaps a different discursive imprint than other slurs. One of the concerns about slutwalk is how it translates across cultures, customs or national borders. This is the point made in the Ms. blog article about the planned walk in Delhi. Many women in the West have long taken for granted the right to go out into public unaccompanied. This is emphatically not the case for women in some other parts of the world, or even for all women in Western countries. As one women notes in the Ms. blog in discussing the situation in Delhi, “On the street … you’re never called ‘slut’”. Indeed, it’s not necessarily what they call you. It’s how they treat you.

Even women in Western countries who go out alone or travel alone are often subject to certain forms of treatment that imply that they are not quite proper. I’m thinking of some of my recent travels wherein I stayed in hotels alone and managed to be harassed by a hotel guest, hotel workmen, and a hotel security guard. The guest looked like a perfect model of an American businessman and father. We chatted briefly and innocuously in the lobby while standing and waiting for an elevator. He chuckled amiably as we stepped into the elevator together. He then took out a large billfold of money and started counting it slowly and talking pointedly about how “lonely” it is when traveling for business. I looked down, tightened my grip on my briefcase (the better to whack him with) and went silent; much to his credit he reddened and put his money away. In another hotel the security guard who responded to my room when I called to complain about jeering workmen in the hallway suggested that I looked as if I was ready to go “on a date” and asked if I wanted him to give me a tour of the hotel. I am sure I looked quite ready for a day in the office in a boxy business pants suit and glasses perched on my head. No matter. It’s clearly not what you wear. The whole discussion of women in hotels raises the specter of DSK—but I won’t go there now. I will remark that the idea that women traveling alone are “suspicious” in more ways than one is a pretty old one and still holds sway. I was watching So Long at the Fair some weeks ago (it was Jean Simmons night!) and in the film, set at the 1889 Paris Expedition and said to based on a partly true story, a woman’s brother and traveling companion goes missing at their hotel. Part of the undercurrent in the film is that she was somehow tainted by the mere fact of being alone.

Some people are prone to draw a sharp line between sexually-tinged remarks and actual sexual assault. And yes, there is a huge difference. But such remarks are along the spectrum of harmful behaviors, and because they are too often deemed “minor” or even “charming” and "flirtatious", they go undiscussed and unaddressed. I am encouraged by events such as slutwalk even despite the difficulties of translating it across cultures. Slutwalk helps to air a problem that has proven intractable despite years of take back the night marches—women’s ability to be free from sexual assault or harassment in public spaces. The only way we will make any headway is for women to talk openly and honestly about the problem.