Black and Pink and Re(a)d All Over: Michelle Obama, Shotgun Feminism and the Media

A recent article in Politico magazine called First Lady Michelle Obama a “feminist nightmare” and lambasted her for her failure to be “edgier” and more vocal about more controversial issues. One commenter quoted in the article asserted that Michelle Obama has become “an almost music-hall-level imitation of a warm-and-fuzzy, unthreatening, bucolic female from some imaginary era from the past.” The author ends on a note of somber resignation: “Someday somebody will shatter the conventional First Lady mold. It just won’t be Michelle Obama.” Nothing, however, could be farther from the truth. Michelle Obama is the most unconventional First Lady in the history of First Ladies. No amount of reading to children and gardening will undo this.  

Discourses of the good wife and mother, along with discourses about empowered womanhood, have historically been forged within the frameworks of racial and class based ideologies. This is especially true today. There remains, for instance, an intimate link between motherhood, race, class and civic membership. Black motherhood is a particularly difficult role to occupy in contemporary United States society, and that difficulty is heightened for educated black women who sometimes find themselves conflicted by the possibility of desireable work outside of the home and meaningful work within it. While an iconic goal of the mainstream (white) feminist movement has often been to get out of the house, for too many black women the goal has long been to get into the house—that is, into their own houses and out of the houses of others where for centuries they worked for no wages or low wages.  

Black First Ladyhood is a whole other dimension of black motherhood and womanhood. It is a role whose demands are at once so complex, novel, and difficult to maneuver that its performance certainly defies and disrupts most labels that we might try to append to it.  This is in large part because being a black First Lady involves a much-too-short historic journey from the kitchen of the plantation Big House to the Executive Residence of the White House. And we live even now in a world where Ivy League-credentialed, business suit wearing, briefcase carrying black women may easily be confused with the cleaning staff, courtesy of a pervasive, deep-seated social and cognitive dissonance that admits of few other possibilities. It is perhaps little wonder that Michelle Obama might like to pause to relish her role as Mom-in-Chief. Indeed what a wonder it is for Michelle Obama to be cast as Everybody’s Mother rather than as somebody’s mammy.

Media portrayals of Michelle Obama’s allegedly deficient feminism are often assumed to be neutral and ideologically pure, fueled by the wisdom of decades of well-honed feminist activism and deep thought.  However, too often neither writers nor readers of such portrayals are conscious of the strong ideological biases that are inevitably encoded, and they sometimes adopt such stances without much critical inquiry. It is certainly true that every act by every woman is not feminist. Even so, feminism is a broad, multifaceted, and highly contextual concept. Media pieces like the one in Politico do feminism a grave injustice by framing Michelle Obama as one of the enemies of feminism, taking scattershot aim with a claim that is at once overwrought and undertheorized.

Of Ethical Parenting and Lines in the Sand

I just came across a New York Magazine article that addressed the crisis in ethical parenting. 

I find this article really confusing. It seems to decry some parents’ lack of operational principles, that is, their failure to adhere to their established values and ethics in the face of  mounting pressures to help their children succeed. In assailing such behavior, the article seems to lump acts such as paying for expensive tutors together with cheating, lying or other "corrupt" acts on behalf of your child.  Maybe I misunderstand the piece, but if this is what the author is claiming, I disagree.

Comparing access to expensive tutors or test preparation with cheating is not only a false analogy but also a claim that misapprehends the full nature of privilege.  If providing educational advantages such as tutors were evidence of corruption, then it would be hard to say where the corruption starts. Where is the line? Does it begin with providing comfortable homes, plentiful, nutritious food and appropriate clothing? Or does it begin with providing access to good schools in safe neighborhoods? Maybe it starts with access to travel, visits to museums and summer camps. I discuss similar issues in my blog article Thief Me.

The parents in the article who seem to speak apologetically about engaging an expensive tutor as if they are making a drug deal should come out of the shadows. They should spend the money proudly, push for the best educational outcome possible for their child, and along the way teach her or him to be the kind of person who critically interrogates the notion of “merit.” They might even encourage their child to be someone who dedicates her or his career to eliminating the inequities of the current system. At a minimum, they could encourage their child to financially support organizations that are trying to make a good education more broadly accessible. Money helps to change things.

The article, however, seems to make a virtue of refusing tutoring or other such assistance, as seen in the example of a student who eschews test preparation:

I know a young man who, on moral grounds, steadfastly refused to enlist the help of an SAT tutor or indeed do any test prep during his overheated senior fall at a private school whose name you know. The college-application system is broken and corrupt, the kid said. “I could sense around me this horrible stress and this defeated feeling,” he told me. “The more prep you take, the more tutoring you do, the better your scores. It seemed like a gross system. I didn’t want what I was doing to be determined by it. I didn’t want to play their game. I wanted to play my game.”

[….] 

Does this story have a happy ending? The kid didn’t get into any college and lived at home, working, until it was time to apply again. (At which point he still blew off SAT prep, feeling that the test he’d already taken was preparation enough.) But he learned something about himself, which was that he really did want to go to college, and now he’s happily studying classes at a school not in the U.S. News top 50, composing electronic music that would blow your mind.

My first response to this story is “Um, what?” How is choosing not to study for college entrance examinations exemplary of a principled moral or ethical stand or of any broad notion of social justice? How is his choice to study electronic music "at a school not in the U.S. News top 50" any different from any other election made by a privileged youth? I would perhaps be more impressed if the young man in question had chosen to study education in order to help disadvantaged children. Since the young man seems under no immediate pressure to support himself, I would have been even more impressed if he had foregone college altogether in favor of volunteering full time at a soup kitchen or teaching basic skills to those without the advantage of a private school education.  If the young man was really exorcised about the "gross system" all around him, he might even have withdrawn from his private school during senior year in high school, enrolled in a public school, and asked his parents to donate his tuition to a worthy cause. 

The profiled young man doesn’t seem to understand that his possible outcomes are already largely determined by a life full of past and continuing advantages. This young man, in making what the article implies is an ethically principled stand, is like the person who draws a line in the sand that he refuses to cross. Only, the line he draws is not a perpendicular barrier to the line on which he walks. The line he draws doesn’t impede his progress at all: it is a parallel line. His refusal to cross the line makes little difference. He still makes the same journey, only on a slightly different path.

Gravity--It's the Law: Science and Free Speech

Popular Science magazine is shutting off its comments.  Here is part of its rationale:

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

This is too bad, but I hear you, Popular Science magazine. Too often the comments on an article (scientific or otherwise) are little more than ad hominem political attacks that betray not only the ill will but the absolute incomprehension of some readers. These types of comments, for me, are like people throwing rotten tomatoes at a work of art available for us all to look at. I don't always like the art piece, but at least I want to be able to contemplate and absorb it unencumbered by people who aren't there to look and offer reasoned critique in the first place. This art metaphor doesn’t go far enough to express what’s wrong with throwing rotten tomatoes at scientific assertions of facts.  At least with art a person can reasonably entertain his or her own opinion about the “truth” or the “merits” of a piece. In the case of science, you can’t seriously argue with certain foundational principles. As one of my high school teachers used to say: “Gravity: it’s the law.”

Now, there are some people who will insist that shutting down comments is somehow a loss for “free speech.” But, to them, I say, “not really.” There is, of course, no Constitutional right, First Amendment or otherwise, to post comments in response to an article in a privately run journal (though this is the very sort of assertion that such commenters often make). Even if we think more broadly about philosophical freedom of expression norms that govern public discourse and ongoing political debates, there is no “right” to make inane, offensive comments that subvert the underlying communication. I talk more about claims around freedom of expression norms in my NYU Review of Law and Social Change article A ‘Ho New World: Raced and Gendered Insult as Ersatz Carnival and the Corruption of Freedom of Expression Norms.

Swedish Exposure Redux, Redacted

[This is the longer version of a post originally titled “Swedish Exposure.” It was originally edited down and posted at another site but ran into sociotechnical difficulties: too many words were deemed “pornographic.”  I think it was the u-word and the m-word, each of which was used once in the edited down version; of course, it might also have been the s-word, or even my first name, which has its own L-word frissonne. To protect both spam filters and sensibilities, I have redacted certain portions of the text below. I trust that readers will use context and/or their imaginations to fill in blanks.]

Some of my colleagues and I have been discussing the recently decided Swedish case in which a 65-year-old man was acquitted of charges of s______  assault after taking off his shorts at a beach near Stockholm and m______into the ocean. You can read about it here. There has been so far a pretty even split between my colleagues who think public m_______  should be punished (though not as a s______ assault, as was the charge in the referenced case) and those who think that public m_______ is acceptable, or at least, should be treated no differently than public u______.  Public u_______, even though deplored and subject to penalty, often goes widely unpunished. Here are some of my thoughts on all of this from a gender, spatial and visual regulatory perspective.

The gendered aspects of this situation intrigue me, starting with the comparison between public u________ and public m________. This is a real Scylla and Charybdis dilemma for me: I don’t want to see either public m_______ or public u______. I will concede that both public m_______ and u_______ often involve exposure of s____ organs, either of which I could conceivably turn away from.   Were I forced to choose which one to view, I am tempted to prefer u_______. I see u_______ as a more compelling sociobiological function whose public performance I am more willing to forgive, though only slightly more willing. I must note that with public u_______, however, I am struck by the gender differences typically involved: men u_____ in public because they can. It is rare for Western women to u_______ openly in public. This is mainly because of a combination of physiological impracticability (it’s easier to stand as men typically do for u_______, than to squat as women do) and social norms that frown deeply on women publicly exposing themselves. At least there is no physiological barrier to women’s public m________ (though there would still be immense social barriers with which to contend), so there is theoretically greater gender parity in regard to the practice of public m__________.

But, since I assume, (and the assumption is not always true, I’ll grant) that the public m________ often uses other members of the public as the impetus for his (and it is usually a he) actions (such as staring at persons he finds s________ desirable), public m______ to me reeks of gross s_______ objectification of others and of breaching the boundaries between public and private. Although the public/private dichotomy has long inhered to the disadvantage of women, keeping n________ g________ and s_________ acts in the private sphere is an example of where the public/private divide serves women. Because of the way in which male public m_______ and g______ exposure have historically been and continue to be used to s_______ harass women, it is not possible to accord male public m_______ and/or other male g______ exposure a neutral valence (“it’s just another bodily function/bodily part”) that ignores this history. Keeping m_______ private is a legitimate, well-founded constraint that protects the public (mostly women) from a potential form of harassment and accords a measure of dignity to m_______ as an intimate s_____ act. Allowing public m________, in contrast, promotes what is chiefly a masculinist prerogative all while cheapening it as a s_________expression.

A larger concern that I have has no bearing on whether the public m_________ uses another member of the public to fuel his m______ or merely uses his own imagination. I am concerned with the way in which the public m______, the public u________ and the public g______ exposer, all of whom typically display their s______organs, wield what some social theorists have called synoptic power: the power of an actor to compel others to look at the actor or at a place the actor directs.  Via display of his s_______organs in a context where such displays are not only non-normative but socially and morally offensive to many, the public m_______ and his ilk shape public behavior patterns, commanding attention or repulsion, and thereby exercise social control. This is true even where, as in the Swedish case, the actor did not “target” a specific person with his m________ (or so the court says). This even stands true where the public m________ does not particularly seek an audience but performs where an audience is in fact present. Public m________ features what is often an intensely coercive, oppressive, and obscene power of “made you look” and of “made you look away.”

So, while I understand the impulse to treat public m_______ as an aspect of broader social and personal freedom, it is a freedom whose exercise threatens to constrain the liberty of many others to enjoy public space.

There But for the Grace of God Go I, Again

Do the well off to do disdain the poor? According to research conducted by psychologist Susan Fiske, the answer is “yes.”  In the project subjects were placed in neuroimaging machines and shown photos of the poor and homeless.  The brains of subjects responded as though the photos depicted objects, not humans. This, apparently, is a sign of revulsion.

I find the claim here of poverty disdain to be very interesting chiefly because of the questions that the claim raises. What were the gender, race, class and educational levels of the subjects and of the observed persons? The answers to these questions would, I think, make a tremendous difference in assessing the subjects’ responses. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the research is the asserted connection between seeing people as objects and reviling them. I have no trouble believing that objectification is tied to revulsion. Whether discussing racism, misogyny, homophobia, or any other number of human ills, objectifying people is often a key element. But what is perhaps missing here is the consideration that an adverse reaction to the poor may not be triggered by disdain but rather by a well-founded fear of rejoining the ranks of the poor.

We like to posit that those who observe the poor and homeless should ideally experience a strong feeling of “there but for the grace of God go I.”   “There but for the grace of God go I” is a saying that is often meant to express humility at the recognition that the misfortune of others could be easily be one's own, but for divine or other fortuitous intervention.  It is also an expression of charity and amity towards the unfortunate. Fiske’s research tends to suggest that there is a good deal more enmity than amity towards the poor. This is not surprising. I find it odd that we would ever expect that the primal response of those observing images of the poor would be to acknowledge the role of providence or luck. We live, after all, in a society where many people persist in believing that both privilege and disadvantage are earned and/or deserved. Privilege and disadvantage are sometimes earned.  But just as often, maybe more often, they are not. Even where those viewing images of the poor do express humility and amity in professing a sense of “there but for the grace of God go I,” my sense is that these viewers are among the very comfortable and long-term well to do. For those viewers whose tenure in the middle class is newer and more tenuous, “there but for the grace of God go I” may express not humility but fear.  This latter group are often people who, like me, have already lived in poverty and do not want a return trip.

As a young child I lived with an aunt and her ten children. I am sure, to most observers, we hit all of the negative stereotypes--impoverished, black, poorly fed, unwashed and poorly dressed, barely housed, badly behaved (I speak for myself--I was a demon child with a cunningly angelic demeanor during that period of my life). My aunt did have a husband, though he was not the father of all of her children and she usually sent him out when the social worker came over to "inspect" how she was using her welfare benefits. I honestly do fear that I will live like that again, and that fear will never leave me. Some years back, when I was practicing law, I had to make a phone call to reach a client who had not appeared for a court hearing. As there was no available phone at the court, I had to use a public phone in a nearby welfare office. I found myself trembling as I waited for my turn using the phone and stood looking at all of the people around me and a flood of memories washed over me.

I experienced a very visceral and likely very measurable reaction to the poor people around me that day in the welfare office. But I did not tremble because I reviled the people or because I was afraid of the people; I was afraid of the possibility of living in that condition again. Some people may scoff at the notion of an apparently middle class person fearing that she will rejoin the ranks of the very poor. For some people, discussions of poverty in such a context may seem purely academic and so they are dismissed along with most other discourses on poverty that challenge the notion of the journey from poverty as a one way street. But for those of us who came from poverty and who continue to work for a living, however “professional” our jobs, past poverty does not make future poverty a moot possibility. This is anything but a moot point. The silence around the threat of re-impoverishment is part of what allows it to occur. By the time re-impoverishment happens, it is often too late for talk to prevent it. Like so many other social scourges that we refuse to talk about, re-impoverishment is a harm that, while imminently capable of repetition, evades review. 

Trayvon Martin, Whistling Vivaldi and Whistling Dixie

I, like so many, am struggling to cope with the killing of Trayvon Martin and the trial of his killer. I am reading and reflecting on the many commentaries in an effort to make sense of it all.

One commentary that particularly struck me was by musician and author Questlove (Amir Khalib Thompson). Questlove wrote in New York Magazine about how the death of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his killer left Questlove feeling not only dismayed but devalued. For Questlove, Martin’s death was a reminder that too often, black lives seem not to count for very much. As Questlove notes, our very physical presence is sometimes a threat to good order. Questlove wrote:

I'm in scenarios all the time in which primitive, exotic-looking me — six-foot-two, 300 pounds, uncivilized Afro, for starters — finds himself in places where people who look like me aren't normally found. I mean, what can I do? I have to be somewhere on Earth, correct? In the beginning — let's say 2002, when the gates of "Hey, Ahmir, would you like to come to [swanky elitist place]?" opened — I'd say "no," mostly because it's been hammered in my DNA to not "rock the boat," which means not making "certain people" feel uncomfortable.

I mean, that is a crazy way to live. Seriously, imagine a life in which you think of other people's safety and comfort first, before your own. You're programmed and taught that from the gate. It's like the opposite of entitlement. 

The problem is, I do have desires to go to certain places and do certain things and enjoy the perks and benefits of being a person who works his arse off as much as I do. So I got over my hang-ups of not wanting to be the odd guy in the room sometime around 2007. It's been mixed results at best.

Sadly, the fear of black physical presence is not new. Questlove’s piece is reminiscent of an anecdote from the book Parallel Time:Growing Up in Black and White by Brent Staples. Staples wrote of his time moving about Chicago while a graduate student:

I tried to be innocuous but didn't know how. The more I thought about how I moved, the less my body belonged to me; I became a false character riding along inside it. I began to avoid people. I turned out of my way into side streets to spare them the sense that they were being stalked. I let them clear the lobbies of buildings before I entered, so they wouldn't feel trapped. Out of nervousness, I began to whistle and discovered I was good at it. My whistle was pure and sweet -- and also in tune. On the street at night, I whistled popular tunes from the Beatles and Vivaldi's "Four Seasons." The tension drained from people's bodies when they heard me. A few even smiled as they passed me in the dark.

Staples, like Questlove, comes from the position of being a large (over six feet tall) black man in a world that too often deems any black man, woman or even a child as a scary Negro. And if anyone doubts that black women and children fall into this category also, they haven’t lived in my shoes nor in any pair that remotely resembles my shoes.  Whether it is driving while black,  reunioning while black, or other WB (while black) incidents, too many black people face the perplexing, infuriating, heart-breaking, debilitating, dangerous, and sometimes fatal task of addressing what scholar Jody Armour labeled “negrophobia.”  Negrophobia is the notion that because of their perceived dangerousness, an otherwise irrational fear of blacks might be justified in situations where whites (or deemed whites—for as George Zimmerman reminds us, whiteness is frequently situational, contingent, delegated and/or relative) take preemptive action such as shooting to thwart a black attacker. This is the Trayvon Martin case in a nutshell.

 This scary Negro trope runs rampant through the minds, media and literature of a country that, for all of its racial progress in some areas, remains wedded to Birth of a Nation style anti-black imagery. Such imagery affronts black men in particular, rendering them as little more than exemplars of the criminalblackman—the mythic black wrongdoer posited by scholar Katheryn Russell Brown. 

 Whistling Vivaldi, negrophobia, the criminalblackman and the killing of  Trayvon Martin are all potent aspects of what social theorist Erving Goffman called discredited stigma—stigma resulting from differentness that is already known or is assumed on the spot. This difference of blackness “spoils" the identity of black people, often rendering irrelevant black people’s adherence to social norms and expectations in other aspects of their lives. If Staples whistled light-hearted pop tunes or classical music to allay the fears of mostly white passersby, he was only trying to assuage the fear of his stigma-ravaged black identity.


 All too often, however, no amount of whistling will calm the fear of blackness. Because this is true, assertions that the Trayvon Martin case was “not about race” leave us with no real way talk about what happened. A man thought someone looked “suspicious,” called police, acted against police advice and followed the allegedly suspicious person, thereby provoking a fight, and then shot and killed the unarmed person.  How does the story about initial suspiciousness or the subsequent fight make sense without viewing it from the lens of the discrediting stigma of blackness? It doesn’t—unless instead of whistling Vivaldi, you’re whistling Dixie.

Help Me Please Chase Away the WB's

I had a frenetic nightmare this morning between 6:30 a.m. and 8:30 a.m., the period when I took back to my bed for a nap to help remedy my night of wakefulness.  In the nightmare I was at a conference for black women lawyers in Los Angeles.  The beginning was fine and felt for a time like  a rather pleasant dream: I went sightseeing, recalling scenes from my Los Angeles childhood. I paid lovely visits to friends who were not at the conference and who do not live in Los Angeles in real life  but who nonetheless were present (A and J, you were there, along with the baby doggy, walking along the beach outside your beach house).

Soon this sightseeing phase of the dream ended and I drove back to the conference site.  I was early for the next meeting  so I went to return some children’s clothes that I had bought nearby but now on close inspection saw that they would be too small for my daughter. I gave the still-tagged clothes to the clerk along with my receipt.  He looked at them and frowned. “This isn’t our merchandise,” he snarled. “You got these from elsewhere and now you want a refund from us!” I was baffled and then I became angry.   He came from behind the counter and grabbed me and dragged me to the back of the store, and another man came to help him.   When I protested the clerk jabbed me in the arm with a sharp pencil, leaving a deep hole in my arm, a hole so deep and painful  that I looked for it when I awakened.  I screamed.  Other shoppers came running over including other participants at the black women lawyers’ conference. They, too, began to protest, telling the man that he was mistaken, that I had no reason to do what he said, and that I was a lawyer and law professor.  At that, the men let me go and threw my purchases back at me, still refusing to refund them.  I left, vowing to get even in every way I knew how.

When the conference started up again I asked to take to the microphone. I then told what had happened to an audience that looked like about 500 women.  They began screaming in anger and disbelief, and we made vows to stop the problem of shopping while black.

I awoke from the nightmare (or daymare in this case) with a headache that still persists and with a profound sense of anger and sadness.  I had no doubt that my dream was triggered by WB’s—while black incidents--that happened to me and my family during the last few weeks. I had not intended to blog about this.  I have other work to do, after all. I have, for example, piles of recent archive notes to write up and incorporate into my book. I planned to think more about the WB's later. But now that the WB’s are invading my dreams, I have to exorcise the demon.

I describe WB incidents as any disparate treatment of black people by persons with authority or under color of authority.  One of the best known of the WB’s is driving while black, DWB, the phenomenon whereby black people are stopped more frequently by police than whites or persons of other races for real or imaginary minor infractions. My husband and I were stopped a few weeks ago by a policeman who passed slowly by us in the opposite direction, stared into our car, and then made a sharp u-turn and pulled us over. He approached and asked for my husband’s drivers’ license.  My husband gave over his license and asked what the problem was and received no reply. The policeman and his partner then sat in their car behind us conducting what was I suppose a warrant check or checks for stolen vehicles.  After several minutes they approached us again, one coming to the driver’s side window and the other standing right behind him with his hand perched on his gun holster.  I wanted to take out my phone to record the interaction but I was too afraid to reach for my purse.

My husband again asked what the problem was and we were told that we had “shined our high beams” into the officer’s eyes.  I had noticed as we sat there that the high beams were on.  They had apparently been on all during our half-mile drive downhill to pick up our daughter from a school dance. We hadn’t passed any other cars, so it was not surprising that we didn’t notice.  This is generally a pretty friendly town and when drivers detect high beams on in another car they give a quick flash, the almost universal signal to turn down your lights. The incident ended with us apologizing for having the high beams on and we went on our way, chagrined by the whole matter.

Another common WB is shopping while black, SWB, such as what occurred in my dream. It occurs with alarming frequency in real life, too. I discuss such an incident here in my letter to the New York Times, addressing an incident wherein actor Forrest Whitaker was falsely accused of shoplifting.

I encountered an entirely new WB just a few days ago that I’ll call RWB--reunioning while black. My entire family and I went back to reunions at my Elite Undergraduate School and got a nice taste of RWB.  First, I was denied entry to my class reunion site by guards who somehow doubted the authenticity of my wristband, the mechanism for gaining entry into each reunion site.  I was livid and humiliated, especially as they insisted that “everyone” was subject to this treatment. I have never observed this over the decades since I graduated, and people were flowing in without challenge or notice even as they gave me close inspection. A short while later, one of my sons, who also attended Elite Undergraduate School, and who was also wearing a wristband, was denied entry to another reunion site by guards who wanted to know “who he was with” and where he was going.  My son had had enough when they asked him and his black friend, also a wristband-wearing graduate of Elite Undergraduate School, for identification.  They moved past the guards, knowing that they had the right to enter and hoping that the matter would go no further.  My lip quivered as my son related the story to me; this is how black people are killed for no reason, I thought.

I have no doubt that these two most recently experienced WBs, DWB and RWB, were responsible for my nightmare this morning. I have relieved some of the pain of the RWB incidents by talking with some concerned classmates about the matter and via communications with representatives of Elite Undergraduate School. I was grateful for these contacts, as one of the worst aspects of these situations is when people are aware of what happened to you and say Nothing. At. All.

I understand the silence in the face of WB incidents.  I really do. It is hard for some folks to accept (or believe) that educated, fairly accomplished black people are subject to WB incidents just like all the rest of black people. Perhaps as bad as the Silent Sams are those who try to diminish the problem. One person said, in response to my reunioning while black incident, “Oh, you should be glad that they want to keep us safe!” I didn’t know who “us” was (though I could hazard a good guess at who he meant) and I didn’t know what we were being kept “safe” from (that, too, I’m sure I could figure out.) Another person chuckled, “Oh, it’s because you look so young! They probably thought you were sneaking in for beer.” I hardly knew what to say. I’d like to flatter myself that I look younger than my years. But I don’t come close to resembling an under aged party crasher. I didn’t have the heart to point out to this person that many of the people coming in without challenge by the guards were white youths who DID, in fact, look like under aged party crashers.

I suppose what is really sending me for a loop is that this whole WB thing shows no sign of abating. It happened to me when I was a teenager, and I thought the problem would disappear when I was older. But so far, no luck. I am too often under scrutiny by clerks, police and other authorities. So, I smile.  I offer small talk. In short, I try to Make Them at Ease.  I Am Nice.  I am Black But (And?) I Am Good. I Am Not a Criminal.  I Am Like the Other People Here.  I Belong.

This is mentally and physically exhausting. I need reinforcements to help make the WB’s go away. 

Open This Gate, Tear Down This Wall: Charles Ramsey, Rescue and Race

I had to fight back tears when I heard of the rescue of Amanda Berry, Gina De Jesus and Michelle Knight, the three women in Cleveland who were rescued from years of captivity.  The story is here. I came close to tears first out of relief for their safety. But I was also saddened because for the last several years I, like so many others, had frequented the area not far from that Cleveland neighborhood where they were found. Like so many others I little imagined that the women, the youngest two of whom had been the subject of much local searching, were still alive. All while I was glad for the women and their families I worried that the community, that we, that I, had failed them by not finding them sooner.

In the aftermath of the coverage an unlikely hero came to light.  The women were rescued thanks to the concern of one Charles Ramsey who did what too few of us do nowadays: he left the curtilege of his own home to go and see about a neighbor.  My heart swelled with pride as I heard Mr. Ramsey tell of hearing one of the victims calling out for help and of how he went to her rescue.  Thank heavens for neighbors like Mr. Ramsey. He is, as many have pointed out, an Internet sensation thanks to his detailed account of his actions surrounding the rescue.

Charles Ramsey, however, got way too real for some people in his interview.  From an NPR blog:

<< What made Ramsey really blow up on the Internet was his observation at the end of the interview.

"Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man's arms," Ramsey told a local TV reporter. The local reporter quickly pivoted away.>>

Yes, that’s what Mr. Ramsey said on live television. While it might have been a pretty cringe-worthy comment for many viewers, it is, unfortunately, a pretty accurate assessment of the situation on the ground in many places, including Cleveland. The city has for too long been racially divided by a figurative and geographical line between east and west, with the east side being much blacker than the west. Even in some of the famously integrated, inner ring suburbs of Cleveland, the level of social polarization between blacks and whites is sometimes more reminiscent of 1933 than 2013.  Mr. Ramsey gave voice to something that many of us have been saying for years: the social barriers between the races are as solid as ever in some places. Even where there are breaches in the racially inspired fortifications, too often the social interactions occurring in the breaches are cold, spare, wanting and rare. 

So, besides feelings of shared relief over the rescue, and thoughts of how we might behave to keep each other safe from the types of harms these women suffered, we might also think about how all of us might come together to address this persistent racial boundary that has also come to light.

Of Husband Hunting and Diamond Mines

There has been a tremendous dust-up in response to Susan Patton's (a member of the Princeton class of 1977) letter to the Daily Princetonian.  In her letter, Patton exhorts Princeton women to begin the task of husband hunting in their freshman year, warning them that “[f]or most of you, the cornerstone of your future and happiness will be inextricably linked to the man you marry, and you will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you.”

Below is my response, a version of which was also published in the Daily Princetonian:

I have to say that while I disagree with most of Patton’s assertions, I don’t find them especially offensive. After all, women can take Patton’s advice or leave it. While Patton’s tone does seem overwrought and off key in several respects, I don’t find her message much different from any other piece of alumni advice. In fact, I find myself uneasier with the assumption by some women that Patton’s point of view is one that should be suppressed. I don’t agree with much of what Patton says. But neither do I think that Patton’s view should be silenced. Haven’t men told women to shut up long enough without women telling each other (for it is mostly women doing the silencing) to shut up? I for one think Patton ought to speak louder and longer to her points. If she did, we might engender fuller and more constructive engagement on the issue of women’s family lives.

I am especially uneasy with the class and race privilege evidenced in the outraged responses to Patton’s letter. There seems to be at work here an implicit understanding that elite college women who look for early marriage with classmates (or perhaps for any marriage at all) are turning their backs on stellar opportunities or are being untrue to bedrock feminist principles such as autonomy or equality. This is problematic because although women come in all stripes, too often norms of feminism are shaped by the elite few. Feminism has been and continues to be the province of the wealthy, the white and the well-connected. Many of these women want to have it all or want a larger piece of the pie. Other women might be content to get any of it at all or might be content with some of the crumbs from the pie much less a piece of it. It is difficult to frame a broad-based emancipatory feminist program in the face of such starkly contrasting metaphors for female success.

The contrast may be especially bleak when comparing wealthy, white women to black women from poor and working class backgrounds. In the context of marriage, some wealthy white women, for instance, may be far more likely to have access to well-paying jobs or other resources that obviate the need for a spouse’s financial support. Moreover, given a higher rate of placement in elite firms and more frequent residence in upscale neighborhoods, wealthy white women who do choose to marry may have far more opportunity to find a like-minded mate at places outside of the elite colleges or universities that they may have attended.

For poor or working class black women and for some other women of color, there is often less available in the way of career or spousal choice. Even equipped with an elite college degree, highly educated black women from poor or working class backgrounds often earn less than their white, wealthy counterparts, making it harder for them to support themselves alone. Highly educated black women from poor or working class backgrounds are also less likely than their wealthy white peers to live and work in settings where there are large numbers of people who share their interests or values. Yes, it may be possible to find a suitable mate in other settings. I’ll call such mates diamonds in the rough. Then again, it may not be possible. There are far more rocks in the world than diamonds in the rough. While solid and dependable, a rock is, well, just a rock.

This is not to say that elite colleges and universities are brimming over with cut and polished diamonds in the form of highly suitable mates. But I think some of us protest entirely too much when we eschew the seeming elitism of remarks such as Patton’s “you will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you.” Certainly I’d adjust that statement to read men or women; heteronormativity is its own form of tyranny. And maybe Patton’s statement it is a bit too emphatic; never is a long time, after all. But the fact is, even if adopting the most anti-elitist stance possible, a lot of us do think this way. We just don’t like to say it and if anyone else says it we cry foul.

Does this mean that I would give my daughter the advice that Patton is proposing? Absolutely not. If my daughter is lucky enough to attend Princeton or a school like it, I want her to view her college years as a momentous first step in a life full of grand possibilities of all sorts. Marriage may or may not be one of them. But, I would also make sure that my daughter understands that for some women, well educated or not, choices and opportunities, if they exist at all, may be narrower and more constrained. Only with this sort of honest acknowledgement of the conditions facing some women can we achieve significant change for all women.

Lean In (Toward the Everlasting Glass)

I think about all the moments I just didn't believe in myself. Every test I was sure I was about to fail, every job I wasn't sure I could do," she says. "It was after watching so many women quietly lean back, after watching myself quietly lean back and miss opportunities, that I started to see the pattern and started to talk about it.

Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, has caused a national discussion of women’s success (and failure) in the workplace with her assertion that women often lose ground because they “lean back,” that is, they choose to forego opportunities. In her upcoming book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, Sandberg details how women can overcome what could, I suppose, be called a pathological unwillingness to power. Women need, per Sandberg, a Nietzschean kick in the butt to get out of their career torpor.

I am, in general, a strong believer in the value and importance of hard work. I know, however, that no amount of hard work and determination can overcome certain types of workplace barriers for some women. The historical and current states of gender, class and racial inequality make leaning in futile in some cases. This is chiefly because Sandberg’s lean in notion relies upon the primacy of ideas such as formal equality and rationality. Lean in ignores the extent to which women have been excluded in shaping the substantive content of equality norms. Workplace standards that are good for the gander are all too often bad for the goose. As to rationality, it has long been clear that many employers will persist in gender or other types of discrimination even where they cause harm to their own interests. In short, employers can and frequently do cut off their own noses to spite their faces.

So, for the Sheryl Sandbergs of the world I offer this paean to leaning in:

“Lean In Toward the Everlasting Glass” (Sung to the Tune of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms”)

If you seek a job advance or want your career enhanced then

Lean in toward the everlasting glass

The glass is oh so thick

Work, wheedle, politick and

Lean in toward the everlasting glass

Lean in, lean in

Man up and break the glass that bars your way

Lean in, lean in

The glass ceiling shatters and you win the day

Forge those nerves of steel

Wear Manolo Blahnik heels and

Lean in toward the everlasting glass

Learn to negotiate, curse, spit, communicate and

Lean in toward the everlasting glass

Lean in, lean in

Man up and break the glass that bars your way

Lean in, lean in

The glass ceiling shatters and you win the day

Ignore class and race

Peer through, press your face and

Lean in toward the everlasting glass

You just talk the talk

Leave others to walk the walk

Lean in toward the everlasting glass