Ain't I a Feminist Legal Scholar Too?

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

2012-01-23T21:42:00.000-05:00

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 songand game

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

A then 14-year-old United States born,non-Spanish speaking African American girl named Jakadrien Turner waserroneously deported to Colombia in 2010. Ms. Turner was, accordingto news accounts, arrested for shoplifting in Houston, Texas. Though thefacts are unclear, U.S. authorities assert that Turner identified herself as anundocumented alien from Colombia. Turner pled guilty to the shoplifting chargesand was turned over to federal immigration authorities who sent her before animmigration magistrate where she was ordered deported. Immigration andCustoms Enforcement then asked the Colombian consulate to issue traveldocuments, which the consulate issued after interviewing the teenager. Turner was then transported to Bogotá. Once in Colombia Turner was apparentlygiven 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 Statesofficials have suggested that Turner’s case is rare. However, the fact is thatwrongful deportations are not as rare as is often asserted. It is probably thecase that many hundreds of people, mostly people of color, are erroneouslydeported every year. Many of these deportations are of non-citizens whosedeportations were based on improper grounds. For many of these people,there is no remedy once they have been removed. There is no such barrier toreturn 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 anamicus brief filed by the NationalImmigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild in Castro v. United States,“the problem of detention and deportation of U.S. Citizens is so widespreadthat citizens may even be detained and deported on a daily basis.” According toa recent articleby Jacqueline Stevens of Northwestern University, data suggests thatsince 2003 more than 20,000 United States citizens have been detained ordeported as aliens.

While there may be more to the Turnerstory than meets the eye, one wonders how in the world something like thiscould happen. Aren’t there numerous safeguards? Just offering the name ofsomeone 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 erroneouslydeported. Such people often look or sound to officials as if they camefrom “somewhere else,” or, at minimum, as if they belong anywhere else buthere. As one commenter in the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo archly suggested aboutTurner's situtation: “si ella hubiese dado el nombre de una delas hijas del Presidente Obama la habrían enviado a la Casa Blanca porque elnombre coincidía” (if she had given the name of one of President Obama’sdaughters, they would have sent her to the White House because the namecoincided.)

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

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

2011-12-15T09:22:00.001-05:00

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

Women and blacks haveoften been said to have lesser faculties than white men. It has beenobserved that, unlike other some social outsiders, women and blacks frequentlypossess physical and social characteristics that function to systematically andexplicitly exclude them from opportunities to which members of other groupsmight 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 legalstrategy of many feminist advocates as they struggled to bring the gains of thecivil 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

2011-11-29T15:34:00.001-05:00

It looks as if Ginger White has picked up thegage thrown by Herman Cain’s lawyer, according to a NewYork Times news report alleging that Republican hopeful Cain was involvedin 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 enterinto combat to gain satisfaction in a dispute. Several weeks ago whensome women came forward with allegations of Cain’s sexual misconduct, Cain’slawyer warned other potential accusers to “think twice” before coming forwardwith 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 yourblock completely off. Even people who had no opinion whatsoever about Cain’sinnocence or guilt of the allegations were animated by such talk. Such talktakes us back to the medieval judicial duel or trial by combat in whichaccusations were settled by tossing a gage followed by a battle between theaccuser and the accused, or their stand-ins. Lorenzo Sabine’s Notes onDuels and Dueling, published over 150 years ago and detailing the historyof the duel, tells us that early Western notions of the judicial duel werefounded on the belief that “a brave man did not deserve to suffer, and that acoward did not deserve to live.”

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

Consider this language from a website on medievaltournaments:

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

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

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

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

According to Sabine, combatants always fought ina just cause, at least theoretically. However, at times even thecombatants knew that they had entered into combat when they were in fact in thewrong. This could lead to “evasive shifts” in which the reason for fightingchanged in the middle of the battle in order to create an actualduel-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

2011-10-28T10:15:00.000-04:00

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

The article detailed some ofthe explanations given by survey respondents:

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

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

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

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

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

• Women lawyers have “an airabout them.”

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

This last comment is a reminder that while women’s participation in the work world overthe last several decades has allowed women greater social, economic, andsometimes even sexual autonomy, women’s move to the work world did notalways herald a decrease in dependence. Instead, there may sometimes be a displacement ofdependence. This is because womenemployed in workplaces alongside men, especially male bosses, sometimes became“office wives” to such men. Thephrase "office wife" has been common in the United States and Canadasince at least the 1930s, popularized by Faith Baldwin’s 1930 novel TheOffice Wife and its 1930 movie adaptation.

The notion of the “office wife” has been rendered more gender neutralvia “office spouse” (or the addition of “cubicle hubby”). Some modernrenditions view such relationships as reciprocally beneficial for men andwomen. However, many commentators have observed that notwithstanding a movetoward gender neutrality, women are still often expected to be subservient tomen in office settings. In even modern times women secretaries and assistantsare often constructed as office wives who are “deferential and ladylike” andwho act as “loyal, trustworthy and devoted” extensions of their usually malebosses, according to Rosemary Pringle’s iconic essay “What is a Secretary?” “Office wife” is a phrase that conveys mixed notions of work, domesticity, andsexual promise, even in some modern contexts. For instance, some relatively recent court casehave involved women claiming to have served as “office wives" to men inworkplaces; 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.

Althoughthe 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 morethan 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; sheis, as the results in the survey may suggest, still fiercely heterosexual inher choice of boss, with the twist that she is now also sometimes polyandrousbecause she has more than one husband-boss.

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

Their Eyes Were Watching God as a “Legal” Novel

2011-09-19T22:08:00.000-04:00

The discussion on DeePerry's Around Noon today was Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes WereWatching God. You can hear all of the show at the linkabove. The book is a timeless classic that, in broad brush summary, is about hierarchy and race, gender and class. The novel beginswhere it ends, and ends where it begins, telling the story of JanieCrawford and her journey from late girlhood to womanhood. It is oftenread in literature courses and especially in African-American literaturecourses. It combines its gritty realism, black dialect and lofty poeticlanguage to depict the black South of over 70 years ago. It is nottypically thought of as a legal novel. There is, of course, chapter 19,which depicts Janie’s trial for murder. But that chapter seemingly stands alonein 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 aboutthe way that social regulatory regimes shape society. It is a book aboutthe way that law is and is not created. There is a very apt quote aboutthis in chapter 5 of the book where the author writes, in describing the town'sfeeling about Joe Starks, its self-appointed, well-to-do mayor: “Thetown had a basketful of feelings good and bad about Joe's position andpossessions, but none had the temerity to challenge him. They bowed down to himrather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of thesethings because the town bowed down." If allusions to Joe are replaced withthe word law, then we can get a very clear sense of how norms, whetherformal or informal, work, both within the novel and outside ofit. This is because even formal law is often said to beorganic—it is molded and remolded at regular intervals, even if that re-moldingis slow. More importantly, we reflect those changes back into the face oflaw. Law can't happen if we turn away. To a great extent, law is only lawbecause we allow it to be. That we allow law to be speaks much about our visionfor ourselves and for our world.

Dangerous Random Stereotypes of Presumed Difference and Sameness

2011-08-29T12:32:00.011-04:00

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

2011-07-09T11:03:00.003-04:00

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.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Real Woman Behind the Unreal Man (Or: Truth and Death)

2011-06-15T11:15:00.006-04:00

This from the Op-ed section of yesterday’s New York Times:

<< The novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, born 200 years ago today, was an unlikely fomenter of wars. Diminutive and dreamy-eyed, she was a harried housewife with six children, who suffered from various obscure illnesses worsened by her persistent hypochondria. And yet, driven by a passionate hatred of slavery, she found time to write “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which became the most influential novel in American history and a catalyst for radical change both at home and abroad.>>

The author goes on to discuss how the character Uncle Tom of the novel’s fame has been reduced to a “spineless sellout” as a result of numerous dramatizations and re-tellings that somehow re-wrote and thereby deformed the “strong and morally courageous”, “muscular, dignified” dramatis persona that Uncle Tom really was. I was struck by how, in the process of attempting to “rescue” the “real Uncle Tom”, and thereby mark the birthday of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the op-ed seems to quite gratuitously verbally assault the character of Uncle Tom's creator. The irony, of course, is that Uncle Tom was not “real” at all. Uncle Tom came to be only because the real woman Harriet Beecher Stowe gave him life. Well, happy birthday, Harriet the harried hypochondriac housewife and mother of Uncle Tom.

It is perhaps not surprising that the image of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom is so much larger than the memory of Stowe herself. Uncle Tom was, as the author of the op-ed points out, an icon of the anti-slavery movement. The problem, if there is one, is that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom has been transformed from a key figure in a complex allegory into a rough-hewn, unsubtle archetype that only scarcely represents the author’s creation. Uncle Tom is in this respect somewhat like Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein's creature (I won't call him a monster, that's part of his bad rap), who, in similar fashion, has been recast by popular culture as a dim-witted brute.

Harriet Beecher Stowe actually had a lot in common with Mary Shelley. Both women were part of socially and politically well-connected families with literary leanings. Both women balanced high-minded idealism and genius with the harsh realities of childbearing and illness. Both women created entire bodies of work that have been overshadowed by the Golem-like figures of Uncle Tom and Frankenstein's creature who were created by words and then ran amuck.

Like the author of the op-ed, I say let the “real” Uncle Tom live. To do so, we need to not only re-inscribe “truth” on his forehead but also give proper homage to his maternity.

Lea VanderVelde’s Mrs. Dred Scott —A Genre Bender?

2011-06-13T22:24:00.010-04:00

There are many ways of writing about history. Three somewhat related genres within the larger historical enterprise are non-fiction history, historicized fiction and fictionalized history. Mrs. Dred Scot, to my read, manages to fall somewhere in the interstices of all three of these. Read more about this at Osgoode Hall's Institute for Feminist Legal Studies blog!

Thief Me (Or, Giving a Six for a Nine in Providing Public Education)

2011-05-01T10:17:00.018-04:00

Theft is, from a moral and legal perspective, a bad thing. Theft that occurs by lying, faking or other subterfuges as opposed to by good old-fashioned five-fingered grabbing is often considered even more reprehensible. Though typically thieves do no physical harm to their victims when they abscond with other people’s stuff, thieves are high on the list of most disliked criminals. As my late grandmother-in-law Nen used to say in her Caribbean accent: “I don’t want nothing to do with someone who thief me.” In her parlance, “thief” was a verb that was synonymous with “steal from” as well as a noun. A thief thieves people. Nen also seemed to envision a special place in hell for people who thiefed people by pretense or fraud. Some of the worst people, she said often, are people who give a six for a nine.

In Norwalk, Connecticut Tonya McDowell has been indicted for first-degree larceny. She faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $15,000 fine. She is charged with stealing education: she allegedly enrolled her son in Norwalk schools from September 2010 to January 2011 when she did not live there. She is alleged to have used the address of her babysitter who did live in Norwalk. You can read about it here in the New York Times. Several people have expressed outrage that a parent seeking a better education for her child would be subjected to such charges. They argue that what should be under indictment is the system of school funding in much of the United States that relies upon local tax funding and thus makes schools in wealthy neighborhoods more likely to be excellent while leaving schools in poor areas deficient.

There are however, a large number of people who remain silent through all of this. They are the quite rational, well-meaning, sympathetic and even empathetic people who, though they might not have criminally charged Ms. McDowell if it appeared that she had enrolled her child in a school district where she did not live, certainly would have advocated the prompt removal of her child from the school. One of their arguments goes something like this: “I worked hard for years to be able to afford a house in this neighborhood. I work even harder to pay the taxes that support the schools in this neighborhood. Why should someone who hasn’t done those things get to take advantage of the school system here?” I get this argument; I really do. Good quality education can be expensive. Yes, we do in many cases pay taxes for certain other services that may be used by all comers whether or not they live in our neighborhood, such as roads, firefighters, and police. But these, we might assert, are in the realm of the really necessary from a health, safety and welfare standpoint. Moreover, these tend to be services that do not always rely entirely on local funding, or that are not frequently used by non-residents (and still, there are sometimes calls to limit use or to charge a fee for use of even these essential services).

There is also the argument made by those who would have supported the removal of Ms. McDowell’s child that school excellence is the result of more than just well-funded schools or excellent teachers. Excellent schools are often attended by large numbers of children who come from safe, warm, clean homes with plentiful, nourishing food, attentive if not loving well-educated parents and other relatives, books and music, private lessons that supplement schooling, opportunities for travel, and all sorts of enrichment. Even if we could insure that all children attend well-funded schools, we would likely have to do a great deal more to create optimal educational conditions for all children. I get this argument, too. Education is, after all, more than instruction. Education has to do with the formation of an individual in numerous ways, ranging from the intellectual all the way to the moral, social and cultural. In contrast, instruction is more precise, and has to do with specific methods used for the transmission of knowledge. Instruction is a part of education, but education is not necessarily instruction. Education begins at home and continues at home long after instruction at a school or anywhere else is over.

So what does this say about whether or not we should be lodging theft charges against a mother for seeking to educate her child in a place where she does not live in order to obtain what she believes (and what many objective measures show to be) a better school? Do the Ms. McDowell’s of the world thief those of us who reside in better neighborhoods when they enroll their children? Is their behavior even more reprehensible because they must by necessity give sixes for nines to school enrollment officials when making representations about where they live?

The answer lies in how one views public education. If we conceive of the provision of public education as a consumer good or service that is subject to being “stolen”, then it is right to charge Ms. McDowell as if she had stolen an item from a luxury store or failed to pay for a hotel stay after representing that she could in fact pay. Such a view is deeply problematic, however. Public education is not a good at all, and though it is a service, it is a really unique type of service. It is a cornerstone of civic engagement and of democracy itself. However, while many of us would agree that we owe a public education to all children in our society, far fewer would agree that we owe a quality public education to every child. That seems to be something reserved for those with the price of admission. This is at the heart of the matter. It could be that by not providing quality education to all children it is we who thief the Ms. McDowell’s of the world. Through some combination of sympathetic tut-tutting and sophistic language about the nature of school funding, we give sixes for nines to the least advantaged persons in our society.

(This post is based on a paper in progress titled Thief Us: The Use of Criminal Sanctions for Enrolling Non-Resident Children in Public School Districts)

Remembering the Victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

2011-03-25T20:19:00.008-04:00

Today is the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. On this day we pause to remember the untold numbers of African women, children and men who were victimized in the Transatlantic slave trade over a period of four hundred years. Although there is sometimes debate about just how many persons were transported, one thing is clear: it numbered in the many millions, as illustrated by much of the data in Emory University's Transatlantic Slavery Database. In memory of the victims, the U.N. General Assembly, in its resolution 62/122 of 17 December 2007, declared 25 March the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, to be observed annually. The resolution called for the establishment of an outreach program to inculcate in future generations the “causes, consequences and lessons of the transatlantic slave trade, and to communicate the dangers of racism and prejudice”.

The specific goal of this day is to honor the memory of those Africans and African-ancestored people who suffered and died as a result of being enslaved, especially those who underwent the horrors of the Middle Passage. However, in making this declaration, Member States recalled that the treatment of African-ancestored slaves is also at the foundation of many present-day situations of social and economic inequality, injustice, racism and hatred aimed at African-ancestored people. This is a day not only to remember the past, but to promote contemporary awareness of the continuing ills of this particular form of slavery.

We might well wonder how something of the magnitude of the African slave trade could be little known or at risk of being forgotten. The problem lies not, however, in whether we are ignorant of or forget about slavery, but in the nature of what we know and in the manner in which we remember slavery. In the case of African-ancestored slavery in the West, history and memory are often contentious distant kinsman instead of close siblings. There is, for instance, a tendency to historicize African-ancestored slavery as an institution instead of simply (or complexly) remembering it as a series of ongoing events with very real, material consequences for individual and collective groups of enslaved black people. As scholar Pierre Nora wrote in his discussion of the relationship between memory and history, memory and history are far from synonymous; they appear often to be in fundamental opposition. The opposition is between an actual past phenomenon and a representation of the past phenomenon. The treatment of African-ancestored people during slavery and in its aftermath is part of a somber past. This past is not, however, personal to African-ancestored people themselves, or to former slave societies, but to the entire world. African women, children and men were removed from their homes and introduced into a system of bondage that was not only sometimes violent and capricious but which also deprived them of the essence of their humanity: freedom and hope for future.

Bridging the history and memory of slavery poses a number of problems. Perhaps chief among them is how not to stand in judgment on a slave past that in some measures defies critique by its very historicity: 1811 was not 2011, and it is at best facile and misguided to bring to bear on the slave past the norms that guide us in present times. Nonetheless, African-ancestored slavery remains a searing memory that scorches the fabric of modernity, and hence, is something that merits attention. The notion of people as property makes manifest Nora’s notion of lieux de mémoires, disparate sites where “memory crystallizes and secretes itself.” While Nora envisions such sites as places, concepts, or objects that symbolize the memorial heritage of a community, in the case of slavery the bodies of enslaved black women, children and men were and are themselves sites of memory. The bodies of the dead are, however, enshrouded by a historic past that obscures the memorial past inscribed upon their very remains.

Gender, Race and Power in the Legal Academy (Or, the BAU Haus Rules)

2011-02-19T15:27:00.017-05:00

In recent days news circulated regarding an incident at Widener University’s school of law. It seems that a faculty member was called to task for repeatedly offering hypotheticals about killing the dean in the context of teaching his criminal law class. The dean happens to be a black woman, Linda Ammons. Some students complained about what they viewed as repeated instances of “violent, racist, sexist” behavior by the white male professor. There were also apparently claims by students that the professor had engaged in a “pattern” of misconduct , "cursing and coarse behavior, "racist and sexist statements" and "violent, personal scenarios that demean and threaten” the professor’s colleagues at the institution. You can read one newspaper's account of the matter here.

I have watched in horrid fascination the various deconstructive responses to this story from members of the legal academy:

1. Silence. This is perhaps the most interesting response, especially given that Dean Ammons has been in the academy for many years and is known to many.

2. Dispassionate equanimity. This mostly consisted of calls to wait and see, to not jump to conclusions until all of the facts are in. We are, after all, law professors. We wouldn’t be acting according to our training if we took a position before knowing all of the facts.

3. Precedential analysis and dismissal. A number of scholars, many of them “progressive”, have suggested that if the legal academy were to get up in arms about what the professor under fire said, it wouldn’t sit well with the position of many (but certainly not all) progressive faculty members in the case of Ward Churchill. Some of you will recall Ward Churchill as the academic who in an essay compared World Trade Center victims on 9/11 to "little Eichmanns". Churchhill was fired by his university but later reinstated.

4. It’s all good because it’s part of the game. Many academics who also teach criminal law have loudly asserted that hypotheticals that feature the death or maiming of people are part of the “morgue humor” that prevails in this area. After all, homicide is for many of us who teach criminal law the crown jewel of the course. There are, by necessity, unpleasant discussions. People die in some cases, sometimes in really horrible ways. If we didn’t laugh, we might cry. Also, an acknowledged part of the “game” of academics is engaging in what one professor called “passive-aggressive” behavior towards administrators. How else can you get back at deans who give you bad offices and worse schedules than with a little good-natured ribbing in hypotheticals?

Moreover, many have asserted in response to this situation that an important part of the game is academic freedom. This mostly consists of assertions that making such statements is well within the rights of a professor. After all, one of the hallmarks of academia is the right to make remarks in the course of doing our work that may be unpopular. Indeed, the whole notion of tenure is closely tied to academic freedom, in recognition of the fact that academics may sometimes do and say things that are not well received or highly valued.

Somehow I have been troubled by all of these responses, so I offer my own deconstruction of the deconstruction.

Silence is perhaps the worst of the responses. Silence basically suggests that this just doesn't matter enough to comment upon one way or another. In some respects this is akin to another relatively recent situation involving a black woman academic. See my blog post On Being a Black Woman Lawyer (Or, the Sound of Silence).

The dispassionate equanimity approach, while making sense on its face, obscures the broader concerns here and hides itself in a cloak of legalism. No, we shouldn't make a decision until the facts are in. But given the nature of the claims here, where we are not really dealing with a denial (the professor under siege apparently admits that he made such remarks about the dean), there is plenty of room for righteous indignation. While the dispassionate equanimity approach is no doubt a tribute to legal formalism, it is also a marvelous example of what some people call the "formalist fiction": that broader normative and policy considerations have no relationship to formal articulations of law.

The problem with the particular brand of precedential analysis offered here is that the analogy to Ward Churchill is, in my view, a very inapt precedent, as it offers little that is substantively useful by way of analogy. A professor who writes an essay ostensibly assailing a group of people that most of us consider innocent victims is very different from a professor who apparently repeatedly makes remarks that invite the captive listeners to violently envision an actual individual known to the listeners. At a minimum, we can generally choose not to read essays. Students in contrast have little power to choose not to listen to their professors or to absent themselves. As I have written elsewhere, the paradigmatic approach of the “legal method” is sometimes flawed, as it is based upon the often unstated assumption that there is broad agreement on the warrants of the paradigm. Now, we usually understand that in undertaking analysis by analogy, there may be few cases that agree “on all fours,” and that part of the exercise is exploring the aptness of the cases cited as precedent. The problem comes in when such analyses take shortcuts whereby no one bothers to parse the analogy, usually based on the assumption that we all agree anyway, when really some of us, sometimes huge sums of some of us, disagree on the aptness of the precedent. This dissonance undermines the value of precedent as a legitimate tool for reaching conclusions, and works a startlingly odd form of legal discursive violence on those in disagreement.

The it’s all good, it’s part of the game approach also has much to recommend it on its face. As someone who worked as an assistant prosecutor in an office where we once passed around photos of a dismembered drug suspect and invited laughter (“there’s one we won’t have to try”), I really understand “morgue humor.” When I taught criminal law I had a hypo where a robber came into the classroom and held a small knife to my back, and I in turn pulled out my high powered assault weapon from the podium (where I repeatedly asserted that I kept it), aimed it at the robber, demanded that he drop his knife and then shot the robber repeatedly until he died. Self-defense or not?

I also get the urge to passive-aggressiveness in hypotheticals. I used to offer a long-running hypo about leaning out of the impossibly small, oddly-positioned window of the office to which administrators had assigned me (jab) and doing target practice by firing across the street to hit the window of a tobacco shop. The “joke”, and the key fact, was that I did this while hundreds of people gathered for a parade in the street below (as was sometimes the case). As I used to explain, I taught so many large classes and served on so many committees that there was little chance that a parade would occur when I was not present at the building (another jab). Is it manslaughter or murder if I kill someone during target practice? It all made for great discussions. But never, ever, did it occur to me to make an actual person, and certainly not an actual person in my workplace, the subject of my hypothetical homicides.

Passive-aggressive humor that explicitly or implicitly assails those who hold power over you is a time-honored part of what some scholars have called “carnivalization”. Carnivalization usually occurs where social subordinates breech the norms of polite discourse and behavior as a means of acting out against oppression. Carnivalization may include mockery of those in power or self-mockery by the oppressed group. I have written about this in the NYU Review of Law and Social Change.

The problem with carnivalization is that while carnivalization represents an upsetting of mainstream power and norms, it is possible to deploy carnivalizing norms to silence persistent outsiders, especially when those outsiders are perceived as "upstarts", that is, when they begin to have some claim to power or status themselves. In my previous writing on this topic I used as a principal example Imus’s calling members of the championship Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed ho’s”. I also offered the instance of upper middle class white college students throwing “pimp and ‘ho” parties right in the midst of their dismayed black classmates. This is ersatz carnival, a cynical inversion of carnival norms. Even in today’s post-racial, post-sexist United States, race, class and gender still frame relations of power. Even when the president is a black man, or the dean is a black woman, there is no disruption of mainstream power norms when those who have traditionally wielded power continue to deploy it in verbal assaults—it is racist, sexist, BAU: business as usual.

Follow-up February 27, 2011:

I received many comments to this post. Thanks all of you for reading! Most comments came directly to me via e-mail, and were signed. Three comments came via the blog and were anonymous. Two commenters expressed disagreement; they were among the three anonymous submissions (funny how that works.) I published the two dissenters below under comments. Quite unintentionally I'm sure, they actually make my point rather than counter it. The third anonymous commenter sent me a link (that I declined to click on, thank you) titled "Why I Hate American Women", LOL. It's all good, I guess. Free speech lives! Kind of. As many scholars have noted (key among them Chris Demaske), the power of discourse in modern societies, and of "First Amendment norms" in particular, lies mostly in the way that such discussions mask the true character of modern power and as a result conceal domination. The power of dominant groups is not via censorship, but in the illusion of the inclusiveness and accessibility of the debate. As long as mainstream discursive norms are able to exercise the equivalent of socio-political, socio-legal filibustering of discourse that drowns out response, and then call it all square, can speech be truly "free"? It is worth remembering that not everybody can speak. LBI

(In)Sanity, Thy Name is Woman (Or, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall)

2010-12-08T12:05:00.023-05:00

According to a recent New York Times article, the upcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5 for short) has eliminated five of the current ten personality disorders. Perhaps most noteworthy among the personality disorders to be eliminated is narcissistic personality disorder. (They are also planning to jettison, among others, histrionic personality disorder. Maybe good riddance to that one, as some of the symptoms seem oddly gendered. Consider that sufferers often: "act or look overly seductive"; are "easily influenced by other people"; are "overly concerned with their looks"; are "overly dramatic and emotional", are "overly sensitive to criticism or disapproval" and believe "that relationships are more intimate than they actually are". (Hmm. Sounds like WAY too many people I know.)

In an age that is chock full of people babbling loudly on cell phones about the mundane details of their private lives while riding in crowded public conveyances, and twittering and facebooking and blogging (!) endlessly, it is wonderfully ironic that narcissism is soon to be dead letter from a clinical perspective. The “me generation” has breached the defenses and taken over the fort (asylum).

The problem, apparently, is that the tuna net of narcissistic personality disorder was catching up too many dolphins in its diagnostic mesh. Being excessively self-absorbed is not really enough for a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. Instead, a special kind of self-absorption is required:

--a grandiose sense of self, meaning a serious miscalculation of your abilities and potential that is often accompanied by fantasies of greatness.

--an expectation that others see your superior qualities and tell you so (mirroring)

--extreme sensitivity to personal slights coupled with an insensitivity to other people’s points of view

According to the author of the Times article, most people with narcissistic personality disorder are men. This is perhaps not surprising. Despite the fact that women are often considered vain and self-absorbed, the truth is that there is very little social space in which women may engage in pompous, bombastic, self-aggrandizing behavior. Even calmly assertive, self-confident women who insist on speaking their minds are more subject than men to being told to “just shut up.” (Ever wonder why there aren’t more women bloggers?) Silence becomes her. After all, it wasn’t very long ago that the symptoms of one form of insanity specific to women included “talking incessantly”, self-amused laughter, obscenity and complaining of “imaginary wrongs”.

A perhaps not unrelated story in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently noted that women athletes may be more likely to have concussive head injuries overlooked.

According to the Chronicle piece:

"Male athletes, though, often reported cognitive symptoms like amnesia or disorientation after a suffering a concussion—signs of head trauma that are not easily overlooked. Female athletes, by contrast, often had neurobehavioral symptoms like drowsiness, or somatic symptoms like sensitivity to noise.

The female athletes’ symptoms, the report cautioned, could be more easily missed than the male athletes’ symptoms. They could also lead sports-medicine staff members to attribute them to a different condition—anxiety, for instance."

So, sports-medicine staffers notice if you seem really out of it, as male athletes apparently often do after head trauma. But if you have more subtle symptoms such as drowsiness or noise sensitivity, as women sometimes do in cases of head trauma, the symptoms may be missed altogether or attributed to “anxiety.” Women can be so high strung (as well as vain and self-absorbed). Anxiety, concussion—gee, who could tell the difference? Certainly not the narcissists among us; they generally avoid the helping professions, and when they do engage in them, they tend to focus on their own opinions and not the complaints of those whining patients. How many times have you been asked "How much pain do you feel? [stage direction: show patient picture of sad face, neutral face, ecstatically happy face; ask her to circle one] and thought that you were getting through to anyone with your reply?

I hope that some of the really useful personality disorders such as OCD will continue to be available to us. After all, it has become a mark of intellectual distinction (if not cool and sexy) to be OCD (a sufferer of obsessive-compulsive disorder). The image that used to come to mind was of Lady Macbeth walking around mumbling "out damned spot" while rubbing her hands together. Now we think of brainy, "revenge of the nerd" college (or ex-college) students who turn hours of seemingly repetitive programming tasks into billion dollar Internet businesses.

Time to end this; my mirror is waiting.

Who’s Sorry Now is Like the Corners of My Mind (or, Connie Francis meets Gladys Knight and Mashes-up Public Memory)

2010-10-20T16:48:00.004-04:00

A New York Times headline recently trumpeted that Virginia Thomas, wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, had telephoned law professor Anita Hill at her faculty office and left a message. You can read about it here. Odd behavior, to say the least. And by odd behavior, I don’t mean the fact that Professor Hill reported the call to campus security or that her university reported it to the FBI. Under the circumstances, I consider the call vexing and harassing. The proffer of an “olive branch” is usually used to symbolize peace, not to figuratively re-assault the victim.

I teach the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill matter in my Race & Racism class and in a class called Law in Literature and Film (we do non-fiction as well as fictional depictions of law in film in the latter class. I spend quite a bit of time discussing, though, whether even televised hearings are truly non-fiction, unvarnished “truth”, given issues of editing, staging, camera angles, etc.). I am always astounded to find that so many students are not at all aware of what had occurred during the Thomas confirmation hearings until we study it. (“Oh,” one student said in a recent class after understanding what had occurred, “Is that why Justice Thomas is always so quiet?” I have no answer for that, really.) My eldest children were very young (younger than some of my students) at the time of the hearings, and yet my children have a very clear memory of the events and a good understanding of what went on based on what they learned as they got older. Given the disparities in shared knowledge about this event, such knowledge (and such memories) begin to feel personal and narrowly cultural rather than public and broadly social. They seem to depend on the particular focus of ones home or educational community.

Public memory can be tricky, as I've determined from exploring it in other work. It is often viewed as static and unchanging, and is typically concerned with forging a collective sense of what to remember and how to remember it, and is often a significant component in forging identities both individual and collective. But public memory, as one scholar writes, is subject to the “history, hierarchies, and aspirations” of a particular community, and is therefore often anything but static. At its core it is both contested and contingent, and the contest is frequently between the “official culture”—that which exercises hegemony, and the “vernacular culture”—informal, unofficial, subsidiary cultures.

In my classes we talk about how the Clarence Thomas hearings started off asking questions about fitness to serve, and ended up as a he said-she said assessment of “truth.” There was no resolution of the truth question, unless you count confirmation as vindication, and I’m not sure that you can. Time has passed, and memories fade or are reshaped altogether, especially where somebody (but who?) should be sorry.

I have to agree with the scholar who wrote: "Memory is more likely to be activated by contestation, and amnesia is more likely to be induced by the desire for reconciliation."

Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the Publication of To Kill a Mockingbird

2010-10-18T14:10:00.007-04:00

This past July was the 50th anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s book To Kill a Mockingbird. Recently I participated in a radio show to celebrate the anniversary. You can listen to it here. The show was a wonderful opportunity to reflect not only on the book itself, but also on the ways in which some of the themes addressed in the book, racism, classism, the role of gender in shaping identity, even access to education, have and have not changed over the last half century. When I first read the book in my late childhood, I was focused first on racial issues, especially on the prosecution of Tom Robinson, and next, on how Atticus Finch, the protagonist, represented what was good and right in America, standing firm in his convictions even in the face of adversity.

However, over the years, especially as I have used the book (and the film based on the book) as texts in law teaching, I see the book and the characters differently. I think that the true hero of the book is Scout, the child narrator who delivers the tale. Scout, because of her age and gender, is able to move between the worlds of black and white and of male and female. Her relative social unimportance allows her a veritable cloak of invisibility from which she can see and hear and thereby gain what comes close to an omniscient knowledge of her community and its people. Tom Robinson, the black man accused of raping a white woman, becomes, with every successive reading, a distant symbol, a cipher, someone who must be convicted and who must die, however unjust such an outcome may be. Tom is, however, no “magic negro” as there is no magic in To Kill a Mockingbird. There is only a finely-wrought and complex sense of truth, but it is a truth that falls well-short of despair. To Kill a Mockingbird troubles the notion of thesis and antithesis often seen in discussions of race, whether fictional or real. Scout and the other children in the book illustrate this, for they are more real than many of the adult characters. They are flawed and imperfect, but joyous, passionate and ultimately just. They are the antidote to our 21st century postmodern, poststructual, and allegedly post racial world.

Welfare Cheese, the Working Class and the Tenure Class (or, the Cheese Stands Alone)

2010-10-04T20:57:00.008-04:00

I attended the Third National People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference a few weeks ago. It was a wonderful event; it was well-organized and intellectually stimulating and offered a broad array of presentations. The National POC is an event that began in 1999 with the coming together of the several regional People of Color Legal Scholarship Conferences. The focus of the national event, like the regional events, is to provide a forum for law professors of color (and other professors with interest in issues concerning law faculty of color) to present scholarly work in an intellectually rigorous but warmly supportive atmosphere. I have long credited the POC conferences with my success in academia, and by success, I mean the fact that I am still here. M’la; m’ap kenbe toujou, as they say in Haiti.

During one of the dinner events at the National POC, I was tickled when one of the speakers referenced welfare cheese. There was a brief wave of laughter, ranging from polite titters to hearty guffaws. It struck me all of sudden: some of the people there not only didn’t know what welfare cheese was, they’d probably never eaten any. Welfare cheese (aka government cheese), for the uninitiated, is cheese that is provided to recipients of welfare and/or other means-tested benefits. I first heard of it, and ate it, during the 1970’s and was mighty glad to get it. Welfare cheese makes awesome grilled cheese sandwiches. I know well what welfare cheese is, from personal hard luck life stories. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who looks like me knows what welfare cheese is from personal experience.

In fact, research shows that highly educated people, even of various racial or ethnic backgrounds, are disproportionately from the middle and upper middle classes or the wealthy classes. This is perhaps nowhere more true than among university faculty members. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education discussed the fact that few studies focus on working class or lower class students and faculty members. While there is some data regarding the economic class of students, apparently no comparable data exists for college faculties. I think that all too often, even well-educated people conflate race and ethnicity with social class, assuming that if, for instance, efforts have been made to bring in faculty members of color then by necessity this means that social class diversity has been achieved. This is, of course, not true, and has never, I think, been widely true. While programs offering greater access to education and other social goods over the last forty years have meant greater racial, ethnic and gender diversity in some workplaces, I might argue that some of the people from underrepresented groups who were helped by such programs were already middle class or very comfortably working class, and had been for a few generations.

Of course, such discussions raise the issue of just what it means to be middle class versus working class. For some people, working class means having parents or grandparents who didn’t have a summer home (seriously; someone shared that with me once.) For others, working class means rarely enjoying mainstream cultural events and knowing no one with a college degree, despite having consistent access to necessities such as food and shelter. Never mind what it means to belong to the poverty class. Poverty class means more than lacking some material comforts; it means lacking necessities and having a near absolute deficit of social capital. Social capital is the stuff that dreams (and educational attainment) are made of. Very few people in academia, it would seem, have ever belonged to the poverty class. This is due in no small part to the fact that access to advanced education takes a good deal more than a bright mind and hard work. It takes a startling array of economic and social resources, and these resources are frequently deployed from the time a person is born.

The discussion of social class in academia reminds me of the not unrelated discussion of the future of tenure in the academy. Some people see the tenure system as a hindrance to good institutional governance, since it is sometimes hard to compel tenured faculty members to embrace change. Others see tenure as necessary for insuring an independent minded, intellectually vibrant academy; faculty members who serve at the will of administrators would be little likely to engage in research or teaching that might offend established norms. Both sides have good points. But what often goes unaddressed in discussions of tenure among tenured faculty members themselves (who, not surprisingly, usually favor the tenure system) is the meritocratic assumptions about the nature of the institution. People who have tenure, or are on the tenure track, deserve those statuses, right? Serial adjuncts and faculty members on contracts often don’t have the same privileges, but if that’s true, it’s because people with tenure (or access to tenure) are smarter, work harder, and are just better, right?

Not right. While there are frequently well-articulated, reasonably objective standards for getting tenure (or for getting on the tenure track) what goes unexamined is the practical barriers to meeting the standards and most shamefully, the sometimes differential ways in which the standards are applied. Looking only at legal academia, it is noteworthy that a majority of persons who work as instructors but are not in tenure or tenure track jobs are women. One reason sometimes offered for this is that faculties often recruit nationally for tenure track jobs, and women are sometimes less able to move around easily to accept such jobs. That is true, yes. But all too often what starts out as a national search for tenured or tenure-track positions ends by settling on a local candidate who is, all too often, surprisingly like the majority of people already in place from a gender and racial perspective. There are other barriers as well. Even when women succeed in getting on the tenure track, they are, according to research, likely to have less prestigious jobs and earn less money than men with similar (and often lesser) credentials.

I could go on and on here about class, both inside and outside of academia. There is a lot to say; these are, after all, long-standing problems. Talking about class makes many people uneasy, since in many ways it raises a challenge to ideals of merit. All the more reason we should talk MORE about it, not less.

What I Did on my Summer Workation: A Woman’s Work and Woman’s Worth (Or, Who's Afraid of Lolita Lebrón?)

2010-09-06T17:55:00.008-04:00

Happy Labor Day.

I’m back. I have been underground this summer working on several projects. I spent much of the summer in the Virgin Islands, where, though it may be hard for many people to believe it, it is possible to have an awesome workation. A workation is like a vacation in that you go away from your usual place of abode, but when you get there, you set up office and work as much as (and often more) than you would at your regular office. Famous writers engaged in workations all the time—think about those stories of people going up to abandoned cabins and writing world famous treatises and novels. Though I got a lot done on my workation, I don’t think I quite achieved literary greatness.

My workation has been over for several days now, and my regular work begins anew with the commencement of the academic year. Why, I’m even working especially hard today, on Labor Day, though perhaps ironically so. I am mostly doing research for scholarly papers, which I call work, but the meaning of work is relative, I guess. I was reminded of this by my daughter, who is in the process of finalizing an essay about the meaning of Labor Day (I am grateful that my daughter's teacher has eschewed the more traditional "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" essay; some kids, as was true for me as a kid, did very little and went nowhere, and so such essays can be sad reminders of the summer void). She is using a set of encyclopedias that my mother bought in the mid-1980’s for her grandchildren, both existing and future. My mother came from an era and a culture wherein knowledge was absolute (at least the knowledge written in books was)and forever. A set of encyclopedias should be valuable, she thought, until they fell apart. To forestall the latter, she bought the more expensive leather-bound set.

The books seem to have been published in 1980, and they have a decidedly ideological bent. First, nowhere in the article on “Labor Day” did they say that it was a celebration of “workers”. Instead, it talked about when such observations began in the United States and the parades that went along with such celebrations. The entry closed by indicating that Labor Day is celebrated in Europe on May 1, and also celebrated on May 1 “with great official gusto in the Soviet Union and other Communist-ruled countries.”

Wow. I urged my daughter to look up the word labor in order to get a fuller sense of what Labor Day is about. Again, I was fascinated that the word work did not appear until several paragraphs into the article on labor. The entry on labor begins: “Labor may be defined as the physical or mental effort of human beings for the attainment of some object other than pleasure. Simple as this definition is there is scarcely a word in it but what has been subject to discussion. The popular use of the word restricts it to those who engage in manual toil but this is of course too narrow. Any scientific definition must include mental effort. In modern industry brains are needed as well as muscle.”

Wow again. The author seemed to be fearful that somehow readers would more quickly equate labor with, say, digging ditches, than with “brain” endeavors such as, say, leading a multinational corporation. Well, I guess I’m safe; no doubt that my “mental effort” counts as “labor” under this definition.

Though I mostly kept my nose to the book and my hands to the keyboard this summer, a couple of interesting things that happened during my workation this summer got my attention.

On August 1, 2010, Lolita Lebrón the Puerto Rican nationalist died at the age of 90. Lolita Lebrón is best known for being part of a group of nationalists that in 1954 opened fire on the United States House of Representatives, wounding five Congressmen. Ms. Lebrón served twenty-five years in prison. After her act, she was either revered or reviled, hailed as a heroine or as a terrorist, depending on your point of view. In either case, she made history in the United States, and is worth including in any review of the noteworthy events of the 20th century.

The death of Ms. Lebrón struck me especially because in my life I have been aware of only two famous Lolita’s: Nabakov’s Lolita and Lolita Lebrón. When growing up I hated my name once I understood what Nabakov’s Lolita symbolized in the minds of many. I recall being a teenager and sometimes getting leers from middle-aged men who became aware of my name. I often mumbled my name to avoid snickers and lewd responses. I learned about Lolita Lebrón when I was in college and I was asked my name by a history professor. When I told it to him, he asked, “Lolita, as in Lolita Lebrón?” When I said that I had no idea who she was, he told me. I was shocked, first by the audacity of Lolita Lebrón’s actions, and next, by the fact that I could have gotten to college and not known that the United States Congress had been fired upon at all, and that it had been fired upon under such circumstances. For those wondering, no, Lolita Lebrón does not appear our encyclopedia. She is, I think, way too scary for either the encyclopedia or the standard school curriculum.

The other summer event that got my attention occurred on August 26, 2010, when we celebrated the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote in the United States. While the fact that women in the United States have not always had the right to vote is probably far better known than the story of Lolita Lebrón, not enough people acknowledge just how big a fact women’s suffrage is. When women were given the right to vote, it was one of the largest enfranchisements in United States history. Moreover, as an Op-ed contributor to the New York Times reminds us, several states opposed the amendment and some went to the Supreme Court to invalidate it. Despite the rejection of their claims by the Supreme Court, some states waited decades to ratify the 19th Amendment: Maryland until 1941, Virginia until 1952, Alabama until1953. Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina ratified the amendment between 1969 to 1971. Mississippi ratified the amendment in 1984.Wow again.

I decided to peruse our encyclopedia to see what it said about women’s rights or women’s suffrage. The closest thing I found was an entry on “Women’s Liberation”. It begins: “‘Women’s Lib’” would have delighted the 19th century theorists of feminism, but it differs in its aims and philosophy from the women’s rights movement as the Black Power Movement differs from the Negro rights movement.” It goes on a short while later: “Unlike the 19th century women’s right’s groups, Women’s Lib is revolutionary rather than reformist….It urges women to unite in sisterhood, as blacks and workingmen have been urged to unite in brotherhood, to overthrow the oppressive order by sheer weight of numbers , and by force of various kinds, such as demonstrations and boycotts, rather than by persuasion or legal action.” Wow oh wow. This is real, folks.

After my most recent encounters with this set of encyclopedia, I had formed the idea of discarding them. I was scandalized with what seemed to be its pure ideological cant. But then I recalled that my mother had spent a lot of very hard earned money to obtain them, and that it was one of her last gifts to me before she died. I also recalled that my mother sacrificed a lot to send me off to college, and that college was the beginning of my journey to becoming a scholar. Scholars work to promote an open exchange of ideas. Even when ideas are disputed or ultimately discredited, scholars should not fear ideas with which they disagree or the books that contain them.

Remembering Marie (Or, Marie’s and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity)

2010-05-23T17:00:00.002-04:00

I am Very Busy these days Writing and Editing Important Work. I have no time to blog these days, and certainly not today. However, my mother is making me write this.

For those who know me, this may seem surprising, since today is the twentieth anniversary of the death of my mother Marie. (Marie was not her real name, but it’s what we called her, for a host of simple and complicated family reasons. I even insisted that it be put on her tombstone along with her “real” name.) In the past, in the years shortly after her death, I marked the days coming up to it and the anniversary itself with copious private tears, with the tears getting more private with every passing year. Big girls (and certainly not big boys) are not supposed to cry, right? I have, correspondingly, trained myself to cry less at her memory. Even now when I cry I think of how my mother used to complain about my crying as a child. I was the cryingist and whiningist child in America, she used to say. My crying and whining by themselves didn’t so much upset my mother; it was the reasons that I cried and whined. Like many children, I cried for many minor matters, assuredly. But I more often cried for things that were beyond my own personal childish grievances. I was always wanting things to be better and different, big things, things for everybody.

So, for example, I used to cry when my mother had to go off to one of her three jobs. I wondered why she had to work so hard and be gone all the time. (I remember, for example, overhearing my mother confiding to a friend that one of her employers owed her a dollar and a quarter from a previous week. She then spent at least half an hour trying to answer my query about what a dollar and a quarter was and why it mattered so much. Once I understood, I ended up crying because I didn’t want us to need the money. ) I didn’t understand that the days of my infancy and early toddlerhood, when she had no job at all and was with me much more of the time, were some of the worst days of her life. As a teen-aged mother she had struggled every day in a home where she contended with her own mother and with a community that looked down on her.

Later, when my mother sent me to live with my aunt while she, as she called it, “got her life together” (she eventually remarried and then spent time smoothing the way for her children to join her in her new home), I used to hide in the closet at my aunt’s house and cry. I cried not only because I felt abandoned but also because my mother couldn’t live like the mothers I read about in Dick and Jane books. When I was finally able to rejoin my mother I almost never cried in front of her. I had learned many things during my time away from her, among them that it was best to be as little trouble as possible if I expected to fit into her new life. She had enough troubles of her own and really didn’t need the added burden of dealing with America’s cryingist and whiningist child. The only time I remember crying in front of my mother between third and twelfth grades was when we were in an auto accident together when I was 14. During those years my tears were in private at all times, and even in private my tears were more like prayers, fervid supplications that my life and her life would be better at some point in the future.

When Marie died I cried incessantly for months afterward, so much so that my toddler twins used to take up stations on either side of me and pat my back while chanting “Don’t cry mommy, don’t cry.” Except at Marie’s funeral, however, I never cried public tears. Mostly I cried at home in front of my children. I suppose that some would say that tears should especially be hidden from young children, so as not to upset them. I felt the opposite, though. My tears were a signal to them and to myself that I was at home and they were at home, and that at home grief should no more be hidden than happiness. Moreover, I cried at the realization that besides me my children now had no other female relative in the world who would adore them, and I blamed myself for somehow not having a large, loving family to give to them. I cried the most at the realization that Marie’s life, and my life, had finally gotten better, and she wasn’t here to enjoy it.

Today for the first time in many years I cried just a little, even with full freedom to give voice to my sadness. Instead of crying I laughed a lot at the joy her memory evoked. In the years right before her death, when I was first starting off in law practice, I began to put away the stoic pose of my late childhood and college years and had taken to sharing with Marie the trials and tribulations of my work life. Marie, bless her soul, would have none of it. At the beginning of any such conversation she would ignore my complaints and engage me on what she felt to be the truly important stuff of life. “What did you eat today?” she would ask. When I persisted on complaining about something at work she would grow exasperated. “Why are you upset about these things?” she would ask. “Don’t whine, work. I raised you so that you could be in a position not to kiss anybody’s [behind. Though Marie could be as polished as a wealthy suburban matron in public, she could at times curse like a sailor when the situation called for it.] Work hard not only for the sake of hard work, but so that you can get out if you must. Vote with your feet.” Then, my mother would go back to her conversation about the real substance of life. “Now, what did you eat today? And did you spend some time outside today?”

I thought at first that the reason my mother refused to engage me in the details of my professional life was that it was too alien for her, too far removed from her own life. My mother had, after all, scarcely attended a regular high school, having studied much of the time at a “continuation school” for pregnant girls and later finishing up at a night school. But I figured out that this wasn’t the reason at all that my mother behaved this way. She was not well educated, but she was certainly bright. She understood the details of my lawyer’s life. The fact was, she understood them better that I did. What she understood was that as important as I thought that my professional life was, it was but a shadow of the seemingly simple but immensely rich and complex internal workings of my personal life. Only when that personal part of my life was well founded could any of the rest of it come together.

I am reminded of a book that I came across recently called Einstein on Race and Racism by Fred Jerome and Roger Taylor. In it the authors discuss one of the lesser-publicized aspects of Einstein’s life, his personal interactions with black people. Notwithstanding the almost shocking absence of black people from the movie “IQ,” a light-hearted fiction that portrays aspects of Einstein's life in the town of Princeton, there were a significant number of black people living in the town during Einstein’s years there, and he had close associations with many of them. The book offers insights from many members of Princeton’s black community on why Einstein was seemingly so comfortable in the black community, both within Princeton and outside of it. It was more than a great man’s admiration for a “simple” folk; after all, he counted among his friends some of the most brilliant and accomplished blacks of the day, such as Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson. What, I think, made Einstein so comfortable was that just walking around Princeton’s Witherspoon Street black community and talking with the residents there about apparently small things, as Einstein often did, made his own scientific work make sense. Such walks and talks were, I would argue, the real stuff of Einstein’s life. As one respondent in the book wrote about Einstein’s walks in the black community, there “he was free.”

So, my mother Marie, like Einstein (she would be tickled by the pairing, because she would know that it was, at the same time, improbable yet highly probable), understood that if life could not be reduced to its smallest elements, then larger structures, such as Law and Science, stood in peril of toppling.

Rest in peace, Marie.

The Examined Life at Age 8 or 98: Dorothy Height Rest in Peace

2010-04-21T10:31:00.004-04:00

The New York Times reported today that Dorothy Height, Activist, Educator, Civil Rights Leader, and quintessential black feminist, has died at the age of 98. You can read the NYT obituary of Dorothy Height here.

Miss Height (and she was a Miss, not a Ms.; Dorothy Height reminded us that words such as “miss” and “Negro” need not be relegated to the dustbin) was for 40 years the president of the National Council of Negro Women. Many people are aware of her work as a quiet but determined worker for the cause of black progress. Far fewer understand that she was also instrumental in helping to forge bonds between black and white women and between people of differing religious beliefs. She championed causes both large and small, and was a counselor to presidents as well as an advocate for the rights of poor children. As the New York Times reports, for much of her early life she was pushed to the background by the male leaders of black civil rights groups and the female leaders of white feminist groups. But she kept working nonetheless.

The report of Dorothy Height’s death follows close on an article in the New York Times about Professor Thomas E. Wartenberg of Mount Holyoke College and his program that teaches philosophy to young children. You can read about it here. Professor Wartenberg uses common children’s books to introduce children (many of them apparently children of color) to basic philosophical inquiries, including aesthetics, ethics and metaphysics. It is Professor Wartenberg’s belief that these children, and all children, have the capacity to understand philosophical ideas and to put them into practice in their daily lives. He is quoted as saying: “A lot of people try to make philosophy into an elitist discipline.” He goes on to say, “But everyone is interested in basic philosophical ideas; they’re the most basic questions we have about the world.” In this regard, Professor Wartenberg’s work is of a piece with that of Dorothy Height. Dorothy Height embodied, perhaps better than anyone of her time, Socrates’ (and later Robert Nozick’s) notion of the examined life, for hers was a life involving public discussion of and engagement with life issues both great and small. Moreover, and more importantly, hers was a life of active service to both the great and the small. She reminds us that the seeming proliferation of fake progressives is not new, for there is nothing new under the sun. Our times now call for the same thing called for in Miss Height’s early career: eschewing labels and limelight and putting our shoulders to the wheel to effectuate genuine change.

Miss Dorothy Height, rest in peace.

The Root's "The Blackest White Folks We Know": What is Race?

2010-03-26T11:22:00.002-04:00

Recently I commented on The Root's "The Blackest White Folks We Know" over at Feminist Law Professors. You can find my piece here. Below is the intro:

Before I begin, let me announce in advance: even as a progressive, Race and the Law teaching, feminist black woman, I DO have a sense of humor about race, gender and other matters of identity. Really. I’ve even been known to laugh at things that some people find distinctly unfunny. Take for example the “mockumentary” film Borat that I recently watched again for the nth time. I find it hilarious...

It is a follow-on to an original post by Feminist Law Professors' Bridget Crawford, posted here.

Check it out!

Want to Comment? Please do! Comments are moderated so may not immediately appear.

The Courage of Her Evictions (Or, Working on a Night Move)

2010-02-22T16:38:00.001-05:00

A recent New York Times article on eviction and low-income black women offered the following:

"New research is showing that eviction is a particular burden on low-income black women, often single mothers, who have an easier time renting apartments than their male counterparts, but are vulnerable to losing them because their wages or public benefits have not kept up with the cost of housing.

And evictions, in turn, can easily throw families into cascades of turmoil and debt.

'Just as incarceration has become typical in the lives of poor black men, eviction has become typical in the lives of poor black women[.]'"

While job losses and the bleak economic picture are to blame in some cases, and tenant misbehavior in others, as the article point out, evictions sometimes occur when tenants complain to authorities about housing violations, making landlords angry. Eviction in these circumstances may be a textbook case of retaliatory eviction, which is, under certain circumstances, a defense to eviction. However, it is sometimes difficult to prove the reasons for an eviction, and, as in many legal matters, poor people of color often lack the resources to raise such defenses. Eviction appears to play a significant role in the cycle of poverty that traps some black women, but, unlike the attention given to foreclosures, evictions sometimes go unremarked and there are few bodies of data enumerating them. Indeed, one challenge to accurately counting evictions is the fact that a large number of evictions are not court-ordered—many people under the threat of eviction move before the process is completed. Some people still engage in what we in my childhood called a "night move"—moving out under cover of darkness to avoid the embarrassment of being seen by neighbors (or the landlord) when there was no hope of getting current on the rent. My aunt, with whom I lived for almost two years, was a night move professional. With her own ten children and the extra children (like me) that she often had residing with her, affordable, suitable housing was a continuous challenge. Note that engaging in a voluntary "day move" doesn't necessarily mean that all is well in your life. My mother used to tell me stoically of the morning that she smiled and waved my father off to work, then packed her personal items and her two children to get away from an abusive relationship. My mother firmly believed that women in situations of domestic abuse did best to avoid confrontation and to disappear while the abuser was away. Sadly, some types of domestic violence "day moves" feature the removal of the entire household even when abused persons don't wish to move out. As the New York Times article remarks, sometimes landlords evict tenants who have made domestic violence reports to police out of fear that authorities will somehow hold landlords liable for tolerating such disturbances.

As the article indicates, some temporary government programs have offered subsidies to those facing crisis in rental housing. The larger, longer term problem, however, goes unaddressed: housing represents a substantial expense even for people with middleclass incomes. This is even more true for the poor, as the cost of housing sometimes means choosing between shelter and food, clothes or medicine. To quote from the article:

"A minimum-wage worker may gross little more than $1,100 a month; a welfare recipient in Wisconsin receives $673 a month, while two-bedroom units start at about $475.

'On $673 a month, how do you buy tennis shoes for the kids, clean shirts for school and still pay your rent?'"

Disney’s The Princess and the Frog: Ain’t Nothing Going on But the Rent (Or, That Old Black Magic)

2010-01-12T18:09:00.001-05:00

Happy New Year.

Over the recent holidays I went with my family to see the Disney film The Princess and the Frog. As many of you know, it features a character who has been billed as Disney's "first black princess," Tiana. My whole household had eagerly awaited this as we are to a person enamored of magic and are especially fond of Disney animated magic. My daughter was particularly keen on going, not because the princess was going to be black but because for her any princess is a good thing— I am of like mind (yeah, I'm just a girly girl at heart). That's why I was so sorely disappointed at the film. Movies are supposed to be fun and escapist. This movie struck me as just the opposite, and it has taken me days to mull over my feelings. (Warning: some spoilers below.)

Tiana is established at the outset as a shadow princess, one who is eclipsed by an actual princess. The film opens with two little girls, one white, one black, sitting and listening to a story. Charlotte (rhymes with Scarlet), the white child, is depicted as spoiled and demanding but cute and sweet (gee, how to be all of that at once?). Charlotte is dressed in princess finery while Tiana, the black child, bears but one indicia of royalty: a crown that seems to have been borrowed from the white child. As the scene expands we learn that the story is being read by the black seamstress mother of the black child and that the black child has accompanied her mother to the large, beautiful and indeed almost castle-like home of the white child in order to make for the white child yet another of what we learn are oodles of fine dresses. Job over, the seamstress and her daughter exit and go out and catch the street car back to their modest home in the black part of New Orleans where we see that Tiana is part of that now elusive social phenomenon, the Intact Black Family. Yes, there is a Dad! But he conveniently disappears early in the film, apparently a casualty of World War I. Nobody says so exactly, but the characters seem to sigh over a picture of Dad in his Doughboy uniform and intimate that he isn't coming back, offering an extremely fuzzy epitaph. Combat death is just too real for the folks in the Magic Kingdom--so I'll say it for them, borrowing from Joseph Conrad by way of T.S. Eliot—Mr. Dad, he dead. Of course, being orphaned or partially orphaned is a common trope in fairy tales. But why introduce the Dad at all?

We are in New Orleans during the period circa World War I. There is even a shot of a character reading a newspaper headline about Woodrow Wilson (also vaguely disquieting for me—Wilson had some not often enough discussed racial baggage of his own. See e.g. the segregation of federal jobs during the Wilson administration.) Now, if you're going to feature black folks involved in magic, New Orleans seems like a good choice what with voodoo and all (note that voodoo can be of the black (evil) or white (good) magic variety. ) But New Orleans also has all kinds of other unfortunate associations, lately starting and ending with Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. I reckon though that what they could really use down there right now is some magic, so, what the heck. The problem with establishing the movie in so well-known a contemporary locale is that it cuts into the fantasy like a knife. I don't know about other viewers but my mind was boggled by scenes suggesting a significant degree of interracial social interaction. I have read that New Orleans was in some ways more racially progressive than other parts of the American South, but depicting, for example, mixed race public dining seemed not quite credible. The dining scenes are crucial because we learn that Tiana, even as a child, was a gifted cook. She grows up to work as a cook and waitress at a restaurant where she dreams of owning her own restaurant and she painstakingly saves money towards it. Yuck, money. Is this a fairy tale or what? As one of my sons commented, introducing money into this tale imparts a nasty element of reality. It's one thing to dream (and Tiana's dream was, I have to say, pretty pedestrian for animated fantasy) but it's another to have to work to amass coins towards achieving a dream.

Just as Tiana grew up, so did Charlotte. Charlotte is now a spoiled (but still sweet and friendly—we don't get to dislike her; she's the real princess, after all) big girl who apparently demands and receives everything she wants from Big Daddy. A foreign potentate, Prince Naveen, is coming to town and Charlotte plans to have Big Daddy throw a big party for him at her big mansion in order to romance and marry him (Charlotte has got way bigger dreams that Tiana). Naturally Charlotte will need the services of a great cook so Charlotte comes into the restaurant where Tiana works and engages Tiana to make a large number of beignets for the party by tossing several pieces of paper currency at her. Yes, Charlotte throws bills. (Table dance, anyone?) This money is pivotal for Tiana—she is now, we learn, close to having the money she needs to obtain a building for her restaurant. Of course, like any good fairy tale, several obstacles come between Tiana and the purchase of her building, including racist realtors (In an alternate version of the tale perhaps they could cast Big Daddy and Charlotte as FHA testers or straw purchasers).

Prince Naveen is worthy of much more commentary than I have time to offer in this blog. After reading some of the summaries before seeing the film I wondered how a black princess could vie with a white woman for the same beau. Even in the new millennium interracial romantic relationships exist at the social margins. The prince's name, "Naveen" gave me some hint of what was to come— "Hmm," I thought, "Are they bringing in a guy from India?" Prince Naveen, it turns out, is a light brown guy from a fictional country with a sort of Latin sounding accent (It turns out the actor who voiced Naveen is Brazilian.) There was obvious confusion here on the part of the Disney folks. Which way to go? They couldn't have the white princess trying to romance a black guy. Neither could they have the black shadow princess romancing a white guy. Answer—go for racial ambiguity. Moreover, Prince Naveen's status as a royal is just as ambiguous. Naveen is a Prince without Portfolio—he has been disinherited by his royal parents for being a lazy spendthrift and has come to America to marry into money. Prince Naveen and his white handler?/valet?/pimp? (more ambiguity resulting from entrenched racial hierarchies —a white guy who is subordinate, yet not) are, in effect, seeking to pull a fast one over on poor Charlotte.

The scheme is further complicated by magic performed by a black villain called Dr. Facilier, aka the Shadow Man (who looks suspiciously like the musician Prince, purple clothes and all). Dr. Facilier transforms the homely handler into a replica of the prince and becomes the handler's handler so that now Dr. Facilier can get control of Charlotte's money after the wedding via the faux prince (this is big pimpin' à la Jay Z— "take 'em out the out the 'hood, keep 'em looking good" …sing along if you know it). Dr. Facilier turns the real prince into a frog and the frog then solicits help from Tiana, the shadow princess who gets in the way accidentally and ends up a princess by as twisted a route as ever could be imagined, including spending most of the film in the form of a frog (and you thought the part I described was convoluted). Tiana's initial interest in Naveen is about getting the money for her restaurant—truly, ain't nothing going on for Tiana but the rent at the beginning of their relationship. Naveen agrees that in exchange for Tiana's help he will give Tiana the money she needs. Not having any money of his own, Naveen plans to get the money from Charlotte after he marries. (Hey kids, can you spell "hustler"?) Why couldn't Tiana go straight to Big Daddy or Charlotte, her lifelong friends, for the money? Even my seven year old asked that question.

I offer a course called "Law in Literature and Film" where, in one of the units, I discuss how fairy tales and folk tales function as rule regimes in at least two respects—first, they inculcate social norms and next, though they offer magical, fantastical solutions to problems, these solutions in fact operate via clearly established rules, norms and hierarchies. I suppose that the Princess and the Frog is perhaps partly explained by this—from a race and gender perspective much of the film promotes business as usual stereotypes.

“The Couch of Restitution” (Or, The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea vs. The Devil in Miss Jones)

2009-12-04T14:01:00.001-05:00

In a previous blog (feels like ages ago—I really must get out from under this blizzard of work!) I discussed the alienation of various aspects of human capacities and attributes, among them the sale of sexual services and the sale of "caring." I noted that, as per Professor Margaret Jane Radin, one significant reason for banning the sale of sexual services is the notion that commodification of this deeply intimate, personal human capacity could ultimately lead to dehumanization. This is true even in many cases where the seller of the sexual service ostensibly has a choice in whether or not to place her or his body into commerce. All too often "choice" is a slippery concept, and is strained to breaking in situations where the chooser has few viable options.

Consider a recent article in the ABA Journal that describes the case of a lawyer who allowed some clients to discharge legal fees by joining him on what he called his "couch of restitution" for sexual activity. After a client complained to the attorney ethics board in her state, ultimately the Michigan Attorney Discipline Board reviewed the matter and sanctioned the attorney by suspending his license to practice for 180 days. More than one client, had, in fact, complained to authorities that the lawyer had offered them the "couch of restitution" in exchange for legal services. According to the ABA Journal, the board opinion noted, "The high degree of similarity of these separate accounts established respondent's system of making sexual overtures to female clients who were seeking legal assistance in a domestic matter. These overtures occurred during a discussion of his legal fees."

It is perhaps not a surprise that women seeking assistance in domestic matters from mostly male lawyers might be asked to perform sexual services in exchange for a benefit. I first heard of such a thing years ago as a young college student when a middle-aged woman of my acquaintance shared with me all of the details of her sex-for-legal-services exchange with her divorce lawyer. I was horrified—I neither wanted to believe that this sort of thing happened nor that it had happened to someone I knew. This woman was a well-established suburban matron whose separation and pending divorce from her abusive husband had left her with few reserves of either money or self-esteem. She was, it seems, an ideal target. Back then I wrote her lawyer off as an abusive weirdo who represented few members of the legal profession. It turns out, though, that the woman that I spoke to is not alone: one scholar cited a nationwide survey of attorneys showing that 32 percent of the respondents answered that they knew at least one attorney who had engaged in sexual relations with a client. A posting to another blog late last spring, Above the Law, describes another lawyer recently sanctioned for trading legal services for sex.

This sort of thing, it turns out, cuts across professions—for instance, the "casting couch," where hopeful actresses perform sexual services for movie producers and directors, is the stuff of legend. Even in today's post feminist employment climate, successful women are sometimes derided as having "slept" their way up the corporate ladder, whether they did so or not. And last, but not least, stories of female students who exchange sexual favors with male professors for higher grades are still very much a part of the academic landscape, university faculty conduct codes notwithstanding. Part of the barrier to ending these types of behaviors is the way in which this sort of sexual favor trading is viewed in not only in specific professions but by society as a whole. Women who participate in such exchanges are sometimes viewed with scorn and derision, dismissed as calculating hussies who knowingly, willingly, and gladly choose to trade sex rather than money for desired benefits. In contrast, the men who accept the sexual pay outs are rarely subjected to public opprobrium and not very often held otherwise accountable; they are sometimes even lauded by locker-room style banter . This is no less true in legal settings. Just review the comments posed after the ABA Journal article linked above. One poster seems to call women who have made such trades with their lawyers "restitutes," a pun on prostitutes. Other posters mocked the fact that the complainer who initiated the matter complained only after she exchanged sexual services yet still received a bill. Very few postings evinced any sympathy or concern for the women involved.

Acknowledging that sexual contact between lawyers and clients is an ongoing and serious problem, in 2002 the ABA drafted a rule explicitly barring sexual contact between attorneys and their clients in certain contexts. Drafters cited the inherent power imbalance of the lawyer-client relationship, an imbalance that easily leads to the exploitation of clients by attorneys. Nonetheless, such abuses continue, as they occur in settings where few victims are willing to come forward. Especially for women seeking legal counsel in domestic matters, if the choice is between sexual activity with a lawyer or continuing on in a difficult domestic situation, it's the choice between the Devil and the deep blue sea. Or is it, as some would have it, the "Devil in Miss Jones?" that is the apt metaphor here?

Alienate My Affections: The Market (In)Alienability of Attending to Others (Or, Aynnie Did You Dun?)

2009-09-26T09:21:00.003-04:00

I have been away from my blog for quite some days now as I plunge into teaching, writing, editing articles, and finalizing my dissertation. Anyway, with all of the intellectual cross-pollination going on in my life, I find myself thinking about the ways in which a number of the concepts I teach about and write about have value and meaning in my real life—yes, my other, mostly non-scholarly life, the one where I make extra strong lattes and watch the wind blow while hanging out with family and friends. I also inevitably end up thinking about just how limited and valuable time is. Both of these thoughts occurred to me the other day after teaching a Property class on "Market Inalienability."

"Market Inalienability" is an article in which the author, Professor Margaret Jane Radin, discusses the extent to which and whether society should ban (or continue to ban in the case of existing prohibitions) the commodification of certain human activities, aspects or attributes while allowing the non-pecuniary transfer of the same goods (if the use of the word "goods" doesn't beg the question). So, for instance, in the case of prostitution, there have long been rules that forbid such activities. In contrast, certain exchanges of sexual favors without direct payment, such as sexual intimacy in marriage, are completely permitted and even encouraged. Of course, a crucial question in the latter example is what it means to get paid for sexual services (how much marital romantic feeling is premised on the desire for general economic well being or even for more specific economic recompense, after all?), but for the most part our broad, modern social understanding of marriage marks it as the ultimate in sanctioned sexual exchange for non-pecuniary purposes. One significant reason for banning the sale of sexual services is, says Professor Radin, the notion that commodification of this deeply intimate, personal human capacity could ultimately lead to dehumanization. Hence, maintaining a system of non-commodification of sexual services (or, at least, "incomplete commodification" which may allow for some commercial activity in the realm of sex as an acknowledgement that values of autonomy and basic human need may require this) helps to promote "human flourishing" by preventing the objectification of human beings.

Well and good, I say. But does this still hold true when considering the "sale" of other forms of non-sexual interpersonal relations such as affection, caring, concern, or even attending to others in the form of working on their behalf? As to the latter point, isn't working for others for pay a form of human commodification? Indeed, working is one form of commodification that can have truly dehumanizing consequences. Thinkers such as Proudhon and Marx didn't call it "wage slavery" for nothing. We (mostly) non-Marxists in the Western world just call it a "job" and call truly dehumanizing situations "bad jobs." Ultimately, it's mostly all good if you can just get paid enough. "Get paid" has become one of the mantras of postmodernity.

This being the case, what's up with spending time on behalf of others and not getting paid? We generally call such actions by rosy euphemisms such as "volunteerism," "community building," "institution building," and even "homemaking." In what I perceive to be a far less rosy use of euphemism, we sometimes construct unpaid activities as actually being paid, either included in the pay you already receive ("it's a duty that's implied in the nature of your job") or being compensated by intangible, non-monetary personal benefits ("you will be incredibly appreciated if you do this.") But one woman's volunteerism or community building is another woman's unpaid and abusive labor situation.

Now, of course, there is significant value to labor performed without monetary compensation, and this is addressed by a number of scholars and non-scholars alike. Sometimes unpaid labor represents an investment that will pay off in pecuniary terms for the worker at some time in the future. Sometimes unpaid labor is what the worker "pays back" for societal benefits he or she has already received, often times in surfeit. At other times, unpaid "care work" (which I define as work promoting or supporting not just the practical needs of others but their aspirations, ideals or goals, and often heavily laden with an emotional, moral or ideological component) is, as some have argued, an operationalization of a broader "ethic of care" that seeks to address unmet community, institutional or personal needs.

However, in a perverse and inverse operation of the saying "you get what you pay for," all too often those who engage unpaid laborers in "care work" get far, far more than they would ever be willing or able to pay for. In contrast, sometimes unpaid workers in such settings, unless they hold prestigious, high profile positions, are not only uncompensated but devalued and frequently forgotten all together. In short, contributing to human flourishing via selflessness sometimes devolves into an absence of self. As one student said to me the other day after our class discussion of Professor Radin's piece and its implications: "What would Ayn Rand have to say about all of this?" (It was awesome to know that people are still reading Rand, even if, as the student said, he felt as if he had to hide the book from public view).

Is there room for the articulation of a principled Randian "ethic of egoism" in all of this, a positive affirmation of the worth of the individual in certain cases where that ethic is all too frequently being implemented only by the powerful? This is, I think, an especially trenchant question for women of color and women in general, as they seem to do an awful lot of the uncompensated work in our society, be it sexual, social or otherwise.

*This blog entry is a shorter version of one of my current working papers.

Masculine, Feminine, Or Human? (Or, Private Parts)

2009-08-25T12:46:00.002-04:00

In a previous blog I wrote about horsey feminism and concern with a female horse winning a major horse race. (see Bully for You, Filly For Me). In that entry I discussed the disquieting effect of anthropomorphism that brings biology-as-social-destiny thinking to the animal world. Recently it all came flashing before my eyes as I watched the hullabaloo surrounding Caster Semenya, the 18 year old South African middle distance runner who won a gold medal in the 800 meter at the 2009 World Athletics Championship. Ms. Semenya is accused of not being female, and is now undergoing "gender verification" by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF). The IAAF has explained that they do not suspect "cheating" but wanted to determine if she has a "rare medical condition" which gives her an unfair advantage.

Well, this is a horse of a different color. Or is it? The emphasis on exacting physical standards reminds us that the world of elite athletics, like horse racing, is far more than just a game. The existence of regulatory boards at the local, national and international level, all vested with varying amounts of quasi legal authority, attests to its importance. Athletes become more than just individuals, but instead are representatives of a unique form of cultural production—Big Sports. As I have written elsewhere (see my paper A 'Ho New World ), Big Sports, in its processes and prerogatives, is uniquely masculine and racialized, and is a venue where fans can act out fantasies of domination via the subordinated bodies of the athletes, whether on an individual, regional, national or international level. In the regime of Big Sports, athletes are more akin to animals: warm, breathing, performing bodies , pawns in the game to be scrutinized ("look at those shoulders!"), worshipped, rubbed and touched like totems or talismans and finally discarded as the circumstances dictate. The focus on women in Big Sports adds an entirely other dimension. Women are sometimes seen as an affront to male notions of sports performance, especially when prevailing cultural and social norms mediate for disinterest in sports participation among women. Excellent women athletes can and do raise social ire because they inhabit a domain that is fundamentally male.

So what about if a woman is not really a woman when participating in big time women's athletics? That's cheating, right? This raises a discussion about the gender aspects of physical performance. While many physicians and scientists would agree that males often outperform females in physical tests, what is not often enough discussed is the reliability of the physical performance tests selected in such assessments and the extent to which such outcomes are more a reflection of women's relative lack of training. So, for instance, if men often outperform women on push-ups, this may be a result of the women's lack of upper-body physical training rather than an innate strength advantage in men. At the end of the day, strength, like so many other capacities, falls along a spectrum in various individuals of either gender and concentrations of strength among men may be more socially rather than biologically dictated.

Yeah, yeah, you may say. How ever it is that men happen to be, on the average, stronger than women, doesn't matter. The difference in physical performance is what causes us to divide sports activity by gender. As one of my kids says, if they didn't, women would get blown away a lot until they catch up to male standards of training. To preserve women's sports, we have to limit participation to only women. Only women. Uh-oh, it's that dreaded p-word again: time for a panty check. (see my entry on Sarah Palin, "Teacher, Teacher, I Declare" for a discussion of a whole other kind of panty check—or is it?)

Determining gender is far more complex than many people imagine. If it were as simple as a panty check, a trip to the showers would suffice. Here the public seems to reduce the human to the animal, querying gender from its apparent physical aspects instead of recognizing the biochemical, psychological and sociological processes which comprise it. What is deeply troubling in the case of Caster Semenya is that regardless of the outcome of the official "gender verification", this young woman has undoubtedly been inalterably changed by international attention not to her full human essence, or even to her full athletic essence, but rather to her private parts.

It is Michael You Mourn For (Or, the Man in the Mirror)

2009-07-07T17:28:00.003-04:00

When I was in high school my English teacher Mr. Tattu made us do something that I hadn't done since third grade: memorize a poem. I was indignant. "Why should I have to do something so hopelessly old-fashioned?" I fumed. Still, being heavily vested in my identity as a Good Girl and a Good Student (at least at that point in my life), I did it. The poem was Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child". It goes:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! As the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

I have never forgotten this poem, especially since, as time has passed, I've come to truly understand its meaning. This is a poem about a child's innate understanding of her own mortality. Someday, sooner or later, we will all be gone. This poem kept playing in my head during the last few days as I reflected on the death of Michael Jackson. On the day that he died, I was traveling west to a conference and had been ensconced in a plane for several hours. I had passed the time doing something that I rarely do on such trips: conversing with the passengers next to me. It's not that I'm antisocial. It's just that, mostly, I've found that the average business traveler (and that's who I often run into on my itineraries) seems to have no interest in conversing with me. Maybe I don't seem…adequately business-like. Yes, we'll call it that. As I've remarked to some friends, there has been a remarkable upsurge in the desire of fellow business travelers to converse with me over the last year or so. When I think about it, it seems to coincide with Barack Obama getting the presidential nomination. Really. I think I have Barack (or maybe Michelle) to thank for making me more acceptable as a traveling companion. Anyway, as we touched down for the landing in Seattle my seat mate was showing me his Blackberry and its amazing bells and whistles. He turned it on as we reached the ground. I read the screen: Michael Jackson dead. I frowned and started to tear up, catching my breath sharply. My seat mate, puzzled, looked at the screen to see what had caused my reaction. "Oh, is Jackson dead? Wow, that'll be a big deal for a while.

A big deal indeed. I saw my whole life, and especially my childhood, pass before my eyes. Suddenly I was back in primary school listening to a Jackson Five song for the first time—somebody had brought it in to play during free time, as we were permitted to do. The class froze. "Who is that?!!" we shouted. Even we little kids knew that we had just heard something special. It was as if the unbounded joy and unmet longing of childhood came together in a heartbeat. Very quickly, the Jackson 5 consumed our and the public imagination. Michael, especially. We dreamed of meeting him. All the more we dreamed of it because we were from Los Angeles. Star sightings were common enough. My mother once worked in an upscale department store where she waited on Diana Ross. We actually knew people who had met Michael Jackson. Michael sightings and interactions became the highest-valued social currency of our childhood. A girl across the street from me named Juliet got a puppy from Michael Jackson because her grandmother, a maid for a Really Famous Person, had met him. A girl from my neighborhood named Venus got to go on the Dating Game with him. Yes, we had only a few degrees of separation from Michael Jackson. He was, to us, like a much better off, distant relative. Maybe none of us could be him. But we could see him; he was always there, somewhere.

As we grew up he was still there, but somehow far larger than life by then. We read tabloids, we heard the stories. Michael was…different. Maybe. But Michael was ours. He was like a cousin that you used to hang out with but then there came a day that you really didn't hang anymore but you still loved and admired him because he was great. And he was…yours.

So, if it seems strange to people that I am mourning Michael Jackson the International Pop Star, so be it. That's only a small part of who he was.

More on the Baby Daddy (Or, No Way Kin You Be)

2009-06-18T16:21:00.003-04:00

I was e-chatting ( some of my best relationships are maintained via e-chat—brief but warm and informative electronic messages traded with friends) with Feminist Law Professors' Bridget Crawford earlier today about her recent blog post "White People's "Baby Daddy." Bridget invited me to weigh in via blog. Never one to pass up a chance to ruminate in the blogosphere (especially since of late I have been consumed with several other projects), I thought I'd give it a whirl. Her post begins:

<<When speakers use the phrases "baby daddy" and "baby mama" in non-colloquial contexts, do they mock African-Americans or do they embrace one way that the American vocabulary has been enriched by the contributions of African-Americans? Both? Neither?>>

This is a topic that I've toyed with off and on ever since I saw Amy Poehler of "Saturday Night Live" fame in the film Baby Mama a few months ago via cable (most of the time I'm too cheap to ante up for the movie theater, what can I say?). "Baby mama" (or the male variant, Baby daddy) is, as the blog post explains, an African-American (or African Caribbean) term denoting the mother or father of one's child who is not one's wife or husband (or even necessarily one's girlfriend or boyfriend.) It usually indicates a clear bifurcation of the biological functions of parenting from the social functions of parenting or intimate partnering. Increasingly bandied about in popular culture, these phrases are sometimes used to symbolize an immense social emancipation from the norms of domesticity: why keep the man (or the woman) when all you really want is the baby (and sometimes you don't want that, but that's another story) ? Baby mama and baby daddy are also, however, widely perceived as being emblematic of the eroding family in black communities.

Bridget Crawford ponders whether the use of these phrases by white people "crosses into twenty-first century blackface minstrelsy." My answer? Maybe. There is, all too often, a thin line between cultural appropriation (incorporation of "outsider" cultural artifacts without acknowledgement of the source) and cultural broadening (incorporation of "outsider" norms without acknowledgement because the "outsiders" come with the artifacts, that is, they are perceived as part of the polity and thus are able to continually participate in shaping the nature of the cultural capital that is incorporated.) We are not yet to the point where mainstream white society can assume that any adoption of black cultural norms is more exemplary of broadening than of appropriation. Some words and phrases stand as much as they ever did for white-racist inspired black oppression. These words still pack a punch for black people no matter how often repeated in white mainstream settings. "Ghetto," for example, is the new and the old black. The blog Bourgie, Interrupted seems to agree on this point. Nonetheless, while we still have a ways to go in sorting out black-white relations, we are, if not post-racial, certainly post-racist. By this I mean that it is definitely uncool to intentionally employ racist cant, and when it is employed unintentionally, right-thinking white people usually clean that …stuff… up pretty quickly. Or, if not clean it up, wrap it up, sometimes sending racism so far under wraps that it becomes both profoundly obscure and obscurely profound.

But more intriguing for me is not just the racial implications of the terms but the gendered implications, especially in the case of "baby mama". This is what hit me when I saw the film Baby Mama. As those of you who saw it know, the film uses the term with an ironic, postmodern, post-heteronormative spin—Amy Poehler's character is the gestational surrogate for another character played by Tina "bitch is the new black" Fey, another SNL alum. Amy is Tina's "baby mama." There is plenty of "baby mama drama" in the film, but not the usual kind. (For the uninitiated, a man has "baby mama drama" when, for example, his baby mama shows up at his new girlfriend's house and asks the new girlfriend for diaper and formula money since she has a job and is taking up time with the baby daddy. Another example is where, true story that happened at my cousin Tata's wedding, the limousine carrying the baby daddy and his new wife intentionally drives by the baby mama's house right after the wedding and blares the horn, and the baby mama comes out holding the baby and curses out the whole wedding party…oh, sorry, I digress…) The film explores the clash of class and cultural norms between the two women, painting them both in high relief in order to tell the tale. Tina Fey is the wealthy, cultured career woman who has put off childbearing in her early years only to find that she is having difficulty conceiving. Amy Poehler play the low life "white trash" woman with a trashy boyfriend to match who wants to make money from surrogating. Brilliant, I thought. What better way to explore the outer limits of divorcing the social and biological aspects of parenting than by mocking gestational surrogacy? Since the seminal Baby M case in 1986 that brought surrogacy to public light, surrogacy has become a much used, mostly legally sanctioned activity (it's still forbidden in some places, and is stringently limited in others) that has made the joy of childbirth a reality for persons who in the past had little hope of creating families in this way. But at the end of the day, surrogacy remains very much a contractual, marketplace arrangement that is all too often (but certainly not always) entered into by less privileged women in our society. Commercial surrogacy, or "reproductive outsourcing" is a growth industry in some parts of the world. Poor women in India, for example enjoy surrogacy fees that equal two or three years' salary.

But what's all this got to do with the price of diapers in Detroit? Plenty, I'd say. "Baby mama," whether used in the black cultural context or to signify women as gestational surrogates, for me signifies an unquiet anomie that bubbles under society's surface. It is a weird, circular wheel on which personal and relational autonomy, here, the right to separate parentage from other social relationships, runs head first into the oppression wrought when the bonds of kinship are not only broken but treated in some cases as if they never existed.

Bully for You, Filly for Me (Or, The Alphas and the Omegas)

2009-05-18T11:42:00.003-04:00

I had been meaning to blog on a New York Times article from a few days ago about the "phenomenon" of women in the workplace who harass, intimidate and sabotage other persons in the workplace. I'll call them bully girls. The article notes that while most workplace bullies are men, about forty percent of workplace bullies are women. It also notes that about seventy percent of the victims of female bullies are also women. The article decries this apparent affront to feminism. As one commentator suggests, such behavior is distressing because it is "antithetical" to the way women are supposed to behave to other women and gives lie to the claim that women are "nurturers and supporters." One commentator in the article suggested that woman on woman bullying may occur because women learn to fight with one another for male attention at any early age. "We're competing with our sisters for our dad's attention or for our brother's attention." I guess the girls just can't help it.

Say what? I don't know what's so surprising about the existence of bully girls. What pink cloud have some of these people have been living on? While it is possible that the behavior that is being described as "bullying" in women is just called "leadership" or "asserting authority" in men, this is not necessarily the case. (That's called the "B" factor, and the b doesn't stand for witch.) People with power, women included, are sometimes…mean to people without power. And it may have nothing to do with peculiar womanish problems. Earth shattering? I hardly think so.

Before I could get to the blog on bully girls another news item struck my attention: "Rachel Alexandra Wins the Preakness" blared the headlines in my New York Times news on tap e-mail. "Wow," I thought. "A female jockey?" Er, no. Rachel Alexandra is the filly that won. The horse. Ridden by a male jockey. The stories about Rachel Alexandra noted that she had broken a horsey glass ceiling of sorts, winning in a field of several highly rated male horses. Relatively few female horses have had big wins of this nature. Another female horse, Eight Belles, came in second in the Kentucky Derby last year but she fractured both front ankles in the race and had to be destroyed. Competing with all those big, rough boy horses was her undoing, according to some pundits.

So what do these two stories have to do with each other? A lot, if you think about it. Both have to do with that really odd gender othering that we do. Take the bully girl (please.) Despite the fact that women are half of the population, they are still treated as if they are slightly outside of the human species. Bully girls are noteworthy because of expectations of a quiet, calm domestic demeanor that follows women from the home place to the workplace. But we all know that some women weren't all sweetness and light even when they were relegated to the home front. Nor were women necessarily "nurturing and supportive" when it came to the women employees they supervised at home, namely, their domestics. As scholar Mary Romero writes, this was particularly true when the women bosses were white and the domestic workers were women of color. The relationship between domestics and their lady of the house bosses was frequently characterized by "spatial and verbal deference," emblems of an unremitting though often silent race and class struggle.

As to all the pretty little fillies that are featured in high stakes professional horse racing, gee, why make a big deal out of a filly winning a major horse race? Well, it seems that some of the same biology-as-social-destiny thinking that features in discussions about human capabilities is also seen in the horse world. It is apparently common in horse racing circles to rate male horses over females, colts over fillies, because of beliefs that fillies may be easily intimidated by the more aggressive colts or may be physically too fragile to withstand the rigors of big races. As one observer said of Rachel Alexandra: "[she] marked herself the alpha-filly of her generation, and it is that kind of horse who has earned a chance to tackle males."

Well, doggie. That's some mighty fine anthropomorphizing. Exporting human social categories such as gender to the animal world and attributing human motivations to the behavior of animals has always been a peculiar phenomenon. Moreover, the practice of investing non-humans with a gender identity ('"engenderneering" as scholar Roy Scwartzman calls it) further sheds light on the values and ideals of the broader culture in which we live. We struggle to find a way to understand the behavior of beings that are other than us. The distinction between human behavior and animal behavior was thought to be pretty clear cut for centuries. But the more we study animals, the more we find that they may have traits and capacities that are just as worthy of respect as our own. They may even behave like us in some cases. What does it mean to be human, anyway? Those boundaries just seem to be slip sliding all the time ("talking" dolphin, anyone?).

In this regard, anthropomorphism has a lot to do with the effort to reconcile human maleness and femaleness. As scholar Wendy Lynn Lee suggests, anthropomorphizing has serious implications for how we construct gender, racial, sexual and class norms in the human world, and for how those norms are deployed. This is because the essential "truth" of anthropomorphism is that the human experience is central, and is posited as the model for understanding the behavior of all living beings (and even in some cases the properties of inanimate objects). Moreover, the human who figures in Westernized anthropomorphic musings is typically straight, white and male: the alpha norm around which all other identity classes group. Those other identity classes are secondary. I'll call them omegas. Because status is often hierarchically arranged based on the relative acceptability of ones identity, there are often some pretty lively battles for avoiding the bottom-most identity status. Being the omega of the omegas is pretty cruddy.

So, what are these identity-challenged omegas supposed to do?

Make like the filly: Keep running, fast. At least until the race (or the way we think about the race) changes.

Color Her Justice (Or, If the Shoe Fits)

2009-05-01T22:00:00.002-04:00

Supreme Court Justice David Souter recently announced that he would step down, clearing the way for President Obama to appoint a new Justice in Souter's place. Immediately pundits were abuzz with possible candidates. One strain of commentary was particularly salient among the progressive bloggerati: President Obama should appoint a woman, and she should be a woman of color.

That seems like an interesting possibility, in light of the fact that few women (and no woman of color ) have graced the bench of our highest court. Imagine, another pair of pumps to keep the wing tips at bay. (For some people the relevant dismissive gendered metonyms are "skirts" and "suits". I'm a shoe person, what can I say? ) Who will she be? One prominent name offered is Judge Sonia Sotomayor, an Associate Judge of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Sotomayor, a Latina (or a His-Panic, as Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan seems to pronounce it, Freudian slippage evident) is someone whose name has been offered for high judicial office from time to time by both Democrats and Republicans. She is, according to some, that elusive creature, the "political centrist." Hmm.

What does that mean? Or, more to the point, should we be worried? Choosing Justices for the Supreme Court is fraught with the peril of getting it wrong, that is, choosing someone whose pre-Court behavior ends up having little to do with his or her Court behavior. History is full of examples. David Souter, the Justice to be replaced, most easily comes to mind. Justice Souter was appointed by George H.W. Bush after having been touted as a "confirmable conservative". His voting record has instead mostly been one of studious moderation, as he aligned himself with the more liberal wing of the Court in later years. Anther famous "mistake" was former Chief Justice Earl Warren, who was appointed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower on the premise that he was reliably socially conservative. The Warren Court, as most of us know, was instead the source of a series of landmark decisions that changed the social and jurisprudential landscape of the United States.

Several recent appointments, especially those under the second President Bush, are seemingly more true to expectations. Chief Justice John Roberts for the most part has certainly lived up to the hype, given his decisions in cases such as Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 , where he penned the majority opinion disallowing the use of racial classifications for purposes of school integration. Roberts: ""[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race"—Gee, is that all we have to do? Who knew? All that time wasted living in a racist society..... Justice Samuel Alito, another recent conservative pick, has also done yeoman's work for the conservative cause. He was nicknamed "Scalito" in the early years of his term for his fairly consistent concurrence with uber-Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

But the truth is, looking closely at the records of even the ostensibly most conservative judges reveals some streaks of judicial independence. It may well be that tenure on the Court often works the way it's supposed to work—there is a smoothing of sharp edges as the pure fire of justice reshapes extreme political ideologies. Yes, there is still a left, right, and center on today's Supreme Court. But those typologies may be increasingly more blurry and consequently less useful in predicting how a Justice will rule.

If this is the case, what then is the role of race and gender in understanding the type of jurist a woman of color will be? Past and ongoing racial and gender discrimination in the United States means that women of color often see life through a particular lens, one that likely affords them a clarity of vision about issues of equity. What they observe through those raced and gendered lenses, however, may not be what we think. For instance, Justice Clarence Thomas, appointed by George H.W. Bush to fill former Justice Thurgood Marshall's seat, while an African American, is certainly no Thurgood Marshall. He must have been (and must still be) wearing 3-D glasses.

When President Obama goes out seeking the Supreme Court nominee who best fits the glass slipper, let us hope (choose one of the following shoe metaphors):

--the shoe fits.

--the nominee clicks his/her heels together three times and brings us back from jurisprudential Oz.

--(s)he's already walked a mile wearing the other one.

--the nominee doesn't take it and throw it at the American people.

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency: The Many Facets of Raced and Gendered Tele-Identity (Or, Nemos, Nomos and Narrative)

2009-04-19T22:39:00.003-04:00

In the new HBO show The No. 1 One Ladies' Detective Agency, based on the book series of the same name, Americans are confronted with what seems for many the multiple improbable identities of the singular subject of the show, Precious Ramotswe. Precious is a middleclass, "traditionally built" (plus sized), Sub-Saharan African woman who works as a detective to mostly middle and upper middle class Africans. She is the fictional creation of 61 year old Zimbabwe-born British white male law professor Alexander McCall Smith and is played by African American woman rhythm and blues singer Jill Scott. Note that that's "Number One", not "No one", a pun that the author likely intended, considering the way in which the heroine of the show reveals herself to a sometimes skeptical public as a definite someone despite being taken on occasion for a gendered and raced no one. Moreover, Precious, with her cheery countenance, her self taught and intuition-driven insights and love for country is a sort of Vernian anti-Nemo (Latin for no one). The numerous race, gender, nationality and class formations at the heart of the show make it unlikely fare for a night time serial.

Precious is the daughter of a tribal elder in a small Botswanan village who, during her childhood, allowed her to be present while he and other elders dispensed justice. In the pilot episode, there is a scene wherein Precious' father adjudicates a dispute between two village men who both claim the same cow. The child Precious, who sits silently watching, suddenly seizes upon an idea: she goes and unties a calf belonging to one of the claimants. The distressed calf runs to its mother, the disputed cow. The message is clear: a calf knows its own mother, and so the undisputed owner of the calf must be the owner of the cow that produced it. The false claimant flees and Precious is congratulated by her father. For all of its pastoral beauty and simplicity the scene is potent in its meaning: wisdom comes from many sources and from many places, and the evidence upon which legal judgments are rendered is often readily apparent to those who have not rejected common sense and knowledge of the natural environment.

Upon his death, Precious' father leaves her his wealth in the form of several head of cattle and a Datsun truck. Precious sells the cattle and takes the Datsun with her to the big city in order to become a lady detective. When asked along the way why she chooses this career, she says "I love my country Botswana". This perhaps strikes some as saccharin in a world where idealism, at least in career choices, is increasingly rare. However, Precious' declaration of love for her country is a touching patria est communis omnium parens (our native land is our common parent) moment, a hopeful mantra that underscores the notion that it is possible to offer filial embrace of not only the Botwana that is the subject of the character's declarations but to also embrace the notion of a hopeful Africa. Indeed, Precious Ramotswe is perhaps a metaphor for the reclamation of what scholar Diedre Badejo has called the "legacy culture of Africa," the transnational and local (re)configurations of African cultures in the modern world. This perhaps heralds the articulation and validation of the full range of human thoughts, feelings and ideals both in Africa and in global African settings. With Precious, one may contemplate Africa's positive promise and its relationship to the broader non-African world rather than endlessly mourn its failures and its seeming disaffiliation from the wider world. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency has the potential to help illuminate the interplay between race, gender, and place and to reform certain pernicious and deeply held cultural ideologies in Western narratives of Africa.

Will the show last? I have to confess, when I watched the pilot episode and the next few shows that followed, I couldn't help but wonder if American white audiences would warm to a show with so many black characters in a setting that is so far from the United States, both geographically and culturally. Some members of audiences of color may find the cultural shift equally as off-putting, accustomed as we are to iconic shows that have featured racial and ethnic diversity but little departure from American social and cultural norms (Cosby Show or Fresh Prince of Bel Air, anyone?) However, along with the lush physical beauty of Botswana where the pilot show was filmed, there is also the dizzying array of black female beauty that is on display in the show. Black women of all sizes, shapes, hair styles and colors people the show, giving black women and other women of color the kind of aesthetic validation that is rarely available on Western television.

The series, presently consisting of a 105-minute pilot episode and six 60-minute shows, follows in the footsteps of gritty, dark HBO series such as The Sopranos, historicized dramas with penchants for brutal violence and graphic sex such as Rome, and socially provocative, psychosexual dramas such as Big Love. Wither The
No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency in this panoply of shows? Only time will tell.

“Octomom”: Social Factoring the Numbers (Or, LCD meets OCD)

2009-03-24T13:25:00.004-04:00

In recent weeks the airwaves have sizzled with stories about Nadya Suleman, the California woman who gave birth to octuplets conceived via assisted reproductive technology. In doing so, Suleman breached numerous mainstream social norms of motherhood.

First and foremost, in having eight babies, she went way beyond the two-child home that has become the standard for middle class-dom. There seems to be a Familial Least Common Denominator rule applicable to middle class parenting. You take the mother, put her in the numerator and put the number of kids in the denominator and you win points based on how close the resulting fraction is to one. If you're wealthy and socially well-placed, extra kids can be subtracted out in direct proportion to how much money and social cachet you have. You lose automatically if the numerator is greater than one--Heather cannot have multiple mommies!

Fuzzy math for sure, but Suleman got the math way wrong. The eight babies were, moreover, in addition to six that she already had at home. It is true that the media and the public have a longstanding fascination with multiple births and with large families (who can forget movies like “Cheaper by the Dozen” which seems to keep being re-made, TV shows like the “Brady Bunch,” or even those current reality shows about multiple sibs?) But there’s a point at which “yay” becomes “yuck”, and that happens right around the time that parents of the brood are revealed to be Other—outside of racial and class norms.

Early reports made Nadya Suleman out to be non-white. With all those kids, (and those lips!) she must be black, right? Just another welfare queen. I was at a birthday party out in Brooklyn back when the news broke and the disapproving whispers of the mostly West Indian party-goers seemed to confirm it –“she’s black, you know; making us look bad!” It was soon revealed that at some point she had been married to a man named Gutierrez. Aha, a Latina. They have lots of babies, too, right? But, no, wait, there’s more! She’s really, per her own account, half Arabic and half-Lithuanian. Oh (silence). One of those people from the nether-regions of the world. Not black. Not Latina. But only sort of white.

Besides breaching racial norms, Suleman breached class norms. According to media accounts, Suleman’s chief means of support for the years leading up to the birth of the octuplets seemed to be disability payments and food stamps for some of the children. How, people wondered, could she afford assisted reproductive technology? That’s for the wealthy, right? Scandal!

The media could posit few acceptable reasons for breaching norms in so spectacular a fashion, bearing and keeping so many babies. So... Nadya Suleman must be crazy. Men-tally ill. Some commentators suggested that Suleman might be suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. “Hooked on pregnancy,” as one writer suggested. Addiction to addition.

A significant aspect of what causes anxiety in the case of Nadya Suleman is her thoroughly post modern take on women's autonomy and choice. Suleman recreates multiply and serially without the need for sexual activity, marriage, or for the physical autonomy suggested by limiting childbirth. Suleman's child bearing is a figurative nose-thumbing at both the right and the left.

You can read more about the socio-legal anxieties engendered by Nadya Suleman and her babies in an abstract of a paper written by Professor Bridget Crawford (of Feminist Law Professors fame) and I at Multiple Anxieties.

[Want to comment? Please do so! Note that comments are moderated and so may not appear immediately.]

Of PDA and PDA (Or, Welcome to the Synopticon)

2009-01-29T17:10:00.007-05:00

In the days immediately before the inauguration there was much talk about whether the new president would have to give up his Blackberry personal digital assistant. Every president before him has, ostensibly due to concerns about security, given up e-mailing before taking office. It is one of the many losses of privacy that come with being leader of the country (and of the “free world”, as many media sources remind us). The new president, however, found this a difficult pill to swallow since he is said to be, like many users of the device, almost addicted to using it. There is a reason that some people call it Crackberry. Ultimately, President Obama won the fight and will be allowed to use a new, specially designed PDA.

Now, I don’t have a Blackberry. My lack is not because I am some sort of Luddite but because since I left the world of private law practice some years ago I just haven’t been able to afford all of the coolest electronic gadgets. Still, I am enough of a techie to see how not being able to e-mail, IM, text and telephone one’s contacts at will could feel like a form of death. I think that in a contemporary version of Dante’s Inferno, one of the circles of hell would be a place where there is no Internet of any kind. A slightly higher circle would have Internet but it would be dial-up service only.

There were a couple of often repeated objections to allowing President Obama to retain his Blackberry. First, someone might be able to intercept his messages, thus compromising national security. After all, wireless communications are famously hackable. Next, theoretically any written communications sent with such a device become part of the official correspondence of the office of the president and may be subject to subpoena by Congress and the courts. Such e-mails may also be subject to public records laws, such as the Presidential Records Act, which requires the National Archives to preserve presidential records.

Both of these objections can be overcome. As to hacking the President’s PDA, it is said that the device to be used by President Obama will be an uber-PDA, one which, while not impossible to hack, will offer security beyond that found in a standard device. As to the possibility of having to archive routine private or familial communications not intended to have much official import (“Hey Michelle, are you going to Malia’s teacher conference today?”), there are exceptions in records keeping laws for purely private communications. At the end of the day, it is likely that Obama’s PDA use will not compromise national security, but will instead be a way for him to stay in contact with his family and close associates. So, what’s the big deal about Obama’s PDA?

I think that part of the big deal about his PDA has to do with the other kind of PDA surrounding the Obamas—that’s Public Display of Affection. Thanks to twenty-four hour news channels, the Obamas PDA was frequently on view during the campaign (remember that affectionate fist bump that got transformed into a “terrorist fist jab” courtesy of Fox News?), during the inaugural parade (serial hand-holding) and most notably during the inaugural balls (lots of lovey dovey, close, but not dirty, dancing). Both types of PDA have to do with the articulation of the traditional binary public-private distinction. This distinction appears to be an expression of a particular point of view in which the public sphere is carefully distinguished from the private sphere. Things associated with the family, with the body, or with any form of intimacy were to be tightly bound within the private realm. Women, and especially men’s intimate relationships with women, were clearly part of that private world. But something odd goes on when dealing with major political office such as the president of the United States. The rules are different, and power is exercised not through keeping intimacy private but through making public certain legitimate, state-sanctioned forms of intimacy. It is a synoptic relationship: the many observe the few, and from those observations, the many draw a sense of discipline, order, and propriety. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman observed, postmodern compliance to social standards is achieved via enticement and seduction rather than by coercion. This enticement comes in the guise of free will, transparency and access, rather than revealing itself as an external force. The whole notion of a “First Lady” is exemplary of this process. The First Lady is First Wife and First Mother to the President and to the nation at large, and such, is our guide to behavior.

Given the symbolic importance of the First Lady, what happens when she is black? Whether we deal in private text messages on a PDA or romantic little hand-squeezes between the Obamas, both are carried out in the context of a culture marked with complex mythologies about black family life and sexuality, and especially about black women. Black women, while long eroticized, have rarely been viewed as having sufficient aesthetic, cultural or intellectual appeal to become models of virtuous Womanhood.

With both PDA and PDA the Obamas are not only redrawing public/ private boundaries but charting new terrain altogether.

[Want to comment? Please do so! Note that comments are moderated and so may not appear immediately.]

He Is (Or, We Are)

2009-01-21T11:19:00.005-05:00

The make it alrighter
The get you through the nighter
The soul defender of anything I fear
The pain remover
The bad times undoer
The joy bringer
The love giver
He is.
Heather Headley, “He Is”

He is walking out onto the stage, the president elect of the United States. This feels like a life-changing event. I am already crying, weeping loudly at first, trying to bring myself under control, glad that I am not in a public place right now. I promised to blog this moment, even in the midst of writing up notes for my paper and preparing my talk, struggling to keep it a regular day, the day that I had planned. I cried when the little black girls came out. He is their father—that one fact is part of what brings it home to me. God Bless America.

Rick Warren is there, providing the invocation. “Let us pray.” There are a few boos. Folks, folks, it’s not the time for that. Good, they keep it together during the prayer.

Biden is being sworn in. He squints—is the sun in his eyes?
It is 11:58 a.m., Barack is up in a few minutes. Yo Yo Ma is playing, beautifully.

Here come Roberts,Barack and Michelle with the bible in her hand.

It is done. He is… the President of the United States. I weep loudly and insistently now with no shame, shaking my head at the unreality of it. It is like when my mother died. Spinning unreality, hot, hot tears, a knowledge that the world will forever, be different, different. But this is a birth; we have collectively given birth to a new leader who is a symbol of a new era. He is, however, but a single symbol in what will, I hope, be long period of broad civic engagement, both here and abroad. Yes, he is, but we are, also.

In his essay, “Messianism in the Political Culture of the Weimar Republic,” author Klaus Schreiner discusses how language is a creature of both cause and effect: on the one hand, changes in language illustrate how society’s political thought and behavior has been transformed, but on the other hand, it is language itself that often spurs these changes. Applying this to the Weimar Republic, Schreiner observed how the use of messianic concepts on the one hand laid bare the presence of messianic impulses in civic life, but such language was also the catalyst of the messianic fervor came to undermine democratic ideals.

Now, this is in no way to suggest that the new administration in Washington is somehow on a messianic journey to undermine American democratic ideals and lead us to a hypernationalistic state. Quite the contrary, I took great solace in the first official statement of our new President. In his inaugural address, President Obama opened with: “My fellow citizens: I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors.” Though many commentators critiqued the speech as lacking in “grandeur” and “loftiness,” I think that President Obama got it just right. He went on to remark how “greatness must be earned” and how there is a long and rugged path back to prosperity.

President Obama is not a messiah or the Messiah. He is a strong and capable leader. He will not walk on water to save us from drowning. He will probably not even tow us all to shore while swimming with the rope from the raft in his teeth. He will, I believe, captain our common ship during storms or fair weather, and even help us to paddle it when it the engine falters.

We must resist the impulse of imagining the secularized eschatology of a New American state, one wherein we are immediately reborn as both less and more: less sexist, less racist, less homophobic, less bellicose, but more rational, more compassionate, and more inclusive. These things may happen, but only over time, only if we, collectively, make them happen.

Change, Change, Change of Fools (Or, If You Don’t Hear, You’ll Feel)

2009-01-13T20:05:00.004-05:00

Happy New Year. I meant to write this several days ago, but fighting a cold and nursing a weak voice that has waxed and waned throughout the holiday season has kept me sidelined until now. (Sports metaphor!) A few more dozen cups of sage tea should fix me right up, though. (Sage works—really.)

I finally gave up this year. I slept through the New Year instead of straining to stay awake as I have almost my entire adult life. I didn’t have Champagne. Instead I toasted in the New Year at 11 a.m. on January 1 with a glass of eight year old Virgin Islands rum, which, by my lights, is a much better drink than even expensive Champagne. For the first time, I did not watch the Times Square ball drop, either in person or on television because, whether in person or on television, I never found it that much fun (sacrilege!). On New Year’s morning I did not watch the Rose Parade or even think about it for the first time since my early childhood in Los Angeles, where my late mother Marie (not her real name, but for many reasons, it's what we called her all of her life. So, I guess it was her "real" name... ), bless her soul, thought that the New Year simply would not arrive if one did not watch the Rose Parade. Past viewing of the Rose Parade has induced within me such a level of ennui that in some years it took me days to recover. In one fell swoop I seem to have abandoned a lifetime of New Year’s Day customs. (I did eat black eyed peas on New Year’s Day for good luck—there’s no need to tempt fate.) It’s all because, like the song says, I am changing. But I am changing into myself. (Dream Girls, eat your hearts out.)

Change is in the air. Just ask the people who voted for Barack Obama. Or, for the flip side of the joy of change, ask the people who invested with Bernard Madoff. My changing means getting in sync with who I really am and who I really want to be, as opposed to what I think someone else thinks I am or ought to be. I’ve spent years trying to craft a workable public persona. Quiet, cooperative team-player? (Sports metaphor!) That seemed to be a good way to go early on in my career. Combative shrew? That comes in handy when years of team play get you nowhere but still on the bench. (Another sports metaphor! Really, they’re much too present in the language and culture. And what do they really add? That’s for another blog, maybe.) It’s hard to know how to behave when neither persona seems to get consistent good results. (Actually, I’ve never quite reached my full shrew state—it takes so much energy, and one tries to reserve that level of outrage for truly pressing problems.) The truth of a person’s identity is much more complex than binary good/bad behavior.

What I now know for sure that I only suspected before is that the goal is to be respected, and maybe liked and admired (icing on the cake, but nice nonetheless), for yourself, your real self. Not a self constructed solely for public consumption. To achieve that, somebody has to be willing to listen to you. I mean, really listen. Not grudgingly lending half an ear then parsing your words and turning them into what you didn’t say. Not involuntarily flinching when you open your mouth then inartfully changing the subject to something that hopefully you won’t join in on. To really listen to someone else is probably one of the most revolutionary acts that any of us can engage in. This is because listening to others means risking the possibility that the listener will himself be changed by what he hears.

A favorite expression of my late grandmother-in-law Nen (Nen was her nickname; her real name was actually Marie but nobody called her that; how the Maries have shaped my life!) was “If you don’t hear, you’ll feel.” It was in its simplest terms an admonition to children to heed their parents’ words or risk physical punishment for failing to do so. But she also uttered these words as a continual reminder that failure to listen to others could bring on all sorts of untoward conditions. These few words actually summarized Nen’s political philosophy. To Nen, hearing the words of others was a necessary first step to understanding your own role in the world, even if ultimately you did not act in accord with what you heard. Indeed, you might even do the exact *opposite*. But before choosing to go left, it’s useful to know why the people going before you went right.

If you don’t hear, you’ll feel; moreover, you risk engaging in the change of fools.

Afropublicrats and a More Perfect Love (Or, Living Wrong and Voting Right)

2008-12-07T16:05:00.021-05:00

Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness in the day of judgment; because as He is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love. (1 John 4:17-19)

My young daughter and I went to church today. My husband, who usually accompanies us, was unavailable, so she and I braved the frigid weather and went to visit a nearby church that we have visited a few times. The theme of the sermon today was fear, which, I think , is a really good topic, in light of the mournful economic times in which we find ourselves. The minister started by offering a message to the children, gathering them together and asking about the things that they feared most. “Spiders,” said one child. “Bats,” said another. “Doctors,” offered a third child, to the amusement of the entire congregation. The sermon went on to discuss how each one of us, adult and child alike, fears something. The goal was to call upon faith to master our fears. I was in the midst of enjoying the sermon when I was blindsided by the minister’s lashing out at black ministers’ opposition to gay marriage and domestic partnership. The comments in summary were:

--Black ministers who preach against domestic partnership are fearful and ignorant
--Black ministers should tend to their own community's problems, such as the 70% of children born to single black mothers.

Indeed I'm sure that the minister did not intend it, but the tone during the delivery of this portion of the sermon was both scornful and arrogant. This impression wasn't helped when some parishioners in attendance laughed when the minister mentioned the rate of black out of wedlock births. The laughter was, I suppose, in response to the seeming irony of a community plagued by unpartnered women being opposed to domestic partnership. The comments and the laughter hit me like a bucket of cold water. A few nearby persons turned to look at my daughter and me (perhaps thinking that I was yet another of those oft-maligned black women with out of wedlock children.) The discomfort and embarrassment I felt were only exacerbated as I looked up at another black woman, a relatively young woman who sat in the balcony. The grim look on her face told me that she hadn't received the message any better. I'm a pretty cool customer usually, but I have to say that it took lots of restraint for me not to take my daughter's hand and walk out.

While I understand that many social progressives (and I count myself among them) feel deeply about the issue of opposition to domestic partnership and gay marriage, assailing the position that black ministers are taking from the pulpit of an overwhelmingly white, prosperous church does little, I think, to advance the dialogue on this matter. Since it is likely that the position of black ministers on this issue is fueled by their faith-based ideas on homosexuality, whether they are right or wrong in this matter, God only knows. Assuming (as I do ) that the ministers have it wrong, it would seem to me that the Christian approach to the issue would be to mention the opposition of the ministers and pray that they reach a better understanding and more perfect love of all of our brothers and sisters, regardless of their sexual orientation or family structure, and leave single black mothers out of it. This approach would also, I'm sure, have spared the feelings of the few black congregants, especially black women, who may have felt as I did.

How did black women get into the political cross-hairs on this issue? After the recent success of Proposition 8 in California which revoked the right of same-sex couples to wed, many pundits on both the political Right and Left have argued than blacks in general and black women in particular were largely responsible for this outcome. While this claim was inaccurate to some degree, polls suggest that large numbers of blacks, especially black women, supported the measure. These socially conservative blacks, termed “Afropublicrats” by New York Times columnist Charles Blow, have moral views that are virtually indistinguishable from those of Republicans, according to Gallup Poll surveys. So, I guess if we’re going to assail black opposition to domestic partnership or gay marriage, maybe it makes sense to throw brickbats at all those black single mothers who are living wrong and voting Right.

Not so fast, though. The tenor of this discussion threatens to further spread the myth of the black/gay divide. While much of the public assumes that blacks are more homophobic than their white counterparts (see e.g. homophobic rap music), this is not born out by most longitudinal research conducted on the issue. This research suggests that while religious blacks often see homosexuality as a sin, they have also been more likely than whites to vote in favor of matters that they perceive to be important civil rights issues for the gay community. At the end of the day, a lot rides on how a particular issue is framed. I think that when it comes to the issue of being gay, many blacks, both gay and straight, simply feel that one's sexuality ain't nobody's business, and it defies reason and common sense that anybody would feel the need to vote to undermine the way that adults want to live their lives. As comedian Wanda Sykes recently stated at a rally protesting Proposition 8: "You know, I don't really talk about my sexual orientation. I didn't feel like I had to. I was just living my life, not necessarily in the closet, but I was living my life. Everybody that knows me personally they know I'm gay. But that's the way people should be able to live their lives."

Yeah, it ought to be that way. Oh, that we may reach a more perfect love.

[Want to comment? Please do so! Note that comments are moderated and so may not appear immediately.]

Dialing Mrs. Murphy (Or, Me Talk Pretty One Day)

2008-11-20T12:51:00.005-05:00

I began the search for temporary housing by scouring Craigslist. I had been making calls for months, but now it was time to nail something down. I found a promising ad: fully furnished, all utilities included, Internet and parking. The pictures looked great. Maybe a little more heavily decorated than I’d like, but the place looked well kept. I made the call. Someone picked up on the first ring, whereupon I stated my reason for calling, trying to sound at once business like and warm and friendly. After listening patiently, the person on the other end asked me to hold while she switched phones. She returned and began telling me about the apartment.

“It’s my father’s place. He’s away visiting in Ireland. We figure we may as well make some money since he’ll be gone for so long. It’s part of my house, downstairs. It’s in the nice part of town so you don’t have to worry about security.” The woman had an Irish accent which grew more pronounced as she continued. “We want someone who doesn’t smoke, has no pets, and is the right sort. It is my home, you know. You’ll have to call back and talk to my husband and he can schedule the showing. You sound respectable, you said you’re a law professor, is that right?”

“Yes, I teach in Cleveland. I don’t smoke, and while I like pets I don’t really have time for or interest in caring for any so I have none.” I said it all rather too quickly. After her comments, I felt as if everything I was saying was a lie. Am I the right sort? Will I be a blight on the neighborhood's niceness and security? Am I respectable, or do I just sound as if I am?

Why would I wonder such about such things? Then it hit me.

She probably thinks that I’m white. Why wouldn’t she? I speak crisp, standard, Northeastern U.S. English with, I’m told, a vague hint of Californian that betrays my Los Angeles upbringing. Most people who speak as I do and have the job that I do are, statistically speaking, white. They are also probably men, but the register of my voice no doubt gives away my gender. So, if she thought I was white, she could certainly be forgiven for thinking so. I struggled mightily to curb the impulse to say: “I’m black; will that be a problem?” I didn’t want to ask because I didn’t look forward to any of the three possible responses I envisioned hearing: 1) stunned silence then a stammered “no” which really meant “yes” 2) stunned silence followed by “Yes, it matters”, followed by polite dismissal (or a click as the receiver was hung up) 3) stunned silence followed by righteous indignation at having been asked about whether race figures in such matters (“We’re all post racial now!”). None of the three possible outcomes seemed attractive. I suddenly feared that I had called the wrong number. Could it be...Mrs. Murphy in the flesh?

Many of you know the hypothetical Mrs. Murphy of Fair Housing Act fame.

The 1968 Fair Housing Act (FHA) proscribed discrimination in most housing transactions on the basis of race, color, religion, and national origin. It contained a noteworthy exception, the so-called “Mrs. Murphy” clause found in 42 U.S.C. §3603(b). This section, in brief, allowed landlords who were owner-occupiers of small scale multiple dwelling units or owners of few rental properties to discriminate. Mrs. Murphy, so named during the legislative debates surrounding the clause, was the hypothetical small landlady who ran a boarding house, or perhaps owned a duplex apartment building and resided in one unit while renting the other. Such persons, legislators argued at the time of the enacting of the FHA, should be able to rent their housing as they saw fit, given the small, intimate settings in which their rentals occurred. The exceptions in the FHA, however, did not include discriminatory housing statements or advertising. Under the FHA, Mrs. Murphy could discriminate racially but could not advertise or state that she was doing so. Mrs. Murphy could, for reasons of race, silently turn down applicants who presented themselves. (There are other legal non-discrimination norms that might proscribe Mrs. Murphy’s silent but racist inspired refusal to rent; these I leave for another time.)

I have had my share of racist experiences while searching for housing. (See my blog post How Now, Brown? Parents Involved in Community Schools and the Triumph of Color Blind Ideology.) In recent years, however, when I have mostly sought short term accommodations, I have generally avoided such incidents by dealing with large, impersonal entities such as corporate housing providers who really only care about whether I can pay. When I do deal with smaller, private providers of accommodations, I generally am known to the provider or am otherwise “pre-approved.” In short, I try to avoid the potential Mrs. Murphys of the world altogether.

With the advent of Craigslist, people who would have advertised their housing with a sign in the yard or maybe an advertisement in the local newspaper can now offer their housing to a national or even international Internet audience. So, Mrs. Murphy now has global reach. Really, anyone may dial her number. A caller’s manner of speaking may often reveal gender and sometimes race to her. Thanks to a greater number of integrated social and educational interactions than used to be common, all too often people of diverse racial backgrounds sound like, well, people of non-diverse racial backgrounds. They sound white ("Speaking Standard English is not 'sounding white'," you say! Yeah, I know that song...). When these people telephone out into the world, whether they set out to do so or not, they are phone passing.

Black people know that I mean. Phone passing is when you call to order goods or services and you breeze through the interaction using your best Standard English voice, knowing that in many cases the person on the other end of the line probably assumes your whiteness and treats you accordingly. Not treating you well, necessarily, just neutrally. You get that nice, even, default customer service mode. There’s nothing funnier (in that wry, sad-funny way) than when you arrive to claim the book you placed on hold at the book store (the last one of its type in stock) or to get your vacuum cleaner fixed after talking to the repairman on the phone (who stayed late to accommodate you) only to be confronted with a puzzled “Oh, was that you who called ?” Most such vendors shrug it off and continue to offer the same level of service they offered on the phone. Some are visibly perturbed by what they no doubt see as racial identity fraud and set about giving what is clearly an inferior level of service.

Phone passing presents a thornier situation when it comes to negotiating for longer term arrangements such as housing or jobs. On the one hand, there is an ethic of non-discrimination that theoretically prevails which would eliminate the need for one to announce one’s race. On the other hand, there is the sober reality that race may especially matter in smaller, more intimate situations and the sooner one puts it on the table, the better. I came to that conclusion years ago when first applying for legal jobs. I attended a good number of interviews with interviewers who were clearly flummoxed by the seeming mismatch between my face and my resume. I learned to avoid awkward interactions by prominently listing on my CV items such as “Black Law Students Association Co-Chair” and “National Urban League Scholarship Winner” in order to tip off potential employers.

In the case of my potential Mrs. Murphy, I chose not to give any indication of my race but, the truth is, I have no intention of calling back to schedule an appointment. Am I being unfair in not giving this a try? Maybe. But there’s just too much chance for unpleasantness, and that would be unfair to both of us, non-discrimination norms notwithstanding.

Too bad. She sounded like a nice lady.

[Want to comment? Please do so! Note that comments are moderated and so may not appear immediately.]

Teacher, Teacher I Declare (Or, From My House I Can See London and France)

2008-11-10T20:26:00.009-05:00

Recently reported by the Associated Press:

< <Republican National Committee lawyers are still trying to determine exactly what clothing was bought for Palin, what was returned and what has become of the rest. Palin's father, Chuck Heath, said his daughter spent Saturday trying to figure out what belongs to the RNC.

"She was just frantically ... trying to sort stuff out," Heath said. "That's the problem, you know, the kids lose underwear, and everything has to be accounted for.

"Nothing goes right back to normal," he said.>>

Pretty sobering stuff.

I admit that I laughed with my husband a few days ago after joking that the RNC would soon be going through Sarah Palin's underwear drawer and checking the tags on her panties. (Oh, that p-word! Always sure to evoke laughter with its frisson of both the forbidden and the familiar. ) As an Obama supporter, I was still on a victory high and relished laughing heartily at the expense of the opposition. But you know, it wasn't really that funny. Or rather, it was funny, but mostly in that really sad, outrageous kind of way. It's even sadder to imagine that it's even close to being true.

The RNC needs to stop. And we, progressive women of all colors, need to tell them to stop.

The presidential campaign of 2008 won't be soon forgotten. For black feminists it offered some particularly interesting dilemmas that caused us to query our racial and gender loyalties. First there was the epic battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination. (See my blog post Barack and Hillary Once Upon a Time in America). After Obama snagged the nomination, a number of women Democrats, mostly white, vowed not to support him, even if failure to do so meant cutting off their gendered noses to spite their progressive faces. Or is that progressive noses to spite gendered faces? That's the problem--is sexual difference more fundamental than any other identity marker, as philosopher Luce Irigaray once posited, and if so, should it mean always voting your gender, no matter what?

Some women, again, mostly white, said yes. So, when John McCain cynically/thoughtlessly selected as his running mate a woman who seemingly lacked the preparedness generally found among nominees to high national office, they felt that a vote for the McCain-Palin ticket was a vote for women's collective rights. But as Sarah Palin, via the opinions she expressed, revealed herself to be the anti-Feminist (sort of like the anti-Christ but with lipstick), many progressive women balked and joined the Obama camp.

Camp Obama is a pretty nice place to be these days. There are lots of activities from which to choose. There is no riflery like there would have been at Camp Palin, but the campers are more diverse and they sing in much better harmony around the campfire. Around the campfire there is lots of laughter, mostly the earnest, kindly sort. Only occasionally is the laughter ironic or ambivalent.What's that smell? Hey Judy, is gender burning? Gee, I hope not, we'd better pull it off the fire/pyre. We'd better put some fiyah in the wiyah and call for help to extinguish the flames. Gender may be hard to locate sometimes and even harder to describe but it's definitely not dead or disappeared.

No disappearing act--that's what Sarah Palin is currently guilty of. The attempt to undress her is in the hope that like the invisible man of science fiction (see H.G. Wells, not Ralph Ellison, but really, either one is instructive here), she won't be there when the clothes come off. What could be better than a ritual public stripping?

Better be careful, laughing at Sarah Palin's clothes debacle could be the death of us.