Of the Digital Divide, Information Superhighways and the Human Tool

Systematic and automatic is the attitude.

The human is like a little piece (on a mechanism)


Who can find the truth, when all of us are confronted?

This is the way to serve to preachers of lies.

Human tool.

Some of you heavy metal/Goth fans may recognize these lyrics from the song “Human Tool” by the Argentinean band Vampiria.  You can hear it here. 

I thought of this when I read a story in the New York Times about how homeless people had been deployed as human Internet hotspots at a technology conference in Austin, Texas.  You can read about it here.  The gist of it is that a marketing company equipped homeless people with mobile Wi-Fi devices that offered conference-goers Internet access in exchange for donations by the users.  The homeless people were paid $20 per day and given business cards and T-shirts. They were also allowed to keep donations. It was part of a larger “Homeless Hotspot” project that the company hoped to offer in other areas where heavy demand on cellular networks caused problems with access. Most striking is a photo of a 50-something black man wearing a T-shirt that reads “I’m Clarence, a 4G hotspot” along with instructions for how to SMS Clarence for access.

It is not news that there is a national and global digital divide wherein there are inequalities in access to, use of and/or knowledge of the diverse and proliferating resources of the digital world. As much research suggests, these inequalities are often heavily influenced by economic status, race, gender, nationality and culture. Economic and social outsiders often find themselves with little or no access, and even when they do have access, there may be divides in the purpose for use of Internet resources, such as entertainment versus research, for example, and in the sophistication of use, such as retrieval and passive consumption versus interactivity and contribution to media.  Perhaps one of the most commonly conceived of divides is the divide in access to the digital world and the corresponding divide in the means and nature of use.  This is often expressed in discussions of connecting or not connecting because of differential access to equipment or service.  This also has to do with the place of access such as at work or in public spaces versus connecting at home, or connecting via dial up (yes, believe it or not) versus using high-speed services.  This all raises the related discussion of a term that gained prominence back in the 1990’s: the information superhighway.  The information superhighway referred in its most fundamental sense to the physical route for the transfer of data, such as fiber optic cables and other hardwares that were going to connect businesses and households to the Internet. The information superhighway also had more metaphoric import as the transport mechanism for ideas and information.  Whether in its literal or figurative sense, the information superhighway was touted as an amazing new way to bring together people as both consumers and providers of information.

It is becoming quickly apparent, however, that just as in the case of the development of physical superhighways, there are casualties of the construction of information superhighways. Physical superhighways often displaced poor and racial minority neighborhoods even as wealthy and white neighborhoods, often the prime users of the superhighways, were able to preserve their own neighborhoods.  Superhighway entrances and exits were often strategically placed to benefit business centers and wealthier neighborhoods. Superhighways also displaced public transit in some communities.  Take Los Angeles, my hometown (please.  I couldn’t resist the joke.  Really, I love L.A.).  We used to laugh sadly about how even though the highway ran right thorough some neighborhoods we had to practically stand on our heads to get on or off of it anywhere near the neighborhood. My grandmother and mother used to wax nostalgic about the public transit  “red cars” of their youth, a network of rail lines and electric streetcars that connected L.A and nearby communities.  These were just memories by the 1960’s and 70’s when major highways were built. The poor and other people without cars were all but stranded by the new highway transit system that depended on driving.  As a poor child living in L.A. in a household that didn’t have a car for many years, I was going, perhaps both literally and figuratively, nowhere.  The superhighways availed me nothing.

Like the physical superhighways, the information superhighway is going right by and right over some people and some neighborhoods. Homeless people as Internet hotspots makes the point in a weird, cynical, dystopic way.  It sort of reminds me of the old, old pre-digital days when people sometimes had to hold the television antenna in order to insure reception for everyone else watching.  You only hoped that you would get a turn watching and not holding.  But with the digital divide being what it is, the homeless people featured in the article are little more than human tools—I don’t know that they are going to get a turn as users of the services they are providing for others. They are collectively, in this regard, maybe more like Atlas holding up the heavens.  

American Jesus, Law Jesus

Happy Presidents’ Day.

My nine-year-old daughter left me rather stunned a few weeks ago when she asked me where in the United States Jesus had been born.

Though I would describe myself as a fairly religious person with strong Christian values tempered by some secular humanism, I have not, for some years now, attended religious services regularly for a number of reasons. When I was nine years old I was extremely devout and attended religious instruction several times weekly with our local priest. By the time my older children came along I was not much attached to organized religion but I did provide them with some formal religious training. My daughter, in contrast to my own upbringing and even that of my older children, has received much less formal religious training. I bought a children's bible and read to her periodically when she was very young, and we have, as always, tried to model our faith by the way we live. Given the lack of explicit religious instruction I suppose my daughter’s question was not terribly surprising. I could, I suppose, have answered her gingerly and gently when she asked about Jesus being born in the U.S.  I am not, alas, a very gentle mom when it comes to knowledge gaps.  I said instead: "Do you seriously think that Jesus was born in the United States? How could you have gotten such an idea? I know that we don't go to church much but popular culture alone should have taught you the answer to that! Don't you listen to the lyrics to all those Christmas songs?" (It occurred to me only later that songs such as "Oh Little Town of Bethlehem" may clarify little about Jesus' origins when there are places such as Bethlehem, Pennsylvania....)

Unfazed by my response and the incredulous laughter that accompanied it my daughter replied: "Well, you know, Jesus just seems like a New World figure to me. I assumed that he was born in the United States or at least somewhere in the Americas."  In response I downloaded a bible to my daughter’s Kindle and told her that I would read it with her. She decided that she needed “an overview and summary” before reading a real bible so she went off and spent the afternoon reading her children's bible from cover to cover. That’s my girl.

My daughter’s comment reminded me of the time when one of my sons used to volunteer in a Sunday school class for young children.  One child thought that my son was associated with Martin Luther King and sometimes called him that.  We were somewhat annoyed, assuming that it was because my son was one of the few black people with whom the child interacted and because MLK was the only black figure consistently presented to children in school. But it occurred to me that my son was kind and caring, smart, knew something about religion and happened to be black. If this evoked MLK for the child, well, I suppose it wasn’t such a bad thing. There is a long and rich cross-cultural history of taking ownership of deities (on a funny, sort of related note, here is a link to a blog featuring a set of old jokes about the racial and ethnic origins of Jesus) and geniuses, and often conflating the two categories. United Statesians (notice the non-use of Americans here; we are not alone in the Americas) are no exception.  There is a spectrum that runs from Jesus to George Washington to Martin Luther King that permeates our religious and secular culture. It is in some respects premised on United Statesian (aka American) exceptionalism and the notion that we are, if not deities and geniuses ourselves, the principal originators of deities and geniuses.

The more thought I gave to it, the more my daughter’s belief that Jesus was born in the United States made sense to me. There is definitely something to it. Our culture does seem to teach that we are the “city on a hill” and that those values such as innovation, inclusiveness, liberty, substantive as well as procedural fairness, redemption, egalitarianism and forgiveness were all made in America. This sounds not only like “American Jesus” but also like “law Jesus,” (is that what they meant in Galatians 6:2?) or better still, given the reform nature of Jesus’ teachings, like Restatement Jesus or Model Penal Code Jesus. Why indeed wouldn't Jesus have originated in the Americas? 

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

Brown girl in the ring  

Tra la la la la

There's a brown girl in the ring

Tra la la la la la la

Brown girl in the ring

Tra la la la la

She looks like a sugar in a plum

Plum plum

Show me your motion

Tra la la la la

Come on show me your motion

Tra la la la la la la

Show me your motion

Tra la la la la

She looks like a sugar in a plum

--Traditional Caribbean children’s song and game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Knight Watch: Cain’s Gage and Disengagement

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

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

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

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

Consider this language from a website on medieval tournaments: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

who entered the lists upon a case which he knew 

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

first onset." Turn, coward !" exclaimed his 

antagonist. "Thou liest!" retorted the knight: 

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

to the death; but my first cause of combat was 

unjust, and I abandon it."

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

The Polyandrous Neo-Office Wife

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Women lawyers have “an air about them.”

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

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


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

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

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

Their Eyes Were Watching God as a “Legal” Novel

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

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