It’s a myth that Brown ended segregation!

MONDAY, MAY 19, 2014

Princeton teams up with the Post: Every ten years, we discuss, and/or pretend to discuss, the deeply important 1954 Brown decision.

This is one of those times! For that reason, yesterday’s Washington Post published this brilliantly muddled report by Princeton professor Imani Perry:

“Five myths about Brown v. Board of Education”

In our view, the professor’s piece leaves no muddle behind, though it isn’t all Perry’s fault.

In this high-profile weekly feature, the Post insists that writers debunk five myths about some topic—not four myths and not six. If the writer can only uncover four myths, she has to invent a fifth.

Also, the points of contention must all be “myths.” In comments, one reader suggested that Perry’s piece should have been called, “Five things some folks don't fully understand about Brown v. Board of Education.”

For ourselves, we wouldn’t say that Perry’s piece rises to that level. But sorry. That isn’t allowed!

To our eye, Professor Perry goes out of her way in this piece to create and extend points of confusion, rather than to dispel them. In fairness, the professor is largely reworking a set of standard claims.

These presentations are designed to heighten the drama about our current public school arrangements. They drive the sense that everything is bad about our racial culture—bad and getting worse.

What’s wrong or misleading in Perry’s report? For starters, she muddies the meaning of “segregation,” a practice which is now quite common.

At one time, analysts would work to clarify the distinction between “de jure segregation,” which Brown outlawed, and “de facto segregation,” which it didn’t address. Today, it’s much more common to blur the distinction. This helps create the sense that everything is worse, so much worse.

That said, how many myths about Brown did Perry manage to dispel? At most, we’d say she got to one. You know a “Five Myths” piece is in trouble when it starts like this:

1. Brown v. Board of Education was only about school segregation.

It’s true that the case concerned segregation in public schools, but its impact went far beyond education...

In just her first two words, Perry acknowledges that her first “myth” is “true.” In the long history of this feature, that’s record time for admitting that you don’t really have “five myths.”

Perry’s second debunking is especially sad. Sadly, she seems to say it’s a myth to think that the Brown decision ended segregation.

Here you see the second “myth” and the bulk of the refutation:

2. Brown v. Board ended school segregation.

American schools are as segregated today as they were 40 years ago, largely because of residential segregation and the racial gaps in wealth and employment. In the 1970s, white flight to affluent suburbs weakened the tax base of cities, hitting black migrants to Northern cities hard. Their schools became under-funded and more isolated than in the Southern Jim Crow states they had fled. Today, the Northeast has the most racially homogenous schools; New York state and Washington, D.C., have the most segregated schools—by race and economic status. And since there is no constitutional right to an education, the federal courts cannot mandate that schools get equal funding. Within schools, advanced programs have become forms of segregation. One study found that, as of 2006, African American students were underrepresented by 48 percent in gifted education; Hispanic students are underrepresented by 38 percent.

Did the Brown decision “end segregation?” Pshaw, Professor Perry says. “American schools are as segregated today as they were 40 years ago.”

Since Brown was announced 60 years ago, this doesn’t exactly address the basic question. Meanwhile, if Brown didn’t “end segregation” in some basic way, you’ll have to explain these enrollment figures from six Tuscaloosa high schools (city and county):

Bryant High: 19 percent white, 75 percent black
Hillcrest High: 57 percent white, 41 percent black
Holt High: 44 percent white, 51 percent black
Northridge High: 35 percent white, 61 percent black
Sipsey Valley High: 73 percent white, 25 percent black
Tuscaloosa County High: 60 percent white, 36 percent black

Before the Brown decision, black kids and white kids didn’t attend school together in Alabama at all. Today, large numbers of Alabama kids go to school black-and-white together.

Did “ancient aliens” make this happen? The History Channel might want to consult this high-ranking Princeton professor.

In fact, the Brown decision did “end segregation” in some fairly obvious ways. It’s sad to see the Washington Post let a Princeton professor denounce that claim as a “myth.”

Meanwhile, just for the record, is that other claim true? Are American schools “as segregated today as they were 40 years ago” in some sense?

In support of her claim, Perry links to this lengthy report; you’ll have to fumble through it looking for the evidence she has in mind (Table 7 may be your best bet). That said, Professor Perry seems to mean that American schools are as “racially unbalanced,” by certain measures, as they were in the 1970s, twenty years after Brown.

We’ll examine that (somewhat slippery) claim as the week proceeds. But even if that claim is judged to be true, that doesn’t mean that American schools are “segregated” in the way they were before Brown.

At any rate, that was Perry’s second myth; it’s a “myth” to say that the Brown decision “ended segregation!” On that basis, we had to chuckle as we perused her discussion of her third myth. It seemed to us that her third debunking conflicted a bit with her second:

3. School segregation was a problem only for African Americans in the South.

Although the starkest Jim Crow laws were found in the Deep South, school segregation was practiced all across the United States. Oliver and Darlene Brown, the lead plaintiffs in Brown v. Board, brought the case in Topeka, Kan. Two of the other cases joined in the Brown litigation were in Delaware and the District...

Brown v. Board of Education had national and multiracial impact. Before the Supreme Court decision, Mexican Americans were segregated in practice, if not by law, in California, Arizona, Texas and Colorado, with the justification that they were native Spanish-speakers. And in several parts of the country, Asian Americans and Native Americans were also segregated.

We’ll guess that many Post readers already know that dual school systems were maintained in the District of Columbia and in “border states” like Delaware (and Maryland) before the Brown decision.

(In the passage we’ve posted, we’ve omitted a chunk about segregation in Boston schools before the time of the Civil War. This was an informative chunk which, of course, had absolutely nothing to do with the Brown decision.)

That said, note the professor’s statement about the Brown decision’s “national and multiracial impact.” In her debunking of Myth 2, she seemed to say that the Brown decision didn’t “end segregation.” In this, her debunking of Myth 3, she seems to hail the way it did exactly that for Mexican-American kids.

Or something! The professor never exactly makes sense. Here’s our best guess at the reason:

For political reasons, all presentations on this topic must paint a gloomy picture. In her segment about Myth 2, Perry is saying that things are gloomier now than you might have imagined. In her segment about Myth 3, she is saying that things were gloomier then than you might have realized.

All things must be gloomier than you would have suspected! That explains the passage from Myth 2 about “gifted education” programs. Black kids aren’t “underrepresented” in such programs because of their academic profiles. They’re “underrepresented” because of segregation!

In this way, “segregation” becomes our Benghazi! Feel bad, feel very bad!

Perry’s fourth “myth” includes information which may be surprising to many people. Her fifth “myth” has nothing to do with the Brown decision at all. All in all, the Princeton professor presented a rather large puddle of piddle. Even worse, the Washington Post was willing to put it in print.

It’s a myth that Brown ended segregation! Feel bad, feel very bad, for kids who go to Princeton.

Feel bad, feel extremely bad, for people who get their heads all muddled up by things they read in the Post.

TWO WOMEN: And their respective plights!

MONDAY, MAY 19, 2014

Part 1—In which the scene is set: Two women, and their respective plights, have been described in the press in recent weeks.

One of the women is quite well off; she holds extremely high professional status. When she isn’t at her Connecticut country home, she lives in Tribeca.

Her plight: She had an extremely good job, but her boss decided to replace her. She will soon have another extremely good job with some other employer.

The other woman is much younger. She’s senior class president at her public high school, where she was also homecoming queen and a three-time individual state champion in track. She lives with her mother, an auto worker, in the least affluent part of Tuscaloosa, a city in Alabama.

Her plight: Due to low scores on the ACT, she may not be able to get into a four-year college next year.

One woman was replaced in a job which is said to have paid her $525,000 per year as part of her compensation package. The other woman, who attends a “low-performing” high school, may not be able to attend college, which she very much wants to do.

If you understand the press corps, you will know which woman’s plight has been widely discussed. You may also understand the way her plight has been discussed.

For starters, we’d say that her plight has been discussed in the standard incompetent manner. Consider the work of Ken Auletta, an extremely high status journalist who quickly emerged as the Boswell, perhaps even the Ovid, of the older woman’s plight.

Last Friday afternoon, we discussed one fuzzy bit of writing by this high-ranking journalist. Defining the story at The New Yorker, he put the word “pushy” inside quotes without explaining if anyone had actually attributed the magic word to the older woman.

As an act of journalism, this was extremely bad work. As an act of novel construction, this piece of work was sublime.

Serving an unnamed master, Auletta put the word “pushy” in play. Beyond that, consider this deathless passage, which basically established the terms in which the older woman’s plight has been discussed:

AULETTA (5/15/14): Let’s look at some numbers I’ve been given: As executive editor, Abramson’s starting salary in 2011 was $475,000, compared to Keller’s salary that year, $559,000. Her salary was raised to $503,000, and—only after she protested—was raised again to $525,000. She learned that her salary as managing editor, $398,000, was less than that of the male managing editor for news operations, John Geddes. She also learned that her salary as Washington bureau chief, from 2000 to 2003, was a hundred thousand dollars less than that of her successor in that position, Phil Taubman.** (Murphy would say only that Abramson’s compensation was “broadly comparable” to that of Taubman and Geddes.)

Murphy cautioned that one shouldn’t look at salary but, rather, at total compensation, which includes, she said, any bonuses, stock grants, and other long-term incentives. This distinction appears to be the basis of Sulzberger’s comment that Abramson was not earning “significantly less.” But it is hard to know how to parse this without more numbers from the Times. For instance, did Abramson’s compensation pass Keller’s because the Times’ stock price rose? Because her bonuses came in up years and his in down years? Because she received a lump-sum long-term payment and he didn’t?

And, if she was wrong, why would Mark Thompson agree, after her protest, to sweeten her compensation from $503,000 to $525,000? (Murphy said, on behalf of Thompson, that Abramson “also raised other issues about her compensation and the adequacy of her pension arrangements, which had nothing to do with the issue of comparability. It was to address these other issues that we suggested an increase in her compensation.”)

That is stunningly awful journalism, to the extent that it can be described as “journalism” at all. And yet, this passage, by a high-status national journalist, has set the terms for the discussion of the older woman’s plight.

Tomorrow, we’ll “parse” that passage, showing what makes it so terrible as an act of journalism. And all week long, we’ll look at the way the American press corps discussed these two women’s plights.

The plight of the older woman will be discussed for weeks. The plight of the younger woman has been completely ignored by the rest of the press, but it was discussed in detail in a 10,000-word ProPublica piece which ran in The Atlantic.

All week long, we’ll look at the way these plights have been discussed. We’ll focus on the press corps’ technical incompetence, and on its love for high-interest novels, preferably novels which turn on issues of race, gender or sex.

Tomorrow: What makes that passage so awful?

We must quickly mention this: What’s wrong with that passage by Auletta, the highly presentable major domo from The New Yorker?

Without delay, we must mention one point from the first paragraph we posted. We’ll change our point of emphasis here:

AULETTA: Let’s look at some numbers I’ve been given: As executive editor, Abramson’s starting salary in 2011 was $475,000, compared to Keller’s salary that year, $559,000. Her salary was raised to $503,000, and—only after she protested—was raised again to $525,000. She learned that her salary as managing editor, $398,000, was less than that of the male managing editor for news operations, John Geddes. She also learned that her salary as Washington bureau chief, from 2000 to 2003, was a hundred thousand dollars less than that of her successor in that position, Phil Taubman.** (Murphy would say only that Abramson’s compensation was “broadly comparable” to that of Taubman and Geddes.)

Oof! That double asterisk leads us to this acknowledgment at the end of Auletta’s piece:

**In an earlier version, Phil Taubman was referred to as Jill Abramson’s predecessor.

Oof! According to Auletta, Abramson’s successor as Washington bureau chief has been paid a higher salary than she was.

For reasons we’ll discuss tomorrow, it isn’t clear that Auletta knows if that is true. But in his original post, Auletta made a groaning factual error. He reported that Abramson’s predecessor in the post was paid that higher salary.

Everybody makes mistakes; that mistake was a beaut. And uh-oh! Flipping around the web yesterday, we saw Auletta’s original, erroneous copy still on display at several prominent sites.

(Example: As of this morning's posting, the erroneous copy is still on display at Ezra Klein’s brainy new site.)

Everybody makes mistakes. In this instance, Auletta committed a genuine groaner.

That said, the way these plights have been discussed takes us beyond the realm of “mistake.” It takes us the realm of “novel,” the place where our national discourse will routinely be found.

Checking their privilege down on the waterfront!

SATURDAY, MAY 17, 2014

Julia Fisher’s suggestion: Should the horrible people who aren’t like us be told to check their privilege?

Frankly, it all depends!

For many purposes, we prefer the previous language, in which people who had a lot of advantages were told that they had a lot of advantages—perhaps even that they had “all the advantages.”

“Advantages” sound like things you’d want to confer on other people. In many contexts, “privilege” sounds like something a scold employs to make people loathe themselves.

In fairness, tyrants have always enjoyed spreading forms of loathing around. And alas! As part of our biological inheritance, we’re often attracted to tyranny and its unpleasant approaches.

Writing at The New Republic, Julia Fisher suggested a different approach! Admittedly, she never should have been discussing this topic at all. Because she attended Georgetown Day School, Fisher shouldn’t be stating her views about the concept of privilege.

(For background, see our previous post.)

Fisher shouldn’t have spoken at all! But since she so predictably did, we thought we’d focus on one thing she said. The highlighted passage made us think of a famous movie scene:

FISHER (5/6/14): Told to check your privilege, it’s pretty easy to feel shut out of conversation; an advantage in life might be turned into a disadvantage in debate. “Check your privilege” can come across as an expectation that a person be repentant for sins he has not committed. In its most generous usage, of course, “check your privilege” isn’t meant to make anyone feel guilty—only to make them recognize their privileged position. But it has the effect of invoking guilt, in large part because the phrase is so often used ungenerously, as a weapon rather than a gentle reminder.

Should people offer “gentle reminders” to those who have all the advantages? Should they try to be “generous” with such running dogs?

Leave it to a privileged person to offer such suggestions! That said, let’s motor on:

When they start their privilegesplaining, the privileged children who type for Salon may tend to be less than generous. In their hearts, they know they’re right. Just like Goldwater did!

That said, Fisher’s suggestion made us think of that famous movie scene. In the scene, Edie Dugan and Terry Malloy are walking not far from the waterfront.

In this very famous scene, Terry Malloy seems to decide that he admires this gentle person—that he may even want to be like her:

On the Waterfront (1954)
TERRY: You know, I've seen you a lot of times before. Do you remember parochial school out on Puluski Street? Seven, eight years ago?

[...]

You don't remember me, do you?

EDIE: I remembered you the first moment I saw you.

TERRY: By the nose, huh? Some people just got faces that stick in your mind.

EDIE: I remember you were in trouble all the time.

TERRY: Now you got me. The way those sisters used to whack me, I don't know what. They thought they was going to beat an education into me, but I foxed them.

EDIE: Maybe they just didn't know how to handle you.

TERRY: How would you have done it?

EDIE: With a little more patience and kindness. That's what makes people mean and difficult. People don't care enough about them.

TERRY: Are you kidding me? I'd better get you home. There’s too many guys around here with only one thing on their mind.

Am I gonna see you again?

When Edie drops one of her gloves, Terry picks it up and slips it onto his hand. To our eye, he starts to notice, in this scene, that Edie is a better person than he is—that she’s different from many of the people he knows on the waterfront.

To our ear, the fiery youngsters at Salon sometimes sound a bit like the sisters out on Puluski Street. The way they whack their moral inferiors, we don’t know what!

Maybe they just don't know how to handle the racists they find, it seems under every bed.

Whatever! When we read Fisher’s inappropriate words—words which never should have been spoken—we thought of this famous scene, which launches On the Waterfront’s undercard.

In the film’s primary theme, Brando fights with and defeats the mugs. In its more resonant secondary theme, a little tenderness works.

In the passage we’ve bolded above, we thought we heard Edie Dugan’s voice. Just think what a squish Julia Fisher would be if she had gone to Friends!

Did someone call Jill Abramson “pushy?”

FRIDAY, MAY 16, 2014

Gaze on the soul of our world: Did somebody call Jill Abramson “pushy?”

We have no idea, though you’d certainly think so from reading Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon.

Here’s the way Williams started her piece, exciting headlines included:

WILLIAMS (5/15/14): Don’t call Jill Abramson “pushy”
A single adjective shows how workplace sexism is alive and well

When the New York Times abruptly announced Wednesday afternoon that editor Jill Abramson was out – and offered the remarkably tight-lipped explanation that it was due to “an issue with management in the newsroom” – the mediasphere couldn’t scramble fast enough to get to the root of the tumult. And by Wednesday evening, the most buzzed about piece of reporting on the matter was Ken Auletta’s New Yorker take, and in particular, a “close associate’s” assertion that when Abramson learned she had been paid less than her predecessor Bill Keller, “She confronted the top brass” in a move that furthered management’s narrative that she was “pushy.”

Does that mean that somebody called Abramson “pushy?”

According to that second headline, that single adjective says it all. That single world is very important. But did anyone actually use it?

Did someone call Jill Abramson “pushy?” To see what slick journalism looks like, let’s consider Auletta’s fuller text:

AULETTA (5/14/14): As with any such upheaval, there’s a history behind it. Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect. Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson, who spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, had been at the Times for far fewer years than Keller, which accounted for some of the pension disparity...

There was more to the discussion of pay. But did somebody call Jill Abramson “pushy?” Let’s try to figure it out!

Auletta’s text is remarkably hard to decipher. For current purposes, we’ll assume it includes no lies.

Based on that assumption, it’s clear that Auletta spoke to a close associate of Abramson. Plainly, the close associate spoke these words: “She confronted the top brass.”

From that point on, it’s hard to tell what Auletta is saying. He seems to be speculating when he writes this: “and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was ‘pushy.’ ”

Auletta seems to be speculating there. Or is he actually paraphrasing what the close associate said? It’s hard to be sure. This makes it hard to tell if someone in management has actually called Abramson “pushy.”

(And of course, if someone actually said that, we aren’t told who that person is.)

Here’s a second possibility:

Is the magic word in question just Auletta’s characterization of “management’s [overall] narrative?” Is that a form of scare quotes around the word “pushy,” signaling us that this is Auletta’s take on what is being said?

It’s hard to know what’s going on in the passage in question. Let’s put that a different way: this is terrible journalism.

Auletta is using a magic word—a word which was sure to create excitement and set off disputes in this particular context.

But how odd! When Auletta used that magic word, he did so in an extremely slippery way. His writing makes it very hard to know what is being said.

The magic word “pushy” appears inside quotes—but we have no idea if anyone said it. If that passage was composed in good faith, that means that Ken Auletta is a terrible writer.

But Auletta isn’t a terrible writer. You can deduce the rest.

This is the way our gossip journalism works as our former nation heads toward the fall. Auletta throws out the shiny bait. All others gulp it down whole.

In this particular instance, Williams opened wide and swallowed the offering. Salon’s excitable headline writers then swung into action.

Bingo! Instant excitement! Get Lemon ready to roll!

Ken Auletta played a game, perhaps as a favor to a pal. At Salon, the children leaped.

Gaze on the soul on our world.

A primer in Salonist headline technique: In a more recent post at Salon, Katie McDonough mcdonoughsplained the Abramson firing.

She didn’t use the word “pushy” at all. But so what? Her piece ran beneath these headlines:

Jill Abramson was right to get a lawyer: “Pushy” women get paid
NYT editor's bringing a lawyer into a pay dispute may have ended her career. But she made the exact right choice

“Pushy” is a magic word. Aside from the slippery Auletta, has anyone actually used it?

WHERE DID PRIVILEGE COME FROM: No dogma can save us from our bad judgment!

FRIDAY, MAY 16, 2014

Part 5—The privileged white woman’s tale: Fifty years back, in another bad time, Bernadine Dohrn forgot to check her privilege.

What happened when she forgot? Because this brief passage is so fascinating, we post it for the third time:

The concept of white privilege also came to be used within radical circles for purposes of self-criticism by anti-racist whites. For instance, a 1975 article in Lesbian Tide criticized the American feminist movement for exhibiting “class privilege” and “white privilege.” Weather Underground leader Bernadine Dohrn, in a 1977 Lesbian Tide article, wrote: “...by assuming that I was beyond white privilege or allying with male privilege because I understood it, I prepared and led the way for a totally opportunist direction which infected all of our work and betrayed revolutionary principles.”

Because she hadn’t checked her privilege, Dohrn prepared and led the way for a totally opportunist direction which infected all her work and betrayed revolutionary principles!

Later, she self-criticized. But even after checking her privilege, she continued to show bad judgment. Nothing, not even checking our privilege, can protect us against that.

By the way:

Are people betraying a sense of “privilege” if they feel they have the right to build bombs, then use them, in support of a noble cause? (Dohrn’s crowd went that way, even after conducting that check.)

There is no ultimate answer to that question. But sometimes, people who think they’ve checked their privilege may continue to exhibit a fairly strong sense of same.

Things work out for people like Dohrn. Today, she’s an associate professor at Northwestern Law School. She’s past director of Northwestern’s Children and Family Justice Center, which is fine with us.

That said, her experience may help us see the potential problems with bumper sticker directives like the one which is suddenly hot.

In theory, it’s a good idea for people to “check their privilege”—to be aware of advantages they may have which other people may lack.

In practice, though, this approach may work out poorly. Because we all have imperfect judgment and weak brains, adherents may end up sounding like bureaucrats in The Great Leap Forward, as Dohrn does in the statement we’ve quoted. They may apply a good idea in highly unfortunate ways.

Could that happen even today as people are told to check their privilege? Of course it could!

The directive can be used as a way to shut people up. It can be used as a way to spread unhelpful guilt and self-loathing.

Revolutionary cadres have always enjoyed inducing this loathing among running dogs. They may not notice their own lack of judgment as they engage in the practice.

In our view, the dumbness of the work at Salon can be seen as a form of privilege. The children rarely seem to feel that their work has to make any real sense as judged by traditional intellectual norms.

There’s little sense that their editors tell them, “Check your potential dumbness.” The youngsters know that they are right. So of course did Dohrn.

The dumbness is always within us! So is the impulse to tyranny, which may explain the way a sense of privilege can survive a privilege check.

We thought of these points in the last week when we read a fascinating memoir by Mariah Dickinson in the quarterly Rethinking Schools. You can read part of it here.

After graduating from American University in 2009, Dickinson spent two years in Teach for America. Today, she’s a strong critic of the program, which is fine with us.

We’ve never been big fans of Teach for America. That’s especially true of the miracle tales its founder likes to spread.

To our ear, several of Dickinson’s critiques seem to make perfect sense. But lordy!

Dickinson lards her tale with the language of “privilege.” She describes the Teach for America training sessions “as a sort of indoctrination boot camp for privileged idealists.” She muses about her own “life as a white, economically privileged woman.” Concerning the work load adopted by some TFA teachers, she says, “It is an example of privilege to be able to work yourself to the point of burnout, knowing that you don’t have a family to support, and you only have to hold on for two years.”

We can’t exactly call that “wrong.” But, despite her checking of privilege, a sense of privilege seems to emanate from Dickinson’s short memoir.

By the second day of her training sessions, she thinks she knows what should be happening better than session leaders do. (We can’t say we’re convinced.) At one point during her teaching years, she makes a suggestion to a program director—and it isn’t adopted!

She seems to be sure that she and her “critically thinking friends” know more than others around them. But even her checking of privilege can’t save her from judgments like the one which follows. Indeed, belief in the doctrine of checking-your-privilege may create thinking like this:

DICKINSON (2014): I was disturbed by the language that TFA used, starting with “closing the achievement gap.” Achievement is an individual act of effort and skill. Opportunity, on the other hand, is a condition of circumstance. To say that there is a gap in achievement is to say that the students on the wrong end of this gap are failing to perform, rather than that they are being set up to fail by an inequitable system. How can an organization mobilize its members to shift a failing education system when it blames the very groups it claims to be helping?

Gack! We’re sorry, but no—when you talk about “closing the achievement gap,” you aren’t thereby blaming “the students on the wrong end of this gap.”

Checking her privilege didn’t forestall that rather peculiar deduction. And as she continues, Dickinson’s critique doesn’t get much better:

DICKINSON (continuing directly): One day we watched a video of a “successful” corps member in his classroom. It was a lesson on classroom management. He had enlisted his 3rd-grade students into a rallying cry, “work hard, get smart,” to the point that they begged him for extra assignments. I watched this story unfold and wondered, what is the message here? This corps member was saying that, if only his students worked hard enough, they would be smart and achieve in school and life. Does that mean that students’ families struggle financially because they do not work hard enough to achieve a “middle-class” life? How classist, oversimplified, and misinformed.

There can always be an issue when we urge children to surpass their parents’ attainments. But luckily, no—if you exhort kids to “work hard, get smart,” you aren’t thereby saying that their families don’t work hard enough.

Dickinson inserts the language of privilege into her short memoir four separate times. She describes the times when she was forced to listen to people with blonde hair or blue eyes.

But alas! Even these revolutionary perspectives can’t protect her from the dumbness which afflicts us all, even when we haven’t purchased some easy point of dogma. Indeed, true belief may encourage errors of judgment, as may have happened with Dohrn.

God save us from the imperfect judgment of youngsters armed with dogmas! On the brighter side, we checked to see what Dickinson is doing today, three years after her term in the classroom.

The white, economically privileged woman landed on her feet! Today, she’s a senior consultant for Booz Allen, the mega defense contractor which is owned by the Carlyle Group.

Who knows? She may be doing something good there. According to her LinkedIn profile, she’s working in “Education Management.”

But no facile admonition can protect us from our dumbness and our bad judgment. At Salon, youngsters armed with the language of privilege seem to us to prove that point every day of the week.

Solving Tuscaloosa: A columnist’s kid!

THURSDAY, MAY 15, 2014

Where do differences come from: We thought of D’Leisha Dent this morning when we read Nicholas Kristof.

Kristof wrote a highly worthwhile column about economic inequality. When we read the following passage, we thought about educational inequality and a superlative kid who lives in Tuscaloosa:

KRISTOF (5/15/14): Inequality has become a hot topic, propelling Bill de Blasio to become mayor of New York City, turning Senator Elizabeth Warren into a star, and elevating the economist Thomas Piketty into such a demigod that my teenage daughter asked me the other day for his 696-page tome. All this growing awareness is a hopeful sign, because there are policy steps that we could take that would create opportunity and dampen inequality.

When we read the highlighted passage, we thought about D’Leisha Dent.

We’re going to take a fairly safe guess—Kristof’s daughter is a superlative kid. According to Nikole Hannah-Jones’ report in The Atlantic, so is D’Leisha Dent.

As we’ve noted before, Dent is president of the senior class at Tuscaloosa’s Central High. She was homecoming queen this year. She’s on the mayor’s youth council.

She’s a three-time individual state champion in track.

There’s one major difference between the two teenagers in question. One grew up in a bookish environment, the other great kid didn’t. As a result, the one kid wants to read Piketty’s book, or at least she thinks she does. The other great kid, who wants to serve, may not get into college.

In theory, that’s what Hannah-Jones refers to when she pictures Dent doing better academically had she attended schools with more white and middle-class kids.

For our money, Hannah-Jones seems to be glossing reality a bit in those extremely brief, extremely easy ruminations. But that’s the theory which is at play in those moments.

Last night, we watched Don Lemon and his stooges as they battered Donald Sterling around. They’ll talk about Sterling till the year 2020 if the ratings hold.

We’d love to see them talk about Tuscaloosa’s kids—about what can be done to help them do better in school.

That will never happen, of course. There’s no sign that they care about that.

That said, we thought about Tuscaloosa’s kids when we read about Kristof’s daughter. In terms of future academic success, some kids grow up with a lot of advantages.

How do we spread those advantages to other kids? This question generates an amazing lack of interest.

On the other hand, Lemon’s panelists simply loathe racism. And they very much want you to know that.

Still coming: A look at the gap

What the folks constantly hear on Fox!

THURSDAY, MAY 15, 2014

Still uncorrected after all these years: How inept are we in the pseudo-liberal world?

Just consider something the folks constantly hear on Fox. Last night, they heard it from Sean Hannity, during a discussion about alleged lies concerning Benghazi.

Did the White House lie about the Benghazi attacks? In particular, did the White House create a phony story about a demonstration at the consulate that night?

Liberal guest Lanny Davis noted that the initial “narrative of a spontaneous demonstration” was created by the CIA, not by the White House.

“The CIA wrote the words, ‘spontaneous demonstration,’ ” Davis told Hannity, “despite the fact that Republicans have attributed that to the White House.”

Hannity knew what to do at that point; he knew what the playbook demanded. Turning to his conservative guest, the skillful dissembler said this:

HANNITY (5/14/14): Did you ever hear, Stephen [Hayes], of a case of a spontaneous demonstration where RPGs are actually in the back pocket and they just happen to pull them out and happen to fire them, and it goes on for 14 hours and we don't send anybody in to help?

HAYES: No. That was not the case. And it's very clear that there was at least some preplanning and some organization to those attacks.

There was more to Hayes’ response. For the record, he started with a familiar sleight-of-hand about “preplanning.”

In the highlighted statement by Hannity, you see the standard burlesque of what Susan Rice said on the Sunday shows on September 16, 2012. It’s what John McCain said in real time, right there on Face the Nation.

When McCain said it that day, it was an absurd burlesque of what Rice had just finished saying. Rice hadn’t said that demonstrators staged the killing attacks that night. On the various Sunday shows, she said the killing attack was staged by “extremists” armed with “heavy weapons” who arrived at the scene and “hijacked events.”

They might have been “al Qaeda itself,” she had just finished telling Bob Schieffer.

All that was disappeared. Susan Rice didn’t say that demonstrators staged the attack. But that’s how McCain reinvented her statement, and Schieffer played right along.

(To review the transcript from that program, see Tuesday’s post.)

Twenty months later, Fox viewers are still being handed this stupid burlesque of what Rice actually said. It was a burlesque when McCain stated it in real time. Twenty months later, it remains a burlesque, right to this very day.

Hannity offered a stupid burlesque of what Susan Rice said. But so what? Twenty months later, that absurd burlesque has never been corrected!

The New York Times hasn’t corrected or challenged this stupid, highly familiar account. No one in the liberal world has ever told them to do so.

By the way, Lanny Davis didn’t correct that presentation last night. He got off to a fiery start, but he let that old groaner go.

Fox viewers heard the story again. As always, our side let it go.

Right there in that short exchange, you see the heart and soul of our broken “national discourse.”

Fox viewers have been hearing that stupid account for twenty months now. It's a trademarked Standard Deception. We know of no one in the upper-end liberal or mainstream world who has ever tried to challenge, correct or confront it.

In particular, the overpaid children on MSNBC haven’t worked to challenge this standard deception. Instead, they teach us to mock the viewers of Fox, who have no way of knowing that they are being misled when they hear this familiar story.

Why should we mock the viewers of Fox? Why don’t we mock ourselves?

Gene Lyons, just last week: It's possible to note what Susan Rice actually said. Gene Lyons did so last week.

The liberal world has never decided that the pushback should be performed en masse.

You can make up tales about us all you like. Twenty months later, your silly tales will still be perfectly good.

WHERE DID PRIVILEGE COME FROM: Revolutionary cadres!

THURSDAY, MAY 15, 2014

Part 4—Can maintain a strong sense of privilege: As we’ve been noting, the concept of “privilege” is suddenly very hot.

How hot is it? This hot:

Last night, Bill O’Reilly and two guests conducted a very fuzzy segment about the very hot concept. The segment was geared to the report that the Kennedy School would be teaching a course on privilege.

When Mr. O does a segment, that’s hot! And not only that:

One hour earlier, the very hot topic had turned up in Salon’s headlines again—and Tal Fortgang’s name wasn’t mentioned! The concept of privilege is so hot that it can carry a Salon report all by itself at this point!

Who needs Fortgang? This is the way a new report was bannered by Salon:

WEDNESDAY, MAY 14, 2014 06:59 PM EDT
The privilege of being “invisible”: As a brown Muslim woman, my visibility comes with my Otherness
When I think of white privilege, I think of the ability to be seen as more than a tired symbol in a culture war
MARIA KHWAJA

“When I think of white privilege, I think of the ability to be seen as more than a tired symbol in a culture war,” Khjwala had said.

Except she also pretty much hadn’t. In her 1550-word piece, the word “privilege” appears only once, in passing. Khjwala’s piece was carefully reasoned—and it made almost no use of a certain hot new term.

Why was “privilege” crammed into those headlines two times? To appearances, Salon’s headline writers had done it again:

Hoping we’d click, they gave us a reason. In revolutionary times, such corners will often be cut.

The concept of privilege is hot. For that reason, we’ve been thinking about the ways the concept can perhaps be helpful—and about the various ways the concept can be misused.

In the current media world, varieties of journalistic misuse will often turn out to be endless. To some extent, that’s how it has seemed as we’ve explored the concept of privilege through the revolutionary cadre at the new Salon.

Full disclosure! Yesterday’s fiery piece at Salon may have been even more wrong than we suggested. Will the Kennedy School really be teaching a course called “Checking Your Privilege 101,” as the hapless but revolutionary Prachi Gupta reported?

In yesterday's report, we noted that Gupta seemed to have misread a joke by her source at New York magazine. And sure enough!

At some point, Gupta’s bungled report was rewritten, with a correction stuck at the end. Meanwhile, Marketplace posted the text of an email from the Kennedy School. The email suggests that Gupta’s bungle may extend beyond the name of that supposed course:

KENNEDY SCHOOL (5/15/14): There appears to be false information in the media being conveyed by reporters who have not contacted Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) officials to verify the accuracy of the information. Contrary to one article that has been picked up by others, the school is not planning to offer classes, coursework, or sessions devoted specifically to "power and privilege"...

Whatever! Which, in its Latinate form, could appear as the motto on the new Salon's coat of arms.

Warning! For better or worse, the new Salon represents the cutting edge of a new revolutionary cadre which is emerging from within the pseudo-progressive world. Not unlike certain groups of locusts, these cadres seem to emerge every fifty years. And make no mistake:

Membership in such cadres will often confer a very strong sense of privilege.

To our nostrils, the fiery young writers at Salon often convey a remarkable sense of privilege. In these revolutionary times, there’s no need to observe even the simplest rules of evidence, argument or logic in the course of their fiery work.

Everything is permitted at such revolutionary times! The dumbest children in the country may end up atop the ramparts. They may reinvent language along the way, or even turn to real bombs.

The last time such a cadre appeared, Theodore Allen was introducing the concept of “white privilege,” if this history by the world’s foremost authority can be believed. Sensibly utilized, the concept might well have its uses.

But alas! At revolutionary times, exceptionally silly cadre members may not be entirely careful in the way they employ and apply their new constructions. Drawing on the research of the highly privileged Julia Fisher, we will observe two possible downsides to the use of the current hot term:

(1) The term can be used to stifle debate or dissent.
(2) The term can spread an unhelpful sense of guilt among those who have grown up with social advantages.

(Quoting Fisher, the term can have “the effect of invoking guilt, in large part because the phrase is so often used ungenerously, as a weapon rather than a gentle reminder.”)

Please understand: According to Fisher Think, inappropriate use of the term can even be used to spread unuseful guilt among those who favor social justice as defined by the revolution. At one point in her Little Red, White and Blue Book, Fisher paints a gruesome portrait of the way the concept can affect the suggestible and compliant:

FISHER (5/6/14): In liberal spheres of debate...privilege can be a sort of scarlet letter. Gawker's tournament may have been intended as comedy, but it was not without insight. “Privilege: so sweet to have,” Hamilton Nolan wrote in the introduction. “But even sweeter to not have. Privilege has its benefits, but the lack of privilege confers that sweet, sweet moral superiority.” The bracket makes explicit the competitive nature of the today's debate about privilege. Everyone is checking everyone else's privilege, competing to be the least privileged person present—and, thus, the most authoritative on the subject of privilege. Privilege is stigmatized; hardship—or assumed hardship—becomes a badge of honor.

Take, for example, the biographies of the students who run the popular tumblr “Check Your Privilege at the Door.” If the blog weren't so self-serious, I'd assume this was parody: “I am mixed race (white and Korean) and a lesbian. I also identify as fat and as an atheist. My privileges include white-passing privilege, cisgender privilege, class privilege and able-bodied privilege. I am an extrovert with low social skills.” Nothing about her personality, interests, or achievements—only where she stood in the Internet equivalent of my high school's sorting exercise. Mixed race: one step back. Fat: one step back. Cisgender: two steps forward.

Can lack of privilege confer that sweet, sweet moral superiority? Yes, but so can rejection of privilege.

It’s amazing to see how many people can be taken in the sad direction conveyed by the highlighted passage above. As we noted in Tuesday’s post, the foremost authority describes a similar phenomenon the last time a pseudo-progressive revolutionary cadre began to arise:

The concept of white privilege also came to be used within radical circles for purposes of self-criticism by anti-racist whites. For instance, a 1975 article in Lesbian Tide criticized the American feminist movement for exhibiting “class privilege” and “white privilege”. Weather Underground leader Bernadine Dohrn, in a 1977 Lesbian Tide article, wrote: “...by assuming that I was beyond white privilege or allying with male privilege because I understood it, I prepared and led the way for a totally opportunist direction which infected all of our work and betrayed revolutionary principles.”

Speaking like a member of a northern branch of The Shining Path, the highly suggestible Dohrn self-criticized to beat the band. After that, she turned to the bombs, getting several people killed and sending Reagan to power.

Make no mistake—membership in revolution can confer a strong sense of privilege. Among the highly suggestible, it may seem that previous rules have all ceased to apply.

Journalistic rules no longer apply, as we routinely see at Salon. Beyond that, exciting private languages can and should be invented. Soon, the others are being told to shut up with the claim that they’re mansplaining, whitesplaining or failing to check their privilege. Failing to check its own dumbness, an excitable cadre seizes the banner of “progressive” debate.

In our view, there’s no doubt about it: dumbly applied, the language of “privilege” can end up being very unhelpful. Tomorrow, we’ll look at one particular wondrous use of the hot new fifty-year-old term.

It comes from a former Teach For America member who now pursues the revolution from an unlikely perch at Booz Allen. She has the language of “privilege” down cold.

On balance, we think her piece just isn’t real smart. More strikingly, it conveys an astonishing sense of privilege, even leaving Booz Allen aside.

Tomorrow: Membership can confer an extremely strong sense of privilege

Walsh and Lemon are better than Sterling!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 14, 2014

By their own admission: If we’re reading this piece correctly, Joan Walsh is a better person than Donald Sterling.

By her own admission!

So is CNN’s Don Lemon, again by his own admission.

That said, we’ll make an admission of our own. We couldn’t force ourselves to watch last night’s Don Lemon Gossip Hour. We felt we had to pack it in when he opened his program like this:

LEMON (5/13/14): Here is reality. As Donald Sterling goes down in flames, he is pouring the gasoline himself. And it all started with a conversation in his own home. What does that have to do with this, the Jay-Z elevator video?

The fact that we even know about these events, is it an invasion of privacy? That's a hot issue that we are debating tonight.

Lemon’s owners had devised a way for him to discuss Donald Sterling and the Jay-Z elevator video! Lemon was going to gossip about D-Ster and about Solange Knowles!

Having an ounce of dignity left, we had to turn it off.

More and more, in every way, CNN is filling prime time with the dumbest possible pseudo-discussions it can possibly conjure. This week, the network is pandering to its viewers in the same way Walsh is fawning to readers—by declaring itself a cut above a semi-demented, 80-year-old nut-cake.

On CNN, this also involves fawning to Magic Johnson this week. Johnson’s the good guy in the network’s low-IQ tale.

Sterling is the bad guy. He’s so bad that Anderson Cooper won’t even empathize with him!

We mention Johnson for this reason:

Last night, we briefly caught a bit of runaway cable. On CNN’s 9 PM show, a progressive guest complained that Johnson has been heavily involved in business dealings with the nation’s biggest corporate plutocrat hustlers.

(This bit of runaway punditry occurred on CNN Tonight, the 9 PM replacement show hosted by Bill Weir.)

Was that runaway punditry accurate? We have no idea. Nor have we been able to examine the transcript. Here we are, at 4 PM, and CNN still hasn’t posted it. For CNN, that’s very unusual conduct.

Has CNN decided to kill the record of the guest who went off-script? If you think that couldn’t be true, we think you haven’t been watching.

Solving Tuscaloosa: In search of solutions!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 14, 2014

Hannah-Jones’ minimal effort: How do you solve a problem like Tuscaloosa?

(Like Baltimore, Cleveland, New York, Seattle? A problem like M9inneapolis?)

To us, that question mainly means this: How do we create a school system which helps a great kid like D’Leisha Dent qualify for a four-year college?

For Nikole Hannah-Jones, the emphasis seems to be different. Here’s the question she examined in her fascinating, chapter-length report for ProPublica and The Atlantic:

How do we create a system in which a kid like Dent goes to school with white kids as well as with black kids?

In fairness, those questions are related for Hannah-Jones, at least in theory. At various points, she suggests that kids like Dent would fare better academically if they attended schools with kids from various races and classes.

That certainly could be the case. At several points in her 10,000-word piece, Hannah-Jones describes research which, she says, points in that direction.

Would Dent be doing better if she had attended school with more white and middle-class kids? It’s certainly possible! Midway through her piece, Hannah-Jones described what happened when American schools desegregated in the aftermath of the Brown decision:

HANNAH-JONES (4/16/14): Desegregation had been wrenching and complicated, but in Tuscaloosa and across the country, it achieved undeniable results. During the 1970s and ’80s, the achievement gap between black and white 13-year-olds was cut roughly in half nationwide. Some scholars argue that desegregation had a negligible effect on overall academic achievement. But the overwhelming body of research shows that once black children were given access to advanced courses, well-trained teachers, and all the other resources that tend to follow white, middle-income children, they began to catch up.

A 2014 study conducted by Rucker Johnson, a public-policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found desegregation’s impact on racial equality to be deep, wide, and long-lasting. Johnson examined data on a representative sample of 8,258 American adults born between 1945 and 1968, whom he followed through 2011. He found that black Americans who attended schools integrated by court order were more likely to graduate, go on to college, and earn a degree than black Americans who attended segregated schools. They made more money: five years of integrated schooling increased the earnings of black adults by 15 percent. They were significantly less likely to spend time in jail. They were healthier.

In the highlighted passage, Hannah-Jones refers to average scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, whose Long-Term Trend study began in 1971. During the two decades to which she refers, achievement gaps between black and white students did narrow, in some cases substantially.

(Click here, scroll to page 16 and the pages which follow.)

That said, Hannah-Jones may have cherry-picked a bit by focusing on 13-year-olds. The gains were less dramatic during that period among 9-year-olds, and the halving of the achievement gap only occurred among 13-year-olds in reading, not in math.

Meanwhile, achievement by black kids has risen substantially on the NAEP in the past two decades, the period Hannah-Jones regards as an age of “resegregation.” This fact tends to undermine Hannah-Jones' general perspective. Perhaps for that reason, it isn’t mentioned in her lengthy report.

It’s also true that Hannah-Jones’ analysis in the passage above may seem a bit shaky. As she starts, she says desegregation “achieved undeniable results” during the two decades in question. Two sentences later, she is saying that “some scholars argue that desegregation had a negligible effect on overall academic achievement.”

Even her most upbeat conclusions have to read with care. Example: “The overwhelming body of research shows that once black children were given access to advanced courses, well-trained teachers, and all the other resources that tend to follow white, middle-income children, they began to catch up.”

That’s fine, but “beginning to catch up” is a very soft standard. Based on decades of experience, we recommend caution concerning Hannah-Jones’ account of Johnson's research.

For ourselves, we’re not impressed by such fleeting work; we think superlative kids like Dent deserve a much more careful appraisal. We had a similar reaction to a fleeting analysis near the end of Hannah-Jones’ report.

In this passage, Hannah-Jones refers to Druid High, the high school for Tuscaloosa’s black kids during the days of legal segregation:

HANNAH-JONES: When school officials make decisions that funnel poor children of color into their own schools, they promise to make those separate schools equal. But that promise is as false today as it was in 1954. Indeed, in some ways all-black schools today are worse than Druid High was back in the 1950s, when poor black students mixed with affluent and middle-class ones, and when many of the most talented black residents of Tuscaloosa taught there.

High-poverty, segregated black and Latino schools account for the majority of the roughly 1,400 high schools nationwide labeled “dropout factories”—meaning fewer than 60 percent of the students graduate. School officials often blame poor performance on the poverty these kids grow up in. But most studies conclude that it’s the concentration of poor students in the same school that hurts them the most. Low-income students placed in middle-income schools show marked academic progress.

Are some all-black schools today “worse than” Druid High was? In part, it depends on what you think a “good school” is, a question to which Hannah-Jones gives little thought.

Druid High taught the children of black professionals; the Central High attended by Dent teaches mostly low-income kids. Central High has fewer Condoleezza Rices to work with. That doesn't tell you how good a job the school is doing with the kids it has, who have many fewer advantages.

In that passage, Hannah-Jones seems to say that kids growing up in poverty “show marked academic progress” when placed in middle-income schools. At least as a matter of theory, that’s an upbeat thought.

But how much progress do such kids show? The claim offered here is very fuzzy. How much better might Dent be doing had she attended mixed-race schools with larger numbers of middle-class kids? Hannah-Jones talks an upbeat game, but she devotes very few words to this supremely important question.

Down through the decades, we’ve seen a ton of careless happy talk about such crucial matters. It’s always easy for journalists to toss off reassuring comments about how much better things would be if we just made a few simple adjustments in our schools.

We’re very reluctant to accept such judgments from drive-by experts like Hannah-Jones. That’s especially true when so little attention to given to these clams in such a lengthy report. We think kids like Dent deserve more than the familiar old happy talk.

In our view, we received more happy talk when Hannah-Jones interviewed superintendent Paul McKendrick. We’ve read happy words like these for way too many years:

HANNAH-JONES: D’Leisha arrived at Central in 2010...A year later, the district hired a new superintendent, Paul McKendrick.

Sitting in his office, at a desk six inches deep in papers and reports, McKendrick, a bespectacled man, quiet but forceful, said the black, mostly poor kids of the West End had been separated and written off. A recent audit of Central had found that 80 percent of students were not on the college track. The low test scores that have plagued the school don’t stem from “a child problem,” he told me. “You may have some children that have special needs or cognitive issues, but you are not going to say a whole group of kids” has “lost intelligence in some way.”

As we noted like week, superintendents always say things like that. Journalists always repeat them. In fact, a great deal of research suggests that kids from low-income, low-literacy backgrounds are way behind their middle-class peers by the time they’re three years old. McKendrick’s formulations sound good, but they fail to address the problems which result from the size of our achievement gaps.

How much better might Dent be doing had she attended middle-class schools? In a 10,000-word report, Hannah-Jones devotes little real attention to this question.

She told the Tuscaloosa News that she wanted to write a good story about a familiar topic—“resegregation” in the South, where we have “a lot of history with the ‘Stand in the Schoolhouse Doors’ and Alabama being the cradle of the civil rights movement.” For details, see yesterday's post.

We think that focus is tired and stale, perhaps a bit dishonest. D’Leisha Dent doesn’t live in the era of “Stand in the Schoolyard Doors.”

D’Leisha Dent lives in an era of very large achievement gaps. Tomorrow, we’ll look at the size of those gaps, and wonder what a city can do if it actually wants to address them.

Solving Tuscaloosa means fighting those gaps. Tomorrow, we’ll look at some numbers.

WHERE DID PRIVILEGE COME FROM: Stifling Julia Fisher!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 14, 2014

Part 3—One possible form of excess: As we’ve told you, the concept of privilege is extremely hot.

Only yesterday, Prachi Gupta salonsplained exactly how hot. Warning! The parts of this excerpt which sounds like a joke may be a reading error.

Headlines included:

GUPTA (5/13/14): Students at Harvard’s Kennedy School will now be required to check their privilege/
The course will be called Checking Your Privilege 101

If Tal Fortgang, the Princeton freshman who refused to check his white privilege, ever wants to go to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, he’ll have to change his tune significantly—or at least spend some time seriously evaluating it, thanks to a new orientation class requirement called “Checking Your Privilege 101.”

New York Magazine’s the Cut reports that “in response to growing demand from student activists, administrators committed Friday to adding a class in power and privilege to its orientation program for incoming first-year students.”

Will students at the Kennedy School really be taking a course called “Checking Your Privilege 101?”

That purported title seems to have been a joke on the part of Gupta’s source at New York magazine. Gupta reported the course title straight, after playing the Tal Fortgang card.

Whatever! It does seem that the Kennedy School is adding some sort of orientation program in which students will “critically examine power and privilege and what it means to have access to this power.”

In theory, of course, this could be a good thing, depending on what is taught. Then again, as Bogart said, we’ll always have excesses.

Can excesses sometimes occur when we start instructing our neighbors and friends, and people we hate, that they should check their privilege? In a recent piece in the New Republic, Julia Fisher described one such alleged excess.

Warning! As some commenters quickly noted, Yale grad Fisher is highly privileged. Under the circumstances, some commenters weren’t real sure that she should be discussing this topic at all.

For what little it may be worth, this is what Fisher said:

Early in her piece, Fisher described an exercise in which a group of high school freshmen were helped to check their privilege. We’ll be honest—this sounds like a bad idea to us:

FISHER (5/6/14): My freshman year in high school, the administration's diversity czars lined my whole class across the gym and read a series of statements, each accompanied by a command to step forward or backward. “If you are white, take two steps forward.” “If your parents went to college, take one step forward.” “If you are gay, take two steps back.” Before long, we were sorted according to our supposed privilege—and I'm pretty sure all of us, from the children of real estate moguls up front to the mostly black financial aid students in the rear, felt awful about where we stood.

That was almost nine years ago, and the incident upset many students and parents. Today, the phrase “check your privilege”—that is, to acknowledge your relative advantage—is commonplace, as is the tallying of privilege.

As she continued, Fisher described a Buzzfeed “How Privileged Are You?” quiz and a Gawker creation, “The Privilege Tournament,” which was apparently “intended as comedy.”

She mentioned the recent flap about Fortgang, noting the problems with his perspective. She then described some possible pitfalls with the “privilege” craze.

Was the high school exercise described by Fisher a good idea? Did the exercise even happen?

One commenter seemed to confirm that it did. In the process, this commenter almost seemed to extend the exercise.

Allegedly, the anonymous commenter is the parent of one of Fisher’s classmates. Fisher should have defined her own privilege further, this anonymous commenter said:

COMMENTER (5/7/14): I'm a parent of a classmate of Ms. Fisher's. She should identify herself and the school to which she refers. (It's Georgetown Day School in the District of Columbia, which justly prides itself on a very early and sustained engagement with civil rights.) Her calling the Upper School a "high school" is a bit of a misdirect since it suggests that she didn't herself attend an elite school (and benefit from a rate of admission to Ivy League institutions that's off the charts). Her mocking of the GDS diversity directors as czars, when they have no real power, is unfortunate. Her reference to a line up in a piece that gratuitously refers to the Holocaust is misplaced. Her claim that many were offended should be supported with evidence—or she should just speak for herself and her parents. It's fine to disagree with the methods used in that event, and perhaps even with its goals, but the tone of this piece (preening moral superiority) is completely off.

According to the anonymous commenter, Fisher had committed an array of sins in her piece. This included “her reference to a line up in a piece that gratuitously refers to the Holocaust.”

That said, we were struck by the commenter’s claim that Fisher had disguised her privilege in her multiply bungled piece. She shouldn’t have called Georgetown Day School a “high school,” the commenter said. For a reason which wasn’t explained, the commenter said that Fisher should have provided more detail about her own privilege!

(Note: Fisher did attend Georgetown Day School, according to her on-line profile.)

Should Fisher have specified that she was discussing a prep school? We don’t really know why. The reference to “financial aid students” seems to imply that this was a private school with students from an array of backgrounds. But Fisher’s description of the exercise would seem to stand or fall on its own, as does her analysis of the possible problems with privilege-checking gone wild.

Fisher’s piece strikes us as basically sane-and-balanced. In this passage, she describes one possible problem—in her view, the most serious problem—with the culture of checking-your-privilege:

FISHER: The real problem with the phrase "check your privilege"—aside from the fact that it reduces people to the sum of their characteristics—is that it has become a handicapping device. White male? Then what could you possibly know about racism or sexism? Calling out privilege often isn't intended to make someone consider his advantages in life so much as to dismiss his perspective. But I want to be able to discuss sexism or feminism with men, and I think their opinions are no less worthy or relevant for the fact that they are male. Similarly, anyone should be able to participate in a conversation about racism without being discounted or silenced on account of race.

That’s why I find Fortgang’s reaction not wholly out of place. Told to check your privilege, it’s pretty easy to feel shut out of conversation; an advantage in life might be turned into a disadvantage in debate. “Check your privilege” can come across as an expectation that a person be repentant for sins he has not committed. In its most generous usage, of course, “check your privilege” isn’t meant to make anyone feel guilty—only to make them recognize their privileged position. But it has the effect of invoking guilt, in large part because the phrase is so often used ungenerously, as a weapon rather than a gentle reminder. This is partly what outraged Fortgang, who refers to the phrase as a reprimand that "threatens to strike down opinions without regard for their merits, but rather solely on the basis of the person that voiced them."

According to Fisher, the phrase, “Check your privilege,” is often used “as a weapon.” In Fortgang’s formulation, the phrase can be used “to strike down opinions without regard for their merits, but rather solely on the basis of the person that voiced them.”

Might this be a possible pitfall when we start privilegesplaining? Can this sort of thing actually happen? Can arguments be struck down “without regard for their merits?”

Of course they can! If you doubt that, you need only examine the comments to Fisher’s piece.

Can privilege be used as a weapon, as a way to stifle dissent? In the sixth comment to the piece, an anonymous reader engages in the very approach Fisher had just described:

COMMENTER 6 (5/7/14): Yes, Julia Fisher, who went to a 30k a year private school k thru 12 and then Yale, please lecture to everyone about why people should cool it with “check your privilege.” Are you kidding me?

The commenter didn’t examine the merits of anything Fisher said. He simply rejected the notion that someone like Fisher should be discussing the topic.

The next commenter pretty much took the same line:

COMMENTER 7 (5/7/14): You have got to be kidding!

Such trivial topics are used to advance the careers of privileged individuals such as Julia Fisher, fomenting rage and resentment among those lacking in privilege, and distracting them from building the skills and contacts that can potentially have some material impact on their lives.

Meanwhile, other privileged individuals such as the self-righteous T. Fortgang are further padding their already privileged status and likely setting themselves up for jobs that rely on connections and social familiarity...

The substance of Fisher’s arguments was ignored. In essence, the commenter said that someone like Fisher should stifle herself on this topic.

The previous anonymous commenter had taken a slightly more nuanced position. Some of what follows is perfectly accurate, but the desire to stifle discussion is very near:

COMMENTER 5 (5/7/14): “Told to check your privilege, it’s pretty easy to feel shut out of conversation; an advantage in life might be turned into a disadvantage in debate.”

Ummm... good. As a straight white male, most of us should shut the eff up more often and listen rather than trying to make sure our voices are heard. Trust me guys, there is no lack of prominent voices speaking up for straight white males in our culture.

It's amazing how upset some of us get when we're forced to experience in even the most trivial way what actually disadvantaged people put up with on a daily basis. Oh boohoo, I was made to feel uncomfortable about my race or gender one time in a college class, that's definitely a problem we need to address right away.

Depending on the situation and topic, it may be true that some straight white males might benefit from “shutting up more” and listening to others. But what if the gay black female is wrong on some point and the straight white male has noticed? What does the straight fellow do then?

Can “Check your privilege” sometimes be used as an ad hominem attack, as a way to stifle dissent against one’s own preferred position? Of course it can!

Quickly, people arrived in comments looking for ways to stifle Fisher. Soon, that classmate’s parent arrived.

She didn’t defend that privilege exercise on the merits as much as she argued that Fisher should have more fully disclosed her own privilege. How can we evaluate arguments unless we have full disclosure of the privilege lying behind them?

Babel lies down that dull-witted road. If you doubt that, read Fisher’s comments.

Tomorrow: The glorious uses of guilt

Did Susan Rice say something wrong?

TUESDAY, MAY 13, 2014

The work of the three blind mice: Did Susan Rice say something wrong when she did those Sunday shows and discussed the attack on Benghazi?

We would say that she did not, and we’d say it loudly. Good luck getting major career journalists to state such an unapproved point!

Rice did make one factual error that day. After saying, about three hundred times, that her information was provisional, she said a demonstration had been occurring in Benghazi before “extremists armed with heavy weapons” arrived at the scene and “hijacked events.”

By now, everyone agrees that there was no pre-existing demonstration. The extremists simply arrived at the scene and launched the killing attack.

But it was clear, from Rice’s account, that the presumed demonstrators didn’t launch the killing attack. The killing attack was launched by those extremists armed with heavy weapons. They might have been “al Qaeda affiliates,” she told Bob Schieffer, or even “al Qaeda itself.”

Those are the things Rice actually said on those Sunday programs. To review excerpts from Face the Nation, just see yesterday’s post.

But alas! Our national discourse rarely turns on the things officials say. Much more often, our discourse turns on the things officials are said to have said.

As we noted yesterday, Rice was instantly misparaphrased in the most ridiculous ways. The truth about what she actually said has never re-emerged.

None of the church mice are willing to say that John McCain created a pitiful, bogus tale about what she actually said. For the three most recent examples, just check out Hirsh, Cohen and Robinson.

At Politico magazine, Michael Hirsh largely took the administration’s side in his recent report about Benghazi. And yet, in accord with Hard Pundit Law, he felt he had to say this:

HIRSH (5/4/14):[I]t’s fair to ask why Clinton seemed to be too busy to deal with new threats in a critical region or appear herself on TV to discuss the murder of a U.S. ambassador. Sure, we know that Hillary hates doing the Sunday talk shows, but so what? She bore far more responsibility for Benghazi than the unlucky person the administration sent out in her stead, then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, whose shaky performance deep-sixed her own Foggy Bottom ambitions.

Really? What was “shaky” about Rice’s performance that day? Eventually, Hirsh managed to offer this pseudo-explanation, even as he took the administration’s side in the debate:

HIRSH: It doesn’t seem to matter that the gradually emerging story about Benghazi has, if anything, only seemed to back the administration’s original account of the violence against Stevens and the other Americans. Recall that the central issue for the critics was—and is—whether the “talking points” mainly drafted by the CIA and provided to Susan Rice for her appearances on the Sunday talk shows accurately reflected what the U.S. intelligence community knew at the time, or whether the administration knowingly misrepresented this intelligence. Accurately summing up the CIA talking points, Rice had said in her TV interviews that the administration believed that the attacks were to some degree spontaneous, partly motivated by demonstrations in Cairo and other cities against a U.S.-made video lampooning the Prophet Mohammad. Still, Rice noted that “extremist elements” might have taken part—again reflecting the intelligence community’s contemporaneous assessment (though Rice might have emphasized the video more than the talking points warranted).

The balance of evidence today, according to intelligence officials and corroborating news reports, is that the terrible events of Sept. 12, 2012, pretty much played out in the way Rice said back then. Authorities still believe that extremist groups opportunistically exploited the anti-American demonstrations in the region to launch the attacks. True, intelligence officials did get one major thing wrong. It took a week or so after Rice’s TV appearances to clarify, for certain, that there had been no protests in Benghazi itself before the assault on the compound—and that, as the office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a statement on Sept. 28, two weeks after Rice appeared, “it was a deliberate and organized terrorist attack carried out by extremists.”

“Rice might have emphasized the video more than the talking points warranted?” That was the best Hirsh could do—and even this claim went unsupported.

Even as he offered this statement, he noted that the events at Benghazi actually did “pretty much play out in the way Rice said back then.” If Hirsh was going to say such things, why did he refer, near the start of his piece, to Rice’s “shaky performance,” which “deep-sixed her own Foggy Bottom ambitions?”

Simple! That was done in accord with Hard Pundit Law! At this point, a scribe is required to say that!

In this morning’s Washington Post, Richard Cohen and Gene Robinson pound away at the GOP for the ongoing Benghazi bullroar. Our assignment, if you can stomach the chore:

Read their columns to see the way they keep stepping around the bull about Rice. The word for fiery fellows like this would have to be weak, lazy, soft.

To this day, no one is willing to say that Saint McCain invented a tale, hackishly helped by Schieffer. You simply will not see that said. Hard Pundit Law doesn’t allow it.

Once someone has been left for dead, careerists never challenge the script. Rice was left for dead long ago. If you doubt that, read the three kings!

Rice’s statements were baldly misparaphrased. Even today, some twenty months later, no one is willing to state that fact or name those two famous names.

Solving Tuscaloosa: Hannah-Jones speaks!

TUESDAY, MAY 13, 2014

About her trip to the South: This morning, we motored over to Morgan State to do The Marc Steiner Show.

Long ago, we sat around watching Colts’ games with Marc. (We refer to the Baltimore Colts.) Today, he runs the nation’s Most Valuable Radio Program, according to The Nation.

After the program, we discussed the racial balance, or lack of same, in the nine public high schools of Tuscaloosa City and County. (Tuscaloosa City runs three of the nine high schools. For enrollment figures, see our earlier post.)

Baltimore City and County’s racial balance is worse, Marc suggested. Incomparably, we took a look at the record.

This is what we found:

Baltimore City’s student population is more than 10-to-1 black. You can’t create racial balance in high schools with such a heavily unbalanced student population.

Beyond the city line, the situation is different. The overall student population in the large Baltimore County school system looks like this (black and white students only):

Baltimore County student population:
White students: 47,490
Black students: 41,253

Despite the relative balance, four of the country’s twenty-three high schools come close to being all black. You can decide how you feel about that, but these are the relevant numbers:

Four Baltimore County high schools
White students/black students
Milford Mill Academy: 13/1308
New Town High: 37/812
Randallstown High: 16/960
Woodlawn High: 20/1227

On balance, we’d have to say there’s less racial balance in Baltimore City and County’s high schools than in Tuscaloosa’s.

In part, this is why we thought the focus of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ piece on Tuscaloosa was a bit odd. When we read her long, fascinating report, we were most struck by the academic profile of Tuscaloosa’s Central High, the one all-black high school of the county’s nine.

Hannah-Jones focused on the school’s lack of racial balance. Her piece bore a rather flamboyant headline: “Segregation Now...”

Don’t get us wrong! We also think it would be better if D’Leisha Dent, a Central High senior, attended school with black and white kids together. But we were more struck by the fact that Dent, who seems to be in the top ten percent at her high school, can’t score well enough on the ACT to get into a four-year college, despite the fact that she’s senior class president, homecoming queen, a member of the mayor’s youth council and a three-time individual state champion in track.

By all accounts, Dent is a superlative young person; why isn’t she doing better in school? More to the point, how well are Central's other kids doing if Dent, “an honors student since middle school,” is having this much trouble?

Why isn’t Dent doing better in school? Tomorrow, we’ll review Hannah-Jones’ suggestions on that score, such as they are. But we were struck by the lack of emphasis placed by Hannah-Jones on the academic profile of Central High, where a lot of good kids are going to school, in favor of a report about “resegregation” in an “apartheid school.”

Lack of racial balance matters. But Tuscaloosa seems to have more of it than Baltimore, to cite one northern example.

What explains Hannah-Jones’ focus? On April 17, the Tuscaloosa News published an interview with her which may answer that question.

According to reporter Jamon Smith, Hannah-Jones spent a year on her lengthy, detailed report, including two months in Tuscaloosa. Why did she focus on the Druid City? We were struck by the highlighted passages:

SMITH (4/17/14): Hannah-Jones said she became interested in school resegregation while spending a year and a half investigating housing segregation. She saw a link between the two that she wanted to explore, particularly in the South.

In the initial stages of her research, Hannah-Jones came across a study by Stanford University that showed that within three years of being released from court desegregation orders, many school systems started resegregating.

“So I contacted the Stanford researchers and I asked them where are the districts that have resegregated most rapidly,” she said. “They sent me a list of the top 10 and Tuscaloosa was on that list. Tuscaloosa wasn’t the worst on the list, but it was among the worst in the country.”

She chose Tuscaloosa City Schools over the other nine because it’s in the South, the system still has white students and it hasn’t been extensively written about nationally.

Hannah-Jones isn’t being quoted here. But at two places, Smith has her saying that she chose Tuscaloosa in part because it’s in the South.

In some ways, that’s a bit odd. In her 10,000-word report, Hannah-Jones notes, in passing, that the bulk of the nation’s “apartheid schools” are found in the North and Midwest.

Why did Hannah-Jones go South? Smith’s report continues:

SMITH (continuing directly): “Tuscaloosa really interested me because it was small enough to intimately tell a story, and that it had gone from one high school (Central) with perfect integration—not perfect as in flawless, but perfect because all students went to the same school—to three high schools,” she said.

“I was interested that Tuscaloosa had found a solution to segregation that had worked, and I wanted to know why it had gone away from that. And of course, Tuscaloosa has a lot of history with the ‘Stand in the Schoolhouse Doors’ and Alabama being the cradle of the civil rights movement.”

The article is one of three resegregation stories Hannah-Jones said she plans to write. The next two will focus on school resegregation in the Midwest and Northeast—the most segregated regions of the country, she said—and how school resegregation has affected Latinos.

At this point, we’ll be unkind and unfair. Hannah-Jones wanted to tell a good story. And she wanted to get a boost from the exciting, feel-good image of those southern governors “Standing in the Schoolhouse Doors.”

They did that fifty years ago. We'd rather try to solve Tuscaloosa today than to keep beating that drum.

Things are worse in the Midwest and the Northeast, but ProPublica headed down South. We’re inclined to think this is bad journalism and bad politics, one more exciting, liberal-friendly way to divide the 99 percent.

It’s exciting to talk about “apartheid schools” and “segregation now.” Our question would be different:

Why can’t a great kid like Dent get into a four-year college?

Tomorrow: Fleeting attempts to solve Tuscaloosa

WHERE DID PRIVILEGE COME FROM: Advantages and pitfalls!

TUESDAY, MAY 13, 2014

Part 2—Genesis of a term: In its entry on “White privilege,” the world’s leading authority on the topic offers an interesting account of the concept, and a history of the term’s origins.

In a section called “History of the concept,” the authority seems to trace the term “white skin privilege” to the work of Theodore W. Allen, starting in 1965. We can’t tell you if this account is correct, but here you see the quick thumbnail sketch:

In 1965, ...inspired by the Civil Rights movement, Theodore W. Allen began a forty-year analysis of “white skin privilege,” ”white race” privilege, and “white” privilege in a call he drafted for a “John Brown Commemoration Committee” that urged “White Americans who want government of the people” and “by the people” to “begin by first repudiating their white skin privileges.” The pamphlet, "White Blindspot," containing one essay by Allen and one by Noel Ignatin (Noel Ignatiev), published in the late 1960s, focused on the struggle against "white skin privilege” and significantly influenced the Students for a Democratic Society and sectors of the New Left. By June 15, 1969, the New York Times was reporting that the National Office of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was calling “for an all-out fight against ‘white skin privileges.’ ”

There’s more, but that’s where the term got its start, according to this history. A bit later, one slightly discordant note is perhaps allowed to creep in:

Though Allen’s work influenced Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and sectors of the “new left” and paved the way for “white privilege” and “race as social construct” study, and though he appreciated much of the work that followed, he also raised important questions about developments in those areas.

For the record, some of our best friends were in SDS at that time. We just thought we’d throw that in.

New terminology can sometimes help people see situations more clearly. (At some point, someone came up with “purple” to help us get past simple “blue.”)

On the other hand, careless use of mew political language can sometimes produce less helpful outcomes. Is there any possible way in which that is happening now?

In recent weeks, the concept of “privilege” has been extremely hot, thanks in part to the depredations of history’s most demonic college freshman. All week, we’ll look at some of the ways the concept of “privilege” is now being used.

That said, what is the concept of “privilege?” In the political context, can this basic concept ever be murky, unclear, overwrought, perhaps unwisely used?

Presumably, any such concept can be misused or overextended. In the following passage, the leading authority gives its basic account of the term, “white privilege.” Already, we see the possibility of a nagging conceptual problem:

White privilege (or white skin privilege) refers to the set of societal privileges that white people benefit from beyond those commonly experienced by people of color in the same social, political, or economic spaces (nation, community, workplace, income, etc.). The term denotes both obvious and less obvious unspoken advantages that white persons may not recognize they have, which distinguishes it from overt bias or prejudice. These include cultural affirmations of one's own worth; presumed greater social status; and freedom to move, buy, work, play, and speak freely. The concept of white privilege also implies the right to assume the universality of one's own experiences, marking others as different or exceptional while perceiving oneself as normal. It can be compared to and/or combined with the concept of male privilege.

Should white people be helped to see the advantages they may have as compared to others? Absolutely! Why not?

That said, we have a question: If someone is able to “love, buy, work, play, and speak freely,” why would you call that “privilege?”

That should be the normal state of affairs. Why not simply describe it as such? If someone isn’t permitted those freedoms, why not attack that state of affairs as “discrimination” or “oppression” (or “bias”)? Is it helpful to hang a term like “privilege” around everyone else’s heads?

Alas! This term, like any term, can be overextended, unwisely applied. For our money, the following passage describes one way the use of this term and concept can perhaps possibly start to drift in an unhelpful direction:

The concept of white privilege also came to be used within radical circles for purposes of self-criticism by anti-racist whites. For instance, a 1975 article in Lesbian Tide criticized the American feminist movement for exhibiting “class privilege” and “white privilege”. Weather Underground leader Bernadine Dohrn, in a 1977 Lesbian Tide article, wrote: “...by assuming that I was beyond white privilege or allying with male privilege because I understood it, I prepared and led the way for a totally opportunist direction which infected all of our work and betrayed revolutionary principles.” The term gained new popularity in academic circles and public discourse after Peggy McIntosh's 1987 essay "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack". McIntosh suggests that anti-racist white people need to understand how racial inequality includes benefits to them as well as disadvantages to others.

To our ear, Dohrn sounds a bit like a Chinese convict, arms pulled behind her back.

“Self-criticism” can be a good thing; it can also be carried to unhelpful lengths. Her fervor stoked by her self-criticism, chastened by her total opportunism, Dohrn and them turned to the bombs.

This probably wasn’t especially helpful. (Except to Nixon and Reagan?)

Should anti-racist white people understand how racial inequality includes benefits to them as well as disadvantages to others? Absolutely—why not? (Assuming your work makes sense.)

But everything can be overdone; critiques can always be overdrawn. Tomorrow, we’ll look at one case in which this concept, which is quite hot, is perhaps being used as some have described—as an ad hominem tool designed to stifle debate.

Tomorrow: Should Julia Fisher speak?

The nature of the American discourse!

MONDAY, MAY 12, 2014

Paul Krugman, Benghazi and you: Right as increasingly heavy rain, Paul Krugman closes today’s column like this:

KRUGMAN (5/12/14): [T]he coming firestorm over new power-plant regulations won’t be a genuine debate—just as there isn’t a genuine debate about climate science. Instead, the airwaves will be filled with conspiracy theories and wild claims about costs, all of which should be ignored. Climate policy may finally be getting somewhere; let’s not let crazy climate economics get in the way.

It’s very hard to doubt the highlighted statement.

In fact, there isn’t “a genuine debate” about any topic in our pitiful public discourse. To demonstrate that fact, let’s start with something Kevin Drum posted over the weekend—something we don’t understand.

Drum’s post—it concerned “Benghazi fever”—was extremely short. Headline included, here’s the whole shazam:

DRUM (5/10/14): Here Are the Origins of Benghazi Fever

Read what Martin Longman says today about Benghazi. If you want to understand the origins of Benghazi fever in the fever swamps of the right, I think he has it right. It was basically born out of shame at the initial conservative reaction to the attacks combined with rage that they finally got called on their vile behavior, which ended up helping Obama win reelection.

If you need to refresh your memory about the details—which you really should—see my real-time reaction here: Day 1, Day 2, Day 2.1, Day 2.2.

Drum includes links to Longman’s piece and to his own original posts on Benghazi.

We don’t understand all the mind-reading about “the origins of Benghazi fever.” Was it really “born out of shame at the initial conservative reaction to the attacks combined with rage that they finally got called on their vile behavior?”

Maybe! But Drum makes no attempt to explain why he feels he knows this.

To us, the story-line seems a great deal simpler. On September 16, Susan Rice went on all five Sunday shows. On four of them, she discussed the attack in Benghazi.

Immediately after she appeared on Face the Nation, John McCain came on the same show and invented the narrative which has never really disappeared. To see how crazy our discourse is, let’s revisit what occurred on Face the Nation that day.

Rice cautioned Bob Schieffer, about ten times, that she was giving him a preliminary estimate. After her repetitive warnings, she told Schieffer this:

RICE (9/16/12): ...Based on the best information we have to date, what our assessment is as of the present is in fact what—it began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo, where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy sparked by this hateful video.

But soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that effort with heavy weapons of the sort that are, unfortunately, readily now available in Libya post-revolution. And that it spun from there into something much, much more violent.

SCHIEFFER: But you do not agree with [the Libyan president] that this was something that had been plotted out several months ago?

RICE: We do not—we do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.

SCHIEFFER: Do you agree or disagree with him that al Qaeda had some part in this?

RICE: Well, we’ll have to find out that out. I mean, I think it’s clear that there were extremist elements that joined in and escalated the violence. Whether they were al Qaeda affiliates, whether they were Libyan-based extremists or al Qaeda itself I think is one of the things we’ll have to determine.

According to Rice, “extremist elements” armed “with heavy weapons” came to the scene of an ongoing demonstration. “It spun from there into something much, much more violent” as those “extremist elements”—which might have been “al Qaeda itself”—“escalated the violence.”

By now, everyone agrees that there was no pre-existing demonstration. Extremists armed with heavy weapons simply came to the site and launched the killing attack.

That said, Rice didn’t say that a group of protestors somehow staged this deadly attack. She said it was extremists armed with heavy weapons who may have been al Qaeda.

That’s what Susan Rice actually said. But immediately after her appearance, on came McCain, spewing this world-class nonsense:

SCHIEFFER: And joining us now for his take on all this, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, John McCain.

Senator, you’ve got to help me out here. The president of Libya says that this was something that had been in the works for two months, this attack. He blames it on al Qaeda. Susan Rice says that the State Department thinks it is some sort of a spontaneous event. What do you make of it?

MCCAIN: Most people don’t bring rocket-propelled grenades and heavy weapons to a demonstration. That was an act of terror. And for anyone to disagree with that fundamental fact I think is really ignoring the facts.

Now, how long it was planned and who was involved, but there was no doubt there were extremists and there’s no doubt they were using heavy weapons and they used pretty good tactics—indirect fire, direct fire, and obviously they were successful.

Could I just say our prayers are with Chris Stevens and Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods and Sean Smith who gave their lives. I met Chris Stevens in Benghazi during the fighting. He was putting his life on the line every day. He was living in a hotel. I was with him on July 7 when the Libyan people voted and he and I were down where thousands of people were saying to him, "thank you, thank you, America, Thank you."

So the last thing that Chris Stevens would want the United States to do is to stop assisting Libya as they go through this very difficult process of trying to establish a government and democracy

SCHIEFFER: Why do you think—is there something more going on here than a difference of opinion when the administration spokesman today says that she believes and the administration believes this was just a spontaneous act?

MCCAIN: How spontaneous is a demonstration when people bring rocket-propelled grenades and heavy weapons and have a very tactically successful military operation?

Right from the start, Schieffer’s performance was weak and very snarky. Misstating several things Rice said, he seemed to assume it must be true if the Libyan president said it.

McCain, though, behaved like a clown.

“There was no doubt there were extremists and there’s no doubt they were using heavy weapons,” McCain insisted at one point, thereby repeating the very things Rice herself had just said. He then introduced a snarky joke which his side would repeat for at least the next year:

“Most people don’t bring rocket-propelled grenades and heavy weapons to a demonstration,” he said, acting as if Rice has said this, the stupidest thing in the world.

Rice never said that people staging the presumed demonstration had brought grenades and heavy weapons to the event. Quite plainly, she said the “extremist elements” who arrived later brought the heavy weapons.

Just that quickly, Saint McCain was mocking Rice for something she hadn’t said.

McCain was disgraceful this day. In part, he repeated Rice’s account, almost word for word, while acting as if he was contradicting her presentation. In part, he invented a snarky joke based upon a mischaracterization of what she had said.

Schieffer prompted McCain in this, then swallowed every word. Here’s our question:

Have you ever seen a major journalist or major news org criticize McCain for what he said and did? Have you ever seen a major Democrat or major liberal inform the American people about the way they got conned that day by this most honest of men?

Simple story! We have no “genuine debates” within our clownish political and journalistic discourse. Virtually all our debates take the form we see in this instance.

Routinely, powerful pols make claims which are clownishly wrong. Journalistic elites routinely decide to play along with such tales.

When this happens, your very bravest liberal warriors head for the high grass. During the fall of 2012, Rachel Maddow didn’t say a single word in Rice’s defense until President Obama finally spoke on behalf of Rice after the election was over. For two solid months, Rice was crucified by this ludicrous clowning as Rachel sat and watched, along with everyone else at The One True Liberal Channel.

(It’s also true that Candidate Gore didn’t say he invented the Internet, didn’t say he inspired Love Story and didn’t say he discovered Love Canal. In the crucial month of September 2000, he didn't lie about his dog’s arthritis pills or about the union lullaby. But all your favorite fiery liberals kept their pretty traps shut about those bogus tales too. This is not an aberration. This is the fundamental way your national discourse works.)

The professors could have spoken up in defense of Rice, of course—Professors Goldstein, Pinker, Lightman and Greene among so many others. The logicians could have spoken up—but they never dirty their hands with such trivia, plus they’re likely to be in the south of France. Beyond that, they wouldn't know what to say even if they wanted to serve. Simply put, they lack the most elementary skills, a point we’re trying to help you see in our weekend posts.

We don’t know where Drum got his theory about Benghazi, which seems complex to us. To us, this is a much simpler story. It basically started with McCain’s instant, unchallenged nonsense.

That episode of Face the Nation should never be forgotten. But alas! The sheer stupidity of that transcript was well beyond the grasp of our journalists and our professors.

McCain behaved like a clown that day; Schieffer was every bit as bad. But their clowning was light years over the heads of our honored elites.

There “won’t be a genuine debate,” Krugman said—but then, that’s true in every instance. Thanks to people like those we’ve named, that’s how our discourse works!