The Way I Talk

When I first moved to California, I went to a lot of concerts, and one of them was Gil Scott-Heron. That would have been at the Berkeley Greek Theater, an outdoor amphitheater. During one of the breaks I went over to the porta-potties for the usual reason, and there was a line, as is generally the case during the breaks. While waiting in line, I got to talking with a couple of young ladies from Oakland. The young ladies were black.

It was a very pleasant conversation, and afterwards, I tried to analyze why I had felt so comfortable. Their young lady-hood obviously was part of it, but it occurred to me that part of it was their accents and manners.

What has come to be called “Ebonics” is actually a large sub-variant of the southern accent and grammatical quirks. My relationship to the southern way of talking is complicated, of course, given that I grew up in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Kentucky, then left for what still seem to be very good reasons. Nevertheless, I have the same reflexive it’s-okay-for-me-to-criticize-but-not-for-you-to-do-so that everyone has about their family, town, state, and country. Added to that is something that I’ve mentioned previously: speaking with a southern accent means that people automatically make all sorts of assumptions about you, including that you are dumb and ignorant.

The black conservative economist Thomas Sowell has written that Ebonics (as well as a number of other features of “Black Culture”) is actually derived from “Cracker Culture,” which in turn was a English/Scots transplant that was pushed on African slaves by their white overseers. One of the features of my mild prejudice in favor of blacks is that I tend to cut black conservatives a little more slack than I do white conservatives, so I lean toward the belief that Sowell believes that American blacks are held back by their culture and would do better if they got rid of it—akin to my own ditching of my southern accent, for example. Nevertheless, Sowell tells only half the story.

The reason why people in the south, both black and white, talk the way they do is partly informed by slaves learning English from Scots overseers, but once that happened, some of the slaves then became the house servants of the southern plantation owners. In particular, they assisted the plantation owners’ wives in household duties, including child care and child rearing. In many cases, they served as wet nurses.

Guess who the children learned to speak from? There have been cases recently of largely absent parents being shocked when their children began to speak Spanish, or Tagalog, or whatever the native language of the main care-giver. In the case of the old south, they learned to speak from the negro slaves, who spoke a creole compounded from Scots grammar and African intonation. In other words, the slave owners began to speak like African-Americans. And when the wealthiest and socially prominent members of a community talk in a certain way, the rest of the community tends to begin talking that way.

The way you speak marks your social class. Every upwardly mobile young person learns this quickly, and the lucky ones are good at dialect. If you are reading a newspaper story, and the word “articulate” is used, chances are that it is being applied to a black person, even if race is not mentioned in the article. It’s one of the standard code phrases, and it means that—surprisingly—the black person doesn’t sound dumb.

Similarly, I would advise any black high school student to work on their accent. The best thing would be to somehow arrange to live in England for a little while and to develop a trace of a British accent. That adds about the same number of assumed I.Q. points that a southern accent subtracts. But any non-Ebonic, non-southern derived accent will do. It’s just part of the tool kit.

A couple of years ago, I was listening to some NOVA special (some PBS thing, at any rate), and one of the speakers sounded familiar. It took a little while for me to place it; he sounded a lot like me. In reaction to a former southern accent, the speaker slightly overemphasized the trailing consonants of words. So while the southern accent says walkin’, thereby dropping the trailing “g”, the reformed southern accent says walking, slightly overemphasizing the trailing “g.”

There are some other features, no doubt. One place to hear them is on Comedy Central, either Dave Chappelle or Stephen Colbert. Chappelle is black and Colbert is from South Carolina. In some ways, it’s the same thing.

The Preacher

"Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad." – Malcolm X, on the assassination of John Kennedy

"I meant that the death of Kennedy was the result of a long line of violent acts, the culmination of hate and suspicion and doubt in this country. You see, Lomax, this country has allowed white people to kill and brutalize those they don't like. The assassination of Kennedy is a result of that way of life and thinking. The chickens came home to roost; that's all there is to it. America—at the death of the President—just reaped what it had been sowing." –Malcolm X, in an interview with Louis Lomax, explaining his earlier remark.


"I was in school in Arkansas when Kennedy was assassinated. When the teacher announced the assassination to the class, practically the entire class stood up and cheered. They stood up and cheered." – a college friend of mine (who is white).

"Store closed due to assassination of nigger-loving President. (Will reopen at 2)" – from newsreel footage seen in recent ESPN documentary "Black Magic" about professional basketball players from historically black colleges.

Could a novelist have come up with a better name than Reverend Jeremiah Wright?

I've been thinking that I should write something about "The Speech," Barack Obama's speech on race and racism in the U.S., given in response to the furor over statements made by his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. It was a speech that had some heft to it, and one that took some courage to make, when he could have said the platitudes, had a "Sister Soulja" moment, and maybe slid by that way. It took away some of my concern that Obama was a lightweight, running as a blank slate upon whom people could project their hopes and dreamy wishes that things could be better without effort, without confrontation, without recognizing that the past produces the future.

But it is Wright that draws attention, does he not? That is what a spiritual leader should do, after all. Wright does not say, as some/many on the Religious Right have said, that God smites us with supernatural intervention, sending hurricanes to lay waste to the modern day Sodom of New Orleans, or visiting a plague upon homosexuals for their sins, though Wright apparently does speak of HIV as a government plot, which is merely incorrect. But then people do tend to grant too much imagined power to those they perceive as enemies.

Wright vents an anger that many have felt, an anger that is hardly confined to the black community. Indeed, the anger is nigh unto universal, it's only the object of the anger that varies from place to place and person to person. The Republican Revolution has been attributed to the "angry white male," but that anger is supposedly not directed at "America," merely certain Americans, certain American laws and freedoms, specific American government officials and programs, plus assorted foreigners, ethnic groups, and, as nearly as I can tell various trees, other flora, and wildlife.

It's also been directed at me from time to time, but big deal. I'm better able to take care of myself than most, and I'm a white male myself. And, I do have my own angers.

So perhaps Wright is one of those "blame America first" people we hear so much about, though he has worn the uniforms of both the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Navy. It doesn't really sound like the "blame America" part was really topmost on his life agenda, nor the first thing that occurred to him.

I have a friend in Tennessee who has actually changed congregations over political and moral disagreements with a pastor or the congregation. My friend's support of Barack Obama has been tarnished, and may be withdrawn over this incident, to my dismay.

I said to my friend, "You're a Christian. If you find Pastor Wright's statements to be offensive, try forgiving him first. That is what Christians do, after all. And forgive Obama for perhaps thinking that this was a point of view he needed to hear, regardless of his own personal opinions.

I don't know how much good my suggestion did. In truth, it's harder to make an argument that one does not support with one's own mind. And I am not a Christian, nor do I think that Wright said anything that needs forgiveness.

But see for yourself.



Remember, whatever happens should not be a surprise. The entire nation is built upon an Indian burial ground. -- overheard on the street

Day Labor

The summer after my freshman year in college, I could not return to my former job of lifeguard, because those jobs are lined up well in advance of summer and I was a thousand miles away at school, making job hunting in Nashville somewhat impractical. When I got back to Nashville, I began a job search, and good luck at finding a good summer job when you begin the second week in June.

I first had a brief, abortive attempt at working the graveyard shift in a supermarket, restocking shelves, during which time I learned something about the music of Jimmy Rogers, because that was what was on the station the store PA system radio was tuned to. I also learned to not use the box cutter on the sugar bags. Then I was laid off to make room for some friend of the family of the night manager.

After that, I tried earning some money via day labor, through Manpower Incorporated one of the first temp job agencies. Again, minimum wage, and sometimes the jobs lasted no more than a single day.

The best job I had during that time was driving the office mail run for Genesco. In the days before email and such, all interoffice communication was through those weird little brown envelopes with the holes in them that were closed by the red strings wrapped around the other red thing that I've never learned the name of. Genesco had a downtown office and one out on Murfreesboro Road, and maybe another drop spot, my memory fails a bit here. The job consisted of driving around one big circuit, dropping off a packet of interoffice mail and picking one up, no interaction with other people, except the occasional smiling receptionist, and listening to the radio as I threaded through the traffic.

I'd have loved to have had that job for the whole summer, but I expect I was just a vacation fill-in for the regular guy, whose family knew the manager or something. Not that I'm still bitter about Tennessee hiring practices from 40 years ago or anything.

Far and away the worst job I had during the Manpower summer was the one that involved unloading the logs from the box car. That was a one-day special, thank god. The logs were destined to become railway ties, if memory serves, and they were cedar, or so I think we were told. You couldn't have proved it by me, since wherever they'd been harvested had been wet, muddy, and now the dirt was caked on them to considerable depth, black and powdery, perfect for rubbing into the skin, hair, or dispersing into the air inside the boxcars, like black smoke.

Outside it was a typical Tennessee summer day, maybe in the mid-80s. Inside the box car it was considerably hotter, approaching sauna temperature. Our sweat mixed with the black powder dirt and covered us with salty mud in the first few minutes of the job. There was water to be had, and we used it liberally, both to drink and then to just pour over ourselves, washing some of the mud off, to be replaced almost immediately, by more mud. Not to get too gross, but we were spitting mud by midmorning, and blowing your nose produced black discharge.

But what the hell, it was only one day.

The day had begun with a ride out to the site with three other guys, all older than me by a fair bit. The driver was maybe in his mid-thirties with a sort of "all over beer belly" if that makes sense. He talked about his band, a bar band from the sounds of it. They did a lot of Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry songs, with an occasional Elvis cover tossed in. It sounded like fun.

The next guy was a little older and scrawny. He told us that he preferred to work "janitorial," which I understood a lot better by the end of the day.

Rounding out our quartet was a middle aged black man who slept most of the way out, obviously a bit hung over. I think he was older than the other two; he certainly seemed older, and more worn out, or maybe worn down. I do not recall my other companions treating him with any disrespect, nor, to the best of my recollection, did I. We were, after all, in the same boat, or at least the same beat up old car.

We arrived at the work site at about the same time as another car from Manpower, and that one included the manager, whose job it was to synch up with the work site boss and get us all started. However, the work site manager, the guy representing the guys who were paying the bills, wasn't there, so the Manpower guy went off in search of him. It was still morning cool, though the sun was beginning to make its presence felt, and we looked around at the boxcars and the flatbed trucks that the logs were to be loaded onto, and, well, then we looked around some more.

At one point the black man, who'd wakened by now, but was still bleary eyed, came over to me and asked, "If the man don't show up, will you make sure we all get paid?"

I think I stammered something about how I'd do my best, or whatever, but the seeming weirdness of the request roiled my brain a bit. Me? What kind of grease did I have with the system? I was as clueless as I could be, and just passing through, so to speak. Fortunately, I didn't have much time to think about it, as our boss and their boss showed up pretty soon thereafter, and set out the work orders. I think they decided that the black guy was maybe too fragile to stand the hot work, so they took him elsewhere, I hope to do something to earn his pay for the day, but I never saw him again so I cannot report.

I've met broken creatures in my life. I once saw an institutionalized woman who talked of nothing but the wires that had been installed inside of her. There was a guy in Berkeley in the 1970s, known as "Serge, the Microbe Man," who would stand on a street corner and babble strange theories about organized crime bosses and "direct light encounters." Too much acid was the story told about Serge, who'd once been a promising student in physics. I've met meth addicts so far gone that they seemed like meat ghosts, no souls left, just reflexive need and motion. I've known people so depressed that they could barely find the effort to breathe.

The man who asked my for my help, help I really could not even think of how to deliver, he was not as broken as any of these other folks. He seemed more defeated than broken. Yes, I'm sure he was probably alcoholic, and maybe he'd have been better off if he quit the drinking. Or maybe he was just circling the drain, and trying to make the pain less intense.

But why me? I've thought about it over the years, and the best I can come up with is that I was still rising, still someone upon whom fortune was smiling. Sure, at the end of the day, I was as hot, dirty, and tired as anyone else on the crew, but I'd go home to a nice suburban home, shower, and get a good night's sleep, with the expectation that things would get better, if not tomorrow, then certainly in the weeks or months after that. I was the college boy. I was on the track to eventually, maybe, even be The Man.

And sure, matters of race and class loom very large in this sort of exchange. The fellow I spoke to was old enough to remember when lynching was a common thing in the South. Whatever schooling he'd had had been in a segregated school. Hell, it was only a few years earlier when he wasn't allowed to eat a most lunch counters in Nashville, and I imagine that he still didn't break out of the old channels very often.

In the years since, I've sometimes consulted for, and advised The Man, sometimes opposed The Man, and on occasion, I've even flirted with being The Man. I'm especially not good at that last one. Truth to tell, most of my dealings with The Man have been fairly problematic, so there we are. And I'm bound to wonder, how much of my failure at that particular aspect of human existence comes from the fact that I never, ever want anyone to look at me again like that old black man looked at me that day?

Chain Gang

It's oddly difficult to get information about the chain gang system that existed in the South until the 1950s and 60s. There are a few famous exposes, plus the pop culture images of "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang," or "The Defiant Ones," or "Cool Hand Luke." There are an awful lot of white faces in these movies.

I was in our back yard in Tennessee sometime in the mid-50s when I saw a work gang in leg irons working on Emory Drive across the vacant lot that abutted our back yard. There were no white faces in that crowd.

The convict labor system was the way that southern states kept their roads repaired for most of the first half of the 20th Century. I've seen claims that the chain gangs were integrated, despite a fully segregated prison system, but I'm bound to wonder how much of that integrated chain gang image came from ignorance and poetic license. There was no mystery about how the prison labor system worked: whenever a road contractor needed labor, the local constabulary rounded up all the "vagrants" in the area, and vagrants were almost invariably black. Putting a white man in a largely black work gang would have been considered appalling.

Perhaps the gangs that were made up of prison inmates, rather than local "pick up" labor were different, but again, how and why would there be a mixing of populations that were not even in the same prisons? The logistics alone make the idea dubious; it would have been a lot like "forced busing," wouldn't it?

As for the pop culture images, there's no question about the dynamic at work there. There would have been no audiences for a film that featured only black characters, whereas adding black men to the mix either allows a statement about racial issues, or it emphasizes the degradation of the main (white) character.

In any case, I've just spent some time on Google Images, looking for a photo of a real chain gang with both black and white men in it, and I couldn't find any. I never saw one in real life, either.

The movie, "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang," was based on a book, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang. The State of Georgia banned the movie. I don't think they did it because it showed chain gangs; I think they banned it because it showed one that was integrated.

Three Jokes

#1
Rene Descartes went out for a walk on a fine Parisian spring day. The air was sweet and warm, perfumed with flowering plants and the smells of baking along the boulevards. His stroll went on for some time, and he realized that he was beginning to feel the first pangs of hunger.

But Paris in spring is bountiful, and Descartes stopped into a sidewalk café. Again, the perfection of the day asserted itself. The bread was fresh and tasty, the wine was full-bodied without impertinence, and the pate seemed to melt into his hunger with barely any need for the rigors of digestion.

His appetite nearly sated, Descartes watched the crowd passing on the boulevard, his thoughts turning to philosophy and the graphical mathematics. So lost in thought was he that he almost did not notice the waiter’s return, and he had to ask the man to repeat the question. The waiter again asked if he wished to have dessert, there was a custard of which the chef was particularly proud.

“Yes, yes,” said Descartes. “That sounds excellent.”

“And will monsieur be having coffee with that?” inquired the waiter.

“I think not,” said Rene Descartes, who then disappeared.

__________________________

This is a fairly mild example of an elitist joke, an in-joke that can be told to strangers. If you don’t know that Rene Descartes famously wrote “Cogito Ergo Sum,” “I think, therefore I am,” the joke goes right over your head.

I once told this joke at a gathering of nurses at my in-laws' house; about a third of them laughed, and when I realized the exclusionary nature of the joke, I figured that I’d been ever-so-slightly rude. But I did notice that the laughter tended to be in two parts, the first part when the person laughed, and the second part being when they realized that not everyone had laughed, and what that meant.

___________________________
#2
An airplane leaving from Poland wound up in a storm over the North Atlantic. Everyone was terrified, as the plane was pitching and yawing, and the crew feared that it would break up at any moment. But one young student stood up and called to the passengers, on the right aisle to move across the aisle. The passengers were dubious but the student insisted. “Hurry,” he said. “Our lives depend upon it.”

The passengers complied and the shaking stopped. The plane righted itself, and made its way safely to its destination. Why do you think the student’s plan worked?

Because you need all the Poles on the left side of the plane for stability.

__________________________

That’s an engineering joke. If you’ve never worked with Laplace Transforms, it is almost completely unintelligible. If you’ve sweated through control theory, it can be hilarious. Really.

I was once at a small gathering of fans at the house of a well-known fanzine Editor, and he told that joke. There were no other engineers there, and he didn’t know I was an engineer until I stepped on the punch line. I more or less blurted it out; I hadn’t meant to ruin the joke, and, for that matter I didn’t, not exactly. Because no one else laughed, and no one else was going to laugh, no matter how well the joke was told, because no one else had the background, just me and him. He’d told the joke with every expectation that it would meet with blank stares.

He and I never got along. I have no idea if that incident had anything to do with it.
_________________________

Paul Zuber was a professor of urban studies at RPI, and a little googling finds that he now has an RPI scholarship named after him (he died in 1986). I had a course from him; I think it was Urban Engineering.

One class he reminisced a little about what it was like in the early days of desegregation at the college level and he told a story about it that wasn’t a joke, because he stepped on the punch line.

___________________________
#3
Two of the first southern collegiate athletics departments that were desegregated had a long standing football rivalry. One of them had a single black running back, while the other had two defensive tackles. During the big, annual matchup game, one play had the running back going straight down the middle, where he was cut down by the two tackles.

A loud voice went up from the stands, yelling…

______________________________

Paul then threw the joke away, saying that the voice yelled something to the effect of “get your blacks off of our black.”

I muttered, not quite under my breath, “That isn’t the way I heard it.”

The actual punch line is “Get those n-----s off our colored boy!”

Paul glanced over at me with a little smile and winked.

This joke isn’t a racist joke, of course; it’s a joke about racists. Wanda Sykes has a routine where she notes that the more championships Tiger Woods wins, the less black he is. My father-in-law tells a similar joke about a black college football star, who wins so much that by the end of the season it’s “Go, Dutch, go!”

One of the things I got to think about during my Urban Engineering course was the ways in which jokes can be a means of hidden communication, and how place of origin and shared witness can sometimes trump race in making, as opposed to breaking, connections.

Bowling

[Crossposted at WAAGNFPN]

At Eastshore Aikikai, where I practice Aikido, we’re pushing the geriatric envelope pretty hard. I’m in my mid-fifties and I’m in no way the oldest person in the dojo; there are also several students who are only a few years younger than I am. Get off my lawn, you whippersnappers or I’ll throw you off.

My mother is in her 80s, though, and she still belongs to a bowling league. Granted, bowling is a lot lower impact than Aikido. It’s also the only one of two sports I know of where people regularly die during participation, the other being golf. Of course the reason for that is that both are sports that have participants of any age, including the very old.

Or the very young. Tiger Woods famously appeared on The Mike Douglas Show at the age of 2. I wasn’t that young when I began bowling, but I started before I entered grade school, although I didn’t join a league until some years later. My dad was manager at a total of three bowling alleys over the years, and I was in a league in all of them.

You’d think I would have gotten really good at it, but actually I was only in the upper reaches of average. The highest I ever scored was 236, and my league average hovered around 170 from late high school to the last league I was in, sometime in the late 80s. the highest it ever got was about 175. I’ve fallen away from the faith since then, so nowadays I bowl a little less often than I golf, which is to say every year or two, when I’m visiting relatives. My bowling is still a lot better than my golf, however.

Being in a bowling league is interesting from an intellectual snob’s standpoint. Despite numerous attempts to move upscale, bowling is still a pretty working class activity, so you wind up rubbing shoulders with truck drivers, beauticians, policemen, and mail carriers. That’s all to the good, in my opinion. It did become less fun when automatic scoring came in, since it eliminated my natural ecological niche: scorekeeper. In fact, I was keeping score in my parents’ leagues well before I belonged to a league on my own.

I’ve occasionally joked that I’m genetically selected for bowling, given that my parents met in a bowling league. It was better joke when I was bowling regularly and I could show people that my right thumb was bigger than my left. I still own two bowling balls, plus bags, shoes, etc.

After my car was broken into in college, where the thieves smashed a window to get in, I took to keeping my car unlocked, never leaving anything in it that was more valuable than repairing a broken window. The only significant thing that’s been stolen since then was my bowling bag, with ball. The humor there was almost worth the loss; a used bowling ball is worth maybe fifty cents, the bag a dollar or two. I like to imagine the thief hauling the sixteen pound ball into the pawn shop or thrift store, only to find out that he’d have made more money panhandling.

Some of my earliest memories are of bowling alleys (I still call them alleys, never having gotten used to saying “bowling lanes”). I’m just barely old enough to remember pin boys, before automatic pin spotters came in. In Nashville, they were invariably black, with the phrase “pin boys” echoing the generally demeaning practice of calling all black men in a service job “boy.” I don’t have any specific recollection of any of the pin boys, but I do have the general recollection that they were all teenagers, given the athletics necessary to hop up onto a perch above the pins when the ball came down the alley, then jump down and reset the pins when time came.

The woman who handed out the bowling shoes was not in her teens, however. She was a middle aged black woman whose name I don’t quite recall, but I want to say, “Miz Abigail,” or “Miz Abbey.” She befriended the little 2-3 year old tyke and let me stay behind the desk with her and hand out the shoes.

I learned, many years later, that the bowling league that my parents belonged to included a company team sponsored by the firm of Acuff-Rose, which included one of the principals, Fred Rose, and one of the artists managed by Acuff-Rose, Hank Williams. Williams died in 1953, and Rose in 1954. The dates are such that it’s just barely possible that I once handed Hank Williams his bowling shoes.

I’ve heard a possibly apocryphal story that Lyndon Johnson insisted on including the public accommodations portion of the 1964 Civil Right Act so that his old housekeeper wouldn’t have to “pee in the bushes” when she drove from Texas up to Washington to visit. It has the ring of truth, because Johnson took his politics personally. He might listen to varying interpretations of the commerce clause, but in the end he knew that politics came down to a pissing match, and a good many southern boys have at least one Miz Abigail in among their warmest memories.

Sun Ra

Names changed to initials and location withheld, just in case…

I was visiting T, a buddy of mine at RPI, and our mutual friend D gave us a call. “Sun Ra’s playing tonight; do you want to go?”

I was only vaguely aware of Sun Ra and his Arkestra; since that first time I’ve seen him twice (and won’t ever see him again, as he died in 1993), but if the order of performances were reversed, I’d have still been unprepared for the experience of that first night. I never saw a performance like that again

Sun Ra was playing in the basement of a (black) Baptist Church, and there was a set of dancers with him. The music that night was almost pure percussion, including the electric piano that Sun Ra himself was playing. Hell, even the saxophone that joined in later seemed like a percussion instrument.

The first two dancers were women, dressed in what seemed to be an array of scarves, their arms outstretched to either side and undulating; if you’d told me that they’d had their bones replaced with rubber I’d have considered it possible. Later they were joined by a male dancer, who had feathers attached in what I vaguely remember as being called the “Rooster Dance,” which has Haitian or Cuban roots. I remember him as also playing the saxophone.

The overall impact was powerful and breathtaking, and that led to a bit of a problem. The three of us had consumed a goodly bit of the ceremonial herb on the drive over, and the night was hot, the church basement even hotter, with a ventilation system not meant to accommodate the crush of people there.

These constitute a good way to set off an anxiety attack, and T had one. I sensed him trembling and saw the look on his face, so I wasn’t surprised when he said, “I’ve got to get some air.” He had a bit of trouble standing, so I took his elbow and guided him outside.

Once outside, we walked around corner of the building and we both lay flat on our backs on the cool of the concrete porch at the front of the church while T babbled a little. After a little bit, it dawned on me that he’d just had a racial panic attack.

Okay, the church basement was full of blacks; other than the three of us, there were maybe four other whites in a room that probably held nearly a hundred people. T was having trouble breathing because of the drugs, the heat, and the stifling air. But he was a middle-class white boy from the suburbs and he’d never been in a situation like that and the fear funneled through his imagination and produced jungle stereotype images straight out of Hollywood B movies.

He knew it was dumb; he knew it wasn’t real; he knew his mind was playing tricks on him. But panic is panic and he was smart enough to make an orderly retreat.

And let’s get clear about the other thing: what I had going for me was experience. I knew full well that the people in the basement or the church were the same people (metaphorically speaking), who had cheered our speeches at the Elks Club in Nashville, the same ones I’d ridden the bus with three times a weeks for ten years when I was younger, the ones I’d talked to at the bowling alley when I was younger still. If I’d had a panic attack it would have focused on something different, not because of some intrinsic virtue of mine, but simply because my imagination throws up different panic images. There are classes of people that are scary to me, but deep down inside, I feel that black people are my friends.

So T and I talked for a bit, and then I started making with the funny. Laughter is a good way to remind the body how to breathe, and stoned guys are an easy audience. And when I need to, I can be a pretty funny guy. So a few minutes later, T and I were laughing like fools on the porch of a Baptist Church, and a while after that we went back inside to watch the rest of the show, from the doorway, where you could still feel the hint of a breeze from the dark and blessed night.

And just so no one forgets the important part, that night, in the basement of a Baptist Church, Sun Ra put on one hell of a show.

The Old South

CP Snow once said that all ancient British traditions date to the second half of the 19th Century, and his only error was to limit this claim to Britain. –John Quiggan

Growing up in Tennessee meant that I was subjected to the mythology of the “Old South” a fantasy of wonderment and social order on the antebellum plantations that takes the place of the quasi-feudal system of misery-based indolence that was the actual reality.

The first “plantation novel” is generally regarded to be Swallow Barn by John Pendleton Kennedy appeared in 1832, pre-dating Snow’s dictum by a couple of decades, but the genre really didn’t take off until after Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), when many southern writers decided to provide an alternative to Stowe’s novel. After all, they seemed to be saying, we actually live here and Stowe does not. Who would your rather believe?

Well, Harriet Beecher won the historical debate, and something of the literary debate as well. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a hard slog for many modern readers, but the plantation novels are virtually unreadable, and are certainly unread. I’ve looked at a couple; I never tried to read more than a couple of pages. The plantation novels live on in zombie form as a sub-set of modern romance fiction, but the later would be as unrecognizable (and possibly as repellant) to the original plantation novelists as the plantation novel is to modern readers. Still, I would like to see Kennedy’s reaction to Mandingo.

There were also a few humorists in antebellum southern literature. Again, at least to this reader, the humor does not age well.

Now realize, I first looked into the subject of antebellum southern arts and letters out of sheer cussedness, and possibly some of my opinions are tainted. Still, a more recent net search on the matter finds many a scholar who agrees with me. In fact, there is some body of scholarship interested in why the old South was largely absent from the “American Renaissance.” The only writer of the time who can stand next to Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman is Edgar Allen Poe, who, in some measure can be said to have achieved greatness by writing about almost everything but the South, and whose influence spanned oceans (e.g. Baudelaire), but had practically no effect on his neighbors.

As for painting, I’ve seen them and they’re dreadful: smarmy portraits of smug plantation owners, is pretty much the sum of it. Architecture? Jefferson doted on architecture, and maybe Monticello is fine, I’ve never visited. I’ve actually stayed in old style plantation homes, not to mention more than a few imitations, and they are more designed to impress one’s neighbors than to actually live in. Of course, I suppose if you have enough servants/slaves, anything become livable.

Then there is music and theater. The Minstrel Show is a good example of how the songs and dances of the slaves were appropriated and fed to white audiences in ways that reinforced the racial prejudices of those audiences. The “song writers” of the antebellum south were often little more than transcribers, up to, and especially including, Stephen Foster. This practice obviously did not end with the Civil War; in various forms, it continues to this day.

Of course, after the Civil War, there came an amazing outpouring of arts and letters from those displaced, uprooted, or just beaten down by the troubles of the times, not to mention the amazing music that evolved, and continues to evolve, from the merging of the African roots of the slaves with the Western music, instruments, and technology that forms the basis of true American art. While some of the post-War literature from southerners was as grand and glorious as Mark Twain, or the narratives of former slaves, much of it was in service of the self-serving white Southern Myth. From D. W. Griffith to Gone with the Wind, the myth is well ensconced in American popular culture with millions believing as part of their basic historical assumptions, that something wonderful had been lost in the Civil War.

Well, no it wasn’t. I’ve looked; there was little back there but a hollow shell of sycophants singing the praises of wealthy men. But telling that to a man with a pickup and a Confederate Flag is as useless as talking to an SCA member at a Renfair about cholera and indoor plumbing.

The Kiss

A re-posting of an essay from elsewhere, because it came up in conversation.

The first interracial (i.e. black/white) kiss on American television was on Star Trek, with Kirk kissing Uhura while under the influence of telekinetic/telepathic control. The Wikipedia entry says that British television did not show that episode of ST until 1993, though for reasons of violence and not interracial making out.

I’m a little ambivalent about this incident in the history of science fiction and popular culture. On the one hand, the idea that such a simple thing as a kiss can be a matter of great taboo is ugly and repellant, so of course I’m glad that the taboo was broken. I’m glad that science fiction had a hand in it.

But on the other hand, what a timid thing it was. The background story says that, in fact, Shatner’s and Nichols’ lips never touched—as ordered by NBC. More importantly, the context was pretty lame; they were under psi control at the time, so it is, in the context of the story, something that the two individuals would never have done on their own, and it was supposed to be humiliating. Not really a blow for racial justice, was it?

I have a memory of another television show of around the same time, maybe a little before, that featured a love affair between a black doctor and a white woman (I think a nurse, but possibly a female physician). I can’t remember any physical demonstrations in the episode, but then, I was surprised to learn that the Star Trek kiss was the first interracial kiss on television, too. Apparently I wasn’t paying attention to that particular aspect of pop culture. In any case, in said TV episode (Ben Casey? Dr. Kildare?), the black man says at one point, “We’re both free, white, and over 21—except me.” The line obviously stuck in my head.

My point here is that, in the context of the show, as opposed to external events, the Star Trek situation had no connection to actual current day race relations whatsoever. In the Star Trek future, racial discrimination is supposed to be wholly absent, so within context the actual problem with The Kiss was that it was against their wills, and it was a superior kissing a subordinate (which also occasionally happened on ST:TOS, but usually Kirk was romancing the alien babes).

In the remembered medical story, however, present day race relations were the crux of things. In truth, that seems more daring, doesn’t it? Even without the physical kiss.

In many ways, science fiction had it very easy for a long time in matters of race. It’s not that hard to be on the right side of the debate on racial justice when the debate is about Jim Crow laws, de jure segregated schools, and matters of obvious and overt bigotry. Moreover, science fiction has the advantage of the distancing effect; we can write about societies where our notions of racial norms no longer hold, so the entire matter becomes as impersonal as an allegory. And there have been slews of science fiction allegories, too. All well and good, but they’re not that difficult either.

Then there is the matter of words vs pictures. Robert Heinlein played a lot of games with the race of his characters, making some of them black, for example, then leaving only the barest of clues as to that fact. Again, well and good, but it was awfully easy to miss those clues, or to ignore them, if you were of such a mind. But when those characters are then given real forms, as in motion pictures, typically Heinlein’s descriptions are ignored, and the characters revert to the white heroic norm.

I will not denigrate the freedom to create and write about societies that are ideal in that particular way, that racial injustice is gone, and multiculturalism flourishes. I’ve met plenty of people who found the Star Trek universe to be attractive for that very reason, that it gave them the hope that there could be a society like that, and that hope was enough to get them out into the world, where they found, if not the ideal community, at least one that was more suitable to them than where they started.

What science fiction does not provide, however, is the road map. How does one get to that desired state? And how does one deal with the present situation in a human and humane way? That is a much more difficult task.

For writers, the task is even more difficult. How does one create characters whose race or ethnicity isn’t ours? To what degree is that an extension of the more fundamental problem: how does one create characters rather than stereotypes? How does one create characters with stereotypical characteristics (because everyone has some stereotypical characteristics, that is how stereotypes occur), and still get across the idea that each one of them is the center of the universe, and each one is the protagonist of their very own plot?

Color Blind Spot

On January 2, 2003, Allen Newsome, 17, attempted to rob what he thought was a pizza delivery man who had come to his apartment building in Harlem, New York City. He used what has been described in various reports as a “pellet gun,” a “BB gun,” or a “toy gun.” It looked, however, like a “real gun,” just as an undercover police officer apparently looked like a “real pizza delivery man.” Newsome was shot and killed.

The news reports on Newsome’s death were used by Brooklyn councilman Albert Vann, and Queens councilman David Weprin to garner support for a bill they had introduced to the NYC City Council to ban toy guns from the city. Obviously they weren’t prescient; they were basing their advocacy on previous cases, such as the August 1998 case of a 16-year-old New York boy bearing a submachine gun water pistol who was shot six times in the legs by polic or the 1994 case of another boy, this one 13, who was shot and killed by a police officer who mistook his toy gun for the real thing.

The Libertarian Party sprung into action. Sensing a threat to our constitutional rights to keep and bear toy guns, Jim Lesczynski, spokesman for the Manhattan Libertarian Party announced a “Guns for Tots” program, to collect and distribute toy guns to the kids of P.S. 72 in Harlem before the ban could take hold.

The Daily Show had a good chuckle. The “Guns for Tots” program itself was not very successful, given that the Principal of P.S. 72 told the students to keep away from those strange white men, and some parents came and denounced the Libertarians as racists.

I bought up the “Guns for Tots” matter to my Libertarian college buddy Jeff, as part of a conversation about the extent to which racism plays a part in Libertarian politics, and in the politics of “self-identified” libertarians. The latter group, to my certain knowledge and from direct observation, includes some outright bigots, and White Supremacists.

Jeff told me, “But I know Jim Lesczynski, and he’s not a racist. He was just making fun of some politicians that he thought were pushing a stupid idea.”

Let’s consider that proposition for a bit. Let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that somehow Jim Lesczynski has managed to grow up in America without a shred of racism in his entire being, a true example of what another Comedy Central guru, Stephen Colbert says: “I don’t see race. People tell me that I’m white.” Let’s, for the purposes of analysis, grant the hypothetical.

Even granting that extreme unlikelihood, how clueless do you have to be to not understand that, in the context of a discussion about how the police are mistaking toy guns for real guns and killing the holders thereof, that handing out toy guns to young children in Harlem is going to result in the perception that you are in favor of having the police kill young children in Harlem? And Harlem children are the very emblem of “not white.” They may not be all “black” any more, given immigration and such, but there aren’t very many of them who are going to be put in the same racial group as Stephen Colbert.

Moreover, this was a PR stunt. There are about a million issues that are more important to the cause of liberty, however you want to define that term, than whether or not children in a particular city get to have super-soakers. This entire thing was a media event attracting media moths, and the Libertarians went for the flame. And if you are going to go after publicity, if you are trying to make points for your cause, whatever that cause might be, it is up to you to make sure that the right message gets across. Whining about how people “misunderstood” just means that you’ve screwed up.

When I was researching this, my favorite argument against the toy gun ban was that “there aren’t many cases” where children had been killed by police who thought the gun was real. Not “none,” you understand. Just “not many.”

There is absolutely no cannibalism in this navy, and when I say absolutely none I mean there is a certain amount. - Monty Python

Enough hypotheticals. Do I think that Jim Lesczynski and the Manhattan Libertarian Party was being racist? Damn right I do. They could have made their point by handing out toy guns to white kids (and maybe made the point that white kids aren’t so much at risk of being shot by the police for holding a toy gun). They could have kept their mouths shut on this one and kept issuing press releases about medical marijuana and other issues where they’re on the side of the angels. But instead, I’ll bet anything that some of them chuckled and grinned at how “daring” and “politically incorrect” they were being, and how they could really make “liberals” fume, and how cool that made them.

I am also absolutely sure that the idea that they were being racist never entered their minds, because, like so many people, they think that you have to be a Nazi or a segregationist, or some other sort of obvious bigot to be a racist. The idea that there can be unconscious racism, that it can affect the way you perceive others or even yourself and your own actions, never enters their minds.

Libertarians, I think, and I’m thinking here of the real-deal Libertarians, the ones who believe in reason, and individual action and responsibility, and the entire philosophical hook, line, and sinker, are particularly vulnerable to this failing. The problem with a blind spot is not just that you can’t see what’s in it, but also because you can’t see the blind spot either.

My Time in the NFL

I occasionally joke that I’m in the USAF and I used to be in the NFL. Those would be the United States Aikido Federation and the National Forensic League.

The National Forensic League makes a sport of public speaking at the high school level. They hold both debate and public speaking tournaments, where participants get points for how well they do in the contests. We started a speech club at my high school (Donelson High School in the Nashville, TN school district), and worked toward qualifying for club membership in the NFL. I forget how many points it took, but we qualified in a remarkably short period of time, owing to having two powerhouses, my friend Phil Wright, and, well, me.

I have no idea if any high school students will read this, but I’ll give the advice anyway: if you have the opportunity to do some public speaking in high school or college, take it. You’d be amazed at how often it comes up in life, and how important just a bit of experience in not getting tongue-tied or otherwise loosing your cool in front of an audience can be.

For the life of me, I can’t remember what holiday it was, when the following took place. It wasn’t the 4th of July, because we were in school, but it was some occasion for patriotism, because I remember portions of others’ speeches referring to 1776, the flag, all the usual things. In any case, our club sponsor, Mr. Anderson, rounded us up and asked if we wanted to go to a speaking contest at an Elk’s Club in downtown Nashville. We’d go to a venue at the drop of a hat during that period. We were trying to rack up points and the old competitive juices were flowing (I know, I know, it was a nerd competition, but winning is winning, and besides, we were nerds). Moreover, we got the afternoon off from school.

So we all piled into Mr. Anderson’s car and headed downtown to the Elk’s Club.

Which turned out to be entirely Black. Nowadays, it would be African-American, but at the time, I think that Black was more correct, although, given the ages of most of the people there, Negro might even have been more proper, i.e. the terminology they would have applied to themselves. Some of them may even have been Colored.

They were dressed in business suits and fine dresses, and fully ready to hear some speeches. Our group had the only melanin-deprived skin in the place; the other contestants were more local to the neighborhood. But everyone smiled at everyone else, and we got to the business of speechifying.

One of the speakers was a black girl who had the cadence thing down to a “T” and who stood off to one side of the podium, hand resting lightly on it, except when she used both hands to gesture. It was a fine performance and as flowery as many of the hats in the audience. I assume I did my regular thing: voice-of-reason-with-just-a-soupcon-of-passion. It works in almost any venue, and I wasn’t about to mess with it. That I don’t remember all that much of it is symptomatic of competitive speaking; you’re paying less attention to what you’re saying than how the audience is responding, and how the other speakers are doing.

Then Phil spoke.

Phil has since become a preacher, or so I understand. I’m sure he still has the chops. Not to put too much weight on it, but he was really good. But about mid-way through, he froze. Just blanked. It happens to the best of us, and it’s one of the reasons for the speech training in the first place. To get it out of your system, to let you know it’s not the end of the world, and to train you to just take a deep breath, refuse to stammer, and wait for the words to return. After a long several seconds, the words did come back and he finished strong.

Later on, after first prize had been awarded to the black girl, second to me, and third to Phil, one of the judges whispered that Phil had been way out in front until his lapse. That may or may not have been true, since it’s always best for the local favorite to win one of those things, but I’m sure he would have beaten me.

Oh, and they handed us checks. We had no idea that there were cash prizes involved. We went home very pleased with how it had all turned out.

I took one other lesson away from the gig, a realization that I had looking out over the crowd, the little nods they gave, the obvious pleasure that each of them took with each mention of the flag, the country, its history and ideals. And that is this: there is no person on this continent more patriotic than a black man in a business suit.

False Positives

A person of my acquaintance (note: I’m removing as many of the serial numbers as I can, since this involves a private confidence) recently spent several weeks in court, as part of a wrongful death suit that my acquaintance’s family had filed against a trucking company. Several family members had been in an automobile that a truck had run off the road, the car had hit gravel, and the driver, an older member of the family, had lost control of the vehicle. It flipped, killing the driver, and injuring other family members.

The trial took place in a town in the Central Valley of California, near where the small trucking firm was based. The result of the trial was that the family lost, and the trucking firm won. Since it was a civil case, unanimity was not required of the jury, and indeed, there were several dissenting jurors.

The family in question is African-American. This turns out to have mattered quite a bit. After the trial, one of the dissenting jurors contacted the family’s attorney and told him that there was never any possibility that the family would win the case. From the very beginning, they were viewed as attempting to ring up a liability suit “jackpot” at the expense of the trucking company, and that the sentiments had been based on their race. Just a bunch of black folks trying to hit up a poor innocent businessman was the majority view.

It also happened that during the trial, the juror had heard another of the jurors talking to the head of the trucking company about some business dealings, which is also pretty rank, but the bailiff claimed to have heard and seen nothing. Yet another tribute to small town America, and yes, I absolutely do have some prejudices there. I will note that there is one upside; the information provided by the honorable juror makes it very unlikely that there will be a countersuit for legal fees and court costs.

My acquaintance noted that the family had gotten some of the “vibe” that the juror had noted, but had tried to discount it. Nobody wants to see racism everywhere, or to make false accusations, but there you are.

I hope that nobody who has been reading any of these essays thinks that I hold myself out as some sort of color-blind paragon, or exemplar of racial tolerance and understanding. I believe that race exists, not as a valid biological concept mind you, but certainly as a real social and perceptual construct, and if you want to function in human society, you need to be aware of the lines that divide the various types of “us’s” and “thems.” Moreover, I grew up here and I’m in no way immune to the various images, fables, and stereotypes that get implanted in our minds without our approval or even knowledge.

What I will say is that, owing to various circumstances of upbringing, experience, and personal proclivities, for several of the most important racial and ethnic groupings in U.S. society, the positive and negative biases have mostly cancelled out. Sometimes, if I’m paying attention, I can even feel the process at work, bad, good, yes, no, up, down, hmm…I think I might like this guy or gal. Cool.

Introspection also tells me that some of the positive comes from a rejection of the negative and some bit of pride at not getting sucked into the stereotypical view. For example, one of the reasons why I really liked actress Maggie Han in the short-lived TV series “Murphy’s Law” (with George Seagal), was the great juxtaposition of Asian features and a New Jersey accent. I thought that was just adorable.

The net result of all this is that I come up as showing a “small implicit bias” in favor of several major U.S. minority groups, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Hispanics on certain sorts of personality tests. I also have a history of getting along pretty well with Jews. On the other hand, (and this is the product of more introspection), there are several racial and ethnic groups that I’ll admit at least a small prejudice against, though not publicly, partly because I think that sort of thing is shameful, and partly because I don’t think that public discussion would be productive. I will admit that I’m more likely to have my knees jerking about religion than race, however, though there are some nationalities thrown in there too.

Now it’s possible that I’m overestimating some of my own prejudices, and overcompensating as a result. Part of living in a society where certain divisions according to perceived race both exist and matter, is that people develop detectors for race. And if one believes that racism is a bad thing, one also develops detectors for racism, which also creates the potential for errors.

Detectors give both false positives and false negatives. There are also “indeterminate readings” if one calibrates the meter in such a fashion as to create a “dead zone” of indeterminacy. That is, after all, what happened to my acquaintance and the trial thing: an indeterminate reading when there was actually a positive showing on the racism meter. The meter “dead zone” had been set too broadly.

One thing I’ve noticed in the ongoing conversation about race in America is this: in most venues, a false positive reading for racism is considered more of a problem than a false negative. Noting that someone is showing a racist sentiment creates far more problems than simply letting the matter pass. And that too is another aspect of racism. I will certainly cop to the fact that my own racism detector is much more sensitive than most other folks, and I know of at least once, in Mexico City, when it was definitely showing a false positive. I expect there have been other times as well. But let’s be honest here, having some say you are exhibiting racist behavior in our society does not carry anything like the downside of being, for example, black. You pretty much have to wear a swastika armband or a white hood to get shunned in our society.

I once asked another friend of mine, who is a member of a minority that isn’t African-American, how often he felt singled out as being a member of his race, how often he encountered racism, in other words. “Every single day,” he told me. Yet I’ve heard other members of his race/ethnic group claim that they seldom encountered racial discrimination or prejudice.

Perhaps they are using a different level of behavior to trigger their “racism meter.” Maybe they have a very broad “dead zone.” More likely, I think, they’ve just learned that mentioning it brings you nothing but grief. They may admit this in private, or they may have internalized it to such an extent that they are now blind to all but egregious examples.

It’s even barely conceivable that they live is some wonderful part of the country where racism has vanished.

But I doubt it.

The Crime of Thomas Jefferson

One way of looking at high energy particle physics is that it consists of hitting some stuff with the biggest hammer you can get, then making up stories about the resulting fragments. In human affairs, we do something similar, but the penetrating radiation consists of ideas and facts, and people’s reaction to them. In the United States, one of the big hammers is the Founding Fathers, their ideas and the facts about their lives. Modern Americans project all sorts of things on those guys, which tends to reveal more about modern Americans than the Founding Fathers.

The most recent furor about Thomas Jefferson is a pretty good experimental smashup in that regard, though the first result is one I’ve mentioned a while ago: when sex enters a narrative, the narrative becomes all about the sex. In Jefferson’s case, the burning issue of the day was whether or not he had a child by his slave Sally Hemings. DNA testing of Hemings’ descendents put the debate into the realm of the truly bizarre. The testing was “inconclusive” in that it could only say that someone in Jefferson’s immediate family was the progenitor, so it could have been either Thomas or his brother Randolf. Naturally, a lot of Jefferson scholars immediately set out to prove that it was Randolf, because otherwise, Thomas Jefferson would have had to have had sex with his slave Sally, who, it should be noted was his deceased wife’s half-sister. That would have made Jefferson no better than…his father-in-law.

Sally was also Jefferson’s property, and it’s hard for us to really grasp what that means. A southern slave owner could certainly legally have sex with his slaves. He could also beat them, mutilate them, force them to mate with anyone he chose, or kill them for any or no reason, all without any repercussion other than financial. Do you own a dog or a cat? Your pets have more legal rights now than did a slave in the Old South.

On the other hand, for Jefferson’s brother to have had sex with Sally Hemings without Thomas’ permission, would have been a serious breach of manners and ethics. If it were done with Jefferson’s permission, then, well, which is worse, sleeping with your wife’s half sister or pimping her out to your brother?

As I say, sex in the narrative tends to muddy the waters and muddle the thinking. In any case, Annette Gordon-Reed, in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy pretty clearly demonstrates that Thomas Jefferson was the only possible father of Hemings' seven children. More importantly Gordon-Reed addresses the issue of how it is that the fairly clear and compelling evidence of the relationship was ignored or explained away by scholars who were basically devaluing the evidence provided by historical sources who were black. Not to put too fine a point on it, implicit racist assumptions led to false conclusions.

Jefferson, of course, was a paragon in the founding of America. His was the language of the Declaration of Independence. As President, he arranged the Louisiana Purchase. He was the prime mover behind the founding of the University of Virginia, the first secular university in America. His is the spirit behind the First Amendment, and his aphorisms in favor of freedom of speech, press, and religion are part of the discourse to this day. He was also a major scholar and scientist. As John Kennedy once quipped at a White House dinner for Nobel Prize winners "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." Jefferson’s library formed the basis of the Library of Congress. He was probably, after Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Thompson, (later Count Rumford) the most internationally famous scientist and intellectual in America at the time.

So then, how to react when confronted by something like this:

I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people. --Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia”

Jefferson’s ownership of slaves made him a part of his culture, and his racist views were also part of that culture. This is that “cultural relativism” we hear so much about. Those who decry cultural relativism must then decide whether Jefferson was an evil man, or whether slavery wasn’t so bad as all that. Since I have no quarrel with cultural relativism per se, I’m willing to give Jefferson a pass on the slave owning, though not a full pardon. Washington gets a full pardon; he freed his slaves at his death. Jefferson supposedly wanted to do the same, but he’d ran up so many debts that his estate couldn’t afford the gesture, so his slaves got sold off, families split, the whole horror show, all because Jefferson just had to add that extra staircase onto Montecello and import a few more varieties of plants for his experiments.

But those sorts of moral transgressions are transient, personal, and local. The same cannot be said for the scientific racialism that he expounded as a whitewash to his own personal good fortune of having been born white and rich in a society whose wealth depended upon slave labor. It may be asking a lot for someone to give up all those benefits of position and privilege. But to use one of the finest minds of his era to rationalize that situation, that is crime that continues to this day. Certainly scientific racism would have existed without Jefferson, but he was one of its originators in this country. And that was a crime against both free society and against science.

Follow the Money

For some reason, I know several people who might be considered academics without portfolio, or, more precisely, without academic positions. These are people who regularly behave as scholars, scientists, or mathematicians, even to the point of publishing papers in academic journals, but who nevertheless do not have positions at any university or similar scholarly institution. I grant you, this is a little weird, to publish without the prod of “publish or perish,” or really, any of the other usual incentives. But there you go.

In some cases, the lack of apparent incentive is just that, appearance, which is to say that they are still keeping their C.V.s polished in the hope of some future connection. Others, by contrast, do it just because they can, and they got into the habit of doing so at some time or another. I think I’m probably in this latter group, in that I’ve got a few unpublished papers that I update from time to time, and every now and then I begin another. Maybe I’ll get around to publishing them someday, maybe not. It all depends on how I feel about it, I suppose.

Anyway, long introduction out of the way, one such friend of mine once had a paper that he wanted to publish in the Journal of Indo-European Studies. For those in the know, this publication was long associated with Marija Gimbutas, the originator of the “Kurgan hypothesis” connecting the archeology of Neolithic burial mounds in southern Europe with the linguistics of the “proto-Indo-European” languages, to some acclaim (from Joseph Campbell among others) and considerable skepticism. Both the acclaim and the skepticism were linked to some pretty spectacular leaps she made in the formulation of “The Goddess hypothesis,” suggesting that Neolithic European cultures were matriarchal, later to be overwhelmed by invasions of patriarchal Indo-Europeans.

My scholar friend is a “Red diaper baby” and sometimes referred to Gimbutas’s “impeccable leftist credentials,” for reasons that will soon become evident.

The Journal of Indo-European Studies has a “sister journal,” Mankind Quarterly. Both were founded by a fellow named Roger Pearson. I forget whether it was Pearson or his co-editor who suggested to my friend that his paper might be published in Mankind Quarterly. It may have been the co-editor, J. P. Mallory.

My friend had never heard of Mankind Quarterly, but I had. Why? Because a large number of the citations given in The Bell Curve are from Mankind Quarterly. And the reason for that is that Mankind Quarterly is the go-to journal for papers dealing with the scientific basis of race, or, put another way, the primary purveyor of scientific racism in U.S. academia.

I’m going to get lazy here and just quote the Wikipedia entry:

Pearson was brought to the United States in 1965 by Willis Carto of the Liberty Lobby, and contributed to some of Carto's publications, such as Western Destiny and at Noontide Press. At the end of the 1960s, he parted with Carto, and successively taught at Queens University, the University of Southern Mississippi and Montana Tech. During his tenure as dean at Montana Tech, Pearson received $60,000 from the Pioneer Fund.

In 1975, he left academics and moved to Washington, D.C., where he founded the Council on American Affairs. He also joined the editorial board of Policy Review, the monthly Heritage Foundation publication in 1977, but was forced to resign in 1978, after the Washington Post exposed Pearson's background following the 11th Conference of the World Anti-Communist League — which he chaired.

Pearson also held the directorship of the Institute for the Study of Man, a group which was alleged by Searchlight magazine to have received $869,500 between 1981 and 1996 from the Pioneer Fund (Mehler 1998) and which under Pearson acquired the peer-reviewed journal Mankind Quarterly in 1978. Pearson simultaneously took over as editor and has remained editor through to the present day, though his name has never appeared on the masthead...Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele's advisor, Otmar von Verschuer, was on the editorial advisory board of this journal before his death in 1970.

Pearson is a former officer in the British Army, serving in India when it was still a colony. He’s also a member of the Eugenics Society. I knew of maybe half the stuff mentioned in the Wikipedia article, having seen a piece on The Bell Curve in The Skeptic magazine. I conveyed all this to my friend.

So my friend had run across the fact that Marija Gimbutas, one of the patron saints of the neo-Pagan movement, was academically in bed with a guy promoting eugenics and scientific racism. More to the point, my Jewish, Red-diaper baby friend, was being asked to publish in a journal that had once had a Nazi on its board.

He was in a quandary. My opinion was basically, a publication is a publication. Both journals were academically respectable, despite everything, and neither would be a blot on his C.V. He did ask other opinions, and, interestingly his African-American colleague in the anthropology department of a nearby university was perhaps the most telling. Said colleague opined that anthropology journals were all so racist anyway that it barely made any difference. Not exactly confirmation of my opinion, but pithy nonetheless.

My friend finally made the decision to hold out for his first choice and his paper appeared in the Journal of Indo-European Studies, not Mankind Quarterly. Fair enough, but it got me thinking.

Roger Pearson, whatever his vices or virtues, pulled in a lot of money from various sources, sources that I personally find more than a tad “icky.” Is there such a thing as “tainted money?” One might ask a neo-Pagan about that. I have no idea what sort of strings were attached to the money Pearson got; most likely there were none, at least not in the sense of quid pro quo. It’s just that Pearson is who he is, and the people with the money thought he was a good person to spend some of theirs. I doubt he disappointed them.

There’s a saying about politics: “If you can't take their money, drink their booze, eat their food, screw their women, and still look them in the eye and vote against them in the morning, you don't belong here.” I’ve always thought more or less the same thing about science and academia, but the fact is that if you play it that way, you don’t necessarily get to have a long career, not unless you get tenure, and the early plays in that game separate a lot of sheep from goats. There’s a lot of money out there for anyone who genuinely believes that tobacco is harmless, that global warming isn’t caused by fossil fuels, or that rich people are rich because of virtue and intrinsic worth.

But there’s just as much money for anyone who doesn’t believe those things, provided they’re just as able at making the case as those who believe them. And cynics don’t have any problem jumping from one funding source to another. The ones who are really committed to the King are the courtiers, and many of them don’t care who’s the King, so long as there is one.

A Little Bit Like Affirmative Action

[From my archives]

It would have been sometime in 1967, as nearly as I can recall. I was in high school in Tennessee, and I got a call to go down to the Guidance Office to see somebody. I may have gotten out of a class for it, or maybe it was during a study period. That doesn't matter at this distance, though it probably did at the time. Often you don't remember all that much about the events that change your life.

The man who wanted to see me was from a college I'd never heard of: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was head of the RPI Admissions Office. Years later I learned that he had a habit of doing what he did that day. Whenever he was away from RPI on business, he made a point of making a recruiting call or two at several high schools in the area he visited. He'd call up the local guidance councilors and ask if they had any bright, scientifically- and mathematically-minded, students that might consider attending RPI. I fit the bill, so I was it for that afternoon. We talked a while about RPI, what it was, why it would be a good school to attend, and he left a catalogue that I read carefully over the next few months. Ultimately, RPI was one of the schools I applied to, and it was the one that I attended, as both an undergraduate and a graduate student.

The man's name was David Heacock. I met him several years later, at a student/faculty/administration party, and during a conversation, we realized that he was probably responsible for my attending Rensselaer. Neither of us had recognized the other, of course. We spoke for a while about his intentions on his recruiting trips. What did he have in mind?

Rensselaer is an old school, the oldest engineering college in the nation, in fact, or it has a claim to the title. Located in Troy, New York (a goodly distance from Tennessee, which was one of my criteria for a college), it is quite well-known in some places, places like New York State, especially New York City and Long Island. It is also well-known in some circles, like among engineers generally, or within General Electric. GE has research laboratories just across the Hudson from RPI in Schenectady.

But it wasn't unusual that I hadn't heard of it, because RPI is generally unknown outside of its own cultural niche, and its own geographical area. Most often, people in most parts of the nation, if they've heard of it at all, remember it as having a good hockey team. That isn't really quite what the RPI administration would like to be the school's main claim to fame, and some of the admissions people took steps to try to expand its reach. Steps like making a special effort to recruit students from Tennessee, when the opportunity arose.

During our conversation, Heacock may have used the word "diversity." Maybe not. It was long ago, and the word did not have had as much baggage loaded onto it as it does these days. Besides, I'm white, and the word isn't often applied to different groups of whites.

Still and all, I understood early on that I had a bit of an edge. RPI wanted me to attend. They recruited me. They accepted my admission. They gave me scholarship money. Was I at the top of my high school class? No, I was 11th. SAT scores? They were pretty good, but there were guys from Long Island with higher scores (especially in math) who didn't get in. But I was on the forensics team, a lifeguard at the downtown YMCA; I'd won a local short story contest, placed second in a swim meet once -- all things that added to the notion that I'd be more than an average RPI student. Which, of course, I turned out to be. Average students didn't wind up at those student/faculty/administration parties.

But all the things that gave me that edge over the generic New York student, all of them still come under the heading of difficult-to-quantify—judgment calls in other words. I say, “difficult-to-quantify,” but they did attempt to quantify it, with formulae for admission and financial aid, formulae that took all the extras into account. That moves the judgment call to the realm of deciding whether lifeguarding quantifies to the same thing as playing in the band, or being in the forensics club is as good as those last 10 points on the SATs. When all is said and done, what happened was that the admissions people looked at me and decided they wanted me to help change the mix of students at RPI, to make the place something more than a regional engineering school.

And if that Long Island student had wanted to make the argument that he was being discriminated against, he'd get no counter-argument from me. It was discrimination, and it was to my benefit.

Over the years, I've seen a lot of discrimination both against and in favor of various people, and various types of people. When I got to RPI, I spent the first couple of months getting rid of the last vestiges of my southern accent (I still remember my date who teased me because my speech rhymed "pen" with "tin."). People with southern accents, white or black, are assumed to be stupid, you see. On the other hand, being tall, blonde, and Anglo has often worked in my favor, and I'd be an idiot not to know it.

When a kid gets into college because he's the son of an alumnus, that certainly discriminates in his favor; and how many black high school students can have that sort of edge? Not as many as whites, of course. Likewise, whites have an edge when it comes to just plain buying their way into schools. Several hundred years of economic discrimination leave effects that wouldn't disappear overnight, even if racial discrimination were to vanish, which, of course, it hasn't. People of African descent are still at a disadvantage, still discriminated against. There are people who think otherwise, or say they do. I hope that they are merely wrong, and not lying, but I know that many of them are, at best, deluding themselves.

I've been writing mostly about discrimination in white and black, because that's what I grew up with. But the same arguments hold true for broad numbers of college-yearning boys and girls, children of immigrants, the racially or culturally disadvantaged, even (as was my case) the geographically disadvantaged. Most of these discriminatory disadvantages can be addressed without much comment. I was geographically disadvantaged when it came to the college I eventually attended: I'd never heard of it. A guy came by my school to try to change that.

All perfectly legal, and not worthy of much comment, apparently. But if someone wishes to try to address the ongoing advantages that white people enjoy, and the disadvantages that African-Americans suffer, there comes a gnashing of teeth and a wailing that this is horrible, that racial discrimination is so odious that it must never, ever, occur. So the lackluster sort of racial discrimination that is called Affirmative Action comes under harsh attack. This attack, it seems to me, primarily comes from those who have all their lives been beneficiaries of exactly the sort of discriminatory edge that got me into college. A discriminatory edge that would apparently have been illegal if it had been because of my skin color, but was just fine since it came from where I lived. Indeed, such is the nature of racism that people often do not even notice the sorts of discrimination that don’t involve race, except possibly in the extreme cases, like opposing partisans noting that G. W. Bush did not get admitted to the Ivy League on the basis of his high SAT scores.

Then there is this aspect: None of the advantage would have amounted to anything if Mr. Heacock hadn’t specifically recruited me. Universities like to recruit wholesale, because it’s cheaper, but I was recruited at retail. That is where so many Affirmative Action programs turn out to be just lip-service: the gatekeepers give the little extra edge in an admission formula, but there isn’t really any active recruiting to back it up; everyone prefers wholesale to retail. The minority individuals who do manage to work the system (which has been every American’s God-given right since the nation was founded), are then told that their achievements are suspect because of all the unfair advantage that they’ve been given. Odd that no one ever told Babe Ruth that his honors were suspect because he never competed against anyone who wasn’t white, but there you go.

All and all, I have to say that I think diversity is something to applaud. It's done right well by me. And I'm under no illusions that it had to be that way. I know how lucky I was, and how lucky I continue to be.