The Cost of Entry and Diversity of Experience

I recently took a family trip to St. Louis.  While in St. Louis, we went to the zoo.  Aside from the ethical questions that all zoos raise, the St. Louis zoo was impressive in design, appearance, and scope.  Most noteworthy, though, was the fact that the zoo charges no entry fee.  As such, the patrons seemed considerably more diverse than what I experience when I attend the Milwaukee County zoo.  I cannot say for certain whether cost is the sole factor (and am not assuming that diversity is coterminous with poverty), but the city's promotion of the zoo and other cultural experiences as benefits of residency seems to make the experiences more communal.

In many ways, the St. Louis zoo reminded me of the Milwaukee lakefront during summer.  It is at the lakefront that the barriers of segregation are at their weakest because the public resource is limited in size, open to all, highly desirable, and accessible in cost.  I should add that there is no equivalent alternative available that could lead to populations self-sorting.  The St. Louis zoo or the Milwaukee lakefront are unique public resources and so have a truly public character.  The experience suggests to me that if we value diversity and prefer integrated social experiences to segregation or self-sorting, then we must place unique and desirable spaces and institutions wholly in the public domain.  By this I mean that the cost of entry and maintenance of the spaces and institutions must be spread progressively and fairly across the public through taxation rather than through usage fees, which are by nature regressive, even when partially subsidized.

Even small entry fees will have, like all regressive taxes, a discriminatory effect, favoring both those best placed economically and those whose sociocultural experience values the space or cultural institution.  In short, if institutions like zoos and museums charge entry fees, they largely become the domain of the middle and upper middle classes (and especially what might be called the traditional or 'white' middle and upper middle classes) because these groups, through received experience, place a sufficiently high value on cultural institutions like zoos and museums so that they will not only be able to pay entry fees but are also willing to do so.  There is nothing wrong with being middle or upper middle class; however, our communities are richer when valuable institutions that help us create shared histories and experiences are actually shared with all people. Progressively spreading the costs of cultural institutions is a sensible way to do this.

Another Take on Race

Jamelle Bouie has a response to the Chait piece at Slate.  It is worth reading because it offers an important corrective to Chait:  there is an actual lived experience of racism that Chait does not address.  The most poignant example is the feeling a 20-year-old black woman has when her younger brother rides his bike to the corner store and is tailed by a squad car.  Regardless of the rhetorical foibles to which our conflation of race and political persuasion have committed us, race still matters at a visceral, experiential, and real level because it in fact still exists.

Bouie effectively reminds us that while it makes sense to remember that racism and conservatism are not coterminous, we must also remember that many conservative policies (such as voter ID laws), whether overtly racist or not, have a disproportionately negative impact on racial minorities, especially African Americans.  In instances when a policy, conservative or otherwise, has a disproportionately negative impact on minorities, we should still get rid of the policy, whether it's origin was intentionally racist or not, and we should not be afraid to discuss the policy's racial impact, regardless of how the policy's supporters react.  And this requires us to engage with, talk about, and act on the lived experience of black Americans.

Jonathan Chait Talks About Race without Hyperbole

Jonathan Chait has an excellent piece in the online edition of New York Magazine regarding the significance of race at this moment in U.S. politics, specifically as it relates to Barack Obama's presidency.  I found it to be one of the more thoughtful treatments of the question.  Chait's thesis is essentially that liberals are guilty of painting everything politically conservative as racist without examining whether the policy or the politician is in fact racist while conservatives are guilty of ignoring the white resentment that stokes conservatism generally and some particular conservative policies.

Chait summarizes his position in a brilliant extended statement:

This fervent scrubbing away of the historical stain of racism represents, on one level, a genuine and heartening development, a necessary historical step in the full banishment of white supremacy from public life.  On another level, it is a kind of racial resentment, a new stage in the long belief by conservative whites that the liberal push for racial equality has been at their expense.  The spread of racial resentment in the Obama years is an aggregate sociological reality.  It is also a liberal excuse to smear individual conservatives.

While the article spends more time addressing the conservative side, Chait does a fair job of pointing out that liberals are perfectly comfortable in taking advantage of the association between conservatism and racism, justified or not, to their benefit.  A telling point is the surprise liberals often express when they make critical statements about Israel and are immediately portrayed as anti-Semites by conservatives.  The bottom line is that our political discourse is skewed because conservatives consider any mention of racism to be a smear against conservatism generally and liberals are willing to use specific instances of racism to smear all conservatives.  While racism is still troubling and alive in America, it would be nice if conservatives would stop assuming every mention of racism is a metonym for conservatism and if liberals would stop using it as one.