A Constant, Blinding Rage

I spend a fair amount of time on longform.org because it is a great resource for finding high quality, long form journalism.  One of the things that has been particularly rewarding lately has been reading the James Baldwin essays that the site has posted which have been thought-provoking and have led me to contemplate a number of things.  First, I consider myself a literate individual with a decent grasp of American history and literature.  However, reading James Baldwin has demonstrated that I am both less literate than I thought and have a more incomplete grasp of American history and literature than I previously supposed.  Second, reading Baldwin has demonstrated that despite having made some progress toward becoming a more egalitarian and less oppressive society, that progress has been depressingly small.  Third, reading James Baldwin often puts me in the mode of a spectator, simply observing the deftness and power of his language.  The man wrote with remarkable power, poignancy, and perception.   

The most recent essay I read is “From the American Scene: The Harlem Ghetto: Winter 1948.”  In it, Baldwin tackles a number of issues involving the experience of being a “Negro” in America.  Toward the end he makes a couple of observations that are worth repeating because they are accurate and powerful.  He writes that “oppression – the social and political optimists to the contrary – does not imbue a people with wisdom or insight or sweet charity:  it breeds in them instead a constant, blinding rage.”  He is, of course, speaking of the African American experience.   As noted above, it is peculiar that I considered myself literate when I was exposed to no such perspective.  I carried an enormous amount of passion when I was young for justice and equality and would rage against the excesses and inequities of the farce known as Reagonomics; nevertheless, the experience that stirred my passion was not “oppression” of the sort Baldwin describes in the essay.  While Reagonomics undoubtedly sanctioned inequity and excess, my complaint in truth was one of quantitative degree.  I looked like the very opponents with whom I argued.  I debated Paul Ryan (yes, that Paul Ryan) in AP History class and realistically the only difference between myself and Paul was and is familial wealth.  Redistribute a bit here and there, luck out a bit here and there, and our positions could be flip-flopped.  My arguments were of a vertical sort, addressing the unfair quantitative differences separating people.  There was in me no “constant, blinding rage.”  I could not conceive of such a thing.  Despite my youthful radicalism, I was at base optimistic.  Things would be better if only we just shared the wealth more equitably.  Unfortunately, redistribution is not the answer to oppression (witness the blinding rage stirred by the image of the “black welfare queen”). 

I retain a sort of optimism, though one measured and realistic, tempered as it has been by time and experience.  One such experience adding nuance to my perspective has been greater exposure persons of African American descent, among others.  Coupled with reading Baldwin (and other African American writers), this exposure has opened a window on a part of the American experience to which I had previously been blind.  I was always against and horrified by racism.  Nevertheless, I could only grasp racism as an intellectual concept, as a category that was like class, which could be ameliorated through quantitative means. 

My son is completing second grade and many of his classmates and friends are African American.  They are, like all of his classmates, funny, delightful, mischievous, ornery, regular, goofy, serious, brilliant, difficult, easy, etc.  In short, they are regular kids.  However, I fear that my son’s classmates and friends will be, if they have not already been, subject to the oppression about which Baldwin writes.  Perhaps it will not come in the form of abject poverty and overt discrimination.  It will however, come in some form, be it traffic stops that happen simply because they are black and driving or the palpable discomfort many white people will express simply because they are young and black or the condescension of those who will assume that their achievements were not wholly “earned” because they are black and must have gotten some affirmative action or something or the razor’s edge they stand on as adolescents between freedom and incarceration for doing things that would just be stupid things if they were melanin-challenged and living in a suburb.  Oppression, I fear, will come.  In this respect, I wonder how far we have come, if at all from Baldwin who, in 1948 wrote,

I can conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life.  All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand, and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.

I look at the boys and girls with whom my son goes to school and I am furious that any single one of them has been or will be irreparably scarred by the conditions of his or her life.  I am furious that I went 40 years before I began to understand in a visceral way that being “black” is not a class category or even a race (as the term is ordinarily understood) but instead is a category of power(lessness).  I am grateful to have encountered James Baldwin on longform.org, but I am furious that I did not encounter him sooner as a mandatory part of my education.  I think every person would do well to read Baldwin and allow his words to percolate and sink in, to consider whether the world about which Baldwin wrote is so different from our own, to consider whether she has been complicit in perpetuating the power differential that causes oppression, to consider whether there is something he can do to change the power differential, to consider whether we want to live in a country where persons deemed “black” are irreparably scarred by the conditions of their lives, to consider how she can fight oppression so that hope and possibility and ordinary striving can “replace constant, blinding rage.”  I leave you with these words from Ta-Nehesi Coates and Lyndon Johnson:

“Negro poverty is not white poverty,” President Johnson said in his historic civil-rights speech.

Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it.

Whitnall Park, Late Spring

It is hard not to be moved by lovely weather in the late spring.  I went for a jog in Whitnall Park and encountered no others on the entire 3+ mile loop.  The temperature was comfortable, but the air was humid in the denser parts of this small forest.  Fresh green leaves covered the ground and exploded from the tree branches around me.  And the humid air seemed a catalyst to appreciate this sense of growth.  In such moments, one can understand the ancients and why they celebrated the return of spring.  Even my creaky knees seemed fraught with impossible possibility, that they were infected with youth, that they were capable of speed again.  

In the first part of the loop, the trail winds across the side of a long slope or ridge.  For a tenth of a mile or so, a short distance, the forest thins out, devoid of the scrub and bushes that otherwise crowd the space between tree trunks.  In this short distance, in this small space, the ground cover is thick and perhaps 3-4 inches high and it is everywhere, blanketing the ground so the trees look magical, as if they are sprouting from a carpet.  Had they fuzzy tops and unusual colors, the scene would be Seussian.  I sense the ethereal and unreal.

Although I do not hear Horton, I find this particular spot entrancing.  It takes much effort to maintain my pace, to keep going, to avoid the temptation to wander off the path and find a spot where rays of sun break through the canopy to the ground, to find the spot and bask in it, in the sunlight, in the verdure, in the impossible possibility, in the sense that I belong here now.  I force myself to consider poison ivy.  This reduces the temptation, but only a little.  I continue on.

I cannot put my finger on what it is about this particular spot that seems so lovely to me.  Nearly the entire loop is picturesque.  I suspect it is the sense of openness and height that has something to do with it.  A cathedral with green leaves through which the light of heaven streams.  But this is not all that is entrancing.  The ground cover growing over downed branches and trees creates the sense of incessant vitality:  even in death the forest brims, life explodes from the mortal wounds of time and weather.  Even the smell is different in this spot.  How so, I cannot say for sure.  The vegetal odor of the forest is present, but less strong than in other places.  I think that I can smell the trees and breathe in their monumental time and strength.  I think of Fangorn Forest and Treebeard when I pass through this space and this flight into Tolkien has something to do with it, I am sure.  

Honestly though, I do not worry about what makes the spot lovely because it is lovely and that is enough.  And it is a lovely late spring day and I had a chance to get outside and run through the lovely spot.  It is hard not to be moved and for that I am grateful.

Privilege, Responsibility, and Freedom (A Work in Progress)

This is a bit loose and unformed; nevertheless, I wanted to publish it because I thing it is an important topic that is frequently misunderstood.  The genesis for the post was thinking about the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

Responsible.  For what are we responsible?  Are we, for example, responsible for the totality of the effects of privilege?  Common notions of responsibility (and decency) suggest that we are or at least should be.  If one is born into a particular station or class, one enjoys the benefits or privileges of the class and so should be obliged to accept responsibility for the effects the class has on others.  If the class into which one is born exists because it marginalizes, oppresses, or exploits other classes then one cannot ethically accept the benefits of class membership without also accepting responsibility for the marginalization, oppression, or exploitation.  In this sense, though it may seem counter-intuitive and unfair, children are responsible for the sins of their parents despite the inheriting responsibility solely through the accident of birth.  Just as it is inherently unfair to ask the disadvantage to bear their disadvantage solely because of the accident of birth, so too is it unfair to allow the privileged to enjoy the advantages of privilege that have been bestowed solely through the accident of birth without also requiring them to bear responsibility for the deleterious effects of their privilege.  Every member of society is responsible to her fellow members of society and this is a duty that cannot be compromised or abdicated without also compromising or abdicating one's moral duty.

The responsibility we have to our fellows never ceases, though its force becomes more imperative when social classes become more stratified and fixed because in stratification privilege and disadvantage are distributed in gross and uneven ways that tend to externalize the effects of privilege for those possessing it and to force the disadvantaged to internalize the costs or negative effects of privilege.  When social classes are flatter and more fluid advantage and disadvantage are distributed more fairly among members of society, in effect ensuring that everyone bears both the costs and enjoys the privileges of one's class without externalizing costs and forcing another group to bear them.  The flattening and fluidity of classes also prevents the ad hoc and irrational distribution of privilege and disadvantage through the accident of birth and the nonsensical mechanism of inheritance.  If we do not accept responsibility for disadvantage when society becomes more stratified and fixed, we abandon not only the moral imperative of social responsibility but we also debase and make a mockery of any cogent understanding of "freedom."

How so?  Quite simply, the idea of freedom requires a foundation of radical equality in order for the idea to be legitimate.  Otherwise, freedom is a purely a function of privilege:  the more privilege you have, the freer you are.  The inverse means that those born without privilege are also born without (or at least with severely diminished) freedom.  In this sense a stratified society is not a free society because "freedom" is in all practical senses coterminous with privilege.  Freedom as a distributed social value only has meaning for individuals and groups to the extent that they can exercise it.  Otherwise freedom is nothing more than an empty platitude or an incoherent abstraction.

[More to come]

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.

Lunch Walk

I like walkable cities and walkable neighborhoods.  I prefer walking or biking to getting into my car and driving.  I’ll be honest, part of me feels a bit smug about this and all the good I am doing the planet/city/neighborhood by leaving the car at home.  Still, aside from any moral or environmental benefits, walking is just nice for no other reason than it feels good to be outside doing what our bodies are engineered to do.  

I currently work near a mall in the suburbs and have lately taken to going for walks during my lunch hour despite the nightmarish traffic and frequently puzzling and seemingly arbitrary decision on which blocks get sidewalks and which blocks do not.  The other day I headed toward an open air “shopping center” across the street from where I work to start the walk.  Although the temperature was cold, the wind was not blowing and the sun was out.  I decided to take the sidewalk next to the businesses while I was out to see what was in the shopping center.  Needless to say, not many persons were walking about.  With the exception of one person, everyone I saw was either making the trip from car to store or vice-versa.  The thing is, though, this is kind of an interesting place if you go slow and pay attention.

I walked past a dance studio that caused me to smile, thinking of the gentle scam that convinces some lonely folks to come back again and again because of their undiscovered talent or the couples dutifully struggling through a foxtrot so they can learn to dance for their wedding (which will be deejayed by someone playing cheesy pop hits from the last three or four decades, few or none of which will be conducive to foxtrotting, waltzing, or cha-cha-ing).  

When I was in law school we studied a case involving a dance studio in which the plaintiff claimed to have been fraudulently induced to spend money based on the studio’s representation that she was talented.  The judge used the phrase, “Terpsechorean arts” at one point in the opinion and made a few of us laugh.  I still smile thinking of it.  

I admit to being slightly disappointed that no tall, slender, bleach blonde-haired woman with a slightly husky voice and an unidentifiable Slavic accent did not bump into me as I walked by to try and seduce me into believing I was, despite appearances to the contrary, the next Fred Astaire (or whomever the equivalent contemporary figure is, if indeed there is one, which I am inclined to doubt).  Of course this would presume a coeval cultural currency between us that would be as weird as this wistful vision of mine is.

As I approached the all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant, a car pulled up. An old couple tottered out of the restaurant leaning on their respective canes and made their way to the car.  Another older couple walked slowly ahead of me for a moment or two before turning into the parking lot to get to their car.  The scene was melancholy.  Perhaps it is the fact that this restaurant has reduced food growth, preparation, and consumption to a mechanized event devoid of the unique, the real, and the spontaneous that did it for me.  A caloric Eden amid a nutritional desert sold at prices that cannot honestly reflect the actual costs involved, which must be borne on the backs of impoverished farmers and migrant workers and other cheap labor, that is borne on the backs of us all in the farm bills that subsidize the growers and processors and agri-chem companies and shippers and truckers and who knows who else.  While a part of me feels the guilt of snobbishness, I am still overwhelmingly convinced that the buffet restaurant is symptomatic of the depressed state in which the American middle class finds itself, part of the downward spiral of Wal-Martification, union busting, and wage suppression that has been going on for two decades or more.

For further proof I didn't have to walk far.  There is it was, that box of societal sorrow, defeat, and despair - a dollar store.  Advertising frozen chicken nuggets for a dollar.  A woman carrying three full plastic bags out of the automatic door.  Difficult.  Dolorous.  Determined.  As if she is not trying hard enough.  Obviously we should further erode her pride and force her to urinate into a cup to keep receiving the meager support the government gives her so she will not have to go hungry.  It only makes sense, right?  It isn't wrong to assume that if she's poor and needs some help that she's probably a drug user, right?

Next door is the high-end tea shop with clever lights and displays selling organic and specialty and fair trade teas that make you feel like a hero for purchasing them.  With appropriate implements necessary for the experience to be authentic and rare.  And commodified.  Like everyone else.  Aristocratic dreams.

The fabric store.  God-awful memories of my youth.  There can be few worse places in which to be a boy while accompanying one’s mother shopping than a fabric store.  Even the imagination has its limits and the fabric store tests them.  The rolls of fabric may entertain for a few minutes:  feeling the faux fir, checking out the sports themed racks.  But then what?  The soul-sucking begins.  The barely audible fluorescent light hum would be hypnotic if it weren't enervating.  The vinyl tile floor lacks the comfort of the carpeted department stores in the mall so you have to stand.  And that is basically all there is to do.  Stand and watch your mother look at fabric and patterns and thread while the light fixture hum bores a hole through your spirit.  Emptiness without nirvana. Boredom that lacks the panache of ennui.  Time slows unbearably.

Then there is the record store that miraculously survives without being a head shop, selling new vinyl and old vinyl and rare vinyl.  The record store beckons me.  Contrary to the horrors of the fabric store, the record store conjures up fond memories of my teenage years and my many sojourns to the record store in my home town where I would pore over Clash and Cure and REM albums amid the always changing but ever-present incense aroma.  Sometimes I would talk to the owner when he was working.  He was a scrawny dude with heavy metal hair and innumerable concert tees.  Once when I was fifteen he sold some weed to a friend and me, though it wasn't at the store.  We burned a bowl and went to the county fair glassy-eyed and ridiculous.  

The hearing aid store makes me think of my father who died nearly eight years ago.  He wore hearing aids, though he spent years denying that he needed them while we shouted our objections.  I miss him often and am grateful for things that bring him back to me if only for a short while.

Eventually I make my way past the last store and return to my usual route through the neighborhoods in the area, alone in the midday winter sun and happy I didn’t drive a block-and-a-half for a burger and fries.