An Interesting Piece on Race in Barbados

I just encountered an interesting discussion of “Race/Colour in Barbados” on the blog What Crazy Looks Like.

The epigraphic quotation from Rihanna, “I was bullied at school for being white…Now I’m in a much bigger world,” was fascinating to me largely in clearly illustrating a fundamental difference in the social organization of race in the U.S. and in the Caribbean, for “being white” is one of the last things Rihanna would be likely taken to be in the U.S.

At the same time, the following quotation from the blog post is a useful set of statements about race anywhere in the Americas, even while the particular details that are relevant in any given place will vary:

“Even when we remind ourselves of just how fluid and contested race is we fail to reveal that race is in itself a fiction.
When we refuse to see the difference between historical racial privilege and racial slurs we foreclose on any opportunity to dismantle the fiction of race.
And when we recognise race as constructed we refuse to see its construction does not make it any less ‘real’.”

Enlightenment Values

The most important contribution to world culture of the Enlightenment was the promulgation of a set of important ideas and values, most notably those of freedom/liberty/autonomy and equality. These are ideals that have continued to have value well beyond the specific 18th/early 19th century period usually referred to as “The Enlightenment,” so that we can speak of an ongoing “Enlightenment Project” of implementing these basic ideals. (There were/are varieties of Enlightenments and Enlightenment Projects. Associated with the French Revolution was the famous triad of liberty, equality, fraternity. Coming much later, but still very much associated with the continuing project of expanding freedom, the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata emphasized land and liberty, the emphasis on both the ideal and the material condition necessary to implement it. In the U.S., liberty/freedom has been especially foregrounded as an ideal. Equality of opportunity and equality before the law have been generally held ideals, while equality of social condition has not been as widely held as an ideal, and the French “fraternity” is largely absent from consideration.)

In practice, Enlightenment values have always been coupled with contradictory practices, e.g. practices of slavery and Jim Crow laws alongside values of equality and freedom.

As a matter of historical or social analysis, these contradictions between ideals or values and practices must remain coupled. Both are part of historical or current social realities.

Further, refusing to decouple Enlightenment values from contradictory practices enables us to better understand things like racist thinking associated with slavery and/or colonialism and their aftermaths. These are syntheses of the contradiction between values and practices. Much scholarship on race in early colonial North America indicates that masters felt no particular need to distinguish greatly between white and black forced laborers, nor a particular need to defend such practices. Racism grew up alongside developing notions of freedom and equality. As the radical inequality associated with forced labor began to seem wrong, but the profits generated were hard to pass up, the development of notions of inherent racial inequality served as useful rationalization – one could treat some unequally because regarded as naturally unequal.

A similar type of thinking developed concerning gender and the growing contradiction between the value of equality and realities of gender inequality. In an engaging essay, “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology” (the essay can be found in The Gender/Sexuality Reader, edited by Roger Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo), Thomas Lacqueur discusses changes in scientific thinking about female and male reproductive anatomy and physiology in the late 18th/early 19th century. Earlier, it had been typical to think of males and females as manifesting degrees of difference along a continuum, with this related to a lingering humoral conception of the body. Male and female genitalia were thought of as the same structures, for example, with “hotter” male bodies extruding the genitalia and cooler female bodies having the same reproductive structures introverted, i.e. females were males inside-out, or perhaps outside-in. Beginning in the late 18th century, males and females began to be seen more and more as different species in terms of their biology, with females’ rationality in particular being affected by menstrual cycles.

As a matter of values for ongoing scholarship and engagement with the world, though, historical and current contradictions between ideals and practices should be decoupled. I don’t mean that practices, now or in the past, that contradict the values of freedom and equality should be ignored, forgotten, justified, or anything of the sort. Far from it. I mean that contradictory practices in themselves don’t undermine or invalidate the values.

The fact that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder doesn’t undermine his words regarding liberty and equality. It makes him a hypocrite, something he himself was aware of, but it doesn’t and shouldn’t make his words in the Declaration of Independence any less stirring (nor do you have to be a communist to be stirred by the evocation of those very words by Ho Chi Minh against French colonialism in the mid-20th century). Nor was his slaveholding a part of an Enlightenment Project. Instead, this was a practice resisting such a project and contradicting his own stated values.

Snakes and Race

They Can Smell Snakes

While I was living in Athens, Georgia in the early to mid-1990s, a friend told me of a bizarre experience she had just had in a local bookstore. She had been browsing the books when another customer, who happened to be a black man, entered the store, looked around for a few things, and then left. As the man was exiting the store, an older white woman leaned over to my friend and whispered conspiratorially, “You know, they can smell snakes.”

Over ten years later, I’m still not quite sure how to take the comment. It’s in no way typical (at least not in the specific claim) – I grew up in the U.S. Southeast, and over the years I’ve heard white people say plenty of things about black people that I would just as soon have not heard, but never anything else quite like that. The ability to smell snakes might even be useful and worthy of envy in a region with a variety of poisonous snakes. As my partner, Reginald Shepherd, who is a black man, commented when I told him about this story, “I’m not sure if I’m offended by that or not.” I’m reminded of a particular comic strip of Aaron Magruder’s Boondocks from a few years ago, right after then Mexican president Vicente Fox’s comment that Mexican immigrants were important to the U.S. because they would take jobs that even blacks wouldn’t. The strip’s main character, Huey, responds something to the effect, “Any minute now I’m going to figure out why I’m offended by that.”

The woman’s specific claim is simply strange, and as I said above not typical. At the same time, though, it is an example of a more general phenomenon. It involves imputing a sort of “animal” or “savage” quality to black people. This, of course, is an all too common component of racist thinking whenever it occurs, the association of the “other” with less than human animal qualities or lesser human savage qualities. In the Americas, this has been particularly the case with racism directed towards people of African descent, and is intimately connected with the intertwined history of slavery, with its actually savage and bestial working conditions, and Enlightenment thinking, with clear ideas of inherent inferiority associated with carefully delineated human groups arising from the attempt to reconcile slavery and abject inequality with new ideals of freedom and equality. (There is a large body of scholarship on this topic of race, racism, slavery, and the Enlightenment. I have found particularly clear and useful, George Fredrickson’s book, Racism: A Short History. On her blog, Nicolette Bethel has written several recent engaging posts on race and the imagery of savagery.)

Field Guides

At some point in my late teens or early twenties, I was looking through a field guide to reptiles with a friend. (I have no real recollection of which friend it was, nor why we were looking at the field guide in this particular context, but that’s not really important here.) We noticed that some species of snakes had distinct coloration patterns depending on the region in which they were found. My friend remarked that it seemed strange that within the same species, one could encounter distinct color patterns.

This was, I think, a momentary lapse in thinking on his part (I could certainly think of at least one other species with distinct patterns of color), but it’s symptomatic of a type of thinking I’ve encountered from time to time over the years among white people. Specifically when they’re among only other white people, some whites seem to forget that people who aren’t white exist. (Let me also emphasis the word “some” in the previous sentence – I’m not saying all white people think this way even part of the time, just that enough do that it’s something I’ve encountered numerous times over the years.) Whiteness is not only naturalized (think about the old Crayola color, “flesh”), but taken as identical with the species – unless non-white people are present.

Two Patterns of Race Thinking

There are then at least two patterns of race/racist thinking that can be occasionally encountered on the part of white people, one pattern when non-white and white people are present together, when animal or savage qualities might be imputed to non-whites in the case of racist thinkers, another pattern when only white people are present, when whiteness might be taken not only as natural, but as so natural that others are temporarily forgotten about.

These are straightforwardly complementary pairs of ways of thinking, but it’s also important to point out that one can exist without the other. Plenty of white people are prone to the second pattern, taking whiteness for granted in the absence of anything clearly different, without necessarily being prone, at least explicitly, to the grotesque racism of the first pattern. (There is a milder variation on the first pattern, where racial difference is marked solely for the sake of distinction, but without imputing qualities of inferiority, e.g. when individuals are remarked on specifically as “black girl” or “Asian man,” even where the individual’s race/ethnicity is irrelevant to the matter at hand. In my own experience, I’ve encountered this sort of race marking very frequently among whites, even among those I wouldn’t generally label as racists.) Likewise, the first pattern, perhaps especially in its most extreme forms, might not be accompanied by the second, i.e. the most virulent racists are probably less prone to take whiteness for granted or momentarily forget the existence of non-whites.

Re-Visioning Race

An ideal society would be one where race didn’t matter. To go further, given human race’s existence as a social construction – and a social construction whose origin is tightly linked to extreme social inequality, an ideal society would be a raceless society.

One obstacle to a raceless society is perception, specifically vision, and the real physicality of signs of race, which through their physicality come to seem “natural” signs and make race seem much more natural than it really is.

I’ve often heard it expressed (given my particular job as a university instructor, I personally happen to hear it most often from students in class discussions, but it’s a common enough sentiment) that when looking at someone, one can’t not see race. What I think they mean is that one can’t not see a person’s phenotypic characteristics, including the features such as skin tone and facial characteristics that function as “natural” signs of race. Certainly the nature of vision is such that one can’t not see the physical features of someone gazed at, but taking this to mean that one inherently must see race misses three important things.

1. Confusing phenotypic characteristics with race serves to naturalize race. There is real and important phenotypic and genotypic variation within the human species. Tying perception of phenotype conceptually with race tends to cover over the fact that the phenotypic signs of race (as socially constructed category) don’t actually match up very neatly with important genetic variation in the human species. For example, in the U.S., people with ancestry from anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, who overall do tend to share a literally superficial commonality of dark skin color (though with actually a great degree of variation in specific skin color – see my next point), are lumped together as “black,” despite the fact of incredible genetic diversity within the continent – arguably greater than among all other world populations – there’s really no congruence at all between the social category and the biological reality.

2. Seeing race when seeing certain phenotypic traits tends to blind many to other phenotypic traits. This can be especially the case for characteristics that don’t serve as signs of race, but the focus on race also tends to occlude the actual diversity with regard to those traits that most clearly mark race, e.g. the actual reality of tremendous diversity of skin color, both within and across race categories. Although not typical, some “white” people have darker skin than some “black” people, and Sub-Saharan African populations actually represent quite a range of skin colors, from light brown to almost literally black, though many simply see them all as simply “dark” or “black.”

3. The fact that phenotypic variation can signify social race doesn’t mean that it must. Historical documentation from pre-modern Europe and even early North America indicate Europeans and Euro-Americans seeing phenotypic variation, but not conceptualizing it in terms of modern race categories. Even when phenotypic variation does signify race, it doesn’t do so in any single, “natural” way. For example, many people who are “obviously” black in the U.S. would be just as “obviously” not black in Brazil.

For anyone socialized in the U.S., I’m skeptical that it’s possible to truly not see race when perceiving someone’s phenotypic traits. I’m skeptical that anyone could be truly “colorblind,” and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims to be.

There are, though, things that one can do in relation to one’s own vision and conceptions.

One can resist race thinking – one can resist seeing another as merely or primarily an embodiment of a general type. One can resist seeing others as white women, black men, Latino boys, Asian girls, and try to think of others as women, men, girls, boys who happen to be Latino, Native American, Asian, black, or white and who also have lots of other characteristics and other social factors influencing their individual identities.

One can see race less by making an active effort to see more. The human species is characterized by a wide array of phenotypic variation – something I see as part of the beauty of the human species – much of which is missed with a narrow focus on a few traits that mark race.

It is also possible to overstep in an effort to be “colorblind,” for example with well-intentioned statements such as, “I don’t see you as a black (or Latino, Native American, Asian, maybe even white) person, but just as a person.” An ideal society would be one where race didn’t matter, but we don’t live in that society. Race, as a social category, does matter, and it has shaped (though never determined) people’s lives. To act as if race doesn’t matter at all (distinct from acting as if race should not matter at all) is really to deny a very real part of people’s actual social experiences.

A Review of Recent News on the Web

Globalization, Protectionism, and the Global Poor

In an insightful article in Prospect Magazine, “Protecting the Global Poor,” Ha-Joon Chang argues that developed countries’ push toward global free trade may increase total economic development, but without necessarily doing a lot to alleviate poverty in developing countries. Chang gives a useful overview of the past few centuries’ economic history and the role of protectionism in the economic development of almost all of the currently developed countries’ histories. For anyone who’s read much economic history or world systems theory, this will be review, but a concise and nicely written review.

Importantly, Chang is not against globalization and increased trading among all countries. He recognizes that trade is critical for economic development and that economic development is necessary, if not sufficient, for the alleviation of poverty. It’s just that Chang also recognizes that unfettered free trade tends to disproportionately benefit more developed and wealthier nations. It’s no coincidence that the British were protectionists when the Dutch were the dominant mercantile power and became free-traders after becoming the dominant economic power themselves.

Chang also usefully points out a rhetorical strategy often employed by free-trade advocates, which is to conflate opposition to free trade in some form or another with opposition to trade generally. Chang writes:

“But there is a huge difference between saying that trade is essential for economic development and saying that free trade is best. It is this sleight of hand that free-trade economists have so effectively deployed against their opponents—if you are against free trade, they imply, you must be against trade itself, and so against economic progress.”

Mexican Cuisine

I’ve recently encountered two interesting articles on Mexican food. The first, “Mexico’s long chilli (sic) love affair,” reports on recent archaeological findings of systematic use of chiles in Mexican cooking at least 1500 years ago. As the article points out, the cultivation of chiles implies a well developed tradition of seasoning and cookery. (There is some research indicating possible antiseptic qualities to chiles, but as food, chiles are grown more as seasoning than for caloric sustenance.) The finding of use of both dried and fresh chiles indicates familiarity with the distinct quality of chiles in different preparations, and to me implies even longer familiarity and use of chiles than is directly indicated by the archaeological evidence.

The second article, “A Crash Course in Mexico’s Varied Cuisine,” simply presents a savory overview of “Mexico’s varied cuisine.” For those only passingly familiar with Mexican food, much less its regional diversity, there will probably be several surprises. For those who are familiar with Mexico’s regional cuisines, there probably won’t be any surprises – but if you’re thoroughly familiar with the range of regional cuisine diversity in Mexico or anywhere else, you probably like reading about food like I do.

Burying the N-Word

A week or so ago, the NAACP held a mock funeral to bury the “N-word.” In my local newspaper, The Pensacola News Journal, columnist Reginald Dogan presented his response to this event in “NAACP campaign to ‘bury’ N-word overlooks the bigger picture.”

Dogan writes:

“I wasn't as troubled by the mock funeral to bury a word as I was by NAACP officials saying ending the use of the N-word is one of their main goals.

“I cannot believe that of the myriad problems facing black people in America, the NAACP sees the N-word as the root of all troubles.”

See also Dogan’s follow-up column, “Racism is not the cause of all ills that plague black people.”

Florida and Climate Change

Also about a week ago, Florida’s governor made surprising announcements regarding plans for the state on energy and carbon emissions. An article in Grist magazine summarizes the announcement:

“His plans include adopting California's strict vehicle-emissions law, making Florida the first Southeast state to go that route; calling for a 40 percent reduction in statewide greenhouse-gas emissions by 2025; and requiring state agencies to prioritize fuel efficiency when buying or renting vehicles and to hold events in facilities certified as green by the state Department of Environmental Protection. Crist is also asking state utilities to produce 20 percent of their power from renewables, and creating a Florida Governor's Action Team on Energy and Climate Change.”

Optimal Foraging

An article on Science Daily, “Monkeys don’t go for easy pickings,” has the following to say:

“Animals’ natural foraging decisions give an insight into their cognitive abilities, and primates do not automatically choose the easy option. Instead, they appear to decide where to feed based on the quality of the resources available and the effect on their social group, rather than simply selecting the nearest food available.”

In other words, monkeys at least do not simply always forage the closest resources, but also forage partly on the basis of nutritional quality of food resources. That alone is easily understood in terms of something like optimal foraging theory. What I find particularly interesting is that monkeys seem to take into account non-nutritional qualities of food resources, specifically potential social effects (presumably things like the different effects likely to result from foraging fruits that are large but less common versus smaller but more common and dispersed), when selecting foraging strategies. This could also be understood in terms of optimal foraging – it’s just that what’s “optimal” becomes a bit more complex to include factors in addition to use of physical space and nutritional qualities of foods.

Southern Culture, Part III

In the U.S. Southeast, it’s not particularly uncommon to encounter cars and pick-ups with various Confederate Flag bumper stickers or other adornments. One fairly common sticker has a Confederate flag and the phrase, “Heritage, Not Hate.”

When white southerners make such claims about the Confederate flag or other symbols of the Confederacy, that that flag today represents simple pride in “Southern Culture” – and where “Southern Culture” represents a subset of southern cultural traits (in terms of Sapir’s discussion of a third sense of “culture” – see my previous post), things like hospitality, pride in family and region, southern food, a laid back approach to life, etc. – and that it doesn’t represent to them the southern past of slavery and Jim Crow, some are simply being disingenuous. After all, it was largely in response to the civil rights movement that displays of the Confederate flag, including its adoption as part of some state flags, became prominent beginning in the 1960s. (Some don’t bother being disingenuous. I once encountered another bumper sticker featuring a Confederate flag that read, “If I had known, I would have picked my own cotton.” At a roadside stand selling flags, I recently saw for sale a Confederate flag with superimposed German Iron Cross. I’m pretty sure anyone who’d fly that flag fully intends to invoke racism.)

Still, many are sincere in that sentiment. It’s not that they’re unaware necessarily of the South’s sordid race history, so much as they find it easy or convenient to elide it, or they don’t see it as an essential component of “Southern Culture” which for them the Confederate flag stands for, or they don’t see the connection between the plantation past and the present, given the wholesale and real transformation of economic infrastructure and cultural ecology in much of the South.

Plantation agriculture and the attendant race system is not part of the way of life, not part of the “culture core” (see my previous post) for most southerners today (with a major exception being for many migrant laborers working in Florida citrus and plantation remnants elsewhere). For many southern whites, the plantation and all it entailed is simply a matter of the past. For many southern blacks, while the civil rights movement clearly improved the situation dramatically, the plantation past is not so easily elided – 250 years of slavery and another century of Jim Crow aren’t so easy to overlook, and while southern economic infrastructure and mode of production have been thoroughly transformed over the past half century, the economic inequalities associated with previous racism continue to have real and serious economic effects for many southern blacks – the past may be over, but the real effects of it are not yet past for quite a few southern blacks.

In my experience, there is actually quite a bit of commonality and agreement between southern whites and blacks when it comes to the positive valuation of much of the content of “Southern Culture.” Most all can agree about the worth of southern hospitality or about the delicious quality of southern food – food in particular seems a particularly “safe” and enjoyable topic for anyone to talk about (As Chris Rock put it, “Cornbread – ain’t nothing wrong with that”). It is more symbols associated with the Confederacy that generate controversy and about which there is a cleavage of interpretation that often follows racial lines. For many southern whites, the Confederate flag simply stands in for “Southern Culture” and pride in it. For that matter, for many “The Confederacy” has come to stand for nobility, virtue, manliness, and defiant self-reliance rather than the secession of states with slavery based economies. For many southern blacks, that same symbol stands not for “Southern Culture,” but for the Confederacy, which in turn is indelibly tied to lack of freedom or self-reliance and to racial tyranny.

Southern Culture, Part I

In the Southeastern United States, there is a cottage industry focused on Southern Culture Studies. This is partly an academic enterprise, with much attention to southern culture in history and humanities departments of southern colleges and universities, and with academic conferences and programs focused on southern culture generally, or southern foodways or folkways. There is also a popular component, with much regional interest in southern culture expressed in various festivals celebrating aspects of it or with tourist sites like Stone Mountain near Atlanta.

What is Southern Culture?

What’s usually meant by “Southern Culture” is a set of cultural elements seen as typical of or typifying (not quite the same thing) the South or part of it, rather than the total set of important elements characterizing life in the South in the fullest anthropological sense of “culture.” The sorts of elements most often emphasized are food, language, and a variety of dispositions or character traits.

Food

As I’ve written before, food is particularly meaningful to people (see “Sushi and Globalization”). Like music, the meaning of food is generally without linguistic content, but it nonetheless can carry significant emotional weight and is invested with identity. Food is vital to life, and the foods we grow up with can be associated with home, family, region, and one’s culture in a variety of ways. Interest in Southern food can be general, emphasizing foods common and thought to be quintessentially southern throughout the region (cornbread, collards, black eye peas, sweet tea, fried chicken, or just about anything else fried), or it can emphasize southern regional diversity in foodways (fried mullet in the Pensacola area of the Central Gulf Coast, tamale pie in central Mississippi, vinegar barbecue sauces in central and northern Georgia and other regional barbecue traditions, Cajun and creole cooking in Louisiana, etc.).

Language

Much academic analysis of southern culture focuses on language, especially the study of southern regional dialects and accents. Distinct dialects, and even more so accents, are also one of the most clear markers of southern culture to the lay public. (When I was a child, whenever we would visit relatives in upstate New York, northern relatives would always want my sister and I to "say something southern" or to say "y'all." I'd ask them in turn to say "yous guys.")

Disposition

To many, southern culture means “Southern hospitality,” friendly attitudes, and a laid-back approach to life. Some would also include notions of noble and chivalrous masculinity, gentility, or other dispositions and character traits.

All of these things are, to varying extents, part of southern culture. Much of this is worthy of celebration. (Personally, I’m wary of any sort of glorification of masculinity, and the glorification of an old-style white upper class of southern gentility turns my stomach. Southern food is wonderful – as occasional food – but I worry about the many southerners who eat large amounts of the salty, fatty fare.)

Symbols

“Southern culture” also evokes or brings to mind various symbols of the South. The most controversial of these is the Confederate flag, a.k.a. the Confederate Battle Flag or the Stars and Bars, but a variety of monuments, especially Civil War monuments, throughout the South are also often associated with “Southern Culture” and capable of generating controversy (see two earlier posts: "Race and Public Monuments in Pensacola, Florida" and "Sometimes a Statue is just a Statue.") (Interestingly, the many monuments throughout the region to Martin Luther King, Jr., a man of the South if there ever was one, seem to be much less associated with southern culture, and for clearer reasons much less controversial.)

These things, food, language, socially patterned dispositions, and symbols, are important (if not always clearly good), and they do define the South in certain ways, but as I indicated above, they are only one subset of the patterning of social life in the region. An anthropological perspective on cultural ecology, economy, and social interaction indicates other important features (of at least cultural historical importance) of the South as well.

Cultural Ecology and Economy

In terms of cultural ecology and economy, plantation agriculture dominated and in part (if never wholly) defined the region both before and for a long time after the American Civil War. This was particularly the case through the “cotton belt” stretching across South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, part of Louisiana, and into East Texas, where after Indian removal and after Eli Whitney’s cotton gin made large scale cotton production feasible, this region of the South was largely colonized by new plantations that transformed the social and natural landscape. Long after the abolition of slavery, this sub-region of the south had both the largest black populations and more of the worst abuses of racism.

Race

The South has also been characterized by a contradictory system of racial classification and interaction, emphasizing both racial intermixture and absolute distinction and division.

Many anthropological and sociological analyses of race have emphasized that in North America, racial classification (at least with regard to black and whites) is characterized by hypodescent, sometimes called the “One Drop Rule,” whereby anyone with any known ancestry in one category (in this case “black” – the category historically constructed as inferior in racist logic) is classified as belonging to that category – even if they majority of their ancestry were from the other category. This is in contrast to racial classification systems in other parts of the Americas, e.g. the Caribbean, where race is not thought of in so starkly binary terms, where there is a gradation of categories in between black and white or African and European ends of a continuum.

What has been less noted is that throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th century, much of the South had a hybrid system which combined the recognition of racial intermixture as with Caribbean race classification and the recognition of absolute and stark division as with North American hypodescent generally. For example, in addition to the categories “black” and “white,” some were categorized as “quadroons” or “octoroons.” Such classifications indicated both racial (and sexual) intermixture, but also emphasized a clear divide. An octoroon was 7/8 white, but it was the 1/8 black ancestry that named the category and marked it as a subset of “black.”

In practice, southern racism has also often had a distinctive intimate quality to it. An older relative of mine who was dear to my heart as I grew up had a very close friend who was a black woman, but at the same time, this relative was in many ways quite racist, having no qualms with making racist generalizations and occasionally using flagrantly racist language. She was typical in this regard. As I grew up in the South, I heard many white racists defend their racism through a lens of intimacy – “We know they’re inferior, because we know them so well,” (usually phrased in contrast to those “damn Yankees” who didn’t know any better). The pattern of interracial friendship with specific individuals alongside a feeling of stark separation between general categories, or even explicit racism, has also been typical in the South.

Race and Class

Historically, race has been intertwined with class in complex ways in the South (as is true most anywhere in the Americas). In the South, there was historically an underclass of poor whites (mostly poor white farmers until well into the 20th century) who saw themselves as having at least a limited stake in the racial system. (This hadn’t always been the case – a number of excellent analyses have spoken of solidarity across race lines by subaltern whites and blacks in the early colonial south, but by the 19th century at least, white racial solidarity could often trump the class antagonism between poor and wealthy whites.) This stake in the racial system was partly about identity, about being part of a superior racial group even if poor, but it was also partly about economics. Slavery and later Jim Crow laws, by prohibiting free action, including economic action, of blacks, shored up the economic positions, even if they were still weak, of poor and working class southern whites.

Many southern whites would understandably like to forget about things like the long history of plantations as ecological and social systems in the South, and the dynamics of race, racism, class, and Jim Crow, and to simply move on. For many southern blacks (for whom such things are not ancient history, but things they experienced, or at least things experienced by their parents and/or grandparents), these are also part of southern culture (not in place of southern food, dialects, or laid-back attitudes, but alongside those things), and for many, who also want to “move on,” moving on entails remembering this less positive side of southern culture and history and dealing with the lasting material legacy of it.

A Round-Up of Recent News and Blog Posts of Interest

Reforestation

Deforestation has been a major concern around the world in recent decades, related as it is to degradation of species habitat (including the human habitats of many indigenous peoples), desertification in some regions, and global warming.

In at article in the Latin American Post, “Many nations’ forests regrow,” Elisabeth Rosenthal points out that there has recently been significant reforestation in many countries around the world.

This is most clearly the case in the global North, where in some places, such as Eastern North America, this trend has been ongoing for several decades now. As I discussed in “Birds and Human Culture,” changes in agricultural practices over the 20th century led to a decrease in use of land for agriculture in parts of North America (and Europe, too – though I was focusing on North America in the earlier piece), even alongside the intensification of industrial agriculture, a change that has been beneficial to some bird species, such as wild turkeys, even while many bird populations are plummeting.

Reforestation is no panacea for global ecological problems. Still, forests can act as carbon sinks, sucking up some carbon dioxide, and reforestation does help some animal and plant species, even if many don’t thrive in the sorts of small, patchy forests that are typical of this reforesting trend. Overall, this is a positive development, even if not a panacea.

Unfortunately (and a point mentioned but not well developed in the article), this reforestation trend does not include the tropical forests of Brazil and Indonesia, forests that are of particular importance in terms of biodiversity.

Health Insurance and Medical Homes

My first reaction to an article on Science Daily titled, “When Minority Patients Have Insurance And A Medical Home, Their Health Care Improves,” was a sarcastic, “Really? What a Shock!”

On actually reading the article, what became clear, though was the emphasis placed by researchers Anne Beal and others at the Commonwealth Fund on both insurance coverage and the notion of a medical home. There’s currently much debate in the U.S. about the 40+ million medically uninsured individuals. For them, dependable and ready access to quality care depends on access to insurance, but the study reported on in the article makes clear that insurance alone is a necessary, but insufficient condition for quality health care in the U.S.

The following is a quotation from the article:


"Insurance coverage helps people gain access to health care, but the next thing you have to ask is 'access to what?'" says lead co-author Anne Beal, M.D., senior program officer at the Commonwealth Fund. "We found many disparities in care; however, disparities are not immutable. This survey shows if you can provide both insurance and access to a true medical home, racial and ethnic differences in getting needed medical care are often eliminated," she adds.

“According to the report, patients have a medical home when they:
- Have a regular provider or place of care
- Report no difficulty contacting a provider by phone
- Report no difficulty getting advice or medical care when needed on weekends or evenings
- Always or often find office visits well-organized and efficiently run”


I’m one of those Americans fortunate enough to have decent medical insurance through my job, but I’d warrant I’m like a lot of insured Americans, much less uninsured Americans, who can’t honestly claim to have a medical home in the full sense proposed by these researchers.

Terry Eagleton on Bakhtin

Via Arts and Letters Daily, I encountered Terry Eagleton’s essay “I contain multitudes” about Bakhtin in The London Review of Books. I found the following paragraph particularly fascinating:

“Bakhtin’s central concept of dialogism does not mean bending a courteous ear to others, as some of his more liberal commentators seem to imagine. It means that every word or utterance is refracted through a host of other, perhaps antagonistic idioms, through which alone its meaning can be grasped. It thus bears an affinity with the post-structuralist concept of textuality. There can be no unmediated truth. We come to ourselves, as many modern thinkers have claimed, through a medium which is profoundly strange to us. Language for Bakhtin is a cockpit of warring forces, as each utterance finds itself occupied from within by alien significations. Every sign glances sideways at other signs, bears the traces of them within its body, and faces simultaneously towards speaker, object, context and addressee. Like human subjects, words are constituted by their relations to otherness, and language is always porous, hybrid and open-ended. There was never a first word, and there could never be a last one. The inherent unfinishedness and unpredictability of language – the fact that I can never deduce from any two of your words what the third one is going to be – is a token of human freedom, and thus in a broad sense political. Signs are never self-identical, and always mean more than they say (a surplus that includes what they don’t say). The enemy is what Bakhtin dubs ‘monologism’, meaning the kind of meta-language which seeks to subdue this irrepressible heterogeneity. At times in his work, it is a polite word for Stalinism. Language is torn between ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ forces – the former decentring, the latter centralising. National languages aspire to be monological but are in fact thoroughly ‘heteroglossic’, spawning a multiplicity of dialects and speech styles.”

Ancient Agriculture in Peru

Most anthropologists and others interested in anthropological news are no doubt aware of the recent findings of squash and other crops from Peru dating back possibly as long ago as 10,000 years. I first read of this finding in this article by Randolph E. Schmid on Yahoo News – Anthropology in the News has a good set of links to others news accounts of the findings.

If these findings hold up, this is significant for pushing back by a few thousand years the earliest known dates for plant cultivation in the Americas.

On reading this account, as well as other recent news stories of early art or trade, I thought of a short, provocative book (sometimes insightful, sometimes irritating), Nomadology: The War Machine by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. At one point, Deleuze and Guattari make what is a ludicrous claim if we are to take it literally, that the state is primeval, having always been a part of human experience. What they meant, or at least what I think they meant (and what might be an interesting point even if it’s not what they meant – it’s one of those books) is that the impulse to order and the contrary impulse to freedom have always been with humans, discussed by Deleuze and Guattari using “the state” and “the nomad” as tropes.

While the state in any literal sense has not been around ever since humans have been, and while I’d be shocked if new evidence was found pushing back the beginnings of the state to 10,000 years ago, it is fascinating to me how many things that it had seemed clear even just a few years ago were relatively recent in human history have now been found by recent archaeological study to be far older than we thought.

Savages

In a recent post, “On Images of Savages, Part 3” at Nicolette Bethel’s Blog, Bethel continues a series of posts on racism, in particular the discourse on “savages” that developed alongside European Enlightenment thought. For the discipline of anthropology, this is a topic close to home, for the discipline grew partly out of this attempt to catalogue the cultural and biological traits of the world’s savages, barbarians, and civilized peoples. Bethel’s latest discussion is insightful in laying out and discussing some of the specific characteristics that have often been linked with “savagery” in whichever particular guise and context it has arisen.

A Review of Recent News and Views from the Web

Race and How Americans Talk About Race

In several recent posts, I’ve discussed race and discourse about race (See “Talking about Race,” and “Racism and Free Speech,” Parts I, II, and III).

An article in Medical News Today, “Americans couch feelings about race in happy talk of diversity speak,” points out some interesting things about how Americans tend to talk about race. Americans in general tend to value diversity, even if when pressed, they often have difficulty describing or defining what they mean by it.

At the same time, “The study found a majority of Americans -- cutting across race, class and gender lines -- value diversity, but their upbeat responses to the term contradict tensions between individual values and fears that cultural disunity could threaten the stability of American society. Also regardless of race, Americans' definition of diversity places white people at the neutral center and all other groups of people as outside contributors.”

Another article in Medical News Today discussed the role of income and race segregation of schools in shaping children’s reading abilities. The article says, "Children in families with low incomes, who attend schools where the minority population exceeds 75 percent of the student enrollment, under-perform in reading, even after accounting for the quality of the literacy instruction, literary experiences at home, gender, race and other variables, according to a new study.”

A quotation from another section of the article: “‘Good instruction is essential, but it's not enough,’ said Kirsten Kainz, an investigator at FPG, senior research associate in the School of Education and author of the study. ‘Most current reading instruction initiatives and policies are aimed at improving classroom instruction,’ Kainz said. ‘This research shows that characteristics of the child, the home, the classroom and the school influence reading development, and that maximally effective reading policy should address all four systems simultaneously.’ The researchers found that one key factor having to do with the classroom context was the percentage of students reading below grade level. Regardless of the quality of other aspects of the educational situation, having a large percentage of children who read below grade level in the class, a situation common in low income and/or minority-majority classrooms, hinders the development of reading ability for children in the class generally.

Death and Politics

In an article on First Things: The Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life, Joseph Bottum has an interesting article on “Death and Politics.” His main propositions are:

“(1) The losses human beings suffer are the deepest reason for culture, (2) The fundamental pattern for any community is a congregation at a funeral, (3) A healthy society requires a lively sense of the reality and continuing presence of the dead.”

In this interesting article, he argues persuasively that death and loss have profoundly shaped the development of human culture, including through things like the development of inheritance customs and laws.

I’d like to acknowledge the website Arts and Letters Daily. It was on that site, which is essentially a clearinghouse of links to articles in the humanities, that I encountered a link to this article.

Farm Subsidies

Two recent online articles discuss the issue of economic subsidies to American farmers.
Tom Philpott, in “The Hand that Feeds: Don’t Blame Farmers for the Farm-Subsidy Mess” on Grist magazine, argues that while many farmers don’t actually benefit much from the U.S. government’s large farm subsidies – instead it is the agribusiness giants like Monsanto or ConAgra that provide seeds, fertilizers and other farming supplies, as well as the distributors of agricultural produce, that have reaped huge profits piggy-backing on the subsidies – farming is worthy of some public support, even if the current subsidy program is a mess. One of Philpott’s main points is that, contrary to both free trade globalizers and anti-globalization sustainable ag types who see agriculture as just another business that shouldn’t be subsidized any more than any other, agriculture is a different sort of enterprise because food is a different sort of commodity, because it’s not just desirable but absolutely essential.

Joyce Mulama’s article “U.S. Farm Subsidies Hurt Africa’s Progress,” on AllAfrica.com, lays out arguments against economic subsidies to U.S. farmers (by extension, the same arguments apply to European farmers). Subsidies to farming in the rich world allow that produce to be sold at artificially low prices, against which non-subsidized farmers in the developing world have difficulty competing. As Mulama’s article argues, this impedes economic development of agriculture in a variety of poor African countries, which in turn creates a further indirect impediment to economic development generally in poor countries as wealth that could potentially be created and reinvested in the country within a “fair trade” context is in fact not created in the first place.

Aboriginal Australia and Government Paternalism

There has been relatively extensive media coverage online concerning the Australian government’s move to ban alcohol and pornography sales in Australian aboriginal communities as part of an effort to stem sexual abuse of Australian aboriginal children. In part, the Australian government’s move is baffling to me. I don’t see the connection, how either the use of alcohol or pornography causes sexual abuse of children (and if it did, shouldn’t the appropriate measure be to ban their sale to anyone?) nor how the lack of alcohol or pornography would cure or otherwise stop someone with pedophilic urges. As any number of commentators, aboriginal or not, have pointed out, the whole thing smacks of racism – when Aborigines drink or view pornography, they abuse children. There are two good commentaries on the situation on the Australian group blog Culture Matters: “A new paternalism for Aboriginal Australia” and “Media Coverage of the Government Intervention ‘to protect indigenous children.’”

Racism and Free Speech: Part III

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s online Intelligence Report has a recent article on the topic of academic freedom and racism in the college classroom. The article can be found at this link: http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=754

Academic freedom is critical for the advancement of knowledge and understanding. Scholars in the sciences, humanities, and arts have to know that their research, writing, and teaching pursuits will not be infringed because of political expediency, corporate interest, or the whim of public opinion.

There are limits to academic freedom. Many academic disciplines and programs have curriculum elements that are prescribed. For example, when I teach a course like “Introduction to Anthropology,” there are certain topics that I am expected to teach. Technically, this abridges my free action in that I have to teach these topics. This is not a bad thing, and my freedom to pursue my research and writing is not infringed upon. Nor for that matter is my freedom to have a perspective on the topics I teach in that course abridged – and I have any number of ways available to go about teaching about human evolution, language, human culture, etc.

Another limit to academic freedom in the classroom has to do with truth, or more precisely with untruth. There is a reasonable expectation on the part of students and the public (including other faculty) that a teaching professor is knowledgeable about the topic they are teaching and that they present the facts of the topic in an accurate manner.

Ideally, people should be knowledgeable about matters that they hold forth about. As the B-52s song “Mesopotamia” says, “Before I speak, I should read a book.” Still, in general people should be free to express whatever the like, even the nonsensical or offensive. And when people say offensive things, others should freely express their offense. As I wrote in my previous post, for example, I’m against both Holocaust Denial and Holocaust Denial laws.

The classroom is different though. Again, there’s a reasonable assumption that what a professor says is accurate and based on expertise. When a professor presents information which is manifestly untrue as if it were true, they’re not just expressing themselves. They’re actively causing harm to the education of their students. In that context, it’s entirely reasonable to restrict things like Holocaust Denial or the presentation of other racist untruth as established fact.

At the same time, I’m wary of formulating restrictions on academic freedom in general. There are too many people who’d like to influence academics’ freedom under the guise of protecting “truth” or “balance” or “academic freedom.” One example: a couple years ago, in the Florida state legislature a bill was introduced (thankfully, it didn’t pass) that would have required balance in the teaching of human origins, the clear and fairly explicit goal of which was to force professors to teach creationism alongside evolution in the guise of protecting students’ academic freedom and scientific debate about truth.

Racism and Free Speech: Part II

Holocaust Denial and Holocaust Denial Laws

Denying or minimizing the significance of the Holocaust is one contemporary form of Anti-Semitic speech, often coupled with other Anti-Semitic expression. (See the following link for an overview of Holocaust Denial:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/denial.html )

A number of countries, mostly in Europe (and also Israel), have laws against denying the Holocaust. (See the following article on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_denial#Laws_against_Holocaust_denial.

As with all content on Wikipedia, use caution, but this article seems to have good content [at least at the time I wrote this].)

The Wikipedia article points out that most countries with Holocaust Denial laws also have other laws slightly abridging free speech by banning speech that incites racial hatred or intolerance. A number of other countries, including Canada and the UK, have such laws banning incitement of racial hatred and sometimes use such laws to prosecute Holocaust Denial, without having specific Holocaust Denial laws.

The article has this to say about countries with Holocaust Denial laws:

“In the words of D. Guttenplan, this is a split between the "common law countries of the US, England and Wales, and former British colonies from the civil law countries of continental Europe and Scotland. In civil law countries the law is generally more proscriptive. Also under the civil law regime the judge acts more as an inquisitor, gathering and presenting evidence as well as interpreting it"[64]

This is an interesting argument, and an accurate one with regard specifically to Holocaust Denial laws, but given laws banning incitement of racial hatred in places like Canada and the UK, there seem to be at least two contrasts at play – one between common and civil law countries, and another between some common law countries (e.g. England or Canada) and others (e.g. the United States). (There is another contrast as well, also pointed out in the article – many of the countries with Holocaust Denial laws have some direct tie to the Holocaust, e.g. Israel, Germany, Austria.)

The law systems of all western nations embody a valuation of freedom, but we see in the reactions to Denial of the Holocaust somewhat different emphases on Enlightenment values stemming from the different strains of Enlightenment thought. It seems to me that the French and other continental traditions, while highly valuing liberty or freedom, have more emphasized the other two components of the revolutionary triad of liberty, equality, fraternity (hence the banning of Muslim head scarves in some public contexts). The English-speaking Enlightenment traditions have emphasized individual liberty to a somewhat greater extent, with this markedly so in the U.S. (where equality has often gotten short shrift, and fraternity never had the sort of resonance it did in France), stemming probably from the experiments with partially democratic self-government in the North American colonies, the American revolutionary experience, and the specifically American variety of Enlightenment thinking (embodied by writers like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, thoroughly grounded in the English-speaking tradition [especially influenced by John Locke], but nonetheless distinct).

Against Holocaust Denial and Holocaust Denial Laws

I’m obviously against Holocaust Denial. It’s one of the most repellent and repugnant forms of contemporary racist thought and expression.

I’m also against Holocaust Denial laws, though, or any other laws that make any political or social commentary illegal. As offensive and contrary to fact as Holocaust Denial might be, the speech act alone doesn’t significantly harm anyone nor infringe on others’ freedoms. (If Holocaust Denial is used in conjunction with or as a form of threat or harassment – that’s different, but it’s the threat or harassment, and not the offensive content, that would make such instances acts that I don’t think should be protected or allowed.)

I sympathize with the supporters of Holocaust Denial laws (especially in countries like Germany and Austria where there is a clear relationship between the nation-state and the Holocaust). I just think that restrictions on speech are not a good strategy (pragmatically or in terms of protecting free action) for combating Holocaust Denial and Anti-Semitism.

I’m aware also that my own simultaneous opposition to Holocaust Denial and Holocaust Denial laws is probably largely the result of the grounding of my own thinking in North American traditions of thinking about politics and culture. (Though such an awareness really says little about the merits of any arguments I might make; it’s simply a contextualization – and likewise with recognition that Holocaust Denial laws themselves are grounded in other varieties of Enlightenment thought.)

Why is Freedom of Expression Important even for Racist Speech?

As I argued in my previous post, freedom of expression should not be abridged lightly. Denying the Holocaust is seriously offensive and repulsive to most people. I don’t think this is sufficient to make illegal such denials. (I understand why others disagree, and even sympathize.) Protecting freedom of expression seems to me more important than protection from offense.

There are pragmatic reasons too to maintain freedom of speech even in the face of high offense. (Again, when speech also constitutes slander, direct harm, assault, or harassment, this changes things.)

Restrictions on speech drive those with offensive ideas completely out of the mainstream and contribute to the sense of persecution and martyrdom common among the racist fringe. On the other hand, allowing the free expression of even offensive ideas allows for engagement. Truly hardcore bigots are typically not open to reasoning, but more run of the mill racists, or the person who might be prone to occasional racist thinking (perhaps without even realizing it) might be. In open discussion, most can clearly see how counter-factual the sort of conspiracy theorizing typical of racist thinking is. But for engagement to happen, free speech has to be protected even at the risk of being highly offended.

Racism and Free Speech: Part I

In my previous post, I discussed briefly the recent controversy surrounding Don Imus and the issues it raises around racism and free speech. In that particular case, the issue actually seems more straightforward than many have made it out to be (Don Imus has a right to say whatever stupid thing he wants; his network has a right to control the speech they present; everyone else has the right to be offended or not at his comments and to say so), but in other instances, things are not so clear.

On the one hand, I find racism and racist speech, and other forms of hate speech, abhorrent. On the other hand, I strongly support the right to free speech. Freedom of speech is a critical component of any society that values freedom of action in general. For scholars, freedom of speech is any absolutely essential ingredient of any intellectual debate that is invigorating, interesting, or respectful of truth. Freedom of speech should only be abridged for good and serious reason.

Still, as is common to acknowledge, there are limits to free speech. To me, the right to free speech reaches a limit when speech causes significant harm to another or seriously infringes the free action of another. (I’m aware there’s a grey quality to this – what counts as “significant” or “serious” – but in actual social relations, I often find that room to interpret and maneuver are as important as principles. So, does calling member of the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed hos” constitute significant harm? It arguably caused harm – it has the character of a slander – but while the comment was offensive, racist, insulting, and I’m glad he’s off the air, in itself I’m not sure how the comment causes significant harm.) Serious slanders that harm another’s reputation and standing; speech which constitutes a threat (and so is as much an assault as the communication of topical content); speech which harasses and thereby infringes significantly on the actions of another; such speech acts should not be protected, but other speech which communicates content and ideas should be, no matter how heinous or repulsive.

I’d like in the next few posts to consider three sorts of cases involving racism and free speech issues – the dissemination of videos by racist hate groups on the YouTube site; “Holocaust Denial” laws; and academic freedom and racism in the classroom.

Racist Videos and YouTube

There is a tendency to think that the internet and other widely distributed communication technologies will bring greater freedom and democratization, and so they will to a certain extent. But that includes greater freedom for organizations like Al Qaeda to coordinate terrorist activities, to communicate propaganda and inspire others to terrorist acts, and to disseminate videos of beheadings.

In the United States, this has also meant greater ability for racists to distribute their ideas – any lone racist can put up a website or blog and reach thousands of readers. Organized hate groups have taken advantage as well of new media technologies. As a recent article in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s print and online magazine Intelligence Report points out, various Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups have already posted thousands of videos on the YouTube web site, some of which have been viewed by hundreds of thousands.

As the Intelligence Report article also points out, YouTube’s policy is to eliminate from the site explicitly racist or hate-mongering videos from the site when the site is made aware of them. Though I strongly support free speech rights, including of racists to make racist videos, I applaud YouTube’s policy. All decent people should reject racism, and to compel a private website to carry content its managers find offensive (or simply bad P.R. for the site) would be a violation of their right of free expression. At the same time, I’d be strongly opposed to any governmental restriction on the distribution of political thought, regardless of how offensive.

Talking About Race

Nicolette Bethel has an interesting recent blog post: “On Why Race Matters” (Nicolette Bethel’s Blog, May 24). I’d like to quote one passage in particular:

“It’s time, I believe, for us to open our mouths and start talking to one another. Until we examine the things that shape our race relations — like slavery, emancipation, labour’s struggle, the fight for equality, and the massive influx of Haitian immigrants — we can never hope to build a united society. Although it’s no longer a matter of law or custom, there are still churches and clubs and parks and professions and schools that are avoided by whites or blacks. There is still very little opportunity for mingling, for getting to know the people beneath the skin. And we have to say so.”

Bethel’s words refer specifically to the Bahamas, but with one minor tweak, they speak to the contemporary U.S. context as well. Except for South Florida, Haitian immigration is not a hot button issue in the U.S., though immigration in general clearly is.

I do think that the U.S. (and most every other nation-state in the Americas) needs more dialogue on race and more interaction across racial and ethnic lines. However, for those interested in a society based on equality and where race doesn’t matter, we also need to talk differently about race.

In his History of Sexuality series, one of Michel Foucault’s important arguments was against what he called the “repressive hypothesis,” proponents of which argue that to be sexually liberated, we need to talk more about sexuality in order to eliminate sexual repression. Foucault pointed out that in western culture people talk endlessly about sexuality, but in ways that pretend to not talk about it, or which express distaste (a good example would be the countless news editorials from about ten years ago which professed to be tired of speaking of the Monica Lewinsky – Bill Clinton scandal and then proceeded to discuss it at length), and ultimately in ways that subject some, such as women (though Foucault doesn’t acknowledge that so much) and homosexuals.

Foucault’s point was that there’s little reason to hope that simply talking more about sex and sexuality would liberate anyone – at least not unless the content of the discourse also changed. In the U.S. and elsewhere, we face an analogous situation with regard to race. In the U.S., we talk quite a bit about race, but mainly in ways that don’t transform the basic premises of people’s discourse.

Recently, there’s been endless high profile discussion in the U.S. about immigration, especially undocumented/illegal immigration, and about Don Imus’ racist comments about the Rutgers’ women’s college basketball team. Most of the conversation consists of continuous (and usually simplistic) rehashing of a few basic themes, though. Immigrants are a threat to the American way of life vs. immigrants make the American way of life possible. Don Imus’ comments were racist vs. Don Imus has an inalienable right to free speech.

More of the same sort of discourse won’t change much. How to talk about race differently, though? I don’t have a blueprint, but I do know that we need to discourse differently on race if we’re to move toward a society where race actually matters less. I do have a couple suggestions:

1. More of the mingling that Bethel seems to be looking for would help – so long as it’s done with an open mind, lest it actually be counter-productive.

2. We can each individually try to talk about race differently. Counter arguments to racist propositions are important and necessary, but so are arguments that change the shape of the debate altogether.

To take again the immigration and Imus examples, discourse which simply presents the goals, motivations, aspirations, and experiences of immigrants could help make the discussion less about “aliens,” and perhaps at least ratchet down support for the most hate filled anti-immigrant screeds.

As for the Imus affair, most debate has seemed to miss the point to me. I’d suggest instead an argument that takes something like the following form: Obviously Imus has an inalienable right to free speech, including to say stupid, offensive things. Just as obviously, the corporation he worked for, as a private entity, has the same right, including to not be associated any longer with his speech, and other citizens have the same right to express disgust and anger at him. Now, why would he want to say what he did? What does the whole affair say about him or anyone else?

Again, I don’t claim to have a blueprint for how to go about engaging in a different sort of discourse on race, one that works more to open up dialogue and understanding and less to subject people (in Foucault's sense of discourse and subjection). I do know that when our public debate takes the form of people yelling the same things back and forth, more of the same isn’t going to change anything.