Dana Goldstein

R.I.P. John Hope Franklin

The trailblazing African American historian John Hope Franklin has died at the age of 94. Chair of President Bill Clinton's Presidential Initiative on Race and a winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Franklin was best known for his research on the lives of free blacks living in the pre-Civil War South. I was lucky to meet Franklin four years ago and write a profile of him for my college paper. Here is an excerpt of that piece:

Another piece of accepted history Franklin questions is the notion that there are uniquely white and black "cultures" within the United States, as opposed to uniquely white and black experiences. Because Franklin maintains that Americans of different races have more in common than they realize, he is skeptical of attempts to tackle the issue of race in homogenous settings.

"I don't believe you can get anywhere doing it separately - you've got to have communication," he said.

Franklin continued, "I have a feeling that this difference in cultures is overdrawn, overblown sometimes. How different is my culture from yours? Well, there's food. Black food is Southern food. ... Or dress? What is dress? Most people wear clothes like I wear, like you wear, like we all wear. And when they're not wearing that, they're wearing a costume. An African dashiki is a costume in this country. Religion. What's religion? Blacks didn't have any Christianity - they got it from whites."

More controversially, Franklin argued that American blacks might be willing to give up some of their group cultural identity in exchange for complete tolerance. "Blacks have been lonely and have tried to create a culture," he said. "Kwanzaa - that was just created whole cloth. It's so contrived. ... There's more of a culture in common that blacks and whites have. Unless there's a deliberate effort to create a separate culture."

cross-posted at TAPPED

Re: Michelle Obama, Race, Gender, and the Sixties

If you've been following our recent discussion of Michelle Obama's image, you should check out Ta-Nehisi Coates' Atlantic profile of the woman he calls, simply, an "American girl." Yesterday I wrote that in her increasingly policy-driven role as first lady, Michelle has been distancing herself from the Jackie O image she seemed to cultivate during the general election, after she got into trouble for her "first time in my adult life" comment. But Coates, whose reporting dates back to the later part of the campaign season, has a different interpretation of Michelle. Early 1960s nostalgia is something she deeply feels, he writes, as it brings Michelle back to her stable, middle-class childhood on the segregated South Side of Chicago -- a place where, unlike the elite institutions in which she would spend her young adulthood, being both black and high achieving felt completely "normal." The first lady truly laments, Coates posits, "our collective fall from motherhood, Chevrolet, and a chicken in every pot." Michelle tells Coates:

My mom and maybe a few others were some of the few who were able to stay at home. A lot of my friends, they weren't called latchkey kids, they were just kids whose parents worked. ... We went to the public school right around the corner and we had lunch, and you could go home for lunch, and we had recess and there weren't closed campuses then. ... They'd bring their bag lunch, they'd sit on the kitchen floor and talk to my mom.

The power of this reminiscence from Michelle isn't just that it hearkens back, comfortingly, to a time of traditional gender roles and single-income prosperity. It is that memories like this one are treasured by just as many white baby boomers as black ones. Indeed, the Obamas are quite adept at using "family values" to cut across racial divides; think of Barack's focus on responsible fatherhood, for example, or Michelle's vow to have her daughters make their beds each day, as if the family didn't have a small army of servants at their disposal.

What's important to remember though, is that the reality of the Obamas' lives haven't always comported to their PR push around traditional family values. When the couple met, Michelle was Barack's boss. They delayed parenting until their mid-thirties. Michelle didn't stop working full-time until her husband's presidential campaign was underway. As much as Michelle treasures her own stay-at-home mom, you can't really understand this woman unless you realize she has never, herself, been a stay-at-home mom. At The Root, Dayo Olopade wonders whether Michelle is a "secret working girl." The truth is, there is no secret at all. Michelle has always worked. And she still is working, every single day.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Affirmative Action on the Ballot

Check on my latest Prospect piece, about how progressive organizers are responding to Ward Connerly's push to place anti-affirmative action initiatives on the ballot in five states come November 2008: Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. I scored several personal interviews with Connerly, the businessman and member of the California Board of Regents who championed California's Proposition 209 and later successfully repealed affirmative action in Washington state and Michigan.

After a string of failures on affirmative action, progressive organizers are trying to control the terms of the debate by challenging Connerly's "civil rights" rhetoric, which implies affirmative action is just as discriminatory as Jim Crow era segregation. Affirmative action defenders are also re-framing the policy as one that primarily benefits women of all races.

But Connerly, who is black, continues to shift the ground under the opposition's feet. He is now speaking frequently about his personal support for "socio-economic affirmative action," and reiterating his long-standing opposition to legacy admissions, which help mostly affluent, white students. "We're saying everywhere we go that there needs to be some kind of transition from racial to socio-economic affirmative action," Connerly told the Prospect. "We strongly support helping those who need it." 

Seeking to soften his appeal, Connerly’s rhetoric echoes that of some progressives who would like to re-focus affirmative action benefits on the poor, instead of on historically-discriminated against groups. Affirmative action defenders say they too support extra help for the poor, but maintain that without programs targeting race and gender, disparities will persist. In California, for example, African American, Latino, and Native American enrollment at UC-Berkeley and UCLA decreased by hundreds of students annually after voters approved Connerly's Proposition 209 in 1996.

Race and IQ

My knowledge of genetic science is limited, but for the sake of conversation, I'd like to point to a series of Slate columns by William Saletan that buy into the theory that black people, on the whole, are less intelligent than whites, who are in turn less intelligent than Asians. Saletan says he's been mostly convinced by race-matters IQ studies, no matter their small correlation values. He points to the smaller brain size of sub-Saharan Africans, and to studies showing that African children develop earlier and grow into more dexterous adults, while whites and Asians are late bloomers with bigger brains.

But after laying out an argument that confirms centuries of racist ideology, Saletan reassures his readers that yes, he's still an egalitarian! After all, many individuals within each race buck the IQ trends. Hey, there are lots of stupid white people! And there's always Barack Obama! (Saletan's example, not mine.) So, despite everything Saletan has just written, he chides readers who might assume it's now okay to judge people based on the color of their skin.

The argument is schizophrenic, not least because while IQ may be a good predictor of an individual's academic and career success, Saletan doesn't grapple fully with the fact that while we know both genetics and environment affect a person's IQ, there's little evidence that genetics are the more important factor. Indeed, as Saletan points out himself in an aside:

Hereditarians admit that by their own reading of the data, non-genetic factors account for 20 to 50 percent of IQ variation. They think malnutrition, disease, and educational deprivation account for a big portion of the 30-point IQ gap between whites and black Africans. They think alleviation of these factors in the U.S. has helped us halve the deficit. Trans-racial adoption studies validate this. Korean adoption studies suggest a malnutrition effect of perhaps 10 IQ points. And everyone agrees that the black-white IQ gap closed significantly during the 20th century, which can't have been due to genes.

Does discussion about possible links between race and intelligence belong in our public discourse? Only if we exercise great caution. Deciding to believe that historically discriminated against Americans are dumber than whites, and then patting yourself on the back for remaining a political "egalitarian?" That doesn't cut it. We should never talk about how American children of different races perform on IQ tests without noting the vast inequalities in access to health care, nutrition, early childhood education, safe schools, and good teachers that still exist -- not in some theoretical society, but right here in the United States. Black children are much more likely to have been born preterm, to be uninsured, and to live in extreme poverty. About two-thirds of black kids attend racially and economically isolated schools, and those who don't are much more likely to be as proficient in math and reading as their white peers, even when they come from poor families.

How can we possibly draw conclusions about race, genetics, and intelligence in America until we significantly close these environmental disparities? Until then, any claim that black Americans are genetically inferior to white Americans is counterintuitive guesswork at best, and nefarious at worst.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Whiteness at College Papers

I like Megan McCardle's caveat to my TAPPED post on the problematic, almost 100 percent whiteness of most college newspaper staffs. Jumping off from Justin Elliott's CampusProgress.org article about how some papers are combatting the trend, I suggested progressive donors do more to fund programs that alleviate the cost barriers (unpaid internships, low-paid entry level jobs, free labor at campus publications) to public interest journalism. Megan points out that minority students at elite universities are likely to be solidly middle-class, but that they come from backgrounds with less wealth:

But I do think that money probably plays a role: not income, but wealth. Minorities--and I think what everyone's really interested in is black and Latino reporters, even though Asians are just as woefully underrepresented in newsrooms--are much less wealthy than white Americans.

An upper middle class white kid who decides to become a journalist is consigning themselves to a lower standard of living than the one they grew up with; at one time I considered writing a book on downward mobility. But it's not the same decision that a kid whose parents are a janitor and a waitress makes. Even if their parents don't give them money, the upper-middle class kid know that if some financial disaster appears, their parents can step into alleviate it. Help with things like housing downpayments in expensive urban areas will be forthcoming. Eventually, a small inheritence will provide capital for needed projects. Meanwhile, an enhanced lifestyle is generally available through parental meals, vacation homes, theater tickets, and so forth.

A kid whose parents have no assets, on the other hand, is taking an enormous risk--or at least feels as if they are. And when they accept a low salary, they're really accepting a low salary, with all that it entails in terms of risk and lifestyle.

All true. I took over a one-third cut in pay to leave Campus Progress and come to my full-time writing gig at The American Prospect. So far I've been able to make ends meet because of my luck in living in an incredibly cheap group house and my most-of-the-time aversion to alcohol. But should I have to move, should my landlord decide to raise the rent, should I run into any kind of trouble -- I would have to rely on my parents to bail me out at my current salary. The reason I can take on this risk is because my parents have extra resources and believe in my ambitions. It's a privilege that makes my magazine journalism career possible.

Foster Sentence Commuted to Life in Prison

The Times reports:

The Texas pardons board, appointed by the governor, took the unusual action of voting 6 to 1 Wednesday to recommend commutation of Mr. Foster’s death sentence. The result was not released until Thursday morning and shortly afterward, Mr. Perry, a Republican, announced he had accepted the recommendation.

“After carefully considering the facts of this case, along with the recommendations from the Board of Pardons and Paroles, I believe the right and just decision is to commute Foster’s sentence from the death penalty to life imprisonment,” the governor said in a statement.

He said he was also concerned about the law that allowed Mr. Foster and the actual triggerman to be tried together and urged the Legislature to re-examine the issue.

It's really remarkable. In the United States, a man driving a getaway car can be tried simultaneously with an admitted murderer?

Rick Perry has an interesting record on the death penalty - a thorny part of any governor's job in Texas. He rejected an earlier pardon board recommendation not to execute a schizophrenic man, but has commuted sentences for juveniles. But meting out death is always and inevitably an inexact science.

I'm in New York and am going to spend some time with my family, but hopefully I'll be back later.

Tragedy Today in Texas

Many of you have probably already read the news that the State of Texas today plans to execute a black man who it knows did not commit murder. Kenneth Foster was driving the getaway car during a teenage robbery spree, and watched his companion kill a man 90 feet away from the car where he sat.  All the men involved -- including the killer -- have said murder was not a premeditated part of their evening. But as the Dallas Morning News writes, "Ours is the only state in the country to apply the 'law of parties' to capital cases, allowing accomplices to pay the ultimate penalty for a murder committed by another."

The only hope for Foster -- and the dignity of Texas -- is a reprieve from the state pardon/parole board and Governor Rick Perry. Stay tuned.

Whiteness and Women and Jews and Me

"Whiteness was a self-invisible norm that many of the women could not identify with; to identify as white in any concrete way seemed racist to most of them."

That quote is from the Guardian's obituary of Ruth Frankenberg, the Welsh-born sociologist whose work is a key building block of intersectional criticism, or analysis of the interplay between class, race, sexuality, and gender. She has died of lung cancer at the age of 49.

Frankenberg's groundbreaking 1993 book The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters, was based on a very small number of interviews (30) with American white women on how they perceived race in their own lives and the lives of others. What Frankenberg found is that many women professed to a "color-blind" mentality, claiming they felt they had no racial identity and did not ascribe racial identities or characteristics to others.

Now I'm going to tell a story about my mom, and I hope she doesn't mind. I may have forgotten the details because she shared this memory with me when I was about 10 years old. My mom grew up in the Bronx during the 1950s and 1960s in a very racially and ethnically diverse working and middle class neighborhood.  One day after school, she accidentally bumped into a group of black girls on the sidewalk. The girls responded angrily toward her with racially-tinged words. (I can't remember exactly what they did or said.) This shocked her, my mom remembered, not only because her bump hadn't been malicious, but also because she had always considered herself "color-blind," and was thus especially hurt by intimations that her behavior could be racially-motivated. The black girls, on the other hand, thought about color all the time.

One other anecdote: A former baby-boomer colleague of mine considers Jews "people of color." While I describe my ethnic identity as Jewish, I consider my race to be white. I think there's two reasons for this. First, I grew up in a town and attended a public school system that was about 50 percent white and 50 percent African American, Latino (including many new immigrants), and Asian. Race and class were very much linked in my hometown, so much so that when I arrived at Brown, while other white kids talked about their excitement to be in such a "diverse" atmosphere, the bigger change for me was unlearning my assumptions about the family structures and economic statuses of people of color.

For me as a kid, being upper middle class and Jewish was a subset of being a white person, in large part, I think, because of my school environment, which felt somewhat polarized between "white" and "non-white." To whatever extent my idea of myself as white was unformed or unarticulated in me before college, it crystallized at Brown. Freshman orientation featured readings and lectures about "unpacking your backpack" of all your privilege. But now that I revisit it, that idea of "unpacking" privilege is rather odd. Once you take your wealth, whiteness, able-bodiness, and the like outta there, what do you do with it? Do you put it on the table and discuss it? Do you try to leave it behind you and continue life as an identity-less person in the name of egalitarianism? Or do you pack it right back in there and try to use that privilege to do some good?

I know I've bitten off a lot here, but these are my thoughts after reacquainting myself with Frankenberg's work. I think that fundamentally, her theories are about that lifelong process of learning to "unpack."

The Geography of Conquest

Garance Franke-Ruta responds to my post on the United States' fetishization of Native American culture by remembering that in New Mexico where she grew up, it wasn't quite as much of a trend to name streets and mascots after Native tribes, perhaps because so many Native people still live in the Southwest.

This makes sense to me, and also confirms my unease with the kind of "Indians are neat" rhetoric I grew up around. It would be odd, for example, if all the Lubavitchers were deported from Brooklyn and then Williamsburg was renamed "Chasid Village." Don't you think?

Jews:Poland::Native Americans:USA?

In a New York Times article about the fetishization of Jewish holidays, music, and food in Poland -- a nation where 10 percent of the population was Jewish prior to the Holocaust but where now only 10,000 Jews live -- the founder of a Polish-Jewish magazine explains, "It’s like when you lose a limb. Poland is suffering from Jewish phantom pain.”

This idea of "phantom pain" or guilt reminds me of how the United States has appropriated a certain vision of Native American culture. We name our sports teams after tribes and turn Native people into face-painted mascots. We consecrate a holiday (Thanksgiving) that ignores most historical evidence to mythologize non-coercive friendship between European settlers and Native Americans. In the town where I grew up, where the local Sint Sinck tribe was deplaced by white settlers into the Connecticut River valley, a middle class neighborhood of Cape Cods is referred to as "Indian Village," with street names such as "Mohawk," "Ramapo," and "Mohegan."

It strikes me that in some ways, we're actually further behind many European nations in explicitly acknowleding our own continent's history of genocide.

--cross posted at TAPPED