The Race Is Not To The Swift

A few days ago I wrote "White supremacists have historically regarded everyone who isn't 'white' as 'black,' and the N-word has been flung at people of many backgrounds."  I was a bit vague because although I knew I'd seen it, I didn't have any examples to hand.

The next day I began reading Ruined City, a 1938 novel by Nevil Shute, who's best known nowadays for his 1957 post-nuclear war novel On the Beach.  Ruined City is about a successful English banker named David Warren whose life is derailed when he learns that his wife has been having an affair with an Arab prince.  Everyone refers to the prince as "black," including Warren, who in a fit of anger drops an N-bomb but then corrects himself.  "In that he was unjust, and he knew it; among the six or seven strains that went to make Prince Ali there was no negro blood."  That's actually funny - as if it wouldn't be unjust if Ali did have "negro blood" - but I don't think Shute meant it to be.

This terminology is, I believe, more common in British writing than in American, and it's why it's often difficult to tell which race/ethnicity a character is meant to be - for example, Othello - because the writers are sloppy and don't care.  The scientifically-minded Shute (he was an aeronautical engineer and several of his novels deal with flying machines) cared enough to be exact in his labeling, but that led to comedy, as it still does.  (Are "Hispanics" a "race"?  Are Sunni and Shi'a Muslims "ethnicities"?)  Most scientists in Shute's heyday held beliefs about race/ethnicity (and sex/gender) that are considered embarrassing today, but they are still with us in slightly different forms. 

Although many people, and I include scientists here, are desperate to preserve race as a valid category, I've yet to see any persuasive case made to do that.  I can't find the public-radio program that touted BiDil, a handsomely-funded drug for heart failure that claimed to be more effective for "patients who identify as black."  It was boosted even before the FDA approved it in 2005, but it bombed, for several reasons. One, it was overpriced, and since it was just a combination of already existing generics, insurance companies substituted the generics.  Two, "in every study, however, the amount of variation within each racial group was far larger than the differences between the between the groups ... As a result, 80 to 95 percent of all black and white patients will likely have indistinguishable responses to each medication.  Although racial differences might exist, they are irrelevant for the majority of patients" (167).  "Whatever the causes of its failure, NitroMed laid off most of its workforce and stopped marketing BiDil in January 2008 [165]."

Despite this, BiDil continues to be touted as a road not taken, if only in principle; GoodRx, the drug discount site, still recommended it as late as 2023.  "Some Doctors Want to Change How Race Is Used in Medicine," this NPR podcast reported in 2022, surprised that some doctors don't want to change, because they believe that there are black kidneys and white kidneys.  It's tempting, and comfortable for many people, to see racism as a problem only among ignorant hillbillies, but that notion doesn't stand up to scrutiny.  Many highly-educated people, not all of them white, won't give up their belief in racial difference until you pry it from their cold, dead hands; and even then, a new generation takes it up.

I don't object to treating "race" as a scientific category because of "political correctness," or even from scientific correctness, though it has been debunked enough times that if you believe in Science you shouldn't rely on it.  What I want to know is how it's a useful category, and by "useful" I don't mean "useful for making a billion dollars by repackaging existing generics."  I mean something like what bearing it has on any issue of scientific significance.  (See the quotations from Noam Chomsky in this post.)  What I've seen so far is a complacent assumption that it must be significant somehow, even if no one has any idea what or how.

* David Jones, "The Prospects of Personalized Medicine," in Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense, ed. Sheldon Krimsky & Jeremy Gruber (Harvard, 2013), p. 163.  Future page numbers refer to this article. 

Barack Is Back!

It appears that the only Barack we've got launched a tirade against a room of big Democratic donors the other day.

“I think it’s going to require a little bit less navel-gazing and a little less whining and being in fetal positions. And it’s going to require Democrats to just toughen up,” Obama said at the fundraiser, according to excerpts of his remarks exclusively obtained by CNN.

“You know, don’t tell me you’re a Democrat, but you’re kind of disappointed right now, so you’re not doing anything. No, now is exactly the time that you get in there and do something,” he said. “Don’t say that you care deeply about free speech and then you’re quiet. No, you stand up for free speech when it’s hard. When somebody says something that you don’t like, but you still say, ‘You know what, that person has the right to speak.’ … What’s needed now is courage.”

And more.  In a way these remarks are unexceptionable, but that's just it: they're platitudes.  If you imagine them being delivered in Obama's grating scold's voice, they become more annoying, especially when you remember that the speaker collaborated with the most far-right elements of the GOP in the apparent hope that they would be nice and work with him.  He let Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy continue before the Republicans asked for them (he later admitted it was a mistake, but so what?).  He appointed a commission of deficit hawks in hopes they'd demand cuts in Social Security, and when they didn't he accepted the demand anyway (though again, he wasn't able to do it).  He fired at least two staffers when right-wing attack media lied about them.  Having kneecapped potential opposition in advance, he scolded activists who criticized his right-wing, anti-immigrant, antigay policies publicly.  

And speaking of whining:

WHAT SOME WOULD HAVE PREFERRED: “Now, I know there are some who would have preferred a protracted political fight, even if it had meant higher taxes for all Americans, even if it had meant an end to unemployment insurance for those who are desperately looking for work.” The assumption here is that he would have lost the fight. It’s pretty much always Obama’s working assumption that he will lose any fight. And then, funnily enough, he does. 

Read the whole post, which consists of quotations from one of Obama's press conferences.  His apologists like to claim that he was helpless because the Democrats didn't control Congress, but that's false. They did control Congress for the first two years of his term, but he was still appeasing the Republicans anyway.

Of course at other times he put up his dukes and announced his readiness to take on all comers (these are from the same press conference);

HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY: “And I will be happy to see the Republicans test whether or not I’m itching for a fight on a whole range of issues.”

WHAT HE SUSPECTS: “I suspect they will find I am.”

HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY: “I’m happy to have that battle. I’m happy to have that conversation. I just want to make sure that the American people aren’t harmed while we’re having that broader argument.” 

He took a similar tack in a meeting with CEOs in 2009:

"My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."

It was an attention grabber, no doubt, especially that carefully chosen last word.

But then Obama's flat tone turned to one of support, even sympathy. "You guys have an acute public relations problem that's turning into a political problem," he said. "And I want to help. But you need to show that you get that this is a crisis and that everyone has to make some sacrifices."

According to one of the participants, he then said, "I'm not out there to go after you. I'm protecting you. But if I'm going to shield you from public and congressional anger, you have to give me something to work with on these issues of compensation."

No suggestions were forthcoming from the bankers on what they might offer, and the president didn't seem to be championing any specific proposals. He had none; neither Geithner nor Summers believed compensation controls had any merit.

After a moment, the tension in the room seemed to lift: the bankers realized he was talking about voluntary limits on compensation until the storm of public anger passed. It would be for show.

I think his leaked remarks to his donors are the same: for show.  They bring to mind Kamala Harris giggling "I told you so!" to a room of her fans.

“Stop looking for the quick fix. Stop looking for the messiah. You have great candidates running races right now. Support those candidates,” Obama said, calling out the New Jersey and Virginia elections, according to the excerpts of his remarks.

“Make sure that the DNC has what it needs to compete in what will be a more data-driven, more social media-driven cycle, which will cost some money and expertise and time,” he continued. 

Again, not such bad advice, though I wouldn't trust the DNC with my money, and he apparently didn't mention Zohran Mamdani, whom various party leaders are doing their best to undermine - "Vote Blue No Matter Who" was never meant seriously.

Tuck Me into Your Procrustean Bed, Big Daddy

If you need more evidence that our discourse around "race" and "ethnicity" stinks to high heaven, look no further than the freakout over New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and his college applications.  Corey Robin had a good post about it on Facebook today.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a blip of a story that temporarily seized the media and folks on Facebook about Zohran Mamdani's college application, where he checked off the boxes for Asian American and African American, while specifying very clearly that by African American he meant that he was from Uganda. The media, Mamdani's opponents in the race, most notably Eric Adams, and other commentators immediately used the story against him, claiming that Mamdani was trying to game the affirmative action system for his personal advantage by falsely claiming he was Black and Asian American.

In fact, Mamdani is Asian American and African-American.  His parents are South Asian by ancestry, and his father was born in Uganda, as was Zohran.  Robin continued:

Long story short: the Mamdani family, especially on his father's side, firmly identified with being African. It was critical to their identity and family story, particularly when Idi Amin kicked out people of Indian descent, claiming that because they were not Black, they were not African. (If you've ever seen Mississippi Masala, which I saw when it came out and recently re-watched, it tells that story, and of course Mississippi Masala was made by Zohran's mother and Mahmood's wife, the filmmaker Mira Nair.) Mahmood Mamdani has written at length on the importance of his, and his family, being African, creating a world for themselves in Uganda and Tanzania, not as part of an Asian diaspora, but as Africans, or as Asian-Africans, if you will.

The ethnicity boxes on college applications (and just about everywhere these days) are notoriously Procrustean, like the ethnicity boxes for the US census.  What box should young Zohran have marked, since there evidently wasn't a "South Asian" one, and as Robin says, "African" was also legitimate.  Africans aren't "racially" monolithic anyway; due to the slave trade, most black Africans in the US were from sub-Saharan western Africa.  White supremacists have historically regarded everyone who isn't "white" as "black," and the N-word has been flung at people of many backgrounds.  Racial categories on the US census have varied over the years.

Consider another complicated case: what "race" or "ethnicity" are Latin Americans?  Many have predominantly European ancestry, though Spaniards haven't always counted as whites in the US.  But Germans and Poles have also contributed to the mix.  So have Chinese, Japanese, and South Asians.  Many have predominantly "Indian" or "Native American" ancestry, and speak indigenous languages as well as or instead of Spanish, though Americans tend to limit both of those categories to North American Indians.

I've told before of the diversity training session twenty years back at the Big Ten University where I worked, whose instructors told us that "Sunni" and "Shi'a" are ethnicities.  They definitely are not, any more than "Catholic" and "Protestant" are ethnicities.  I protested, and the instructors insisted that they were so.  So I let it go.  As I've also indicated before, I don't object to university diversity programs and policies on general principles, only to the ignorance and incompetence of the people who manage them.

I've been collecting anecdotes on this topic for a long time around here, such as the white liberals who thought it hilarious that a white American woman could set herself up as a Zen master, or who mock the Bible as the work of old white guys.  (Wait, wasn't it written by illiterate Bronze Age shepherds?)  I wish I could track down the white liberals who declared that race is as real as nappy hair, but that claim seems to be lost.  If hair color or texture were "racial" markers, then my brothers and I (born to the same parents) would be of different races. 

Then there was the Congressperson who threw a tantrum when a Sikh was invited to deliver a prayer in the House of Representatives.  First she claimed he was Muslim, then when corrected she insisted that non-Christian prayers should not be allowed in Congress even though Muslims and other non-Christians have led prayer there before.  Do I really care that she doesn't have a fine-tuned knowledge of racial, ethnic, or religious difference?  No, not really.

The people who attacked Mamdani's choices on his college applications postured as good liberals concerned for the well-being of real blacks and Asians, though they showed that they didn't understand the issues involved, and didn't care.  They're just throwing any mud they can at him, in hopes that some of it will stick.  One would think that in a time of resurgent US racism, they'd be more circumspect, but of course not.

Those Were the Days...

One of my current projects is reading some of the bestsellers of the 1950s, especially those my parents owned and left around the house. When I was about 6 my father brought home a box of books a co-worker had given him, I think with my mother in mind -- she was more of a reader than he was, especially of fiction. (He was ambitious, though: among the books he got for himself were G. Polya's How to Solve It and John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. I don't think he read them, though.) I remember poking through the box and being disappointed that it contained nothing for kids.  But over the years I read some of them.  Those copies are long gone, but I've tracked down those whose titles I remember.

Right now I'm going through The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor, originally published in 1956.  It sold very well and was filmed twice, once with Spencer Tracy and again for television in 1977, starring Carroll O'Connor.  It's an interesting story of the last political campaign of Frank Skeffington, an Irish-American machine politician in an unnamed city that resembles Boston. There's general agreement that The Last Hurrah is an accurate depiction of big-city politics in the first half of the twentieth century; one famous Boston pol objected to it at first as a portrait of himself, but when it became popular he claimed he was the model after all.

What I find interesting so far is that although everyone, including Skeffington, stresses that his style of politics is on the way out, partly because of the advent of television, it doesn't seem to have vanished yet. Take these remarks by Skeffington to his nephew, about a prominent local political reporter:

Second, while he did cover politics around here for a number of years, there’s no guarantee that he really understood very much about what he was covering. The fact that he was a newspaperman would suggest that he didn’t. It’s a point of pride with most of our political journalists that they don’t know a great deal about politics; if they did, it would interfere with what I believe they call their ‘objective analyses.’ The finest example of an objective analyst we’ve ever had was a reporter named Mulrooney who used to write a City Hall column. He was so objective that he didn’t know where City Hall was. That was no handicap, however, as he wrote his column for ten years without ever leaving the house; they used to call him ‘Mattress’ Mulrooney because it was believed that he never left his bed, either. Towards the end of his career it was rumored that some informer had smuggled in some valuable information to him: facts about the size of the city, who the officials were, how many parties we had, and what year it was....

I must say the most of our journalists don’t seem to be too strong on facts; no doubt they have an occupational distrust of them. 

Anyone who's watched the antics of the political press corps today should find that this description still applies to many of them.  So far The Last Hurrah is entertaining; I look forward to the rest of it. 

Let Jesus Sort Them Out

 

I was horrified by this image, which a Christian friend shared on Facebook.  It came with a post declaring that it "touched me in a powerful way, as it shows the precious girls running through water, to get to JESUS."  Not to quibble, but it looks to me like the girls are running on water, and why not? They're dead, and no longer bound by the limitations of the flesh. The flash floods that killed them rose far above their heads.  I'm sure this person wouldn't want to deny the supernatural elements that the picture takes for granted.

"People around the world need to see the joy on the girls faces and the warm, excited embrace of Christ."  Eeeuuw.  Just eeeuuw.  Christians never stop to think what they're revealing about their psyches when they write stuff like this.

I clicked on the original poster's profile, and something symptomatic was going on.  He was distraught over the lost girls, praying in tears.  Didn't he have faith that an excited Jesus would take them to his, erm, bosom?  That they weren't dead, but sleeping?  Someone commented that seven girls had been rescued, praise God!  Doesn't that mean that those precious girls didn't get to go straight to the Pearly Gates and be with Jesus forever?  Do they want them to be separated from their Heavenly Father?  

C. S. Lewis wrote somewhere that deep in our hearts, we all believe that we are immortal. But if that were so, why would we see death as a bad thing, instead of a portal to a higher existence?  By Lewis's reasoning, it would seem that deep in our hearts, we don't believe we're immortal.  In an excellent book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (Pantheon, 2019), the philosopher Martin Hägglund showed that in traditional orthodox Christianity, mourning the beloved dead shows a dangerous, even sinful lack of faith.  He quoted St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and C. S. Lewis berating themselves for feeling sorrow when someone dear to them went to be with God.  In general Christians have a great deal of difficulty reconciling their lively faith with their humanity.  As Sappho wrote, we know that death is an evil, or the gods would be mortal. (Lest someone try to claim that the Christian God became mortal through the incarnation, let me point out that he was only mostly dead, and rose again. He knew that mortality was an evil - but then according to Christian mythology, death is a curse he laid on us.)  

In the case of the Kerr County flash floods, which killed far more people than just the children at Camp Mystic, we're looking at what used to be called an act of God.  I've noticed that many Christians are squeamish nowadays about that kind of language, but it belongs to them and they shouldn't be allowed to distance themselves from it.  Not all Christians feel that way, of course, but they're still inconsistent about it.  By the time they get around to praying for the victims of this or that disaster, the damage is already done; it wouldn't occur to them to ask God not to make the disaster happen in the first place.  But after all, Jesus needs more angels to help him make rainbows.  God made the floods, and the Lamb reaps the harvest.

Once again I'm struck by how exactly the 18th-century philosopher David Hume described the ordinary believer's conception of God and his providence:

He will tell you of the sudden and unexpected death of such a one: The fall and bruise of such another: The excessive drought of this season: The cold and rains of another. These he ascribes to the immediate cooperation of providence: And such events, as, with good reasoners, are the chief difficulties in admitting a supreme intelligence, are with him the sole arguments for it. 

The Facebook friend who shared the image is the same person who lost her car keys and didn't find them until she'd spent a couple hundred dollars replacing them.  Meanwhile her friends prayed that they would turn up.  They also exhibited the understanding of their god that Hume described.

The poster on Facebook identified the artist behind the image as Afton Burkard, which I mention because artists should get due credit for their work, no matter how creepy it is.  But on the original post someone added a community note that the image is AI-generated, which seems more likely. 

All I Really Want to Do...

There was a flurry of concern online last week about a San Francisco bookstore that declared it would no longer sell books by J. K. Rowling. The store made the decision after Rowling, a billionaire and anti-trans troll, announced that "she would use her personal wealth to fund the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund, which describes itself as a legal fund to support 'individuals and organisations fighting to retain women’s sex-based rights in the workplace, in public life, and in protected female spaces.'"

There are valid concerns about such a move, but most of the discussion I saw exhibited the usual confusion about freedom of expression, censorship, and gender. People seem to be overlooking the fact that booksellers are also book buyers, and they're no more obligated to buy a given book than their customers are. It would be worrisome if Amazon or Barnes & Noble were to decide not to carry books by a certain author, but that's not likely to happen, and I'm not sure I'd object if they did.  Every case has to be evaluated on its own merits.  In this case, Rowling has made her personal brand inseparable from her politics, rather as Elon Musk has done, or Orson Scott Card before them. Uncomfortable as they are, boycotts are a valid tactic, even when I oppose specific cases.

I wrote about this at length a decade ago, 

when a new GMO-free grocery was targeted for boycott, because the owners had posted on their Facebook page that they opposed same-sex marriage and "one of the store’s co-owners linked to a libertarian article arguing that stores should have the legal right to refuse to serve gay customers."  It seems to me that since the owners took pains to state their beliefs publicly, it's acceptable for gay and pro-gay potential customers to react to those beliefs.  In particular, if the owners of a business declare publicly that they want the "right" not to serve me, I have the right to take them at their word, and not give them my business.  If they don't want my money, far be it from me to give it to them!...

[Comics artist and blogger Barry Deutsch] drew a distinction between choosing not to patronize a business whose owners have views one abhors (which is okay) and making others aware of the owners' abhorrent views and presenting a more or less united front of people who choose not to patronize that business (which is not okay); I'm having trouble grasping where the difference lies.  It's not as if we're talking about someone's personal, privately-held political beliefs; we're talking about someone's beliefs that they publicized on their business's Facebook page, thus advertising their politics along with their business. It's they who chose to connect their business and their politics. [Barry] argued that a boycott is not a good way to persuade the owners that they're wrong; well, an antigay declaration on Facebook is not a good way to persuade potential customers to patronize one's business. One commenter complained that a boycott isn't meant to persuade but to coerce and punish; I think he's right, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing.  Again, [Barry] doesn't mind my taking my money elsewhere, and I wouldn't be doing that to persuade them either.

It seemed to me that the people who called the bookstore's action a "ban" were the same kind of people who would deny that getting books removed from public libraries or public school libraries is a ban. After all, they say reasonably, if you want your kids to read filth you can always buy it for them on Amazon; it's not censorship to remove books from a library, since no library can stock all books.  They conveniently forget that the pressure groups want laws passed that will force librarians to remove books they dislike.  That's government action, and by their own definition it's censorship.

I've been wondering how younger kids feel about Rowling's stance and actions.  After all, the Harry Potter books getting long in the tooth now; the first was published in 1997, the last in the series in 2007.  Will a new generation of kids be swayed by the batty opinions of their parents' favorite author, or will they be turned off by them?  One independent bookstore's boycott won't affect Rowling's net worth, but a generation's antipathy might.