Being a world-renowned professor while black

Prof. Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr. -- Harvard University Professor, editor of the Root, etc. etc. -- was arrested on his own front porch after it was determined that he was, indeed, the legitimate homeowner as far as I can tell. Writer Samantha Henig of Slate and the Double X Factor comments on this and links to some other good commentaries:

Just as upsetting to me as the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest, Emily, is the way that so many people have been responding, including in our own comments section. There’s this reflexive defense mechanism that so often kicks in with white people (of which I am one) in situations like these; an urge to stand up for the white person accused of discrimination because hey, I’m white, and I’m not racist. I’ll admit, I feel that pull too at times—I cringe at people who fling around groundless accusations of racism [and other hot-button issues].

But this is not a case where people should get all smug about being “brave” and “honest” enough to question whether race was a factor; to suggest that maybe it was Gates who was out of line, not the cop. In all the steps of this story—the neighbor who called the cops, the way the officer spoke to Gates, the fact that the kerfuffle between them, no matter how much it was instigated by Gates, led to an actual arrest—it is just so hard to imagine that not one of them was influenced by Gates (and his driver) being black.

Blogger Kate Harding has a thorough explanation of why declarations that race isn’t a part of this arrest are coming from a position of white privilege. And to “people are trying to be all devil’s advocatey about it and suggest that Gates bears responsibility for making matters worse,” she offers this: “I’m sorry, who wouldn’t be a belligerent prick after getting off a long flight, coming home to a jammed door, then finding a cop in your living room accusing you of trying to steal your own shit? I sure would.” Ditto that.

Read the rest here.

Firefighting in black and white: More on Ricci v. DeStefano (aka the New Haven Firefighter Case)

This continues an earlier J-Continuum/Anekantavada discussion about the discrimination case before the Supreme Court of Ricci v. DeStefano. Again on Slate, an article does a pretty good job covering a lot of the relevant territory. Although I won't get into it now in any depth, a couple of facts together seem to me to point to why the city got it right in throwing out test results and denying promotions to everyone from that round of testing (i.e. mostly white, one Hispanic, and no Black promotions would have resulted):

a) In their entries, Allan and Bazelon lay out a still-common history and present of discrimination against minority firefighters, such that majority Hispanic and Black neighborhoods have had and often still have majority white firefighting forces, and even further, have stratification such that the supervisory levels are quite disproportionately white, along with

b) In this case, the white firefighters are predominantly from almost-totally white neighborhoods (~95% white) outside of the city they serve, New Haven, while the minority firefighters are mostly residents of the city. In entry exams, city residents get a slight (5%) advantage, on supervisory applications, there is no preference for those who live in-city. (It seems to me that living in the place you serve as a civil servant is a logical thing to preference for, if not require or distinctly advantage -- there's something to debate here, but I think you should be an explicit member of the civic community you supposedly serve for a variety of reasons, and the very least, this should likely be preferenced/encouraged in perhaps positive-incentive ways if it were not to be required). Further, in this specific case, allegedly some of the white firefighters "joke on the phone about 'working in the ghetto.' [Black, female New Haven Firefighter Erika Bogan asked] 'How dare you, when you live in Madison or Guilford, come in here and take our money and go back to your communities and talk shit about New Haven?'" I don't know that this has entered the case, but such casual disdain -- even as a joke -- speaks poorly of a white "civil servant" who doesn't even live in the place he's "serving." (It just compounds the problematicness of the whole thing -- at least if he lived in the "ghetto" he'd have the social "right to speak" ill of it by being a part of the community, rather than an "outsider" ridiculing it.)

c) The tests were based almost wholly on memorization and technical details of firefighting, items which don't even (apparently) apply to the majority of cases faced by the New Haven dept. (which are emergency calls, often medical in nature, according to the article). In other words, the tests don't have an apparent relationship with the actual on-the-job performances and requirements of firefighting in New Haven.

d) The firefighter's union chose to support Ricci (the white firefighter), despite accepting dues from all the firefighters, of all races; when a court ruled they couldn't back Ricci in court, they still spent union funds supporting his case, despite protestations (and an impending suit) from Black firefighters. This seems to me to constitute another form of institutional bias; it clearly should've sat out of this case in this manner, attempting to see the interests of all of its members. (One could argue it sees this supposedly "neutral" test to be in the interest of all of its members, but when the vote went straight down racial lines, it seems to me paternalistic and institutionally (i.e. not individually or purposefully) racist to then honor the requests of the majority-white vote.

e) The way the test was designed and conducted -- little input or review by outside experts (to avoid potential cheating, apparently) and out of step with what appears to be best practices in many other municipalities -- seems to me to further indicate the possibility of systematic unfairness and, importantly, to indicate that it is not necessarily the best way to determine promotability. This is one of the cornerstones of the "disparate impacts" bit of discrimination law -- if there's a better way to assess ability that is less likely to affect races differently, then (from my lay interpretation) it appears the city did the right thing in vacating the test.

f) Scalia apparently said at oral argument that he doubts the city would've done the same thing had the situation been reversed and almost exclusively black firefighters got promoted. ARGH. That just sounds so FUCKING ignorant to me. For one thing, that seems unlikely -- actually, if someone can point out an example of that happening, I'd like to know, because the very fact that all blacks doing better than all whites on a job exam seems to be rare if not non-existent points to me to the persistent and lingering problems of institutional racism, which is the very spur for the city's interpretation of the law that Ricci is challenging. Besides which, if that happened, wouldn't the white firefighters seem likely to challenge it? And wouldn't they, perhaps, have a point? One cannot simultaneously maintain that the white firefighters would be right to challenge the results in that case, and that they are right to challenge it in this case, without the logical implication that the point is that the white firefighters are entitled to do better automatically. And the white firefighters would likely be right to challenge it should the results have been nearly all-black. And if the city's behavior in THAT case would possibly be illegal, it is possibly illegal in this case. To be logically consistent, if he's going to find for Ricci in this case, Scalia would have to think that a case where only blacks were promoted would be prima facie legal, I think. (Despite the Latin, I'm not making a specific legal claim since I know nothing about the practice of law.) Bottom line: that sounds potentially discriminatory to me. In the end, this objection sounds suspiciously like "Oh, the city is just too obsessed with promoting BLACK PEOPLE," which is a stone's throw from "Political Correctness is ruining us all" and a good ways down the road, but on the same road, as calling them "Nigger lovers." Really, Scalia just disgusts me with that (though I know that's in part visceral and not logical, but it still, to me, trades on racial anxiety in a deceitful way.)

Anyway, I actually did talk at length about all that. Ooops. Time for showering and eating and writing actual academic work.

So, I'll leave off here with a quote from what seems to me to be a (rare) exceptional bit of writing from Slate (and an exception to much of Bazelon's recent production, despite my overall fondness for her as a writer based on memories of articles I liked long ago):

To young black firefighters like Mike Neal and Erika Bogan, that sounds like a solution. "We want to be on a level playing field," Neal says. "We want everything to be given to us on our merits." Ricci's group, on the other hand, feel as if they've already earned their promotions based on merit. They did what the city told them to. It's hard to imagine how they'll feel right about starting all over again.

Neal and Bogan's conception of merit is different from Frank Ricci's. It's easy to see why. Ever since the test results came out, the black Firebirds and the white plaintiffs have had opposing interests. Stretching back further in time, back over the decades, the two groups also see the history of the department through a different lens. For Frank Ricci, the past is a story of ethnic heritage and family pride. For Mike Neal and Erika Bogan, it's a story about breaking the lock on hiring that kept their people out.

Maybe promotions based on an assessment center would serve the city better, in the long-run, by testing for the abilities fire captains and lieutenants most need. Or maybe there are just a lot of firefighters well-qualified to do these jobs and a scant number of openings. "It seems like guys on both sides of the line feel like they've been cheated, like there just aren't enough positions to go around," says William Gould, the white captain. He supports Frank Ricci. But he can see what this fight looks like from the other side. If New Haven could start over, maybe it could also admit outright that it has more deserving firefighters than it has rewards. The city could come up with a measure for who is qualified for the promotions, rather than who is somehow best. And then it could choose from that pool by lottery. That might not exactly be fair, either. But it would recognize that sometimes there may be no such thing.

White Like Him

Read this great post on Buzzflash by the appropriately named Tim Wise.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Tim Wise

For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because "every family has challenges," even as black and Latino families with similar "challenges" are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

White privilege is when you can call yourself a "fuckin’ redneck," like Bristol Palin’s boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll "kick their fuckin' ass," and talk about how you like to "shoot shit" for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don’t all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you’re "untested"...

You really should read the rest.

Readers, especially my white readers, should perhaps note that White Privelege is not, in itself, an accusation or indictment. I learned in some valuable diversity seminars (seriously, they were good) at my old job that it takes quite a bit of work for a group of people of different races and backgrounds to come to believe and understand simultaneously that: a) there is still racism, which has likely negatively affected minorities in the group (including women -- "minorities" in this sense means groups whose sociopolitical power is "minor to" their proportion in the population), and b) it is not personally accusatory for it to be said or believed that racism is still at work within an institution. Indeed, there's a phrase for it: institutional racism.

As with White Privelege, the point is not that White People Are Bad or some similarly simplistic message ("This Is Your Fault"), but rather that the system we've inherited, incontrovertibly, was built on a racist heritage. White people, normatively speaking (being that they are normatively better off) are better off in no small part because of past discrimination. I think of it this way, in part: if my grandfather stole your grandfather blind, and was able to raise my father in a better environment and send him to a better school (or was able to help found, support and build a better school), then I have benefitted from the ill actions of my grandfather, and your family has been hurt by it. Property law certainly can be interpreted to mean that I owe you what was stolen, since I have gained from it -- whether or not it was my fault, my success is in at least some part due to an ill-gotten heritage -- but more important than property law is, I believe, an obligation to help those who are worse off, especially if the source of their difficulties is in some part tied to the source of my advantages.

The point of all this is that responsibility doesn't start, or end, at guilt, but rather that fighting racism doesn't simply mean not being actively racist oneself, but also fighting the vestiges and inequalities today that it generated. The fact that one is Priveleged does not mean one is Guilty, but I would argue it does morally impel one to Responsible Action to work to remedy the source of such privelege, regardless of personal, individual responsibility for that source. Some people (achem, i.e., libertarians) ignore or disagree with these view to responsibility, as apparently there is a statute of limitations such that if I can rip you off and get away with it, once I can pass it to my kids, it's not their problem and you or your kids don't deserve anything despite the wrong against you (see Dick 2, 2 Hank 4, and Hank 5 -- that is, Shakespeare's Richard II, Henry IV Part 2, and Henry V).

Anyway. Sarah Palin. More bad stuff. White privelege. And did you freaking hear about the rape kits -- Palin's city of Wasilla's former policy of charging raped women for their rape kits? Even the conservative National Review Online sees this as pretty egregious, and though it argues that there's no evidence Palin knew about it, they do concede that she had a responsbility as mayor to have known what her Police Chief was doing and put a stop to it. It is interesting that the NRO reporter engages in what can only be called moral relativism, in that he tries to excuse the situation by saying: other places have charged for rape kits, and (more non sequitirly) Obama voted "present" on an importnat bill on child abuse. (I was inclined to examine and defeat that last claim by the NRO, but for now it suffices to say that this is irrelevant as to the question the article is nominally about -- Palin, Wasilla, and rape kits -- and that I somehow doubt that the implied characterization of Obama's vote is wholly accurate or impartial.)