What Type of Slur is "Racist"

Commenting on yet another "I am not a racist" non-sequitur, Ta-Nehisi Coates wants to know

what it means among white people to be considered a racist. I don't mean under the sanction of black people. I mean in places where there are no black people. It almost feels like, among whites, to be accused of being a racist is a class slur. Like racist is short for "inbred uncultured hick."

It's an interesting analogy, but I'm not sure it gets quite at what's going on. My views have evolved since I wrote this post, but it captures a very real dynamic. There's indignation about the possibility of being labeled a racist, but there is also terror. The proportions may vary, but both feelings are definitely there. Racism is America's original sin, and the term "racist" has become emblematic of a supreme evil. To be considered "racist" is to be a Nazi, a slave-owner, or a Klansman. It is to be a person who must be shunned in public society.

All of this is amplified by the fact that there is no generally accepted definition of racist in the public discourse. The sanctions of being successfully labeled "racist" are high, but there really is no way to determine in advance who will be burned by it. Michael Richards' career is ruined, but Ann Coulter survives more or less unscathed. There is a wanton and freakish quality about the whole discourse, and I do think most White people view the accusation of racism as akin to a bolt of lightening: powerful, random, unpredictable, and deadly. They do not know what causes the blow to rain down (except that saying anything -- and I do mean anything -- related to race makes it more likely), so they intone their "I am not a racist" incantation to the heavens in panicked hope that it will serve as a ward. It's main quality is totemic.

And being subjected to such uncertainty, in turn, breeds resentment. It's simultaneously self-sustaining and self-serving. Self-sustaining because the resentment renders true dialogue about what "racist" means impossible, maintaining its mystical quality and preventing any sort of enlightenment. Self-serving, because the entire cycle serves as a warrant for the hostile sentiment in the first place. The anger and rage that those people seem to hold power over me -- that they can end my career, sever my friendships, and expel me from the community with but a "casual" word -- burns with a righteous fury. At that point, railing against the entire idea of racism becomes effectively a subspecies of populist anti-authoritarianism.

The Kiryat Arba Synagogue

A little while back, Will Saletan asked about the "ground zero synagogue" -- a synagogue being built in Kiryat Arba, near the site of one of the worst acts of Jewish terrorism against Muslims (Baruch Goldstein's Hebron massacre). It's an analogy I've endorsed. Indeed, for all the unsubstantiated blather about a "victory Mosque", the local settlers really did try to build a shrine to Goldstein. The Kiryat Arba settlers are amongst the most radical and violent of the settler movement -- unlike the Park 51 Mosque founders, they are self-identified sympathizers of Jewish terror. But my endorsement notwithstanding, many of Saletan's readers apparently didn't appreciate the comparison. In general, I thought Saletan did a good job dispatching their arguments.

The one response which at least gave me some pause was the argument to "leave Jews out of the Mosque debate". I made a similar point when Dutch Muslims published a cartoon claiming the Holocaust was exaggerated as protest against allegedly anti-Muslim films produced by Geert Wilders -- despite the fact that the Jewish community was largely uninvolved in the latter dispute. I don't think Saletan's citation of the ADL's spectacularly ill-judged intervention is sufficient to render Jews parties here. Nonetheless, I think the comparison remains valid -- first, because the analogy is considerably more precise, and second, because it's a thought experiment, as opposed to an actualized effort to hurt or restrict the rights of other (if Saletan actually marched over to Hebron and started demanding the removal of Jewish shrines from the area, I'd think differently).

Whirling

Whirleyball caps off a whirley day! Possible news to report soon (I know, I know -- I'm such a tease).

20 Years

When one hears of a theory that posits that judicial decisions are caused by nothing more sophisticated than "what the judge had for breakfast", one assumes that it is the creation of some academic too long ensconced within the ivory tower. The phrase is attributed to the legal realist movement through Jerome Frank, and while it is a slight exaggeration of Frank's views (and thus a considerable exaggeration of the realist position, as Frank was well on their fringe), it does at least cast some illumination.

Frank believed that legal decisions are the product, not of legal doctrine, but of the fact-situation presented to the judge. Legal reasoning is just dressing to make it sound good. Moreover, Frank believed that how judges react to various fact-situations is nearly entirely idiosyncratic -- in that sense, it might as well go back to what the judge ate that day, for all the prediction one might do.

But Frank was not actually an academic at all. He was a trial attorney for 20 years, then chair of the SEC, and then a judge on the 2nd Circuit. Which I think makes his legal realist philosophy sound less ivory-towerish -- and more like a depressed drunk:

Let me tell y'somethin'. *hic* I've been, been practisin' law for 20 years. And it's all random. All of it. It's just whatever, whatever the judge thinks is right that day. Law -- you can find law for anything. Judges don't care. They just do whatever they think is right, and who knows what that is. 20 years of practice and it's, it's all random.

Or maybe not.

It Gets Better

Tim Gunn's video:

The Social Script of Objectifying Men

I find the story of the Duke "fuck list" to be very interesting, in a perverse sort of way. I admit my first reaction was very similar to the one I had after the Larry Craig scandal broke -- that is, how many women are looking at the list and saying "been there!" I feel like this list shows up in every other issue of Maxim, no?

One of the things I've noticed about dominant social views on sexuality is that men really believe that a zone of sexual inviolability surrounds them and get really angry when it's penetrated. They want, at all times, to be in complete control of any sexual event or happenstance that involves them--but they don't seem to believe that women deserve the same courtesy. So when there is even the slightest risk of breaching a man's sexual perimeters (e.g., a gay man coming on to you in the bathroom), we erect all sorts of social and legal barriers to block it. Some jurisdictions seem to allow or at least condone violent assaults by heterosexual men being hit on by a gay man at a bar. And as Senator Craig's case shows, even something as tenuous as possibly signaling a sexual proposition of another man in a public place can get you arrested. Stacking that sort of treatment up against the yawning silence we give to the massive amount of street harassment women (especially urban women) face is mind-blowing.

These things seem to only become "problems" when the victims are men. What makes this list so shocking is that it makes men into women -- that is, casts them in the social script typically reserved for women. They stand passive and naked, judged solely on the amount of sexual pleasure they gave to this woman, and (horrors upon horrors!) some of them didn't make the grade. At the risk of hyperbole, that never happens in the American public sphere. And while I certainly understand why it would be disconcerting to be cast into that spotlight, once we get past the gender-inversion, it's hardly uncommon.

My second thought was that there is simply no winning position for women in this sort of scenario, whereas for guys there's at least something of a mixed bag. There are basically three roles one can play: the list writer, at the top of list, or at the bottom. If you're the guy whose at the bottom, well, yeah, that sucks pretty unambiguously. If you're a guy at the top, though, that's a little awkward, but also kind of a badge of pride. And if you're the guy who wrote the list -- well, you'll probably be seen as a cad. But you're also a stud who banged 13 ladies (hells to the yeah!). Again, at least a mixed blessing. By contrast, a female writer of this list is a slut, a woman who tops this list is a slut, and a woman who is at the nadir is either a frigid bitch or an untalented slut. Yeah, that's no-win.

Finally, I'm curious about the social meaning of this designation for the guys involved. As a society we have basically no experience with this sort of naked sexual objectification of the male body. It just doesn't happen. So if this list becomes a top 10 google hit for these guys in the future, what's the likely result? We don't know if we're supposed to be sympathetic, or high-five them, or shun them, or mock them, or what (for women in analogous situations of course, the answer is shame and shun). I think our collective confusion will result in it being effectively ignored.

This, I think, goes back to my old post, Second Thing We Do, Objectify All The Men. Because men aren't in a situation where, as a class, their moral subjectivity is unrecognized, recognition of their objectivity is considerably less threatening.

This doesn't mean that this list didn't cause a lot of pain and embarrassment, or that we shouldn't be attentive to it. But it does illuminate some deeper issues of sexual inequality that are clearly, I think, more intense (and more ignored) when the victims are women.

Two IDF Soldiers Convicted of Crimes During Cast Lead

They were charged with ordering a 9-year old boy to open packages they thought might have been booby-trapped. The punishment has not been announced.

Sarah Palin Invented the Internet Change

Sarah Palin apparently has a beef with new Obama chief of staff Pete Rouse.

Palin appears to have been no fan of Rouse for a long time. In her 2009 memoir, she accuses him of being among those in the Obama presidential campaign who allegedly tried to smear her when she was named McCain's vice presidential nominee.

She also accuses him of lifting Obama's "change" slogan from her own gubernatorial campaign in 2006.

"Every part of our campaign shouted 'Change!'" she wrote. "We were amused a couple of years later when Barack Obama, one of whose senior advisers (come to think of it) had roots in Alaska– adopted the same theme," she wrote in reference to Rouse.

As Kevin Drum put it:

I don't know whether Rouse tried to smear Palin or not. Given Palin's expansive understanding of the word "smear," I wouldn't be surprised. But does she really think that she's the first politician to ever run on the theme of "change"? And that Obama via Rouse stole it from her? Holy cow.

It's unreal, the world that woman inhabits.

Shadowy Financiers, and, J Street as Israel

When the story first broke that J Street had, in fact, taken substantial amounts of money from George Soros (after previously heavily implying that they had no such funds), I left a comment over at the Z-Word that captured my views rather succinctly:

I have to say, there is something definitively creepy about how keen folks are to echo the “shadowy Jewish financier” trope when it comes to Mr. Soros. It is obviously disconcerting that J Street has not been entirely forthcoming about its relationship with Mr. Soros. But I remain deeply distressed at the all-too-common anti-Semitism that is directed at Mr. Soros for daring to be a Jew with money who backs causes. It’s very “J Street, backed by the Jewish money it didn’t tell you about ….”

One should not have to agree with Mr. Soros or J Street on everything -- indeed, on anything -- to find the position Mr. Soros has been cast into in our society to be profoundly disconcerting. I don't begrudge J Street's opponents for seizing on this misstep to try and score points against it. That's how politics works. But they do, I think, have an obligation not to contribute to what is by all lights classic anti-Semitic imagery of Mr. Soros' role in society. I find the "shadowy Jewish financier" narrative considerably more creepy than I do J Street's financial misstatements.

That being said, let's be clear: J Street misled us here, and that's a problem. And I'm not convinced that the statement Mr. Ben-Ami put out shows that he gets it. While purporting to "take responsibility" for misleading the public, Ben-Ami rapidly pivots to allege that the folks attacking J Street are "not good government watchdogs concerned about the state of non-profit financing in the United States," but simply opposing partisans seizing the opportunity for a some cheap points.

To which I say, so what? Yes, J Street has some powerful enemies, who will take non-existent crimes (much less real mistakes, as here) and blow them up into epic crimes against humanity. In this, J Street is reminiscent of another rather prominent Jewish institution that also complains, not without justification, of unfair treatment from the surrounding community. But guess what -- they knew they lived in that world, and I expected them to behave accordingly. You can either cry about the refs being biased, or you can raise your game. Just because the rules aren't fair doesn't give you an excuse to make it amateur hour. Obvious errors like this betray a fundamental lack of seriousness ill-befitting of the gravity of the problems J Street is trying to solve.

I still support J Street because I still think they fundamentally have the right idea for what will make Israel and Palestine safe and secure now and in the future. But today, they've embarrassed all of those -- myself included (and I don't have a problem associated with Mr. Soros) -- who stood up for them and have worked to make them a viable player in the American pro-Israel community.

The Forward's excellent editorial on the matter is also worth reading.

NOTE: Folks whose comments I've previously identified as choking off the oxygen of my comments section will refrain from posting in this thread.

Freebie

It looks like the bank bailout will end up paying for itself. The cost of saving the economy apparently really is priceless.

On the Need To Know More

I took the Pew U.S. Religious Knowledge quiz and scored a perfect 15/15. What can I say? I'm good at standardized tests. I'm also Jewish, and the Tribe (along with atheists/agnostics and Mormons) apparently outperformed the field on this thing.

Matt Yglesias and Jamelle Bouie attribute this to the hypothesis that minorities simply need a working knowledge of the majority as a "survival skill":

All that said, let me speculate a bit. To me, it’s no surprise that the highest scorers — after controlling for everything — were religious minorities: atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons. As a matter of simple survival, minorities tend to know more about the dominant group than vice versa. To use a familiar example, blacks — and especially those with middle-class lives — tend to know a lot about whites, by virtue of the fact that they couldn’t succeed otherwise; the professional world is dominated by middle-class whites, and to move upward, African Americans must understand their mores and norms. By contrast, whites don’t need to know much about African Americans, and so they don’t.

Likewise, religious minorities — while not under much threat of persecution — are well-served by a working knowledge of religion, for similar reasons; the United States is culturally Christian, and for religious minorities, getting along means understanding those reference points. That those religious minorities can also answer questions about other religious traditions is a sign of broader religious education that isn’t necessary when you’re in the majority. Put another way, there’s a strong chance that religious privilege explains the difference in knowledge between Christians and everyone else.

Ilya Somin isn't sure. He says that, were this the case, we'd expect the primary advantage of these groups over Christians to be regarding questions about Christianity. But while we do, in fact, hold a slight advantage in that category, the area we really clean up in is questions about "world religions" (Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism), etc.. He says this is indicative that it is great "cosmopolitanism" amongst these religious groups that accounts for the difference.

But I think Somin's test is ill-conceived. Aside from the fact that I can think of at least a few reasons why knowledge of certain "world religions" would fall in the "survival skill" category for Jews, Atheists, and Mormons, the baseline expectation would be that each group should do well in their own category and poorly in all the others. For the Bouie/Yglesias hypothesis to hold, Jews don't have to outperform Christians on Christianity -- they only need to be close to them so as to demonstrate they've attained a working knowledge of the group. The point isn't that Jews know more about Christianity than Christians (though apparently we do), it's that Jews know more about Christianity than Christians know about Jews.

Admittedly, this is somewhat difficult to test, because a lot of the questions are overlapping of Judaism and Christianity -- the only question I recall that is specific to Jews asks when our Sabbath starts (Friday, Saturday, or Sunday). It would be interesting to see if Christians did as well on that questions as Jews did on specifically-Christian questions (e.g., who founded the Protestant Reformation or what Catholic views on transubstantiation are).

But in any event, I think the results still, on face, bear out the hypothesis rather well. When you're a small, vulnerable minority, you simply have to be curious about the world around you. When you're the biggest fish in the pond, you don't. Cosmopolitanism is a survival skill.

One State --> Two State?

Robert Wright puts forward the argument that strong, non-violent Palestinian agitation for one-state could actually pave the path to two-states by shaking Israeli moderates out of their apathy and breaking the hold that the Israeli far-right has over Israeli peace initiatives. In the post-script, he acknowledges some of the reasons why it won't work -- chief among them that the Palestinian Authority has no interest in a one-state solution where it will likely lose significant amounts of power. But I think even in his "best-case" layout -- where Palestinians do manage to create a massive grassroots non-violent protest for simple voting rights, and Hamas is somehow deterred from participating -- I'm highly doubtful that it will end up leading to two states rather than one.

The core observation Wright makes -- that it will be incredibly difficult for either Israel or the international community to resist a non-violent Palestinian campaign for voting rights in the polity that currently controls their lands, and that such a campaign poses the most serious and immediate existential threat to Israel's existence as a Jewish state -- is one I already agree with. I also agree that it may well shake Israeli moderates out of their torpor and put them in control over their more right-wing fellows.

But so what? It's not a given that, in a world where there is widespread international popular support for Palestinian demands, that the Palestinians would have any reason to accept two-states, or that the international community would suddenly withdraw their support if Palestinians did hold out for one state in the face of even a credible Israeli offer for a two-state solution. After all, many still believe (though I disagree, strongly) that a one-state solution is the first-best outcome -- they oppose the state of Israel on principle, not merely instrumentally insofar as it is a putative block to the existence of Palestinian nationhood. When the dream is in sight, why settle for the compromise?

Of course, this simply reinforces the fact that, regardless of whether it leads to a fair and just outcome for all parties, Wright's proposal is rather obviously the best practice for the Palestinians. It is virtually guaranteed to give them the minimum of what they want, and stands a good chance of giving them absolutely everything. Of course, groups often do not take the wisest of paths (witness the end of the settlement freeze), but there is a limit to how long Israel can count on the Palestinians being idiots. More than Iran, more than Hamas, this is the most dire threat to Israel's existence in the world today.

Punked!

The latest James O'Keefe scandal -- where he tried to trick a CNN reporter into boarding a boat loaded with sex props in order to "seduce her" on camera and then embarrass her publicly -- is, in addition to being frankly bizarre, creepy as all get out.

According to the document, O'Keefe was to record a video of the following script before Boudreau arrived: "My name is James. I work in video activism and journalism. I've been approached by CNN for an interview where I know what their angle is: they want to portray me and my friends as crazies, as non-journalists, as unprofessional and likely as homophobes, racists or bigots of some sort....

"Instead, I've decided to have a little fun. Instead of giving her a serious interview, I'm going to punk CNN. Abbie has been trying to seduce me to use me, in order to spin a lie about me. So, I'm going to seduce her, on camera, to use her for a video. This bubble-headed-bleach-blonde who comes on at five will get a taste of her own medicine, she'll get seduced on camera and you'll get to see the awkwardness and the aftermath.
[...]
"If they pursue this as you are a creep, you should play it up with them initially only to reveal that the tape was made beforehand confirming this was a gag," the document states. "If they [CNN] admit it was a gag, you should release the footage and focus on the fact they got punked, and make sure to emphasize Abbie's name and overall status to help burden her career with this video, incident and her bad judgment in pursuing you so aggressively."

Finally, "if they go on the attack, you should point out the hypocrisy in CNN using the inherent sexuality of these women to sell viewers and for ratings, passing up more esteemed and respectable journalists who aren't bubble-headed bleach blondes and keep the focus on CNN."

Oh, and sexist too.

I'm so glad that he was the assignments editor for the much of the media on the ACORN faux-scandal.

My Replacement

Too busy to post today. So just read Jon Chait instead. Though I will defend, perhaps irrationally, Walt Whitman HS against private school competitors.

Let Him Breathe

J.J. Goldberg on President Abbas' recent charm offensive towards the American Jewish community:

Abbas’ dinner was the climax of a day jam-packed with heated appeals to American Jews to show enthusiasm for Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. The floating pep rally might have been a product of timing, given all the international leaders gathered in New York for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. Perhaps it was inspired by the approaching Sukkot holiday with its tradition of inviting strangers to dine — or, alternatively, its pointed evocation of a homeless, stateless people lost in the desert.

It also reflected the growing sense in Israel and the West Bank that negotiations can’t succeed without President Obama’s involvement, and that Obama can’t get in and stay in unless American Jews back off and give him some running room.

Interesting.

Elmo Defends Katy Perry on Good Morning America

This is actually adorable. And really like that it seems like the cast of the show is genuinely enjoying themselves (you can hear producer-type folks laughing in the background).

Two and Two

I forgot to mention the most fascinating part of my trip thus far. We checked into our room in Las Vegas, and the coffee table is all wobbly. It turns out that the pillar was not securely attached to the base, like it had been jarred loose.

Closer inspection revealed one more oddity nearby -- one half of a broken pair of handcuffs.

Hmmm .... delightful.

This Isn't a Parody?

I can't believe the West Virginia Republican Senate nominee, John Raese actually said this in an interview:

LEWIS: Tell us a little bit about you and your business experience and how you got here.

RAESE: I made my money the old-fashioned way, I inherited it. I think that’s a great thing to do. I hope more people in this country have that opportunity as soon as we abolish inheritance tax in this country, which is a key part of my program.

Are you kidding me?

Man of the people!

Quote of the Evening

The quote, excerpted here, is cited to Moshe Lilienblum, The Future of Our People (1883):

The opponents of nationalism see us as uncompromising nationalists, with a nationalist God and a nationalist Torah; the nationalists see us as cosmopolitans, whose homeland is wherever we happen to be well off. Religious Gentiles say that we are devoid of any faith, and the freethinkers among them say that we are Orthodox and believe in all kinds of nonsense; the liberals say that we are conservative and the conservatives call us liberal. Some bureaucrats and writers see us as the root of anarchy, insurrection and revolt; and the anarchists say we are capitalists, the bearers of the biblical civilization, which is, in their view, based on slavery and parasitism. Officialdom accuses us of circumventing the laws of the land – that is, of course, the laws directed specifically against us….Musicians like Richard Wagner charge us with destroying the beauty and purity of music. Even our merits are turned into shortcomings: “Few Jews are murderers,” they say, “because the Jews are cowards.” This, however, does not prevent them from accusing us of murdering Christian children.

Off to Las Vegas tomorrow (my brother is turning 21). Vacation blogging schedules are in effect.

You Can Say That

God, John McCain is such an enormous prick.

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