2015

Here are some of our domestic issues that we bring along unresolved from the year that ended: the minimum wage, immigration, police conduct, Obama care. These are not our only problems but they are important ones.

You notice immediately their common element: racial conflict is important in each case. Many Americans imagine all poor people as persons of color. The minimum wage conflict affects poor people the most. Immigrants are largely nonwhite. Conflict about police conduct centers on the treatment of black people by white policeman. Obama care has to do with the racially tinged opposition to his programs.

As we begin 2015, we encounter the old nightmare of the United States – the conflict between whites and persons of color, more specifically African-Americans.

It is tempting to respond with some good advice to ourselves and our fellow citizens. We may admonish ourselves not to be prejudiced, not to believe stories that whites tell about Blacks that have no foundation in fact. We may remind ourselves of the signal contributions to our national culture made by African-Americans.

That sort of advice, though often repeated, has proven useless. We are as deeply divided by racial animosity as we ever were. These common bits of advice completely misunderstand the powerful and dark forces that keep racial conflict alive.

There is nothing the matter with pre-judging persons. We cannot avoid pre-judging. When you need help clearing the leaves in your yard in the fall, and some young fellow offers to do the work for you at a reasonable price, you need to decide whether to trust him to do a decent job even though you don't know him at all. You look him over, you listen to how he talks and you decide that he is trustworthy. But that is, of course a prejudice because you don't know this person and you just go on the little bit of information you have about him, how he looks, how he talks. Perhaps you consider his clothes or the vehicle he came in. But you still prejudge him.

It is not useful, either, to admonish people not to judge others on the basis of poorly documented stories. It is totally astonishing what bizarre stories people believe when they defend their prejudices, say, against welfare recipients. The fact that some of those accounts are complete fabrications makes no difference to people who believe that every welfare recipient is a lazy cheat. No mountains of evidence will change their mind.

In racial and other conflicts, truth is not really at issue.

Racial prejudice is fueled by emotion, by fear or anger. It does not have a lot to do with the facts and statistics and real histories of African-American or of white families. It does not have a lot to do with who did what to whom. Discussing real history is pretty irrelevant to moderating racial animosities.

We need to face up to these often very deep-seated emotions. Here we can only make a brief beginning.

Supposed that a black family buys the house next to mine. My first reaction is panic. I feel threatened, I am afraid the value of my house will go down. Then I feel thoroughly ashamed of myself. I remind myself that all I know about my new neighbors is that their skin is darker than mine.

I try to imagine their feelings. Are they frightened? Are they afraid for their children, remembering Emmett Till or the four young girls killed in the bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama church?

When I meet them, I am civil and welcoming. I try not to be excessively friendly, thereby showing how acutely I am aware of the difference in skin color between myself and them, while I'm pretending not to notice it at all, as white anti-racists, like myself, often do. Relations are uncomfortable until my new neighbors cease being the black couple next door and become the unique individuals that I know and like as my neighbors. I may also not like them very much; they may not like me. But now we are known to each other and the emotion of the first encounters subsides.

One strand in racial conflict is the fear of people we do not know. Racial conflict is fueled not by the relations between races but by my, and your unease in the world. It is easy for us to be afraid not of known threats, but of unknown persons who, we fear, are a danger to us. One source of racial conflict is our perception that the world is extremely dangerous and we are barely able, if at all, to survive in it.

Why does our world seem so precarious and threatening? White people may well feel guilty for their treatment of the descendants of African slaves. But we too have been badly treated. We have been bullied and made fun off as children. We have been neglected and abused. We have been victims of many different forms of violence. We grow up excessively aware of possible threats to our well-being, always expecting to be harmed by strangers as well as by people we are close to.

Our world overflows with violence leaving us fearful, always prepared to encounter threats, coercion and humiliations. That leaves us unsure of ourselves; it also leaves us with a reservoir overflowing with anger. Prejudice against persons of color (or those who are “white”), against the opposite gender, against folks speaking poor English, against those with different religious practices from ours—all are welcome opportunities to unload some of that anger. We transfer the violence and humiliation we experience on to others.

Racial conflict is an aspect of this circuit of violence—someone excites our rage with violence and we visit that anger on someone else. Racial dissension will remain an important part of our lives until we manage to construct a less violent society.

Free Speech Confusions

The murder of French journalists that worked on the magazine Charlie Hebdo is totally unacceptable.

Public reactions, as reported in the media, seem perplexed in the face of such violent anger at cartoonists lampooning Islam and Muslims. But why is such anger so difficult to understand? Suppose the targets were Jews, African-Americans, or women victims of rape? Suppose the targets were Americans? What would public opinion in the US be if Charlie Hebdo had published cartoons about 9/11 or about the Marathon Bombing in Boston?

Surely, in that case, our anger would also been violent. But in our Western context killing people who do not imminently threaten your life is clearly wrong whether you are offended by what they say, about how they conduct themselves, or what they stand for. It is also against the law. ( Here we begin thinking about Michael Brown in Ferguson or Eric Garner. The parallels with the present case are thought provoking.)

Some public reactions reminded us that it is good to laugh, even at sacred cows. But what if the sacred cow is something that moves you deeply, that you treat with the utmost respect, that is as close to your heart as anything?

A lot of people talk as if these murders had to do with free speech. The First Amendment has to do with efforts on the part of the government to squelch critical opinions. We regard that as illegal. But we regard it as illegal only under carefully limited conditions. You may not, under penalty of the law, shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater where there is no fire.

In recent years we have adopted laws against “hate speech,” against speech that incites to violence, against speech that humiliates and insults persons for being women, Black, disabled, Native American.

But, if you think about this for a moment, you can see how difficult these matters are. On the one hand, we want to be able to utter opinions even if they are unpopular, even if they offend powerful persons.

Consider the case of Steven Salaita, appointed last summer to a teaching job at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champain. In the last moment, Salaita was informed that the Chancellor would not submit this appointment to the Board of Trustees as bureaucratic rules demanded. The reason: Prof. Salaita had tweeted intemperately during the latest attack on Gaza by the Israelis. Since the leadership of the University of Illinois disapproved of these tweets, the job offer to Prof. Salaita was withdrawn.

Most people—unless they were fanatic Zionists—would react with outrage to this case because we believe that citizens should be able to express their political opinions even if the opinion or the passion with which the opinion was expressed offends others. We should all be able to say what we believe, as long as doing so does not incite to violence or produce imminent harm in some other, serious way. We should not be punished with unemployment for our political views.

But now think of Rep. Steve Scalise, of Louisiana, who in 2002 addressed a meeting of a group associated with the KKK. A number of people have recently criticized him for this. He has apologized, but the Congressional Black Caucus, among other groups, is not satisfied with that. Giving a speech to a white supremacist group that has, for a very long time harassed, including lynched, African-Americans certainly gives the appearance of taking sides with the white supremacists against Black citizens. An elected Congressional Representative should represent all voters in his district, not only the supremacist whites.

Here the inclination is obviously to censor a political stand taken by a politician. They too have the right to express their opinions freely but, on the other hand, since they are elected to represent all voters in their district we expect them to use good judgment in choosing their associates, including what groups to address.

Considering these two cases, side by side, shows very clearly how fraught with controversy and uncertainty free speech issues are. We want speech about politics, religion, matters sexual to be protected. But we also want everyone to be thoughtful and restrained in using those rights. While abuse of free speech rights does not license killing anyone, of course, Americans have always been quite willing to persecute and prosecute people whose political opinions they regarded as potentially harmful to the survival of our republic.

In 1947, a number of screenwriters refused to testify before the House Un-American Affairs Committee trying to find out about Communist influence in Hollywood. One of them, Dalton Trumbo, who authored several Oscar-winning films, lost his job in Hollywood. His political position was punished by taking his job away. During those years, that appeared perfectly acceptable because the country was in the grip of a hysterical fear of Communists and “subversives.” Ten years or so later, firing Trumbo seemed to many liberals an abuse of free speech rights and Trumbo was reinstated.

Questions of free speech are complicated and in many cases, most of us have difficulties deciding whether a certain speech was justified or should be suppressed. Our assessment often depends on the affiliations of the person making a judgment as well as, as Trumbo's experiences show, on the most powerful public opinion of the moment.

But it, of course, also depends on who the target of political speech is. Charlie Hebdo made fun of “muslims.” But there are no muslims-in-general. In France where they constitute about 5 – 6% of the population and a sizable number of them are French citizens, they tend to be poor, unemployed and uneducated at much higher rates than white French citizens. They are, in other words, a vulnerable group.

One would have thought that they deserve some extra protection against being publicly ridiculed. They deserve protections even if groups of “radical” Islamists commit murder in their name.

2015

As we begin a new year, we make a list of the problems we carry along. Here are some of our domestic issues that we bring along unresolved from the year that ended: the minimum wage, immigration, police conduct, Obama care. These are not our only problems but they are important once.

You notice immediately the common element in all of these difficulties: racial conflict is important in each case. Many Americans imagine all poor people as persons of color. The minimum wage conflict affects poor people the most. Immigrants are largely nonwhite. Conflict about police conduct centers on the treatment of black people by white policeman. Obama care has to do with Obama and the opposition to his programs is racially tinged.

As we begin 2015, we encounter the old nightmare of the United States – the conflict between whites and persons of color, more specifically of African-Americans.

It is tempting to respond with some good advice to ourselves and our fellow citizens. We may admonish ourselves not to be prejudiced, not to believe stories that whites tell about Blacks that have no foundation in fact. We may remind ourselves of the signal contributions to our national culture may by African-Americans.

That sort of advice has often been repeated but it has proven useless. We are as deeply divided by racial animosity as we ever were. These common bits of advice completely misunderstand the powerful and dark forces that keep racial conflict alive.

There is nothing the matter with pre-judging persons. We cannot avoid pre-judging. When you need help clearing the leaves in your yard in the fall, and some young fellow offers to do the work for you at a reasonable price, you need to decide whether to trust him to do a decent job even though you don't know him at all. You look him over, you listen to how he talks and you decide that he is trustworthy. But that is, of course a prejudice because you don't know this person and you just go on the little bit of information you have about him, how he looks, how he talks. Perhaps you consider his clothes or the vehicle he came in. But you still prejudge him.

It is not useful, either, to admonish people not to judge others on the basis of poorly documented stories. It is totally astonishing what bizarre stories people believe when they defend their prejudice, say, against welfare recipients. The fact that some of those accounts are complete fabrications makes no difference to people who believe that every welfare recipient is a lazy cheat. No mountains of evidence will change their mind.

In racial and other conflicts, truth is not really at issue.

Racial prejudice is fueled by emotion, for instance by fear or anger. It does not have a lot to do with the facts and statistics and real histories of African-American families. It does not have a lot to do with who did what to whom. Discussing real history is pretty irrelevant to moderating racial animosities.

We need to face up to these often very deep-seated emotions. That is a difficult and large project.

Here I want to just look at two of these emotions, our fears and the anger those fears arouse.

I try to understand this better by making up a story. I imagine that a black family buys the house next to mine. My first reaction is panic. I feel threatened, I am afraid the value of my house will go down. Then I feel thoroughly ashamed of myself. I remind myself that all I know about my new neighbors is that their skin is a lot darker than mine.

I try to imagine their feelings. Are they frightened? Are they afraid for their children, remembering Emmett Till or the four young girls killed in the bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama church?

When I meet them, I am civil and welcoming. I try not to be excessively friendly, thereby showing how acutely I am aware of the difference in skin color between myself and them, while I'm pretending not to notice it at all, as white anti-racists, like myself, often do. Relations are uncomfortable until my new neighbors cease being the black couple next door and become the unique individuals that I know and like as my neighbors. I may also not like them very much but now they are known to me and the emotion of the first encounters subsides.

One strand in racial conflict is the fear of people we do not know. Racial conflict is fueled not by the relations between races but by my, and your unease in the world. It is easy for us to be afraid not of known threats, but of unknown persons who, we fear, are a danger to us. One source of racial conflict is our perception that the world is extremely dangerous and we are barely able, if at all, to survive in it.

Why does our world seem so precarious and threatening? White people may well feel guilty for their treatment of the descendants of African slaves. But we too have been badly treated. We have been bullied and made fun off as children. We have been neglected and abused. We have been victims of many different forms of violence. We grow up excessively aware of possible threats to our well-being, always expected to be harmed by strangers as well as by people we are close to.

The violence in our world leaves us and our children prepared to be fearful. That pervasive fearfulness fuels racial tension.

Racial conflict will remain an important part of our lives until we manage to construct a less violent society.