alexandraerin

So, Joel Stein wrote a thing for Times which received a backlash that prompted him to write this:

I truly feel stomach-sick that I hurt so many people. I was trying to explain how, as someone who believes that immigration has enriched American life and my hometown in particular, I was shocked that I could feel a tiny bit uncomfortable with my changing town when I went to visit it. If we could understand that reaction, we’d be better equipped to debate people on the other side of the immigration issue.

And you know what? That sounds like it would have been a great article, a really thought-provoking piece full of introspection and self-examination that could serve as examples for us all. But what he wrote doesn't come close to that. Well, it does come somewhat close to that maybe once or twice. At one point he stops and compares his reaction to finding his hometown now has a thriving Indian-American subculture to the reactions of people in Arizona.

Well, no. He doesn't stop and compare... he just compares and moves on. There's no examination. He applies no value judgment to the thoughts he imagines he shares with white xenophobes in Arizona. Given the tone and tenor of the rest of the article, it's hard to see that he's doing anything but honestly sympathizing with them.

In the end, it's impossible to tell if his "stomach-sickness" is describing his sincere intentions that he utterly failed to convey (it can happen to the best of us, especially when grappling with -isms we've thoroughly internalized while learning to think of as being wrong) or whether it's a total ass-covering maneuver by someone who thought the atmosphere was right for a piece like this to be well-received.

But also in the end, it doesn't matter: whatever his intent, he wrote some seriously offensive shit that won't be funny to anyone who doesn't already chuckle at slurs like "dot heads" and he tried to pass it off as humor, and he did this not in some private blog but under the auspices of Time, who regret that his humorlessly offensive writings offended anyone when they were intended to be humorous.

I found myself, in a roundabout way, reading a months-old blog post that had been linked to in a Livejournal post that karnythia linked to.

You can read the posts to see what they're about. If you're not familiar with the topic, there is plenty of material in the Livejournal post and the many posts it links to, breaking down the issues involved. I'm not planning on parsing through them here.

Rather, I'd like to call attention to something happening in the comments of the post I link to at the top of this entry. The post details an encounter that, along with the racial dynamics the author breaks down, involves the use of the epithet "black bitches" being directed at the author of the post.

I'll repeat that for emphasis: "black bitches".

So what's happening in the comments? Surely this will be the one time when everyone can agree that racism actually exists and is in play... right?

Wrong.

Unfortunately, I think we spend so much time and energy as labeling something as racism.

and

Must be terrible to live life with a chip on your shoulder like that. No, I don't get it - and I guess I never will.

and

My problem with this post is that the writer seems to make the incident all about race.

and so on.

Unbelievable.

This post is the sequel to my previous post about the notion of a "throat-punching machine". It has been sitting in an open Notepad window on my netbook for a couple of weeks now. A post on a friend's Livejournal made me realize I never actually put it up.

Note: There will almost certainly be people reading this who think that parts of it were written to address things they said in particular, either as comments on the referenced previous post or elsewhere, but everything between the two horizontal bars was written before that post went up.

---

I think that most people would agree in the abstract that a system that punches some people in the throat isn't good and it isn't fair, but of course not everyone is going to agree that we have a system like that, or that it's widespread.

So now, I'm going to talk about one particular "throat-punching mechanism" that is present in our society. The purpose of this post is to show how the attitudes that we share does disadvantage persons of color and therefore does privilege white folks.

I mean, if somebody else is getting held back, you have an advantage, right?

And here's where we come to one of the reasons why I've made a series of posts revolving around the proposition of racism arising without racist intentions. On its own, this might actually look like kind of a wishy-washy way of confronting racism.

And it is.

Seriously, it is.

But there is a point here. There is a method to my blandness!

See, so long as we think of racism that can only happen when somebody is acting on a racist intent then the answer, the rebuttal, to any talk of widespread racism is to say "But I don't even think about race.", to insist that we could solve any lingering problems of racism by refusing to think about race, by being "colorblind".

But a lot of the mechanisms by which our society punches people in the throat is at work no matter what a given individual thinks of race or even if a given individual thinks of race.

Does that sound impossible? HP managed to put a web cam that functioned better for white people without thinking about race. Whether or not you want to call that "racism", the fact is still there that if they had thought about race they might have tested the camera more extensively and caught the problem before it went out.

So, anyway, let's imagine for the sake of argument a crazy hypothetical situation, something that's just slightly less ludicrous and far-fetched than the literal throat-punching device and something that has just slightly more real-world impact on people than a webcam function that works better for people who happen to look like the folks who designed and tested it.

The remainder of this post is addressed as if the reader is a white American, or something near to that. That's who the message behind it is more or less aimed at, though there may be a lesson in it for others. You can consider the racial and cultural identity of the referenced "you" as part of the hypothetical, if it doesn't otherwise apply to you.

Now, you aren't racist, right? You don't have a racist thought in your head. You have friends of many races... not that you notice their races, because you don't. People are all just people to you. The place you live in is a place of shocking diversity, where nobody seems to even notice race all that much. Certainly you never hear anybody talking about it.

So that's you.

You sound pretty swell, actually.

Hypothetically speaking.

In our hypothetical situation, we'll imagine that your ideal for what hair looks like when it's clean, well cared-for, normal... professional... is what hair with the texture and follicle structure most commonly associated with white people is when it's been treated with the typical regimen that white Americans tend to follow with regards to hair care.

Of course it would be ridiculous to imagine you came to this idea all on your own, so we have to imagine that you're part of a society in which this idea is widespread, so that it could have been propagated through you in the first place.

You don't think of it as "white hair", of course.

You don't think about race that much at all... you prefer to judge people by the content of their character, right? Because you're not racist. Where you come from, it seems like no one talks about race... certainly no one thinks about it, much less acts on it.

So when you're rubbing elbows with someone on public transportation, when you interact with a person doing their job... from food service to health care, from manual labor to white collar professions... or when you're considering hiring somebody for a position, you're not thinking about what race they are, you're judging them on things that might indicate whether or not they seem like a pleasant person, whether they're someone you'd care to do business with, someone you'd trust to take care of your interests.

You don't even think about race.

You only assess people based on things that matter.

Things like... hygiene.

Things like whether they take pride in their personal appearance or they just don't seem to care.

Whether they look professional enough to be acceptable, or slovenly.

Of course, in our crazy hypothetical world one of your benchmarks for how you judge these things--how they keep their hair--just happens to be tied up in race.

Yes, there will be people of color who manage to fit themselves into your box for "acceptable standards of hair care". Some of them might not even to try that hard... after all, the physical things that underly our sociological concept of "race" are not binaries.

But more European-descended people will fit your standard more easily than people of African extraction.

And so it's not hard for you to end up making racially biased judgments about people without harboring the slightest intent to do so. You can do it while thinking to yourself how bad racism is and how much it sucks to judge other people for the color of their skin. And because it's not just your own random personal preference, a larger hypothetical society is also doing this, the results of this "unintended racism" are felt by large numbers of real people.

Your individual impact might be minimal... in fact, depending on where you live it may be possible for you to personally harbor this bit of programming in a way that never actually affects anyone.

And maybe you personally don't care how people wear their hair. Maybe you're not in an industry where it matters. Maybe you're kind of a grungey slacker type yourself so even if certain hairstyles code to you as kind of grungey you don't care.

Or maybe you're a human resources agent, and maybe you mentally sort job applicants into an A and B pile based on how "professional" they look, how well you think they'll fit in with the "corporate culture", and maybe hair that looks "dirty" or "unprofessional" to you nudges people towards the B pile.

Either way, tthe mechanism is still there, and it's only one of many. If you're not a cog in this particular throat-punching machine, you'll still be a cog in several others.

Now, of course, I'm being more than a little facetious when I call this a "crazy hypothetical" situation... I'm talking about the world we live in, where the default for what is nice, what is normal, what is presentable, what is professional, what is hygienic in how we wear and treat our hair is strongly rooted in how white people from Europe tend to wear the sort of hair we tend to have.

And of course, hair is hardly an aberration. It is... like the HP camera... merely one example in a sea of examples.

The voices that most stand out to us (and thus register as "loud") in a crowd of people all having conversations in big echo-y public spaces are the voices that sound the least like our own and like the voices we grew up surrounded by. The voices like ours, being "normal", get swallowed up in the crowd.

See also: names.

See also: any criteria we might use to judge what constitutes somebody who is "just hanging out"/"just passing through" vs. someone who is "up to something".

And even if we are aware of these things and do our very best not to be influenced by them personally, we white folks are still privileged by the existence of these standards.

I've had to cut or re-color my hair for job interviews before, but I can walk into any building where they might be hiring wearing a hair style that naturally "works" with my hair and not worry about whether it will be accepted as professional. I don't have to think about it. I don't have to choose to spend a lot of time and money and anguish altering my hair or dealing with the consequences that come with treating it more naturally.

That? That's privilege. Even if I never have another job interview, even if I never take advantage of that fact, it's an opportunity I have.

It's a thing about which I do not need to worry, ever.

I'm not the first person to observe this, but the thing about the status quo is we don't have to try very hard to reinforce it. It wouldn't have become the status quo if there weren't forces at work preserving it. No matter how unbiased we try to be (and chances are we aren't as unbiased as we think we are) these forces are still going to affect us and even work through us.

Notice I'm using "we", the first person plural, here... I am not exempt, I am not above it, I am not some post-racial paragon. I do see race, I do think about race, I fail about race... often hardest when I'm not thinking about. I hope nobody (least of all the people whose kneejerk response to people talking about race is to worry that they're going to get "blamed" for something) thinks I'm standing up high somewhere looking down at people and lecturing.

I'll straight-up say it: J'accuse moi!

I am part of the problem I am describing!

For each time I make a post on the internet about race (which is pretty much the extent of what I'm doing to dismantle racism, honestly), there are dozens of times that I walk right past the throat-punching machine that isn't programmed to hit me and I don't say a word about it. Sometimes I honestly don't notice that it's there... is that better or worse than the times I see it's there but don't say anything because I can't be bothered at the moment or because I'm afraid or because I don't want to deal with the people who are going to lash out at me for pointing out its presence?

So the point of all this isn't to say that we white people are all horrible, horrible people who are condemned to a life of being condemned for privilege no matter what our intentions are.

But at the same time... can we really excuse ourselves for not being willing to talk about this stuff? To think about it? To examine society around us... to examine ourselves? People are being punched in the throat. Other people are being held down in ways we aren't, and we're being helped up in ways that other people aren't.

And no, privilege does not just come from racism. There is classism. There is ableism. There is sexism. There is privilege rooted in sexual orientation and identity. There are a lot of different ways that these things intersect. I've been emphasizing racism over any of the others because it's one of the major areas where I'm unequivocably privileged. I'm not arguably white or a little bit white. I didn't experience white privilege for just part of my life.

I could have picked an area in which I am less privileged, in which I experience genuine oppression, but how much good would that do when my point is that we shouldn't fear talking about our own privilege? We shouldn't be afraid to own our issues, be they with race or class or anything else.

I said "I accuse myself" above, but privilege isn't a crime. We all have our privilege. We all have our racial and class-related and other issues. Feeling guilty about them isn't a solution and it's not even necessarily a step in the right direction... too often, the guilt ends up being treated as if it were the problem and then the solution becomes seeking absolution, rather than addressing the actual situation.

---

Conversations We Won't Be Having: Why you would care more about the oppression of some people if it weren't phrased in terms of privilege other people have, how "some hair" actually does look cleaner/more professional, how treating the majority as the default is just a fact of life and statistics and not racist at all... and above all else, how racism can only exist when a human being articulates an explicitly racist intention.

I've still got the follow up to my "Throat-Punching" post saved up, but I'm going to wait a few days for my blood pressure to go down before I try to tackle that subject again.

In the meanwhile, here's a nice, calm, relaxing topic instead:

According to the USDA, which apparently tracks such things in the United States, the typical cost of raising a child from birth to age 18 is a hair short of $125k for the poorest bracket of households and just shy of $250k for the wealthiest. Keep those figure in mind.

The chart on that page actually breaks down the cost year by year, by age, so if you were looking at a hypothetical situation where somebody took on the responsibility of raising a child who had already been born, you could do the math appropriately.

These figures aren't any kind of absolute benchmark for the resources needed to merely keep a human being alive from one age to another, of course... they're based on the amount of money that is spent on children in the country that is sort of the poster child for the First World. It's based on our way of life and our standard of living.

This is how much money we spend on a child, on average. It doesn't include the cost of bringing that child into the world. It doesn't include the cost of post-secondary education.

If an American adopts a child from a country that's impoverished, that's the kind of money that is going to be spent making sure that child has "a good life": making sure they have nutritious food and clean water and education and possibly health care, clothing and shelter and toys to stimulate and educate and entertain and distract.

$7,000 to $14,000 dollars a year to take this one person out of a life of poverty... is that a bad price, to take someone out of those circumstances? It might not be, if our reaction to the sort of desperate circumstances that much of the world exists in is to take one specific human being and remove them from those circumstances.

But with that kind of money... well, the gross capita income in Haiti is $480. (It was, anyway, at the point that chart was made. I think the figure for 2010 might be lower.) Think about how little money it would take to change somebody's life if that's all that they have to get by on to begin with.

You could pick twenty-eight random people and double their income with $7,000 dollars. How many mouths would that feed? How many lives would that change?

You could give clean water to 500-1,000 more people a year, with the amount of money it costs to raise a child in America.

You could send Afghan children to school.

You could invest in infrastructure and education. You could support economic opportunities for disadvantaged women. If you had the money to take on a child from overseas, you could, in short, spend that money... you could even spend a fraction of that kind of money... to change the conditions that we find so horrifying to view from afar that it motivates us to swoop in and "rescue" children from their own families.

...

Now, I don't honestly think anybody reading this right now has an extra hundred grand per year and is thinking to themselves, "Gosh, I can't make up my mind... do I want to adopt a child from overseas or do I want to start a lifetime of philanthropy to try to change things from the ground up?" While it would be great if the above motivates a few donations, the other purpose is to lay the groundwork for what I'm going to say next.

Laura Silsby is, unless the news has been uncharacteristically skewed against a white American Christian lady, a human trafficker. Another word for that is "slave trader".

What's going on in Haiti right now is not that a group of well-meaning people, through their ignorance or lack of judgment or impulsiveness, have been accidentally ensnared by a law meant to curtail an activity that their plan sort of resembled. The law accomplished its purpose.

There's enough coming out in the news that there is room for some semi-informed speculation about Silsby's motives, but I'm not even going to get into that. I'm just talking about what she did.

Her plan involved claiming (both to authorities and her co-congregants, it seems) that she had documents giving her permission to take "100 Haitian children" out of Haiti and into the Dominican Republic, where she'd be able to put them up for adoption. Stop and think about that. 100 children. Not "the following children". Not "the individual children listed below". She was claiming to have permission to pick up 100 children and transport them across the border, where she would make money giving them to people.

She was claiming the right, in other words, to treat the children of Haiti... brown-colored children of a poor, non-Christian, non-American nation... as a commodity. An absolutely interchangeable commodity.

And... though she didn't really think this through... she obviously believed this claim was plausible. Anybody who was working with her who wasn't actually in on the scheme certainly found it perfectly believable. The authorities she dealt with on both sides of the Haitian/Dominican border were less persuaded.

I'm not a lawyer. I'm not an expert on international adoption. Even knowing that there are abuses of the system and there is endemic exploitation and there is commercialization and commoditization of children going on within the legal channels, I doubt very much that any nation which actually tracks such things issues papers that say, in effect, "This document entitles the bearer, A Nice White Lady, to one hundred (100) children." Her imaginary document apparently had no reference to the legal status of these children and put no onus on her to coordinate what she was doing with any kind of authorities who might be tasked with looking after their welfare... again, not just on the Haitian side of the border.

Her whole scheme seemed to hinge on the idea that for any Dominican Republic officials who happened to notice a new orphanage suddenly appearing in a posh resort catering to wealthy white people from overseas, "oh, these are Haitian children" would be sufficient explanation for how they came to be in her (and this really is the right word) possession.

Commodities.

To anybody who thinks that under the circumstances she should be let off with a warning because of some sort of perceived "gray area" or the idea that maybe she really didn't understand the enormity of what she was doing, it turns out she was let off with a warning the first time she tried to steal a busload of kids. And she turned right around and picked up another batch of lil interchangeable commodities to try again.

Given our history in this country... our shameful and not at all distant (150 years is only two, three human lifetimes) history as the last "civilized" nation of western, European-descended folk who thought it was really cool to literally commoditize human beings of another race... we should be way more sensitive about this stuff than we are. We should be way more aware of this.

There should be nobody in the United States who misses the undertones of what was going on here, but of course there are.

Look, we all know there are people who are also trafficking in children for much worse purposes... there are children being trafficked who suffer far worse fates than being adopted by well-to-do foreigners. But that doesn't change what Silsby was doing. She can't claim ignorance of the law when at every turn, she was told by officials on both sides of the border that what she was doing was trafficking and chose to ignore it. Did she think the laws of Haiti wouldn't dare to descend upon her? Did she think that the risk wasn't big enough to outweigh the reward?

I don't know.

I don't have a lot of sympathy for her cohorts. I understand how they might have been sucked in... there are actually numerous scams going on in the United States at any given time that are based on taking advantage of the belief that one's congregation is full of people who are Right With God and who will never lie or deceive you. It's a dangerous belief, and one that's not particularly well-supported by the Bible (I don't recall what number of people the Bible says are righteous, but I think it's smaller than the number it takes to fill a church), and even that speaks to an arrogance, a sort of imperialism: we are the good people and everybody else is bad. Anything WE do is right. Anything they do is suspect.

And of course that leads right into any child is better off with one of US than with one of THEM... the kind of thinking that leads to stolen generations. So, yes, perhaps some of the people involved really wanted nothing more than to improve the lives of some children. They didn't approach that goal from a very pure place, though... and see also: what several thousand dollars a year can really do to improve the lives of children.

Also, whatever they believed about Silsby's plan and the legality of what they were doing, they were evidently lying to the parents, lying to the children... if your plan requires you to lie to children, Jesus may not approve of it as strongly as you think.

There have been other news stories done in the wake of this "scandal" crime with reporters talking to Haitian parents who explain how willing they are to give their children up to families overseas. I worry about this stirring up sympathy for people running schemes like Silsby's. The thing is, these parents are in an impossible situation where there are no good options available to them, and so some of them take the one that seems like the best for their children.

But the key is that this option is contingent on the idea that a foreigner with enough money to care for a child in the American fashion intervenes in their lives in the first place! I'm not going to sit here and condemn everybody who's ever taken part in a foreign adoption (though honestly there are people who will do that, and they have several good points), but I will point out again that this kind of money could be spent on the ground in countries like Haiti to help end the circumstances that will otherwise result in even more children being born and living in the conditions you might "rescue" one single child from.

I could keep going on this forever but I'd just end up repeating myself. Children aren't commodities, no matter how desperate the circumstances they're living in. Adopting a child doesn't "make a difference" in a statistically meaningful sense.

Please Note: The question of "Why should we...?" (spend the money to improve Haiti, get involved, feel any sense of guilt or responsibility) is a separate topic from the one I'm addressing here. It is, for the purposes of this post, The Conversation That Is Not Happening Here. The adoption scheme of Silsby hinged upon the idea that there are already people with money to spend on improving the lives of Haitian children.

---

Related reading:

Orphans???, a posting from Anthropology Now that partly inspired this.

Also worth reposting, since I know many people don't have money to spare:

The Hunger Site.
Free Rice

karnythia recently linked to a news article about people studying the effects of television on racial biases. There was an old bit on SNL's Weekend Update when I was growing up, where Norm Macdonald would read a headline about a recent medical study and then announce that it and other news could be read in the pages of the medical journal "DUH!".

As others observed on her post, there have been studies about this sort of thing for as long as there has been television... while more attention given to it is not a bad thing, the thought behind this research (as presented in the article, anyway) seems somewhat naive.

To quote:

The psychologists wondered how such biases could persist in a society in which racism is socially unacceptable and indeed publicly denounced.

I would submit that there is and always has been a difference between "this thing is not done in our society" and "this thing is not admitted to in our society". What is socially unacceptable is to be openly and overtly racist, to admit to racism... this is what makes talking about racism so difficult. If a person or group is doing something in a way that seriously disadvantages or negatively impacts minorities, attempts to discuss the very real problem they present frequently break down into protracted discussions of their motivations and their feelings.

Of course, people who shout "I HATE [epithet]S!" from the rooftops seriously suck. Seriously. But their ability to affect people on a day to day basis is severely limited because they are denounced so quickly and people are so quick to distance themselves from such overt racism. Such overt bigots can assault people, can injure and hurt them, but do not usually have the power to oppress all by their lonesome.

(This isn't to say we shouldn't denounce them. If we don't make it clear that such things are intolerable, then they won't stay lonesome and they will get power. "Society" is a shoutocracy: loudest voice frequently wins.)

Oppression is a systemic problem. It comes from institutional racism.

Example: when a company sells only products that are primarily useful for or attractive to white folks or markets them in a way that makes it seem like they're only meant for white folks, it might be described as a pure number-crunching exercise. They might describe their target audience not as white (or hetero, or able-bodied, or cis, or English speaking) but as "mainstream". And many people wouldn't argue with that.

But doing this is not only a response to our society where certain people and their perceived tastes are "mainstream" and thus more worth catering to, it perpetuates that perception, rebuilds it and makes it stronger all the time.

Take a look at this video:



Now, because some things are going to be raised as objections any time something like this is posted in an open forum:

1. Yes, the lighting conditions are not optimal and probably not in line with the manufacturer's recommendations or set-up instructions. It's certainly possible that with enough jiggering and a bit of poking, the man in the video could get the camera to recognize and track his face.

2. No, the HP engineers did not invent the laws of physics as they apply to optics.

3. No, no one is saying that Hugh L. Packard, president of HP, said "FUCK THE BLACKS. MAKE IT ONLY WORK ON WHITE PEOPLE."

The fact is that a major consumer electronics manufacturer released, shipped, and sold a device that at the very least works best for white people, works under a wider range of conditions for white people, and requires less fiddling around with your room's set-up out of the box for white people. That's charitably assuming it would work in a reasonable fashion for the gentleman doing the demonstration, if he dimmed the backlighting and put a light source in front, as some commenters on the video suggested.

"That's not racist, that's just how lighting and cameras work."... except... can anybody imagine this being considered a viable commercial technology if it worked the other way around? If the technology for using facial tracking on white folk was such that it would require a level of finicky fiddling about with ambient lighting that the old ROB robot that was bundled with the NES in the 1980s did, would a computer manufacturer actually bundle it with a computer webcam package on the cusp of 2010? Or would they be going "It's an interesting concept, but the technology is not really 'there' yet. Let's keep trying to improve it."

Some people will probably look at that and wonder if I'm suggesting that nobody should be able to buy this webcam product unless it works perfectly for everyone. I'm not. I'm suggesting we wouldn't be able to buy it... at least not as a feature with an HP media center computer rather than a quirky toy for techno-hobbyists who don't mind the fiddling around... if it didn't work well for white people. Because it does, it has "mainstream commercial appeal".

This is systemic racism, institutional racism in action. I'm sure some people are going to roll their eyes and say things like "Oh, life is so hard for people who can't get a webcam to follow their movements. It must be nice if that's the only problem they have to complain about." To which I say: yes, I'm sure it would be nice if that were the only thing that someone had to complain about. But this is not some weird random example of something that goes against the common trend. The "mainstreaming" of whiteness is pervasive and so are its effects.

Shows and movies (and books and magazines) centered around white actors/characters are marketed as the default. If a character with a different skin tone is cast white in an adaptation to broaden the appeal, it's a main character... characters who become minority in translation ostensibly for the same reason are almost always background characters or sidekicks (There are exceptions. They are played by Will Smith and Morgan Freeman. And Obama is president. And Sammy Davis, Jr. played at the Copacabana Club. The existence of minority superstars are one of the best examples of the hoary old chestnut about "the exception that proves the rule".) We judge the cleanliness and "professionalism" of people's hair based on the way white folks' hair looks when it's well-cared for. We have a similar rubric for judging the professionalism of people's names.

The number of people who can complain with a straight face on the "racism" of a channel called "Black Entertainment Television" when we spend our lives so immersed in things targeted directly at white folks "mainstream people" demonstrates how pervasive the problem is: it's so deeply rooted in our culture that we don't even see it.

I almost didn't post this... but since popelizbet tells me it's International Blog Against Racism Week, I decided to go ahead and ride out the wank. If I can man the battlements to engage in internet arguments over Dungeons and Dragons, I can do it for this.

...

Okay, so here in Omaha, there's a "joke".

The "joke" has been most memorably phrased to me as police code NWO7... as in, the sirens go on and someone says, "Must be an NWO7 in progress." WO7 stands for "West Of 72nd". I'll let you guess what the N stands for, but if you know the answer, for the love of God don't shout it out.

The flipside of the "joke" of course is white folks being afraid, with varying degrees of seriousness, of going east of 72nd. The exact line of demarcation for what's considered the safe part of town varies from person to person... usually depending on how far west one lives. I've had people who live way out in West O act shocked that I'm around the 90s.

And of course, my neighborhood does have people of many races living here... and even if you go all the way out to Oakview you won't see a completely whitewashed crowd.

But the "joke" is there, and it's based on a hard truth. Not the truth that cops are all racist bastards, but the truth that racism exists. It is extant. It is part of the fabric of our society, in a pernicious fashion.

Cops exercise a broad amount of discretion in determining who they pull over, who they stop, who they question, who they move along. A lot of the stuff they consciously scan for... who looks like they belong, who looks like they don't, who looks like they're up to no good, who fits a "profile", who looks like they've got a reason to be somewhere... can be coded to race even if the officer expresses no overt racism.

It can be argued that when someone is pulled over or stopped, they have no way of knowing if their race had anything to do with it or not. And to those of us who are comfortably white, this might seem like an argument against "playing the victim card"... but honestly, I have to say I think the reverse is true. Because the truth is that most racial minorities (this post was spurred by cases involving African-Americans in particular, but I'm not going to start a laundry list because I know I'd leave someone out) do attract disproportionate amounts of official attention and suspicion and therefore when they're the ones that cops stop, or when they have cops knocking on their doors in the middle of the night to follow up on a sketchy report, or when they're the ones that cops single out of everybody hanging out in a parking or parking lot and ask them if they don't have somewhere else to be, they always have reason to wonder if it's not their race.

Almost anybody who's been pulled over for speeding knows the feeling of being singled out unfairly. If you're white, it generally stays personal: the cop's a dick, who pissed in his Grape Nuts, give an asshole a badge and he thinks he's God, etc. And because it's personal, you can go on about your day, bitching about Asshole Cop in your mind or even forgetting about him... you're not seriously worried that the next cruiser you see is going to do the same thing. You don't have to worry every time you see a cop.

If you had any reason to think, Is this because I'm white?, it would be a different experience.

So most people who are targeted by cops have no way of knowing for sure if their race made a difference in that particular case... but knowing that it happens, they have two choices: shut up and place nice and hope that the encounter doesn't become more than a temporary and embarrassing hassle, or confront. Some people would say it's never wise to confront the cops or that it's not fair to confront someone with an accusation of racism without proof.

To the latter, I will say that if the Gold Standard of being able to talk about racism is having proof on the order of someone saying, "Man, I've been waiting all day to pull over one of you types!", then we need to give up because racism wins forever.

To the former, I would agree that it seems like the safest course of action to not confront, in the short term, but in the long term... again, racism wins forever.

And this is why, even if Professor Henry Louis Gates's response to being called out of his home in the middle of the night was more "disorderly" than his own account claims, I cannot agree with anyone who says that he should have known better or that the cop was within his rights to respond by arresting him, or that this is not a matter for national attention.

The police officer was in his rights? What about the professor's rights? He was in his home. English common law recognized that "a man's home is his castle" even back when they had a real monarchy and all the tyranny that we eventually revolted from. The police had more need to demonstrate their reason for being there than he had to demonstrate his right to be there.

Sure, if someone said, "But wouldn't you be glad for the police's protection if they kept an intruder from invading your 'castle'?",

I would agree... but that wouldn't stop me from trying to verify their identity and their reason for being there if they knocked on my door in the middle of the night... and we come back to the fact that I could write it off as just a weird random happenstance.

There would be no reason for me to look for a larger pattern, it would just be a crazy story I could tell at parties, if I ever went to parties: "Let me tell you about the one time I came home late, and someone saw me struggling with the door and thought I was a burglar..."

Of course, I do belong to a few non-racial minorities that have been known to be targeted by police, and if there was at all a reason to think this was a factor, then for me to meekly comply and then laugh it off the next morning would be to validate that kind of discrimination, to give it license and strength.

So, if the question is put to me: do I think cops should just have to take it when they get called racist for doing their jobs?

That's the wrong question.

The question is, should the citizens that police officers exist to serve and protect just have to take it when they have reason to doubt they're being served and protected? That question applies to all people, obviously, but if the answer is that no, we should not, then as long as we know that racism exists (which we do know) and that it affects how police do their jobs (which we do know) then we can't ignore race as a factor in police interactions with the public. Even without proof in a particular case that the officer is an admitted racist or acted on racist impulses. It can't be ignored.

Oh, well, we (speaking to those of us comfortably white and comfortably middle class) can ignore it. We have that privilege. But it's not our place to judge when others choose not to, to call them stupid for asking the questions that we habitually avoid.

And we can sound so sophisticated when we duck them, too.

"It's tempting to see something as simple as a racial dynamic at work, but I see a more complicated question of class." is a popular one, but cases like that of Professor Gates, or Denzel Washington being unable to get a cab in New York, or then-General Colin Powell being stiff-armed by airport security, or actor Jeffrey Wright being ejected from a bar and tasered by cops show us the truth... presumably when these men find themselves on the receiving end of discrimination and official harassment, it's not because those doing it have identified them as wealthy successful men of color, but because of how dark skin "codes" to them: low class, no business being there, could be trouble.

Likewise, there was an article in Forbes explaining how the real issue was not one of race but of broader first amendment questions, and it raised some excellent points about the liberties that cops have taken with our liberties, but the existence of those points don't actually eliminate the racial side.

And that's the bottom line: yes, I'd believe the police officer if he said that anyone who had responded to that visitation the same would have been given the same response from the police, but it wasn't anyone who got the visit and not just anyone would have had good reason to believe their race was a factor.

Anyone who did receive such a visit and did suspect so would have had every right to speak out against it.

It's not the "smart" (meaning "safe") thing to do but it beats the alternative.

Racefail in comic fandom, found via ktempest's Twitter. For the linkaphobic, some portion of the fandom has apparently gone groddshit over the startling level of diversity of the current incarnation of the Justice League, especially during a crossover with Milestone characters.

(Interestingly, they're laying this at the feet of Dwayne McDuffie, who has since left the book after a run that was dogged by his utter lack of input over the team's roster.)

I could really go nuts analyzing this, but I think a few pictures might say it all.

Here's the cover of the first issue of the current volume of the Justice League:



Oh my God.

Are you lost amidst the sea of diversity yet?

Of course, since then, the roster's changed a bit. They've added the current Firestorm, Jason Rusch, who is an African-American teenager. Sometimes they deal with another Green Lantern, like John Stewart. So, you know, you can add two more heroes of color to that picture mentally.

You don't have to put them up front or anything, though.

And in case you're wondering, the guy with the red face is a robot. A robot who looks like a white guy when he isn't being a superhero. Of course, front and center is an alien who looks like a white guy. This is one of the few versions of the Justice League to not include a martian who, when he needs to not look like a martian, usually looks like a white guy. Canonically the martian has multiple identities throughout the world, of all races and both of the two major genders. We're told, occasionally, that he's the most popular hero in South America simply because he has "local" identities down there. Writers remember to tell us this sometimes, but when we see him being human, nine times out of ten he's John Jones, American everyman.

White default in action.

Now, one possible reason for the backlash is that fans who came of age from the mid 90s on may resent any dilution of the "big seven" version of the Justice League, the classic configuration of Aquaman, Batman, Flash, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, Superman, and Wonder Woman that was revived at that time and impressed on the public consciousness through the Justice League cartoon. But that same revival was itself a groundshaking event, as it supplanted other versions of the Justice League that had their own popular followings. Two of them, Justice League International and Justice League Europe, were actually attempts to shake up the status quo and broaden the team's base to beyond characters who code as white Americans (even if they're Kryptonians, Amazons, or Atlantians).

We can maybe expect Justice League Europe to be a little eurocentric, but that's okay... they had Justice League International around to diversify things a little.

Let's take a look at their lineup:



Talk about a rainbow connection! I am dizzy with lack of breath from the whirlwind of ethnicities on display.

They did eventually gain a member from South America, a Brazilian hero named Fire.

Fire looks like this:



I apologize to any of my fellow white fans who I've made to feel marginalized and excluded by putting these images on display. Don't worry, some day comic companies will realize that people like us buy comics, too.