Every Little Queer Vote Matters: Reflections On The Demise Of DOMA

"Oh my G-d, he's marrying another man!"

Now that Rahm Emanuel has gone off to work his magic on Chicago, it seems that everyone in the Obama White House has gone a little light in the loafers, as my Dad used to say.  Clinton-era palliatives to the right wing that beat back the gays, while Republicans reorganized to elect a president who would send our money and our jobs abroad, are dropping like flies. First the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell received a timetable for withdrawal, and yesterday Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice will not defend the Defense of Marriage Act because it is unconstitutional.

In both cases, the Obama administration is holding out an olive branch to liberals who have been in an impatient "show me" mood.  But looked at another way, one of the things we know about conservatives is that they are increasingly less persuaded, as a group, in the moral issues that right-wing strategists use to obscure other fiscal and political agendas.  Abortion is probably the one exception to this, and I can't help but wonder whether the Republican attack on Planned Parenthood -- in many communities the only place where uninsured women of low and middle income brackets have access to birth control, breast cancer screening and gynecological care -- isn't going to come back to bite them in the a$$.

What is interesting to me, looking at a longer historical trajectory, is that Obama's tactics in this regard are quite similar to those used by Jimmy Carter in the first two years of his administration. In 1977, the National Gay Task Force (NGTF)* sent a negotiating team of six men and six women to the White House to negotiate a repeal of an Eisenhower-era ban on gays in government.  The group included luminaries of the left like peace activist and radical lesbian feminist Charlotte Bunch, and was backed by former ACLU Sexual Privacy Project attorney Marilyn Haft, who had gone to work in the Carter administration.

Looking at the archival record, which I have recently for an article that will come out in the Journal of Policy History, you can see two things.  One is that Carter's aides wanted nothing to do with gays, and could have gotten away with that.  Unlike feminists, while GLBT Democrats were organized, they had not yet had a structural impact on the party at the national level.  Carter, however, was persuaded that the moral argument against homosexuality did not preclude a human rights argument on behalf of gays who were excluded from access to many citizenship rights because they were homosexuals.  While the NGTF pressed throughout the administration for the President to take a public stand on gay human rights through an executive order that banned discrimination (legislation originally written by Representatives Ed Koch and Bella Abzug in 1972 is still languishing somewhere on the island of Untouchable Bills), what Carter chose to do was simply stand back and allow the NGTF to persuade Cabinet-level agencies to allow homosexuals to grieve discrimination just like all other citizens were entitled to do.

In this way, a great many barriers to employment fell by eliminating the category of sexual orientation as justification for special discrimination in the federal realm.  This had ramifications beyond government employment, since agencies like the FCC and the Treasury had great power to hear, or not hear, complaints about discrimination that shaped critical areas of American cultural and economic life. That said, the administration did not force agencies to conform to this model, which left the military and the national security apparatus largely untouched. 

Indeed, the similarities between Obama's policies and Carter's are more dramatic the harder you look. Few people not on a GLBT listserve of some kind probably noticed that an out transwoman, Amanda Simpson, was appointed to the Commerce Department in 2010, or that six months later, the State Department lifted the requirement that transpeople have surgery to alter their gender on their passports.  This latter move is incredibly important for the freedom of transfolk to cross borders (and incidentally, to consume airfares and whatnot), but it lifts one form of discrimination while leaving the principle in place that gender identity itself is a border that ought to be complicated and difficult to cross.

Two observations, in closing.  White House statements that Obama's personal views in this matter are separate from his presidential responsibilities demonstrate how far we have not come in the last forty years and how far we have come in the last twenty.  That a president cannot simply come out and say all forms of discrimination, even discrimination against people who disgust you personally, is wrong, demonstrates how the Age of Reagan permanently reshaped political discourse.  And yet, the way that this has happened, much as many mainstream GLBT people would like to be embraced by the President, potentially begins a turn away from neoliberal ideologies that have collapsed the public and private realms since 1988.  A neoliberal himself, Obama has nevertheless re-established some clarity between the realm of personal views and the realm of constitutional, public responsibility has, I  would argue, far broader ramifications for developing the concept of good government than we can perceive around this one issue.  But he is doing so in a way that also sets limits to what can be accomplished, since it stops short of an affirmative statement and affirmative actions that ban all forms of discrimination against GLBT people.

Cross posted at Cliopatria.
___________________________

NGTF became the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in the mid-1980s, and now often colloquially refers to itself as "The Task Force."

Department of Uniquely Tacky Political History Gifts

Seriously? Chia Obama? I saw this on TV tonight and couldn't wait to run upstairs and log in.

The good news is that Chia Obama is part of the "Proud To Be An American" series that includes Chia Washington, Chia Lincoln and Chia Statue of Liberty.  If you go to this part of the Chia Products website, you will see that Chia Washington has his green hair neatly trimmed colonial style, whereas Chia Lincoln, Chia Obama and Chia Liberty all have a neat 'fro.



We are living in amazing times. I don't think a sitting President has ever been honored with his own Chia, come to think of it. So buy one now -- for that historian who has everything. For a limited time only. $19.95 + $7.95 shipping and handling. Free shipping with two or more. Buy Chia Obama for the whole American wing of your department. It's never too soon to start thinking about the holidays.

Annals of American Ignorance: Or; The President Prays Every Day, And So Should We All

It's all over the news lately that, according to a new poll conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, nearly one in five Americans is dumber than a rock -- er, I mean, thinks that Barack is a Muslim (not that there's anything wrong with that!) The increase in those who believe that Obama sneaks off to the mosque behind our backs -- seven percent since last spring- is accompanied by a "sharp decline" of 14% in the number of Americans who think Obama is a Christian.

In May 2009, LiveScience reported that one out of five Americans admit that they pee in the swimming pool. The Centers for Disease Control reports that one out of six Americans has genital herpes, one out of five Americans infected with HIV do not know they have it, the American Dental Association reports (gag!!) that one out of five Americans surveyed do not brush their teeth twice a day, and the National Institute of Mental Health reports that more than one in four Americans suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder.

So who cares what Americans think about the President's spiritual life? Tend to your own damn gardens, America, that's what I say, and don't forget to wear a rubber when you are playing any version of hide the salami. For a list of the other things characterizing one out of five Americans, go to this article in The Washington Post.

Interestingly, the number of African-American people who think the President is a Muslim has only risen from 6% to 7% in the same period in which whites in both parties, and those registered in neither party, have been successfully brainwashed by paid political operatives and radio talk show hosts. Given that the margin of error for each category was around 4% (and I suspect somewhat higher for African Americans, since their proportion of the survey group was probably the same as their percentage of the population), we can say with some confidence that it seems to be only white people who are obsessed with this question and there may be no black people who believe that Obama is a Muslim.

Odd that the media is not reporting this, isn't it? I guess this is what it means to be post-racial.

Stranger still, given how much talk there has been about the President's religion, in the part of the poll that links job approval to the Christian/Muslim question two out of five Americans, when asked about his religion, said they didn't know what religion the President was. This is truly amazing, since the right answer and the wrong answer are available on every media outlet nearly every day. And finally, when asked a series of questions about the proper role of religion in politics, and specifically on presidential decision-making, two out of five Americans were unaware that religious conservatives or liberals had created formal lobbying organizations to try to influence politicians and policy-making.

While the White House has reassured us that the President is not only Christian, he prays every day, there is very little concern being expressed about how unbelievably ignorant and ill-informed Americans are, and why Americans think being religious -- much less having the "right" religion -- has anything to do with policy-making. Not since the 1960 Presidential campaign, when John F. Kennedy had to repeatedly reassure Americans that he would not appoint the Pope to a cabinet post, has religion and the paranoia that Protestants in America harbor towards religions associated with non-white and immigrant people, been such an accepted part of the political landscape.

And not since the nineteenth century has rumor been such an acceptable substitute for being well-informed for so many people. But that may be because only one in five Americans reads above a twelfth grade level.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Sunday Radical Roundup: Surely The Obama Presidency Means We Are Now Beyond Race

To paraphrase Leslie Nielson in Airplane (1980), "No, not if we are firing black people in public service for talking about race -- and don't call me Shirley." Even out in Minnesota, where the Radical family was taking a vacation from all things political, everyone was aware that it wasn't a great week to be Shirley. Read good commentaries in today's New York Times from Frank Rich, a particularly lucid Maureen Dowd, and Van Jones on the Shirley Sherrod affair.

Sherrod's firing and rehiring by Tom Vilsack, a Midwestern progressive who should have known better (and a West Wing that either signed off or insisted on it) is a teachable moment. Ponder, if you will, what this event tells us about the cynical use of race in contemporary political culture. Why the Obama administration can't do better than it does, particularly given the historical lessons of the Clinton years in which accomplished black women routinely took it on the chin and were then hung out to dry by their allies, is something academics might want to think about too. Has anyone noticed that as women and people of color are breaking through to higher ed. administration in unprecedented numbers, yawning hiring, tenure and salary gaps persist, and are usually explained as the outcome of discrimination that only existed in the past -- discrimination that could not possibly be corrected in the present by women, people of color and self-proclaimed feminist men who now have the power to do exactly that?

But returning to the kamikaze political life that seems to be shaping the nation's destiny, I would like to add a few observations. As someone who is currently working on the history of radical feminism in the 1970s, it seems quite obvious to me that the political right learned to do this from the political left. Look at any New or Old Left social movement, and you will see a kind of winner-take-all viciousness in which a large scale ideological attack often took the form of taking a remark, or a political stance, as a thread that would then be used to unravel the opposition's whole sweater. Look at the dirty politics internal to mid-century American Communism; trashing in radical feminism; the decades-long success of the AFL-CIO in suppressing organizing among non-industrial labor; the internal struggles that ended with the expulsion of whites from SNCC (and the subsequent, less heralded, resignation of many black members of SNCC); and the number of queer organizations that have been founded, and then turned on, by Larry Kramer. In other words, there is some shared responsibility for the development of these practices and for the strategic deployment of dirty tricks, particularly statements that are spun out of context to "prove" a foregone conclusion.

This is not to say that the left is worse than the right in this regard: only that they shared in pioneering this behavior; that it has now been fatally merged with racist right-wing political tactics dating from Reconstruction; and that it is now being perfected in an age in which a media story can be transmitted in nanoseconds.

I would also observe that this is not just a political problem, it's a cultural problem. It is the kind of $hit that occurs daily on blogs: blogger writes a six or seven paragraph essay, and some a$$hat latches onto a sentence out of context, gives it a hateful spin, and writes a "comment" that is actually just a personal attack intended to discredit the blogger wholesale. The idea? Who cares about ideas? You would have to read the whole post to grasp the ideas!!!! How much easier just to move on to the next blog, knowing that the writer is exactly the putrid idiot you knew s/he was before you started reading.

Which is all to say: we have become Adderall Nation. Even our intellectuals and journalists often lack the attention span to read or watch anything all the way through. We tape everything on TV so we won't have to watch the commercials; we subscribe to Twitters from politicians so we won't have to read their position papers; and we read or view something just long enough to have -- not even an idea, but a reaction - and then we express our outrage as a character assassination of the person who provoked us.

Is it about the technology? In other words, if information could not be spread unchecked through blogs and other free social media, would a good woman like Shirley Sherrod have been assaulted in this way? Certainly the technology makes it possible -- but like any other phenomenon that has a history, it doesn't make it inevitable or necessary.

And as my mother used to say, it's the thought that counts.

Crossposted at Cliopatria.

Next Week, For My Benefit, President Obama Will Play Basketball With Lesbians

What, exactly, has happened to feminism?

If Joanne Lipman's peculiar rant in yesterday's New York Times about why women should only blame themselves for the lack of gender equality in the so-called "post-feminist" world was not enough to inspire this question (see Historiann for extended commentary), read today's paper. A front-page story by Mark Leibovich features former Clintonista Dee Dee Myers wagging a finger at President Obama for playing sports with men. Forget it that a grown woman who calls herself Dee Dee, and whose job description seems to be pundit, is accusing the President of not taking female people seriously. Forget it that Dee Dee would know better than anyone that it is not always a good thing for the President to relax by playing with girls.

No, I am going to lay those issues aside and cut to the chase: who the President plays basketball with has nothing to do with key feminist issues like the right to choose, equal pay for equal work, violence, homelessness, child care, health care, social security, welfare or institutional discrimination.

That's right, you heard it here first. Back in the 1970s, feminists never really cared about whether the boys had a tree house or not, they cared about whether men were running the world and ruining women's lives from the tree house. Gender segregated social spaces, while they reinforced male privilege, were in fact only an effect and a fringe benefit of what virtually all men, of all social classes and political convictions, believed prior to women's liberation: that it was their natural, biological, divine and constitutional right to run the entire world and keep all the money, jobs, property, education and power for themselves. Men, as well as women, were encouraged to believe this by law, theology, psychiatry, and science. These fields were almost exclusively male because of schools that admitted almost no women; global churches that gave women no authority to interpret scripture; political parties that didn't promote women for public office; unions that didn't organize women or fight for their right to work; and corporations, universities, police forces, law firms, construction projects, brokerage houses, fire departments and hospitals that didn't hire women. Men hung onto their exclusive right to run the entire world until feminist politicians, attorneys and grass-roots activists (as well as male politicians who suddenly got it they could be elected by actually serving the interests of women voters) forced them to give it up by making gender discrimination illegal.

To return to the New York Times for a moment, what seems really sexist to me is the article itself. For narrative flow, Mark Leibovich relies on crude gender stereotypes of boyish boys who play sports and do guy-guy stuff; meanwhile the girly-girls at the White House plan showers and tea parties that the menz are excluded from. Describing Obama as a "an unabashed First Guy’s Guy," Leibovich notes that since he was elected the President "has demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of college hoops on ESPN, indulged a craving for weekend golf, expressed a preference for adopting a `big rambunctious dog' over a `girlie dog' and hoisted beer in a peacemaking effort."

Can I just say, Mark, that aside from the fact that they rarely get elected to anything, this would describe a lot of lesbians I know too? Or Sarah Palin?

OK, you might ask, what is Leibovich's take-away political point in this story? It is that "women" (the word feminism does not appear) will not trust the President to respect them or take their issues seriously because, when not with his wife and children, he socializes primarily with men. "While the senior adviser Valerie Jarrett is undeniably one of the president’s closest White House confidantes," he writes,

some women inside or close to the administration complain that Mr. Obama’s female advisers are not as visible as their male colleagues or, they suspect, as influential.

"Women are Obama’s base, and they don’t seem to have enough people who look like the base inside of their own inner circle,” said Dee Dee Myers, a former press secretary in the Clinton administration whose sister, Betsy, served as the Obama campaign’s chief operating officer.

Is the point of the story to remind us that Hilary Clinton is not President? Enquiring minds want to know.

For Myers, "looking like" -- or what I would call proxy politics -- would be an acceptable substitute for serious policy commitments that might promote women's rights and/or proof that they exist. But hold your horses, my friends! You might remember that Bill Clinton looked like a feminist, and he filled his administration with women. But as it turned out, he treated individual women badly (including his very intelligent and capable wife, now Obama's Secretary of State), and promoted economic policies that were bad for women around the world. Recently I made an argument that it was a strategic error to mistake the mere inclusion of "people who look like me" for intellectual and institutional transformation, but I've got to say, Valerie Jarrett and Dee Dee Myers sure don't look like me. If Obama hired Nan D. Hunter of Georgetown Law we could get closer to someone who "looks like me," but to really nail it you would have to go for....oh, a gas station attendant in a Cold War film noir.

But to get back to politics, women's liberation, as a movement, relied on structural critiques for its great successes, not social critiques or gender essentialism. The idea that men who are in the company of other men are inherently incapable of reaching conclusions that are good for women is not a correct feminist analysis, or a logical one unless you believe in universal male stupidity, and it gives a great many men a big pass for a long history of discrimination. Feminist history teaches that one can, theoretically, trust a president who is not, at all times, accompanied by a simulacrum of "me." Why? Because who the President plays basketball or golf with (and I've got to ask, I know I have bad knees, but how many women over 35 are actually competing to be bumped and stomped at lunch by a bunch of menz?) does not need to be an issue, as long as the President works effectively with people -- women and men -- who take gender equity in all spheres of life seriously.

Like much of what passes for the media's coverage of national politics, Leibovich's article masks social commentary as political news and by doing so, drowns the potential for a feminist agenda in symbolic issues and hurt feelings. In the 1970s, feminists like Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the ACLU understood that breaking the barriers that kept women off the basketball court and out of the policy-making room required lawsuits and legislation, not socializing. By turning feminist ideas into pragmatic political action, they changed laws and policies that prevented women from access to all forms of work and education. Gender-segregated social space became important to feminist attorneys, not in and of itself, but when it facilitated the exclusion of women from participating equally in work (holding business meetings at men's clubs), or when women paid equal dues for unequal access (private athletic clubs, where women were barred from swimming so that men could swim in the nude or restricted to tennis and golf reservations in non-working hours.)

True, men often countered challenges to exclusive social spaces and schools by waxing eloquent about the importance of male-only spaces to manhood itself, justifications that feminist attorneys countered by pointing to the critical role these spaces had in corporate decision-making and professional networking. So I admit that social space and political space do overlap, and if competent, willing female Congressional aides had been overlooked when Obama's people were picking golf and basketball companions (the article presents no evidence that this is the case, only that it might be) I would be a little pissed. But I would probably still care more about the President's position on DOMA, ENDA or the Helms Amendment. What is wrong with sex segregation is when the men involved actually believe that women are not in the room because they are less intelligent and capable, not that men (or women for that matter) might play some pick-up hoops in between a foreign policy meeting run by Hilary Clinton and a skull session on the health care bill run by Kathleen Sibelius.

What this article best illustrates, once again, is not a political problem, but a distressing standard for what counts as good journalism in what is purportedly one of the nation's finest newspapers. Other than the fact that I am sick of the New York Times pandering to its right-wing critics by criticizing the President for something -- anything! -- and pandering to the soft news market with human interest stories about politicians, I would like to point out that in this post-JFK, post-Clinton, post-John Edwards moment, this feminist Democrat sleeps better at night knowing that, when not with his family, Obama relaxes by playing competitive sports with the boys, and is not wasting political capital that might otherwise be spent on health coverage for women and children on schtupping interns, videographers and campaign volunteers. As a feminist, I think that this is not only better for "women," but for the United States, and perhaps the world.

Happy Birthday Mr. President, From Your Favorite Radical

Barack won't get a party as nice as this one (I hear the Senate Democrats are coming over for ice cream, cake and donkey rides) , but Happy Birthday anyway, Mr. President!

This Post Is Not About Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Attempt To Enter His Own Home In Cambridge, MA

As news about Professor Gates' confrontation with the Cambridge Police Department was breaking -- or was it shortly after the President spoke so forcefully about it? -- a friend turned to me and said: "Do not blog about this."

That may be some version of what Michelle Obama was thinking as she saw her husband embark on what I thought was a humorous, candid and incisive commentary on the events surrounding a wealthy Harvard professor, his friend, being schooled by the police. (As an aside: if Obama were a blogger, he would have known not to use any derivative of the word "stupid." Feminist bloggers know the content of what they are trying to say dissolves as (male) conservatives leap to censure them for disparaging such noble whitemale institutions as American policing or the Varsity Sport That Must Never Be Mentioned.) If there had been a thought bubble over Michelle's head, it would have said something like: "Oh Barack, do not be honest with white people about this thing. They cannot handle it." And indeed, it seems that we cannot.

Black commenters have spoken eloquently about the class and racial dynamics attendant to Professor Gates' arrest, particularly here and here. I think white people have very little to add to some parts of this story, and so I would only like to thank the President for having said an honest and true thing. Why, even if I didn't agree, it's such a relief to hear a President do that! I don't even think the word "stupid" is a fatal flaw: my guess is that it was a place-holder for "racist" in the way people often substitute a non-descriptive word for the descriptive one when trying to speak about repetitive, painful events (Spouse: "How was the department meeting?" You -- a seething full professor who has just been treated like she knows nothing about her own field by a bunch of people not in her field -- "Oh, it was just stupid." And you say that because if you said "It was so sexist" you would have to experience that stab of knowing that nothing you do, ever, will cause them to stop treating you badly; that you will always have to endure it.) And of course, there were many layers of racism in this incident: from the anonymous white person who called the police in the first place, to the white officer unwilling to appear intimidated by a wealthy black Harvard professor's rage, to the news media choosing to depict Professor Gates in handcuffs screaming, or with a mug shot, rather than using any one of a number of portraits that are commonly available (In less than half a minute, I downloaded the one in this post from his academic web page.)

So I want to talk about and to that anonymous white neighbor. Because I am a white neighbor of black and brown people, one who lives in an urban university environment, and there are a few things I have learned.

Primarily what I have learned is that white people put black people in danger every day, an insight that was crucial to southern women's activism against lynching as early as the 1930s. I have learned that while many of us believe racially integrated neighborhoods are desirable, and some of us actively seek them out, no one talks to white people about their responsibilities for reigning in the racism that inevitably follows when white and black people come into proximity with each other. There is no doubt in my mind that white people put black people into danger all the time as a result of their good intentions, and that being aware of this is a full time job. I worry, for example, every time a close friend of mine I have known since college -- a major property owner in the neighborhood, with an Ivy degree, wealthy, and a football celebrity -- borrows my lawn equipment, because to your average cop he is just another _________ (fill in the blank) walking down the driveway and up the street with someone else's electric mower.

This kind of awareness is very painful to come to terms with, as was the time I was driving a black job candidate around Zenith, stopped to ask directions, and saw the white man in his pretty suburban yard hurrying his children into the house -- until he noticed that there was a white woman getting out of the driver's side. I could feel his relief as an almost physical thing between us. As one of my friends said later about the job candidate, "I guess it's something he should know about what it would mean to live here." Of course he did already -- it was me who had to learn it.

Coming to terms with slights, and ones that can turn into a dangerous situation in a heartbeat, is something every person of color in America deals with and knows more about than virtually any white person: I don't care if Republican senators like Jeff Sessions says it ain't so, it is so. Sonia Sotomayor is absolutely correct on this point. And to my mind, white people have a responsibility to come to an awareness about this. and act on it as a moral responsibility. To wit:

About two years ago, I was about to leave on a trip; my partner had taken the car somewhere else, so our driveway was empty. As I opened the door to a small hallway that leads to our back door with a bag of garbage in my hand, at that precise moment, a man standing at the door popped the lock with a screwdriver and stepped into my house.

I was, needless to say, surprised, and so was he. I said, "what the fuck are you doing in my house?" He said, very politely, "I'm so sorry," turned around, closed the door, and walked swiftly down my driveway. I came shooting out the door, shouting some version of what I had already said as he turned the corner of the driveway and disappeared. Needless to say, I was very frightened, and probably would not have behaved so aggressively if I had not been.

I called the police. It seemed to be the right thing to do at the time, since my neighborhood suffers from a lot of petty theft that I suspect is endemic to neighborhoods full of students from the 'burbs who can be pretty casual about locking up: laptops next to open windows disappear, bicycles are liberated from back yards and so on. I described the thief the best I could: around 5'8" (my height); medium-complected African-American; shaved head; round preppy glasses; middle-aged; dressed in a tennis shirt, pressed chinos and white sneakers. He looked," I said helpfully, "Like a college professor." What happened next was instructive: the investigating officer put the description out, and asked if I wanted to ride around and look at a variety of men who were being braced around the neighborhood for my inspection. I did, and with sinking heart, I saw "suspect" after "suspect" who looked absolutely nothing like the description I had given. They were tall; they were short; they were twelve; they were old; they were dressed like bangers; they were dressed in rags; to a man, they had full heads of hair, mustaches and beards; none were wearing glasses, and so on. Oh yes -- all of them were, as far as I could tell, Latino, which in Shoreline generally means Mexican or Puerto Rican.

As I tried not to be sick with shame all over the officer's front seat, I thought three things. One was, I hope to Heaven they have not picked up one of my friends or one of the next door neighbor's children (who were routinely picked up by the police after a purse-snatching in the neighborhood.) The second was, how easy it would have been for me to say, "That's him!" either in honest error or not and cause someone a world of trouble that was beyond humiliation: being taken to jail indefinitely, a lost job, being kept out of school, being found guilty of another misdemeanor. And the third was, this is what racial profiling looks like. Unless I or someone I know has been violently assaulted, I must never, ever call the police again for something so small if I am going to be a responsible citizen of this neighborhood. Letting someone get away with attempted robbery, a person who was completely non-violent (which experienced burglars are), is absolutely worth not humiliating ten other people who the police are using this opportunity to intimidate and shake down for evidence that they are committing some other petty crime.

This kind of event is, of course, part of what police mean by being in control, and what the officer was doing when he arrested Professor Gates who was guilty of nothing more than saying angry, nasty things at the top of his lungs as a crowd gathered. When a police officer makes an arrest like that he is saying, "See? I can do this. I can make your life a living hell for an hour, a day, or longer. I require deference." The desired result is how many black men describe living their lives: a constant state of uncertainty as to what the police will actually do in any given situation, resulting in the need for profound deference and elaborate forms of self governance at all times (don't run, wear too much jewelry, show money or speed when driving; make sure you dress nicely, cut your hair, avert your eyes, carry your company/university ID at all times.) A policeman intimidates so that he does not have to use violence (hence, making the risk of violence to his own person greater.) This can be best accomplished when a large number of people already believe that a policeman could become violent at any moment, for any reason at all. And why do the police not do this to white people as much as to black people?

Because, God help us, we white folks believe the police are our friends.

So Mrs. Cambridge White Neighbor, what should you have done? You should have stopped and asked the gentleman who was trying to get into the house if he needed help -- and did he want to use your cell phone to call a locksmith (hint: burglars don't jimmy the front door in full sight of everyone.) If he had no business getting into the house, he would have left. If he did have business in the house, he might have said, "No thanks -- I think I've got it!" Or, "We've had so much rain, are your doors stuck too? " Or, "Yes, thank you, I need to call my wife -- hi, I'm Skip."

But you didn't. Perhaps it was because you fear black male strangers, like so many white people, no matter how they are dressed. But my guess is that you were embarrassed. You thought, "This is probably a Harvard professor trying to get into his own house, but if I stop and ask, he's going to think I think he's a criminal just because he's black. And he might think I am a racist! I can't risk that. So just to be safe -- I'll call the police!"

And my point is, Mrs. White Neighbor: safe for who? Why safe for you! Because the police are not a neutral party in such matters. They are not paid to help you navigate the social awkwardness of identifying your neighbors in a racially integrated neighborhood. They are paid to intimidate people who are physically similar to Professor Gates on your behalf, which means you cannot call them and expect that there will be no damage. To save yourself embarrassment or fear, you put a neighbor in a position in which there was a high likelihood that he would be arrested, physically injured or killed. He knew that -- why didn't you? And this is something I have not heard anyone say as a possible explanation for why Professor Gates behaved as he did in this situation.

He was frightened. And if so, in my experience, he was right to be.

What, Exactly, Is The Gay Agenda? And What Part Should Repeal Of The Defense of Marriage Act Play In It?

I had missed it that the federal Department of Justice (DoJ) had filed a brief supporting the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DoMA) until my Facebook friends went berserk over it on Friday. DoMA, for those of you who have been living under a rock, withholds federal recognition from any marriage contract not enacted between a man and a woman (read Jennifer Finney Boylan here on the application of that idea to transpeople), and licenses states to void gay marriages contracted in other states that are illegal under their own laws.

Many queers see Obama backpedaling on GLBT issues, and point to a campaign statement where he explicitly objected to the provisions of DoMA. I suppose it isn't worth it it to point out that Attorney General Eric Holder is not the President: he is only the President's right hand. My capacity for outrage is currently taken up with other things, such as: why paying bonuses to financial industry executives represents a crucial commitment to the sanctity of contracts, but paying benefits that were promised to retired auto workers is not. Or why Congress is setting its hair on fire over auto dealers losing their livelihoods, but seems unconcerned with the reverberating effects of auto workers losing theirs. I do have some room for other topics, however, and it seems clear that Miss Mary Obama needs to get his s***t together and communicate his good will to queers in a more concrete way than he has to date. I would add that queer people may need to pull themselves together too, as my buddy Bear Left is urging. "Don't Moan, Organize!" he advises. And yet, Bear, as you point out in the post, gays and lesbians are very organized.

I guess my question is this: is the brief really an outrage, except in the realm of symbolic politics where every queer victory is one step closer to Utopia, and every loss another step towards the Gulag? The Daily Kos has a selection of responses to the government's position on DoMA, and on the brief's effect on Obama's relationship to queer voters. The overall sentiment is that seems to be here that Obama had a chance to weigh in on the side of gay marriage, and not only did he fail to do so, but he weighed in on behalf of the status quo.

But this may be a good thing, because the status quo is legally quite fragile. DoMa has created fertile ground for a crushing wave of lawsuits, particularly now that some states have legalized gay marriage. One attorney I consulted in Connecticut thinks there will be major litigation under the commerce clause (click here and look under "Section 8, Powers of Congress"), as married couples working for national corporations are transferred to states that do not support, or that explicitly prohibit, their marriages or any benefits derived from them. These people will sue in federal court for access to the employment benefits they were entitled to but are then denied in state #2, even though they work for the same company. And they will win.

In this vein, check out law prof Nan D. Hunter over at Hunter For Justice. A former Clinton appointee, she has been working on these things for a long time, and infers that we are seeing the Obama administration play out a political game ultimately aimed at overturning DoMA in Congress. Congress will see a tsunami of litigation bearing down on them, she argues, and act to avert it by voiding their own stupid legislation. She also suggests that the arguments made by the DoJ in last week's brief are relatively superficial, sending a subtler message than the pro-marriage folks are able to hear right now in the wave of frustration and rage over the Prop 8 decision in California. A feeble case for restricting marriage was certainly the strategy in Connecticut, according to a member of the State Supreme Court who voted with the majority and who I had dinner with after the decision was published. Attorney General Richard Blumenthal did what he was supposed to do, which was to defend the constitutionality of the marriage law, but let's just say that he and his team didn't produce the kind of compelling brief we have come to expect from them in other matters, nor did "Swinging" Dick Blumenthal himself appear to argue for the state.

What are the advantages of sending DoMA back to Congress rather than steering multiple cases through the courts? Well, it might be faster, for one thing. Another is that social engineering from the bench has become a huge source of political conflict in this country, and the opposition it engenders can be crippling to a progressive agenda. Every piece of legislation should meet a rigorous constitutional test prior to being enacted, and the enactment of social change through federal legislation makes progressive change part of a democratic process that is more likely to produce consensus after the fact (unless, of course, you are a follower of John C. Calhoun's theory of concurrent majority.)

There is now a long history of judicial interventions that have overturned discriminatory laws, and very few of them have had the impact that progressives have hoped, or that has been achieved by say, the Wagner Act, the 1965 Civil Rights Act, or Title IX. Two failures of what conservatives call "legislating from the bench" are prominent, in my view: school desegregation and abortion. Half a century after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), our nation's schools are as (or more) segregated than they ever have been, and our private universities call themselves "diverse" when 5-10% of the entering class is African-American, and 20% are "students of color." Kevin Kruse's 2005 White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism demonstrates how whites in Atlanta successfully used what laws and institutions were available to them to re-segregate the geography and public institutions of their city, including its schools. Furthermore, court-ordered busing, as a remedy to residential segregation, has been a disaster, even though a great many people my age, black and white, benefited from it enormously.

And of course, as I have discussed recently here and here, the struggle to preserve abortion rights in the United States has become a principle rallying point for conservatives, and a source of endless litigation, during which women's reproductive freedoms have narrowed dramatically as "contraception" and "abortion" have become categorically merged by conservatives, religious extremists and the family values crowd. Thirty-five years after Roe v. Wade (1973), a woman's constitutional right to act on a private consultation with her physician by not bringing a pregnancy to term has been devastated in multiple ways, and corrupted the process of vetting judicial appointments by allowing one issue to dominate over others.

I've come a long way toward being sympathetic to the desire for gay marriage, but I continue to believe that it has consumed vast resources that might have been devoted to achieving universal access to: decent housing; good schools committed to educating citizens that are safe for queer kids; accessible higher education; universal health insurance; non-discrimination in assigning pension, death and federal retirement benefits; equality in adoption laws; equality under the law for women and children; ending discrimination in family court; full funding for public health outreach and research into communicable diseases; universal day care; immigration reform; disability rights; pay equity, a living wage and anti-poverty legislation. Citizens have a fundamental right to these things, whether they are married or not. As one of my favorite organizations, Queers for Economic Justice has pointed out on multiple occasions, the reason gay marriage is perceived as a middle class issue is because it is a middle class issue. Poor people have no property or rights to convey through marriage, nor do they have to worry about visiting someone in the hospital, because they can't get into one anyway. And why does "Don't ask, don't tell" not muster the emotional outpourings that gay marriage campaigns do? Because, as Janet Halley pointed out in Don't: A Readers Guide to the Military's Anti-Gay Policy, educated middle-class queers either don't approve of war, or they don't need to sign up for military service to get access to human rights that are currently privileges in the United States, and that they can find a way to purchase. In queer academic circles, at least, while marriage is the gay agenda everyone loves to hate, military service is really off the radar. In other words, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell (Don't Care!)"

If the Obama administration is not getting sucked into an eight-year struggle over DoMA that saps energy from their other social initiatives, then I would say that they have already learned the lessons queers need to learn: that there are some critical things that support a dignified life, and the right to marry is at the bottom of that list. I say this knowing how much people want it, and even having felt the warm fuzzies as it has passed, state by state. But that said, my gay agenda is to live in a country where marriage is purely a choice that people make out of sentiment, but one that conveys no material privileges whatsoever.

What Will Be The "Obama Effect" for Women?

Over time the American conservative movement has actually agreed about few things. But ultimately, one might argue, it came together largely over a combined hatred of the New Deal and its children, Harry Truman's Fair Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. This hatred --which was ultimately expressed in polemic form as the need to defend the traditional nuclear family from the state -- coalesced over the course of three generations and came to embrace a broad social and geographical constituency over time.

We who are on the left, while we do not believe that the state is unequivocally our friend, also believe in the capacity of the government to legislate our protection and support as a people: national health insurance, civil rights protection, pensions and employment equity are important categories where we think government intervention has been, and will be, successful. But progressives would also do well to pause and think before they ask Barack Obama for the 21st century equivalent of the New Deal. It was the Roosevelt Administration, as Alice Kessler-Harris has noted in her book, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Pursuit of Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (2003) that, as it sought to empower working men in a capitalist economy, wrote social discrimination against women into economic legislation. Indeed, they saw this as recognizing the different role men and women already had in families and communities. Feminists who had worked for years in cross-class movements, many of whom lived with other women and believed marriage and family to be incompatible with a career, transported these ideas to Washington in 1933 (see Susan Ware, Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism and New Deal Politics, a book which appears to be flying off the shelves at Amazon right now.)

One member of this network (all friends of Eleanor Roosevelt who had unique access to the administration as a result) was Frances Perkins. The official website of the Social Security Administration, where I found the above framed image of Secretary of Labor Perkins, the first woman to fill a cabinet level post, quotes her thus: "I came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain common workingmen." Eager to reinforce male bread winning as the foundation for "normal" families, fair labor standards, social security, the federal tax code and unemployment benefits all undermined an equitable workplace for women. And this was not just a question of gender discrimination, since although white working-class women did not have access to equal pay they did sometimes have access to unions. But women of color did not. By deliberately excluding domestic service from labor legislation, the Roosevelt administration specifically, and knowingly, undermined the economic citizenship of women of color, most of whom worked in what would now be called pink collar occupations.

And in her study of Social Security and AFDC, the two New Deal programs that, between them, "created the contemporary meaning of welfare," Linda Gordon argued over a decade ago that the state articulated poor women as widows and/or mothers, but not workers. As Ruth Crocker of Auburn University noted in a review of Gordon's book in 1995, the view that men were supported through wages and women through charity prevailed, "even though most poor women were also wage workers" (Gordon, 145) Gordon also cautioned us to remember that female policy makers, who had come out of a long middle-class feminist political tradition that saw working-class women's labor as ideally contributing to the economy in shoring up the nuclear family and raising children. As Crocker writes:

A central purpose of this history of policy-making is to explore why "welfare" or ADC programs took the shape they did -- how they emerged as one alternative among many. Black welfare thought provided one such alternative source of solutions, ignored rather than rejected by policy makers, and by historians of New Deal policy-making. Black welfare leaders were not consulted nor were their interests protected in the 1935 Social Security Act; their "alternative vision" was ignored by policy makers who also omitted domestic workers and agricultural workers from the Act's coverage. More disadvantaged than white women and disenfranchised even after 1920, black women nevertheless articulated a powerful "welfare vision" that was distinct from that of whites. Gordon provides a valuable summary of black women's welfare activism between 1890 and 1935. For African- Americans, the issue was not programs for the needy, but access for blacks of ALL classes to public services. These women organized, built, and sustained private institutions of health and welfare, defied stereotypes, asserted leadership, and struggled not as women, but as race leaders. Gordon makes the important point that for these women, welfare meant civil rights -- indeed, the assumption by policy historians of a dichotomy between welfare and civil rights stems from "a white notion of welfare" (Gordon, 119).

So in other words, it isn't an accident that we have not yet achieved equal pay for equal work, that women are more likely to be poor than men, and that the fastest ways for a woman to exit the welfare system before the state gives her the boot is to marry a man who has a job.

So let's not make the same mistake twice, shall we? In the wake of a petition circulating in the feminist blogosphere reminding President Obama that "shovel ready" projects in construction, transportation and public works may not employ women on the scale that they employ men, this great article by feminist labor historian and committed public intellectual Eileen Boris, Hull Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California -Santa Barbara appeared in Salon on January 16. Infrastructure is important, says Boris, who is writing a history of home care workers (many of whom are organized by SEIU) with Yale's Jennifer Klein. "But we also need to enhance the social infrastructure, bolstering not only a green economy but also the carework economy, by generating and improving pink jobs in home care, health and education." As Boris argues, this will not only employ women, who represent 46% of the work force in the United States, but it will deliver services to the people whose need for services is often enhanced in times like these: the elderly, the sick and children.

Barack Is (Not) Responsible For Making All Things Good: The Radical Disputes The Proposal That There Is An "Obama Effect" On Education

Much as I would like Barack Obama to sprinkle magic dust all over the country, fixing racism, poverty, and absolutely everything we hated about the Bushies, each policy question will have to be tackled thoughtfully, one by one. Today's topic is the national education agenda.

A crucial issue here is the continuing mania for using public school children as a vast pool of customers for corporations specializing in both mass curriculum distribution and in the endless testing through which students -- on pain of humiliation, summer school, and being held back a grade -- are asked to regurgitate these educational products. (I use the phrase "educational products" consciously: currently, a standard curriculum in the United States is to education what Cheez Whiz is to cheese.) The sad backstory of test scores going up in any given school are the number of students who drop out, or are encouraged to drop out, because of their low test scores.

No Child Left Behind, built around a testing mandate, is a great example of "an expensive government program" (to use a distinction our new President made himself) that does not work and ought to be eliminated. While few federal tax dollars are spent directly on NCLB, its unfunded mandates put a huge financial burden on state and local education budgets. Under systems driven by high-stakes testing, students learn by rote, rather than becoming critical thinkers, many students drop out altogether rather than be left back a grade, and we are no closer to creating equal access to a good education than we were a decade ago. And yet, today's New York Times buries this issue with yet another assertion that the symbolism of an Obama presidency, rather than radical policy interventions, will fix what is broken in our nation by lifting up the self-esteem of African-American people. Our paper of record reports that education researchers tested a group of children before and after the presidential nomination. The test before the nomination demonstrated what is commonly called the "achievement gap" between African-American and white students. But in the test after the inauguration, presumably because their self-esteem was raised by watching an African -American man become president, the African-American students stepped up their game. On that second test, racial differences in the children's test scores were "statistically insignificant."

This, the researchers imply, potentially reinforces previous studies showing that white students do better on standardized tests because they believe that they will succeed; and that African-American students do significantly less well on the same tests because they believe they will do poorly. I am sure I am over-simplifying a large body of research, but as a historian, to design one's research around such a notion seems pointless, particularly since this longstanding belief has never done anything to actually make Americans a better educated people. I am reminded of Booker T. Washington's firm belief that education was useless to formerly enslaved people until they had acquired self-esteem through physical and moral uplift (personal hygiene, and specifically proper deployment of the toothbrush, was one way to develop self-esteem; another was to learn how to make an excellent brick.) Such arguments have been by no means solely the province of African-American social scientists and educators. Post-1945 white liberals like historian Kenneth Stampp were entranced by the notion that persistent social inequalities are a result of low self-esteem, rather than ongoing racial and class inequality. By the 1940's, self-esteem arguments had moved into progressive, anti-racist social science through the black doll-white doll test designed by influential African-American psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark, used as evidence in Briggs v. Elliott (1952) and other lower court cases folded into Brown v. Board of Education (1954). As Waldo E. Martin has noted, this test was not without critics on both sides of the issue, many of whom saw methodological flaws in the Clarks' experiments. However, the gravity of the moral issues at stake, Martin writes, meant that arguments about self-esteem resulting from the study nevertheless became powerful visual evidence in what stands out as a classic liberal decision by the Warren court.1

Brown, of course, eliminated de jure segregation, which was important. But it failed to address other educational questions that contribute to what we now call the achievement gap, because the scope of the decision, influential as it was, left undisturbed the connections between segregation, institutional racism and economic inequality. Furthermore highly theatrical demonstrations, filmed and widely distributed, of serious African-American children unerringly choosing the white doll, became one of the great reproaches to liberals of interventions too long delayed and compromises too often made, just as southern whites with hate-twisted faces spitting on African-American grade schoolers is a past that conservatives will have to endure as part of their history. To this day arguments about self-esteem dominate our discussions about the education available to children of color. While not entirely unimportant, they have a tendency to occlude other kinds of questions that should be asked about why our public education system is in such terrible shape.

In the spirit of full disclosure, we at la casa Radical wish that Obama had selected someone for this important Cabinet-level position like Stanford's Linda Darling-Hammond, who was briefly considered for the post and had been chosen to head up Obama's education policy working group. But things could have been much worse. Joel Klein, superintendent of New York City's school system was under consideration, and of course, there is always Michelle Rhee, a strong proponent of free market solutions for public education (read: siphon tax dollars to corporations) right outside the White House gates.

So it could have been much worse than Arne Duncan, formerly CEO (yes, that was his title) of the Chicago Public School system. Time Magazine recently characterized Duncan as friendly to several camps of school reformers. That is all good, and it will help him be effective in a highly contentious and ideology-driven professional world. But one of the challenges Duncan needs to be asked to deal with is the dominance of standardized testing as an assessment method. Under the Bush administration, high-stakes testing has been the centerpiece of education policy. Literally billions of education dollars now go into creating, administering, and grading these tests -- dollars that could go into the teaching of critical thinking; that could be keeping libraries open; that could be funneled into tutoring programs and smaller classes. Perhaps we could use a billion to provide regular dental and health clinics for children in each school so that they can see the blackboard and are not in physical pain in the classroom.

In conclusion, I would argue that the research cited by the New York Times is useful, but probably not in the way the researchers imagined. Forget self-esteem for a minute, as well as the problem of using the so-called achievements of white people (good test-taking skills) as the measure of intellectual success for everyone. If the inauguration testing experiment means anything, it certainly tells us something about the researchers. The resilience of assumptions about the importance of self-esteem in educational research design has caused them to leak information, as if it were an exciting new intellectual path, about a piece of research that even they admit is incredibly scattershot. But more importantly, this little experiment shows that testing children doesn't tell you what they actually know, and therefore, testing is failing at the most basic level that any policy or practice can be evaluated. If test scores are so dramatically affected by social and psychological factors like whether a child is excited that someone of his or her so-called racial group is President of the United States, then in fact, the one thing we know is that standardized tests are a bad tool that do not give us any reliable gauge of whether teachers are teaching well or students are learning.

Cross posted at Cliopatria.

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1 Waldo E. Martin Jr., Brown v. Board of Education: A Brief History With Documents, Bedford Series in History and Culture (New York: MacMillen, 1998), p. 28.

The Gay Agenda

Dear Barack,

First of all, congratulations on the end of one journey and the beginning of another. We are all looking forward to your presidency, and many of us, I am sure, are thinking about how to share your burdens. So much of what happens next is about activating what already works: I was thinking about this after our third snowfall in so many days here in Shoreline. I didn't want to get up and shovel again -- but I did, because there are a lot of elderly people in my neighborhood who have worked hard to be independent and stay in their own homes, and a bad fall could end that in a matter of seconds. So I was out shoveling and scraping, along with the Italian sons, who drive in from the suburbs to make sure their parents' walks are clear; and the Black and Latino kids from the projects around the corner, who were trying to make a little money before school started. Then a couple guys came down the street and said to me "Put that shovel down Dr. Radical!" and it turned out they had been sent by my old college friend, Tim, an African-American man from Louisiana who used to play professional football, and has invested the bulk of his earnings in Shoreline neighborhoods. By doing this, a great many of his efforts go towards providing decent housing for poor people. Tim also hires guys from Shoreline who have been in prison and gives them the jobs they need, both to get parole and try to make new lives. Did I mention that Tim is busy developing land for a school back in Louisiana, and that he is particularly concerned about the educational prospects of girls?

So you see what I mean? There are a lot of people who are ready to step up, because they are stepping up already by thinking about somebody else every day and doing something about it. I think you know that, or you wouldn't be investing so much of your presidency in talking to us about it.

But I don't think you know much about the gay agenda. Oh yeah, yeah, there is one -- it's not just some right-wing scare tactic. There is. And part of what makes me think about this is the story in today's New York Times about queers of color and their allies picketing Pastor Rick Warren's Martin Luther King Day appearance in Atlanta. King's message of tolerance, protesters said, would have included gay and lesbian people. But actually, that is not true. It did not. We know that Bayard Rustin was marginalized from the movement because of his homosexuality, and only brought back to coordinate the 1963 March on Washington because of the highly-principled A. Philip Randolph, president of the influential Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

My point is that on that day when Martin talked about his dream, Bayard had a dream too, which was that the sexual acts he performed and his love for other men, Black and white, would not subject him to the double jeopardy of being a Black gay man. And that dream has also not yet been realized.

So without further ado, let me tell you what the gay agenda is:

That when anti-gay activists talk about special rights that queers are asking for, you remind them of the special wrongs we have endured. Like losing our jobs, being subject to arrest for gathering socially, being beaten and raped by the police, having our intellectual life censored, being imprisoned, being committed to mental asylums, having our children taken away, being thrown out of our homes as children and being forced to survive by selling sex acts to strangers, being bullied and beaten at school and on the street, electroshock treatment, being killed, being expelled from school, being subjected to endless public denigration and hatred as a group, having our belongings and money be stolen by the families of our deceased partners, being evicted from our homes, being excluded from hospital rooms when our loved ones are ill, being dismissed dishonorably from the military and losing our benefits, being permanently excluded from all benefits, financial and legal, that accrue to people who are married, and employment discrimination. To name a few. You tell them that, ok?

That you put all the reports that have been commissioned over the years that have reluctantly concluded that GLBTQ people are not only as good, but better, soldiers than straight people, in the public record; and by executive order, end all discrimination against GLBTQ people in the military. While you are at it, you might remind the Joint Chiefs that people in the military do not have access to freedom of speech as civilians do. You can order them to immediately issue a standing order to all commissioned and non-commissioned officers that they will no longer be permitted to voice their opinion that gays in the military are disruptive to a good national defense. They will convey explicitly, if they feel the need to discuss us at all, homophobia in the ranks, and all forms of prejudice and discrimination, is disruptive to a good national defense.

You can solve your Rick Warren problem by getting religion the fuck out of politics. Everybody is entitled to hir own faith, but they are not entitled to bludgeon the rest of us with it, and that act should not be facilitated by the President, the Congress, or any other elected official. This is not about being against religion per se; it is about the separation of church and state. Church and state may, and should, speak to each other; they should not speak for each other.

Issue an Executive Order canceling the Defense of Marriage Act. Leaving marriage "up to the states" when the federal government does not recognize gay and lesbian marriage as a legal contract is a punt. When people cannot take advantage of federal tax laws, transport their families over state lines, keep their health benefits, or know that they can retain custody of or access to children when they move to another state, their marriages are not equal to the marriages of straight people.

Tell the IRS to immediately investigate the non-profit status of churches that are investing large sums of money in anti-gay initiatives. Tell the IRS to agree back off when they agree to stop engaging in discriminatory activity.

There's more, but you have a lot to do, my friend, so I will stop here. So as you move forward, Barack, don't be tolerant like Martin Luther King, Jr., great as he was in so many ways. Be tolerant like A. Philip Randolph, who truly knew how to accept a person for who s/he was and the talents s/he brought to this great country.

This post goes out with love to Cheryl Clarke, poet, activist, intellectual and friend. Popsie did not live to see today, but he left his great lesbian daughter to carry on the mission.

"Magnificent Wind:"* In Which The Radical Begins Receiving Excuses From Her Students Even Before The Term Begins

Yesterday I, and a number of other colleagues who work at Zenith and other colleges, began to receive a steady stream of emails from students. They said some version of the following: "Hey, Professor, I am going to Barack's inauguration and won't make it back in time for class on Wednesday afternoon. I am sure you support my presence at this historic event. Hope this is ok -- let me know if it isn't, (signed) Siouxsie Q."** I had several crabby, middle-aged responses to the emails I received, including:

"Hay is for horses" (I had a kindergarten teacher back in 1964 who was fond of this one.)

"If I am not going to the inauguration because I have a prior commitment to be at school to advise you on Tuesday, and teach you on Wednesday, why shouldn't you actually have some commitment to be there and receive these services?" As the Mother of the Radical (MOTheR), a font of wisdom on matters of playground justice, would say, "So who told you life was fair, Radical?" Point taken.

"In the twenty-four hours between the end of the swearing in ceremony (which you will be watching on a Jumbotron, simply another kind of TV) and my class at 1:10 the following day, you could get back from San Francisco, London, and perhaps even Moscow; you can certainly get back to my classroom from the District of Columbia, so actually you are staying so you can party all night and not get up at the crack of dawn to put your sorry, hungover behind on public transportation." Now this is something I could have sympathy for, as opposed to the claim that affordable and timely travel arrangements are impossible.

"Oh grow up Radical" (said to self) "Who gives a crap what they do? Particularly when it offers you a topic for a blog post?"

Then I sent an email to my class telling them that I expected to see them there at 1:10 sharp on Wednesday, and I went to a lovely dinner party where we talked about what a relief it was to finally hear a (prospective) cabinet member say, in so many words that water-boarding (aka, simulated drowning) "is torture."

But I do wonder whether the Bush administration's penchant for acting like mutual obligation was a waste of time and money, for telling obvious lies as if they were true, and pretending that bad decisions represented the only possible option, has infected all of us in some indefinable way that will take time to recover from, no matter what breed of dog the Obamas eventually adopt. As a much younger colleague from another institution who was at that dinner party agreed, this kind of exchange is common between teacher and student nowadays, at least among those of us who teach at elite private colleges. "I have to go to the inauguration, which unfortunately conflicts with your class," is yet another version of, "I just found out I can't be in class tomorrow because my parents want me to come to Paris for the weekend" (I mean, whose parents really tell them on Wednesday that they expect to see them at dinner in the Marais on Friday?) Or try this one: "I need to take the exam early because my dad's travel agent bought me a non-refundable ticket to L.A. and I'm leaving the Tuesday before break." But my favorite one is this. Every once in a while students at Zenith organize a campus strike to raise consciousness about some serious issue. Inevitably, I am then asked -- well-known left-winger that I am -- whether I would please cancel my class so that my students can go on "strike" and not have to worry that they will miss anything that will affect their final grades. Some of you, dear readers, might say that there are students less interested in the political issue at hand who have actually (I know this is gross, but I am going to say it) paid for that class, and might think I have an obligation to teach it if they plan to be there. This is one good point. But a second is that the point of a student strike is to interrupt business as usual, and it doesn't work if business as usual has been, well, canceled, by lefty profs sympathetic to the cause.

All of these interactions have several common themes, in my view: powerlessness over one's own schedule; an assumption that the activity to be substituted for the academic obligation is not a preference or choice, but an unavoidable conflict with fixed parameters; and the request that permission be granted, after the fact, so that the student can feel good about the choice to do something fun that displaces the obligations attendant to being in school. "I hope this is ok" is another way of saying "what kind of unjust person would you be to kick me out of a course I need for my major just because I went to DC to party my butt off at this unique, historical moment for partying?" I agree that probably would be too steep a penalty for missing the first day of class; but it would also be fair to let you know, that I know, that for $15, you can catch one of many Fung Wah Bus departures from the District of Columbia after 3 P.M. Tuesday. Tickets are still available!

I could kick them out of class if I wanted to, but they are banking on it that a reasonable person would not do such a thing. Looking on the bright side, it is even a compliment that I am perceived as a reasonable person. But the corollary to that, in my view, is that I should not be required to endorse their failure to meet their obligations to me; or to reassure them that meeting these obligations was clearly impossible, given the odds stacked against them. This last can be tricky when, for example, we all know that there are parents who are exactly so narcissistic that they make fixed, and expensive, plans without consulting their children at all; and that, because of various divorces, joint custody arrangements and remarriages, children who are not at all wealthy are buffeted by impossible scheduling demands from an early age and might just find it easier to submit to family demands. Yet, would not some of those parents be able to hear it, and even be impressed at the sign of new maturity, if Biff responded to the notice from the travel agent by saying: "Gee Dad, I'm so sorry you are going to have to change the ticket, but this economics midterm is just too important to me to screw it up. And it isn't fair to the teacher to put her to the trouble of making up a new exam and setting up a proctor just for me. If you want me to pay the difference, I can, but next time, could you ask me?"

Part of what I would like to salvage from these encounters -- which in the end, mean little in terms of a semester's work -- is what they have to teach us about the changing climate for instruction more generally, both in elite schools like mine and at schools where students are more highly conscious of the conditions by which hard-earned cash is exchanged for knowledge and credentials. And how do we talk about these things as faculty without trashing students, and in a way that examines our own responsibility to meet students where they are? Part of what is shifting dramatically, and what we do not know how to talk about except in the crudest, most reactive terms, is the notion that a college course represents some kind of fixed, but unspoken, contract between teacher (authority) and student (subject), in which the student is bound to a particular schedule, and a social relationship, that respects the traditional power imbalance between teacher and learner, grader and gradee. It is very rare that I find myself enforcing all the terms of my syllabus nowadays; but it is also rare that more than a few of my students feel bound by the terms of the syllabus, or that any expectation, great or small, cannot be altered to accommodate their "needs," great or small. How, and why, these power relations between professors and students are shifting; what constitutes a successful negotiation about expectations between teacher and student; how electronic communication has facilitated and/or ameliorated those shifts and how we speak to each other about them; and how new expectations about power and authority play themselves out in daily, casual encounters between teachers and students -- all of these things deserve a great deal more thought as we enter this bright and shining new day.

* According to Wikipedia, "Magnificent Wind" is a loose translation of "Fung Wah." Perfect, no?

**This is an amalgam of several, surprisingly similar emails, received by me and other colleagues. The emails were so similar that I actually went to the Obama-Biden Transition Team web page to see if there was a standard excuse being made available to students skipping class to attend the inauguration.

The Portuguese Water Dog -- Er, I Mean, The "Lion" of the Senate, Returns

Teddy Kennedy returned to the Senate yesterday, as the New York Times put it, "flanked by his wife Vicki and his two Portuguese water dogs, Sunny and Splash." Much speculation has been raised about the role of these influential, rare and intelligent dogs in the new Obama administration. I'm not surprised about this. Sunny and Splash delivered a critical endorsement in the primary season that some have credited with turning the Obama campaign around, and they worked unstintingly for our current President-elect while Teddy was being treated for brain cancer. Right now, the Radical's informants are silent on what offices Sunny and Splash have been offered, but the advantages to appointing the Kennedy dogs are obvious: neither has ever sent an email that could embarrass them, their family or the administration. And they are Kennedys, underlining the point the national press seems to be going to town on lately, which is that the Obamas should not be scary to anybody because they are really just African American Kennedys (think Black Barbie.) Try Googling "Bamelot" and see how many hits you come up with.

But what Sunny and Splash will have to overcome are the three most common misunderstandings about the propriety of Portuguese water dogs participating in politics in the first place, and this, at least, is a serious issue.

Portuguese water dogs are already powerful movers and shakers in the Senate: why give them more influence? If Portuguese water dogs were as powerful as they would like to be , we would have national health care, bailing out the Big Three auto makers would not even be a question, banks would have been regulated up the wazoo, and the troops would be home from Iraq and Afghanistan now. We would also have a national "time out" every day at 11 a.m. when all citizens went outside, rain or shine, and chased tennis balls.

Portuguese water dogs are politically divisive figures and well-known biters of reporters. Also not true: in fact, they have hardly seen a reporter in the last eight years, having been crowded out by special interests and a variety of terriers who work for Dick Cheney (but who claim to be George and Laura Bush's "pets.") In fact, Portuguese water dogs dedicate themselves to currying favor with everyone and will continue to negotiate even after the bill is passed. They are well-known for constantly crossing --and re-crossing -- the aisle in true non-partisan fashion, particularly if Orrin Hatch has left an old potato chip bag in the wastebasket under his desk but Harry Reid dumped donut crumbs in his.

There was once a political scandal when a Portuguese water dog received a $400 haircut and it was reported in the national news; Obama will thus be endangered by the specter of gay hairdressers coalescing as a special interest to demand national bad hair insurance. There is some truth to this. But the cost of the haircut in question was exaggerated. How do these lies get spread? The top price for a wash, blow dry, clip, ear-plucking, and toe-nail trim is about $135, probably less at the Senate barbershop. And although it was repeatedly suppressed during the campaign, liberal as well as conservative policy makers are well aware that bad hair is a critical national security issue.

The Content of Our Character: Making The History Of President Obama

We did it. Oh my God, let me help the Bushies pack. I've been saving boxes for them. And once we're done, I'll start saving boxes for Joe the Senator, that skunk of a former Democrat who has succeeded in making himself completely irrelevant. Hope it was worth it, Senator Lieberman: at least you will have two wars and thousands dead to look back on when you are going through your memory books in two years.

I myself feel as though I have just been liberated from a dictatorship: I cried throughout Obama's victory speech last night, overwhelmed with relief, exhaustion and the hope that things would be different soon. And you know, wherever Obama comes down on GLBTQ rights in the end, he won't be out to to get us like the Bushies and their pals in the Heart(less)land were. Things have been so bad -- for example, using hideous, antigay initiatives to get poor, white conservatives to the polls to vote for politicians who were ready to turn the economic screws harder on those same voters -- that I would settle for just being left alone by the state and by the people of this great land. And if Obama can do better than that, well then, Goddess bless him.

In the midst of our long-awaited celebration, may I inject a request that our euphoria not cause us to over-read what has just happened? One of the things that is going to be a little hard to take over the next few days is the ooze of self-congratulation already begun in the media about the sea-change in American race relations, "proven" by the majority of the electorate having chosen an African-American man as president. I needn't remind you that, although put in context it was a resounding victory, many millions of people did not vote for Obama: some of those people will become reconciled to his presidency and many, I suspect, will not.

This means that we need to take with a grain of salt the announcement by pundits like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, that inequality, and the culture of racial meanness that has pervaded politics since Reconstruction, is officially at an end. "And so it came to pass" Friedman writes biblically, "that on Nov. 4, 2008, shortly after 11 p.m. Eastern time, the American Civil War ended, as a black man — Barack Hussein Obama — won enough electoral votes to become president of the United States." He continues:

"A civil war that, in many ways, began at Bull Run, Virginia, on July 21, 1861, ended 147 years later via a ballot box in the very same state. For nothing more symbolically illustrated the final chapter of America’s Civil War than the fact that the Commonwealth of Virginia — the state that once exalted slavery and whose secession from the Union in 1861 gave the Confederacy both strategic weight and its commanding general — voted Democratic, thus assuring that Barack Obama would become the 44th president of the United States.

"This moment was necessary, for despite a century of civil rights legislation, judicial interventions and social activism — despite Brown v. Board of Education, Martin Luther King’s I-have-a-dream crusade and the 1964 Civil Rights Act — the Civil War could never truly be said to have ended until America’s white majority actually elected an African-American as president.

"That is what happened Tuesday night and that is why we awake this morning to a different country. The struggle for equal rights is far from over, but we start afresh now from a whole new baseline. Let every child and every citizen and every new immigrant know that from this day forward everything really is possible in America."

After an entire election season of barely talking about race at all, suddenly an Obama victory has unleashed a torrent of reflection on slavery, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement. (Um -- does anyone remember what happened to erode black citizenship after the civil rights movement? Like unprecedented rates of incarceration, ending antipoverty programs, and defunding public eduction?) Allusions to the horrors of American racism should probably be dealt with gently by the Obama administration, to be sure. Most white Americans don't really understand them, and they don't understand how they are implicated in inequality. But I am not comfortable with the announcement that Obama's great victory has simply bookended this history, and that we can now start all over. For example, on NPR yesterday, a white construction worker explained that he thought undocumented Mexican workers should be paid as much as he is, and that equal pay for equal work should be guaranteed by law -- but he doesn't want "them" in his union. Why? the reporter asked. Because, Joe the Carpenter explained, he doesn't.

Americans have a great fantasy about starting over. That was, in part, what the original colonial project in the Americas relied on: people who had mucked up their lives in Spain, or France, or England, or Scotland coming to try all over again in a place that they thought -- mistakenly -- was empty. Or Puritans leaving behind a corrupt church to gain God's grace all over again. Think of Lincoln surveying the scorched and tangled ground of Gettysburg battlefield, piles of bodies as yet unburied, and reassuring his audience that this evidence of political catastrophe marked a moment to rebuild American politics. Or think of the Mormons, piling their polygamous families in wagons and leaving their charred homes behind in Illinois, enduring endless hardship to get the shores of the Great Salt Lake, where Brigham Young announced firmly, "This is the place." And think of the Indians who had, in fact, lived in that place, and have been starting over ever since.

It's a myth, for sure. And yet, Americans do start over. Again and again. We fling history to the winds, we change our names, we change our genders, we change our noses and tummies, we change our wives, we change our vinyl siding. It is an indisputable feature of how Americans, and people who have longed to be Americans, understand the promise of this country. So it's wrong that we can just start over as if the long history of American crimes against black people never happened, but if we exercise some caution, it can be right too. After a Republican reign that has been a catastrophe, in which bad things happened one after another, each thing more incredible -- and predictable -- than the last, the nation has been liberated once again. This time we will be freed by a mixed race man, his father an immigrant, who will be the first black president -- not just in the history of the United States -- of the Western industrialized world.

But after the euphoria passes, let's get to work, shall we? Let's figure out what starting over really means and what it is going to take, on the streets and in the classrooms. Listening to John McCain's supporters boo and catcall the next President of the United States last night (something he and Sarah Palin taught them to do, just like Elizabeth Dole authorized that awful Jesse Helms-ian ad against Kay Hagen that will stain her otherwise good name forever) reminds me of the meanness that has been unleashed by the McCain/Palin campaign, a meanness that has lurked under the surface of every major Republican policy, and every major political season, since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. There's lots of work to do, but repairing our political culture is at the top of the list.

Oh -- and if you are a soldier in Iraq? Keep your head down and your vest buttoned tightly, friend. You're coming home.

For good post-election activities, click here for Barack's pre-inaugural reading list , compiled by Scott McLemee of Inside Higher Education. Your Radical is featured, as is her Zenith colleague Elvin Lim.