Killing Two Birds With One Stone: Tea Party Candidate Solves Social Problems, Shoots Self In Foot

Tea Party social welfare program?

In case you were wondering why we haven't solved the problem of how to get cheap food on the table without large numbers of undocumented workers who will work under substandard conditions for no money, it's because wussy liberals won't bring back the chain gang.

Okay, Jack Davis, who wants to run for the vacant seat in New York's 26th congressional district didn't quite say that.  But this is what the Tea Party candidate did say, according to reporter Jerry Zremski, as he was being screened by the GOP in that state:

that Latino farm workers [should] be deported -- and that African-Americans from the inner city [could] be bused to farm country to pick the crops.

Several sources who were in the Feb. 20 endorsement interview with Davis confirmed his comments, which echo those he made to the Tonawanda News in 2008, when he said: "We have a huge unemployment problem with black youth in our cities. Put them on buses, take them out there [to the farms] and pay them a decent wage; they will work."

Since Davis has been articulating such views publicly for at least two years, so the shock being expressed by the New York Republican Party leadership means little else than that they aren't doing their homework.

"I was thunderstruck," said Amherst GOP Chairman Marshall Wood. "Maybe in 1860 that might have been seen by some as an appropriate comment, but not now."


Davis spokesman W. Curtis Ellis acknowledged that Davis' comments "may not be politically correct and ... may not be racially correct."

Yes, Mr. Ellis, we can start there.  Davis's comments are also really st00pid.  One wonders how far the Tea Party tolerance for come one, come all freedom of expression will extend in the next election cycle if upstate New York Republicans (who are about as conservative as God makes 'em and not your normal bastions of political correctness) are running for the hills on this one.

Hat Tip.

It's A Poor Sort Of Memory That Only Works Backwards; Or, New (Old) Thoughts About Tenure

Alice Ad-dressing the White Queen.

`You're wrong there, at any rate,' said the Queen: `were you ever punished?'

`Only for faults,' said Alice.

`And you were all the better for it, I know!' the Queen said triumphantly.

`Yes, but then I had done the things I was punished for,' said Alice: `that makes all the difference.'

`But if you hadn't done them,' the Queen said, `that would have been better still; better, and better, and better!' Her voice went higher with each `better,' till it got quite to a squeak at last.

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (And What Alice Found There) (1871)

Paul Caron over at Tax Prof Blog reports that a new study "conducted under the auspices of the American Bar Foundation with additional funding from the Law School Admission Council" finds that "the perceptions of female tenured faculty members and tenured faculty of color" about the granting of tenure in law schools "differ significantly" from the perceptions "of their white male counterparts. Both female professors and professors of color perceived the tenure process as less fair and more difficult than did male or white professors. Female professors of color had the most negative perceptions [.]" 
  
Quelle surprise.  Try doing this study in the humanities and social sciences, why don't you?

It is interesting how we can know these things and then continue on as if we did not know these things.  I have to wonder whether any empirical study is capable of altering the ingrained practices that produce the "perceptions" described above (many of us would substitute the word "reality" here, but never mind.)  For different reasons, depending on our position in the hierarchy of academic bodies, like Alice's White Queen, we who are tenured have become adept at managing impossible information.  While one commenter on Caron's post is amazed that you would survey a group of people who have succeeded in a gate keeping process about the fairness of the gate keeping, I would argue that part of what is interesting about the study is that people who have succeeded don't always see their own success at achieving tenure as an unqualified vote of confidence for their intellectual work.  Indeed, the difficulty of evaluation and promotion, the rude inquiries that are often made about women and scholars of color during tenure procedures and the public undermining of the intellectual authority of these scholars even in successful promotion cases, is often stunning.  It is equally stunning to me how eager one's colleagues are to relieve white men from the burdens of such scrutiny.  A variety of what might be considered flaws and procedural bloopers that require lengthy revisiting for women and scholars of color are simply dismissed as irrelevant for white men.  Connections of the candidate to prominent people in hir field that are serving as tenure referees are seen as proof of a white man's prestige (correct).  But in the case of (wo)men of color, such referees are often dismissed because they are perceived as lacking objectivity (they are often perceived as lacking status in the field as well), and new ones must be found, even if those new referees are further from the field of specialization. And scholars in queer studies?  Fugedaboudit.

Here's another piece of unofficial data for you:  the number of women, and people of color who, denied tenure in one place, go on to a better job elsewhere.  Not always true, but boy, would I like to see the numbers on it.  A common assumption about failed promotion cases is that the person's career as a scholar is brought to an abrupt end by denial, and that is true in too many cases.  However, very often it is not true, and that is where follow up of failed tenure cases might be worthy of investigation. At one prestigious SLAC I know well, two tenure cases involving individuals in the group under scrutiny were differently fumbled in the not so recent past, and both individuals almost immediately went on to tenured positions at prestigious R-I universities.  You would think that would count as some kind of data, wouldn't you? Or that it might trigger some kind of public recognition at the tenure-denying institution that what is being smugly articulated as high standards could be, just perhaps, something else.

`That accounts for the bleeding, you see,' [the White Queen] said to Alice with a smile. `Now you understand the way things happen here.'

`But why don't you scream now?' Alice asked, holding her hands ready to put over her ears again.

`Why, I've done all the screaming already,' said the Queen. `What would be the good of having it all over again?'

City of Cambridge to Gates: "The Whole Thing Was Your -- Uh -- A Big Misunderstanding"

Chauncey DeVega, over at We Are Respectable Negroes, has a few comments on the report issued by the City of Cambridge about the July 16 2009 arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Give it a look and think about what it must be like to be Skip Gates and suck this one up. Or, hypothetically, what it would be like to be you and suck this one up.

Gates, as you may recall, was arrested in his own house after having presented his Harvard identification and, subsequently, losing his temper with Sergeant James Crowley. The conclusion reached by the panel of investigators? Both men were responsible for the incident. They feared each other, the report reasons, and acted accordingly. Gates shouted, Crowley locked him up. Because of their mutual fear, the commissioners reason, the two men shared responsibility for the incident because each might have taken a step back at a crucial moment. (Note to historians: this could be a real methodological breakthrough, as we sift through the evidence of a variety of people whose oppression and genocide might have been avoided if only they had kept their mouths shut and not frightened their colonizers so badly.)

My esteemed colleague DeVega rightly points to the report's implication that Gates' main error was to be in unlawful possession of negritude of the uppity variety. Charles Ogletree, a Harvard colleague and Gates' attorney, noted that while "the report is important and timely" and will help move the community forward, the notion that "both Gates and Crowley had an equal opportunity to deescalate the situation is just breathtaking and unbelievable." See? This is the difference between lawyers and English professors. English professors start yelling; lawyers say something nice to get your attention, and when you are listening, say that the other side is full of $hit.

As Ogletree points out, only Crowley had the power to make an arrest: Gates did not, nor was it within his power to compel the officer to leave his house or to require an explanation for why Crowley invaded it in the first place. At the time of Gates' arrest, opinions abounded about his role in this confrontation: that he had lived so long in the university bubble that he had lost touch with the deference to police authority required of all African-American people; that all people, black or white, who express anger at our friends the police deserve what they get; and that Gates ought to have been grateful that Crowley was there to protect his property, even though he was arrested as a result. Even President Obama, by calling the "beer summit," where all three of them sat down in the spirit of shared masculinity (underlining graphically that "racism is over" because the least socially privileged ma at the table was Crowley, the White Guy) tried to divert us from the real issue here.

And what was that issue? Why the valorization of state power, of course, and the pervasive propaganda that nothing in post-civil rights Amerika is racist anymore. What looks like racism is just collateral damage accidentally inflicted on people of color as the police state keeps the rest of "us" safe from -- whatever.

That's right. If, for example, of the 8,000 people on the "no fly list" there are some who are there by mistake and cannot return to the United States, that's too bad, but wouldn't you rather have one or two or 1000 people falsely imprisoned, tortured and exiled to prevent another 9/11? Sure you would. Particularly when it isn't you.

It's why we all stand there passively while TSA people treat us rudely, shout at us when we move too close to a bag that they are searching, and grab their coworkers to point and giggle at the private items we have in our luggage. Similarly, our current desire to yield all moral authority to the state has many Americans' fully persuaded that Arizona's new anti-immigrant law is aimed only at people without legal residence documents, not Latino/as -- even though Canadians, Irish and Russians don't seem to be rushing to the the Sunshine State to take below minimum wage jobs. If you are arrested and deported because you look Latino/a and have no documents handy, well then stupid you, because you had the power to choose to carry documents. If you die while being deported, it isn't racism; just a misunderstanding you could have avoided by not coming to the United States in the first place or by carrying documents that prove your family lived in Arizona in 1848.

The point that is occluded by our national zeal to be endlessly cooperative with law enforcement is that the law, even when written as a neutral instrument, inflicts itself unevenly because police spend their time actively looking for criminals, not doing good deeds. White people tend not to appreciate this fully because they (and their family members) are usually not the ones dressed in the Sing-Sing bracelets, being tasered to death at the Mexican border or trying to find a place to stay in Cairo for the indefinite future. More importantly, however, policemen are the instrument of the law, not citizens, and it was Officer Crowley alone who was responsible for acting correctly during the course of a "misunderstanding" about whether that elderly black man needed to be taught a good lesson about respecting authority.

But there is a second point about racism and the law that the Cambridge report misses. While racism in the application of the law is an important way to discuss state power, in a few decades Americans seem to have forgotten a lot of history: racism became so powerful in the United States because of the law and because the military and the police have historically enforced racism even when no laws are broken. In other words, had racism simply been a matter of personal ignorance and social attitudes -- as people choose to believe nowadays -- it would have had less impact on history than it had. The law was frequently enforced informally by whites who exercised various forms of violence on people of color, but when said whites were challenged as to their right to control or exclude people of color, they could always point to the laws that ratified the racial order.

Theoretically, of course, the law is race neutral. But you can see, by the following analogy, how discrimination written into the law produces aggrieved attitudes among those who the laws privileges. According to the New York Times, when repeatedly questioned about her initial attempt to bar military recruiters from Harvard's career counseling center (Harvard's nondiscrimination policy includes GLBTQ people, and is therefore in conflict with the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy),

Ms. Kagan repeated that she found the ban “unwise and unjust,” and told the committee that she had been trying to reconcile Harvard’s own antidiscrimination policy with a provision known as the Solomon Amendment, which requires universities that receive federal financing to give full access to the military. Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, helped write the amendment, and made clear his displeasure with Ms. Kagan.

“You were punishing the military,” Mr. Sessions said at one point. Later, outside the hearing room, he came close to accusing Ms. Kagan of lying, calling her “not rigorously accurate” in her explanation.

Two things seem immediately obvious to me here. In a truly interesting hearing, someone might have asked Kagan the legal question: are there not two federal laws in conflict here (e.g., that institutions that accept federal funds must allow military recruiters on campus and that institutions, legally, must enforce their own rules as they are written, including those barring discrimination) and how would she rule if such a case came before her?

The second -- to come back to Mr. Gates -- is this: under what conditions does the Dean of the Harvard Law School have the power to punish the military, even if s/he wanted to? Is withholding space on the Harvard campus tantamount to banning military employment for Harvard graduates, or even an actual humiliation to the federal government? Even if it were, would such a "punishment" be in any way similar to the power the government has to damage research at Harvard by withdrawing grant and scholarship money? Or humiliate GLBTQ soldiers by drumming them out of the armed services?

And is not the government's insistence that institutions defer to them and abandon their own principles an act of far greater, and utterly needless, vanity?

Discriminating Tastes: What People Who Are Not Normal Might Know That You Don't Know

One of the things that prompting my last post about the restructuring of institutional benefits during a period of budget cutting was not, as some people assumed, that I think cutting faculty compensation is a viable way to save higher education. I don't. Rather, my concern was that the failure to address compensation inequities already in place means that in a period where we might potentially rethink and repair such inequities, many people, in the name of radical opposition to The Man, can only draw the wagons closer around what already exists. More progressive change, they argue, is unrealistic in a crisis, and must be put off to a distant future, when utopia will be possible. This is the pattern of debates over national health care, and it is a belief currently prevalent at private institutions that have done for the select few what the state refuses to do for everyone (hence supporting the following equation: salaried labor = health care = virtue.) Worse, in my view, is that periods of "reform" enshrine prejudices that, in turn, become the standard for what is "normal." This, as I discuss in that post, is one of the lessons of the New Deal.

That the current crisis might be related to structural inequities, and the skewed ethics that support such inequities, is hard for people to focus on (unless they are thinking about Wall Street) because they know best the world they already live in and take for granted. So imagine my delight when I discovered Richard Thompson Ford's excellent piece in Slate las Wednesday, A Primer on Racism: The Many Uses Of The Word And How Legit They Are. It is a must-read for anyone who enters the thorny waters of trying to talk openly about the question of bias, a conversation few people wish to have. (This is the vast majority of people, in my experience, progressive and conservative.) Ford usefully points out that the form of racism where someone will simply state, categorically, that white people are smarter, better, cleaner, more capable, or more law-abiding than people of color is rarely apparent nowadays, even though that is the stereotype invoked when the term "racist" is used. Being stereotyped, and stigmatized, is why people so resent and fear being labeled as racist, sexist or homophobic, and why, in turn they don't like to risk discussing discrimination at all.

So what, according to Ford, are we not talking about when we are not talking about racism? Most dominant, he argues, is institutional racism "when often the racial inequity is unintended" but the injustice is contained in "practices that contain built-in headwinds for minority candidates." Or we might be talking about environmental racism, in which the "headwinds" are toxic living conditions that are descended from segregationist practices and are perpetuated by the lack of political power that poor and working class people have. Ford also notes the importance of cultural bias and misunderstanding that is largely class-based and can function as an intra-group dynamic. He debunks the notion, loudly touted on the right, that “reverse racism" -- prejudice against white people - is an equally serious problem. Rather, he argues, bias against white people, as a group, is the property of the isolated cultural nationalist, and has only become imagined as a pervasive issue because of the political machinations of right-wingers seeking to mobilize white voters through fear.

While I would argue with or elaborate on some of these points, I thought this essay deserved attention for its clarity and thoughtfulness. It also caused me to think about encounters I have had in which people that I do and do not know well have felt the need to assert (for no apparent reason) that they are without prejudice and regard everyone as similar. However, the fact that I see race, gender and sexuality as live dynamics in our contemporary world demonstrates that I, myself, am bigoted or that any mention of these dynamics contains an implicit accusation of bigotry.

One underlying difficulty, from my point of view, is that people rarely speak honestly about the differences among us, actual and perceived. They like to discuss even less the power relations structured by differences, so they become hysterical very quickly, often lobbing defenses prematurely when no accusation of any kind has been made. For example, very few of the people I know are "homophobic" in the strictest sense of the term, even though they fear that I think they are. They do not fear what I am, they don't think that I am a sicko, they aren't worried about leaving the kiddies or wife alone with me, and many are actively educating their children to understand that queer people populate their world and need to be valued. I very rarely accuse someone of being homophobic, in part because people find it deeply shaming and it is a real conversation stopper, but mostly because what is going on is usually a great deal more complex in the way Ford points out.

And yet, when I come to a real difference of opinion with a person, s/he often finds it necessary to assert not only that s/he is not homophobic, but that s/he believes that I am just the "same" as s/he is.

This is where things start to break down. To my mind, one pernicious legacy of the social justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s is the notion that the opposite of invidious hierarchy is the equality of similarity. Corollaries to this are the assumption of those in the dominant group that:

a) People in subordinate groups want to be similar to “normal” people in the dominant group;
b) That having technical access to certain privileges means that those privileges (and the institutions that grant those privileges) are consonant with broader notions of social, economic and cultural justice;
c) That equality exists when "we" all accept the notion, theoretically, that we are all the same and want the same things;
d) That a continuing suspicion of the dominant group by historically subordinate groups is unreasoning and without foundation.

Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor's much-discussed pronouncement about the insights of "a wise Latina woman" coming from the "richness of her experiences" were not misguided. A racial perspective does matter, not because it is information other people don;t have, but because it is a way of knowing the world that other people can acquire if they try. Instead of being derided and suppressed, Sotomayor’s insight needed to be amplified to take into account a peculiar modern condition where inequalities in the law have been, in many cases, overturned and exposed, but the society and belief systems that these old laws created has not.

Hence, people fear being called racist or homophobic both because it stigmatizes and mischaracterizes them as someone who is actively bigoted (as opposed to still learning), and because it makes them feel misunderstood: they sincerely believe in justice and equality. But what they often fail to understand is how the institutions they hold dear are, in their own minds, synonymous with what also constitutes a natural and normal world. And this causes them to miss what some of us believe are structural inequalities.

Take marriage. One of the things that worries me about gay marriage is not that a lot of gay people long to be more similar to, or even appear to be exactly the same as, straight people. That has always been true in one way or another. It's that gay marriage reinforces the falsehood that everyone has access to the same privileges if they are willing to make the "same" commitments. That marriage delivers only a simulacrum of similarity, even to straight people, and that there is no logical reason to make it a gateway to privilege, is a conversation that gay marriage has made it more difficult to have. Consequently, that marriage represents the pinnacle of ethical commitment to another person is an assumption by which the unmarried are stigmatized.

One might also point to loving commitments between children and adults, in which legal custody of a child is firmly viewed by most Americans as the greatest ethical commitment possible. Commitments outside that legal and/or biological relation, however deeply felt, are viewed as a degraded version of this bond. Again, let us look to gay and lesbian people who now parent. In this case, technical inclusion of non-traditional parents has allowed the institution itself to remain a socially, legally and economically privileged site. It used to be that gay people were all perceived as potential child molesters (that was homophobia); now we seem to all be, in the eyes of our friends, potential parents. This is not homophobia, but it's not progressive either: it means that queer people who do not own children are now subject to similar stigma that child free heterosexuals are, and their relations to children they love are not taken seriously as an ethical commitment.

What is really peculiar is that neither institution -- marriage or parenting -- is as accessible or as stable as straight people seem to think, much as economic mobility for people of color is not as simple as white people think. The great publicity attendant to lesbian parenting, and the great visibility of gay men and lesbians parenting in a few places, has somehow delivered the misimpression that the only reason many older queers didn't have children was that we were barred from doing so. Now that we are not, the reasoning goes, we can freely exercise what is a natural and normal desire for all (wo)men. Now this is a problem, in part because it leaves intact the notion that all normal people like children, and that wanting to parent is the natural way that all human beings will want to establish an intimate bond with a child. But it also occludes two facts of life for queer people who do wish to parent. One is that that there are huge hurdles -- medical, fiscal and legal --that face lesbians and gays when it comes to obtaining children, either by gestation or by adoption. These hurdles are faced by some heterosexual couples, but not by the vast majority of them. Second, many parents still lose custody of and access to their children because they are gay, lesbian and/or transsexual; and legally, a child can only have two parents, so that if all parties to the conception are known to each other, at least one person in the deal must agree to terminate and/or not seek custody. Furthermore, as my attorney recently explained, no adoption agency will knowingly and officially deliver a child into the hands of a queer person, although many agencies, domestic and foreign, operate on a "don’t ask, don't tell" basis, and individual judges will perform these and second party adoptions in jurisdictions that permit them.

The privileging of parenting has another effect that few people are aware of: discrimination in health benefits. In health plans such as mine, operated by Cigna, there are substantial allowances made for the conception and bearing of children. One of these is for fertility treatments, which are time-consuming, painful and expensive, and I am sure entirely worth it for people who wish to have children and have had trouble conceiving on their own. But what is explicitly excluded from our health plan is gender reassignment. Nominally, this is because there is some dispute as to whether wanting to change your gender is a "medical" condition. But I would also ask, if being infertile is the normal condition of your body, and you are otherwise perfectly healthy, what makes that a medical condition?

This kind of dispute is not about money, and it is not about personal prejudice, although such claims are easily made and believed. But the reason that is so is because of how institutions recognize the grounds for legitimate personal happiness, reward what they perceive as good decisions and by doing so, enshrine them as normal. And yet, just as one might argue that no one needs gender reassignment, it could be argued that no one needs a child. Now that we no longer farm the soil to sustain ourselves, saying that one "needs" a child expresses a complex set of desires that are social and emotional. In fact, much as a person born a man might wish to fulfill her felt destiny by becoming a woman, people born as children seek to live out a particular narrative of fulfillment and happiness by transforming themselves into parents.

How much more progressive and rational it might be to frame all of these things as desires that offer happiness and fulfillment, not to mention the possibility that one might be truly loved. For some people, it might be produced by having a child; for others, it might be surgical gender reassignment, the first stages of which are actually less expensive than a round of in vitro treatments. And for others, it might be getting their teeth straightened in middle age, anti-psychotic medication, or having a poorly repaired cleft palate remodeled by a skilled plastic surgeon.

I compare these things not to be absurd, but to provide graphic examples of how institutions structure inequities by judging some desires legitimate, figuring them as "normal," and persuading all of us that if we adhere to these values, and not ask for anything else, we can all be normal and happy. As Ford argues in his piece, old inequities have not disappeared, but we are in an era in which discrimination often presents as the absence of inclusion rather than the active determination to exclude. Hence, racism and homophobia, as concepts, no longer do the work we want them to do, particularly in progressive communities that have gotten the message -- but not quite.

Remember the Alamo? Texas Conservatives Won't Jump On The Latina-Bashing Bandwagon

As the Dallas Morning News reported yesterday, prominent Texas Republicans are not jumping on the racism bandwagon being pulled by extremist conservative Republicans over the Sonia Sotomayor nomination. Republican Senator John Cornyn has come out strongly against this smear campaign driven by stalking horses Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh (who, by the way, have not been elected by anybody to anything lately. Just saying.) Cornyn's colleague, Kay Bailey Hutchison, said to be running for governor of the Lone Star State in the next cycle, has chimed in as well, trying to limit the damage to the Republican Party that these dumb-asses with fat media contracts are doing (and by the way, who cut off Dick Cheney's Zoloft supply?) Today on CNN's "State of the Union" she separated herself from the lunatic fringe by saying clearly that the debate should be based on Sotomayor's record, not on labels applied to her by others.

This, by the way, was also the position taken by the very influential Republican Senate Judiciary Committee member Orrin Hatch on NPR Friday morning. Hatch took the opportunity to say that the tenor of the confirmation process that we are stuck in and with (otherwise known as "being Borked") was invented by liberals, which is not precisely true: many conservatives hated Bork because he was a judicial activist, but they did not have the influence necessary to take him out without help from the liberals. In other words, if they could have Borked Bork alone, they would have, but they were stuck in the role of Greek chorus. But Hatch, although he still seems bitter about the Bork battle, said that he had voted for Sotomayor back in 1998, and that he hoped his colleagues would "take the high road" -- even though he would not be surprised if they did not.

But back to Texas. I wish Senator Hutchison would say something stronger, but not slandering Sotomayor and asserting that she intends to be fair is a good start. What happened to Elizabeth Dole when her campaign took the low road against Kay Hagen in November should be instructive to all: there are some things that centrist swing voters, most prominently Christian women and Hispanics who are conservative on some issues and not on others, do not think ought to be part of the conservative repertoire: discrimination, dishonesty and character assassination seem to be among those things. And they don't seem to think it is ridiculous identity politics to vote their consciences on these matters.

I would also like to take the opportunity to say that I have always liked Kay Bailey Hutchison, despite the fact that we have strong disagreements on some key civil rights issues. I have always thought she was a class act and I admire her professional achievements in a state and a region that can be politically bruising for women. Senator Hutchison declined to comment on the racism charge in the Dallas Morning News yesterday, when she was asked if she would reverse the no vote cast in Sotomayor's confirmation hearings eleven years ago, and said that she is going to look at Sotomayor's record on 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. "Hutchison has said that the 1998 vote was about Sotomayor's judicial activism as a district court judge," writes Eric Aasen of the News.

Well fine. Because however much I dislike it, this is a legitimate school of legal thought. It's called strict constructionism, for those of you who have been living under a political rock. It assumes that the original wisdom of the founders (all white, all male) foresaw all of the ways their society would evolve until the Last Days (funny that they did not foresee the end of chattel slavery, non-white people being admitted to full citizenship or women's suffrage.) It also assumes that the separation of powers articulated in the Constitution ought to be absolute. But you know what? Sotomayor's view that the Constitution is a living document is also a legitimate school of legal thought. So is the view, which she expressed precisely once as far as we all know, that life experience shapes one's insight into how the Constitution speaks to new problems as well as how it speaks to older, seemingly intractable problems. It is called "critical legal studies," and it is a field that rejects the idea that the law deals with us all equally when it assumes that all of our life experiences and opportunities have been equal. There is nothing in her record as a jurist to suggest that she has thrown key decisions because of her overwhelming empathy for Latina women, but we suspect perhaps that she reads Patricia Williams and Derek Bell with a flashlight under the covers long after Ann Coulter has gone off to bed to rest up for another hate-mongering day.

I have been unable to comment on this matter until now because I am so sick and tired of being told that civil and economic inequality -- whether we are talking about access to marriage or education or to basic services like health care and trash collection -- is merely accidental, or a question of personal virtue rewarded. I am sick, sick, sick of white people and straight people and men (depending on the issues involved) screeching about "identity politics" when those who are being discriminated against have the temerity to object to being discriminated against. And just to speak to one issue that is being raised in relation to the Sotomayor nomination - I live in the City of New Haven, and it is no accident that the overwhelming majority of our police and firefighters are white. No accident whatsoever. And it's also no accident that our police and firefighters do not live here -- a city in which whites are in the minority, even when Yale is in session.

I object as a citizen to the notion that only women, queers and people of color have "identity politics" and that white people, straight people, men reflect the world as it is. Frankly, I object to this idiocy as a historian, because it obscures the ways in which what have come to be known as "identity politics" were invented by those who are now screaming foul because of Sotomayor's comment on the role growing up Latina played in forming her intellect and consciousness. Historical examples I would cite are:

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld the civil right of white people to exclude black people from their company and their commerce. Of Jim Crow statutes, the court argued that "A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races-a distinction which is founded in the color of the two races, and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color-has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races, or re-establish a state of involuntary servitude." We might argue that conservative activists' insistence that they are "color blind" initiates its intellectual history at the moment that its opposite was being expressed: when jurists insisted that actually seeing color and using it as a basis to restrict the access of some citizens to all spaces did not also restrict their civil rights.

U.S. v. Thind, in which an all-white group of Supreme Court Justices explained that the founders intended to only admit "white persons" to citizenship. Lest the Court be accused of judicial activism, in the following year an all-white Congress passed the National Origins Quota Act (1924) that made it illegal for "aliens ineligible for citizenship" to immigrate to the United States, even as temporary laborers.

OK, I could go on, but I want to get back to Texas, a state that might be on the brink of going Democratic (Hat tip to conservative Christian blogger.). Because the stand that Hutchinson and Cornyn are taking is not unrelated to their life experience as white politicians who know that white people can't win in Texas with only white votes. They know that bashing prominent Hispanic professionals who have pulled themselves up from poverty through hard work and sacrifice doesn't pay dividends. If you look at the most recent Texas Census, you will see that a whopping 36% of Texans identify as of Hispanic or Latino, as opposed to 15.1% nationwide. But this doesn't actually tell the whole story, since a fair number of other people of Hispanic descent (many of whom don't even like the term Hispanic since it collapses many histories into a hybrid, pseudo-racial box) are checking other boxes, including "white."

I'm not saying that Hutchison and Cornyn aren't principled. But mightn't their principles also be related to life experience, as opposed to having been pushed from the womb without a racist bone in their bodies? And whatever personal qualities they may be bringing to this -- whether it is fairness, professionalism, honesty -- they are bringing a cold hard fact to the table as well. Attacks on Sonia Sotomayor will be perceived, even by the most conservative Hispanic voters, as racist -- because they are. Whether you agree with the idea that one's life experiences are a path to empathy and knowledge or not, the truth is that she also took that other path to knowledge: Princeton summa cum laude (in history, no less); and Yale Law Review. And it is when facts like this are being disregarded in favor of creating a hullabaloo about a comment made outside the court room that conservative women and conservative Hispanics tend to smell a rat. Because even though some of us are conservative and some of us are not, none of us was born yesterday, Newt.

To weigh the overwhelming evidence of Sotomayor's scholarly excellence against her willingness to identify publicly as a Latina woman (as opposed to, say, a white man's objective brain in a Latina woman's body?) and find that the latter trumps the former is nothing but racism.

And the Senate delegation from the Lone Star State knows it.

"Clarence Walker Can't Say Those Things, Can He?" A Review of Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings

Any of us who know Clarence Walker personally are well aware that he can, and does, say those things. He is the Molly Ivins of the historical profession, a razor-witted, capaciously well-read scholar and critic of scholars, who is often seen at professional gatherings holding court in the hotel bar or leading a large group out to a fabulous restaurant. Because Clarence is my friend, I am immediately disqualifying myself as an impartial reviewer of his new book, Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009.) But on the other hand, since he sent me a free copy and I enjoyed it so much, I have to express my gratitude somehow. So in an act of fandom, as well as friendship, I am going to try to persuade you to read this delightful book too.

Now, you may say to yourself, "I have read so much on this topic, and even if I have only heard or read about Thomas Jefferson's black descendants, what can I possibly learn from another book about an ex-president's sex life?" In this case, a lot, because it will also make you think about how history does -- or does not -- get written in the first place.

Now I admit that I have not yet read Annette Gordon-Reed's comprehensive Pulitzer-prize winning book on the Jefferson-Hemings affair (it's sitting on the summer reading pile), but even if you have done so, I am pretty confident that you will find something new in Mongrel Nation that will grab your attention. If Gordon-Reed addresses the rich facts of the case, Walker, providing concise narrative where necessary, pays closer attention to the nature and implications of the dispute. In other words, why does the sanctity of the historical profession -- indeed, of the nation itself -- seem to rest so critically on where and when Thomas Jefferson dipped his wick?

One answer, Walker responds, is the ongoing resistance of powerful white people -- historians and other guardians of the White Republic -- to the notion that racial amalgamation was foundational to the making of the United States. This, he argues, requires historians' attention to their privileged role as producers of the past. In the course of this small book, he asks us to reconsider certain fundamental precepts of our profession that necessarily create the epistemological scaffolding within which facts are, or are not, meaningful. Among the assumptions he takes on are: that people always mean what they say (Jefferson's writings about his revulsion for miscegenation, particularly in Notes On The State Of Virginia, have been a constant rebuttal to an alternative history of Monticello); that the history of family is the history of order and respectability (equally strong evidence suggests that respectable families remain respectable in part by lying about and condoning the sexual escapades of family members); that private convictions are consistent with public evidence (I have two words for you -- Strom Thurmond); and that one can usually frame and interpret evidence by generalizing about historical phenomena, identities or power relations (all sex between white men and black women was rape; mixed-race people always identified, and were identified as, socially and culturally black; white men who established the foundational principles of democracy told the truth, kept their promises, and were ruled by reason, not lust.)

Among other important interventions, Walker provides one of the more insightful critiques I have seen as to how we might understand the web of exploitation, violence, love and choice that framed sexual intercourse between white men and black women in the plantation world. All sexual encounters are framed by power and individual circumstances, he argues; and nearly everybody lies about sex to protect their reputations. The Jefferson-Hemings debate, he points out, is perhaps one of the longest family values campaigns in American history. And it is one of the most foundational, since Jefferson's defenders have firmly sutured his reputation as a father and a husband to his role as father of the nation. Walker does not disagree with them in this; but he does disagree that that nation fathered by Jefferson and his contemporaries was a white one.

Those of us who are devoted readers of Walker's books (a rather large subset of whom have also been entertained over food and drinks by his biting wit) know that he can, and does, say "those things," and he puts them in print too. Walker is an equal opportunity smasher of shibboleths. In We Can't Go Home Again: An Argument About Afrocentrism, a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year in 2001, he took on the cultural and academic politics of his own field with a sharp demand to replace ideology with archival labor. He doesn't believe that history should cut its coat to serve any political fashion, right or left, and it is a joy to see such an independent intellect go to work on the Jefferson-Hemings affair. So if you are putting together your summer reading list, here are a few reasons to put Mongrel Nation at the top of it.

It's short. There is something to be said for a book that can give you a great argument, a concise summary of everything written on a topic to date, some great laughs, and that can be read in one sitting. More historians should try this: it could do a lot for the profession.

It's an elegant example of how to do historiography without being dull. Need I say more? Historiography is dull to many people, but those of us who love it think it doesn't have to be. And yet, how many of my own students have dropped off to sleep after asking a simple question which I respond to by going into raptures about the debates in the field?

It calls out the racism that is part of the wallpaper of American history, but also argues that anti-racist historiography may be part of the problem too. Walker's position on the politics of the profession is not going to satisfy those who want to do any kind of ideological work with history by drawing grand generalizations. Past worlds were just as complex as contemporary worlds are, and many of the objects of our inquiries habitually began each day as did Lewis Carroll's White Queen, by holding two contradictory ideas in their heads at the same time. Mongrel Nation is an excellent model for taking apart larger themes in the profession that become politicized because their nuances and contradictions make scholars uncomfortable.

Furthermore, when historians who claim to base their work on nothing but fact get the rug whipped out from under them by another set of plausible facts, what prevents them from standing corrected rather than claiming -- hypocritically -- that such evidence is simply not conceivable because of the "character" of the individual involved? Or, if neither side can claim irrefutable facts, what causes historians to insist that the story told by the historical subject in question must be defended at all costs rather than reinvestigated? Sexuality, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is a particularly nasty location for such disputes, because historians also come to see their own interests as intertwined with preserving the "respectability" of their subjects from the criticisms of what such historians view as venal, agenda-driven interest groups. The Jefferson-Hemings affair, for which DNA testing is but the icing on what appears to be a chocolate cake, is a particularly good example of this kind of struggle. By addressing the many human impulses that historians bring to the table, and uncovering the kinds of cosmic repression that has been necessary to the ongoing denial of the Jefferson-Hemings affair, Walker builds a historiographical argument about the importance of slavery and miscegenation to a broader national history.

Clarence Walker makes you laugh about the most serious things. Who else would suggest that Jefferson's many theories about black sexuality were not based entirely on racism and/or the limitations of eighteenth century scientific knowledge, but on "fieldwork" (p. 41)? Suggest that anyone at all should be looked for in the "woodpile"? Or drop in the word "coochie" as part of a sentence summing up his argument?

Clarence Walker would, that's who. And as for the last two quotes, you're going to have to read the book to find them. This white girl can't do all your work for you.

**********************

(Persuaded? Buy Mongrel Nation here. One of my readers wrote me an irritable note asking me why I keep shilling for Amazon.com, so if this review ripped a little skin off you, you can recover by going to Powell's and making a politically correct purchase.

Advanced Interviewing; or, My Favorite Martian

"Dear Professor Radical," wrote a longtime lurker who had finally decided, in desperation, to reveal hirself. "You told us about the job letter. About the phone call. About the conference interview. About wardrobe -- even though you obviously know nothing about clothes: everyone knows you wear nothing but black and grey trousers from Banana Republic, complemented by matching T-shirts. And yet, right on the brink of crossing the finish line, you have abandoned us. WHAT ABOUT THE CAMPUS INTERVIEW, DAMMIT?!?"

Well, I'm sorry. This has been quite a dilemma for me, in part because we have been too busy interviewing at Zenith for me to attend to any of my professional responsibilities, much less write blog posts. But I had an ethical problem as well: should I actually be giving advice about campus visits when we, in the history department at Zenith, were interviewing eleven candidates (for three jobs) this spring? I decided no. There are too many people out there who claim that they take my advice. My fear was that I risked actually appearing to be giving directions for how to get a job in my very own department at Zenith. If I were Drag King of the World, that would be all right, but actually I have upwards of twenty other colleagues who (tiresomely, I know) also have a vote in these decisions, and they may have different quirks than I. In fact I know they do.

So in lieu of giving bad advice to candidates, I thought I would give advice to those people who were doing the interviewing instead. And it's a particular kind of advice: how not to look like a fool when interviewing what we now call a "diversity candidate." Now for the sake of brevity, let's say the candidate is either a man or a woman (technically all women are diversity candidates), but may also be either of color or queer (technically queer people are never diversity candidates. Unless they are -- for some other reason.) Because these categories are too internally various, and because in fact there is surprising overlap in some of the ways you could possibly offend the people who occupy them, let's call them: Martians. And we'll assume for the sake of clarity in what follows that "you" are not a Martian, and that "I" am. Are you ready? Let's begin.

1. Do not tell irrelevant stories about your friends who are Martians, or that your daughter decided to come out as a Martian last year and how great you feel about it. I understand that you are doing this to make us Martians feel as though we are among friends, and to demonstrate your absolute lack of Martianophobia or your committed anti-Martianism. I appreciate that. Really, I do. But you know what? It suggests just the opposite. It suggests that the Martian in your presence, who is me, is making you uncomfortable, and that you are bravely overcoming it. We Martians are used to being in the minority, but it makes us impatient to have other people remind us of it all the time -- in the name of pro-Martianism, no less. So we will all do better during the interview if you stick to scholarship, teaching and what the actual requirements of the job are.

2. Do not take me to a Martian restaurant for dinner. First of all, a Martian restaurant that is not on Mars, or in a place with a significant Martian population, is likely not to be any good. It will serve Martian food cooked to the taste of the non-Martians who populate your planet. So I will find this depressing. But furthermore, it suggests that I, as a Martian, am in danger of feeling alienated on your planet because I may not be able to access my "culture." Though a Martian, as a scholar and an intellectual, I probably feel I am a little more cosmopolitan than that.

3. While we are at dinner, stay away from topics that betray how invisible the other Martians on campus or on your planet are to you. Telling me that I may wish to live on the planet one light year away because it has a larger Martian population is one way of conveying this, as is: explaining that retaining single Martians is so difficult because it is so difficult to meet and other, marriageable, Martians on your planet; or announcing that, incredibly, there is a Martian Episcopalian church that serves the entire planet right in your canyon! So even though there aren't many Martians on campus, there will be a terrific community for me. On Sundays. (Did I say I was religious? Did I?)

4. Admit it if your college does a crappy job of recruiting and serving the needs of Martians. Most colleges and universities that are not on Mars do -- it's not up to you to apologize for it. As in (1), don't tell me about the one Martian who graduated Summa and won the department prize twelve years ago. And although there may be serious Martian politics on campus, don't assume that I share your view of what it means to be progressive on these issues, even -- or especially -- if you are a fellow Martian.

5. Refrain from hinting to me coyly that there is someone I "really need to meet" but not telling me why. This is the most frequent way that people have of dropping a few hairpins that I am a Martian (duh), and this other person is a Martian, but being a person who doesn't really "see" or believe in interplanetary differences, you aren't going to say the word "Martian" (wink, wink.) Most Martians find this tiresome. We aren't at a job interview to meet other Martians: we're there to get a job. And if meeting another Martian on campus is important to me, I'll tell you so.

6. Try to police your references to Martian stereotypes, whether social or intellectual. Don't ask me, for example, why I ended up a historian and not a flight engineer; don't tell me that the special barber I need to cut the hair around my antennae is in the next town over (we don't all have antennae, ok?); and don't, for heaven's sake, if I am interviewing for a Renaissance Literature position, reassure me that the Martian Studies program is very welcoming. Don't put the chair of Martian Studies on my schedule without asking me, if I am not interviewing in Martian Studies, or set up lunch with the one other out Martian to talk about how I might like to work up a Martian survey once I get a firm grip on the courses I am actually being hired to teach.

And last of all -- if you make any of the above errors, please forget about it and move on -- don't embarrass all of us by dwelling on your faux pas and trying to repair the damage. Martians are used to being in the minority, and we can take care of ourselves, thank you very much.

Until Florida Is Free, None Of Us Is Free

One of the workshops at History Camp featured three wonderful young southern historians who are writing about late twentieth-century political mobilizations in the former Confederacy. A conversation which I love to have, with colleagues and with students, is: does the South still cohere as a region? If so, what is "regional" about it and -- given the vast emigration of black and white southerners to northern and western industrial cities in the twentieth century, what characteristics of the "south" are shared by other places? And to what extent does the contemporary South draw on its past for distinctiveness?

I thought of our conversation when I saw this story on the Associated Press wire, which describes an attack last night on city-owned vehicles in Orlando, Florida. Cars were sprayed with anti-Obama slogans such as "Obama smokes crack" and what the AP reporter described as "a racial epithet."

Funny the reporter did not consider "Obama smokes crack" to be a racial epithet.

At any rate, the other feature of this was that there were also anti-McCain slogans left by the vandals as well (on "business cards"); but cards were also left that indicated the damage had been done by disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters. And this all occurred hours after Clinton and Obama campaigned together for the first time.

Strange times we are living in, no? My first response was, "Don't forget that Florida is in the South," and by this I do not necessarily mean the racism alone. Clearly by including McCain in the attacks, the vandals intended, despite the use of racial epithets, to target Clinton (in the guise of "supporting" her) as both "racist" and "sexist." And we should not forget, as the reporters did in this story, that McCain was himself the target of racist leaflets in 2004, when activists either supported or inspired by the Bush reelection campaign there went after his adopted child as the "secret daughter" McCain had supposedly fathered with a black woman (what's wrong with a white man having a biracial daughter out of wedlock, you ask, and then taking her into his home? The short answer is that it's not the having, or the keeping of her, it's the telling of it that is a political and historical sin.)

The intent, as I understand it, is to foment explicitly racial and gendered antagonisms in the Democratic party, and to remind voters on the radical right that a vote against Obama is a vote for everything that white supremacy has and does stand for. I was thinking about the potential for this kind of attack while watching the Unity Event last night, since it is impossible for me to watch the news without going into historian mode. Clinton and Obama touched each other and embraced lightly now and then; they whispered intimately in each other's ears (which political candidates are inclined to do even, or especially, when of the same gender and/or race.) And this thing that was happening publicly between a black man and a white woman was like history hitting me smack in the face. That, my friends, is where Southern history still has us by the throat: that for some people, this image of a black man and a white woman together, whether in a political or an actual marriage, will be the image that has the power to mobilize irrational and dangerous rage. And it will be used.

So this is my response. I think we all have to commit to the principle that until racial violence masquerading as politics no longer happens in Florida, we are not free of it in the United States either. By this I wish to emphasize that those of us who live in places like, say New England, are quick to stigmatize places like Florida. But Connecticut had its Jim Crow too, and it still does: look at the difference between schools in New Haven and schools in Greenwich; the percentage of people who can and do vote in Bridgeport and those who can and do vote in Stamford, only a few miles down the road? I used to think about this during the Pennsylvania primary, when reporters talked about the vast "Alabama" between Pittsburgh and and Philadelphia: well, I don't know what Pennsylvania they were looking at, but when I was growing up in the Suburbs, for many black people, North and West Philadelphia were Birmingham. And just because they vote for Democrats in the wealthy suburbs now doesn't mean it isn't Alabama in some respects. Or Florida.

Perhaps it is because I am engrossed in Barbara Ransby's wonderful biography of Ella Baker, but I have to say, I do not think it is working for us not to talk publicly about race, particularly since when I am with groups of white people they are talking about it a lot, in both productive and scary ways. One white woman I have known for a while, a New Englander, repeated every single crazy lie all of us have heard about Obama ("How," I found myself stuttering in shock,"Can Obama be both a devoted parishioner of the Reverend Wright and a madrassah-educated Muslim simultaneously?") And why did she say these things to me, of all people? It was not until later that I recalled the context -- we were alone, two white women, in a private space where no one who was not "one of us" --as it were -- could overhear.

What we white people who have become, or have always been, Obama supporters must decide is: are we willing to break the racial contract of silence that has more or less held for years (witness our endless use of the euphemism the n-word as if somehow our white lips suddenly became unable to make those sounds after 1964)? And if so, how will we break the contract, without putting ourselves first, as we often have in other historical moments? Despite the fact that Obama would be wise to talk about race as little as possible, how do the rest of us, and particularly white women, pursue a specifically anti-racist agenda in this election season? And to what extent are we willing to take responsibility for the fact that if this is happening in Florida, it is being countenanced elsewhere?

Coda: click here for young white kids who are taking the name "Hussein" as an everyday act to eliminate the stigma right wing crazies have attached to it.

Cross posted at Cliopatria.

Conquest; Or, Why Do We Still Think Tenure Is A Good System?

The truth is that many of us don't think tenure is a good system, and would prefer to be in a union. Tenure is, in fact, a more or less abusive system, and one that reproduces power hierarchies as they exist in society and in the university. Many of us who make it through the tenure process with the lifetime sinecure that is promised often do so because we are really good at repressing what actually happened. It is true that women, queers and people of color are not always turned down anymore just because our presence makes others uncomfortable, or just because the kind of knowledge we produce is actually critical of what more senior people in the department do. But it is also true that the people who control tenure nearly always make us hurt for it, even when we get it. I was lucky: I got to put the hurt off until I was being reviewed for full professor.

Then I was not so lucky. And frankly, even though I have my job and my promotion, and I more or less have my career back, I am still angry about those three lost years. It didn't have to happen, except that some people who don't like me very much -- and others, who were insecure enough that they longed to be perceived as having "standards" -- decided it should. And that year, not a single woman was promoted, either to tenure or to full professor. There were five of us. And there are people who still think that was just a coincidence.

Go here for a wonderful post by Oso Raro at Slaves of Academe on the Andrea Smith tenure case at the University of Michigan. Oso inspired the thoughts that became this post. He is right: Smith will get tenure somewhere. She is brilliant -- I mean, really brilliant. She has written a book called Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide that many of us use, and she was once on a panel that I organized, and the rest of us were more or less blown away by the intensity and depth of her intellect.

But each complicated tenure case -- and we have had several at Zenith, to which I can only allude that much, since there are still people who are angry at me for writing pseudonymously about peripheral features of these cases -- leaves endless circles of damage in its wake. The number of walking wounded out there is staggering. I traded some email with someone this morning who told a familiar story: working in a department where so many people had been turned down for tenure, the senior people had forgotten how not to be abusive as a matter of daily practice. Not only does a tenure case gone bad hurt the person who has been denied, it creates havoc for supporters of that person. Furthermore, relationships crack open when an entire narrative is built up around the failed case by supporters and by opponents that, in the end, bears almost no relationship to the truth of what happened.

Years ago, when I still lived in Manhattan part time, I was out walking my dog one morning when I encountered a man, also with dog, and the dogs began walking around in circles sniffing each other's behinds, as dogs do. The companion man and I exchanged a few words, and in seconds he was blowing his stack -- not at me in particular -- but at Zenith, because 'lo and behold, he had not only failed to get tenure at Zenith, but had failed to get tenure in my very same department some ten years previously. What were the chances of that? And if he talked this way to strangers...well, you get the point. This guy's tenure case had changed his life forever. For the worse.

Who else is hurt by tenure? All the people who are friends, lovers, children and companions of those who come up for tenure. People who get tenure are harmed by tenure, often because they have had to bow and scrape for so long before The Man and the women who are also The Man that they don't know how to get back up again. Or they are so damaged by the process that they turn around and do the same thing to the next candidate coming up the pipeline.

Each tenure case, successful or failed, is an object lesson to the next cohorts coming up. Untenured faculty watch them like hawks, trying to glean information. What should I do? How many shall I write? Was K really turned down because s/he didn't live in Zenith -- went to the wrong dinner parties -- published in the wrong journals? Didn't publish enough? Did they count the articles that were out at journals when s/he was hired? Did the book come out too late -- too soon? Was s/he -- lower your voice to a hush -- "difficult?"

Of course, we are not allowed to tell. As Oso argues in his post, that would wreck the only thing that really makes tenure valuable: its mystery.

I have argued against tenure for several reasons: that it destroys mobility in the job market. That we would do better financially, and in terms of job security and freedom of speech, in unions. That it creates sinecures which are, in some cases, undeserved. That it is an endless waste of time, for the candidate and for the evaluators, that could be better spent writing and editing other people's work. That it creates a kind of power that is responsible and accountable to no one. That it is hypocritical, in that the secrecy is designed to protect our enemies' desire to speak freely -- but in fact we know who our enemies are, and in the end, someone tells us what they said. But here is another reason that tenure is wrong:

It hurts people.

Being "Diverse" in the Middle Ground: Thoughts on Racisms, Sexisms and the Many Phobias

Gayprof, who is a continual inspiration to my desire to write and think better, recently put up this post on being a "minority" in a humanities department. In "Enough Minorities? Minority Enough? (Part I)" he responds to Oso Raro's thoughts in his this recent post at Slaves of Academe (which, if you have never visited it, is also one of the most beautifully written blogs I know.) In addition, Gayprof is following on a previous post of his own about so-called diversity hiring, and presumably since "Enough Minorities? Minority Enough?" is labeled "Part I" there will be at least one more follow up. I'm looking forward to it. And for those who want to read a really great piece on similar questions, turn to my colleague Indira Karamcheti's classic article,"Caliban in the Classroom." Originally published in Radical Teacher, it is anthologized in Pedagogy: The Question of Impersonation, Ed. Jane Gallop (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.)

Indeed, this was a good week for White Lesbian Semi-Tranny Me to read these provocative posts about the perils of embodying one's "culture" for others. Each post articulates the burdens of those who constitute the "difference" offered (marketed?) by a twenty-first century university as dilemmas that need to be at the center of the discussion. But also, to cut to the chase, I was, this week, for the umpteenth time in my career, accused of being a racist. Mostly deployed as an implicit rather than an explicit attack, it always raises questions for me about how those of us who embody "otherness" can also become entangled and implicated in the system that creates "others." I raise this because, while I don't think I never screw up, the real racists who walk my little part of the planet virtually never get told so to their faces, although they have plenty to say to me about my apparent inability to see the world with their scientifically objective eyes.

Familiar as being called a racist is (for reasons that will become clear below), it always leaves me speeechless, which is probably a good thing, because being caught in a shouting match with someone who is makig accusations of any kind is not something you come out of with your hands clean. It does not hurt as much as it used to -- or as much as it is intended to. And before I proceed, I would like to add that I am not claiming victim status from these difficult moments. Although it does not cancel out real errors I have made or have been perceived to have made, I have also been privileged with colleagues, students, friends and relatives of color who have gone out of their way to recognize my record as a comrade, and this matters too.

In my seventeen years of teaching, I have not only been accused of racism, explicitly and implicitly, I have been called names that identify me with historic figures in the history of white oppression. And racism isn't the half of it. In other heated encounters, I have also been accused of being a homophobe, a transphobe and anti-male (another version of this is "anti-whitemale.") I have been called what we might call a "heterophobe": in other words, students writing in anonymous teaching evaluations that I like queer students best; that I don't like them because they are straight (who knew? you looked so gay!); or, in a nasty dig at the fact that I am an out lesbian, some version of "although I did not feel listened to, Professor Radical loves the ladies in the room."

That's me, cruising my own office hours for innocent young things to use and throw away like Kleenex.

Two white students once accused me of sexually harassing a woman in our class by winking at her (the student took it as it was meant, as recognition of her achievement of having talked in class for the first time ever, but the Homo-Sexism Patrol had not been informed in advance.) A student once accused me of racism for bringing a plagiarism case in relation to a paper that was, in fact, copied from several books that s/he had helpfully returned to the library. Several male students have said up front prior to beginning classes with me that they don't expect to do well in a class where "white males aren't welcome." This is presumably because the class is taught by me, who does a good imitation of a white male but isn't one -- although many white males I have taught have not only succeeded in my class, but gone on to get Ph.D.'s, prestigious law degrees, and whatnot. A parent once accused me of racism because hir child was failing a tutorial, having not turned in any work all year, because, as s/he pointed out, I would "not have allowed that to happen to a white student." When I replied that a student not turning in work is not something you "allow," and that I had repeatedly asked the student to drop the honors project because s/he so clearly did not want to do it, the parent lectured me that no white student "would have ever been asked to drop an honors project."

Just to complicate things for you, like Gayprof, I get a lot of crap from faculty too, which I won't go into at length because students come and students go, but tenure is 4-Evah and there are any number of colleagues who could and would read themselves into stories that aren't even about them. OK, since you beg, just one. There was the individual, years back, who told me that there was concern about me having been appointed as chair of a search committee because I was widely perceived as being "prejudiced against white people." In the course of this conversation a racial epithet was used which I think was intended to give me an opportunity to disidentify with faculty of color and demonstrate that I was really on the (white) team. Instead I went home and cried and didn't tell anyone about it for several years. Here's a lesson for you: you tell people shit like this and they mostly don't believe you. But that is just a taste of what I have had to put up with over time because of my work on behalf of the scholarly projects on race that I have worked on at Zenith. How many searches have you participated in where all the finalists were white? Nearly all of them, did you say?

Now, this narrative compresses a very few incidents (but certainly not all) in a university life that has lasted almost twenty years: the two previous paragraphs read as though I am continually under attack, and that is not the case. Most of my life is lived as other people live their lives, and things get difficult when I have to deal with structures of power to which, regardless of my whiteness and class background, I will always be an outsider because of my politics. And I don't think the burden I labor under comes anywhere near that of my colleagues of color, who are too few, too beleaguered, and the object of too much projection and expectation from all sides. But I would like to say that I think I do catch more flak than most white people, and I do not actually think these things would happen if I were not so fully engaged with race, gender and sexuality in my teaching, scholarship and institutional work.

Here is where I am often left. I have my allies, it is true, and they are good ones, and we accomplish good things together despite having to do so on the margins of what constitutes power and influence in a university. But it is rare, as a white person, that one is fully trusted by a critical mass of faculty of color among one's own colleagues. That is simply a fact, although there are transient moments that give you an idea of what it would be like to have access to a more permanent sense of inclusion. Simultaneously, if, despite this problem, (which is a structural one, not a question of so-called "reverse discrimination" as the conservative critics would have it) should you manage to maintain fragile, but successful friendships and alliances over time with faculty of color, and should you invest seriously in race as an epistemelogical field, there is a surprisingly large group of white colleagues who make it clear, in word and deed, that you are not worthy of their trust.

Being labeled more or less a race traitor is simultaneously painful and liberating. It is painful because being misunderstood sucks, and because all of us who are women, queer, of color have -- consciously or not -- spent our entire careers trying to overcome the social barriers to our success by doing anything we can to be perceived as the intellectual equal of anyone in the room. This often means, by the way, being more or less a habitual overachiever, knowing all the conventional knowledge as well as your own undervalued field, which queer people, women and scholars of color who work on so-called "minority issues" have to do to get into the room in the first place. But it is also simply the case that you will not be acknowledged as an intellectual equal unless you conform, more or less, to dominant prejudices about what constitutes knowledge; or if you don't or can't conform, you must implicitly agree to leave those prejudices undisturbed and consign yourself to a status of permanently marginal critique.

Which is why becoming a race traitor, as opposed to being called a racist, can be liberating: it opens the door to saying and doing radical things. And at least if you are taking shit for it, you are taking it from the right people. But frankly, I think we are at a place in the history of the university life -- a place where, for example at Zenith, instead of affirmative action, we have a document that gives us helpful hints on how to "Avoid Discrimination" -- that this needs to be addressed far more openly by those of us who were there yesterday, and will be there tomorrow, to do the radical work of what has come to be called diversity.

Things I Think About As We Approach The Tsunami Primary on February 5

Here are the things that do not worry me at all.

That Barack Obama smoked pot. The only thing I can say about this is: Oh. Please. Stop. This -- and the severe penalties that people can be exposed to for taking naked pictures of their toddlers at the beach and having them developed at Walmart -- are perhaps the worst residue of the Reagan era's conservative cultural backlash. Being honest about getting high is, in my opinion, one of the things that makes this man genuine in his approach to others -- it's no wonder that young people like him! And I can name at least one prominent conservative intellectual/pundit, a man who helped get us into the Iraq war, who I got high with repeatedly in college. So shut up already. Clearly getting high is not a barrier to power.

That Hillary Clinton is a racist. This is truly absurd. Hillary and Bill have been profoundly progressive on race, Bill as a white governor in a state that -- under former governor Orville Faubus -- was for a short time the poster child for massive white resistance to desegregation. And Barack Obama has offered us proof of what he said in last night's debate was his great weakness -- a lack of executive experience -- by not putting the hammer down on this right away. I am quite sure that he does not believe in the kind of attack that was launched by people in his campaign in response to Senator Clinton's remarks about Dr. King. Now the Clintons are not so progressive on welfare, education, unionization or fair trade. But those are different -- if related -- issues, and not what Senator Clinton was attacked about. Which, to my mind, means something about the political intent of those who attacked her.

That John Edwards has a large, expensive house. Has anyone evaluated the Clinton bungalow lately, in lovely Westchester County? How about the Obama homestead in pricey metropolitan Illinois? And perhaps the founder of modern liberalism -- not to mention the welfare state itself -- Franklin Roosevelt: what was his net worth, and how many houses did he own when he became President? President Reagan? That newish Bush ranch? And let me just say -- you could easily spend $400 on a haircut. Someone needs to ask Hillary what she spent on her most recent color job.

That Mitt Romney is a Mormon. Honestly, as an exiled Westerner, I kind of like him for this. Do you know that Mormonism is the only true American religion? As a queer, I've never seen polygamy as entirely bad -- only abused as an institution. And why would Mitt Romney be a worse president than Mike Huckabee, who believes that the world will be devoured in fire and chaos, with the Devil walking the earth, and that only those who have taken Jesus Christ as their Saviour will survive and be taken to heaven to live with their loved ones?



Here are the things that do worry me.

That every Democratic candidate is solid on civil unions that convey equal rights for gay and lesbian people, as well as gay and lesbian adoption and child custody, but all candidates have tacitly accepted that marriage for queers is a political poison pill. Ok -- I don't believe in marriage as a way to convey equality. I don't believe in marriage at all as an institution that is inherently good for anyone. But really -- if civil unions and marriage would be the same in every way in a Democratic administration, why would we keep the two legal statuses separate (but equal)? This is the kind of thing that causes me to sympathize with gay men and lesbians with whom I otherwise have nothing in common: letting them get married undermines our society and economy -- how?

That Barack Obama doesn't think his lack of administrative experience/ability is an issue. Honey, that's why they call it "Commander in Chief," and the President's quarters "the Executive Wing." And no, you can't just say you will hire the good people who will run the government for you, you will supply great ideas for change and it will be ok. Who are these people? Will we be electing them?

That Hillary Clinton says things like the Martin Luther King statement and doesn't think it will come back to smack her in the fanny. The Clintons are too damn smart and too ready to demonstrate it: that caused people to hurt them before, and it will cause people to hurt them again. And of course Hillary was historically correct: what activist actually does move legislation? Did John Brown, Frederick Douglass, or Harriet Tubman end slavery? Did SDS bring the troops home from Vietnam? All you have to do is read Robert Caro's terrific third volume on Lyndon Johnson (which only goes up to 1960) and you know what the woman was talking about. The Senate sat there for twenty years watching mass black protest in the South and violent white resistance to that protest and did almost nothing. It took a President who knew how to control the Senate to get voting rights and civil rights legislation passed. Hillary is talking about the moral authority of the presidency, but she is also talking about raw, statist power. And in politics nowadays we are supposed to talk about political power in user-friendly ways that mask and mystify its real nature.

That media outlets get to decide for the rest of us citizens who is a legitimate candidate and who is not. Lucky for democracy, the kickin' Dennis Kucinich is taking this on by suing NBC over his exclusion from the televised Nevada debate. My question: what happened to the League of Women Voters, who used to sponsor these debates?

That Mike Huckabee reminds me a lot of Huey Long. Or Henry George. Watch him talk, why don't you?

But can I say that I do just love politics? I really do.

Look! A Black Woman; or, Re-interpreting the History of Black Men and White Women in Politics

I read the Sunday New York Times in this order: sports section, Styles section (quick jump to the "Modern Love" feature, then a scan of the marriage announcements to see if there is anyone I know who is Doing It), "A" section, Metro section, Connecticut section. If, as I do, you live outside the metropolitan area -- in Connecticut, Minneapolis or Bahrain -- the magazine and the Book Review come on Saturday. This is not only distinctly un-festive, it causes us in this household to miss Sundays with the paper and deli from Russ and Daughters on East Houston Street in New York. But it matters less than it might have in the past.  I have come to dislike the Magazine and the Book Review section; the former is badly edited from my perspective and the stories inane, while the latter tells you nothing you wouldn't learn from looking up the book on Amazon.com.

I almost never read the "Week in Review" section. I don't know why, except that I spend enough time on the internet that by Sunday I often feel that I have absorbed enough commentary on the week's news. Except today.  For some reason my aging eyes picked out the names of history colleagues Sara Evans, Joan Scott and James Patterson, who were asked to comment on the Hillary Clinton - Barack Obama primary contest. This was timely for your Radical because, after soliciting the opinions of many young friends over the last ten days, I had just decided last night to give it up that John Edwards will be my party's nominee. And even though the Connecticut primary is so irrelevant and our blue state status so predetermined that candidates only come through to collect money from us, I feel that I need to begin to develop an opinion nonetheless, and one that addresses the political terrain as it is developing. So I point you to the front page article in today's Week in Review, Mark Leibovitch's "Rights vs. Rights: An Improbable Collision Course," which pursues the question of whether the "white woman" or the "black man" should "go first" as a path-breaking presidential nominee.

I would like to propose that it doesn't matter whether we nominate the white woman or the black man, since they both have utterly bourgeois values and neither one provides much of a new direction -- both will have a horrendous burden awaiting them, and I think there is a good chance that neither one will be able to do much more than stop the bleeding.  Which would be a relief, but not progress, as it used to be perceived.  I would also propose that what it means intellectually or politically to be a "woman" or "black" or "gay" is something we should be long over, given such luminaries as Phyllis Schlafly, Clarence Thomas and the extended Cheney clan.

So let's start somewhere else.  As a queer feminist, I would like to tackle the binary we are being asked to make a decision about here, and propose that while identity politics can help us critique policies that have prevented movement on the large number of imperfections in our democracy in recent years, we have also hit the limits of identity politics in this election. It may truly not make a difference whether we choose Clinton or Obama. In the general election, either the Republicans will do the sensible thing and nominate McCain -- in which case it will be a dogfight -- or they will nominate anyone else and it won't. And all three prospective presidents will have trouble governing -- for different reasons, none of which will be related to race or gender.

But since I wanted to vote for the white man whose politics represented a significant shift to the left, and this has pretty much been taken off the table, I hoped the article would give me something to think about. Which it did -- except, of course, what it caused me to ruminate on is how journalists deploy history badly to imagine the significance of current events and perpetuate false choices. And I don't blame this on the historians, mind you: any of us who has been interviewed for a newspaper article knows that it is the rare journalist who comes to us to learn something.  Mostly they are looking for good quotes to beef up the story they already wanted to write. Evans, Scott and Patterson do a skillful job of teaching a large audience by delivering the quotes that Leibovich used. Perhaps the most masterful is this analytical point by Joan Scott, in which she sums up three books worth of feminist political theory in one sentence: "How do you become a universal figure," i.e., a president, "when you represent movements that have claimed the right of equality for you in your difference?"

So despite what the historians gave them, the article misses the point in its unwillingness to address the difficult questions here, one of which is the missing -- and impossible figure -- of a black woman as a contemporary political leader, and what that means. The article writes the possibility of a black woman out immediately by looking to the nineteenth century rift between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass over the Fourteenth Amendment as a suitable parallel, noting that despite their differences, the women's movement and the movement for African American civil rights moved forward together from the 1860's onward.  

This is simply misleading and untrue, except in a very general sense. The only reason this analysis has credibility is because of a skillful, entirely modern political phenomenon which should lead us back, as Joan Scott suggests, to the emergence of difference as a category through which similar political claims could be made by disempowered identity groups, working in loose coalition and using each others' victories in the courts and in Congress to amass credibility. By the 1970's, as Alice Kessler Harris has shown, American feminists had long decided to pattern their claim to citizenship on the modern civil rights movements, as would gay and lesbian activists after them. This, and Sara Evans' path breaking scholarship on the direct links between the movement for black civil rights and second wave feminist organizing, has caused many casual observers to articulate the relations between the two movements as harmonious and their issues as comparable in the twentieth century, an argument that is significantly troubled if you look at the struggles between white women and women of color in the feminist movement from the mid-1960's on. "One issue that is of major concern to us and that we have begun to publicly address is racism in the white women's movement," wrote the members of the Combahee River Collective in their 1974 Statement "As Black feminists we are made constantly and painfully aware of how little effort white women have made to understand and combat their racism, which requires among other things that they have a more than superficial comprehension of race, color, and Black history and culture. Eliminating racism in the white women's movement is by definition work for white women to do, but we will continue to speak to and demand accountability on this issue."

So this is where we need to look at history -- and our current dilemma about the Clinton-Obama primary campaign -- far more critically. Four historical arguments that might better inform our thinking are:

1. The nature of support for expanding the franchise has always depended on who would benefit, and that has to be placed in the context of class politics: in the 1860's, it was the Republican party who first used black votes and then used a powerful white male war veterans' apparatus, the Grand Army of the Republic, to pursue support for a set of expansionist national policies that were dedicated to putting money in the pockets of national elites.

2. Voting has always, more or less, been a corrupt and inexact practice in the United States. It became idealized in the post- World War II period because of the contradictions between the violence of mass black disenfranchisement and United States foreign policy claims that articulated voting as a major point of distinction between democratic and communist forms of government (see, for example, founding contributor to Legal History Blog(ger) and historian Mary Dudziak on this topic.) In the United States, however, black people and poor people have been perceived over the long term as the source, rather than the means, of this corruption in a way that white women -- often viewed as the conscience of white men -- have not. When black men in the south proved not to be as corruptible as the Republican party had initially hoped, activating their own political networks independent of the national Republican party, and negotiating locally, first with southern Democrats and then with third-party movements, Republicans and Democrats agreed between themselves in 1877 that the black franchise in the south was "corrupt" (see Steven Hahn, A Nation Under our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, Belknap Press, 2003). And it is no accident that white women's votes were seen to have a "purifying" influence by 1921, when the historians of the Dunning school had "proven" to a national political elite that black men's votes were the epitome of corruption.

3. White women have been perceived as exceptional in the category of "women" over the course of United States history:  for example, the modern perception of welfare recipients as overwhelmingly women of color living their lives on undeserved charity, or the choice of white feminists to emphasize their whiteness as a qualification for full citizenship prior to 1921. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her allies, as the central movers of a bourgeois nineteenth century women's movement, capitalized on the perception that they were exceptional among the mass of women, and that their whiteness entitled them to political privilege.  They were racists, in the modern sense, because like most educated, middle class people, black and white they did not believe in the universal franchise. They believed that the enfranchisement of millions of new citizens -- former slaves or immigrants -- corrupted the political system because their educational and biological inferiority could be easily exploited by others. They were what coalesces late in the nineteenth century as "liberal racialists," who believed that black people would eventually be prepared to shoulder social and political responsibility, but that slavery had delayed that project for an indeterminate amount of time. One was not simply a "racist" in the nineteenth century: racialisms were a complex set of beliefs that criss-crossed class, gender, and often "racial" groups themselves.

4. Bourgeois black men who aspired to political office in the nineteenth century, many of whom, like Barack Obama, were bi-racial, and many of whom were the acknowledged or unacknowledged sons of planter elites, have also historically believed that they were exceptional among the greater mass of black people, both those who were poor and undereducated, and those who were women. And, frankly, nineteenth century white feminists were not wrong to perceive themselves as having been left at the altar after the Civil War by black male politicians, who believed that their opportunity for the vote would be lost if they "feminized" their claims by insisting on bringing their white, feminist allies from the anti-slavery movement with them. This, I think, muddies the water significantly as to whether white women are the only villains of this sordid little historical tale. If you admire pragmatism, it was probably the right thing to do; if you admire principle, it was not.

OK, so to return to the present -- what is really at stake in the Clinton-Obama contest? What is at stake, I would argue,  is not the merits of the two candidates (who are distinguishable, but barely, and it's hard to even know how Obama's slightly more liberal stance would play out in post-election political realities.) The real anxiety here for the Democratic party is whether "women" and "blacks" -- the most sought after political blocks of votes over the last half century-- will actually hold together as political groups and which candidate will maximize their impact.   Can the reduced number of  "black" voters who have not been disenfranchised by modern forms of voter purge be counted upon to turn out and vote for a Democratic candidate who is a white woman?  Will Obama be perceived as "black" by voters who still view American blackness through a history of enslavement that Obama cannot claim? Will "women" stay home if they are thwarted again in their quest for political equality and power?  And what I propose is this: that both candidates pledge that whichever one of them wins the nomination, that they will run together as a ticket. This, in my view, does two things. It might get us back to ideas -- rather than inane debates about whose political rights matter most -- and it would demonstrate that each candidate is truly willing to put the nation's best interests at this crucial historical moment ahead of careerism and selfish personal gain.

And by the way, if you don't recognize her: the woman at the top of the page is the late, great, Shirley Chisholm. She was the first African-American woman to be elected to Congress, and in 1972 she became the first black woman to run as a major party candidate for President of the United States.