Half Changed World

TBR: Paul Robeson

I usually don't do book reviews of books that I read a long time ago, but since we've been talking about Paul Robeson, I though I'd make a plug for Martin Duberman's wonderful biography of Robeson.  It's a long book, but it illuminates a fascinating and complicated man, as well as what it meant to be a successful black man in pre-civil rights America  (he was born in 1898 and was the third African-American man ever to attend Rutgers), and the Red scare.

The anti-communist hysteria of the 50s certainly caught up many people who weren't really communists, but Robeson wasn't in that category.  He may or may not have ever been a formal member of the Community Party USA (he always denied it; Gus Hall claimed he was), but there's no doubt that he was a communist sympathizer.  To his credit, he truly believed in the universal brotherhood of man; to his shame, as Dave noted, he continued to insist that Stalinist Russia was an exemplar of that ideal, even when confronted with evidence to the contrary.  Duberman doesn't shy away from that failing in Robeson, but he makes a convincing argument for how a proud and idealistic man could avoid confronting a truth that would give aid and comfort to those who had persecuted him for years, and embarrass the people who had stood up for him.

If you didn't listen to the song I posted last week, go back and listen.  His voice is awesome.  This is the CD of Robeson singing that I have.  It's an eclectic album that doesn't quite hold together, but shows off the range of his repertoire.  It has his version of Ol' Man River, as well as the House I Live In, and Joe Hill.  It also has him singing Motherless Child, Ode to Joy (in German), a Yiddish folksong, a song from The Magic Flute, discussing how "hello" sounds the same in many languages, and reciting the final speech from Othello. 

Iowa

Someone posted on my neighborhood listserve this morning, wondering "where are the cries for help for the poor people of Iowa? Are they less deserving than the people of Louisiana?"  The question wasn't from someone I know, and maybe I'm misjudging him, but my interpretation of the subtext was "all you people who were so dramatic about Katrina weren't really worried about the people, but looking for a reason to beat up on Bush."

My impression is that the floods in the midwest have caused massive displacement, and overwhelming property loss, but that there's been relatively little loss of life.  Kari Lyderson writes at Rooflines about the contrast between the disasters and suggests a few causes:

1. The local governments are far more functional.
2. Most people displaced in Iowa are staying with friends and family; in New Orleans, many of the affected had no social networks outside of the city.
3. Those from outside helping (FEMA, National Guard, volunteers)  have positive impressions of the people they are helping: "To put it bluntly, law enforcement and volunteers in Iowa were not afraid of or harboring deep-seated hatred toward the people they were trying to help."  I mentioned this idea to someone at work, and she commented that if Iowans break store windows, they'll be seen as "getting needed supplies" not "looting."

That said, I do think it took a ridiculously long time for the East Coast media to figure out that this was a major story.  One of my colleagues is from Iowa, and she was stressing last week when the flooding started.  I hadn't heard the news, so went online to look, and discovered that there wasn't a single mention of the flooding on the Washington Post's website at the time. 

Via Crunchy Granola, I found Boomerific's postings about the flooding.

Some ways to help:

• Red Cross  -- their disaster relief fund is empty and they're borrowing to keep going.
• Union for Reform Judaism disaster relief.

speeches

I've quoted here before from the speech that Dr. King gave on the eve of his assassination.  It's a stunning speech, made almost unbearable by the clarity of hindsight.  I've included pieces of it in my haggadah for Passover at times, and no one ever seems to manage to get through it without their voice breaking.  Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, you can watch some of it online. 

This 40th anniversary of King's death has a particular resonance, because of the comparison in that final speech between him, and Moses, seeing the promised land, but not making it there himself.  The Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years before they made it.  How long will we wander?

***

I was at a meeting last week where we were discussing Obama's speech about race, and someone said that he thought there were echoes in it of Kennedy's speech after King's death.  I hadn't heard it, so I went and found the video online.  Go watch it.  (Warning -- this clip cuts to footage of Kennedy's assassination.)

kids and race

At dinner tonight, I asked D if he knew why we were celebrating Martin Luther King's birthday.  He said that King was famous, and that he worked so that blacks and whites could both do things equally.  Fair enough for a first grader.

Last year, D's class was almost entirely African-American, with one other white kid.  This year, at a different school, his classmates are more diverse, with a majority Hispanic, but a scattering of white, black, and Asian kids.  He considers almost all of his classmates his friends, with Pokemon the main unifying interest. When he draws a generic person, he reaches for the brown crayons.

But we're not living in a non-racial utopia.  One day D came home sad because a classmate didn't want to play with him, and he explained it as this boy only wanting to play with other kids with brown skins.  I didn't know what to say. We've been trying to set up a playdate with another kid for months, but it hasn't happened -- I'm not sure whether it's the language barrier, cultural issues, or just that family's lack of interest. 

D's invited about 8 of his classmates to his birthday party next week, and we haven't heard back from most of them.  I'm afraid that my super-sensitive kid is going to be heartbroken if they don't come.  And I'm concerned about what message he's going to take away if it's only white kids who wind up coming.

I don't think it's race per se that's the barrier, but economic class and language may well be issues.  Some of the kids' parents probably don't own cars. Our house is only about half a mile from the bus stop, but the buses run very seldom on weekends.  Or non-fluent English speakers may feel awkward about calling us to RSVP.  We're going to ask his teacher if we're allowed to bring in cupcakes so he can celebrate with his friends in any case, but I'm still worried.  I'm probably overdoing it with the party preparations (a papermache pokeball pinata, a jigsaw puzzle with a secret message) to compensate.

Sexism and the campaign

Blogging while I watch the election results come in from New Hampshire.  Clinton's still leading Obama with a bit under 1/3 of the results in so far.  If she wins, it will be really interesting to see the analyses of why the polling over the last few days was so far off.

The Steinem piece on Hillary has been getting a lot of play today.  I think she's completely right that Hillary has been the object of a great deal of sexism -- from the constant refrain that she's "shrill" and "strident" to the obsession with her appearance and the damned if you do, damned if you don't coverage of her emotions.

That said, I do think the campaign has highlighted the degree to which sexism continues to permeate the environment, at a time when overt racism has become clearly unacceptable, at least in high-level politics.  Obama's been the subject of some nasty anti-Muslim comments (even though he's Christian), but other than the people who keep calling him "articulate",* there's been very little racism in the campaign so far.  (But I still think racism probably does more to hold people back on the US overall than sexism.  Some other day, I need to blog about the Pew findings on race, gender and intergenerational mobility)

[CNN just said that their exit polling is showing more support for Clinton from women in NH than they saw in IA.  If so, I think that may well be driven by the blatant sexism of the news coverage of the past few days -- from the headlines, I thought that she had burst into tears and been unable to continue, rather than having a hitch in her voice.]

But I think Steinem's overstating the degree to which sexism is driving the results so far, as opposed to people's real enthusiasm for Obama.  Yes, it's improbable that a woman with Obama's bio could be a serious candidate for president. But it's also totally improbably that he's a serious candidate for president.  And it's not fair, but that's part of his appeal.

I also think that when Steinem includes "powerful fathers" along with "sex, race, money.. and paper degrees" in the things that shouldn't be driving our choices, it's more than a bit disingenuous for her not to include "famous husbands" in the litany.

*  "Articulate" is a compliment when you're talking about a teenager, or someone you're interviewing for their first job.  When applied to an adult who has been elected to political office, it's either damning with faint praise or code for "he doesn't sound black."

[AP and CNN are calling New Hampshire for Clinton.  Judging by my disappointment, I'm officially off the fence.]

Kindergarten blues

Jody and Phantom Scribbler and chicago mama all have thoughtful posts up about the NYTimes article about redshirting kindergarteners.

D's birthday is in January, so he's in the middle of his class age-wise, one of the smallest kids, one of the most advanced academically.  One of his good friends, with a July birthday, is doing "junior kindergarten" this year -- but he has some sensory issues, and I know his teacher were worried about his ability to stay on task.  It's not clear how much easier he's going to find it next year, though.  N's birthday is in October, so he'll be nearly 6 before he starts Kindergarten.  If I didn't know that other parents were likely to be holding their summer-birthday kids back a year, I might be in the school office, arguing to let him start a year early.   I was 4 when I started school (November birthday, December cutoff) and didn't suffer.

I think the points the author made about the class issues are real ones -- redshirting kindergarteners is definitely an upper-middle class phenomenon -- but am unconvinced that it matters in the scheme of class inequities in education.  For one thing, I'm doubtful that many poor kids are going to be sitting in the same classrooms as those redshirted kids.  EdWeek has a new tool out that lets you generate reports for any school district in the country on graduation rates and school segregation levels. I took a look at the one for Alexandria and was shocked to see that its school system scores a .78 (on a 0 to 1 scale) for racial segregation and a .52 for socioeconomic segregation.  Those numbers are far higher than average for either Virginia or the country as a whole, but what makes them really shocking is that all the segregation is in the elementary schools -- there's only one high school (TC Williams, of Remember the Titans fame) and two middle schools.

And we're not talking separate but equal either.  My friend who has her kindergartener in one of the predominantly white, middle-class, active PTA schools has been told that her son has been identified as gifted and talented (even though the pull out activities don't start until 3rd grade) and invited to come in for a meeting to discuss the curriculum.  I'm quite confident that if any such process were happening at D's school, we'd have heard about it.  We haven't.

A year ago, in my post about the decision to send D to this school, I wrote " What I worry about is whether they'll learn that school is something to be endured."  I do think this fear has somewhat come true.  D's bored a fair amount of the time at school -- his biggest complaint is that it takes up too much of his day.  And the whole class often loses privileges when some kids misbehave.  D's counting days to the end of school.  And frankly, I am too.

Happy Birthday, Dr. King

D came home from school last week singing various songs about Martin Luther King.  Very cute.  The school also showed his class a movie that apparently involved time travel and how the world would be different if Dr. King hadn't lived.  In particular, D was quite concerned that if it weren't for Dr. King, black kids and white kids couldn't go to school together and he wouldn't have hardly any friends!

I didn't want to spoil D's enthusiasm, but two things about that claim disturb me:

First, I'm wondering if educators show the same film in inner-city classrooms that are 100% minority.  As Jonathan Kozol points out, if you visit any school in America that is named after Dr.  King or Rosa Parks, the chances are that it will be just as segregated as any school before Brown vs. Board of Education.

Second, with all due respect to Dr. King, I think it does a disservice to the civil rights movement to suggest that it all hung on one man.  The  path might well have been different -- and quite possibly more violent -- but I find it hard to imagine that we'd still have legal segregation in the US even if Dr. King had never lived.

I'm guessing I may have an annual series of posts for as long as I continue blogging, quibbling about how the schools talk about Dr. King.  Last year's edition is here.

TBR: American Born Chinese

I picked up this week's book, American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang, after hearing that it was the first graphic novel to be nominated for the National Book Award, for Best Book for Young Adults.  I probably would have liked it better if this hadn't raised my expectations for it.

Even though there are three different plot lines, each story is relatively straightfoward, so it's easy to keep everything straight.  The graphics are attractive, but not especially sophisticated -- "cartoony" is the word that comes to mind.  The book has a pretty heavy handed, if well-intentioned, message: Be true to yourself; don't try to be something that you're not. 

Part of my disappointment with the book is that it felt like a bit of a period piece, set in the 80s or 90s, rather than today.  Will the target audience of today's teens even get the references to Sixteen Candles?  My guess is not. 

Different

I had an interesting conversation with an acquaintance the other day.  She was talking about how she had prepped her daughter for the first day of camp, explaining that her daughter doesn't cope well with loud, chaotic settings, and is also quite short.  So, they've been going over strategies, such as bringing a quiet toy to play with, and telling the other kids how old she is when they meet.  I commented that my son, D, is also short for his age, but that I don't think he's noticed.

It's hard for me to know whether it would be helpful to try to give D some social skills advice before he starts kindergarten  -- try to learn the other kids' names, don't sit there waving your hand every single time the teacher asks a question.  As a parent, there's a desire to protect your child from obvious traps.  And yet, it's not clear that such warnings would be helpful.  D's much more of an extrovert than I ever was, and makes friends easily with kids on the playground.  He's convinced that everyone he meets wants to be his friend, and his belief often makes it true.

There's also the complicating factor that, based on the school's demographics, D is likely to be either the only white kid in his class, or one of just a couple.  And he may well be the only Jewish kid in the school.  So, he's going to stick out.  I can't help but worry that it's going to make any social sins he commits much more obvious.

Any thoughts, stories, suggestions?

TBR: I'm Every Woman

This week's book is I'm Every Woman: Remixed Stories of Marriage, Motherhood and Work, by Lonnae O'Neal Parker. It's the book about a black woman's perspective on the whole work-family thing that was mentioned in the Times article I discussed last month.

It's an interesting book.  At times it delivers exactly what it promises -- insight into the ways that work and family issues play out differently for black women.  Parker says that she never realized that some women feel guilt for working outside the home until she was in her twenties, as all the women in her families had worked for pay.  She writes about the extra time that she needs to carve out of her day to comb and braid her daughters' hair, and illustrates her stories with quotes from the blues, R&B, and hip hop.

Parker also offers insights that cut across racial lines:

"I no longer ask the people around me to give me time.  I do not know if it is fair to ask them to go against their most basic nature, which is to want me there, available for everything they need me for, for as long as they can have me.  Instead I do the hard work of being completely clear about what I need.  Then they don't have to give me anything.  They just have to respect the boundaries I insist on maintaining.  It can still be a tough sell, but at least I've got half the battle won."

But at other points the book wanders and loses focus.  The long discussion of 1960s television shows left me cold.  One chapter simply reprints Parker's Post magazine article about her "white" cousin who lives with her.  It was interesting -- I remember finding it interesting when it was first published -- but doesn't really fit in with the rest of the book.  Another chapter includes a random paragraph about Michelle Obama that seems to be a left-over remnant from a section that got edited out.  At times Parker can't resist including every tangential bit of history that she knows about a subject.

In several places, Parker discusses the slave history of black women in the United States, and points out that her burden is light compared to what her foremothers endured.  How can she complain about juggling the demands of writing for the Post and caring for her family when women worked from sunup to dark in the fields, and stole moments with their children at night?  When women routinely lost their children to the slave trade and death?

It's a brutal standard.  Given the horrors of history, and the suffering of millions worldwide today, who of us has any right to complain?  Certainly not me.  And such comparisons are often used as a silencing maneuver.  But Parker uses these stories as a source of strength, telling herself that she can handle whatever fate brings to her.  And I'm sure she can.

Race, class, and opting out

Moxie more or less tagged me to respond to this New York Times article, about upper-income black mothers, and their reactions to the whole work-family debate.

Jill at Feministe gives the Times credit for talking about race, but complains that once again, the discussion is limited to upper-income college-educated professionals.  She's right, but the article is clearly framed in the context of the Times' obsession with "the opt-out revolution" which is all about upper-income women with lots of choices.  So I'm willing to cut them some slack on that.

Overall, I do think that class probably matters more than race in determining who stays home.  I know Lareau deliberately studied a racially diverse population and found that parenting styles didn't vary much across racial groups, holding class constant.  Edin and Kefales also didn't find much racial differences.  (I think ethnicity/immigration status probably does matter; there are definitely ethnic groups where there's still great cultural pressure against moms of young children working.)

Of course, "holding class constant" is a heck of an assumption.  As I've discussed before, stay-at-home parents are concentrated at the very high and very low income ranges.  And there are relatively few African-American families with a single wage-earner making over $100,000 a year.  And even holding income constant, African-Americans have significantly lower assets, making relying on a single income more risky.

The article suggests that there's more support/pressure for African-American women, especially those who have higher education, to work outside the home.  That may well be true.  But it's also true that, as Cashin argues, even well-off African-Americans are more likely to live places with higher crime rates, and worse public schools.  So that may provide an incentive to have a parent at home to keep an eye on things.  I don't know what the net effect is.

Dreams from My Father

Today's book is Barack Obama's memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.  He wrote it shortly after he graduated from law school, when he attracted attention as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, and it was reprinted in 2004 after his stunning keynote address at the Democratic Convention. 

I was a big fan of Obama before reading this book (see here and here), and it confirmed my enthusiasm for him.  He writes eloquently of the contradictions of his life -- a black man whose only family as a child was white (he only met his father once, when he was 10, and didn't meet the Kenyan side of his family until he was an adult), a community organizer who had instant credibility in inner city Chicago because of the color of his skin, but who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia.  And he recognizes the contradictions of others' lives, but points them out without judgement.  He's capable of both acknowledging how important Harold Washington's election as Mayor of Chicago was to many African-Americans and of pointing out how little business as usual changed as a result.

The American Prospect has a cover story on Obama this month.  It notes that he has been -- deliberately -- low profile in the Senate over the past year, but that he clearly dreams big.  The part I found most interesting was about his ability to disagree with people, to vote against them, and still leave them feeling respected and listened to.  That's a rare, and powerful, talent.  I'm very much looking forward to seeing what Obama does when he's no longer worrying about stepping on his colleagues' toes.

TBR: The Shame of the Nation

This week, I'm writing about Jonathan Kozol's latest book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.  I guess I should begin by saying that I agree with probably 90 percent of what Kozol says in this book.  I agree that the inadequate education offered to the vast majority of inner-city students is a national embarassment and should be a source of outrage to all Americans, not just those whose kids are stuck attending those schools.  I think it is absurd to take the kids who come to school with the least family resources, put them in overcrowded underfunded classrooms with the least experienced teachers, and then blame them for their failure to pass standardized tests.   I share Kozol's deep skepticism about the "scripted" teaching programs that are being offered as panaceas to lift up those test scores. 

And yet, I found myself repeatedly arguing with Kozol as I read the book.  He pushes his argument to such extremes that I couldn't follow him all the way.  Yes, it's terrible that kids are attending schools with asbestos coming out of the walls and stopped up toilets.  But Kozol seems to be equally outraged over kids going to classes in trailer classrooms -- which aren't ideal, but aren't terrible, and are common in a good number of solidly middle class school districts too.  He talks about the beautiful and expensive new building provided for Stuyvesant High School in New York, while other schools in the city were falling apart, and points out that only about 3 percent of the students at Stuyvesant are black or Hispanic.  But he doesn't acknowledge, even in passing, that about half of Stuyvesant students are Asian, many from low-income families.

I was also frustrated that Kozol never made a clear case for why he thinks that it's so important for black and Hispanic students to have white classmates.  He devotes a lot of effort to proving how segregated many urban classrooms are -- most notably, observing that if you want to find a segregated school in America, you should look for one named after Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King.  But is the problem that the schools are (largely) segregated, or that they're lousy schools?  Is integration worth fighting for in its own right, or only as a means to improving schools for poor minority kids?  Kozol clearly believes the former, but he doesn't provide an argument for it that will convince anyone who doesn't already share his views.

I'm actually scared that Shame of the Nation will set back Kozol's goal of integration.  If you want to convince middle-class parents to send their kids to integrated schools, publicizing the worst case scenarios of dreadful inner-city schools isn't the way to do it.  I'm not saying we should give up on Brown v Board of Education, but if we somehow managed to provide truly excellent public schools to all students, I think a good bit of educational and residential segregation would fade away without a massive government intervention. 

TBR: The Anatomy of Racial Inequality

Do you remember the song from A Chorus Line, "Dance 10, Looks 3"?  Today's book, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, by Glenn Loury, gets a rating of "Content 9, Writing 3."  Loury makes some very important arguments, but they're buried in some of the most inpenetrable writing I've ever encountered.  And it's especially frustrating since I've read some essays by Loury that I found both lucid and eloquent.

Loury uses the language and mathematics of classical economics to address the question of why racial disparities aren't fading away in American society now that formal discrimination ("discrimination in contract") has largely been eliminated.  (Paul Krugman writes that there was a MIT joke that Loury's thesis began: "This dissertation is concerned with the economics of racism. I define racism as a single-valued, continuous mapping...") Specifically, Loury argues that even if you begin with the assumptions that race is a social convention with no underlying biological reality, and that there are not overall differences in the innate capacities of the different races, it can still be rational for people to treat members of different races differently. 

An example Loury offers is of the cabbie who must decide whether to pick up a potential fare.  Loury suggests the following scenario:

• Criminals are distributed equally often among members of two groups.
• Criminals are less sensitive to how long they have to wait for a cab than law-abiding citizens (who can turn to alternatives like taking the bus or asking a friend for a lift -- these are not good substitutes for someone planning a holdup).
• Cabbies believe that members of group A are more likely to be criminal than members of group B, and therefore are less likely to stop for them.
• Therefore, members of group A have to wait longer for cabs that members of group B.
• Therefore, the law-abiding members of group A are less likely to take cabs.
• Therefore, the subpopulation of group A who takes cabs is in fact more likely to be criminal than the subpopulation of group B.

Loury argues that similar logic could apply to various other scenarios, such as hiring workers. He then offers the question: "If the association between payoff-irrelevant markers [such as race] and payoff-relevant traits [such as criminality or work ethic] is not intrinsic, but is engendered by the nature of agent-subject interaction, then shouldn't somebody learn what is going on and intervene to short-circuit the feedback loop producing this inequality?"  (And yes, the whole book is in this sort of awkward language.)

Loury's answer is yes, somebody should figure out what is going on, especially governments and other large entities.  (He writes: "Consider a traffic cop sitting in a $50,000 cruiser, who has received $100,000 worth of training, is backed by a big bureaucracy, and has a computer at his fingertips that allows him, by simply reading a license plate, to instantly generate reams of information.  This is an observer with no excuse for allowing his behavior to be driven by racial generalizations.")

So why *don't* we study these sorts of interaction more closely and figure out the intervention points that could break the cycle?  Loury argues that it's because of persistent racial stigma.  He claims that when girls are laggging behind boys in school, people think "something must be wrong with the schools" but when blacks are lagging behind whites, people think "something must be wrong with the blacks." 

Loury is a somewhat controversial figure.  In the 1980s, he was considered a prominent black conservative, known for opposing affirmative action and arguing that self-destructive behavior was responsible for many of the problems of the black underclass.  He's moved away from his former allies on the right, but is still far from a classical liberal -- in this book he argues that the self-destructive behavior is in part a result of the distorted incentives and limited opportunities offered by a racially unequal society.  I think his ideas are worth grappling with, but the dense language of this book makes it hard to get a grip on them.

Segregation and self-reflection

I wanted to thank Jody for her comment on yesterday's post in which she talks about how Wake County's desegregation scheme affected her choice of where to live.  I think it's incredibly hard for people to talk about these issues, especially white people who don't want to be labelled racist.

It made me want to talk a bit about where I live.  I just looked it up, and as of 2000, the census tract where I live was almost exactly 50/50 black/white.  But I wouldn't call it a stable integrated community either -- almost 2/3 of the population lived in a different house in 1995.  Forty years ago, it was the historic heart of black Alexandria.  Today it's gentrifying and getting whiter, but slowly.  The change is slow both because there's a good chunk of public housing in it, and because there are a significant number of older residents who own their own homes and aren't moving.  But the housing prices have appreciated so much that when the older generation dies, their children are mostly taking the money and running.

We knew very little of this history when we moved here.  Our primary search strategy was that we wanted to be walking distance to the metro, and I wanted to feel safe doing so by myself at night.  We started looking along the Red line, then the Orange line, but didn't find anything that we liked and could afford.  (And yes, everything was ludicrously cheap compared to what it's going for now -- but it still seemed like a lot of money to us.)  Our realtor convinced us to extend our search to the Blue/Yellow lines, and this was the first house we saw in Alexandria.

So, we weren't looking at race directly when we looked for a house, but it was only a step removed.  If you look at a metro map of DC, the racial politics of transportation becomes glaringly obvious.  African-American neighborhoods are underserved by metrorail, and the disparity was even worse before the last parts of the Green line were finally opened a few years ago.  There are a few majority-black neighborhoods with metro stations (especially along the eastern branch of the Red Line), but I woudn't feel comfortable walking alone in them at night. 

Cashin talks a little about "accidental integrationists" in her book.  She focuses on South Arlington, which is the next community over. It has a similar class mix as Alexandria, although it has less public housing and has more of a Latino population, and less of an African-American one.  I saw a lot of myself in the white parents that Cashin talked to and I found it reassuring to hear their stories.

TBR: The Failures of Integration

Today's book is The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining The American Dream, by Sheryll Cashin.  (I had actually requested it from the library, but not started it, when Bitch PhD wrote about it.  Dorcasina is also reading it.)  It's a very interesting book, but ultimately one that left me somewhat frustrated.

The first section of the book simply reviews the facts about residential segregation in the United States.  Little of this section is new research, but Cashin lays out the facts in a readable conversational tone.  She points out that much of what we consider "integration" consists of small number of well-off minorities living in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, as well as of neighborhoods that are in transition.    Very few whites -- and even fewer whites with children -- choose to live in neighborhoods that have a significant black presence, let alone that are majority black, even when such neighborhoods are less expensive than comparable majority-white neighborhoods.  (Cashin mostly discusses race in terms of black and white, although she notes that one type of stable integrated neighborhood is the multi-ethnic urban center.)  Cashin also notes that a significant number of blacks who could now afford to live in majority-white neighborhoods have chosen to live in majority-black communities where they are "more comfortable."

In the second section, Cashin makes a case that most of society is worse off because of the persistence of race and class segregation.  The ways in which poor urban minorities suffer have been well documented.  Cashin argues that middle-class whites also suffer because they have to spend more than they can afford and/or put up with horrible commutes in order to guarantee safe neighborhoods and decent schools for their kids.  (These sections echo some of the arguments from Perfect Madness and The Two-Income Trap.)  And for me, the most novel part of the book was Cashin's discussion of how the problems of urban areas follow middle-class blacks into majority-black suburbs.  She spends a lot of time discussing Prince George's County, MD, and why it still has mediocre schools and few retail shops, even though it is the most affluent majority-black county in the country. 

I found the third part of the book, in which Cashin discusses her hopes for the future, the weakest.  Cashin doesn't really have much of a solution to offer to the problems she's identified.  She calls for better enforcement of housing anti-discrimination laws, which I agree is a necessary, but not sufficient first step.  She supports school choice in the form of charter schools, but not vouchers, and talks approvingly of Raleigh's busing scheme, but doesn't directly address the issue that busing was a significant factor in pushing white families out of urban school districts.    She bewails our polarized political environment and the focus on suburban swing voters, but doesn't discuss how gerrymandering penalizes communities that are geographically scattered. 

I like where Cashin's aiming at; I just don't see how we get from here to there.

Update: I really want to encourage anyone who is reading this in a feedreader to click over to the comments on this post and the next one.  If you're only reading my posts, you're missing out.

Human Equality is a Contingent Fact of History

"Human Equality is a Contingent Fact of History" is the title of an essay by Stephen Jay Gould, originally published in Natural History magazine, and later included in his essay collection, The Flamingo's Smile. Gould was an elegant writer, and the essay is worth reading in its entirety. (To read beyond the page in the link, increment the page number in the URL by one.) Gould's argument is, first, in support of human equality as not just a moral principle but a scientific fact -- at least with respect to racial differences. He writes: "Human races are not separate species (the first argument) or ancient divisions within an evolving plexus (the second argument). They are recent, poorly differentiated subpopulations of our modern species, Homo sapiens, products at most of tens or hundreds of thousands of years, and marked by remarkably small genetic separations." But then he goes on to point out that there's no biological reason why this had to be the case. There could conceivably have been more than one human species, both intelligent, but with meaningful biological differences. How we would have treated each other in that case -- what rights and obligations we would have -- is a fascinating topic for thought. I was reminded of this essay upon reading in paper today that researchers have found remains on Flores island of a new human species that they think lived about 10,000 years after the Neanderthals had become extinct. And it ties in with my thoughts yesterday about whether it's a good idea to base our moral arguments on factual premises. A small request: Some of you may have heard about the controversy that erupted earlier this year when someone discovered that when you entered the word "Jew" into Google, the top link was to an anti-semetic site. The response, after a flurry of initial accusations, was a campaign to get people to link the word "Jew" to its entry on Wikipedia, as I just did. This is now the top result of a google search. Well, in searching for this essay on line, I discovered that the top hit on "human equality contingent fact history" is for David Duke's official website. Ugh. If you find this as horrifying as I do, please consider providing a countervailing link to the actual essay, like this: Human Equality is a Contingent Fact of History or to Gould's page on WikiQuote, like this: Human Equality is a Contingent Fact of History Thanks. November 4 update: The David Duke site is no longer the first result on Google -- now this site is. Not quite what I had in mind, but at least anyone coming here will be pointed to the full article.