Category Archives: Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading

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Come get some:

One of the most surprising, and perhaps confounding, facts of charity in America is that the people who can least afford to give are the ones who donate the greatest percentage of their income. In 2011, the wealthiest Americans—those with earnings in the top 20 percent—contributed on average 1.3 percent of their income to charity. By comparison, Americans at the base of the income pyramid—those in the bottom 20 percent—donated 3.2 percent of their income. The relative generosity of lower-income Americans is accentuated by the fact that, unlike middle-class and wealthy donors, most of them cannot take advantage of the charitable tax deduction, because they do not itemize deductions on their income-tax returns.

What happened in Steubenville makes me sick, but we are kidding ourselves if we think that it is not representative of what is happening in basement parties after the homecoming game all across America. Our kids want to talk about it. They need to talk about it. We need to have conversations about consent that are not centered around what should have been done, but are instead centered on what will be done in the future. Our teens can handle it, I promise they can.

A strong understanding of consent as an enthusiastic and unequivocal yes is essential to reversing the culture that our teens have grown up in. The amazing thing is the way my students responded to the conversation. Our students want a better way, it is our responsibility to show it to them, even if it is scary, especially when it might make us uncomfortable.

Goma’s growing significance as a ‘humanitarian space’ also brought about important socio­geographic changes and left a visible imprint on the urban landscape. The city’s development and expansion has to be situated in a context of informality and quasi absence of state authorities in urban planning.The presence and interference of humanitarian agencies only further strengthened the shift towards privatised urban planning and development.

While a massive influx of IDPs resulted in the emergence of new informal districts in the urban periphery that were deprived from any urban infrastructure, water provision, electricity network, schools, health centres or markets, at the same time a gentrification of the central districts could be observed as a consequence of the settlement of international humanitarian organisations.

With its numerous NGO establishments, UN compounds, luxurious residential areas, hotels, bars and rebel headquarters, these central districts gained increasing importance and came to represent modernity, global culture and new lifestyles. Specific demands for housing and working infrastructure as well as economic demands increased the socioeconomic significance of these central districts, and improvements in the overall urban infrastructure (such as electricity, internet, roads and water) turned them into the real ‘quartiers riches’.

Weekend Reading

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Read these links before they disappear!

Both priests placed the blame for their kidnapping and subsequent torture on Jorge Bergoglio, who was then in charge of the Jesuit Order. It was, after all, Bergoglio who stripped them of their functions and, in doing so, removed the protections provided by the church. Shortly thereafter, a paramilitary group delivered the priests to the ESMA. Both had served impoverished communities. They were only freed after the Episcopate agreed to grant an audience to General Roberto Viola and Minister of Economy Jose Martinez de Hoz. A day before the audience, Yorio and Jalics were drugged and transported by helicopter to an open field in the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

Imagine if a democratically-elected mayor was suddenly neutered and replaced by an “emergency manager” with the power to steamroll City Council. Imagine if the manager had the authority to unilaterally modify or even eradicate collective bargaining agreements and used that authority to entirely wipe out public sector unions. For Detroit, and its staunch labor movement, that scenario is less far-fetched than it sounds. In fact, it’s already happening in the Michigan city of Pontiac.

Since Lou Schimmel became Pontiac’s emergency manager in 2011, he has privatized the Department of Public Works, outsourced police services to the Oakland County sheriff’s office, and turned over the city’s fire department to nearby Waterford Township, killing the public sector unions which represented the city’s firefighters and cops. He’s put every city property, including City Hall, up for sale and cut the city’s public employee workforce by about 90%. And he’s done it all without the consent of the city council.

There is no reliable data to prove the assertion that MOOCs are revolutionizing anything; such rhetoric, moreover, gives a progressive and agreeable tinge to what may be a harmful, exploitative, and short-lived bubble of entrepreneurial capitalism. Something like 5-10% of the people who enroll in these so-called “classes” complete them, and almost none receive academic credit. And what does “primarily free” mean? MOOCs are only available to people with excellent broadband internet access and fast computers, which excludes about half the population and leans heavily towards the already privileged, and white, sectors—unless they live in rural areas, where such access is largely absent. Internet provider data caps and fee-based download plans are already raising questions about the cost or feasibility of taking such courses. As a so-called “access” campus, we have to be concerned about the effect of online instruction on success rates for underprepared students, especially students of color, whom studies have shown benefit the least from online instruction and flourish most when engaged on campus through residential housing, mentorships, and involvement in student organizations and community service.

Weekend Reading

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Here’s your serving of weekend reading:

I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.

The other day I walked past this particular deli. I believe its owners to be good people. I felt ashamed at withholding business for something far beyond the merchant’s reach. I mentioned this to my wife. My wife is not like me. When she was 6, a little white boy called her cousin a nigger, and it has been war ever since. “What if they did that to your son?” she asked.

And right then I knew that I was tired of good people, that I had had all the good people I could take.

One of the challenges to organizing on campus is getting undergraduate students—many of whom are being buried under mountains of student debt—to realize that their degree will probably not result in the comfortable middle class lifestyle that they’ve been told awaits them after graduation. This runs counter to their day-to-day experiences in which they do not yet find themselves in the uncomfortable position of not being able to pay back their loans. In a way, we are asking students to anticipate their own future failure. We need to think through the temporality of what people are being asked to act on and how that impacts participation. This requires a longer term relationship with students that may even extend beyond the time it takes them to graduate. Community involvement needs to include alumni and a more intergenerational approach to thinking the figure of “the student.”

With regards to graduate students and faculty, we need to dispel the notion that your scholarship can be your activism. Participation in university-based activism means material risk for individuals whose careers are tied to the institution in such an intimate way. Many of our colleagues, while championing anticapitalist, antiracist, and feminist politics in their work, routinely fail to participate in an open struggle to change the structures that govern our lives. While our writing and research can feed, nurture, and illuminate our struggles (and vice versa), the two should not be conflated. As scholars, we need to put our bodies where our theory is.

Given the current state of student debt, a vicious administrative class, and the prevalence of idealism and creativity, we believe that university campuses are logical and essential sites of struggle. That being said, the university is a trap—only university-based struggles that aim at generalization, at escaping the university and becoming part of wider social condition of refusal (as in Quebec), will have a shot at avoiding either recuperation or reformism. For us, this implies a two part, long-term organizing problem: first, organizing enough students to form a powerful bloc capable of acting on the terrain of the university, and second, organizing the communities that surround us.

Another reason Up falls short as political commentary is because pinning a society’s inequities onto the backs of a dozen kids and expecting them to perfectly reflect those ills sets up the project for failure. As Apted comes to realize, one person’s life is not a data point — at worst, it’s an irrelevant anecdote, and at best, it’s a metaphor. It would be a mistake to universalize the experiences of these 14 and hold them up as evidence of England’s failure to provide opportunities for all children.

That being said, the series hints at a number of socioeconomic trends that become particularly relevant to the next generation of characters — the childrens’ children. Tony and his wife take care of grandchildren that their daughter can’t raise. Paul’s daughter went to college and studied art history (a degree she doesn’t use at her job, naturally) while his son has five kids and is precariously employed, leaving Paul and his wife to take over when they’re needed. There were no “twentysomethings” in the original series — with the exception of Suzy, briefly, they all went straight from adolescence to adulthood. That’s not the case for their adult children, who, as Sue points out, are much more dependent on their parents than their generation was.

The very opportunities the original Up characters had seem to be fading, too. Will Sue’s daughters, who decide not to go to college, have a shot at the job their mother had — or will they end up working at Tesco? If tragedy or illness befalls Jackie’s boys, will they have a safety net to soften the blow?

Weekend Reading

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Cycling students through the global sites allows NYU to increase its enrollment without having to keep up the expensive New York infrastructure needed to house and support all those extra students. In Abu Dhabi, the entire project has been bankrolled by the emirate, while most of the other nodes are outposts run on the cheap, with faculties made up of relatively low-paid contract workers, not expensive and sometimes obstreperous tenured professors. The students, however, are still paying full freight. You pay NYU about the same for tuition, room, and board in Ghana as you would in Greenwich Village.

NYU’s globalization of education looks a lot like the offshoring of labor and industry in the 1990s: A multinational corporation makes more widgets for less money and uses the savings to grow even more. But while the administration is enthusiastically milking the GNU, faculty members remain skeptical of programs run in partnership with authoritarian regimes and with little academic quality control from professors in New York. “Abu Dhabi, who would want to go there?” Miller asks. “Are you kidding? You’re not even allowed to have a camera on the street there! Or be gay! Or be Jewish!”

In fact, with student and faculty participation in the GNU still lagging behind its hyper-aggressive targets, the administration has had to resort to informing departments that some of their funding will be conditioned on more enthusiastic cooperation.

You think a novel about an institution so violent and depraved that a woman would rather kill her children than be forced to hand them over is the stuff of nightmares? Imagine the waking nightmare Margaret Garner lived, faced with the awful “choice” of murdering her own kids or watching them be returned to slavery. And she was just one person out of millions. Any honest account of this history should disturb and unsettle us.

Of course, imagining that nightmare is precisely what Murphy is insisting that her kids shouldn’t have to do. The question is, does the math add up on a claim that one white kid’s bad dreams outweigh the value thousands of students get out of confronting a history we’re all still living with the ramifications of? Including many students who are bound to be the descendants of slave owners or slaves – in some cases, both?

Murphy justifies keeping students from grappling with this history in the name of “[making] sure every kid in the county is protected.” In this reckoning, 17 and 18 year olds need protection from a few lost nights of sleep, from realizing that people are capable of doing truly awful things, from the knowledge that some people live with horrific, daily, inescapable violence.

The erasure of Quvenzhané’s name is an attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to step around and contain her blackness.  Yes, sometimes black people have names that are difficult to pronounce.  There aren’t many people of European descent named Shaniqua or Jamal.  Names are as big a cultural marker as brown skin and kinky hair, and there has long been routine backlash against both of those things (see: perms, skin bleaching creams, etc.).   This insistence on not using Quvenzhané’s name is an extension of that “why aren’t you white?” backlash.

Weekend Reading

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Whenever the government suppresses opinions or beliefs like Schenck’s, it claims to be acting on behalf of values—national security, law and order, public safety—that are neutral and universal:  neutral because they don’t favor one person or group over another, universal because they are shared by everyone and defined by everyone in the same way.  Whatever a person may believe, whatever her party or profession, race or religion, may be, she will need to be safe and secure in order to live the life she wishes to live.  If she is to be safe and secure, society must be safe and secure:  free of crime and violent threats at home or abroad.  The government must be safe and secure as well, if for no other reason than to provide her and society with the safety and security they need. She and society are like that audience in Holmes’s theater:  whether some are black and others white, some rich and others poor, everyone needs to be and to feel safe and secure in order to enjoy the show.  And anyone who jeopardizes that security, or the ability of the government to provide it, is like the man who falsely shouts fire in the theater. He is a criminal, the enemy of everyone.  Not because he has a controversial view or takes unorthodox actions, but because he makes society—and each person’s pursuits in society—impossible.

But Americans always have been divided—and always have argued—about war and peace, what is or is not in the national interest.  What is security, people have asked?  How do we provide it?  Pay for it?  Who gets how much of it?  The personal differences that are irrelevant in Holmes’s theater—race, class, gender, ethnicity, residence, and so on—have had a great influence in the theater of war and peace. During the First World War, Wall Street thought security lay with supporting the British, German-Americans with supporting the Kaiser, Socialists with supporting the international working class.  And while the presence or absence of fire in Holmes’s theater is a question of objective and settled fact, in politics it is a question of judgment and interpretation.  During the war, Americans could never decide whether or not there was a fire, and if there was, where it was—on the Somme, the Atlantic, in the factories, the family, the draft—and who had set it:  the Kaiser, Wilson, J.P. Morgan, Teddy Roosevelt, the Socialists, the unions, the anarchists.  Without agreement on these questions, it wasn’t clear if Schenck was the shouter, the fire, or the fireman.

When you value continuity above all, you glide silently over the fact that “the university” is radically transformed when its primary function is simply to exist. When the president of a university is fighting to get rid of programs that don’t pay for themselves, because they don’t pay for themselves, it doesn’t really matter what they are; the substance of the university’s intellectual work is not what matters, just its bottom line. The result is that managers and academics are in inevitable conflict. Universities are divided between administrators—whose concern for institutional health is expressed in fiscal projections and budgets—and academics who would look at a President spouting historical ignorance in an alumni magazine as a bleeding sore on the academic body.

There is, however, no better example of the mentality that prioritizes institutional continuity over intellectual principles than the 3/5ths compromise. The apparent arbitrary nature of the number is what makes it stick in our minds as a historical scandal, in some ways more than it should; after all, at a time when the vast majority of American adults could not vote—when the franchise rested almost exclusively with white male property-owners—the scandal was not that slaves “only” counted as 3/5ths of a person, it was that they were slaves in the first place. But what the number’s arbitrariness demonstrates is how both sides were simply compromising in order to compromise, prioritizing the continuance of the Union over everything else. “3/5ths” didn’t mean anything, and no one pretended it did. The only important thing was that the power elite came to a consensus, and 3/5ths was where the horse-trading stopped. If that consensus required that millions of dark skinned people be enslaved and brutalized, well, that was a small price to pay for the glorious union. Continuity is what matters, after all.

Weekend Reading

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I’m traveling this weekend, so enjoy whatever I scrounged together earlier in the week or in my spare time here in Milwaukee:

The claim that someone who is not a racial minority cannot evaluate racism is a too-convenient alibi that makes the detection of racism into a minority affair. To ask a racial minority to examine whether or not something is racist, to refuse, in fact, to put yourself on the line for calling out something as racist, is massively, massively unfair. Because it is to return those minoritized through race to the experience of that minoritization: to ask them to risk hurt in the name of some experience-based empiricism.

I’ve written this before, but it’s worth repeating: to describe something as racist, to describe an experience as racist, is to name, inadequately, a deep, persistent hurting, to try to capture, inadequately, how it feels to be deemed less than. It is to risk ridicule, disavowal, and the ever-condescending “maybe it’s all in your head.” It is to risk something.

For those who live with status updates, check-ins, likes, retweets, and ubiquitous photography, such an understanding is near inescapable. Social media have invited users to adopt a sort of documentary vision, through which the present is always apprehended as a potential past. This is most triumphantly exemplified by Instagram’s faux-vintage filters.

There’s always tension between experience-for-itself and experience-for-documentation, but social media have brought that strain to its breaking point. Temporary photography is in part a response to social-media users’ feeling saddled with the distraction of documentary vision. It rejects the burden of creating durable proof that you are here and you did that. And because temporary photographs are not made to be collected or archived, they are elusive, resisting other museal gestures of systemization and taxonomization, the modern impulse to classify life according to rubrics. By leaving the present where you found it, temporary photographs feel more like life and less like its collection.

Dorner’s reaction is partly rooted in a corrosive version of American masculinity — his response to institutional corruption is uniquely Jack Bauer and John Wayne. Gratuitous violence included. Dorner is a wholesale product of a society gone mad on racism and war, of a state that aggressively punishes dissent, of an intellectual milieu where telling the truth has become a dangerous act. There was no internal institutional outlet for him to address injustices against him: the blue line prevented that.

Weekend Reading

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As the blizzard rolls through New England – and my car is marked by a tiny mound in 3 feet of snow – I bring you the weekend reading. Seek shelter, dear readers, in words on the internet:

It’s not quite free, as early MOOC proponents began by promising. It is worth mentioning, too, that Udacity is a venture-funded startup, that classes will be supervised not by tenured profs but by Udacity employees, and that Thrun declined to tell the Times how much public money his company will be raking in for this pilot—or what more may have been promised should the pilot prove “successful.”

Okay, fine, but let’s get this straight: public money has been mercilessly hacked from California’s education budget for decades, so now we are to give public money, taxpayer money, to private, for-profit companies to take up the slack? Because that is exactly what is happening. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just fund education to the levels we had back when it was working?

In Oklahoma, 32 percent of adults are divorced, 10 points higher than the national average. In 2000, the state has diverted 10 percent of its welfare money (a total of $10 million) to finance a statewide marriage initiative. The program’s listed goals would be to reduce the high number of divorces in Oklahoma by one-third, teach citizens about the benefits of marriage, and encourage cohabiting Oklahoma couples to marry. For Governor Frank Keating, who put the initiative into place, the program’s possibilities didn’t stop there. “The marriage initiative,” he wrote, would, “make our state rich. That simple.” To strengthen marriage, he contended, would be to create a stronger and more stable economic base for the family unit, and by extension, for the state itself.

I spent years as a waitress—in high school, then college, then as a struggling freelance writer—in that time I received pats on the ass, scribbled phone numbers in lieu of tips, and many, many personal questions I’d have preferred not to answer. Requiring feigned intimacy on the part of the worker allows the customer to ignore normal boundaries and pretend that a smile is an invitation to cross. Like the Pret workers, one of my bosses hired secret shoppers to make sure that servers went the extra mile; we were downgraded for not thanking our customers by the names we mispronounced off their credit cards. Not only our tips—which were our livelihoods, seeing as we only made $2.13 an hour, the legal minimum for tipped restaurant workers that hasn’t changed in 22 years—but our jobs were at stake if we didn’t smile hard enough.

Weekend Reading

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For reasons mostly unquestioned by the public, courts routinely permit wardens to intubate hunger-striking prisoners, by force if necessary. Most of these cases, decided in local courtrooms, never see the light of media. Unlike the young and vulnerable Terri Schiavo, convicted criminals are often harder to rally public sympathy around. Whatever prior court cases and their media campaigns may have done for patients’ rights, judges deciding prisoner feeding tube cases still defer to prison authority.

That’s what happened when William Coleman tried to have his forced feedings stopped.

Eventually I realized I was getting so many questions about people’s genitals that I started the recurring column What’s Up With My Penis. I also received more complicated questions about like teen pregnancy, suicide, and family issues, which lead to another recurring column, Tough Love. My mother, a doctor, would ghostwrite anything that was medical or would check anything particularly serious in nature. I wrote, edited, and produced over 1,500 articles and daily columns. I received thousands and thousands of letters, sometimes upwards of 100 a day. Occasionally a kid’s mom would write me, asking me to please answer her son because I was the only one he’d listen to.

The problems in 2012 were legion and they began before voters even made it to the polls. In New Mexico, where the Native population grew more than 11 percent in the last decade, the state ran out of voter registration forms in six counties—half of them in counties with high Native populations. In Arizona, as I’ve previously reported, just setting up polling places involves a fight. Many Navajo, or Diné, must vote in one spot for federal elections and in another for tribal elections. The distances between them, in addition to the long lines reported at several precincts, can easily take several hours to traverse. Many voters didn’t have that kind of time and were essentially forced to choose in which election they would participate.

Elsewhere, Native voters faced Bull Conner-style intimidation. The Indian Legal Clinic, based at ASU’s law school in Phoenix, headed up Native Vote Election Protection in Arizona. Law school students like Ed Hermes scattered throughout Arizona to monitor precincts with heavy Native populations. In the course of six hours, five Maricopa County Sheriff’s vehicles were observed patrolling outside the Guadalupe polling location, which mostly serves Pasqua Yaqui voters. In Pima County, border patrol agents were stopping every vehicle leaving the Tohono O’odham Nation. The agents, accompanied by German Shepherds, were asking drivers about their citizenship. In Yavapai County, a Republican poll watcher was reprimanded for speaking to voters directly.

Weekend Reading

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The perspective of pain is what this story is about. For fans, injuries are like commercials, the price of watching the game as well as harrowing advertisements for the humanity of the armored giants who play it. For gamblers and fantasy-football enthusiasts, they are data, a reason to vet the arcane shorthand (knee, doubtful) of the injury report the NFL issues every week; for sportswriters they are kernels of reliable narrative. For players, though, injuries are a day-to-day reality, indeed both the central reality of their lives and an alternate reality that turns life into a theater of pain. Experienced in public and endured almost entirely in private, injuries are what players think about and try to put out of their minds; what they talk about to one another and what they make a point to suffer without complaint; what they’re proud of and what they’re ashamed by; what they are never able to count and always able to remember.

Obama called the declaration “that all of us are created equal” the “star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall…” That’s not what you would have heard in a Mitt Romney Inaugural Address. But Obama’s celebration of collective action was also noteworthy for the proper nouns he didn’t name: Lowell. Pullman. Flint. Memphis. Delano. Obama’s speech celebrated feminist activism, civil rights activism, and LGBT activism, but didn’t mention labor activism. That’s a noteworthy omission, not an accident of alliteration.

Weekend Reading

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It’s the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, “Why don’t they just rise up and kill the whites?”  If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains.

Sally E. Haden, in her book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, notes that, “Although eligibility for the Militia seemed all-encompassing, not every middle-aged white male Virginian or Carolinian became a slave patroller.” There were exemptions so “men in critical professions” like judges, legislators and students could stay at their work.  Generally, though, she documents how most southern men between ages 18 and 45 – including physicians and ministers – had to serve on slave patrol in the militia at one time or another in their lives.

And slave rebellions were keeping the slave patrols busy.

Past day 315, population growth slowed. More than six hundred mice now lived in Universe 25, constantly rubbing shoulders on their way up and down the stairwells to eat, drink, and sleep. Mice found themselves born into a world that was more crowded every day, and there were far more mice than meaningful social roles. With more and more peers to defend against, males found it difficult and stressful to defend their territory, so they abandoned the activity. Normal social discourse within the mouse community broke down, and with it the ability of mice to form social bonds. The failures and dropouts congregated in large groups in the middle of the enclosure, their listless withdrawal occasionally interrupted by spasms and waves of pointless violence. The victims of these random attacks became attackers. Left on their own in nests subject to invasion, nursing females attacked their own young. Procreation slumped, infant abandonment and mortality soared. Lone females retreated to isolated nesting boxes on penthouse levels. Other males, a group Calhoun termed “the beautiful ones,” never sought sex and never fought—they just ate, slept, and groomed, wrapped in narcissistic introspection. Elsewhere, cannibalism, pansexualism, and violence became endemic. Mouse society had collapsed.

The “it’s suppose to happen” in inner-city communities reframe is not surprising. Places like Columbine, Aurora, and Newtown exist because of the fear-industrial complex. The white middle-class flocked from cities into the suburbs and rural communities partially due to fear of black and Latino youth, integrated schools, and urban crime. The continuously deployed the narrative of “it’s not suppose to happen in Newtown” and their neighborhoods mirroring “American family’s dream” embodies this entrenched belief. The efforts to imagine Holmes and Lanza as good kids turned evil, to scour the earth for reasons and potential solutions, works to preserve the illusion of safety, the allure of white suburbia, and the power of whiteness.

In imagining the killers as good kids who did a bad thing, who snapped because of a divorce, because of too much medication, because of inadequate mental health treatment, because of too much mental health care, because of guns, and because of who knows what, white manhood — the visible link that binds together so many of these shootings –always gets erased.