New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Algorithmic Housing Discrimination

It appears that HUD, as part of the general initiative to stop enforcing the housing laws it’s supposed to enforce, is poised to allow landlords to hide behind computer algorithms as they discriminate against minority tenants. As Andrew Selbst – who co-authored one of the foundational pieces on exactly this sort of problem – describes the proposed rule change in Slate:

“The proposal, while billed as a mere update to bring regulations in line with the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision, creates entirely new rules for landlords using algorithms. There are functionally two separate defenses being created. First, the proposal allows landlords to use an algorithm as long as its inputs are not “substitutes or close proxies” for protected characteristics and as long as it’s predictive of what it purports to predict—or a “neutral third party” certifies that fact. So if a hypothetical landlord decides to predict number of noise complaints as a proxy for difficult tenants, using music streaming data they somehow obtained, they might find a correlation between preferred musical genre and how difficult a tenant is. Of course, musical preference is not a substitute or close proxy for race, but an algorithm that equates a preference for hip-hop with noise complaints is probably picking up on race as a factor in frequency of noise complaints. Unlike under existing law, under this rule, a landlord would be off the hook even where there may be less discriminatory alternatives. Second, the landlord is also immunized from any discrimination claim if he uses a tool developed and maintained by a recognized third party. These safe harbors supposedly ensure that a model is legitimate and the landlord has not himself “caused” the discriminatory outcome”

A brief discrimination backgrounder: legally, discrimination can be on the basis of disparate intent, or disparate impact.  Disparate intent is what it sounds like: I discriminate against black tenants if I decide not to rent to any, because they are black.  As you can imagine, this sort of discrimination is hard to prove, because not so many people are dumb enough to advertise it.  The more standard strategy is to mask discrimination behind proxies that name race (or some other protected category) without actually naming it.  Given residential segregation, for example, zip code is a pretty decent proxy for race, and so a landlord might systematically disfavor applicants whose previous address is in a specific zip code.  That’s also not ok, because although the rule doesn’t (directly) “intend” to discriminate, the impact of this policy is disparate between racial groups, and so is the same as if it did.

Radical White Terrorism as State Policy: Trump, Sovereign Decision and homo sacer

By Gordon Hull

As our tin-pot “President” continues his inexorable slide into narcissistic authoritarianism, it is worth noting recent events that establish beyond any residual doubt that radical white terrorism is now official policy.  When historians look at the Trump presidency, assuming we all survive long enough for there to be historians, I suspect last week is going to be a significant one.  It began with Trumps’s remarks after Charlottesville, in which he managed to say that counterprotestors shared in the blame for neo-Nazi violence and that there were many “fine people” hiding in the mob of white supremacists.  These made his own views clear (as though they weren’t already).  But they did not establish state policy.  Events Friday did: the pardoning of former Maricopa Country Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the border patrol’s decision to keep inland border patrol checkpoints open during the evacuation from Hurricane Harvey, and Trump’s apparent decision to end the DACA program.  Together these say: radical white terrorism is above the law, and the undocumented are homines sacri. Foucault remarked at one point that in a biopolitical state “it’s impossible to reconcile law and order because when you try to do so it is only in the form of an integration of law into the state’s [administrative] order” (Power, 117).  In Trump’s America, you get neither law nor order: Trump despises both the rule of law, as evidenced Friday, and the administrative state, as evidenced by his repeated appointment of incompetent, unqualified partisan hacks to head regulatory agencies the very existence of which they oppose.  The theoretical framework through which all of this behavior is intelligible finds its expression in the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.

Radical White Terrorism

By Gordon Hull

Although they murdered one person, injured 19 others, and celebrated two governments, one of which systematically exterminated over 6 million people in the name of white supremacy, and another that systematically murdered and enslaved millions more, also in the name of white supremacy, members of the far right somehow managed to proudly act like newly liberated victims of something or another (“cultural Marxism?”).    It’s not like Charlottesville should have been a surprise; the FBI and DHS warned about the threat from white supremacists months ago.  White supremacists had been nursing fantasies of running over liberals with cars for quite some time, and racist hate crimes – including, as in Portland, the murder of those who try to stop racist hate crimes – have (unsurprisingly) been on the rise since Trump came to power.  Moreover, what happened last weekend was not about free speech and marches.  It was much more about political violence and intimidation: they showed up in Charlottesville looking for a fight, toting semi-automatic weapons and militia groups so that they might not just exercise their First Amendment rights, but deprive others of their First Amendment rights.

Trump Attacks Privacy of Non-Americans in the U.S.

Amidst the general horror that is Trump’s xenophobic and bigoted executive orders*, and in the executive order attacking sanctuary cities, comes Trump’s attack on the privacy of immigrants (h/t Dennis Crouch at Patently-O).  The order stipulates:

“Privacy Act.  [Federal] Agencies shall, to the extent consistent with applicable law, ensure that their privacy policies exclude persons who are not United States citizens or lawful permanent residents from the protections of the Privacy Act regarding personally identifiable information.”

The Act does not require protection extend to non-permanent residents; Crouch provides the context, noting that “some agencies, however, have been providing aspects of privacy-act protections to non-citizens and permanent residents.  The order appears to force agencies to stop that approach and instead expand governmental data collection and dissemination of information related to non-Americans.”  In other words, expand the surveillance state as much as possible.  I don’t see how this expansion won’t involve the collection of data on citizens, since citizens often interact with those in the U.S. lawfully or otherwise (for example, as students, H1-B workers, or under other programs), and so a threat to the privacy of non-citizens is indirectly a threat to the privacy of everyone in the United States.

The 2016 Election and Racism, Soft and Structural

Foucault famously proposed that biopolitics - the power to foster life, or allow it to die - tended to produce its own outside in the form of state racism: not only might life be allowed to die, but there might be those who must die, literally or metaphorically, so an inside “we” could live. That is, it is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die” (Society must be Defended, 254).  Note the subtle elision: there is life that is allowed to die, and then there is also life that must die.  Thus, “if you want to live, they must die” (255) becomes the message.  In other words, biopolitics produces two forms, almost simultaneously.  Foucault is thinking of 1930s fascism, where (for example), the German emphasis on the health of the ethnically-German population was coupled with the extermination of European Jews.

But there’s an analogue, however imprecise, in the Presidential election last week.  In it, we saw two versions of biopolitics.  On the one hand, Clinton ran on a campaign of building a better life together, with a particular emphasis on fostering the lives of children and families.  The Affordable Care Act would be improved.  Paid leave for working parents.  And so on.  Even her negative ads against Trump emphasized the positive biopolitics: our children are watching.  What kind of President do you want them to see? On the Trump side, we saw nothing but Herrenvolk biopolitics: Mexicans, Muslims, African-Americans and women were taking over, making America not great.  This had to stop.  Law and Order.  Our country is at its nadir, thanks to an ineffective, losing President who was probably born in deepest, darkest Kenya anyway.  He also somehow founded ISIS, which by the way is winning. China is winning.  Everyone but America is winning.  But if we keep the Mexican rapists out, and all the Muslims, maybe something good can happen.  We will be strong.  We will win again.  In Messianic tones that Masha Gessen reminds us (this piece is a must read) we should take very seriously, he proclaimed that “I alone” can save you.  That almost none of that narrative was true became irrelevant, in the same haunted house in which Clinton’s email server somehow became a darker mark against her character than his many business failings, tax evasions, failures to pay subcontractors, etc.

Two version of biopolitics.  In Foucauldian terms, Trump was advocating the return of state racism.  At one level, this is an obvious point, given his endless racist rhetoric about Mexicans and Muslims in particular.  But liberal commentators, including myself, have tried very hard to explain the Trump victory in other ways.  I have decided it can’t be done.  The Trump election is fundamentally about the maintenance of White Supremacy, something that women and people of color said a week ago.

On the Police Shooting in Charlotte, and being Ordered to Remove a Post

For those who haven’t been following the news, there was a police shooting in Charlotte the night before last.  The facts of the case are still being investigated: the police claim that the black man who was shot had a gun; his family says he had a book.  I’m not sure the distinction matters, as North Carolina is an open carry state, so “he had a gun” isn’t obviously relevant.  There were violent protests both last night and the night before.  Yesterday afternoon, I put the following statement on the Ethics Center’s webpage (including the italicized portion marking it as my own).  I woke up this morning to an email ordering me to take it down, and to call my dean.  I am not going to die on this hill, so I removed the post.  But we live in a world where University Ethics Center directors are not allowed to attempt to exercise moral leadership in the communities they serve, even as those universities claim to commit and recommit to their communities. And where Ethics Centers are forced to be strangely silent on moral issues like HB2 and police violence.

I reproduce the statement in its exact form below, in case someone may find it useful. Systemic violence against people of color is worse than the loss of our universities - including public ones, as I was sternly informed UNC Charlotte is - as places of intellectual engagement.  But the latter is not trivial or insignificant, as the steady collapse of meaningful public discourse is a disaster for any viable understanding of democracy.

UPDATE (9/22): There is dashcam footage of the shooting, which the CMPD has.  The family has seen the video, and wants it made public.  Earlier in the day, the CMPD chief had declared that the video would not be made public, because "The video does not give me absolute, definitive visual evidence that would confirm that a person is pointing a gun."  Unless this is a misstatement (but this is the exact quote I have seen, in several sources), this means that the CMPD Chief has essentially refused to release the video on the grounds that it does not clearly exonerate his officer.  Someone please show me how I am misreading this statement!   In any event, there are already too many issues to discuss here, but the national conversation has to include discussion about what to do with video footage of shootings.  North Carolina has passed a law that generally suppresses the public availability of that video.  It takes effect Oct. 1.  I do not know what the legal situation with the footage is now, but the conflict between the CMPD Chief and the family on whether the video should be released is important.

Kajieme Powell, Charles Kinsey, and “Blue Lives Matter” in an age of structural racism

August 19 was the two-year anniversary of the shooting death of Kajieme Powell, an unarmed black man who robbed a convenience store, and whose shooting at the hands of responding police was clearly documented on video from a bystander’s cellphone.  Powell’s killing was within a few miles and weeks of Mike Brown’s, on August 9, and the news was buried in the coverage of the protests surrounding Brown’s death.  In a way, however, Powell’s death presented a more troubling case, as cell phone footage clearly showed to any reasonable observer that the shooting was unjustified.  As I noted at the time, the officers who arrived on the scene decided to escalate with firearms before even stopping, and even their brief interaction with Powell should have convinced them that his cognitive processes weren’t normal (the video makes this abundantly clear).  It took them about 15 seconds from the moment they pulled up on the scene to open fire.  They didn’t bother to first talk to the shopkeeper who made the call, or to the eyewitnesses who had video footage of the entire incident, and their defense that Powell lunged at them was risible. Of course, after a year, the officers weren’t charged with anything.

After the apparent lone-wolf shooting of several police officers in Dallas, "Blue Lives Matter" has emerged as a slogan.  Fair enough: the officers, who were protecting and interacting peacefully with a Black Lives Matter protest, were apparently murdered in retaliation for police shootings elsewhere.  What does it mean to say that “lives matter,” though?  I want to push the point here that when we’re talking about “lives,” we’re talking about more than the biological process of living.  After all, most of us can imagine some sort of tipping point - perhaps being in a persistent vegetative state - where we would conclude that our own life was no longer worth living: that it no longer “mattered.”  To say that “lives matter” is to say something more than the obvious truth that police officers want to get home to their families in the evening.  It’s to say that their lives as police officers should be livable, supported lives.  And if you frame the question that way, I think it is very clear that the state apparatus has failed blue lives.  Not with the relentless intensity or in the same way that White Supremacy has failed black lives (I will say more about this in a subsequent post).  But a failure nonetheless, and a failure that needs to be remarked upon, because it is related to the failure to make black lives matter.

Online sexism and racism is a thing (surprise surprise!)

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

Yesterday the Guardian published the results of a research conducted on the over 70 million comments that have been placed at Guardian articles over the years. The question was: is there a pattern in who gets most abusive comments? Given the Guardian’s policy to block comments (blocked by moderators) when they are not aligned with the spirit of constructive debate, this constitutes an extremely dataset to explore online behavior (it is reassuring by the way that only 2% of the 70m comments were blocked!). It has been long felt that women, and in particular women speaking from a feminist perspective, receive much online abuse in reaction to what they write. (Comment sections are one such venue, but think also of Twitter and other social media platforms.) But crunching the numbers is the right way to go if one wants to move from the level of ‘impressions’ to more concrete corroboration. The results will probably not come across as surprising:

Although the majority of our regular opinion writers are white men, we found that those who experienced the highest levels of abuse and dismissive trolling were not. The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. And of the eight women in the “top 10”, one was Muslim and one Jewish.

And the 10 regular writers who got the least abuse? All men.

New Paper on Juridical and Biopower and School Desegregation Cases

by Gordon Hull

This is shameless self-promotion, but I've just posted "Equitable Biopolitics: What Federal School Desegregation Cases Can Teach us about Foucault, Law and Biopower" to SSRN.  This is my SPEP paper from 2014, and I've referenced it in a few blog posts here.  So here it (finally!) is.  The abstract is:

The present paper looks at the intersection of juridical and biopower in the U.S. Supreme Court’s school desegregation cases. These cases generally deploy “equitable relief” as a relay between the juridicially-specified injury of segregation and the biopolitical mandates of integration. This strategy is evident in the line of cases running from Brown to Swann v. Mecklenburg, and has its antecedents in pre-war economic regulation. Later cases have attempted to close this relay, confining equality and rejecting claims of equitable relief. Study of the school desegregation cases thus both shows an example of the intersection of biopower and law (which has been difficult on Foucauldian grounds), as an example of the biopolitical race war that Foucault identifies in Society must be Defended.

Was Charlie Hebdo 'Mocking' The Death Of Alan Kurdi?

By: Samir Chopra

Charlie Hebdo has offended again. A recently published cartoon titled “So Close to His Goal”, shows Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler whose tragic drowning death sharply focused the world's attention on the desperation of the migrant crisis in Europe, lying face down on the sand near a billboard featuring Ronald McDonald and advertising a 2-for-1 McDonald's Happy Meal with the legend: 'Two children's' meals for the price of one." The caption reads, 'So close to his goal.' And above it all, "Welcome to migrants.' A second cartoon titled “The Proof that Europe is Christian” shows a toddler drowning in the ocean. waters. Next to him a Christ-like figure walks on water. The caption reads, "Christians walk on waters… Muslims kids sink.”

Here is how I 'read' the cartoon, roughly: The West and Europe imagines itself the haven of liberal, secular ideals; it imagines itself the bastion of democracy, republicanism, and the social welfare state. In point of fact, it is as much in thrall to old-fashioned notions of Christian triumphalism and the blurring of the church and state as those regimes that it disdains. The West and Europe still fight holy wars; they still imagine themselves under attack from the 'Huns' and the 'Goths' and the 'barbarians' and the 'Moors.' The migrants might have thought they were escaping to this promised land where they would be welcomed with open arms and invited to make a new life. Little do they know that they were only heading for a vapid, shallow, xenophobic, insular, Islamophobic, consumerist culture, one whose patron saint is Ronald McDonald, and whose guiding slogans are not the call to arms of the great revolutions, but rather, sales pitches for cheap goods.

That's how I read it. I did not take these cartoons to be 'mocking' a dead child.  I do not claim to know the 'intent' of the cartoonist, but given Charlie Hebdo's history, and the current context, my interpretation strikes me as at least halfway plausible.

I am not going to offer a systematic defense here of Charlie Hebdo, but want to make note of a couple of what I think are relevant points:

1. The famous cartoon of Barack and Michelle Obama exchanging fist-bumps in the Oval Office, while wearing 'Arab dresses' and carrying guns, appeared on the cover of the New Yorker. Had it appeared on the cover of the National Review Online, complete with a comments section of gibbering right-wingers rubbing their hands in glee, reactions to it would have been considerably sharper.
2. The Onion once ran an article titled 'Redskins Kike Owner Refuses To Change Team's Offensive Name.' I did not think the article or its headline was anti-Semitic. Some Jewish friends of mine were offended.

Charlie Hebdo's cartoons are bound to offend many and their choice of vehicle for making their political points might be questioned. But they have ample material to choose from and ample opportunity to offend; this world and its dominant species' arrogance and continuing self-destructive behavior will ensure that. Satirists exist and find work because we are worthy targets of satire.

Note: This post was originally published--under the same title--at samirchopra.com.

Finding Common Cause: Deaths of Lions, Deaths of Black People, and Lori Gruen's article

By Roberta Millstein

I'd been trying to grapple with the weeks and weeks of horrifying stories about the treatment of Black Americans at the hands of police, with Sandra Bland and Samuel DuBose only the latest victims, when the story about Cecil the Lion hit social media. Some reacted angrily, frustrated that one lion was getting more attention than all the black women and men whose lives had been lost. Lori Gruen, however, responded differently:

Rather than pointing fingers at each other about inadequate or disproportionate grief at the deaths of some and not others, social justice activists might instead work to develop what political theorist Claire Jean Kim calls an “ethics of avowal.” In contrast to disavowal, the act of rejection or dissociation that often leads to perpetuating patterns of social injury, she suggests that we recognize the ways that our struggles are linked and to be “open in a meaningful and sustained way to the suffering and claims of other subordinated groups, even or perhaps especially in the course of political battle.” We should empathize with the pain and indignities of others who are disempowered and avow, rather than belittle, their search for justice.

This seemed so exactly right to me that I was surprised to see a number of commenters on the Feminist Philosophers blog voice strong disagreement. Stacey Goguen's early comment set the stage for much of the disagreement:

The Return of Sovereign Shaming

In May, a 13-year-old named Izabel Laxamana took a selfie wearing a sports bra and some leggings, and sent it to a boy at her school.  When school administrators heard about the picture, they contacted her parents.  What happened next defies easy comprehension: delivering on a threatened punishment for breaking his social media rules, Izabel’s father cut off her hair.  He then made a video of Izabel with her hair (in a pile on the floor), demanding that she say breaking their rules hadn’t been worth it.  The video found its way to social media.  Two days later, Izabel jumped off an overpass, and a day later, she died from her injuries. The reasons why Laxamana committed suicide are of course complex, and may or may not be because of the shaming (and the father may or may not be the one who posted it to social media).*  But the videoed retaliatory haircut seems to be real.  In a recent piece in Slate, Amanda Hess catalogues the sudden re-emergence of this medieval phenomenon – literally medieval; women were punished by having their hair cut off, often in public – and situates it as part of a more general re-emergence of the public shaming of teenagers by their parents:

The Deadly Self-Pity Of The Police

By: Samir Chopra

In 1997, as a graduate teaching fellow, I began teaching two introductory classes in philosophy at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Many of my students were training for careers in criminology and law enforcement. Some hoped to join the FBI, yet others, the New York City police force. And, as I had been told (warned?) some of my students were serving NYPD officers, perhaps hoping to become detectives, gain added educational qualifications and so on. In my first semester, I did not meet any of these worthies.

What is it like to be a person of color in philosophy?

Following the sucess of What is it like to be a woman in philosophy? a new blog has arisen on the blogosphere: What is it like to be a person of color in philosophy? I look forward to hearing about people's experiences; although many will no doubt be painful to hear, this is a conversation that is long overdue.  I hope that the new blog will be as good for the profession its predecessor has been.  So far, with the first five posts, it delivers well.

Waiting on Ferguson

by Leigh M. Johnson

We continue awaiting the decision of a grand jury on whether or not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer, who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, exactly 15 weeks ago today on a suburban street in Ferguson, Missouri. News reporters from across the globe have been camped out in Ferguson for months, their expectation of an announcement teased and disappointed several times in the last week alone.  On Monday, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard in advance of the grand jury's decision. Yesterday, President Barack Obama, in what can only be judged to be an anticipation of Wilson's non-indictment, preemptively urged protesters not to use Ferguson as an "excuse for violence."  In the meantime, demonstrators of various ilk remain on standby, rallying their troops, refining their organizational strategies, painting their oppositional signs, standing vigilantly at the ready for whatever may come.

But what are we waiting for, really, as we wait for Ferguson?

Normalizing Civility, Policing Critique, Enforcing Silence and Misunderstanding Collegiality

By Leigh M. Johnson

How we ought to understand the terms "civility" and "collegiality" and to what extent they can be enforced as professional norms are dominating discussions in academic journalism and the academic blogosphere right now.  (So much so, in fact, that it's practically impossible for me to select among the literally hundreds of recent articles/posts and provide for you links to the most representative here.)  Of course, the efficient cause of civility/collegiality debates' meteoric rise to prominence is the controversy surrounding Dr. Steven Salaita's firing (or de-hiring, depending on your read of the situation) by the University of Illinois only a month ago, but there are a host of longstanding, deeply contentious and previously seething-just-below-the-surface agendas that have been given just enough air now by the Salaita case to fan their smoldering duff into a blazing fire.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll just note here at the start that I articulated my concerns about (and opposition to) policing norms of civility/collegiality or otherwise instituting "codes" to enforce such norms some months ago (March 2014) in a piece I co-authored with Edward Kazarian on this blog here (and reproduced on the NewAPPS site) entitled "Please do NOT revise your tone."  My concern was then, as it remains still today, that instituting or policing norms of civility/collegiality is far more likely to protect objectionable behavior/speech by those who already possess the power to avoid sanction and, more importantly, is likely to further disempower those in vulnerable professional positions by effectively providing a back-door manner of sanctioning what may be their otherwise legitimately critical behaviors/speech.  I'm particularly sympathetic to the recent piece "Civility is for Suckers" in Salon by David Palumbo-Liu (Stanford) who retraces the case-history of civility and free speech and concludes, rightly in my view, that "civility is in the eye of the powerful."

The Ferguson Lesson: Another Way to "Take Up Arms"

As someone who has spent the better part of her career researching, analyzing and teaching not only about the structure and nature of oppressive power regimes, but also better and worse ways to resist or transform such regimes, I've nevertheless been unable to settle in my own mind, to my own satisfaction, my position with regard to the moral or political value of revolutionary violence.  I can say that my core moral intuitions (for whatever those are worth) definitely incline me toward favoring nonviolence as a principled ethical commitment... though, over the years, I have found those intuitive inclinations fading in both intensity and persuasiveness.  As a philosopher, a citizen and a moral agent, I continue to be deeply unsettled by my own ambivalence on this matter.

First, a preliminary autobiographical anecdote: I spent a year between undergraduate and gradate school in the nonprofit sector, as the Director of the M.K.Gandhi Institute for the Study of Nonviolence.  (That was back in 2000, when the Gandhi Institute was still housed at Christian Brothers University in Memphis, which is now my academic home, evidencing the kind of bizarro turn-of-fate that can only be credited to some particularly clever-- or ironically humorous-- supernatural bureaucrat.)  I went to the Gandhi Institute initially because nonviolence was an all-but-unquestioned moral virtue for me at the time.  But, after a few years in graduate school and consistently since, the many and varied until-then-unposed questions about the moral or political legitimacy of violence pressed their way to the fore of my mind.  In roughly chronological order, I'd say that the combination of (1) my first real engagement with Frantz Fanon's argument in "Concerning Violence" (from his Wretched of the Earth), the arguments by Marx (and Marxists) in various texts advocating more or less violent revolution, and Noam Chomsky's considerations of the same, (2) my extensive research into human rights violations, transitional justice and transitional democracies, postcolonial theory, feminist theory and critical race theory, which collectively constituted the subject of my dissertation, (3) the radically dramatic shift in what counts as properly-speaking "political" and/or "revolutionary" violence in the post-9/11 world and (4) my own experiences, from near and afar, with the increasing number of (threatened, proto-, aborted, defeated and/or more-or-less successful) revolutions taking place in my adult lifetime (e.g., OWS, the Arab Spring and, much closer to home and far less violent, the current and ongoing academic revolution surrounding the Salaita case), all worked together to contribute to my rethinking the merits and demerits of violence as a way of resisting/combatting/correcting oppressive, exclusionary or otherwise unjust power regimes.

“In a lethal situation, they used lethal force:” The Myth of the Myth of the “Angry Black Man”

Only a couple of weeks after the Ferguson shooting, and only about three miles away, St. Louis police shot and killed another black man, Kajieme Powell, after he apparently shoplifted from a convenience store.  The details of what happened in Ferguson are in dispute, which has allowed the law and order crowd to defend putting six bullets into unarmed Mike Brown – two into his head – as a proportional act of self-defense.

No such ambiguity exists in the Powell case.  The police released cellphone video yesterday, and it is absolutely chilling.  Powell emerges from the convenience store with a pair of canned drinks.  He seems a little confused – puts them down, paces around, and so on.  Then the police show up in a white SUV, and jump out, guns drawn (already! They decide to escalate before even arriving at the scene).  Powell backs away, says “just shoot me” a couple of times, climbs up on a retaining wall, takes a couple of steps in the direction of the police… and then they shoot him dead.  Total time between the police arrival and his death? About 15 seconds.

The video, of course, completely contradicts the police department’s story about a drawn knife and aggression on Powell’s part.  When confronted with the contradiction, the police chief replied that “in a lethal situation, they used lethal force.”  The only thing harder to understand from that video clip than why killing Powell was justified by the situation is how anyone can continue to deny that the problem is structural.  I am not accusing the officers or the police chief of lying.  It’s much, much worse than that: I’d be pretty sure they really did think their lives were in immediate danger.

 

Ferguson and American Apartheid

 

For they know they are not animals. And at the very moment when they discover their humanity, they begin to sharpen their weapons to secure its victory.
--Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

America has been and remains an apartheid state.  That sad but increasingly undeniable fact was made apparent last night in Ferguson, Missouri to a group of peaceful protesters amidst tanks, deafening LRADs, a haze of tear gas and a firestorm of rubber (and real) bullets.  The other tragic fact made apparent in Ferguson last night is that America is only ever a hair's-breadth away from a police state... if we understand by "police" not a regulated body of law-enforcement peacekeepers empowered to serve and protect the citizenry, but rather a heavily-armed, extra-constitutional, militarized cadre of domestic soldiers who provoke and terrorize with impunity.  Much of the time, we are able to forget or ignore these unfortunate truths about contemporary America-- and by "we" I mean our elected officials, our bureaucrats and financiers, and a lot of self-delusionally "post-racial," though really white, people-- but the mean truth of gross inequality, both de facto and de jure, remains ever-present in spite of our disavowals, simmering steadily just below the allegedly free and fair democratic veneer of our polis.

Greg Howard, journalist and parrhesiates, said it about as plainly as it can be said this past Tuesday in his article for Deadspin:  America is not for black people. The truth of "American apartheid" should make us all ashamed, saddened, angry, deeply troubled as moral and political agents.  And, what is more, it should frighten us all.

Next best thing since The Bell Curve

In an earlier post, I discussed Nicholas Wade provocative new book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, and mentioned that it had been getting a lot of reviews and attention because of its controversial claim that contemporary science supports the view that biological races really exist after all.  But now, the definitive review has been written and posted to the Gentopia blog. Stephen Colbert couldn't have said it better himself.  Check it out.

Social Policy and Explanations: Within- and Between-Population Variation

In a post last month for Demos, Matt Bruenig argued that if one in fact cares about childhood poverty, a recent conservative position promoting marriage as a means of reducing childhood poverty rates is as cruel as it is misguided (http://www.demos.org/blog/4/14/14/single-mother-child-poverty-myth). In a nutshell, Bruenig notes that countries with low childhood poverty rates have not achieved this success via promoting marriage, nor are their rates of single-parenthood markedly different from those in the U.S.

One way to put this basic observation is that people promoting marriage are deliberately ignoring most of the variation that matters.  Yes, it is true (ceteris paribus, of course!) that in the international sample Bruenig looks at, in every country, the children of single parents are more likely to be poor than the children of married parents living together.* But far more variation in childhood poverty rates is associated with different policies in the different countries, and not with the relationship status of the parents; indeed, even if the child poverty rate in the U.S. dropped to the level associated with children living with married parents living together in the U.S. today, it would still be substantially higher, indeed, quite grossly higher, than in the other countries Bruenig looks at.

SB 1391 and the Criminalization of Pregnancy in Tennessee

A petition is circulating online asking Gov. Bill Haslam to veto SB 1391.  The bill would modify the Tennessee criminal code to allow for criminal assault charges to be brought against women who use illegal narcotics while pregnant, should their drug use lead to harm or death for the fetus or child.  These charges carry a penalty of up to 15 years in prison.  But the bill is so badly written, it could affect all pregnant women in Tennessee, whether or not they use drugs, should something go wrong during their pregnancy.  In effect, SB 1391 threatens to criminalize pregnancy in Tennessee. 

Policy analysts and political commentators across the world have voiced their concerns with SB 1391, arguing that it could have far-reaching consequences (Reality Check, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, and NPR).  Even some pro-life groups recognize that SB 1391 could incentivize abortions for women who use drugs, since women risk up to 15 years in prison by continuing their pregnancy, especially if they are unable to access drug treatment programs (All Our Lives).  

If we really want to support the flourishing of children in Tennessee, then we need to move beyond the pro-life/pro-choice framework to seek reproductive justice for everyone, based on “the right to have children, not have children, and to parent the children we have in safe and healthy environments” (SisterSong).  For example, rather than punishing women who use illegal drugs while pregnant, we should be extending the Safe Harbor Act to support women who use either prescription drugs or non-prescription drugs to get the treatment they need, and to stay clean for the sake of their families and themselves. 

Hiring, academic pedigree, and exclusion: Is going for pedigree racist and classist?

On the basis of this year’s partial hiring data, Marcus Arvan notes that the majority of tenure track hires (a whopping 88%) are from people of Leiter-ranked programs. Only 12% of hires are from people of unranked programs. Also, 37% of all tenure track hires come from just 5 schools, the Leiter top 5 list - this is amazing if one ponders it, and one may wonder at the direction philosophy is going to, if most of its future tenured workforce comes from just a few select programs.

This has caused a lot of debate: why would people go to grad school in unranked programs at all? Why attend an unranked program if you can’t get into a highly ranked one? But what is often overlooked are the many factors, such as class and ethnic background, may contribute to someone not getting (or, as I will examine in more detail below), even applying to get into top programs. In fact, going for pedigree may be a particularly effective way to screen out people who come from poorer backgrounds and of different ethnicities.

Philosophy, its Color Line, and its Culture of Justification

Over at Times Higher Education, Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman has written an important piece calling the discipline on the carpet for its overall failure to critically engage its own whiteness.*

There is a lot of remarkable stuff in the piece, which is organized around the paired questions of "who 'gets to do' philosophy?" and "who 'gets done' in philosophy?." It should be read in its entirety. As a teaser, however, let me just reproduce the following paragraph, which I'll discuss a bit below:  

In a 2012 blog posting titled “What could leave philosophy?”, Brian Weatherson, professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, argues that “[f]or a few areas [of philosophy], it is easy to imagine them being in other departments, because they already overlap so substantially with work done in other departments”. Thus, instead of seeing overlap as an opportunity to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries, Weatherson sees overlap as an opportunity to police, enforce and constrict the boundary around philosophy. This narrow-mindedness is an example of what Kristie Dotson, assistant professor of philosophy at Michigan State University, has called philosophy’s “culture of justification” – not the legitimate demand that one justify the conclusion of one’s arguments, no, but the illegitimate demand that one justify that what one is doing counts as “philosophy”.

Russell Maroon Shoatz

Is an African American political prisoner in the US. He was convicted of killing a police officer in the course of resistance work with  the armed wing of the New African Liberation Army.  He has been held in solitary confinement for the last 30 years, in violation of numerious international agreements, and under conditions that clearly constitute torture.  Below is a letter from various Nobel Laureates calling for his release into the general population, and information on how to support him. 

Mississippi on the Volga (hat tip Ta-Nehisi Coates)

Yesterdary was International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

One of the many horrific consequences of radical evil is that it functions to let everybody else off the hook for their depravity. Thus, for example, the narrative that the United States and the Soviet Union could do no wrong because they had defeated the Nazis. Not something the tortured or dead victims in Castillo's Guatemala, the Shah's Iran, etc. etc. etc. or the people of Eastern Europe during that period would have understood in the least.

But remembering can have another function completely at odds with this, making us aware of our own historical complicity with the radical evil as well as the fact that the perpetrators of radical evil are almost always not very different from any other human beings. Americans in particular must see the Shoah in light of a prolonged genocide against the native peoples of this land, over two hundred years of slavery, another hundred of disenfranchisement and extreme economic injustice instituted by widespread terrorism, and over fifty years of post-civil rights disenfranchising retrenchment after that.

But what does the holocaust have to do with any of this? Please consider the following passages from two recent books.

I've Been to the Mountaintop

Stanley and Weaver on the US and "racial democracy"

[UPDATE, Sat 18 Jan 2014: 4:00 pm CST: Moving to front to highlight this very important post by Tommy Curry and John Drabinski, with thoughtful comments by Jason Stanley.]

Many people have already read this important piece in NYT's The Stone. I have seen a few online reactions as well, including this one and this one by Eric Schliesser. Here's one by Peter Levine. What I'd like to do here is offer the comments to further reactions and / or to links of other online discussion. 

My Dad went to LSU, and all I got was this lousy pee-cup

A few days ago, while trying to open the interwebs thingy to allow me to start entering my grades, I was prevented from doing so by a pop-up menu that referenced LSU's Policy Statement 67. The text included unsubstantiated and highly dubious claims such as that most workplace problems are the result of drugs and alcohol abuse by workers. And this was only a few weeks after all of the chairs at LSU had to provide verification that every single faculty member had read a hysterical message from our staff and administrative overlords that justified expanding the extension of pee-tested employees at LSU to now include faculty. The wretched communiqué justified pee-testing faculty because of new evidence showing that marijuana is harmful to 13 year olds.*

Anyhow, when I scrolled to the bottom of the popup, I had to click a button saying not only that I read the document but also that I "agreed" with it. 

I honestly don't get this. Are my beliefs a condition of employment at LSU? There was no button that said I read it but didn't agree with it.

In what sense(s) is the Black Pete tradition racist, if any?

The debate around the Black Pete tradition in the Netherlands rages on: while many outspoken voices have presented different arguments on why the tradition should be at the very least severely modified (I recommend in particular the pieces by Asha ten Broeke), a very large portion of the population has expressed its support and fondness for the tradition as is, in particular by ‘liking’ a Facebook page, a ‘Pete-tion’, defending the continuation of the tradition. As of now, more than 2 million Facebook users have ‘liked’ this page, and last Saturday supporters gathered for a rally in The Hague.

Interestingly, in its most recent update, the Pete-tion FB page (Pietitie, in Dutch) proudly announces that it is ‘against racism, let us be clear on that’. Now, what they mean by ‘racism’ here must surely be different from what Black Pete critics mean when they describe the tradition as racist. More generally, and as often the case, it seems that those involved in the debate may at least to some extent be talking past each other because different meanings of ‘racism’ are floating around. (To be clear, I do not think this is a merely verbal dispute; there does seem to be a core of true disagreement.) Well, one of the skills we philosophers pride ourselves on is the skill of language precisification and conceptual analysis. So in what follows I’ll attempt to distinguish some of the different meanings of racism underpinning the debate, in the hope that such a clarification may somehow contribute to its advancement. (Full disclosure: what I really want to accomplish is to convince my many intelligent, well-meaning friends who do not see the racist component of the tradition that it is there, and that it is problematic.)