The struggle for racial justice

The struggle for racial justice in America was in its sharpest form in the 1960s, from the Freedom Marches in the South in the early sixties to the militant and determined struggles in the North in the later sixties. Organizers, militants, activists, leaders, and volunteers gave their best energies, brains, and courage to this extended effort to change American society. And when you think about it, this decentralized movement was remarkably successful in terms of its reach, the ability of various civil rights and activist organizations to motivate followers, and some of the concrete structural changes that were achieved. (It goes without saying that we have a very long way to go in pursuit of racial justice today, in 2008.)

One way of getting a better understanding of the Civil Rights movement is to read some of the very good historical and sociological scholarship that has been done on the period -- for example, Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters : America in the King Years 1954-63 or Doug McAdam's Freedom Summer. But another way is to talk with people who lived through the struggle -- people who went "went South", people who worked as organizers and activists in Chicago or Detroit, people who got involved in some of the militant organizations such as the Black Panthers. And often what you gain from conversations like this is somewhat different from what comes across in the organized historical scholarship. It's more intense, for one thing -- just as it must have been in the 1960s to talk with veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade about their experiences in the Spanish Civil War. But it also gives you the participant's perspective on things rather than the historian's view. And it focuses often on the process of mobilization and consciousness-raising, rather than the eventual outcome.

I've done two recent interviews with scholars whose own experiences of the Civil Rights movement are genuinely absorbing. One is Ahmad Rahman, a history professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and the author of The Regime Change of Kwame Nkrumah: Epic Heroism in Africa and the Diaspora. Rahman is an accomplished historian and a rising authority in African and African-American history. He was also an activist and member of the Black Panther Party in Detroit in the 1960s. The second interview is with Dr. Gloria House, a professor of humanities and African and African-American Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. House is a well-respected poet and author, and has played an important role in the continuing prominence of Broadside Press. She edited a great volume celebrating the press; A Different Image: The Legacy of Broadside Press: An Anthology. Her own experience of the Civil Rights movement began at UC-Berkeley, followed by time in Alabama and Detroit. Her experiences with SNCC and the struggles in the South are very intense, and she finds the voice to express what she experienced powerfully. She has spent decades as a scholar-activist in Detroit.

Both interviews are absorbing and eye-opening. One point that comes out of both Rahman's and House's recollections is the importance of the struggles for African national liberation in the development of consciousness within the African-American movements -- and the "echo" of American developments in African liberation thinking. There is a very clear demonstration of the political-intellectual work that went into framing an understanding of American society and liberation that was suited to the African-American experience. But there are dozens of other important insights -- the ways in which the struggle for Black Consciousness developed, the importance of youth engagement in the struggle, and the power of poetry during those decades. Rahman brings some of the issues forward to the present day, by comparing the struggles of French immigrant people against police brutality with the struggles of the African-American community in the earlier decades. And House shares some of her thinking about where the quest for racial justice may be going today -- emphasizing community-based activism. She also shares several of her poems about the early days of the struggle at the end of the interview.

It is a constant struggle for all of us to go beyond clichés and cartoons in our understanding of our society and our history. And a very powerful way of doing that is to listen to the voices of people whose experiences are so directly connected to the major fault lines and turning points in our history.

The video interviews with Rahman and House are posted on YouTube, and audio versions are posted as well; Rahman, House part 1, House part 2. The audio interviews are also included in the UnderstandingSociety podcast, available through iTunes.

Visit also this relevant posting on Jim Johnson's blog, with information about the recent publication of Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders.

Higher education and social mobility

There is an appalling level of inequality in American society; and even more troubling, the multiple dimensions of inequality seem to reinforce each other, with the result that disadvantaged groups remain disadvantaged across multiple generations. We can ask two different kinds of sociological questions about these facts: What factors cause the reproduction of disadvantage over multiple generations? And what policy interventions have some effect on enhancing upward social mobility within disadvantaged groups? How can we change this cycle of disadvantage?

Several earlier postings have addressed some aspects of the causal question (post, post). Here I'd like to consider the policy question -- and the question of how we can use empirical evidence to evaluate the effectiveness of large policy initiatives on social outcomes such as mobility.

One social policy in particular seems to have a lot of antecedent plausibility: a policy aimed at increasing the accessibility of higher education to the disadvantaged group. The theory is that individuals within the group will benefit from higher education by enhancing their skills and knowledge; this will give them new economic opportunities and access to higher-wage jobs; the individuals will do better economically, and their children will begin life with more economic support and a set of values that encourage education. So access to higher education ought to prove to be a virtuous circle or a positive feedback loop, leading to substantial social mobility in currently disadvantaged groups.

It is a plausible theory; but are there empirical methods through which we can evaluate whether it actually works this way?

Paul Attewell and David Lavin undertake to do exactly that in Passing the Torch: Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations?, published in 2007. Their research consists of a survey study of a cohort of poor women who were admitted to the City University of New York between 1970 and 1972 under an open-admissions policy. Thirty years later Attewell and Lavin surveyed a sample of the women in this group (about 2,000 women), gathering data about their eventual educational attainment, their income, and the educational successes of their children. Analysis of their data permitted them to demonstrate that attenders were likely to enjoy higher income than non-attenders and to have children who valued education at levels that were higher than the children of non-attenders.

The benefits of higher education in increasing personal income were significant; they find that in the population surveyed in 2000, the high school graduate earned $30,000, women with some college earned $35,000, women with the associate's degree earned $40,783, women with the bachelor's degree earned $42,063, and women with a postgraduate degree earned $54,545. In other words, there was a fairly regular progression in income associated with each further step in the higher education credential achieved. And they found -- contrary to conservative critics of open-access programs in higher education -- that these women demonstrated eventual completion rates that were substantially higher than 4-6 year graduation rates would indicate -- over 70% earned some kind of degree (table 2.2). "Our long-range perspective shows that disadvantaged women ultimately complete college degrees in far greater numbers than scholars realize" (4).

So access to higher education works, according to the evidence uncovered in this study: increasing access to post-secondary education is the causal factor, and improved economic and educational outcomes are the effect.

This is an important empirical study that sets out some of the facts that pertain to poverty and higher education. The study provides empirical confirmation for the idea that affordable and accessible mass education works: when programs are available that permit poor people to gain access to higher education, their future earnings and the future educational success of their children are both enhanced. It's a logical conclusion -- but one that has been challenged by conservative critics such as Bill Bennett. And given the increasing financial stress that public universities are currently experiencing due to declining state support for higher education, it is very important for policy makers to have a clear understanding of the return that is likely on the investment in affordable access to higher education.

Consumption and environmental collapse

Today the Dalai Lama presented a lecture on global environmental sustainability at the University of Michigan. One of his central points had to do with personal consumption and personal happiness: the fact that the planet simply cannot sustain the level of material consumption characteristic of affluent countries, in support of the world's population of over 6.5 billion people. He expressed his hope that we will come to think differently about happiness, fulfillment, and material consumption.

This message made me think of the very powerful analysis that is conveyed in an important recent book by James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. Speth has been an environmental scientist and policy expert for decades -- he is currently the dean of Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies -- and he has an understanding of the crisis that our global society faces that is just as powerful and fact-based as any I have read.

Speth opens his argument with a set of sixteen graphs over a time scale of 1750-2000. And they all have roughly the same shape: beginning at moderate levels in 1750, each of the variables show exponential growth that begins to accelerate in roughly 1900-1950. The variables? Population, total real GDP, foreign direct investment, damming of rivers, water use, fertilizer consumption, paper consumption, motor vehicles, CO2 consumption, ozone depletion, average surface temperature, great floods, ocean ecosystems, coastal biogeochemistry, loss of rain forest, global biodiversity. These graphs tell a powerful story in the aggregate: these are trends that cannot be sustained.

Or consider the second paragraph of the book:

Half of the world's tropical and temperate forests are now gone. The rate of deforestation in the tropics continues at about an acre a second. About half the wetlands and a third of the mangroves are gone. An estimated 90 percent of the large predator fish are gone, and 75 percent of marine fisheries are now overfished or fished to capacity. Twenty percent of the corals are gone, and another 20 percent severely threatened. Species are disappearing at rates about a thousand times faster than normal. The planet has not seen such a spasm of extinction in sixty-five million years, since the dinosaurs disappeared. Over half the agricultural land in drier regions suffers from some degree of deterioration and desertification. Persistent toxic chemicals can now be found by the dozens in essentially each and every one of us. (1-2)

This is the "edge of the world" to which the title refers.

Speth correctly notes that these environmental crisis lines all derive from the economic realities of accelerating economic growth since 1900. Economic activity consumes resources, produces waste products, and clears land for development. Moreover, he observes that the economies that we have created in the modern world place growth at the value center: the central goal of economic activity is to accumulate and grow. And yet he notes as well that often this growth is counter-productive; for example, he quotes the UNDP Human Development Report 1996 and its findings of jobless growth, ruthless growth, voiceless growth, rootless growth, and futureless growth. And he reviews some of the survey data about "personal happiness" that seems to support the point as well: past a certain threshold point, greater income doesn't bring greater happiness.

So if there is a bridge at the edge of the world -- what is it made of? What kind of transformation of the world's activity can slow and eventually reverse these catastrophic environmental trends?

Speth provides a hard but achievable prescription, and it is very much like that expressed by the Dalai Lama today in Ann Arbor: we must re-evaluate the meaning of life, we must change the way we think about material consumption, we must find happiness in activities that are not resource intensive, and we must tame our growth engines in the economic structures in which we live. Nothing less than a fundamental change in our personal philosophies and our economic structures will save the planet's welfare -- from rain forest to Great Lakes to fisheries to the air we breath and the water we drink.

Can we do it? It seems most unlikely. But it's probably the only way out.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today is a sad day of remembrance in America and the world. Forty years ago today Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis. And, followed by the murder of Robert Kennedy only a few months later, America's heart and history were jolted.

Dr. King's life devotion to the cause of racial justice in America is one of the most important legacies we have in this country. His moral clarity and his personal courage provided our generations with signposts we still haven't fully absorbed. And the work to which he devoted his life is unfinished. It is crucial for our future as a country that we make intelligent and compassionate progress based on this legacy.

It is so remarkably striking to me to see the different life experiences that white and black Americans have lived, especially the generation who are in their fifties and sixties today. These men and women were in their teens and twenties in 1968. They have clear, personal memories of that day in April forty years ago, and of the months that followed. For most African-American people in this group there are very specific, vivid, and personal memories of segregation and racism in their years of childhood and adolescence. Whether their experiences were of growing up in Arkansas or Chicago in the 1950s, most African-American people of this age cohort have deep and personal experiences of racism. And their memories of the murder of Dr. King have an urgency and personal sorrow that feels very different from the experience of white Americans of the same age.

My discipline is philosophy and I have taught social and political philosophy intermittently throughout my teaching career. At this stage of my career it is very striking to recall how mute this field of philosophy has been to the experience and structure of American racism. The ideas of equality, liberty, and justice are defining values in the field of social philosophy. And yet the topic of racial justice has not been a central focus; only rarely has it been even talked about as we consider the theories of Kant, Rousseau, Mill, or Rawls. And yet my whole education and career are framed by the murder of Martin and the candidacy of Barak. How could race not have been the central problem of social philosophy in America during these decades? It is a failure of collective social cognition, an instance of willful social blindness.

I think there is a connection between these two points. A part of teaching about principles of social justice should be a serious learning of the lived experience of injustice.

The majority in America is inching its way towards a commitment to racial justice. We can make further progress along this road if we will only listen in humility and silence to the experiences of racism that shaped the lives of so many millions of our fellow citizens.

The price of rice

The price of internationally traded rice has roughly doubled in the past several months. There are several independent factors that seem to be contributing causes for this sudden spike in prices (New York Times story, Toronto Globe and Mail story), but the bottom line is that this is very bad news for many developing countries in Asia and Africa. Poor people everywhere spend a high percentage of their income on food. If the price of the chief staple food rises abruptly, this will predictably cause suffering and hunger among the poor. Amartya Sen's penetrating ideas on issues of hunger and famine are as relevant today as they were two decades ago (The Political Economy of Hunger, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation). And, as Sen discovered, prices and incomes are critical determinants of malnutrition and famine. And recall that current estimates of the number of malnourished people in the world approach one billion!

Another important symptom of food distress for the world's poor -- the UN food program announced a few days ago that high prices have exhausted its budget (emergency appeal). It has called upon donor nations to provide immediate supplemental funds to permit it to continue its crucial programs.

This shift in international market conditions will also have the potential for creating civil unrest in several countries. There are already signs of urban unrest in the Philippines, where rice riots and disturbances have already occurred. The Times story cited above mentions food riots in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. Governments that fail to assure the availability of affordable food supplies will be reminded of the volatility of the issue of food -- from medieval Europe to revolutionary France to Poland in the 1970s.

There seems to be a similar issue percolating in North America -- a sustained rise in the prices for wheat and maize over the past year. In this case the cause seems to be the increased demand for grain created by ethanol production on a large scale. Americans spend a smaller percent of income on food, so the immediate consequences are less damaging to population welfare. But this trend suggests a similar caution that we need to heed -- we need to pay attention to the stability and sustainability of the world's food system.

Food security is an important dimension of a developing country's long-term welfare and stability. These issues haven't gotten much attention in the international press in the past decade or so. Neo-liberal doctrines, market restructuring, and the Washington Consensus have pushed these more material aspects of economic development to a lower priority and visibility. But maybe current conditions will bring the issue back to center stage.

Anonymity and civility

The topic of civility on the internet has gotten a lot of ink recently (posting, posting, posting). People flame each other online in ways they would never do in a public meeting. And this tendency is most extreme in anonymous postings on blogs and web sites.

What is it about anonymity that sometimes brings out the worst in people? Fundamentally it is the separation between speech and accountability that sometimes poisons anonymous speech. Plato speculated about the Ring of Gyges in the Republic: how would people behave if their actions were entirely untraceable? And English moralists had similar fears about the Masquerade in the eighteenth century: social functions in which men and women attended in masked costumes were bound to create moral disorder (web page). Anonymous speech on the internet seems to provide a real-world test of the proposition. And, by the evidence, there are a fair number of people who will take the cloak of anonymity as permission to express outrageous, harmful, and fundamentally disrespectful things to and about others.

And it is interesting to realize that this is not a twenty-first century development. One of E. P. Thompson's final books was a careful study of the social conflicts in rural eighteenth-century England (Whigs and Hunters), where he focuses on the "Black Act" -- a package of laws designed to squelch poachers, timber thieves, and other rural misbehavior. Two behaviors in particular were prohibited with severe penalties -- going about in a mask and conveying anonymous, often threatening, letters. Anonymity was a tool that was used by individuals and groups to threaten and coerce landlords, wardens, and gamekeepers. Thompson describes a raft of anonymous letters and their social function in "The Crime of Anonymity" (included in Albion's Fatal Tree).

Here are some examples of anonymous letters that Thompson quotes in the appendix to "The Crime of Anonymity":

Ms orpen i am informd that you and your family whent before last year and glent up what the pore should have had but if you do this year it is our desire as soon as your corn is in the barn we will have a fire for it is a shame you should rob the pore ...

...

this will all com true
this is to give notis that you millers and shop keeper all
kill the over Seeer
had best to take keare of youer selves and mind that you
arnt kild and if you dont sink with your folower [flour] we will make
tom Nottage is a dam Rouge
you sink for we have rob your Mill seavel [several] Times and we
kill him for one there is 4 more we will kill

...

To The Damd Eternal Fire Brands of Hell Belonging to Odiham and its Vicinity. In other Words to the Damd Villans of Farmers that with hold the Corn that please God to send for the Poeple of the Earth away from them.

...

And a response from the forces of order --

ONE HUNDRED
Guineas Reward

Whereas some wicked and evil disposed Person or
Persons, did write a Letter, addressed to Joseph Bulmer,
threatening to take his Life, and to burn his Premises, unless
he would advance the Shipwright's Wages--and did put the
same Letter under the Door of the Compting-House of
Messrs. R. Bulmer and Co. in South Shields, where the same
was found on the Morning of the 14th Inst.

Whoever will give Information so that he, she, or they,
may be convicted thereof, will be paid a Reward of ONE
HUNDRED GUINEAS by the said Messrs. Bulmer, on
the Conviction of such Offenders or any of them ...

...

So what are we to make of this curious behavior from two centuries ago and from the present? One piece of the story of anonymity is the situation of "speaking truth to power". Anonymous threats and accusations are "weapons of the weak" in James Scott's terms (Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance). They are a way for powerless people and groups to express and advocate their claims without repression. And they can be a potent social instrument of power as well, constraining the power and behavior of the high and mighty. It is why the complaint box doesn't require a sign-in process. Thompson puts it this way: "The anonymous threatening letter is a characteristic form of social protest in any society which has crossed a certain threshold of literacy, in which forms of collective organized defence are weak, and in which individuals who can be identified as the organizers of protest are liable to immediate victimization" (Albion's Fatal Tree, 255).

But anonymity can also be a tool of oppression and intimidation. Anonymous messages and actions can be intimidating and harmful on a range of levels, from irritating and insulting to slanderous and reputation-destroying. The anonymity of the klansman's sheet and hood was deliberate: it made it all the more impossible for the people oppressed and threatened by the KKK to retaliate against the pharmacist or gas station owner who cowered within. And it permitted the threat of Klan violence to be all but irresistible.

The discussions that are occurring online about civility often invoke Jurgen Habermas and his ideas about the public sphere as a place for open and civil debate (e.g., The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society). (James Gordon Finlayson's Habermas: A Very Short Introduction gives a very good introduction to Habermas's thought.) The idea here is that publicity is an essential component of a democratic polity: people engage with each other in a public space, and they embody an ethic of mutual respect that permits profound disagreements to occur without the collapse of civility. And, through these public interactions the citizens develop the possibility of a deeper consensus about what is to be done.

So it seems that the categories of privacy, anonymity, civility, and public democracy are all tied together somehow. And the internet gives this mix of sometimes conflicting values a particular urgency.

William Gibson's future

All Tomorrow's Parties expressed a lot of it: William Gibson's dark but somehow humane picture of what the modern world might be heading for. First the dark part -- nation states that have fallen apart into NoCal and SoCal and the Kombinat states; whole communities of people living anarchically and precariously -- but astonishingly, harmoniously -- on the earthquake-damaged Oakland Bridge ("interstitial communities," as Gibson's observers call them); corporations that use deadly force to recruit top scientists from each other; weird new viruses that cause deadly epidemics and psychotic disorders; and, of course, the matrix of computer systems, hackers, console cowboys, and software simulations that constitute a counterpoint reality to all of it. And there is a lot more in Gibson's imagination: a trend spotter who has a visceral allergy to brand marks, a Japanese anthropologist studying the micro-communities of what has become of North America, and, most recently, an elusive Chinese-Cuban crime family in quiet war with the national security apparatus of the United States government (Spook Country). Across the whole canvas there is a feeling of what Gibson refers to as "bit-rot" in a website that's beginning to degrade: a social order that is no longer functioning.

So what is the humane part of the corpus? So many of the characters Gibson creates are decent, moral people, coping within the context of social breakdowns that they can't entirely evade but can somehow live around. There is Chevette, the taut, orphaned bicycle messenger in San Francisco, living with the aging Skinner on the Oakland Bridge, bringing hot-and-sour soup up to the tiny cubicle Skinner has created on an upper reach of the bridge. There is Rydell, the ex-cop, ex-private security guard for a post-modern convenience shop, with a generous spirit and a willingness to go to bat for his friends. (He'll go up against a team of assassins with a chain gun, if he needs to. ) And there is Fontaine, the used-stuff dealer on the bridge, friend to Skinner, and -- once again -- a morally grounded man coping in a world of nutty and irreversible breakdowns.

What the social message seems to be is something about non-sustainability. It's the opposite of utopia; it's a cool vision of what some of the most visible currents in contemporary society might lead to. (The currents that are highlighted include unfettered corporate power, accelerating breakdown of social welfare systems, states that no longer govern, cities that simply "sprawl" from Boston to Atlanta, and technologies that play an entirely ambiguous role in supporting human welfare.) Here is how things can fail to work out for us, Gibson seems to be saying. Our complex, interdependent, technologically skilled but socially inept civilizations seem to be falling apart in Gibson's worlds. And ordinary people have to find their own human solutions, locally and provisionally. There's a recurring motif of "re-use" of things -- the knife that Skinner forges from a motorcycle chain and gifts to Chevette after his decline and death, or the intricate "collage" boxes that figure into the plot of Neuromancer. And re-use maybe points the way to a greater degree of sustainability?

It's not exactly a social philosophy. It's not Hobbes, for example, offering a description of the state of nature and the war of all against all. And it's not Rousseau, expecting community to emerge from the commonality of shared interests. The category of power comes into the novels again and again -- power used capriciously, self-interestedly, corporately, and unforgivingly. But at the same time the universe that Gibson describes is not one lacking moral rules. The people involved in the novels express their own commitments, loyalties, and values. But what does not seem to be possible in Gibson's world is a polity -- an organized community establishing a system of law and assuring the basic welfare of all its citizens. "Justice" is not a part of the picture. The closest thing to a functioning society that is described in the novels is the bridge community -- the refugees from San Francisco who have taken up precarious residence on the Oakland Bridge, building ramshackle shelters, shops, gardens, and pubs out of recycled industrial materials, bits of plastic, and used motorcycle parts. And the bridge community seems to be entirely anarchic -- the only order that exists is the order that is created and enforced by the bridge dwellers themselves.

Gibson's novels are placed in the genre of science fiction. But the genre isn't quite right. Really, they could be called "futurist social fiction" in the way that Thomas More's Utopia was social fiction: a vision of what a social realm might look like. And in this description, the work is very appropriate content for ChangingSociety.