Family values

I don’t refer often enough to the excellent blog Halfway There, by the pseudonymous Zeno, a community-college math teacher in California. Apart from having picked an amusing combination of names (a reference, of course, to Zeno’s Paradox), blogger Zeno writes interesting things about socio-political news, frequently calling the right-wingers on their bullshit.

Today’s entry is a perfect example, where he lampoons a feigned Think about the children! argument against running a front-page photo of lesbian sailors kissing. In response to a letter to the editor in the Sacramento Bee, which said, in part, this:

Did anyone consider that young children might be confused by the display on the front page?

The Bee has selfishly and disrespectfully usurped the rights of parents to choose where and when to have a thoughtful discussion, with their children, about homosexuality. Believe it or not, there are still some families whose values are not reflected in the type of photo that The Bee published; and they are neither intolerant nor filled with hate.

...Zeno has this to say:

I can’t help wondering how Jane’s children managed to grow old enough to be confused without Mommie Dearest having had that thoughtful discussion she values so highly. It’s not as though most toddlers spend any time perusing the pages of the newspaper. And why should even older children be upset by a glimpse of a same-sex couple kissing on the Bee’s front page? Have they not seen plenty of same-sex kissing among family members and close friends? Doesn’t grandma kiss mommy? Doesn’t mommy have BFFs from high school or college who hug her and smooch her whenever they meet?

[...]

She wants us to believe that people who object to displays of same-sex affection are neither intolerant nor filled with hate. But I don’t believe that. Not filled with hate? Maybe, but that’s not self-evident. Filled with intolerance? Definitely.

Indeed. But let’s be even more direct about showing the bigotry behind that letter. Let’s suppose that the photo had not been of two women kissing, but of a black man kissing a white woman. And let’s look at the letter with that shading:

Did anyone consider that young children might be confused by the display on the front page?

The Bee has selfishly and disrespectfully usurped the rights of parents to choose where and when to have a thoughtful discussion, with their children, about interracial couples. Believe it or not, there are still some families whose values are not reflected in the type of photo that The Bee published; and they are neither intolerant nor filled with hate.

Would anyone seriously believe her claim of tolerance and love in that case?
No.

Believe it or not, there are still some families whose values are not reflected in images of warmth and affection. How sad for them.

Equal-Pay Day

Today, 12 April 2011, is Equal-Pay Day in the U.S. If you took the median-salary American man and the median-salary woman, and started paying them both on the first of 2010, today is the day when the woman will have finally earned what the man took in through 31 December, about 14 weeks ago.

Of course, it’s not that simple. You can’t just take any man and any woman and make that comparison. The figure that’s used for this is the median income: take all the men’s annual salaries, list them in order of lowest to highest, then pick the one in the middle. Do the same for women’s salaries. Compare. The median of the women’s salaries is about 78% of the median of the men’s. We could use the average (mean) instead of the median, but for these sorts of economic comparisons it’s typically the median that’s used, because it doesn’t suffer from skewing by the extremes at the edges.

The problem is that the majority of the gap comes from the fact that men and women are not equally represented in all the different jobs... and the jobs that employ primarily men just so happen to pay more than the ones that employ primarily women. I can’t imagine how that happened, but, well, there it is. Nurses earn less than doctors. Beauticians earn less than plumbers. Teachers earn less than corporate executives. And so on.

And it doesn’t stop there: what about college-educated women? What about those with PhDs? Because another fact is that more women than men are finishing college, these days, and more women than men are completing PhD programs. Doesn’t that fix it?

No. For one thing, when we look at the fields that women are getting degrees in, we find the same thing: the fields that attract women more tend to be the less lucrative ones.

But also, when we break it down by field we still find differences. In April of 2007, the American Association of University Women released a study titled Behind the Pay Gap (PDF). The study showed that female biological scientists earn 75% of what their male colleagues do. In mathematics, the figure is 76%; in psychology, 86%. Women in engineering are almost there: they earn 95% of what the men do. But less than 20% of the engineering majors are women.

The other argument for why there’s a pay gap is that women and men make different decisions about their lives. Women choose motherhood, a bigger hit against career advancement and salary opportunities than fatherhood. More women work part time. And so on.

The AAUW study looked at that. They controlled for those decisions, and they compared men and women who really could be reasonably compared. They looked at people in the same fields, at the same schools, with the same grades. They considered those of the same race, the same socio-economic status, the same family situations. They didn’t just compare apples to apples; they compared, as economist Heather Boushey puts it, Granny Smith apples to Granny Smith apples.

And they found that even in that case, there’s an unexplained pay gap of 5% the year after college, which increases to 12% ten years later. From the study:

The pay gap between female and male college graduates cannot be fully accounted for by factors known to affect wages, such as experience (including work hours), training, education, and personal characteristics. Gender pay discrimination can be overt or it can be subtle. It is difficult to document because someone’s gender is usually easily identified by name, voice, or appearance. The only way to discover discrimination is to eliminate the other possible explanations. In this analysis the portion of the pay gap that remains unexplained after all other factors are taken into account is 5 percent one year after graduation and 12 percent 10 years after graduation. These unexplained gaps are evidence of discrimination, which remains a serious problem for women in the work force.

It has gotten better: if today the general pay gap is about 20%, 15 years ago it was 25%, and 30 years ago, 35%. The improvement is good news.

But the speed of the improvement is not. The disparity of pay between male-dominated fields and female-dominated ones is not. The gap in pay between highly trained men and women in the same field is not. And that unexplained 5-to-12 percent is certainly not.

Let’s keep pushing that date back, and look for the year when equal-pay day is December 31^st.

One nail in Prop 8’s coffin

After a busy IETF meeting and a nice few days off in Bruges and Brussels (photos forthcoming, when I get time to sort through them), and a break from both news and blogging (I’ve written somewhere in these pages about being out of touch with the news when I’m travelling), I have a few moments to write. I thought I’d mention what was one of the most significant news items I missed last week:

A U.S. District Court has tossed out Proposition 8, that vile, homophobic ban on same-sex marriage in California.

Proposition 8 cannot withstand any level of scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause, wrote Judge Walker. Excluding same-sex couples from marriage is simply not rationally related to a legitimate state interest.

Indeed, and well said. And one has to laugh at things like this:

But Andrew Pugno, a lawyer for the defense, said Proposition 8 had nothing to do with discrimination, but rather with the will of California voters who simply wished to preserve the historic definition of marriage.

The other side’s attack upon their good will and motives is lamentable and preposterous, Mr. Pugno said in a statement.

Preposterous? Right, they really just want an old-married-couples’ club. They don’t want those people to be able to join, but that’s not discrimination, not at all. Oy.

Nothing is settled yet, of course; this will clearly be appealed. The Ninth Circuit will have to weigh in — they’ll almost certainly uphold this decision. And then it’ll go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Maybe we can hope for a Scalia resignation before that happens.

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Update, 19 Aug: The delays continue. Here is Thom’s blog post (see his comment to this entry) from yesterday.

So, what was I doing on Monday, the day the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied my right — you may argue that it merely delayed it, again, but the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., accurately noted that a right delayed is a right denied — to marry the man I love, the man with whom I’ve spent the past seven years, and the man I intend to be with until the day one of us stops breathing? What sinful, un-American civilization-destroying immorality was I indulging the day our hopes were dashed again?

Go read the whole thing.

It’s not in my job description

Amy Alkon comments on this item from the New York Daily News:

Equal Pay For Equal Work...

Doesn’t that mean...equal pay for equal work? Meaning...the women do the same work the men have to do?

According to a story by John Marzulli in the New York Daily News, one of the charges in a harassment suit against the NYPD accuses the department of having a female officer perform heavy manual tasks normally assigned to males.

Sorry, but is that discrimination...or equality?

Now, the officer’s complaint points out a number of things, and the one singled out above is taken out of context. So let’s look at the issue of what constitutes job requirements, and, therefore, what can fairly be required of employees.

When I worked at IBM, my job involved computer software stuff, management stuff, working with people in other parts of the company, working with other companies, and so on. Once in a while, of course, we’d need to move a piece of equipment, but my job did not involve moving heavy things. That said, if we needed to shift a 21-inch CRT display^[1] from one place in the lab to another, I’d either muscle it myself or ask someone to help me carry it.

Alternatively, I could have called a mover in; we had people on site to do just that sort of thing. Put in a request, and they’ll be there in a day or two. Call directly and ask nicely, and you could often get someone over within the hour, if they weren’t already swamped.

But we’d do it ourselves, usually, because we could, and it was easier and quicker. It wasn’t, though, part of the job, and no manager would assign it to any of us. And, indeed, it’s not reasonable to ask a 110-pound person — of either sex — to move a bulky computer display that weighs more than 70 pounds.

Police departments don’t likely have movers sitting around at the stations, and when some heavy stuff has to get moved, they can call in contractors and wait a few days... or they can ask the officers who are there to do it. We can be sure that a sergeant is more likely to ask a couple of 250-pound men to do the moving, and less likely to call on a 130-pound woman.

But more to the point: what are the police officers there for? Is it to lift heavy stuff? Or is it to do any number of things we more commonly associate with police work?

Hm.

And, so, the point here is that we do things that aren’t strictly in our job descriptions, because it just makes sense to go ahead and do them. It helps us get things done, and it helps us get along. And in doing those things, we don’t worry so much about spreading the work as we do about who’d best suited to do it and get us all back to what we’re supposed to be doing.

It’s likely that the heavy manual tasks in Officer Glover’s complaint fell into this category, and they were normally assigned to males for exactly these sorts of reasons.^[2] That they were given to her was not a question of doling out job-related work, but formed part of a pattern of workplace behaviour that was meant to give her a hard time for being a woman in a man’s job, and for being a lesbian, on top of that. And that she objected does not bring into question her fitness for the job — the job that she was hired to do.

So, to answer Ms Alkon’s direct question: No, it’s not equality. It’s abusive behaviour — not on its own, but as part of an established pattern.

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^[1] They’re heavy — more than 70 pounds each.

^[2] I suspect that the men could also complain about such assignments and refuse to do them, and I suspect that the union would back their refusal. They don’t refuse, because it’s all part of doing what needs to be done and getting along.

Demographics and The Supremes

Yesterday evening, as I browsed the NY Times RSS feed, I saw a headline about retiring Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens: “Justice Stevens, the Only Protestant on the Supreme Court”. The summary in the RSS feed said this:

The Supreme Court is made up of six Roman Catholics, two Jews and Justice John Paul Stevens. His retirement makes possible a court without a single member of the nation’s majority religion.

“Say what?”, said I, bristling. “Have we gone so far back in time that we’re going to worry about the religious affiliations of our Supreme Court justices?”

I clicked through to the article, though, and I was relieved: no; indeed, that’s exactly the point of the article, that we used to care about that, but we don’t any more. It used to be a big deal to consider appointing Catholics or Jews, but now it’s not remarkable.

Instead, we pay attention to other things, for better or for worse:

On the other hand, society seems to demand that the court carry a certain demographic mix.

It is hard to imagine the court without a black justice, for instance, and it may well turn out that Justice Sonia Sotomayor is sitting in a new “Hispanic seat.” It would surprise no one if President Obama tried to increase the number of women on the court to three.

I prefer that, but what I’m really waiting for is when it doesn’t matter at all. When we put people in positions based purely on their qualifications, and we honestly don’t think it matters whether they’re men or women, and what their ethnic backgrounds are. We’re a long way from that now, of course, and for now, it’s important to have a mix. I’m glad to see — especially considering the resurgence of the importance of religion in politics — that religion is not part of that mix today.

Mark Tushnet, a law professor at Harvard, had another suggestion.

President Obama, he said, could use Justice Stevens’s retirement as an opportunity both to honor tradition and to break new ground.

“The smartest political move,” he said, “would be to nominate an openly gay, Protestant guy.”

No, that’s not it. Let’s really show that it doesn’t matter. Pick an atheist.

Or is that still beyond the pale?

Bias is bad for science

The New York Times recently published an article about bias against women and minorities in science fields (and schooling). I’ve written about this before, and that was about a study from 2004. We’re not getting much better at this — or, if we are, it’s not fast enough.

Consider this:

The report found ample evidence of continuing cultural bias. One study of postdoctoral applicants, for example, found that women had to publish 3 more papers in prestigious journals, or 20 more in less-known publications, to be judged as productive as male applicants.

And this:

In a separate survey of 1,200 female and minority chemists and chemical engineers by Campos Inc., for the Bayer Corporation, two-thirds cited the persistent stereotype that STEM fields [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics] are not for girls or minorities as a leading contributor to their underrepresentation.

Other studies have shown that papers written by women are more likely to be accepted by journals if they list their authorship by initials, rather than using a feminine first name. And, of course, women still are paid, on average, only a little more than ¾ of what men are.

We weren’t raised by wolves; why can’t we fix this? Smart, successful, technically adept women do not pose a threat to men. Quite the opposite, they add to the pool of qualified developers, researchers, and educators. And the same goes for minorities. We need them. We should be encouraging them, instead of behaving in ways such as this:

Many in the Bayer survey, also being released Monday, said they had been discouraged from going into their field in college, most often by a professor.

“My professors were not that excited to see me in their classes,” said Mae C. Jemison, a chemical engineer and the first African-American female astronaut, who works with Bayer’s science literacy project. “When I would ask a question, they would just look at me like, ‘Why are you asking that?’ But when a white boy down the row would ask the very same question, they’d say ‘astute observation.’ ”

A few years ago, there was a series of advertisements about diversity — public service announcements, really — that aired on PBS. One depicted a job applicant ending what appeared to be a pleasant and successful interview. The applicant was clearly “of colour”, and he was talking with two white men. After he left the room, the older man crumpled his application and tossed it in the waste bin. “I think we have enough ‘diversity’ around here, don’t you?”, he said.

The younger man reached into the bin, took the wad out, flattened it on the desk, looked at the older man, and said, “No. I don’t.”

Let’s move in that direction now, and let’s all help. As the tag line from the ad goes: One voice can make a difference.

A Pew report for Dr King

The Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project has given us a Martin Luther King Day gift: a report on their new survey on racial attitudes a year after President Obama’s election (full report (PDF) here).

Not surprisingly, the number of African Americans who think that they are, as a group, better off now than they were five years ago has about doubled since 2007, from 20% to 39%. And more than ¾ think that blacks and whites get along well.

It’s clear that perspective is a significant thing. When asked, “Has the country done enough to give blacks equal rights with whites,” 54% of whites and 42% of Hispanics said yes, “The country has made the necessary changes,” while only 13% of blacks responded that way. That doesn’t surprise me either: it’s easy for whites to see some bit of progress, as we’ve had many of over the years, and to say, “That’s made it better,” while those at the receiving end of the discrimination still see the problems, and what has yet to be done. Even the election of an African American president doesn’t automatically fix everything.

The part I find the most interesting is the section on interracial marriage. It seems, there, that blacks are, as a group, more accepting of familial diversity than whites and Hispanics are. See the graphic to the right (click to enlarge). What it says is that about 80% of blacks say they’d “be fine with” a family member’s marrying someone of another race, whether that person be white, Hispanic, or Asian... it doesn’t seem to matter which. In contrast, Hispanics and whites are more apprehensive about adding a new African American family member than they are about the other ethnic groups, and only 64% of whites say they’d “be fine with” a black in-law.

I find the difference curious. It seems to dispel a myth — one that exists among whites, at least — that about the same proportion of blacks dislike whites as the other way around. That certainly doesn’t seem to be the case, at least when folks are made to say that they wouldn’t want their daughter to marry one.

Finally, in both 2007 and 2009, significantly fewer blacks have put the blame for difficulty “getting ahead” on discrimination. On this question:

Which of these statements comes closer to your own views—even if neither is exactly right?

A. Racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days.

B. Blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition.

...52% of blacks (and about 70% of whites and Hispanics) chose B, and 34% chose A. The answer by whites fairly well tracks the numbers who think that discrimination is no longer a problem, but that’s not true of the statistics from blacks. That seems to say that blacks think there’s more that they, themselves can do to address or to overcome discrimination.

There’s lots more interesting stuff in the full report and in the data from the questionnaire. Far fewer blacks than whites trust the police, for instance. And about 10% of us have no friends of a different race than ourselves.

The world is black; the world is white

There’s perhaps nowhere that companies want to be more careful about how a message comes across than in advertisements. In general, ads are carefully scrutinized to ensure that they cause no offense and make people think positively about the product or service they’re touting, and there’s a long history of ads that were rescinded because they violated those points in one way or another.

That’s why I’ve been pleased with ones like a billboard I saw this week. It was a credit-card ad, the normal sort of thing that reminds you what you can buy with the card. In this one, a black woman was showing off her new clothes to a white man, and the implication from the context was that they’re a couple. Nothing’s made of it; it’s just there.

A few years ago, a provider of satellite television service ran a TV ad depicting a family that had switched from cable to their satellite service. The family was very happy with the change. The family: white mother, black father, and a brace of bi-racial kids.

Nothing’s made of it; it’s just there.

What’s great about this is exactly that the ads are presenting it as unremarkable. When I was a child, in the early 1960s, seeing a black and a white holding hands certainly was remarkable. It was unusual enough that even if you thought it a perfectly acceptable situation, as we did, you noticed it, you pointed it out... you remarked on it. And no company would have even considered putting an interracial couple in one of their ads.

Now, one sees such couples on the streets — of major cities, at least — every day. My early training still has me noticing, though I don’t remark on it any more, unless there’s a particular reason to. The simple fact that they’re interracial is no longer a reason. And, so, the ads are just reflecting reality.

But, significantly, that such couples and families are being used in ads means they’re reflecting a reality that’s sufficiently socially accepted that conservative advertisers aren’t afraid of its putting customers off. It’s OK, now, to have an interracial family advertising your service on prime-time television. It’s fine, today, to display an interracial couple above the commuters at a major-city train station.

Yeah, that warms my heart.

And now a child can understand
That this is the law of all the land
All the land

The world is black, the world is white
It turns by day, and then by night
A child is black, a child is white
Together they grow to see the light
To see the light

— David Arkin, “Black and White”

Judging Proposition 8

The lawsuit in California that’s challenging the constitutionality of the odious Proposition 8 — the ballot proposition that passed last November, which prevents same-sex couples from legally marrying in the state — has drawn U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn Walker to adjudicate. Initial feedback is good for the good guys: Judge Walker is challenging the Prop 8 supporters to show actual harm that same-sex marriage will cause to heterosexual families.

A federal judge challenged the backers of California’s voter-enacted ban on same-sex marriage Wednesday to explain how allowing gay couples to wed threatens conventional unions, a demand that prompted their lawyer to acknowledge he did not know.

The lawyer for the Prop 8 side tried to turn it around and claim that there might be harm that we can’t yet see, saying that “it is not self-evident that there is no chance of any harm, and the people of California are entitled not to take the risk.”

Judge Walker isn’t having that. He’s refused summary dismissal of the suit, and insists that the Prop 8 side has the burden to show harm, and to show that it doesn’t unconstitutionally violate the rights of same-sex couples. The case is scheduled to be heard in January.

The general counsel for the groups that devised Prop 8 sums it up this way:

What really is happening is the voters who passed Proposition 8 are essentially on trial in this case, and they continue to be accused of being irrational and bigoted for restoring the traditional definition of marriage.

Damn right!

The anti-Obama bigotry

You’ve surely heard the latest right-wing insanity, which hit the news last week: President Obama has made a videotaped speech, talking directly to school children. It’s intended to be shown at schools on Tuesday. And some wing-nut parents, fired up by the conservative media, are objecting, refusing to have their kids exposed to this... this... um... this speech by the President of the United States.

According to NPR’s report, most of the school districts in the Dallas suburbs, for example, will not be showing the speech to the children. And what are they worried about?

[...] one lesson plan suggested the students write about how they might help the president to improve public education. For parents who don’t want to help the president, that sounded like indoctrination.

Oh, my heavens! How dare the president think to approach school children with the idea that they can take part in things, and can actually help make a difference! Of course, that’s not really what the objections are about; this is:

NPR: But at the bottom of it all, [parent Wendy] Carlin says she doesn’t trust the president. She believes if he’s not trying to influence the students directly, a liberal message might be subliminal.

Ms Carlin: Well, it doesn’t matter what I’ve heard he’s gonna say, he usually changes it up anyway.

You can’t trust him. He usually changes it up. He’s inscrutable. He’s not even a real American, you know.

A few weeks ago, Greg Laden had a rant over at Quiche Moraine about how this sort of idiocy about the president is thinly disguising racism, and at first I didn’t buy it. He’s seeing racism when it’s really something else, I thought. Sure, some people don’t like having a black president, but they’re a tiny minority, and what we’re seeing here is something else, I thought. But the more I thought, and the more I see this stuff happening — the lies about Mr Obama’s birthplace, the lies showing up in the health-care debate, and so on — the more I think Greg is right.

It’s not acceptable to say that a black man doesn’t belong in the White House, so they say that he wasn’t born in America, and doesn’t belong in the White House.

It’s not acceptable to say that you can’t trust a black man, so they say that he “usually changes it up”, or that he’s lying about his religion and he’s really a Muslim, so you can’t trust him.

It’s not acceptable to say that a black man can’t lead us in health-care reform, so they say he’s like Hitler, espousing Nazi policies, so we can’t accept his health-care reform.

It’s not acceptable to say that they don’t want a black president talking to their children, so they make up shit about political “indoctrination” and “subliminal” liberal messages, or compare him to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il (as Mark Steyn did last week), and won’t allow their children to listen to the president.

This garbage has no basis in ideology, and no one has tried to make things like this up about other presidents, no matter how much they disliked or disagreed with them. The only conclusion I can come to, when I look at all of it and think about it for a while, is to agree with Greg Laden that it’s all a proxy for racism.

From the Times article:

“The thing that concerned me most about it was it seemed like a direct channel from the president of the United States into the classroom, to my child,” said Brett Curtis, an engineer from Pearland, Tex., who said he would keep his three children home.

“I don’t want our schools turned over to some socialist movement.”

Can you imagine parents actually refusing to have their kids watch a speech by the president in earlier years and earlier administrations? My parents would have been thrilled if my brothers and I had had a chance to see President Kennedy, President Johnson, or even President Nixon, whom they disliked, speak directly to us in our schools. They’d have been thrilled if we’d gotten the message that the president wanted our help.

Even as much as I despised our 43rd president, had I had school-age children and had that president prepared a video address to them, it would never have occurred to me to demand that they not be exposed to it. Quite the opposite: I would want them to see what he had to say, and I’d have taken the opportunity to discuss it with them afterward. It would be a learning experience, where the kids could think for themselves and, you know, learn.

But these are people who are afraid of learning, afraid to have their hatred, ignorance, and idiocy exposed. If anyone who falls outside their acceptable group should speak to their children, the children might, just might, actually see another way of thinking. They might actually understand that people other than their parents can have something worth listening to. They might actually see their parents for the narrow-minded bigots that they are.
 

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Update, 6 p.m.: Here’s the text of the president’s speech, as officially released by the White House. Of course, there’s no telling whether he changed it up on the video.

Update, 8 Sep: Here are two appropriate political cartoons, by David Fitzsimmons and John Cole. I love what’s on the guy’s t-shirt in the Fitzsimmons cartoon. [Thanks to Lisa Simeone for the pointer to the Cole cartoon.]

Women at Risk

Bob Herbert’s op-ed pieces in the New York Times are often good ones, and last week’s is particularly so. Written in the days after the attack on a gym, which resulted in the death of three women, Mr Herbert notes that such attacks are far too common:

We’ve seen this tragic ritual so often that it has the feel of a formula. A guy is filled with a seething rage toward women and has easy access to guns. The result: mass slaughter.

Back in the fall of 2006, a fiend invaded an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania, separated the girls from the boys, and then shot 10 of the girls, killing five.

I wrote, at the time, that there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar.

That, as he says, “[w]e have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected,” could even be seen in the presidential campaign, when candidate Hillary Clinton was belittled with sexist comments of the sort that we’d never see for a serious male candidate — and they were excused by press and public alike, putting us in collective denial of the obvious bias.

I’ve spent no small amount of outrage about bias and violence  against  women in these pages before, and this is another case of the pervasive misogyny in our society. This time, though, I want to have a word about the motivation, the male side of it. Again, Bob Herbert:

One of the striking things about mass killings in the U.S. is how consistently we find that the killers were riddled with shame and sexual humiliation, which they inevitably blamed on women and girls. The answer to their feelings of inadequacy was to get their hands on a gun (or guns) and begin blowing people away.

And he quotes Dr. James Gilligan:

What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal, is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.

That last point really connected, and reminded me of male coming-of-age rituals in societies from African and American tribes to criminal groups and street gangs. Tolerate pain. Show how tough you are. Assert dominance. Fight, and win. Kill, and be proud of it. And, whatever you do, be strong, and don’t let any woman get the better of you.

Our legends and fiction, too, are full of that last message. Beware the femme fatale, the woman who will undo you if you aren’t wary enough. The Sirens. Delilah. Their power comes from what they can get men to do. And the message is clear: avoid them... or kill them.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Physical strength no longer has the importance it once did. In our modern society, balance is more important. That we have an anthropological basis for these sort of demonstrations of power and dominance doesn’t mean we have to keep them. They do not serve us well now, if they ever did.

Some will write all these attacks off as perpetrated by unstable individuals, and deny that it’s supported by our mainstream society. And, to be sure, these people are unstable, nuts, very far from the norm, and there will always be such people. We can’t change that.

But the point is that, while their behaviour is extreme, its direction is set by what we see all around us, every day.

We can change that. We have to.

The Tap Dance Kid, and other thoughts

In the mid-1980s I saw a musical on Broadway called The Tap Dance Kid. I enjoyed it a lot — I liked the story, the characters, the songs, and the dancing. It’s not a very well known musical, it got a poor review in the New York Times (Frank Rich liked it much less than I), and it ran for less than two years.

It’s the story of an African-American family, centered around a pre-teen called Willie. Much of it is the standard sort of story: Willie wants to do one thing with his life, but his father thinks that frivolous, and demands that he aim higher, follow the family business, or some such. The Jazz Singer is one version of the story that’s been done a few times.

In this case, Willie wants to be a dancer — a tap dancer, in particular. His father, William, is a lawyer, and would like Willie to be one too. He looks down on the dance idea, and on Uncle Dipsey, Willie’s mentor.

In some versions of this story, the father is just being obstinate, insisting on his vision of his son’s success over the son’s own. The Jazz Singer has that, but adds cultural tradition to it. Whether it was Al Jolson, Danny Thomas, or Neil Diamond, the son was more than just “wasting his life”, but also abandoning the family and its heritage.

So it is in The Tap Dance Kid: William wants Willie to meet the former’s standards in life, of course, but he also wants his son to show the world, as he did, what a black man can do. And so it’s doubly disappointing to him that Willie is going in a direction that’s not only frivolous, but also stereotypical.

William’s disappointment comes through in the story’s climax, the powerful and moving “William’s Song”. He starts by berating Dipsey before he addresses his son:

Who ever heard of a grown man named “Dipsey” before?
Every day of your life, every moment you live, you lose!
You’re going nowhere, but you go too far,
Telling my son he’s gonna be a big star,
Shining, shining, sure:
Shining shoes!

Now, Willie, I don’t want you thinking I haven’t any feelings.
I don’t want you thinking I haven’t got my dreams.
I only want what’s best for you,
’cause we’ve got better things to do
Than dancin’... like a monkey with a ring through its nose!
Dancin’: every time a curtain opens
Another door is gonna close behind you.
And I won’t have that; I just won’t have that!

[Listen to an excerpt from “William’s Song” on Amazon. And as I write this, I see that the out-of-print CD is going for $180! Yow! If I ever need some extra cash, I suppose I could sell mine.]

I thought about The Tap Dance Kid and William’s line about shining when I was recently in Boston: there was a shoe-shine station in the hotel, off by a side entrance. Most of the time I passed, it was unattended. A few times, it was attended, but without a customer — the gentleman attending it, a black man who seemed to be in his 50s, his sparse hair graying, was reading a newspaper. But once, there was a customer.

I had an uncomfortable reaction to the scene. There was a black man kneeling at the feet of a younger white man, the former buffing the latter’s boots as they made small talk. There were sepulchral echoes of a slave past going through my mind.

But what of that? I felt uncomfortable? The man seemed at ease with his job, and perhaps he liked it very much. Perhaps he enjoyed working in a nice hotel and having a chance to talk with many different people throughout his day. I didn’t ask him, and I wouldn’t have known how to do so without having it come across disrespectfully. Am I being like William, expecting this man to represent all African-Americans... and denigrating[1] his job in the process?

Worse, am I showing up as the white man looking to “save” the black man from... from what? From being part of an image that sticks in my mind and makes me uncomfortable? From something I imagine him to have risen above, when I don’t know the first thing about him or about his work? How arrogant of me!

I don’t know how to conclude this entry, so maybe some commenters can provide a coda.
 

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[1] It’s the word that came first to mind, and I then realized that it has a particular connection here, in its obsolete sense of “to make black.”

On racial awareness

On Monday, Miss Incognegro wrote about having black dolls to play with as a child, what it meant to have a doll that looked more like her, and the idea of being “color blind”. It’s a good post; go read it, and, while you’re there, look at yesterday’s post, too, about watermelon.

Miss Incognegro ended Monday’s post with the question, “What are your childhood memories and recollections about race and racial awareness?”, and I commented on that in the blog entry. I think it’s worth repeating it here, so what follows is what I said there — my comment followed one by a black man called Jovan.

 
From a white guy looking at it from the other side: Like Jovan, I grew up in a racially mixed environment — a few years ago, a friend looked at my high school yearbook (1974), and was surprised to see all the different-coloured faces, among the teachers as well as among the students. My father always taught me that everyone’s the same... or, really, that everyone’s an individual, and you judge each person for what s/he is, and the shade of skin makes no difference. I internalized that at an early age.

I started my life in Brooklyn, but we moved to south Florida when I was quite young, and that’s where I grew up. Realize that “south Florida” is not “the South”, but that other parts of Florida are, so I sporadically had glimpses of what that meant. It was the early 1960s when we went there, and, while it was unknown where I lived, I did see “Whites only,” and “No coloreds,” signs in other parts.

I’ve always been skeptical of people who say they “don’t notice” skin colour. Of course we notice it, just as we notice hair colour and style, and choice of clothing. The question isn’t whether we notice it, but what it means to us. The difference never meant anything to me, because of how I was brought up, and I often “didn’t notice” in the sense that the race of someone often didn’t really stand out for me, until someone pointed it out.

I’ll share one particular story that stays with me. My family had black-and-white TVs only, and the first program I ever saw in colour was the Star Trek episode “The Ultimate Computer” (so I can even tell you the date, thanks to IMDB: 8 March 1968, so I would be 11 in a month). I went to a friend’s house, and it was the first time I saw the colours of all their shirts (references to “red-shirted guards” didn’t mean much to me before that). The episode was about a scientist [Dr Richard Daystrom, right, played by William Marshall] who invented a computer system that could run the whole starship by itself. The Enterprise got to test it out, and, of course, there were some bugs in the system that they had to work out.

As the episode progressed, I heard occasional mutterings, grunts, and grumbles from my friend’s father, a middle-aged man from the deep South. Finally, about halfway through, the scientist said something and my friend’s father said, “Huh. This is ridiculous! They’re making out like he’s as smart as they are.” I replied, “He’s smarter! He’s the scientist!” I was quite impressed by scientists, you see. And friend’s dad burst out with, “But he’s a n*!”

So. Yes, now it was pointed out. Of course Dr Daystrom was a Negro, as we’d have said at the time, but what difference did that make? I didn’t know what to say, and, as a not-quite-11-year-old I had the sense not to say anything. So we watched the rest of the show. And I don’t remember spending any time around that friend’s father after that, but I’d have felt very strange if I had.

What makes me feel sad is that, while we’ve come a very long way in the 41 years since then, there are still people today who would respond as my friend’s father did.

Juneteenth + 12 squared

Today is the 144th anniversary of Juneteenth. I like that, because it combines three things that matter to me: words ("Juneteenth"), mathematics (144 is 12 squared), and social justice, freedom, and equality.

That last is, of course, the point.

The Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order by Abraham Lincoln, which declared slaves in the dissident Confederate states free, went into effect on the first day of 1863. At that time, it applied to ten states, which remained under secession,[1] though it specified exemptions. Of course, since the order applied only to states that were still out of Union control, its effect was brought through with the advance of Union troops, and slaves were freed over time.

A major event in the abolition of slavery came two and a half years later, in 1865. On the nineteenth of June of that year, General Granger and his Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, and on that day the slaves in the last holdout state were officially declared free.

Of course, not every person was actually freed on that day, and, indeed, we would fight hard for civil rights for the next century, and yet still have segregation and lynchings and refusal to allow blacks to vote, though they had that legal right. Titular freedom and equality may come with the stroke of a pen; real freedom and equality are more elusive.

But we celebrate a significant achievement today, nonetheless. The return of Texas to the Union did have real consequences for everyone, slave and free man alike. Beyond that, we celebrate the nation’s resolution to work toward freedom and equality, however long it might take.

We’re not done yet; it will still take longer. But we’ve come a great distance in the last 144 years.

By the President of the United States of America.

Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:

“That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and FOREVER FREE, and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

“That the Executive will, on the first day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State, or the people thereof, shall on that day be, in good faith, represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such State shall have participated, shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State, and the people thereof, are not then in rebellion against the United States.”

Now, therefore I, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and in accordance with my purpose so to do publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days, from the day first above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States, the following, to wit: Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, (except the Parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the City of New Orleans) Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Ann, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth), and which excepted parts, are for the present, left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.

And by virtue of the power, and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward SHALL BE FREE! and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.

And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence, and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.

And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.

And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the eighty-seventh.

By the President: A.Lincoln
William H. Seward, Secretary of State.

 

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[1] Interestingly, it did not free slaves in several border states that had not officially seceded, and, thus, were not covered by the executive order. They kind of skipped that bit when they taught us about it in grade school. They didn’t teach us about the exemptions, either.

New Hampshire joins the enlightened

Jeopardy!®
State Laws for $400:

All of New England except Rhode Island... and Iowa.

[Ping!]

“What U.S. states have non-discriminatory marriage laws?”

 

Yes, indeed; as of the first of 2010, New Hampshire — also in the news as the home of outgoing Supreme Court Justice David Souter — will allow people to marry, without regard to what sexes they are. It joins Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont, and Iowa, an interesting blend. I’m curious to see whether Rhode Island (state motto: “Don’t blink: you’ll miss us!”) follows suit, to fill out New England.

Of course, if you’ve spent any time reading these pages, you already know how strongly I agree with fixing this problem, and spreading sensible non-discriminatory laws to all states. So I only have two small things to say about New Hampshire’s law.

1. I often wonder about the “effective dates” of laws. Sometimes it makes sense, allowing time for re-tooling or other real changes that have to be made in order to comply with or implement the law. But sometimes it seems arbitrary. What changes really have to be made for this that will take six months to effect? It seems that someone just needs to print new forms that say “Party A” and “Party B” instead of “Wife” and “Husband”, and they could start issuing these marriage licenses tout de suite. Is there really a good reason that a couple of gay Dartmouth students should have to wait six more months, or else drive across the bridge into Vermont?

2. Much has been made of the compromise wording, put in to comfort religious groups that are opposed to the law. It’s actually been toned down a bit from an earlier version, but things have been up and down:

The committee last week recommended changes further emphasizing the rights of religious groups not to participate. They include a preamble to the bill that states, “Each religious organization, association, or society has exclusive control over its own religious doctrine, policy, teachings and beliefs regarding who may marry within their faith.”

Now, some people demanded this to “protect” religious organizations from being “forced” to perform same-sex marriages, and some are outraged that this wording was allowed in. I say: What’s the big deal? It’s both unnecessary and harmless.

As far as I can tell, no church has been forced to marry any couple in the past. Churches always have the option to decline to join interfaith couples, if their sensibilities go against such a provocative thing. A church can always refuse to hold a wedding if both parties do not adhere to the tenets of the church. And plenty of straight people have had to search far and wide to find priests, rabbis, and ministers who would perform their ceremonies.

This is no different. It allows any couple, straight or gay, to get a state license, and to have a legal marriage in the state of New Hampshire. If they want magic words and incense, they still have to go looking for that, with or without the law’s preamble.

One final thing:

Kevin Smith, director of the Cornerstone Policy Research, a group opposing the bill, said lawmakers “rammed this legislation through” in a way that “reeks of backroom deals and a subversion of the legislative process.”

Yes, well: I made no judgment about what happened in this case, but see here and here about backroom deals and subversion. This law is direct and to the point.

Movie review: Steam

Last week, I saw a movie that I really liked: Kyle Schickner’s Steam. Mr Schickner’s philosophy is that there can be interesting films about people other than straight white men, and he — a straight white man — is committed to making interesting, engaging, thoughtful movies about women (straight or lesbian), gay men, African-Americans, and other characters that mainstream filmdom is less inclined to take risks on.

Steam tells three stories of three women, woven around their periodic chance encounters in the steam room of their health club. The steam room provides the title, and an occasional point of focus. But the three stories — of a young college student (Kate Siegel), a 40-ish single mother (Ally Sheedy), and an aging African-American woman (Ruby Dee) — are what form the movie, as it weaves us in and out among them. We watch the three women as they go about their lives and cope with domineering manipulative men... and we see the changes in them as they learn, at each different age, to build strength of their own.

Cartoonist Alison Bechdel popularized a test for movies; a character in her cartoon strip will only watch a movie if:

1. it has at least two women in it,
2. who talk to each other,
3. about something besides a man.

This movie does not actually pass that test, as it turns out. Yet I think that anyone who would apply that test would be pleased with Steam, nonetheless.

Steam is a movie worth watching if you don’t judge your movies by how many explosions they have (none), or by whether the boy and the girl are together in the end (they’re not).

The only thing is that it might be difficult to find. If you see a screening of it (and the previous paragraph doesn’t put you off), go. I saw it at my local independent-film theatre, the Jacob Burns Film Center, and had the opportunity to talk with the filmmaker (writer, director, producer), Kyle Schickner, afterward.

Otherwise, the DVD is due out this fall. I’ll be buying it. [And you can watch for it on Mr Schickner’s web site, FenceSitterFilms (sorry: the entire web site is in Flash; I hate it when people do that).]

Africa on television

Those of you who get the HBO TV channel and are looking for a real winner of a television series should not miss The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. It’s based on the stories of Alexander McCall Smith, about a woman in Botswana who sets up a business as a private detective. There are mysteries solved — some with happy outcomes, and some not — but the show is really about the characters, more than about the cases.

It’s wonderful to see a mainstream television series set in a little-known African country — Botswana, once a British protectorate called Bechuanaland, is nestled among the higher-profile South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia — and starring many African actors. The scenery is gorgeous, and it’s great in high definition. And we see something of African life beyond the “nature” shows.

The two principals are African-American actresses. The detective, Precious Ramotswe, is played by Jill Scott, who proves that it’s not necessary to be Twiggy to be beautiful. (And I see that she just had a new baby a week ago!) Her assistant, Grace Makutsi, is theatre and film actress Anika Noni Rose. Many of the others, though, are African, including South African Desmond Dube from Hotel Rwanda.

And the costumes are as gorgeous as the scenery. I love the colours and patterns, and wouldn’t mind a few shirts from the same fabric as Ms Scott’s dresses.

But another thing I find engaging about the show is the tiny glimpse we get of the local language. Almost everything is in English, of course, but we’re teased by a few phrases in Setswana. Setswana, spoken in Botswana and parts of South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia, is a Sotho language, a subgroup of Bantu. What we hear most is the standard greeting, “Dumela, mma,” meaning “Hello, ma’am,” using the word for “mother” as a general feminine term of respect. (And, of course, the corresponding, “Dumela, rra,” for “sir”.) We also hear, “Ee, mma,” (pronounced “eh”) for “Yes, ma’am,” along with “nnyaa” for “no”. Other words and phrases haven’t so far been repeated enough for me to’ve picked them up.

[Update: See the comments for some language links.]

In the episode titled “The Boy with an African Heart”, we hear a conversation in the Xhosa language, carried on through a translator. The Xhosa “click” sounds are fascinating. I always wonder, when I consider various languages, how we settle on the particular set of sounds we use in our languages, and how those sounds vary from language to language.

Watch this show, if you can! The first seven episodes have aired so far, but episodes 5 thru 7 are still scheduled for repeat airings. I will certainly buy the DVD set when it comes out — I’ll want to see these more than once or twice.

Psst! Don't buy from those people!

Via BoingBoing, we get this item about a guy with an "alternative" to kosher salt:

Retired barber Joe Godlewski says he was inspired by television chefs who repeatedly recommended kosher salt in recipes.

“I said, ‘What the heck’s the matter with Christian salt?’ ” Godlewski said, sipping a beer in the living room of his home in unincorporated Cresaptown, a western Maryland mountain community.

My first thought was that this is silly, that Mr Godlewski is a bit of a nutter, and that I didn’t have anything to say about it. Mostly harmless.

But then I thought again. It’s not harmless.

There’s nothing in Christian dietary laws that would point to any inspection or blessing of salt in order to make it acceptable. And the culinary preference for “kosher salt” has to do with its coarseness, not is blessedness or its “Jewishness”.

The only reason to create a “Christian” version is to encourage people — presumably Christian people — not to buy from Jews. And that’s not harmless.

What Mr Godlewski says is this:

“This is about keeping Christianity in front of the public so that it doesn’t die. I want to keep Christianity on the table, in the household, however I can do it.”

And he plans, if this is successful, to introduce other products like rye bread, bagels, and pickles. It’s no accident that those are also mostly associated with Jewish producers. It’s not just about “keeping Christianity in front of the public”, but specifically about pushing Jewish products aside.

Of course, he has every right to produce his products, and people can and will choose what to buy.

Personally, I’ll continue buying from Christians and Jews alike, as well as from Muslims and Hindus and non-believers. Just not from silly bigots.

Salt Lake City, in three acts

Utah is a beautiful place, but with pluses and minuses. As the seat of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, it’s a very politically conservative place, and very insular in many ways. But the people can also be very friendly and caring. The skiing can’t be beat. And, well, it sure is beautiful country.

And, as it happens, the New York Times had three stories about Utah on Monday. Forthwith, Salt Lake City, in three acts.

Act I: Why you should keep your religious icons in your church

PLEASANT GROVE CITY, Utah — Across the street from City Hall here sits a small park with about a dozen donated buildings and objects — a wishing well, a millstone from the city’s first flour mill and an imposing red granite monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments.

Thirty miles to the north, in Salt Lake City, adherents of a religion called Summum gather in a wood and metal pyramid hard by Interstate 15 to meditate on their Seven Aphorisms, fortified by an alcoholic sacramental nectar they produce and surrounded by mummified animals.

In 2003, the president of the Summum church wrote to the mayor here with a proposal: the church wanted to erect a monument inscribed with the Seven Aphorisms in the city park, “similar in size and nature” to the one devoted to the Ten Commandments.

The city, not surprisingly, said no. The Summums, equally unsurprisingly, sued, and won in federal court on first-amendment grounds. Says a Summum counselor, “They’ve put a basically Judeo-Christian religious text in the park, which we think is great, because people should be exposed to it. But our principles should be exposed as well.”

And now it goes to the U.S. Supreme Court. I expect that this will go against the Summums, the conservative Court being as it is, and I have mixed feelings about that. I absolutely think that if you get to parade your basic principles around, then I get to trot mine out too.

Which brings us to the more important point that we should all keep our preaching where it belongs... and that’s not in the city parks. Neither monument belongs there. And this is the sort of conflict we invite when we ignore that.

Act II: I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more

SALT LAKE CITY — Leaders of Utah’s largest group supporting equal rights for gay people announced a proposal on Monday to increase the rights of same-sex couples in the state, saying they saw a silver lining in the passage last week of a same-sex marriage ban in California.

The measure in California stripped away the legality of thousands of same-sex marriages and incited protest rallies and marches against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one of the ban’s major supporters.

But leaders of the rights group here, Equality Utah, said statements made by Mormon leaders in defense of their actions in California — that the church was not antigay and had no problem with legal protections for gay men and lesbians already on the books in California — were going to be taken as an endorsement to expand legal rights that gay and lesbian couples have never remotely had in Utah, where the church is based.

Equality Utah’s chairwoman says, “We are taking the L.D.S. Church at its word.” The L.D.S. Church “declined to comment.”

One message here is, “Don’t piss people off.”

But the real message behind it is that everyone has the same rights, and attempts to hold them back and to stop people from exercising them will ultimately fail... maybe not today, maybe not next year, but ultimately.

Haven’t we spent enough time learning that throughout history?

Act III: People who need people...

SANDY, Utah — For months now, the emotions have welled up whenever Andy Williams has left the field after games. Some of it has come from his desire to lift Real Salt Lake to a new place, the Major League Soccer playoffs. Some from knowing that at 31, he is in the twilight of his career.

Mostly, though, it comes from thinking about his wife, Marcia.

She received a diagnosis this summer of a rare form of leukemia and has struggled to find a donor match for a bone-marrow transplant. Without one, she is likely to leave behind her husband to raise their daughter and hers from a previous relationship, alone.

But not entirely alone, no: the community is backing the Williamses up.

It’s not what they’d expected when they moved to Mormon country.

The community is giving their money and time. The community is looking for bone-marrow donors. The community is giving its full support to Andy and Marcia Williams, and it’s coming from the team, from the businesses, even from the high schools — two high school girls’ teams played a charity match to raise money.

This is the best that people can be.

Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.

— The Third Aphorism of Summum

Black and white

About a week ago, NPR had an item about the then-candidates’ campaigns in Florida. Don Gonyea talked with some Obama supporters in Sunrise, not far from where I grew up:

Don Gonyea: Seated two sections over was 57-year-old Joan Benn[?], who was born in Guyana, but who has been a U.S. citizen for 30 years. As an African American, she says she always hoped she’d see what she’s seeing now; she just didn’t think it was possible so soon. She thinks an Obama presidency would restore America’s global reputation.

Joan Benn: The world would look at us in a different way, and a different level. I think it’s good for our children, and my grandchildren, to see a black president.

Now, in case you’re not sure, Guyana is here, in South America. It used to be called British Guiana, and it’s next to Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana), Venezuela, and Brazil. It’s not in Africa.

I don’t know whether Ms Benn (and I’m sorry if I’m getting her name wrong, but NPR didn’t spell it) does or doesn’t prefer the term “African American” for herself, but I suspect her own reference to “a black president” is a strong clue. In any case, I’ve known a number of dark-skinned people who hail from South America and the Caribbean who are quite bothered by it. In the words of a Jamaican friend of mine, “I am Jamaican; I am not African.”

Of course, her ancestry might be traceable to Africa within the last few centuries, but the question comes down to how one identifies oneself, compared with a hyper-political-correctness that drives our media to pick a term that has to “fit all”. When the movie Pocahontas came out in the mid‘90s, I read a newspaper article that said that Disney had engaged as a consultant “an American Indian (the term [he] prefers)”. They went on to refer to him as a Native American for the rest of the article.

I’ve also seen references in the U.S. news to, say, Algerians living in France, or Nigerians in England, as “African Americans”, even though they might be talking about people who’ve never set foot on our shores.

Ideally, we wouldn’t characterize people unnecessarily, and when it is significant and needs characterization, we ought to use the subject’s own preference when we can — and use some common sense, rather than bleat like sheep.

Dark-skinned ≠ “African American”. That ought to be as plain as black and white.