Does Being Colorblind Divide the Colors Rather Than Unite Them?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the racial policies of America’s various governments lately. [The photo has little to do with the topic [though, as a sometime literary and film critic, I know I could make something up]; it's a shot of balconies on an apartment building in Chicago.) My thinking became more concentrated on this matter -- I’ve always generally kept up with issues of race and society -- because of a thought-provoking essay I read in the Chronicle of Higher Education some months back by Ian F. Haney López, a professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law at California-Berkeley. López believes that what he calls “colorblind theory” is strengthening racism as much as preserving or fostering racial inequalities in this country. Colorblind theory is the idea that America’s laws should take NO account of race in setting policies, making laws, or adjudicating legal conflicts. Colorblind theory, lately, has become a set of principles that many courts have started acting upon and various political scientists and legal theorists have defended. For example, some US Supreme Court justices have has been using colorblind theory in cases the court has heard concerning affirmative action. How do we get rid of racism and racial inequalities? legislators, bureaucrats, and judges ask themselves. Stop making decisions in terms of race, has become a more common answer.

López argues, however, that the preservation of “white dominance” is the true, hidden goal of colorblind thinking:

Contemporary colorblindness is a set of understandings -— buttressed by law and the courts, and reinforcing racial patterns of white dominance -— that define how people comprehend, rationalize, and act on race. As applied, however much some people genuinely believe that the best way to get beyond racism is to get beyond race, colorblindness continues to retard racial progress. It does so for a simple reason: It focuses on the surface, on the bare fact of racial classification, rather than looking down into the nature of social practices. It gets racism and racial remediation exactly backward, and insulates new forms of race baiting.

Whew! That’s a strong and challenging view, which caught me by surprise when I first read about it more deeply. I have been pondering such criticisms of colorblind theory and will probably have to ponder them longer before I make up my mind about how to regard it. In general, I would like to see racial issues addressed as practical matters. The ideal of a non-racial society, if it’s even possible, and the principles of anti-racism are not up for discussion with me (though I take it as crucially necessary for a pluralist always to listen to anyone about anything, even about the craziest or cruelest ideas out there [which will have to remain a subject for another excogitation]). What I would like our policy-makers to ask is, How do we best lessen the racial inequalities in our society and how do we best get more and more and yet more people to pay no regard to race? The goals, for me, are not at issue. The goals are less racial inequality and less racism. The issue, for me, it whether it is best to adopt policies that take account of race or to have policies based on colorblind theory, as some learned legal scholars and judges are now doing? For me, that’s a practical question. What will work best? Because I take this approach, I am not prejudiced against attacks on colorblind theory, nor am I in favor of ending colorblind thinking in policy and legal decisions. I long for a colorblind society and a colorblind personal life. How we get there is the issue.

I have sympathies with colorblind theorists, with the notion that the way to get race finally out of the picture is to take it out completely out of the picture right now. But López argues, effectively, counter-intuitively, that this simply leads to racism, perhaps not more of it right away, but to its persistence at current levels. For this reason, López wants to keep race, wherever pertinent, in every decision of law or policy:

To actually move toward a racially egalitarian society, however, requires that we forthrightly respond to racial inequality today. The alternative is the continuation of colorblind white dominance. As Justice Harry Blackmun enjoined in defending affirmative action in Bakke: "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way."

I have not read a more forceful attack on colorblind policies than López’s (though I am almost certain more are out there in cyberspace). I will be thinking more about this criticism of colorblind theory. I want only what’s best, overall. Whatever can put an end to racism and racial inequality quicker is better. (Whatever theory is used to set policy and make law, racism and racial inequalities will surely be hard to defeat, sort or long term.) The problem is that addressing the cause of certain kinds of social inequalities that racism has brought about might do little to correct the social inequalities that racism has so sturdily built up and maintains.

My cousin Bob Orton and I once discussed these issues at length some years back. I have hopes that he’ll weigh in on this latest turn in the debate.

At the Edge of the Drop-Off

Miranda Davis, my daughter, who lives in Copper Harbor year-round, sent me a great shot from a few days ago of the Copper Harbor Lighthouse. She took her two dogs, Gus and Capone, on a walk out to the light across the harbor, which is now frozen solid. The shot has the perspective of someone standing up high on something, even though it was taken from on the ice of open Lake Superior. Yes, she was standing up on something, the ice piles that form first at the edge of the drop-off in front of Hays Point, which this peninsula is called. It's quite shallow a good two hundred yards from shore here. I'd say that at the spot at the bottom of the photo the depth is only about six feet or so. This shelf, made of solid bedrock (and so advisable for ships to avoid), runs east quite a way east of the point before the bedrock falls steeply off into the channel that forms the shipping entrance to the harbor. Remember when you were a kid and feared the edge of the drop-off in the inland lakes your parents took you to. There was a drop-off on Sylvan Lake, outside Pontiac, MI, where my Kilpela grandparents lived for many decades when I was a child and teenager. It was always pleasurably spooky to swim to the edge and then dive down for a peek in the dark murkiness. At this drop-off there is no murkiness. The water is stunningly crystal clear. But I've got to admit that I don't quite get the same chilling rush when I swim or paddle out here, as I have done often over the years. Drop-offs don't scare me much any longer. For a ship's captain, it's the "come-ups" that give one the chills, naturally. Thanks, Mir, my nickname for her, which has spread. I'll post another shot from her soon.

A Dunking

I mentioned Logan's escapades along the Red Cedar River in Okemos last week, and here is the evidence. Log is standing on the ice at the edge of the river. Well, he's no longer standing on it. He's standing beneath it, for right at the edge of the river, at the foot of a short but steep embankment, he went through the mushy ice and hit bottom with on of his brand-new snowshoes, the new high-tech kind, made of aluminum and hard plastic and rubber. I was thinking of the incident as a problem (not enough of a problem NOT to takle a photo, of course), for if I had dunked my old wooden snowshoes (which I will show you in a photo coming soon), I might have had to spend a good ten minutes or more knocking all the ice off them, if not abandoning them altogether. But though Log repeatedly dunked one of the snowshoes he was wearing into the muddy river water, trying to get out, when he did get out, all he had to do was give the shoe a couple of stomps and the ice all fell away. How nice. His other snowshoe went through the ice as well but had found support just above the level of the river on a large fallen branch. We continued our hike for another hour or so.

Independence

I recently stumbled on an odd book at a fine used bookstore in town entitled The South Was Right. This led me to the discovery, on the web, of a longstanding movement to defend the idea that the secession of the southern states and the creation of the Confederate States of America was a just act on the part of those states. Such was at issue, of course, in the U.S. Civil War. I had known, from skimming a book about current southern confederate sympathizers that my wife Marsha recommends highly (Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horowitz) that there are still thousands upon tens of thousands of people who believe that the “South” had a right to secede from the U.S. -- indeed that any state has a right to secede. But I did not know how many web sites and books have been devoted to the topic.

I’ll admit I have long had sympathies with the South. [The photo is a shot of the far north, along some U.P. highway some years ago. What it has to do with the topic at hand is little, except that the fellow who lives on this plot of land seems to have trying to create some kind of idyllic independent kingdom, with his faux windill and his plastic deer.] Any American, I suppose, should feel sympathy for independence. But under what conditions independence is just and good is a matter of endless, raucous, and sometimes underground debate. It turns out that the subject is germane at this very moment. For this past weekend, the state called Kosovo declared itself a nation through independence from Serbia, an act which Serbia, Russian, and China quickly questioned, and quite strongly (Serbia because of its economic stake and the Serbian minority in Kosovo; Russia presumably because of the difficulties it has had with the independence conflict in Chechnya and other regions within its current borders; and China presumably because of Taiwan). So the principles of the right of secession, or independence, remain central in the world of politics and morals.

The authors of the book I ran across, some fanatic fellow named Walter D. Kennedy, has written other books, some with his brother, about better democratic government and so-called “States’ Rights,” which suggests that his view of the right of the South to secede is inspired in part by his larger desire to justify certain forms of government that he approves of and to restrict certain forms of government that he does not approve of (which means the current federal government of the United States). Funny to me, and often astonishing, how history -- or the myths of the past that we create, as the case usually is -- plays such a large role in the present. For example, the intellectual question of the causes and purpose of the Civil War stirs up considerable and often quite heated debate. Did the North make war to end slavery, the South to preserve it? Or did the North make war to preserve union, the South to withdraw from it? Such questions still at times arouse white-hot passions. Many consider it slightly (or strongly) racist and fully idiotic to suggest that the principal cause of the Civil War was NOT slavery. But I have seen good reasons to think it might NOT have been. It’s hard to step back from the debate of specific historical issues and simply consider them as intellectual issues. For as soon as one takes some positions, even tentatively, such as a position perceived to be in favor of the Confederacy, one is suspected of being a racist or even a supporter of slavery. The Kennedy brothers say, take it or leave it, that they do not support or approve slavery, past or present, in any sense.

This broad, woolly subject is nothing new to me. I’ve been my thinking about it for more than 30 years. What I can say now is that it seems rationally possible to defend almost any moral position on Southern secession, regardless of the harshness with which the two sides often dismiss each other. That is, a thinker could well defend by reason that the South had the right to secede; and that a thinker could also reasonably defend that the South had no such right. Further, what follows from the decision on whether the South was right or wrong is also highly variable and complex. I realize that though each of us wants independence for his state, his county, his township, his family, and himself, none of us has much “independence,” all in all. We are all heavily restricted in many, many ways by our federal government, by our state governments, by our counties, townships, cities, even our families and cultures and societies. Life is so complicated that we seem wholly unable to determine how the specific historical question of the South’s right to independence might apply in each segment of the life of each American, of each person who lives anywhere or will come to live.

The recent defenders of the South’s right to independence have been irritated by the hypocritical application of moral and political principles that have expressed by many American thinkers and leaders of the "North," such as the people of New Hampshire at its founding. The men who established NH’s constitution 200 years ago declared that they have the right to “establish a new government” on their own volition: “... whenever the ends of government are perverted, or public redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to, reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.” According to the people of New Hampshire in 1792, it seems, not resisting arbitrary power is absurd. That which was true in 1792, defenders of the Confederacy claim, was equally true in 1861 -- and remains true today (what are they proposing?). It is absurd, they reason, to think that a free people would not resist arbitrary power. This seems a good argument and perfectly in tune with American moral, cultural, and political principles. But the current leaders of and thinkers in the State of New Hampshire might argue, quite easily and reasonably, that the men of the NH past didn’t quite mean what the defenders of the South take them to mean by those 200-year-old words. In principle and in the specific application of principle, they would surely argue, the defenders of the South have got it wrong. It usually depends on what one means by the adjective “arbitrary.” For one mans “arbitrary” is another’s “sensible.” One man’s tyranny is another’s justice. One man’s oppression is another’s necessary social order.

The idea of the South’s being right is an oddball belief. Those who hold it are fighting for credibility, but their views appear to be mostly dismissed or denigrated, probably because of fears of what might follow from the principle that the South had the right to secede. What the implications of the issue are -- how much independence the states of the U.S.A. have a right to -- is beyond the scope of the issue, no matter how one might decide the historical issue. The whole issue is moot as well. For regardless of how one views the justice of Southern secession, we all still live with this federal behemoth that controls so much of our lives. Is someone proposing that some state or set of states start a new civil war against federal “tyranny”? I haven’t heard that one yet. Though that oddball belief, too, is probably out there.

The justice of the South’s secession will be on my mind for a long time to come, probably to the end of my life. Perhaps I will offer another excogitation on the matter some time. Meanwhile, the legality, justice, and morality of national independence will be playing a significant role in world politics.

A Turn in the Red Cedar

Cousin Kev Koski, on a trip around the world by bicycle, asked for more shots of the MSU campus, and I am willing to oblige, bit by bit. First, I should finally put up a link to Kev's wonderful blog, which I encourage all to read:

http://www.kevinkoski.com/blog/

For you Kev, here's a shot I took recently, just a few days ago actually, on campus. Can you believe this scene can be found in the midst of the small city that is Michigan State University. Some 25,000 people live on campus. An additional 12,000 work on campus every week day, and yet another 20,000 students live just off campus in the surrounding city of East Lansing. This is the Red Cedar River, which runs through the middle of MSU and through a couple of very nice natural areas. It mostly follows a straight course, but it does take a couple of dramatic turns in a couple corners of campus. I will give a special prize (what? a big kiss?) to anyone who can identify the location within, say, a couple hundred yards. I know that there are a few readers of this blog who lived on campus at one time or another, some for a long time, though for many it was a long time ago. But that should not be a problem. This location hasn't changed much in 75 years.

Cops & Killers

I see a lot of films, but rarely at theaters, because such enterprises rarely offer much that I consider worth seeing. Yet I did see No Country for Old Men, that new film directed by the Cohen brothers, at the theater because it has been judged highly by many of the film critics whom I trust the most (which means that I trust them, at best, about half way). However, I found it a weak film for many reasons, even poorly made at many points, despite far too many panting proclamations that it’s a nearly perfect work of cinematic art.

But a critique of No Country is not my objective here. What I have been thinking about is that I have yet to find any lawmen or lawwomen who have objected to the film’s generalized portrayal of police officers. The central “good” character is a rural sheriff named Ed Tom Bell who at the end quits his job because he can’t hunt down or protect people from the film’s killer, a fellow named Chigurh, the main “bad” character. In my experience and studies, cops are seldom so easily defeated (nor were they so in 1980, the year in which the film is set). Even if one cop might get to feeling spiritually bruised by a stone propelled at him from some sling of outrageous fortune, plenty of other doggone determined and devoted cops always take up the mission to catch a killer, especially one of such horrific cruelty as the one this film depicts (he’s so horrific that he’s rather a cartoon, in my judgment).



Why have no cops jumped up to point out the weakness and inaccuracy of this film’s portrayal of police work? (The photo is a shot of the Ship and Shore Motel in Saugatuck, MI, by the way. There were several sinister motels in No Country for Old Men.) Heck, I’m not even much for cops. As a class, I find them a little too law-loving and autocratic for my don’t-tread-on-me inclinations (vestiges of dreams of Sixties-style hippie-dom, no doubt). Yet I find the portrayal of Sheriff Bell so skewed as to be insulting. I am aware that some have said that this film is not intended as realism, but as an allegory of the darkness of life, a mythic delineation of some of the ways in which human beings can lose all control of evil and in which unbridled evil can wreak so much damage in our lives. If so, the allegory is told in an intensely realistic manner and, thus, owes a great deal to accuracy and plausibility. Yet I have found that seldom, if ever, are cops so beaten down about a killer as callous as Chigurh. On the contrary, they get charged up, gung-ho to the point of obsession, to get their “man,” as the saying goes (though women can kill like this, too, as depicted in the true-crime biopic Monster, which concerns an infamous female serial killer in Florida). The film portrays Sheriff Bell as a symbol of exhausted, bewildered dismay in the face of utmost evil, but I think he is a defective symbol because of the film’s inaccurate, almost contemptuous, portrayal of him. His portrayal wholly falsifies the allegory.

I might write more about this film, which so many have extolled. Some critics have pronounced it one of the great artworks of all time, an assessment with which I disagree quite strongly. The specific topic of the portrayal of police work plays only a very small part in my judgment of the film as very weak art. As I was writing this post, as probably most Americans know, another mass shooting occurred in America, this time in Missouri (within a day or two that shooting was out of the headlines, but not off the minds of the cops). It turned out to have been a businessman with a grudge who shot up some city officials with whom he had had squabbles over a contract. At a time like that, no doubt, people were happy to have cops around. Does this film help us fathom such factual occurrences of mayhem? Hardly at all. Which is mostly why I consider inferior cinema. Though such are matters for a separate excogitation.

I don’t know how to classify this excogitation, my first one. The portrayal of Sheriff Bell is just something I’ve been pondering lately. This is the way it’s going to go in this series, for good or ill. And I didn’t come close to keeping it to 250 words. Try, try again.

Red Cedar Snow-Shoeing

A few weeks back I told you that I was going to take Logan snow-shoeing in the near future, and we did go out a a couple times a couple weekends ago. We've had other opportunities, but, believe it or not, the weather has been downright frigid and dangerously windy. This shot is from a hike we took in Legg Park, which is a Meridian Township park a few miles from our home in Okemos. It's a place I have explored and photographed on dozens of occasions over the years. The boys and I have taken many walks along this river. I even hiked here with Miranda many times in the past. I wonder how much she remembers of those hikes. The Red Cedar River is pictured here. Before going through the MSU campus and meeting up with the Grand River on its way to Lake Michigan, the Red Cedar courses through this park and Riverfront Park next door. Log is standing in his new high-tech snowshoes on a shelf of ice on the river. No need to worry. The ice was pretty thick and the river rather shallow at this location. I will put up a shot of Log's plunge into the river at another location in the very near future.

The Start of EXCOGITATIONS

I am going to start a new series of posts on this blog about my life. I intend to label these ruminative posts “Excogitations.” I will keep these posts short, only about 250 words. I am a thinking person who has read and still reads a lot, for good or ill. Much of my adult life has been spent reading books and pondering intellectual issues. I have thought about the economics of life a lot recently and down the years (a book on the notion was recently published, entitled The Logic of Life). I realized that if you were to judge how much I value particular activities by how much time I spend doing them, you would conclude that I value reading and thinking above just about all else besides immediate family.

I have no agenda in writing these posts, though I do believe it is possible that an agenda could develop for one reason or another. But, for now, I’m just going to write casually about what I’ve been thinking about lately, which is usually inspired or motivated by what I’m reading (or writing in other areas). Also, I am going to tack on an art photo when I feel moved to do so. The one posted here is a shot of a power pole near some tall pines. I have many intellectual interests, so I can’t say exactly what might come up. Nonetheless, here’s a short list of some general topics that will surely come under consideration, wide regions into which my mind often moseys:

1. God -– I have always wanted to find out whether he/she/it exists, whether she/it/he can be known, and how I can know her/him/it.

2. Religion -- If we can figure out who God is, what he might want of me -- or all of us -- if anything.

3. Film -- I have been tinkering with a book of film criticism for a number of years.

4. Evil (the human variety) -- I have long brooded on its causes and cures.

5. War -- I ponder this, probably, because there are so many war films.

6. History -- I have been a history buff and interested in the philosophical theory of history for decades. Many eras, from the U.S. to ancient Rome, interest me. But my specialties are probably New Testament Palestine, Constantinian Rome, Reformation Europe, and the U.S. Civil War. (Why these four? Well, there's a subject for an excogitation, no?)

7. Human Behavior -- I am always wondering why people do what they do and think what they think -- why I do and think what I do, for that matter.

8. Strange Beliefs -- I have long ruminated on why people adopt oddball beliefs, true or untrue (does oddballness make a belief untrue?).

9. Literature -- I have read a lot, mostly the standard greats that Humanities major tend to favor or really well-written books. But sometimes a well-turned work of literary entertainment can keep me thinking for weeks.

These are areas of thought I regularly visit during my life. The list is not exhaustive, but it gives a good idea about the areas I might jump into in this series of EXCOGITATIONS.

Who am I writing this series for? I don’t know. For I don’t really know who reads this blog. But I have long aspired to be a writer, and so I am using this blog to write about what I am thinking about, which is usually what I want to write about. That hardly needed saying, did it?