Just Do What?

I finally saw the big Nike ad.  When I first heard about it, I thought the uproar was about Kaepernick, but this reaction poll makes it clear that Nike really hit the racist nerves. Yeah, the Kaepernick anthem thing is about race, but so much discussion of it confuses the issue.  The figures in this article make it abundantly clear what is going on.

First, watch the video with the reaction info:


Note that the big dips are not just when Kaepernick shows up but when the ad features Lebron James and Serena Williams.  Why would they cause people to feel less positive?  One could guess it is about Lebron's political efforts but Serena? 


Then, look at the breakdowns:

Yowza.


 Turns out Gen x is nearly as racist as the boomers...  Not great.

And yes, our partisan polarization may just be about race:


 Deplorable, you might say. 

Clarifies things mightily.  The noise about Kaepernick is not about patriotism and the troops but part of a larger divide in our society.  I would like to see a similar analyses of Obama's speech yesterday, but I am pretty sure most of the lines would be so flat as to make the exercise pointless.

I don't think Nike was super-brave to do this ad, but I do appreciate the company for being smart enough to now where its market is (young and diverse).  The Democrats have a similar market, and I hope they are smart enough to figure out how to message to it.

Progress? Not Fast Enough, ISA 2018 edition

I have been in this business for more than 25 years, and have gone to about 25 or so annual meetings of the International Studies Association (and about the same number of APSA's).  Over the years, I have been struck by how much has changed since I started.

Besides the disappearance of polyester and leisure suits (yes, they still existed in the early 1990s), one of the big changes has been the gender balance.  It used to be the case that it seemed as if the only young women at these meetings were those representing the book publishers.  There are far more women (although not that many seniors) than there once was.

This time, I was struck by the increased ethnic diversity.  Sure, I know from the TRIP studies (including my own) that 21st century IR is mighty white.  But it is less so than it was.  So, I could be pleased by the improvements. Yet....

Oh my.   The only person I heard of getting badged--checked to see if they belong in the sea of ISA goers--was an African-American woman.  The same woman was also asked by multiple participants to get their drinks or clean up the lobby.  I will not go into the details, as it is her story to tell, but FFS!!!

So, I am reminded of many conversations with Teen and now College Senior Spew:
Me: sure, things aren't perfect, but we have made progress (on gender, race, LGBTQ, etc).
Her:  NOT FAST ENOUGH!!!

And, yeah, she persuaded me that she was right.  This ISA was mostly a super-positive experience for me, but it is easier since I am a white, straight, male with an endowed chair and heaps of tenure.  It is easy for me to look around and notice that there is more diversity.  What is less easy for me is to see how the women and the African-Americans and the Latinx and the Asian-Americans and all the rest of the folks are treated and how they experience the event.

Which reminds me of something that happened at the airport.  On my way out, I sat next to a white woman who left her bag behind and walked off.  See something, say something, right?  After waiting a few minutes, I did so.  And then moved far away from that bag.  Twenty minutes later, she returned--that bag had acted as a seat-saver, I guess.  Oh, and security didn't show up in that 20 minute interval.  Hmmm.


So, see something, say something and then some, right?

You Might Be a White Supremacist

Thanks to John Kelly's incredibly dumb comments about the American Civil War, I have been inspired to finally write a post that has been germinating for a while (and I am ripping off Jeff Foxworthy's "you might be a redneck routine.")

• If you think that both sides of the US Civil War were honorable, you might be a white supremacist.
• If you think that the civil war happened because the North didn't compromise enough (despite many historic compromises named things like "The Missouri Compromise"), you might be a white supremacist.
• If you think there were fine people on both sides of Charlottesville, you might be a white supremacist.
• If you take a vague executive order about a ban on Muslims and enthusiastically enforce it, you might be a white supremacist.
• If you empower the immigration folks to violate a heap of norms (sick kids in hospitals?), then you might just be a white supremacist.
• If you give Steve Bannon an office in the White House, you might be a white supremacist.
• If you continue to have Stephen Miller involved in policy-making and speech-writing, you might be a white supremacist.
• If you appoint a friend of the KKK as Attorney General, someone the 1980s GOP thought to be too racist to be a Federal Judge, you might be a white supremacist.
• If you support disenfranchising minorities via voterfraudfraud, such as by appointing a known vote suppressing such as Kris Kobach as head of a voter suppression effort, you might just be a white supremacist.
• If you target an NFL player for protesting police violence against minorities, you might just be a white supremacist.

I could and probably will go on....   but this gets the idea across even without referring to Trump's racial discrimination in rental housing or other older statements/behavior).

Update:

• If you cannot denounce slavery, you might just be a white supremacist:

Today journalist April Ryan asked Sarah Sanders: "Does this administration believe slavery was wrong?" Sanders left without answering. pic.twitter.com/vZYCZnMFAH

— Tara McKelvey (@Tara_Mckelvey) October 31, 2017

Gender and Syllabi: A Progress Report.

Many threads in the past two days on gender and race and citations.  That what ends up being cited and being on syllabi tends to be the product of not so much merit but merit plus path dependence plus other stuff going on, which means women and minorities are under-represented (see this storify that has the threads by Paul Musgrave and Dan Nexon).  Similar dynamics tend to apply regarding syllabi--women are under-represented.*

*  I focus on women here, because I am not sure how to do a better job of adding minorities to my syllabi.  Simply put, it is far easier to identify women (although not always) than minorities via names if I don't know the people. 

I focus on this rather than citations since I just finished the syllabus to one of my classes: Civil-Military Relations.  For the past couple of years, I have been more aware of this stuff, so I have tried to improve the gender balance on my syllabi.  Unlike journal articles where the editors might extend the word count to improve the gender balance (h/t to Dan Nexon, see the storify), a syllabus is more or less a zero-sum game.  I can't add tons of new readings and expect the students to read them all (the iron law of reading assignments--the more you assign, the less they read).  So, some folks do get dropped from required to recommended as I seek to improve the gender balance.  I don't aim for 50%--I just aim for more.

For the stuff I teach, it tends to be not that hard to find stuff written by women.  For some aspects/weeks, it is easier than others right now.  Alliances?  Not a problem with folks like Patricia Weitsman, Sarah Kreps, and others.  For Canadian defence, tis harder.  Counting pieces of required reading by whether is one or more women involved (solo or co-author), my syllabus is 37% women.  I used Jane Summer's tool to see how this syllabus does: it says the authors are 28% women, 1.5% Asian, 9.2% Black, 4.2% Hispanic and 83% White.  I have to get the syllabus into the library so I will send it as is, but in the next year, I will keep an eye out for work that is in this area from groups that are less represented.
Update: Using http://womenalsoknowstuff.com/experts-by-area/, I have found a bunch of women doing civil-military stuff--mostly junior profs and grad students, so I will be revising my syllabus a bit.


Why? Because it is the least I can do.  It does not involve much work--mostly awareness and a smidge of self-awareness.  Students are less likely to model themselves after people who are dissimilar to them, so I think it is a good thing to try.  Also, when it comes to syllabi, some folks are more likely to get promoted if they can prove that their work is used in syllabi around the world.  Tis harder now as many syllabi are on gated coursework sites (blackboard, webct), but not impossible.  Anyhow, it seems like the right thing to do.  And yes, working on this is a good way to procrastinate on the article I need to finish for the APSA meeting in late August.* 

* The deadline for that (August 14th) is silly and according to this survey likely to be disrespected. 

Talking/Thinking About Race

Will Moore has an interesting post about taking about race and racism.  It comes out of a conversation that he and Erica Chenoweth and Christian Davenport had online:




There is a fourth reason why folks don't talk about race and racism: fear.  That is, people are careful about talking about race because they don't want to offend anyone and don't want to be accused of being racist.  Whether it is something being taken out of context, like Obama's mention of the n-word (notice that I don't spell it out) in the Marc Maron interview, or just musing aloud might lead to something that one might regret saying, fear matters a great deal in how/whether people talk about this stuff.

I guess I vary in my comfort/discomfort when I talk about race.  As a scholar focused on ethnic conflict, I tend to view race as I view religion, language or a similar attribute that shape people's identities and shape the politics of countries.  Despite the troubled history of race in the US, I tend to think of race as being less inherently problematic than other identities since there is no direct logical implications about racial divisions as there is for religion, for example.  Different religious groups will have different beliefs about right and wrong and about what the role of government is because the differing values are inherent in religion.  Linguistic divisions usually matter politically in employment and education because that is where language matters.  Race?  What does the color of one's skin have to do with anything?  And the answer, obviously, can be everything as I was reminded listening to a Moth podcast yesterday about apartheid.  While everything is ultimately socially constructed, the political implications of race are much more so, I think.  

I get less comfortable thinking/talking about race when I think about the course of my life, rather than the conflicts elsewhere.  Why? I have tended to live in highly segregated communities:

• I went to summer camp at a Jewish camp.  The only African-Americans were a few counselors and some of the staff.  The kids always considered the African-American counselors to be the coolest.  
• that my high school class had one or two African-Americans, a few Latinos, a couple of Asian-Americans, and was mostly quite white. 
• that Oberlin had more people of color than my high school, but the place was still fairly segregated.  And raising the question of segregation was problematic since it was perhaps the case that some of the African-Americans chose to live among themselves in part because they had always lived in segregated communities and felt isolated in the mass of white people.  Criticizing them for not exposing themselves was wrong.  So, I didn't develop any lasting friendships with African-Americans from college.  I did develop friendships with other people of color during my college years, including Latinos and Asian-Americans.
• This pattern largely continued in grad school, as the folks in my class and in the cohorts around mine were largely white with some Latinos and Asian-Americans and one African-American.  
• While Lubbock was perhaps one of the more diverse communities I lived in, it was also very highly and very clearly segregated.  My only friends were junior faculty in my department and frisbee players.  So, no, no new African-American friends in Lubbock for me.
• My brief time in Virgina was different.  The community may or may not have been diverse, but I didn't really notice since I was working very long hours at the most integrated office of my life--the Pentagon.  We didn't talk about race and racism.  The only "heavy" conversation I remember having there over identity was about religion--about "under god" in the pledge of allegiance.  The place might have been more racially diverse than religiously diverse, or at least it sometimes felt that way.
• In terms of my two lifetime preoccupations, both are relatively white.  The latest TRIP survey has IR in the US and Canada as being 80-something percent white.  I now have some African-American political science friends, and we have talked about racism even if we have not really talked about race itself, if that makes any sense.  Ultimate frisbee is less white than it used to be, but is still a very white sport.  I have had Asian-Americans/Canadians* and Latinos on my teams as often as not, especially in Montreal, but I have only briefly played alongside or against African-Americans/African-Canadians. 

* For this entire section of this post, I feel uncomfortable since I am not sure what is the way that various groups prefer to be called.

 The point here is I am not entirely comfortable when talking about race because I have rarely been engaged in sustained conversations about race with people of other races.  The internet helps with this as my twitter feed is more diverse than my facebook feed.  But these virtual friendships that are formed are not quite the same thing either.  I am sure there is some of the guilt that Will mentions in his post  is at the heart of my discomfort, since I sometimes think I have not done enough to reach out.  Again, it gets to fear--that I might say the wrong thing.

The good news it that my daughter has lived in far more integrated communities than I did, as we tended to end up sending her to schools with lots of immigrants especially in Virginia and Montreal.  And she went to her college a week early as an "international" student despite her American citizenship, so she immediately had a more diverse community to hang out with.  Her friends on facebook are a far more diverse lot than mine.  I don't know whether she is more comfortable about talking about race with her friends, but I guess I can find out on one of the many long drives in our near future. 

Of course, when I am uncomfortable, I try to make jokes and making jokes in a racial context can be very problematic, which is why I leave it to the professionals:



Update: I wrote this post and then read this piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which makes my notion of fear silly by comparison.  Which points to a second way in which the internet is a positive force--I read more stuff written by those who have very different, very powerful perspectives.

Evil and the Agent-Structure Problem of American Racism

I was listening to the "Do You Like Prince Movies" podcast while biking today, and it got me thinking.  Alex Pappademas and Wesley Morris noted that Hollywood tends to depict people who have messed up lives by having them eat out of Chinese takeout cartons.  This is anti-takeout-ist they noted.  Eating out of takeout cartons is not wrong!

Anyhow, their conversation eventually turned to the appearance of President Obama on the Marc Maron podcast.  Alex expressed his frustration with the discussion of the murders in the Charleston event as evil, that it allows us to shrug and move on, rather than consider why the event happened.  And this got me thinking while I biked along a particularly beautiful part of Ottawa about evil and the agent-structure problem of Racism in the U.S.

As a quick caveat, I am not an expert on any of what I am about to discuss.  I am starting to realize how apt the name of my blog is as something that is spewed is not filtered.  Something that is semi-spewed is only partially filtered.

I don't want to be too social science-y, but when I think of the Charleston event, I don't want to let anyone off easily.  That is, if we blame society or politics, we focus on the social/political structures at the expense of agency--that this one individual had free will and chose poorly, so very badly.  If we focus on the individual, that the perpetrator was insane or racist or whatever, we tend to gloss over the conditions that enabled him and even encouraged him to kill nine innocent people.  The reality is that both matter and both... can be understood and perhaps even treated via social science.

Observers/pundits/folks trying to make sense of events like this prefer to privilege one side or the other, the actor or the structural conditions, and get upset when people focus on another aspect.  Nobody is wrong for focusing on the agent or on the social/political structures, but they are wrong for dismissing the arguments of others who focus on the other part of the problem.

I do think that focusing on "evil" is a problematic approach because it takes us away from agents and structures.  There can be "evil" within individuals and within institutions, but we need to explain why there is variance--some people and institutions are more "evil" than others--as the variance provides us with leverage so we can figure out causes and conditions that facilitate the bad stuff and then develop ways to mitigate/reduce. 

Why focus on agents?  Because lots of people exist within a set of norms (what is appropriate behavior, what is expected behavior) and institutions and yet few pick up a gun and shoot a bunch of people (too many, but still not only a few).

Why focus on social structures and political institutions?  Because an individual who is somehow messed up may act out in any number of ways.  Why target African-Americans?  Something in this guy's social scene/growing up/whatever helped direct the blame for his circumstances towards African-Americans.  Why was he able to kill so many people so quickly?  He lives in a society where access to guns is easy and where the focus is on gun rights and not on gun responsibility.

Obviously, there is more to both sides of this problem, and that is where social science comes in--figuring out as much of this as possible not so that we can eliminate evil (even I am not that naive or optimistic) but so that we can reduce the harm caused by these agents and these structures.

And to both illustrate the agent-structure problem and to have something pretty to offset the ugliness of racial divisions, I present a picture from the aforementioned bike ride.

Everything in Moderation Including Anger

There is a lot of discussion in the aftermath of Charleston about forgiveness.  The relatives of the victims immediately forgave the perpetrator, which was most impressive.  My friend, Bill Ayres, wrote a sharp piece on forgiveness.  Much of the arguments here tend to that anger is destructive to those who have been victimized, and that it is better to let go then let anger poison oneself.  Indeed, the classic saying (by Buddha or not):

“Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

There is much to that.  I am a big fan of this particular view:


But I want to push back just a bit.  Alcohol can be a poison if too much is imbibed, but is not so bad in moderation.  How about the same for anger?  Might anger be useful?  Might it be a potentially positive force?  I am thinking of political mobilization (not that I have read much of that literature)--that being outraged and offended gets people off of their couches and out in the streets.

I have not seen Inside Out yet, but I think I am comfortable with the idea that emotions can co-exist. That Anger might co-exist with Love, so that one can be motivated to engage in peaceful dissent, maybe?  There are other ways to motivate action, and anger can, of course, lead to the dark side, but passion can be directed towards turning out the vote, for getting folks to ignore the costs of collective action and ignore the logic of free-riding.

Maybe this is all rationalization since I suck at letting go.  I am trying to let go of a key long held resent since the subject has reflected and admitted much remorse even if the behavior has not entirely changed.  I am reaching the point of being able to forgive and let go the anger towards this person.  On the other hand, I still feel anger and will refuse to forgive former colleagues who continue to act in the same old ways.  For me, I guess, forgiveness requires that there is learning and remorse... (and I am not alone) which means I am not able to forgive the murderer of nine people last week.  So, perhaps I can only think of focusing my anger in positive ways since I cannot let go.

Just like the U.S. is a work in progress, so am I...

Meanings of America

Last weekend, I got to see Ellis Island and Liberty Island.  I had been to the latter before but not to the former.  What struck me most of all?  How incredibly diverse the people visiting these places were.  I am not a huge fan of ELF--ethnolinguistic fractionalization score as a variable in quantitative work on ethnic conflict and civil war--but I cannot imagine any place getting a higher value than those two places. ELF--essentially measures the odds of whether you bump into someone in your ethnic group--was close to one, indicating that nearly everyone there seemed to be from a distinct ethnic group/nationality. 

And I felt real good about that--that these two locations represent a key part of what it means to be an American--that being American is not about where one comes from or the color of one's skin or the language they speak but something else.  What that else is may change over time.  It is freighted with the tragic mistakes and problems of the past (slavery, what was done to the native Americans) and of the present.

Others see America as a place for white people, maybe white Christians (narrowly defined).  That seems to be the story of today (again) as a white guy shot up a Black church.  This crime is not one thing--it is not a hate crime or terrorism or spree shooting--it is all of these things.  And apparently the guy said that he viewed Blacks as taking over and they "need to go."  This hate is deeply ingrained in American history, but it is not the America that I saw at Ellis Island and at Liberty Island. 

So, we have dueling conceptions of America, and this conflict is not going to go away.  We will see stuff like this happen again and again as it has happened many times before.  I'd like to focus on the positive side, but that is easy for me since I never had to worry much about the personal consequences of Driving While Black, Walking While Black, Hanging Out in My House While Black....

All I know is that what happened is awful and that we will probably not learn that much from it because it is really not anything new.  What a depressing thought after an uplifting weekend a week ago.