Reading as Labor

One of my favorite new activities is reading while sitting outside my local coffee shop and liquor store located on the town square of my hometown during normal business hours.  While I generally dislike the contrived pretentiousness that often accompanies public reading, I started noticing an interesting trend.  Try this sometime.  Select a location that you frequent and where you are among people who know you, or at least among people who know who you are in a pedestrian sort of way.  Begin reading, and then keep track of people’s good-humored attempts at playful comments as they pass.      

“Don’t you have a job?”  “You have the day off?”  “Cutting school?”  “I wish I had time to read.” “Must be nice!” 

The older I get, the more these seemingly innocuous comments irritate me.  I know these folks are kind and well-meaning, and they intend no maliciousness.  We’ve all likely made similar comments in similar situations.  This type of lighthearted interaction is simply normative.  My irritation is not with the people making these comments but rather with what these norms and comments indicate about our culture and the way we think about and devalue reading. 

Many people struggle to actually read books even as they simultaneously state their desire to have more time to read.  It’s not uncommon for people to periodically acquire a book, set it somewhere prominent in our home or office, and resolve to spend time each day reading.  We may dutifully read for two or three days before days begin to slip by without reading.  A week or two later we may put the book on a shelf, promising ourselves that we’ll come back to it when we have more time.  More often than not, I think what many of us are confronting in these moments is that meaningful reading is laborious.  The prevalent idea that reading is an inherently fun and leisurely activity often collides with our actual experience, and when reading gets challenging and laborious, novice readers often stop making the effort.  Reading requires more than time.  Reading requires commitment, self-discipline, dedication, persistence, and long-term concentration and focus.  Reading requires practice.  Reading requires sacrificing time that could be spent on less mentally demanding and more fun activities.  Reading can also be, as I’m sometimes told by students, boring.  I agree, sometimes reading is boring.  For example, try reading Noam Chomsky.  With all due respect, the man’s writing is boring.  What’s also true is that Noam Chomsky is brilliant.  A tenacious reader will eventually come to understand this, but it will require lots of effort and lots of reading other people’s work prior to reading Chomsky in order to even begin to understand him. 

It forever astonishes me that college professors are expected to be content experts but that when professors spend time reading to develop and refine our expertise it is largely perceived as non-work.  I’ve spent my fair share of time reading during my teaching career.  Much of this time was on weekends, and the majority of this time was during the months when teachers are often scorned and denigrated for having the “summer off.”  The prevailing attitude is that if professors are reading (or writing), we are not actually working.  Even worse, we are perceived as enjoying leisure time that others cannot access as part of their own employment and thus, we are sometimes resented or envied.  At the same time, if professors don’t read, we are less able to perform our job well in the classroom and we will be admonished for not keeping up-to-date in our discipline or with our pedagogy.  Apparently, teachers are supposed to magically know what to teach and how to effectively teach without wasting time engaged with the non-work of reading. 

I am all too familiar with the attitude of reading as non-work.  I spent much of my youth making fun of people who read.  While I have many fond memories of being read to as a child, by the time I started school I fully embraced the secular cultural doctrine of anti-intellectualism and learned to avoid and detest reading.  Furthermore, reading was an activity that was associated in my young mind with being female, and nearly every American boy coming of age in the 1980s got the message early and often that being a boy/man meant the rejection of all things feminine.  And even though reading is more widely considered a normative behavior for females, this didn’t stop me from regularly making fun of a girl in my class as early as third grade because of the books that she read.  This girl was reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace in Elementary School.  Not kidding.  She is now a medical doctor.

This culture’s attitude about reading is ripe with contradictions.  On the one hand, reading is supposedly a leisure activity for those with the privilege of not needing to perform actual work who can thus enjoy reading in ways that others cannot access.  Must be nice, don’t you have a job?  On the other hand, reading is a laborious struggle for many people to sustain much less comprehend what they are reading.  If I were to lend my book to the people making those playful comments to me on the street, would they be able to sustain the effort to read it?  Would they understand what they were reading?  I’m not posing these questions in an effort to denigrate people or minimize the knowledge, skills, and work lives of those making these comments to me.  I concede that these folks have knowledge, skills, and work lives that I do not understand.  What baffles me is that comments that normalize reading as non-work, regardless of intention or tone, denigrate and diminish a form of work that is fundamental to my profession.  It is inconceivable that it would be acceptable for me to make comments, playful or otherwise, that would devalue the work and knowledge of others.    

Comments that normalize an attitude of reading as non-work underpin more blatant manifestations of anti-intellectualism.  Normative comments that belittle reading effectively act as subtle encouragement to avoid reading or to put forth effort to cultivate the literacy skills that allow a person to become a more knowledgeable and informed citizen.  In short, we cannot lessen social problems or preserve democracy without a literate electorate.  We must consider ways to combat this form of anti-intellectualism.  Here is one modest suggestion.  The next time you encounter an acquaintance (or stranger) who is reading, please consider alternative ways to interact that will support and encourage the work of literacy and normalize reading as labor.    

“Enjoying your book?”  “What are you reading?”  “Do you think that’s a book I might be interested in?”  “What’s your book about?”  “What interested you in this book?”  Or perhaps after a simple and kind greeting, “I’ll leave you alone so you can get back to work.” 

Most new professors learn quickly that failure to read inhibits our development as teachers. You don’t realize how little you know about your own discipline until you are in the position of having responsibility for publicly explaining and teaching your curriculum for 150 minutes a week for 16 straight weeks.  When I began teaching, I would prepare pages of notes on a yellow legal pad for each class period only to occasionally come up 10-15 minutes short.  This happened periodically during my first couple years of teaching, and I was embarrassed every time.  It took me several years to build my knowledge base within my discipline and prevent this.  I accomplished this not by taking more classes but by reading.  Reading is simply an inherent part of the teaching profession.    

Regardless of what professors are reading or writing we are working when we are reading or writing, and this applies far beyond books.  We are working when we are reading articles from The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and the like.  We are working when we are watching films and documentaries or attending theatrical performances that apply to our discipline or the Liberal Arts as a whole.  We are working when we read articles from The Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed.  Fun fact, after I wrote the previous sentence I went to the website for The Chronicle of Higher Education and the headline of the story at the top of the page was, “Is This the End of Reading?  Students are coming to college less able and less willing to read.  Professors are stymied.” How serendipitous is that?   

In the spirit of the over-used Gandhi quote about being the change you wish to see in the world, I think I’ll go to my town square tomorrow, a Monday, around 1:00 p.m., first day of the work week, and read.  In fact, I think I’ll sit in front of the liquor store rather than the coffee shop just to up the ante and invite playful contempt.  Maybe I’ll really turn the screws on people and get a non-alcoholic beer to put on the table next to me as a prop.  This will likely further encourage, inflame, and amplify passersby commentary.  

“Don’t you have a job?”  “Yeah, I do.  Right now, I’m working on a book recommended to me by a colleague titled, A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, And Where We’re Going, by Michael Muthukrishna.  It’s a very thought-provoking book, and it’s causing me to reevaluate how I teach certain issues.  I highly recommend the book.  Now, if you will please excuse me, I need to get back to work.” 

Fool Us Twice, Shame on Us

When President Obama won reelection in 2012, the Republican Party and some of its most high-profile leaders took a good, long, hard look at the Party as reported in the “Growth and Opportunity Project,” also known as the 2013 “Autopsy Report.”  The Republican National Committee (RNC) chair at the time, Reince Priebus, referred to this report as “the most comprehensive election review” ever undertaken.  Against the backdrop of back-to-back losses to the nation’s first African-American president, the report contained several key takeaways that were supposed to produce adjustments within the Republican Party.  The report cited the Party’s “marginalization of itself” by failing to appeal beyond shrinking core constituencies.  The report acknowledged the impact of current and future demographic shifts and called upon the Party to soften its public policy positions to be more “welcoming and inclusive.”  The report expressed concern that Latinx voters perceived the Party as rejecting them.  Finally, the Autopsy Report concluded that if the Party did not stop “talking to itself” it would become increasingly difficult for the Party to appeal to new and increasingly diverse voters.  All of these key recommendations within the Autopsy Report were situated in an effort to adjust to demographic shifts and more inclusively appeal to voters, a textbook set of recommendations with respect for democratic principles and adherence to democratic processes.   

In 2016, Governor Jeb Bush (Florida), Governor Chris Christie (New Jersey), and Governor John Kasich (Ohio) did their best to abide by these recommendations during the Republican primary only to be summarily rejected by Republican primary voters who tend to be more politically extreme and disproportionately white, male, and/or Christian Evangelical.  Instead of using the Autopsy Report as a gameplan for a more successful long-term strategy, the victorious 2016 Republican primary candidate doubled-down on a short-term strategy rooted in the past; trickle-down/neoliberal economics, racist appeals, xenophobic fear of immigrants, Christian fundamentalism, constitutional originalism, misogyny, a cult of patriarchal masculinity, and scientific illiteracy.  In the 2016 General Election, this candidate won the Electoral College by appealing to what sociologist Michael Kimmel refers to as aggrieved entitlement, “a perception that the benefits and/or status you believe yourself entitled to have been wrongfully taken away from you by unforeseen forces.”  This manipulation and exploitation of aggrieved entitlement subsequently fueled an even more extreme state-level push to enact voter suppression laws and further gerrymander congressional districts, dispense with legislative and procedural norms, appoint judges with questionable qualifications, discredit journalists for doing their jobs, and undermine teachers and public education curriculum.  Instead of following the recommendations of their own Party’s Autopsy Report, Republican voters chose a wannabe autocrat who primarily appeals to a shrinking numerical minority of the population, exactly what the 2013 RNC Autopsy Report warned against.  The only way this strategy can lead to long-term success is to dismantle democracy itself. 

Since the 2016 election, articles and books from nearly every academic discipline have been documenting the historical parallels between contemporary American politics and past and current autocracies.  Unfortunately, very little of this history, literature, or academic research will ultimately change the minds of people so far down the rabbit hole that they’re willing to vote for an insurrectionist, a person who skipped town rather than participate in the orderly and time-honored peaceful transfer of power, and someone who recently met with and praised the autocratic Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán.  Any ONE of these infractions (among many others from which to choose) should effectively disqualify this candidate in the minds of democratically literate voters.    

An Electoral College victory for the anti-democracy candidate in 2024 will likely result in further right-wing extremism, creeping fascism, heightened anti-intellectualism, erosion of civil liberties, disregard for the procedural norms necessary to sustain the foundational principles of liberal democracy, and it may nearly cement a system of tyranny by a minority.  However, if the 2024 pro-democracy Presidential candidate is victorious, we may witness one of the most significant political party realignments in American history, forcing the Republican Party to revisit their own 2013 Autopsy Report and adjust the Party platform to support more inclusive policy positions that appeal to women, people of color, LGBTQ+, religious minorities, and people who are scientifically literate and concerned about climate change.  People who lean conservative but who remain tethered to reality and who wish to save the Republican Party and American democracy itself cannot simply not vote.  They’re going to have to vote for the pro-democracy candidate, regardless of public policy disagreements, in order to force the Republican Party to adapt, evolve, expel treasonous candidates and voters, and appeal to moderate voters who prioritize country and democracy over Party.  It is imperative that we understand that modern autocracies, such as Hungary and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, arise less from an outright coup and more through the use of lawfare, “the strategic use of legal proceedings to intimidate or hinder an opponent.”  

From 1992 to 2020, the only Republican Presidential candidate to win the popular vote is George W. Bush in 2004.  In the decades prior to the 2000 Electoral College victory for George W. Bush in 2000, large majorities on both sides of the political aisle supported the elimination of the Electoral College in favor of a direct, popular vote for the Presidency.  “A 1966 Gallup poll found 63 percent support for abolishing the Electoral College.”  That same year, 90 percent of members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce supported Electoral College reform or abolishment.  A year later, the American Bar Association also supported abolishment, referring to the Electoral College as “archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous, indirect, and dangerous.”  By 1969 support for Electoral College abolishment was shared by prominent members of both political parties as well as the AFL-CIO and the League of Women Voters.  By 1969, polls indicated that 81 percent of Americans supported the abolishment of the Electoral College, and a proposal to do so was approved by the House of Representatives by a vote of 338-70.  When the U.S. Senate finally took a “cloture vote” on September 17th, 1970, 54 Senators voted in favor of ending the debate and to proceed with a vote to abolish the Electoral College.  However, 54 votes to end debate did not meet the threshold to defeat a procedural filibuster, and so states never got an opportunity to vote on a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College.  

The Senate filibuster, a counter-majoritarian procedural mechanism, is NOT enshrined in the U.S. constitution as some assume.  The very first U.S. Senate adopted a “previous question motion” that allowed a simple majority to end debate.  In 1806, this motion had been used so little that the Senate eliminated the rule entirely out of concern that it could be employed to avoid debate.  By eliminating the “previous question motion,” the U.S. Senate inadvertently lost the procedural mechanism to end debate and force a vote on a bill.  For several decades, this didn’t really matter or impact debate and lawmaking.  Then, around 1850, Southern senators began framing the filibuster, a procedural tactic to prolong debate and delay or prevent a vote entirely, as a “constitutional minority right.”  The filibuster gradually gained currency and legitimacy, but only at the rate of about two filibusters a decade up till 1917.  When the U.S. entered WWI in 1917, a Senate filibuster was employed to prevent a vote on a bill that would have permitted the Wilson administration to arm US merchant ships to defend against German U-boat attacks.  With no existing rule by which to procedurally end debate and force a vote in the Senate, and with assistance from Senators allied with President Wilson, the Senate passed “Rule 22,” requiring two-thirds of Senators to vote in favor of ending debate and to force a vote on a bill, a practice known as “cloture.”  In the modern era, with fifty U.S. States and one-hundred Senators, cloture now requires 60 of 100 Senators.    

Throughout the 20^th century, use of the filibuster gradually increased.  “Minority veto power was used to block anti-lynching legislation in 1922, 1937, and 1940 (despite more than 70 percent public support), as well as bills to abolish the poll tax in 1942, 1944, and 1946 (despite more than 60 percent public support).”  Still, the filibuster was rarely used because it still required Senators to “hold the floor—by speaking continuously—to sustain a filibuster.”  Then in 1970 the Senate filibuster was unleashed by permitting Senators to simply signal their intent to filibuster.  The easier it got to employ the filibuster, the more frequently it was used by the minority party to thwart popular majority legislation.  Today, filibustering is as simple as a phone call or email to Senate leaders indicating an intent to filibuster.  According to the Brennan Center for Justice (as of 2021), “There have been more than 2,000 filibusters since 1917; about half have been in just the last 12 years.”  Effectively, our current U.S. Senate requires a super-majority (60) to call for a vote on a bill.  However, simply eliminating the filibuster without additional procedural and structural adjustments and constitutional amendments is also potentially problematic. 

During the Constitutional Convention in 1787, less populated states rejected proposals for proportional representation in the Senate, fearing that more populated states would exercise too much control.  A bargain was struck.  The number of Representatives from each state within The House of Representatives would be determined proportionally by state population whereas the Senate would be comprised of two Senators from each state, regardless of population.  Additionally, slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person for determining the number of delegates from each state in the House of Representatives.  The three-fifths clause initially increased the South’s representation in the House by 25 percent, effectively giving the South control of nearly half of the House of Representatives. 

While each state now elects two U.S. Senators by direct election rather than appointed by state legislatures, we still elect two Senators per state.  Anyone with even a vague notion of how the U.S. population (341,814,420) is distributed by state will quickly understand why this is so problematic.  States like Wyoming (584,057) and Vermont (647,464) have as much influence in the U.S. Senate as Texas (30,503,301) and California (38,965,193).  As a result, “At no time during the twenty-first century have Senate Republicans represented a majority of the U.S. population.  After the 2020 election, which left the Senate evenly split, the fifty Democratic Senators represented 55 percent of Americans—41.5 million more people than the fifty Republican Senators.”  In 2016, Senate Republicans won a fifty-two-seat majority, but they represented only 45 percent of Americans.  It is vital to remember that one of the functions of the U.S. Senate is to thoroughly vet and vote on confirmation of Presidential nominations to the Supreme Court.  As a result, “Four of the nine Supreme Court justices—Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—were confirmed to serve life-time appointments by a (Republican) Senate majority that collectively won a minority of the popular vote.”  Additionally, three of these justices were nominated by a President who lost the popular vote in 2016.    

In the 2024 Presidential election, there is a candidate on the ballot who has made no attempt to conceal his dictatorial aspirations and intentions to further engage in lawfare and destroy the republic.  Nor are his supporters shy about their intentions.  Jack Posobiec is a right-wing activist who, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, has extensive ties to white supremacists.  Notably, he delivered a welcome speech at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).  Posobiec remarked, “Welcome to the end of democracy.  We are here to overthrow it completely.  We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here.”  Posobiec then held up a cross necklace. 

The impending 2024 Presidential election is, in effect, a referendum on democracy with just as serious implications as the 2020 election.  We will either elect the pro-democracy candidate and reaffirm our commitment to democratic principles, or we will cede the legacy and responsibility we inherited to anti-democracy forces who will further engage in lawfare and resume our slide toward a dystopian autocracy, a tyranny of the minority.  One of the most maddening parts of this entire situation is that the anti-democracy candidate regularly exploits anti-intellectualism by misappropriating the language of his critics and projecting his own reckless behavior onto his pro-democracy rival, a man who still regularly espouses his desire and belief in bipartisan legislation.  Joe Biden may be a lot of things, but a threat to democracy is not one of them.    

As reported by The Hill on February 18^th of this year, “The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey which was conducted from Nov. 15 to Dec. 31, included current and recent members of the Presidents and Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, which is the foremost organization of social science experts in presidential politics.”  President Biden was ranked 14^th of 45.  In addition to being the 45^th President of the United States, President Trump was ranked 45^th. 

If President Trump wins the Electoral College and possibly even the popular vote in 2024, it won’t be because a majority of people support him.  In addition to voter suppression laws, it will be because otherwise good, decent, and reasonable people didn’t vote because they failed to understand the long-term consequences of their inaction.  Avoiding our civic responsibility by deceiving ourselves into thinking that both candidates are equally unqualified, essentially adopting a position of neutrality on the choice, is civic recklessness.  We don’t get the luxury of voting for the candidate we want; we have a civic responsibility to vote for the best option on the ballot.  Electing the pro-democracy Presidential candidate will not ensure progressive policy changes in the near future, but it may preserve a system that is capable of doing so in the decades to come.   

“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”  —-John Stuart Mill, February 1, 1867

Inspired by, Tyranny of the Minority, by Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, both professors of Government at Harvard University.  A fabulous and highly accessible read.  Gift the book to a good, decent, and reasonable person who is considering not voting for President in 2024.   

The Right Book, at the Right Time, for the Right Person

For the past several years, I’ve required students in my Race & Ethnicity class to read the book, So You Want to Talk about Race, by Ijeoma Oluo.  The chapters are relatively short, readable for students who may not have a lot of background knowledge, and I’ve had excellent completion rates among my students.  Many have written excellent papers 10-15 pages in length even though I set the minimum requirement at eight pages.  However, I’ve also questioned and pained over my selection of this book due to the high caliber of the students who typically enroll in this particular class.  I probably should have elevated my expectations and selected a more challenging book.  The problem is that I have to select books well in advance of knowing who will be in the class or how well they will grasp the course curriculum leading up to the book.  If I had known this information in advance, I would have selected the book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, by Heather McGhee. 

While I like Oluo’s book and admire the niche that her book serves in the classroom, I think McGhee’s book is among the top five contemporary books I’ve ever read on race and racism.  McGhee writes for an audience that has more in-depth knowledge regarding race.  Each author’s narrative is guided by a set of assumptions about the knowledge base of their intended audience.  Importantly, each book assumes that the reader understands or is at least open to considering racially discriminatory patterns as primarily systemic and historically embedded problems that exist independently of personal prejudices and behaviors. 

Ideally, neither of these books should be read without the necessary background knowledge and historical context to keep the reader focused on what each author is actually writing about.  This preparation will hopefully keep the reader focused on political solutions to social problems rather than focusing on individual change. Within the classroom, I have the opportunity to create a learning environment where this preparation can occur over the course of a couple months prior to reading any book.  Of course, not all readers of these books have the advantage of being students, and not all readers bring enough background knowledge to these books to fully contextualize the issues.  Just as writers have to think carefully about their intended audience and meet them where they are, readers also have to accurately self-assess their own knowledge and select the right book, at the right time, for them. 

Most of the time, I think I do okay with selection of books for my students and for myself.  I’m sure I’ve made errors and passed-up books that could have been highly impactful on my own thinking and teaching or been particularly effective for my students.  Sometimes I get lucky, and I self-correct and read something engaging and thought-provoking that was right in front of me for years.  For instance, during the past two years, I’ve received a minimum of one email a month recommending the book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson.  Each time, I would glance at the email and quickly hit delete.  This may have been a knee-jerk reaction to the book’s commercial success.  It’s a foolish assumption to make, but I know I kept reading “#1 New York Times Bestseller” and “Oprah’s Book Club 2020” and dismissed the book as intended for a different reader.  The barrage of emails finally wore me down, and I got a copy of Caste and resigned myself to reading it during holiday break.      

I sheepishly admit that Wilkerson hooked and reeled me in quickly.  I am not suggesting the book lives up to the platitudes that many reviewers have showered on it, but the book has the potential to move the needle and foster depth of understanding among a wider audience.  Among several strengths of the book, one is chief in my mind.  This book has the potential to help the reader develop a deeper appreciation of the present-day impact of American race history.  In my experience in the classroom, helping students understand WHY we study history is the primary hurdle, and Wilkerson provides teachers, in particular, pedagogical tools for helping students overcome this hurdle. 

In just one of many ways that she accomplishes this, Wilkerson describes living in the United States as akin to living in an old house.  Present-day dwellers of old homes were not alive when the home was built, nor do we have any idea where the materials to build the home came from, what kinds of decisions were made by previous owners about repairs and preventive upkeep, quality of the materials used, or whether the repairs were completed with short-term goals of affordability or long-term goals of quality and stability.  Residents of old homes do not deserve blame for decisions that predate their ownership, but the home and the responsibility to address the problems are now theirs. 

When it comes to race and the legacy of racism, residents of the United States are ALL living in a home that is four-hundred years old.  Our home also happens to have been built on location where the idea of biological race was first conceived and codified into law in order to rationalize and justify slavery.  We cannot fix our home if we are oblivious to how our present has been shaped by our past.  And if we fail to identify the problems and accept responsibility for fixing the problems we’ve inherited, our problems don’t simply remain but intensify and worsen as a result of our passive inaction.  These problems impact everyone in the house, albeit in very different ways and with great variation based on personal racial identity and the intersectionality of our race with numerous other social positions we each occupy.      

The brunt of Wilkerson’s book rests in search of historical commonalities among three seemingly different but arguably similar systems of human oppression and exploitation:  India’s caste system, the Nazis and the Holocaust, and American Slavery.  Wilkerson identifies eight common pillars these three systems share, among them the belief in inherent superiority/inferiority, rituals of dehumanization, the use of terror and violence to enforce subordination, and the heritability of social position.  She highlights historical parallels in the ways each system was normalized, naturalized, and enforced. 

Wilkerson glides seamlessly from writing about Martin Luther King Jr. visiting India in an effort to understand the caste system to the Nazi’s careful study of the creation of race in the American colonies and the American legal system that emerged to categorize a permanent underclass based on race in order to justify slavery.  The Third Reich’s study of American history informed their own development of the Nuremberg Laws designed to formalize and institutionalize the subordination of Jewish people whom Nazis believed were poisoning the blood of their country.  Similar in style to the way in which Michelle Alexander persuasively argues in The New Jim Crow that the criminal justice system is essentially doing the work of yesterday’s Jim Crow laws, Wilkerson wields the concept of caste to shed light on the historical malleability and durability of white supremacy in the United States.  She is NOT suggesting these systems are identical, but rather that they mirror one another in terms of their organizing principles and historical rigidity.  In short, Wilkerson is attempting to make institutional racism and white supremacy more visible by employing the language of caste and exploring the parallels of India’s caste system with Nazi Germany and racialized American slavery. 

While reading Caste, I did that thing that I should not do but that I have trouble stopping myself from doing.  I started reading one-star reviews of Caste on Amazon.  The content of most of these reviews is exactly what I would have predicted from people who either did not read the book or who did not understand the book.  A few other reviewers, apparently, felt the need to publicly demonstrate how smart and well-read they are by pointing out various historical omissions in Wilkerson’s book.  Why didn’t she talk about this?  How does she explain this? She left this inconvenient fact out!  Seriously, people?  Do these reviewers really believe that Wilkerson is unaware of what was done to Indigenous and Latinx people by white settler colonialism?  Do they really think she is unaware of the unique historical trajectory of every other racial minority group who are not Black within the United States?  She was not attempting to write THAT book.  If that’s the book you want to read, then go read it.  Editorial decisions about what to exclude from a text does not necessarily constitute ignorance on behalf of the author.  

Some reviewers are all too eager to demonstrate their misunderstanding by asserting in a myriad of ways that they treat everyone the same and are thus not part of the problem, a response indicative of someone who either did not read the book or who failed to understand what they read.  Another commonality among confused and often agitated readers is personal defensiveness and assertions that they refuse to feel “guilty” for something they did not do.  This reaction is not atypical among readers who may not have acquired the skills to think structurally, institutionally, and historically about race. 

Outside of a small percentage of poor reviews from lay readers on Amazon, there are a couple much more serious and substantive academic critiques of Caste that, to be sure, should not be casually dismissed.  The crux of these sharper and more highly-informed critiques, as I understand them, is the failure to acknowledge how the socio-historical construction of race and white supremacy are intertwined with capitalist expansion and exploitation, and a few academically astute readers detect an upper-class bias to Wilkerson’s narrative.  Fair enough.  However, regardless of omissions, weaknesses, or blind spots, I still think this book is capable of cracking the door open for a wider audience to an eventual deeper understanding of race and racism.  This is the niche this book fills, and whether or not a person should read this book is a matter of whether this book is the right book, at the right time, for the right person.  Academic criticism aside, it takes a special talent to write simply, effectively, and to persuasively present material that cracks a door open for novice readers without triggering personal defensiveness.  In many ways, cracking the door open for the uninitiated reader is way more challenging than fully opening the cracked door for the choir.  While academic researchers excel in the latter, teachers are specialists in the former. 

I finished reading Caste quickly.  The writing style is extraordinary and highly engaging.  My initial apprehension to reading Caste was its mainstream success. However, the more I thought about this, a truth about my reading preferences emerged.  Nearly all of my personal selections for the most impactful books about race and racism have appeared on bestseller lists.

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, by Heather McGhee

The 1619 Project:  A New Origin Story, by Nikole-Hannah Jones

The New Jim Crow:  Mass incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, by Ibram X. Kendi

Racism Without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality, by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

Each of these authors, including Wilkerson, is particularly skilled at writing about complicated and often challenging issues in comprehensible and engaging ways.  They each excel at what some of the best academic researchers are not particularly good at, effectively communicating with non-experts.  These authors are, ultimately, exceptional teachers.  They are able to quickly and powerfully explain race as a socio-historical construction that is American-made and expose the brutal and contemporary legacy of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and colorblind racism.  If you prefer to read other books about race and racism with more academic-laden prose and complexity that include all the nitty-gritty research details, knock yourself out.  However, if you are a novice reader with a genuine desire to understand these issues better, one of the books listed above, including Caste, may be the right book, at the right time, for you.    

Why write about this?  In the year 2024, within one of the two major political parties in the United States, there is a Presidential candidate who seeks to ban books that document and demonstrate the legacy of our racist, sexist, and homophobic past, another candidate who cannot even muster the courage to publicly acknowledge that the Civil War WAS about slavery, and another candidate who is parroting Nazis and scapegoating people who are “poisoning the blood of the country.”  Those who suggest that these behaviors are “not normal” are not familiar with American history; these behaviors are all too normal.  If we were a healthy and fully functioning democracy, we would have learned from our history and these modern-day behaviors would make a candidate for any public office effectively unelectable. 

Contemporary American politics must be understood against the backdrop of racial demographic shifts that will make white people less than fifty percent of the US population within twenty years.  White anxiety surrounding this shift is the impetus for racial gerrymandering of congressional districts to pack as many people of color into as few congressional districts as possible and voter suppression tactics that disproportionately disenfranchise people of color and all poor people.  It is not hyperbolic to suggest that a viable path toward repairing OUR home and creating a just and inclusive democracy may not survive the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election.  History is not something that happens to us; history is made by our choices.

“If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”  — Abraham Lincoln

Postscript:  As I was finishing Caste, I learned that film director Ava DuVernay is set to release a biographical drama this month based on Caste titled Origin.  Origin places Wilkerson in the lead role and follows her personal life, travel, speaking, investigation, and writing of Caste.  Given DuVernay’s previous work, that includes the films Selma and the documentaries 13^th and When They See Us, I anticipate a powerful film.  

On Learning New Words

I’m in the process of wrapping my head around a word that up till about six months ago was not part of my lexicon.  I’m not sure why, given what I read and teach, this word has eluded me as long as it has.  When I first read this word, I had trouble saying the word aloud let alone understanding what the word really means.  Given how rare it is for me to hear this word in conversation, I’m inclined to think that most people have never heard this word and, if they have, do not fully understand the meaning of the word and how to correctly use it.  To the best of my recollection, no one I personally know has ever used this word in conversation with me.  I’m still not sure I fully understand the word and how and when to properly use it.  I hope writing about this word will help me more fully grasp its meaning, clarify my own thinking, and enhance my ability to employ this word confidently, precisely, and accurately in my analysis and defense of American democracy.  I hope others will join me in using this word. The word is illiberal. 

I understand my initial struggle with grasping the word illiberal, and it’s really not surprising even if it is somewhat embarrassing to admit.  The prefix “il,” of course, means “not.”  In common contemporary usage, liberal is primarily utilized as a noun, to refer to someone who holds political beliefs associated with the political left.  As a result, when my brain hears the word “illiberal” it more quickly and readily tries to associate the term with someone who does NOT hold political beliefs associated with the political left.  In everyday language we readily speak of liberals and conservatives, not liberals and illiberals.  Given the common usage of the word liberal as a noun to refer to people on the political left, my brain was having a very difficult time switching to the use of liberal as an adjective, as in “liberal democracy.”  Given what I teach, you may have assumed this would not have been such a struggle for me, especially given my regularly occurring defenses of liberal arts education.  Perhaps some of my difficulties were further complicated by my regular use of the term “neo-liberalism” to refer to the politically conservative philosophy in favor of liberating the free market from governmental regulations and labor unions.  Regardless of the reasons for my confusion, I was confused.  In the process of dealing with my confusion and ignorance, I’ve realized more than ever that the primary threat to American democracy in the contemporary era is illiberalism. 

American democracy is a liberal democracy, referring to a commitment to the protection of individual liberties.  The health and maintenance of liberal democracy depends on citizens who understand and protect the rights to due process and legal equality, freedom of speech and religion, an independent judiciary, and the maintenance of a free and independent system of journalism.  The preservation of a liberal democracy requires an adherence and a commitment to process, regardless of outcome, and especially when the outcome is unfavorable for those who hold power.  Until recently, this commitment to liberal democracy is how the United States navigated the peaceful transition of power between political parties.  We need elected leaders who closely adhere, respect, and accept the constraints of a liberal democracy on their own power.  There are historical examples of both Republican and Democratic administrations who failed, at various times, to adhere and follow the constraints of liberal democracy.  In these moments, these leaders were acting illiberally and placing American democracy at risk. 

The common idea that American democracy is simply a system of majority rule fails to formally acknowledge that the majority are expected to protect and abide by minority protections afforded by a liberal democracy.  If a person wins the office of the President within a system of majority rule (leaving aside the issue of the Electoral College) and then proceeds to act illiberally in an effort to dismantle rights to due process and legal equality, curb freedom of speech and religion, dictate educational curriculum, defund public education and ban books, undo an independent judiciary, intimidate journalists, and refuse to accept the outcomes of fair and free elections while implementing policies of voter suppression, they have placed their Party’s interests and/or personal interests ahead of what’s best for the nation.  These illiberal actions thus place the long-term stability of American democracy at risk. 

Any person seeking political office who advocates, supports, and pledges to act illiberally if they are elected, poses an inherent threat to American democracy.  I do not fear a Republican/conservative president as long as this person demonstrates a commitment to the tenets of liberal democracy.  Similarly, I would never support a Democratic presidential nominee who espoused ideas and policy positions that are illiberal.  In both cases, these candidates would be elevating their own Party’s interests above the well-being of the nation, using majority rule and the democratic process to dismantle liberal democracy itself.  Majoritarianism is sometimes used to rationalize and justify illiberal, anti-democratic actions. Within recent years, Brazil, Hungary, Turkey, and other countries have all had majority elected leaders who were/are acting illiberally, behaving in ways we might refer to as “creeping authoritarianism.” 

Today, illiberal voices are making lots of noise, which may suggest illiberalism may be gaining support within the United States.  Largely propelled by wannabe political “strong men” who vehemently proclaim their love of this country, these people either do not care, do not understand, or do not respect the basic tenets of liberal democracy.  Against the background of demographic shifts, these individuals masterfully wield fear and prejudice in an effort to garner enough votes to place themselves in positions of power to ultimately dismantle liberal democracy.  Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump and his ilk strenuously deny their own illiberalism and then project it onto their opponents.  Ultimately, Trump is a symptom of wider historical forces.  Others are eagerly lining up behind Trump, poised to continue his assault on liberal democracy.    

Nothing I’ve just written is necessarily different from what I’ve written previously.  Only now, I’m employing the linguistic tool of “illiberal” to more precisely identify the most dangerous threat to American democracy.  If “illiberal” were to become a commonly used and widely understood concept, we may be able to more effectively inform and educate and prevent this nation from becoming Brazil, Hungary, or Turkey.  In a two-party representative democracy, we need two functioning political parties that are fully committed to the preservation of liberal democracy.  Any candidate for any elected office who will not pledge to uphold and adhere to the basic tenets of liberal democracy should be soundly rejected by a well-informed and educated populous who understand the inherent danger of illiberalism. 

An illiberal democracy is NOT a democracy.  

What Barbie Can Teach Us About Oppenheimer

More than a catchy marketing ploy known as “Barbenheimer,” there is value to viewing the films Barbie and Oppenheimer back-to-back that, to the best of my knowledge, has not been addressed by movie reviewers and cultural critics.  I’ve read many reviews of each film, mostly positive but a few critical of Barbie’s history and Oppenheimer’s omissions.  Nearly all the reviews have explored various facets of each film in insightful, meaningful ways that continue the conversation beyond the films.  I found both films to be equally superb, albeit in very different ways and for very different reasons.  However, what is noticeably absent in the critiques of these two seemingly different films is the underlying connection between them.

Film is a form of public pedagogy.  To characterize this particular artistic expression as simply or solely “entertainment” is to view film through the capitalist lens.  However, the educational capacity of film is what makes film a cultural and political force.  Film is a relatively accessible artistic expression that has the potential to be culture bearing.  What I mean by “culture bearing” is that film has the potential to impact and alter culture and public policy.  Film can produce transformative, generational change that results in public policies that address our most pressing concerns as citizens and as temporary occupants of Earth.  This is why art is fundamental to democracy, and this is why film must be understood as public pedagogy.  While true for all forms of artistic expression, film is, perhaps, one of the most impactful forms of public pedagogy in the modern era due to its mass appeal and the medium’s ability to appeal simultaneously on an intellectual and emotional level.  

Barbie and Oppenheimer are two examples of exceptional use of this medium to produce culture bearing artistic expressions, and each film has much to teach us about our history, the impact on our present, and the precariousness of our future.  Many of these lessons have been written and discussed extensively in the past month.  I have no intention of analyzing what has already been written.  Instead, my intention is to build a bridge between these two films that can best be expressed in a question.  “What can Barbie teach us about Oppenheimer?” 

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a brilliant and insightful juxtaposition of Barbie Land and the real world.  In Barbie Land, women are free to be who they are and pursue any career, in the color and shape of the bodies they inhabit, free of judgement for their appearance and life choices.  Barbie can be whomever she wants in Barbie Land.  However, it is interesting to note that even in Barbie Land Barbie remains hyper-vigilant in her effort to not make Ken feel bad, which remains highly problematic and dangerous for women in the real world.  When traditional Barbie is asked to leave Barbie Land and confront the real world, her expectations are shattered.  In the real world the Kens control society, and every aspect of women’s physical being and choices are scrutinized and judged by the standards of a male, Ken-centric culture.  Upon learning of such a place, Ken returns to Barbie Land to tell the other Kens what he’s discovered and to foment rebellion and overthrow the Barbie-centric culture of Barbie Land.  Betwixt Barbie Land and the real world, the central theme from the film emerges.  Neither Barbie Land nor the real world are particularly good or healthy for women AND men.  The film’s narrative is a deconstruction of a hierarchal gendered society in favor of a de-gendered society built on egalitarianism and equity.  Barbie is more than a superficial feminist critique that seeks women’s inclusive participation within patriarchy.  The film challenges viewers to consider the benefits of a gender fluid social system that eschews gendered, hierarchical categorization and organization.  The film is both a critique of patriarchy’s impact on women and an exploration on how patriarchy, while clearly benefitting men in material ways and privileging male-centeredness, is paradoxically making men unhappy and at the root of many of men’s social and psychological problems.  The film is more than an exploration of gendered relations; the film is an analysis and an indictment of a gendered, patriarchal society. 

Christopher Nolan’s film “Oppenheimer” is cinematic genius both in terms of production and narrative.  The film forced me to re-evaluate many things I thought I knew and believed about American history.  In the film, science, physics, chemistry, mathematics, global politics, economics, morality, philosophy, ethics, love, psychology, and sociology collide.  While not literally setting the Earth’s atmosphere on fire in a chain reaction as some thought possible, we are left to question if the development, detonation, and (arguably) unnecessary deployment of an atomic bomb near the conclusion of World War II set the world’s atmosphere ablaze in a myriad of figurative ways that reverberate today.  However, what is most interesting to me is that no one is commenting, critiquing, or even simply acknowledging the highly masculine, patriarchal nature of this story and history.  Oppenheimer is a story about (white) men, told by (white) men, from (white) men’s point of view.  This is certainly NOT a criticism of the film.  How could this story honestly and accurately be told otherwise?  Ultimately, this is a story about men committing human atrocities and other men’s attempt to thwart further human atrocities by committing more human atrocities.  This historical episode is emblematic of the self-perpetuating cycle of patriarchal domination & control driven by fear, hatred, and bigotry where the only acceptable response to violence and inhumanity is to regain the upper-hand through greater violence and inhumanity.

To be abundantly clear, I am NOT making an argument for or against the development or deployment of the atomic bomb in the context of World War II.  This issue is beyond the scope of this post.  I am ONLY identifying the fact that gender and patriarchal masculinity are invisible and normalized within Oppenheimer’s narrative.  Simply put, if women had been the primary leaders and actors in this historical episode, gender and femininity would be central to the historical narrative and our understanding of what happened and why.  Instead, viewers of Oppenheimer are not challenged or explicitly asked to think of Oppenheimer as a gendered story.  Whether it be Hitler and the Nazis committing genocide, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, or the United States deployment of two atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, this history is a male-based story inherently bound up in patriarchal masculinity.  While not in the film, it is interesting to note that the atomic bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima was referred to as “Little Boy,” and the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki was referred to as “Fat Man.” 

One of the most important scenes from Oppenheimer is one that has generated little commentary.  After President Truman ordered the bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer, who up till this time had mostly approached his role in the development of an atomic bomb as a scientific challenge, is confronted with the real-world implications of its use.  Oppenheimer expresses to President Truman his fears about the future in the wake of the bombings, and Truman subsequently dismisses Oppenheimer as a “crybaby.”  Whereas in Barbie, Ken’s fascination with men’s “cowboy” bravado in the real world is employed as vapid & vacuous performance for comedic and educational value, in the real world of Oppenheimer the wannabe cowboys are in control of the world’s most deadly military force. 

Gender, and patriarchal masculinity in particular, is in the marrow of our culture and institutional structure.  This is precisely why gender issues have proven so highly valuable among some high-profile conservatives, mostly men but a few women, for stoking and leveraging culture wars to create opposition to any progressive policies that address extreme inequality and that would further democratize society in inclusive ways.  Historically speaking, patriarchy is the original hierarchy upon which all other social hierarchies are built.  To question the social construction of gender and patriarchal masculinity is to question the foundation of an economic system that requires the exploitation of humans and the environment.  Essentially, any “ism” or ideology that operates to rationalize and justify the control and exclusion of some humans from life’s necessities, equal opportunities, and basic human rights rests on patriarchal masculinity and the normalization, and even naturalization, of domination.

Oppenheimer is, in part, a cautionary tale of what happens when patriarchal masculinity dominates our society and our politics.  Unfortunately, this lesson from Oppenheimer is being lost in the cultural commentary of the film’s cultural and political significance.  Barbie is explicitly about gender and highly critical of binary ideas about gender that are required for hierarchical organization.  Barbie explores the “war zone” that women in the real world navigate.  Barbie heightens our consciousness of gender and provides viewers of Oppenheimer an additional layer of insight into the film.  Barbie teaches us that Oppenheimer is ALSO a story about gender and that the invisibility of masculinity in Oppenheimer’s narrative is exactly how male power functions on an institutional and cultural level. 

Our problems, social, racial, cultural, economic, agricultural, political, and ecological, are rooted in patriarchy and patriarchal masculinity.  When we talk about gender, and especially patriarchal masculinity, we’re never “just” talking about gender.  We’re also talking about patriarchal white-supremacy, capitalist exploitation of people, soil, water, and corporate domination.  We have a history of treating sex & gender injustice and patriarchy as secondary issues that are rarely prioritized.  Until we prioritize these issues, we will be severely hindered in our ability to make progress with every other form of social and environmental injustice.  And if we’re willing to listen, learn, and evolve, Barbie can teach us how to avoid the next Oppenheimer moment. 

The Public Squalor of Privatized Opulence

The pursuit of privatized opulence requires public squalor.  If we were to collectively acknowledge this self-evident, subversive, inconvenient truth, we’d spend less time blaming poor people for being poor.  Conversely, we’d spend more time challenging the decisions made and policies supported by the non-poor that, in effect, subsidize the creation and concentration of wealth, lower/eliminate tax free inheritance and intergenerational transfers of wealth, and ultimately create poverty.  Social systems like capitalism, whose preservation is dependent on wage slavery, must create ideologies to justify exploitation as the result of laziness and poor decision-making while simultaneously celebrating the “self-made” worth of “makers” who use the system and their connections to corral the spoils.  Ironically, if any one segment of the population’s existence is built on government dependency, it is those who see themselves as “makers.”

Defining and measuring poverty is inherently political and riddled with complications.  In the United States we still, unbelievably, calculate poverty thresholds based on research from 1965.  This 58-year-old calculation was based on the observation that to meet daily dietary needs in 1965, a third of household income was spent on food.  Poverty thresholds were then calculated by taking into account the number of people in a household and multiplying the estimated cost of food by three.  This methodology made little sense in 1965, and it makes even less sense today.  The typical American household spends approximately 10-12% of household income on food, not 33%.  While the cost of food has declined since 1965, the cost of housing has skyrocketed along with every other living expense beyond food.  Furthermore, the poverty thresholds do not account for vast regional variation in the cost of living.  The government did implement a supplemental poverty measure in 2011 in an attempt to address these flaws, but this additional tool is still inadequate.  Additionally, “poverty measures exclude everyone in prison or jail—not to mention those housed in psych wards, halfway houses, and homeless shelters—which means there are millions more poor Americans than official statistics let on.”    

For these reasons, I am disinterested in debating the exact number of people living in poverty, especially with people who suggest with straight-face that there isn’t any real poverty in the United States.  The inescapable reality is that tens of millions of people are needlessly struggling and suffering in the wealthiest nation in the world, living in neighborhoods with deteriorating and dangerous infrastructure, often working (multiple) dead-end jobs that don’t pay the bills so that others may hoard, invest, and make more money that their children will inherit work-free and increasingly tax-free.  Additionally, there are tens of millions more people who live just above the official poverty line who misdirect their legitimate anger at the poor rather than the primary benefactors of their exploitation.  The lack of awareness and understanding of the contemporary impact of history, public policies, and how privatized opulence and public squalor are actually created fosters a worldview that justifies inequality as the deserved outcome of personal failures and successes.    

The poor are less likely to vote, and the poor are disproportionately impacted by the implementation of voter suppression strategies in response to the non-existent problem of voter fraud.  Neither do the poor have the capacity to donate money to political campaigns or lobby congressional representatives.  As a result, advocating for poor people is a political liability for any elected official within a system that has been usurped by the legalized bribery of quid pro quo campaign donations.  Poor people are politically expendable.  Furthermore, the public vitriol directed at poor people is so palpable that even those elected officials who would like to propose and support polices that empower poor people, provide affordable housing, repair infrastructure, and fund high-quality public schools are boxed into a position of silence.  While some representatives are better than others, this is not primarily a people problem.  It’s a structural problem.  Championing policies that require people, and especially those who are major contributors to electoral campaigns, to make minor lifestyle sacrifices in order to uplift and empower poor people who typically don’t vote is rarely rewarded in American politics beyond empty rhetoric.  This is how systemic oppression operates.  Policies designed to uplift the poor, provide food assistance, livable wages, and affordable housing are currently untenable policy positions within American democracy.  What is acceptable and rewarded is labeling poor people as freeloaders who milk the system and supporting punitive policies designed to immiserate and incarcerate a permanent under-class who work the most dangerous jobs at the lowest wages to prop up lives of privatized opulence.      

In the past fifty years, there has only been one major federal policy initiative directed toward poverty, and it was neither progressive nor helpful for the poor.  In 1996, President Bill Clinton (D) fulfilled his campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it” by signing into law the Draconian “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.”  Part of the Clinton strategy to win the Presidency for two terms was to “cozy up” to the Southern Strategy employed by President Nixon (R) and his Republican Presidential successors.  By appealing to classist bigotry and racial prejudices by peddling racially coded “get tough on crime” initiatives, Clinton shifted the entire Democratic Party to the right in an effort to recapture enough white, working-class voters who had fled the Democratic Party during the “Reagan Revolution.”  Further “dragging” both political parties to the right was the rise of arch-conservative House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R), who in 1996 became the first Republican Speaker of the House in forty years.  The table was all but set, and the poor were not invited. 

As a result of the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act,” Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was replaced.  AFDC was administered at the federal level, and almost all AFDC funds were used to provide single-parent families with cash assistance.  In its place, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) was introduced.  TANF awarded each state a “block grant” from the federal government to be administered by each state as deemed necessary by that state.  The outcomes were predictable to anyone even remotely familiar with the history of providing states discretionary power.  “Nationwide, for every dollar budgeted for TANF in 2020, poor families directly received just 22 cents.  Only Kentucky and the District of Columbia spent over half of their TANF funds on basic cash assistance.  Of the $31.6 billion in welfare funding, just $7.1 billion was realized in dollars-in-hand relief to the poor.”    

With nearly no federal oversight as to how states spent the funds, the limits of what constituted assistance to the poor were stretched beyond logic.  Using TANF funds for job training and offsetting childcare costs may have merit, but some states used TANF funds for marriage counseling (Oklahoma), abstinence only education (Arizona), anti-choice women’s pregnancy centers (Pennsylvania), and a Christian summer camp (Maine).  One particularly ludicrous example recently seeped into the news when it was discovered that Mississippi had spent funds hiring evangelical worship singers to perform at church concerts as well as a payment to Brett Favre, former NFL quarterback, to deliver motivational speeches.  (After this story published, Favre returned the payments.) 

These examples only begin to scratch the surface of the highly problematic legacy of the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.”  “States are not required to spend all of their TANF dollars each year, and many don’t, carrying over the unused money into the next year.  In 2020, states had in their possession almost $6 billion in unspent welfare funds.”  Further contributing to this problem, many poor people who are eligible for public assistance don’t apply, in large part due to the purposeful, onerous bureaucratic obstacles associated with the application process.  With states granted such wide discretion in the use of TANF dollars, the poor are further marginalized while states misdirect money in ways that fail to specifically uplift poor people but that appeal to classist, racist, and sexist prejudices about poor people.    

The dominant narrative justifying this situation among those who see themselves as “makers” and the poor as the “takers,” in addition to being morally and ethically bankrupt, is simply inaccurate.   So-called “makers” are receiving more government assistance than the supposed “takers.”  Just a few examples:

“The IRS now estimates that the United States loses more than $1 trillion a year in unpaid taxes, most of it owing to tax avoidance by multinational corporations and wealthy families.” 

“In 2020 the federal government spent more than $193 billion on homeowner subsidies, a figure that far exceeded the amount spent on direct housing assistance for low-income families ($53 billion). 

“The lifetime limit for cash welfare to poor parents is five years, but families claiming the mortgage interest deduction may do so for the length of the mortgage, typically thirty years.  A fifteen-story public housing tower and a mortgaged suburban home are both government- subsidized, but only one looks (and feels) that way.” 

“If you count all public benefits offered by the federal government, America’s welfare state (as a share of its gross domestic product) is the second biggest in the world, after France’s.  But that’s only true if you include things like government subsidized retirement benefits provided by employers, student loans and 529 college savings plans, child tax credits, and homeowner subsidies: benefits disproportionately flowing to Americans well over the poverty line.”

In the United States, we only identify the poor as being on the government dole.  Everyone else, and especially self-described “makers,” believe they earned it and deserve what they receive, even if their wealth, education, and opportunities were government subsidized, inherited, and built on the historical legacy of white settler colonialism, classism, slavery and racism, and sexism.  The reality is that ALL Americans are takers, and this is exactly the point.  The United States could end poverty, hunger, and housing issues if these issues were a political priority.  Instead of acting as poverty abolitionists and demanding public policy changes, we donate to charities and food banks, band-aids that are incapable of addressing the root causes of poverty.  In the meantime, our humanity and empathy coarsen, related social problems are exacerbated, and we delude ourselves in the pursuit of privatized opulence built on public squalor.    

Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond’s most recent book, Poverty, By America, is one of the most accessible books on poverty in America that I have read.  In fewer than two-hundred pages, Desmond clearly explains and provides the historical context, details, and data necessary for informed public policy debates related to poverty, food insecurity, and housing.  Desmond’s strategy is somewhat unique in that he mostly refrains from placing blame on either political party for the creation and condition of the poor in the United States.  Instead, Desmond simply drops this issue at the doorstep of the non-poor and challenges readers, “How is our inaction morally and ethically justifiable?” 

In 1962, sociologist Michael Harrington published The Other America.  The book heightened public consciousness about poverty and led to the creation of poverty thresholds and public policies intended to uplift the other America.  How quaint.  A public intellectual and writer did research, wrote a culture-bearing book, congressional representatives and citizens read it, who then pressed for policy changes.  This almost makes me nostalgic.  It’s democracy 101.  What are the chances, today, that the people who most need to read Desmond’s book will do so and, if they do, will be emotionally mature enough to hear the message?  Will enough of us support policy changes that reduce or remove governmental assistance directed toward the wealthy and those of us who are economically secure and don’t need assistance?  Will we close the tax loopholes that further concentrate privatized wealth and disinvestment in the public sphere?  And will we ease access to governmental assistance for those who most need it by implementing policies that simplify the process of applying for aid, raise wages, create universal healthcare, subsidize high-quality daycare, provide affordable housing, and dismantle the invisible walls created by zoning regulations that racially segregate neighborhoods and lock the poor out of neighborhoods with affordable housing and well-funded schools? 

A society characterized by excessive economic inequality for the many and lavish privatized opulence for the few requires the public squalor of millions.  Public policies and history created contemporary wealth and poverty in the United States, and public policies hold the potential to solve poverty and minimize economic injustice.  Personalizing poverty is an ignorant exercise in futility that misses the forest for the trees.  And that’s Poverty, By America. 

If you still have questions, the answers are probably in Desmond’s book.  All direct quotations are taken from the book.

The Monetization of Stupidity

I use the word “ignorance” and I’ve made many past references to “willful ignorance,” but I am extremely reluctant to use the word “stupid.”  I do not like this word, nor do I think this word should be used frequently or carelessly, especially in direct reference to people.  I am not using the word “stupid” flippantly here; I’m using it to identify a genuine social-psychological problem. To be ignorant of something is to be unaware yet remain conscious of our ignorance.  We all are ignorant about some things, and for most of us our ignorance includes many things.  I am ignorant of everything mechanical, most everything technological, and nearly everything related to any kind of engineering, just to name a few.  When these and other issues pertaining to my ignorance are urgent to public policy debates, I stop talking, listen carefully, do my best to understand and, most importantly, search for and accept consensus among experts.  Those of us acutely aware of our own ignorance are typically mindful of our limitations, and we make an effort to educate ourselves and value and admire expertise in others.  More problematic than ignorance is willful ignorance, a conscious & deliberate effort to avoid information and reject education in an almost gleeful, prideful commitment to remain ignorant and resistant to changing our thinking and behavior.  Willful ignorance and anti-intellectualism are staples of the American experience, and they have long been recognized and understood as impediments to democracy. 

Beyond ignorance and willful ignorance, and profoundly more dangerous, lies stupidity.  Stupidity may or may not include willful ignorance but it is more specifically a failure to be aware of one’s limitations, often leading to an abundance of unwarranted self-confidence and a gross overestimation of one’s abilities, an outcome psychologists refer to as The Dunning-Kruger Effect.  As cognitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian explains, this is “a well-known psychological phenomenon that describes the tendency for individuals to overestimate their level of intelligence, knowledge, or competence in a particular area. They may also simultaneously misjudge the intelligence, expertise, or competence of others. In other words, they are ignorant of their own ignorance.”  Unsurprisingly, those who display the Dunning-Kruger Effect are attracted to and vote for people who also demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger Effect.      

Sometimes people who are NOT genuinely stupid perform stupidity and deliberately demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger Effect in an effort to cultivate and exploit this quality in others.  For example, we now have (additional) evidence of this phenomenon in the nightly, prime-time broadcast on the Fox News network with Tucker Carlson.  Carlson knowingly broadcast 2020 election misinformation while privately acknowledging the ridiculousness of the claims and ridiculing those making them.  I have long wondered if Tucker Carlson is truly stupid or if he simply plays a stupid person on television to placate and grow his audience.  Apparently, it’s the latter.  Carlson’s performance of stupidity has resulted in the most watched cable news program, and he has masterfully and consciously monetized stupidity for Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation.  The narratives of stupidity Carlson creates subsequently spill onto the internet, further polarizing the electorate and cultivating anger, an emotion that has also been monetized by a handful of social media platforms. 

The media regulatory framework that used to protect OUR media system, foster journalism, prevent corporate monopolization of news, and elevate democracy has been dismantled.  Bolstered by the legalized bribery of campaign contributions and exacerbated by a 2010 Supreme Court decision equating money with speech, profitable misinformation takes precedent over journalistic integrity and truth.  One consequence of this deregulatory agenda is that those who perform stupidity, legitimately or through contrived performance, now have mainstream media access and are financially rewarded for cultivating stupidity.  Tucker Carlson is not a problem to be fixed; he’s a symptom of a larger deregulatory scheme that elevates the goals of capitalism, enriches a handful of media conglomerates and their investors, and subordinates the needs of democracy.  Any attempt to correct this situation is met with fierce and well-funded opposition.  For example, Gigi Sohn, a public-interest advocate and former FCC official, recently withdrew her name from consideration for FCC Chair.  Sohn’s confirmation was delayed 500 days.  Yes, really.  More than two years into his Presidency, Biden still does not have an FCC Chair.  In a statement regarding her withdrawal Sohn remarked, “It is a sad day for our country and our democracy when dominant industries, with assistance from unlimited dark money, get to choose their regulators. And with the help of their friends in the Senate, the powerful cable and media companies have done just that.”  If you have not heard of Gigi Sohn or her failed nomination to serve as FCC Chair, you may want to consider why that is. 

The normalization of stupidity as legitimate public discourse, real or contrived, is the background noise that has led to an increasing number of Governors, state legislatures, and local school boards attempting to ban books and censor educational curriculum they do not understand and, in some instances, attempt to defund public universities and specifically diversity, equity, and inclusion curriculum and training.  Driven by a narrative of stupidity, contemporary anti-intellectualism has morphed into absurdity.  The co-optation of the concept of “wokeness” from African-American culture and the weaponization of “wokeism” to oppose the advancement of civil rights of all minority people should surprise no one familiar with American history.  The subtexts of wokeism are equally bizarre, resulting in multiple catch phrases of manufactured outrage about how DEI curriculum is “teaching white people to hate themselves and feel guilty for being white.”  Collective stupidity is at the root of this misplaced outrage.  

Many of the people weaponizing “wokeism” are not even able to define what they mean by it.  Dana Perino, who served as press secretary in the George W. Bush administration, recently commented that “Democrats want to get you in an argument where you have to define ‘wokeism’ as if the Webster’s Dictionary is defining it.  That’s not what it is.  It could be a feeling; it could be a sense.”  Perino added, “sort of like the Supreme Court definition of pornography: you know it when you see it.”  Translation: “Wokeism,” much like accusations of communism, terrorism, and socialism, is the latest tool to gin up anger and manufacture opposition, even if the policies have nothing to do with civil rights.  Application:  Human induced climate change is not a well-documented, scientific reality that threatens the ecology of the planet to sustain human life.  Instead, climate change is a “woke” myth created by China to undermine the United States and the West and destroy capitalism.  Good grief. 

Stupidity is a cognitive failure to understand our limitations.  Contrary to the cliché, we CAN fix stupid.  Journalism and education have the capacity to elevate expertise, guide political debate and collective decision-making, and minimize the influence of stupidity on public policy.  Political debate within American democracy is designed to occur between various philosophies of conservativism and liberalism with strict adherence to procedural, democratic norms and acceptance of electoral outcomes.  When stupidity conflates itself with conservativism, insists it is a legitimate and serious perspective, and is elected to serve in any capacity at any level, the system is rendered dysfunctional.  

The modern ascension of collective stupidity, aided considerably by modern technology, is less about personal failures and inabilities and more a societal outcome of the institutions of democracy taken hostage by capitalism and the opportunity to monetize stupidity and exploit it for political gain.  Within democracy, ignorance is not of equal credibility to knowledge.  Until stupidity as a social-psychological phenomenon is clearly defined, identified, understood, relegated to the margins of our society, and left without congressional or presidential representation, American democracy will remain at risk of collapse.  

Give Me One Reason

The most challenging lesson I’ve had to learn and periodically relearn as a professor is that there are some students I simply cannot reach.  When I was a young and inexperienced teacher, I believed that if I was given the time and opportunity that I was capable of helping any student, no matter the extent of initial resistance, gain empathy and understanding through sociology.  While this admission may be interpreted as delusions of grandeur on my part, among professors, I don’t think I’m alone.  This is why unreceptive students occupy an inordinate amount of mental space within the professorial mind.  When professors fail to reach a challenging student, professors notice and quietly obsess more than we are willing to admit.  

Most teachers are able to recall in extraordinary detail the students they could not reach, whether it be from last semester or ten years ago.  I’m not simply referring to students who failed to learn the curriculum.  I’m talking about students who demonstrate willful resistance, belligerence, and unabashed hostility toward learning; students who will literally say or write, “I don’t care.”  In communication with one another, professors utilize numerous rhetorical strategies to assure each other that these outliers are not necessarily an indication of personal pedagogical failure.  While these assurances are likely true, these students lodge in the professorial mind like a piece of food between two teeth with no dental (mental) floss in sight. 

Each time I experience this, I find myself refocusing my attention on the centrality of the humanities to all forms of intellectual and emotional intelligence.  While I teach within the social sciences, the lesson I relearn during these instances is that without an appreciation and an understanding of the humanities, other academic disciplines cannot gain any traction because traction requires caring.  The humanities, in short, provide us reasons to care.  The humanities make scientific discoveries meaningful for our future, mathematical insights consequential for our understanding of the world, and social science research valuable to public policy.  Without meaningful appreciation of the humanities, nihilism fills the void, empathy withers, and there is no reason to care about injustice, inequality, other people and cultures, the future, or the planet.      

While very few students outwardly articulate that they “don’t care,” I suspect there are far too many who quietly share this sentiment in varying degrees.  Appeals to the intellect have limits, and prejudices against learning are ultimately emotional commitments to ignorance that spiral in an array of fears, anxieties, and insecurities which manifest in hatred or disregard for others, violence, and self-harm.  I no longer think professors can reach students, who do not care, with the tools of logic, scientific facts, mathematical proofs, or research demonstrating systemic injustices and ecological emergencies.  The dilemma for all professors of all academic disciplines is, “How do I make my students care about what I have to offer?”  I think the answers to this dilemma lie within the humanities.  Once students care about what they’re learning and why, the learning process falls into place.  The humanities are the gateway to the rest of higher education.  Students may earn degrees, but without an understanding of the humanities they cannot be truly educated.  A recent encounter with a former student reminded me of this truth. 

Several weeks ago, I was at a local restaurant.  A woman approached me and asked my name. She introduced herself and said, “I was in your Introduction to Sociology class in 1997.”  She went on to tell me that she had earned her Master’s Degree in Sociology and that she had worked in admissions within higher education for twenty years.  What did she remember about my class?  “You played Tracy Chapman’s song Fast Car in class.”  The song was the emotional hook that provided her a reason to care and the desire and motivation to learn and see value in the sociological perspective.  The more I thought about this chance encounter, the more I realized that my own path to sociology was exactly like hers.  The forces that drove me toward sociology were music, literature, film, and philosophy.  The humanities supplied me with a reason to care, and the rest took care of itself. 

When professors choose to distance ourselves from thinking and discussion about the centrality of emotions to teaching & learning under some guise that such thinking is not scholarly or serious, we do so to our own detriment.  Most barriers to learning are not cognitive, they’re emotional, as in, “I just can’t do math.”  Emotional intelligence is the fertile ground in which the intellect grows.  If I were asked to choose between a chemistry teacher with no understanding or interest in the humanities and a chemistry teacher with a deep love of literature, philosophy, music, or theatre, the latter is going to be far more effective in providing her students a reason to care and eventually to understand why chemistry matters.  The humanities provide the possibility to reunify emotions & feelings with reason & thinking, a dualism that was precipitated by Western rationality.  Dualistic thinking provided valuable insights, but it is time to collectively evolve and reassemble our knowledge into one, holistic, unified whole. 

The fight to protect, elevate, and FUND the humanities is fundamental to the preservation of democracy, which is why aspiring authoritarians and fascists see no value in the arts and actively work to defund humanities education, restrict curriculum, and dismantle teacher tenure.  Neoliberalism (privatization of the public sphere, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, union-busting, and deregulation) has undermined democracy and fostered public disregard for the humanities for the past forty years.  We feign interest and support for STEM, but only when research within these disciplines can be monetized.  When STEM research indicates the dire need for fundamental change to our institutions and way of life, we ignore STEM.  Despite all the rhetoric, we don’t really care about STEM because of our disregard for the humanities.  If emotion is made irrelevant to learning and the humanities are treated as inconsequential to critical thinking, problem-solving, and public policy, education is rendered meaningless and we cease being human. 

My recent encounter with my former student provoked another classroom memory. 

About a decade ago, I was playing a different Tracy Chapman song before class began: Give Me One Reason.  Without warning, one student, a guy, suddenly and loudly began singing the opening lyrics.  Give me one reason to stay here/And I’ll turn right back around/Give me one reason to stay here/And I’ll turn right back around/Said I don’t want to leave you lonely/You got to make me change my mind.  By the second verse, several other students joined him, with most of the other students singing more quietly to themselves.  I turned the volume down just a bit so that I could better hear the class singing.  I stood looking at my class in disbelief for the rest of the song.  When the song finished, I jokingly said to them, “Class is over, I have nothing more to teach you.” 

The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.  –Terry Eagleton

On Those Who Seek to Ban Books

When I was growing up, my dad worked as an administrator in the public school district of my small, rural hometown in NW Illinois.  While my dad was not a well-read lover of books, he did understand the ridiculousness of parents calling him or speaking at school board meetings in an attempt to alter the curriculum and/or demand teachers be reprimanded for their curriculum choices or teaching methodologies.  I have vivid recollections of my dad sitting at home after work, sipping his five o’clock martini while my mom made dinner, wryly imitating parents who contacted him to ask, “What’s going on down there at that school house?”  Later in life, I learned that when my dad accepted the job in the early 1970’s that the school superintendent rhetorically asked him, “You do realize you’re moving into a very ignorant community.”  I do not share this story in some condescending attempt at humor aimed at my hometown.  To this day, I struggle with reconciling my good and positive memories of growing up in my small, rural hometown, and the decency I know firsthand among the people who live there, with the ignorance that often accompanies a worldview shaped by social isolation and characterized by anxiety and fear of change or anything different. 

If people lack the interest or financial means to travel as well as access to high-quality education and books to simulate experiences of others beyond their community, people living in social isolation are susceptible to having their prejudices weaponized against them.  This inhibits social and political solidarity across boundaries of economic class, race & ethnicity, sex & gender, sexual orientation, and exacerbates the mental gulf that often separates people living in rural & urban areas.  Of course, this mental gulf cannot simply be reduced to rural vs. urban as some are wont to do.  Many who live in urban areas also lack the means to travel, and they also live and work in highly segregated and homogenous spaces, largely the result of historical and contemporary housing and banking discrimination and white flight.  In light of these historically created patterns of social and geographic segregation, one of the few methods we have, as a society, to bridge mental gaps and mend the misunderstandings that polarize people, is education and books.

It’s difficult to exaggerate the level of hubris among some parents, school administrators, school board members, and state & federally elected officials in their attempts to restrict educational curriculum, up to and including, the banning of selected books.  The notion that parents, the majority of whom do not even regularly read aloud to their own children, deserve collective oversight in the selection of educational curriculum is beyond absurd.  Most parents are unable to articulate the purpose of an education in regard to citizenship and democracy or even understand basic science and mathematics, much less determine the most effective curriculum to prepare young people for an ever-changing and increasingly diverse world.  It’s important to remember that, according to the U.S. Department of Education, within the United States, 54 percent of adults have a literacy below 6^th grade level, and 21 percent of adults are functionally illiterate.  The only genuine problem we have with books is that so many citizens are incapable of reading them or understanding what they are reading.  Even among those who are literate, some adults simply cannot deal with how our society is changing because they lack the knowledge, history, and critical thinking skills to understand the changes. 

At the risk of historical embellishment, teachers are no longer respected by parents or students as specialists with unique training and knowledge who are equipped to fill the void created by social isolation.  Teachers are now often viewed as suspect outsiders with their fancy university education who are exposing students to dangerous ideas and indoctrinating children.  Efforts to challenge and ultimately ban books is one measurement by which to gauge anti-intellectualism as well as a primary indicator of social anxiety & fear of social and demographic change.  According to a recent report by NPR, at least 1500 book titles in 26 states were banned or restricted in the past two years, directly impacting at least 86 school districts.  Unsurprisingly, most of the banned or restricted titles are books about race and racial history, sex, gender, & gender identity, and sexual orientation.  Also not surprising, Governor Abbott in Texas and Governor DeSantis in Florida are two of the most vocal proponents of banning books, deliberately stoking culture wars to leverage prejudices and capitalize on fear of change for political gain.  Their intent is not necessarily to successfully add more titles to the banned list or pass more restrictive legislation.  The narrative itself is the point, fueling a movement of uninformed, misinformed, and sometimes hysterical parents questioning their local school board members, who also typically don’t understand the issues, and insisting that any book that makes them “uncomfortable” must be forbidden to their children. 

For many years, I’ve had a bumper sticker on my office bulletin board with a quote from Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451.  “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture.  Just get people to stop reading them.”  One could just as easily substitute the word “ban” for “burn” and leave the meaning of the quotation intact.  While some adults are trying to ban books, young people are expressing less interest in reading with each passing decade.  According to Pew Research Center, “Among 13-year-olds surveyed in the 2019-20 school year, 17% said they read for fun almost every day, a smaller percentage than the 27% who said this in 2012 and roughly half the share (35%) who said this in 1984. About three-in-ten students in this age group (29%) said they never or hardly ever read for fun, up 21 percentage points from the 8% who said the same in 1984.”  The thing is that despite these trends, in the digital age, legislative efforts to ban books are not going to actually stop people from accessing books, but these efforts will further normalize anti-intellectualism and elevate the status of willful ignorance. 

The emotional and psychological fragility of people who are threatened and angered by a book, any book, is difficult to fathom.  I feel genuinely sorry for these folks.  This level of sustained panic takes a heavy toll on emotional and physical health.  Additionally, the fear and ignorance that animates movements to ban books reinforce and normalize authoritarian impulses that have the capacity to further unravel democracy.  History has taught us, over and over, that one method by which aspiring authoritarians control a population is by forbidding access to an education, controlling the curriculum, and denying the opportunity to learn to read and write. 

It is short-sighted for those of us who live in states with relatively sane Governors and state legislatures to pretend that we are unaffected by states like Florida that are awash in legislative attempts to curtail curriculum, academic freedom, and free speech.  The fact that a district judge found Governor DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE Act” unconstitutional and “written in such a way that teachers and businesses could conceivably be sued for just about anything” is beside the point.  These legislative attempts to curtail curriculum have already served their actual purpose.  The chilling effect of this movement is undoubtedly causing teachers throughout the country to self-censor out of fear of losing their jobs.  Teachers are leaving the profession, schools are struggling to find new qualified teachers, and now the state of Florida has legislatively cleared the way to hire military veterans who have no college education to teach for a period up to five years as long as they are working toward a college degree.  While Governor DeSantis rails against “Woke Indoctrination” curriculum, he’s supporting the hiring of untrained teachers who’ve been trained to follow and never question orders from superiors, which perfectly illustrates his true vision of education and his neo-fascist tendencies.    

What’s going on down there at that school house? 

Tenure and shared governance systems within higher education exist because external forces have long posed a threat to academic integrity and academic freedom.  However, as tenure systems are dismantled or weakened by public officials who neither understand or care, teachers’ salaries also stagnate and college tuition rises because, apparently, the heavens will implode if we raise taxes on anyone at any income level or any corporation to adequately fund public education and raise salaries capable of attracting and retaining high-quality teachers.  For those teachers who do remain, our jobs are more challenging, less rewarding, more labor intensive, and we’re expected to do more in exchange for yearly raises that don’t even match annual cost of living increases. 

A wave of teacher burn-out exacerbated by COVID, a mass exodus from the profession due to a lack of public support and compensation, and fewer, less qualified new teachers are converging.  The cumulative impact of four decades of neo-liberal economic policies of privatization and tax cuts continue to decimate the public sphere, leaving the public ill-equipped to identify the neo-fascist warning signs of those who seek to ban books.    

Don’t it Make my Brown Eyes Blue

Jane Elliott, a former third-grade teacher in tiny, rural, Riceville, Iowa, was preparing her next day’s lesson in her living room on the evening of April 4^th, 1968.  Despite her disdain for television, she turned on the nightly news as she finished her work.  The news of Martin Luther King’s assassination brought her lesson planning to an abrupt halt.  As she watched the news, she knew she had to address the issue with her students the following day.  Elliott remained awake for many hours that evening, trying to figure out how best to help her students understand what had just happened and why.  The next day, Friday, April 5^th, she marched into her classroom, divided her students into two groups based on whether they had blue eyes (including green and hazel) or brown eyes.  Once separated, she began an “exercise” she would repeat many, many times for the next five decades, with both school-aged children and adults, across the United States and eventually throughout the world.  By many accounts, Elliott was ruthless in her methods.  She privileged the brown-eyed group with praise, privileges, and opportunities, and marginalized, dismissed, and ignored the blue-eyed group.  She explained to the children that there was scientific proof that brown-eyed people were smarter than blue-eyed people.  She openly encouraged brown-eyed children to bully and harass blue-eyed children as she silently watched, in horror, as otherwise kind, friendly, and decent children maliciously turned against one another. 

By lunchtime, the children had fully accepted Elliott’s arbitrary system of superiority as real; therefore, the consequences were real.  As Elliott pondered her next move, she entered the faculty lounge.  As her colleagues ate lunch, she began asking them what they were doing in their classrooms to address the King assassination.  The collective response was “nothing,” with one teacher remarking, “I don’t know how you have time for all that extra stuff.  It’s all I can do to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic.”  Another veteran teacher took this response several steps further.  “I don’t know why you’re doing that.  I thought it was about time someone shot that son of a bitch.”  Elliott exited the lounge, returned to her classroom, and continued the exercise.  Later that evening, Elliott penned a letter to a friend and remarked, “This morning segregation turned my happy, secure, loving, appreciated and appreciating third graders into two races, one of haughty, arrogant, insolent, presumptuous, exultant, jubilant, swaggering bullies and the other of confused, ashamed, crushed, crest-fallen, actually servile underlings.” 

The following Monday, Elliott continued the exercise but flipped the situation so that the blue-eyed children were the privileged group and the brown-eyed group the oppressed group.  The results were noticeably different, likely because the students had clued-in.  “Elliott noticed that everyone seemed kinder today.  The blue-eyed children had seen the cost of their brown-eyed aggressors’ conduct and chose not to duplicate it, even though they had the opportunity…They didn’t seek to exact revenge.”  At 3:00 p.m. on Monday, Elliott ended the exercise and debriefed her students using what she referred to as the “Magic Circle” for discussion.  She explained what had just happened, why, and what it had to do with race and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.  “In Magic Circle, almost immediately, the children hugged each other.  Some cried.  Everyone had gone through trauma together and all had seemingly survived.  The children in classroom No. 10 bonded as never before.” 

The origin of the blue-eyed brown-eyed exercise is not entirely clear.  Elliott has always been very careful when replying to questions about the origin of the exercise.  There is at least one account of a teacher from Colorado who used this technique prior to Elliott, but it’s not clear whether Elliott was aware of this teacher or not.  Elliott often attributes the origins of the exercise to the Nazis, sometimes saying that she didn’t invent this, the Nazis did.  Elliott repurposed the blue-eyed brown-eyed distinction, simulating it for brief periods of time as a learning exercise to teach people to understand the social dynamics of prejudice and discrimination and to demonstrate, unfortunately, just how easy is it to create a fabricated situation in which people will adopt a prejudice based on some arbitrary characteristic and, subsequently, create norms, rules, and laws that solidify that prejudice and justify discrimination.  The leap, of course, is helping people to understand that this is exactly what this society has done with skin tone.  If our society had built institutions that produced disparate impacts on the basis of eye color, whether or not a person wears glasses, or based on whether a person is left-handed or right-handed, we would immediately recognize this as unjust and change our institutions.  However, due to the four-hundred-year long history of race and the institutionalization of racism, disparate outcomes based on skin tone remain intact and are even believed to be biologically predestined in the minds of hard-core racists. 

I don’t remember exactly when I first learned about Jane Elliott.  It could have been the 1970 ABC documentary, Eye of the Storm, or the 1985 PBS Frontline episode, A Class Divided.   However, it seems more likely that it was a 1992 episode of the Oprah Winfrey show (BTW: This episode of Oprah is on YouTube–search “Jane Elliott Oprah Winfrey show 1992”).  Elliott appeared on Winfrey’s show five times, and during most of these appearances she conducted the brown-eyed blue-eyed exercise on adults in the studio audience, with both remarkable and disturbing success.  Elliott’s style is aggressive, regimented, determined, and singularly-focused when conducting this exercise.  She plays the part of rigid and ruthless authoritarian extraordinarily well, and she’s done this so many times that she knows exactly how to respond to questions and rejection of the exercise from those in the blue-eyed group.  She is a poker-player of the highest caliber.  Elliott is so good at this that her critics and people who get upset when her wrath is directed at them simply do not understand her point.  Even after her shenanigans are fully revealed to the participants, there are always some who simply still do not understand it and who still think Elliott is serious.  It is not uncommon to hear some participants say things like, how dare you judge me based on another blue-eyed person’s behavior, which, of course, is exactly the damn point. 

Regardless of the origin of the exercise, no one executes this exercise with the tenacity of Jane Elliott.  This tenacity garnered Elliott high praise from many across the nation and scorn from some of her former students and contempt from many within the Riceville community.  Elliott insists, to this day, that this teaching method be referred to as an “exercise.”  Her critics, and especially her critics who were and still are residents of Riceville, refer to what Elliott did as an “experiment” in which Elliott tormented and psychologically scarred the children of Riceville in ways that some former students claim has negatively impacted their entire life.  Some Riceville residents despise Elliott to this day, refusing to use her name when asked about the “experiment.”  Some residents, both past and present, believe that Elliott was driven by ego and self-interest, using the exercise to launch her career beyond Riceville.  In the eyes of some Riceville residents, Elliott made the community look like a bad, racist, backward town.  Why else would the experiment be needed?  Seemingly lost on these critics is any genuine understanding of what Elliott was doing by briefly creating an alternative social system with rules, norms, and policies that empowers one group at the expense of another group based on some arbitrary quality.  The exercise is intended to provide people the tools of analysis necessary to see and understand that this is exactly what is happening in everyday life on the basis of skin tone and racial categorization.   

I admit that I initially had a very difficult time understanding and empathizing with some of Elliott’s former students who reportedly have experienced life-long, psychological and emotional problems as a result of the day-long exercise.  To be sure, with our modern sensibilities about bullying it is highly unlikely that anyone could, or should, try to reproduce exactly what Elliott did in 1968, how she did it, and with third-grade students.  It was clearly a different time in many, many ways, and it would be unwise and reckless of me to play amateur psychologist in regard to the potential psychological impact the exercise may have on young children, even if only for one day.  However, as for white adults who have participated in this exercise, for brief periods of time, in a place they voluntarily agreed to be, who claim to suffer long-term emotional problems as a result, I’m only left to wonder.  What would their emotional state and psychological health be if they were a person of color living all day, every day, in a white-supremacist society?  It’s of no surprise that the cumulative impact of day-to-day racism on the mental and physical health of people of color is well-documented in the research. 

With all apologies to singer Crystal Gale and lyricist Richard Leigh, I’d like to repurpose the blue-eyed brown-eyed distinction to make a different point.  The inability of some people to understand the point of this exercise is depressing, and don’t it make your brown-eyes blue? 

Inspired by, blue eyes, brown eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality, by Stephen G. Bloom.  Quotations taken from the text.