Remember when “Separate but Equal” was an abhorrent racist euphemism? It used to refer to the legal doctrine, according to which racial segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted at the close of the Civil War, which guaranteed “equal protection” under the law to all citizens.

Using this doctrine, state and local governments could require that services, facilities, public accommodations, housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation be segregated by race, as long as the facilities provided to each race were “equal”.

 

It was widely understood, though, that services and facilities offered to African Americans were almost never “equal” in any real sense. The repeal of laws that divided people by race, known as “Jim Crow” laws, was the focus of the Civil Rights movement, and in 1954, the Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education formally overturned the “Separate but Equal” doctrine.

But there was still a lot of work to do. Most black people understood that the only path to their rightful place in American society was full “integration”, and that was the basis of Martin’s message. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, he notes that 100 years after the Civil War, African Americans are still  “badly crippled by the manacles of segregation”.

Of course, Malcolm had a slightly different message, and one that resonated at least as strongly as Martin’s, that focused more on independence than integration. But everyone understood that “Separate but Equal” was not the answer, and the focus of all our collective efforts over the years was to refute it.

But, with time, the odious phrase lost its bite and actually came to represent something desirable for some young people. It’s a bit disorienting to hear black high school students advocating for segregated proms, for example, using the that very same phrase. You can’t help but feeling they haven’t read their history when you hear this.

Yesterday, I wrote about events at Evergreen State College, where white people were asked to stay away from campus for a day. Today, I’m reading that Harvard has held separate commencements for students of color. At their request.

Everything old is new again.

Somehow, the word “equity” has come to replace the word “equality” in the pedagogic vernacular in discussions of racism on campus. Maybe it’s because my own concerns are so far removed from those of today’s college student, but when I hear the word “equity”, I think of this now-secondary definition:

“the money value of a property or of an interest in a property in excess of claims or liens against it”

Indeed, the first definition in the online version of the Merriam Webster dictionary is now:

“justice according to natural law or right; specifically :  freedom from bias or favoritism”

It’s a little confusing to someone on the outside, but it feels a little bit like the goal of ensuring that everyone has the same opportunity to achieve has been replaced with the goal of ensuring that everyone achieves the same outcome.   And it’s not immediately obvious to the lay person what the deficiencies of the now obsolete term, “equality”, might have been.

Evergreen State College has an Equity Action Plan. It’s an impenetrable thicket of jargon, but the gist of it is that racism explains just about everything that’s wrong. It’s got different “goals” listed, including Content Goals, Process Goals, Outcome Goals, and a single Equity Goal, which is:

• Our equity goal, simply put but not simply achieved, is to substantially improve the experiences of underserved students on our campus so that we close equity gaps in student learning and student success. An “equity gap” is an unequitable difference—read “worse”— between the experiences, opportunities, and/or outcomes of underserved students. We choose “underrepresented” and “underserved” with intention, in recognition of the power of language to name the problem as one of historical exclusion from ‘the academe’ and its power and resources, eschewing language that sources the problem as the students themselves (“at risk”) or in a negative light (“minority”).

In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Bruce Weinstein, a biology professor at the college, voiced his disagreement with the Plan.

The plan and the way it is being forced on the college are both deeply authoritarian, and the attempt to mandate equality of outcome is unwise in the extreme. Equality of outcome is a discredited concept, failing on both logical and historical grounds, as anyone knows who has studied the misery of the 20th century. It wouldn’t have withstood 20 minutes of reasoned discussion.

This presented traditional independent academic minds with a choice: Accept the plan and let the intellectual descendants of Critical Race Theory dictate the bounds of permissible thought to the sciences and the rest of the college, or insist on discussing the plan’s shortcomings and be branded as racists. Most of my colleagues chose the former, and the protesters are in the process of articulating the terms. I dissented and ended up teaching in the park.

Weinstein also disagreed with the “Day of Absence” at Evergreen, where all white people have been asked to stay off campus. He wrote an email protesting the event which induced accusations of racism and ignited a campus firestorm.

This has given outlets like Breitbart apoplexy.  To be honest, the concept of asking any group to stay away does seem a little over the edge, although the idea of being on the same side as Breitbart on this or any issue is dread-inducing at best.

The Washington Times reports some of the action this way:

A video of the confrontation, captured by Mr. Vincent, shows Mr. Weinstein attempting to reason with dozens of students who routinely shout him down, curse at him and demand his resignation.

When the professor tells the students he will listen to them if they listen to him, one student responds, “We don’t care what terms you want to speak on. This is not about you. We are not speaking on terms — on terms of white privilege. This is not a discussion. You have lost that one.”

Another protester asks the professor whether he believes “black students in sciences are targeted.”

After asking for a clarification, Mr. Weinstein says, “I do not believe that anybody on our faculty, with intent, specially targets students of color.”

That remark prompts shrieks of outrage.

Weinstein, a lifelong liberal, is now literally under siege and his resignation has been demanded. In a lengthy interview on the Rubin Report, he claims that student protesters threatened to kidnap him

Equity in action at Evergreen State College. Ugh.

My cousin Screwie came over the other day with a couple of six-packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon to watch the Celtics get crushed by the Cavaliers. He was flipping through channels after the game and landed on an episode of “All in the Family”.

It was the one where they flashed back to the time Gloria, the budding flower-child daughter, first introduces Michael, her long-haired leftie boyfriend, to Archie, her old-school working-class father.  Archie and Michael (or “Meathead”) are left alone to get acquainted.

Archie: What kind of a name is Stivic?

Meathead: Huh?

A: Where you from?

M: Oh, uh, Chicago.

A: I mean what’s your nationality?

M: (A little baffled) I’m an American.

A: I mean, where are your people from?

M: They’re from Poland.

A: (Rolls eyes) That would make you Polish, then.

Screwie’s had three or four PBRs at this point and says. “See? See how far we’ve gone in the wrong direction? This is why I hate St. Patrick’s Day. And Columbus Day”.

“What are you babbling about?”, I politely inquire.

He explains that in 1971, forty-six short years ago, this joke was on Archie. He was unenlightened and bigoted, and wanted to impose some sort of negative stereotype on Michael for being “Polish” when Michael wasn’t Polish at all, but a proud American, indeed every bit the American that Archie was.

Archie’s impulse was to “other” the Meathead, to assert his own right as a “real” American to decide who else had the Bona Fides to join the club. This was the definition of small-mindedness at the time – the opposite of what it meant to be “progressive”. Archie didn’t understand that everyone in this country (except the indigenous peoples, the “real” Americans) was an immigrant or the child of immigrants, all aspiring to be “American”. The audience roared. Archie was an idiot.

So I say, OK cousin, but what does this have to do with St. Patrick or Columbus?

Screwie says, “Look at this recent St. Patrick’s Day parade we just had. It was the usual cast of characters from Southie, having their one big moment to assert their “superiority” by keeping others out, namely gay people. None of them were “Irish”, any more than the Meathead was “Polish”. They were all Americans, the same as you, me, Archie, and Meathead. I’ll bet you none of them has ever even been to Ireland.” Even the Boston Globe writes, “The St. Patrick’s Day parade is the embarrassment that never goes away.”

“Same with Columbus Day. Columbus stumbled onto the “new world” while trying to do something else entirely, and ‘discovered’ a continent of people who were doing just fine for ten thousand years without him. And now all the “Italians” here want to have a parade. But they’re not “Italian”, they’re American.

And their antecedents, like the Irish, Polish, and all other immigrants before them, were desperately trying to scrape a few cents together to leave whatever hell-hole they were living in to come here and be ‘Americans’. Only generations later does that old country become something to hang your hat on and brag about, no matter how horrible it really was. And how horrible would it have to be for you to want to escape it without any money, prospects, English language skills, or anything else? Pretty bad.”

“Huh”, I reply, incisively.

But now Screwie is on a roll. “The problem is this crazy idea that’s taken root called ‘Multicuturalism’. The old idea of accepting the ‘tired poor huddled masses yearning to be free’ has morphed into ‘bring all your crazy shit over here and pretend you’re still in Beirut or Guadalajara or Mogadishu or wherever.’ Don’t bother learning English or Baseball or anything else – we’ll just accommodate you no matter what because that’s just how ‘progressive’ we are. Never mind that if you keep doing what you were doing over there, pretty soon life for you will be the same over here.”

“The very thing we saw as regressive and bigoted in Archie Bunker is the thing we now celebrate – no one wants to be just an ‘American’ now like Meathead and all the other enlightened people of 1971 did.”

Screwie is an organized thinker, and likes to make lists to clarify his points. The subject of multiculturalism is no exception, and he forges ahead, opening yet another PBR.

He says,
“1) Multiculturalism is an American obsession – no one else cares about it or thinks it’s a good idea. That’s because we’re the only country founded on the principle that everyone is welcome to jump into our melting pot. It makes a big stew called ‘American culture’ from all the ingredients brought here from everywhere else. Lately, we’ve forgotten about the melting pot and have become a Tapas place, where everyone has their own identity and ‘culture’, and ‘American’ culture, if it exists, is something to scorn.

2) It’s a one-way street. When I travel to Malaysia for business, I first read “Culture Shock – Malaysia”, because I don’t want to offend anyone. When in Rome, I try to do as the Romans do.  I learn that in Malaysia you don’t shake a woman’s hand when we meet in the office, because they’re Muslims and it’s not cool. When our diplomats travel to the Arabian peninsula, the women wear head-scarves to be respectful of their culture.

But when the Malaysians or Saudis come here, the women don’t shake my hand here either (and their men don’t shake the hand of the women here, even the CEOs), and their women still wear the veil here.  No one is reading “Culture Shock – America” when they come here, hoping to fit in. We defer to their ‘culture’ when we are there, and we defer to it when they are here. No one defers to American culture.

3) Multiculturalism marginalizes and even denies American culture, even though it pervades the world. When the Iranians refer to the ‘Great Satan’, they are not talking about our politicians or our foreign policy or our Christians and Jews. They are talking about American ‘culture’, that siren song of temptation – the movies and music, sexual freedom, gender equality, consumerism, pornography, hedonism, atheism, etc. etc. All of it. It threatens them and their culture (at least they worry that it does). I’m not saying American culture is better than anyone else’s or even that it’s good. I’m saying it exists, but that when we elevate and aspire to ‘multiculturalism’, we are denying it.

4) It re-enforces identity politics and grievances and gives old prejudices sustenance. That’s what Archie was doing with Meathead, and we used to understand it as a bad thing.

Remember that news story in Cambridge the other day? The one about the high school kids on the bus that were acting up and playing their music way too loud and annoying the other passengers? They were kids being kids and being inconsiderate and annoying, as kids will be. The driver tells them to pipe down, and that’s when the story becomes ‘news’.

See the driver was Whatever-White-American and the kids were African-American. So a seventeen year old girl starts in on how this is a ‘micro-aggression’ and racism because in her ‘culture’, music and sound and blah blah blah.  Not too long ago, the kids would have said “sorry” or “fuck off, old man” or whatever, but insisting that their right to annoy others is based in their ‘culture’? And that the driver is a racist? This is what they’re now taught in school. Wow.

5) Multiculturalism perpetuates and accentuates what divides us at the expense of what unites us. Another example from school: the kids have access to video equipment so they can create stuff to be shown on their own little TV station, which other citizens of Cambridge can watch. Kinda cool.

So I’m watching this perfectly charming piece made by a girl about her neighborhood and family and what she likes about school, etc. And she says, ‘On my street, there are about half American families and half Muslim families’.  Holy shit, I think. This is a problem.

A couple of months later, the Boston Marathon bombing happened.  A little punk named Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, along with his older brother, did the crime. He went to the same high school as the video-maker girl, where he was given a college scholarship by his Cambridge neighbors, wrestled on the school team, smoked some dope, and appeared to be like any other kid. He lived just a couple of streets over from the girl who made the video in which the distinction between Americans and Muslims was casually and innocently asserted, and not corrected or edited out by any teacher. You do the math.

6) It weakens our position in foreign policy matters when our own people are hyphenated. I don’t think we’ll be going to war with Ireland any time soon, though with President Crazy-pants you never know. But if we do, should we send our Irish-American troops?  Or just our British-American ones?

Remember the Japanese internment after Pearl Harbor? It is now recognized as one of the worst things we ever did – rounding up Americans with Japanese antecedents because we couldn’t trust them to be ‘Americans’. Just when we got to the point where we realized that mistake, we are now reversing direction and glorifying and encouraging everyone to maintain their real ‘identity’, i.e membership in some group that is not ‘American’.

7) People no longer come here to be ‘American’. They come here to remain what they were, but with political stability, economic opportunity, and social equality. This cannot sustain. And it’s un-American, There. I said it.

8) If we insist on everyone’s right to maintain their own culture, we are ignoring the many areas of conflict between what we want our culture to be and what you insist yours is. Should we encourage ‘culture’ hostile to homosexuality or women’s rights? Or one that includes genital mutilation, polygamy, or honor killing? We say we want to honor the other cultures, but some other cultures are built on what we abhor, and some are downright hostile to ‘American’ culture. See point 2 above.”

By this time my head is spinning. Screwie’s a lot smarter than I am, so I never just dismiss what he rants about. But after all those PBRs, I’m not sure he really means it all, and he’s starting to slur his words a little. I figured it was time to kick him out.

Anyway, it was time to fix dinner for my house-mates, who are proud Feline-Americans.

The other night, at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, host Hasan Minhaj finished his remarks by saying, “Only in America can a first-generation Indian-American Muslim kid get on this stage and make fun of the president. It’s a sign to the rest of the world, it’s this amazing tradition, that even the president is not beyond the reach of the First Amendment.”

For the first time since Reagan was in the hospital recovering from being shot, the president wasn’t there. Trump was in Harrisburg, PA, because he’s a pathetic coward and dangerously thin-skinned narcissist who can’t take a joke. And because, unlike Minhaj, he doesn’t respect the First Amendment at all, as it apparently allows people to disagree with him publicly.  He spent the evening leading chants of “Lock Her Up”, asserting that all news (except FoxNews) is fake, that coal mining jobs are coming back, that the first hundred days of his presidency were much better than anyone else’s, and so on.

But today’s blog isn’t about Trump. It’s about Asian Salad, or should I say “Asian” salad. There was an opinion piece in the Rapidly Failing New York Times (the “rapidly” is new, just added in Harrisburg!) a few days ago by author Bonnie Tsui, complaining about the casual racism of the word “Asian” in this context.

Am I taking this too seriously? The casual racism of the Asian salad stems from the idea of the exotic — who is and isn’t American is caught up wholesale in its creation. This use of “Oriental” and “Asian” is rooted in the wide-ranging, “all look same” stereotypes of Asian culture that most people don’t really perceive as being racist. It creates a kind of blind spot.

Most of the RFNYT readers who commented on the piece thought that, yes, she was taking this too seriously, though some agreed vehemently that these sorts of “micro-aggressions” must not be tolerated. Quite a few noted that it was just this sort of over-sensitivity and identity politics that invites the backlash that ultimately leads to Trump getting elected.

I don’t have a strong opinion about this controversy, except to celebrate that at least it is someone with “Asian” roots complaining here, unlike, say, the concern trolls who want Chief Wahoo banished from baseball. The minute Native Americans complain about him, as they well might, Wahoo has to go. But they haven’t yet, at least as far as I’m aware.

But what struck me most from the “Asian Salad” article was this sentence:

“To a white audience, it reads as diverse. To actual Asian-Americans, it reads as ridiculous.”

I started thinking, is there a corollary to “Asian Americans” anywhere in Asia, or anywhere else? In other words, is there a sizeable population of second-generation “North American-Koreans” living in Seoul, say, who are offended by some local fast food joint selling American Bar-B-Q or whatever? I don’t think so.

Yes, there are pockets of American ex-pats and conscientious objectors who have established a beach-head elsewhere, but in general they attempt to assimilate and become like everyone around them. If they move to France, they aspire to become French, not to sit around Les Deux Magots complaining that they’re insulted by the American Hamburger on the menu. More likely, they’d join in the criticism of America from their new home. And if, against all odds, Le Figaro published some complaint along these lines, does anyone imagine Parisians chastising themselves for their own insensitivity?

Our country is really the only one in the world founded on the idea of accepting everyone from everywhere else, and turning them into “Americans” (again apologies to indigenous peoples here). Or letting them retain their own culture and respecting that, if they want, though you’ll be hearing from my cousin, Screwie Generis, on the subject of multiculturalism soon enough.

It’s galling to hear other people elsewhere in the world (I’m looking at you, Germany), criticizing us for racism, cultural insensitivity, and intolerance. Do we have a lot of work to do and a lot of room for improvement before every last citizen is treated as they’d like? Yes, of course.

But only in America has this goal been enshrined in the founding documents. That’s why so many people want to come here (or to escape here, if you prefer), and so few want to leave.

And if a new arrival or one of their descendants wants to point out that the rest of us are a bunch of racists for putting Asian Salad on the menu, the New York Times is ready to give them a platform to fire away. The rest of us will give it serious consideration.

Carrie Fisher was perhaps best known for playing Princess Leia in the original Star Wars flick. When Steve Martin heard about her death the other day, he tweeted the following tribute:

Kind of sweet, right? Unambiguously meant as a compliment and homage.

Wrong. It’s an insult. Unbelievably insensitive.  He had to delete it because of the backlash from outraged internet strangers.

See, Carrie Fisher struggled all her life against being a sex-object for Star Wars nerds. How could Steve Martin be so crass and clueless not to to see the damage his tweet does?

Cinnabon also tried to be nice and was slapped down. They deleted this indefensible assault:

Three things are at work here:

The first is the tyranny of the individual, a recent phenomenon that we have previously discussed. Lots of people liked the tweets but a couple didn’t. The tweets must go.

The second is a weird addiction to outrage that so many now seem to be afflicted with, and which the internet enables.

The third is that there is no such thing as “deleting” anymore. When Steve Martin attempted to delete his tweet, he thought it would disappear, appeasing the outraged,  and that would be the end of the controversy. The opposite happened. The tweet was given new life and was greatly amplified.  It would now be seen by tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of people, rather than just those who “follow” Martin.

Be very careful about what you type, and be prepared to weather an unforeseeable shitstorm.   It’s all on your permanent record. The internet is forever.

A postal worker in Cambridge MA apparently got in some sort of altercation with a Hispanic guy while gassing up his vehicle. A witness reported that he yelled at the guy, “Go back to your country. This is Trump land. You ain’t getting your check no more.”

Is Cambridge Trump land? You wouldn’t think so, but maybe it is. It’s got the big universities and their thousands of students dominating street life, and a pretty crunchy-granola kind of city government. And of course it’s a Sanctuary City, which means it will lose any sort of federal funding, that is if you believe anything our President-elect says.

Cambridge has a very diverse population which includes a lot of working class white folks, for whom Trump’s message and style may resonate. One of the things we learned from the election was that, as the Trump campaign insisted, there were in fact a lot of Trump fans who were reluctant to voice support publicly, but who actually liked everything about Trump. These are the people who said, “Trump says what I think”.

Trump said many outrageous things during the campaign,  things that had been previously unacceptable to say. In doing so he, he gave us all permission to say or even yell whatever mean-spirited nastiness that we all previously knew to keep to ourselves. “Political correctness” prevented these expressions, and pro-Trump sentiment is nothing if not a rebellion against political correctness.

Trump has thrown the Overton Window open wide, possibly forever. The dogs were just waiting  to jump through it.

 

 

Full disclosure: I’m old.

I complained about the outdated voting procedure and the geriatric poll volunteers, and it probably seemed like I was saying I could do their job better than they were doing it. No, I would be worse. I’m older than any one of them and am no better equipped to do their job  – not sharper or smarter, don’t hear or see any better, don’t have more energy or compassion, and certainly don’t have the needed patience for dealing with other people for more than a minute or two.

In  Hombre, Fredric March explains to Paul Newman why he stole from the Indians he was supposed to help by saying, “It’s a shock to grow old.” For me, “It’s a shock to BE old” says it better. Growing old didn’t feel like anything at all. What nobody ever tells you is that you might find your 17 year old self living in a 70 year old body, with desires, tastes, opinions, and so on, pretty much unchanged.

At least, that’s the way it worked for me. Maybe it’s because I have no children and never had to really accept the role of “adult”. Maybe I’m just selfish or have some sort of arrested development syndrome or that I’m just a weird outlier of some sort. Not sure.

It’s the way others see you and what you see in the mirror one fine day that’s shocking.

It would be nice if there were some benefits to getting old, like maybe a little respect or deference from younger people. Historically and forever, any time someone said something like that, about how “kids today” have no respect for their elders, the response was always to quote Heraclitus or someone complaining about the same thing a million years ago, meaning nothing is different now and it will always be thus.

But in the internet age, something really is different. The casual mockery and disdain for old people is part of the DNA of the digital world, a world created and driven by young people, largely catering to their own needs and fashions. Ageism is really the only unchecked and even unremarked prejudice left in today’s hypersensitive world. There is no “safe place” for old people to avoid the “triggers” that everyone else agonizes over.

And any knowledge acquired through age is now irrelevant. Thanks to the internet, knowledge has become a completely de-valued commodity. There is no incentive to learn and retain information that is instantaneously available to everyone on their phone. You can’t impress your friends by reciting your memorized list of state capitals. It’s something no one cares if you know because anyone can know it at any time.

Once in a while I’d like to expose someone’s nonsense by saying something like, “Benghazi? What are you so upset about? I bet you can’t even tell me what country it’s in!” But all they’d have to do is glance at their phone to prove me wrong, even if I was right.

Stupid is the new smart.

And, it turns out, wisdom isn’t really something you get more of as you get older either. Experience is worth something, I suppose, but experience and wisdom are not the same thing.

For old white men, all this is exacerbated by the various political and social movements that aim to diminish and discredit the influence and achievements of old white men past and present. It’s a bummer for the Mozarts and Galileos, but it is what it is.

But I’m not complaining.  It’s now obvious to me that old white men actually don’t know anything more useful or valuable than anyone else. There is absolutely nothing that qualifies me to make a decision about anything that affects anyone else.

And I take this to mean that the same was true for just about all the old white men that came before me, and for any that now insist their birthright has been taken from them and want it back.