‘Race’ Isn’t an Explanation

Nothing so well illustrates that impossibility as the conviction among
otherwise sensible scholars that race ‘explains’ historical phenomena;
specifically, that it explains why people of African descent have been
set apart for treatment different from that accorded to others. But
race is just the name assigned to the phenomenon, which it no more
explains than judicial review ‘explains’ why the United States Supreme
Court can declare acts of Congress unconstitutional, or than Civil War
‘explains’ why Americans fought each other between 1861 and 1865.

Only if race is defined as innate and natural prejudice of colour does
its invocation as a historical explanation do more than repeat the
question by way of answer. And there an insurmountable problem
arises: since race is not genetically programmed, racial prejudice cannot
be genetically programmed either but, like race itself, must arise
historically. The most sophisticated of those who invoke race as a historical
explanation—for example, George Fredrickson and Winthrop
Jordan—recognize the difficulty. The preferred solution is to suppose
that, having arisen historically, race then ceases to be a historical phenomenon
and becomes instead an external motor of history;
according to the fatuous but widely repeated formula, it ‘takes on a
life of its own’. In other words, once historically acquired, race
becomes hereditary. The shopworn metaphor thus offers camouflage
for a latter-day version of Lamarckism.

Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America.”

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Choice and Narratives of Blackness

By illuminating the idea of black criminality in the making of modern urban America, it becomes clear that there are options in how we choose to use and interpret crime statistics. They may tell us something about the world we live in and about the people we label “criminals.” But they cannot tell us everything. Far from it. For good or bad, the numbers do not speak for themselves. They never have. They have always been interpreted, and made meaningful, in a broader political, economic, and social context in which race mattered. The falsity of past claims of race-neutral crime statistics and color-blind justice should caution us against the ubiquitous referencing of statistics about black criminality today, especially given the relative silence about white criminality. The invisible layers of racial ideology packed into the statistics, sociological theories, and the everyday stories we continue to tell about crime in modern urban America are a legacy of the past. The choice about which narratives we attach to the data in the future, however, is ours to make.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Urban America,

How do you break through inertia?

The initial challenge for an organizer—or anybody who’s going to provide leadership for change—is to figure out how to break through the inertia of habit to get people to pay attention. Often that breakthrough happens by urgency of need. Sometimes it happens because of anger—and by anger I don’t mean rage, I mean outrage. It’s the contradiction between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. Our experience of that tension can break through the inertia and apathy of things as they always are.

How do organizers master urgency to break through inertia? The difference in how individuals respond to urgency or anxiety (detected by the brain’s surveillance system) depends on the brain’s dispositional system, the second system in the brain, which runs from enthusiasm to depression, from hope to despair. When anxiety hits and you’re down in despair, then fear hits. You withdraw or strike out, neither of which helps to deal with the problem. But if you’re up in hope or enthusiasm, you’re more likely to ask questions and learn what you need to learn to deal with the unexpected.

Hope is not only audacious, it is substantial. Hope is what allows us to deal with problems creatively. In order to deal with fear, we have to mobilize hope. Hope is one of the most precious gifts we can give each other and the people we work with to make change.

The way we talk about this is not just to go up to someone and say, “Be hopeful.” We don’t just talk about hope and other values in abstractions. We talk about them in the language of stories because stories are what enable us to communicate these values to one another.

Why Stories Matter, by Marshall Ganz

Mischaracterizing Poverty and the Limits of Liberalism

The notion that poverty is generated within a self-reproducing “cycle” of material deprivation and behavioral or cultural dysfunction was itself an expression of a way of thinking that had deep roots and many variations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American social thought and has been the source of a disproportionate amount of theorizing ever since. Despite considerable change over the course of centuries, this theorizing has consistently centered on the most thoroughly subordinated or socially “submerged” segments of industrial and postindustrial working-class populations—Marx’s lumpenproletariat, the Victorians’ “dangerous” or “vicious” classes, the ghettoized American “underclass,” Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen”—and on the behavioral pathologies that, even when understood to be adaptive to circumstances, supposedly perpetuate these groups’ marginality. The War on Poverty helped to institutionalize such theorizing, but also to embed it within a consciously developmentalist, putatively sympathetic frame: Liberals embraced deeply flawed ideas about a “culture of poverty” as a rationale for remedial intervention, and not, as such ideas quickly became for their conservative critics, as an explanation for why intervention would only make things worse. The War on Poverty was an especially important venue for cultivating and trying out theories about how to help the “culturally deprived” children of poverty that were emerging within the specialized field of child development—in particular, ideas about the imperatives of early intervention that would quickly be embraced as gospel truth.

Alice O’Connor, Poverty and Paradox

V.O. Key: Blaming the People is a Cop Out

For a glaringly obvious reason, electoral victory cannot be regarded as necessarily a popular ratification of a candidate’s outlook. The voice of the people is but an echo. The output of an echo chamber bears an inevitable and invariable relation to the input. As candidates and parties clamor for attention and vie for popular support, the people’s verdict can be no more than a selective reflection from among the alternatives and outlooks presented to them. Even the most discriminating popular judgement can reflect only ambiguity, uncertainty, or even foolishness if those are the qualities of the input into the echo chamber. A candidate may win despite his tactics and appeals rather than because of them. If the people can choose only from among rascals, they are certain the choose a rascal.

V.O. Key, The Responsible Electorate

On the hallowing out of cities

The idea of diverting huge sums of money to thin suburban growth at the expense of starving city districts was no invention of the mortgage lenders (although they, as well as suburban builders, have now acquired a vested interest in this routine). Neither the ideal nor the method of accomplishing it originated logically within our credit system itself. It originated with high-minded social thinkers. By the 1930’s, when the FHA methods for stimulating suburban growth were worked out, virtually every wise man of the government–from right to left–was in favor of the objectives, although they might differ with one another on methods. A few years previously, Herbert Hoover had opened the first White House Conference on Housing with a polemic against the moral inferiority of cities and a panegyric on the moral virtues of simple cottages, small towns and grass. At an opposite political pole, Rexford G. Tugwell, the federal administrator responsible for the New Deal’s Green Belt demonstration suburbs, explained, “My idea is to go just outside centers of population, pick up cheap land, build a whole community and entice people into it. Then go back into the cities and tear down whole slums and make parks of them.”

The cataclysmic use of money for suburban sprawl, and the concomitant starvation of all those parts of cities that planning orthodoxy stamped as slums, was what our wise men wanted for us; they put a lot of effort, one way and another, to get it. We got it.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Democracies, Republics and Mistaken Pedantry

You may have noticed that I have referred to “popular governments” in Greece, Rome, and Italy. To designate their popular governments, the Greeks, as we saw, invented the term democracy. The Romans drew on their native Latin and called their government a “republic,” and later the Italians gave that name to the popular governments of some of their city-states. You might well wonder whether democracy and republic refer to fundamentally different types of constitutional systems. Or instead do the two words just reflect differences in the languages from which they originally came?

The correct answer was obfuscated by James Madison in 1787 in an influential paper he wrote to win support for the newly proposed American constitution. One of the principal architects of that constitution and a statesman exceptionally well informed in the political science of his time, Madison distinguished between “a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person,” and a “republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place.”

This distinction had no basis in prior history: neither in Rome nor, for example, in Venice was there “a scheme of representation.” Indeed, the earlier republics all pretty much fit into Madison’s definition of a “democracy.” What is more, the two terms were used interchangeably in the United States during the eighteenth century. Nor is Madison’s distinction found in a work by the well-known French political philosopher Montesquieu, whom Madison greatly admired and frequently praised. Madison himself would have known that his proposed distinction had no firm historical basis, and so we must conclude that he made it to discredit critics who contended that the proposed constitution was not sufficiently “democratic.”

However that may be (the matter is unclear), the plain fact is that the words democracy and republic did not (despite Madison) designate differences in types of popular government. What they reflected, at the cost of later confusion, was a difference between Greek and Latin, the languages from which they came.

Robert A. Dahl, On Democracy