On the Power of Sharing Stories

The personal should not have to be political.

But it is.

There are innumerable reasons why someone might terminate a pregnancy. Virtually none of them entail events one wishes to broadcast to the world. That's not a matter of shame. Someone who finds out that their very badly wanted pregnancy is non-viable, and that the safest way to forward is through an abortion proceeding, might not feel especially inclined to share a play-by-play on Facebook. Very often, abortions occur because something didn't go right -- the pregnancy was unplanned, or unwanted, or it was wanted but non-viable, or any number of other permutations -- and people are, or should be, allowed to grieve in private.

And yet. I have been inspired by the number of people in my circles who have shared their stories of having an abortion, or seriously considering having one, or having the immediately live prospect of needing one. As much as the Supreme Court just rolled back the constitutional clock, it cannot do so entirely, because these stories are out there and are publicly shared. The world is not as it was in 1973. Women who quite directly relied on Roe's promise for their own health know what would have been had Roe not been present for them. Women who tomorrow will not be able to access that care will know, in a very public way, what could have been.

Dobbs will bring about terrible things, but those terrible things (what an awful consolation prize this is) will be public in a way they would not have been in 1973. We have language to speak of them, and we know we could live in a world free of those terribles because we had lived in it. What had been countless discrete experiences in isolation, out of the public eye, out of the public discourse, now is a shared reality. Being able to name it, being able to organize around it, being able to know that one isn't alone and that it doesn't have to be this way is an irreplaceable resource. The stories matter, and the willingness to share them matters. It will make a difference. Every story, account, and tale, makes those who suffer these terribles feel a little less alone. Again, what an awful consolation prize. But it is the seed of how we fight back.

It shouldn't have to be like this. Each time I read one of these stories, typically someone sharing a wrenching, emotional, miserable moment at the most intimate core of their personal lives, my heart breaks twice -- first that it happened, second that the narrator now feels obligated to share something so personal with the world. They shouldn't have to. It is, in itself, a massive sacrifice they are making for us. But they are sacrifices that make a difference, and I am grateful for every story.

The Good Place: Final Thoughts

*MAJOR SPOILERS*

At the conclusion of season three, I registered my prediction of how The Good Place would end:

The abolition of the afterlife in its entirety (no more good or bad places); a re-emphasis on doing as best you can when it matters (i.e., during one's actual life); the core quartet is sent back to Earth to live out the rest of their natural lives as friends.

I would say that, like most religions, I got about 5% right. The afterlife, as we knew it, is abolished. And the series does end with all of the human characters passing on. But in between, The Good Place takes a much more audacious swing: a genuine attempt to reform the afterlife. And -- and I think this is perhaps even more profound -- an essential acknowledgment that this attempt fell short. A perfect paradise was not created, and in fact the final conclusion of The Good Place seems to be that such a paradise is impossible even in concept.

After all, cut away the underbrush and the heroes' solution to the problem afflicting The Good Place was to offer the choice of suicide. And while the penultimate episode suggests that perhaps just having the option will suffice to stave off the ennui of eternal bliss, the finale refuses to accept that out. Every human character, eventually, kills themselves. Their happy ending is that they are content to die. The best possible paradise is one where people can and do eventually choose to erase themselves from existence. Skip over the beatific forest setting and the stipulation of emotional contentment, and that's a rather melancholic, if not outright grim, conclusion.

It's easy to draw a parallel between the last episode and the need for fans to accept the voluntarily-chosen end of a great show like The Good Place (it's even easier to draw it to the need to accept our own mortality). But another recurrent theme in The Good Place is the failure of systems. Over and over again, the systems the characters find themselves in are revealed to be either malfunctioning or outright designed to immiserate them.

From the very beginning, Eleanor and Chidi confront the brutal harshness of the points system, which results in nearly all people being horrifically tortured for eternity (incidentally, that Chidi isn't immediately repelled by -- and suspicious of -- this set-up is a rare miscue in terms of characterization, if not plotting). They resolve to try and improve Eleanor, only to find out that they're actually in a perpetual torture chamber which will literally reset every time they come close to escaping it.

At this point, the series becomes a repeated effort to find ever-higher levers in the celestial bureaucracy that can be appealed to. They find a judge, who is at best indifferent to their predicament and not particularly interested in helping them. Upon returning to earth, they discover first that they can't ever improve enough to enter The Good Place (because -- knowing the stakes -- their motivations are corrupt) and then that nobody can successfully enter The Good Place because existence has become too interwoven and morally interdependent for anyone to satisfy the standard of admission. They meet the actual Good Place committee, who are worse than useless and content to let everyone suffer forever because taking any concrete action risks violating some procedural norm. And when they finally enter The Good Place, they discover it's as dysfunctional as everywhere else -- gradually sucking the life out of its residents who, given eternity, eventually tire of everything. All the systems fail. All of them are doomed to fail. They can't not.

Hence, the suicide gate (and sidenote: If The Good Place ever has a spin-off series -- and lord knows it shouldn't -- it should definitely involve exploring the first murder in the Good Place when someone gets involuntarily shoved through that archway).

By the time it reaches its conclusion, The Good Place is one of the few depictions of the afterlife to take the concept of eternity seriously. Some other venues glance in this direction. Agent Smith in The Matrix tells Neo that humans reject a simulation of paradise -- the implication is because we're diseased, but perhaps also indicating that perfect, eternal happiness ... isn't. Maya Rudolph's other afterlife vehicle, Forever, certainly touches on this theme. The Order of the Stick has an afterlife where people can eat all the food and have all the sex and otherwise satisfy all the "messed-up urges you people have leftover after having your soul stuck in a glorified sausage all your life". But this is only the "first tier" of heaven: once you're bored, you can "climb the mountain" to search for a higher level of spiritual satisfaction. And while what this entails is left vague, it is not death -- those who ascend can, if they wish, descend back down to the lowlier pleasures (OOTS also introduces the very neat concept of "Postmortum Time Disassociation Disorder").

But the story which provides perhaps the most powerful foil to The Good Place's view of eternity and immortality is (and of the approximately 143,000 Good Place retrospectives being written right now, I bet I'm the only one to make this comparison) Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

The ultimate adversary in HPMOR is not Snape, or Malfoy, or Voldemort. It is death, and Harry is committed to the "absolute rejection of death as the natural order." The message on the Potters' gravestone is, after all, "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death" (and it's a sign of my cloistered Jewish upbringing that I thought this was a Rowling original -- it is in fact a quote from I Corinthians). Harry Potter wants people to live forever. And the story anticipates the objection, placed in the mouth of Dumbledore, "What would you do with eternity, Harry?"

Harry took a deep breath. "Meet all the interesting people in the world, read all the good books and then write something even better, celebrate my first grandchild's tenth birthday party on the Moon, celebrate my first great-great-great grandchild's hundredth birthday party around the Rings of Saturn, learn the deepest and final rules of Nature, understand the nature of consciousness, find out why anything exists in the first place, visit other stars, discover aliens, create aliens, rendezvous with everyone for a party on the other side of the Milky Way once we've explored the whole thing, meet up with everyone else who was born on Old Earth to watch the Sun finally go out, and I used to worry about finding a way to escape this universe before it ran out of negentropy but I'm a lot more hopeful now that I've discovered the so-called laws of physics are just optional guidelines."

The last few episodes of The Good Place are, in a sense, a calling of this bluff. Even if you play out the string all the way to extinguishment of the sun or the heat death of the universe -- well, forever is a long time. It can wait. Harry argues that the only reason we accept death is because we're used to it, and if you took someone who lived in a world where there was no death and asked them if they'd prefer to live in a universe where eventually people ceased to exist, they'd look at you like you're crazy. The Good Place provocatively argues the precise opposite -- that if death didn't exist, people would have to invent it. Or they would go crazy, with infinite time on their hands.

And so we are, perhaps, back to where we started. The paradise the heroes create is certainly better than that which they replaced. But it still is deeply, tragically flawed -- and The Good Place seems to believe that these flaws are fundamentally inescapable.

The suicide option is the clearest manifestation of how cracked paradise must be, but there is another issue that the show alludes to: paradise depends on other people, and on their choices. Way back in the first season, "Real Eleanor" raises this precise point: if her soulmate doesn't love her, "this will never truly be my Good Place." Sure it's actually a contrivance to torture Chidi, but it's easy to imagine it as real. What if your paradise is to live blissfully with a certain special someone and ... that person doesn't love you back? Both Simone and Tahani seem okay with Chidi and Jason respectively choosing someone other than them (Eleanor and Janet). But that's in harmony with the audience's happy ending. It's not hard to imagine a different world where they were less sanguine about it.

Or take a far more direct problem: If paradise comes with a suicide option, what happens if your loved one takes it? Harry's excited declaration of all the things he'd do with infinite time is not fundamentally, the reason why he desires immortality. When push comes to shove, he's motivated by a far more basic yearning: to make it so "people won't have to say goodbye any more."

Eleanor's utter panic at the thought of losing Chidi forever was, for me at least, the most visceral emotional gut-punch of the entire series -- even more than the finale of season three (at least there, we could be reasonably assured their separation was temporary). She eventually comes to terms with it. But sit on it a little more: imagine a "paradise" where your soulmate has left you forever. People fantasize about heaven to be reunited with their loved ones, yet we end up looping right back into eternal separation. What kind of paradise is this, where people still have to say goodbye?

So we have two problems that seem to threaten even the conceptual coherency of a paradise:

• First, if paradise is forever, eventually everything will become tired. That suicide is presented as a good solution to this problem shows just how serious it is (and, for what it's worth, I'm not sure the suicide "option" would necessarily bring relief. It could easily generate crippling anxiety -- a sense of trappedness between the irrevocable permanence of death and the unbearable ennui of existence). 
• Second, if paradise depends on the choices other people make, how can we be sure they'll make choices compatible with your happy ending?

The Good Place presents the first problem as unavoidable and skates past the second entirely. But could they be overcome?

Maybe. In the penultimate episode of The Good Place, one solution proposed to the problem of eternal ennui is to reset people's memories, so the things that bored them become fresh again. This is swiftly rejected as a repetition of how the quartet was tortured in The Bad Place. Too swiftly, in my view. Neighborhoods were also used to torture -- should those be jettisoned too?

The problem with eternity is that eventually, everything gets repetitive. Go-Kart Racing against monkeys may be a blast the first time, but it loses its luster after a million reiterations. The wistfulness comes from wishing one could go back to that initial burst of discovery and experience -- before one had the memory of doing it all over again. This was my immediate solution to the ennui problem -- not that some demon should periodically reset you, but that you should be able to choose when, where, and how to reset yourself. It's not just about going back in time. It's reoccupying any memory state you've ever possessed. Go back to before you ever raced against monkeys -- then zoom forward to when you've already experienced all the monkey-races you could handle.

It's like a load/save system for your mind. Hell, you can even adjust the "difficulty" level. It's true that, for many, a "paradise" where one simply automatically gets whatever one wants will feel unsatisfying. But one needn't set the parameters of paradise to guarantee success. It can be as hard or easy as one wants; people can be as pliant or obstinate as one likes (not for nothing is one of the afterlife attractions in OOTS -- a fantasy roleplaying-based setting -- "The Dungeon of Monsters That Are Just Strong Enough to Really Challenge You").

Or dream bigger. If one has infinite ability to reverse and remake memory as one wishes, then one could at any point adapt any set of memories one ever could have had. Don't just live a different life, remember a different life. Then jump forward and remember all the different lives you lived -- each of which (when you lived them) you had erased the memories of all the others. Every single possible timeline is lived -- and can be relived in all its glory, as many times as one wants.

For me, at least, this dissolves the problem of others' choices as well. If anyone can make not just any possible choice, but live through any possible timeline, what does it mean to ask which one is "real"? If your paradise involves loving and being loved by a particular someone, will in your paradise, the person you need to love you, loves you, and stays with you as long as you need. In their paradise, they might love someone else. You enjoy a timeline where people choose exactly the choices that would make you most happy; they live in a timeline which is the same for them. Of course, the sorts of philosophical questions that would raise (among others: What does it mean for the "same" person to simultaneously exist across multiple timelines? Who, exactly, is "choosing" which version they occupy? And if the one that does choose doesn't choose a timeline that involves them loving you back, is the version that does love you really "them"?) are even more esoteric and less accessible to a network audience than the moral philosophy questions The Good Place did try to introduce. So I don't blame them for skipping by it.

* * *

The last enemy to be defeated may not, after all, be death. It may be time.  Time ruins all things. Eventually you run out of it. And even if you never ran out of it -- you had infinite time -- it would defeat you in a different way: via boredom, repetition, and ennui. We can, perhaps, imagine a world where we vanquish death. But can we imagine one where (forgot about possibility, and just think conceptually) we defeat time?

I can. Barely, but I can. Of course, it's in many ways a moot point, since I'm profoundly skeptical that humanity ever will master time in this way -- or even if it's practically possible (that it won't happen in my lifetime is actually less material, given that if it ever did happen we'd probably be at Omega Point anyway). But at least it holds out the possibility of an actual happy ending -- where the last enemy is truly vanquished, and nobody has to say goodbye.

Stories of Anti-Semitism

My good friend Richard Jeffrey Newman is collecting stories of anti-Semitism in a post over at Alas, a Blog. He's looking for stories from Jews and non-Jews alike -- his only rule is that you can only give a story: no analysis, no critique of some politician's rhetoric. Just a story.

It's a good project, and an interesting one, and Mr. Newman has specifically told me he's looking to grab from as wide a scope of people as possible. So, if you have a story you'd like to share (anonymously or otherwise), please drop by his comments section and put it down.

Quote of the Day

Grace Jantzen, "In Order To Begin: Death and Natality in the Western Imaginary," in Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana UP 1999):

Arendt was painfully aware that one of the features of a totalitarian regime is that it seeks not only to eliminate its victims, but also to eradicate even the memory of their lives, wiping out their stories so that they sink into 'holes of oblivion' as if they had 'never existed at all'. This makes it it all the more imperative for the survivors to try and recover the lost memories of the victims, to tell their stories, so that the totalitarian regime shall not have the last word. Though Arendt does not draw the comparison, many feminists will find in her emphasis on reclaiming the stories of victims of oppressive regimes resonances with the efforts to reclaim the 'dangerous memories' of women who have been silenced, oppressed, and consigned to the oblivion of the unrecorded past. It is indeed in part the feminist work to give voice to these voiceless ones, whether in the past or in the continuing oppression of the present; and as we have seen, the possibility of women learning to speak as women is in reciprocal relation to becoming (women) subjects. (148)

I think it parallels my post on the need to recognize the Armenian genocide very nicely, and I think the extension to feminist (and, I think, all anti-subordination theory) is likewise quite insightful.

Originalism, The Death Penalty, and The Perfect Poison

The decision in Baze v. Rees set off much discussion (stemming from Justice Stevens' concurrence) as to whether the death penalty can be ruled unconstitutional. The major argument against is that the constitution clearly contemplates the use of the death penalty at several points -- most notably the due process clauses ("No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...."). Given this rather clear affirmation that the state can (after satisfying due process concerns) take away a person's life, is there any room for the an abolitionist claim?

To explore this issue, I offer up a fantastical historical scenario which I nonetheless think might illuminate how context is critical, even in seemingly clear textual cases. It is the story of the Perfect Poison:

* * *

When European settlers first began to arrive in America, they discovered a bounty of new flora and fauna, wildlife and crops, that were rare or non-existent back in their homelands. One of the most intriguing of these was a small, clover like plant that grew wild in the forested expanses of the east. Local Native Americans used it as euthanasia for their dying elders, or warriors mortally wounded in battle, for, when mashed into a paste and ingested, it had the effect of immediately and painlessly causing death. Observers who saw the plant being administered marveled at how -- in contrast to the bloody spectacle of beheadings or the slow struggle for air during a hanging -- men and women who were fed the clover simply seemed to drift off to sleep, without struggle or apparent distress. Dubbed "American Hemlock", the plant was colloquially known simply as "the perfect poison."

Seeking to distinguish themselves from their more backwards European forebearers, American colonists rapidly began utilizing the perfect poison as their sole method of execution. This is not to say there was no debate over the morality of the death penalty. Quakers and other abolitionists argued strongly that the state had no right to claim a human life, as part of their generic opposition to non-violence. When America achieved independence and the constitution was being drafted, this debate grew in salience dramatically. When the due process clause was drafted to include the potential for capital punishment, progressives reformers attempted to make a stand and strip the word "life" from the text.

The debate was fierce, instigated primarily by a few true believers on each side. Knowing that their "objective" critique of capital punishment was unlikely to sway undecided delegates, abolitionists pointed to the excesses of the French Revolution and tried to emphasize the risk of brutal, undignified killing at the hands of the state. The "spirit of '76" made the delegates very receptive to the inherent human dignity possessed by all individuals, even criminals. But advocates of the death penalty responded by pointing to the perfect poison. America already had nearly 100 years of experience with this drug, and thus reliably knew that they could apply the ultimate punishment while still maintaining the dignity of the criminal. They pointed out that if, by some chance, the national government wished to abandon the perfect poison, it would run afoul of the just-completed clause prohibiting "cruel and unusual" punishment (what would later be the 8th amendment). The risks the abolitionists claimed were confined to old Europe. Americans had developed their own method of execution, that was quick, painless, and immediately lethal.

As the debate progressed, it became clear that the existence and use of the perfect poison was going to be the decisive factor. Delegates who had come in undecided were gradually won over to the pro-death penalty side. The abolitionist's arguments were abstract and unpersuasive given the existence and universal usage of the perfect poison. "Were we still in England, and capital punishment meant sickening hangings (with many more savage citizens clamoring for the return of burning at stake!), I would not hesitate to ban it," proclaimed one delegate from New Jersey. "Where the culture is one of barbarism, where the norms of the enlightenment have not penetrated, the penalty of death is too dangerous to lie in the hands of man. But, God blessed America with an excellent herb, one which evades all the traps of savagery, and our people in their infinite wisdom have taken to use it. It is always possible that our people will regress or thirst for more blood, I admit. But I believe that, given the choice between civilization and the abyss, our people will choose the former."

And so it was that the constitution passed explicitly contemplating the use of the death penalty in America.

Unfortunately, what was not foreseen by the Representative from New Jersey, nor any of the other delegates at the Convention, was the rapidity by which Americans would settle their new country. American Hemlock, as mentioned, grew only in the leafy expanses of the eastern forests, and was resistant to cultivation. It was also highly sensitive to human encroachment. As these woods were cut down to make room for new farms and homesteads, the perfect poison became harder and harder to find. At the same time, its demand was skyrocketing, leading to over-harvesting. By the mid-18th century, the plant was only rarely seen. In response to this scarcity, governors began authorizing the alternative forms of execution that had repelled the framers: hanging and firing squads. But even with this shift in policy, habitat loss had doomed American Hemlock. By 1890, it was declared extinct.

* * *

The point of this story is to illustrate how contemporary context can matter, even to an originalist or textualist. The framers sanctioned the use of the death penalty within the specific context of the availability of the perfect poison. Not contemplating the modern problem of ecological collapse, the founders did not envision the potential for these circumstances to change. But, without the perfect poison, it would seem clear that, at the very least, the question of whether the death penalty was constitutionally sanctioned was open again, notwithstanding constitutional text that contemplates its use.

Now, obviously, this story is extreme. Most obviously, there was no perfect poison, nor is there any proof that American colonists would have used or preferred even if there was. Also importantly, the story creates a scenario where the necessary trigger for permitting the death penalty physically disappeared from the planet. I am not arguing that the actual process of deliberation over the death penalty even closely approximated this.

Nonetheless, I think this story is conceptually illustrative. For one, at the very least I think it demonstrates that changes in context can theoretically alter what is and is not sanctioned by constitutional clauses, even under a very strict form of originalism. And I think it demonstrates that point more broadly that might be apparent at first glance. The framers in this story were making decisions about broad principles based upon what -- in retrospect -- we can see to be temporally-specific assumptions. Here, the assumptions were laid out explicitly (in the debate, anyway -- the drafted text did not anywhere specifically demand that life only be taken by the perfect poison), and the change in circumstances was dramatic. But in general, I think it's obvious that when people engage in deliberation they work from within the only conceptual framework available to them -- that is, their own place, time, and vantage point -- and make decisions that are contingent on those assumptions. As Iris Marion Young points out, "in political communication our goal is not to arrive at some generalities .... Instead, we are looking for just solutions to particular problems in a particular social context" [Inclusion and Democracy (Cambridge: Oxford UP 2000), 113]. Everyone deliberates that way, utilizing assumptions (usually unstated) drawn from the world around us that -- like the world itself -- can and often do change in the future.

The standard "originalist" (or perhaps "classical originalist", since I think the debate here is still largely intra-mural) response here would be to say that the constitution accounts for changing circumstances through the amendment process, nothing more. But I think the perfect poison story demonstrates why this is too thin a response. The existence of the perfect poison -- assumed to be permanent but really contextual -- was an embedded assumption laid into the text as originally deliberated and drafted. It would seem foolish to take from that ratification debate the principle that the death penalty absent the perfect poison is consistent with the mutually agreed upon principles that came out of the ratification debate, because that's clearly not what had been agreed upon. Rather, any debate about the current constitutionality of the death penalty would have to closely examine the relevant context and assumptions under which it was passed (including assumptions about justice and human dignity) to see whether they still hold up in the present day. If, for example, the founders ratified the use of the death penalty based on a conception of human dignity that is now "extinct", is that any different than ratifying the use of the death penalty based on the availability of a "perfect poison" that is now extinct? I don't know. But it's an interesting question to ask.

I Am a Slayer of Worlds

I just found out I beat a Rhodes Scholar in debate!

Allow me to explain. My first ever round of varsity LD in high school (sophomore year), I faced a young woman from a nearby school -- let's call her Jane. Jane was a sophomore as well, but far more experienced than I was, and extremely talented by any measure. It was a mismatch. I got stomped, and she went on to win the tournament.

But for some reason she remembered me fondly, and we became friends. The next year, at NCFL nationals, we were hanging out at lunch, going over each other's cases and swapping ideas, potential rebuttals and responses, etc.. And then, wouldn't you know it, we are paired against each other for round four. What are the odds?

So we trooped into the classroom, giggling like maniacs. I explained to the judges that we had just spent all of lunch reviewing each other's cases, so this might be a rather odd round. And it was -- but the extra preparation also made it into an awesome display. All our arguments were tight and on the money. And with an additional year's experience, I avenged my previous defeat and took Jane down on a 2-1 decision. That was on my way to my best LD performance of my career -- a quarterfinals appearance at the national tournament (where I proceeded to get spanked by the eventual champion).

Anyway, Jane IMed me today to inform me that she won the Rhodes Scholarship. A few days ago she won the Marshall Scholarship, so I knew she was already running in that circle (though -- knowing Jane -- I have to say she is the one person who I would have been more surprised to find out she didn't win the scholarships than that she did. The woman is just operating on another level from us mortals). Congratulations are in order to her, of course, but due respect to me as well -- Junior year of high school, I bested her in argumentative combat.

A Jew in Sun Country

On my recent trip to New York, I flew Sun Country Air. I've used them before, and have had generally positive experiences. For flights in and out of Minneapolis, they are far cheaper than the competition, especially the exorbitant fares charged by Northwest, which dominates the airport. They fly direct, which is nice for me, in comparison to the other major low-fare airline that goes to MSP--AirTran, which directs all its flights through Atlanta (Atlanta is not exactly on the way between the Twin Cities and DC). And their flights are normally uncrowded--not a good sign of profitability, but far more comfortable to fly in.

The flights on this trip were delayed on both ends, but that was more a function of JFK International being a complete mess than anything the airline did. However, I did have a rather peculiar experience flying home. Sun Country offers a hot sandwich as its "snack" on the flight. The way there, it was turkey pastrami. Coming back, it was a cheeseburger. Being a semi-kosher Jew, I can't eat cheeseburgers. I asked if they had one without cheese, and the flight attendant told me, sorry, they don't. So I told her they should have a few without cheese, because sometimes Jews fly too. And she looked at me and said, half-indulgently and half-patronizingly, "well, we can't have everything."

She didn't say it mean, exactly, but the tone of voice made me feel as if I was making some wildly unreasonable demand of her company. And I resent being made to feel that way. I don't like it when Judaism is treated as some strange and mysterious cult, and I don't think it's utter craziness to set aside a few hamburgers without cheese so that people who--because they keep kosher, or are lactose intolerant, or whatever--can't have cheeseburgers still can eat. But I didn't say any of that. I don't like to make a fuss. So I accepted a small, significantly less filling cookie, and sat quietly for the rest of the flight.

Of course, the ordeal was even more awkward for me because of my own imperfect record of keeping kosher. Though I still don't ever eat bacon or shellfish, the "milk/meat" mix rule has started to fall apart significantly. The turkey pastrami sandwich on the way there had some hot goo on it which "for all I knew was mayonnaise", but pretty surely was cheese. I eat Philly Cheese Steaks without embarrassment now, and Chicken Parmesan as well. But, in my childhood, cheeseburgers were the quintessential example of an "unkosher food", something everybody ate but I didn't. As such, even though I don't really honor the rule which prevents me from eating it anymore, it occupies a peculiar space in my psyche that turns it into a sort of redline: if I start eating cheeseburgers, I've crossed over into total non-kosherness. So, unlike the pastrami, I refused the cheeseburger, and sat hungrily in my chair. Academically, I think this sort of negotiation over how to be Jewish in the modern world is totally legitimate. But practically speaking, it makes it hard for me to truly press that the airline accommodate kosher preferences.

But even still, this experience really impressed upon me that, even though Jews are treated pretty well in America and are reasonably comfortable here, we're still "strangers in a strange land." If I was flying El Al, this event would not have happened. My imperfect little negotiations would have been a moot point, and it's nice sometimes to not have to deliberate about which little sacrifices to my Judaism I'm willing to make to be a non-obtrusive citizen. What this event signifies is that even minority groups which are on relatively friendly terms with majority culture still remain minority groups. There is always that moment of strangeness, and the more common those moments are, the more stressful life can be. It's nice sometimes to be able to retreat into my own space--the Jewish Students Center at Carleton, for example--where I know I'm not going to be weird because I'm Jewish. And because of that experience, I feel I have an obligation to support similar cultural spaces for other minority groups who are "strangers in a strange land", and should not have to always be a minority, all of the time.

Flying First Class on Southwest

This was a great anecdote from a book I recently picked up, Sheryll Cashin's The Failures of Integration:

I have my own informal means of observing the consistent discomfort with African Americans on the part of nonblacks. It is a phenomenon that, ironically, I greatly benefit from. I call it "Southwest Airlines First Class." My husband and I enjoy this inside joke when flying Southwest, a dependable, cheap airline that allows passengers to seat themselves on a first come, first serve basis. We always hope that there will be a black person far ahead of us at the front of the line; a dark-skinned young black male is best. At least four out of five times, we can depend on the seats next to that black person being empty, even if his row is far up front, begging for the taking. I am always happy to take this convenient seat, feeling grateful for the discomfort of others and marveling at the advantage they are willing to pass up due to their own social limitations. I smile warmly at my black brother as I plop down next to him.

Sheryll Cashin, The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class are Undermining the American Dream, (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 12-13.

I wouldn't say I've consciously noticed this phenomenon, but having mentioned it, it does strike me as familiar on my own frequent flying trips. Earlier, Cashin cites a study showing that White people are willing to pay up to a 13% premium to live in all White neighborhoods. The racial discomfort we feel causes us to pass up on opportunities we might otherwise enjoy--from a better seat on an airline to a cheaper house in a good neighborhood. The problem, as Cashin and others have noted, is that "green follows White," so if White people cluster away from their Black peers, then social resources too will follow Whites away from Blacks. This serves to blunt the costs Whites should have to face due to their discomfort towards people of color, but it often has devastating effects on the minority community.

So while the micro-benefit Cashin enjoys as a Black women due to White discomfort does tickle me a little bit, it is symbolic of a larger issue that is very serious and largely detrimental to a large slice of the American populace.

It Doesn't Wash Off

UNC Law Professor Eric Muller reposts a message sent to the Brown alumni listserv by a Black alum of the college. It's entitled "How Many Gun Barrels Have You Looked Down"? It shows how even wealthy, otherwise privileged Black people still face devastating racial harassment. This guy is by no means economically disadvantaged. He went to Brown. He has no criminal record. He has DOD clearance. And yet, he estimates he's faced a gun barrel aimed by a police officer around a dozen times. I'm in a roughly similar economic strata. My tally? Zero.

It is important to hear stories like this, and I've posted similar ones before. But by and large, these tales do not penetrate into mainstream (White) discourse. And that's problematic. It really plays into why I so strongly support diversifying social institutions. When writing on Barack Obama's judicial criteria including empathy with marginalized groups, I quoted Jack Balkin on the need to situate our view of the world within the confines of our particular social position:

If we do not investigate the relationship between our social situation and our perspectives, we may confuse our conception of what is reasonable with Reason itself. If we do not see how our reason is both enabled and limited by our position, we may think our judgments positionless and universal. We may find the perspectives of those differently situated unreasonable, bizarre, and even dangerous, or we may not even recognize the possibility of another way of looking at things.

I've discovered that the best check against the opinions of other groups appearing to be "unreasonable, bizarre, and even dangerous" is simply rote repetition. I recently chatted with a friend about this, and she said she'd had similar experiences as a woman talking about jogging in certain places at night. Some of her male friends dismissed her concerns as paranoia. As it happens, I have many female friends who have relayed similar concerns, so when she told me that there were certain paths she wouldn't run in the evening, I didn't find it odd or strange. But had I not talked to many women about this, I can certainly see how it might seem foreign. After all, I never feel any hesitation about walking or running where I want, when I want. Certainly, there are some high crime areas I might avoid. But there is no place at Carleton that I wouldn't feel comfortable at alone in the evening.

Similarly, reading just this piece, I may be able to dismiss the author's recollection as biased, or just aberrational. It rings so foreign to my own experiences. But I'll tell you--whenever I talk to my Black friends--of whatever social class, they tell the same stories. I went to a summer program at Yale University, and two Black girls in my unit were livid at being basically run out of a store in downtown New Haven. I shopped in New Haven all the time when I was there, never had anything remotely resembling a problem. A friend of mine at Carleton was pulled over by the cops outside of Northfield, on some random traffic thing, and they held her up for hours. Pretty much stranded her in a cornfield. She was in tears. This is a girl who grew up in Apple Valley, interned for a US Senator, and oh yeah, attended Carleton College. The only time I've seen the Northfield police is breaking up loud parties. What more should she be doing to insulate herself from police harassment? When I hear the same stories over and over again, from people I know and trust, verifies these happenings in a way that hearing a set of statistics, or even complaints from a civil rights leader, doesn't. There is no linking factor, no explanatory event, that connects these oh-so-similar stories other than race. Because, as the Brown alum explains, no matter how rich you get, what car you drive, what job you have, or what zip code you live in, being Black doesn't wash off.

And this emphasizes why it is important to have these diverse social connections. If every person I converse with about jogging is male, then of course talk of women feeling unsafe on certain jogging paths will feel odd. It doesn't cohere to our experience--we all jog and none of us have any problem. If I have no Black friends, then stories about police brutality or harassment will feel overstated or aberrational. You've faced a police gun twelve times? You must be doing something wrong--all of my friends are good, law-abiding men and women, and they've never faced anything like that. Jerome McCristal Culp has lamented the tendency of Whites to perceive the experiences of people of color as a kind of "shrill craziness," and this, I feel, help explains why. Remembering that our perspective may be constrained by our position is important, for it indicates that a monolithic social circle is also an incomplete one--that we cannot know it all by ourselves, and that we have to make sure our views and policies are informed by the experiences of a representative cross-sample of the community.

The Script of Crime

I found this story from Julian Sanchez based on Ezra Klein's riff on the last passage and what it means for our criminal justice system. But it's actually a fascinating tale in its own right. Basically, a man was robbing a dinner party, but right after he demanded the money, a guest instead offered him a glass of wine. The robber accepted and sipped the wine. He then tucked away his gun, asked for a group hug, and then left without taking anything. Sanchez relates the story to a South African cop who was chasing a female anti-apartheid protester, billy-club in hand. The woman lost her shoe, so instinctively the cop stopped to pick it up and hand it to her. Once he did that, he couldn't just turn around and beat her, so instead he walked away. Sanchez writes:

We all act on a variety of social scripts, from which we find it enormously psychologically difficult to deviate once they're activated. Often, this is a problem, causing people to follow orders when they shouldn't, or to stand by in a crisis when they ought to be rendering aid. Sometimes it has more benign effects. The loss of the shoe suddenly shunted the policeman from his cop-script to his chivalry-script. Something similar probably happened with the burglar.

The crucial move here is that he wasn't directly challenged within the terms of the burglar script: The guests didn't refuse outright to hand over their money, but only offered him some wine first, so there was no need to move on to Act II: further threats. But since he hadn't asked for wine, the offer was not in line with the compliant-hostage script either: It was a social courtesy. Once he'd accepted, he was reading from the party-guest script. And holding up one's host at a dinner party is simply not the done thing.

"Script-breaking" is a rather prominent part of feminist theory, for example, in Sharon Marcus' work on rape prevention. She argues that rape is "a series of steps and signals whose typical initial moments we can learn to recognize and whose final outcome we can learn to stave off." It's not as easy as it sounds--just as the burglar is operating within a script of criminality, the target will naturally want to lapse into the script of "victim", the series of moves that society recognizes as the proper way for victims to behave. However, the risk of script-breaking is that its unpredictable--since people don't do it that often (hence it being a break), we don't know what the result of our behavioral alchemy will be. As Sanchez indicates, the best hope might be trying to divert the narrative from one recognized situation (robbery) to another recognized situation (dinner party)--even if the recognition stems only from media, TV, or social mores rather than lived-experience. But this only mitigates, not eliminates, the danger. For example, if rape is primarily a function of the desire for power and domination, a case where the victim refuses to behave in a recognizably "victim-like" manner could disorient and befuddle her attacker, but it also could enrage and infuriate him, leading him to yet more sadistic violence. This problem would seem to be extant regardless of whether the alternate script is familiar or not (although familiarity does seem to be a precondition for successful diversion).

Diversion works because it presumes we all have access to a certain universal index of narrative experience that has roughly similar (or at least mutually intelligible) meanings across the board. Where this is not the case, script-breaking runs into problems. The script itself may not adequately describe the situation being faced (a "rape script" premised around a drunk guy at the bar may not be of help when the woman is facing rape from her husband or father), or the perpetrator of violence may not be familiar with the alternative script being proposed (if someone had no conception of what a dinner party meant, the guest's reaction might have felt like mockery or worse). However, conceptually speaking, looking at crime in terms of scripts, and seeking to derail it by noting chinks in the armor of the narrative, is a surprisingly effective way to combat and prevent crime. Who says post-structuralism never gave us any useful practices?

Quote of the Evening

"'Do you trust white people?' You do not and you know that you do not, much as you want to; yet you rise and lie and say you do; you must say it for her salvation and the world's; you repeat that she must trust them, that most white folks are honest, and all the while you are lying and every level, silent eye there knows you are lying, and miserably you sit and lie on, to the greater glory of God."

W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater (Amherst, NY: Humanity, 2003) (1920), 102.

If the only thing you've read of Du Bois is Souls of Black Folks, then you haven't read Du Bois. Arguably the greatest thinker and intellectual in American history (not African-American, but American), Du Bois' writings and narratives remain powerful and poignant today. Du Bois' personal journey--from democratic idealist to socialist to communist, culminating in his self-imposed exile to Ghana ("I am departing America and have not set a date for return") represents one of the greatest live tragedies in the modern era. He died August 27, 1963--one day before Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

A Story Is Worth A Thousand Words

I'm not a fan of fiction. Yet, oddly enough, I am a fan of stories. By stories I mean actual, real life events, told in the form of a story. I believe stories can bring across important truths that are obscured in dry, academic prose or even passionate speech and argument. One of my interests as a scholar is on incorporating storytelling into approved, official legal discourse.

As you all know, I have a deep and abiding interest in issues of racial justice. I write on a variety of issues on the topic, but one of the more interesting and distressing ones is racial profiling, and the general treatment of (mostly young) Black men by the police. You can read a wide variety of polemics on why racial profiling is bad, ineffective, or immoral. But the tales of racial profiling rarely make it out, because the people being targeted are primarily poor and don't have access to major media arms to publicize their stories. I excerpted from a stellar Washington Post article once that was an exception to this rule. And now, I want to share another story, which I will leave without comment.

The author is andre douglas pond cummings, and he is a law professor at West Virginia University. Prior to that, he was a corporate attorney for the prestigious Chicago firm of Kirkland & Ellis, which was his position at the time of these events.

While practicing corporate law at Kirkland and Ellis in Chicago, once a week (or sometimes twice) I quietly left the firm at 7 P.M. or so, to participate in a formal inner city youth mentoring project. I drove due west from downtown Chicago, 200 W. Randolph Street, to the "west side" near Grand Avenue and Monticello, one of the many "west side" neighborhoods in Chicago, where I met up with several young men and women, typically between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, and drove them to a local church where we did homework together for two hours or so. I engaged in this mentoring program all three years that I lived and worked in Chicago, prior to entering the legal academy. Up close and personal, I witnessed a variety of astonishing incidences:

As a reward for homework well done and high marks received, I planned to meet several of my mentees on a Friday night at 9 P.M. for dinner and a movie downtown in "the Loop." On this particular Friday night, I could not break away from K & E to make my 9 P.M. appointment with the mentees. By the time I was able to finish my work it was 10:30 P.M. or so. I immediately retrieved my car and drove out west to see if the disappointed youngsters would at least like to grab a late dinner in downtown Chicago. After picking up two young men, the three of us were accosted by two members of the Chicago Police Department ("CPD"). The two officers quickly turned into six and before we knew what was going on we had been cuffed, searched, my vehicle had been tossed and we had been tussled and menaced by the officers. Constitutional search and seizure violations were plentiful. Apparently, I had trespassed into a "well known" drug area, and that my interaction with two young black males indicated a "clear" drug transaction.

Once I was able to force the officers to realize that I was a practicing attorney, the four "extra" officers disappeared quickly, and we were left standing at the rear of my car, the contents of our pockets strewn across the trunk, my vehicle car doors open and contents of my glove box strewn about, and having heard enough threats to "stay out of this well known drug area" to last a good long time. This experience, where I was personally bullied and where attempts to physically intimidate all three of us had been exercised, was one that I could not let pass. I wrote a letter to the supervising lieutenant in that police precinct and clearly delineated the experience and made demands on the police department as to how I thought they should appropriately respond to the clear constitutional violation of our Fourth Amendment rights. The initial officers on the scene had an internal affairs investigation opened into their behavior on that evening and both were required to hire attorneys to represent their interests. Some of my demands were met by the CPD while the eventual conclusion to the investigation was a finding of "no cause." Apparently, we needed more witnesses than the three of us involved in the police malfeasance, in order to effectuate suspensions of these officers.

As we continued on our way toward downtown Chicago, one of the high school students remarked that he was unfazed by this incident. "Happens every day," he stated nonchalantly.

Here is the letter Professor cummings relayed to the Chicago Police, requesting an investigation:

The Tragedy of Great Bracket Politics

And other tales of the day.

Today was the first day of the term, meaning the obligatory "what did you do over break" conversations with various folks. In my first class, I happily chirped away about how I went to Vegas. "What about you, Mara?" I asked.

"I went to Louisiana with Habitat for Humanity."

"Oh."

So that started my day off with a heaping dose of "I'm a horrible human being."

Later on, another friend remarked at how I was sitting at a right-handed desk, even though I'm lefty. I'm so used to them by now, I think I naturally gravitate towards righty desks at this point. It's odd, because I'm usually pretty gung-ho about left-handedness. So I was going to make a joke about how normally I'm a "left supremacist." Except instead, I said how normally I'm a "White supremacist." Wow.

Finally, I'm currently losing in my NCAA pool tournament to a girl who had Illinois in the finals. Illinois! A 12 seed that lost in round one!