Screwing up

I’m not going to link to the post* because I’m still embarrassed at messing up so badly, but despite all my “practice” in mixed-race setting, I got myself in an emotional knot and made a posturing inappropriate comment in a blog thread in which Black women were talking in really deep and important ways about their experiences. Even though I really wanted to connect human to human with the tread, my comment was more focused on trying to present myself as experienced and liberal than on connecting with the experiences people were writing about. When called on it, I apologized, and I tried to behave myself thereafter, but I know the people over there think I’m a jerk, and I feel bad about it. So I’m just sitting with the bad feeling, because I think it is good for me. This is not the first time I’ve realized I’ve been a jerk, and I’m afraid it won’t the last. It’s too darn easy to be smug about racial issues when you spend a lot of time with White folks who are more clueless than you are, so as painful as this is, I’m accepting it as an important reminder that there is an objective reason why humility is the best stance.

I knew when I was writing my comment what the ground rules were, and I know that the reason I screwed up was that I got myself in an emotional tizzy that left me more worried about my own feelings than about the needs and feelings of other people. One thing that drives people of color crazy is having to deal with the emotional needs of White folks confronting their own internalized racism and discomfort in charged interactions. If you are White and paying attention to what is really happening and what people of color are saying about their experiences, it can feel just awful, and you feel like you need to be DOING SOMETHING to help, or to distance yourself from all that awfulness. These are legitimate feelings and we White folks need to deal with those feelings, but we need to do it with other White people, I think, because people of color have their hands full already dealing with being the targets of racism.

This ties in with the theme in church yesterday, Hearts Breaking Open. It was done in music and song and was a lot more poetic than I am, but the general point was that we have to let our hearts break, let ourselves be open to the suffering in the world. We cannot fix the world, but we can respond to the world by letting it into our hearts. One of the lines (someone was being quoted, but I don’t know who) was: philosophy is safer than love. When we are confronted with the suffering of others, it is too easy to shut the heart down. It is safer to intellectualize or to be cynical than to feel all that pain. Or to focus on our own pain and not other people’s needs, like not visiting a loved one with a terminal illness because we “just can’t bear to see him that way.” We were reminded that the world is both very beautiful and very broken, and we live amidst that beauty and that pain. When we open our hearts to both the beauty and the pain, we have the possibility of responding to others’ needs.

* OK, I realize this is more stupid impression management. Of course I should link to the really WONDERFUL post and discussion thread over at stuff white people do in which Black women talked in honest detail about their experiences, where the discussion really evolved and they explored commonalities and differences. One line of discussion, for example, involved their common experiences in programs for the gifted. Another was about not being treated as feminine. The main theme was the “Strong Black Woman” who can take anything, whose feelings don’t matter. It is painful, wrenching, but also very thoughtful and insightful and truly beautiful. My heart was broken open by reading what they wrote, even as it was also broken open by recognizing my own brokenness.

an old friend found too late

My spouse spotted the NYT obit for Dennis DeLeon, an old friend from high school we have not seen since our wedding reception in 1970. Our last communication from him was a note saying he’d get our wedding present to us later. It’s a common name so we wouldn’t know it was him without the picture (which looks just like we remember him) and corroborating biographical details. He was an important part of the speech/debate team, the small circle we spent most of our time with in high school in California, and was my spouse’s debate partner in their senior year. We wondered over the years what had happened to him. Now we know. He was a prominent human rights activist  in New York who announced that he had AIDS in a 1993 NYT op ed . His activism is not a shock, as he was already a student leader in high school and at Occidental College. Nor is his sexual orientation, although it wasn’t anything we were aware of at the time. We were a nerdy crowd and people were not dating much anyway. I sure wish we’d known where he was — it would have been great to see him.

when you are called racist

This is an edited version of what I wrote for my students after a class discussion about the responding when someone calls you racist. The discussion started when a student described an upsetting experience of a homeless man calling her racist because she would not accept a jar of pennies in payment (it was against company policy). I made points I’ve made before about Whites overreacting to the r-word, including the story about teachers overreacting. I cut off discussion prematurely because of concerns about not getting farther behind in lecture materials due to the expectation (which proved correct) that I might miss class the following week, so I sent them this memo, which I think may be of interest to some readers of this blog.

Some of you were upset* because I seemed to be saying that it was OK for minorities to use the word racist as name-calling and Whites should just ignore it, while others were upset with me for seeming to say that any use of the word racist is just name-calling. I actually did not mean either. What I should have been trying to draw out is the whole complexity of the situation and the different perspectives different groups bring to the table. I’ve written some material (below) to explain how I see this, by developing two contrasting points of view – the “minority” (especially Black) view, and the “majority” (White) view. These are both extremes and there are many people who don’t fit these extremes, but I hope it will help to explain the point.

Extended Family

(This was mostly written last week but I didn’t have time to post it from the road. Today’s snow emergency gives me the time to finish it.)

We’ve been here all week due to the death of my father-in-law Thanksgiving night. The funeral was yesterday, a week after he passed. It was a great celebration of a life well lived by a man who spent time with his children and grandchildren and gave abundantly of himself to a wide variety of community projects. The funeral was followed by a noisy and warm family gathering. Now it is quiet. As I write this, my mother-in-law and brother-in-law are napping, my sister-in-law is watching TV, the other set of grandchildren have headed home or are out shopping. My daughter is napping in the motel. My husband, son, son-in-law and I are all sitting in the living room playing games on our laptops. I decided this was the time to write the blog I’ve been thinking about all week.

I’m not sorry I came here for the whole week. It is important to honor a family you have been part of for nearly forty years. At the same time, it was a hard thing to do. The air travel arrangements for five people were an expensive mess. We traveled on four different itineraries. Three of us had to change travel plans made after the “death is imminent” call. Commitments that seemed unbreakable in the uncertainty of “sometime soon” were sacrificed in the face of the certainty of death. It is a very bad time to be away from work, this close to the end of the semester. I made arrangements to reschedule or plan alternate activities for my classes and I’ve done a lot of work via remote access. But I still care about my work obligations and worried that missing a whole week of classes is somehow too much for an indirect relation like a father-in-law. My son took a whole week away from his classes in grad school. I could not help but think about all the jokes we make about the mortality rate of grandparents, especially just before or after Thanksgiving break.

I did not go to the funerals of any of my own grandparents. The circumstances of each was different, but the relative estrangement of my parents from their own parents, complex and delayed funeral arrangements, coupled with the difficulty and expense of travel made my attendance seem optional to them. I remember and still regret my non-attendance at the last one, the funeral for the grandmother I liked best. I had small children, was in debt and could not afford to fly the whole family out, had just talked to her by phone earlier in the week, and knew the family would not blame me. But I realized too late it hurt anyway, especially because I was the only grandchild missing. A Black friend from a low income dysfunctional family was deeply shocked and scandalized when she found out I had not gone to my grandmother’s funeral. “Were you close?” is the question we often ask when hearing of a grandparent’s death. When I tried to explain to my friend that I’d never seen my grandmother much even as a child, she just said, “But it is your grandmother!”

Here’s where the work and sociology part comes in. We academics have careers that are very flexible in many ways. But we relate to a national job market and typically live far away from our families of origin. We are rootless nomads, and many of us do not even realize how peculiar this is. There are a fair number of ethnographies written about working class folks who live within a few miles of their extended families as if they are some sort of backward exotics worthy of anthropological notice. There are not many ethnographies about the family structures of the nomadic academic and business classes, and it is my impression that many sociologists think this is what “normal” families are like. Many of us were reared in the same kind of rootless placeless families as we are creating. There are deep costs we pay, and our children pay, for this lifestyle. Even if you don’t view the effects as “costs,” there are definitely huge impacts on people’s understandings of what human relationships are about. For one thing, we believe that a sign of having a significant commitment to the academic life is that one is a rootless cosmopolitan who is willing to live anywhere the intellectual climate is good. And we know that schools that “hire their own” and give preference to people who don’t want to move tend to become inbred and parochial intellectual backwaters. I think it is true that the mobility of the professorate is good for science. But what is good for science is not good for families or people.

Those of us in the higher occupational categories give a very high priority to jobs and job advancement over other values. There are other value systems. I remember hearing my husband’s grandfather complain about one of his sons (one of my husband’s uncles, a business executive) that he spent too much time working and did not take his son fishing. The working-class uncles got more esteem from the older man for face time with children than for the money they made. My father-in-law did not go to college. He worked his way up into management from the shop floor, then lost place in a corporate shuffle and finished his career in a variety of lower-level jobs. I know my father-in-law spent a lot of time with his sons, and both my husband and brother-in-law spent a lot of time with their children, not in a “look at me, I’m violating gender roles” way, but in a “this is what fathers do” way. There is a traditional “family man” masculinity that involves active hands-on time with children and caring treatment of wives and mothers that often seems invisible in rhetoric about gender roles and family life, although it shows up periodically in the research literature, often to the surprise of the sociologist authors who report that “feminist” attitudes are not well correlated with actual patterns of household activities (basically because working-class people on average have less feminist attitudes and more gender-egalitarian household task allocations than professionals).

Professionals also have jobs that require us to do things that cannot be done by others and cannot be deferred until later. We are much more able to respond to the needs of kin or life emergencies in the summer and during breaks than in the middle of the school term. Our jobs are a central part of our lives and our identities. This, coupled with our distance from extended families, leads us to have a high proportion of our close significant relations tied to work rather than neighborhood or family. I was talking with a colleague about her research on how these patterns put people like us at a significant disadvantage under certain kinds of major life challenges. (I’m not going to say more because I don’t want to scoop her as-yet unpublished research. But it is going to be a blockbuster when it comes out.)

More and more graduate students come from academic families where our nomadic lifestyle is the norm. If your extended family is already scattered all over the country (or globe), you have no choice anyway. Other people come from bad families they are happy to be far from. (My own thin relation with my grandparents was due to divorce and abuse when my parents were children.)  But if you come from a good family that has a place, one of the choices you face as an academic is whether to try to live closer to that family, even if it puts you in a less good place than you’d like to be otherwise, and even if it means you may not be able to live as an academic. Geographic choices that seem manageable when you are young and childless often become more painful when you have children who don’t know their grandparents, or your parents age. Monday, 36 hours after finally getting us all back from the delayed flights from the funeral, I got word that my mother had been hospitalized with unexplained bleeding. Fortunately the diagnosis points to a relatively mild problem and is not immediately threatening. But I am sick to report that one of my first thoughts was, “Oh no. I can’t miss any more class. I just can’t.”

The work-family choices are not just about caring for small children. They are about the structure of your whole life. If you think this is just a “personal issue” and not a “professional issue,” then you should realize you’ve said something about yourself. Or perhaps about your family.

My jaw dropped: racial interactions

I study racial disparities in criminal justice, but this still completely blew me away. I started clicking around and have ended up collecting links to a large number of quite amazing videos of racial interactions that would be great discussion-starters in class. The two segments that just make my jaw drop were broadcast last February on ABC 20-20’s “What Would You Do?” series last February. They are a little over six minutes each after a 15 second commercial*. The setup is a parking lot in a public park in a White suburb. In part 1, for several hours three White boys overtly vandalize a car. Dozens of White people walk by, looking but doing nothing. Only one ever calls the police; a few say something to the boys. In part 2, three Black boys do the same thing: lots of people call the police, many more people intervene.  In both cases, there is overt criminality going on, although possibly so overt that people might have defined it as some kind of stunt. On balance, a clear demonstration that failure to sanction overt White crime is part of a racial disparity pattern, not just response to Black crime. But the real shocker: while the White kids are vandalizing the car, the police DO get TWO 911 calls from the same parking lot. What they call about is Black people SLEEPING in a nearby car: they phone it in as “possible robbery!”

Vandals 1 (white)
Vandals 2 (black)
(*I found these originally on Youtube but link to ABC despite the commercial opening in the interest of supporting copyright holders where possible.)

There are also some really chilling Driving While Black segments available.

This 10-minute segment was produced by a New York news station about Nassau County. It is really quite incredible, the tester ends up handcuffed and held for thirty minutes after making a U-turn on a residential street and refusing to explain what he is doing in the area. No response to White testers who duplicate the action, although the Blacks in the trailing news car are stopped and hassled.

This ABC Primetime episode on Driving While Black is also very good, but the YouTube versions are all scratched and vertically stretched. I cannot find an on-line version of the original. The first segment is 10 minutes, the second is about 2 minutes of wrap-up
10 minute main segment
2 minute wrap up

A Fox news video shows a black customer being surrounded and beaten by whites but the black man is the only one arrested

The ABC Primetime What Would You Do? series also has a number of great segments (generally 8-10 minutes long) about bystander intervention into overt cases of racial/ethnic discrimination. Actors play the part of store clerks or real estate sales people who overtly insult and harass Black or Muslim or Spanish-speaking lower class (day laborer) shoppers (also actors). Bystander responses are videotaped. Each segment shows lots of people either standing by without intervening or in some cases approving the discrimination, but also highlights people who do intervene. John Dovidio (a psychologist known for work on bystander intervention) provides commentary that praises those who do intervene. Again, these seem like great discussion-starters. I linked to YouTube when I could not find the segment on the ABC site.

Real estate agent insulting Black and Muslim couples looking at a home.

Black shopper in a upscale clothing boutique gets insulted and even frisked

Muslim woman trying to buy an apple Danish (quite a few shoppers join in on the discrimination, while a White man who says is son is fighting in Iraq challenges it)

Spanish-speaking guys in work clothes trying to buy coffee (quite a few shoppers again join in on the discrimination, few seem to speak against it)

H/T to http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com/ which pointed me to the Muslim shopper video on YouTube, from which I found the rest through YouTube searches, ABC News searches, and Google.

oh my

This is sociologically useful I guess. I friended my aunt on Facebook, and after I posted one of those viral pro-health care reform things that was going around, she responded with notes equating health insurance reform with wanting a government handout because you are too lazy to work and then “everyone gets health care if they ARE DYING WHY DO U LIE” [stet on the capitalization] about that “nobody should die for lack of insurance” thingie. Well ok, I mean not all of us are used to writing in complete sentences and we do have different political opinions and this is my aunt after all, not some troll I don’t know.  I responded politely with my opinions.

And maybe she was mad  because earlier this year I hit reply/all instead of just reply when, after she* forwarded to me and several dozen other people this weird story about a Muslim invited speaker in a prison workshop confessing under tough questioning that really Muslims are required to kill all non-Muslims and he used the phrase “people of faith” and  Obama uses that phrase so draw your own conclusions (i.e. Obama must be a Muslim who plans to kill all non-Muslims), I responded by saying that this was obviously an urban myth that made no sense on its face because a) an invited speaker Muslim would have known the jihad question was coming and wouldn’t be tricked in that way and b) if he really did plan to kill all non-Muslims he wouldn’t say so in a prison workshop and c) liberal Christians use the phrase “people of faith” all the time, and that is obviously Obama’s tradition.

Now the latest is is an email that she sent me, two youtube links, one equating Obama’s plan to speak to school children with Lenin, Hitler and others’ indoctrination of youth, and another showing an election-period video (commercial) in which a mixed-race group of children sing about hope for unity and change and “vote Obama” with Hitler’s youth campaign.

This whole Facebook thing is confusing my normal policy of avoiding political discussions with certain relatives. I’m not actually trying to get in a fight. I guess it is at least getting me out of that liberal academic bubble. Sigh.

*At the time I thought it was my uncle whose name is used on the email, but now I’m guessing it is her.

interesting post on racial boundaries

I found this post by dorkchaser at thinkingsex while surfing when I should be writing. The surfing’s bad, but this is a really good post on the different experiences of a white-identified girl and her brother in the same majority-Black high school, because she appeared biracial and he did not. The post discusses this with reference to Joane Nagel’s Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers, which I am now motivated to read.

Done

The task force report on addressing racial disparities in criminal justice is now officially done and voted on. Hurrah! There was a sense of euphoria, I think. I felt it . Some of us talked about how we really need a party. The head of the public defender’s office offered her home for this purpose for  next month, although I don’t know whether it will actually happen. The last few weeks have been very intense and conflictual. I’ve drafted several partial posts about some of the conflicts and issues, but couldn’t get them into a state to post, partly because I was too darned busy trying to catch up on everything else I should be doing. The events involved crying, shouting, confrontations between “system” people concerned about being made to sound bad or worried about being told to do things that are just impossible and “community” people wanting their voices and perspectives heard. Also glaring examples of racial/ethnic cultural differences and the huge effect of standpoint. The past three rounds of meetings have involved people proposing changes to the report to bring it into line to something they could vote for. Several key compromises were worked out. I bailed out of the writing committee after the last round — I just had to do my course preparation and other work. The chairs just hung in to the bitter in, accepting and processing proposed changes and trying to get a consensus document pulled together. I’ve worried that the watered down the voices of the oppressed too much, but the compromises saved the “public hearing” section, in which people’s stories are told, albeit with language reminding people that they are unverified stories from particular individuals.

Tonight’s meeting had a different spirit, friendlier, warmer. We’d all gone through intense disagreement and struggle and had ended up with something people are pretty proud of, even the people who voted no on some of the specific resolutions. The conflicts and divisions are still there. After all the votes, some of the people had to hurry away at the official ending time of the meeting. About half of us stayed around for check out, where people took turns saying that the experience was often painful and difficult, but we respect each other and feel like we have grown from the experience. This is a group of people who are mostly White and Black, one Hispanic, a mixture of “system” people and “community advocates.” One of the women, an older Black woman with a 9th grade education (how she describes herself) whose son is in the system and who was on the committee as a community advocate, expressed her pride at having her name in “the book”, the 80-page report (with appendices).

If I ever get time, I’ll try to go back to those partial posts and try to describe some of the dynamics and conflicts. In the meantime, I’m thinking to myself that finally, by the last meeting, we’ve done the work we need to do to be together as a community, and now we are disbanding. Somehow this seems like a metaphor for our society.

In the meantime, I’m behind in course prep and in pulling together the paper for a conference in two weeks.

Reading Tables

Reviewing articles makes me realize that people (including people who appear to be otherwise quite sophisticated in their methods) don’t know how to read tables for error and instability.  Obviously, I just found a zinger. Details suppressed in the interest of the integrity of the peer review process. But if the author had really looked carefully at the tables instead of just coming up with stories to explain the coefficients, s/he should have realized something was amiss.

When you are comparing different model specifications on the same data, don’t just look at what is significant, and don’t just look at the variables you are interested in. Pay attention to whether the coefficient on each variable is relatively stable across models or fluctuates with the addition or subtraction of other variables.  The coefficients on the same variables on the same sample normally stay pretty similar as other variables come and go from alternate specifications.  If the coefficients are relatively stable (roughly the same magnitude, roughly the same standard error) in different models, this is good. They may go in and out of statistical significance depending on what else is in the model, but if the effect size stays about the same and the standard error stays about the same, that’s stable, that’s good.

If they are not stable, you need to know why before you mail the article off to the journal. In the worst case, unstable coefficients change between significantly positive and significantly negative, or between close to zero and large in either the positive or negative direction.  But also pay attention if they keep the same sign but get a lot bigger or smaller.

What if coefficients are not stable? If the coefficient of variable X changes when you add other variables, one of three things is true: (1) the other variables correlate with X and overlap or interact with it in explaining the dependent variable, or (2) the sample is different in the two models, or (3) you made a mistake in running the models or copying the tables.

Some correlations or interactions among independent variables are substantively meaningful or otherwise unproblematic. It is normal for the coefficients of each of a set of correlated variables like income and education to be smaller when they are together in a model. Sometimes the whole point of an article is that a coefficient goes to zero or changes from zero to significant when something else is controlled. Similarly, sometimes the point is that some factor is salient only for a subset of the sample.

But before you hang your whole theory or interpretation on a fluctuating coefficient, you want to make sure it isn’t just a mistake. Make sure there are no typos in the code that produced the results. Make sure the table is copied properly. Check the sample sizes to be sure cases were not dropped for some unexpected reason. And especially check for specification error: explicitly test whether coefficients bounce with minor changes in model specification. Very often, you will see that the explanatory power of a model does not change at all when you add more variables, even though the coefficients change. This is a symptom that your sample is too small to make the distinctions you are trying to make. This is especially likely in fields where samples are necessarily relatively small, as is often true in research on organizations or political units or annual time series. Do your variables of interest have strong bivariate effects without controls? If not, exactly which control variables are needed in the model for the variable to have a significant effect? At what point do you stop adding explained variance and just change coefficients? In particular, watch out for pairs of correlated variables like income and education that take opposite signs in models with lots of other independent variables: this is frequently an artifact.

The problem of ignoring coefficient fluctuations is especially likely when the coefficients for “control variables” are suppressed. I have reviewed quite a few articles in which coefficients on control variables fluctuate quite suspiciously with nary a mention from the author, and am never happy when control variable coefficients are omitted entirely. (If they are going to be suppressed in the interest of space and readability from the main table, I still want to see them in an appendix as a reviewer, even if they appendix will end up on a web site instead of in print.)

Also pay attention to the number of cases in each model, to be sure you are not losing cases unexpectedly to missing data or other anomaly. If patterns of missing data are not a problem, the coefficients will stay pretty stable despite sample size fluctuations. But if a coefficient changes markedly when the sample size changes, that’s another sign of trouble.

uh oh

I’ve got to be careful how I say this. A future candidate for public office left a message on my home answering machine asking me to call. When I called back the cell phone number given, Candidate could not remember who I was, said “are you a lawyer, I’ve been calling a lot of lawyers.” Uh oh #1 — you are running for office, you leave me a message, but when you answer your phone you don’t know who I am? We arranged a later time for a longer phone conversation. When Candidate called me the second time, Candidate still did not know who I was, except a name on a list. The only information Candidate had is what I told Candidate the first time, that I’m at the University. Uh oh #2, now you have had time to prepare for the call again, and you still don’t know who I am.  I don’t want to sound arrogant, but the last time someone was planning to run for this office, the candidate asked to meet with me because of my particular expertise, bought my lunch, and was hoping to get my particular endorsement as well as assuring me that my policy input would be important. As Candidate is from my party, I’m going to vote for Candidate against the other party as a matter of principle.  But unless Candidate learns FAST, I’m very uneasy about the outcome of an election I care about a lot. I don’t mean learns fast about me, I mean learns fast about how to do basic Internet research and how to handle cold telephone calls without sounding like a total doofus.

negotiations

We are trying to get the task force report done. This is a ton of work. Lots of writing. But the most time-consuming part is the endless pre-meeting meetings and conference calls to discuss what to write, how to hold the meetings. Calls and meetings that seem to resolve nothing. There are some real substantive disagreements about certain key issues. But the biggest problem is language. Statements that seem reasonable and neutral to some of us strike others as strident and offensive. Quotations from public hearing statements by offenders, accused offenders, or the family and friends of offenders about unfair or unreasonable aspects of the criminal justice system are viewed by the system people as unsubstantiated hearsay that should not be included in the report. But the consequence would be to banish entirely the voices of those at the bottom of the system. (I’m going to try to see if we can negotiate language that includes them as perceptions.) Even the claim that a lot of people think the CJ system is unfair or biased is subject to critique — how do we know it is a lot of people? Well, if “people” means “Black people,” you have to be living in a hole not to think a “lot of” people think the CJ system is unfair. But of course the people launching that critique don’t think “people” means “Black people.”

Then we are hassling about whether there are “too many” citations for low level offenses. Citations are better than arrests, we mostly agree. But citations come with fines, large fines on the order of several hundred dollars a ticket. This is no biggie if you have a full professor’s income or a lawyer’s income. But if you have no job or a McJob, the fines are huge relative to your resources. So one proposed recommendation is to give fewer tickets. But the system people are upset at any implication that they are giving “too many” tickets or even a lot of tickets. Should I go back and crunch the older data that shows that this area has an extraordinarily high level of “disorderly conduct” arrests? Would actual data even seem relevant to the people having this argument?

And the planning committee is hassling about voting rules, which were never agreed upon at the beginning of the process. Some people were hoping for consensus, although without a clear idea of how you achieve consensus, not to mention the problem that consensus is the same thing as allowing one person to veto. Some of us are pushing for voting, but even then you have to argue about voting rules. Do you have a vote if you are not at the meeting? How will the opinions of people who can’t get to the meeting be assessed? And I won’t even go into the confusion and disputes about the process we went through in collecting and consolidating recommendations. Or the lack of trust that is making every single part of this process difficult. It is exhausting.

police report

One of the many disputes that have arisen in task force debates is the complaint of some “community” people that police sometimes lie on their reports and that the prosecutor just assumes the police are telling the truth. Law enforcement folks and prosecutors react with offense: “It is a felony to lie on a police report.” I roll my eyes. Um, it is a felony to deal drugs, too, but that doesn’t mean people don’t do it. And there have been at least some cases in which movement activists have video taped protest policing and caught police lying on reports. To point out that some people break the law, by the way, is not to assert that all or even most police lie. Most often there is no need to lie. But there is the time-honored and safer tactic of putting the most persuasive possible construction on ambiguous events. Not to mention the ubiquitous problem that different people simply see events in different ways and that well-intentioned honest police may still lack a complete view of the situation. So I was very interested to read the police report for the arrest of Henry “Skip” Gates in Cambridge the other day. Here’s a copy of the police report on the arrest of Gates for disorderly conduct which was posted by BigSole whom I got to from Field Negro. Today a Facebook link pointed me to this careful analysis of the report at SameFacts.com. The officer is clearly trying to justify the disorderly conduct arrest, which has to involve other people and a public place and cannot be made inside a person’s own house. Even the officer’s own version of events involve him persuading Gates to walk outside so that he could have an excuse to arrest him. Gates had already provided his identification and the officer makes it clear in his report that while he was still inside Gates’s house he knew he was no longer investigating any kind of crime. Gates’s “crime” in the officer’s own report consists solely of loudly accusing the officer of being a racist and asking for his name and badge number. The report makes it clear that the arrest was meant as a retaliation for being yelled at and called a racist, and he really didn’t care that the charge wasn’t going to stick. Out on the streets, this kind of interaction happens all the time: objecting to police mistreatment when you have, in fact, done nothing wrong gets to you arrested for disorderly conduct or resisting an officer. To me the most frightening thing about this incident are the large number of commenters on some sites who are sure the police have the right to retaliate if you object to their mistreatment.

about data

It is happening again. Lawyers who don’t know anything about data analysis make a request (often an official open records request) for information from agencies. Then, because I have gotten a reputation for analyzing public data and making it reveal previously-unseen patterns, they dump it on me and ask me to  analyze it.  Some years ago the request was for information on the racial breakouts of juvenile arrests for misdemeanors and citations — the person making the request assumed without asking that information about felonies already existed. That request yielded a pile of printouts of incomparable information from a dozen different agencies, including hundreds of pages of printouts listing all juvenile arrests in the central city.  (I dealt with that by giving the data entry job to freshmen in a “research experience” program; it was a good experience for them, even though the data was of limited value.)

This time the request vaguely asked for information on the racial breakouts of arrests and traffic stops and was sent to the two dozen law enforcement agencies in the county.  They sent me the responses yesterday. Six agencies responded with spreadsheets that are all in the same format, which includes the breakouts  by race for 64 offense groups and five citation/stop categories. The two biggest agencies responded with dumps of all charges: to turn them into the appropriate counts, you first need to collapse the charges down to incidents (as the same person can have multiple charges in an arrest or traffic stop) using the date and time of the contact and the date of birth of the offender, following some sort of protocol for which offense to treat as the “most serious” offense, and then collapse the zillions of specific offenses into a smaller number of categories.  Of course there is no crosstalk file for linking the specific offenses into either the 64 standard categories used by the six agencies that used the same format nor the Uniform Crime Reports categories nor the severity code, nor did the agencies include these fields in their data dump, even though they must have that information for their own needs. The most passive aggressive agency did not even include the offense description field, just the statute number. The rest of the agencies responded in a wide variety of ways, including PDFs of pie charts of the racial breakouts of traffic stops, counts by race that summed across arrests and traffic stops, or emails that said “everyone we arrested was white” (no counts given).

UPDATE 7/29: One agency actually sent a VIDEO with slides of their report that rotate in 3-D space and a voice-over describing was was on each page. I am not kidding!

The lawyers don’t understand why I’m saying it isn’t worth my time to try to “analyze” this mess. They say, “We asked for it, it will look bad if we don’t include the results in the report.” And they can’t understand why I can’t get it done by next week, when the draft report is due.

enforcing immigration law

As I mentioned in a previous post, there is a concern in my area about ICE (immigration) raids and about the sheriff’s policy of telling ICE about possible illegal immigrants. Stated policy is to send ICE the name and birth date of any non-citizen who has been arrested and is processed into the jail, regardless of reason, even for unpaid parking tickets. People are also being grabbed by ICE when they come to court as witnesses or to collect child support. Our task force had a pretty intense discussion of this the other day. The task force combines “system” people (sheriff, police, district attorney, judges) with community activists and social service providers. Several system people have objected to a draft recommendation to change the policy and to some of the assertions the draft makes about what is happening based on one task force member’s conversations with some bailiffs. We know we don’t agree about what should be done – there are deep social conflicts about the immigration issue itself, and about the proper role of law enforcement. So we have to figure out what the report will say.

At first we were going to defer the discussion to the next meeting, as we knew it would be  controversial. But as a member of the writing subcommittee, I said I really needed to know what the policy actually is, so that it could be correctly characterized. I offered to talk to the head of the jail privately later, but the group decision was to take “five minutes” to get this clarified. The five turned into thirty, but it was a very instructive thirty minutes. I asked, “so what is the policy, exactly?” Answer: Information about all immigrants is sent to ICE. “So how do you know whether someone is an immigrant? What about Canadians?” Answer: They tell us. We ask if they are a citizen. ” So if someone with a Spanish accent tells you they are a citizen, you believe them, and that’s that?” Answer: Yes . . . [voice trails off, the rest is quieter and the sentence is incomplete] . .  unless there’s other information . . .  The sheriff says: Look, the policy has been the same for thirty years, we ask everyone place and date of birth, citizenship status. “So if someone with a Spanish accent says they were born in El Paso, that’s it? They are OK?”  [No clear answer . . .]   Later in the discussion, people ask why if the policy has been the same for thirty years, it is only in recent years that people are getting arrested when they come into the court house as witnesses or to report to drug court. The sheriff’s answer is that the change is the creation of ICE and ICE policies, not his policies. The DA says it is part of the post-9/11 anti-terrorism policies. But this implies there are two policies: what you ask people, and what you do with the information. ICE was created in 2003, so the sheriff couldn’t have been sending information to ICE for the last thirty years. The sheriff implies that there is no choice about sending information to ICE, other people think there is.

Then other people ask questions. So how is it that people who come in as witnesses or to collect their child support get arrested? One task force member has talked to bailiffs and says they told her that they go over the names of people coming in and routinely send immigrants’ names to ICE. But the head of the jail says that people are not doing that, he has talked to his supervisors and that just isn’t happening, she is just relying on hearsay. I point out that she talked to some people and he talked to some people: it’s the same thing. More tension. Then he says, well of course in some cases you have to run people through the computer, you have to make sure there are no restraining orders or outstanding warrants. That is part of the job of keeping the court safe. You don’t want people fighting at court. Sometimes an ICE warrant shows up in the national computer, they did not know it would be there, but when it is there, you have to execute the warrant. I say “There are lots of warrants. You can have a warrant out for unpaid parking tickets.” The DA sort of starts to object and the sheriff says that our area is sending parking tickets to collection, not to court orders. I insist: “I know a white guy who was, in fact, arrested and taken downtown for unpaid parking tickets.”  The rest of the story – which I don’t go through – is that he got out quickly when arrangements were made to pay the tickets, but if he had not had a friend who put up the money for the tickets, he would have been sitting in jail for unpaid parking tickets. That is a fact. And the DA knows it is a fact, as he acknowledges when we chat later: the vast majority of warrants are for “failure to appear” in court, which can be for anything. It turns out that legal procedures require running criminal background checks on anyone who will appear as a witness, so it does happen that people come in to be interviewed as potential witnesses and get arrested for outstanding warrants. Although ICE arrests are the current concern, this also happens for other kinds of warrants.

But law enforcement officers vehemently say they do not get to choose which warrants to execute, a warrant is a warrant, that is their job. If they know there is a warrant out for the arrest of a person, they are duty-bound to arrest that person. There is no choice. And so we are back again to the question: when do you run someone’s name through the computer to look for warrants? Do you run the name of every single person who enters the court house through the computer? Well, no, that is impossible. There are too many people going and coming every day, and there is no central list of everyone who is scheduled to come in as a witness or to make an appearance for some reason. So how is it that some people get arrested by ICE when they come to court? Why is ICE waiting for them? Well, we may get a tip or information about someone . .  . [voice trails off . . .]  Hmmm. I think to myself, this ties in with complaints we heard at the public hearing about ICE sending spies into the Latino community. SOMEBODY could well be running the name of every single local Latino through ICE computers and then looking for opportunities to nab the folks who are identified as illegal.

I find it very instructive to hear the law enforcement people and the district attorney insisting that if there is a warrant you have to arrest, this is non-discretionary, this is central to who they are as part of the legal system. This is just non-negotiable. There is a lot of emotion when they say this. It is a very deeply held value at the core of a worldview about what it means to be an officer of the court.

Next people ask whether there is a way for people to find out whether there is a out warrant on them. The DA says that it is not considered good police policy to tell people in advance that they are going to be arrested. Folks pretty much go along with this (although I’m thinking to myself that there are circumstances in which people are allowed to turn themselves in rather than be arrested). But people repeat the question: not necessarily warning people they will be arrested that day, but telling people that they should find out whether there is a warrant out for them, and some way of being able to find this out. After all, the vast majority of warrants are for missing a court date, and the most likely reason for missing the court date is that you forgot it or you never read or understood the summons in the first place  or you didn’t go because you didn’t have the money to pay your fine anyway. I remind people that there are faulty warrants out there – the warrant for the kid who was tasered at the high school when he tried to run away from the police was actually a mistake that shouldn’t have been in the system in the first place. (We all know about that case because both the tasering and the fact that police were arresting a kid at school were big controversies that got a lot of news play.) Law enforcement and the district attorney are looking pretty dubious about the idea of giving ordinary people access to the national law enforcement databases.

The community activists say: OK, we get it that arresting someone if you know there is a warrant out on them is non-negotiable from the point of view of law enforcement. So the community needs to know this and needs to know exactly what the policies are. Can you give us written policies? The sheriff and the DA say the policies are straightforward and clear-cut. But it will take them a while to write them down.

This was a very good discussion, even as it was very intense. I learned a lot. I’m thinking later again about the radically different ways you can look at the same thing. I respect the rule of law and the police view that you don’t choose which warrants to execute, and I can respect the people who feel that violation of immigration law is a violation of law and as long as the law is on the books, they are obligated to uphold it. The real problem is the immigration policy and the disconnect between the formal immigration policy and the reality that Mexican people have always worked in the US. But then I am reminded that the police who helped arrest the Jews in Europe under Hitler were also following orders, and that the US was party to trials that said that following orders is not an excuse, that citizens have a positive obligation to refuse to follow immoral orders. Such discussions were very common in the 1960s regarding citizen obligations about the Vietnam war.  Ivan Ermakoff is working now on a project showing that police in different places actually varied in the zealousness with which they carried out the orders to arrest all Jews. I know that many people would take deep offense at my even bringing this up. Killing and torturing people isn’t the same as deporting them. But I do think the people who want the police to be less aggressive about running people’s names through the computers think that the immigration policy is immoral and that it is the duty of moral people to work around the policy.

garlic mustard massacre

Pulling garlic mustard today, I realized that if there are garlic mustard historians or novelists or prophets, they’d describe me as a mass murderer or an angry god. I’m sure I thought of this because I’m reading Paulette Jiles’s The Color of Lightning . The opening chapters describe a violent attack in 1864 by Comanche and Kiowa warriors on the women and children in a small mixed-race settlement in Texas. The events are told from the point of view of the White and Black women who are repeatedly beaten, raped and then enslaved by the tribes. The tale is not one-sided. Other scenes in the book have people talking about violent attacks and treaty-breaking by the White settlers, providing the context for the raids, and as the story unfolds, there are positive images of the family lives of the native people. But because the violence against native people happens off camera, as it were, while the violence by the native people is vividly described from the point of view of the victims, there is an asymmetry in the descriptions in the book, at least so far.* The Black and White women are individual people who suffer, while the Comanches and Kiowas are unknown enemies, or abstractions.

From the book summary and the review I read, it sounds like more conflict and violence is to come, as the Black husband will try to rescue his wife and a pacifist Quaker reformer is coming out to try to make peace with the tribes. The book is well grounded in the reality of the history, so a happy ending all around seems unlikely. This conflict is like so many. There are the depersonalized political historical forces, in this case European invaders attacking and displacing native people and native people fighting back. And there is violence and pain at a personal level on all sides. The reality of the personal suffering, or the reality of the joy of overcoming adversity and establishing a new settlement, are etched into consciousness and passed down to generations, creating fundamentally antagonistic ways of understanding the past.

So, having read the flyers from the Department of Natural Resources,  I view the garlic mustard as the invader, as a powerful invasive species that must be beaten back or it will take over and destroy all the other “good” plants. I’m playing God, deciding which plants will live and which plants will die in my yard, just as humans for millennia have decided which plants to nurture and which to weed out. From the point of view of the garlic mustard, this is just a massacre. The innocent plants were not doing anything to hurt me. I seek out and destroy all the plants I can find, even the little baby ones, and from the point of view of the garlic mustard, this is as bad as the White settlers in the Americas and Australia and South Africa killing the native people for sport. I think about this. All living organisms affect the lives of other organisms, helping some to live and damaging others. As animals, we must eat other living organisms to survive. As humans, we know that what is good for some of us may hurt others. As a White American, I know that the United States was founded on the destruction and enslavement of other people, and that I would not be here or have this house and this yard without the destruction of someone else’s way of life. But even members of groups who have been oppressed have to face the same reality: the things that benefit them often hurt other people. Some people react to this reality with a fearful or hostile “kill or be killed” mentality. I don’t. I still seek to live in peace and justice with all of life and all of humanity. But I know it is complicated. I  live with those contradictions as I seek to eradicate the garlic mustard.

* The review suggests that there will be other points of view to come.

Turf

These are excerpts from two longer statements written by Ida Thomas, an older Black woman who only completed the ninth grade and considers herself uneducated. She and I are members of the same racial disparities task force. She has a son who has been in prison. She wrote up her ideas because she wanted me to speak for her at a meeting she could not attend. Most of her writing focused on concrete recommendations relevant to the task force agenda. But I was blown away by some of what she said and wanted to share it. She specifically asked me to edit what she wrote so it would sound good, and I have complied by doing minimal editing for spelling and grammar. All the ideas and word choices are hers. I am posting this to my blog with her permission after reading it to her and receiving her approval. She wants her name used.

What we Blacks fail to realize is that we have invaded their town. We are on their turf now. It’s do like we say or go to prison, for sometimes petty stuff. And we did wrong by coming here, trying to change their ways. They only know how to protect their own color. They are not used to us. Especially the way we think or act. Every race has its own culture. I don’t think this will ever change here if you ask me, Ida. They really want us to go away like the wind, rain, winter and summer.  It’s a nice place to live if you can stay out of their system. But can you be sure to do that here? No. It’s like in the slave days here. Yes Madam, yes sir, you are right. Every Black person here is living on borrowed time for freedom. You have to walk a straight and narrow line. Please let’s change this.

. . .

Many White people do not know how to deal with Blacks here in Wisconsin — they look at us like we are from another planet. Their culture is much different than ours. We think differently, look at life differently. We need people in our culture that will defend us, that understand our way of thinking.  Where are those people for us to communicate with?  .  .  . * Your best bet is to stay out of trouble if you can here, or you will end up with your back up side the wall like so many have done before. It is said, come down here on vacation, go back on paper.**  But that’s not true about going back on paper, because sometimes they want you to stay down here and finish your paper here. That’s unfair because if you sneeze the wrong way you will be going to prison to finish up some of your time. You are never free here.  .  .  .  It’s is a beautiful place to live but there is a price that you have to pay to live here. Myself, I love it here.  But Madison keeps you walking a straight line on a narrow path. Let’s live and let live.

* The omitted material talks at length about the lack of Black judges, district attorneys, public defenders, and police.

** To be “on paper” is to be on probation or parole, i.e. living in the community but under correctional supervision.

social critic?

I’m on an extended vacation in Italy with my spouse, so not posting much. But this part of my travel journal seems pertinent to sociology. In Venice, we visited the Church of the Frari. There is a lot of important and wonderful renaissance art here (the Titian and Bellini works were gorgeous), and we listened to an informative audio tape that described the art. But what blew me away the most was a piece that was not described in the audio and had no English (or Italian for that matter) interpretative material. Lots of Latin on the signs. Intricately carved statues of Black slaves in tattered clothes holding bags of flour? rice? on their shoulders and thereby supporting the edifice above — a rich Doge surrounded by angels and dragons. The slaves are very human and wear unhappy expressions. There are also two black skeletons holding scrolls that tell about his life. I thought that the artists were perhaps making a statement about the source of power and wealth. I spent a lot of time looking at it. To me, the “message” of the piece was unmistakable: this wealthy doge lived by exploiting the labor of suffering Black people. It seems to me that the artist had to intend some critique. But as the monument was meant to honor someone, maybe not. I bought a postcard so I could look this up later. It is the monument to Doge Giovanni Pesaro, designed by Baldassarre Longhena; the giant statues  are by Melchior Barthel from Dresden.. You can see a lot of good-quality slides showing the details of this monument beginning here.

Here is some straightforward text description from one tour site.

Here is another reaction: “Beyond the Titian, and over the small door of the S. Aisle, stands the gigantic, vulgar, and ugly monument of Doge Giovanni Pesaro, (d. 1659,) by Longhena and another. This is the worst Baroque work in this church, almost equaling in pretentious vulgarity the tomb of the Valiers in San Zanipolo. The boastful character of the monument is shown, not only in its vast size, but in its theatrically gesticulating Virtues, its fly-away Faith, Hope, and Charity, its oddly startled figure of the Doge, jumping forward under the canopy of his own sarcophagus, (which is supported by very fearsome nondescript animals,) and, above all, in the four figures of captive negroes (black marble faces with white eyes) which sustain the whole. The skeletons below are in the vilest taste of their period. The bombastic Latin inscriptions, exactly paralleling the style of the tomb, state that the Doge “lived 70 years,” ” unlived,” (not died,) “in the year 1659,” and “lived again in this monument in the year 1669.” A monstrous and hideous nightmare.” Source:  http://www.oldandsold.com/articles29/venice-30.shtml >

From Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad: “The monument to the doge Giovanni Pesaro, in this church, is a curiosity in the way of mortuary adornment. It is eighty feet high and is fronted like some fantastic pagan temple. Against it stand four colossal Nubians, as black as night, dressed in white marble garments. The black legs are bare, and through rents in sleeves and breeches, the skin, of shiny black marble, shows. The artist was as ingenious as his funeral designs were absurd. There are two bronze skeletons bearing scrolls, and two great dragons uphold the sarcophagus. On high, amid all this grotesqueness, sits the departed doge.” Source: http://twain.thefreelibrary.com/The-Innocents-Abroad/23-1#Pesaro

My spouse and I keep debating whether the artist meant to glorify the doge or meant some social critique. The doge was dead when the monument was built so its object did not have to be consulted. It obviously had to be at least readable as honor by his heirs. But was a critical alternate reading meant by the artist, or am I just imposing it later with my own sensibilities? If it almost universally strikes viewers as ugly and vile, can this reaction not have been meant by the artist? The Internet tells me that very little is written about this monument in English. I wonder if anybody knows.

Sharing the pain

There’s a lot of dissensus and hard feelings in the interracial task force I’m on right now. Some of it erupted publically the other day at a public hearing (with TV cameras running, no less). Everybody is committed to addressing the issues and cares about them, but this does not take away the divisions among us: divisions by race, class, and  institutional position. We are suspicious of other people’s motives or commitment; irritated what we consider to be their abrasive or insensitive or over-sensitive or authoritarian or disorganized personal style; and tired and frustrated from trying to work on a huge task with too little time while having to put up with our interpersonal differences. We blow things out of proportion and we sit back in sullen silence. We get mad at the chairs, who themselves are exhausted and wounded from working hard to keep everything moving after having an organizational mess dropped on them and then putting up with all the criticism. Although other groups I’ve worked with are racially diverse, this one is more diverse than most of the others by class and background as well as race. Some of us have worked together on boards and committees many times over the years; others have no prior working relations. Anger and distrust abound, despite genuinely shared goals. We talk through a difference, end on a conciliatory and friendly note, and then blow apart again the next time.

Our small work groups were intentionally formed to mix people with different demographic and institutional statuses and tasked with coming up with recommendations on a tight deadline. Many are struggling. My work group exploded again today in anger and recrimination. The last time, I was the angry one; I reached out later to privately talk to and make peace with the person I got mad at. Today I was the calm one while two high level professionals got very angry with each other. At root is a genuine and important conflict about policy priorities and interests and ways of doing things that becomes  personal as people get tired and frustrated about the impasse and try to talk each other into submission. I think I managed to play a constructive role this time and we ended with some forward movement, although there is still a lot of tension. I also talked afterward with one of the disputants, who is taking double heat in our group and as a co-chair. I made a point of telling her how much I appreciate all her work, even though I don’t always agree with her. I also told her that when I get really frustrated and irritated in community meetings – which is often  – I remind myself that the deep differences of interest and experience and the inequalities and injustices that fuel the conflicts are real. Not to mention the cultural style differences that can drive each other crazy. We bring these differences with us when we come to the table. We are experiencing the very pain of the world we are trying to help heal. It’s our share of the pain. She said it helped to think about it that way.

facts

Originally posted at Scatterplot. I just stumbled across the matter of Jared Diamond’s New Yorker article last year telling the story of vengeance fights in Papua New Guinea based on stories told to him by his driver.  As Diamond told the story, the driver Daniel Wemp and other real people whom he named by name and attributed to a specific tribal group — bragged about murdering and raping people in an ongoing vengeance war. The short version of what appears to be true (the case is still in process) is that Daniel Wemp told Diamond the stories when they were driving around in 1999-2002, but  Diamond did not take notes on them at the time but rather reconstructed them from memory and a follow up interview in 2006, and got the facts all wrong about who did what to whom and when and why and what tribes were involved, as described in meticulous detail byRhonda Roland Shearer at stinkyjournalism.org. The original article was pulled from electronic archives last year. The driver and purported murderer, Daniel Wemp, and one of his purported victims, Henep Isum (who was not, in fact, paralyzed by Wemp or anyone else), filed suit April 20 in New York for libel and defamation of character, asking for $10 million in damages.

Taking Offense

(I’m mostly busy writing on my overdue project. I wrote this paragraph as part of it, and am fond enough of it that I’ve decided to share it here.)

When confronted with evidence of racial disparities in treatment, one reaction is to blame the measurement. It is not uncommon for agencies or officials to refuse to collect data on race or ethnicity, or to refuse to analyze the data they do have, claiming that the data cannot possibly be meaningful, because race is not real and the classifications are arbitrary. Or they say that they “don’t see race” and treat everyone equally, and argue that collecting or reporting data by race is, itself, racist. Or – and I’ve heard this said quite a few times by criminal justice officials – “the data would be used in the wrong way.” If you ask what that means, it appears the answer is that the data might be used to suggest that there has been racial discrimination by the agency. (I responded to one police chief who said this by saying, “Well, the data could show that you don’t discriminate.” He said, “I never thought of it that way.”) It is sort of like blaming the thermometer for a fever. Or – and this is probably closer to the problem – like blaming the auditor for finding that money is missing from the cash box. The implication is that somebody is a thief. Even asking for the books to be audited can be taken as an insult.

Certain kinds of racial discrimination are illegal and overt racial discrimination on the part of public officials is generally censured. Beyond that, discriminatory behavior is generally seen as stemming from the personal flaw of racial prejudice. Many people believe that prejudice is a moral failing and that unprejudiced people are incapable of discriminating. Evidence of possible racial discrimination is thus seen as evidence of moral turpitude. Just as people are offended at being called thieves, people take offense at any implication that they may have discriminated on the basis of race. I have heard and read quite a few White people assert that calling someone racist is “just as bad as the n-word.” Many people face these issues without the help of even weak understandings of the social science ideas of unconscious discrimination, systematic or institutional racism or discrimination, indirect consequences of actions taken for other reasons, or pernicious interactions and feedbacks among different social forces. They focus solely on whether there is evidence that an actor intended to behave in a racially discriminatory fashion; if there is any ambiguity about intentions then, ipso facto, there must have been no discrimination.