The View from Flyover Country

by Sarah Kendzior

  Mainstream media cruelty targets those who lack power. Their crime is daring to exist. Along with cancer patients and transgender individuals, racial minorities are a frequent focus.

  Over the past year, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen has argued that interracial marriage triggers the “gag reflex” of “conventional Americans” and that young black men like Trayvon Martin deserve to be viewed as suspicious (and by association, shot). This is not an unusual position—one can find similar views on white supremacist websites. But when a mainstream newspaper promotes an extreme viewpoint as normal, it helps make it normal. It sets parameters—“Are interracial relationships repulsive?”—that most Americans would never countenance, and forces us to take them seriously.

  This tactic is not limited to newspapers or websites. We find it in book publishing as well. Next month, professors Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld are set to release The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, which ranks groups by cultural superiority.

  Unsurprisingly, Chua and her husband fall into the most exalted categories: Chinese and Jews. The book is peddled as “scientific,” but its hierarchy of peoples is racist propaganda with a careful omission of the word “race.” Anthropology’s theory of culture, which sought to debunk ethnic stereotypes, is now used by people like Chua to uphold them.

  The most interesting thing about Chua’s book is that someone agreed to publish it. This is also the most interesting thing about Cohen, Hannan, the Kellers, or the innumerable mainstream media publishers who trade on biases most find repugnant. Some have attributed this to a search for clicks and traffic—“hate-reading” as profitable pastime. But there is a broader question here: that of legitimacy.

  Disproportionate Influence

  Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has called the Internet “a public sphere erected on private property.” All voices can speak, but only few are heard. Amplification is tied to prestige, meaning that where you publish—and what privileges you already have—gives your words disproportionate influence.

  The terms of public debate are rarely set by the public. “Inequality” has risen to the fore in pundit discourse, but mostly in terms of whether it deserves to be debated at all, as recent columns by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein and The New York Times’ David Brooks demonstrate. For a public well aware of income inequality—since they have to live with its consequences every day—such debates reflect an inequality of their own: a paucity of understanding among our most prominent voices.

  In the American media, white people debate whether race matters, rich people debate whether poverty matters, and men debate whether gender matters. People for whom these problems must matter—for they structure the limitations of their lives—are locked out of the discussion.

  In January 2014, Suey Park, an Asian-American activist, was asked by the Huffington Post to help curate an “Asian Voices” section that would bring prominence to underrepresented Asian Americans. She was thrilled—until she was informed her contributors would not be paid a dime. Disgusted, Park rejected their offer and took to Twitter with the hashtag #ExploitedVoices.

  The hashtag was meant to highlight how minorities are priced out of journalism, but it aptly captures the ethos of our times. In the mainstream media, exploited voices are meant to be seen—and criticized, and chastised, and caricatured for clicks and cash. But rarely are they heard.

  —Originally published January 22, 2014

  PART VI

  Beyond Flyover Country

  U.S. Foreign Policy’s Gender Gap

  The dearth of women in U.S. foreign policy is a subject of continual interest, mostly because it never changes. According to a 2011 survey by policy analyst Micah Zenko, women make up less than 30 percent of senior positions in the government, military, academy, and think tanks.

  As of 2008, 77 percent of international relations faculty and 74 percent of political scientists were men. In international relations literature, women are systematically cited less than men.

  The majority of foreign policy bloggers and the vast majority of op-ed writers—with estimates ranging from 80 to 90 percent—are men. When lists of intellectuals are made, women tend to appear in a second-round, outrage-borne draft. Female intellectuals gain prominence through tales of their exclusion. They are known for being forgotten.

  People talk about the glass ceiling, but it is really a glass box. Everyone can see you struggling to move. There is an echo in the glass box as your voice fails to carry. You want to talk about it, but that runs the risk of making all people hear.

  Balancing Career with Motherhood

  Before the summer of 2012, Anne-Marie Slaughter was best known as an international relations theorist and advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She is now best known for detailing the difficulty of balancing her career with motherhood in her Atlantic cover story “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.”

  The essay describes Slaughter’s decision to resign her State Department post for her teaching position at Princeton, which allowed her more time with her children, and argues that the inability of women to rise to power has less to do with a lack of ambition than a lack of structural support. It is the most-shared article in The Atlantic’s history.

  Obviously the success of the article does not diminish Slaughter’s achievements in international relations. But younger women in the field could likely not publish such a personal piece and remain respected. The most radical thing about Slaughter’s article is that she wrote it at all.

  Slaughter, the all-star, took one for the team (although who the team is, given Slaughter’s elite circles, remains up for debate). This was possible because her accomplishments already trumped her gender in terms of her public reputation, if not in her private life. She was seen as a person, so she could afford to be seen as a woman.

  Slaughter’s article resonated with many younger women trying to succeed in competitive fields. But her own field, international relations, remains one of the most lopsided, gender-wise. Year after year, the imbalance is decried.

  What accounts for women’s exclusion? There are two problems.

  The first is perception, which translates into respect. The second is money, which translates into opportunity. The first problem is a gender problem (and a race problem). But the second problem is shared by everyone—or almost everyone. It is the “almost” that is itself the problem.

  A Self-Selecting Community

  The foreign policy community is suffering from what national security fellow Faris Alikhan calls “credential creep.” Credential creep, he writes, is the stockpiling of prestigious degrees and experiences to differentiate oneself from the increasingly esteemed competition. But these accolades come at a price too high for the average person to pay.

  An MA in foreign policy can run a person tens of thousands of dollars into debt, and the expectation that one’s initial labor—whether in internships, fellowships, or writing contributions—will go unpaid limits participation in the field. Cities of power like D.C. have become unaffordable for most people. As a result, Alikhan argues, the U.S. foreign policy community is looking a lot like the Song dynasty.

  “The next generation of foreign policy leaders is socialized in a hyper-competitive bubble, while voices from lower-income and minority groups are seldom heard since they can’t afford to compete,” he writes. “In essence, those who aspire to affect one of the most important aspects of our nation—our relationship to the rest of the world—are part of a self-selecting community of those whose families are wealthy enough for them to develop credentials and connections.”

  Money, not gender, is the biggest barrier to a career in international relations, or any prestige industry. It eliminates the bulk of the talent pool from the start. Building a career in policy often means not only living on little income, but paying your way around the world.

  Nowadays, candidates for internships at The Economist must be able to fly to London m
erely to interview. Interning at the United Nations means relocating temporarily, unpaid, to expensive cities. Foreign policy was always an elite profession, but the cost of entry has skyrocketed.

  There are ways around this. Writing, for example, is an inexpensive way to get out your ideas and build a reputation. But here a woman runs into a second problem: perception.

  List of Indignities

  Every woman working in an intellectual field has her list of indignities. Mine include being called a “mom blogger” by USA Today, despite having never written about my children; having questions about my research directed to the male scholars sitting next to me at conferences; and the constant assumption that I study “women from Central Asia.” (I reply that I study people from Central Asia, and then awkwardly explain that women fall into this category.)

  Hiding behind a computer screen seems an effective way to dodge gender bias. Sometimes the reader bypasses your byline and accidentally respects you, culminating in an email of praise.

  But other times you find what political scientist Charli Carpenter described, in the midst of a blogging controversy, as a “power dynamic to engage in actual, deliberate, blatant, sexist, sexualized, public disparagement of me and other female scholars and public intellectuals over the years as a way of dismissing our ideas when we dare to make a mistake or are simply politically unpopular.”

  On the Internet, everyone knows you are a woman.

  The online atmosphere Carpenter depicts has been commented upon by many female writers, but endured quietly by more. To discuss how you are negatively perceived forces people to see you through your detractor’s eyes. To discuss sexism is to invite pity, to be reduced, even in support, to something less than what you are. When you work in the realm of ideas and trade in the currency of respect, this is a tough balance to pull off—and it goes hand in hand with the tough balance Slaughter describes of career and family.

  Parents of both genders are discriminated against in any field that requires unpaid work, inflexible hours, and frequent travel. But it is a simple truth that mothers bear these burdens more. They pay the highest financial toll, turning down opportunities as the cost of child care soars and salaries stagnate. They also endure a greater stigma for discussing it.

  In the glass box, a statement of fact sounds like a complaint. In a tough job market, a complaint can be a career killer. Discussing gender bias can be mistaken as a plea for tokenism. It seems safer to downplay structural problems—and the subjective subtleties of discrimination—for a more uplifting take.

  Breaking Down Barriers

  What results is an argument that women bring something special to foreign affairs that necessitates their inclusion—not as people, but as women. Arguing that women should be hired because, well, that seems fair, lacks the imperative force needed to undermine gender hierarchies and unjust economic structures. Instead, the grounds for exclusion are marketed as virtue.

  Countless think tanks have issued statements, like this from the National Democracy Institute: “Democracy cannot truly deliver for all of its citizens if half of the population remains underrepresented in the political arena.”

  The notion that representation by women in the political arena will necessarily lead to democracy has been refuted, both on a national level (dictatorial Belarus, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan have the highest representation of women in parliament) and on an individual one (think: Thatcher, Palin). But in the end, it does not matter whether you believe that being female makes you particularly diplomatic, or empathetic, or kind.

  It matters whether you believe women are as capable of the job as men, whether you believe capable women deserve the job as much as capable men, and whether you act on this belief or let the ratio rest.

  U.S. foreign policy needs workers with a greater diversity of skills, ideas, and experience. This means not only including more women, but working against the economic barriers that deter many talented young people—male and female—from entering the field.

  If you need convincing that foreign policy needs new blood, look at the state of the world around you. The strongest argument against the status quo is the status quo itself.

  —Originally published March 20, 2014

  Snowden and the Paranoid State

  “Paranoids are not paranoid because they’re paranoid,” Thomas Pynchon wrote in Gravity’s Rainbow, “but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.”

  On June 23, 2013, Edward Snowden left China, a repressive state with a vast surveillance system, to fly to Russia, a repressive state with an even vaster surveillance system, in order to escape America, where he had worked for a surveillance system so vast he claims it gave him “the power to change people’s fates.”

  In proclaiming his ability to change the fates of others, Snowden lost control of his own. He was lambasted as the instigator of international conspiracies and praised as the source of their revelation. He was at once a hero and a traitor, a pawn and a king, a courageous whistle-blower with the means to bring down nations and a naive narcissist, little millennial lost.

  What are people looking for when they look at Snowden? They are looking for answers about how much states and corporations know about their personal lives, but more than that, they are looking for a sense that answers are possible. They are looking for knowledge untainted by corruption, as Snowden continues his world tour of corrupt regimes. They are looking for state agendas explained by someone without an agenda of his own. They are looking, and they are not finding what they seek.

  Snowden’s Legacy

  Satisfactory explanations require trust in the person explaining. In the long term, Snowden will be seen as a symptom of breakdown in political trust, not a cause. His legacy is paranoia—the paranoia of the individual about the paranoia of the state that spurs the paranoia of the public. This is not to say that paranoia is always unjustified. But it has become a weltanschauung instead of a reaction.

  It matters, of course, whether the allegations of mass surveillance and data-collecting made by Snowden and Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald are true, but this is not what determines how the allegations are received. Suspicion of surveillance can be as poisonous to a functioning democracy as surveillance itself. Not knowing the extent of surveillance—of whom, by whom, to what end—heightens anxiety over the distance between the powerful and the public, an anxiety that was in place long before Snowden emerged.

  Between the state and the citizen, we have the media, whose biases and careerism thicken the fog. With Snowden, every revelation has a refutation, but citizens are left to evaluate the state of their nation based on their trust in the individual reporting it.

  Months into the scandal, it has become clear the Snowden beat tends toward the tautological. If a writer believes—or finds it advantageous to proclaim—that NSA employees respect the citizen’s right to privacy and the legal codes that protect him or her, then Snowden’s claims are unfounded exaggerations. If a writer believes—or finds it advantageous to proclaim—that NSA employees are prone to abuse the system they have created, and that the government will lie to protect its creation, then Snowden’s claims are evidence of systemic abuse.

  * * *

  You do not need a database to watch Americans suffer.

  * * *

  “Sometimes paranoia’s just having all the facts,” wrote William S. Burroughs. And sometimes paranoia is the broken belief that having the facts is possible.

  When Anxiety Attacks

  American political paranoia has a long history, perhaps most famously summed up in Richard Hofstadter’s study of the “paranoid style in American politics,” in which he described how a small minority employed theories that were “overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression,” often gaining power in the process.

  Hofstadter’s study was published in 1965, thirty years before the popularization of an international communications system that potenti
ally gives every citizen the ability to debunk fatuous claims and distribute reliable evidence. The Internet would seem an antidote to conspiracy theories and state secrecy, but it has only amplified both.

  Paranoia is aggression masked as defense. It was paranoia (and hubris, and greed) that caused the run-up to the Iraq War; it is paranoia that leads to thousands of innocent Muslims being profiled in New York; it is paranoia that led to Trayvon Martin being shot to death on the street. In Congress, paranoia is less a style than a sickness, employed less with flourish than with fear. Paranoia is the refusal to recognize others except as filtered through ourselves—and how do Americans see themselves? Afraid, afraid, afraid.

  Digital transparency changes politics, but also reinforces what aspects of politics seem resistant to change. When WikiLeaks released its cables two years ago, they did not impart shocking new information so much as confirm people’s worst suspicions.

  One of the most disconcerting aspects of a massive spy system is how little all that information does to remedy corruption and incompetence. Big Brother is scary not just because he knows so much, but because he is capable of so little.

  Snowden came of age in a paranoid era. The Bush administration was marked by twin delusions: hysteria over terrorism, abetted by an insistence on defining reality contrary to evidence, and self-congratulation on triumphs never achieved: Hurricane Katrina relief efforts characterized as a “heck of a job,” the war in Iraq characterization as “mission accomplished,” and the bubble economy.

  Obama ran as an alternative not only to Bush policies, but to the Bush mind-set, offering “hope and change” as antidotes to delusion and intransigence. He inherited the Bush administration’s problems at the same time social media networks like Facebook gave powerful people new means of exploring the data of our lives—and of exploring our lives as data.