A white classmate asked the boy, who was black, what he meant. He said that had happened to his uncle. The white boy looked at the black boy blankly. You can live next to your neighbor and still exist in a different city, with different rights and rules. You can greet each other with sincere warmth, and never fathom the disparity of experience.
In January, my daughter's school held an event to celebrate the life of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. They called it "MLK: Not a Day, But a Way". We marched through the neighborhood, parents and children and local leaders, to show that the struggle against injustice was never over. But we all marched to different beats, to different histories, and it is foolish to pretend otherwise.
In the auditorium, in a great public school that is, like so many majority black St Louis public schools, in danger of losing accreditation, we sang "We Shall Overcome". My daughter clasped hands with a black boy, her partner in the afterschool science club. They sang a few bars then lost the words, and began whispering to each other about the movie "Frozen".
It was a scene of childhood innocence that advocates of a post-racial society like to promote: a black boy and a white girl, sweetly holding hands. But like all childhood innocence, it is an illusion. That boy will find danger when he ventures into the world unless St Louis - and all US cities - change their ways.
There is a movement to heal St Louis. For St Louis to heal, we need to examine deep wounds: decades of discrimination and distrust. We need to protect the young black men who are threatened but portrayed as threats. Michael Brown is one of St Louis' many sons taken too soon.
--Originally published August 27, 2014
The freedom to criticize free speech
In the summer of 2012, thousands of people took to the streets to protest a perceived assault on their religion. Traditional values were under attack, the protestors claimed, thanks to the meddling antics of Westerners seeking to disparage conservative views. But in this deeply divided and staunchly sectarian part of the world, it was not long before a counter-protest emerged. Activists picketed the sites of the original demonstrations, condemning the first group's actions as backward and inhumane. Media pundits from both sides spurred on the controversy, which dragged on for weeks, while politicians exploited it to their own advantage. Meanwhile, people from outside the region looked on in disdain. How could so much outrage be generated over something so trivial?
I am talking, of course, about Chick-fil-A.
Those wondering how the low-grade YouTube clip The Innocence of Muslims managed to incite revolt would do well to remember that America spent the summer of 2012 having religiously motivated protests over a chicken sandwich. On June 16, Dan Cathy, the CEO of the fast food restaurant Chick-fil-A, announced that he opposed same-sex marriage on "biblical" grounds, saying that gay rights advocates were "inviting God's judgment on our nation". Cathy had donated millions in proceeds from Chick-fil-A to anti-gay activist groups, including groups who want to make "gay behavior" illegal.
In July, gay rights advocates called for a boycott of the chicken chain, companies cut contracts for corporate tie-ins, and politicians contemplated a ban of the restaurant in several cities, with one mayor accusing Cathy of peddling "hate chicken". Americans who shared Cathy's views were outraged. On August 1, over 630,000 people showed up for "Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day", an event organized by conservative Christian politician Mike Huckabee to celebrate the restaurant's willingness "to take a stand for the Godly values we espouse". Two days later, gay rights activists held a "Chick-fil-A Kiss Day", in which same-sex couples were encouraged to show affection at the chicken chains.
Advocates of the Chick-fil-A boycott saw it as a matter of civil rights. They were not comfortable giving their money to an organization that donated it to groups that promoted discrimination. Those who opposed the boycott were largely conservative Christians who shared Cathy's view that same-sex marriage was wrong. But that was not how they framed their argument. Instead, they presented it as a matter of freedom of speech.
The fine lines of speech
According to the Chick-fil-A supporters, Dan Cathy's constitutional rights had been violated. "Calling for the boycott... has a chilling effect on our 1st Amendment rights," said Sarah Palin, adding that Cathy was getting "crucified" for "having voiced support for kind of that cornerstone of all civilization and all religions since the beginning of time". One Virginia demonstrator, who admitted that she opposed same-sex marriage, said that the protest was "more about people frankly being offended that people are offended".
The United States has been said to have an exceptional free speech environment. From a legal perspective, that is true: Racial insults, flag burning, and desecration of religious materials are all permitted by law. In practice, attitudes toward free speech are more diverse and complicated. The line between advocating free speech and seeming to applaud what people say is often blurred, as is the line between censorship and condemnation.
Chick-fil-A defenders like Palin believe that to call for a boycott against an organization which promotes hateful speech was to threaten freedom of speech as a whole. But while the politicians who argued against allowing Chick-fil-A in their cities may have overreached, the protest was aimed at getting people to avoid an organization that encouraged intolerance. It was not aimed at preventing Cathy or others from expressing their intolerant views.
To condemn hateful speech, or call for a protest against those who promote it, is itself a form of free speech. Announcing that you are offended when someone insults you or something you believe in is not an act of censorship. What person would refrain from issuing a rejoinder against those who insult him on the grounds that the right to insult precludes the right to defend? It is worth remembering this in light of The Innocence of Muslims and the hostile rhetoric against those whom it offends.
Shock and offence
On September 19, the French magazine Charlie Hebdo published cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad, including several in which he is depicted in lewd positions. Their justification: freedom of speech. "Freedom of the press, is that a provocation?" the editor of the magazine said, adding that the images will "shock those who will want to be shocked". The French government banned people from protesting the cartoons. They say they are protecting freedom of speech while denying citizens the right to demonstrate their disapproval.
Shock and offence are not feelings people cultivate. They are spontaneous emotions that reflect a violation of a person's sense of self. When someone is shocked or offended, it is natural that they would express it. Yet when Muslims offended by the movie or the cartoons do so, they are accused of being an enemy of free speech. There is no excuse for reacting to an insult with violence. But many who peacefully express their condemnation of hateful views are lumped into the same category: "Why Are Muslims So Easily Offended?", goes the refrain.
Worse yet, the creators of the cartoon are portrayed as heroes for mocking Islam in a country known for its hostility toward Muslim immigrants and fierce state protection of free speech provocateurs. Editorials around the world have lauded the magazine for its alleged bravery, with one author proclaiming, "If free speech means anything, it's the right to say and publish things that other people find objectionable and irresponsible, even blasphemous."
Such a perspective confuses what free speech does with what free speech means. Free speech allows people to insult, berate, and defame each other, but that is not what most people want, and it is rarely what makes freedom of speech attractive to those who do not have it. Those forced to live in countries without free speech know that one of its greatest values is the ability to speak the truth about one's position, to contest false depictions, to refute bias and slander.
Free speech means not only the right to offend, but the right to defend. When Dan Cathy proclaims his prejudice against homosexuals, or Charlie Hebdo its hatred of Muslims, that is free speech. But when gay rights groups call for a boycott, and Muslims protest a cartoon or a movie,that is also fre
e speech. Free speech does not mean deferring to people's right to abuse you.
The ingredients of free speech
In America, a nation was divided by a sandwich. Across the world, people are dying because of a Z-grade film trailer. The battle lines of free speech are often drawn over the banal. One strategy of those who seek to minimize the argument of the offended party is to scoff at what inspired it. Only a restaurant, only a movie, only a cartoon - why the outrage, they ask.
But such conflicts are rarely about the object in question. They are about the participants and their culture, their ideologies and their faith. They are about sanction and censure, about whose dignity can withstand whose degradation.
Freedom of speech is protected by law, but guided by emotion. We should not mistake legal sanction for personal approval, but we should also not mistake personal disapproval for a rejection of free speech. In free societies, people have the right to say hateful things. And those offended have the right to oppose and condemn them
--Originally published September 25, 2012
PART IV: HIGHER EDUCATION
The closing of American academia
It is 2011 and I'm sitting in the Palais des Congres in Montreal, watching anthropologists talk about structural inequality.
The American Anthropological Association meeting is held annually to showcase research from around the world, and like thousands of other anthropologists, I am paying to play: $650 for airfare, $400 for three nights in a "student" hotel, $70 for membership, and $94 for admission. The latter two fees are student rates. If I were an unemployed or underemployed scholar, the rates would double.
The theme of this year's meeting is "Traces, Tidemarks and Legacies." According to the explanation on the American Anthropological Association website, we live in a time when "the meaning and location of differences, both intellectually and morally, have been rearranged". As the conference progresses, I begin to see what they mean. I am listening to the speaker bemoan the exploitative practices of the neoliberal model when a friend of mine taps me on the shoulder.
"I spent almost my entire salary to be here," she says.
My friend is an adjunct. She has a PhD in anthropology and teaches at a university, where she is paid $2100 per course. While she is a professor, she is not a Professor. She is, like 67 per cent of American university faculty, a part-time employee on a contract that may or may not be renewed each semester. She receives no benefits or health care.
According to the Adjunct Project, a crowdsourced website revealing adjunct wages - data which universities have long kept under wraps - her salary is about average. If she taught five classes a year, a typical full-time faculty course load, she would make $10,500, well below the poverty line. Some adjuncts make more. I have one friend who was offered $5000 per course, but he turned it down and requested less so that his children would still qualify for food stamps.
Why is my friend, a smart woman with no money, spending nearly $2000 to attend a conference she cannot afford? She is looking for a way out. In America, academic hiring is rigid and seasonal. Each discipline has a conference, usually held in the fall, where interviews take place. These interviews can be announced days or even hours in advance, so most people book beforehand, often to receive no interviews at all.
The American Anthropological Association tends to hold its meetings in America's most expensive cities, although they do have one stipulation: "AAA staff responsible for negotiating and administering annual meeting contracts shall show preference to locales with living wage ordinances." This rule does not apply, unfortunately, to those in attendance.
Below poverty line
In most professions, salaries below the poverty line would be cause for alarm. In academia, they are treated as a source of gratitude. Volunteerism is par for the course - literally. Teaching is touted as a "calling", with compensation an afterthought. One American research university offers its PhD students a salary of $1000 per semester for the "opportunity" to design and teach a course for undergraduates, who are each paying about $50,000 in tuition. The university calls this position "Senior Teaching Assistant" because paying an instructor so far below minimum wage is probably illegal.
In addition to teaching, academics conduct research and publish, but they are not paid for this work either. Instead, all proceeds go to for-profit academic publishers, who block academic articles from the public through exorbitant download and subscription fees, making millions for themselves in the process. If authors want to make their research public, they have to pay the publisher an average of $3000 per article. Without an institutional affiliation, an academic cannot access scholarly research without paying, even for articles written by the scholar itself.
It may be hard to summon sympathy for people who walk willingly into such working conditions. "Bart, don't make fun of grad students," Marge told her son on an oft-quoted episode of The Simpsons. "They just made a terrible life choice."
But all Americans should be concerned about adjuncts, and not only because adjuncts are the ones teaching our youth. The adjunct problem is emblematic of broader trends in American employment: the end of higher education as a means to prosperity, and the severing of opportunity to all but the most privileged.
In a searing commentary, political analyst Joshua Foust notes that the unpaid internships that were once limited to show business have now spread to nearly every industry. "It's almost impossible to get a job working on policy in this town without an unpaid internship," he writes from Washington DC, one of the most expensive cities in the country. Even law, once a safety net for American strivers, is now a profession where jobs pay as little as $10,000 a year - unfeasible for all but the wealthy, and devastating for those who have invested more than $100,000 into their degrees. One after another, the occupations that shape American society are becoming impossible for all but the most elite to enter.
The value of a degree
Academia is vaunted for being a meritocracy. Publications are judged on blind review, and good graduate programs offer free tuition and a decent stipend. But its reliance on adjuncts makes it no different than professions that cater to the elite through unpaid internships.
Anthropologists are known for their attentiveness to social inequality, but few have acknowledged the plight of their peers. When I expressed doubt about the job market to one colleague, she advised me, with total seriousness, to "re-evaluate what work means" and to consider "post-work imaginaries". A popular video on post-graduate employment cuts to the chase: "Why don't you tap into your trust fund?"
In May 2012, I received my PhD, but I still do not know what to do with it. I struggle with the closed off nature of academic work, which I think should be accessible to everyone, but most of all I struggle with the limited opportunities in academia for Americans like me, people for whom education was once a path out of poverty, and not a way into it.
My father, the first person in his family to go to college, tries to tell me my degree has value. "Our family came here with nothing," he says of my great-grandparents, who fled Poland a century ago. "Do you know how incredible it is that you did this, how proud they would be?"
And my heart broke a little when he said that, because his illusion is so touching - so revealing of the values of his generation, and so alien to the experience of mine.
Originally published August 20, 2012
Academic paywalls mean publish and perish
On July 19, 2011, Aaron Swartz, a computer programmer and activist, was arrested for downloading 4.8 million academic articles. The articles constituted nearly the entire catalogue of JSTOR, a scholarly research database. Universities that want to use JSTOR are charged as much as $50,000 in annual subscription fees.
Individuals who want to use JSTOR must shell out an average of $19 per article. The academics who write the articles are not paid for their work, nor are the academics who review it. The only people who profit are the 211 employees of JSTOR.
Swartz thought this was w
rong. The paywall, he argued, constituted "private theft of public culture". It hurt not only the greater public, but also academics who must "pay money to read the work of their colleagues".
For attempting to make scholarship accessible to people who cannot afford it, Swartz is facing a $1 million fine and up to 35 years in prison. The severity of the charges shocked activists fighting for open access publication. But it shocked academics too, for different reasons.
"Can you imagine if JSTOR was public?" one of my friends in academia wondered. "That means someone might actually read my article."
Academic publishing is structured on exclusivity. Originally, this exclusivity had to do with competition within journals. Acceptance rates at top journals are low, in some disciplines under 5 per cent, and publishing in prestigious venues was once an indication of one’s value as a scholar.
Today, it all but ensures that your writing will go unread. "The more difficult it is to get an article into a journal, the higher the perceived value of having done so," notes Katheen Fitzpatrick, the Director of Scholarly Communication at the Modern Language Association. "But this sense of prestige too easily shades over into a sense that the more exclusively a publication is distributed, the higher its value."
Discussions of open access publishing have centered on whether research should be made free to the public. But this question sets up a false dichotomy between "the public" and "the scholar". Many people fall into a grey zone, the boundaries of which are determined by institutional affiliation and personal wealth. This category includes independent scholars, journalists, public officials, writers, scientists and others who are experts in their fields yet are unwilling or unable to pay for academic work.
This denial of resources is a loss to those who value scholarly inquiry. But it is also a loss for the academics themselves, whose ability to stay employed rests on their willingness to limit the circulation of knowledge. In academia, the ability to prohibit scholarship is considered more meaningful than the ability to produce it.
The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior Page 8
