Kali Tal

March 29, 2007

American Nightmare: Charter Schools

Joaquin Q. Malik commented that the only point he didn't agree with me on in my Predictions for 2007 blog was short summary of the problems with charter schools. Malik is working on a piece about charter schools himself, which I very much look forward to reading when he's finished. In the meantime, I'll expand on what I think are the problems with them.

If public schools were safe, decently funded, and the teaching was of high quality (as was once the case, most notably in the 1930s-1950s), charter schools would never have been considered an acceptable alternative. The folks who select charter schools with the goal of giving their kids the education they should have received in the public schools don't bother me -- I think it's sad that they have to do it, but I understand it given the current defunding of public schools. The intentional destruction of the public schools by the U.S. government, aimed at furthering a conservative agenda, is what forces progressives (who have historically believed strongly in public education) to consider private and charter schools in the first place.

What bothers me about the government's advocacy of charter schools is that they know they have less and less incentive to keep up the quality of public schools if "school flight" pulls out all the kids whose parents have the resources to see they're well-educated, leaving the public schools as a dumping ground for children the government either doesn't give a damn about, or would actively like to prevent from being educated -- the children of the poor and the "underclasses".

For those who thought that charter schools would end segregation, see Harvard University's Civil Rights Project report: Charter Schools and Race: A Lost Opportunity for Integrated Education. Even when minority rights organizations themselves sponsor charter schools and give children a progressive education, they do it almost exclusively in segregated environments.

Furthermore, charter schools are subject to mismanagement, both unintentional and deliberate -- that's the biggest cause of charter schools closing. Public schools can't close and strand students. There's an excellent overview of this problem in Northwest Education Magazine: "Why Charter Schools Stumble -- and Sometimes Fall."

Additionally, charter schools give carte blanche to religious fundamentalists of all flavors, whose idea of schooling is in direct contrast to the ideals espoused by the (now defunct) American educational system. These people now educate their children at the expense of those (black, poor, female, etc.) people they specifically want to subjugate or to keep out of their schools. The idea that they get tax dollars to further their oppressive religio-political agendas really sticks in my craw. And they don't turn out more educated students, as this article in New York Teacher demonstrates with a very good graph.

One can, of course, rightfully critique public education in the U.S., particularly the influences of sociological constructs like Taylorism, which aimed to educate working class students to accept the place designated for them in capitalist society, and which certainly rests of a foundation of segregation, a legacy that continues long after Brown vs. Board of Ed. (A good summary of the critique is John Taylor's Gatto's, "Against School". For a popular, accessible overview of different views of public schools, check out the PBS series School: The Story of American Public Education.)

One can also criticize the funding methods of public schools, especially the problem of using the local tax base to fund local schools, so that people who live in more affluent communities can provide better educations for their children. These inequities were and are pervasive in the public school system and have been well covered for decades by Jonathan Kozol and others.

Traditionally, American public education has had the tasks of teaching students subjects, and also socializing them as citizens. It's absolutely no accident (though given Reaganite American chauvenism it's certainly ironic) that in the Reagan area "government" classes were starting to drop from most public school curriculae -- sure, it was often a stupid, boring class usually taught from a conservative and grossly nationalist viewpoint. On the other hand, it also told students how the machinery of the State operated and I know that when I took the class in a huge, mixed class, mixed-race public school (North Hollywood High, 1975), there was a contingent of leftist ("opposition") students who were happy to educate their peers about the contradictions in the rhetoric of "liberty and justice for all." Boring as it seemed at the time, in retrospect it gave us the opportunity to talk (in and out of class) and got us to think and -- although we didn't know it -- to take a position on politics upon which we could build over the years.

I believe strongly that there is a liberatory value in teaching children to read, write, cipher and analyze, whether or not the intent is to mainstream them and fit them into predetermined social molds. There's a reason why oppressed people in western culture seek literacy -- literacy is power (remember the scenes in The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass where he learns to read by hook or crook, and at great personal risk). The degradation of literacy in the U.S. follows the curve of defunding public schools and the rise in charter schools. In the International Adult Literacy Survey, 1994-1998, the results indicate that when comparing U.S. adults to adults in other high income countries "the U.S. overall performance is mediocre at best, and that, as a nation, the U.S. is among the world's leaders in the degree of inequality between its best and poorest performers.." In the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. ranked higher. In the 21st century, they rank lower than they did in the 90s.

There are disputes about the degradation of reading skills in the U.S. population. For example, Jeff McQuillin tries to debunk the widespread perception of a literacy crisis in "Seven Myths about Literacy in the United States (1998)." I've read his work and remain unconvinced, in large measure because schools have responded to accusations about literacy failure by "teaching to the test," ensuring students score higher (even, at times, teaching the test questions themselves, when they can get them), but failing miserably to teach students how to think about texts, to critique and analyze them.

Stephen Zemelman, Harvey Daniels and Marilyn Bizer note the following in their article, "Sixty Years of Reading Research -- But Who's Listening?" [Phi Delta Kappan, V80, 1999]:

Actually, the opposition between conservative and progressive views of education has existed for a long time. Conservatives see children as primarily in need of discipline, while progressives see them as creatures seeking opportunities for expression and initiative. Conservatives look to education mainly to supply basic skills for a competent labor force -- skills taught one at a time and tested by standardized, impersonal instruments -- while progressives want school mainly to nurture active citizens and creative individuals. Conservatives think of education as socializing students to the status quo, while progressives view it as an opportunity to teach students to critique and question the world they've inherited. Many conservatives doubt that public education is even an appropriate domain for government, while progressives see it as the seedbed of democracy.

...

In a sense, research studies and journal articles are beside the point; this is a religious controversy. After all, if you believe that children are intrinsically flawed beings who need to be tightly controlled and amply punished, you will design a very different kind of classroom from the one you would design for people who were seen as basically good, worthy of love and respect, and capable of self- actualization. If you believe that books -- especially religious scriptures -- have only one correct meaning that is inherent in the text, you are not going to be very friendly to schools that teach children to explore a wide range of books and ideas, to write and discuss their own responses, to make critical evaluations of what they read, and to develop strong and independent voices as authors.

... there are clear distinctions between conservative and progressive approaches to education. A classroom in which children are working in small groups on various projects they've chosen looks and feels far different from one in which students are sitting in rows listening to a lecture or filling in worksheets. We've watched children from all backgrounds excel when given lots of opportunities to choose their own reading, writing, and inquiry topics and when classrooms are structured so that the teacher can provide lots of individual attention that's well-tuned to students' personal needs. Students at the Best Practice High School, a small Chicago public high school we helped found in 1996, prove to us every day that progressive ideas can be brought to life in the inner city. And on the other side of the equation, we've observed the failure of punitive approaches, of approaches that assume that young people bring to school no relevant knowledge or abilities of their own, and of lockstep scripts that prevent teachers from using their own judgment to provide what students need at a given moment.

Posted by kalital at 10:37 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 21, 2007

Self-Hating Jew Products for Sale on Amazon!

I was researching the term "self-hating Jew" via google and hit this amazing Amazon.com page:

http://www.amazon.com/tag/self%20hating%20jew

Hey, be the first one to write a guide about self hating jews! Create a Listmania list! Sell products related to self-hating Jews! (There's already a Noam Chomsky book for sale!)

I wrote and suggested that Amazon remove the category. I hope by the time you click on the link it's not there any more.

Have I said recently how much I can't stand the crass consumerism of the net?

Posted by kalital at 7:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 14, 2007

Political and Economic Predictions for 2007

I've had a couple of friends tell me lately that things I said about American politics and the economy 4-5 years ago turned out to be exactly as I'd projected. It's too bad, since they weren't very happy things. But I figured that since I was right last time, I might as well publicly go on record about what I believe the future holds for the U.S. My analysis is based on my study of history and culture and what I'm talking about are probabilities. I don't claim any of the skills of a seer.

Foreclosures in the U.S. have already hit Great Depression levels in many areas and exceeded them in some.. This is coupled with unprecedented unemployment (well over Great Depression levels) if you use the real numbers and not the fudged government "statistics." And even the corrected stats don't count the underemployed and the working poor. My prediction is that the U.S. economy will continue to spiral downwards at an increasing rate, but that corporate "profits" (which, of course, include massive layoffs and neglect of infrastructure to appear to reap short-term gains) will allow the government to sustain the illusion of a potential recovery for a while yet. I expect that the facade will begin to break down completely after the 2008 election, and will be entirely gone by 2010, at which point the U.S. will no longer be able to pretend it's not in dire straits. By 2015 it'll be a recipient of international aid, rather than a bestower.

Along with the mortgage foreclosures, the contracting job market will plunge hundreds of thousands of heavy consumer debtors into bankruptcy, and the new laws will not allow those people to make a fresh start. Instead, they will be enslaved to debts they can no longer pay, and a new version of the crop-lien system will evolve in which creditors begin to control virtually every financial aspect of a consumer's life. Student loan debt will also push the current and next generation into debt servitude, without providing jobs that allow them to work off those debts in a reasonable time frame.

The U.S. stock market will become increasingly volatile as it's buffeted by one shock after another, and at first the world markets will take a hit ever time that happens. Eventually (and sooner rather than later), it will become apparent that the value of the dollar is no longer of primary importance to the rest of the developed world, and the European market will get stronger and become more stable as the U.S. market collapses. (Asian markets will remain more volatile, but will also eventually become independent from the U.S. market) This process will be accelerated when the world oil market -- except for U.S. holdings -- moves to the Euro.

As the dollar continues to drop in value, more and more of the multinationals with large U.S. holdings will invest in Euro, since that currency is likely to hold its value in the world market. (We can see this already, as large U.S. real estate companies are now buying up blocks of European apartments to counter the tumble in the real estate market in the U.S.) The U.S. dollar will go the way of the peso and the illusion of prosperity in the consumer market will take an enormous hit because imports will no longer be "cheap."

Debt-ridden, cash poor, with a diminishing tax base, a desperate U.S. will pursue acquisitions of oil and other resources via military adventurism. At the same time, repressive measures will continue to be employed, increased and tightened at home as an increasingly destitute population becomes more restless and resistant to a government that acts consistently against majority interests. More and more behaviors will become criminalized, adding to the artifical populations of criminals created by drug laws, "terror" laws, copyright laws, and the suggested "family violence" laws (which would criminalize any parent who physically disciplined a child). If everyone is a potential criminal, that will serve as the rationalization for increased surveillance, control and emphasis on "homeland security" and "protecting the public."

The U.S. prison population will continue to swell, as will U.S. "guest worker" programs (indentured servitude), so that the corporations that remain in the U.S. will have access to an enormous slave and indentured labor force. This will not, however, work out well for corporations in the long run, since even a huge drop in the wages in the U.S. won't bring the work force down to the level of labor in the third world countries they prefer to exploit, and U.S. made products will never be competitive with those produced in Asia, even if it were possible to retool the U.S. infrastructure and rebuild the country as a kind of third-world manufacturing base. The U.S. has also squandered the bulk of its easily accessible raw materials (oil, timber, copper, etc.), so that it is more cost effective to turn to richer stocks in Africa and Asia.

Destruction of the U.S. public school system and the promotion of largely unsupervised charter schools has already produced two generations of poorly educated additions to the citizenry and the work force. The lack of foundation makes it impossible for students to rise to high levels of achievement even in good colleges and universities. The U.S. underproduces highly trained personnel in almost every field in the sciences, and it has largely given up attempting to educate persons in the humanities and the social sciences. Increasingly, those corporations remaining in the U.S. will be forced to recruit from Europe and Asia to fill technical and professional positions.

Religious fundamentalism will rise as the economy worsens, and scapegoating of those who are different will dramatically increase, and will include the passage of laws (and perhaps Constitutional amendments) to abridge the freedoms of queers, women, and aliens and nonwhite persons. Black and brown people will be increasingly under the control of the criminal justice system, feeding the needs of the corporations who use them as forced labor and the police system that uses the threat of incarceration as a way to discourage political and economic protest.

Racist and homophobic violence will increase dramatically in this period, justified by the alleged "terrorist threat" that paints everyone who is not a Republican, white, American male as a potential "enemy." Profiling will be the rule, habeus corpus will be suspended for Americans, and detention camps for American political dissidents will spring up in different parts of the country. Dissidents will be criminalized, jailed, and isolated. Media control will continue to be more and more consolidated, and access to information will become harder to get. The U.S. internet will become entirely privatized and the large providers will be the gatekeepers, baldly employing a political agenda to limit free access to content. The "news" is already close to being as seamless as it was under the Soviet republic, and this will continue to be the case.

American military adventurism will continue to be justified by the "war on terror," and the U.S. will set up missile defense stations in Poland, Czechoslovakia and other "friendly" countries. It will retool its nuclear arsenal and revive the nuclear threat, forcing other nations to beef up their nuclear programs in reaction. As U.S. real power dwindles, U.S. imperialist efforts will become more desperate, and U.S. foreign policy of the next decade will make the brinksmanship of the Nixon/Kissinger era look like a calm and friendly game of chess.

The Democrats are not going to make an iota of difference -- they don't have the power to stop the coming economic crash, which is already well under way. Nor do they have the will to walk away from the strategy of military-intervention-as-resource-grab. They don't give a damn about the poor, or about the fact that the American middle class has virtually disappeared. They don't have the guts to stand up to to corporations, to socialize utilities or medicine, or to insist on rebuilding our infrastructure. They don't want to reinstitute the civil rights that were stripped from Americans or foreign residents. They will not end the drug war, and they will not end the war on terror. They will hold power briefly and ineffectively, and they will be replaced by the cronies of the same Republicans they are attempting to oust from power. The electoral system of the U.S. is bankrupt, the Constitution is shredded, and we no longer live under a rule of law -- the Democrats have neither the ability nor the fortitude to confront that fact and to set things right.

Over the years a lot of people have called me a pessimist when it comes to predicting what will happen. I'd like to take a moment to point out that I have been on the money about everything I've said would happen, and that things are just as bad there now as I said they'd be... and they're heading for worse.

Personally, I'd suggest getting and staying the hell out of the country if at all possible. If you have anything to invest, do it outside the U.S. and stay away from the dollar like the plague.

Posted by kalital at 1:51 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

March 3, 2007

Authority and Enlightenment Ideals: Reason in Progressive Thought

A discussion on the nature of authority developed on Brother Art's blog, and I wanted to addresss the question at some length, so I brought it over here. I've been thinking about the way "authority" relates to "experience" for a long time; the issue has been at the center of my intellectual and activist work since at least 1979. I can't claim to any "authority" over the answer, since in my opinion it's one of the most complex questions that we face, but I can frame the question with some confidence.

At its heart this is a question of who can and should be regarded as an expert (an "authority," a "legitimate" analyst, an "authentic" voice to speak for a community, the person who "really" knows, and so on). As with any discussion like this, it has to start with the questions that are almost always begged by the assignment of "authority": 1) Who grants expertise? 2) What constituency does the expert serve? 3) What is the expert's personal stake ("material interest," in Art's words) in the question? As usual, my exploration of the question is roundabout, so think of this as a tour of my mind while I attempt to assemble the information and ideas from the various disciplines in which I work in order to address the issue as holistically as I can.

Western culture -- with its embedded white supremacist ideology and its sexist foundation -- has a real stake in determining who is and who is not an "authority" on a matter. The gatekeepers of authority are almost always the same gatekeepers who have a material interest in preserving hegemony; shutting down challenges, and shoring up the totalizing structure upon which their power depends. Virtually all institutions that grant "authority" in this culture are steeped in bias -- but they almost always claim neutrality while enforcing inequity and punishing those who question that inequity. (See, for example, my recent complaints about racism and sexism embedded in the Citizendium project.)

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

One of the central features of Western claims to authority is the lip service given to philosophical ideas that rose to prominence during and after the Enlightenment (the Age of Reason), so I think it's important to talk at least briefly about why the Enlightenment is central both to projects that enforce hegemony in Western culture, and to many that challenge it. It's important to remember that the patterns of thought that were crystalized and refined in the community of Enlightenment thinkers during the 18th century in Europe and the U.S. were outgrowths of the long conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism and reflect a struggle over authority: who had it, who wanted it, and why.

I'm going to engage in a crass but useful generalization here, to sum up the situation. Historically, Catholicism was linked to an ultimate and centralized hierarchical authority structure -- the Church's claim that its highest official (and no one else) has the direct ear of, and is the right hand (man) of God on earth. Politically, this had long meant that Rome claimed the right to tell even kings what they should and should not do, and to challenge royal authority with its orders and its armies. England's rejection of the Church's authority, and the establishment of its Anglican state religion by Henry XIII (cemented in place by Elizabeth I) was a radical move -- both politically and philosophically.

The politics and philosophy of Protestantism relocated the political "ultimate authority" from the religious to the secular realm and birthed the Western "democratic" tradition of separation of church and state. While Henry meant merely to usurp Rome's power and keep it for himself -- claiming the "divine right of Kings" -- that was not, in fact, what happened. Instead, dislodging God from the top of the hierarchical structure opened the door for other men to question the authority of what was, after all, simply another man, however high-born. Reduction of the authority of the monarch was a central project of those who worked to establish the existence of "natural law" to combat the "divine law" of either Pope or King. Similarly, the interest in scientific method and logical thought and argument relocated authority from those who had inherited as a right, to those who "deserved" it.

Tools and weapons, once forged, may be turned to other purposes and used by hands other than those who created them. The white men who espoused Enlightenment philosophies never meant for them to empower more than a small group of privileged white males; they were themselves prejudiced, racist, sexist. Just as Henry XIII didn't see that he'd ultimately undermine the power of the monarchy by challenging Rome's authority, almost none of the proponents of Enlightenment principles fully understood the revolutionary idea of the arguments they put forward. Studies in comparative revolutions demonstrate their lack of foresight clearly (I highly recommend the work of Murray Bookchin in this regard). The American Revolution took place in an environment and among a milieu that failed to seriously question its own racist underpinnings, and to apply its philosophies to the subjugated slaves upon which the wealthy men of the nation depended for their labor, but one cannot say the same about the Haitian Revolution of 1791 -- a revolution as deeply rooted in Enlightenment principles as either the American or the French ever were.

My point here is that reason and logic, once unleashed, can be turned to many purposes... including the purposes of liberation. This is something that African American and feminist critical thinkers have underlined, again and again, for over 200 years now. That those tools are most often used in the service of the oppressors speaks only to the power of the oppressors and not to the quality of the tools themselves. Logic and reason are not the only tools in a revolutionary's box, but they are often employed and serve many functions. One purpose they serve is to catch the oppressor in inconsistencies -- the points at which those in power profess one set of beliefs and standards, while operating on an entirely different set. Since the post-Enlightenment oppressor claims to operate by "rational" rules, this challenge can be a powerful force in destabilizing the margins, and sometimes even the center (as Ghandi effectively destabilized Britain's "moral center" to achieve real-world political results by using nonviolent tactics to challenge Britain's purported "goodness" and "rectitude" in a global theater, and as the civil rights movement would attempt to destabilize U.S. hegemony later).

The Declaration of Independence, for example, has been held up as a justification for revolution and rebellion by a wide variety of groups, ranging from ante-bellum radical abolitionists in the U.S. to the supporters of 1950s-1960s revolutions around the world from Vietnam to Angola. These revolutionaries weren't fools -- they knew that the freedoms discussed in the Declaration were never INTENDED to apply to them; nonetheless the ideas, logically extended, DO apply. This is the power of ideas and it seems to me to be one of the things that makes us human: we can take instances, generalize, and then apply those generalizations to a wide variety of situations.

Neither are reason or logic the sole province of the West -- strong arguments can and have been made that the logical principles the West lauds the Greeks for inventing originally sprang not from the Mediterranean, but from Africa and Asia where there are also long traditions of inquiry into the sciences, mathematics and other disciplines that require the presumption of a world that can be known -- "facts," in other words. As Art has noted, facts are always interpreted in particular material contexts, but one of the beauties of logic is that even if a logical conclusion flies in the face of accepted truth backed by the power of the dominant culture.... it is still a logical conclusion. Those in power may not want to allow a paradigm shift (see Thomas Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_) and may deny "the truth" (think about Gallileo and the church here), but, once the argument has been made and the evidence presented, the work of suppression can rarely be complete.

What does this have to do with the construction of authority? Quite a bit, really. If one takes as a given (as most post-Enlightenment thinkers do), that there are such things as facts (however difficult they may be to determine in particular cases), and that logical rules of argument apply, then "authority" (at least in theory) ought to be delegated to those who have the most facts, and whose logical interpretation of those facts is least assailable. In practice, of course, there is no such level playing field -- control over information is always political and oppressors claim not only power over material objects, but power over our minds. access to, and use of ideas for particular purposes.

PSEUDOSCIENCE

"Pseudoscience" is a set of behavior patterns that purport to be "scientific" (based on documented evidence and logical argument), but that in fact support a viewpoint -- often the Status Quo -- at the expense of evidence and logic. (Yes, the authority to determine who is a "real" and who is a "pseudo" scientist is also political.) We can see an example of Status Quo pseudoscience at play in the debate over intelligence, aptitude and standardized testing. The most famous contemporary example of this is the "Bell curve" "argument" in which the scientists who support the idea that blacks fall at the lower end of the curve refuse to concede or even seriously examine the claim that the measuring instruments themselves are biased and flawed. If you don't have the time or stomach for the Bell curve "debate," then you can see it in effect in short form by examining a couple of online documents discussing gender bias in SAT testing. La Griffe du Lion's pseudoscientific "explanation" for why white men should dominate the science professions employs precise mathematical equations to calculate the "correct" male-to-female ratio in the sciences, while completely ignoring the substantiated claims that the tests upon which his numbers rely are themselves biased. Contrast this to the FairTest Examiner article that analyzes why tests return such biased results.

Quite a bit of what those in power claim to be "science" is really "pseudoscience" rooted in ideological and material desires, and isolated from "reality" (documented evidence, testable hypotheses, logical scrutiny). Scientific trends can't be understood in isolation from the culture in which they evolve and a lot of what scientific "authorities" have put forward as "true" has turned out, in the longer run, to be completely laughable: phrenology, virtually all pre-1920 (and much post-1920) gynecology, Freudian psychoanalytic theory, "scientific" theories of race, social Darwinism, and so on. But it's logically untenable to conclude that because there is a lot of bad science, there is no good science: because people lie about the nature of reality, doesn't mean that reality has no nature. A number of revolutionaries understood this very well. One of my favorite Che quotes -- a (perhaps apocryphal) answer when he was charged with being biased and looking at everything through his ideological Marxism: "I can't help it that reality is Marxist." Che -- a scientist, a physician himself -- did believe that there is a verifiable and documentable reality, and, more importantly, believed that his belief system did and should match that reality. On another end of the political spectrum, the complicated and difficult poet, Laura Riding, asserted: "Appearances do not deceive, if there are enough of them." I think she was right -- the question, however, is always which appearances we are allowed or encouraged to see, and which are repressed and obfuscated with lies.

The label of "pseudoscience" is usually used to discredit those outside the power structure's definition of authorities, starting with the Flat Earthers, the folks who believe we never went to the moon, and the people who wear tinfoil hats. It's important to remember, however, that pseudoscience takes place as often inside the institutional halls of power as outside it, and that the institutional backing of a particular set of scientific beliefs is not a measure of its validity: validity can only be determined by an examination of evidence and argument.

THE CONTRADICTION BETWEEN "AUTHORITY" AND "EXPERIENCE" AND THE QUESTION OF CATEGORIZATION

And here is where we get to the meat of the authority question. If we accept that there are indeed facts, and that out of these facts we can construct arguments to support or disprove our conclusions or the conclusions of others, then we have to believe in some sort of authority, some sort of hierarchy of judgement. Else, how can we put anything out as a "fact" (whether it's a fact by objective measure, or a fact by subjective assertion -- "experience"), in the context of anything we call an "argument"? If you don't believe in the existence of any facts whatsoever, if you believe that "all facts are created equal" and are equally unverifiable, if you don't believe in logical argument, and are a complete moral relativist, I will have lost you here. But if you don't meet at least three of those criteria, you're going to have to come along for the ride, at least for a while.

And this is where it gets really sticky, because if we do acknowledge some sort of factual and logical validity, we then need to be clear about the standards we use for judging the relative worth of the arguments set before us. Otherwise, there'd be no way to compare arguments. And we need to make a pitch for those standards that relies on something other than, "because I say so." If "because I say so" is not good evidence for those in power, who want to justify their choke-hold on the interpretation of truth and assignment of authority, it has to be insufficient evidence for those outside of power as well. But of course, the question of who says what is VERY important, in large measure because historically some voices have been shut out of the conversation and some voices have been privileged. We can't pretend that there's any equality of power, even though we might want to advocate for an equal rule system: all testimony is not created equal, nor judged equally. How do take account of that in judging the quality of arguments?

One of the goals of progressive forces has been to move marginalized voices towards the center. We see this on many, many levels, around every issue where the less powerful have gathered to testify to the more powerful, and to each other. Because, in political terms, black Americans have historically been spoken FOR -- rather than listened TO -- it's crucial to ensure the presence of a critical mass of black voices in American public debate, not just on issues related to race (although what issue ISN'T related to race?), but on all issues debated among the polity. Likewise, the excluded voices of women, queers, the disabled, [insert excluded group here] also need to be admitted to the conversation, not just in a token fashion, but in proportion to their real numbers and on an equal footing, so that the question of their future exclusion is no longer in the hands of upper class heterosexual white men. I am, in fact, talking about revolution, since I believe firmly that those in power don't cede power unless they no longer have a choice. The above is a statement of ideals: the reality is so far from this ideal that I'm not sure it's even useful to describe the ideal form. And yet... unless I can hold an ideal form in my mind, how can I be certain of my goals?

THE AGE OLD PROBLEM OF TESTIMONY

This is where I often part company with my fellow political travelers. I've worked with witnesses, "survivors," people who have "experienced" and want to "bear witness" to various atrocities, to political oppression, to exclusion for the last 25 years. I am, in fact --as a woman and a sexual abuse survivor -- a "witness" myself. And the conclusion that I've been inescapably forced to draw is that "not all witnesses are created equal." This may seem blindingly obvious to some, but it's a real political hot potato. I've written about this extensively in Worlds of Hurt, and it's been at the center of much of the rest of my intellectual work.

As progressives, we're caught in a couple of binds. On the one hand, we must acknowledge the structural validity of categorizing "women," "men," "African Americans," and so on. We need to acknowledge that these categories of identity exist (however permeable the margins) or we couldn't see and describe patterns of discrimination, gendered or raced patterns of social interaction, or any other large-scale social phenomenon where distinctions are rooted in identity. We understand that denying the existence of these categories only reinforces discriminatory patterns, naturalizes them, individualizes them, and that such denial is woven into the fabric of white supremacist and sexist cultures. On the other hand, we are suspect of categorization because historically it's most often been arbitrarily determined by the very structures we're trying to oppose: if race hadn't been constructed, then we wouldn't need to use constructions of race to analyze discrimination based on race. Trying to navigate between these two poles is like dancing on a minefield.

On the one hand, we are committed to the recognition of individual rights, human rights, and the right of people to describe and name themselves, claim their own history, "own" their constructions of who and what they are. We're painfully aware that historically oppressors have imposed their definitions on the oppressed, and enforced those definitions in deadly and deadening ways, so giving prominence to those voices is a major part of our project. On the other hand, we are forced to often painful recognition that those whose desires we wish to respect don't all agree on their goals, and, even if they do agree, differ widely on how to achieve them. There is no simple "black" or "female" or "queer" answer to the question of how to go about improving people's lives; rather, there is a hotly contested debate within each one of those communities over goals, strategies, and tactics.

For the progressive, this means choosing between the equally "black" political positions of, say, Shelby Steele and Manning Marable, Angela Davis and Condoleeza Rice, or between the equally "female' positions of Ann Coulter and Maxine Waters. I'm giving extreme examples here, because for progressives they amount to "One-Question IQ Tests." Of COURSE it's Marable over Steele, Davis over Rice, and Waters over Coulter, and most of us would make that choice automatically, without reference to the moral and ethical mechanisms we use to make it. But we need to step back and examine the implications of making those choices, because not all of them are so simple.

PERMISSION TO JUDGE

We are not only empowered, but responsible for judging which of the afore-mentioned thinkers' views are "better" (or more in line with our own political values). In other words, and at every level, as post-Enlightenment thinkers, we grant ourselves the right to evaluate and judge, based on certain criteria that conform to our internalized belief that evidence and argument matter MORE than simple (or complex) identity when determining the validity or strength of an intellectual position. I don't think this is a bad thing in and of itself. It BECOMES a bad thing when our material interests interfere with our intellectual, ethical and moral analysis, and we begin choosing one person's argument over another's not because those arguments are more powerful by the agreed upon objective standards, but because they serve our interests, affirm our beliefs, or make us comfortable.

I make no apologies at all for my claim that I am qualified to judge between arguments put forward by anyone who is speaking on topics on which I've struggled, studied, puzzled, researched, and labored. I refuse to concede that another person's opinion about a topic is more valid than mine by virtue of their simple identity: black, white, male, female, queer, straight, differently-abled. If I didn't hold this position, I'd be unable to contest anything that any man said about the nature of masculinity or manhood; that any straight person said about the nature of heterosexuality; that any white person said about the nature of white supremacy. Authority does not inhere to identity on an individual level; period.

How does this jibe with the statistical fact that the huge majority of sources I read and respect in discussions of race are black? Doesn't that show I believe black people more than white people, at least on this topic? This may sound like an idiotic question, but believe me, I get asked that regularly, mostly by white people who don't like what I have to say about race. The answer is that, by objective measure, the balance of work done on race by black scholars and intellectuals and activists is measurably superior to the work of most (but not all) white people who voice opinions about black history, politics, culture and "experience." The pool of people doing excellent work on the nature of race in America is disproportionately black for obvious reasons, just as the pool of people doing excellent work on gender issues is overwhelmingly female: the members of these communities have the most interest in doing excellent work in these areas, because the quality of their lives and the lives of their communities depend on it. Whites, on the other hand, benefit from the Status Quo, just as males do. They have a material, vested interest in NOT doing excellent work, because excellent work will challenge their biases and the foundation of their own power.

In INDIVIDUAL cases, the above does not give us the measure of worth of a scholar's opinion; in AGGREGATE it creates a preponderance of evidence. It's a simple matter of probability and the coin flip. Each time you flip a coin you have a 50/50 chance of it landing heads or tails, no matter how many times you flip the same coin. On the other hand, you have a smaller and smaller chance of a run of "head's up" coin tosses. This is why smart gamblers don't place their money on single bets; they bet against long "head's up" streaks. If I round up a group of 100 black scholars and a group of 100 white scholars and ask them questions about race issues, I'm simply betting the odds when I go with the majority opinion among the black scholars; statistically, it's a lot more likely to be correct.

Probability is not the best evidence for an argument, though it's not trivial. But I don't need to rely on probability -- I can look at the evidence gathered by all parties, analyze the arguments presented, and come to a conclusion about an argument's strength and weakness in comparison to other arguments. I've done that, over and over again, in race and gender studies, which is, I believe, what makes me an expert in comparison to other people who have not done this -- whether they are black or white. As a white scholar, I am a minority in the community of persons dedicated to seriously and competently studying race in the U.S., but competence is achievable for anyone -- white or black -- if they are willing to put in the work and the time.

THE QUESTION OF "EXPERIENCE"

Creating a balance between experience and expertise is not simply an academic problem; it's a real problem that we deal with every day. I'll use two examples of the problem of privileging experience and devaluing expertise -- both outside of the arena of race, since the problem is not peculiar to race or gender analysis.

The first example is taken from my work with Holocaust survivors, done at the Holocaust Museum. I worked in the oral history department there, where of course survivors are received with great support and sympathy and considered to be ultimate authorities on their experiences. While working there, however, the historians noticed some very interesting divergences between survivor testimony and what "really" could have happened, based on historical facts. There are too many to go into detail here, but I'll give you the most common and easily verified example. A large proportion of survivors who had been deported to Auschwitz said "authoritatively" that Mengele had been the one to meet their train and sort those who would live and those who would die.

One of the very interesting facts about their testimony is that the descriptions of Mengele were often very similar to each other, and also often resembled pop culture Holocaust depictions and acceptive normative historical narrative descriptions of the man. Even more interesting, a large number of these people had been at Auschwitz when Mengele was not stationed there. Anyone who wants to use this inconsistancy as a "fact" that "proves" the Holocaust didn't happen, or that survivors are liars is a damned fool and an anti-Semite, BUT we do need to account for the discrepency in testimony somehow.

We know, by the documentation, corroboration, and interviews that for sure these people are "authentic" survivors; on the other hand, we know that the memory of at least SOME of their experience has been eroded and replaced by pop culture images. (There is, by the way, a fantastic British study done post WWII that documents the exact same phenomenon in those who survived the blitz of London.) Many of those who speak with the authority of experience are also demonstrably less well versed on the history of the Holocaust than are most Holocaust scholars.

What can we learn from this disjunct between memory and history, and how can we separate out the issues at play and the web of power relations within which both testimony and analysis take place?

First we must acknowledge the malleability of memory -- well documented on many levels from eyewitness testimony in the court-room to oral history accounts of remembered experience. When we interview people about their experiences, we need to be aware that they are simply not going to be accurate about every detail, and that the farther they are in time from the experience, the muddier their recollections will be. But we don't go to testimony simply for "facts." We go to testimony for an understanding of subjective experience -- a richer and deeper sense of an era or an event than a mere listing of the facts can give us.

"Objectivity" -- the arena in which scientific method, evidence, and logic operates -- is a subset of "subjectivity." Objectivity is impossible without a set of agreed upon standards of measurement -- those standards by which we can judge the relative accuracy of facts and the logical structure of arguments. "Subjectivity" includes the realm of objectivity, and transcends it -- giving us access to human truths on individual and cultural levels that transcend the objective sphere. We need to think of subjective testimony as laying beside (rather than subsumed under, or replacing) objective analysis. Without subjective engagement, we would never be able to step outside of the self-referential sphere that objectivity creates.

For example, in the case of the Holocaust survivors who mistakenly asserted that they were met by Mengele at Asuchwitz, it would be a terrible mistake to dismiss them as "wrong" and therefore discount and invalidate their testimony. Rather, the consistent misidentification of Mengele can be read as a sign-post to a cultural phenomenon -- the erosion of memory by popular culture and social pressure. Without that "mistake" it would be impossible for us to see, much less begin to examine, the problem of social construction of individual memory, and the pressures upon survivors to reshape their experiences in a form more recognizable and perhaps more palatable or attractive to outside interviewers. The survivor's testimony of experience is absolutely "authentic" (we know this because we can document that the survivor has actually survived the experience -- been in a particular place at a particular time). It is not, however, always accurate... even though it is precise.

The responsible thing to do in the above case is to acknowledge the importance of both authentic testimony, and the specific inaccuracies in the survivor's stories, without using the latter to diminish the importance of the former.

Another, very different example of problematic testimony is evident in the debate on what has come to be known as "False Memory Syndrome." Objectively speaking, we can document the vast number of instances of violence against women and children, and make an unassailable argument that this violence pervades the culture and that an unacceptably large number of members of both of those populations have been and will continue to be victims of that violence. We can also examine rape claims and, by the numbers, determine that in the vast majority of cases in which women have pursued the prosecution of their rapists or abusers in the criminal justice system, there is well documented evidence to support their claims.

What we cannot do, however, is predict whether an individual woman is telling the truth or not when she accuses a man of rape or sexual abuse. The preponderance of evidence would put the odds in her favor, but that is by no means a sure bet -- and when you're talking about imprisoning a person for rape, you really do want to be certain beyond a reasonable doubt. In a very small minority of very well publicized cases, evidence has been brought forward to cast doubt onto a particular woman's claims of suffering a particular sort of sexual abuse or the accuser has publicly retracted her testimony. (In at least some of these cases, she received a financial reward for the retraction.) The focus of the defense, and of the press, has been on the truth or falsehood of the sexual aspects of the woman's claims, and the court and the public has taken as a vindication of the man the admission of the woman that she exaggerated or lied about incest or rape. In these cases, much of the "blame" for false memories has been heaped on the therapist, who is accused of egging the patient on to invent the memories, and some of those who disbelieve in the phenomenon of recovered memory claim those false memories are the result of a therapy-caused illness: False Memory Syndrome. (A summation of this position can be found at the web site of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation [FMS Foundation] You can find information that contests the view of the FMS Foundation at the Recovered Memory Project).

A key claim of the FMS Foundation is that there is a sort of "witch hunt" going on and that "hysterical" women make claims of abuse which are unquestioningly accepted by the courts and the public. The analogy is often made to the Salem Witch Trials, and the people being accused of the abuse are turned into victims, not only on an individual level, but on a social level where the point is being made that hysterical, vindictive and irrational women control the legal system and influence the public sphere. As a claim, this can be empirically disproved by analyzing the very low rate of convictions for rape or child abuse, compared to even conservative estimates (as, for example, issued by the FBI) of the number of these crimes taking place. Most rapes and most child abuse are unreported; most reported rape or abuse is not prosecuted; most perpetrators plea-bargain and don't make it to trial. Only the cases in which there is virtually indisputable evidence, and where the victim is adamant about and can afford to pursue prosecution, is there even a moderate conviction rate -- and conviction in that case also depends on the race and personal history of the accuser as much as on the evidence against the accused.

Progressives, with good reason, would not want to identify themselves with women who falsely accuse people of committing sexual abuse. But as progressives we value personal testimony and the authenticity of experience. How can we find a balance when we're examining such cases: people who didn't commit abuse shouldn't be prosecuted or convicted; but people who say they have been abused need to be taken seriously. The answer lies, again, in laying objective and subjective reality side by side. One thing that really illuminates this phenomenon is the finding that, in virtually every case of alleged "False Memory Syndrome" that has been widely publicized, the woman who testified to being abused was the documented victim of severe physical and emotional abuse, even if sexual abuse could not be proved. Physical abuse is apparently widely accepted enough that it isn't spectacular on its own to warrant prosecution in most cases; sexual abuse, however, is in a small number of cases sensational enough to be brought to trial. In broad terms, it is easy to see that a severely abused woman would have reason to emphasize sexual abuse over physical abuse in making her charges against those who assaulted her.

There's a comparison to be made here between the small number of men who pretend to be Vietnam veterans suffering from PTSD, and the small number of women who claim to be rape or sexual abuse survivors when they in fact are not. At least one study has shown that "fake veterans" are often male survivors of sexual abuse, just as "false rape" victims are often real victims of physical violence. In both cases, a claim is made for attention based on the kind of assault that the culture is most likely to be sympathetic about; in both cases real assaults have taken place; and in both cases, the claims of a particular status are not "true." The progressive position, here, has to be to neither blindly believe "testimony," nor to blindly dismiss the importance of the testimony because it is not "accurate." Rather, it needs to balance the objective truth with the emotional and social truth of the testimony: We need to recognize that something is very wrong here, even if the specific problem named is not the thing that is wrong. In other words, in order to fully address the problem, we need to understand the social conditions that manufacture fake vets and women who claim rape when they haven't been raped, rather than claiming there's no problem because the assertions of the members of these groups have been "disproved."

CONCLUSION: TESTIMONY AND AUTHORITY

Boiling this down to the most personal level (I think this is important for us to do, because a central tenet of revolutionary philosophies from sexism to antiracism is that the personal is political), I have to conclude that my lived experience is indeed important -- it matters that I am a woman, a sexual abuse survivor, a Jew -- and that I can testify to my individual experience on these terms. On the other hand, my lived experience does not automatically grant me a mastery over -- or even a familiarity with -- the factual information necessary for conceiving a broad structural analysis of the phenomena to which I can testify. In short, I may know intimately what it feels like to be a secular progressive Jew in the U.S. today, but know very little about the history of Judaism or Jewish theology. Similarly, I may have no experience at all of being black, and yet have a very broad knowledge of black history, politics, culture and literature in the U.S. In neither of these cases can I claim an ultimate authority; but in both cases I have some authority. The key point is that any authority I may claim, from either position, is part of a larger structure of subjective thought, of which objectivity is an important component.

Both objective and subjective methodology is required to gain the fullest possible understanding of complex social and cultural phenomenon -- particularly of totalizing forces like white supremacy or sexism. Objective analysis, rooted in Enlightenment principles, is an excellent tool for for analyzing our arguments and evidence; while subjective analysis is necessary if we are not going to be trapped within the hermeneutic circle (the self-referential environment within which meaning is produced in a particular culture). We need both authentic testimony and expertise -- the realms intersect, but are not contiguous.

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