Kali Tal

Musings on Sicko

2007-07-19T15:08:23Z

I'm not sure where people are getting their information about the German health care system, but I believe it's incorrect.

I'm a retired U.S. university professor (and U.S. citizen) now living in Germany. I didn't have an ax to grind about the U.S. health system when I moved here because, as a state employee, I was covered by an excellent insurance plan in the U.S. The plan covered 80% of my expenses when I went to plan-approved physician, and 70% when I selected my own physician. As a member of the upper-middle class, I wasn't bogged down in the HMO systems and I can pretty securely say that I had just about the best insurance program and access to care that it's possible to have in the U.S.

After moving to Germany I realized, within a year, that the German system is hands-down better than the U.S. system in every way possible. I didn't expect it to be better, but it was. Here are the differences:

In the U.S. I paid $320/mo for my insurance policy. When I went to the doctor, I paid 20% or 30% of the costs, which get pretty high for those of us who have chronic (but in my case not serious) health issues. I paid approximately $250/mo additionally for medications purchased under my insurance plan, and an average of $50/mo as my part of the fee for doctor visits. Over a 10-year period I had a couple of emergency room visits and a surgery, and my total out of pocket costs for those came out to $3,500 (20% of an expensive surgery is nothing to sneeze at.) I figure my total health care costs were approximately $600-650/mo. In addition, I paid my taxes which (at my salary of about $55,000) amounted to about 33-35% (federal, state, and local)... none of which went to my own medical care.

Now... let's see what happened when I moved to Germany... In Germany (where I am not employed), my husband earns about half of what I did in the U.S. Because of our low income, he pays under 10% in taxes. My better-paid friends pay up to 35% in taxes, though I hear it can go higher if you earn a lot more money. Here, though, we get medical care included in our tax payments (12.7% of one's income a year under our plan), so that reduces the 35% quite a bit, meaning that we actually pay far lower taxes here than we would in the U.S. overall.

I'll give you two stories about access to medical care here. The first is as an uninsured person -- a "private patient" as they say here. When I first arrived on a tourist visa I developed a serious retinal condition. I went to the local doctor (office in our apartment building). His nurses decided that my case was too serious for him to handle and he sent me to an "expensive" (they warned me) clinic down the street in the prestigious Axel-Springer building. I went to the specialist, with no appointment, and waited for almost an hour in her waiting room. She saw me, gave me a thorough examination with the latest equipment, and gave me two prescriptions with the order to return in 2 days. Although I was worried about the cost, obviously my health was the primary issue, so I continued to go to this clinic as a private patient, for several months while they treated my problem. Some weeks I was there 2-3 times. I never waited more than an hour, and usually less than 15 minutes. In the end, she mailed me a bill which I was terrified to open. In the U.S., such treatment would have been in the many thousands of dollars. The bill read: "672 EU".

It got even better after I got married. I am covered on my husband's insurance policy and the amount he must add to his payment each month is minute and more than compensated by the tax break the German government gives him because I'm not employed. In effect, I get my medical care for free and we now get an additional several hundred dollars a month out of his (admittedly small) paycheck.

Doctor visits have a quarterly co-pay of 10 EU, and if you visit a specialist, it's an additional 10 EU per quarter to see each of them. Thus, if I go to my primary physician and see four specialists a year -- no matter how many times I see them! -- the cost is never more than 200 EU per year. Pretty amazing. On average, I wait a far shorter time in European doctor's offices than I waited in the U.S. In addition, I've never had a problem getting an appointment with a German specialist, though the date might have been as much as 2 months away in non-emergency situations. The wait time was similar for getting into the offices of U.S. specialists, or even worse. (For example, in Tucson, I was told that not a single endocrinologist was accepting non-diabetic new patients for the foreseeable future -- I had to wait 6 months and go to Phoenix to actually be diagnosed and treated.)

The level of care here is superb. In the U.S. I made a point of going to the best doctors no matter what they cost -- health, after all, is everything. I'm not naive about the field of medicine and have some background in physiology myself. It is clear to me that I get the best care possible here. And, just like U.S. doctors, they are careful -- in my case, they needed to rule out a brain tumor and they did not hesitate to send me to get an MRI, even though the possibiliy was remote.

Germans do complain about the quality of their health care, but it's important to remember that their complaints are relative to their own system... not to the U.S. system. I, too, would whine about a 2-hour doctor office wait... unless I'd been used to sitting for 4 hours. And I, too, would object to the 10 EU co-pay being raised from once a year to once a quarter (effectively quadrupling my health care costs) unless I'd been used to paying more a month than a German visiting four specialists pays in a year. Likewise the cost of medications might seem high at 5-10 a prescription (though many are free!) ... if I hadn't been paying $20-40 per scrip in the U.S.

In the interest of honesty, I will say that when I started going to the university medical clinic for my eyes, to see the best specialists in the country, I did find longer wait times -- sometimes up to 3 hours. But this is an exception since it is a teaching hospital and the specialists are overburdened. Unlike in U.S. hospitals, I found that the younger specialists are directly supervised by the senior specialists, and I have never had an office visit to this clinic where I wasn't examined personally by the head doctor. It was unusual to find my care was not relegated to interns or residents, as it is so often in equivalent U.S. teaching hospitals (where I've spent more time than I'd have liked).

As for the "collapse" of the German medical system... any examination of the figures shows this is absurd. Costs are indeed increasing, and taxes are rising in different areas, but again, they are nowhere near what most of us pay in the U.S. and we get so much less for our money.

This is why Americans should travel -- a brush with the European health care systems can be very illuminating, and an illustration of what we should be demanding from our own government. For all the hue and cry about the dangers of socialism I hear from both right wingers and libertarians, I simply can't see the reality of it here in Germany. Germany's not perfect, but in many aspects -- and particularly in serving the broadest spectrum of its citizens medical needs -- it is indeed better.

If you need still more reassurance, just take a look at the relative health of the German vs. the U.S. economy. On virtually every relative measure, Germans are healthier, live better, and are better educated than their American counterparts. It really is pretty embarrassing when you think about it, given our relative access to resources.

I'm not, of course, talking about the living conditions of the richest 5% of the American population -- the rich live well wherever they may be. But if you measure the quality of life of the other 95% of both societies, you might well be astonished at the results.

Of course health care is a right -- it's certainly one of the crucial foundations of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" (or "property" if you prefer that version). And the U.S. is virtually the only developed nation that refuses to recognize that right. I find it sad when I hear Americans screaming loudly that people don't "deserve" accessible health care unless they can afford to pay exorbitant prices for it. And I wonder how durable their "get tough" attitude would be if they were faced with illness of a loved one or their own serious illness. It's a lot easier to say that strangers should die on the street, but a lot harder when it's Aunt Molly.

There is, of course, no convincing the hard core libertarian ideologues, who insist that selfishness is at the root of all human endeavor. But anyone who believes in empathy, in compassion, and in communal responsibility is going to have a hard time making an ethical argument against universal health care.

American Nightmare: Charter Schools

2007-03-29T08:37:57Z

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.

What this suggests to me is that at the moment when "sixty years of research" was demonstrating unequivocally that "whole language" teaching -- reading rooted in the analysis of literary texts -- was most effective in educating students, particularly in the areas of comprehension skills and critical thinking, and when such research began to be institutionalized in the public schools, conservative forces marshaled together to slam public education and joined with the conservative government administration to defund public schools while funding these new charter schools. This was going on at the same time as the so-called "Culture Wars," in which right-wingers claimed that "leftists" controlled the universities and were teaching their students according to a "leftist agenda"... as if there was no "conservative agenda" already in place. What was really happening was that conservatives were panicking as study after study demonstrated that "liberal" methods worked better than the methods they espoused, and that their worldview was increasingly difficult to substantiate given the current state of research in just about every field, from biology to anthropology. (But that's another story...)

A 2004 report from Democracy Now discusses a Bush administration burial of its own government agency, which found that "children attending charter schools score lower on standardized tests than students at regular public schools." I suppose the Bush maxim, "No Child Left behind," is at least mathematically valid if all children receive an equally bad education. I could not avoid seeing the damage done by the privatising of public education; it was glaringly obvious over my 20+ years of teaching, most of which took place in state universities. Each year, my students would come to me less and less prepared for the tasks that college students must undertake: critical thinking, formulating questions, hypotheses, and arguments; evaluating evidence; college-level reading comprehension. Charter school students made up a large segment of this group, and the worst were the kids from the fundamentalist charter schools who, in the words of Joseph Heller's fictional character Ralph Newsome, "have no ideas, and they're pretty firm."

In the last five years, I've had class after class of good-hearted, well-meaning students who were stunned to find out that they, in fact, could not read. Well, most of them could read the words on the page, and often whole sentences. But they simply couldn't make sense out of a paragraph. One paragraph -- one idea: that was a foreign thought to them, and it tooks weeks of course time to teach them to be able to paraphrase even a paragraph of a critical essay that, 20 years ago, they would have been able to do blindfolded by the 8th grade. And writing... each semester I'd count fewer and fewer students who could write comprehensibly, much less coherently. By the time I left teaching at the end of 2005, I often had classes where not one single student could write at what I considered at 12th grade level.

20 years of charter and private schools down the line, and we've severely disadvantaged our children. We've stolen their potential and narrowed their chances for success. In a system like this, the only people who succeed are the few with the who are brilliant, inquisitive, self-motivated and lucky... or the ones who have money and connections already. Almost none of these kids are qualified to do jobs beyond a lower-management or menial level -- but of course the kids of the privileged classes, the kids with the family connections, will be hired whether they're qualified or not. They don't have much competition, after all. The rest will be left to rot in the enormous sea of American under- and un-employed, intentionally bereft of the skills that would help them successfully challenge an unbelievably unfair system.

Self-Hating Jew Products for Sale on Amazon!

2007-03-21T17:47:42Z

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?

Political and Economic Predictions for 2007

2007-03-14T11:51:39Z

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.

Authority and Enlightenment Ideals: Reason in Progressive Thought

2007-03-03T15:14:37Z

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.

Archiving Your Myspace Blog

2007-01-25T18:33:41Z

A month or so ago I was complaining to my partner (a computer programmer) that backing up my blog on MySpace was a real hassle. Unlike for LiveJournal, there didn't seem to be any MySpace blog archiving and posting software out there. Backing up by hand was getting to be so time consuming that I often didn't bother to do it. Plus, there was no way to back up all the comments my friends have so helpfully posted.

My partner is a wonderful person, and he wrote a script to back up my blog. It worked great and I thought maybe other folks could use it, so I bugged him to make it generally available. I think it's a time and aggravation-saver if you want to back up a blog where you've posted a lot of entries. Plus, the nifty archive format lets you navigate your MySpace blog archives on your own computer and creates cool index and category pages to make it easier for you to search through your posts.

Check it out at http://www.spacewrapper.com.

If you like the service, feel free to pass the information around to your friends, post it in your blog, etc., so that everyone who wants a full copy of their MySpace blog on their own home computer can have one.

More on Racism and Citizendium

2006-12-02T14:51:38Z

Here's Gina de Miranda's letter to Larry Sanger and Citizendium. I encourage others to write and express their opinions to Sanger as well.:

From: benet_gesserit@sbcglobal.net
Date: November 30, 2006 10:43:04 PM MST
Subject: Citizendium.org and real enlightenment
To: sanger@citizendium.org

Dear Mr. Sanger,

I read postings by Kali Tal and Florian Cramer that delineated their reasons for withdrawing from your project at Citizendium.org. Then, as is appropriate preparation for determining the merits of their allegations, I went to your site. They appear to have a credible basis for taking you to task for your decision as regards Ethnic groups and women.

You, sir, are not trying to put together a project that will add to the wisdom of the world. You are shrinking knowledge and thought to fit within the paradigm of the "PC" academia. I want you to know how that feels. You seem to believe that women have been given equal treatment in academia as regards what is written about them or by them. How did you arrive at this determination? Had you read medical literature, you would have discovered that the relatively recent requirements to include women in FDA studies revealed that men and women metabolize medication very differently. You would have discovered that the knowledge of these differences has changed treatment regimes and made them dependent upon gender. Is that politically correct? I think that it is actually appropriately neutral and efficacious.

If you had read literature about women in political science, sociology or half a dozen other disciplines, you would have discovered that women think and act differently from men in a wide variety of ways. Women are geared towards cooperation, fairness and building consensus in group settings. Women bring problem-analysis and problem-solving skills that are different from those of men. By virtue of these differences, the writing, thinking and analyses provide more varied ways of considering any issue. Surely, the significance of these facts is not lost upon a man who prides himself on neutrality. Why on earth would you wish to reduce the richness of thought that different genders and ethnic communities bring to interpretation, analyses and problem-solving? Instead of opening up the process to the vivid panoply of human perspectives that might result in a more robust cogitative activity, you've put blinders on.

How sad that we have learned nothing from the last 6 years where US policy was driven by a similar myopia.

Gina de Miranda

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"A brave heart is a powerful weapon"

maisoon

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Who Is A Nazi? Name Calling and Hair Pulling

2006-11-30T15:02:38Z

In a moment of lovely synchronicity a friend mentioned that she found my name and photograph on a "hit list" of "self-hating" and "anti-Israel" Jews. I'm not special -- there are about 8,000 people listed -- but I'm among the minority of folks who have photos and blurbs posted about them. Part of what's awful about me (in addition to the fact I signed a petition supporting Palestinian rights and a fair peace settlement) is that I'm "bi-sexual, bi-racial and tattooed." You can see my mug shot if you like; I think it's a cute picture and I find myself in pretty good company with other Jewish progressives and folks who don't think that the genocidal campaign against Palestinians is a good thing.

The blurb of course doesn't mention I'm a Holocaust scholar who worked at the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum for years. That would sort of undermine their claim that I'm the equivalent of a member of the "Judenrat" -- the Nazi bureaucracy administered by Jews themselves and set up to manage the ghettos and deportations; in other words, a Jewish Uncle Tom.

But it's interesting (if more than a little nauseating) to be called a Nazi collaborator by one group, while at the same time being charged with calling the members of another group Nazis by implication. Certainly it tells us a lot more about the power and traumatic significance of the term "Nazi" than it tells us about my politics or beliefs, since any term that's used so broadly and in such conflicting ways by groups with such different agendas loses any concreteness of meaning it might once have had.

What "Nazi" has really come to mean in U.S. discourse is "unspeakable." It's the ultimate conversation stopper, after which no comment is really possible. Chomsky talked about this a long time ago, when he was describing the radically pro-Israeli response to his critiques of the treatment of Palestinians. Once somebody publicly calls you a Nazi, what do you say? You're damned if you say you're not, because you're put on the defensive and allow yourself to be sidetracked from your original argument. And you're damned if you say, "Go ahead and call me a Nazi" because nobody thinks being a Nazi is okay and rhetorically such a stance is repulsive. And you're damned if you don't say anything, because once somebody has called you a Nazi the burden of proof is apparently on you to clear yourself.

All of this makes it very difficult to talk about Nazism itself -- a real historical phenomenon with a real history, documented by real evidence -- and to make legitimate comparisons between, say, Israeli policy towards Palestinians and Nazi policy towards Jews and other "undesirables." We've lost an important tool for understanding power structures and oppressive regimes if the word "Nazi" is off limits in analyses and comparisons. And who does this benefit? Certainly not people who are oppressed and suffering.

When I look at who is coopting and appropriating the term "Nazi," it's not generally folks who fall into the camp I consider the "good guys." I don't hear people on the left, feminists, those struggling for black liberation, queer activists or others on "our" side of the fence using the term as a pejorative label to describe general behaviors. No, it's conservatives, war-mongers, racists, sexists, and haters of all varieties who are out there both calling people Nazis and claiming to be called Nazis, right and left, to an extent that has left the word practically meaningless.

Update on Racism and Sexism at Citizendium

2006-11-28T19:44:13Z

Larry Sanger quickly responded to my critique of Citizendium in a very predictable fashion. He called my critique a "threat" and my analysis of his racist and sexist POLICY a "personal insult ... not unlike accusing someone of being a Nazi or fascist." My words are "shocking" and a "conversation stopper" that should be responded to only with "contempt." I'm a "bigot" and "prejudiced" because I use "white man" as a categorical description of... white men.

Challenging a man on racism or sexism apparently gives him license to go on a name-calling spree that so far exceeds the charges about his behavior that it spills over into absurdity. It's another way of making our critiques inaudible or unlistenable. If challenging a person on racist and sexist behavior is instantly inflated into "She called me a Nazi!" then there's really no conversation possible, is there? And who stopped it? Me, by describing policy as racist or sexist, or Sanger, for claiming that the mere mention of racism or sexism is so outrageous that it deserves nothing but contempt? Racism and sexism are the rules in U.S. contemporary culture -- empirically demonstrable phenomena -- but we can't label anyone's behavior racist or sexist because it's too insulting? Nice trick.

And then there is the victim component: Sanger claims that being accused of racism or sexism can cause "social and academic death." I only wish that were true. Unfortunately, racists and sexists carry on every day -- whether they're accused or not -- without interruption, and with a great deal of social approval. As is exemplified by Sanger's own post, where he carries on with great self-righteousness and proficiency, untouched as head of CZ.

The bottom line is that Sanger's categorization policy creates a chilling environment for women and minority participation in CZ, whatever he intends or believes. It does not, despite his protests, create the impression that CZ encourages participation from scholars in those groups. That's just a fact. A nice, neutral fact. And it will be borne out in the demographics of CZ.

Racism and Sexism at Citizendium

2006-11-28T18:58:30Z

A month or two ago I was invited to join in building a new repository of knowledge on the Internet, a spin-off from Wikipedia called Citizendium. The chief attraction of Citizendium (also called CZ) was that articles would be authored by laypersons and experts alike, but editorially approved by experts -- thus creating an environment of authority and reliability that Wikipedia, with its lack of quality control, could not match. I strongly support public intellectual work and I am all for making reliable information and analysis widely available to all who seek it. I joined CZ with high hopes, and with the goal of recruiting others to participate in a project I felt could be very useful and rewarding. My initial contributions impressed Larry Sanger enough that he invited me to join the Executive Board of Citizendium, and I accepted.

I wrote to colleagues and friends about CZ and invited them to participate -- and especially appealed to African Americanist and feminist scholars, since that is my own area of expertise. I asked, in my announcements, what Wikipedia might have looked like if there were significant participation from black or women scholars from its inception. I assumed -- wrongly -- that Ethnic studies and Women's studies scholars would be welcome at CZ. I was gravely disappointed. We are not welcome, and our disciplines are not welcome. We may participate only if we are willing to subsume our work under the headings of other, "more traditional" disciplines. CZ as conceived of and enforced by Sanger is a strongly conservative endeavor, and adamantly opposed to progressive scholarship.

I am withdrawing from Citizendium because of the racist and sexist policy put in place by Larry Sanger, who claims that the disciplines of Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies do not belong in the list of top level categories in Citizendium, or as individual categories at all. Sanger has unilaterally decided that all race and gender topics should be split up under traditional disciplinary headings, so that there will be, for example, a sub-group of "African American Literature," and "African American History," but no category -- at any level -- in African American studies, and he embraces the same tactic of fragmenting other Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies. The fact that his broad strokes of exclusion primarily effect women and minority scholars does not seem to matter to him.

Here is what Sanger has to say about gender and race studies:

"I take the view that most of these university departments are inherently
cross-disciplinary and--here I know I am treading on thin ice and saying
what few dare to say--highly politicized themselves. Well, I do not want to
make CZ "politically correct," i.e., appealing especially to one (largely
American/Western/Left) ideology. I really do want to make it neutral, and
that means **not** creating special groups for ideologically-motivated
groups." [posted November 16, 2006 10:29:59 AM MST to the Citizendium Editors listserv]

The notion that traditional disciplines are race and gender "neutral" is at the heart of Sanger's rationalization for exclusion. The credibility of this argument has been (for anyone knowledgeable in the those areas) thoroughly destroyed over the last thirty or forty years, as accumulated quantitative and qualitative evidence has shown that despite many white male scholars' protestations to the contrary, power and authority have remained firmly gripped in their hands. The claim that clearly biased disciplines are "neutral" is a plain and simple power play, and an excuse to perpetuate the patterns of exclusion that have been in place for hundreds of years. The tactic of fragmenting ethnic and gender studies into small, minority sub-categories under the control of larger white and male dominated groups is also well understood, both by the white men who employ the tactic to their advantage and by the minorities and women who are disadvantaged by it. The idea that Gender and Ethnic Studies are "political" and enforce "political correctness," while somehow traditional disciplines are above politics and do not enforce an inequitable Status Quo would be laughable if it were not so pernicious and injurious to the people who are oppressed by sexism and racism -- women and minorities.

Once again, this is a case of a white male scholar with no experience in either race or gender studies legislating, with broad strokes, how those disciplines will be represented in an academic endeavor he hopes will be of major importance. He does it with no regard for the current state of scholarship in those fields, or the expertise of their practitioners -- an irony in an academic endeavor that claims to rely on expertise for its authority. Expertise apparently only counts if it agrees with the naive opinions of the untutored white man in charge.

Sanger claims that his version of neutrality is rooted in Enlightenment principles. But as anyone working race and gender studies knows very well, white men have traditionally only applied Enlightenment principles to each other. It is the work of women and minorities that has extended those principles and challenged those who espouse them to apply them more and more broadly... and it is women and minorities who have risked their livelihoods and even their lives as they have engaged in over 250 years of activist work dedicated to building communities and nations that are free not only in principle, but in fact. By refusing to acknowledge Ethnic Studies and Gender studies as essential top-level disciplinary categories, Sanger is attempting to roll back our progress towards freedom and equality, as conservatives everywhere have been trying to roll back all of our gains.

Frankly, I am embarrassed to have had anything to do with CZ and I will be publicly critiquing Sanger's policy in various venues. I hope that all supporters of race and gender studies will join with me in boycotting CZ, and with protesting Sanger's decision.

You can find more information on Citizendium at http://www.citizendium.org. Most of my discussions with Sanger took place on the Editors listserv, but there are a few on the Citizendium Forum pages:

http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,259.msg2165.html#msg2165
http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,251.msg2164.html#msg2164

Kali Tal
http://www.kalital.com

Dropping Knowledge -- Dropping The Ball

2006-09-26T23:14:11Z

There was a tremendous amount of press about a recent event in Berlin called "The Table of Free Voices," hosted by Dropping Knowledge last month. This table featured over a hundred notables answering "the most important questions" facing the world today. It was certainly an interesting group of people, spanning the spectrum from shamans, to musicians, to scientists, to theologians, to NGO workers, and I'd have to say that representation was truly global — a rarity even in organizations that claim to be widely diverse.

I wound up at the dinner the day after the event in a sideways sort of fashion: my boyfriend's mother was one of the "Voices," we live in Berlin, and so Yaro and I went as guests. Because it's a small world, I ran into a couple of people I know there (other "Voices") and it was quite pleasant. The participants seemed to enjoy themselves and to feel that the "Table of Free Voices" had been quite a successful event. Coincidentally, another friend and colleague wrote to me a couple of weeks later asking if I'd attended, and saying he was going to be participating in the Dropping Knowledge web site discussion. I hadn't known about the web site, and so I went to check it out. It was a serious disappointment.

The site is pretty techno-spiffy if you have a fast connection and up-to-date hardware and software. There is a nifty graphics function that allows you to surf through the "topics" and sift down to the particular questions that were asked over the past months, and out of which the "100 most important questions" were chosen. For a visitor, however, the information is both overwhelming (in the sense that there are thousands and thousands of questions and answers) and disappointingly sparse (very few questions are well thought out, and almost none of them are answered in anything more than a superficial fashion).

The project is swaddled in the kind of rhetoric about the "unprecedented democratizing power of the internet" that seemed so exciting in the mid-1990s, but the process by which "knowledge" is "dropped" is of questionable utility and it is hard to see its potential for human improvement or liberation, or its practical application to social justice causes.

The categorization system is arbitrary and sometimes downright foolish: "Animal Rights" is a top level category, as is "Gender," but "Racism" isn't a category header at all and seems to be scattered and buried under various sub-headings in "Ethniticy & Culture," and "Justice and Civil Rights." Likewise, there is no entry-level category header for "Education," while "Democracy and Freedom" floats right at the top. While ideological bias may be unintended (and is certainly unacknowledged), it nonetheless is embedded in the structure of knowledge presented to the public.

Practically speaking, the forum is also disappointing. To follow a discussion, you have to keep coming back and checking in to each Q&A, without any system of notification when a new answer has been posted — a courtesy we've come to expect even from old-fashioned web-based bulletin boards. Furthermore, variations on the same question are asked again and again in different sub-sections, and so the answers ("knowledge") are scattered to the winds, and can be harvested only if you are a diligent, informed, a patient user of keywords, and willing to scroll through the often incoherent questions and comments that surround the very limited collection of useful answers.

The biggest problem, though, is the pedagogical model on which "Dropping Knowledge" is based. It's elitist education at its worst: the money comes from corporate and individual sponsors (i.e., the rich — however well-meaning they may be). The participants are picked on the basis of either name-recognition (how famous or "interesting" they are), or on cronyism ("I know a person who would be great for this...") at a first or second remove. The presumption is that the public can ask (carefully filtered) questions, which the "important" people can answer for them; hardly a liberatory paradigm of education and one that Freire, for example, would despise.

I felt, walking around the enormous dinner "round-table", and talking to participants, that they had all really enjoyed themselves, and enjoyed each other's company. This isn't a bad thing if we're talking about a dinner party, and multi-million dollar parties aren't that uncommon among the super-rich. The celebrities were enjoying themselves because they had the opportunity to meet "interesting" people without being inundated by press or autograph hounds, while the "interesting" people got to meet and talk to celebrities they'd always admired. Both groups got to feel like they were doing this for "a good cause." This is how the rich and famous mingle, but it bothers me when such socializing is couched in the language of leftist politics and progressive causes, and when the public is told that they will benefit from such mingling.

Given the quality of the answers (transcribed from the videotaped event) to the "100 questions," I have to wonder what might have resulted if a requirement for participating in the Table of Free Voices had been to think rigorously and answer even a fraction of the questions in a prepared, concrete, and truly useful fashion. I believe that at least some of Voices would have agreed to that request (and some may well have been glad of it). The fault lies not with the participants in these situations, but with the event organizers. Perhaps they were afraid to scare their celebrities away with requests that went beyond simple appearance and lending their names to the project. In any case, the Q&A format was seriously flawed and resulted in the production of nothing more than sound-bytes and feel-goodism, the simplification of inherently complex questions, and the impression that progressives are very, very sloppy thinkers.

Educating the public is a lot of work. The biggest challenge is not producing content (there is more good content out there than we could ever utilize). There are two central challenges: 1) People must be convinced that the pursuit of education is in their interest, and that it is an essential part of building free and humane societies. 2) People must feel an investment in, and a responsibility for their own educational process; a goal that cannot be achieved without building educational systems that truly serve the whole population, rather than serving the middle- and upper-classes.

Top-down education is often oppressive (and can replicate and reinforce repressive social structures). In the West, the top-down model has met the consumer model. When kids don't see a connection between their education and their "real life," they cut classes, drop out, and avoid school work as much as possible. That's why we have truancy and compulsory schooling laws. Adults often don't have to continue their education and often Western cultures encourage them by making education "fun." But too often, "fun" means that education isn't rigorous, doesn't encourage people to think deeply, and avoids anything smacking of critical thinking because critique can be uncomfortable and even painful. Consumers will avoid products that make them feel uncomfortable or inadequate.

Dropping Knowledge seems to buy, without question, into a consumer model of top-down education and is careful to make both its questions and its answers vacuous enough to be inoffensive (and also, uncoincidentally, ineffective). Although the group of participants was diverse in terms of race, nation of origin, gender, ethnicity and sexuality, it did not appear to be diverse in terms of class. It was a distinctly upper- and middle-class group, and — by the answers they gave — very out-of-touch with the concerns of working people and the poor, with some notable individual exceptions. The classes that were represented are specifically those to whom top-down educational models most appeal, and who have a vested interest in believing that they are the possessors and potential bestowers of knowledge.

The problem is a lot more obvious if we turn the Dropping Knowledge model on its head. What if a group of powerful and influential celebrities were invited to ask questions of a large and diverse group of grass-roots and indigenous community workers, and to listen respectfully as they answered at length in their own idiom? What if they were charged with turning their wealth and power to serving those communities without being in charge, without being "authorities," and without being asked for their opinions on the topic? It's a bit hard to imagine, isn't it? The idea that those with the money and the fame should dictate answers to the "nobodies" has been thoroughly naturalized in Western cultures (and Dropping Knowledge certainly springs from Western roots — European and U.S.).

I am struck by the difference between the methods and the results of Dropping Knowledge and an organization like Tostan, described recently by gUaVa jAm in her blog. Through community-based education, TOSTAN managed, in a period of about three years, to allow women in Senegal to take charge of their education, and to educate themselves and each other about their bodies and health. The women responded by building an indigenous movement to eradicate female genital mutiiation in Senegal — an organization effort so successful that it's believed that in a year or two the practice will have almost entirely ceased throughout the country.

Like Dropping Knowledge, Tostan relies on donations. Unlike them, they don't throw fancy dinner parties where famous men and women can come and praise each other. Nor do they have a fancy web site or, as far as I can find, a web site at all. What they do have is people on the ground, working to empower communities by providing free education and information to those who need it and want it.

Some might say that there's room for both organizations like Dropping Knowledge and like Tostan, but I don't think so. It seems pretty clear to me that there's a limited amount of progressive money out there, and events like The Table of Free Voices suck money out of the pool for the gratification of people who really don't need another fancy dinner or the wonderful free Robbie Conal posters and shirts that were available to all participants. (And yes, I have both the shirts and the posters. I think Conal is a great political artist and you wouldn't believe how expensive t-shirts are in Germany, where they tax the hell out of imports from countries they think don't have fair labor practices.)

We Didn't Know What Would Happen: Opening the Discourse on Incest and Sexual Abuse

2006-06-13T12:37:25Z

The work of putting Worlds of Hurt online is going well. The seventh chapter, "We Didn't Know What Would Happen: Opening the Discourse on Incest and Sexual Abuse," is now available. I hope it will be helpful to those who are searching for substantive material about the cultural and political history of the feminist struggle to reveal and challenge the institutions that support and conceal violence against women and children. I think this chapter is also particularly important because it directly addresses the racism of mainstream, white feminism and argues that any true progress will need to be based on the recognition that race and gender are inseparable issues for women not just women of color, but for all women.

Trauma, Community and the Revisionary Process

2006-06-08T23:04:04Z

Just a notice to let folks know that the sixth chapter of Worlds of Hurt is now online: "There Was No Plot and I Discovered It By Mistake: Trauma, Community and the Revisionary Process." I think it's particularly timely given the rising U.S.-Iraq veterans antiwar movement. The chapter discusses the ways in which the political protests of antiwar Vietnam veterans were gradually channeled into the medical system, with the institutionalization of the diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Angry veterans became "sick" veterans, paid by the VA to take and stay on medications and in therapy that dulled their inclinations to protest and invalidated their critiques of U.S. policy via the process of medicalization of their complaints.

The Farmer of Dreams: The Writing of W.D. Ehrhart

2006-06-05T15:30:21Z

Another chapter of my 1995 book, Worlds of Hurt has made it to the web. Check out "The Farmer of Dreams: The Writing of W.D. Ehrhart." Though my discussion of Ehrhart's work ends ten years ago, the writer has kept on writing. I encourage scholars and writers &emdash; especially those interested in the effects of war on soldiers and veterans — to use my work as a basis for further discussions of Vietnam veteran and later veteran writers. Also check out Ehrhart's web site, which hosts a lot of great recent writing and will bring you up to date on this long-time antiwar activist, novelist, non-fiction writer and poet.

Favorite poets...

2006-03-09T22:33:32Z

I've been reading poetry since I was a kid. My father was addicted to it, though he likes more dramatic verse than I ever did. (I'll never forget his impassioned rendering of the "The Highwayman.") My grandmother taught me a love of Dickinson and Millay, but it was really the discovery of the Norton Anthology of Modern English Poetry that converted me forever. This edition is, sadly, no longer available, but it was new and shiny in 1976 or 1977 and full of poets it was easy for a young woman to love, from Wallace Stevens to Etheridge Knight to Sonia Sanchez. I read the whole thing, page by page, and felt like I was discovering a new world. In those days I had a near photographic memory and a lot of those poems stay with me still, if I close my eyes and visualize the page.

Selected Poems Margaret Atwood	Selected Poems II Margaret Atwood	Transbluesency: The Selected Poems, 1961-1995 Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones)	The Complete Poems William Blake
Selected Poems Gwendolyn Brooks	Complete Poems Stephen Crane	Complete Poems 1904-1962 e.e. cummmings	Complete Poems Emily Dickinson
Just For Laughs W.D. Ehrhart	The Outer Banks and Other Poems W.D. Ehrhart	Four Quartets T.S. Eliot	Collected Poems Langston Hughes
Fruits and Vegetables Erica Jong	The Essential Etheridge Knight Etheridge Knight	Collected Poems Edna St. Vincent Millay	Collected Poetry Dorothy Parker
The Love Space Demands: A Continuing Saga ntozake shange	nappy edges ntozake shange	ed., Penguin Book of First World War Poetry Jon Silken	The Complete Love Poems May Swenson
Collected Poems Wallace Stevens	God's Trombones James Weldon Johnson