"We have met the enemy, and he is us"

I watched this video this afternoon before I went to work, and it's been occupying my mind all day. Right after I watched it, I shared it on Facebook with some comments about how it gets at 3 clustered sets of assumptions (aka stereotypes):

1. Young white men doing something that looks very suspicious obviously wouldn't really be doing what it looks exactly like they're doing, so even when they say that they're doing what it looks like, they must be kidding.

2. Young black men are always under suspicion, and even over-the-top behavior must really be what it looks like.

3. Attractive, young white women ... I'm not quite sure. Is it that the guy who offered to help her steal it was back at stereotype (1) (putting her with white men and treating her statement that she was stealing it as a joke), or did he think that helping her steal it might give him a chance?

My sense of it is that the bystanders were not necessarily racists, as such, but subject to society's implicit differential standards for black men/white men/white women (I'm sure some of the bloggers I follow would have something to say about the continued invisibility of black women in society involved in ABC's having left them out of the experiment).

What I mean by differential standards is that with the 2 white actors, people gave them some level of benefit of doubt: things seemed fishy, so the bystanders felt they needed to think it out before calling the cops. With the black young man, they were immediately ready and ignored anything indicating that things might not be as they seem.

To my mind, this gets at the kernel of what differential privilege is:

1. The great majority of a society need to have internalized ideas of what various types of people are allowed to do such that when someone steps "out of line" for their type, a mob of seemingly independent people can put a stop to the "infraction",

2. Members of groups that are allowed more freedom of action within the ideas in (1) need not be aware that they have more freedom. Indeed, in a supposedly classless society, it is "better" if they aren't aware since awareness of that inequity (aka "checking one's privilege") could lead to elimination of the relative privilege.

Thus, my using a quote from Pogo for the title of this post: Society is a thing, and what it is is that mass internalization of standards, mores, memes, and so on. That means that a great many of us will have internalized some of the crap that our conscious selves disavow. To get society rid of that crap, we must as individuals become aware that we have that crap and deal accordingly.

Technorati Tags: privilege, marginalization, racism, color-blind society

It's time to revise our ideas about "protecting" children

I saw this article—"Florida teen fights expulsion and criminal charges for same sex relationship"—that came out a couple days ago. Florida seems to be intent on winning the label of Cesspool of the Universe what with trying to let George Zimmerman get away with killing Trayvon Martin (until public pressure forced them to do something), then trying to persecuteprosecute Kiera Wilmot (again, pressure). Now, the parents of a 15 year-old girl are siccing the state on their daughter's 18 year-old girlfriend.

Before people say Well, Kaitlyn was breaking the law, after all, let's look a little more carefully:

1. This is about whether the parents of the 15 year-old approved of her relationship. We all know people with officially underage kids in relationships with someone a little too old (generally, more than 24 months older) to legally be in a relationship with them. The parents we all know like their child's friend, though, so they shield the couple from the law.
2. The community is persecuting Kaitlyn (and her girlfriend) for being a lesbian and for having a same-sex romantic relationship. The legalities of the situation are merely the vehicle that lets them bring the power of the government into the situation.

Clearly, as a culture we need to get rid of the homophobia that is central to this situation, but I actually want to talk about getting rid of the vehicle used for the persecution: the notion that minors are incapable of consent. First, let me state that I have a daughter who is, at the moment, 16 (lest anyone try to say You'd change your tune if you had a kid). As one of her parents, I share responsibility with my wife for protecting our daughter's interests until she turns 18. For example, my understanding is that she could sue us if we badly mismanaged funds that grandparents have established for her with us as the named custodians. As her parents, we do not have rights so much as responsibilities.

That is the key, here. The law should not be set up so that abusive parents can use it to impose their own narrow visions of the world or morality on their kids (much less so that prosecutors can use it to persecute kids for sharing nude images of themselves with their friends, and, yes, persecution of teen sexting is part of the motivation for this post). The law needs to be such that sex without consent is called rape but not such that minors are incapable of giving consent.

We need nuance in the law, and that nuance should be informed by facts about adolescent development and how adolescents can and do give consent. It should not be based on fantasies of juvenile innocence or the preservation thereof. I am neither a lawyer nor a psychologist, so I have no specifics for a proposal for how the law should look, but I do know it should look more like my vision than like the status quo.

Technorati Tags: parenting, sexuality, children's rights, lgbtq equality

Aphorisms 3 through 8

A collection of aphorisms I've been using in my .sig file:

3. Cacti instead of cactuses? To me, that makes no more sense than saying Hamburger instead of hamburgers or bazaarhaa instead of bazaars.

4. I find it interesting that the US, with one of the lowest rates in the industrialized world of acceptance of the theory of evolution through random mutation and natural selection, should be one of the most devoted to the social Darwinism of capitalism.

5. I see no reason to "correct" the grammar of a native speaker of a language. If native speakers can easily understand each other's dialects, neither needs to adopt the rules of the other's.

6. I was thinking that if a native speaker of a language is unsure about how they would express themself in their language or if they have the idea that non-native speakers speak their (the native's) language better than them, then they must have been subjected to some pretty serious psychological abuse with respect to the use of their native tongue.

7. I'll consider using "a whole other" instead of "a whole nother" when prescriptivists call fruits from Citrus ×sinensis trees "noranges" instead of "oranges."

8. The fact that someone holds certain values stubbornly does not make them absolute definitions of right and wrong.

Technorati Tags: language, ethics, politics

Political etiquette

This was a post I made to Facebook on January 5, 2013 that I thought I'd put out on the larger Web:

In 2010, the federal government temporarily reduced the Social Security payroll tax from 6.2% to 4.2%. That reduction expired at the end of 2012, so people are noticing somewhat smaller paychecks.

This event, of course, gets spun in different ways, depending on political orientation, so I have a proposal for an etiquette rule for political discussions about such temporary measures:

1. Since Republicans will want to characterize the expiration of the measure as a tax hike, they are not allowed to complain that it's only temporary when discussing the measure around the time that it passes. Use of the word temporary in or near such discussions is an automatic bar to their later being allowed to use the words tax and hike near each other when the measure expires (except insofar-as to remind Democrats that they are now subject to Part 2 of this rule).

2. Conversely, since Democrats will want to characterize the expiration of the measure as just going back to normal levels of taxation, in all discussions of the measure in or around the time of passage, they must not only use the word temporary, they must put stress on the word (through the usual phonetic means in speech or by bolding, italicizing, or equivalent in writing). Any failure to do so is an automatic bar to their being allowed to object to Republican characterizations of the expiration as a tax hike (except insofar-as to remind Republicans violating Part 1 of this rule that they are in violation).

Technorati Tags: civility, politics, etiquette

Aphorisms #s 1 & 2

1. Some liberals think the U.S. national motto should be e pluribus unum like it was 220 years ago. Most right-wingers want it to be in God we trust. Neither motto captures the dominant U.S. philosophy: Arbeit macht frei.

2. Rebecca West said I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute. Stealing the pattern of that quotation, I myself have never been able to find out precisely what political correctness is: I only know that people call me PC whenever I confront them for expressing their sense of being entitled to their privileged status.

Technorati Tags: aphorisms, ideology, political correctness, Amerika über alles

Towards a more gnuanced atheism

The caricature of gnu atheism has it as obsessed with wiping out every vestige of religious belief. A more accurate view of what many atheists want is just to eradicate the meme-pair that demands conversion of the world to the religion that it infects and condemns those that don't convert to hell. Though the pair may infect other religions, fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam seem to be the major hosts right now. Those 2 groups thus face off, each with the idea of eradicating the other. If they just did that and left the rest of us in peace, it might not be so bad, but since they might just take the whole planet with them (keep in mind that, depending on which party is in power, fundamentalist Christians either control the US government or at least influence it strongly), we all have an interest in getting rid of the meme-pair.

That is why I am much more interested in working with theists who don't condemn or try to convert good people who don't share their beliefs than I am in increasing the number of atheists. We all have a common cause of reducing the influence of the idea of conversion by the sword.

Technorati Tags: fundamentalism, religion, atheism, islam, christianity

Nonsense about marriage

There's this meme out there that the answer to marriage equality is for the state to get out of the marriage business and let it become just a religious notion. This is a bad idea for at least 2 reasons.

First, regardless of what you call family relationships, society will have an interest in various issues that they involve: What happens if the relationship ends? Should remaining partner(s) get more favorable treatment with respect to inheritance than people outside the family? Can 1 partner be compelled to testify against the other(s)? I doubt that many opposite sex couples would want to have to engage a lawyer to draw up all the appropriate documents that some kind of laissez-faire, libertarian view of marriage would entail. What marriage equality demands is that same sex couples be given the chance to have all the rights that opposite sex couples have the chance to get and to get them in the same way: by getting married.

The other reason I think it's a bad idea is that it gets history completely wrong. Its proponents claim that marriage used to just be religious, but until the Enlightenment, talking about secular law, religion, and culture as separate concepts would be hard indeed, even if all talk of marriage had been in religious terms. But I really doubt that it was, anyway. Since marriage was an economic relationship back before the Romantic Era, the secular law would have played a large role in its regulation even back in the day.

Technorati Tags: marriage equality, libertarian nonsense