Good Intentions, But Still A Long Way To Go

One of the most momentous changes in my lifetime has been the broad social recognition that discrimination against women and people of color in American society is wrong. The idea that women and African Americans were deservedly inferior was a fundamental belief in Western society for so long that the seemingly sudden rejection of discrimination made the 1960s movements for equality seem revolutionary.

The revolution didn’t happen. Instead, gradual shifts in gender and racial relations have moved our society toward more equality in fits and starts over the past 50 years. Powerful resistance to change has slowed down the movement to equality at every point.

But lately a basic change in the arguments of the resistance demonstrates at least some ideological success. While the initial opposition to equality claimed that inequality was natural and God-given, those who oppose further change now often say that equality has been achieved, or even that the balance has shifted so far that white men are now at a disadvantage.

Daily life proves otherwise. The city of Boston is currently in an uproar over one of the innumerable daily incidents that show how persistent prejudice resists good intentions. The premier Boston art museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, long ago recognized that urban high culture tended to serve mainly the interests of white people. To counteract the legacy of racism, the MFA produces extensive programs to highlight the cultural contributions of black artists and to attract a diverse community. For 7 years, the MFA has celebrated Juneteenth, the oldest national commemoration of the end of slavery. The largest film festival in New England “celebrating film by, for, and about people of color”, the Roxbury International Film Festival, will also be held in June for the 21^st year.

These laudatory initiatives came from the Museum’s leadership. But below the top level, racial resentments have not been eradicated. When a group of black 7^th-graders from the Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy, a local middle school whose students are not white, visited the MFA last week as reward for good behavior and good grades, they were greeted almost immediately with open expressions of racism. A museum staff member told the children how to behave: “no food, no drink, and no watermelon.” Security guards ostentatiously followed them around. Other museum patrons felt it was necessary to make racist remarks, including “Never mind, there’s fucking black kids in the way.” The MFA apologized, launched a wide investigation into this particular incident, and pledged to keep trying to improve its services to communities of color.

Only those who insulate themselves from the daily news would find this incident surprising. The broad social acceptance of the idea that discrimination is wrong has meant that the blatant daily transgressions against equal treatment have been splashed across the national media over and over again. That’s both useful and discouraging.

While continued instances of racism often make the news, the persistence of gender inequality is less visible, because it mostly occurs in private spaces. A remarkable recent book shows the stubborn tenacity of male resistance to equality, despite the profession of good intentions by men to relinquish a key privilege: letting women do most of the work of child care. The psychologist Darcy Lockman wrote “All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership” after she realized that her husband kept finding ways to avoid participating equally in child care, such as saying he needed to go to the gym after work. She found that equal parenting is mainly a myth.

While many men believe they carry equal weight at home, in fact women who work outside of the home still take on two-thirds of child care, a proportion that has not budged over the past 20 years. The time-use studies by the Bureau of Labor Statistics detail what men and women actually do every day. In families with a child where both parents work full-time, women spend 50% more time on “household activities”, 65% more time on “purchasing goods and services”, and 50% more time taking care of children. Men spend their extra time watching TV and in recreation.

I don’t get it. Watching TV or going to the gym is more interesting than caring for your child? Changing diapers is too difficult for men to master?

Lockman offered a set of interlocking explanations: men had generally been raised to think less about the needs of others; some people believe that women by nature were better suited to caring for children; men are more reluctant to let family responsibilities interfere with work; women are reluctant to demand that their partners take an equal role. But she ends the book with a more forceful insight: men resist giving up their privilege. Lockman cites the NY Times opinion column by philosophy professor George Yancy entitled “I am sexist” as an example of what most of the men she interviewed would not do: admit their privilege.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote to a male cousin in 1855, “Did it ever enter into the mind of man that woman too had an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of her individual happiness?”

We might broaden this plea to apply to both racism and sexism. Only once those who have enjoyed the privilege of belonging to dominant groups ask themselves whether other people also deserve the same rights will our society get beyond good intentions to equal results.

Steve Hochstadt

Boston

May 28, 2019

Taking Back Our Lives

When I started writing this weekly column about 10 years ago, I gave it this title. I felt it was important for me, and possibly for others, to take more control over our lives, to fight against the many forces and institutions which try, openly or secretly, to control us.

At that time, I was not thinking mainly about government, because I did not feel that our governments, local, state and federal, were asserting too much control over my life. Certainly there were actions taken by the federal government that worried me, notably the secret surveillance of our personal communications that George W. Bush’s administration had set into place. A report in 2009 written by the Inspectors General of all US intelligence agencies concluded that the program involved “unprecedented collection activities” that went far beyond the scope of its legislative basis and was based on a “factually flawed” legal analysis.

But I was more concerned about how private corporations took control over pieces of our lives, often without our knowing anything about it. Since then, we have learned much more about the invasions of our privacy perpetrated by the giants of the digital world, who collect information about what we do and buy, where we go, and whom we contact, and then sell it to other corporations, all of whom are thinking about profit.

So one way that I have tried to maintain more control over my life, to take it back from those who want to know more about me than I want them to know, is to keep as much of my life off the internet as possible. I buy online with credit cards as little as I can. I mainly use checks and cash. I stay away from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. I refuse to provide my telephone number or email address to most of the people who ask for it as a normal part of their employers’ snooping about their customers. I ignore the constant requests for me to respond to “surveys” about my “experiences”, because I believe they are mainly attempts to gather information about me. I don’t believe that I have suffered in any way from trying to retain these aspects of my private life.

But it’s not enough just to be defensive. To take control over our lives we also need to demand clearly what we want. We certainly deserve a better federal government than we have now, and that means learning about candidates, supporting ones we like, and voting every chance we get. When we spend money, we deserve to get value in return, and that means complaining when we don’t get it.

That brings me to the message I just sent to my local newspaper about the unacceptable quality of what they have been delivering to my door. I reproduce that letter to the editor here as an example of taking back my life. I am not suggesting that you do the same thing, although many of you live here in Jacksonville. I do urge you to be assertive about what you deserve to all those institutions who control chunks of our lives. Protest shoddy merchandise or service. Refuse to do business with crooks (I’m thinking about Wells Fargo here). Call upon authorities to behave as they have promised, to fulfill their obligations to us individually and collectively.

We won’t always get satisfaction. But without speaking up, we’ll get only what those who have power want to give us, which is often much less than we deserve. Both public government and private corporations have too much illegitimate power. Take back your life.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

May 21, 2019

To the Editor and Staff:

In the Journal-Courier of Saturday, May 18, the long story about the sexually abusive Ohio State University doctor appears two times, on pages 4 B and 8A, under slightly different headlines. That might seem to be a rare example of publishing error, akin to a 100-year flood. Except that, like the recent repetition of 100-year floods, I believe this is the third time in two months that the Journal-Courier has produced newspapers with the same story in two places.

Unlike floods, repeated instances of journalistic incompetence are preventable. Apparently, neither our local publishers nor Hearst Newspapers care enough about producing a quality newspaper to fix this problem. That was clear in the lead headline on page 1, where “musuem” was spelled incorrectly.

Is this related to the reduction in local content over the past year? Has some financial statistician at Hearst discovered that a local newspaper does not need local content or careful production to make money? Is that all that matters in Jacksonville journalism any more?

We subscribers deserve better. In exchange for our money, the Journal-Courier now guarantees to deliver the paper by 6 a.m., and claims to want to “be the undisputed news and editorial leader in West Central Illinois”, speaking “intelligently”, and embodying “the highest principles”. I don’t know what they mean by those words. I would like my subscription to pay for a promptly delivered, carefully produced and thoroughly researched daily newspaper that tells me things no other newspaper offers. What is happening in Jacksonville? What is happening in the rest of the world that we in Jacksonville should know about? What do people in Jacksonville have to say?

Only Hearst and other newspaper conglomerates are getting rich by journalism, by robbing us of the richness of good journalism. Generations of far-sighted Jacksonville newspaper people created a tradition based on other ideals. Is that going extinct, too, like our natural world?

Steve Hochstadt

Lessons in Citizenship

Citizenship is becoming an ever bigger political issue. After some years of heated arguments about undocumented immigrants and whether they ought to be allowed to become citizens, a new front in the citizenship war has broken out over the census. The Trump administration wants to include the following question on the 2020 census form: “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” Possible answers include: born in the US, born abroad of US parents, naturalized citizen, and “not a US citizen”.

It certainly is useful to have accurate data on the citizenship status of our population. But political calculation lurks behind this question, based on the following chain of reasoning. In the midst of a Republican campaign against immigrants and immigration, a citizenship question might frighten immigrants, both legal and not, from responding to the census, thus lowering total population counts. The census results are used to apportion Congressional seats and Electoral College votes, including everyone counted, whether citizen, legal or unauthorized resident. Many federal spending programs distribute funds to states based on population. Places with large numbers of immigrants tend to be Democratic-leaning big cities, so there could be long-range political power implications if the count is skewed. Counting citizens and non-citizens connects to counting votes, the most important constitutional issue of our time.

The biggest impact could be in Democratic California, one of Trump’s most persistent adversaries: 27% of Californians are immigrants and 34% of adults are Latino. Studies have already shown that Latinos were undercounted in the 2010 census and non-Hispanic whites were overcounted, according to the Census Bureau itself. The amount of federal funds that California could lose if a citizenship question causes even larger undercounting could reach billions of dollars.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Steve Bannon (then a white House advisor), Kris Kobach (then Kansas Secretary of State), and others decided in early 2018 to put in the citizenship question, last asked in the 1950 census. Ross claimed the impetus came from a concern in the Department of Justice about protecting voting rights, but journalists uncovered an email trail proving he lied. The chief data scientist of the Census Bureau, John Abowd, opposed the addition of a citizenship question, which he said “is very costly” and “harms the quality of the census count”, and would result in “substantially less accurate citizenship status data than are available” from existing government records.

Nevertheless, Ross decided to include the question. Democratic attorneys general for 17 states, the District of Columbia, and many cities and counties have mounted a legal challenge in federal courts across the country. Judges in three federal courts in California, New York, and Maryland have already ruled that there should be no citizenship question. One judge described the argument by Commerce Secretary Ross as “an effort to concoct a rationale bearing no plausible relation to the real reason.” Another judge called the Republican case a “veritable smorgasbord of classic, clear-cut” violations of the Administrative Procedures Act, a 73-year-old law which makes the simple demands that decisions by federal agencies must be grounded in reality and make logical sense.

The Supreme Court has agreed to take the case on an expedited basis. So the census absorbs considerable political weight and becomes itself a constitutional issue, pitting Democrats and Republicans on the stage of the Supreme Court. A lawyer for the Democratic-controlled US House of Representatives will be one of the four attorneys arguing against the citizenship question. He will repeat the political power argument on which the local Democratic authorities based their case: they have standing to sue, because they would lose House seats and federal funds due to deliberately skewed results.

The pure political weight of each seat on the Supreme Court has never been made so clear as in the past three years, where one seat in 2016 became the prize in a naked display of Republican Senatorial political power: we can do this, so we will. Now 5 Republican-appointed justices and 4 Democratic-appointed justices will decide the case. The decision will soon have consequences, when the 2020 Census results are used to allocate state and federal representation by Republican and Democratic legislatures for the next election, and even before that, to allocate federal dollars.

If you are interested in a fuller discussion of the significance of this case, go to the website of the National Constitution Center:

https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-constitution-and-the-supreme-court-census-case.

It is rare to find a detailed, logical, clear and unbiased description of the facts on such a politically charged issue.

While technical legal issues determine who is a citizen, each party has been proclaiming their version of a good citizen. Republicans have been clear about their version of how a good citizen should act. Hate the free press, because they only tell lies. Physically attacking journalists is okay for a Republican citizen, and elected  Republicans will defend your right to do that. The government elected by the citizens is evil, not a democratic institution, but one run by an unelected hidden “deep state”. Nothing is wrong with manipulating the tax system, because taxes are bad, the government wastes the money it collects, and the IRS is an ideological ally of the deep state, anyway. Citizens not only have the constitutional right to resist an oppressive government, but a good citizen treats our federal government as oppressive, and ought to resist it now, with the exception of everything the current President does.

It’s not necessary to be a violent white supremacist to be a good Republican citizen, but that’s not a disqualification. Disqualifications have to do with paperwork, with color, with where one was born, and with ideological viewpoints. Liberals are traitors to America, the worst kind of a citizen. People who believe in the right of a pregnant woman to control her own body are murderers, still citizens, but belonging in jail. Various other crimes of the mind disqualify Americans as good Republican citizens: advocating gun control, believing in climate change, and demanding that we protect the endangered environment.

Democrats need to tell Americans how we think about citizenship, not just the paperwork and the legalities, but the ethics and good behavior. I think a good American citizen:

1) Prizes the diversity of viewpoints that an ethnically and religiously diverse society produces;

2) Believes in the power of government to make people’s lives better;

3) Believes that government should act in the interests of all citizens, especially those who have the least resources;

4) Wants the government to protect the rights of minorities;

5) Believes that personal religion should be a free choice, but that the religious beliefs of no particular group should determine government policy.

If that is not a winning argument about what it means to be an American, then there will be no progress toward creating an equal and just democracy.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

May 14, 2019