Another blog new to me, this time courtesy of a mention in Sentence First: Ben Trawick-Smith’s Dialect Blog. Ben is an actor with a serious interest in linguistics; on his FAQ page he says "I became interested in dialects as an actor, then this interest become an obsession all its own. ... I have spent over a decade studying dialects intensely. And any time there is a gap in my knowledge, I try to be forthright about this." He writes about a wide range of subjects; the top few posts on the front page right now are Glide Deletion in the American South, “Dude:” Thoughts on an American Word, Singing in Dialect, and Is the glottal stop bad for you?. In the last, he says with appropriate sternness:

And this is where, methinks, the legacy of class rears its ugly head. Glottal stopping is associated with accents—Cockney, African American Vernacular English, the Bronx—that are stigmatized. I have no doubt that generations of diction coaches and voice professionals were taught that the sound was “ugly” for this very reason. And while few will admit as such, you can still find people, such as prescriptivist language blogger Benjamin Chew, who will openly state the thinking behind this:

If one wishes to be a speaker of elegant English, then one has to avoid glottal stops. The so-called language professionals may disagree and start waxing eloquent about linguistic diversity. I am all for healthy diversity, NOT unhealthy ones, not one that allows incorrect and poor English to run rampant.

One can almost smell the whiff of Twinings wafting from the Edwardian drawing room, can’t one?

One can indeed. I recommend bookmarking and checking regularly.

Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti was a Nigerian hero, a political insurrectionist – and had 27 wives. Now a hit musical celebrating his extraordinary life is coming to Britain

He was meant to be a doctor, an upstanding member of Nigeria's elite like his father, an Anglican pastor who had founded the Nigeria Union of Teachers, and his mother, an aristocrat, nationalist and fiery feminist who had won the Lenin peace prize. His two brothers were already committed to the medical profession to which he was likewise promised. At 20 he would study in England, where his first cousin, Wole Soyinka, was already making waves as a literary lion.

Instead, Fela Ransome-Kuti became infamous, an outlaw musician who declared himself president of his own "Kalakuta Republic", a sprawling compound in the suburbs of Lagos that housed his recording studio and offered sanctuary to the dispossessed. At his club, the Shrine, his band played until dawn while dozens of singers and dancers writhed and glittered amid drifts of igbo smoke. Here, Nigeria's corrupt dictators were denounced and ancient Yoruban deities honoured, all to a relentless backdrop of the "Afrobeat" that Fela had distilled from the musical collision of Africa and black America.

His music and outspokenenness made Fela a hero to Africa's poor, but he would pay a high price for his insurrectionary micro-republic, which was repeatedly raided, and he and his followers would be arrested and beaten. In early 1977, the military junta had had enough – Fela's record Zombie, mocking the army's do-as-you're-told mentality, may have been the tipping point for head of state General Obasanjo, who had once been in the same primary school class as Fela. A thousand soldiers overwhelmed Kalakuta, brutalising and raping as they went, then razing the compound to the ground. Fela was beaten close to death, and his elderly mother thrown from an upstairs window, afterwards dying of her injuries.

Fela defiantly established a short-lived political party and continued to spar with the authorities. "ITT (International Thief Thief)", for example, deplored the exploitation of Africa by multinationals. Increasingly, he carried his music and message to an international audience, though the west's media acclaim was never matched by record sales or stadium concerts. Tours that entailed a 50-strong entourage and albums of 20-minute songs didn't help. Nor did his imprisonment for two years on trumped-up currency charges on the eve of a 1984 world tour. Later still, Fela became a student of the spirit, only leaving home to play twice a week at the Shrine.

At his death from an Aids-related illness at the age of 58 in 1997 Fela left behind seven children, 50-odd albums and a musical legacy that has been kept fiercely alive by his sons Femi and Seun, and by his erstwhile drummer Tony Allen, who last month celebrated his 70th birthday with an all-star concert in London. Belatedly, Afrobeat has become a cause célèbre among young European and American music fans.

Yet the most surprising aspect of Fela's afterlife arrived two years back when the biographical musical Fela! became the unexpected toast first of off-Broadway and then Broadway itself, garnering rave reviews and a string of awards. Never able to conquer the United States while alive, Fela Kuti had finally been taken to its cultural heart, captivating a new generation of black luminaries such as Jay-Z (one of the show's co-producers) and Alicia Keys. Next month the production opens at London's National theatre, with African-American actor Sahr Ngaujah alternating in the lead role with Britain's Rolan Bell.

Fela Kuti is hardly the first rebel outsider to be posthumously embraced, but the success of Fela! is not without irony; the likelihood is that more westerners will enjoy this virtual Fela than ever heard or saw the living man. For Fela's children, this is a cause for celebration: daughter Yeni is unreservedly positive. "It has introduced him to so many people who would been ignorant of him, his life and beautiful music," she told me.

Apart from the show's dazzling choreography and terrific music (drawn mostly from Fela's gilded 70s output), what impresses is the nuanced portrait of Fela himself, who is presented not in the usual militant stereotype, but as a compromised, flawed, even unbalanced soul.

"The show is faithful to Fela's character," says Rikki Stein, who was Fela's manager for 15 years, and who recalls "a tornado of a man who liked to play, eat, have sex and get high. But he was also sweet – he loved humanity, he was principled. He was a lot of fun to be around. He'd show up in the lobby of a five-star hotel wearing nothing but a pair of Speedos."

The extravagance of Kuti's personality is captured cannily by Sahr Ngaujah's onstage incarnation. The actor was raised in Atlanta, the son of a Sierra Leonean father and Cherokee mother, and remembers hearing Fela's music as a child (his father was a DJ). Ngaujah is also a sometime resident of Amsterdam and London; a world citizen with an engaging presence. Asked what he has learned about Fela from his role, Ngaujah testifies first to Fela's courage: "He was fearless enough to be an individual. On another level he's an archetype in modern clothing; a warrior, a trickster, while in his relationship with his mother, Funmilayo, you can see a very old motif – mother and son – at work.

"Technically, it's been a demanding role, because at the very least you want a convincing representation of a real person. Each time we rehearsed I focused on a different aspect of Fela; his walk, the way he held a cigarette, the timbre of his voice, his pronunciation. What I learned is that if you talk like this" – and here Ngaujah rolls his eyes mischievously and goes into a languid Lagos drawl – "then you have to be very cooool!"

His impersonation offers a flash of Fela's seductive power, and that charisma is the reason why Fela! exists – the show's architects, producer Steve Hendel (an oil trader by profession), writer Jim Lewis and choreographer Bill T Jones were all fans way before they hatched the idea of creating a musical. In retrospect, Fela's life has all the necessary ingredients – a great soundtrack, extraordinary showmanship and dancing, plus a story that involves heroism and martyrdom – but to stage it still required a leap of faith.

Fela!'s success has inevitably awakened interest in its subject – Kuti's sprawling back catalogue has been dusted down and partially reissued – and reanimated the careers of his sons Femi (48) and Seun (28), both of whom bear a striking physical resemblance to their father and whose music likewise follows the Afrobeat mould created by Fela in the late 1960s. Seun, indeed, now fronts his father's old band, Egypt 80.

Afrobeat was essentially a synthesis of Ghana's jazzy highlife with Yoruban polyrhythms and James Brown funk. Brown, enormously popular in west Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, provided Fela with a model for a stage show that included dancers, extended instrumental workouts and lengthy call-and-response vocals. The influence may have been mutual; when Brown toured Nigeria in 1970 he and his band visited the Shrine. Yet Fela's musical roots are more tangled than might appear. When he came to London as a 20-year-old he had been sent to study medicine. Instead, he enrolled at Trinity College of Music and studied piano and composition. Asked, in 1984, which musician he most respected, Fela declared it was George Frideric Handel and said that he particularly admired Dixit Dominus and was making "African classical music".

Music ran in the Kuti family; Fela's Anglican father was a gifted pianist, while his grandfather had recorded hymns in Yoruba for a forerunner of EMI back in 1925 (one of which is used in Fela!). In London, Fela visited R&B; clubs and formed a band, Koola Lobitos, that played highlife and jazz. Fela first called his music "Afrobeat" in 1967, but it was a visit to Los Angeles with his group in 1969 that completed Afrobeat's alchemy. Fela met black power activist Sandra Smith, who introduced him to the politics of black militancy, to the rhetoric of Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael and LeRoi Jones, to the sight of dashikis on the pavement, to the "black and proud" mood of soul music. While Smith tried to learn what being "African" meant, Fela suddenly perceived the process of neocolonial control that reigned in his homeland.

"Being African didn't mean anything to me until later in my life," he said in the mid-80s. "When I was young we weren't even allowed to speak our own languages in school. They called it 'vernacular', as if only English was the real tongue."

On his return to Nigeria, Fela renamed his band Africa 70 and started writing the strident, satirical numbers that would make him both hero and renegade, always using pidgin English to cast his message wide. "Gentleman", for example, questioned why Africans aped western dress: "Him put him shirt put him tie put him coat… him go sweat all over him go smell like shit."

Musically, the early 70s was Fela's golden era; the peerless Tony Allen left following the Kalakuta raid – "I'm a musician, I didn't sign up to be a fighter," he told me, and other musicians disliked the "hengers on" that proliferated at court.

Fela changed his name to Anikulapo Kuti at this point, rejecting Ransome as a "slave name"; his new title meant "One who holds death in a pouch". His advocacy of African tradition extended to religion, running contrary to his father's Christianity, though it's tempting to see Fela's "Shrine" as a version of his father's pulpit. His denunciation of corruption and support for the underclass tied in with his mother's crusading, though her championship of women's rights must have been affronted by her son's sexual politics. On "Lady" Fela castigated modern womanhood for thinking itself equal to men, while his infamous 1978 marriage to 27 "wives" – mostly his singers and dancers – has often been brandished against him. For his part Fela declared polygamy an African tradition and claimed that by marrying them he was protecting his wives against charges that they were prostitutes. Ever the contrarian, in 1986, he divorced them all, saying that no man should own a woman's body.

His daughter Yeni has ambiguous feelings about this. "I learned at an early age that men were polygamous, so I just accepted it. For me, as a kid, it was fun having so many stepmothers, though now, at 49, I wonder how my mother Remi, who was born and raised in England, really felt."

The paradoxical character of Fela was there even at his death. His last record, "Condom Scallywag and Scatter" deplored condoms as un-African. Aids, he declared, was a white man's disease. Yet confirmation that it had indeed laid waste to Fela – news delivered by his brother Beko, a noted doctor and public health campaigner – jolted Aids awareness in Africa.

Aside from Fela! – which threatens to become a yet more international phenomenon – it is hard to gauge Fela Kuti's long-term impact. Afrobeat has never been more popular among westerners; Rikki Stein estimates that there are some 100 Afrobeat bands around the globe, yet only two of them – Femi's Positive Force and Seun's Egypt 80 – are in Nigeria. These days the country's charts are made up mostly of R&B; crooners and hip-hop acts.

"The Afrobeat heritage is still there," says novelist and commentator Diran Adebayo. "Femi is very popular for starters, and the hip-hoppers will use Afrobeat loops in their music like their American equivalents will use old funk records.

"But across Africa there has been an MTV-isation, with a lot of mid-Atlantic radio stations that have promoted a consumerist lifestyle… America is still the land of dreams."

Fela himself is no longer the bête noire he was once painted, reckons Adebayo. "He has a cuddlier image, he's become something of a national treasure. Nigeria respects money, and he's become bankable. Plus Femi is clean-living; he's in the tradition of the Kuti family as cultural leaders."

Both Femi and Seun maintain the political outspokenness of their father, albeit in more general terms. "Musicians have a responsibility to motivate the young," Seun tells me by email, "though I don't appreciate western celebrities coming to Africa saying they are here to help. They never come without a camera. We don't want handouts.

"Life here is so hard, people don't have time to think about anything but survival, which is why I say, 'Stand up and think', rather than 'Stand up and fight'. I don't think African art, in general, is representing the cause of the continent. The corporations push commercial things: cars, clothes… it's a brainwash. People here respect Afrobeat artists because they know we are trying to give the people some kind of voice."

Seun was raised for many years by his uncle Beko – "His conservative lifestyle was the perfect foil to my father's eccentricity" – and doesn't share Fela's religious inclinations, though he does talk of Fela being "in a Godlike state" at the end of his life. "He had been through so much. He was a man on knowledge."

Given his early demise, Fela seems to have tempted fate when he gave himself the title of Anikulapo, the holder of death. For the moment, however, through his sons and his music, Fela lives.

Fela! starts previewing at the Olivier theatre, London SE1, on Saturday (6 November); to coincide, Wrasse Records are releasing a series of box sets spanning his career as well as Fela! Original Broadway Cast Recording. wrasserecords.com

Recently, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) issued a call for translators fluent in Ebonics. Cue the hair pulling and rending of garments. Some folks worried that such a move by a government agency would encourage "hip hop" speak. Others confused Ebonics with "jive." Still others fretted about coddling ignorance. Some insisted that a person who can accurately understand and mimic "urban" speech patterns is surely not worthy of employment by the DEA. I wondered why a linguistic pattern should cause such a panic. Then I remembered that black speech patters are too often seen as markers of poor education and undesirability.

What is "Ebonics" anyway? On The American Prospect "Tapped" blog, Adam Serwer wrote about some of the unique characteristics of Ebonics, more appropriately called African American Vernacular English (AAVE).

On the syntactic front, AAVE speakers have a more granular tense-marking system. In standard English, for instance, "James is happy" can mean either that James is happy at the moment or that he is habitually happy. AAVE uses the verb "to be" to mark the habitual form, but omits it otherwise:

James happy = James is happy right now

James be happy = James is usually happy/a happy person

Linguists like James McWhorter caution against viewing AAVE as "bad English." In reality, it is just another English linguistic form, no different than, say, Cockney, and it deserves no special derision. There are many others, often those who have not studied language, that disagree. And I worry that the disdain engendered by AAVE may go deeper than a desire for grammatical consistency. I suspect there is racial bias involved in the resistance to view AAVE as anything more than ignorance.

It is telling that it is not just black speakers of more vernacular language that are criticized for their speech patterns. So, too, are those that speak Standard American English with tones, cadences and pronunciations associated with blackness.

... just as there is a vernacular dialect known as African-American English, spoken by many African-Americans across the country, there is also a standard variety of African-American English. This variety combines a standard English grammar with phonological features, intonation patterns and lexical items associated with African-American communities. Standard African-American English is used by many middle-class African-American speakers and indicates their social class or educational background without obscuring ethnic identity in their speech (so that they still "sound black"). The relationship between language and identity can be quite complicated!

During the 2008 presidential election, both Barack Obama and his some of his high-profile black supporters were criticized for what some viewed as nefarious use of a black accent or the cynical unleashing of a "hidden" black accent when among other African Americans. I recall listening to a caller on a national political talk show express her mistrust of then candidate Obama. Sometimes he speaks "Ebonics" when he talks to black people, she fretted. He should speak "regular." The caller's implication was that white pronunciations, cadences and tonality are "regular," and all else is substandard and suspect.

I am a black woman with fairly race neutral diction, meaning if you can't see me, you may not be able to pinpoint my race from my speech. Many black people do, however, have some degree of accent that is recognizable as African American. I stress that, in this case, I am talking about an accent, not poor diction and not slang, but a distinct cadence and way of pronouncing words.

I was born and raised in the upper Midwest. Due to the Great Migration, a lot of Midwestern black speech is influenced by Southern pronunciations and cadence. For example, some black Midwesterners will extend the word "five" into a drawled "fahve." I grew up around this speech pattern. And though the speech I use out in the world is perfectly natural, when I am alone with family or black friends, I drawl a little more, add in a few more colloquialisms. The change is largely unconscious mimicry, much like how a New Yorker who now lives in California might find her Brooklyn accent gets a little stronger when she goes back home; or how my coworker says her English husband's accent gets stronger when they visit across the pond.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a black accent, except that in a society where whiteness is normative, a black accent is judged as less desirable. Making a call without your "white" voice on could mean the loss of a job, an apartment, any number of opportunities. So, as a matter of survival, upwardly mobile blacks learn to effortlessly code switch, that is unconsciously modify speech to slip from one culture to another. Many of us reserve speech with ethnic markers for conversations with other people of our ethnicity.

Consider this excerpt from Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America:

Given their desire to fit in both with black and non-blacks, many women often "code-switch" by shifting between dialects, languages and styles of communication. Code switching is a result of what we call the "yo-yo paradox," the pressure black women feel to shift back and forth in order to meet the conflicting codes, demands, and expectations of different groups. They shift "white" at the office, in the classroom, when addressing the community board during a public forum; and they shift "black" at church, during book club meetings, among family and friends. Many African American women learn how to code-switch from an early age. The lessons on which voice to use and when to use it are often as much a part of their tutelage as good manners and the ABCs. They learn that what is acceptable on the playground is not always acceptable at home, that what is required in the classroom could cause them problems with their teenage cousins. For some black woman, code switching is relatively effortless; sometimes it's even an opportunity to use voices that reflect different aspects of their selves.

But for others, code switching is a more arduous exercise. The multilingualism required to speak one way to a Southern grandmother, another way to youths raised on MTV, and still another way in a corporate boardroom can be as challenging as learning to juggle three balls without dropping one. It can lead to the painful "yo-yo effect," as a woman feels conflicted about shifting between two distinct voices, self-conscious about using the "wrong" voice in the wrong situation. Women who have difficulty switching may be mocked or unfairly criticized by blacks and whites alike. "She thinks she's white." "She tries too hard to sound black." "She's a ghetto girl." "She's not very bright."

African Americans face a conundrum, then. Black vernacular English is unacceptable. Standard English spoken with an accent common to black Americans is unacceptable. And being able to move smoothly between the speech patterns of the black community and those of the broader white community is suspicious.

What is so wrong about "sounding black?" The answer should be "nothing all all." And so, it is well worth exploring why typically black speech patterns--no matter how close they are to the standard--can provoke such strong and often negative responses.

 

Awareness of issues often goes in waves, and over the past few weeks, I've seen a resurgence of "Teabonics" postings on Facebook. I was initially struck by the coined phrase, and wondered how it came to be. It seems to have originated with the Flickr account of Pargon who has a string of photos highlighting errors in the sign of Tea Partiers. There was a wave of publicity about the term earlier in the year but nothing on the origins of the name. What I did learn is that "pargon" comes from the video game Eternal Darkness and is similar to "oomph." But I digress.

Like most, I immediately noticed the play on Ebonics. I had a vague recollection of the Oakland School District's Resolution to recognize the language system as valid. Controversy ensued over whether the move would further marginalize children or help bridge their learning. Despite the true intent of the resolution, the general connotation of Ebonics remained: that it is rooted in ignorance and laziness. That was the mainstream story, and they were sticking to it. So, when I saw these pictures with grammatical, spelling and word choice errors from Tea Party members, I could not help but hear the underlying message: These people are as stupid and lazy as those who speak Ebonics.

I'm not alone in my analysis of the word choice. However the recent call for Ebonics translators at the Drug Enforcement Administration made me revisit my reaction.

In that NPR video, Dr. John McWhorter explains that Ebonics is a dialect of English just as Sicilian is a dialect of Italian. He refers to it as Black English and is quick to point out that contrary to popular belief that it came from West Africa (perpetuated by the Oakland resolution), Ebonics actually has its roots in Great Britain dialects spoken by the indentured servants early slaves often worked alongside. It is a dialect and system with rules. It is not, as many have said, based in ignorance, nor is it a lazy attempt at Standard English.

What the Tea Party signs convey are mistakes. Ebonics is not a series of mistakes. Yet as we learned during the Oakland controversy, Ebonics is not simply about language. It has become a proxy for negative and demeaning stereotypes of African Americans (rather than link to the hate sites, I'll leave it to you and your preferred search engine). With that in mind, it makes sense to link the connotations of Ebonics with the Tea Party signs in an attempt to discredit the group as unintelligent. I get the underlying intention, yet the premise is faulty. To call their grammatical errors Teabonics misconstrues the already murky conception of Ebonics.

I cannot claim to know what Pargon, or whoever originated the phrase, intended when coining the phrase. However, I am left with the work of unpacking the connection that has been made. There was a part of me that thought writing this piece would be futile. I am speaking out against the misappropriation of a connotation rather than a true understanding of a concept.

The other part of me felt strongly that this further misperception of Ebonics should be called out. Research, conducted in the U.S. and Europe, has suggested that using the vernacular from home can help support student learning. Ebonics is not about African American kids being unintelligent. There is much more to the achievement gap than vernacular. Similarly, the critique of the Tea Party movement should be multifaceted and on solid ground rather than a shaky analogy.

In the end, I (clearly) decided to highlight the racial connotation of the Ebonics-Teabonics discussion and the continued misunderstanding of Ebonics. I guess it's like that annoying nickname that sticks. As much as you try to get it to go away, it remains. But you continue to express your dismay in hopes that one day they'll reconsider.

 

The Washington Times has a piece on what's being talked about as the 'Ebonics translator' jobs at the Drug Enforcement Agency. The headline includes "Effort isn't official recognition of language" and the article opens with a comment that the DEA "does not recognize Ebonics as a formal language". What the hell is a 'formal language' here? The DEA has a pressing practical need to understand how people talk, and ideology has them and many others struggling to deny this way of talking any kind of status, beyond 'street slang'.

Here's a quote from the article where an actual expert makes the point:

John Baugh, a director of African and African-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and a specialist on linguistics, praised the DEA for seeking the translators and said he wishes other government agencies "would have an appreciation of the linguistic consequences of the slave trade."

Mr. Baugh said translators can be helpful because speakers of African American Vernacular English can easily be misunderstood by others … .

We're seeing the emergence of exactly the issue my earlier post was poking at with a stick: The government and the press are getting ground up in the gears between trying to deny that African-American Vernacular English is a 'language' and the need to have people on board who have real command of this variety.

DEA seeks people who understand black vernacular English to translate wiretaps and stand up evidence in court

The demand for large numbers of Spanish translators in America's war on drugs will come as no surprise given the route cocaine takes to the US.

But an attempt to recruit people who speak what some controversially regard as a homegrown United States language has put the Drug Enforcement Administration in the unique position of seeking translators to understand what African Americans are saying to each other.

The administration is hiring nine speakers of Ebonics – a term that appeared in the mid-1970s to describe US black vernacular English – to translate wiretaps and video surveillance tapes to a standard that will allow government agents to "follow the money" and that will stand up in court.

Ebonics is described by some linguists as English incorporating the grammar of African languages, but as it also includes many words invented on the streets, it is dismissed by others as mere slang.

Nonetheless, the administration is confused enough to ask firms providing translation services to provide the nine Ebonics translators to cover an area from Washington DC to New Orleans and Miami and even the Caribbean.

The move is a contentious one. American officials have in the past denied that there is any such thing at Ebonics.

"A lot of times people think you're just dealing with a few slang words, and that you can finesse your way around it," John Rickford, a Stanford University linguistics professor, told the Associated Press. "And it's not – it's a big vocabulary. You'll have some significant differences."

Although Ebonics has been rejected as a concept by many scholars, it drew nationwide attention in 1996 when a school board in Oakland, California decided to recognise it as a primary language and to offer instruction.

The move was widely criticised as likely to undermine African American children's command of English. Jesse Jackson, the African American leader, described it as a "an unacceptable surrender, borderlining on disgrace". He later changed his position, saying he had misunderstood that the school's intent was to use Ebonics to improve the students' English.

"It seems ironic that schools that are serving and educating black children have not recognised the legitimacy of this language," said H Samy Alim, a Stanford linguistics professor. "Yet the authorities and the police are recognising that this is a language that they don't understand. It tells us a lot about where we are socially in terms of recognising African-American speech."

The administration's need for Ebonics translators was revealed in a document outlining its requirements, first published by The Smoking Gun.

The administration says most of its requirements involve Latin American Spanish but it is also seeking people fluent in 114 languages listed either as "common" or "exotic". The common tongues include Arabic, Farsi and Punjabi. On the exotic list are Baloch from Iran, Berber dialects, Chimora from Guam, Ibo from Nigeria and Norwegian.

The Ebonics translators are to be assigned to the Atlanta field division where there will be a similar number of Vietnamese, Korean and Laotian speakers – and 144 Spanish translators.

Wire slang

In the US TV series The Wire, Baltimore police spent hours listening to wire-taps. Paul Owen untangles the jargon.

We got to book We've got to leave

I need a re-up I need a new supply (eg of drugs)

Word is bond I mean it

I might got to drop him; I ain't even playing I may have to kill him; I mean it

I might could school you here; I banked him I might be able to teach you something about that; I beat him up.

Got $10 I can hold? Can I borrow $10?)

Is he shook? Is he scared?

Well, later. I got to grind Bye. Got to get to work.

DEA seeks Ebonics experts to help with cases

Federal agents are seeking to hire Ebonics translators to help interpret wiretapped conversations involving targets of undercover drug investigations.

The Drug Enforcement Agency recently sent memos asking companies that provide translation services to help it find nine translators in the Southeast who are fluent in Ebonics, Special Agent Michael Sanders said Monday.

Ebonics, which is also known as African American Vernacular English, has been described by the psychologist who coined the term as the combination of English vocabulary with African language structure.

Some DEA agents already help translate Ebonics, Sanders said. But he said wasn't sure if the agency has ever hired outside Ebonics experts as contractors.

"They saw a need for this in a couple of their investigations," he said. "And when you see a need — it may not be needed now — but we want the contractors to provide us with nine people just in case."

The DEA's decision, first reported by The Smoking Gun, evokes memories of the debate sparked in 1996 when the Oakland, Calif., school board suggested that black English was a separate language. Although the board later dropped the suggestion amid criticism, it set off a national discussion over whether Ebonics is a language, a dialect or neither.

The search for translators covers a wide swath of the Southeast, including offices in Atlanta, Washington, New Orleans, Miami and the Caribbean, said Sanders. He said he's uncertain why other regions aren't hiring Ebonics translators, but said there are ongoing investigations in the Southeast that need dedicated Ebonics translators.

Linguists said Ebonics can be trickier than it seems, partly because the vocabulary evolves so quickly.

"A lot of times people think you're just dealing with a few slang words, and that you can finesse your way around it," said John Rickford, a Stanford University linguistics professor. "And it's not — it's a big vocabulary. You'll have some significant differences" from English.

Critics worry that the DEA's actions could set a precedent.

"Hiring translators for languages that are of questionable merit to begin with is just going in the wrong direction," said Aloysius Hogan, the government relations director of English First, a national lobbying group that promotes the use of English.

"I'm not aware of Ebonics training schools or tests. I don't know how they'd establish that someone speaks Ebonics," he said. "I support the concept of pursuing drug dealers if they're using code words, but this is definitely going in the wrong direction."

H. Samy Alim, a Stanford linguistics professor who specializes in black language and hip-hop culture, said he thought the hiring effort was a joke when he first heard about it, but that it highlights a serious issue.

"It seems ironic that schools that are serving and educating black children have not recognized the legitimacy of this language. Yet the authorities and the police are recognizing that this is a language that they don't understand," he said. "It really tells us a lot about where we are socially in terms of recognizing African-American speech."

Rickford said that hiring Ebonics experts could come in handy for the DEA, but he said it's hard to determine whether a prospective employee can speak it well enough to translate since there are no standardized tests. He said the ideal candidate would be a native speaker who also has had some linguistics training.

Finding the right translators could be the difference between a successful investigation or a failed one, said Sanders. While he said many listeners can get the gist of what Ebonics speakers are saying, it could take an expert to define it in court.

"You can maybe get a general idea of what they're saying, but you have to understand that this has to hold up in court," he said. "You need someone to say, 'I know what they mean when they say 'ballin' or 'pinching pennies.'"

--

So, any of y'all need a job... XD

Serious, though, I'm not sure how I feel about this, but I do know I want to send a hale and hearty "Fuck you" to Aloysius Hogan for that "languages that are of questionable merit" bullshit.

Is the slang used by some African Americans, including some drug dealers, a foreign language? The Smoking Gun reports the DEA is seeking to hire ebonics linguists to assist in their drug investigations, particularly on wiretaps. They even have the contract.

A maximum of nine Ebonics experts will work with the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Atlanta field division, where the linguists, after obtaining a “DEA Sensitive” security clearance, will help investigators decipher the results of “telephonic monitoring of court ordered nonconsensual intercepts, consensual listening devices, and other media”

The DEA’s need for full-time linguists specializing in Ebonics is detailed in bid documents related to the agency’s mid-May issuance of a request for proposal (RFP) covering the provision of as many as 2100 linguists for the drug agency’s various field offices. Answers to the proposal were due from contractors on July 29.

Case law involving Ebonics arises far more frequently in civil cases, particularly workplace harassment and discrimination cases. One court opinion says "Ebonics" is also known as "African American Vernacular English." (Webster's II New College Dict. (2001) p. 356, col. 1.)

In my experience, drug agents frequently misinterpret the conversations they hear on the wiretaps, and that includes Ebonics as well as official languages like Spanish or Hmong. I don't think their reliability or their methodology should pass muster under Daubert. But there's very little case law on it. [More...]

A defense expert could be useful to demonstrate that the case agents were mistaken in their interpretations of the intercepted calls, to prepare for a Daubert hearing challenging the reliability of their testimony and at the hearing challenging the validity of the wiretaps. I wonder how many courts have refused to allow them to testify in criminal cases. If a number of them have, how can they approve Ebonics translators?

One inmate brought a habeas action challenging his lawyer's effectiveness for failing to call a Ebonics expert to challenge the Agent's interpretations. He lost. The court called the expert a "Black language" expert. Stevenson v. Yates, 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 88637 (E.D. Cal. Oct. 16, 2008)

In United States v. Williams, 2000 U.S. App. LEXIS 168, 3-4 (7th Cir. Ill. Jan. 4, 2000), the defense called a Ebonics expert at sentencing, and the Court referred to the expert as "a purported expert on African-American English (Ebonics)."

McIntoush testified that the phrase "hit him" might mean "page him" or "call him," and that the phrase "gonna get his ass tonight" did not necessarily relate to criminal activity, but might instead mean "pick him up" or "hook up with him." McIntoush opined that Williams more likely would have used other phrases had he meant to convey an intent to commit robbery, such as "break [*4] him" or "stick him up."

In a civil case reported at Underwood v. La Salle Univ., 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 88959, 15-16 (E.D. Pa. Dec. 3, 2007), an African American student sued LaSalle University for discrimination, saying he was disabled because of Ebonics. The Court described it, quoting this source, as:

This is African-American English, especially when considered as a distinct language or dialect with linguistic features related to or derived from those of certain West African languages, rather than as a non-standard variety of English.

The most detailed explanation is in a case called Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children v. Ann Arbor School Dist. Board, 473 F. Supp. 1371, 1372 ( E.D. Mich. 1979):

The issue before this court is whether the defendant School Board has violated Section 1703(f) of Title 20 of the United States Code as its actions relate to the 11 black children who are plaintiffs in this case and who are students in the Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School operated by the defendant School Board. It is alleged that the children speak a version of "black English," "black vernacular" or "black dialect" as their home and community language that impedes their equal participation in the instructional programs, and that the school has not taken appropriate action to overcome the barrier. ...This case is not an effort on the part of the plaintiffs to require that they be taught "black English" or that their instruction throughout their schooling be in "black English," or that a dual language program be provided.

The Court summarized the testimony of experts on Ebonics from what it calls "carefully researched projects":

All of the distinguished researchers and professionals testified as to the existence of a language system, which is a part of the English language but different in significant respects from the standard English used in the school setting, the commercial world, the world of the arts and science, among the professions and in government. It is and has been used at some time by 80% Of the black people of this country and has as its genesis the transactional or pidgin language of the slaves, which after a generation or two became a Creole language. Since then it has constantly been refined and brought closer to the standard English as blacks have been brought closer to the mainstream of society. It still flourishes in areas where there are concentrations of black people.

It contains aspects of Southern dialect and is used largely by black people in their casual conversation and informal talk. There are many characteristic features found in "black English" but some of the principal ones identified by the testifying experts as being significant are:

• The use of the verb "be" to indicate a reality that is recurring or continuous over time.
• The deletion [**13] of some form of the verb "to be."
• The use of the third person singular verbs without adding the "s" or "z" sound.
• The use of the "f" sound for the "th" sound at the end or in the middle of a word.
• The use of an additional word to denote plurals rather than adding an "s" to the noun.
• Non-use of "s" to indicate possessives.
• The elimination of "l" or "r" sounds in words.
• The use of words with different meanings.
• The lack of emphasis on the use of tense in verbs.
• The deletion of final consonants.
• The use of double subjects.
• The use of "it" instead of "there."

The Court continued:

The substance of the thoughtful testimony of the experts also indicated that because "black English" does not discriminate among some sounds which are distinguished in standard English, teachers experience difficulty in getting the students to use correct pronunciation. The experts further testified, however, that efforts to instruct the children in standard English by teachers who failed to appreciate that the children speak a dialect which is acceptable in the home and peer community can result in the children becoming ashamed of their language, and thus impede the learning process. In this respect, the black dialect appears to be different than the usual foreign languages because a foreign language is not looked down on by the teachers. The evidence also suggests that there are fewer reading role models among the poor black families than among families in the rest of society.

Finally, it is clear that black children who succeed, and many do, learn to be bilingual. They retain fluency in "black English" to maintain status in the community and they become fluent in standard English to succeed in the general society. They achieve in this way by learning to "code switch" from one to the other depending on the circumstances.

All of the experts testified that the language used is a specific system that has been used by blacks and continues to be used by blacks in casual conversation and informal talk. It is a language system having its genesis among black people. In many areas of the country where blacks predominate, many among them, particularly the poor and those with lesser education and their children, speak this dialect among themselves although they may be quite capable of speaking eloquently in standard English and although they do speak standard English when talking to community outsiders. "Black English" is a dialect of a segment of the black population and is used by them only a part of the time.

The court ends with this summary:

The language of "black English" has been shown to be a distinct, definable version of English, different from standard English of the school and the general world of communications. It has definite language patterns, syntax, grammar and history.

In some communities and among some people in this country, it is the customary mode of oral, informal communication.

A significant number of blacks in the United States use or have used some version of "black English" in oral communications. Many of them incorporate one or more aspects of "black English" in their more formal talk.

"Black English" is not a language used by the mainstream of society black or white. It is not an acceptable method of communication in the educational world, in the commercial community, in the community of the arts and science, or among professionals. It is largely a system that is used in casual and informal communication among the poor and lesser educated.

The instruction in standard English of children who use "black English" at home by insensitive teachers who treat the children's language system as inferior can cause a barrier to learning to read and use standard English. The language is not as discriminating in its use of sounds as is standard English and much of its grammar is simpler. There are fewer reading models in the life of a child who uses "black English."

Back to the drug agents. How do they get it wrong? In one case I remember, the agent said "“Crackalackin’ “ is code for “Have crack for sale.” Here's a XXL Magazine, April, 2005 Interview with Rapper Brian “Nomb” Jackson on growing up in Charlotte, N.C.

Realizing that hip-hop wasn’t exactly crackalackin’ in North Cackalack, Nomb relocated to California in 2001.

Another example: A case in which an agent maintained the word "lil' neakers" meant 9 ounces of cocaine. The word for 9 is nina, not neakers. Nina could mean 9 of anything, for example, "I've got my nina on deck" could mean "I have my 9mm gun with me." Or it could refer to $900.00. But nina and neakers, I was told, are two totally different words, with two totally different meanings. The agent was either guessing or he misheard the word.

I wonder what the agents are using as training manuals? Are they using intercepted communications from real cases? I would think the Courts wouldn't be happy if this is the case. Wiretaps are authorized for the purpose of gathering evidence to use in a future criminal proceeding. Once the case is over, given the privacy intrusion, I don't think the transcripts should be used for other purposes, like training linguists who get hired by the DEA.

There's an unspoken bond of trust between reader and author. If it's in print, we think, it must be true. But that's not necessarily so. Literary hoaxes have been foisted on us since the 5th century BCE, when Dionysius the Renegade wrote a play called Parthenopaeus and passed it off as the work of Sophocles. Dionysius's motive was to make a fool of his rival, Heraclides. These days, the motive behind literary hoaxes is usually money.

One literary form in which fakery has been especially rampant is the memoir or autobiography. This is my life, an author says, and who's going to say it isn't? But readers, perhaps jaded as a result of having been tricked so many times before, no longer take memoirs at face value, and a number of them have been proven to be partially or wholly untrue. In some cases, even the author doesn't exist. Here's a list of our top confirmed modern-day memoir hoaxes.

Mafia Misinformation

In 2001 Simon & Schuster published a book called The Honored Society by a man calling himself Michael Gambino and claiming to be the illegitimate grandson of Mafioso Carlo Gambino. In the book, the author writes of his life as a gangster, including twelve years in prison for murder, bribery, pimping, gambling, extortion, kidnapping and money laundering. Carlo Gambino's real grandson Thomas exposed the book as a fake written by a man named Michael Pellegrino, who had earlier served time for theft and impersonating an FBI agent.

Deception Down Under

In her runaway bestseller Mutant Message Down Under, Marlo Morgan wrote of time spent with Aboriginals in Australia. Various Aboriginal groups protested and claims were made that Morgan may never actually have set foot in Australia and had made up large portions of the book. Now the book is clearly marked as fiction.

Satanic Silliness

In the late eighties, a memoir called Satan's Underground by Lauren Stratford told of the author's upbringing in a Satanic cult. She was a baby breeder, producing babies who were murdered in snuff films and sacrificed by Satanists before her eyes. After investigators dismissed her claims as complete fabrications, Stratford (real name Laurel Rose Willson), undaunted, reinvented herself as Laura Grabowski, a survivor of Mengele's experiments at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

Traumatic Youth

Memoirs of harrowing upbringings are a popular subgenre in the world of faux memoirs. One of the best known is Go Ask Alice by Anonymous, published in 1971. It's supposedly the diary of a 15-year-old girl who died of a drug overdose in the late sixties. The author, purported to be the book's "editor," Beatrice Sparks, certainly had the world fooled. The New York Times called the book "a document of horrifying reality and literary quality." But in a later interview, Sparks claimed Go Ask Alice had been based on the diary of one of her patients but that Sparks had added material based on her work with other patients. To this day, no one claiming to have known the real "Alice" has ever been found.

In another famous youth memoir, a girl who is part Native American and part Caucasian writes of growing up as a foster child in South-Central Los Angeles. In Love and Consequences, published in early 2008, Margaret B. Jones writes that she ran drugs and carried illegal guns for the Bloods; her brother was shot to death by the Crips. The New York Times called the book "humane and deeply affecting." That may have been true, but it was also completely made up by one Margaret Seltzer, a young white woman who grew up with her natural family in affluent Sherman Oaks. In radio interviews she spoke in African American Vernacular English, referring to her alleged gang buddies as her "homies."

In the mid-nineties a teenage boy known as JT (for Jeremy "Terminator") LeRoy gained attention by publishing short stories and communicating with older writers by fax, email and phone. JT was a transgendered, homosexual, drug-addicted teenager who had been forced by his abusive mother into prostitution. In 1999 he published a novel called Sarah. A critical success, the book gained him celebrity friendships. However, almost no one had actually ever seen JT, and those few encounters were always very short-attributed to JT's extreme shyness. Around 2001 he began appearing in public, but he wore a hat, wig and dark sunglasses. More books appeared. One of them, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, was being turned into a film.

Then a writer named Stephen Beachy published an article in New York Magazine asking whether JT LeRoy was a real person, and proposing that he was in fact the pseudonym of 39-year-old woman named Laura Albert, who had supposedly taken JT off the streets and let him live with her and her husband. Invariably she was with JT at his appearances, and JT's earnings were always paid to members of Albert's family.

But who was the person appearing as JT in public? More damaging pieces appeared, including one in The New York Times exposing the public JT as Savannah Knoop, the half-sister of Laura's ex-husband. Laura was revealed as the real author of the JT LeRoy books. In 2007 she was convicted of fraud and ordered to pay reparations for signing legal documents in the name of her fictional persona.

Native American Nonsense

In 1976 a writer named Forrest Carter published The Education of Little Tree, an account of growing up among the Cherokee Indians. As it turned out, the author was actually Asa Earl Carter, a former white supremacist.

Approximately 25 years later an author named Nasdijj published The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams and two other novels recounting details of the author's life: his Navajo heritage, his abusive parents, and growing up to become the father of an adopted child with fetal alcohol syndrome and another who is HIV-positive. "Unfailingly honest and very nearly perfect," Esquire called The Blood Runs. But honest it was not. The author, real name Timothy Patrick Barrus, had made it all up.

Holocaust Horrors

Another popular subgenre of made-up memoirs are those set against the ghastliness of the Holocaust. In 1996 Shocken Books published Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood by Binjamin Wilkomirski. "Stunning," The New York Times called the book, which received major literary prizes in the US, France and Britain. In the book the author writes of internment in not one but two concentration camps. In the late 1990s a Swiss journalist exposed the memoir as a fake by a man named Bruno Dössekker who had fabricated his Holocaust-survivor past.

Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years was published by Misha Defonseca in 1997. In it the author tells the story of walking nearly two thousand miles across Europe in search of her deported parents, killing a German officer in self-defense and being adopted by a pack of wolves. The bestseller was translated into 19 languages and made into a film. But in early 2008, after much speculation as to the books' authenticity, Defonseca (real name Monique de Wael) admitted publicly that the memoir was made up. The story, she said, "is not actual reality, but was my reality, my way of surviving." There were moments, she said, when she "found it difficult to differentiate between what was real and what was part of my imagination."

Finally, there is Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived by Herman Rosenblat. In it he tells of his imprisonment in the Buchenwald concentration camp, and of a nine-year-old girl on the outside who would throw him food over an electrified fence. Years later they would meet accidentally on a blind date and marry. Rosenblat appeared twice on The Oprah Winfrey Show; she called Angel at the Fence "the single greatest love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we've ever told on the air." However, shortly before the book's publication, its main events were discovered to be false. Publication was cancelled. Ironically, though Rosenblat's story of the apple girl was invented, he is an authentic Holocaust survivor.

Misery Lit

Oprah was also taken in by James Frey's hugely successful A Million Little Pieces, the author's grueling memoir of drug addiction and recovery (including root canals without anesthesia for fear of an addictive reaction to Novocain). When it was revealed that Frey had exaggerated many of the book's key elements, Oprah had both the author and his editor, Nan Talese, as guests on her show. She blasted them. David Carr wrote in The New York Times: "Both Mr. Frey and Ms. Talese were snapped in two like dry winter twigs."

Fictional Friend

Norma Khouri cashed in on the world's growing interest in the Middle East when in 2003 she published Forbidden Love (also published as Honor Lost), the purported story of her best friend, Dalia, a Jordanian woman who fell in love with a Christian soldier. When Dalia's Muslim father learns of the relationship, he stabs Dalia to death in an "honor killing." A year after publication it was discovered that Khouri had made the whole story up. Khouri, however, still insists her memoir is true.

Exclusive Access

Perhaps the best-known memoir hoax is the one perpetrated by Clifford Irving and Richard Suskind when they created a fraudulent autobiography of the reclusive Howard Hughes. The two men believed Hughes would never draw attention to himself by denouncing their book. Irving forged letters from Hughes and used them to convince publisher McGraw-Hill to offer a hefty contract. But Irving and Suskind had been wrong about Hughes. He went public, saying he had never even met Clifford Irving. Irving, his wife Edith and Suskind were indicted for fraud. Irving spent 17 months in prison, Suskind five months. Later Irving published a book called The Hoax in which he detailed his and Suskind's scheme in detail. In 2007 a film version of The Hoax was released, starring Richard Gere as Irving, Alfred Molina as Suskind and Marcia Gay Harden as Edith.

No one will argue that the authors of these fake or partially fake memoirs aren't talented writers. Each of the books above will provide you with hours of lively entertainment. Just keep in mind that for the most part, they're pure fiction.

Tim Parks

Not all writers share the same sense of whom they are writing for. Many may not even think they are directing their work at any audience in particular. All the same, there are clearly periods of history when, across the board, authors’ perceptions of who their readers are change, something that inevitably leads to a change in the kind of text they produce. The most obvious example is the period that stretches from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century when writers all over Europe abandoned Latin for the vernacular. Instead of introducing their work, as before, into an international arena presided over by a largely clerical elite, they “descended” to local and national languages to address themselves to an emerging middle class.

In the history books this shift to the vernacular tends to be presented as a democratic inspiration that allowed a wealth of local vitality into the written text and brought new confidence to the rapidly consolidating national languages. That said, it was probably driven as much by ambition and economic interest as by idealism. There came a point when it no longer made sense to write in Latin because the arbiters of taste were now a national rather than international grouping. Today we are at the beginning of a revolution of even greater import that is taking us in a quite different direction.

As a result of rapidly accelerating globalization we are moving toward a world market for literature. There is a growing sense that for an author to be considered “great,” he or she must be an international rather than a national phenomenon. This change is not perhaps as immediately evident in the US as it is in Europe, thanks to the size and power of the US market and the fact that English is generally perceived as the language of globalization, so that many more translations go toward it than away from it. However, more and more European, African, Asian and South American authors see themselves as having “failed” if they do not reach an international audience.

In recent months authors in Germany, France and Italy—all countries with large and well-established national readerships—have expressed to me their disappointment at not having found an English language publisher for their works; interestingly, they complain that this failure reflects back on their prestige in their home country: if people don’t want you elsewhere you can’t be that good. Certainly, in Italy where I live, an author is only thought to have arrived when he is published in New York. To appreciate how much things have changed one only need reflect how little it would have dented the reputations of Zola or Verga had they not achieved immediate publication in London.

This development has been hugely accelerated by electronic text transmission. Today, no sooner is a novel or even an opening chapter complete, than it can be submitted to scores of publishers all over the world. It is not unusual for foreign rights to be sold before the work has a local publisher. An astute agent can then orchestrate the simultaneous launch of a work in many different countries using promotional strategies that we normally associate with multinational corporations. Thus a reader picking up a copy of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, or the latest Harry Potter, or indeed a work by Umberto Eco, or Haruki Murakami, or Ian McEwan, does so in the knowledge that this same work is being read now, all over the world. Buying the book, a reader becomes part of an international community. This perception adds to the book’s attraction.

The proliferation of international literary prizes has guaranteed that the phenomenon is not restricted to the more popular sector of the market. Despite its questionable selection procedures and often bizarre choices, the Nobel is seen as more important than any national prize. The Impac in Ireland, Mondello in Italy, International Literature Award in Germany are rapidly growing in prestige. Thus the arbiters of taste are no longer one’s own compatriots—they are less easily knowable, not a group the author himself is part of.

What are the consequences for literature? From the moment an author perceives his ultimate audience as international rather than national, the nature of his writing is bound to change. In particular one notes a tendency to remove obstacles to international comprehension. Writing in the 1960’s, intensely engaged with his own culture and its complex politics, Hugo Claus apparently did not care that his novels would require a special effort on the reader’s and above all the translator’s part if they were to be understood outside his native Belgium. In sharp contrast, contemporary authors like the Norwegian Per Petterson, the Dutch Gerhard Baaker, or the Italian Alessandro Baricco, offer us works that require no such knowledge or effort, nor offer the rewards that such effort will bring.

More importantly the language is kept simple. Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of the importance of avoiding word play and allusion to make things easy for the translator. Scandinavian writers I know tell me they avoid character names that would be difficult for an English reader.

If culture-specific clutter and linguistic virtuosity have become impediments, other strategies are seen positively: the deployment of highly visible tropes immediately recognizable as “literary” and “imaginative,” analogous to the wearisome lingua franca of special effects in contemporary cinema, and the foregrounding of a political sensibility that places the author among those “working for world peace.” So the overstated fantasy devices of a Rushdie or a Pamuk always go hand in hand with a certain liberal position since, as Borges once remarked, most people have so little aesthetic sense they rely on other criteria to judge the works they read.

What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives. In the global literary market there will be no place for any Barbara Pyms and Natalia Ginzburgs. Shakespeare would have eased off the puns. A new Jane Austen can forget the Nobel.

Originally published in Slovenian in

It seems almost obscene to speak about culture during a time of global economic and political crisis. But I will persist in my intention. I offer two justifications for doing so.

The first is my conviction that the exchange of products of cultural creativity sustains the life of a human community and gives temporary meaning to our pursuit of a better, more sophisticated and more complete experience of reality. Each and every individual needs to pursue meaning within overlapping cultural frameworks, ones that sparkle – even if deceptively – with the thrilling beauty of our living present, the better to resist the grip of banality.

The second reason is that culture is not just a more or less convenient tool for increasing the gross national or municipal income: it is much more than that. Culture is an open space of play and criticism, imagination and meditation. It is precisely within this open space that particular experiences and collective visions cross-fertilize and permeate one another, come into contact and engage with one another, thus producing specific ideas about human existence and personal fulfilment, old age and death. Culture is in fact a grand laboratory of meaning.

As I do not intend to split academic hairs, I'll be straightforward. What I have in mind when I say "culture" are those specificities that characterize a certain group at a certain time in a certain place, while "civilization" refers to ideas and technologies that are not restricted to one group alone but are transferable in time and space. Culture rejuvenates itself by feeding on locally binding principles of thought and action, while civilization propels itself forwards by improving inventions and testing their general applicability.

Each and every culture is based on a selection from a large, although not arbitrary, catalogue of narrative possibilities and stocks of meaning. In a culture thus understood, the products of intellectual creativity as well as material achievements and religious ceremonies, dining habits and lyrical monologues, find their legitimate place. Something else should be kept in mind, too: people's ability to successfully occupy the most varied niches of a living space is inseparable from their ability to recognize differences and attribute meaning to them.

It is precisely difference that is crucial for individual or collective self-awareness, if not self-confidence. Every shaping of identity depends on a difference – difference between me and the others, my family and another family, my neighbourhood and the one on the other side of the city, peoples and nations. A difference established by setting a limit, finis, turns into a definition of meaning.

The basic principle of affiliation can be given social truth only by inventing, maintaining and shifting differences. The latter repeatedly establish borders between us and them, be they regional, national, linguistic or religious communities, or contemporary "urban tribes". From this vantage point, it becomes clear that cultures, understood as systems of lived collective experiences, do not automatically become uniform when the economic circumstances of diverse life-worlds become similar. After all, even modern information and communication technologies, which represent a supreme realization of universal and global applicability, are included in particular life-worlds and local communities in different ways and adjusted to local circumstances.

The modern technologies and ideas that, for better or worse, are used today by all communities around the globe, stem from the modern western paradigm. Let me be more specific: the contemporary package of narratives and tools with which we manage human experience that governs the contemporary world was indeed born in western Europe, but it is no longer the exclusive possession of its peoples. Today, literally all peoples of the planet reach into this package, in ways that frequently clash.

The package of modern ideas

The global expansion of the package of western modernity was set in motion when Europe first established a link with the Americas. The globalization process began in earnest in sixteenth century, after the Genoan sailor in the service of the Spanish king "discovered the new world" on his trans-Atlantic voyage to India. Globalization and modernity therefore wear the same shoes and made the big leap into the unknown together.

Western modernity, or the mindset of the era that was born through the midwifery of the Renaissance and humanism, Protestantism and capitalism, was actually marked by a revolutionary event: human authority replaced divine authority and human reason replaced collective faith, while the power of better argument gradually prevailed over hereditary privileges.

Medieval Europe exacted the unconditional observance of Christian dogma and the rules of the Church as the sole road to truth. Different approaches to the pursuit of meaning gained ground under the umbrella of modernity – relativist approaches that were grounded in the rational logic of trial and error, empirical observation and mathematical calculation.

The sceptical individual mind is clearly observable in, say, seventeenth century Dutch culture. There, the defining feature of the dominant value system was anti-clericalism and anti-feudalism. No wonder: it was based on Protestant resistance to Papal theology and politics of the then recently departed Spanish occupying forces. It also drew on the self-confidence gained by reclaiming valuable land from the Atlantic Ocean through the design and application of dams. One of the local sayings captures this defiance well: "God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands." Amsterdam and other Dutch ports rapidly integrated into the exchange of military, economic, cultural and political products between the old and the "new world," and – in stark contrast to feudally rigid Spain – equally rapidly developed the capitalist principles of operation.

What does this mean? Simply though not incorrectly put: instead of asking whether this or that thing was the will of God, Dutch merchants and sailors wanted to know whether this or that thing "worked". Such a functional perception of the world could not but give birth to recognitions that are the backbone of modern social practices: instead of suppressing opinions differing from yours, it is more profitable to adopt a tolerant attitude.

To illustrate the traditional, monolithic "world view" that dominated Europe in the Middle Ages, let it suffice to draw attention to the fact that artists of that time were not seen as being much different from skilful and mainly anonymous craftsmen. Understandably, they did not "create from nothing", as modern (particularly Romantic) tradition would have us believe. In medieval times, the ability for creatio ex nihilo was reserved for the absolute source of authority: God.

Christianity began to lose the status of absolute norm as early as the Renaissance and humanism. The educational curriculum, based on a new interest in Greek and Roman authors, sprang from the belief that ancient (pagan) writers rather than medieval Christian scholars represented the peak of human achievement. Although Petrarch and Boccaccio, the pioneers of humanism, had neither read many ancient Greek texts nor spoke fluent classical Latin, their enthusiasm for ancient writers spread across the old continent like wildfire.

When the fall of Constantinople in 1453 brought an end to the eastern Christian or Byzantine empire, many Greek-speaking Constantinopolites found refuge in Italian city-states. Not only were they skilled speakers of ancient Greek, but they also brought with them many ancient manuscripts. The ancient Greek and Latin curriculum received new impetus and was formalized in such a way that in the sixteenth century, classical Latin rather than medieval Latin became the language of spoken and written communication among educated Europeans.

The study of classical works, respublica litteraria, consisted of prescribed subjects that were uniform across Europe, thus contributing greatly to the emergence of a kind of solidarity among educated elites. Able to turn to classical sources for inspiration, their descriptions and criticism of the world were no longer dependent on respublica Christiana alone.

The emerging rejection of the absolute Christian norm came to light in Boccaccio's and Petrarch's works that – written in the Italian vernacular – dealt with the popular topics of everyday life, love and eroticism, adventures on the open road and carnal insights in kitchens. In other words, the medieval world was reshaped into the modern world through the symbolical adoption of diverse experiences and the stylization of lived experience.

By the end of the fifteenth century, the new invention, Guttenberg's movable printing press, made possible the publication of ancient Greek and Latin texts previously available only as manuscripts. European printers' hunger for new and popular products increased their interest in authors writing in the vernaculars and dealing with popular subjects. In the early sixteenth century, around two thousand printing presses across Europe encouraged and enabled the dizzying diffusion of ideas, including revolutionary ones. By that time, works by Francois Rabelais, Geoffrey Chaucer and other authors writing in the vernacular already accounted for the majority of all published works.

One trait shared by the best among these texts was that, although religious in tone and perhaps even in intention, they nevertheless placed man at the centre of attention. Man, not God, became the main subject of description, doubt and criticism.

The lure of freedom to which modern man responded, and not without a shudder of excitement, was perhaps most lucidly explored by Machiavelli and Luther. Each, in his unique way, came to the far-reaching realization that the site of moral life was no longer a community but an individual. The fragile balance of power in national affairs and the fragile balance of soul in human relations; both describe the developmental trends of western modernity, Machiavelli in the name of national interests and Luther in the name of personal liberation.

The first condition for such a perception of the world was the separation of Church and State. In modern states, it is a constitution and legislation, not the doctrines of one religious community or another, that determine the basic frameworks of co-existence. Christians of various denominations across post-Renaissance Europe came to recognize a new principle: that of relative autonomy enjoyed by various spheres (science, arts, ethics). In other words, in modernity scientific rules cannot be applied to the religious sphere without inflicting serious cognitive harm; and by the same token, the sphere of art cannot be required to observe religious principles.

While the Renaissance, humanism, Protestantism and capitalism destroyed the metaphysical unity of the Christian world, the compleat mapa mundi, the twins of Enlightenment and the French Revolution provided the legal framework for the modern paradigm. Finding encouragement in the fresh examples of successful and total change, namely the liberation of thirteen American colonies from the British crown, France set the new rules of game with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Both documents would have been unimaginable during the feudal ancien régime. The missionaries of the Enlightenment no longer saw the world as being based on privileges arising from blue blood and Church traditions, but on the equality of all before the law of the state. Instead of the God-blessed monarchy, the secular state and its representative government became the main organizers of communal life.

Civilization and barbarism

Modern western civilization, born as it was from the pains of revolution, is far from monolithic. This holds true, too, when it is compared to other civilizations. The late American professor, Samuel Huntington, famously viewed the world as the "clash of civilizations", with the clash between the West and Islam in the foreground.

Yet such a perception of the world is based on a false assumption: that civilizations behave like countries. Civilizations, however, do not have material power or control over a territory, and they do not behave like singular "players". A much more appropriate representation of a civilization is to imagine it as a cognitive framework or a package of ideas. And ideas have always travelled among civilizations.

Think of the ancient Greek and Roman ideas of law and art, philosophy and politics! Their enormous influence on modern western imaginaries is well evidenced. Moreover, their impact can be observed far beyond the time and space of the community that first integrated them successfully into its symbolic economy. Armenians, Jews, Persians, Egyptians and other peoples eagerly utilized these ideas for centuries, long after their originators had disappeared under the ruins of collapsed empires.

Borders between civilizations are neither clear-cut nor impenetrable. Rather, they are shifting and permeable demarcation lines traversed by the processes of cross-fertilization and cross-stimulation, acceptance and rejection. Civilizations are invariably in contact, communication and conflict with one another. For this reason, all civilizations are "impure" and "hybrid".

In principle, all civilizations are reluctant to accept ideas that are in conflict with dominant opinion and manner of behaviour; but most absorb the inventions that promise to reinforce power, wealth and prestige. They differ precisely in their ability to recognize the promises of freedom that emerge from the communication between "local" and "foreign" inventions.

Sceptics are particularly numerous among the ranks of those who would like to place an equation mark between Christianity and modern Europe, making Europe a Christian realm. The test of the authenticity of this theory is quick and painless: try calculating your monthly salary using Roman numerals! Everyone will agree that this would be an awkward and time-consuming task. The expedient elegance of Arabic numerals is much better. Along with the decimal system, it is an indispensable component of modern western literacy.

Medieval Muslims, whose reign stretched from the African and European Mediterranean in the West to Iran, India and China in the East, took these symbols from Indian mathematicians. They brought them to Moorish Europe in the tenth century. Western languages pay tribute by gratefully naming them "Arabic numerals", although the Arabs themselves do not conceal their origin either and call them "Hindu numerals". Here, hybridity comes to light in a most graphic way.

As the modern West detached itself from its moorings by colonizing South and North America, a process was set in motion. While the colonists indeed arrived to the new coasts under the flag of belligerent Christianity, they were already the children of revolutionary times. No wonder, then, that the processes of globalization were driven by both the warrior's sword and the writer's pen. Hernan Cortes and other conquistadores no doubt committed genocide against native peoples in the name of Christian superiority. But other Christians who disembarked in the new world bravely rejected crime, and meticulously catalogued atrocities in the name of equality of all people, whether "civilized" Europeans and "barbarian" natives.

Bartolome de las Casas, a contemporary of Colombo and later the first bishop of Chiapas, Mexico, arrived in Cuba as a young dandy eager for a quick profit. Horrified at the torture of locals, he joined the monastic order of Dominicans and later meticulously documented and condemned colonialism in the Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552), a bestseller that was eagerly read across Europe. It is Herman Cortes and Bartolome de las Casas together that represent the true face of modern western civilization – its Janus face.

This also means that the power of the modern West lies precisely in sceptical reflection and reasoned critique. This gave birth to a recognition that has been repeatedly confirmed by history and, in a particularly painful manner, by the totalitarian twentieth century: "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism", concluded Walter Benjamin, the melancholic voice of the homeless Weimar Left, writing in exile in Paris. Benjamin's analysis of the staggering coincidence of German artistic mastery and political catastrophe actually illuminates the structural frame of the modern West.

The global framework of the modern West

The ideas and technologies conceived by the modern West have today become global. The processes of the first globalization during the imperial sixteenth century, the second globalization during the colonial nineteenth century, and the third globalization in the corporate twenty-first century, changed the world dramatically. All national groups and cultural traditions on the planet have become interdependent through the exchange of ideas and information, people and capital, goods and services.

In the course of these processes, the ideas of the modern West turned into a general framework that today governs the reasoning and operation of the contemporary world. Modernization and westernization are Siamese twins. Those societies that rejected important elements of the package sooner or later encountered great obstacles, for example, the Soviet Union yesterday or North Korea today.

What does this package include? For starters, the basic notions of time and space. Consider this: years and longer time units are measured by the Gregorian calendar that western (Latin) Christianity designed in the sixteenth century. Hours and smaller units of time are measured by a clock, a mechanical device based on the use of weights and transfer of force discovered by Muslim engineers in Moorish Europe and adapted to public use by the Latin Christian monks in the late Middle Ages. Gerard Mercator, a Renaissance cartographer from the Netherlands, substantially improved the spatial representation of the world through the invention of a globe. After initial resistance, which lasted a good hundred years, Mercator's theory was accepted within the Ottoman Empire, then the most formidable non-European power, and later elsewhere across the Islamic Middle East. Today, such understanding of time and space is on evidence across the globe.

The package also includes political geography. Borders between countries should and can be drawn in a way that influences the sense of group belonging. Such an organization of life naturally requires symbolical narratives that can be used by people in their collective search for the common good.

The modern West invented a number of such narratives. Among them are representative government and the rule of law; the separation of church and state; freedom of speech, media and association; nationalism and liberalism; individualism and human rights; but also clericalism and communism, Nazism and Fascism. During the colonial era, the package was transplanted, virtually wholesale, to the two Americas and Australia. Elsewhere in the world, even the most stubborn local elites were compelled to accept it in order to be able to participate in administrative affairs or gain independence.

After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism in the late twentieth century, modern western capitalism indisputably became the global system. We have no grounds for doubting its worldwide presence. However, we have good grounds for doubting its alleged responsibility for the division of the planet into the "West and the Rest".

The idea about the two opposing camps containing all humankind is certainly appealing. Politically progressive advocates of a different, supposedly more just world find this simple division attractive because it creates room for accusatory moralization. The reactionary advocates of the clash of civilizations, on the other hand, find it hard to resist open arrogance and contempt for all non-western peoples, nations and cultures.

Westernistic civilization

Instead of subscribing to the ideology that views the world through the "hard" lens of conflict between "the West and the Rest", let us try a theory that looks at the world through the "soft" lens of "westernistic" civilization.

An analogy between Hellenistic and westernistic civilization is helpful. In much the same way as classical Greece cannot be equated with Hellenic civilization, the modern West is not the same as westernistic civilization. Until 4 BC and the twilight of city-states, classical Greek civilization remained within the territorial borders of the southern Balkans. Similarly, the civilization of Latin Christianity or the traditional West was firmly rooted in the western countries of Europe until the advent of modernity.

The Hellenistic civilization of Alexander the Great emanated from classical Greek heritage, but territorially it stretched across the entire world then known to man, reaching to Egypt and India, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. In the same way, the westernistic civilization that has arisen from modern western heritage comprises the entire known world today.

A special fusion of Middle Eastern and Indo-Iranian cultural traditions on the one hand, and ancient Greek tradition on the other, gave rise to forms of collective life in which classical Greek ideas represented only the backbone rather than the entire social body. Alexander the Great systematically expanded both the borders of his multi-national empire and the minds of his multi-cultural subjects. He encouraged "mixed marriages" between Greek colonists and locals with the same fervour that he supported merging of Greek and local ideas and technologies.

Westernistic civilization, too, has a hybrid nature. The backbone of the basic package of ideas arises from the heritage of the modern West, but its many ribs extend to all ends of the planet. Various communities in various parts of the world adopt and adapt these ideas in their singular ways as they take into account local specificities. Elections provide an example: this form of representative democracy is today practiced in virtually all countries of the world, although we will readily agree that this process is not equally free and honest across the board.

In ancient Greece, individual identity was determined by the politics of a city-state. It embodied the centre of the world. For this reason, the ancient Greeks engaging in trading and military expeditions, and especially those in overseas colonies, always invoked their homeland, their home city or metropolis. In Hellenistic civilization, the origins of a person was not an issue worthy of much attention. After all, ancient Greek ideas were carried to the outside world by an army under the command of a Macedonian.

Within this empire that stretched across three continents, in which the journeys between regional capitals could take several years, the need for just one centre gradually diminished. The idea of a metropolis was replaced by the idea about a world city or cosmopolis. It transcended local citizenship and offered an answer to the new need for diverse identities, obligations and loyalties. Instead of exclusive patriotic feelings incorporated in the ancient Greek differentiation between "the home and the world", the inclusive Hellenistic cosmopolitanism expresses the paradox of global awareness: "The world is the home."

Diverse identities of peoples and locales in westernistic civilization are perhaps best expressed in cosmopolises such as Marseille and Milano, London and Lisbon, Berlin and Barcelona. All of these cities are historically and geographically rooted in the countries and the cultures of the traditional West, but they have included in their symbolic and actual economy many non-western elements. From fast food to intoxicating music, from fashions to exciting social customs, "local" and "foreign" elements merge on the street corner and in the office, producing new synthetic products and hybrid ideas.

A similar process is unfolding beyond the traditional West: megalopolises such as Sydney and Saigon, Cairo and Kuala Lumpur, Mexico City and Manila are the laboratories of diverse identities. While transport and trade, science and industry, communication and arms are unerringly of modern western provenance, every local environment uses them in keeping with their own prejudices and needs, capacities and resources.

Ancient Greek, the lingua franca of the Hellenized world, has acquired many local accents and underwent (not only subtle) adaptations through the babble of tribes and peoples, soldiers and diplomats, merchants and pilgrims. This process is not unlike the spread of the English language in modern westernistic civilization, as various groups and individuals make use of it in their (not only subtle) exchange of ideas, goods and services.

Westernistic civilization therefore does not imply a western model that is uniformly imposed all over the planet in the same manner. This is the assumption of those who advocate the division of the world into the "West and the Rest", explaining the processes of cultural exchange as a blind alley at the end of which the victorious robber (the West) empties the purses of all the rest.

The notion of westernistic civilization carries a cognitively different, even if politically unpromising content. It is a two-way street accommodating a lively trade in ideologies and technologies that the modern West invented, but (no longer) holds in sole possession. To use another illustration: the ideas and technologies of the modern West are like sewing patterns that define the basic rules of tailoring but do not dictate the thickness of the garment or the colour of seams.

Perhaps the best illustration of westernistic civilization is Japan. The Land of the Rising Sun began to absorb western ideas more than a century ago. Having assimilated administrative, military and industrial procedures of the modern western type, Japan avoided the fate of a western colony and itself became a regional colonial force. Japan uses the package of modern western ideas in its own unique way, adapting these to local cultural traditions.

Japan turned the fruits of such hybridization into profitable export items. For experts, these are anima and manga, for ordinary people karaoke and karate, for business elites industrial miniaturization, just-in-time delivery and the mass production of low-price high-quality electronic gadgets. The secret of Japan's global success lies precisely in its ability to creatively combine western and local ideas.

However, it is not possible to overlook the fact that many people in many corners of the planet seriously fear globalization. Unfortunately, the one-sided exposure of the destructive consequences of global trade in services, products and goods is frequently grist to the mill of popular fears and mass paranoia. A terrified mind cannot help but perceive globalization as a flood threatening to sweep away diverse and special cultural traditions, and to seek scapegoats in response.

A closer look will show that many critics of globalization point their moralist finger and turn up their refined noses at one or another internationally popular style, be it teenage hip hop or Madonna's indulgent raving, Hollywood kitsch or hard-boiled detective movies. To be more precise: the critics of globalization frequently use cultural diversity and defence of collective (national) identities as a kind of smoke screen. It usually conceals some other agenda: in most cases, it is romantic anti-capitalism that is close to leftist zeal, or modern anti-Americanism nourishing rightwing litanies.

The actual processes of globalization are controversial and complex, but the international exchange of ideas and technologies, symbols and methods of operation increases and broadens cultural diversity. If culture is understood as a laboratory of meaning, on which individual communities feed, then we have to accept the flexible process of adaptation and resistance, transformations and hybridity, where the border between the "domestic" and the "foreign" evaporates like cheap petrol.

oD-wide classification

Topics: 

Culture

Economics

In his book, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by Yale historian David W. Blight describes in detail how the history of the Civil War-its meaning, cause, purpose and effect-was completely rewritten to reflect the views of Southern racist ideology over a period of 50 years after the war.  Blight describes the interactions of three different broad visions of Civil War memory-reconciliationist, emancipationist and white supremacist-which contended with one another over time. Eventually, the reconciliationist narrative, which had its roots in revulsion at the sheer horror of the war itself, became completely subsumed by the white supremacist narrative, simply because the South refused reconciliation on any other terms, thus resulting in the virtual elimination of the historically accurate emancipationist narrative, which did not fully re-emerge until the Civil Right era in the 1950s and 60s.  I wrote about Blight's book at some length in my December, 2008 diary, "American Amnesia: The Cost of Accommodating The South".

In turn, something very similar to the process Blight describes has been underway to rewrite the history of the Civil Rights Movement itself, and the recent uproar over Harry Reid's clumsy remarks about Obama's appearance and speech is a classic illustration of that process at work.  Another example is the Facebook invitation I recently received to attend the Republican Party of Los Angeles County's "first annual" Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Legacy Awards Dinner. The event description began:

Please join the Republican Party of Los Angeles County as we honor two great Republicans who embody the courage and spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr. - A Republican who stood for individual responsibility and spoke eloquently and boldly in defense of liberty and justice for all.

The dreams of Dr. King live on in scores of Republicans today. This year our first annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Legacy Award will be presented to Star Parker and Walter Allen.

This crude attempt to reinvent King as a conservative Republican is laughable to anyone the least bit familiar with the real King, a democratic socialist well to the left of the entire white political spectrum. Most particularly, as I pointed out in my 1995 MLK Day essay republished here last night, "Martin Luther King - A Different Drum Major", King's concept of character-as reflected in his speech, "The Drum Major Instinct"-was the polar opposite of the acquisitive conservative ideal, touted by the likes of Parker.
Although similar to the earlier process, the later rewriting process is distinctly different in two major ways.  First, there is, generally speaking, no attempt to retain the old ideological core of unambiguous overt racism, as there was in the first rewriting.  Instead, the aim is focused on establishing a new interpretation of "equality" that is fundamentally racist in terms of perpetuating structural inequality, and preempting even the possibility of engaging in critical discourse attacking that false equality.  Such an interpretation allows the election of a black president, but only if he keeps his mouth shut about race, even as his political opponents use his race as an integral part of their largely irrational attacks against him.  Second, this rewriting process is part of a larger rewriting process aimed at altering all of Western, and indeed world history to conform to a radical right view in which the tradition of political liberalism that gave birth to the modern democratic political order does not exist in any coherently recognizable form.  Books such as Liberal Fascism are examples of this revisionist project.

Consider three items as illustrative of what's going on.  First, a perceptive presentation of what's actually going on in the contrasting cases of Reid and Lott.  Second, a reality-check about the intense differences that differences in black skin tone can make. Third, a sobering look at the deep differences between how blacks and whites evaluated and make judgments about racial progress & the continuing costs of racial inequality.

Restoring Common Sense Comparing Reid and Lott

First, from the Situationist blog, is "Reporting Social Facts vs. Pining for Jim Crow: No Comparison Between Reid and Lott" by UC Irvine professor Eric D. Knowles.  He begins:

Imagine a scenario. An African American lawyer, we can even call him "Barry," has applied for a job at a prestigious firm-one that has never before hired a Black person. You eavesdrop on a couple of partners talking about the candidate. Question: Which, if either, of the these overheard comments is the more racist?

"I don't know... Barry's facing an uphill climb at an all-White firm like this. However, he just might have a shot given the fact that he's fairly light-complected and doesn't speak using African American Vernacular English."

"This firm's going to hell if it hires a Black guy. I wish Strom Thurmond were the head of the hiring committee."

The analogy may be a bit crude. But those paying attention to recent political news will recognize the partners as stand-ins for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and former Senator (and Majority Leader) Trent Lott, respectively.

Actually, I don't think the analogy is the least bit crude.  It's spot on.  But I want to fast forward a bit to the last paragraph of the post:

This episode says a great deal about how Americans talk (or fail to talk) about race. Most illustrative were comments made by Liz Cheney on ABC's This Week. Ms. Cheney found herself sparring with, of all people, conservative commentator George Will over the Reid affair. Cheney contended that Reid's comments were "outrageous" and "racist." When Will countered that Reid's comments contained "not a scintilla of racism," Cheney responded-and this is telling-"George, give me a break. I mean, talking about the color of the president's skin..." For Cheney, the mere mention of race is tantamount to racism. It's worth pausing to appreciate how pernicious this extreme form of color-blindness is. If we can't talk about race, we can't talk about racial inequality-and if we can't talk about racial inequality, we're guaranteed not to do anything about it. Perhaps this is exactly what some people want.

No "perhaps" about it.  That's precisely the intent of colorblind racism, a subject I've blogged about on various different occasions.  Racism has always insisted on controlling the discussion of race, making it into a taboo in most social situations. Unequal enforcement of the taboo then becomes a key part of the process of controlling the discourse about race, and by controlling the discourse, one ensures that certain ideas remain anathema and unthinkable.  Expunging those ideas from one's consciousness, it then becomes possible to construct whatever sort of fantasy one desires-including reinventing Dr. Martin Luther King as a conservative Republican.

Being A Light-Skinned Black Really DOES Make A Difference

Our second item is intended to redress an oversight that most white people--even progressives--are largely oblivious to.

In white aka "mainstream" political discourse, the fact of prejudice being linked to shades of skin color is not simply subject to suppression by righwing ideology, as pointed out above. Even when it is acknowledged, it is not dwelled up.  In contrast, for blacks-and other minorities as well-it is an inescapable fact of life, particularly for those who are darker skinned.  This was vividly underscored by a recent study regarding the life-and-death significance of "blackness," Looking Deathworthy: Perceived Stereotypicality of Black Defendants Predicts Capital-Sentencing Outcomes (pdf), by Jennifer Eberhardt, Paul Davies, Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, and Sheri Lynn Johnson.  The abstract explains:

Researchers previously have investigated the role of race in capital sentencing, and in particular, whether the race of the defendant or victim influences the likelihood of a death sentence. In the present study, we examined whether the likelihood of being sentenced to death is influenced by the degree to which a Black defendant is perceived to have a stereotypically Black appearance. Controlling for a wide array of factors, we found that in cases involving a White victim, the more stereotypically Black a defendant is perceived to be, the more likely that person is to be sentenced to death.

Going into more detail, the study was divided into two parts, first studying cases with white victims, then cases with black victims.  Significantly, there different results for the two parts:

PHASE I: BLACK DEFENDANT, WHITE VICTIM
....
In fact, 24.4% of those Black defendants who fell in the lower half of the stereotypicality distribution received a death sentence, whereas 57.5% of those Black defendants who fell in the upper half received a death sentence.

So, if you kill a white person (or, rather, are found guilty of killing a white person), then it makes a big difference how black you are.  OTOH.:

PHASE II: BLACK DEFENDANT, BLACK VICTIM
....
Employing the same analyses as we did for the cases with White victims, we found that the perceived stereotypicality of Black defendants convicted of murdering Black victims did not predict death sentencing, F(1, 110)<1 (Fig. 2b). Black defendants who fell in the upper and lower halves of the stereotypicality distribution were sentenced to death at almost identical rates (45% vs. 46.6%, respectively). Thus, defendants who were perceived to be more stereotypically Black were more likely to be sentenced to death only when their victims were White.

So, skin tone doesn't matter if you're convicted of killing a black person.

Summing up:

Our findings suggest that in cases involving a Black defendant and a White victim-cases in which the likelihood of the death penalty is already high-jurors are influenced not simply by the knowledge that the defendant is Black, but also by the extent to which the defendant appears stereotypically Black. In fact, for those defendants who fell in the top half as opposed to the bottom half of the stereotypicality distribution, the chance of receiving a death sentence more than doubled. Previous laboratory research has already shown that people associate Black physical traits with criminality (Eberhardt et al., 2004). The present research demonstrates that in actual sentencing decisions, jurors may treat these traits as powerful cues to deathworthiness.

In light of the above, given the wild-eyed fantasies that conservative elites have managed to propagate about Obama-a light-skinned-back, it's hard to imagine anything more serious than subject of how skin-tone effects white prejudice.  Harry Reid may be many things, but when talked about Obama's skin-tone, he was simply being a moderately saavy political observer.

Black vs. White Views of Racial Progress & the Costs of Inequality

Our third item is a really explosive one, especially considering how unequivocally Barack Obama has shut the door on even whispering about the issue of reparations.  Once again, we turn to an item from the Situationist blog, "Examining Why Estimated "Costs" of Racial Inequality Vary by?Race", a post from early 2008, which began:

Situationist contributor and Harvard social psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, along with Ohio State social psychologist Phillip Mazzocco, were the subject of a recent article by the Washington Post's Shankar Vedantam, who studied recent research concerning unequal perspectives on racial inequality. Their research was contained in the 2006 article, "The Cost of Being Black: White Americans Perceptions and the Question of Reparations," DuBois Review, 3, 261-297. Their co-authors on the article were Ohio State's Timothy Brock, Harvard's Kristina Olson, and Gregory Brock.
We excerpt Vedantam's piece below.

Before looking at the article, here's the abstract of the paper:

White Americans have long resisted the idea of reparations to the descendants of slaves. We examine the psychological basis of such resistance, primarily testing the possibility that resistance may be a function of Whites' perception of the ongoing cost of being Black. White participants (n = 958) across twelve independent samples (varying in age, student status, and geographic location) were asked variations of the question: How much should you be paid to continue to live the remainder of your life as a Black person? Participants generally required low median amounts, less than $10,000, to make the race change, whereas they requested high amounts, $1,000,000, to give up television. To the extent that larger amounts were requested, support for reparations also increased. Attempts to educate participants about Black cost/White privilege had negligible effects on assessments of the cost of being Black and support for reparations. Together, these results suggest that White resistance to reparations for Black Americans stems from fundamental biases in estimating the true cost of being Black. The implications of our findings for color-blind and multiculturalist conceptual approaches are discussed.

Such fundamentally biases are intutitively quite likely to be similar to the biases discussed last weekend about perceptions of risk related to global warming--they are biases that shap our perceptions of fact. We now return to the excerpt from the article, contained in the post, which begins thus:

Social psychologists Philip Mazzocco and Mahzarin Banaji once asked white volunteers how much money would cover the "costs" of being born black instead of white. The volunteers guessed that about $5,000 ought to cover the lifetime disadvantages of being an average black person rather than an average white person, in the United States. By contrast, when asked how much they wanted to go without television, the volunteers demanded a million dollars.

Mazzocco and Banaji were taken aback: The average black person in America is 447 percent more likely to be imprisoned than the average white person, and 521 percent more likely to be murdered. Blacks earn 60 cents to the dollar compared with whites who have the same education levels and marital status. The black poverty rate is nearly twice the white poverty rate. Blacks tend to die five years earlier than whites; the infant mortality rate among black babies is nearly 1 1/2 times the rate among white babies. And because of long-standing patterns of inheritance, blacks and whites begin life with substantial disparities in family wealth.

"The point we were making is, whatever the cost of being black might be, whites are vastly underestimating it," said Mazzocco, of Ohio State University at Mansfield. "You throw in the 5-to-1 wealth gap . . . if you wanted to put a dollar-and-cents value on the difference, you would come up with a number much larger than $5,000."

The unusual experiment is one of dozens that have found that whites tend to have a relatively rosy impression of what it means to be a black person in America. Whites are more than twice as likely as blacks to believe that the position of African Americans has improved a great deal. Blacks are more than twice as likely as whites to believe that conditions for African Americans are growing worse.

This long-standing war of perceptions created the perfect storm last week after sermons by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright - former pastor of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) - painted a picture of stark inequality at odds with white perceptions.

I pointed out at the time that Wright was right, and that Obama's attempt to distance himself from Wright had a fundamentally dishonest aspect to it.  Obama tried to (falsely) portray their differences in terms of Wright refusing to acknowledge progress--but that's just a way of avoiding the real issue here, which is that white people vastly under-estimate the ongoing costs of racial inequality.  In fact, there's even evidence that blacks as a whole under-estimate such costs, though not by as much as whites.  If blacks did uniformly understand the true costs, it is highly questionable that reparations could be kept off the national political agenda.  The costs are simply that staggering, as indicated by some of the figures cited above.

The excerpt from the article concludes:

Mazzocco and Banaji, who teaches at Harvard, found that when volunteers learned about the disparities, they started to demand much larger sums of money.

"Many whites assume blacks are making use of old crimes to gain present-day benefits that are unearned," Mazzocco said. "Underlying this is a misunderstanding and ignorance about black costs and white privilege."

But knowledge about disparities is not the only reason whites and blacks have different perceptions about racial equality. Social psychologist Richard Eibach at Yale University has shown that whites and blacks often employ different yardsticks to measure racial equality. Whites tend to measure progress by comparing the present and the past - and America has made giant strides since the Jim Crow era. Nonwhites, Eibach found, are likely to evaluate racial equality in comparison with an idealized future. These yardsticks create entirely different perceptions.
When Eibach asked each group to use the other's yardstick - whites to focus on the future and nonwhites to think about the past - the differences disappeared. Now, everyone agreed the country had come a long way - and had a long way to go.

Now, to push a little bit past the rhetorical pseudo-reconciliation used to close that piece, let's consider what's actually going on here.  When whites--particularly younger ones, who are (justifiably) proud of their freedom from prejudice--look at racial differences in terms of how far we've  come, they are in effect taking credit for the results of other people's struggles, whereas blacks, looking forward, are thinking much more realistically about the struggles that they themselves--as well as their friends, families and future descendents--actually face.

Is there any question which group--blacks or whites--deserves to be considered the "reality-based community"?

And therefore, is there any question that any technique, procedure, political strategy or ideology that "brings them together" somewhere in the middle is a compromise between truth and lies?

And is there any question that a compromise between truth and lies is itself a lie?

Where was nothing wrong with Reid's phrasing of "African-American Vernacular English." He was simply assessing the degree of America's racial enlightenment.

In his State of the Union response to Pres. George W. Bush a few years ago, Harry Reid included a heartwarming anecdote about a kid in his old hometown saying he wants to grow up to be like him. Did the ten-year-old realize that he, too, could be charmless and inarticulate and still be an awesomely powerful politician?

The furor over Reid’s comments about then-candidate Barack Obama being “light-skinned” and not speaking in “a Negro dialect” says less about the Senate majority leader’s racial attitudes than his already well-advertised tin -- or is it iron? titanium? some metallic substance yet unknown to man? -- ear. If nuance and verbal intelligence were necessary to success on Capitol Hill, Reid would have quit long ago.

But since when is a history of saying dumb things a defense in a racial controversy? Since when is the truth even a defense?

TheRoot.com, the website of Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor last seen accusing a white cop of racism for the offense of showing up at his door, published an elaborate defense of Reid. It cited the 1993 paper “When White Voters Evaluate Black Candidates: The Processing Implications of Candidate Skin Color, Prejudice, and Self-Monitoring” to support Reid’s contention that Obama’s lightness would help him with voters. As for “Negro dialect,” TheRoot.com argues it’s a catchier phrase than “black or African-American vernacular English,” and what harm comes from “using dated language with no bad intent”?

No conservative Republican should test this tolerance for archaic speech. Reid’s idiocy is excused, fundamentally, by his political positions. In absolving him, Obama cited “the passionate leadership he’s shown on issues of social justice.” Al Sharpton, who’s built a career on stoking distracting racial controversies, advised that “these comments should not distract America from its continued focus on securing health care.”

Real racism has been almost entirely eliminated from respectable American public life. With no one defending segregated lunch counters anymore, the accusation of racism is left mostly to hang on infelicitous phrases, legitimate policy disagreements, or the airing of uncomfortable truths.

That means the charge has become unavoidably subjective, and those with the most credibility to make it -- black politicians and civil-rights groups -- all lean to the left. They’ve turned it into a handy political tool wielded only against their opponents. Reid could practically perform in a minstrel show, and the NAACP would defend him as long as he remained a reliably liberal vote.

It isn’t just that Reid is treated differently than Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott, whose disastrously foolish praise of Strom Thurmond’s segregationist 1948 presidential campaign spiraled into his resignation from leadership. It’s that the Left read more meaning into a minor candidate for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee distributing a CD with a parody song called “Barack the Magic Negro” than into Reid’s earnest use of the term. It’s that there was more outrage on the left over fabricated Rush Limbaugh quotes endorsing slavery than over comments Reid doesn’t deny making.

The fraudulent Rush quotes illustrate the next logical step in the charade: Accusing someone of racism based on the belief that the person somehow should be racist. The anti-Obamacare protests of the summer had racial motives attributed to them, even though they were notably absent of racial content. One protester who ostentatiously carried his rifle outside an Obama event in Phoenix was deemed a racist threat to the president, even though he himself was black.

Taking the Reid flap to its absurdist conclusion, The Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates concluded that GOP objections to Reid’s comments themselves prove “that the GOP is not simply still infected with the vestiges of white supremacy and racism, but is neither aware of the infection, nor understands the disease.” Maybe one of Reid’s Republican critics can be made to resign for his insensitive criticisms.

Most racial controversies are eventually described as “teachable moments.” If only the lesson of this one were that the politicized game of taking racial offense deserves permanent retirement.

---

Reuters

Rich Lowry » Harry Reid's history of saying some pretty dumb things Salt Lake Tribune As for "Negro dialect," TheRoot.com argues it's a catchier phrase than "black or African-American vernacular English," and what harm comes from "using dated ... 'Special Report' Panel on Senate Majority Leader's Racial Remark About ObamaFOXNews Should Obama tackle the race issue again?CNN International US Senator Reid's lesson: you're always on the recordThe Daily Maverick Chicago Sun-Times -The Swamp (blog) -San Francisco Chronicle all 3,345 news articles »

By: Omar Wasow

CNN is aflutter. Bloggers are calling it a "bigtime" mistake. Newspapers describe the "racially tinged" remarks as "sensational." What is this "juicy revelation"? Apparently, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid privately told two journalists in 2008 that Obama was more electable because he's "light-skinned" and lacked a "Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." With the publication Reid's impolitic quote in the new book Game Change, journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin have landed a PR coup. By revealing Reid's racial faux pas, they've also set in motion the now tediously familiar process of a media frenzy, an inevitable apology from Reid acknowledging "deep regret", and an equally inevitable gracious acceptance of the said apology from Obama. Lost in all the handwringing and shock, however, is any clear explanation of what's wrong with Reid's comment. Clearly, using "Negro dialect" is about half-a-century behind the times but does anyone think Reid meant ill by his anachronism? Moreover, as the recent kerfuffle about the 2010 Census revealed, "Negro" is still used by a non-trivial number of older black folks. In 2000, for example, more than 50,000 people went to the extra effort of writing-in that they identified themselves as "Negro" (over-and-above the millions who checked the box for "Black, African-Am., or Negro"). And what term would you use? Ebonics, a neologism coined in 1975 from ebony and phonics is now laughably dated. Linguists currently refer to "black or African American vernacular English" but that hardly rolls off the tongue. Yes, Reid (and the Census) should get with the times but using dated language with no bad intent should hardly be grounds for days of media analysis, conscience-stricken mea culpas or organized damage control. And, more importantly, the substance of Reid's comments is spot on. Research strongly suggests that white voters do favor lighter-skinned black candidates. Political scientist Nayda Terkildsen studied the effect of skin color on white voting preferences in her 1993 paper, "When White Voters Evaluate Black Candidates: The Processing Implications of Candidate Skin Color, Prejudice, and Self-Monitoring." In an experimental study, she presented a random sample of adults descriptions of "one of three fictitious candidates running for governor." Each candidate was described in identical terms with the only difference being an attached photograph of either "a white male, a light-complected black male, or a dark-complected black male." Terkildsen found a statistically significant effect that "black candidates were penalized by white voters based on the candidate's race, skin color, and individual levels of racial prejudice." Put another way, when presented with otherwise identical candidates, white voters generally preferred the white candidate to the black candidates and the lighter-skinned candidate to the darker-skinned candidate. (Terkildsen's analysis only looked at white voters but perhaps Reid's remarks will encourage someone to study the effect of skin color on candidate preferences among blacks, Latinos and Asians, too.) Similarly, black English is regularly associated with negative perceptions of blacks. John Edwards (not the candidate, I assume), writing in 1999 about "Language Attitudes" in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, notes "hundreds of experiments have revealed negative reactions toward Black English." Though there don't appear to be any academic studies on the effects of black English on voting, it ain't much of a stretch to think such attitudes would extend to candidate evaluations and voting booth behavior. Further, Reid's statement that Obama could choose to use a "Negro dialect" is linguistics 101. Everyone "style shifts" or switches their manner of speech depending on the context, politicians especially so. Given American history, such color and culture hierarchies in voting preferences should be unsurprising. That Reid would highlight these advantages for Obama's candidacy merely reflects the fact he's a savvy politician (if not a savvy commentator about race). Pointing out political realities is not the same and endorsing them. Moreover, as CNN Political Analyst Roland Martin noted, Reid's comments would have been entirely unremarkable in a discussion among a group of adult African Americans, almost all of whom have seen and experienced forms of color and language bias. Even a cursory knowledge of black history suggests colorism shapes which blacks attain leadership positions (I'm looking at you Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and Douglas Wilder).

So, given all the evidence that Reid was right, what's he apologizing for? Perhaps, Reid's real faux pas was talking about our "post-racial" America as if race still mattered.

... the decline in the use of AAE over childhood and into adolescence, and a curvilinear trajectory in which AAE variants intensify in early adolescence after a period of decline or stability during the early elementary school years. ... Project Description: The overall purpose of this study is to determine if the vernacular literacy association during the school years will be explained in part by decoding skills, metalinguistic skills, and school attitudes. ...