Redrawing the Boundaries

Well Worth Reading

After a death, family members show signs of grief and exhibit ritualistic behavior. Field biologists such as Joyce Poole, who has studied Africa’s elephants for more than 35 years, describe elephants trying to lift the dead body and covering it with dirt and brush. Poole once watched a female stand guard over her stillborn baby for three days, her head, ears, and trunk drooped in grief. Elephants may revisit the bones of the deceased for months, even years, touching them with their trunks and creating paths to visit the carcass.

The most recent National Geographic has a moving article on efforts to save orphaned elephants in Kenya. Because elephants are such social animals, they need humans to provide emotional support as well as food and shelter.

It’s amazing how sophisticated the elephants are in their interaction with the people and peers around them. The boundaries we set for cognition come out looking pretty arbitrary.

Come to Chicago to Learn How to Hate

Well Worth Reading

“You gotta blame both sides,” he says. “The hate was preached on both sides. I didn’t teach my kids to hate like that. But apparently there were people in the neighborhood that did.”

In this week’s Chicago Reader, Steve Bogira concludes a heartbreaking two-part series about the racial violence that accompanied the integration of the Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood in 1971. The racism that greeted the neighborhood’s first black families was appalling; the violence that snapped out of it was a tragic, misguided waste. The person who comes out looking the best is the one who lost the most. It’s incredibly sad, and well worth reading for a reminder of attitudes and actions that aren’t long buried.

Crybabies About Color

Music

The Brookings Insitution has published a report, “What It Means to Be an American: Attitudes in an Increasingly Diverse America Ten Years After 9/11.” It’s an interesting read; there are some good points about religious freedom (and some distressing views of Muslims). But the real kicker for me was this:

Nearly half (46 percent) of Americans agree that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.

As a white guy, I hear this sentiment a lot from people who think I agree with them. And it drives me crazy like no other, the idea that minority groups that have long experienced crippling discrimination are somehow on par with one of the most privileged groups in the history of the world.

Today’s American society is more accepting of people from minority backgrounds, which is great. Things have changed a lot even from when I was a kid. And sure, there are underprivileged white people. If you’re on the wrong side of the the class divide, it can be developmentally crippling, much like our country’s long history of racial discrimination.

But like the poisonous “producer/parasite” bullshit or the idea that poor-as-dirt welfare families are the ones really living the good life, this “minorities are the real racists” argument is a pathetic distraction from everything that’s really happening in country to make average people poorer and more desperate.

Who’s pushing the distraction? The report shares this as well:

Nearly 7-in-10 Americans who say they most trust Fox News say that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. In stark contrast, less than 1-in-4 Americans who most trust public television for their news agree.

The Long Game

Politics

By Thomas’s reading, Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act, to say nothing of Medicare and Medicaid, might all be unconstitutional. “Justices can be influential by indicating to lawyers the boundaries of what’s possible,” Eugene Volokh, a professor at U.C.L.A. School of Law and a widely read blogger, said. “There is conventional wisdom about what’s possible, like ‘Whatever you think about the Commerce Clause, no one is going to go back to the pre-1937 approach,’ or ‘The Second Amendment is a closed issue.’ Thomas has shown that sometimes the conventional wisdom is wrong.”

Jeffrey Toobin has a fairly terrifying story in the New Yorker about Clarence Thomas’ judicial philosophy and growing influence. “Partners” outlines how Thomas’ strict originalist approach is reopening Supreme Court rulings that have been thought settled for decades.

In aligning his decisions with the Tea Party political maneuvering of his wife, Thomas is leading a block to undermine the regulatory framework that enables many of our governing institutions.

Toobin also touches on the institutions, money and training networks that have brought this viewpoint to prominence. It’s sobering to think how little of a response has been organized by proponents of shared, effective government.