"You can keep your plan" In Context

Obama is not as strong a communicator as I would have liked, not because he isn't good at breaking things down, but because he appears rather unthoughtful when it comes to rhetoric. He's at his best when he's in 'teacher mode,' explaining something complicated in comprehensible terms; but conservatives hate this, and attack him for it. Conservatives don't like being 'lectured' and 'pointed at,' transforming miraculously into liberal, politically-correct, cultural studies pedagogy experts when they feel Obama is playing too much sage-on-the-stage rather than guide-on-the-side. So Obama's communication style is fraught, to say the least; and not all of his own doing.

Among his communication blunders is the 'if you like your health care plan, you can keep your plan' thing. Of course we know now that the ACA will prompt insurance companies to modify their services, which means they might cancel or revamp certain plans. And of course Obama and his administration knew this all along.

What I'd like to explain here, though, is the context of the 'you can keep your plan' claim, which our worthless political media simply aren't covering. This is a short post, because this is a simple explanation.

Conservatives primarily, but also plenty of establishment media liberals, are claiming that Obama willfully lied and misled the American public about the prospects of not being able to keep our health plans. It's not that simple. If you recall, when Obama was fighting to sell the ACA to the American public, and conservatives were fighting to tarnish and sabotage the ACA, conservatives were making up the lie that the ACA will result in 'government takeover' of your health insurance. The conservative line was that the ACA would force you from your private insurance plan onto a 'government-run' insurance plan; hence, 'government takeover.'

Obama's 'you can keep your plan' comments weren't just uttered in a vacuum; they were a response to the conservative lie about 'government takeover.' When Obama said 'you can keep your plan,' he meant 'you can keep your private insurance; the government will not force you onto government insurance.' Putting aside the fact that, ridiculous as it is that I have to point this out, THE ACA PROVIDES NO ADDITIONAL GOVERNMENT INSURANCE, outside of Medicare and Medicaid, which long since existed, Obama's comments about 'keeping your plan' were meant to ease anxiety that was nefariously cultivated by conservative talking points about 'government-run healthcare.'

The difference here is subtle but crucial: 'you can keep your private insurance' versus 'you can keep the same specific insurance plan your private insurer has always offered' are actually very different claims. What matters especially is that the ACA itself--Obama's signature law--is not the thing that takes away certain specific private insurance plans. There's nothing in the law that says insurance companies must change their offerings. Instead, it's insurance companies who decided to change their offerings in reaction to the law. They might have done this to send a political message, that they'd make it difficult on anyone who tries to regulate them; or they might have done this simply to adjust costs and revenues and offer plans that are more commercially viable for themselves. In either case, the not-at-all-insignificant point is that with or without the ACA, insurance companies have always reserved the right to change and manipulate their offerings. They might be using the ACA as an excuse, but changing plans--and what their plans cover--on customers is old news for insurance companies; they do it practically every year, as anyone knows who bothers reading that big packet of information they send every year.

I do think that Obama should have been more clear about what he meant when he said the 'you can keep your plan' stuff. He should have preempted the insurance companies maneuver and explained to the American people that private insurers will use the ACA as an excuse to modify their offerings, but the exchanges will provide enough of a market that those whose plans are cancelled by private insurers or modified or re-priced will nevertheless be able to find a different plan at the same price point offering the same coverage. Instead of 'you can keep your plan,' it should have been 'a more competitive insurance market means you can keep your value and your price point, even if your insurance company tries to modify your plan.'

Still, it's important to recognize that Obama didn't simply lie to the American public to get the ACA passed and the American people on board. He responded to a conservative lie that was meant to sabotage support for the ACA. Ironically, anyone who thought that 'you can keep your plan' meant not simply 'the government won't take over your private plan,' but 'I guarantee your insurance company won't change your plan' would have to believe that Obama is actually as draconian as conservatives claim he is: that he presumed to exercise direct control over what specific insurance products private companies would offer. Considering it's largely conservatives (and a few beltway liberals) who are trying to paint this thing as a colossal lie, perhaps it's not as ironic as I suggested.

Democrats are Conservatives and Conservatives are Lying

While political scientists like Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal have demonstrated the various ways in which US politics has shifted rightward over the years, this work lacks a crucial rhetorical component that would allow people to make actual meaning of this rightward shift. Statistics and charts say 'more right,' and journalists report it this way; but what does this actually mean? 'More right' from what? From 'the center'? What's 'the center,' then? I'm going to give it some meaning here.

Let's consider, to start, a broad political spectrum. On one side of that spectrum, the left side, is the belief that if we privatized nothing and had the government run all major institutions, we could live in a perfect utopia in which resources are distributed equitably, no inequality exists, and no poverty exists. This is, in other words, a communist utopia.

On the other side of that spectrum, then, is the belief that if we privatize everything, have the government run no major institutions, place no regulations on commerce, and leave everyone to his or her own unfettered business, we could live in a perfect utopia in which everyone has what they want, and no poverty exists, because the 'rising tide' of unregulated freedom 'lifts all boats.' This is, in other words, a libertarian-capitalist utopia.

Let's put these extremes aside for a moment and look at where our political discourse actually stands today in the US. Though conservatives call Democrats things like 'socialist' and 'communist,' actual Democratic policies tend to focus more on regulation than publicization of private institutions. Taking healthcare as an example, Democrats have employed in Obamacare a free-market solution to the problem of an out-of-control, under-regulated healthcare market. Notice that the move by Democrats isn't to render healthcare a state function--to render insurance, doctors, hospitals, and bidding on medical technology, devices, innovations, etc. functions of the government. Obamacare actually does the opposite: it finds a series of complicated work-arounds to address the problem of out-of-control healthcare spending precisely without bringing these under government control. Despite the amped-up rhetoric about Obamacare, it's a totally private-sector solution.

In fact, if you look at any other major Democratic policy, you'll find a similar trend. In 'finance reform,' for example, Democrats propose merely to follow through on regulatory laws already in place. On marriage equality, Democrats propose to scale back government regulation imposed upon same-sex couples. Democrats won't even touch campaign finance reform because it could introduce more government regulation into a very expensive marketplace of 'ideas.' These are just a few examples.

Broadly speaking, then, the function of Democrats in US political discourse is fundamentally conservative: Democrats simply try to put the breaks on processes that have spun out of control in the absence of effective government regulation. The Democrats are not communists--not even socialists; on the political spectrum, they're little more than soft regulators.

This is what conservatives used to be, too, by the way. The big differences between Democrats and Republicans for so many years in the 70s and 80s has been about whom to regulate more versus whom to regulate less. Even the 'rising tide lifts all boats' idiom is typically mis-attributed to Ronald Reagan and 'trickle-down economics,' though it was first a phrase used by John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Today's conservatives, however, bear little resemblance to even the Republican party of the recent past. With policies aimed at radically redistributing wealth upward through regressive tax policies, attempting to eliminate the income tax, slashing basic, previously uncontroversial government provisions (like Medicaid), attempting to privatize social security, attempting to abolish the IRS, the EPA, attempting to privatize huge tracts of government land and national parks, voting to shut down the government and allow the US government to default on its debt, rejecting minimum wage hikes or even the concept of a minimum wage, today's conservatives very clearly occupy a place farther to the right of center than do the Democrats left of center.

In fact, the political ideology of today's conservatives, by these policies I've listed above, which none of them will deny, is a near-perfect recapitulation of libertarian-capitalist utopianism.

Let me illustrate this another way. Democrats today acknowledge the reality that neither a far-left utopia nor a far-right utopia is tenable. Democrats aren't trying to put an end to the private sector. And in calling on the government to do some basic things for people in need--and to regulate markets that produce costly and dangerous negative externalities when left unregulated--Democrats are neither proposing to hand it all over to the government, nor pretending like clearing the government completely out of the way will produce a utopia. Conservatives, on the other hand, truly are proposing that if we get the government out of the way, we will have a utopia. Not just a better society; a utopia.

You might think I'm overstating this, but try this sometime: ask a conservative how they plan to address the reality of neediness, of the inevitable losers in the free-market system. If on one hand your conservative says it's not the government's role to dole out welfare for the needy, and on the other hand they say it's not the private sector's role to provide living wages or care for the poor, then who takes care of those who, whether out of laziness or personal defect, or out of circumstances (health, poor circumstances of birth, disability or injury, etc.) that get in the way, can't take care of themselves? If your conservative answers you not with a practical plan for what happens to these people and how to care for them, but with moralizing and abstract thinking (they 'should' be able to take care of themselves; they 'shouldn't' need handouts, etc.), you're talking to a utopianist. A utopianist doesn't want to recognize the reality of poverty and need and dangerous externalities IN ANY SYSTEM. They want either to moralize about what 'should' be the case--which ignores the reality of what IS the case--or they want to gloss right over the question and pretend like poverty and need and pollution and usury and monopolistic markets don't exist.

Either that, or they'll tell you that 'a rising tide lifts all boats.'

So here's the thing, the part about conservatives lying: the only way a conservative utopianist can get around the poverty of their ideology and sleep at night is by convincing themselves that taking away the welfare safety net, keeping wages low, flattening out the tax curve so poor people pay as much as rich people, giving tax breaks to rich people but punishing employment with payroll taxes, allowing insurance companies to discriminate against and deny services to sick people, and keeping those without insurance or access to basic healthcare uninsured and without access to healthcare, all of these policies are actually helping out the poorest and most vulnerable members of society.

This is the number one, biggest lie in contemporary US politics. Rather than admitting that a conservative utopianist ideology is bad for the poor and downtrodden, and that subscribers to a conservative utopianist ideology simply have no answer to the question 'how would you care for the inevitable losers in any system,' and simply care nothing for the poor but to moralize about what they 'should' and 'shouldn't' do, the conservative utopianist tells himself (and the rest of us) an enormous lie: it's all for their own good.

I could summon a shred of respect for a conservative utopianist who just comes out and says 'look, people should have to take care of themselves, that's their freedom and their responsibility too, so if you can't cut it for one reason or another, fuck you, you deserve to go hungry, get sick, and die, and so do your kids, because that's all on you.' I could. But I can't summon any respect for a politics that amounts to this crude dismissal of the needs of the indigent, but then, in some thin act of dissemblance, claims that all of this blatant disregard is in the service of the people being disregarded.

So the challenge stands to the conservative utopianist: even if you can convince yourself that a utopia could exist in which there are no poor people, no mentally ill, no sick or injured, no needy...and you sure as hell can't convince me of that...who takes care of these people, if not you, not the businesses you idolize, and not the government? Who sees to it, systematically, that our society doesn't systematically let people fall ill, mad, cold, hungry, drunk, and dead by the wayside?

The Compromises Before the Shutdown

The completely cynical position that the politicians of both sides of the shutdown are purely self-interested and equally to blame is one of the most intellectually lazy positions out there. It should stand to reason that just because both sides are flawed doesn't necessarily mean that both sides are equally flawed. The government shutdown is in many ways and in so many words the Republicans' fault. Nevertheless, conservatives have been working hard to spin the situation so it looks like Obama and the Democrats are the ones who won't compromise. Below you'll find the short history of Democratic compromise that the apparently amnesiac Right seems not to remember; in case you, too, have temporarily misplaced your mind.

Let's start with Obamacare, which was at least ostensibly the wedge issue that drove petulant conservatives to sabotage the US government.

Here's an indisputable fact: Obamacare's core features--making it illegal for insurers to deny coverage based on 'preexisting conditions'; the mandate to be insured, required so that healthy people don't opt out of the insurance exchanges; and government subsidies for low-income people--are also the core features of the 1989 health reform plan that was created at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. The core features of Obamacare, in other words, are not liberal policy; they're conservative policy.

In fact, that individual mandate that conservatives tried to render unconstitutional? That idea was introduced twice by Republicans in Congress in 1993.

Here's another indisputable fact: these same core features of the Heritage Foundation plan would later appear in Mitt Romney's implementation of that plan while governor of Massachusetts. Mitt Romney is a Republican, remember?

In fact, Mitt Romney is THE Republican who ran against Barack Obama in the last presidential election (if you recall). Then, conservatives were vocally concerned about Romney being their candidate, in large part because the smarter ones among them understood that it would look kind of strange and not very good for Romney to campaign against a health reform plan that he himself implemented. It's not that Romney was schizophrenic or something; he was just campaigning against Obama, the man who borrowed the core ideas from Romney's health reform plan, and from the conservative Heritage Foundation plan, and made it what we call, today, Obamacare.

Let's turn now to the broader history of compromise on health reform the led up to the recent government shutdown, now that we've established that Obamacare is unmistakably a conservative policy idea.

I know it's so long ago, but remember when Barack Obama was campaigning for President of the United States the first time? If you don't, here's another indisputable fact: Barack Obama ran on health reform as part of his platform. And he won. And the insane thing is, the second time he ran for president, he ran again on health reform, which still hadn't come into effect yet. And I'll be damned, he won again! Remember?!?!

In fact, when Obama started out with this health reform talk, what liberals really wanted was a single-payer system. That's where the negotiation started: with single-payer, which would be a truly nationalized means of healthcare insurance (though not a nationalized form of delivery of care; doctors would still be privatized). So when Obama and the Democrats floated the single-payer idea, conservatives went apoplectic. The Democrats calculated, probably correctly, that they wouldn't be able to pass a bill that enacted single-payer healthcare.

So they went back to the drawing board, and they came up with something called the public option. Remember the public option? The idea was that everyone would have the choice of private insurance, but on top of that we'd offer everyone the option to buy into a government-run insurance plan. It wouldn't be 'nationalized health care' unless you opted into the government plan. So Obama and the Democrats in Congress floated that idea, and negotiated it with Congressional Republicans, and realized that even that relatively liberal idea, a compromise on single-payer, mortified Republicans.

Yet again Democrats calculated that it would be in their best interest to compromise another liberal idea, and took one more rather significant step to the right. That was the point at which they arrived at what became Obamacare.

Just to reiterate, in case your memory is failing you since you read the first half of this article: Obamacare is Romneycare is Heritagecare, a center-right health policy idea.

So to be clear, amid the process of winning two presidential elections, Obama moved all the way to the right, adopting a conservative idea, for the signature legislation of his presidency. If you don't call that a compromise, I don't know what the word could possibly mean to you.

But it didn't stop there. Obamacare was written and rewritten, debated and redebated, disputed and redisputed, dragged through endless bipartisan committees. In fact, it went through the same kind of rigorous process that so many laws go through WHEN THEY BECOME LAWS. Which is to say, Congress, with Democratic majorities (because this is how elections work) passed the bill into law. Republicans immediately started spinning about how Obamacare was 'rammed down our throats,' except for the brief history I've just recounted above.

In the end, then, all the bitter disputation leading up to the government shutdown--all the whining about lack of compromise by Democrats--turns out to be little more in context than the last gasps of conservatives who lost both the elections and the policy battle.

If you want to win on the policy front, here's my suggestion: win the elections.

Build Me An Ethics Robot

Technologists are always portrayed as future-oriented, on the cutting edge of the major questions of the age. But if we examine this ubiquitous representation of the "innovative" and "disruptive" world of technology, this characterization couldn't be much further from the truth. These fields are on the cutting edge of making money and selling you something, but not much else.

Notice how the power of technological innovation is always described not in terms of potency but of potential. It's always the future of technology that will revolutionize the world. But just how revolutionized have we been?

Sure, the landscape looks a lot different today than it did 100 years ago. We've seen changes and innovations commensurate with what one might expect of 100 years' worth of human existence. But is it truly "revolutionary" to have quicker and more efficient ways of encountering the same old human problems? Even something as breathtakingly consequential as the domestication of electricity, something that today none of us could imagine our lives without, has solved only minor problems in the grander scheme of human development: has electricity decreased poverty or helped enable it? Has it eliminated warfare and sectarian difference, or has it helped us develop new tools with which to battle out our differences?

I recognize that I'm pushing it here; I'm not a luddite, and I'm not anti-electricity. I'm not anti-technology or anti-innovation. What I am is skeptical of the grandest claims of technofuturism: the idea that it's technologists who are on the cutting edge of solving the world's major problems.

This grand claim of technofuturism suffers from a major fallacy: the idea that facts can do things.

In my circle of educated liberals, I'm continually perplexed by how perplexed others are that data and facts can't change people's minds. Every so often we'll see a scientist writing with self-righteous indignation about how despite overwhelming scientific evidence of man-made climate change, all these ideological morons (that's what they mean, though they don't write it this honestly) still won't get on board. The same goes for articles making the same claim about religion: if only these Bible-thumping mouth-breathers could wake up to the facts, they'd abandon their stupid religion. Almost laughably (if it weren't so sad), the same people making these complaints double down on their faith in the transformative power of facts, citing more research on why people aren't moved by fact. Their next il/logical step is to try to find ways to better understand why people don't respond as readily to facts, in hope of one day being able to move the earth and transform human kind simply by saying 'this is the case' (which sounds strikingly similar to 'this is the word of god'). The reporting of such research on why people don't respond to facts as scientists wish they would is presented as itself a scientific discovery, as opposed to a small piece of sound reasoning. Everywhere self-righteous people who are also intelligent fail to understand why facts themselves are incapable of changing people's minds.

I don't think it's a revolutionary insight to understand why this is obviously the case. Knowing that climate change is man-made doesn't answer the very important questions of what values underlie a decision to do something about it versus not, and what policies we should implement to recognize such value conflicts. Likewise, if someone has chosen to have faith in something unknowable as a way of structuring their life, there's not a single scientific determination or technological development that is or ever will be that will change that person's mind on fact alone. The only way anyone could delude themselves into thinking the contrary would be if they believed, as a person of faith, so strongly in the ultimate transformative power of facts and technology that they've beome blind to the obvious.

These fundamental questions of faith, values, ethics, governance, and coexistence are old problems that facts and technology can assist in solving, but can never solve alone. They're problems that have not been "revolutionized" by any technological development, but certainly disrupted and complicated by technological developments. And the people on the cutting edge of these kinds of questions simply aren't scientists and technologists.

If it were the techno-optimists and factmongers on the cutting edge of these problems, they'd be working on something other than, primarily, ways to make money on consumer goods, or ways to blow shit up or protect us against getting our shit blown up. They'd be building me something I've always wanted: my ethics robot.

See, once these cutting-edge geniuses trained their efforts on one of the world's most fundamental problems, they could build me a robot that always knows the right thing to do, simultaneously in any context (universal) but also in every specific context (historical). By bringing my ethics robot to Washington, I could begin using the robot to solve all the world's problems. Do we intervene in Syria, ethics robot? Should abortion be legal, ethics robot? Should we spend more money on penis pill R&D or on food technologies for the food-insecure, ethics robot? What should we do about climate change, ethics robot? Is religion good, ethics robot? Am I a good person, ethics robot?

I mean, if these ultra-visionary technogeniuses can make me an app that tracks my sleep rhythms by listening to my breathing and wakes me up at the right time, or a tv that knows what I want to watch, or telescope that shows me galaxies lightyears away, surely they can solve once and for all time the simple question of what's the right thing to do?

No? Oh well then.

Is it Racist for White People to Like Black Music, Wear NWA T-Shirts?

Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon has written a piece on the retail chain, Forever 21, marketing NWA, Notorious B.I.G. and 'straight outta Compton' t-shirts to its predominately white consumer base. Her basic claim is that marketing such materials to suburban white people is a form of cultural expropriation, like when the 'Harlem Shake' meme went viral, depicting groups of mostly white college kids dressed like clowns, flailing around and air-humping in ways that bear no resemblance to the Harlem shake dance. For Williams, marketing NWA t-shirts to white people amounts to what Lindy West calls 'hipster racism':

And doesn’t it bother you even a little that these big chain stores selling all those Biggie and Tupac and Cypress Hill and ODB and Tribe Called Quest and not even employing non-white models? Doesn’t that make your penchant for irony seem petty and insulting? Because it is. And if you don’t know, now you know.

I have two major issues with Williams' position: 1) she's painting cultural expropriation with a brush so wide that it deflates the term; 2) she's unwittingly tethering the 'ghetto' image to, what, any race but Caucasian? Putting aside what it suggests that Williams drops into her article the most cringeworthy and ironically used ghettoisms (like 'yo' and 'street cred') intermixed with mean-girl-isms like 'fug' (this is the linguistic equivalent of Forever 21's marketing campaign), her argument only reinforces a backward divide between popular culture that white people are allowed to consume and popular culture reserved for everyone else.

First of all, a white person wearing an NWA t-shirt is not an instance of cultural expropriation. I can see why knowingly marketing this stuff to a white suburban consumer audience grates--I'm outraged by all kinds of marketing tactics too--but we're not talking about cherrypicking, distorting, and ethnicizing a minority culture here (the way that, for example, the 'Harlem Shake' meme, or the hawking of 'Native American' headdresses along the interstate, do). We're talking about jumping on the bandwagon that has been the hip-hop mega-industry for decades now--a bandwagon that got rolling when urban artists tried desperately to break out of predominantly local, black clubs, parties, radio stations, tv stations, and into 'mainstream' American discourse so they could get their stories heard. There was a time when the Grammy Awards didn't televise the hip-hop awards section of the show--just cut it right out of the national programming. These artists have been fighting for a long time to bring hip-hop from the margins to the center of the musical universe, and in many ways (not all certainly) they've accomplished this, quite impressively.

It might occur to Williams that Notorious B.I.G., NWA, and Lil' Wayne actually have broad fan-bases and lots of completely un-ironic white fans, in the same way that many people in London follow the New York Yankees despite having never set foot in New York beyond Time Square, or kids wear Ramones shirts despite having never been authentically part of the punk rock scene that came of age before these kids were born. Williams' move is to essentialize the 'authentic hip-hop experience,' disturbingly along racial lines; yet I wonder if Williams is as offended by the examples of inauthenticity I gave above, or by Urban Outfitters' marketing of the California bear t-shirt to lots and lots of people who aren't from California? Would she have a problem with me teaching Jay-Z's memoir, Decoded, to my predominantly white college students, or must this artifact of the ghetto only be taught and marketed to those with enough 'street cred' (g-cards?)? The double standard people like Williams apply when it comes to rap--the only genre for which we demand some kind of authentic, essentialized tie, while we're happy to excuse a white audience at a performance of Dreamgirls, or a white audience at a Basquiat gallery--suggests to me a more troubling attitude about race and art in those who embrace it than in the targets of its criticism.

Should marketing be a more ethical, culturally sensitive, and culturally responsive practice overall? Yes (though I'm not holding my breath). Should chains like Forever 21 veer clear of the Abercrombie and Fitch model model and include a greater diversity of models in their marketing, giving a greater diversity of customers the chance to imagine themselves in the clothes? Yes, absolutely. But why, pray tell, must hip-hop apparel in particular appear on black models? We already know that authenticity can't be a viable test for what's an acceptable screen-printed t-shirt to wear (we're not talking about Benetton-style marketing of dashikis to white girls, though perhaps we should be): widespread acceptance of Londoner Yanks fans, millennial Ramones fans, preppy Metallica fans, etc. all disprove the authenticity standard for what t-shirts we can wear without being taken to task for being poseurs (or worse). So all that's left to justify Williams' argument is the essentializing of the 'ghetto' experience along racial lines. The ghetto experience (the one we're talking about here) could be considered a black experience historically; but why should this be essentialized in a way that only reinforces ghettoization (in the literal sense: to isolate or segregate a group to a confined space or cultural field)?

In other words, I put the question back to Williams: what does it mean to single out black bodies for the burden of representing 'ghetto' rap culture?

Cultural expropriation is a tricky phenomenon, and not all instances of 'crossover' are also instances of appropriation. There's political potential in dwelling on the margins; but as Williams seems to forget, keeping that potential on the margins is the very definition of marginalization.

Stop the 'Generation Why' Blaming

You've probably come across this thing making the social media rounds, describing how people of 'generation y/why,' the millennial generation, are unhappy: because we were told from a young age that we're special, unique snowflakes, and we can be anything we want to be, and then we stumbled into the harsh, cruel world and found a massive disparity between the fairytale we've been fed by our baby boomer parents and the cold, unyielding truth: shit is a struggle.

This is an old, tired argument that's been around for a while before some clever person made stick figure cartoons and colored graphs about it, turning it into an internet phenomenon (apparently this is all it takes to transform a mundane, establishment idea into an internet phenomenon, but that's for another article).

I'm here to tell you today why this argument is bullshit. But before I do, I'll show you my hand. I'm an early gen-y/millennial who is sympathetic to the struggles of my generation. But I'm also a professor who teaches students who are of the same generation, just the latter half of the range that those who study gen-y typically use. So you can say that my defense of gen-y is just another instance of typical gen-y entitlement; but then you should keep in mind that, unlike most of you, I have to put up with this generation's shit all the time--the young ones, and especially the rich ones, who maybe need an extension on the assignment this week because the NGO they founded in Mali during the summer after they graduated from high school is having a really important board meeting.

Further, I'm not a sociologist or demographer of any kind, and I'm skeptical from the outset of the value of making claims about generational characteristics. What I am more accustomed to studying, though, is the way cultural and historical circumstances shape the way we perceive what's going on in the world. In light of this I have a few things to say about this grand theory of the coddled gen-y yuppie.

The first is that just about anything that's said about the 'gen-y yuppie' can also be said of yuppie subculture more generally, leading me to believe that feeling entitled, feeling empty, and chasing never ending dreams as a consequence of these is more a facet of yuppie subculture and other cultures of privilege than a generational particular. Young, privileged, educated professionals of any generation are in a striving phase of life. When the country used to fight global wars in which not just the poorest and most disenfranchised people were part of the war effort, but everyone went to war in a way, there were obviously fewer yuppies; the would-be yuppies of 'the greatest generation' were at war. Why don't yuppies go to war today? It would be easy to throw this question on the bonfire of vanity we project onto gen-y yuppies: we're too entitled and precious to fight in a war. But there's something else we're forgetting: war today isn't something we do as a last resort to a problem; war today is an industry. We don't fight wars we believe in; we assign people who have few other options to fight wars that special business and political interests want to fight. The point here is that, whereas in times past young people could find fulfillment in military or civil rights causes larger than themselves, young people of gen-y have had to look outside of military engagement to find our defining generational causes. This is partly why among gen-y people, issues like gay marriage, the environment, and international development are popular causes; and this is why the privileged, educated, cause-oriented gen-y person is probably a yuppie rather than a soldier: the jobs that allegedly transform the world these days are all yuppie jobs.

Of course, this isn't necessarily a good thing. Because these yuppie jobs are also part of a dramatic historical change in the way people are employed, and what employers expect of their employees. Which brings me to my second point: everything is corporatized.

A gen-y person grew up in a world in which the concepts of civil society, civic responsibility, public education, privacy, and family cohesion are mostly things of the past. Everything is corporatized, from education and non-profit work to media and politics. Gen-y lives in a world in which even currencies (Bitcoin, Amazon dollars, etc.) are privatized. Employers pay investigative firms to stalk employees on social media; employers administer drug tests for employees with no criminal record or evidence of illegal drug use; employers give employees smartphones, and pay the bills, so that they can call on employees for work at any time, and expect a prompt response; employers have created the unpaid internship while simultaneously requiring the prestige of a college degree for employment. Think about this for a second. Employers today say you need a college degree for a job, but reject the idea that a college degree prepares you for one; so you must work unpaid labor to get 'experience.' Meanwhile, amid this deliberate shift to reallocate prestige in opportunities for unpaid labor rather than opportunities for education and intellectual, civic, and humanistic development, wages have remained stagnant for decades while cost of living and GDP have risen, putting gen-y people and in many cases our parents in the position of having to maintain our standards of living through debt rather than real earnings. This is not just a gen-y thing. The entire US economy runs on debt, not on real production of value, goods, and services. Further, as economies became increasingly globalized, corporatized, and debt-driven all at the same time, while socioeconomic inequality hit record highs by multiples, the prospect of job security, let alone career security, began to diminish. This is the case not just for millennials, but for anyone of any generation seeking employment today.

So where does gen-y fit into all this. It's a lot simpler than the grand psychoanalytic theory of inflated self worth. Gen-y is simply the most vulnerable generation in a time of political, economic, and environmental failure. The people running these failure ships into the giant iceberg of fucked are not gen-y people. The people expecting their young employees to be peachy about all this, to tolerate low wages despite high qualifications, are not gen-y people. The people complaining about gen-y people are people with lots of experience--most of it experience fucking something up royally--who can't answer the demands of a generation who simply want better for the world, not just themselves. One acquires such an idealistic outlook when raised during a time in which prosperity and hope turns to shit, all before your eyes in the years in which you're barely old enough to drive a car, let alone do something about the fall of Rome. And you know what? For a generation that supposedly has had everything handed to it, why aren't we talking about everything this generation has had handed to it? Dysfunctional politics, crushing debt, deregulation and game-fixing for the greatest rent-seekers in the world, perpetual warfare feeding a gluttonous military-industrial complex, the abandonment of public education, the rotting scraps of what was a civil society, utter abandonment of both personal responsibility for elites and the public obligation to care for those less fortunate, personal data mining and the mass violation of basic privacy rights, off-shore accounts and off-shore torture cells in which due process doesn't apply, and countless other fundamental failures. These are the things we've been handed. This is not the first time things have gone to shit just in time for a generation to come of age; which is why gen-y is not unique in its demands for a better world, and why prior generations are not unique in calling younger generations a bunch of entitled pansies. There's simply no reason to reify some notion of the particular specialness of gen-y as a generation of the particularly special.

Lest you read this as a complaint, let me remind you that it's a defense. But it's only a defense. Unfortunately I don't have high hopes for the ability of my generation to turn things around. This brings me to my closing point: when systemic dysfunction reaches a certain degree of entrenchment, it's like a cancer in metastasis. Good people can fight the good fight (and we're definitely not all good), but it won't help much. To fix these problems we need a transgenerational effort. We need even more idealistic gen-y millennials to reject the worst of yuppie and corporate cultures along with whatever prefab notions of 'happiness' that allegedly come with (puts on gruff voice) building a stable career, buying a home, etc. There's no rational reason why gen-y should settle for the hand it's been dealt, as though we haven't inherited a world on fire.

PMB Responds to the Goldman Sachs Guide to Manhood

You might have seen this Goldman Sachs 'unofficial' guide to being a man. PMB responds point by point below:

GS: Stop talking about where you went to college.
PMB: Stop talking about what it means to be a man.

GS: Always carry cash. Keep some in your front pocket.
PMB: I stopped carrying cash after the second time I was mugged at gunpoint.

GS: Rebel from business casual. Burn your khakis and wear a suit or jeans.
PMB: Under no circumstances should a suit and jeans be conflated as like solutions to a sartorial problem. If you're going somewhere and you can't decide whether to wear a suit or jeans, you're missing something.

GS: It's OK to trade the possibility of your 80s and 90s for more guaranteed fun in your 20s and 30s.
PMB: Is it OK to trade 50% of the hours of every day of your life in your 20s and 30s for a cubicle at an investment bank?

GS: The best public restrooms are in hotels: The St. Regis in New York, Clairidge's in London, The Fullerton in Singapore, to name a few.
PMB: Privatize public restrooms!

GS: Never stay out after midnight three nights in a row...unless something really good comes up on the third night.
PMB: Night 1: call girls and blow. Night 2: call girls and blow. Night 3: call girls and blow...again? Oh AND karaoke? You don't say! Fuck it, I'm down, bro.

GS: You will regret your tattoos.
PMB: I would too if my tattoos were all quotes from Ayn Rand and Bret Easton Ellis.

GS: Never date an ex of your friend.
PMB: Because at Goldman Sachs, we're all about loyalty.

GS: Join Twitter; become your own curator of information.
PMB: @BrockMan69 where we drinking tonight PUSSY #infocuration

GS: If riding the bus doesn't incentivize you to improve your station in life, nothing will.
PMB: It was all a dream / I used to read GQ Magazine / Seersucker on the bus don't stay clean / Mark Rothko on my wall / every Saturday Bellini brunch next to a shopping mall...

GS: Time is too short to do your own laundry.
PMB: Time is too short to brush your own teeth.

GS: When the bartender asks, you should already know what you want to drink.
PMB: Your bartenders should already know what you want to drink without you having to ask. C.f. 'be a regular at more than one bar.'

GS: If you perspire, wear a damn undershirt.
PMB: If you don't perspire, see a doctor.

GS: You don't have to like baseball, but you should understand the concept of what a pitcher's ERA means. Approach life similarly.
PMB: ERA = Earned Runs / Innings Pitched * 9; lower ERAs reflect greater pitching performance. So if I'm getting your drift, we should pay the pitchers with the highest ERAs massive end-of-year bonuses for failing at their jobs?

GS: When people don't invite you to a party, you really shouldn't go. And sometimes even when you are invited, you shouldn't go.
PMB: And sometimes when you really have to go you shouldn't go at a party. Find the nearest hotel.

GS: People are tired of you being the funny, drunk guy.
PMB: People are tired of you being the guy who squeezes really hard during a handshake to assert yourself.

GS: When in doubt, always kiss the girl.
PMB: "Her eyes say no, but they mean yes."

GS: Tip more than you should.
PMB: Feel entitled to assert your superiority over service staff by reminding them that you can spare the money.

GS: You probably use your cell phone too often and at the wrong moments.
PMB: You DEFINITELY use your cell phone too often and at the wrong moments.

GS: Buy expensive sunglasses. Superficial? Yes, but so are the women judging you. And it tells these women you appreciate nice things and are responsible enough not to lose them.
PMB: Try signaling responsibility in more substantive ways than the sunglasses you wear, and maybe you won't be surrounded by such superficial women all the time.

GS: If you want a nice umbrella, bring a shitty one to church.
PMB: I have a PhD from Oxford and I have no idea what that means.

GS: Do 50 push-ups, sit-ups, and dips before you shower each morning.
PMB: And don't forget to wear the tank top of the gym you belong to while you're out walking your dog, bro.

GS: Eat brunch with friends at least every other weekend. Leave Rusty and Junior at home.
PMB: Are Rusty and Junior children or pets? And are they self-sufficient left at home?

GS: Be a regular at more than one bar.
PMB: But not after midnight more than three nights in a row...unless something really good comes up.

GS: Act like you'e been there before. It doesn't matter if it's in the end zone at the Super Bowl or on a private plane.
PMB: Or in an IRS auditor's interrogation cubicle.

GS: A glass of wine or two with lunch will not ruin you day.
PMB: But when you fuck up royally on a credit default swap because the combination of those lunch wines and the Ambien you took at 4am last night clouded your judgment, you'll ruin someone else's day for sure.

GS: It's better if old men cut your hair. Ask for Sunny at the Mandarin Oriental Barbershop in Hong Kong. He can share his experiences of the Japanese occupation, or just give you a copy of Playboy.
PMB: Yeah, I've been to Hong Kong; never left the Mandarin Oriental, but I'm sure you believe I'm a real world traveler from this yarn.

GS: Learn how to fly-fish.
PMB: Learn how to clean and cook a fish.

GS: No selfies. Aspire to experience photo-worthy moments in the company of beautiful women.
PMB: In other words, never update your aspirations from those of your adolescence.

GS: Own a handcrafted shotgun. It's a beautiful thing.
PMB: Place it next to your leatherbound book collection atop a shelf of rich mahogany, behind where you keep the fine single-malt scotch that you ignorantly drink with ice, proximate to the other cliches in your abode.

GS: There's always another level. Just be content knowing that you are still better off than most who have ever lived.
PMB: Be content, or be 'incentivized' to reach that next level after bus pass?

GS: You can get away with a lot more if you're the one buying the drinks.
PMB: As if you're the one buying the women, I'm sure you know.

GS: Ask for a salad instead of fries.
PMB: A sedentary lifestyle requires sacrifices.

GS: Don't split a check.
PMB: Why?

GS: Pretty women who are unaccompanied want you to talk to them.
PMB: Not the ugly ones though, right? Ugly women are allowed to have their own desires without you projecting yours onto them?

GS: Cobblers will save your shoes. So will shoe trees.
PMB: Do you tip a cobbler?

GS: When a bartender buys you a round, tip double.
PMB: Accept no acts of generosity without using money to leverage feelings of superiority and diminish the acts of others.

GS: The cliche is that having money is about not wasting time. But in reality, money is about facilitating spontaneity.
PMB: If you can't facilitate spontaneity without money, that the truth is that money only enables your lack of imagination.

GS: Be spontaneous.
PMB: Spend money.

GS: Find a Times New Roman in the streets and a Wingdings in the sheets. She exists.
PMB: A man of true refinement seeks a Garamond, and understands what this means.

GS: Piercings are liabilities in fights.
PMB: Investment bankers are liabilities in trying to have a night out where fights are avoided.

GS: Do not use an electric razor.
PMB: Time is too short to shave yourself.

GS: Desserts are for women. Order one and pretend you don't mind that she's eating yours.
PMB: And remember: salads are for men.

GS: Buy a tuxedo before you are thirty. Stay that size.
PMB: While you're at it, learn how to tie your own bow tie. All these fancy pre-tied men can't even operate the tools of their own vanity.

GS: One girlfriend at a time is probably enough.
PMB: Yeah, probably.

GS: #StopItWithTheHashtags
PMB: Hashtags are so un-curatorial.

GS: Your ties should be rolled and placed in a sectioned tie drawer.
PMB: Time is too short to curate your ties.

GS: Throw parties. But have someone else clean up the next day.
PMB: If ever there were a metaphor for investment banking, this is it.

GS: You may only request one song from the DJ.
PMB: What if it's R. Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet" in multiple parts? Is that like a loophole, like carried interest?

GS: Measure yourself only against your previous self.
PMB: Invest in all-natural male enhancement.

GS: Take more pictures. With a camera.
PMB: But no selfies. And only in the company of beautiful women, in photo-worthy moments.

GS: Place-dropping is worse than name-dropping.
PMB: So please disregard what I said previously about hotels in Hong Kong, New York, London, and Singapore (if my accounting is correct; but we know you don't care much about correct accounting).

GS: When you admire the work of artists or writers, tell them. And spend money to acquire their work.
PMB: No wonder every single done-up Hoboken apartment has the same shitty artwork on the walls, and Business Insider's list of 35 books to read at least once in a lifetime is a high school English syllabus.

GS: Your clothes do not match. They go together.
PMB: They go together to the Korean guy who does your laundry and has infinite time.

GS: Yes, of course you have to buy her dinner.
PMB: She's not sleeping with you otherwise.

GS: Staying angry is a waste of energy.
PMB: So is holding the debts of people with no money.

GS: Revenge can be a good way of getting over anger.
PMB: See above, then reflect.

GS: If she expects the person you are 20% of the time, 100% of the time, then she doesn't want you.
PMB: If Jane is driving down the highway at 50 miles per hour on the way to Jeff's house, and Jeff lives 10 miles away from Jane, how long will it take Jane to get to Jeff's house?

GS: Always bring a bottle of something to the party.
PMB: Human blood.

GS: Avoid that 'last' whiskey. You've probably had enough.
PMB: We know because there's vomit on your suit. I'm stating to come around to this not doing your own lanudry thing...

GS: Don't use the world 'closure' or ever expect it in real life. There may still be a mortally wounded Russian mobster roaming the woods of south Jersey, but we'll never know.
PMB: But isn't 'closure' part of 'foreclosure'? See this is going to be problematic.

GS: If you are wittier than you are handsome, avoid loud clubs.
PMB: Always avoid loud clubs.

GS: Drink outdoors. And during the day. And sometimes by yourself.
PMB: Drink in a house, with a mouse, in a box, with a fox...in the dark, in the rain...

GS: Date women outside our social set. You'll be surprised.
PMB: So will their friends when you walk into the Raven sporting a tie clip and throwing your credit card down at a cash bar.

GS: If it's got velvet ropes and lines, walk away unless you know someone.
PMB: Unless they're lines of cocaine.

GS: You cannot have a love affair with whiskey because whiskey will never love you back.
PMB: At lest whiskey will fuck you.

GS: Feigning unpretentiousness is worse than being pretentious. Cut it out with the vintage Polo and that '83 Wagoneer in Nantucket.
PMB: Cut it out with Nantucket.

GS: The New Yorker is not high-brow. Neither is The Economist.
PMB: You're not high-brow unless you've read periodicals from before 1800.

GS: If you believe in evolution, you should know something about how it works.
PMB: Like for starters, evolution is not a 'belief.'

GS: No one cares if you are offended, so stop it.
PMB: "I'm entitled not to feel guilty for offending you."

GS: Never take an ex back. She tried to do better and is settling with you.
PMB: It may be that being settled for is your best option.

GS: Eating out alone can be magnificent. Find a place where you can sit at the bar.
PMB: Because your ego is too fragile to be seen alone at a table.

GS: Read more. It allows you to borrow someone else's brain, and will make you more interesting at a dinner party--provided that you don't initiate conversation with 'so, who are you reading.'
PMB: Don't be afraid to show off your sensitive side.

GS: Ignore the boos. They usually come from the cheap seats.
PMB: Validate all actions arising from your will, regardless of the consequences they inflict on others, by creating an axiom that says poor people aren't worth listening to.

GS: Hookers aren't cool, and remember, the free ones are a lot more expensive.
PMB: Did you catch the subtle dig at women who court rich men who court women who court rich men?

GS: Don't ever say 'it is what it is.'
PMB: Say 'it is what it isn't,' and maybe they'll actually buy a share of that junk.

GS: Start a wine collection for your kids when they are born. Add a few cases every year without telling them. It'll make a phenomenal gift in twenty years.
PMB: In twenty years your kid will be so spoiled and entitled that they'll wonder why you only got them a 200-case, 20-year-old collection when Michaela's mom got her 500 cases of wine and car for her super sweet 16.

GS: Don't gamble if loosing $100 is going to piss you off.
PMB: *$100 of your own money, that is. Only gamble with other people's money.

GS: Remember, 'rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men.'
PMB: It's easier to be guided by the rules rather than constrained by them if you're the one making them up as you go along.

No, Reza Aslan Didn't Misrepresent His Credentials

In the fallout of Lauren Green's awful interview with (or should I say at?) Reza Aslan (which I've written about here), we've seen a couple people come forward to make the argument that in the interview Aslan misrepresents his credentials as a scholar of the history of religion. At First Things, Emeritus Professor of Political Science Matthew Franck makes the claim, as does an indignant Joe Carter at Patheos.

I'm weighing in here because the claim that Aslan misrepresents his scholarly credentials in the context of the Fox News interview is so silly that it could only be made by someone looking to score cheap and meaningless 'gotcha' points amid a politically charged controversy. And before I go any further, let's note that Aslan is invoking his scholarly credentials to satisfy the question of why he would be *interested* in writing about the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

The arguments of Franck and Carter would appear to center on:

A) That Alsan has a BA in religion from Santa Clara University (for which he wrote a senior thesis on the gospel of Mark), a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard, a MFA in Fiction from Iowa, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Santa Barbara (for which he wrote a dissertation on 20th century Islamic social movements). In other words, that Aslan doesn't have a Ph.D. in history.

B) That he's a professor of Creative Writing at UC Riverside (not a professor of religion or history)

Let me explain why these arguments are absurd.

Carter's article is a good place to start, where he poses two rhetorical questions so laughable that they could pass for academic parody: "Why would Aslan claim he has a Ph.D. in history when his degree is in sociology? Does he not understand the difference between the two degrees?"

Well, Carter evidently doesn't understand either the differences nor the similarities between these degrees. The field of sociology, for example, is rather starkly divided between quantitative sociologists who do more 'social science' research akin to the work that dominates political science and economics departments, and cultural sociologists whose work often ranges into historical research. Aslan's Ph.D. in sociology fits rather clearly into the latter, preparing him well to do historical research on religions. Only someone entirely unfamiliar with academic credentialing and doctoral training in these disciplines would ask the questions that Carter does. Either that, or only someone looking to score cheap political points would willfully ignore the wide practice of cross- and interdisciplinary research training and methods in doctoral work and beyond, particularly in social science and humanities fields that often need to gather evidence from across disciplinary boundaries to make convincing arguments.

Carter goes on to complain that "most academic historians as well as academic sociologists would take offense at the idea that a sociology of religions degree and a history degree are interchangeable." "Interchangeable" is itself a misrepresentation of the situation, but I'm curious about which academics Carter spoke with before making this claim. Because I can't imagine any but the most petty and territorial would argue that someone whose research field is so clearly 'religion' and who has a Ph.D. in either the cultural history of religion (from a sociology department) or the cultural history of religion (from a history department) has no business writing about the cultural history of religion.

We should keep in mind here what Carter and Franck seem to want to neglect: what we call departments and degrees is more a matter of heuristics than 'essential' qualities of academic training and methodology. For example, some universities put the history department under 'social sciences' with sociology, political science, economics, and maybe anthropology. Others put history under humanities, with English, philosophy, French, and maybe anthropology. The types of training people get in doctoral programs in each department vary more according to the character and research interests and composition of the departments themselves, rather than the general name of the school or department. To assess credentials as shallowly as by whether a degree says 'history' or 'sociology' on it is childlike in its simplicity and naivetee about how academic training works. What is fair grounds for questioning Aslan is whether he has a record of peer-reviewed scholarship in these fields. But keep in mind that Aslan is portraying himself as expert enough to take a scholarly interest in Jesus, not as someone with a stellar research record on Jesus. For every *trained scholar* who becomes an expert--including scholars who switch gears at some point in their career and study something they're not yet especially known for--there must be a first few publications. Fox host Green grilled Aslan on his justification simply to be interested in writing about Jesus, and Aslan responded that as a scholar of the history of religions, this is in his wheelhouse. It is.

I suspect Franck, an Emeritus Professor of Political Science who apparently thinks that, despite his own title as 'political scientist,' he can weigh in on matters of the history of religion while calling Aslan out for having a sociology degree, really ought to know better. But if we look at Franck's writing background, we see that he's a conservative pundit who is very willing to play dumb about academic credentialing to try to score cheap political points on Aslan. What's especially infuriating about these 'get off my [academic] yard' arguments is they portray academics as snide and territorial. We often are, sure; but it's just not that uncommon for people to do work on and across the borders of their traditional scholarly disciplines. Ph.D. training is narrow, but it's not so narrow that there's no overlap between fields.

That Aslan is a professor in creative writing, by the way, is as much a matter of funding streams than anything else. Again, where these critics fixate on titles, they're the ones being misleading. Aslan clearly teaches a number of courses in religious studies in addition to creative writing. This is the reality of modern academia: people are called on to teach what they *are qualified* to teach (and sometimes, frankly, even more), because universities don't want to spend money on *both* a creative writing professor and a religious history professor when they can have two for one. In a twist of dark humor, it's typically conservatives of the kind making the attacks on Aslan who want to defund higher education and slash faculty hiring budgets, resulting in people teaching outside of their 'title' fields. But again, there's nothing wrong with Aslan, who holds a MFA from the top MFA program in the country, teaching writing, while also teaching religion as a holder of a Ph.D. that, while granted by a sociology department by name, is so obviously a religious studies Ph.D. (given the dissertation). It wouldn't surprise me if Aslan had an historian and/or a religion department representative in addition to a sociologist on his dissertation committee. He may even have had dual advisors in history and sociology, religion and sociology, etc., something that's quite common. And as for the claim that because Aslan's main title is professor of creative writing, he doesn't teach religion 'for a living,' this, too is majorly flawed. It may very well be that Aslan was hired specifically because he could do both, but paid via the tenure stream available in the creative writing department. Again, this is common.

At this point I could assemble a list of academics who have made colossal contributions to fields in which they don't *specifically* have a Ph.D. by the name on the parchment...eh, why the hell not:

Maybe you've heard of:

Jurgen Habermas (Ph.D. in philosophy, pioneer in sociology and history of sociology)

Jacques Derrida (Ph.D. in philosophy, pioneer in literature)

Karl Popper (Ph.D. in psychology, pioneer in philosophy of science)

Ludwig Wittgenstein (degree in engineering before making his key contributions to philosophy pre-Ph.D.)

Bertrand Russell (degree in mathematics, pioneer in philosophy)

Alain Badiou (degrees in mathematics, pioneer in philosophy)

Daniel Kahneman (Ph.D. in psychology, pioneer in economics)

Judith Butler (Ph.D. in philosophy, pioneer in literature)

Martha Nussbaum (Ph.D. in philosophy, professor of law, literature, and philosophy)

I could go on for quite some time, and these only come to mind for me because most relate to my own field/s of study. Apart from these big-name examples, however, the average college student can take 10 minutes to look up the credentials of his or her professors, and will find that many of them are doing cross-disciplinary work, with philosophers and mathematicians trading places in math and science and philosophy of science courses, economists, MBAs, accountants, and psychologists trading places in psychology departments, econ departments, and business schools, literary scholars, historians, and cultural sociologists and anthropologists citing one another in their respective fields, and computer scientists, statisticians, and engineers all working together and across disciplines where relevant.

Alsan is well within his credentialed territory, and anyone who says otherwise should be suspected of either political motives or an unforgivable ignorance about the basics of academic training.

Bigots, Muslims, and Scholars: Which Do Conservatives Trust?

If you haven't yet seen it, check out this clip of a Fox News host interviewing history of religion and Biblical studies scholar Reza Aslan, in which the host keeps insisting that the fact of Aslan's Muslim background is more relevant to the argument of his book on Jesus of Nazareth than his scholarship and his credentials. My explanation here doesn't do justice to the magnitude of Fox host Lauren Green's dogged stupidity.

You don't need me to list any further examples of conservative bigotry against Muslims; but what I will comment on here is how this much-discussed clip fits into another history of conservative bigotry, this against scholars.

On one front of the conservative opposition to knowledge and knowledge seekers, any scientist whose findings run contrary to conservative and especially religious conservative dogma gets smeared. Climate science, for example, has and has had its share of serious skeptics. UC Berkeley physicist Richard Muller has been a serious climate science skeptic for a long time now, so much so that he put together a group specifically tasked to study all the climate science data they could get their hands on from a metacritical perspective. In other words, Muller, a capable and well funded professional scientist, set up a research group to investigate that which he was skeptical of, and has since found that we do have cause to believe that humans contribute significantly to climate change. The biggest private financial contributor to Muller's research group was the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation (i.e. of infamously conservative Koch Brothers machine).

Still, conservatives continue to allege personal bias, payoffs, corruption, and conspiracy anytime a professional scientist like Muller--even one funded by their own people--produce findings that conservatives don't like.

We see the same tactics with regard to evolutionary biologists and 'creationism.' This is a story that, again, you don't need me to rehash to understand what's going on.

The gift and the curse for scientists wading into issues like human evolution, the history of the universe, climate change, and genetic studies that suggest being gay isn't a 'choice,' is that these topics generate enough interest not just from conservatives but from the average person to garner lots of attention and, by virtue of that, lots of angry, ignorant opposition from armchair pundits.

On the other hand, humanities and social science research tends to be ignored by conservatives until it touches a 'culture wars' nerve, like findings about the viability of single or gay parents, for example. Much humanities and social science research likely would really send conservatives into apoplexy; but then again, the gift and the curse of humanities and some social science scholars is that very few bother to read the scholarship, are widely and wildly ignorant of it, and so hardly have exposure to enough publicity to launch any specific complaints about it.

Where such scholarship more prominently comes under attack is with regard to teaching, as when the David Horowitzes and Republican Governors of the world lament courses on the history of sexuality, or gender studies, or Asian American literature, because they'd rather pretend that these things aren't a significant part of the American experience, and because they think that when a course topic sounds kinda liberal, it means the professor is necessarily engaging in liberal 'indoctrination.' This kind of alleged indoctrination that study after study can never seem to locate is also, I should add, somehow different from teaching school children that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.

The conservative attack on Reza Aslan is an interesting moment because here we're not talking about the vaunted findings of science, nor the indoctrination of students by evil mastermind liberal professors, but a piece of humanities scholarship.

And what fascinates and infuriates me most about this conservative response to Aslan's scholarship is that it takes the the approach to the non-falsifiable that would earn humanities undergrads a failing grade.

Because so many of my students are miseducated in their high school literature and history classes, I make clear on day one of every semester that the stuff we're doing in class isn't just some watered down version of science where you claim knowledge that you can't prove. Rather, to take Aslan's book as an example, there are aspects of the life of a guy who lived thousands of years ago that we simply can't know with certainty today. The scholarship marshals as much evidence as it can to make an argument. The result of this scenario is that there is scholarly disagreement even among historicaly plausible arguments.

To put it another way, what I must convey to my students is: just because there is disagreement over plausible but unfalsifiable arguments in humanities scholarship doesn't mean that humanities scholarship is a free-for-all in which any idiot's opinion holds equal weight with a rigorously researched, informed argument supported with ample evidence.

This is the difference between the bullshit paper you're taught to write in high school where you 'argue' that the green tree 'represents individuality in the protagonist's quest for success,' and the evidence-based argument akin to the kinds that Aslan's book makes about Jesus of Nazareth.

As you can see in the Fox News clip, the conservative technique is not merely the bigoted, ad hominem argument that the media has given so much attention to (Aslan is a Muslim, therefore his scholarship on Christianity is bunk), but something else too. The Fox News anchor keeps invoking the fact that 'other scholars' disagree with Aslan's position in order to try to bolster her claim that Aslan's perspective on Jesus isn't duly scholarly, but instead comes from someone with a 'Muslim agenda.' The anchor uses the same elementary fallacy of mistaking the unfalsifiability of humanities scholarship for the idea that humanities scholarship is a free-for-all. She fails to understand that legitimate, informed, evidence-based arguments about an historical figure from a time long in the past absolutely can plausibly disagree without discrediting the rigor of either argument. She fails to understand, in other words, that for historians it's not as easy as looking at the results of a controlled experiment and finding 'yes' or 'no.'

In this way Aslan is doubly marginalized by conservatives as both a Muslim and a scholar. This is a serious problem of modern conservatism--the way bigotry and anti-intellectualism would seem to bolster one another in a self-perpetuating cycle of ignorance.

Abortion is Not a Single Issue

Predictably, recent 'debates' over abortion have been taken over by technocratic arguments about 'fetal pain.' I think this is one of the dumbest possible ways of discussing abortion (I think I have a pretty decent memory, but as it turns out I have no recollection of my experience in the womb). Here I'll offer a much simpler and yet more thorough way of looking at it.

I'll preface this by saying that I'm not necessarily against BANNING abortion after 20 weeks. I know this will outrage many of my friends on the left; but fear not. As it turns out, I have a few conditions to attach to this view.

Let's start with basic anatomy. Every time a woman and a man have vaginal intercourse, there's a chance of pregnancy. Nevertheless, we know that certain things, like contraception and a basic knowledge of the anatomy and mechanics of intercourse, can reduce the risk of unwanted pregnancy to nearly zero.

Here's another fact, this of basic medical technology: if you're not sure if you're pregnant, it's pretty easy for a doctor to resolve that uncertainty for you. A basic check-up with an obstetrician can also tell you if there appear to be an complications of your pregnancy that you need to know about for your own health and safety. Some of you might say sure, but you can get an over-the-counter pregnancy test for that. Yes, if you're insured and wealthy enough to bear the consequences of a false negative, you can; but if not, is the possibility of a child developing in your womb something that you're happy to leave to an over-the-counter test? In most cases, actually, yes, at least as a first step before seeing a doctor; but I'm not the one who portrays abortion as a matter of the life and death of a baby.

Based on these facts, we know three more important things: 1)people who don't understand accurately the basic anatomy of sexual intercourse and human reproduction are at higher risk for unwanted pregnancy; 2) people who do not use contraception, either because they fall under category 1 above, or because they don't have affordable access to contraception, are also at higher risk for unwanted pregnancy; 3) women who suspect something is wrong or different with their bodies and think they might be pregnant are at higher risk of only realizing that they're pregnant after 20 weeks if they also fall under category 1 above (ignorant about their basic anatomy) and/or if they don't have affordable access to basic medical care.

This is all just a laborious way of saying that more people will be seeking abortions, and more of those people seeking later-term abortions, when we live in a situation in which not everyone has 1) basic sex education rooted in modern scientific understanding, 2) access to contraception, and 3) access to basic medical care.

In other words, if we provided a guarantee of healthcare for all, free access to contraception for all, and thorough and standardized basic sex education for all, we would be justified in making it illegal to have an abortion after, say, 20 weeks. We could then say that in almost all cases (save, perhaps, rape, mental illness, or endangerment of the life of the mother), a person seeking an abortion after 20 weeks has had plenty of prior opportunities to make a decision on her pregnancy.

This is not our world, however. The next question, then, is: why is this not our world?

The answer is that the same people who want to restrict abortion rights and access are the people also restricting universal and sound sex education, universal access to contraception, and universal access to basic medical care.

I hate to break it to you guys (yeah, it's mostly guys), but there's no way out of this for you. You Republicans who are opposed to abortion rights and access but also opposed to all of that health stuff I've listed above have fundamentally to admit that you are at least one of the following:

1) Logically inept
2) A hypocrite
3) Delusional
4) In favor of tons of women having tons of abortions
5) In favor of society's poorest and most uneducated having lots of unwanted children
6) Of the opinion that having sex is a privilege only to be reserved for the rich and educated

Honestly. If you are a 'pro-life' Republican and you do not readily identify with at least one of the items above, you have some serious explaining to do. Because you're effectively saying that, though you'd prefer to make abortions, especially late-term abortions, a thing of the past, you're also willing to support every single policy we have that we know beyond a shadow of a doubt contributes directly to more people having more abortions. And if, as you prefer, these people weren't allowed to have abortions, then of course they'd be having unwanted children that they can't afford, more children born out of wedlock, and more children and families born into a state of dependence on government support, also things you're not in favor of.

And here, with me, you will not be able to wriggle out of this with some kind of appeal to 'personal responsibility.' Should I hold you personally responsible for information that you don't even know where to get, let alone know enough to know you need to get it? Should I hold you personally responsible for accessing something that isn't available to you? Should I hold you personally responsible for not acquiring the preventative care that I'm simultaneously denying you? Should we hold infant children personally responsible for their parents bearing them into poverty? Come up with any analogy you want, and you'll find that, lo' and behold, people don't think they should be held responsible for that which they are systematically barred from taking responsibility.

Since you can't deny that your policies lead to more abortions, and you can't deny that they also actively bar so many particularly poor women and couples from understanding precisely how to take responsibility for their sexual choices (do you really think the urban poor LIKE having kids they can't afford while they're trying to finish high school?), the only path left for you to go is this:

You just don't think poor people should be allowed to have sex. Or, to put it less polemically, you think that sex is an option that a society should only tolerate among people who have the means to bear the risk. Again, if you were in favor of educating everyone such that they could properly understand the implications of that statement, you might then be able to claim some tenable moral position. But you're not in favor of that, are you?

It's long past time for 'pro-life' Republicans to look themselves in the mirror and admit to themselves what they're actually for.

Can there be Good Corporations?

People who consider 'growing' a large corporation to be the pinnacle of life achievement will talk about the corporation as the centerpiece of not only American life, but of modern civilization. For most of us the corporation is just a semi-neutral fact of life. And for others just uttering the word 'corporation' calls up nostalgia for hippie protesters trying to 'stick it to the man.'

By the logic of political tennis, it's become a stock liberal thing to be unthinkingly anti-corporate and a stock conservative thing to be pro-corporate even when corporations violate key tenets of conservatism (like open market competition). I'm not very interested in this article in red-meat interest stories about corporations behaving badly (like the BP oil spill) or corporations defying expectations and doing something good for the world (corporate charities). I'm interested in a more fundamental question about the corporation: can it ever be a good thing?

I realize that technically a corporation can be two guys running a business out of their garage, but this obviously isn't what I'm talking about here. Since the amorphously defined 'small business' is a cheerleading occasion in our political discourse, let's not play word games here: you don't get to laud the 'small business,' then come back to me and say 'yeah, but don't hate on corporations; a corporation can be two guys operating out of a garage.' When I say 'corporation' here I mean a large-scale business association. I'm not using 'corporation' as a legal term, though I'm aware that it is one.

The questions, then, are whether large-scale business operations can be a good thing, and at what point is large too large. The second I'm not prepared to answer here. The first I have preliminary thoughts about.

In some ways the large corporation is a paradox. It's a business under one name (even, absurdly, when it becomes a conglomeration of large corporations doing things independently); but it's also a disconnected group of individuals over whom no one can possibly maintain realistic levels of accountability. Corporate CEOs command increasingly enormous salaries based on the premise that they're responsible for tens if not hundreds of thousands of employees. But a child could point out that it's just not possible for a single human being to actually take on that quantity of responsibility with any realistic expectation of oversight, accountability, or relevance in the lives of the vast majority of employees. And I get it; the point of the CEO and upper-level executives is to think about the 'big picture'; but really, what else could they think about? And what do they know about what the 'big picture' means when, like a giant mosaic, it's employed as millions of little-picture operations in the daily business of the corporation?

So the first thing about corporations that's arguably very bad is that the magnitude of responsibility that those at the top of corporations take on is, paradoxically, the very reason that these people have absolutely no realistic sense of responsibility whatsoever. It's easy to see this paradox in action. Just read the words of upper-level executives when some lower-level employee or far-flung appendage of the giant corporate association does something stupid that makes news. Remember when Mitt Romney was running for president and disavowing responsibility for the high-leverage destruction his firm was specializing in? Of course he disavowed responsibility. As an executive (chairman of the board, I think) he's part of a elite group of people who take it as a given that they should get paid hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year to do absolutely nothing. When he disavowed responsibility, he admitted then and there, unwittingly perhaps, that the job he was getting a six-figure salary to do was a sham, that he wasn't actually doing the job, that only an idiot or a madman would have the audacity to expect someone in his 'job' to do anything for their compensation, and that of course he had nothing to do with the mistakes his firm made, because he was only...CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD. What kind of corporate executive actually TAKES REAL RESPONSIBILITY for what happens at the lower levels?

Yes, I'm sure you can point to all kinds of examples of CEOs being fired for what shareholders deem underperformance or enough of a scandal to harm the corporate image. This happens with university presidents, too. This scenario of accountability typically goes like this: "Bad, bad CEO! Take this $22.5 million severance, plus this $8.5 million in stock options, and this house in Malibu, and DON'T EVER COME BACK until next month when we meet in this lavish boardroom with the Chairman of the Board of Other Corp., which, we understand, is now you."

Ah yes, accountability in action.

The second inherent problem with corporations is that, like their CEOs and upper-level executives, they, too, defy their very justification for being. A corporation's reason for existing on such a large and in some cases monopolistic or oligopolistic scale is that the free market is a meritocracy. By the fallacy of petitio, a corporation argues for its existence no matter what the costs because its existence itself is evidence that it has outdone the competition.

The problem with this is that within themselves, corporations are fundamentally anti-meritocratic. The student in my class who writes the best essay gets an A; and when I catch a student in my class plagiarizing, they fail the assignment. That's meritocracy. The corporation, by contrast, is built on plagiarism. Lower-level people do work and receive money for it. Their work is taken by the next rung up the ladder and claimed for the merit of that group. The mid-levels' work is taken to the top and claimed for the merit of the executives. You could call it a pyramid scheme, but it's really more properly a sanctioned form of plagiarism. When I worked for a corporation, my work was presented to clients by someone else every week. In fact, much of my daily work as a consulting firm analyst involved teaching the results, methods, and context of the work I did to the upper-level executives of my firm so that they could present it to upper-level clients.

We can look at this in other ways besides what I call sanctioned plagiarism. You could say my work is part of a labor collective, that I don't own my work, but it goes toward the good of the collective (corporation). In this way, as an employee, I can't have the expectation of ownership of my work products; it's 'proprietary,' as we say in the biz. In this sense, then, you could say a corporation is fundamentally communistic. Not even socialistic, but communistic. The resources, including labor resources, are owned by the collective, and the bureaucratic head of this collective decides who does what with these resources,who gets credit for what, and what privileges each member of the collective accrues, independent of who does the work. Sure, even within a communist collective merit plays a limited role; but this is no meritocracy.

The second point, then, is that corporations claim a moral right of existence by the principles of meritocracy, but operationally corporations are anti-meritocratic.

I think that these problems are primarily problems of scale, and that the large-scale corporation, then, is inherently problematic because it necessarily outgrows its own principles and justifications, with often terrible results for employees, the economy, and virtually anyone but the Inner Circle.

Take, for example, the two (or let's say 22) guys (or employees) running a business out of their garage (or small warehouse). First, the person or persons in charge can feasibly be accountable to the actions of their employees. Second, this smaller scale creates the potential for employees to work with closer proximity to the end product and the profits that ensue (whereas the person in China making your iPhone has no reason but fear to do anything less than their best). Third, a smaller and more flexible employee base makes it easier for those at the top to properly evaluate and compensate those working below them, which gives meritocracy a fighting change in such a system, because such a system can be flatter in organizational structure (and remember, the people in China making your iPhone aren't really rewarded for doing better; only punished for doing worse). Finally, a smaller scale business has less need for the sanctioned plagiarism that is par for the course in corporate culture, I think largely because a very large scale necessitates hypercompartmentalization of labor and the imposition of structure for structure's sake.

Many of these thoughts are speculative, I acknowledge; and there are other insidious aspects of corporate culture that have to do with things other than scale. But the very fact of the large-scale corporation strikes me as inherently bad for the reasons above. Certainly I've waded into a much larger series of issues regarding corporate governance, and not simply the fact of the large-scale corporation itself; but it's also worth considering whether any massive association of human beings will choose to organize itself any other way, or without falling victim to the flaws I point out above.

A final question: if we wouldn't be cool with a communistic dictatorship running a country, a city, or even a township, because of the whole 'if men were angels' thing, why are we so OK with such a system running a massive corporation that employs as many people as reside in some cities and townships, and controls enough aspects of the lives of these people (what they do with most of their waking hours, health insurance, drug testing, internet footprint, maternity leave, etc. etc. etc.) that employing is akin to governance?

The Elephant in the Massive Open Online Classroom

Let me begin by stating that online education has a place and a set of roles to play in higher education. I don't think many would say otherwise; but if they did, I'd be inclined to disagree with them. I'm not absolutely opposed to the technologies online education avails itself of; in fact, I use some of them in teaching my own courses.

Nevertheless, every time something to do with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) comes up, the media jump on it and proclaim it the most earth-shatteringly revolutionary 'disruptive' mind-blowingly novel and innovative innovation since the invention of Jesus Christ. A MOOC can never just be what those of us who actually work in higher education usually talk about it as: an experiment, a data-collection method, a thing foisted upon us by the university administration, or a useful component of a course that also involves a taught, face-to-face component. Never. A MOOC must be the news equivalent of an extinction level event. This silly article at Slate is titled 'The MOOC that Roared," and implies that, somehow unlike every other MOOC news that roars until it's hoarse and we're all smothered in hot air, this one that costs money is going to be a cheaper equivalent to the highly-rated but much more expensive classroom-based master's in computer science at Georgia Tech. This is almost comical in light of the fact that the last such 'this one actually counts toward a degree' experiment, San Jose State's partnership with Udacity, has resulted in epic failure.

Despite all this blustering about 'disruption' and 'revolution,' the MOOC and its ilk are not pedagogically revolutionary or 'game-changing' in any way. They don't change anything about the fundamentals of how people teach or learn, apart from providing limitations to these, as we saw in the SJSU case. We tend to talk about MOOCs as things that add possibilities for what teachers can accomplish; but in fact the MOOC adds nothing that a 200-person lecture hall and a platoon of TAs haven't been accomplishing for decades. The MOOC only scales this up from the hundreds to the thousands, which again offers nothing new in the way of pedagogy; only scope. For those inclined to think that such magnification of scope is itself a revolutionary and democratizing thing, let me remind you of the massive elephant in the room.

To make this elephant appear more real to you, let's give him a name. His name is Prestige. Prestige the Elephant.

As I've been arguing for a long time, the fact that US higher education, even at some of the most technical and vocational 4-year institutions, is based on a liberal arts educational model, what matters to employers is not what you majored in, but where you majored in it. Apart from those hiring for a minority of very technical or specialized jobs whose markets would be detrimentally flooded if everyone listened to the grandstanding politicians and suddenly majored in [speech-language pathology or biomedical engineering], it's not about the major.

Despite the corny articles that come up every month in business trade newsletters and USA Today and the Wall Street Journal about '10 Majors That Aren't Worth the Tuition,' filled with cartoonish assessments of job prospects for typical scapegoat majors like 'theater arts' ('so you wanna be a thesbian? Good luck performing street tricks for quarters!') or 'religious studies' ('There are only 3 jobs in the world at Religious Studies Museums, where you could hunch over your old dusty Bibles and do whatever little thing a 'religious studies' major does!), employers don't look at resumes and exclaim 'wow, this person MAJORED IN BUSINESS! HIRED!' They look at resumes and exclaim 'wow, this person GRADUATED FROM HARVARD! They have a chance.'

The reason for this is that quality of education--not just general topic of education--matters to US employers. What matters even more, however, is prestige. Prestige the Elephant, remember? If you're misguided enough to go to college simply because you think college owes you a job, and you want a leg up in the job market upon graduation, my advice is: go to the best college you can and major in whatever the hell you want.

The prestige factor flies directly in the face of arguments that MOOCs will revolutionize higher education. The point of getting a degree from Harvard isn't necessarily that Harvard provides a better education than Brown, UVA, or Vassar. You go to Harvard because of the absurd number of people who apply to Harvard each year, only 6% are told by Harvard they're ALLOWED to go to Harvard. Getting into Harvard, then, is a signal to employers that you've made it past a significant competitive hurdle; that you're validated as elite, even if you never actually end up graduating.

When Harvard offers free MOOCs that anyone can take just by signing up, and that don't lead to a Harvard degree, it's a nice public service, but it doesn't fundamentally change anything about higher education. Just watch what happens when universities like San Jose State and Georgia Tech start charging for online degrees. First, the degrees will be worth nothing if anyone can enroll. Second, those paying for the degrees will begin to wonder whether they're getting as good an education as those paying more for face-to-face instruction (and we'll be able to measure this to some extent; the early results don't look good for MOOCs). Third, employers will begin to wonder the same thing.

Thus, though MOOCs don't exactly revolutionize teaching and learning, they do have the potential to revolutionize one thing in particular: labor costs. MOOCs offer the illusion of quality for the reality of cheap. While brick-and-mortar college tuition is way too high right now, a product of corporate people running universities into the ground and building stadiums and gyms instead of academic reputations, there's a reason why higher education costs must necessarily be above free. The reason is you have to pay experts and provide expert-ready facilities for students to learn with. These are the fundamentals of higher education, which the existence of MOOCs will not alter. You will never get the same experience answering a multiple-choice chemistry quiz online that you do being guided through an experiment in a state-of-the-art chemistry lab by a PhD student working under a PhD-trained professional chemist. It really is that simple.

But what you will get for cheap through a MOOC is a cut-rate education. And if you are the person receiving this cut-rate education (which doubles as a market experiment for for-profit companies like Udacity), chances are you're not a well-positioned student like the kind who goes to Harvard or Swarthmore, but a first-generation college student, likely working-class, likely speaking English as a second language. In other words, the MOOC enterprise experiments on our most vulnerable and underprepared students, creating an even more pronounced multi-tier system of privilege in US higher education.

At the same time, the MOOC will undermine faculty pay and resources, and, if implemented full-scale the way many of its proponents envision, will turn the university experience into a consumer experience akin to shopping at Walmart. There's a reason that plastic toy costs less than $2: it was made by someone in rural China for a fraction of a penny. It may be good enough for your 4 year old, but is it a good enough model to base higher education on? The MOOC offers a similar mechanism. It employs a combination of technology and part-time, non-professinal, unskilled technical labor to replace the quality of classroom instruction under a trained and credentialed professional.

As a consequence, one thing academia an the technology sector have in common is that both are increasingly run not by trained experts, but by business types and MBA-holders. This is why the tech sector and stories about it are now flush with absurd, blindly optimistic jargon like 'disruption' and 'innovation' and 'synergy.' This is the kind of shit only corporate culture can come up with. For some these may appear big and exciting words, but in reality they're just the language of inflation and destruction.

Unmuddling Race in the Trayvon Case

I know you've read plenty of opinions on the Trayvon Martin tragedy, but I'm offering this today because there's so much confusion and sloppy thinking out there about the role of race in the shooting and in Zimmerman's trial. I'm attempting to clear some of this up here.

We have a lot of people on the left claiming this is all about race, and a lot of people on the right claiming this has nothing to do with race at all. Both positions are typical, and both positions are stupid.

First, though the verdict in the Zimmerman trial is perhaps unsatisfying, it's a technically correct verdict. According to the law and the process, Zimmerman was rightly found not guilty. Where there's room to criticize this outcome, it's with the laws and the process themselves: perhaps we shouldn't have such broad legal interpretations of 'self-defense.' And even though Stand Your Ground wasn't invoked explicitly in this case, you better believe it was a card waiting to be played, a card that influenced the outcome of the trial and certainly both the prosecution and defense strategies. In fact, the defense's choice to waive the Stand Your Ground hearing at the beginning and fold those issues into the broader self-defense trial was itself a play on Stand Your Ground: it allowed the defense to keep Zimmerman off the stand.

We can criticize jury selection, police action at the scene, and other factors that allowed for Zimmerman, a cop, to get a very fair trial, a degree of fairness that, as Alex Pareene rightly points out, is not necessarily available to everyone in our society. This is the point at which the race question begins to come up; but it's important to understand that we don't even need to get to the race question, nor do we need to criticize the verdict itself, in order to question the law. The law allows room for Zimmerman's defense to argue that deadly force was justified because Trayvon's 'deadly weapon' was the concrete sidewalk. This effectively means that any time you get into a fistfight in Florida and someone goes down, so long as someone has a gun, they're legally justified in using it to shoot someone dead. To win a fistfight. In my view that's entirely moronic, and a society that wants to resolve fistfights with gun death is the epitome of insane. So for those who are claiming this is 'all about race,' it's not ALL about race. It's largely about the law. We could have a field day on the law alone before mentioning race.

Of course race and the law aren't extricable. Which is to say this can't ever be ALL about one or the other. It must necessarily be about both. In other, less publicized cases, race and the law are always at play together; we just choose not to notice. Either that, or it's just harder to tell that race is operating in white-on-white or black-on-black murder, albeit in different ways.

Next, for those who claim that this is NOT about race AT ALL, I'll explain why you, too, are wrong.

Race is a social construct (this phrase is repeated all the time, but most have no idea what that means). What this means is that race doesn't inherently describe who someone is, with depth or logic or accuracy; instead it's a category that we make up based on very rough and not particularly logical nor consistent impressions about how people look. Race is not the same as ethnicity, for example. This is why the term 'African-American' is used to describe black people, even if they don't come from Africa. This is why a 'white' person may be of Italian, Polish, Irish, or even Hispanic ethnicity.

There's been a lot of confusion about whether Zimmerman is 'white' or 'Hispanic.' He's both. White is a racial category and Hispanic is an ethnic category. This is why someone descended from Cuba via Africa from back in the 18th century when African slaves were transported to the Caribbean to work the sugar cane and tobacco fields would typically identify today on the US Census as Black Hispanic (black and Hispanic at the same time). This is why someone whose ethnic heritage is more closely tied with indigenous Latin America via Spanish imperialism would typically identify as White Hispanic (white and Hispanic at the same time). And of course someone who hails directly from Spain would typically identify as 'white,' like other Caucasian Europeans. Zimmerman is white Hispanic. We can dispute these categories or the very assignation of racial categories; but within the racial framework we have--mind you, a framework that is based on social construction--there's nothing wrong with labeling Zimmerman a white guy.

Of course, some will argue that it's reductive to call Zimmerman a white guy. Shouldn't we also acknowledge that he's Hispanic? I tend to agree; but then again, how often do we demand that a white Irish guy gets called 'white Irish,' a white Italian guy 'white Italian'? Why don't we demand that all 'whites' be identified with an ethnicity in addition to a racial category, like 'white European,' 'white Hispanic,' 'white Anglo-Saxon,' 'white Celtic,' etc.? Because each of these categories is every bit as white as Zimmerman; and Zimmerman is every bit as white as each of these categories.

I've argued for a long time now that the category of 'whiteness' is extremely problematic precisely because it gets imbued with a specifically gentrified white Anglo-Saxon culture to which the vast majority of white people don't belong or identify (including Zimmerman). To put it more simply, people like Mitt Romney are 'white,' while people like Marshal Mathers are 'acting black.' But why should people like Mitt Romney dominate the representation of whiteness? Why can't Eminem represent whiteness too? It's not that all us white people got together and voted on it. It's because whiteness, like blackness, is culturally loaded beyond its (weak) racially descriptive function. This loaded notion of whiteness is precisely why when we accurately call Zimmerman, an Hispanic guy, 'white,' people get confused and can't seem to accept it. Because 'white' and 'Hispanic' are culturally loaded, too; and the identity stereotypes they carry are often incompatible. For many on the left the idea of calling an Hispanic man 'white' comes too dangerously close to eliding the historically protected status of Hispanics as a minority in the US.

The wrench we throw into this, then, is this idea of historically protected status. Racial and ethnic identities aside, there are some components of identity in the US for which, because of historical (which is NOT to say not ongoing) discrimination, we have certain legal and cultural protections for protected groups. Consider, for example, that a white Jew could identify as both white and Jewish (a term with ethnic as well as religious connotations), and be protected as a consequence of historical anti-Semitism. As a white guy Zimmerman isn't protected as such; as an Hispanic he is. By calling Zimmerman white, we don't forfeit whatever protections are due him because he is also Hispanic. But too many people can't seem to see past this fact, and want to put him into one box or the other. In a way, I admit, this is not fair to whiteness, nor to Hispanics. When we persecute Hispanics as 'illegals,' stop and search them (like Zimmerman did Trayvon) without reasonable suspicion, and perpetuate any number of other harmful stereotypes, we prove that 'Hispanic' is and should remain a protected status. But this doesn't mean some whites--like, say, white Hispanics--aren't discriminated against.

To put it simply, we don't have to purge an individual of all his or her whiteness in order to admit that they can be discriminated against. To think this way is to be discriminatory against whiteness, placing it squarely in the evil category, the category of irredeemable status.

What matters much more than Zimmerman's race, however, is Trayvon's. Remember, Trayvon is the innocent dead kid. The innocent dead black kid. If it were Zimmerman in Trayvon's position, we might talk a bit further about whether Zimmerman's Hispanic ethnicity had anything to do with what happened to him. But since Zimmerman got the fairest of fair trials and the best legal defense to be expected--far better than virtually 99% of the rest of the US population--we don't need to question whether race played a role on his end. The real racial issue in this case is about a young black man dressed a certain way being unquestionably profiled as 'suspicious' despite doing nothing wrong. This profiling unquestionably led directly to his tragic death. This is principally where race is very relevant. Not because of the racial dynamic between the shooter and the shot--black cops shoot and beat innocent black kids too--but because of the racial import of Zimmerman's 'suspicion.' How many white kids in hoodies get stopped by police and shot for walking around at night? And just imagine how quickly white people would 'play the race card' and beat the 'reverse-racism' drum were a white kid to get gunned down by a black or brown cop with a demonstrated history of profiling whites?

And when the black community was understandably outraged at what happened, race perceptions again meant that the media had to warn us that we had to fear for 'riots' and disorderly and violent behavior. Like Trayvon, blacks who are justifiably angry about what happened are presumed guilty until proven innocent. So to say race isn't a part of this picture is naive at best, willfully ignorant at worst.