From Ricci To Gates-gate: Listening To "the Conversation"

"Obama’s fundamental reflectiveness extends to refusing to enable this camp – Hallelujah."

I guess it was just a coinky dink that Obama's fundamental reflectiveness didn't kick in until a public outcry over Obama's slander of police damaged his poll numbers.

In fact, McWhorter can give zero - repeat, zero - evidence to back up his (not the first time) assertion of Obama's "fundamental reflectiveness."  Because Obama cops the mannerisms and style of an intellectual, McWhorter thinks it must be true.  But in fact, everything Obama says and does is un-reflective, un-creative, standard-issue leftism.  And McWhorter, David Brooks, Marty Peretz, Christopher Buckley etc. - they all bought it!

Not smart.

Obama didn't slander the police.  To describe an action as "stupid" can be wrong, or correct, or spontaneous, or considered, or a number of other things in between all of those, but as all human beings and all institutions can be guilty of a wrong decision or false move, it's not slanderous to suggest that one such may have happened.

For my own part, as someone from a police family, it strikes me as somewhat unprofessional, given the circumstances, for Sgt Crowley to have gone the way of calling in support and starting the arrest sequence in a situation in which he had identified the house owner as on his own property, but there's no reason why he should be persecuted for that, and both professors and smart cops can be subject to male ego surges and not want to back down.

Obama made his original statement not because of some knee-jerk leftism, but because a friend of his had suffered an unpleasant incident (which he noted at the start of his remarks in the first press conference), and he has now admitted he was wrong and gone beyond that original statement,  looking for a way of bringing people back into connection with each other.

In fact, the more important truth is that the whole question of police-citizen interactions has absolutely zero to do with standard mindless labels such as liberal or conservative, left or right, but reflects deeper currents and changes and energies in our society.  It's good, however, if they come to the surface and people talk about them openly now and again.

In terms of actual meaning, "deeper currents and changes and energies in our society" has approximately the same meaning as "blah, blah, blah."  It's the kind of phrase that would find publication in places like the Journal of Critical Legal Studies or the Journal of Feminist Epistemology.  And it's an instance of the Obama technique: Say something actually worthless, that dumb people will think is smart.

If an un-reflective leftist confronted the Gates-police situation, what would he do?  He'd come out against the police, even if he didn't know the facts of the situation, which is precisely what Obama did.  And that's the test we should apply to Obama generally:  Look at the "stimulus bill," the attempt to take over health care in this country, etc., and ask yourself: Is this any different from the behavior of a prototypical, comic-book unreconstructed and unreflective Lefty?  Answer: It isn't.

But Obama does it all with the veneer of verbal faux-nuance and sophistication, which feeds the vanity and wins over those who imagine themselves fellow members of the faculty club.  

(When he was an actual member of the faculty at University of Chicago School of Law, he chose the historically important but comparably easy areas of Constitutional and Civil Rights law, while his colleagues were intellectual pioneers in fields such as Law and Economics.  He contributed zero written scholarship in his entire career, and his colleagues at Chicago Law have said he was not active in discussing or debating the law.

From the Boston Globe:

www.boston.com/.../law_professor_obama_embraces_nuance_on_trail

"Richard Epstein, a prominent conservative who taught with Obama at the University of Chicago, said he likes Obama but rejects the suggestion that he is an intellectual, arguing that he merely mimics an intellectual's mannerisms.

'It's not a title that's an honorific,' Epstein said. 'He's an activist.' " )

Whatever.

Just as an afterthought -- it's pretty revealing that you picked out one small quote from the extensive selection in the Globe article and even managed to misunderstand that.

There is this other issue or question, that, dare-I-day-it, transcends race: how  "disorderly conduct" is used. At what point, when confronted by police, are your words, which is what we're talking about in professor Gates's case, "disorderly conduct?" Historically, as anyone who was involved with civil rights struggle could describe, "disorderly conduct" is often subjective and political.  In any case, are even insulting words or questioning in the wrong tone of voice illegal? Gates, after all, wasn't screaming fire in a crowded theater, an act that might get him arrested even if he owned the theater.

Most of the "conversation" about the Ricci case and the Gates incident has been reflexive and polarized.  The "conversation" I take Holder to have been talking about is the kind of conversation that Obama has advocated in the wake of the Gates matter, but which has not yet occurred -- a conversation about the relationship between the police and the black community.  That conversation would not entail laying all of the blame at the feet of the police, but neither would it entail contending that racism and profiling on the part of the police is merely a figment of blacks' imaginations.  

McWhorter erects straw men in contending that the conversation Holder wants is simply for whites to embrace guilt for victimizing blacks, and that people like Holder are "frustrated that America does not arrive at a conclusion that black America’s main problem is still racism."  McWhorter provides no evidence that Holder or Obama want that kind of conversation.  I think it is clear that they do not.  But while they would not contend that the MAIN problem faced by blacks is racism, I am sure they would contend that it remains a significant problem, and that there remains much misunderstanding between the races.  McWhorter embraces the view that white racism has been virtually eradicated and that blacks need to look inward to solve their problems.  So when he hears that said, he believes we are having the conversation that we need to have.  

And yet, in his earlier piece about the Gates affair, McWhorter is constrained to admit that we are not yet "post-racial" and that racial profilng and racial bias among the police is the greatest obstacle to achieving a post-racial society.  So which is it McWhorter?  Are we post-racial or not?  If not, then the conversation cannot merely be to say that we are post-racial.

I have commented extensively elsewhere regarding the Ricci case.  McWhorter continues his failure to grasp that the principle of federal law that the City of New Haven was deferring to was not that any test with a racially disparate impact is unacceptable, but that it is unacceptable if it does not genuinely test for the necessary qualifications or if equally valid but fairer tests are available.  McWhorter theorizes elsewhere that the black candidates performed poorly on the test (he does not address the relatively poor performance of the Hispanic candidates) because, for cultural reasons, they are not as competent with written language as whites are.  Well, if written language skills are necessary for the job, then it would indeed be unfair to scrap the test, and federal law does not require it.  But if written language skills are not necessary, and the test does not genuinely assess skills necessary for the job, then there is nothing "unfair" about scrapping the test.  Indeed, it is arguably unfair to USE the test, because it would be exploiting cultural differences between the races to exclude blacks from promotion who may be equally qualified for it.

But more importantly, even if the disparate-impact provision of federal discrimination law is a bad idea as a matter of public policy, McWhorter fails to grasp that it is not the role of the Court to second guess Congress about that.  That is what the Supreme Court did in the Ricci case.  It construed federal discrimination law so as to put employers in the untenable position of being exposed to liability not matter what they decide to do with a test having a racially disparate impact.  It did that by construing any race-conscious government action as constituting intentional discrimination.  I have not heard the "[c]ries from assorted quarters that the very possibility of Civil Rights claims are now threatened."  But such cries would be warranted.  If the government cannot be conscious of race, then the logical extension of that proposition is that government cannot remedy discrimination or civil rights violoations based on race.

Well said about our post-racial-as-humanly-possible era, and why so many resist it.  But it still stops short of what seems to me the inescapable conclusion-- or the delicious irony.  Two guys who actually are in the business of teaching racial sensitivity encountered each other-- and in two seconds they were having a big fight over race.  How can that be seen as anything other than the Challenger explosion of the racial sensitivity industry, proof that in fact it makes everything worse, feeds grievances and keeps wounds unhealed?  

One thing that has struck me in listening to so  many people opine over this kerfuffle  is that many distinguished black citizens have proffered accounts of their  own interactions with cops and have stated that they were   "SURE"  (positive, no doubt about it) that if they had been white, that their treatment would have been  very different (milder, gentler, more polite or nonexistent).

Given how many white people have related stories about abusive and/or power-crazed  cops, if seems like it is time for African Americans to question their perceptions on this issue, and stop using such unqualified language to describe these  experiences.  Although there are of course still problems with racial profiling, they are harder to single out and address when minorities support their claims with such notions as, "....I just KNEW.....," or, "....they ONLY stopped me because...." and so on.  It would be real progress if we heard more expressions such as, "....it seemed likely...,"  or,  ".....I felt...."   Relinquishing certainty is the first step in moving forward on this issue.  How can you give someone the benefit of the doubt if you don't  even acknowledge that sliver of doubt?

It is important for  all people to recognize the need to challenge their own perceptions of events.  That is, after all, what it means to not be prejudiced.

mgmax, I think the point is that it wasn't exactly race they were having a fight over.  It was the male ego.  It's not at all impossible that the events could have gone that way even if Gates had been white.  We're dealing with a police-citizen interaction here -- exacerbated by racial identity, no question -- but even if black-white relations were perfect in this country, we'd still have bad-tempered homeowners who have just come back from a long trip and cops who stand on their dignity to excess when people don't defer submissively to them.

It is interesting to note how differently this media-created racial kerfuffle ended compared to other ones.  And I think the key event that made things turn out different, that turned the tide, was Sgt. Crowley's insistence -- which I believe he stated the day after Obama's comments -- that "I'm not going to apologize, I did nothing wrong."  

Obama Vs. Bibi? Six Ways The President Can Regain Israeli Trust , by Yossi Klein Halevi So Are We Having

The New York Times

July 30, 2008

The Long Run

Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Apart

By Jodi Kantor

CHICAGO — The young law professor stood apart in too many ways to count. At a school where economic analysis was all the rage, he taught rights, race and gender. Other faculty members dreamed of tenured positions; he turned them down. While most colleagues published by the pound, he never completed a single work of legal scholarship.

At a formal institution, Barack Obama was a loose presence, joking with students about their romantic prospects, using first names, referring to case law one moment and “The Godfather” the next. He was also an enigmatic one, often leaving fellow faculty members guessing about his precise views.

Mr. Obama, now the junior senator from Illinois and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, spent 12 years at the University of Chicago Law School. Most aspiring politicians do not dwell in the halls of academia, and few promising young legal thinkers toil in state legislatures. Mr. Obama planted a foot in each, splitting his weeks between an elite law school and the far less rarefied atmosphere of the Illinois Senate.

Before he outraised every other presidential primary candidate in American history, Mr. Obama marched students through the thickets of campaign finance law. Before he helped redraw his own State Senate district, making it whiter and wealthier, he taught districting as a racially fraught study in how power is secured. And before he posed what may be the ultimate test of racial equality — whether Americans will elect a black president — he led students through African-Americans’ long fight for equal status.

Standing in his favorite classroom in the austere main building, sharp-witted students looming above him, Mr. Obama refined his public speaking style, his debating abilities, his beliefs.

“He tested his ideas in classrooms,” said Dennis Hutchinson, a colleague. Every seminar hour brought a new round of, “Is affirmative action justified? Under what circumstances?” as Mr. Hutchinson put it.

But Mr. Obama’s years at the law school are also another chapter — see United States Senate, c. 2006 — in which he seemed as intently focused on his own political rise as on the institution itself. Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed for this article, was well liked at the law school, yet he was always slightly apart from it, leaving some colleagues feeling a little cheated that he did not fully engage. The Chicago faculty is more rightward-leaning than that of other top law schools, but if teaching alongside some of the most formidable conservative minds in the country had any impact on Mr. Obama, no one can quite point to it.

“I don’t think anything that went on in these chambers affected him,” said Richard Epstein, a libertarian colleague who says he longed for Mr. Obama to venture beyond his ideological and topical comfort zones. “His entire life, as best I can tell, is one in which he’s always been a thoughtful listener and questioner, but he’s never stepped up to the plate and taken full swings.”

Mr. Obama had other business on his mind, embarking on five political races during his 12 years at the school. Teaching gave him satisfaction, along with a perch and a paycheck, but he was impatient with academic debates over “whether to drop a footnote or not drop a footnote,” said Abner J. Mikva, a mentor whose own career has spanned Congress, the federal bench and the same law school.

Douglas Baird, another colleague, remembers once asking Mr. Obama to assess potential candidates for governor.

“First of all, I’m not running for governor, “ Mr. Obama told him. “But if I did, I would expect you to support me.”

He was a third-year state senator at the time.

Popular and Enigmatic

Mr. Obama arrived at the law school in 1991 thanks to Michael W. McConnell, a conservative scholar who is now a federal appellate judge. As president of The Harvard Law Review, Mr. Obama had impressed Mr. McConnell with editing suggestions on an article; on little more than that, the law school gave him a fellowship, which amounted to an office and a computer, which he used to write his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.”

The school had almost no black faculty members, a special embarrassment given its location on the South Side. Its sleek halls bordered a neighbor-hood crumbling with poverty and neglect. In his 2000 Congressional primary race, Representative Bobby L. Rush, a former Black Panther running for re-election, used Mr. Obama’s ties to the school to label him an egghead and an elitist.

At the school, Mr. Obama taught three courses, ascending to senior lecturer, a title otherwise carried only by a few federal judges. His most traditional course was in the due process and equal protection areas of constitutional law. His voting rights class traced the evolution of election law, from the disenfranchisement of blacks to contemporary debates over districting and campaign finance. Mr. Obama was so interested in the subject that he helped Richard Pildes, a professor at New York University, develop a leading casebook in the field.

His most original course, a historical and political seminar as much as a legal one, was on racism and law. Mr. Obama improvised his own textbook, including classic cases like Brown v. Board of Education, and essays by Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Dubois, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, as well as conservative thinkers like Robert H. Bork.

Mr. Obama was especially eager for his charges to understand the horrors of the past, students say. He assigned a 1919 catalog of lynching victims, including some who were first raped or stripped of their ears and fingers, others who were pregnant or lynched with their children, and some whose charred bodies were sold off, bone fragment by bone fragment, to gawkers.

“Are there legal remedies that alleviate not just existing racism, but racism from the past?” Adam Gross, now a public interest lawyer in Chicago, wrote in his class notes in April 1994.

For all the weighty material, Mr. Obama had a disarming touch. He did not belittle students; instead he drew them out, restating and polishing halting answers, students recall. In one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. “Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other?” he asked in a mock-innocent voice.

A favorite theme, said Salil Mehra, now a law professor at Temple University, were the values and cultural touchstones that Americans share. Mr. Obama’s case in point: his wife, Michelle, a black woman, loved “The Brady Bunch” so much that she could identify every episode by its opening shots.

As his reputation for frank, exciting discussion spread, enrollment in his classes swelled. Most scores on his teaching evaluations were positive to superlative. Some students started referring to themselves as his groupies. (Mr. Obama, in turn, could play the star. In what even some fans saw as self-absorption, Mr. Obama’s hypothetical cases occasionally featured himself. “Take Barack Obama, there’s a good-looking guy,” he would introduce a twisty legal case.)

Challenging Assumptions

Liberals flocked to his classes, seeking refuge. After all, the professor was a progressive politician who backed child care subsidies and laws against racial profiling, and in a 1996 interview with the school newspaper sounded skeptical of President Bill Clinton’s efforts to reach across the aisle.

“On the national level, bipartisanship usually means Democrats ignore the needs of the poor and abandon the idea that government can play a role in issues of poverty, race discrimination, sex discrimination or environmental protection,” Mr. Obama said.

But the liberal students did not necessarily find reassurance. “For people who thought they were getting a doctrinal, rah-rah experience, it wasn’t that kind of class,” said D. Daniel Sokol, a former student who now teaches law at the University of Florida at Gainesville.

For one thing, Mr. Obama’s courses chronicled the failure of liberal policies and court-led efforts at social change: the Reconstruction-era amendments that were rendered meaningless by a century of resistance, the way the triumph of Brown gave way to fights over busing, the voting rights laws that crowded blacks into as few districts as possible. He was wary of noble theories, students say; instead, they call Mr. Obama a contextualist, willing to look past legal niceties to get results.

For another, Mr. Obama liked to provoke. He wanted his charges to try arguing that life was better under segregation, that black people were better athletes than white ones.

“I remember thinking, ‘You’re offending my liberal instincts,’ ” Mary Ellen Callahan, now a privacy lawyer in Washington, recalled.

In his voting rights course, Mr. Obama taught Lani Guinier’s proposals for structuring elections differently to increase minority representation. Opponents attacked those suggestions when Ms. Guinier was nominated as assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1993, costing her the post.

“I think he thought they were good and worth trying,” said David Franklin, who now teaches law at DePaul University in Chicago.

But whether out of professorial reserve or budding political caution, Mr. Obama would not say so directly. “He surfaced all the competing points of view on Guinier’s proposals with total neutrality and equanimity,” Mr. Franklin said. “He just let the class debate the merits of them back and forth.”

While students appreciated Mr. Obama’s evenhandedness, colleagues sometimes wanted him to take a stand. When two fellow faculty members asked him to support a controversial antigang measure, allowing the Chicago police to disperse and eventually arrest loiterers who had no clear reason to gather, Mr. Obama discussed the issue with unusual thoughtfulness, they say, but gave little sign of who should prevail — the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposed the measure, or the community groups that supported it out of concern about crime.

“He just observed it with a kind of interest,” said Daniel Kahan, now a professor at Yale.

Nor could his views be gleaned from scholarship; Mr. Obama has never published any. He was too busy, but also, Mr. Epstein believes, he was unwilling to put his name to anything that could haunt him politically, as Ms. Guinier’s writings had hurt her. “He figured out, you lay low,” Mr. Epstein said.

The Chicago law faculty is full of intellectually fiery friendships that burn across ideological lines. Three times a week, professors do combat over lunch at a special round table in the university’s faculty club, and they share and defend their research in workshop discussions. Mr. Obama rarely attended, even when he was in town.

“I’m not sure he was close to anyone,” Mr. Hutchinson said, except for a few liberal constitutional law professors, like Cass Sunstein, now an occasional adviser to his campaign. Mr. Obama was working two other jobs, after all, in the State Senate and at a civil rights law firm.

Several colleagues say Mr. Obama was surely influenced by the ideas swirling around the law school campus: the prevailing market-friendliness, or economic analysis of the impact of laws. But none could say how. “I’m not sure we changed him,” Mr. Baird said.

Because he never fully engaged, Mr. Obama “doesn’t have the slightest sense of where folks like me are coming from,” Mr. Epstein said. “He was a successful teacher and an absentee tenant on the other issues.”

Leaving the Classroom

As Mr. Obama built his political career, his so-called groupies became an early core of supporters, handing out leaflets and hosting fund-raisers in their modest apartments.

“Maybe we charged an audacious $20?” said Jesse Ruiz, now a corporate lawyer in Chicago. Mr. Obama was sheepish asking for even that, Mr. Ruiz recalls. With no staff, Mr. Obama would come by the day after a fund-raiser to stuff the proceeds into a backpack.

Mr. Obama never mentioned his humiliating, hopeless campaign against Mr. Rush in class (he lost by a two-to-one margin), though colleagues noticed that he seemed exhausted and was smoking more than usual.

Soon after, the faculty saw an opening and made him its best offer yet: Tenure upon hiring. A handsome salary, more than the $60,000 he was making in the State Senate or the $60,000 he earned teaching part time. A job for Michelle Obama directing the legal clinic.

Your political career is dead, Daniel Fischel, then the dean, said he told Mr. Obama, gently. Mr. Obama turned the offer down. Two years later, he decided to run for the Senate. He canceled his course load and has not taught since.

Now, watching the news, it is dawning on Mr. Obama’s former students that he was mining material for his political future even as he taught them.

Byron Rodriguez, a real estate lawyer in San Francisco, recalls his professor’s admiration for the soaring but plainspoken speeches of Frederick Douglass.

“No one speaks this way anymore,” Mr. Obama told his class, wondering aloud what had happened to the art of political oratory. In particular, Mr. Obama admired Douglass’s use of a collective voice that embraced black and white concerns, one that Mr. Obama has now adopted himself.

In class, Mr. Obama sounded many of the same themes he does on the campaign trail, Ms. Callahan said, ticking them off: “self-determinism as opposed to paternalism, strength in numbers, his concept of community development.”

But as a professor, students say, Mr. Obama was in the business of complication, showing that even the best-reasoned rules have unintended consequences, that competing legal interests cannot always be resolved, that a rule that promotes justice in one case can be unfair in the next.

So even some former students who are thrilled at Mr. Obama’s success wince when they hear him speaking like the politician he has so fully become.

“When you hear him talking about issues, it’s at a level so much simpler than the one he’s capable of,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “He was a lot more fun to listen to back then.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

www.nytimes.com/.../30law.html

The New York Times

January 28, 2007

In Law School, Obama Found Political Voice

By Jodi Kantor

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

www.nytimes.com/.../28obama.html