May We Remember

Like many Americans the news of the deaths of two black men in Louisiana and Minnesota, and of the police officers in Texas shook me to the core. Feelings of sadness, anxiety, fear, and from those anger, flooded me for several days. Then, like many Americans, ordinary everyday routine reclaimed my life, the knots in my stomach along with the anxiety, fear and anger ebbed. It’s not that I (we) forgot what happened, but I (we) could turn away from the immediacy and relax.

Lying in bed last night awake in the dark early morning hours, it finally occurred to me that this ability of most Americans to push these issues out of the forefront of our lives is part of the problem. Because the people most directly concerned – African Americans (especially young black men) and uniformed law enforcement – do not have this luxury.  Sadness, anxiety, fear and anger are embedded in their daily lives in way that the rest of us cannot really understand.  

However, the experiences of African Americans and uniformed law enforcement while similar in some ways are not identical.  

Sociologists use the term “master status” to encompass things those things in our lives that are central to our definition of self and our identity.  Both being “African American” and a “law enforcement officer” are important master statuses, central to the personal identity and sense of self of most of the individuals who can claim those statuses. The difference is that being “African American” is an ascribed status, one conferred at birth by having parents/grandparents with African ancestry, one imposed by society regardless of one’s own wishes, and impossible to exit except by death.  Being a “law enforcement officer” is an achieved status, obtained by study  and practice, consciously chosen as an occupation by an adult over other possible occupations; while far more central to a person’s identity than “working in a factory” or “flipping burgers,” achieved statuses such as law enforcement officer can be exited by choice resignation and retirement, or can be forced upon one by disability or death. Exiting the status of law enforcement by death is the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, law enforcement officers can and do take vacations from their status – they can take their family to Disney World and not be perceived by anyone else as a law enforcement officer.  There is no vacation from being African American.

So the thought came to me as I lay in the dark, that it is important for the rest of us – who are neither African American nor law enforcement – to remember the intensity of the fear, the anxiety, the anger and to remember that while we can let it go and get on with our lives, others must continue to deal with those destructive, life-corroding feelings every day. The goal is not to make us all live in fear and anger, but to use our memory to assist in building a society in which no one need feel that way every day. 

Here goes....

Since it would appear that no one actually reads my blog, I might as well write whatever I want. So...

I was just watching Brit Hume's "Special Report" on Fox News (yes, I watch Fox News, it's always important to know what the enemy is up to). He had a panel of very articulate, interesting and thoughtful guests having a rational discussion about the immigration bill being debated in Congress. Two of the panelists pointed out that the current bill does not really have the support of the business community, because it does not go far enough with the guest worker program.

The current bill only offers 400,000 guest worker slots per year, and proposes that the workers only stay 2 years, then go back to their country of origin for one year, before being able to return for another two year stint. The American business community, according to one of Hume's conservative panelists, would rather see a million workers a year, with a three year work permit, that can be renewed for another three years without having to return home. (If you doubt my version of this, check out Brit Hume's "Special Report" website on Thursday, and click on the transcript for today's show -- Tuesday May 22, 2007 -- it won't go up until later today or early tomorrow).

I have absolutely no doubt that this speaker is right on the money when it comes to a large proportion of American businesses which depend very heavily on the inexpensive labor of immigrants, especially illegal workers.

What I find so fascinating about all this, is that the American upper class and business elite, have been stoking the fires of xenophobia and racism for more than a hundred years as a means of keeping the working class divided among itself and unable to joing together as a politically coherent class based political power. The power elite as G. William Domhoff calls them, make use of their ownership and control over mass media outlets, to promote this rabid anti-immigrant sentiment. [And don't give me any crap about the so called "liberal media" -- Lou Dobbs, who I am sure is considered "liberal" by folks on the far right, does a superb job in ramping up the hysterial xenophobia of his viewers].

If you're interested in a serious, well documented sociological study on the use of racism and ethnic divisions to control the work force, check out the classic Blue Collar Community by William Kornblum about steel workers in South Chicago in the 1970's. For a less scholarly, but well written view of the same issue, read bell hooks where we stand: class matters [no capitals in the original].

As a genuine left winger, I would like to see amnesty for all immigrants with jobs [if they are legal, they won't worry about being deported, and they can be more radical and agressive in pressing for better pay and working conditions]. If it weren't for that, I'd be crowing for joy that the American business community is not getting what they want out of this immigration bill. It seems only fair that if you spend a hundred years of fanning the flames of hate and fear, that hate and fear will suddenly be inconvenient when you suddenly decide you actually need a lot more cheap workers. Hoisted on their own petard.

Obama, memories, and me

Recent dissection of Barack Obama's youth and his memories of that youth in his book "Dreams from My Father" (see the Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0703250359mar25,1,605874.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed), prompted me to think about two of my most significant and influential memories of conversations.

The Chicago Tribune article about Barack Obama states:

"He said he does recall long, soulful talks with the young Obama and that his friend confided his longing and loneliness. But those talks, Kakugawa said, were not about race. 'Not even close,' he said, adding that Obama was dealing with 'some inner turmoil' in those days."

"'But it wasn't a race thing,' he said."

The article goes on to say:

"Some of these discrepancies are typical of childhood memories -- fuzzy in specifics, warped by age, shaped by writerly license."

My own experience suggests that a remembered conversation can be "about" something, even if it was not part of the conversation. Two conversations that I had with friends, about two months apart were extraordinarily influential in shaping my career path. The first of those conversations was "about" the impact of racial/ethnic and cultural differences, the second was "about" the impact of social class.

I know for a fact that race/ethnicity and culture were never even mentioned in the first conversation, yet that is precisely what that conversation was "about." August before my sophomore year in college I gave a party to reunite some friends from high school. Much of the conversation revolved around men and romance (pretty typical of a group of 19 year old women). Two of my friends, blond blue-eyed Betty and raven haired, brown-eyed Debbe, started talking about being attracted to young men who were different from themselves. Betty's affections were drawn to a man a few years older, from South America, and Japanese-American Debbe had been interested in a Caucasian man. Betty was still seeing her young man despite disapproval by her parents, but Debbe explained that after a great deal of thought and some anguish, she had decided dating someone of another race was not worth incurring the disapproval of her parents.

Betty and Debbe's discussion became heated, when Betty suggested that Debbe needed to show some spine and independence, and stop letting her parents decide who she would date. As they argued about this for some time, it was obvious to me, as the observer, that they both thought about this argument in terms of personality and individual preference, but that it was really about racial/ethnic and cultural differences in the way they were raised, and how they thought of themselves in relationship to their families.

As a result of this conversation, I spent the next several years researching racial/ethnic and cultural differences in child raising and identity, especially among Chinese- and Japanese-Americans. I'm sure that my memory of this conversation and what is was about, is entirely different from Betty and Debbe's memory of it -- if they even remember it at all.

The second remembered conversation is from just two months later, October in my sophomore year. I was stuck in Cleveland Hopkins Airport trying to stand-by for flights to Washington, D.C., and I ran into a fellow student, Ivory, also having difficulty getting on a flight. [I always traveled stand-by, but Ivory was the victim of flight cancellations due to striking air line employees).

I had something of a crush on Ivory, and knowing what I was like back then, I could be more than a little obnoxious to the objects of my affections. So in retrospect, it was kind of him to take the time to talk with me while we both waited to catch a flight. We conversed for nearly five hours stretched out over much of the day. Most of what we talked about is lost to memory. But two things about the conversation remained with me clearly. The first was that he was desperately unhappy at Oberlin College. The second was that at least some of that unhappiness derived from the mismatch between his family's view of purpose of a college education and the view held by the faculty and most of the students at Oberlin.

Ivory's family, like my own, sent him to college to become a teacher. To his parents, like mine, college was an instrument for obtaining a decent job. But the ethos at Oberlin College, in that day, was quite different. Having an instrumental approach to education was frowned upon -- unless it was as an instrument of social change. College was for intellectual, artistic and personal discovery. God forbid that any Oberlin student should show any concern for the pecuniary benefits of education [unlike the Commonwealth of Kentucky today that has signs saying "education pays" posted on every state vehicle and along the road sides].

Ivory expressed great anguish, and a sense of being rent in two, by the differing expectations of family and college community. Although I did not experience the pain Ivory did over this clash of values, I was very much aware of the disparity between my family's views about education and the views of my professors and friends at Oberlin.

The conversation stayed with me because I felt honored to have been the recipient of such confidences, and because it resonated with my own experiences. By the time I reached graduate school (5 years later) I remembered this as a discussion about social class, and the pain and bewilderment faced by working class students in an upper middle class environment. However, in retrospect, I cannot honestly say that either Ivory or myself spoke about social class at the time we had the conversation. Perhaps we did. Perhaps we did not. That does not make it any less "about" class.

The memory of this conversation, about social class, heavily influenced my work as a sociologist. Almost everything I have done has been in some way or another "about" social class, and the millions of ways that class affects our lives.

So who is really to say, just because Senator Obama's friend "Ray" (Kakugawa) does not remember Barack talking about race, does not mean that the pain he expressed at the time did not have a racial component. Sometimes it takes years to gain perspective on our pasts and know why it really was that we suffered.