Considering the lives of transnational adoptees

This week in North Philly Notes, Kristi Brian, author of Reframing Transracial Adoption, reflects on the assumptions commonly articulated by non-adopted people that rightly infuriate many adult adoptees.

Thousands of people took to the streets of Moscow earlier this month to protest the adoption ban that prevents U.S. citizens from adopting Russian children. Although the turnout was impressive (reported estimates range from 7,000 to 50,000 protesters) I have to wonder what really brought all these people out.  Are the protesters genuinely united for the sake of Russian children as much as they say they are? Do people feel that they honestly need to help preserve the interests of the mostly white, middle-class, U.S. adopters left with pending or halted adoptions? Of course, it’s not too tough to get folks to stand up for the sake of “poor, orphaned children,” but it’s especially easy if a critical mass of people stands practically “at the ready” to yell at the big state machinery that hasn’t done much for them lately. I suspect this was the predominant unifying element of the protesters and I certainly can’t blame dissidents for making the most of a “hot” moment to demonstrate their democratic freedoms. However, when it comes to rallying behind precious, romantic statements about the immensely better life adoptees are destined to have in the U.S., I urge caution.

As my research on transnational/transracial adoption from South Korea explains (see Reframing Transracial Adoption), “the better life in America” assumptions commonly articulated by non-adopted people rightly infuriate many adult adoptees. Many of the adoptees I spoke with helped me to understand their reality of navigating the imposition of gratitude that surrounds being “rescued” from a nation often implied as inferior.  While it is true that Russian adoptions into white U.S. families are often pursued as a way to avoid the racial component of adoption, questions of belonging, origins, and abandonment are nearly universal to all state-regulated adoptions.

Not only do we have a lot to learn from adult adoptee perspectives, but critically observing the rise and fall of massive adoption projects, such as Korean-American adoption (the first and longest-running form of transnational adoption) should allow nation-states to learn from one another’s mistakes. Korea went from being the world’s top “supplier” of children for adoption in the mid-1980s to a “sending nation” that is, at least to some degree, more conscious of the meaning and impact of that history. This change happened through internal and external criticism, and most notably, in recent years through the dedicated reform work of the Korean adoptees who have returned to Korea to help keep more Korean children in Korea.

While there may be heartache for families with their minds set on a particular child to “bring home,” I feel abundantly confident that criticism and worldwide scrutiny of transnational adoption serves us all. If nothing else, dramatic legislative actions such as the adoption ban should help us to fine tune our understanding of the relationship between family and the state. Perhaps it will make us ask us what the state has done for our family lately. Or what the role of the state should be in helping us form families. I suspect most of us would like to think of the state as an afterthought. It’s there when we need it otherwise we prefer to keep it out of our family matters. Yet for folks fighting like hell to have the state validate their most intimate, loving partnership as legitimate and legal, the family-state question becomes more vivid. Similarly, for those of us unfortunate enough to find ourselves facing the threat of losing our family members, acquiring them, or reuniting with them based on the intervening policies of a state (including policies of the child welfare system, the police force or the prison system) the power struggle can get ugly.

When it comes to your family or your government, who do you expect to win the power struggle? And in the case of transnational adoption, adopters’ vision for family must interface with the power and politics of two nations.  When the fate of our families becomes heavily determined by the “personalities” of two competitive capitalist nation-states (with many skeletons in both closets) both posturing as the top contender in human rights protections, we can only expect a stampede of contradictions to complicate our attempts at creating family intimacy.

My ethnographic research on adoptive families has led me to a position much like the one being voiced by Russia’s Children’s Rights Ombudsman, Pavel Astakhov. Astakhov has stated candidly at human rights hearings on adoption that the “hysterical warnings” about international adoptions being the best viable solution for Russian children only serves those seeking profit from adoption.

The fact of the matter is, as much as we hate to admit it, transnational adoption is a marketplace driven by and reflective of capitalist modes of production. The desires of white Americans and Europeans (predominantly) are the buyers in that marketplace interested in “giving” a better life to a child of their choice. Race does play a big role in which adoption programs adopters choose. Given this fact alone, transnational adoption offers us a chance to follow the advice of philosopher George Yancy as he urges us to shift our gaze (in Look, a White!) to assess the ways of white folks rather than simply accepting them as the way things ought to be done. 

My book explores the actions of white adopters in Korea’s history with transnational adoption. But more importantly it highlights the work of the Korean adoptees who have critically observed adoptive family life in the U.S. as well as the politics of race, culture and statehood surrounding their adoptions. Although Korea has provided more children for overseas adoption than any other place in the world since 1955, Korea has dramatically reduced its numbers down to 627 adoptions to the U.S. last year. That is still a lot of children being transplanted through the complex bureaucracies of two national-states that cannot begin to attend to the life-long emotional realities of adoption. The more we see those numbers decrease in all “sending” countries, the better I feel about our abilities to create home-grown solutions to globalized problems that often masquerade as new ways to embrace superficial multiculturalism.

Speaking of race and class matters at colleges elite and otherwise

This week in North Philly Notes, Elizabeth Aries, author of Race and Class Matters at an Elite Collge and Speaking of Race and Class, looks at the potential impact of the outcome of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which considers race as a factor in a university’s admissions process.

There is much at stake in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which came before the Supreme Court last week. The Court will determine whether universities can legally continue to consider race as one factor in their admissions process. If they are not allowed to do so, the racial and ethnic diversity of students on our campuses will diminish, as will the educational benefits that ensue from having a diverse student body. 

My books, Race and Class Matters at an Elite College and Speaking of Race and Class have focused on those educational benefits.  I illustrate what, if anything, students actually learn from being with classmates of different races and social class backgrounds inside and outside the classroom. For both books, I followed a group of black and white students, both affluent and lower-income, over their four years at a liberal arts college, interviewing them at three points along the way. The educational benefits of diversity are real and they are important.

Many students come to college from segregated communities and high schools, having acquired widely held racial and class-based stereotypes that persist unchallenged without contact with the people they have stereotyped.  College can provide students with the opportunities to get to know and understand classmates not of their race and/or class, to have their stereotypes and world views challenged, to see the world through a new lens. 

The majority of white students in my study entered college having thought little about race or its consequences for peoples’ lives. Some never thought of themselves as even having a race. Some came to campus believing racial discrimination was a thing of the past, having never personally observed it. But as white students made friends with black classmates, and heard about friends’ encounters with prejudice and discrimination, they recognized that racial discrimination is still a reality. Those who had been taught a color-blind philosophy, taught not to think that race even really exists, found it shocking and upsetting to learn from minority friends about their experiences with prejudice and discrimination, and came to understand that race affects the experiences and opportunities people have. Over their years at college cross-race relationships led many white students to think more about race and racism and to become aware of their white privilege. Racial stereotypes were undermined as white students discovered the diversity within the black student community on campus – the great variability in language, tastes and preferences, in social class, religion, or identification as Caribbean American, African American or African. Given this diversity, it was hard for white students to hold on to the notion that blacks were poor, lived in the inner city, dressed in baggy clothes, spoke Ebonics and listened to rap music. Many students came to realize their racial stereotypes were incorrect and limiting.

Bringing students to campus from widely discrepant economic backgrounds also produced important learning. Students did not fail to notice what classmates had and did not have, not only in terms of material possessions, but in terms of the opportunities they had to go out to eat, take spring break trips, to make connections to pre-professional summer jobs and to good jobs after graduation. Many affluent students who had grown up in the bubble of their affluent communities had been unable to see outside that world. Some considered themselves to be “kind of poor” because their families lacked the extreme wealth of others in their communities. Friendships with lower-income students made them aware of just how privileged their families were, gave them a deeper awareness of class inequalities, of their own unearned privileges, and of the important role social class plays in shaping people’s lives and opportunities. Many lower-income students entered college with extremely negative stereotypes about the wealthy, seeing them as arrogant, spoiled, snobby, entitled, exclusive, as all about showing off their wealth. Through relationships with affluent classmates they, too, recognized that many students did not fit their stereotypes.

Colleges and universities educate students who will become our future leaders. If we, as a society, value equity and social justice for all citizens, we must produce leaders who have had their stereotypes challenged and are able to understand the world from perspectives different from their own. The impending Supreme Court decision may well reduce the opportunity for this kind of learning to occur.

To Read Chapter 1 of Race and Class Matters at an Elite College, click here
http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1941_reg.html

To Read Chapter 1 of Speaking of Race and Class, click here
http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2248_reg.html

A Q&A with Vice Presidential candidate Judge James P. Gray, author of Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It

As election season heats up, Judge James  P. Gray, author of Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It,  took some time out of his campaigning to answer questions about running for Vice President of the United Staes on the Libertarian Party ticket.

What prompted you to run for Vice President on the Libertarian Party ticket with nominee Gary Johnson? 

Based upon his stature, courage, and accomplishments as a two-term governor of New Mexico, for a long time I had been calling Governor Gary Johnson the most qualified person to be president that I knew of.  So when he asked me to be his running mate, what was I supposed to say?

What can your running mate do to help the country and what will you do to help him achieve that goal?

Our country is in serious trouble on numerous fronts.  Taking just three of them: the economy, jobs and education.  President Obama and Senator Romney are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on TV ads, and not talking about their records – because they can’t – nor about their ideas – because they almost literally don’t have any – but instead spending all this money showing how inept the other one is – and we agree with both of them!  Today of every dollar the federal government is spending, we are borrowing 43 cents!  That is simply not tenable!  We will submit a balanced budget to Congress in 2013.  This so-called radical budget of Paul Ryan will not balance the budget for 28 years.  We will conduct an audit of the entire federal government, and reduce spending on programs and agencies that are not giving value for our tax dollar.  Similarly, we will repeal the income tax, which will make our products – both manufactured and agricultural – more competitive with other goods around the world.  With that result, companies will bring their manufacturing back to the United States.  In effect we will have a reverse outsourcing of jobs.  Regarding education, we will empower parents to control where the government’s money is spent on the education of their children.  As such, they will demand excellence.   This program is now working famously well in Milwaukee and New Orleans, and it will work in the rest of the country under the leadership of Governor Gary Johnson as well.

Your platform involves balancing the budget, rethinking education, extending civil liberties, developing a plan for legal immigration, reforming health care, and environmental protection issues. How do you feel your approach to these issues differs from the other candidates?

In so many ways, like set forth above, Romney and Obama are the same.  We come at Obama from the left, because we would repeal the so-called Patriot Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, and the pattern of flying drones over our towns and cities to monitor citizens without a judicial warrant.  And we come at Romney from the right, because we really would reduce the size, cost and intrusion of the federal government.   The choice between Romney and Obama, on the one hand, and Governor Gary Johnson on the other, is stark.

One of your major platforms is reforming drug laws, which was the subject of your Temple University Press book, Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed…. How have drug laws been less effective in the time since your book was published?

When I first published my book in 2001 I was convinced that we would change our failed and hopeless policy of Drug Prohibition if only we could legitimize the discussion, and that my book would contribute to that discussion.  Honestly I believe that the book has, but today in 2012 we are in a much worse position than we were 11 years ago: more drugs in our communities, more people in prison, more deaths from the drug violence, more deaths from lack of quality control, and on and on.  There is simply no question that eventually we will come to our senses and hold adults accountable for their actions, but stop attempting to hold them accountable for what they put into their bodies.  But until that day, we will continue to make the situations worse at all levels of our lives.

How do you feel your work as a Superior Court Judge from Orange County qualifies you as a Vice Presidential candidate?

Honestly, there is no doubt in my mind that I am more qualified than any other of the candidates for Vice President.  I will be the first person to be elected to national office who was a Peace Corps Volunteer.  I am the only one of the six of us running for president or vice president who has served in the military.  And I am the only one who has been a federal prosecutor and a judge for 25 years.  Similarly, Governor Gary Johnson has more administrative experience than both Obama and Romney combined.  We are the most qualified team by far, and it is frustrating that, so far, we could not even be a part of the debates.

You and Gary Johnson are on the ballot in 47 states and the District of Columbia. How/where will you get media coverage over the next month leading up to the election?

Getting coverage from the mainstream media is one of the most difficult parts of our campaign.  Why is hard to figure out.  But it is best illustrated by the time in about September when Jessie Ventura was being interviewed live on CNN when he endorsed Governor Gary Johnson for President.  When CNN put the interview on its website, they deleted the endorsement.  But slowly we are making progress, and if people demand that we get coverage, we are sure eventually it will happen.

Will you be touring America? Where can people see/meet you and/or Gary Johnson?

Governor Johnson and I continue to travel our country in this campaign.  Everywhere.  People can track us through our website, which is www.GaryJohnson2012.com

You and Gary Johnson are challenging the Republican/Democrat Status Quo. What disappoints you about Republican/Democrat discourse?

As Libertarians we believe in honest competition.  That is what frustrates us the most about the Republicans and Democrats, because they don’t.  For example, the Republicans have traveled all around the country challenging our qualifications to be on the ballots.  So far we have successfully repelled their challenges, except in the State of Michigan.  And overall it is the voters and the country that will suffer for this action. 

What would we do in office?

We would balance our budget, because a weak economy is the biggest threat to our security.  We would repeal the income tax and bring back millions of jobs to our country, as stated above, we would keep our loyal troops out of military conflicts unless our genuine national interests and security were to be threatened, and we would repeal these threats by our own government to our freedoms and our liberties.  We care about our great country, and will reverse the process of prosperity, equal opportunity and freedom slipping from our grasp.  The alternative is to give up, and that will simply never happen!

Examining how narrative accounts of mob violence produced by vigilantes legitimized frontier justice and lynching

This week, Lisa Arellano, author of Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs, describes what triggered her interest in writing about vigilantism and vigilante narratives.

People are sometimes surprised that I have written a book about vigilantes.  I spent most of my college and early graduate school years studying political movements and the ways that people use language and stories to create ideas about their identities, and possibilities for political change.  When I finally found my way into a history graduate seminar, I discovered that history sometimes works in very similar ways.  So now, I work on politics and history and on the ways that these two types of knowledge intersect. 

I remember very clearly the moment in graduate school that triggered my interest in vigilantism.  During a history seminar, we were reading Neil Foley’s The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture.  Foley quotes a Mexican American man who said, about a man who immigrated to the U.S. after him, “I’d lynch him if I could.”  My fascination with that formulation was the genesis for my dissertation about vigilantes.  What was this man trying to express about himself and his place in the U.S. when he made this claim?  As someone who grew up in the West, I was already familiar with the positive spin sometimes put on frontier vigilantism.  The writings of anti-lynching activists like Ida B Wells and Walter White had familiarized me with the horrors of Southern lynching and the work of scholars like Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and Robyn Wiegman had helped me to think about the narrative and representational qualities of lynching violence.  The line from Foley’s book seemed to be about all, and none, of these familiar aspects of vigilantism and lynching.  The primary goal of my dissertation was to explain how all of these pieces were connected.

After travelling to archives around the country, and after looking at a wide array of different kinds of records left by vigilante groups, I discovered that oftentimes vigilantes worked very hard to leave glorified accounts of what they had done. They actually wrote histories of their own movements in order to create a favorable record of their actions!  These vigilante histories are still the centerpiece of my work and are the basis of my argument that a particular narrative formation was what created the form of violence we know as lynching.  According to this vigilante narrative, “an ideal vigilance committee convened and acted in an organized and even-handed fashion in response to uncontrolled criminal conditions and was roundly supported and applauded by its community for doing so.” 

When it came time to revise my dissertation for publication as a book, it was important to me to that I offer a fuller explanation of the ways that the vigilantes’ histories and accounts about themselves became so widely influential in histories of the region.  Some additional research on western archivist and historian Hubert Howe Bancroft allowed me to link up the vigilantes’ histories about themselves with histories about the west and with the process of regional archive building.  The vigilantes, their historians, and early local archivists and history writers did a remarkably good job creating positive accounts of vigilantism until Ida B. Wells intervened.  Among the anti-lynching activists, it was really Wells who figured out how important language, stories and narratives were in legitimizing vigilante practice.

While Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs is about the past and the ways that we remember and write history I believe that its most important lessons are for the present day.  The vigilante narrative continues to appear in a variety of contexts—from border patrols to community anti-crime groups.  The historical vigilantes help us understand how and why these practices can be understood, by some, as heroic (as well as the reasons that this self-understanding is often misplaced.)  The vigilante example also clearly demonstrates how violence, like politics and history, is both constituted and legitimated through language and stories.  My new research focuses on violence, gender and sexuality from 1950 to the present in order to understand these ideas in a different context.

Commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Title IX decision

This week, recent voices reflect on the impact of Title IX following the 40th anniversary of this landmark decision. Here are some interviews, opinions, and articles on the effects of ending sex discrimination on federally funded education programs.

Nation Public Radio’s Scott Simon, host of Weekend Edition, talked to Nancy Hogshead-Makar, co-editor of  Equal Play (Temple University Press) about the impact of the law that opened competitive sports to millions of American girls and women.

 Listen to the interview here: http://www.npr.org/2012/06/23/155622564/in-sports-opportunities-women-still-lag

 

The Chronicle of Higher Education published two pieces this month on Title IX.

Title IX at 40: Have Colleges Done Enough?

 By Welch Suggs

Sometime in 2002, while working as a reporter, I was on the phone with an athletics director talking about Title IX. He asked to go off the record—and proceeded to vent.

He understood Title IX, the 1972 amendment to the Higher Education Act that forbade sex discrimination at institutions receiving federal funds. He got it. But what could institutions do if there simply weren’t enough women interested in playing sports at the college level? His daughters had played sports happily as elementary-school students, but after they turned 12, their and their friends’ interests turned elsewhere. What more should he do?

To read more of this article, visit http://chronicle.com/article/Title-IX-at-40-Have-Colleges/132581/

40 Years of Title IX: Leadership Matters for Women in Academe

By Yvette M. Alex-Assensoh

Forty years ago this month, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 became law, requiring an end to gender discrimination in admissions at educational institutions that receive federal money. Since then, progress in attaining gender equity for women has been heartening, but there is still considerable work to be done, particularly in the areas of faculty and leadership.

In the 1980s—in little more than the blink of an eye—women surpassed men in admissions on most college campuses. And now, unlike their parents and grandparents, these women are increasingly likely to be taught by women. This is good news, and we have Title IX to thank.

To read more of this article, visit  http://chronicle.com/article/40-Years-of-Title-IX-/132311/

The Nation published this piece last week:

Don’t Like Sports? Three Other Reasons to Be a Fan of Title IX

By Bryce Covert

This Saturday marked the fortieth anniversary of Title IX, the civil rights law that prohibits discrimination in education on the basis of sex. To say I’m not sporty may be an understatement. True story: I fulfilled my high school team sport requirement with a short-lived stint on the bowling team, during which I devoted more attention to my calculus homework than to perfecting my strikes and spares. I am about as likely to hit a baseball as to hit the lotto jackpot. I am far from a poster child for the common perception of a Title IX beneficiary: one of the girls who entered school sports in droves. The number of girls participating in sports in elementary and secondary schools rose from 295,000 the year Title IX was enacted to 3.2 million in the last school year.

But there’s a lot more to love about the law than the paths it cleared for women of the sporty persuasion. If you’re like me and not a fan of what Mitt Romney and I call “sport,” here are some other great reasons to be on board—and push for enforcement of the law to go even further:

To read more of this article, please visit: http://www.thenation.com/blog/168553/dont-sports-three-other-reasons-be-fan-title-ix?rel=emailNation

 

Once a Lawyer…

Robert A. Brooks, author of Cheaper by the Hour, about temporary lawyers and the deprofessionalization of the law, has shared this blog entry about why he may have a law degree, he’s happier not practicing.

I am a recovering lawyer.

Now, that’s not as bad as it sounds. I’m happy I went to law school and got some good experience practicing at a couple of corporate firms and the U.S. Justice Department, and I still use my legal skills (in my personal life and as a Criminal Justice professor).

But I’m happier that I stopped practicing. I can’t help but notice that the law (as well as other professions) seems to be headed toward greater proletarianization (bureaucratization and other processes that leave attorneys little ideological control over their work) and deprofessionalization (work is becoming more standardized, routinized, insecure, and surveilled).

I wrote about these processes in my book Cheaper by the Hour  which is based in participant-observation (I did the work myself for three years while working on my dissertation) and in interviews of other temporary lawyers.

Cheaper by the Hour calls temporary lawyers the “leading edge of the new legal underclass” and describes attorneys working in sometimes abysmal physical conditions and performing rote work (“document review”) that uses few legal skills. In a review of the book,  Library Journal rightly called this a “Dickens-meets-Dilbert world” (nice – I wish I’d thought of that myself).

Lawyers’ dissatisfaction with the law and their careers is of course nothing new, but there seems to be a harder edge to it now, a deeper disappointment. Witness the recent slew of lawsuits (described in the New York Daily News) filed by alumni of a dozen law schools that claim the schools inflated their placement statistics.

I’d love to hear from current law students, recent grads, practicing lawyers, and burnt-out ex-lawyers. Is the practice of law changing fundamentally? Do you find satisfaction with your work? Are you able to balance work/life demands? Are you under-employed and overburdened with debt? Would you do it all over again if given the chance?

Can we empathize with those whom we deem “the enemy”?

In this blog entry, Rajini Srikanth, author of Constructing the Enemy, considers how we understand issues of empathy and antipathy using examples from reality and fiction.

Philosophers and psychologists who write about empathy agree that it is a state of mind that combines cognition (knowledge of the particulars of some other person’s circumstances) and affect or feeling (growing out of awareness of that person’s reality). 

I remember when the (first) President George H.W. Bush appointed Justice David Souter to the Supreme Court there were some critics (on the left) who observed that because Judge Souter had lived all his life as a single man he would have no understanding of the pressures of raising a family and the many challenges that the majority of Americans face.  He could not, their implication was, be empathetic to the vast majority of the public.  Nobody actually used the word “empathy” at the time, and Justice Souter went on to show, in his opinions, that he could be quite empathetic to the complicated lives of Americans of all backgrounds and circumstances. 

Creative writers and literary theorists remind us that the exercise of the imagination is a prerequisite for empathy – it is only when one is able to imagine the circumstances and feelings of another that empathy has a chance of emerging.  Richard Wright called this labor of imagination “a kind of significant living.” Describing his efforts at creating Bigger Thomas, the angry disaffected African American protagonist of his 1940 novel Native Son, Wright said, “It was an act of concentration, of trying to hold within one’s center of attention all of that bewildering array of facts which science, politics, experience, memory, and imagination were urging upon me. . . . I was pushing out to new areas of feeling, strange landmarks of emotion, cramping upon foreign soil, compounding new relationships of perceptions, making new and—until that very split second of time!—unheard-of and unfelt effects with words.”

But this very novel shows us that one can be empathetically imaginative without feeling the need to alleviate the distress of the person whose circumstances one cognitively understands. In Wright’s novel, the state’s Attorney General says to Bigger Thomas, ““Maybe you think that I don’t understand. But I do, I know how it feels to walk along the streets like other people, dressed like them, talking like them, and yet excluded for no reason except that you’re black. I know your people.’” His cognitive knowledge of Bigger Thomas’s circumstances is not accompanied by care and concern for Bigger. In fact, Bigger is bewildered at the Attorney General’s attitude: how could he know so much about Bigger and yet be “so bitterly against him.”  And herein is the dark side of empathy – it can become an exploitative means of power and control. It is precisely because of the empathizer’s power over the recipients of empathy (in certain circumstances, as in, say, the CIA’s “empathetic interrogation” of prisoners) that the latter are suspicious of empathy when it is offered. 

Yet empathy is also, paradoxically, about vulnerability. In Morgan Spurlock’s television documentary “Thirty Days as a Muslim,” a Christian man from West Virginia agrees to live for 30 days in Dearborn, Michigan with a Muslim family and to respect all their customs and participate in the everyday activities of their life. When he arrives at the West Virginia airport to leave for Detroit, he is dressed in Muslim attire, and he realizes for the first time what it means to be vulnerable –  the suspicious and hostile stares he receives, the heightened scrutiny he is subjected to at security, these new realities unsettle him and make him feel exposed. As a result of this initial reaction by others to his newly reconstituted body (as a Muslim man), he begins to experience vulnerability and gain the first traces of understanding of what it might mean to live as a Muslim in present-day United States.

It is this vulnerability that accompanies some instances of empathy that leads to its being discredited, particularly by those who feel that there ought to be no place for empathy in the legal system. When President Obama announced in 2009 that his nominee to the Supreme Court would possess the key characteristic of empathy, the criticism from the right was sharp. An empathetic judge would be vulnerable to manipulation by groups with specific ideologies; an empathetic judge would not be able to adhere strictly to the text of the Constitution; an empathetic judge would be an activist judge.

The complexity of empathy as a sentiment (the intertwining of power and vulnerability in those who experience it), its complex reception by those who observe its emergence or are its recipients, and the difficulty of its emergence provide a humanist with an intellectually challenging terrain to explore. But it is not just the intellectual frisson of studying empathy that first drew me to it. Rather, what led me to pursue the study of empathy was a sense that it, of all the sentiments that are critical to the effective functioning of a true democracy (concerned with issues of equity and justice), is perhaps the most crucial to cultivate.  I became interested in exploring empathy when it is least likely to emerge and to understand the motivations of individuals who are courageous enough to open themselves up to the emergence of empathy in these situations. It seemed obvious to me that we are least likely to be empathetic to those whom the state, with the acquiescence of the citizenry, constructs as “the enemy.” 

Consequently, I zeroed in on two historical moments – the internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the current U.S. global “war on terror” leading to the detention of Muslim men in domestic detention centers and at Guantanamo Bay.  We have apologized formally for the internment of Japanese Americans and made reparations to the surviving internees. Yet, despite our retrospective empathy with regard to the Japanese American internees, we are currently immersed wholly in the “war on terror,” convinced of the righteousness of our approach, and pursuing a problematic strategy of detention and military tribunals, the possibility of preventive detention, and deportation.

In 2004, I began to hear lawyers who were questioning the arbitrary application of executive power, and I became aware of the work of the Center for Constitutional Rights, the New York City-located nerve center for lawyers from the private bar who were offering their services pro bono for the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. In speaking with some of these lawyers, I realized that they were drawn to become involved not from empathy but principally to uphold the U.S. Constitution, but it also became clear to me that through following the letter of the law some other larger emotional and humanistic space of interaction was opening up between the lawyers and the Muslim detainees. In attempting to examine that humanistic space, I turned to what I know best – the work of creative writers. In doing so, I brought into juxtaposition the use of language by lawyers and creative writers as they both consider “the enemy” and how they bring their respective skills into representing this enemy.  Ultimately, I am interested in exploring whether the work of these lawyers and creative writers has any impact on policy decisions, or whether their work is significant only in reminding those whom they represent (legally or creatively) that antipathy is not universal, and in providing some small relief in an otherwise bleak and unrelentingly hostile political and socio-cultural climate.

Continuing the argument about why we need to repeal our failed drug laws

Judge James P. Gray

In this blog entry, author Judge James P. Gray makes a case that our drug laws are not working. He explains why–and why he updated his book Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do about It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs.

On April 8, 1992 I did something quite unusual for a sitting trial court judge: I held a press conference and announced my conclusions as publicly as I could, both as a judge and former federal prosecutor, that our great nation’s policy of Drug Prohibition was not working – and would never work. 

Since that time the situation has demonstrably only gotten worse. Eventually I became so frustrated about the amount of evidence mandating a change away from this failed policy that I organized my thoughts and wrote a book entitled Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do about It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs.

The first half of the book is intended to make people angry at all of the unnecessary problems we have inflicted upon ourselves and the rest of the world because of the policy of Drug Prohibition.  But the second half of the book was intended to give people hope, because it outlines many of the options we have to that failed policy. In fact, many of those options have been proven to be successful both by our own experience and that of other countries.  In many ways, the response to the book was gratifying because it helped to initiate and perpetuate a full, open and honest discussion about this critically important area.

But now the situation is much worse even than when the book was originally published.  So at the request of my publisher and numbers of others, I have written an updated second edition that traces many of the developments of the last ten years. 

Many of these developments have been predictably disastrous, like the fact that our country still leads the world in the incarceration of its people; that tens of  thousands of people, including many children and other innocent bystanders, have been killed in Mexico and elsewhere not because of drugs, but because of drug money; that the continued obscene profits made by juvenile street gangs and adult gangs like the Hell’s Angels, Mexican drug cartels and other thugs are solely facilitated by the continuation of Drug Prohibition; and that all of these illicit drugs are easier to be obtained by children – if they want to – than it is for them to get alcohol, expressly because the illicit dealers don’t ask for I.D. 

But there have also been some definite signs that people in our country and all around the world are beginning to understand the cause and effect of what is happening.  This realization, along with the fact that many of the options used by some other nations like Portugal and Switzerland are working far better than ours, are evidence that we will see some material and positive changes in the not-so-distant future.

Personally I believe that helping us change away from the failed policy of Drug Prohibition is the most patriotic thing I can do for the country I love.  Further, the most effective way of achieving that goal is to let people know that it is all right to discuss drug policy, and that just because we discuss the fact that we have options to our present failed policy does not mean that we condone the use of any of these drugs.  Please join me in this important effort, and I hope that this new edition of Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed will assist all of us in providing a foundation for that positive change.

Can Victims of a Scandal Find Closure?

In this blog entry, Nancy Berns, author of Closure addresses the Penn State scandal.

Hoping that victims will find “closure” in the Penn State sex abuse scandal is wrong. Using the concept of closure helps those responsible for the harm; it doesn’t help victims. What does “closure for victims” really mean when used in these political and criminal cases?

Jerry Sandusky, former assistant football coach at Penn State University, is facing multiple sexual assault charges for molesting many young boys. The grand jury report lays out damaging evidence and outrageous details regarding these criminal acts. And those who knew about these crimes failed to take proper action. They did not view the children worthy enough to risk reputations and jobs.

In 2002, a graduate assistant witnessed Sandusky raping a child, approximately 10 years old, in the shower of an athletic facility. The witness was Mike McQueary, former Penn State quarterback and current receivers coach. After seeing the sexual assault still in progress, McQueary called his father who told him to leave the building immediately. So he did nothing to stop the assault and help the child. After waiting a day, McQueary and his father told Paterno about Sandusky. Paterno (after waiting another day) told university officials. A week and a half later, these officials talked to McQueary and then banned Sandusky from campus. Basically this action says, “We’re not going to stop your sexual assault of children, but please do not do it on campus.” None of these people called the police. None of them tried to find out who the boy was and what help he needed.

Not long after witnessing the sexual assault, McQueary was promoted. He eventually became an assistant coach.  Did this job come with the pressure to remain silent?

People are starting to resign and more will surely follow. Reports indicate that Joe Paterno will announce his retirement today. But the problems of sexual assault and bystander silence are much larger than Penn State.  It is not clear whether our society will seize this moment to understand and change the cultural attitudes that allow this abuse to happen. Unfortunately, the calls for “closure” will only inhibit any ongoing conversation.  And that is a travesty for victims.

Victims of sexual assault do not get closure. Effects from abuse stay with people the rest of their lives.  This does not mean that victims cannot go on to have successful and beautiful lives.  Many do.  But they still carry the pain from the abuse. Other victims don’t recover but are lost to severe depression, drugs, or suicide.

We want to believe victims can find closure. Don’t misunderstand what I mean. Victims can heal and learn to live with the experience.  But when we fool ourselves into thinking they have “closure,” then the devastating, long-term effects of abuse do not stay in the conversation.

The undergraduate student body president at Penn State, TJ Bard, released a statement calling for closure: “I believe that the well-being of the victims and closure for all involved should be the top priority.” He has no idea what those victims experienced, and how they continue to manage the abuse. In calling for closure (for ALL involved), Bard is saying that having this story “go away” would be good, especially for Penn State’s reputation.

McQueary’s father wants the case to be resolved, so his son can move on. What will help the young boys who were molested?  What will prevent future abuse? What will make bystanders do more to stop the abuse?

Rather than seeking closure, we need to talk about what we value in our society. Using the misguided idea of “closure for victims” shifts attention away from the perpetrators and the gut-wrenching cultural truths about sexual abuse that we need to face. There should not be closure to this case.  Seeking closure to the case is what the university coaches and officials have been doing for years.

The Death Spiral of a Health Care System

 In this blog entry, Judith Swazey author of Merger Games, recounts the unfolding of a medical merger that provides truth can be stranger than fiction.

             Merger Games conveys the often unexpectedly dramatic nature of the events that my colleagues and I chronicled from 1994-2003 in a study of a medical merger. That research, and the “reads like a novel/should be made into a movie” book that it generated involved the historic acquisition and union of two medical schools in Philadelphia, The Medical College of Pennsylvania (MCP) and Hahneman University by the nonprofit Allegheny Health Care System. We detailed the fate of the merger process when, after a series of voracious acquisitions under the dominion of its CEO, Sherif Abdelhak, Allegheny financially imploded, becoming the country’s largest nonprofit health care organization to declare bankruptcy. The bankruptcy, in 1998, led to the fire-sale purchase of Allegheny’s Philadelphia-area holdings by the Tenet Health Care Corporation, with management and then full control of the medical and other health science university schools by Drexel University. Allegheny’s death spiral also triggered a cascade of state and federal investigations, lawsuits, and civil and criminal indictments.

            The MCP/Hahnemann/Allegheny story has its own particular elements, especially in its cast of players and their organizations and the effort to fuse two medical schools. The lengthy merger process, still underway when the bankruptcy took place, was a tumultuous, tension-ridden, often acrimonious affair. It involved turf wars between the faculties, staff, students, and graduates of the previously separate medical schools, between the medical school and other schools in the  Allegheny University of the Health Sciences, and between the schools and the corporation; educational problems and stresses for the medical students, who called themselves the “merger guinea pigs;” and clashes between the historically ingrained organizational cultures of MCP and Hahnemann, and, most prominently, between the powerful cultures of the academy and the corporation. Riveting as this story is, it is not unique.

             Mergers are rampant, in non-profit and for-profit sectors of health care and in small and large businesses and corporations. Moreover, the merger landscape is littered with failures. Some 60 percent of business mergers reportedly fail; finances are the most frequent reason, followed by an irreconcilable clash of organizational cultures, whose importance is seldom recognized and dealt with before and during an attempted union Mergers, in short, share many common characteristics and patterns that are documented and illuminated in Merger Games. There are lessons to be learned for those considering or undertaking a merger about what a complicated, lengthy, conflict-ridden undertaking this usually is, and why mergers, akin to marriages, may succeed with a great deal of hard work, may have a broken engagement, or end in a divorce.