Staging America’s First Contact with China

In this blog entry, John Haddad, author of America’s First Adventure in China, writes about The Empress of China, a play about an American voyage to China, that he saw in Hong Kong.

In 1784, the Empress of China sailed from Philadelphia to Canton, becoming the first American vessel to reach China.  This commercial voyage, undertaken mere weeks after the end of the Revolutionary War, marked the beginning of the Sino-U.S. relationship.  In 2011, the Hong Kong Reperatory Theater staged The Empress of China, a dramatic rendering of this historical journey.  The play was a big deal.  The Theater commissioned a production from Joanna Chan, a successful script writer and director of historical movies and television dramas.  In anticipation of the show, the city was festooned with banners and posters advertising the production.  After finishing its run in Hong Kong, it moved to New York for its American premiere.

I was not only living in Hong Kong at this time, I was writing a book specifically about Americans in China – America’s First Adventure in China.  When I saw the performance, I had recently finished writing a chapter on the very same voyage.  I knew as much of the actual history as anyone, and was well-equipped to compare the play with the historical record.  You may think I am one of those historians who takes pleasure in pointing out the factual inaccuracies in historically-themed plays and films, but that is not my aim here.  I understand that Joanna Chan had to take liberties to ensure that her production appealed to today’s audience.  That said, I do think that a comparison is meaningful.

Though Chan mostly stuck to the historical record, she made two big additions.  First, there is a scene in which the Americans demonstrate fencing to the Chinese, and the Chinese teach the Americans about Kung-Fu.  The scene is thrilling, funny, and acrobatic…but it never happened.  Second, the play includes a forbidden romance between Samuel Shaw, a dashing American, and the lovely daughter of a Chinese merchant.  This also never happened.  Why do I point out these additions?  Trust me: my purpose is not to say either “you want history to be exciting, but I’m here to crush your hopes by informing you the past was dry” or “you want meaningful cultural exchange to have taken place, but the truth was neither side showed any curiosity in the other.”   Actually, deep personal relationships and cultural exchanges did really happen – they just did not happen during the very first Sino-American encounter.

In the 1800s, Americans in China formed close relationships with the Chinese and engineered meaningful exchanges of culture.  Examples are plentiful, but I’ll share just a couple.  In the 1820s, Nathan Dunn, a merchant from Philadelphia, forged friendships with Chinese merchants and government officials.  Why did they like him?  Along with being affable, Dunn opposed on moral grounds the opium traffic that was making his peers rich.  These friendships came in handy.  When Britain’s East India Company tried to force Dunn out of the China trade, his Chinese friends stood by him and protected his business.  These friends also appreciated Dunn’s fondness for Chinese art and culture – though “fondness” does not adequately capture the obsessive nature of Dunn’s collecting.  Mania is more like it.  With the help of Chinese friends, Dunn amassed thousands of artifacts, which he shipped to Philadelphia.  This massive collection became the first serious exhibition of Chinese culture in America.

Another example involves  Anson Burlingame, a former congressman from Massachusetts, as U.S. Minister to China appointed by Abraham Lincoln in 1860.  When Burlingame arrived in Beijing, China was in turmoil: the Qing Government had lost the First Opium War to England, was losing the Second Opium War, and was trying to quell a rebellion.  An ardent opponent of slavery, Burlingame saw China’s foreign affairs through the lens of America’s great debate over slavery.  Just as Southern whites unjustly used superior force to enslave blacks, so too did Britain use its superior military to bully the Chinese.  After befriending Chinese and European officials, Burlingame sought the unimaginable: to replace the West’s “gunboat diplomacy” with what he called the “Cooperative Policy.”  In a nutshell, the European powers and China would settle disputes not with warfare but rather by developing mutual trust, engaging in dialogue, and abiding by treaties.  Though the “Cooperative Policy” did not last, it did define Sino-Western relations during the 1860s.  As Burlingame prepared to return stateside in 1868, the Chinese fêted him with farewell banquets.  At one affair, they blindsided him with a remarkable request that shows the deepness of their trust.  Would Burlingame agree to represent China’s interests in Europe and America?  Burlingame agreed, was given an official Chinese rank, and embarked on an amazing diplomatic odyssey.

I will close by making one last observation about The Empress of China.  That the play exists at all shows that we in the twenty-first century are highly interested in – or concerned about – U.S-China relations.  Yet Chan’s additions suggest something else.  Our desire for this relationship to be about friendship, trust, and cultural exchange is so strong as to compel us to project these things onto the past.  But do we in the present really need to enhance the past so it can offer hope for the future?  If we look not at this single voyage but at the first 100 years of Sino-American interaction, we see much to encourage us.

What Huckleberry Finn teaches us about seeing past race and status

In this blog entry, John S.W. Park, author of Illegal Migrations and the Huckleberry Finn Problem, uses Mark Twain’s character to address lessons about illegal and undocumented immigrants

Huckleberry Finn has two interrelated problems: first, when he discovers that Jim is a runaway slave, he can’t bring himself to tell someone, and so he can’t seem to send Jim back into slavery even though he thinks that he ought to report fugitive slaves; and second, throughout Twain’s novel, Huck can’t seem to see Jim or other black people as full persons, as persons who deserve to be free.  Even at the end of the story, it’s not clear that Huck has changed his mind about slavery or its underlying morality, and Jim is free not because white people thought that slavery was wrong or that it ought to be abolished, but because Miss Watson had died and she had freed (just) Jim in her will.  Unlike many characters in 19^th and 20^th century novels, Huck doesn’t change in any fundamental way as a result of his adventures, nor does he reflect on what he’s experienced.  He doesn’t “solve” either aspect of his problem: Jim is free, so telling on him is moot, and when Jim saves Tom Sawyer, Huck concludes from this act of sacrifice that this black man was really “white inside.”  Huck never sees past Jim’s race or status.

The primary arguments within my book, Illegal Migrations and the Huckleberry Finn Problem, reflect on both aspects of Huck Finn’s problem. I’ve tried to show how these dilemmas have been and are still so intertwined.  After slavery, law continued to define people as “unlawful,” as out of place, and the example of illegal Chinese immigrants is but one example among many from the 19^th century.  They were not the only unlawful people during that time: Native Americans were sometimes described as “off of the reservation,” and so often that “off of the reservation” became a colloquial phrase in English to denote anyone who was dangerous, out of his mind, and out of place.  In the original meaning, it referred to a Native American who should have remained within a federal prison system designed for conquered Native American people.  “Reservation” had two common meanings: the first referred to Native American settlements controlled by the federal government; and the second referred to areas where wild animals were protected from hunting.  A Native American who was “off of the reservation” could, in theory and in practice, be killed, as if he were a wild animal.

A great many (white) Americans have had problems seeing people of color as people.  People of color have also had trouble seeing one another as people, as they too are often infected with white supremacist ways of thinking.  American law—once it defines a group as “illegal” or “unlawful” or “out of status”—can and did blind a great many people to the common humanity of the other, so much so that they can come to tolerate a level of abuse and degradation against the “illegals” that is shocking and unconscionable.  Law dehumanizes before it kills.  Because law and legal institutions can have this power, the objects of the law have attempted to hide their status, their stigma, and they have tried many different ways to “cover” their illegal status or to “pass” as someone who doesn’t have it all.  By the mid-20^th century, thousands of illegal Chinese immigrants lied about who they really were, all in attempts to “pass” as American citizens or legal residents.  Many people who are out of status now try to “pass,” too, and the ones who drive well below the posted speed limit or never mention legal status at all are doing their best to “cover,” just like other generations of “illegal” people.  Meanwhile, many Americans who complain about these “illegals” rarely bother to question the morality or justice of a system that gave them citizenship simply because they happened to be born here, which really isn’t an “achievement” nor reflective remotely of any kind of moral desert.

We all love Huckleberry Finn, especially when he decides to go to hell and to save Jim, but we should endeavor to be the opposite of him.  We should look past race and status, even if this means ignoring some of our own laws.  We should see and acknowledge, first and foremost, the humanity of everyone around us.  We should be reflective of our common history, and we should realize that we now celebrate people who have resisted American laws that once reduced people to things, or framed some immigrants as though they were a form of pollution or a dangerous kind of “problem” rather than a group of people.  We should stop criminalizing people for crossing international boundaries in search of a better life.  We should take seriously our common obligations to one another as human beings, either by helping to make a better life possible for all people irrespective of where they are, or by showing compassion to people coming among us when their homes and countries fall apart.  In other words, unlike Huck, we should grow up.

Why do we reflexively include a woman in an artistic rendering of a kitchen?

In this blog entry, Krista Jenkins, author of  Mothers, Daughters, and Political Socialization: Two Generations at an American Women’s College addresses how women’s roles have changed–or not–over the decades.

I’m endlessly interested in the state of gender relations in the 21^st century. The women’s movement remains with us, but its revolutionary panache has dissipated as gender equality sounds more passé than novel. Women are encouraged to live lives unconstrained by traditional gender roles, and yet when it comes to who does the lion’s share of domestic work even in households with working moms, it’s the women who remain the go to sex for cooking, cleaning, chauffeuring, school volunteering, and the like. Look at the statistics. A recent Pew Research and American Time Use Survey found that within dual income households, working women spend almost twice as many hours engaged in housework and child care than their spouses or partners.

Not a big believer in stats? Ok, then consider the following: Back in April of 2010, Time Magazine included an article entitled “The Hazards Lurking at Home.” The story was about environmental toxins found in everyday household items, and was accompanied by a drawing of a home. Each room had items to identify its purpose, such as a crib in a baby’s room and television in the family room. The kitchen had the obvious items – refrigerator and sink, for example, but it also had a woman. The takeaway from this? Kitchens are unthinkable without a woman firmly ensconced in its environs.

So, what gives? If we’re almost four decades since the heyday of the modern women’s movement and women can be found in areas of life that were virtually unthinkable a generation ago, why does  a glass ceiling persist? Why are women disproportionately absent from certain high paying and high powered professions? Why do women with ambitious career goals choose to walk away once children arrive?  Why does dinosaur-ish behavior in the form of discrimination and harassment remain a part of the workplace for so many? And why do we reflexively include a woman in an artistic rendering of a kitchen?

To answer these questions, I did what social scientists often don’t do. That is, look at the forces in an individual’s life that are operative at the micro level. “Large N” surveys are the tool that’s most often used to examine the how and why behind a variety of political and social phenomenon. Although an invaluable tool, all too often we overlook what goes on at the micro level which, in the case of my book, means the influence of a mother on her daughter’s political development. Or, more specifically, what I consider in my book Mothers, Daughters and Political Socialization: Two Generations at an American Women’s College is the extent to which a mother influences whether her daughter accepts or rejects traditional gender roles.

My research is based on 23 paired interviews with mothers and daughters, both of whom attended the same women’s college a generation apart. They were selected because 1) their experiences at a women’s college should have made them especially receptive to the tenets of the women’s movement and 2) the mothers came from a cohort who were interviewed 25 years earlier while they were college undergraduates and experiencing the women’s movement during the peak of its heyday.

Ultimately, what I find is that mothers play an important role in how their daughters approach their understanding of gender roles. So, for example, I find a good amount of consistency between how a mother approached questions of professional and maternal responsibilities and how her daughter envisions her own life unfolding. If, despite her early career ambitions, a mother decided that caregiving was preferable for a variety of reasons to pursuing her professional goals, it was likely that her daughter would echo similar sentiments in her long term planning. This is just one of the interesting insights that I discovered through speaking with these smart, engaged, and verbose women.

Also considered is the role of coming of age during different political climates which, for the mothers, was an environment steeped in a revolutionary ethos while, for the daughters, post-feminism reigns. However, a central takeaway from my book is simply this: When it comes to the acceptance or rejection of traditional gender norms in one’s life, the apple doesn’t fall from the tree.

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.

Mourning the loss of a pioneer of women’s history

Temple University Press is saddened to learn of the passing of women’s historian Gerda Lerner. In honor of Dr. Lerner, we are re-posting this interview from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Political Engagement as Therapy for the Intellect

By Danny Postel for The Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 May 2002

The writing of one’s life can offer an “explanatory myth” at worst and an “entertaining tale” at best, says Gerda Lerner, a professor emerita of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

In Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (Temple University Press), she recounts the prehistory of her career in what she calls the “intellectual revolution” of women’s history, a field on which she left a pioneering mark with such works as The Woman in American History (1971), The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993).

Q: You grew up in Austria in the 1920s and ’30s. How did that experience influence the development of your political consciousness?
A: From an early age, I experienced revolution, counterrevolution, military occupation, and fascism. I was imprisoned, I was a hostage—I lived in great danger. I was essentially struggling for my life. Living through this makes you very much aware of politics as a force in life and of the need to struggle for human rights.

Q: After the war, in America, you were active in the Communist Party for a time and then left. You write that it took you some years “to think [your] way out, not of one political movement only, but out of Marxism, the theory.”
A: There was a period when, though I was disillusioned with the Communist Party, I was still a Marxist. Then, after 1958, when I began to study academically, I began to have serious problems with the doctrine in regard to women. It was my feminism that made me realize that Marxism was wrong.

Q: You went many decades without publicly discussing this chapter in your life, the Communist years. Why now?
A: Well, I’m 81 years old—when am I going to do it if not now? I felt uneasy about evading the issue based on fear. I felt that I owed it to myself and to the people who have learned from me and respect me to tell them the whole story. And I feel that there is something to be learned from my story.

Q: What, exactly, would you say that is?
A: That active political engagement is good for thinking. If you are engaged in the world, you have a way of testing your thinking. I tested Marxist thought. It didn’t work.

Q: At the very end of the book, you say that for many years you felt that you had nothing to apologize for, but you go on to say that you feel differently about this now. Why the change?
A: We learned things that we did not know at the time. I defended the Hitler-Stalin pact [over which thousands of Communists left the party] at the time, and I’m sorry I did. The decisions I made in my life seemed to have a good logic then, even if 60 years later, that logic may not stand up.

 

The End of Backlash Politics?

In this blog entry, Jocelyn Boryczka, author of Suspect Citizens,looks at the broader issue of women’s citizenship and how it helps explain why backlash politics does not end with the 2012 elections.

Women played a decisive role in the 2012 elections. They voted for President Obama in much greater numbers than men. Single women and mothers stood out as voting for Obama and against Republicans running for House and Senate seats.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, among others, see this election as marking the American people’s clear rejection of prolife Republican candidates who took extreme positions on banning abortion even in cases of rape, identifying legitimate rape, and supporting a ban on contraceptives. Politicians such as Todd Akin, Rick Santorum, and Mitt Romney lost because they held positions with which nearly 60% of Americans disagree.

Do the 2012 election results mean an end to the endless cycles of backlash politics against women?

Around 1990, people asked similar questions about feminism, wondering if it was “dead.”  Susan Faludi in 1991 wrote Backlash:  The Undeclared War against Women.  In this book, she coined the term “backlash” to refer to the cycles of political reactions against advances made by women toward equality. Feminism, for “backlashers,” serves as the real source of women’s continued discontent with their jobs, education, and political status. For women to be happy, they must abandon the women’s movement and return to their traditional roles as mothers, wives, and obedient daughters.

The fact that we keep asking the same questions indicates that neither the backlash nor feminism is dead.

Taking a step back to look at the broader issue of women’s citizenship helps to explain why backlash politics does not end with the 2012 elections.

The number of female representatives in the U.S. House and Senate is a common way to measure women’s citizenship, or membership in the political community. Voting for women to represent the interests of the people living in their state or congressional district involves trust. Such trust in politics gives the representative the legitimacy necessary to vote on behalf of their constituency. Getting elected to the House or Senate indicates that more Americans trust women as citizens with the legitimacy and authority to represent other citizens.

Women in the 2012 elections still only hold about 17% of the seats in the House and Senate. This number has basically stayed the same since 1992, the “Year of the Woman” when we saw a jump in these female office holders from 6 to 10%. Globally, the U.S. remains on par with the average number of female representatives in legislative bodies at 19%. In comparison to fledgling democracies in the developing world, however, the U.S. is far behind. 56% of Rwanda’s legislature are women, the largest proportion in the world, surpassing even Sweden. A major reason for such higher numbers is that these nations build proportional representation of men and women into their constitutions.

Needless to say, the U.S. has not amended its constitution in this way and, indeed, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) failed in large measure due to an intense backlash led by women such as Phyllis Schlafly. While some feminists still fight for the ERA, its political future remains quite bleak.

Beneath these numbers, however, a deeper issue exists within the American political culture that helps to explain why the 2012 elections do not mark the end of backlash politics. Women who run for and hold office, much less protest against war or for reproductive freedoms abandon the way Americans traditionally understand women’s relationship to politics – as mothers and wives. These female roles historically grant women the power to socialize future male citizens. Women’s domain in the private sphere of the home also serves as an anchor of social stability amid the disorder of democracy and capitalism.

“Backlashers” remind Americans of this traditional view. Doing so raises the specter of distrust and suspicion of women representatives and activists who claim an active, engaged part in the political community. That part dramatically breaks with the conventional role of women in politics.

As long as Americans hold onto this view of women, they will remain suspect citizens who lack the level of trust necessary for full membership in the political community.  People will sustain doubts about their legitimacy. Such societal doubts about women are the fuel for backlash politics.

The 2012 elections then may be a backlash against backlash politics, but not an end to its endless cycles.

Remembering Harold Washington

Gary Rivlin, author of Fire on the Prairie: Harold Washington, Chicago Politics, and the Roots of the Obama Presidency, reflects back on Chicago’s first black mayor on the anniversary of his passing.

He was the first black mayor of Chicago, a city whose black populace had endured innumerable indignities at the hands of its fabled political machine. Yet to sum up Harold Washington as a racial pioneer and little more is to diminish the man and all that he accomplished. Behind him amassed a multiracial coalition consisting of blacks of all political stripes along with white progressives, Latinos, Asians, and gays, all organized around progressive totems like affordable housing and a more equitable distribution of city resources. Jesse Jackson would get his political start in Chicago; so, too, would a young community organizer named Barack Obama, who found inspiration in Washington. For decades anti-machine crusaders had tried but failed to reform. But even today Washington, who served during the 1980s, still looms as a before-and-after figure in the city’s history. Under Washington, Chicago saw the implementation of any number of good-government reforms, from the freedom-of-information act he signed to the steps he took to tame a bloated, inefficient city budget. He opened up the contracting process to women- and minority-owned businesses, shifted the focus of economic development from downtown to the neighborhoods, and gave voice to Latinos, gays, and other Chicagoans long locked out of City Hall.

Harold Washington died 25 years ago yesterday. His death represents one of those where-were-you-when-you-heard the news moments, at least for Chicagoans of a certain age.  Me, I was in my car, listening to NPR on my way home from some last minute Thanksgiving shopping. There was something strange about how the world learned the news: from Tom Bradley’s office, in Los Angeles, which had sent out a press release offering the mayor’s condolences. I was a staff writer for the city’s alternative weekly, the Chicago Reader, and I nosed around in search of an explanation. It turns out that allies of Washington were keeping the lid on the news of the mayor’s death until their preferred successor could make it to the hospital, where he would appear with the doctors in a press conference. Meanwhile, word of Washington’s passing had spread among a small fraternity of black mayors of large cities. Putting the kibosh on tragic news for political reasons; It was quintessential Chicago.

Like a lot of Chicagoans, I was crushed by the news of Washington’s death. I was sad for myself, no doubt. I had just done the first of what was supposed to be a series of interviews with him: about his life and his time as mayor for the book that eventually would be called Fire on the Prairie. From my narrow perspective, I’d be denied the pleasure of spending time with an interesting and larger-than-life figure. But mainly I was crushed by what it meant for the city and the movement I believed in. Imagine the fierceness of the legislative opposition Barack Obama faced in the last two years of his first term: that was nothing compared to the nastiness and resistance that confronted Washington at every turn through his first few years in office.  Finally, he consolidated his power with his election to a second term. But then six months later, he would be dead and the multiracial progressive coalition that had assembled behind him fell apart.  Within a few years, again Chicago would be run by a Daley.

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

Arlen Specter: An Appreciation

Hal Gullan, author of Toomey’s Triumph published this Op-Ed piece in the October 17, 2012 issue of The Philadelphia Inquirer  to acknowledge the passing of Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter.

I was thinking of Arlen Specter while watching this year’s first presidential debate, reflecting on how rarely these gaffe-avoidance exercises actually change anyone’s preconceptions. The most one-sided political debate I’ve ever seen was during Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in 2010. Specter, the longtime incumbent, simply demolished his challenger, that seasoned old salt Joe Sestak.

Specter was by turns the folksy Arlen, recalling his reverence during his modest Kansas upbringing for Franklin D. Roosevelt, the inspiration for his public life – well, that and symbolically getting his father the bonus promised for his service in the First World War – and the “snarlin’ Arlen” who would reach for the jugular of any opponent, whatever his or her age or gender. Specter all but challenged his younger opponent (as most were at that point) to “take it outside.” One could appreciate that debating was his sole extracurricular emphasis at Penn.

Oddly, it was Sestak’s standing in the polls that rose almost immediately thereafter. Apparently, no one had actually watched the debate or cared about it.

Like many athletes, politicians often stay just one season or one term too long. For that matter, Specter was always better suited to general elections than to primaries. After all, he was a birthright Democrat turned Republican turned Democrat again – some 44 years later.

Privilege to serve

Although Specter was not devoid of conviction, pragmatic ambition often took precedence. He wanted to run for Philadelphia district attorney, and only the Republican nomination was available. He wanted to win yet a sixth term in the Senate, and only the Democratic nomination was viable. Specter is likely the only American politician who was supported in one election by George W. Bush and in the next by Barack Obama. Yet at the end of the electoral road, he could quietly affirm to his constituents, through apparent tears, “It has been a privilege to serve you.”

Thomas E. Dewey once observed that no one should seek public office who could not earn more elsewhere. I first met Specter when, as the graduate of a prestigious law school, he went to work for the old-line Philadelphia firm then called Barnes, Dechert, Price, Myers & Rhoads. He was likely its first Jewish associate, arriving around the time of its first female associate. Arlen was amiable enough, but he soon left to join the District Attorney’s Office: The long road to respectable liquidity wasn’t for him.

Reasoning that, after all, both major parties still had big tents, he accepted Billy Meehan’s invitation to run for D.A. as a Republican. He won handily, and by all accounts ran a highly effective, vigorous, and nonpartisan office. Public service would be his vocation from then on.

He was reportedly difficult to work for, but no less demanding of himself. Over the years, few may have viewed him as particularly lovable, but no one doubted his intelligence, thoroughness, grasp of the law, or sheer tenacity.

Tirelessly on the job

To me, Specter’s finest moment was one of the few races he lost. Far more people remember his still-controversial single-bullet theory or his extraordinary contradictions as the longest-serving senator in our state’s history, having savaged Robert Bork and Anita Hill with equal ferocity. But my bittersweet memory is of his campaign for Philadelphia mayor in 1967, the only one I ever volunteered for.

Although running as a Republican, Specter assembled a remarkable team of reformers from both parties and neither. Unfortunately, his opponent, the amiable but uninspiring James H.J. Tate (popularly called “Hesitate” for his inactivity), simply lucked out. His timely promotion of parochial schools and vocal support for Israel in its moment of greatest peril supplemented his unqualified guarantee, in a law-and-order climate, that he would retain the popular police commissioner, Frank Rizzo.

Specter just said he would keep everyone who was doing a good job, and he and his entire slate lost by a whisker. They would have changed the future of Philadelphia.

How, in the end, to define Arlen Specter? The best word, like the life itself, is inexplicable. Over his unprecedented Senate tenure, he stuck laudably and consistently with some causes, such as civil and women’s rights. In other areas, his views were remarkably variable, at no time more than after he returned to the Democratic Party in 2009. He may have been “moderate” in many of his positions, but he was not in his ambition.

Of course, in this he was hardly alone. In 1932, Roosevelt campaigned for a balanced budget.

In personal terms, how can anyone fail to admire Specter’s courage? After so much illness, he stayed tirelessly on the job and prided himself on visiting every one of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties every year – and still played squash regularly. I can testify from experience that there is nothing more therapeutic than bad tennis, but there is no such thing as bad squash. If you’re not fast enough, you will simply miss the ball.

I will miss Arlen Specter in our public life. We will not see his like again.

Harold I. Gullan is a Philadelphia historian and the author of Toomey’s Triumph as well as the forthcoming Tough Cop: Mike Chitwood vs. the “Scumbags.”

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!