Looking at Religion, Politics, and COVID-19

This week in North Philly Notes, Paul Djupe and Amanda Friesen, coeditors of An Epidemic among My People, write about the impact of COVID-19 on collective action in religious communities.

If I shut up heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people; If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. —II Chronicles 7:13–14 (King James Version)

A pandemic, unprecedented in nearly all of living human lifetimes, swept across continents starting in late 2019. By February 2021, total cases topped 100 million worldwide, with deaths numbering over 1.3 million. Understanding, explaining, and responding to this (preventable?) catastrophe has pitted science against ideology, pushed tensions among people of faith, and drawn sharp lines between people and their governments struggling to respond in reasonable ways with lives on the line. As social scientists interested in studying religion and society, we’ve been thinking and gathering data about the implications of the pandemic for our social institutions and individual behaviors as well as the reverse—how our social institutions shape responses to the pandemic. We see the pandemic response as a massive collective action problem—individuals need to cooperate with others and their governments at a time when the individual costs appear high in terms of restricted behavior, and the benefits are distant and collective.

Thinking about the pandemic in terms of collective action highlights core concerns in the social sciences regarding trust in others and in government, compliance with laws that are otherwise difficult to enforce, the availability and spread of accurate information, and the civil society forces that make or break effective governance. Though 1000s of articles have been published about the social science of COVID-19, we thought that a book-length treatment was necessary to mark this substantial moment in time. We were uniquely positioned to address these questions as many Americanist social scientists had secured funding, ethics approval, and organized plans to collect original survey data in a consequential presidential election year. Pivoting to ask about the pandemic in addition to religious and political inquiries provided a nimble responsiveness to events typically not available on the average academic budget. Yet, to fully understand the depth and breadth of these relationships, we needed experts across the social sciences of religion to tell the full story. One particularly rich data collection by the editors conducted in late March 2020 and then October 2020 was made available to our recruited authors who may not have access or funding to run their own studies. In this way, we were able to expand the number of voices interpreting our empirical results.

One of the values of this collection is the breadth and scope of how social scientists approach questions about religion and the COVID-19 pandemic. To keep the individual chapters in conversation with one another, we organized the chapters around three major themes. In the first part, we investigate the reaction of religious communities to pandemic public policies. Numerous churches, well covered in the media, defied state government public health orders, but how common was defiance in the broader population? What religious forces drove defiance?  Part II shifts gears to the courts and court of public opinion, exploring arguments of religious freedom versus public safety. Part III reverses the causal arrow to examine how the pandemic (and pandemic politics) affected group and individual religious choices, behavior, and beliefs.

Throughout, our contributors find a variety of novel insights that have not been aired elsewhere. Here is a sample. Much of the resistance to shut-down orders was linked to prosperity gospel beliefs, in which fervent belief recruited God’s protection from illness. And many religious adherents were more likely to adopt COVID conspiracy theories. Another finding is how Christian nationalists had little regard for protecting the vulnerable at the expense of liberty and the economy.

We looked for racial differences in congregational and clergy reactions given the frequent assertion that racial minority communities were hit harder than white communities. Surprisingly, we largely did not find disparate reactions organized by racial groups, and defiance to public health orders grew as people attended worship more across racial groups. We also saw that racial groups equally trust their clergy with their health, but African-Americans had less trust of medical professionals early in the pandemic.

Despite strong partisan lines drawn over restrictive public health orders, the public’s willingness to save people largely did not follow that pattern, though Trump remained a polarizing figure in related religious freedom cases. This is no surprise, in part due to his own rhetoric, but also because Christian Right organizations found common cause with Trump in the pandemic due to a connection to their historic commitments to law and order and against foreign threats.

An Epidemic among My People expands upon these findings, digging deeper into sources of pandemic information, the impact of the pandemic on religious behaviors, discussion of the legal battles, and more. Our goal was to provide a nearly comprehensive discussion of religion in public life.

Our Contributors: Daniel Bennett, Kraig Beyerlein, Cammie Jo Bolin, Ryan P. Burge, Angel Saavedra Cisneros, Ryon J. Cobb, Melissa Deckman, Joshua B. Grubbs, Don Haider-Markel, Ian Huff, Natalie Jackson, Jason Klocek, Benjamin Knoll, Andrew R. Lewis, Jianing Li, Natasha Altema McNeel, Matthew R. Miles, Shayla F. Olson, Diana Orcés, Samuel L. Perry, Jenna Reinbold, Kelly Rolfes-Haase, Stella M. Rouse, Justin A. Tucker, Dilara K. Üsküp, Abigail Vegter, Michael W. Wagner, Andrew L. Whitehead, Angelia R. Wilson, and the editors: Amanda Friesen and Paul Djupe, who also contributed chapters.

Amanda Friesen is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario and Canada Research Chair in Political Psychology (Tier 2).

Paul A. Djupe directs the Data for Political Research program at Denison University, is an affiliated scholar with PRRI, the series editor of Religious Engagement in Democratic Politics (Temple), and co-creator of religioninpublic.blog. Further information about his work can be found at his website and on Twitter.

An Epidemic among My People is available open access or for purchase

Teaching Fear

This week in North Philly Notes, Nicole Rader, author of Teaching Fear explains how parents’ fear of crime influences how they (think they) protect their children.

Parents who watch the news regularly see images of kidnapping and homicide victims and hear about school and mass shootings. Most recently, parents were bombarded with images of four young college students at the University of Idaho who were brutally murdered while sleeping.  These horrific and fear-producing crimes make parents think twice about sending their children to school, activities outside the home, or anywhere. Parents teach kids how to protect themselves from crime when they are away from home and provide a variety of lessons about stranger danger. Studies have found that up to 70% of parents are afraid of crime for their children. A recent Gallup poll study found that one in three parents recently said that they were worried about their children being a victim of a school shooting. Fear of crime is high on the list of things parents worry about for their children.

Parents may be surprised to hear that most of their fears for their children are based on myths passed down from generation to generation and reinforced by the media. These myths emphasize a fear of strangers, a fear for young, white girls, and a belief that if one tries hard enough, victimization can be prevented.

Most parents are surprised to learn that strangers rarely hurt children. When children are victimized, they are typically victimized by a family member. 

Parents are also surprised to hear that children are rarely kidnapped, and a known offender typically takes those children who are kidnapped.

Finally, research has found that school shootings are sporadic and that children are actually safer at school than almost anywhere else, including the home.  

In other words, the reality of crimes against children looks quite different from what most parents have been taught to believe about crime and victimization. What this means for parents is that they often worry about the wrong types of crimes, people, and locations of crimes happening to their children. Crime myths, then, fuel fears of strangers, fears of kidnapping, fears of school shootings, and fears of public spaces, but, ultimately, when children are kidnapped or hurt by others, it is almost always a known person in a private location (like a home). 

Parents operating with misinformation make choices on keeping children safe by taking a litany of precautions that will have little payoff in protecting children from crime. Because of fears related to stranger danger, parents avoid public locations, restrict children from being alone outside (even in the front yard), track children on their phones, and expect constant communication with their children when they are unsupervised. This exhaustive list becomes the gold standard for protecting our children. 

What this list does not include are actionable items parents can take to arm their children with accurate knowledge about crime and victimization.  The conversations with children about how to talk to others if someone they know hurts them or how to seek help when they know about friends who are being hurt by loved ones are lacking by most parents. These conversations seem harder to most parents than talking about stranger danger.  

Teaching Fear examines where parents learn crime myths—from socialization agents like parents to school, and the media—and how these agents influence what parents teach their own children. I spent 20 years researching fear of crime and safety precautions, and did a deep dive into other research, public policy, and public opinion on crime to not only outline the problem of how we teach fear to children today, but also provides parents with the tools to “teach fear better.”  

How Biopsychosocial Perspectives Help Explain Seemingly Unexplainable Crimes

This week in North Philly Notes, Chad Posick, Michael Rocque, and J. C. Barnes, coauthors of Fitting the Facts of Crime, write about the connections between gun availability, mental health, and masculinity in discussions about mass shootings.

The United States is no stranger to seemingly random acts of violence. Mass shootings, in which four or more are killed in a single attack on a public stage, are on the rise in both number of cases and number of victims per case in America. The question that most of us have when one of these highly publicized attacks happens is, “Why?” Why would someone shoot a school full of children? Why would someone shoot strangers at a concert? Why would someone target churchgoers? In the case of mass public shootings, they are defined as being unrelated to other forms of crime, such as gang violence or robberies. This means that the motivation and causes of mass public shootings remain cloudy.

As criminologists, we are often called upon for answers to questions about why such crimes occur. People have also not been shy to offer their opinions. It’s guns. It’s mental health. It’s racism. The perpetrators are just bad eggs or sociopaths.

For us, explaining these vicious crimes means moving beyond simplistic, all-or-nothing approaches. While it is attractive to try to isolate the one or two most “important” causes of mass public shootings, if we truly want to understand them, so that we can prevent them, we have to look at all relevant factors and how they intertwine in complex ways. And there is no better way to approach these questions than using the biopsychosocial perspective we promote in Fitting the Facts of Crime: An Invitation to Biopsychosocial Criminology.

One of the approaches we took in the book was to show how traditional, sociological perspectives are able to help us understand particular crime and justice patterns, but how, at the same time, they are incomplete. This is no less the case for mass public shootings. Let’s take a look at some of the more common social/environmental factors that the scholars and policy-makers often point to as causes of these attacks.

Guns

While there is debate about just how much mass public shootings are concentrated in the US, it seems reasonable to conclude that more attacks of this nature occur in America than elsewhere. This begs the question of what it is about the US that makes such attacks more likely to take place here?

One prominent factor that is mentioned in the news media and in scholarship is guns. The U.S. has a lot of guns. Some estimates indicate that there are nearly 400 million guns in this country; more guns than people. And since mass public shootings require access to guns, it is reasonable to wonder whether more guns leads to more mass public shootings.

There is a growing amount of research on the relationship between guns, gun control, and mass public shootings. Research has found that the public tends to favor gun control if they live near the site of a mass shooting. Some work has found that in places where gun laws are less strict, there are more mass shootings. Other research has examined how different gun laws influence mass public shootings. Several studies have shown that banning large capacity magazines, or magazines that hold more than 10 bullets, is associated with reduced mass shootings. Two of these studies showed that requiring a license to buy a handgun is also related to fewer mass shootings.

Interestingly, however, not every scholar is convinced that gun availability and gun control are significantly related to mass shootings. In fact, studies that show the importance of gun licenses and large capacity magazine bans have shown that other measures (such as assault weapons bans) do not affect mass shootings. In a recent study, conducted by one of us, the data have shown that gun availability by state is unrelated to incidence and severity of mass public shootings. While one study showed that gun ownership was strongly associated with mass public shootings internationally, guns are clearly not the only factor that explain these attacks. What is missing?

One factor to consider is that underlying individual characteristics make some people more likely to carry, and use, a gun. Genetic differences account for some of the variation in why one person will carry a gun and another will not. Researchers are also coming closer to identifying specific genetic differences associated with neurotransmission that explain gun carrying behavior. It may, then, be the combination of gun availability in society, coupled with individual characteristics, that lead to gun carrying and mass shootings.

Mental Health

Another controversial but widely discussed factor used to explain mass shootings is mental illness. After two particularly deadly mass public shootings in 2019, then President Donald Trump stated “Mental illness and hatred pulled the trigger. Not the gun.” This statement was met with immediate backlash from those arguing that mental illness is not a “predictor” of mass shootings.

Research focusing on public attacks has found that mass public shooters are disproportionately mentally ill. For example, in his dataset, Grant Duwe found that 61% of mass shooters suffered from a mental illness, which is far higher than estimates for the general population. While it is notoriously difficult to assess mental illness from open sources (commonly used to collect data on mass shootings), other research has confirmed that there are disproportionate rates of mental illness in populations of mass shooters.

Once again, though, this risk factor is certainly not sufficient to explain mass public shootings. The vast majority of those with mental illness will never commit gun crimes, let alone a mass public shooting. Additionally, we know that those with serious mental illness are actually more likely to be victimized by gun crimes than to commit them.

Interestingly, and related to our next factor, gender is related to mental illness and mass shootings. Research has shown that women have higher rates of mental illness than men across countries. Yet women almost never commit mass public shootings. Data show that women tend to be less than 6% of all mass public shooters.

Clearly, mass shootings cannot be reduced to mental illness, though it does appear to be an important factor. Mental illness is influenced by genetic factors and it may be that individuals who experience certain social stressors in conjunction with genetic predispositions are more likely to engage in mass shootings compared to others in society. Once again, this highlights the importance of considering the interconnected nature of biology and the social world.

We agree with the summary statement in a recent study examining the link between mass killers and neurodevelopmental disorders, “These extreme forms of violence may be a result of a highly complex interaction of biological, psychological and sociological factors.”  

Masculinity

As just mentioned, mass public shooters are overwhelmingly men. In Duwe’s data, roughly 99% of mass public shooters were men. In other research with less restrictive definitions, this figure is lower, but still above 90%.

Unlike the other issues we have discussed, there is little dissensus on the finding that mass public shooters are almost always male. Some research—but not much!—has attempted to understand this pattern. In some work, masculinity is identified as a primary factor. Some scholars suggest that mass shootings may be viewed as a “masculine” way to regain control that has been lost. The theory is that when certain men feel they have been denied masculinity, they react in particularly deadly ways. However defined, though, denial of masculinity is clearly more prevalent than mass public shootings.

Masculinity, gender, and sex, may be more relevant in mass shootings that target women or families. But attacks motivated by grievances against women only represent about 34% of mass public shootings, according to some work. Thus, other factors are likely at play.

Furthermore, while female mass public shooters are rare, they do occur. For example, one recent study of 18 female mass public shooters found that they were more similar to male mass public shooters than female general murder offenders.

Masculine identity is not simply due to parental or peer socialization—although that can certainly add to how one views themselves and society. It is an outgrowth of evolutionary processes that extend far back into our ancestral past. Efforts to promote the positive aspects of masculinity while tempering the negative aspects—often called toxic masculinity—will require concerted effort and a thorough understanding of the complex bio, psycho, and social aspects of human nature.

Putting it Together

In our view, gun availability, mental health, and masculine identity are all contributing factors to mass shootings in the U.S. The holy grail of behavioral science is to identify necessary and sufficient causes of a human behavior. Yet none of these factors fit that profile—although gun access is necessary to commit a mass shooting, having access to a gun is not a sufficient explanation. And as we outlined above, it not necessary to suffer from a mental illness nor is it necessary to have toxic masculinity.

When necessary and sufficient causes are elusive, behavioral scientists face a more complicated reality. All risk factors must be included, studied, and considered. This includes factors beyond simple socialization explanations. Instead, we must consider that humans are the product of millions of years of evolution, genetics, and socialization. To focus on only one aspect misses the others and, for us, will result in ineffective policy. In Fitting the Facts of Crime, we lay out what we see as the most promising approaches to understanding these types of crimes and offer policy suggestions we believe can help us prevent crime and intervene if necessary.

A Q&A with Temple University Press’ new Editorial Assistant, Will Forrest

This week in North Philly Notes, we get to learn more about Temple University Press’s new editorial assistant, Will Forrest, who joined the Temple University Press staff this week.

You are “returning” to the Press having worked here as a student. Can you talk about your experiences at the Press?

I first worked as an intern for TUP during my senior year as an undergraduate, mostly working on rights and contracts. I was amazed at the variety of responsibilities I was handed and their importance. It was not your typical mindless gofer intern busy work. I loved my time as an intern and got a feel for nearly every aspect of what it takes to publish a book. I am overjoyed to return as an editorial assistant!

What book(s) do you like to read/are you currently reading?

I am currently reading By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age by Paul Boyer. History is probably my biggest love, and oddly enough, I have been interested in the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war for most of my life (although the Soviet Union did not exist when I was born). I am also rereading Anthony Heilbut’s The Gospel Sound, his look at the vibrant and often underappreciated world of African-American gospel music. It might be my favorite book on American music.

Has any single book made a particularly strong impression on you? (What and why or how)?

Many of my strongest responses to books came early in my life, and the book that I credit with really sparking my interest in writing and storytelling is Judy Blume’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. It was the first book I remembered reading where I felt like I identified with the character, understood that he was speaking from a unique point of view, and made me feel less isolated. It launched me into reading Blume’s other books as well as other stories about teenagers and young adults. I still find that I especially like reading novels and consuming other media about young people, and my creative ideas are often filled with young people working things out.

You have an interest in playwriting. Can you tell us about that?

I have loved theater for most of my life, and writing has also been a major part of my life, but it wasn’t until around college that the two began to dovetail. I like the freedom and sparseness of writing plays compared to other forms. Most of my play ideas end up being rooted in history one way or another, and often my plays are places to string together seemingly separate interests and ideas I have. I actually have a play I wrote being read online at Temple this fall called Window of Vulnerability about nuclear war planning and its psychological impact on ordinary people during the Cold War.

When and how do you read?

I am a very undisciplined reader. I typically read in the evenings after most of my daily business is done, and read essentially until I get tired or disinterested, whichever comes first. Even if I am very engaged by a book I don’t usually feel the urge to finish it right there and then, and I sometimes then end up reading multiple books at a time. 

What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

I would venture to say that many of my books on the Cold War might surprise some given the event took place before I was born. One that might surprise most people, especially people of a certain age, is Richard Zoglin’s biography HOPE of Bob Hope. It’s natural to wonder why any young person would be interested in the life of a comedian known for being a conservative square who performed well past his prime and toured the world with the USO. But American entertainment history is a major interest of mine, and like him or not (and some of his early movies aren’t bad), there are few entertainers as important to 20th century America as Bob Hope.

Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine?

To be honest, I never really identified much with superheroes or superhero/comic culture in general aside from watching some of the films. I used to wear a Superman t-shirt that I won in a crane machine on the NJ boardwalk when I was much younger, and I suppose I still think he’s pretty cool. I also like Superman because he’s not as omnipresent as the Marvel heroes in today’s culture.

What Temple University Press book has particular meaning to you (and why)?

This is an unusual and obscure choice, but it is a book the Press published in 1974 called Broadcasting in Africa: A Continental Survey of Radio and Television. When my brother, who shares many of the same historical interests I do, found out I worked for the Temple University Press and that they had a library of their catalog, one of the first things he asked me about was this book. He wanted to know if they had it because it is very hard to find and one of the only books written during the era on the topic. It was this experience that made me realize the unique vision of TUP to publish pioneering works on topics that are not often written about, and it crystallized that the books TUP publishes are interesting to many diverse groups, including my brother.

What Temple University Press book would you recommend to someone?

I think Mary Lou Nemanic’s recent Metro Dailies in the Age of Multimedia Journalism is an incredibly important read for anyone who cares about truth. As local newspapers shutter around the country in the face of the digital revolution, especially in smaller communities, local stories and viewpoints slowly start to disappear from the nationwide conversation along with their invaluable investigations. Local dailies are often the first papers to report on what will become major national stories, and when they fall on hard times, things start to fall through the cracks.

What book will you read next?

My backlog of books to read is quite extensive. I have Peter Guralnick’s biography of Sam Cooke entitled Dream Boogie on my shelf, and as a huge fan of Cooke, that era of American music, and Guralnick’s other books, I will devour it. I also just bought Vincent J. Indonti’s African Americans Against the Bomb and am very excited to read it.

What three writers would you invite to a dinner party?

Even though I read largely non-fiction, I think great fiction storytellers might make better dinner party guests because of their natural inclination towards dreaming worlds and listening to their characters. So I would invite Judy Blume and Elena Ferrante, two of my favorite living novelists (I hopefully will have learned Italian to speak with Elena) as well as Sarah Ruhl, a playwright I admire very much. I would pay homage and hopefully we would spend the evening talking about everything other than their work. I’m also not much of a cook, so if any of them have any specialties or feel inclined to provide courses, I would be ecstatic.

Election books

This week in North Philly Notes, in anticipation of the upcoming election, we showcase titles on political campaigns and voting.

The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the realignment of American Politics in the 20^th Century, by Keneshia N. Grant
Examines the political impact of Black migration on politics in three northern cities, 1914-1965

Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics, by Susan Herbst
How American politics can become more civil and amenable to public policy situations, while still allowing for effective argument

Good Reasons to Run: Women and Political Candidacy, edited by Shauna L. Shames, Rachel I. Bernhard, Mirya R. Holman, and Dawn Langan Teele
How and why women run for office

Gender Differences in Public Opinion: Values and Political Consequences, by Mary-Kate Lizotte
Explores the gender gap in public opinion through a values lens

Philadelphia Battlefields: Disruptive Campaigns and Upset Elections in a Changing City, by John Kromer
How upstart political candidates achieved spectacular successes over Philadelphia’s entrenched political establishment

Navigating Gendered Terrain: Stereotypes and Strategies in Political Campaigns, by Kelly Dittmar
Explores how candidates and campaign professionals navigate the gendered terrain of political campaigns

Race Appeal: How Candidates Invoke Race in U.S. Political Campaigns, by Charlton D, Mcllwain, and Stephen M. Caliendo
Why, when, and how often candidates use race appeals, and how the electorate responds

On the Stump: Campaign Oratory and Democracy in the United States, Britain, and Australia, by Sean Scalmer
The story of how the “stump speech” was created, diffused, and helped to shape the modern democracies of the Anglo-American world

Latino Mayors: Political Change in the Postindustrial City, edited by Marion Orr and Domingo Morel
The first book to examine the rise of Latino mayors in the United States

Campaign Advertising and American Democracy, by Michael M Franz, Paul Freedman, Ken Goldstein, and Travis N Ridout
Surprising findings about the positive effects of political advertising

Choices and Changes: Interest Groups in the Electoral Process, by Michael M. Franz
The most comprehensive book about interest groups in recent American politics

Why Veterans Run: Military Service in American Presidential Elections, 1789-2016, by Jeremy M. Teigen
Why more than half of American presidential candidates have been military veterans—and why it matters

Social Distancing with Shakespeare

This week in North Philly Notes, Jeffrey Wilson, author of Shakespeare and Trump, writes about why people are cycling experiences with coronavirus through Shakespeare.

First came the meme to wash hands for the duration of Lady Macbeth’s “Out, damned spot” speech.

Soon society was shutting down. “I’m worried about Covid-19 causing theatres to go dark,” tweeted theater-maker @MediocreDave on March 9, 2020. “Not because I’ll lose income, but because we’ll inevitably be subjected to opportunistic Shakespeare scholars making smug but superficial analogies to the playhouse closures of the late Elizabethan plague years.” That’ll be the end of that, I thought.

The next day, Slate ran a piece from Ben Cohen, “The Infectious Pestilence Did Reign: How the Plague Ravaged William Shakespeare’s World and Inspired his Work, from Romeo and Juliet to Macbeth.” Two days later, Shakespeare scholar Emma Smith was historicizing appropriations of Lady Macbeth’s hand-washing scene for Penguin Books. Another two days, and The Atlantic ran Daniel Pollack-Pelzner’s “Shakespeare Wrote His Best Works During a Plague.”

The content of these essays—Shakespeare born in plague, shuttered theaters prompting his poetry, Romeo and Juliet derailed by quarantine, playwrights sustained by wealthy patrons, disease threatening rival acting troupes, great art created in isolation—is not as fascinating as the questions raised by their method. Why are people cycling experiences with coronavirus through Shakespeare? What do we gain from comparisons between social distancing in Shakespeare’s time and in ours? How might our experiences with social distancing help us better understand Shakespeare’s? How can these examples help us think about academic work in 2020?

On March 14, @rosannecash caused a collective groan by tweeting, “Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote King Lear.”

Twitter did its thing. “Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” wrote @sydneeisanelf. “Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he masturbated incessantly,” said @emilynussbaum.

With doors shuttered, some theaters offered plays and programming online, free to the public, including Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theater, the Public Theater, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Then came pop-up performances like Patrick Stewart’s #ASonnetADay and The Two Gentleman of Verona on Zoom. What is the value of art in times of social distancing? How is social distancing changing the way art is done? Based on the analogy to Shakespeare, what might the art that comes out of coronavirus look like?

Academics followed suit. On March 23, Andy Kesson, Callan Davies, and Emma Whipday launched A Bit Lit, featuring open-access, of-the-moment interviews with early-modern literary scholars. What is the role of humanistic thought and conversation in times of social distancing? What is the importance—if any—of studying Shakespeare when society is in such turmoil?

Social distancing with Shakespeare soon became A Thing. Kathryn Harkup in The Telegraph on March 15; Andrew Dickson in The Guardian on March 22; James Shapiro on CNN on March 30. The genre was common enough to call for satire. On April 1, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner wrote “What Shakespeare Actually Did During the Plague” for The New Yorker: “Day 25: Definitely too dark. Keep the mood light! No one wants to see a tragedy after a plague.”

Emma Smith tackled that tension with a straight face in the New York Times, arguing that “[Shakespeare’s] fictions reimagine the macro-narrative of epidemic as the micro-narrative of tragedy.” Is our experience with coronavirus tragic? What makes something tragic?

Elsewhere in the New York Times, Ian Wheeler cited Shakespeare to argue that, in America, “We need a better patronage system for artists.” In The New Yorker, James Shapiro lobbed Coriolanus-shaped bombs at the Trump administration: “The casual insults, the condescension, and the refusal to accept responsibility will be familiar to anyone who has lately tuned in to the daily White House briefings on the coronavirus pandemic.”

These various ShakesTakes sift into terms developed in Shakespeare and Trump, my recent book about the surprising—and bizarre—relationship between the provincial English playwright and the billionaire President of the United States. There are the ShakesMemes. There are the Politicitations. And there is the Shaxtivism.

Above all, the Shakespearean gloss on social distancing shows the power—and pitfalls—of Public Shakespeare, where scholars eschew peer-reviewed academic writing in favor of public engagement.

I come not to bury Public Shakespeare, nor to praise it. I want to ask what it is, where it comes from, how it works, and why it elicits simultaneous enthusiasm and nausea. What is behind the push in some scholars to filter current events through Shakespeare? What is behind the tendency in others to get annoyed when they do?

Why are Shakespeareans suddenly authorities on everything—from presidential politics to social distancing? At a time when Donald Trump nonchalantly disclaims, “I’m not a doctor,” then proceeds to use his power and platform to promote hydroxychloroquine, why are Shakespeare scholars going widely outside their areas of expertise surrounding a 400-year-old English playwright to comment on current events?

Four points:

1. As an early-modern playwright who often represented medieval and ancient history, Shakespeare built into his texts the practice of engaging the present with the distant past.
2. As artworks that often have scholarly sources, yet are performed for a broad audience of mixed social backgrounds, Shakespeare’s plays have public engagement built into them.
3. The long tradition of modern-dress Shakespearean performance and adaptation provides a model for scholars looking to bring ideas that are old and artistic into conversation with current events.
4. At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, Public Shakespeare gives scholars a platform to illustrate the practicality and utility of our field.

There is tremendous energy right now behind public-facing ShakesWork with an ethical if not activist edge. There is also legitimate skepticism of that endeavor. As @ClearShakes wrote on April 12, “Guys, sometimes there just isn’t a Shakespeare play that’s relevant to our situation.”

But recognizing Public Shakespeare as more closely related to Shakespearean performance than Shakespearean scholarship helps us understand why, like any show that takes creative risks, some cheer and some hiss.

 

A Passion Reignited

This week in North Philly Notes, Bill Double, author of Charles E. Hires and the Drink that Wowed a Nation, writes about his passion for Hires Root Beer. 

Whether a frosty mug at a Stewarts’ drive-in or the brain-clearing rush of herbal effervescence from a freshly opened bottle of Hires at home, I grew up with a yen for root beer. Fortunately, this habit proved nonaddictive. As I moved on, the drink faded into a pleasant memory, occasionally relived but hardly a compulsion.

Neither did this early craving influence my decision to chronicle the life of Charles Elmer Hires, who turned a humble homemade root beer into an iconic national brand.  Hires was an intrepid entrepreneur and an authentic American success story. His life and times would have fascinated me as much had he instead concocted a new ginger ale, pet food or soap powder.

Nonetheless, researching Charles E. Hires and the Drink that Wowed a Nation reawakened my latent root beer thirst.  I ordered an eight-pack of modern-day Hires from Amazon (of all places) and began to sample other brands.  Root beer seemed to be less prevalent today and certainly less promoted in the popular media. Was the spicy, woodsy flavor enjoyed by millions during Charles Hires’ heyday fading from the public’s palate? My findings suggested otherwise.

I discovered a thriving root beer subculture, a legion of fiercely loyal aficionados who shared my taste and interest in the brew. An array of websites, Facebook pages and blogs are devoted to discussing, dissecting and exalting root beer. Some sites, it is true, are mounted by commercial bottlers eager to pitch their wares. But others are clearly labors of love maintained by dedicated root beer buffs. Among these: Root Beer Review (“Root beer reviews by root beer lovers.”); The Root-Beer Blog (“Root Beer is a goodness, government is not and freedom and liberty are worth having and so is a good Root Beer!”), the Stark Raving (Root Beer) Blog! and the Association of Root Beer Enthusiasts.

Eric’s Gourmet Root Beer Site, perhaps the most comprehensive, presents histories of the vintage brands, industry news, reviews of new craft root beers and reader comments.

After perusing the painstaking instructions offered root beer homebrewers on other websites, I decided to join their ranks.  I purchased a three-ounce bottle of Zatarain’s Root Beer Extract, a product quite similar to Hires’ original, and followed his 1880 instructions closely.  To my surprise, my first attempt yielded a dozen bottles of root beer that were both delicious and nicely carbonated.

I also found that the craft beer movement, instrumental in improving the quality of real beer in America, had spawned dozens of craft root beers. Brands include Virgil’s, Maine, Boylan, Fitz’s, Dominion, Saranac and Sprecher. The online Root Beer Store offers details on these brews and many others.  They are available at venues ranging from soda pop stores to Trader Joe’s and even some old-style taprooms.

This proliferation of craft brewers would not have displeased Charles Hires, provided they used natural ingredients and did not infringe on his trademark. However, another modern trend – alcoholic root beer – would surely have evoked his ire. One such brew, aptly dubbed Not Your Father’s Root Beer, boasts an alcohol content over 5 percent.  While all fermented root beers contain a trace of alcohol, temperance advocate Hires was forced to battle a WCTU boycott that falsely contended the level in his drink was alarmingly high.

Meanwhile, “Big Soda” continues to woo root beer fanciers with traditional offerings – Barqs, Dads, Mug, Hanks and Frosty. Dr. Pepper Snapple alone produces four root beer brands – A&W, IBC, Stewarts and Hires. Regrettably, Hires ranks lowest in the company’s promotional pecking order.

In conclusion, I am pleased to report that the drink Charles Hires perfected and so successfully promoted over a century ago is at no risk of becoming a relic. While failing to attain the popularity of Coke or Pepsi, its unique flavor still delights and inspires a discerning minority. Indeed, root beer’s longevity reminds me of jazz music, another of my long-time passions. Neither root beer nor jazz has quite managed to achieve mainstream respectability in the modern era. Yet both tenaciously continue to endure, evolve and reward those receptive to their charms.

An interview with Richard Gilman-Opalsky co-editor of Against Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Against Capital in the Twenty-First Century addresses present impasses in imagining a world ungoverned by capital, a world of different possibilities, both desirable and practical. It is a collection of rival visions and heterodox analysis that can be read as an alternative to the whole liberal litany of administered economies, tax policy recommendations, and half-measures. The history of government failures to reverse the most dangerous capitalist tendencies is as old as capitalism itself. We aim to think beyond those failures and dangers. Media outlets interested in a critique of the Left from the farther Left (as opposed to from the Right), should get in touch for media events. 

We chatted with co-editor Richard Gilman-Opalsky about his book.

What was the impetus that prompted you and John to compile this book? You describe it as a “contrary accompaniment” to Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
There were two general impetuses for this book. First, we were (and remain) dumbfounded by a stunning lack of imagination on so much of the Left, which often seems to have accepted a position of acquiescence, especially on the question of capitalism. That positon is perhaps best exemplified in Thomas Piketty’s 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty shows that capitalism has generated, does generate, and will continue to generate unacceptable inequality. And yet, he strangely concludes that we must accept that there are no alternatives beyond the same old litany of failed tax initiatives aimed to re-regulate a near-totally liberated capital (Piketty’s refurbished brand of this is the global tax on capital). But we do not accept that we have to accept the unacceptable in perpetuity. So, we wanted a “contrary accompaniment” to Piketty’s book. Since one did not already exist, we created it.

Second, John [Asimakopoulos, co-editor] and I share an interdisciplinary commitment to thinking against sectarian currents which have long divided the radical milieus of Marxism, anarchism, critical social theory, feminism, and other currents. So, we wanted our volume to embody and reflect some of the real diversity of thought that is out there, which we consider necessary to the task of working against capital in the twenty-first century.

What were your criteria in selecting the contributors/contributions for the volume? They seem to both work in concert and create a conversation about critical thinking on capital(ism), anticapitalism, and inequality.
We used three basic criteria in compiling the volume: First, we wanted a diverse range of theorists, activists, and artists who offered a deep—if not total—critique of capitalism. Second, we sought contributions that were not interested in any resuscitation of the top-down politics of Leftist statism, which we both feel (and argue in our introduction) should be left buried in the graveyards of the twentieth century. Third, we wanted to include some of the rich diversity mentioned above, so in addition to contributors from many academic disciplines and practices, we also took care to include contributions from Black radical and feminist writers. Contributions by Frantz Fanon, Raya Dunayevskaya, Silvia Federici, Selma James, CLR James, Alicia Garza, KRS One, Isabelle Stengers, Marina Sitrin, and Angela Mitropoulos are part of that diversity.

Readers will notice that the book is full of philosophical and political disagreement too. We don’t claim to agree with everything in the book ourselves. Our overarching criterion was that everything in this volume should be a critical part of any conversation about how to confront and abolish a world organized by the logic of capital, about how we can bring an end to the reign of a world governed by money. If you’re interested in that conversation, we want this book to participate in it.

There is a diversity in voices and perspectives in the volume. How did you balance the views/ideologies, topics (and contributors)?
One of the many challenges we faced was the blend of the living and the dead. Some of our contributors—such as Cornelius Castoriadis and Félix Guattari— are no longer living, or recently deceased, like James O’Connor. Most of them are still alive and working, and of those some, including Sayres Rudy, Alicia Garza, and Stevphen Shukaitis, are newer creative voices while others have work stretching back decades (Penelope Rosemont, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, John Holloway, Isabelle Stengers, Peter McLaren, and Henry Giroux). The question for us was to find what we thought essential to the construction of a forward-looking radical theory and practice for the twenty-first century.

The book’s sections are organized around topics we think of as fundamental categories of inquiry. So, while the book is not comprehensive, we insisted on sections dedicated to theory and praxis, class composition, racialization and feminism, critical pedagogy, literature and art, ecology, history, and forms of action.

You focus on how theory is related to and comes out of movements and global uprisings.  Can you explain this?
I published a previous book dedicated to this very subject, Specters of Revolt: On the Intellect of Insurrection and Philosophy from Below, in 2016. This is also a major part of John’s work, which helps us to understand the importance of revolt in a different way. We both agree that contentious social movements and global uprisings (including riot, revolt, and insurrection) are phenomena that make sense within the contexts of their historical occurrence. Yet, global uprisings are frequently discounted as violent, irrational, and ineffective. We claim, to the contrary, that they are the opposite. Revolts are more often responses to violence (and not the violence themselves), their reasons are perfectly legible if only we would take their disaffection seriously (instead of discounting it as incoherent), and they are very effective in changing the lives of their participants in so many ways, changing political conversations, and saying what has to be said about the world in which they break out. So, in addition to ourselves, we included contributors who share our contention that theory is articulated and developed in contestation.

Can you discuss the importance of culture for radical politics?
We have a dedicated section in the book called “Capitalist Culture and Cultural Production.” We also have a section entitled “Language, Literature, and Art” that includes poetry, an excerpt from a story, lyrics, and an interview with a filmmaker. Culture is one of the central contexts in which we learn, think, and interact, and for radical politics, it can be the context in which we develop a critical consciousness.

We chose a quote from Angela Y. Davis to open the book’s section on culture: “It’s true that it’s within the realm of cultural politics that young people tend to work through political issues, which I think is good, although it’s not going to solve the problems” (PBS Interview, 1997). I tend to agree with Davis and think that cultural content can expose people in moving ways to a radical critique of the existing state of affairs often more powerfully than philosophical texts and revolts. Also, people do not just consume culture. People produce a lot of cultural content themselves to communicate their feelings, frustrations, and hopes. All of this cultural content is really important to helping people work though how they feel about themselves, their lives, and the world, and to communicating with one another in affective, transformative ways. Yet, Davis is also correct that epiphanies alone will not solve our problems, so radical politics needs ultimately to move in various ways beyond cultural production and consumption to real confrontations and new modalities of collective action. In fact, the concluding section of our book is entitled “New Modalities of Collective Action.”

What Temple University Press staff wants to give and gift this holiday season

This week in North Philly Notes, the staff at Temple University Press suggest the Temple University Press books they would give along with some non-Temple University Press titles they hope to read and receive this holiday season. 

Mary Rose Muccie, Director

Give: Just in time for Christmas, we’ve reprinted P Is for Philadelphia, an alphabet book, beautifully illustrated by Philly school children, that celebrates everything that makes the city great. I’ll be giving it to my 7-year-old niece, Hailey, and can’t wait to read it with her.

Get: Earlier this year I read a review of The Bedlam Stacks, by Natasha Pulley and have had it on my list ever since. Set in mid-1800’s Peru, it’s a combination of science fiction and fantasy, mystery and adventure. If I don’t get it, I’ll be giving it to myself!

Irene Imperio, Advertising and Promotions Manager
Give: P Is for Philadelphia. Although Amazon doesn’t have copies we do!!!  And it’s fun for the whole family!

Karen Baker, Financial Manager
Give: I would give We Decide!, by Michael Menser, to my son-in-law because he is very interested in politics and democracy.

Get: I would like to receive I Can’t Make This Up: Life Lessons by Kevin Hart because I think he is hilarious.

Ryan Mulligan, Editor 

Give: The Cost of Being a Girl I’ve discovered while publishing this book that there are people on Twitter who search for the phrase “wage gap” just to tell anyone who happens to be talking about it that the concept is a myth – that women’s wages are lower because they have less experience on average and go into lower-paying fields.

The irony is, this book takes that contention head-on by looking at a population where all labor is equally unqualified and low-skilled: teenage workers entering the workforce for the first time in fields like retail and food service. Even here though, Besen-Cassino shows us that male workers are fast-tracked towards management, while female workers are pegged for “aesthetic labor” and “emotional work” that pays less and takes a significant toll on the worker’s well-being. These dynamics not only reveal the biases of the workplace, but set teens on unequal tracks that continue into adulthood. And the book is really compelling reading. So I’d give this book to all those Twitter trolls.

Get: Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform by John Pfaff.  A lot of criminologists I talk to are really excited about this book. Mass Incarceration is one of the US’s defining issues of the day, of concern across the political spectrum thanks to its disproportionate hold relative to the rest of the world, its effect on American families, and its costs. Pfaff’s contribution, undertaking a sensical review of the dauntingly hard-to-consolidate evidence, sounds like discovering a new verse to a song you thought you knew by heart.

Ann-Marie Anderson, Marketing Director

Give:  I’d give a copy of Tommy Curry’s The Man-Not to aid in understanding the stereotypes (and oppression) of black men.

Get: I’ve already received my holiday supply of books to read, but I have just learned about Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, a survey of African American art from 1963-83 which was a crucial period in American art history.  The book purports to bring to light previously neglected black artists, like Sam Gilliam, Melvin Edwards, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, and many others.

Sara Cohen, Editor

Give: This holiday season, I’ll be getting my friends and family copies of Philadelphia: Finding the Hidden City. As the editor of this book, I learned a ton about Philadelphia’s Gilded Age history, and it’s really changed the way I think about and read our city.  It’s a great gift for the urban historian/architecture critic/fine photography connoisseur/Philadelphian in your life.

Get: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I haven’t read it since I became a mother, and because it’s partially about how weird it is to create and be responsible for another being, I’ve been meaning to reread it.  Plus, 2018 will be the 200th anniversary of the book, and rereading it seems like a great way to celebrate it’s bicentennial.

Aaron Javsicas, Editor-in-Chief

Give: Pennsylvania Stories–Well Told, by Bill Ecenbarger. Bill is a superb writer, and he showcases some of the wonderful weirdness — but also nobility, industry, and the dark side — of our often overlooked commonwealth. From the Pennsylvania pencil and fireworks industries, to the turnpike, to the author’s ride-along with John Updike, to the unfortunately significant presence of the Klan, Ecenbarger treats his subjects with humor, insight, and honesty. I love this state and know a lot of other folks who do too, so this will be an ideal gift.

Get: Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America, by Nancy Rosenblum. National politics over the last eighteen months or so have been quite inspirational — by which I mean, it has inspired me to focus local politics. This book looks like a great way to get your mind around what that means, by examining our neighborly democratic interactions. Local relationships form the underlying fabric that supports our larger democracy, so what makes that fabric strong or weak?

Joan Vidal, Senior Production Editor

Give: Pennsylvania Stories—Well Told, by master storyteller William Ecenbarger. This compelling collection of articles originally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, which features topics that range from Byberry to Zambelli Fireworks to deer hunting to John Updike, makes a perfect gift for anyone interested in Pennsylvania history and popular culture.

Get: the novel Lilli de Jong, by Philadelphia author Janet Benton, which tells the story of a young Quaker woman who decides to keep her baby girl after giving birth in an institution for unwed mothers in 1883 Philadelphia. Through a series of journal entries that detail her struggles, she sheds light on the daily lives and social norms of the people and communities around her.

Dave Wilson, Senior Production Editor

Give: Phil Jasner “On the Case”. This book is about the long-time Philadelphia Daily News sports writer and Naismith Hall of Famer who had a tireless work ethic in his quest to report Philadelphia sports. Phil’s son, Andy, also a sports writer, assembled a book showing just a sliver of his dad’s greatest moments and Phil’s passion to report accurately while exhibiting a tireless work ethic. This book is a wonderful tribute by a son to this father. The book shows the amazing relationships Phil had with great Philadelphia sports legends, and the chapter introductions from prominent Philadelphia sports figures make this an entertaining and touching read.

Nikki Miller, Rights and Permissions Manager

Give: Exploiting the Wilderness by Greg L. Warchol as a holiday gift.  As an animal lover, I think this is a great book that offers a look into the wildlife crime that occurs in Africa and what can be done to stop it.

Get: Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly.  I’ve read great reviews about this book and can’t wait to start reading it over the holidays.

Kate Nichols, Art Manager

Give: Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, published by Temple University Press on behalf of the UCSB Center for Black Studies Research. As per George Lipsitz, the Senior editor, “In addition to its featured peer-reviewed scholarly articles, Kalfou devotes parts of each issue to short features focused on the places where ideas, activism, and art intersect.” As Volume 4, Issue 2 was just published, the journal is more important and timely than ever.

Rachel Elliott, Marketing Assistant

Give: The Audacity of Hoop by Alexander Wolff, because it is a visually compelling book that brings the president, often an inaccessible figure, down to the real world. We get to see him as he is in real life.

Get: We Should All Be Feminists because it has been recommended to me several times already! I love learning more about women’s issues and inclusive feminism and this book explores exactly that!

Gary Kramer, Publicity Manager

Give: I recently attended the 20th-anniversary party for Ellen Yin’s restaurant, Fork. While the menu has changed since she published her memoir/cookbook Forklore, the recipes and stories collected in her fabulous book are timeless, and still wonderful to read and savor.

Get: I’ve been wanting to read Sherman Alexie’s You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me since it was published. One of my favorite authors has written a memoir about his mother. But I just know this is going to break my heart, so I’ve been resisting it. But if someone gave it to me, I’d feel obligated to read it.

The Seeds of the Imagination: Colin Kaepernick’s Gift

This week in North Philly Notes, we repost a September 27 article from The Con by Grant Farred, author of Long Distance Love, about the NFL’s “Take a Knee” controversy.

In his response to his friend Fredric Jameson’s essay “American Utopia,” Slavoj Žižek makes a case for what is all too often lost in the uproar and turmoil caused by a historical event. What is forgotten, Žižek argues, are those “seeds of the imagination” that first created the conditions that made the event possible; the “seeds of the imagination” are overwhelmed by the event and, without the deliberate act of retrieval, lost to history. Žižek has no timetable, but one suspects that he has a longer view in mind than Colin Kaepernick’s decision to take a knee on the 1 September, 2016. It was in a National Football League (NFL) game for the San Francisco 49ers against the-then San Diego Chargers.

Still, there is a resonance about Žižek’s concept in a moment when there is large-scale support for the decision by NFL players, coaches, owners and an assortment of commentators in response to Donald Trump’s condemnation of the “SOB” players who, following Kaepernick’s example, have kept up the tradition of taking a knee. The bi-racial Kaepernick, adopted by a white family in Wisconsin, took his decision because of police violence and mistreatment of other minorities in the United States. This was not a nation, Kaepernick declared, whose flag or anthem he could honour, this was not a nation to which he could pledge allegiance. Kaepernick was, in this regard, following Jackie Robinson, who had, decades earlier, taken the same stand. As, Robinson said, a “black man” signified very differently to him than it did to white Americans. Unlike Robinson, who made this statement after his career had ended, Kaepernick has paid, like Muhammad Ali, a professional price. Since the end of last season, in a league full of mediocre quarterbacks (and even worse backups), Kaepernick has been out of a job.

However, what Kaepernick brought to the fore was politics. The politics of race, police brutality and the unequal treatment of minorities. In the aftermath of the Huntsville rally where Trump criticised the “sons of bitches” footballers for taking the knee, in this weekend’s NFL games, there was an outpouring of condemnation.

Players, from the usually reliable (Seattle Seahawks’s Richard Sherman and Michael Bennett; Marshawn Lynch, once of Seattle, now of the Oakland Raiders; and so on) to the unexpected (Tom Brady, [New England] Patriot in more senses than one, a Trump supporter to boot; the Dallas Cowboys, albeit taking a knee before the national anthem); coaches, from the admirable (Pete Carroll, Seahawks) to the shocking (Rex Ryan, for whom Huntsville was a Damascus experience); owners, well, other than the Steelers’ Rooney family everyone was a surprise. Shahid Kahn (Jaguars), the New England Patriots’ Robert Kraft (like his quarterback Brady a Trump man), Jerry Jones (who participated in the premature knee-taking) to the owners of the Philadelphia Eagles . . . It would seems that the New York Jets’ Woody Johnson, a rather fervent Trump underwriter, is out in the cold by himself. It promises to be a lonely place for Woody. But at least he’ll have the company of the National Hockey League’s (NHL) Pittsburgh Penguins, who only represent the whitest sport in America. He’ll have to do without the likes of National Basketball Association (NBA) superstars Lebron James (Cleveland Cavaliers) and Steph Curry (Golden State Warriors), who want no part of Trump and his White House. Then there’s Robin Lopez of the Chicago Bulls, whose tweet suggests that he expects Trump to be indicted.

What has been lost sight of, in the nigh universal locking-of-arms, taking-of-knees, and expressions of public outrage by commentators from the normally ebullient Chris Collinsworth to the articulate Bob Costas, from the savvy of CNN’s Bakari Sellers to the erudition of MSNBC’s Brian Williams, is how the entire conversation is being overwhelmed by the discourse of respectability, responsibility and, of course, patriotism. The case has made based entirely on the players’ First Amendment right: the right to free speech; their right to protest animated, of course, by the anger fuelled by Trump’s incendiary call to “fire” the “SOBs”.

The players, almost every commentator announces, are patriotic. They have “great respect” for the American flag. Under no circumstances must their protest be understood as a slap in the face of the military. The players are apparently united in their respect for the nation’s armed services, for the police force and all other state institutions whose members work to keep the country safe.

Whatever happened to the “seeds” of Kaepernick’s “imagination?” Have we already forgotten that Kaepernick, like Ali once did (before his conservatism got the better of him), like Robinson and John Carlos and Tommie Smith, understood, correctly, that the problem is precisely the American nation as it is constituted. To be sure, both Carroll and Costas gave voice to this. And, each in their own way, began from the political premise that racism and institutionalised inequality are ingrained in the nation’s fabric; discrimination of African-Americans, Latinos and other minorities is the very stuff of America – you know, like apple pie.

What is more, the dominant line of defence has been, the NFL players “care” about their “communities” and work very hard to contribute to it. These “communities” are never specified, but one presumes that it has to do with kids, and, almost certainly, with kids in under-resourced neighbourhoods.

But . . .  But . . . None of this matters. None of it.

In fact, the only way in which the First Amendment means anything, has any political purchase, is if it begins from the ground that the players, like every other resident of this country, have rights that are in no way contingent. That is, they are free do as they choose – protest, take a knee, stand with their hand over their heart, raise a clenched first – regardless of whether they are “responsible” citizens given to doing good deeds in their assorted “communities.”

What the discourse of “caring” achieves is to imbricate, relentlessly and repeatedly, the players’ right to protest, their right to give voice to their anger, whether it be against police brutality or against Trump’s racist bullhorn (very much in the spirit of Alabama’s own “Bull” Connor), in the discourse of respectability. Because the players, and the NFL, by extension, are responsible stewards of their “communities,” they are then implicitly immunized against the charge of disloyalty to the nation. Their commitment to their “communities” is the surest sign of their investment in America and its values; because they have “great respect” for cops and “deeply appreciate the sacrifice of our brave men and women in uniform” the act of taking a knee on a Sunday afternoon must not be mistaken for a lack of “patriotism.”

Why ever not? Isn’t the very fundament of the rights enshrined in the First Amendment precisely the right to offend? To give offense, again and again? To disrespect the flag, turn your back on the singing of the national anthem or to pour scorn upon American “values?”

In the rush to support or defend the players’ right to protest, what that right means has been reduced to a publicity relations campaign overwhelmed by the discourses of respectability and responsibility. The logic of this defence proceeds from the ground that the players are “worthy” of their rights; they are “upstanding members” of their “communities” who care —  a point with which I am fully sympathetic — about disproportionate police brutality against blacks and the structural inequality that remains a persistent feature of American life.

It does not matter if they are “upstanding” citizens or not. (No one makes the same demands of the owners, those who, like Johnson and Jones and Kraft, remained silent when Trump berated Mexicans as “murderers and rapists,” or advocated predatory sexual behaviour against women, or mocked a specially-abled reporter or . . .). The right to the First Amendment, if it is to have any political salience, must be apprehended as unconditional, something like sovereign. The moment in which support for the players is made to rest upon their socio-political “worthiness,” the discourse of respectability and responsibility veers unthinkingly into political paternalism. Only the “worthy” can give voice to their frustration or anger. Girding this argument is an unreflective and, within the context of the US, historic racism.

Respectability and responsibility (the NFL has its share of miscreants and unsavoury characters, from Lawrence Taylor to Ray Rice to . . .) is installed as the litmus test. There must be no contingency, no dependency upon others burnishing the players’ grievance and anger with their, to mix metaphors, their seal of ethical approval.

There is no need for the players to “nuance” (a term Costas favoured on Monday as he made his way on the talk show circuit) their protest. In fact, they have every right to make, if they so wish, public their disdain for the military or, contrary to what the Steelers so spectacularly failed to do, call one another out, team mate to team mate. Why should one team mate not be divided from another on matters of politics? Why should a league of which, at least, some 70% are black men, not let the mainly white crowds know that they disapprove, in the strongest possible terms, of their – the crowds, as was shown on Sunday and Monday evening – voting tendencies? Why ever not? Why not reiterate the division between black performance (labour, albeit a labour of love, as it is for many) and white consumption? In a moment of historic racial division, it can be argued that the first right is that of enunciating racial difference and the continuing deleterious effect of American racism. From police brutality to the failing Chicago Public School system (ask Chance the Rapper about that) to the intense racial animus that Trump has traded on.

It may very well not, this insistence on the right to unfettered right, to the absolute right to express that right, be the most efficient PR strategy. But, then again, there has never been a protest movement that began by first seeking approval. Or, allowed the fear of sanction to immobilise it. The Montgomery bus boycott, the March to Selma, Ali’s willingness to sacrifice his career because, as he said when he refused induction into the US Army, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong, they never called me Nigger,” owes much to its willingness to offend, to take issue, publicly, with the status quo.

Because of the rush to respectability, because of the visceral impulse to submit to the discourse of patriotism (the first refuge of scoundrels, as I’ve argued elsewhere), Kaepernick’s gift is in danger of being trampled upon. It might serve the NFL players better if they resisted the urge to clothe themselves in the cloak of respectability, if they eschewed the trappings of responsibility.

If, instead, they embraced fully the “seeds” of Kaepernick’s “imagination.” Kaepernick sowed, through his willingness to articulate the politics that informed his act of kneeling, in his stated opposition to the racism that has repeatedly allowed police officers who have ended the lives of black citizens (a point Sellers made on CNN) to be summarily ended without any palpable justice, a seed uncompromised by the desire for respectability. Kaepernick acted as a political “bad boy.”

If that “seed” is lost, if his “imagination” is not properly understood and honoured, if the “seed of his imagination” does not grow into a politics rather than a placatory course of action, then, as Žižek reminds us, there will have been, no matter the amount of ink spilled on this issue, no matter the hours spent trolling the internet or sitting glued to the TV/computer screen offer their opinions on it, fidelity to Kaepernick’s “seed,” to the possibilities a now unemployed quarterback opened up when he first took that knee, in that game more than a year ago against the Chargers.

The only proper way to honour Kaepernick is to recognise the promise of the political “seed” he germinated and then to exceed it. As the Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett senior put it, his NFL-playing sons, Michael and Martellus (tight end for the Green Bay Packers), will continue to protest. Out of one “seed,” potentially another. And so on, and so on. The Seahawks defensive end appears ready to add the force of his political “imagination” to the “seed” Kaepernick planted in San Diego. Who said that defensive ends are the scourge of quarterbacks? Not in this case, one dares hope.

ABOUT GRANT FARRED

Grant Farred teaches at Cornell University. His most recent work is Martin Heidegger Saved My Life (University of Minnesota Press, 2015).His previous books include In Motion, At Rest: The Event of the Athletic Body (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), What’s My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), Phantom Calls: Race and the Globalization of the NBA (Prickly Paradigm, 2006) and Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football (Temple University Press, 2008). His forthcoming works include Conciliation (Temple University Press) and The Condemned: Lio Messi, Luis Suarez and the 2014 World Cup (Indiana University Press).