Category: Politics

“Problem Description: Images of two homosexual men on television kissing.”

Image from: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/sports/michael-sam-celebrates-draft-pick-kiss-boyfriend-n102341

The title of this post comes from one of the complaints the FCC received in response to Michael Sam kissing his boyfriend after getting drafted into the NFL. I admit that I don’t particularly care about the NFL or about Michael Sam being added to the growing list of “first openly gay person to…” But I did find the language of the complaints to be really interesting. First, the repeated emphasis on display and “openness:”

“I was incensed at this vile, disgusting, inappropriate display of homosexual behaviour.” “The show depicted homosexual acts openly between two men”

This kind of talk stems less, I think, from a desire to pretend that homosexuality doesn’t exist, but rather from a different kind of sexual ethos that demands one speak around, rather than directly of, same-sex desires. In fact, second, the unwillingness to name what these viewers saw as “gay” — or even to use a pejorative — and instead the constant use of the term “homosexual” speaks, I think, to an attempt to name what is still essentially unnameable for a large segment of the population. For the most part, the complaints aren’t really about condemning same-sex desire as such — though that is clearly present — but rather about the fact that ESPN forced these viewers to engage with the existence of such desire on different terms. This is one reason why its important to not allow the national momentum seen by the gay marriage movement to overshadow continuing regional differences. Recently, the Human Rights Campaign announced a multimillion dollar program to promote gay rights in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama. The goals of the campaign are rightly focused, it seems, on community outreach, but number one is “Empower LGBT people (and straight allies) to come out” and I wonder if that is necessarily the right path to take when it’s clear that the movement speaks an entirely different language than the people it is trying to reach.

The Past in the Present

At the risk of turning my blog into all Germany all the time, I wanted to put this up primarily as a teaching reference.  Last semester, when my Modern Europe class had begun to study the Holocaust, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo put up a post on how he and his wife had to reassess what they knew of her family’s experience of the Holocaust.  She had thought that her great-grandfather had been shot by the Einsatzgruppen, when in fact he had died in Auschwitz.  This moment occurred just as I was re-reading Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive, in which she describes precisely the same realization that her “mental furniture has to be rearranged” because while she had thought her father had died in Auschwitz, he had in fact had been transported to Lithuania and Estonia and “who knows how they were murdered” (40).  That “these stories have no end,” as Klüger says is aptly demonstrated by Marshall’s update to the story, in which he shows his readers his wife’s great-grandfather’s death certificate:

The reason I’m sharing this with you is that the death certificate itself captures for me one of the paradoxes of the Holocaust. Why even keep death certificates? Auschwitz was after all a network of concentration and extermination camps. I’m not even talking about the fear of possible punishment after the war, though that’s another significant question. Just simply, why? These are people, a whole people, being sent into oblivion, to be erased from the earth and from memory. These were to be much less than ordinary deaths.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Good Researchers Change Topics

I’ve been fairly fascinated by the kerfluffle over the Heritage Foundation’s report on the implications of immigration reform not because the report itself was surprising in the conclusion it reached, but because of the way in which it (unfortunately?) reinvigorated a discussion on the relationship between IQ and race just after the doyen of such studies himself, Charles Murray, had visited Kenyon College.  One of the co-authors of the report, it turns out, had written a Harvard dissertation asserting, among other things, that “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against” and the U.S. should therefore institute an IQ-based selection system. I’ve been somewhat bemused by all this, not least because I was under the impression that the conclusion that low-IQ scores within certain racial groups can be attributed to genetic causes had been thoroughly discredited within the relevant social science literature (Andrew Sullivan’s continued beating on the drum notwithstanding). Granted, as someone unconvinced that IQ measures anything biologically-fixed about a person whatsoever, I would not be inclined to give much credence to studies saying the opposite either.  Ta-Nehisi Coates has a recent post on an alternative explanation for why such disparities come up when they do (and they often do).

Anyway, considering all this, I was fairly confused to see that Harvard approved a very recent (2009) dissertation making this kind of argument. There is a difference, it seems to me, between researchers at the American Enterprise Institute and those accredited by Harvard.  So I was unsurprised to read that the author of the dissertation, Jason Richwine, thanks Charles Murray as his “primary advisor.”  What continues to amaze me, and I thought it worth emphasizing this aspect of the story, was how Richwine came to the topic in the first place:

By his own account, Jason Richwine came to the Harvard Kennedy School deeply fascinated with the link between race and IQ. Richwine told The Washington Examiner’s Byron York that, as an undergraduate at American University, he fell in love with Charles Murray’s work on the topic. Murray, who will become an important player in Richwine’s story later on, is one of the authors of the infamous The Bell Curve, the 1994 book whose claims about the genetic roots of the black/white IQ gap set off the most famous public food fight over race and IQ. Richwine describes Murray as “my childhood hero.”

…

“Jason had the topic fully formed in his mind before he talked to me,” [the dissertation chair], wrote via email. “I played no role in topic selection or forming the research agenda.”This line raised eyebrows among some scholars familiar with social science dissertations. Dan Drezner is a Professor of International Politics at Tufts’ Fletcher School, an institution that’s somewhat similar to Harvard’s Kennedy School in character, who’s been following the Richwine case closely. “If I’m an advisor, and I have a student that comes to me,” Drezner said, “the last thing I would do is say ‘write this.’” They key issue is “how well formed was Richwine’s argument when he came to Borjas?” Students should come up with their own dissertation topics, Drezner said, but if an advisor didn’t sufficiently challenge them on whether it was a good, well-thought out program, that could be a problem.

Everyone who enteres a research project comes into it with certain predispositions and predilections.  Otherwise, they probably wouldn’t be that interested in doing the research the first place.  But anyone who enters a dissertation with an idea of a project (and apparently, in this case, an answer as well!) and comes out of it with the exact same idea, probably has a problem that goes beyond the lack of a primary advisor willing to challenge your assumptions. Sometimes you just begin a project that is not feasible as a grad student.  Sometimes the materials don’t exist or the research would be too expensive.  Sometimes the results come out differently than you expect or the evidence doesn’t support your initial claim or idea.  But always, always, you engage with a pre-existing literature that will inevitably reshape the contours of a topic that you initially formulated prior to graduate school. There is a vast difference between working on IQ in 1994 and working on it in 2004. The Belle Curve  itself actually has little to do with this issue; a research topic that does not shift through a four year (in Richline’s case) dissertation is one that has not developed sufficiently for doctoral research.

Indeed, this is something I emphasize to my students in “Practice and Theory of History.” We begin that course with a research proposal and the one thing I emphasize as we begin to work on it is that the final project will often not resemble the argument and topic initially posed.  Most of my students, with some resistance, came around to seeing why that might be the case and why, in the end, that is a good thing.  It signifies their ability to master even a small part of a literature and to understand the ways in which scholarship transforms and shifts over time in reaction to the work a community of scholars engages in together.  Richwine, it seems, failed to understand that very basic concept.

Marriage Equality and Queer Politics

In the context of recent oral arguments before the Supreme Court, students taking “Sex and the City” discussed the marriage equality in the context of a course that addresses some of the more radical implications of queer politics and practice.  Claire Potter at the New School provides some thoughts on that subject that students may find intriguing.  Here’s her conclusion:

The radical queer critique of marriage emerges from this history: under current conditions, gay and lesbian people who marry signal a commitment to things as they are, not as they could be. But this does not have to be the case: just as marriage should not require the marginalization of the unmarried, movements for economic justice do not have to occur in a world where no one at all marries. Marriage is not a radical act, and ought not to be spoken of as one — but radical people sometimes marry. Regardless of what the court decides, the agenda must be to continue the critique of marriage as an institution, scrutinize the improper power relations that marriage nurtures. But asking millions of people, rich and poor, to accept a set of discriminatory and humiliating legal exclusions until the revolution comes, laws that hurt them economically and repeatedly articulate them as second class citizens, does not necessarily move a social justice agenda forward either.

Adam Smith on the Social Contract

Although they had read the exact same text I had, my students in Modern Europe seemed skeptical about my interpretation of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.  Smith’s notion of the “Invisible Hand” of the market may be his most famous contribution to modern economic thought, but he also elaborates a role for the state in providing the necessary conditions for those free markets to emerge.  In order to bring the point to our own time, I related what he said in our excerpt (from our primary source reader Perspectives from the Past) to Elizabeth Warren’s defense of contemporary liberal politics.  I wanted to illustrate how Smith — associated with a particular vein of economic liberal thought and used to justify nonintervention in the industrializing economy — was taken up by people and reinterpreted according to a particular ideological agenda, rather than attention to the actual text.  So, just for the record, here’s what I was thinking of.

Smith:

The expence [sic] of defending the society, and that of supporting the dignity of the chief magistrate, are both laid out for the general benefit of the whole society.  It is reasonable, therefore, that they should be defrayed by the general contribution of the whole society, all the different members contributing, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities (425).

Warren:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there – good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea – God Bless! Keep a Big Hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Smith actually mentions everything Warren does, but, then again, Adam Smith was a well known socialist.

P.S.  Students, by the by, should feel free to comment.

Lessons from the History of Sexuality

Timothy Burke at Swarthmore shows why the history of sexuality is relevant to understanding the flaws contemporary political discourse on gay marriage.  He focuses on man of the hour Rick Santorum as a proxy for culturally conservative arguments, but it’s worthing noting that many gay marriage proponents make similarly ahistorical claims about the universality of monogamous marriage, sometimes reifying it into a type of biological need every person must indeed feel.  For instance, Andrew Sullivan not only rhetorically eliminates any future for the marriageless, but associates the desire to join the institution with the onset of puberty:

As a child, when I thought of the future, all I could see was black. I wasn’t miserable or depressed. I was a cheerful boy, as happy playing with my posse of male friends in elementary school as I was when I would occasionally take a day by myself in the woodlands that surrounded the small town I grew up in. But when I thought of the distant future, of what I would do and be as a grown-up, there was a blank. I simply didn’t know how I would live, where I would live, who I could live with. I knew one thing only: I couldn’t be like my dad. For some reason, I knew somewhere deep down that I couldn’t have a marriage like my parents…

And when puberty struck and I realized I might be “one of them,” I turned inward. It was a strange feeling—both the exhilaration of sexual desire and the simultaneous, soul-splintering panic that I was going to have to live alone my whole life, lying or euphemizing, concocting some public veneer to hide a private shame.

For Sullivan, sexuality and marriage are intimately linked because one can only fully appreciate and accept the former so long as one has access to the latter.  Such arguments in favor of gay marriage are just as one dimensional as those against it because they ascribe marriage to an essentialist urge that ignores the processes through which the institution developed as well as the social, political, and cultural pressures that made it seem so central and eternal in the first place.