Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. More

Born in 1975, the product of two beautiful parents. Raised in West Baltimore -- not quite The Wire, but sometimes ill all the same. Studied at the Mecca for some years in the mid-'90s. Emerged with a purpose, if not a degree. Slowly migrated up the East Coast with a baby and my beloved, until I reached the shores of Harlem. Wrote some stuff along the way.

Revisiting The Moynihan Report Cont.

National

There was some good conversation in comments yesterday about Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family: A Call For National Action on the black family and some of the resulting pushback. Horde Legionnaire Socioprof offered this link to a 2009 issue of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. In it, Moynihan's legacy is re-assessed from several perspectives. 

I am just beginning to go through the volume. But the first essay argues that Moynihan was unfairly tarred as a racist by people who had not read the report. Apparently portions of it were leaked early, many of them taken out of context. I have my own critiques of The Negro Family. I think the slavery portion doesn't hold up as well as some of the other portions of the report. I also think anyone considering its arguments about slavery should check out Herb Gutman's The Black Family In Slavery In Freedom.

But Moynihan's argument is differs substantially from the kind of ahistorical shaming you see from people who attack black culture as the font of the race problem.The opening chapter is written Douglass Massey and Robert Sampson. I'm not very familiar with Sampson, but I know Massey's work well. He is a pioneer in understanding the continuing effects of segregation and the piracy of black wealth that characterized mid-20th century domestic policy. Here are their thoughts on what Moynihan was actually trying to accomplish:

The key to arresting the alarming rise in family instability, he felt, was a dedi- cated federal effort to provide jobs for black men. He was, after all, assistant sec- retary in the Department of Labor, not in the Department Health, Education, and Welfare; his purview was the workforce and not the family. The crisis in the black family was his justification for a federal jobs program. Along with educa- tion, training, and apprenticeship programs that would enhance the employabil- ity of black men, he favored a major public works effort that would guarantee jobs to all able-bodied workers. If full employment for black males - especially young black males - could be achieved, he thought, then family stability could be restored and government would be in a better position to attack more entrenched problems such as discrimination and segregation.

I tend to think that it would be really hard to separate out segregation from employment and family stability. But that's a subject worthy of debate. But Moynihan didn't get a debate. He got condemnation:

Perhaps a major effort to generate employment for low-income, minority workers was never in the cards. Even LBJ was skeptical of government work pro- grams. But something else also transpired to seal the fate of Moynihan, his report, and its emphasis on federal employment programs. Immediately after the presidents speech at Howard University, someone leaked the Moynihan Report to journalists, who naturally published the florid language and incendiary prose that was meant to stir passions within the administration while ignoring the more prosaic but critical structural analysis embedded in the report.

Soon, headlines blared that Moynihan was calling the black family pathological and blaming it for the problems of the ghetto, which suggested that he was layingthe onus of black educational failure, joblessness, and criminality on female matri- archs. Moynihan-bashing quickly became a boom industry in the liberal press, led by the journalist William Ryan, who in The Nation coined the term "blaming the victim" to describe the report (Ryan 1971).

Moreover, in the context of an emer- gent black power movement, Moynihan s emphasis on humiliated black men could not have been less timely, and in the context of a coalescing feminist movement, his pairing of matriarchy and pathology could not have been less wel- come. Young black militants and newly self-aware feminists joined in the rising tide of vilification, and Moynihan was widely pilloried not only as a racist, but a sexist to boot.

A great irony is that few of his vociferous critics had actually read Moynihan s report. It was still an internal document with a very limited number of copies. Most people had only read selective extracts published in columns and stories about the report, which when combined yielded a bowdlerized version of its arguments. One wonders, for example, whether critics who claimed Moynihan was racist had read even the first page of the report, where it was claimed that "the racist virus in the American blood stream still afflicts us." The report was not actually "published" and widely distributed until 1967, when Rainwater and Yancey included a facsimile in their analysis of "the politics of controversy."

By then, of course, it was too late; Moynihan s report had been consigned to the netherworld of the politically incorrect, where it would remain for decades. One can only imagine the even more vociferous reaction that would have ensued had the Moynihan Report been leaked in the technological world of today, with its capacity for instantaneous and frenzied distribution the world over.

Perhaps. There's also an argument that Moynihan Report actually would have done better today--a two year lagtime in publication is unthinkable. Moreover, in 1967 the tools of publication were only in a few hands. Today they belong to anyone with an internet connection.

But there would be no Moynihan report today. The liberal consensus has shifted too far to the right. And so we have people who were influenced by Moynihan's thoughts on the importance of family, neglecting to heed his lessons on how to solve those problems.*

Moynihan powerfully believed that government could actually fix "the race problem." He probably believed this because he knew that government had, at best, stood aside while the problem was created and, at its worse, actively contributed to the problem. This is not a line that liberals in politics generally advocate for today.

*Note that this pose is much less risky, politically. There's no real political cost to telling people to get married. (Everyone loves a wedding.) Telling them that there should be a job program that makes more men marriage-material is different.

Revisiting the Moynihan Report

National
Children Without Fathers.jpg

The Urban Institute revisits Daniel Moynihan's The Negro Family: The Case For National Action and finds that a lot has changed. Mostly for the worse:

These demographic trends are stunning. Five decades after Moynihan's work, white families exhibit the same rates of nonmarital childbearing and single parenting as black families did in the 1960s when Moynihan sounded his alarm. Meanwhile, the disintegration of the black nuclear family continued apace. That the decline of traditional families occurred across racial and ethnic groups indicates that factors driving the decline do not lie solely within the black community but in the larger social and economic context. Nevertheless, the consequences of these trends in family structure may be felt disproportionately among blacks as black children are far more likely to be born into and raised in father-absent families than are white children.

I've never really gotten the hubbub over the Moynihan Report. It seems pretty clear to me that in America, parenting is about resources. That families that can bring to bear two streams of resources have better outcomes, on balance, than those who only have one strikes me as logical and predictable. I don't say that as a black person, but as parent.

Moreover unlike people who believe that black people think reading makes you white, or think that blacks somehow like being poor, Moynihan was never confused about the root causes of the black communities predicament:

That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary -- a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have. That the Negro community has not only survived, but in this political generation has entered national affairs as a moderate, humane, and constructive national force is the highest testament to the healing powers of the democratic ideal and the creative vitality of the Negro people. But it may not be supposed that the Negro American community has not paid a fearful price for the incredible mistreatment to which it has been subjected over the past three centuries.

Moynihan believed that the crisis of the black family was the result of having been "battered and harassed by discrimination, injustice and uprooting." Three centuries of injustice," wrote Moynihan, "have brought about deep-seated structural distortions in the life of the Negro American." In my experience people love to quote Moynihan's thoughts on the crisis of the black family. Quoting Moynihan on the how and why of the crisis? Not so much.

The Urban Institute's report demonstrates that the battering Moynihan highlights continues into the present. Last week, I argued that you can't really analogize the "black middle class" with the "white middle class" or the "black elite" with the "white elite" in any real meaningful sense. You can see why in this chart.

Neighborhood Poverty.jpg

To summarize:

The historical segregation of neighborhoods along racial lines fueled the geographic concentration of poverty and the severe distress of very high-poverty neighborhoods. As Massey and Denton demonstrated in American Apartheid (1993), discriminatory policies and practices confining urban blacks--among whom the incidence of poverty was markedly higher than for whites--to a limited selection of city neighborhoods produced much higher poverty rates than in white neighborhoods. Subsequent job losses and rising unemployment pushed poverty in many black neighborhoods even higher.

Today, despite the significant decline in residential segregation, virtually all high-poverty neighborhoods (neighborhoods where more than 40 percent of the population is poor) are majority-minority, and blacks are over five times more likely than whites to live in high-poverty neighborhoods.4 Poor white households are much more geographically dispersed than poor black or Hispanic households. In fact, the average high-income black person lives in a neighborhood with a higher poverty rate than the average low-income white person.

It's worth considering the message a society sends to its citizens with data like this. If you are an African-American aspiring to affluence, you can expect to live in a neighborhood that is about as impoverished as the average poor white person.

The Art of the College Lecture

National

I think I've said before that I like to boot up college lectures and listen while gaming. I'm still playing Civilization V (stuck on King) and so I generally use the Yale History Department's lectures (available through Open Yale) as background music. "Background music" is really disservice, if only because since I've started teaching I've been thinking about which lectures I enjoy and which ones I do not.

My favorite right now is John Merriman's "European Civilization, 1648-1945." It obviously helps to be actually interested in what folks are lecturing on, and European history is basically my second love. I've long said that had I been born white, I would have been a medievalist. I don't read the material for the courses, or purchase the books, though I'm going to read Merriman's single volume history of modern Europe this summer. Still, listening to these guys have helped me get a hold on what makes for a great lecture.

Merriman is a kind of a freestyle rapper. He is riffing off the material and doesn't really do "in this year this happened, and in that year that happened." Instead, he just gives you anecdotes, quotes, and observations about the periods. Merriman has this weird ability to inhabit the history -- he'll do these really exaggerated accents or capture the tragicomedy of World War I by noting the obvious threat of the Germans "in Ostend eating moules frites."

Or he'll note the frightening absurdity of Austrian anti-Semitism by quoting Karl Leuger's assertion, "I decide who is a Jew."*

Last week I was talking about how much of teaching is performance, and Merriman gives a show. This is not demeaning. So much of getting people to care about a subject is conveying your own passion. I imagine that it's a lot easier to convey passion at the University level, then at the elementary and secondary school level where teachers often must be passionate over a range of subjects, and passionate about a curriculum that may not be their own.

Anyway, I highly recommend Merriman if you like European history. He is not quite as focused as David Blight. And I wouldn't listen to get a strict "chronological" read of history. But there's something to be said for not presenting history as an orderly sequence of events. Rarely do people at the time see it things that way.

* I've thought a lot about that "I decide who is a Jew" quote. It really says a lot about how a ruling class uses race to conceal their power. Surely the Jews existed as a people with their own traditions, folkways and affinities. But when Leuger says "I decide who's a Jew" he is claiming the right to declare who is inferior by blood and who isn't. It is very similar to the way the colonial Virginians (and racists today) claimed the right to "decide who's a nigger." It is not enough to say "I have more guns than you, so I win." The "win" must be ordained by God. Or science--which to the racist, is just another word for "God." Beyond the task of justifying and reifying power, "race" has little meaning.

A Rising Tide Lifts All Yachts

National
I've spent the last couple of months looking at the roots of white supremacists' policy, and the limits of color-blind policy in addressing its damage. A few weeks back, while debating Andrew over IQ differentials, I cautioned against comparisons between blacks and whites which claim to control for income and even wealth:

This is not merely a problem for your local diversity and sensitivity workshop. It is a problem of wealth and power. When you create a situation in which a community has a disproportionate number of poor people, and then you hyper-segregate that community, you multiply the problems of poverty for the entire community -- poor or not. That is to say that black individuals are not simply poorer and less wealthy than white individuals. Because of segregation, black individuals and white individuals of the same income and same wealth do not live in communities of equal wealth.
I also pointed to sociologist John Logan's research which points out that, on average, affluent blacks tend to live in neighborhoods with poorer resources than most poor whites. To understand this you must get that African Americans are the most segregated group in American history. Right now, at this very moment, the dissimilarity index -- the means by which we measure segregation -- is at the lowest point it's been in a century. Despite that, African Americans are still highly segregated.

To understand the profound consequences of segregation, consider this study by sociologist Patrick Sharkey -- "Neighborhoods and The Mobility Gap" -- which looks at how children fare when exposed to poverty. The answer, of course, is not well. Instead of trying to do a one-to-one match of African Americans and whites via income or wealth, the study considers African Americans and whites within the neighborhoods in which they live. The conclusions are generally not surprising:

Among children born from 1955 through 1970, only 4 percent of whites were raised in neighborhoods with at least 20 percent poverty, compared to 62 percent of blacks. Three out of four white children were raised in neighborhoods with less than 10 percent poverty, compared to just 9 percent of blacks. Even more astonishingly, essentially no white children were raised in neighborhoods with at least 30 percent poverty, but three in ten blacks were.

And more shockingly still, almost half (49 percent) of black children with family income in the top three quintiles lived in neighborhoods with at least 20 percent poverty, compared to only one percent of white children in those quintiles. These figures reveal that black children born from the mid 1950s to 1970 were surrounded by poverty to a degree that was virtually nonexistent for whites.

This degree of racial inequality is not a remnant of the past. Two out of three black children born from 1985 through 2000 have been raised in neighborhoods with at least 20 percent poverty, compared to just 6 percent of whites. Only one out of ten blacks in the current generation has been raised in a neighborhood with less than 10 percent poverty, compared to six out of ten whites. Even today, thirty percent of black children experience a level of neighborhood poverty -- a rate of 30 percent or more -- unknown among white children.

When you take an even more holistic look at poverty, it gets much worse:

Previous research has used a measure of neighborhood disadvantage that incorporates not only poverty rates, but unemployment rates, rates of welfare receipt and families headed by a single mother, levels of racial segregation, and the age distribution in the neighborhood to capture the multiple dimensions of disadvantage that may characterize a neighborhood.

Figure 2 shows that using this more comprehensive measure broken down into categories representing low, medium, and high disadvantage, 84 percent of black children born from 1955 through 1970 were raised in "high" disadvantage neighborhoods, compared to just 5 percent of whites. Only 2 percent of blacks were raised in "low" disadvantage neighborhoods, compared to 45 percent of whites. The figures for contemporary children are similar.

By this broader measure, blacks and whites inhabit such different neighborhoods that it is not possible to compare the economic outcomes of black and white children who grow up in similarly disadvantaged neighborhoods. However, there is enough overlap in the childhood neighborhood poverty rates of blacks and whites to consider the effect of concentrated poverty on economic mobility.

I strongly urge you to read this report. But in case you don't -- to summarize -- "the effect of concentrated poverty on economic mobility" is very, very bad:

The main conclusion from these results is that neighborhood poverty appears to be an important part of the reason why blacks experience more downward relative economic mobility than whites, a finding that is consistent with the idea that the social environments surrounding African Americans may make it difficult for families to preserve their advantaged position in the income distribution and to transmit these advantages to their children.

When white families advance in the income distribution they are able to translate this economic advantage into spatial advantage in ways that African Americans are not, by buying into communities that provide quality schools and healthy environments for children. These results suggest that one consequence of this pattern is that middle-class status is particularly precarious for blacks, and downward mobility is more common as a result.

When you hear people claiming that "class" can somehow account for the damage of white supremacy, or making spurious comparisons between Appalachia and Harlem,  you should be skeptical. I have made those comparisons. But learning is the entire point of researching, writing, and reporting. I am learning that you can not simply wish the past away.

White-supremacist policy is older than this country. It begins with the slave codes in mid-17th-century colonial Virginia. It proceeds through the the 18th century, inscribing itself into our Constitution. It moves into the 19th century with such force that slaves alone were worth more than all the productive capacity of the country put together. War was waged to assure slavery's continuance. The war was lost. We had a chance to do the right thing. We didn't. So white supremacist policy endured. Even American liberalism's proudest moment -- the New Deal -- would be unimaginable without its aid. This era of policy did not close until the late 1960s, well within the living memory of many Americans.

In the face of this, liberals today are arguing that 300 years of immoral policy can be undone by changing the subject. If only we can fool white racists by helping black people under the guise of "class," maybe we can get out from under this. But the math says that black people are a class unto themselves. There is no "black and white" elite, no "black and white" middle class, no colorless poor. And when you consider that white supremacy is a dominant strain in our history, how could there be?

Almost twenty years ago, Deborah Malmud made a critique of class-based affirmative action (which is in vogue at the moment) which sticks with me:

Patterns of race-based class differentiation -- the fact that, in the aggregate, being the black child of a black lawyer means something different in the American social world from being the white child of a white lawyer -- are particularly problematic for the American vision of class mobility and racial equality. And a race-neutral program of class-based affirmative action will only submerge those patterns. In so doing, it will disserve the interests of the minority middle class.

I don't mean to be harsh or unsympathetic. It really is a terrible political problem. But you can't pretend it away. We are not going to trick the forces of history by appealing to color in our individual morality, and avoiding it when confronted with our national morality. Booker T. Washington already tried that. Red Summer was our reward.

Kurt Vonnegut Is for the Kids

Personal
So I handed my copy of Slaughterhouse-Five off to my son. His thoughts thus far.
1.) "Billy is stupid."

2.) "Wild Bob is life."

The zen of children. More thoughts coming.

To Stop Being the Party of Stupid You Must Stop Being Stupid

Politics
My label-mate David Graham finds the GOP saying dumb things about women, pregnancy, and rape again:
"Before, when my friends on the left side of the aisle here tried to make rape and incest the subject -- because, you know, the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low," Franks said.

Franks continued: "But when you make that exception, there's usually a requirement to report the rape within 48 hours. And in this case that's impossible because this is in the sixth month of gestation. And that's what completely negates and vitiates the purpose of such an amendment."
In fact, as Garance Franke-Ruta has pointed out, the incidence of pregnancy from rape is not low:
STUDY DESIGN: A national probability sample of 4008 adult American women took part in a 3-year longitudinal survey that assessed the prevalence and incidence of rape and related physical and mental health outcomes. 

RESULTS: The national rape-related pregnancy rate is 5.0% per rape among victims of reproductive age (aged 12 to 45); among adult women an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year. Among 34 cases of rape-related pregnancy, the majority occurred among adolescents and resulted from assault by a known, often related perpetrator. Only 11.7% of these victims received immediate medical attention after the assault, and 47.1% received no medical attention related to the rape. A total 32.4% of these victims did not discover they were pregnant until they had already entered the second trimester; 32.2% opted to keep the infant whereas 50% underwent abortion and 5.9% placed the infant for adoption; an additional 11.8% had spontaneous abortion. 

CONCLUSIONS: Rape-related pregnancy occurs with significant frequency. It is a cause of many unwanted pregnancies and is closely linked with family and domestic violence. As we address the epidemic of unintended pregnancies in the United States, greater attention and effort should be aimed at preventing and identifying unwanted pregnancies that result from sexual victimization.
More:
Each year in the US, 10,000-15,000 abortions occur among women whose pregnancies are a result of reported rape or incest. An unknown number of pregnancies resulting from rape are carried to term. There is absolutely no veracity to the claim that "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down." A woman who is raped has no control over ovulation, fertilization, or implantation of a fertilized egg (ie, pregnancy). To suggest otherwise contradicts basic biological truths.
I've said this before but conservatives often perceive liberal attachment to diversity as a kind of "everyone's a winner" cuddle party, where we sit around exchanging rice-cakes and hating on the military. But the great strength of diversity is it forces you into a room with people who have experiences very different from your own. It's all fine and good to laugh at Sherrod Brown dancing to Jay-Z. But dude is outside his lane and he's learning something. M.C. Rove should be so lucky.

If you are not around people who will look at you like you are crazy when you make stupid claims about other people's experiences, then you tend to keep saying stupid things about other people's experiences. It is not enough to pay a political price, or even to be shamed into silence. You have to come to believe -- in your heart -- that sincerity itself is not the same as accurate information. It is not enough for you to not be "the party of stupid" or to "stop saying stupid things" you must show some active commitment toward being less stupid.

That commitment is never comfortable. And you might find yourself the next contestant on that Summer-Jam screen. But your going to be on that screen anyway. Better to be awkward than stupid.

Syria, Intervention, and the Weight of History

Global
There is some excellent push-back down in comments on Fareed Zakaria's take on Syrian history which deserves some highlight.
First on Zakaria's read on the force of colonialism:
His analysis actually strikes me as pretty ahistorical, even given my fairly rudimentary understanding of Syrian history. It was decades after decolonization before the Syrian regime took on its sectarian (Alawite) character -- I think Salah Jadid was the first to take the Baath party in this direction. 
It's also a major stretch to compare this war, sparked by a popular uprising on the heels of the other Arab revolutions of 2011 with the Lebanese Civil War which was, in large part, sparked by the Middle East's serious refugee crisis. 
This sort of stuff is important to take note of. Sectarianism has become a problem in the Syrian civil war, but arguing that we shouldn't be involved because we'd be meddling in some sort of historically necessary process that's been brewing since the 1970's (or, to adopt his extreme position, since Sykes-Picot) is not helpful. 

Even if we adopt Zakaria's advice and merely aim for some sort of 'political' intervention, we'll need to come to grips with more plausible causes for sectarianism to avoid creating fallout.

On the mashing together of the Middle East and revolutions in general:

I agree with everything Michael Y says. Tunisia and Libya are showing progress, and while Egypt is a mess, it's no Saudi Arabia or Iran (its courts are still fighting, and despite restrictions, so is its media). Political revolutions are very messy.
Generally, what a society determines to be a balance of powers and rights has to be determined on some level from politics. This is not a -you-can't-make-an-omelette-without-breaking-eggs argument, but just an observation of history. The French and European revolutions took a long, long time to develop stable polities. I think a big mistake that we take from recent history is to compare revolutions to those in Eastern Europe in 1989. 

The fact that a bankrupt, occupying empire chose to not support its puppet regimes, and that popular uprisings replaced those regimes with liberal democracies, is more of a fluke of history (helped in no small part by those countries bordering NATO/ EEC), then a normal example of political revolution.

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If I Were a Black Kid, Cont.

Personal
I've been meaning to link to this interview I did with The Days of Yore for awhile now. Without harping, it probably explains why I blanch at criticizing children for wanting to play sports or be rappers. Essentially I was that kid:

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Tony Dorsett, the running back for the Dallas Cowboys. That's what I wanted to be.

Did you play a lot of football on your own or was that just sort of a....?

I did, but I didn't play too much on account of not being very good. You know, it was just something we did in the neighborhood, threw the football and ran around a lot, yeah, a lot of fun...

And not only was I that kid, but the roots of my present self are there:

And you listened to a ton of hip-hop.

It was constant, it was the soundtrack of my childhood. It was just everywhere.

So then I wanted to be a rapper, that was next. But much like being a running back, I wasn't very good at it so that was a minor problem with that dream. I wasn't good at that but that led me to poetry and I did poetry for a while. I was a better rapper than I was a running back and I was a better poet than I was a rapper. I wasn't particularly good at any of those things yet.

There was a great degree of failure in my life and I never really... You know, the way I came up, it quickly became clear to me that no person has the right to success. There's no guarantee to success at all; you may get it or you may not. You can like something and you can be bad at it and you can keep doing it or you can be not great at it and you can keep going or you can be mediocre at it and you can keep doing it. You keep doing it because you like it, just because you like it, for you, it's yours, it's private, you own it. Not to please other people, not to impress nobody.

I wasn't really good at school, I wasn't an athlete, I wasn't particularly good with girls, I didn't have any of that. I wasn't a social outcast; I had pretty good social skills and was well-liked among my crowd, so I didn't have the sort of nerd-geek experience. But I did have the experience of not being particularly good at anything measurable as a young child.

And I went through a long period, once I got to writing, of not being very successful but I kept doing it because I liked it.
When I think about my early life I don't really see much difference between myself and other kids--except one thing. I had people around me who. whatever their disappointments in me, really encouraged my interests. My house was pretty tough place. You could get your ass kicked for disrespecting your mother, your teachers or any other adult.  Yet there was always hippy-streak to my folks and they tended to be great believers in imagination. So, for instance, I wasn't allowed to have GI Joe's with white faces--this was the era of black Barbie, and black everything. But my Dad never really told me and my brother Malik to put away the Dungeons & Dragons and read some Du Bois. (He was more a Booker T guy, anyway.)

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Fareed Zakaria on American Intervention in Syria

Global
I was out of town last week reporting in Chicago. I wanted to post this piece, but it slipped away from me in the crush of events. At any rate, here is Fareed Zakaria over at Andrew's place arguing against American intervention in Syria.
I really appreciate this piece because one of my pet peeves with journalism, when I was young, was its ahistorical nature. I think that's changed--oddly enough--in the era of blogs and the internet. Any explanation of Syria that begins with "You gotta step back when you talk about what we should do in Syria and understand what is happening..." is going to get my attention. Zakaria does not disappoint.

Mad Men Has Become a Bad Comic Book

Entertainment

I've been thinking for some time about this piece Emily Nussbaum wrote on Mad Men where she articulates the basic problems with the sixth season and, perhaps now, the entire series:

As the island was to "Lost," Don Draper is to "Mad Men." He was a great premise, a mystery we were dying to understand. But, the more the puzzle has been filled in, the more he's begun to feel suspiciously like a symbol, a thesis title rather than a character: "Appearance Versus Reality"; "American Masculinity as Performance"; "The Links Between Prostitution, Marriage, and the Ad Game." I'd hoped that the death of Don's California-stoner muse, Anna, two seasons ago—in one of the series' standout episodes, "The Suitcase"—would work as an exorcism, but instead Weiner doubled down, adding fresh flashbacks, to the point that even JT LeRoy might think that he was laying it on a bit thick. 

To recap: Don's real name is Dick Whitman. His prostitute mother died in childbirth; his dad, her john, beat him. His fundamentalist stepmother called him a "whore's child." Then his father got kicked in the head by a horse, and the stepmother moved in with her sister, herself a prostitute, living in a brothel. The stepmother, heavily pregnant with Don's half brother, prostituted herself to her brother-in-law, as the teen-age Don knelt outside her door. He watched them, through the keyhole, have sex. C'mon, now. This is no longer the backstory of a serial adulterer; it's the backstory of a serial killer.

We haven't even got to the part where Whitman goes to fight in Korea, accidentally blows up his superior officer, Don Draper, steals his identity, forms a secret relationship with his widow (she's motherly, yet also somewhat prostitute-like, since he pays for her upkeep), becomes a greaser, and seduces a model who is also concerned primarily with appearances. Eventually, he gets into advertising, and when his half brother, Adam, finds him, Don rejects him, and Adam hangs himself. It's not that none of this makes sense, or could make sense; it's just too much, overdetermined. None of the other characters has this sort of reverse-engineered psychology, and for good reason: it's a lazy way to impose meaning.

Reading Emily detail Draper's back-story, I had the feeling that I'd seen this improbable twisting and turning before—in comic books. We grant comic books that license because they are arched over decades, forged by different writers and editors. Some writers emphasize one aspect of backstory more than others, and whole events are often retconned into oblivion. Either way I don't think backstory is so much the problem, as the belief that backstory has more explanatory power than it actually does.

We are being told that Don is having an affair with Sylvia. Presumably this affair has some relation to the perversions he experienced as a child. That's a good start but it is insufficient. Why—specifically—Sylvia? Who is she? What, precisely, is she offering that Don simply can't get enough of? How does that particular character interact with whatever is going on in Don Draper's head?

This is not a new challenge. What made Don Draper's two affairs so powerful in the first season was the sense that both Rachel and Midge were doing something for him. Rachel and Don connected on mutual feeling of being a pariah. Midge was window into a world of nonconformity that has always intrigued Don—the representation of a path that an identity thief, running from a dysfunctional family might, himself, have taken.

And each of these characters were actual people. Rachel had a father and a sister and expectations emanating from each of those. She had her own thoughts on Judaism and Israel, ad ultimately, on what constituted cowardice and what didn't. Midge inhabited the falling world of the Beatnicks. And you had some real sense of that world—you got to see her friends, you got to go to Jazz clubs with them, and finally, you got to see her in love with someone else.

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Notes From the First Year: Some Thoughts on Teaching at MIT

National
A commenter asks:

If this isn't too off topic, what do you find motivates most of your students at MIT? Do they really love the subject, or do they see it as a pathway to bigger things, or are they just doing it because that's what you do to succeed in life? I'm sure it's a combination of all of them, but I would be interested in how you saw the break down.
The first thing I should say is that the kids at MIT are, I think, different than most. Even among students from the highly competitive schools they seem a little different. We live in a world that valorizes "intelligence,"  "talent," and "ideas." (The obsession in journalism with the counter-intuitive springs from this.) What I found at MIT was something a little different. They were plenty smart, but they weren't particularly enamored with that fact. And more than being smart, they were tough. 

I've never taught writing before, but I tend to believe that toughness is really important if you are going to be a successful writer. What you need to write is the ability to not get knocked out. You need to be able to take brutal critique and tolerate awful people. But more than that, you need the physical courage to look at a blank screen, and write. What you write will generally be pretty awful -- especially when you are young. And for the most part, this does not change as you age. The writing in your head may well be the sweetest music. But when you put it on to the page what you will get will likely only be some vague, mushy approximation.

The old adage is true -- writing is rewriting. But it takes a kind of courage to confront your own awfulness (and you will be awful) and realize that, if you sleep on it, you can come back and bang at the thing some more, and it will be less awful. And then you sleep again, and bang even more, and you have something middling. Then you sleep some more, and bang, and you get something that is actually coherent. Hopefully when you are done you have a piece that reasonably approximates the music in your head. And some day, having done that for years, perhaps you will get something that is even better than the music in your head. Becoming a better writer means becoming a re-writer. But that first phase is so awful that most people don't want any part.

I think because MIT is a pretty bruising place, my kids came prepared for most of this. I don't know if they expected it in a writing class, or not. But I generally think that arts and humanities classes should not be easy, that they should, in fact, reflect the great difficulty of the actual profession of "artist" or "critic." So I tried to give them that.

I didn't have to work hard to motivate people. What I found was that if I showed up, and I was excited, they fed off of that, and they got excited. I came to feel that teaching was performance. My job was to communicate my own energy and belief in the importance of the work. I had it pretty easy. I wrote my syllabus, and thus chose work that I loved. If the syllabus wasn't working, I could make a change as we went. (I found, for instance, that teaching kids how to write compelling sentences is a lost art.) More than that, I love writing. I go to bed thinking about it, and wake up thinking about it. Some communicating energy was never a problem.

This probably won't really help anyone else in the teaching world. I don't know how well I'd do with a pre-written curriculum which I had to follow to the letter. I don't know how well I'd do in a class where we were studying writing, but not trying to learn how to write. I don't know how well I'd do at a school where the kids cared less. 

Still, I enjoyed this year tremendously. People think that teaching at a science and engineering school means you'll be faced with a group of awful writers. But I have read enough dense and vague lit criticism to know that writing clearly does not have a direct relationship with interest in the humanities. In some ways, I felt that the rigor of math had better prepared these kids for the rigor of writing. One of my students insisted that whereas in math, you could practice and get better, in writing you either "had it" or you didn't. I told her that writing was more like math then she suspected.

What Makes Fiction Good? It's Mostly the Voice

Entertainment
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Delacorte

I finished Slaughterhouse-Five last week. It is probably the the funniest book I've ever read. Here's a sample. Billy Pilgrim, Lazzaro, and Edgar Derby are prisoners in a German war camp. Lazzaro is plotting revenge against an English POW who broke his arm. In the course of explaining this he tells a story about killing a dog with clock springs and a steak:

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If I Were a Black Kid ...

National
Here's a question from yesterday's comments:

Here is a thought experiment -- I do not pose this as an argument, or a "gotcha" proposition. I seriously want to hear this speech: TNC, if you are invited to your high school, Baltimore Polytechnic (thanks Wikipedia! P.S.: that you are not listed as a notable Alumnus is BS) and asked to speak to the students, what would you say? You're not allowed to give an impersonal, professorial talk about your academic interests. Let's assume the people who have invited you really want to know what you think they should do as individuals, and what they should do as a community, in order to achieve the kind of success in life that you have earned.

The large majority are good kids: driven, hungering for success and a sense of self, and desperately looking up to you for encouragement and advice, to somehow move them, even if they are too cool to show it. It's a pretty good school, but you are exceptional, and deep down, they want to be valued like you are valued. They want to be exceptional too. Sprinkled in the audience are also a bunch of fools who are making terrible choices and wrecking their own lives and hurting their community. But for this one hour, regardless of whether they have chosen to actively build up or tear down their lives and their community, they are ALL listening. You've got the mic. What would you say?
Well, first, I would say that you should be careful with Wikipedia. I did, in fact, attend Baltimore Polytechnic Institute ("Poly" for short). But the reason I am not listed as a notable alumnus is probably that I didn't graduate from there. Oh, and here is something else -- I was asked to leave. Twice. The first time, my parents argued for me to be readmitted. The second time they just threw up their hands and said -- "Fool, you are on your own." 

I was 16. I'd been arrested for assaulting a teacher and suspended on suspicion of assaulting another teacher. In my last year there, I got into a really huge fight in which I took a steel trash can to the head and then promptly failed four out of seven classes that year. I actually failed English. (You can read all about my lovely adventures with the Baltimore City Public Schools here.) So, you see, it is highly unlikely that I would ever be invited back to Poly to address the students. My older brother Malik, who also went to Poly and has gone on to work for Dreamworks, would be a much better candidate.

But, weirdly enough, I often do get asked to speak to predominantly black schools. Last year, I had the honor of going back to the site of my old middle school and spending a day with the kids. My mother teaches in Baltimore County and I've gone out and talked to her kids. I've even talked to the kids at Poly's longtime rival -- City College. I'm pretty sure the teachers bring me in because they believe my checkered background might mean I have something to say to them.

What I generally try to do is avoid messages about "hard work" and "homework," not because I think those things are unimportant, but because I think they put the cart before the horse. The two words I try to use with them are "excitement" and "entrepreneurial." I try to get them to think of education not as something that pleases their teachers, but as a ticket out into a world so grand and stunning that it defies their imagination. My belief is that, if I can get them to understand the "why?" of education, then the effort and hard work and long study hours will come after. I don't know how true that is in practice, but given that I am asked to speak from my own experience, that is the lesson I have drawn.

This will come as somewhat depressing news, but one of the main reasons I wanted to go to Poly was to get away from the violence that dogged virtually every other Baltimore city high school. That didn't exactly work out as I planned it. But my point is that my childhood -- and my education -- was largely guided by the need to negotiate violence. When teachers talked to us about why we needed to succeed, they talked about not ending up dead, or not ending up in jail. 

Much like President Obama's own rhetoric, this line of conversation is understandable, and it has its uses. A lot of us were killing and being killed. A lot of us really were going to jail. My parents generally talked the same way, and in their case, I have to say it was largely successful. In a few days, I am going to see my younger brother sworn as a lawyer in the state of Maryland. My father has seven kids. All of them hail from in and around West Baltimore. All of them, except me, graduated from college. Perhaps that makes the point. But I know how close I came to the edge. And I think a part of that was that not getting shot and not going to jail simply wasn't enough to make want to succeed in school. No one ever told me about Paris. No one I knew had ever been.

What I have come to believe is that children are more than what their circumstance put upon them. So my goal is to get kids to own their education. I don't think I can hector them into doing this. I don't think I can shame them into doing it. I do think that might be able to affect some sort of internal motivation. So I try to get them to see that every subject they study has the potential to open up a universe. I really mean this. 

I went to the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2008, and I still was, very much, a product of my 'hood. I could not believe what I was seeing. There was a guy next to me who had been old friends with Peter Jennings. He was retired. He had tales about taking Peter Jennings' boat out sailing. He talked about how he'd spent the day up at the Continental Divide with his dog. He loved his life. His only trouble was that he couldn't convince his wife to retire. 

Negro, I didn't even know what the Continental Divide was. And I remember thinking, "People actually live like this. Like, we're doing this now?" And then I remember thinking, "I want to live like that." By which I meant, I wanted to see things. If this was one world far from mine, there must be other worlds. And I really wanted to see them. 

I recall sitting in my seventh-grade French class repeating over and over "Il fait froid. Il fait chaud." Why was I learning French? Who did I know that spoke French? Where is France? Do they even really talk like this? Well, yeah, they kinda do. I figured that out at 37. And now I find myself clutching flashcards, repeating "Il fait froid. Il fait chaud." This summer, I am going to live with my family in Paris for eight weeks and study the language. I had no idea that education could make that possible. If I had been more serious about education, the opportunity would have come a lot sooner.

So when I talk to young black kids, I try to talk about the "why?" as much as the "what?" And, for the record, I do the same thing at MIT. I start my class explaining that learning to write is their moral duty. I told them they had access to more information that 99 percent of all humans who have ever lived. It is a moral duty to learn how to communicate that information, clearly and compellingly. I think everyone should own their education.

I don't know if any of that works. But I am convinced that my problem was not mere laziness nor a lack of work ethic. Work ethics don't magically appear. Mine is most evidenced when I understand why I am working and when I find that "Why" compelling. I never really had that as a student. "Try harder" has to have some actual meaning beyond sloganeering.

At this point I am fairly well self-educated, though I have many weaknesses which I likely would not have had, if I'd really gotten a proper and challenging education. (St. Augustine, stats, grammar, genetics etc.) I'm not ashamed of this. It's just a fact. But I also know that if I'd understood, as a youth, what education can give you, that a degree was not simply a matter of being "Twice As Good" but a key to bearing witness to "Twice As Much," I might have made better choices. 

Addendum: One other thing I try to do is avoid talking about education in the negative. So I rarely talk to kids about what they "shouldn't be doing" or what they "can't do. I prefer to talk about what they can and should do. This is not mere phraseology. If you are a twelve-year old black kid who dreams of being the next Kendrick Lamar or Lebron James, I don't really see a problem. If you are are 12-year old black kid who only dreams of being that, I do see a problem. My argument to you is not that you should stop dreaming of rapping or playing ball, my argument is that you should dream about much more. That is part of the magic of being 12.

One problem with being from highly segregated communities (as most black kids are) is that you tend to have less exposure to the world. I had more exposure then virtually any of my friends, and that still wasn't much. When you don't have much exposure to the world the options you see for yourself tend to be limited--you can't really dream about that which you don't know exists. I would argue that the exposure granted by education is a potent antidote to the kind of provincialism that you must necessarily see in segregated communities. So my argument to black twelve year-old boy isn't that he should stop dreaming of being a rapper or a ball player, but that he should understand that that isn't the end of their possibilities. And one way to see more of what it is possible is education. 

I would not urge you simply to get off the PlayStation. I would urge you to understand who made the game. I would not urge you to take down your King James poster. I would urge you to think about the business that makes him possible. Perhaps you'd like to be part of that business some day. I would urge you think about what Kendrick is doing in his lyrics, to think about music. Do you know how to read music? Have you learned an instrument? Would that interest you? How about poetry? Have you ever read any? Would you consider trying to write some of your own?  

I think we all get frustrated with the state of our community. I think it is easy to turn that frustration into a kind of catharsis by denigrating the dreams of children. I believe in taking the dreams of children seriously, and then challenging them to take their own dreams seriously. Again--ownership.

Again, I can only draw from my personal biography. I am doubtful that I could have been shamed into making better choices. Some people probably can be. There's was plenty of shaming around me as a child. But I did not take education seriously until I saw something in it for me, aside from what everyone else thought.

Color-Blind Policy and Color-Conscious Morality

National
I wanted to circle back to a post I wrote some weeks ago looking at the ways in which the president addresses black America. (Here are two critiques of that piece from Andrew Sullivan and Jim Fallows.) One reason I've focused on the ways racism perpetuates itself in seemingly color-blind policy is to challenge the theory that a rising tide lifts all boats. I think it is important to raise such a challenge as we consider a president who generally advocates for for color-blind policies while arguing for a color-conscious morality.

To wit, here is the president in 2007 at Brown Chapel A.M.E in Selma:

But I'll tell you what -- even as I fight on behalf of more education funding, more equity, I have to also say that, if parents don't turn off the television set when the child comes home from school and make sure they sit down and do their homework and go talk to the teachers and find out how they're doing, and if we don't start instilling a sense in our young children that there is nothing to be ashamed about in educational achievement, I don't know who taught them that reading and writing and conjugating your verbs was something white.
Here is the president in 2008 in Chicago:

Yes, we need more money for our schools, and more outstanding teachers in the classroom, and more afterschool programs for our children. Yes, we need more jobs and more job training and more opportunity in our communities.But we also need families to raise our children. We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child -- it's the courage to raise one... It's up to us -- as fathers and parents -- to instill this ethic of excellence in our children. It's up to us to say to our daughters, don't ever let images on TV tell you what you are worth, because I expect you to dream without limit and reach for those goals. It's up to us to tell our sons, those songs on the radio may glorify violence, but in my house we give glory to achievement, self respect, and hard work. It's up to us to set these high expectations.
Here is the president again in 2008:

We cannot use injustice as an excuse. We can't use poverty as an excuse. There are things under our control that we've got to attend to.
In 2008 at the NAACP convention:

That's why if we're serious about reclaiming that dream, we have to do more in our own lives, our own families, and our own communities. That starts with providing the guidance our children need, turning off the TV, and putting away the video games; attending those parent-teacher conferences, helping our children with their homework, and setting a good example.
In 2009 at the NAACP convention:

To parents -- to parents, we can't tell our kids to do well in school and then fail to support them when they get home. (Applause.) You can't just contract out parenting. For our kids to excel, we have to accept our responsibility to help them learn. That means putting away the Xbox -- (applause) -- putting our kids to bed at a reasonable hour. (Applause.)
In 2009:

And I've said it before and I know I may sound like a broken record, but I'm going to say it again: Government alone cannot get our children to the Promised Land. (Applause.) Government can't put away the PlayStation. .. These are things only a mother can do and a father can do. These are things that a parent can do. (Applause.)
And so it goes. I think Barack Obama's defense of his rhetoric would be something like the following: "I am very much aware of the country's long history of racist public policy, a history whose effects continue today. But doing more about those effects requires a political will than cannot be mustered in a country populated by people who have long endorsed those policies. Thinking in a globally competitive context, it is critically important that African-American not just close the achievement gap but excel. We are now in a situation where we have only ourselves to depend on."This is the theory of "Twice as Good," and it has great currency in the African-American community. You can read my thoughts on "Twice as Good" in this essayish profile of Bill Cosby. Toward the end of my reporting, Cosby said something that sticks with me even today:

If you looked at me and said, 'Why is he doing this? Why right now?,' you could probably say, 'He's having a resurgence of his childhood.' What do I need if I am a child today? I need people to guide me. I need the possibility of change. I need people to stop saying I can't pull myself up by my own bootstraps. They say that's a myth. But these other people have their mythical stories -- why can't we have our own?"
I read that and it still stirs me today, in much the same way that Obama's speech stirred Morehouse. The most motivating feature of "Twice as Good" is that it promises agency -- a world where we need not plead and cajole, where we do not have to get our head cracked in order to get white people to do the right thing. When Barack Obama makes a moral appeal, he is not performing a Sista Souljah tactic. He is speaking sincere beliefs that run deep in his community. I happen to think those beliefs elide some difficult truths about the nature of power.
 
In the case of the president, I think they elide the fact that there are actual policy steps he could be taking and isn't. I think yesterday's post on marijuana busts really brings this home. You will not find me among those arguing for deadbeat dads. But putting away the X-Box will not change those incredible arrest numbers. Policy will. As it stands, the president is on the wrong side of that policy:

Recently, there have been increasing efforts to legalize marijuana. The Obama administration has consistently reiterated its firm opposition to any form of drug legalization. Together with Federal partners and state and local officials, the Office of National Drug Control Policy is working to reduce the use of marijuana and other illicit drugs through development of strategies that fully integrate the principles of prevention, treatment, recovery, and effective supply reduction efforts. Proposals such as legalization that would promote marijuana use are inconsistent with this public health and safety approach
Beyond that, I would argue that the current black predicament did not arise because black people lacked sufficient moral will. I would argue that we recognize this in other communities and their own predicaments. It would not be productive for the president to go before a white working-class Appalachian audience and say, "We know that economic unfairness exists, and has long existed, but government programs won't keep your kids off meth and painkillers." The fact that meth and painkiller addiction is higher in those communities, that one in ten kids born in Appalachia was born addicted to drugs, would not be seen as relevant to, say, a jobs program.

Nor would it be productive or wise for the president to go before a primarily Hispanic audience and say "We know that the DREAM Act is the right thing to do, but what you really need to do is keep your babies from having more babies." The fact that the Hispanic community has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country would not be seen as relevant to, say, immigration reform.

And it would not be productive or wise for the president to go before an audience of Native Americans and say, "Yes, this country stole your land and prosecuted a ruthless war against you, but what would really help now is if you stopped your kids from drinking so much." The high rate of alcoholism among Native Americans would not be seen as relevant. And as I've said, it would not be wise for the president to go to Newtown and point to the absence of active fatherhood in the life of Adam Lanza.

But for some reason all of these kinds of statements are appropriate in the black community. Not because of higher rates of anything, and it not even because the president is black. They're seen as appropriate because there a deep belief -- even among black people -- that morality lies at the seat of our troubles. This is why Bill Clinton, in 1993, delivered this speech in Memphis, where he attempted to speak as a modern day Martin Luther King:

"I fought for freedom," he would say, "but not for the freedom of people to kill each other with reckless abandon, not for the freedom of children to impregnate each other with babies and then abandon them, nor for the freedom of adult fathers of children to walk away from the children they created and abandon them, as if they didn't amount to anything."
He would say, "This is not what I lived and died for. I fought to stop white people from being so filled with hate that they would wreak violence on black people. I did not fight for the right of black people to murder other black people on a daily basis. "
This is very similar to the kind of appeal Barack Obama makes when he addresses black audiences today. The neighborhoods where black people shoot at each other are the work of racist social engineering. We know this. But we do not say it, because there is almost no political upside. Instead we hand-wave at racism and pretend that individual black morality might overcome many centuries of wrong:

Folks are complaining about the quality of our government, I understand there's something to be complaining about. I'm in Washington. I see what's going on. I see those powers and principales have snuck back in there, that they're writing the energy bills and the drug laws. We understand that, but I'll tell you what. I also know that, if cousin Pookie would vote, get off the couch and register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics.
But Cousin Pookie did vote -- at historic levels, no less. And Cousin Pookie's preferred candidate has taken that vote and continued about the business of busting all the other Pookies out there for things the candidate did in his youth. And those busts are happening at rates well beyond Pookie's other American neighbors. There is no reason to think this will change any time soon. That saddens me. 

I don't think I'll be breaking any news by pointing out that I'm a fan of the president. And I am not a fan simply because he is black and smart. We have a lot of that. I am a fan of his uncommon imagination. I am thinking of that moment in his address on drone policy a few weeks ago when the president was heckled. Instead of shouting down the protester, he acknowledged her point. And it's not so much that this acknowledgment reflected some deep insight, it was that it was the kind of generosity and wisdom that we are not used to seeing from those who wield existential power. And this actually extends to race. Whatever my critique of his 2008 race speech (and I have one), it's very hard to argue that -- within the context of American history -- the speech is not an incredible document. (Very few Americans even know what redlining is.) 

My disappointment with how Obama addresses black people originates in the fact that I believe he, quite literally, knows better and could do better. It is not enough to point out that crowds of black people cheer him on. Greatness demands that you not just make people cheer, that you not just grant them "Oh my people" catharsis, but that you make them think. This is about legacy. This is about asking whether "First Black President" will simply be an accidental honorific. 

I think back to Barack Obama's favorite president -- Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln is my favorite, too. What I remember about Lincoln is that, in his last public speech, he committed himself to suffrage for black men who'd fought for their freedom in the Civil War. This would have been (and eventually was) a major step in the long war toward true democracy. The next day, Lincoln was shot for his willingness to make that step. He is my favorite for more than his ability to forge compromise. He is my favorite because he is, at the end of the day, a man who laid down his life in a war against our greatest illness -- white supremacy.

What does such a legacy call those of us who admire Lincoln to then do? Is it enough to make the kind of individual moral appeals we hear at family reunions and church services every year? Is it enough to simply speak words that make those who love us most cheer? Or all we ultimately called to something more?

A Drug War in the Time of Color-Blind Policy

National
I don't know that it will come as any surprise to anyone reading here that black people are arrested for marijuana possession a lot more often than white people, despite there being virtually no gap in marijuana usage. Still, this data from a new ACLU report is worth considering:

Marijuana use is roughly equal among Blacks and whites. In 2010, 14% of Blacks and 12% of whites reported using marijuana in the past year; in 2001, the figure was 10% of whites and 9% of Blacks. In every year from 2001 to 2010, more whites than Blacks between the ages of 18 and 25 reported using marijuana in the previous year. In 2010, 34% of whites and 27% of Blacks reported having last used marijuana more than one year ago -- a constant trend over the past decade. In the same year, 59% of Blacks and 54% of whites reported having never used marijuana. Each year over the past decade more Blacks than whites reported that they had never used marijuana.
And now some data on actual arrest rates:

In 2010, nationwide the white arrest rate was 192 per 100,000 whites, and  the black arrest rate was 716 per 100,000 blacks. Racial disparities in marijuana possession arrests are widespread and  exist in every region in the country. In the Northeast and Midwest, Blacks  are over four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession  than whites. In the South, Blacks are over three times more likely, and in  the West, they are twice more likely. In over one-third of the states, Blacks  are more than four times likelier to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites. 

Racial disparities in marijuana possession arrests exist regardless of county household income levels, and are greater in middle income and more affluent counties. In the counties with the 15 highest median household incomes (between $85K-$115K), Blacks are two to eight times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites. In the 15 counties in the middle of the household income range (between $45K-$46K), Blacks are over three times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites. In the poorest 15 counties (median household incomes between $22K-$30K), Blacks are generally 1.5 to five times more likely to be arrested ...
The overall black population has almost nothing to do with this disparity:

For example, in Lycoming and Lawrence, PA, and in Kenton County, KY, Blacks make up less than 5% of the population, but are between 10 and 11 times more likely than whites to be arrested. In Hennepin County, MN (includes Minneapolis), and Champaign and Jackson Counties, IL, Blacks are 12%, 13%, and 15% of the population, respectively, but are 9 times more likely to be arrested than whites. 

In Brooklyn, NY, and St. Louis City, MO, Blacks comprise 37% and 50% of the residents, respectively, and are 12 and 18 times more likely to be arrested than whites. In Chambers, AL, and St. Landry, LA, Blacks account for more than twice as many marijuana arrests (90% and 89%, respectively) than they do of the overall population (39% and 42%, respectively). In Morgan and Pike Counties, AL, Blacks make up just over 12% and 37% of the population, respectively, but account for 100% of the marijuana possession arrests.
The disparity is not getting better, it's getting worse.  Since 1990 arrests for marijuana possession. The increase has not been color-blind:

As the overall number of marijuana arrests has increased over the past decade, the white arrest rate has remained constant at around 192 per 100,000, whereas the Black arrest rate has risen from 537 per 100,000 in 2001 (and 521 per 100,000 in 2002) to 716 per 100,000 in 2010. Hence, it appears that the increase in marijuana arrest rates overall is largely a result of the increase in the arrest rates of Blacks.
The years between 2000 and 2010 do not simply constitute a war on marijuana, but a war on black people who use marijuana. 

A rising wave smashes Negroes first.

The Mad Men Treadmill

Entertainment
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AMC

It's become pretty clear to me that Mad Men's sixth season is its worst season. It cannot be saved by the notion that Matt Weiner is "building up to something." "Building up to something" only works when you actually care about the characters. Despite some great acting, I don't really care what happens to Don Draper. I don't much care whether he's pathetic. I don't much care whether he's a badass. I know who he is, and who he is will never change. So his story is pretty much over. There are other, more interesting, characters. But because Don is the show's centerpiece, they'll never get the time that he gets.

It's sad to see the show just drifting listlessly from shocking event to shocking event.
I think this has become more of a problem. One reason the (temporary) reunion between Betty and Don worked so well was because Betty's character was so well explored in the first three seasons. The series developed her (even if they've since abandoned that project) and so Betty and Don are two fully fleshed-out characters in conversation. You can't really say that about any other woman in Don's life. Sylvia is barely an actual person compared to Betty. (I also think that January Jones and Jon Hamm, for whatever reason, have a kind of chemistry on set that hasn't been since duplicated.)

It's sort of sad to see the show just drifting listlessly from shocking event to shocking event. It points to a lack of actual things to say about actual human beings. Ostensibly, Mad Men is a show about "the '60s." But stories "about" particular times almost never work. Stories about people work. At any rate, it's pretty clear that Season Six has almost nothing to say about the times beyond, "This guy called this guy a fascist, and some hippies were doing drugs, and that guy called that guy a racist." As uninteresting as this season has been, it is at its least interesting when it is trying to "say" something—about the year, about the city, whatever.

Increasingly the magical '60s and a crumbling New York have become a crutch for Mad Men. I hope this changes in the seventh season. But I see no reason why it would. I suspect this series ended a while ago. (I'd argue either the second or fifth season.) It feels like we're on a tour-bus, and one of the tourists is driving.

So I'm Halfway Through Slaughterhouse-Five ...

Personal
...And I'm wandering around the house muttering "So it goes..." I know. Very unoriginal. Still I can't decide whether "So it goes" beats "Every night, priest five against one!" for funniest lines I've read. 

I'm certainly enjoying Slaughterhouse-Five more than I enjoyed A Farewell To Arms. Still "Five against one!" is hilarious. 

The Many Secrets of a 'Bloated National Security State'

National

Steve Coll argues (convincingly) that the Justice Departments disclosed surveillance of the press is only the tip of the iceberg, and originates somewhere deeper than presidential disposition:

It seems likely that Holder or his deputies have authorized other press subpoenas and surveillance regimes that have not yet been disclosed. The Justice Department has acted belligerently even in cases where no grave harm to the public interest has been demonstrated, or where, as in the A.P. case, the leaks under suspicion have served to publicize the Administration's successes. Why would the President preside over such illiberal decisions? His longest-serving advisers are disciplined and insular to a fault; press leaks offend their aesthetic of power. And it would hardly be surprising if Obama viscerally disdained the media's self-important excesses. Yet the Administration's record cannot be chalked up to the President's temperament or to Holder's poor judgment alone. 

It is no coincidence that the A.P. and the Fox cases arose from national-security reporting. Obama inherited a bloated national-security state. It contains far too many official secrets and far too many secret-keepers -- more than a million people now hold top-secret clearances. Under a thirty-year-old executive order issued by the White House, the intelligence agencies must inform the Justice Department whenever they believe that classified information has been disclosed illegally to the press. These referrals operate on a kind of automatic pilot, and the system is unbalanced. Prosecutors in Justice's national-security division initially decide on whether to make a criminal case or to defer to the First Amendment. The record shows that in recent years the division has been bent on action. 

Last month, at the National Defense University, Obama pledged to end America's formal war on terrorist groups. His speech was one of the most impressive of his second term. He announced renewed plans to close Guantánamo, and he promised to tighten the rules governing classified drone strikes. He made no mention, though, of the many examples of investigative reporting -- about the torture and abuse of prisoners, about official lies issued by the Bush Administration on the road to war in Iraq, about targeting errors in drone attacks -- that have helped to discredit the policies he now seeks to wind down.
I think that last point is really key. Many of the debates we are having, and have had, would be impossible without leaks. (Chris Hayes details them a few of them above.) It's perhaps a self-serving cliché to point out the need for an oppositional press in an actual democracy. But it's also a fact. Not to take away from Coll's point, but I think this (typically) excellent Jane Mayer piece on how the president handles whistle-blowers is worth a re-read.

After Earth: What Was Will Smith Thinking?

Entertainment
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Columbia Pictures
Will Smith's movie After Earth , in which he stars with his son, is really getting beat up in the press. Our own Chris Orr looks into "Will Smith Inc."  and comes out horrified:

These manifold shortcomings might recede in importance if After Earth had a compelling protagonist at its center. But it doesn't. The younger Smith is persuasive enough--at times perhaps a bit too persuasive—in his portrayal of an awkward, tentative adolescent, but he is entirely lacking in the big-screen charisma that made his father one of Hollywood's major stars.

Indeed, I'm not sure I've ever seen a film in which the text and subtext--both concerning an effortlessly gifted father who presses his less-talented son to follow in his footsteps--were so completely in alignment. Alas, only in one of the two does the story end happily.

Reading this, I can't stop wondering what, precisely, Will Smith was thinking. I don't want to parent anybody else's kid, but I am trying to imagine myself at 16, put on a stage before the world, and universally panned. One way to think about this is to consider that Will Smith has basically been on stage since high school.

But this is not hip-hop back in 1988, with only a few outlets covering the music. This is you stretched out in the street, and the full weight of the internet leaping on you with both feet. And it happens with the backdrop of your Dad being a mega-star. I don't know. If I were famous, I think I'd hide my kids away somewhere--or break out the blanket like Michael Jackson.

On the plus side, Chris says that After Earth is "no worse" than M. Night Shyamalan's last two films. 

The Conservative Case for Doing Nothing About the Wealth Gap

National

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I mentioned in the comment thread below that I could see a conservative reading this and thinking "This sounds like a great case against expansive government." On that note, here is something else worth considering -- segregation, which is the root of at the root of the wealth gap, is actually on the decline.

Here are two papers that you should read. The first comes out of The Manhattan Institute and is little too optimistic in proclaiming an "end" to segregation. But the paper is still correct in noting a positive trend away from hypersegregation.  

The other paper is co-authored by Douglass Massey who, for my money, has written the most clarifying book in the poverty canon on the nature of the black ghetto -- American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. (It contains the best critique I've seen of William Julius Wilson's work.) Massey, whose book was pretty pessimistic, generally concurs that black hypersegregation is declining.

Before we get into this, here is a little math. (Yes, math. From me.) The main tool social scientists use to understand segregation is called the "Dissimilarity Index." (I am going to call it DI here.) What this basically measures is the percent of people in a group who would have to move to a different area (ethnically, racially, economic, whatever you are measuring) to achieve what social scientists call "evenness." Evenness means an "even" distribution of a group across a particular area -- that is to say a population proportionately represented in every micro-area (say census tracts) at the same level they are represented in the macro-area (say, a city). Evenness is measured on a scale of 0 to 1.0. Since black people represent something like 15 percent of the American population, to achieve perfect "evenness" -- or a DI of 0 -- we would have to be 15 percent of every American state. 

Here is another way to think of it: You have a city is which is 40 percent black, and you want to know what  percent of black people would have to move to make every neighborhood in the city 40 percent black, which would be perfect evenness (a DI of 0.) If you needed 30 percent of all black people to move, the dissimilarity index would be .3 and it would be .5 if you needed 50 percent to move, and it would be 0 (again perfect DI) if you needed no one to move.  You can measure dissimilarity through states, cities, and census tracts. Social scientist generally describe any DI above .6 -- on a tract-level -- as high. 

At the dawn of the 20th century the average African-American DI was .6, which is to say it was high -- and then it got much, much worse:

As African Americans increasingly urbanized, however, segregation within cities rose from high to rather extreme levels, with the tract-level dissimilarity between blacks and whites going from an average of .60 in 1900 to .77 in 1970. In many cities levels reached .80 and even .90. No group in the history of the United States has ever experienced such extreme residential segregation, either before or since.

You must remember this paragraph anytime someone tells you that the black ghettos of Chicago are "no different" than other white immigrant ghettos. Such a person is speaking in ignorance of the actual math and should be immediately instructed to put down the hair tonic.  The black ghettos of America are unlike anything that we have ever seen in this country. And, as we have shown over the past few months, they were the direct result of American policy.

The good news is that it appears that tract-level segregation has actually declined again. Black people are less segregated right now than they've been since the dawn of the 20th century. In one sense that should make you happy. In another sense it should scare you. The "good" news means that black people went not from hypersegregated to integrated, but from hypersegregated to very segregated. Progress. Yay. Still, let's live in the good news for just a moment. If black/white segregation has declined over the past two decades -- and it has -- can we not assume that it will continue to decline on its own? 

Massey argues that ultimately segregation is at the root of most of the social ills affecting black people, because it concentrates all of the problems of poverty on the shoulders of one group -- whether everyone in that group is poor or not. To recap, the black poor are not evenly distributed in the way that, say, the daughters or sons will be evenly distributed. Thus black people -- poor or not -- will suffer higher exposure to poverty than white people. 

But this is less true today then it was fifty years ago. Can we extrapolate from that that someday -- if we let things alone -- it won't be true at all? Can we assume that segregation will recede, and racism as a force in politics will recede, and the burdens that come from disproportionate exposure to poverty will recede? And if we assume that, is it just to say to those who are still suffering in highly uneven neighborhoods, "We are sorry, but it will be better for your kids, even better for your grandkids, and truly American for your great-grandkids?" Is this just? And just or not, is it in fact, wise? 

I offer no conclusions or answers. But you should read those two papers. It's all very, very fascinating.

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