Ta-Nehisi Coates

Robert Huber at Philadelphia Magazine is catching probably about the amount of hell he imagined when he penned his piece on "Being White in Philadelphia." Many of Huber's critics are attacking the piece for what it says about race and who he interviewed. That criticism may or may not be fair. Reading through the piece myself, I thought the article's problem was more technical than racial.

Writers who focus on race/gender/sexual orientation are often of the mind that the issues that they are tackling have, somehow, never been tackled before, or if so, have not been tackled "honestly" or "forthrightly" or "candidly." In the arena of race, the notion that Americans "don't talk about race" is a particularly pernicious rendition of this logic. I've never actually found this to be true. On the contrary, there's a lot of literature on the subject -- some of it enlightening, some of it clueless, and some of it racist. The sheer amount of material should, theoretically, raise the bar for "writing about race."

But because Americans actually enjoy yelling about race a great deal, it does not. At this moment, Huber's piece is the most read story on his home site. I am certain his editors are unsurprised. I think I could drum up all sorts of traffic if only I mentioned reparations, Ron Paul and the Confederate flag every other post. I think this is why, with some regularity, we are bombarded with bad journalism premised on getting us to "talk about race."

Robert Huber writes:

I've shared my view of North Broad Street with people -- white friends and colleagues -- who see something else there: New buildings. Progress. Gentrification. They're sunny about the area around Temple. I think they're blind, that they've stopped looking. Indeed, I've begun to think that most white people stopped looking around at large segments of our city, at our poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods, a long time ago. One of the reasons, plainly put, is queasiness over race. Many of those neighborhoods are predominantly African-American. And if you're white, you don't merely avoid them -- you do your best to erase them from your thoughts.

At the same time, white Philadelphians think a great deal about race. Begin to talk to people, and it's clear it's a dominant motif in and around our city. Everyone seems to have a story, often an uncomfortable story, about how white and black people relate.

Huber then fills in his piece with various white people (most of them anonymous) offering their thoughts on "race in Philadelphia." As an after-school special on the minds of white Philadelphians, the piece is marginally successful. As an essay on "Being White In Philadelphia" it is a failure. And it must be a failure. Great writing moves from the particular, from the hard details, from specifics out to the universal. (Their Eyes Were Watching God will always trump a thousand alleged "conversations on race.") Like most pieces purporting to be about race, Huber's is lost in a sea of interesting anecdotes that never gel into anything.

This is surprising to me, because Huber is a very good writer. This piece on Bill Cosby is the best article written (among many) about Cosby during the era of the poundcake speech. Anchored to a particular thing, specific reporting, and actual people, Huber is able to tell us something about Bill Cosby, race, and the limits of moral castigation.

No one who wants to write beautifully should ever -- in their entire life -- write an essay about "the subject of race." You can write beautifully about the reaction to LeBron James and "The Decision." You can write beautifully about integrating your local high school. You can write gorgeously about the Underground Railroad. But you can never write beautifully about the fact of race, anymore than you can write beautifully about the fact of hillsides. All you'll end up with is a lot of words, and a comment section filled with internet skinheads and people who have nothing better to do with their time then to argue internet skinheads.

[L]et's assume that many Iraqis may indeed be better off. For Americans that's not the relevant fact. After all, many people in Cuba, North Korea, etc might be better off if the U.S. invaded there too. The question I am asking is whether this was a sane investment of American lives, money, national focus and attention, and international reputation. I argued before the war and soon after that it wasn't, and I think time has strengthened rather than weakened that case.

For MIT itself the effects, Kastner says, will hurt -- a lot. The hit to the annual research budget will be about $40 million -- falling most heavily on the School of Science, which gets 95% of its research budget from the federal government. The effects won't be felt equally across the board. If you run a big lab then you have some room to manouver, Kastner acknowledges. "Is ever Eric Lander going to slow down? He'll find a way." But, he says, "The rich survive and the poor get devastated. The real question is the next generation. " 

That is: the sequester wreaks its havoc by striking hardest at particular points in the life cycle of a university researcher. New tenure-line faculty are actually somewhat insulated from the very worst of the pressure. "Every agency has set aside money for young investigators," he says,"some from private foundations, and a lot from the feds." Cuts in budget strike those dependent on other people's grants -- graduate students, post docs and soft-money research scientists -- but a new faculty hire has somewhat better prospects than most for the first few years. The rubber hits the road, though, at tenure. MIT, like other leading research universities, generally tenures faculty at around the seven year mark. 

Researchers achieve tenure on the basis of strong performance in those first years and then after promotion are expected to advance their program through what should be the heart of their productive lives. The tricky part is that it is already enormously difficult to do so. Once tenured, the researcher competes for grants against the entire population, Nobel laureates, National Academicians and all. There's a reason that the average age for winning your first R0-1 grant is 42 -- that's up by more than five years since 1980. Add the sequester's cut on top of that existing semi (or more than)-crisis, and you have a circumstance where early-mid career scientists could become even more at risk to career-blasting loss of research funding.

But to cut through to the hard cash at the core of this whole crisis, the simple truth is that paying for basic research is a bet a society makes on its future. And it turns out that it is one of the safest wagers around. In the 2007 report linked above, the CBO writes, in predictably dry language, "Federal spending in support of basic research over the years has, on average, had a significantly positive return, according to the best available research." (p. 15) Or, to put it a more gaudily, it's estimated that the Human Genome Project delivered a return on investment of 141:1 -- $141 in wealth created for every dollar spent on the job. 

No one claims that all basic research posts such glorious rewards, but as MIT president Rafael Reif and former Intel CEO Craig Barrett noted this week in the Financial Times, "A report by the non-partisan Information Technology & Innovation Foundation estimates that over those nine years, such cuts would reduce GDP by $200bn - and that estimate compares sequestration to a scenario where R&D merely remains at the 2011 rate. If in those nine years the US instead kept R&D spending constant as a proportion of output, the economy would be $565bn bigger. And if it invested in R&D at the same rate as China, that gap would grow to $860bn." 

Thus the risk posed by the sequester: it magnifies strains in an already constrained scientific enterprise. And from that, it's not hard to weigh the concept of decline, an actual, lasting erosion of essential national capacity. We can certainly avoid such an unforced error; we can decide to invest more, and more reliably in the future. But we may not...and that choice has consequences that aren't too difficult to perceive.

BY CONSEQUENCE, or train of thoughts, I understand that succession of one thought to another which is called, to distinguish it from discourse in words, mental discourse. 

When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever, his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently. But as we have no imagination, whereof we have not formerly had sense, in whole or in parts; so we have no transition from one imagination to another, whereof we never had the like before in our senses. The reason whereof is this. All fancies are motions within us, relics of those made in the sense; and those motions that immediately succeeded one another in the sense continue also together after sense: in so much as the former coming again to take place and be predominant, the latter followeth, by coherence of the matter moved, in such manner as water upon a plain table is drawn which way any one part of it is guided by the finger. But because in sense, to one and the same thing perceived, sometimes one thing, sometimes another, succeedeth, it comes to pass in time that in the imagining of anything, there is no certainty what we shall imagine next; only this is certain, it shall be something that succeeded the same before, at one time or another.

Sometimes a man desires to know the event of an action; and then he thinketh of some like action past, and the events thereof one after another, supposing like events will follow like actions. As he that foresees what will become of a criminal re-cons what he has seen follow on the like crime before, having this order of thoughts; the crime, the officer, the prison, the judge, and the gallows. Which kind of thoughts is called foresight, and prudence, or providence, and sometimes wisdom; though such conjecture, through the difficulty of observing all circumstances, be very fallacious. 

But this is certain: by how much one man has more experience of things past than another; by so much also he is more prudent, and his expectations the seldomer fail him. The present only has a being in nature; things past have a being in the memory only; but things to come have no being at all, the future being but a fiction of the mind, applying the sequels of actions past to the actions that are present; which with most certainty is done by him that has most experience, but not with certainty enough. And though it be called prudence when the event answereth our expectation; yet in its own nature it is but presumption. For the foresight of things to come, which is providence, belongs only to him by whose will they are to come. From him only, and supernaturally, proceeds prophecy. The best prophet naturally is the best guesser; and the best guesser, he that is most versed and studied in the matters he guesses at, for he hath most signs to guess by. 

A sign is the event antecedent of the consequent; and contrarily, the consequent of the antecedent, when the like consequences have been observed before: and the oftener they have been observed, the less uncertain is the sign. And therefore he that has most experience in any kind of business has most signs whereby to guess at the future time, and consequently is the most prudent: and so much more prudent than he that is new in that kind of business, as not to be equalled by any advantage of natural and extemporary wit, though perhaps many young men think the contrary. 

Nevertheless, it is not prudence that distinguisheth man from beast. There be beasts that at a year old observe more and pursue that which is for their good more prudently than a child can do at ten. 

As prudence is a presumption of the future, contracted from the experience of time past: so there is a presumption of things past taken from other things, not future, but past also. For he that hath seen by what courses and degrees a flourishing state hath first come into civil war, and then to ruin; upon the sight of the ruins of any other state will guess the like war and the like courses have been there also. But this conjecture has the same uncertainty almost with the conjecture of the future, both being grounded only upon experience. 

Does EVERY WOMAN ON THE INTERNET baselessly hate Anne Hathaway? I took a quick straw poll. "She is that theater kid with good intentions but secretly annoys the shit out of you," said one friend, adding, "You want to be excited for her and you are but deep down you are kind of rolling your eyes." Another replied, "I think someone told her she was America's sweetheart and she believed it." One friend placed her in the category of "really affected drama queens," saying, "I can imagine her non-ironically yelling 'Acting!'" In other words, she's always onstage, always calculated -- not someone with whom you'd want to party or share your deepest secrets. "I am an Anne Hathaway supporter," said a friend who sidestepped the question of whether or not she finds the actress likable. "Sure, she's kind of needy, but so are all actors."

What does it really mean when we say an actress "annoys the shit" out of us, anyway? That we hate the roles she chooses? The paparazzi'd version of her life we see in US Weekly? Her insufficiently funny quips on the red carpet? Or, as Salon asked today, is it her face? In some ways, the point of sitting on the bleachers of celebrity culture is the thrill of judging with impunity. Unlike our neighbors or co-workers, we convince ourselves that famous actors, by dint of making their living entertaining us, have chosen to be judged. And judge we do. (This isn't just a byproduct of our Twitter-enforced instapundit culture, either: "Let's get Entertainment Weekly and play my favorite new game: Love Her/Hate Him," exclaims Will in a 1999 episode of Will & Grace.)

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Something is happening to lives and spirits that will never show up in the great housing shortage of the late 40s. Something is happening to the children which might not show up in our social record until the 1970s.

The difference in wealth between typical households in each racial group ballooned to $236,500 in 2009, up from $85,000 in 1984, according to the study, released Wednesday. By 2009, the median net worth of white families was $265,000, while blacks had only $28,500...

Income gains are also a major differentiating factor, even when whites and blacks have similar wage increases. Whites are typically able to put more of their raises towards accumulating wealth because they've already built up a cash cushion. 

Blacks are more likely to use the money to cover emergencies. Inheritances also make it easier for some families to build wealth. Among the families studied, whites were five times more likely to inherit money than blacks, and their typical inheritances were 10 times as big.

[Scarlett] Johansson isn't even on MacFarlane's list for a film she made. Instead, she made her way into the song because of a real-life invasion of privacy, where her nude photos were stolen from her phone and leaked to the Internet. That is an actual, not fictional violation, and MacFarlane played it for laughs.

This kind of terrorism was never as effective as the kind of racist power deployed by the upper classes -- at the University of Chicago, for instance. Indeed, Hirsch's study left me thinking of terrorism as a weapon of the weak -- the unsubdued weak, but the weak all the same. Still, terrorism was a kind of power in Chicago, and Hirsch shows how it made it significantly harder for the advocates of integration to create housing across the city. Think of it like this: Al Qaeda can't end air travel, but it can certainly alter it. Likewise, the White Circle League couldn't stop black succession. But they could seal blacks in and thwart integrations.

Unable to do anything to alter the plans that shaped their lives, Chicago's blacks responded viscerally, charging the planners with conspiracy and reviving an old strain of nativism in response to their ethnic antagonists. The dimensions of the conspiracy varied. Some believed the "plan" was to drive all blacks out of the area between 12th and 63rd streets; others stretched the territory to be "reclaimed" by whites down to 67th. The same new governmental agencies and powers that frightened white ethnics similarly affected blacks - only the latter saw no communists or subversives. "Land-grabbing" realtors, bankers, businessmen. and institutions provided explanation enough. 

There were as many reasons for the perceived conspiracy as there were villains: Blacks were to be pushed out of their desirable inner-city locations and herded to the outskirts of the city or to undesirable suburbs such as Robbins to make way for Loop workers (there was at least some truth to this - not all conspiracies were fantasies); the dispersal of black population was designed to dilute that community's political strength; the use of eminent domain was intended to reduce black property owners to tenancy. 

Whatever the validity of these contending explanations, the blacks employing them - as the whites who discovered their own conspiracies - were responding to the fact that large forces beyond their influence were controlling their lives, a perception as accurate as it was distressing.

One of the great contributions of Arnold Hirsch's Making The Second Ghetto is the conception of racism not as deviancy, moral degeneracy, or stupidity, but as a political ideology whose employers' tactics differ according to class, but whose goals remain the same. 

The goal of post-war white Chicago was to keep African Americans sealed in the ghetto. Working-class and ethnic whites worked toward this goal through what Hirsch calls "communal violence," which is to say entire communities angling toward terrrorism:

Rioting was undertaken for particular reasons and not as a generalized expression of racial hostility. Those reasons, and not the external forces of social control, were primarily responsible for the development, intensity, and duration of disorder.

This politicized violence erupted with some regularity between the 1940s and 1960s in Chicago. It was it's most spectacular in Cicero. But it occured throughout the city -- at the Airport Homes, in Fernwood Park, in Englewood, in Bridgeport, in Park Manor. Violence was not restricted to "working-class" areas. African-American chemist Percy Julian was named Chicagoan of the Year in 1949. In 1950, white terrorists firebombed Julian's new home in suburban Oak Park. Twice. 

This kind of terrorism was never as effective as the kind of racist power deployed by the upper classes -- at the University of Chicago, for instance. Indeed, Hirsch's study left me thinking of terrorism as a weapon of the weak -- the unsubdued weak, but the weak all the same. Still, terrorism was a kind of power in Chicago, and Hirsch shows how it made it significantly harder for the advocates of integration to create housing across the city. Think of it like this: Al Qaeda can't end air travel, but it can certainly alter it. Likewise, the White Circle League couldn't stop black succession. But they could seal blacks in and thwart integrations. 

The point here is two-fold: First, terrorism in the mid-20th century, in the cradle of the North, was common. Second, the terrorism at least partially worked, and when considered as a compliment to the structural violence of developers and the forces of urban renewal, it certainly worked.

The ghetto is not a mistake. The racism of white ethnics in Chicago was not due to brainwashing, false consciousness or otherwise being too stupid to recognize their interests. On the contrary, it was the political strategy of one community, attempting to subvert the ambitions of another. The strategy was successful. 

....Imagination, therefore, is nothing but decaying sense; and is found in men and many other living creatures, as well sleeping as waking. 

The decay of sense in men waking is not the decay of the motion made in sense, but an obscuring of it, in such manner as the light of the sun obscureth the light of the stars; which stars do no less exercise their virtue by which they are visible in the day than in the night. But because amongst many strokes which our eyes, ears, and other organs receive from external bodies, the predominant only is sensible; therefore the light of the sun being predominant, we are not affected with the action of the stars. 

And any object being removed from our eyes, though the impression it made in us remain, yet other objects more present succeeding, and working on us, the imagination of the past is obscured and made weak, as the voice of a man is in the noise of the day. From whence it followeth that the longer the time is, after the sight or sense of any object, the weaker is the imagination. For the continual change of man's body destroys in time the parts which in sense were moved: so that distance of time, and of place, hath one and the same effect in us. 

For as at a great distance of place that which we look at appears dim, and without distinction of the smaller parts, and as voices grow weak and inarticulate: so also after great distance of time our imagination of the past is weak; and we lose, for example, of cities we have seen, many particular streets; and of actions, many particular circumstances. This decaying sense, when we would express the thing itself (I mean fancy itself), we call imagination, as I said before. But when we would express the decay, and signify that the sense is fading, old, and past, it is called memory. So that imagination and memory are but one thing, which for diverse considerations hath diverse names.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt but God can make unnatural apparitions: but that He does it so often as men need to fear such things more than they fear the stay, or change, of the course of Nature, which he also can stay, and change, is no point of Christian faith. 

But evil men, under pretext that God can do anything, are so bold as to say anything when it serves their turn, though they think it untrue; it is the part of a wise man to believe them no further than right reason makes that which they say appear credible. If this superstitious fear of spirits were taken away, and with it prognostics from dreams, false prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be would be much more fitted than they are for civil obedience. 

And this ought to be the work of the schools, but they rather nourish such doctrine. For (not knowing what imagination, or the senses are) what they receive, they teach: some saying that imaginations rise of themselves, and have no cause; others that they rise most commonly from the will; and that good thoughts are blown (inspired) into a man by God, and evil thoughts, by the Devil; or that good thoughts are poured (infused) into a man by God, and evil ones by the Devil. 

Some say the senses receive the species of things, and deliver them to the common sense; and the common sense delivers them over to the fancy, and the fancy to the memory, and the memory to the judgement, like handing of things from one to another, with many words making nothing understood.

Last summer, an eruption on the sun's surface scored a solar weather hat trick, racking up all three of the major phenomenon scientists observe: a solar flare, a coronal mass ejection (CME), and coronal rain, "complex moving structures in association with changes in magnetic field lines that loop up into the sun's atmosphere," NASA explains. The solar flare in the video is not massive, by the sun's standards, but "moderately powerful," as NASA calls it. But what makes the show special is the coronal rain, charged plasma slowly dripping in fiery loops along the sun's magnetic fields.

The decision by the national police commissioner to remove the investigator, Warrant Officer Detective Hilton Botha, was the latest in a series of abrupt twists and setbacks in the prosecution of Mr. Pistorius, the double amputee track star accused of murdering his girlfriend on Feb. 14 by firing four shots through a locked bathroom door while she was on the other side. 

Riah Phiyega, the commissioner, said at a news conference that a divisional police commissioner, Lt. Gen. Vinesh Moonoo, would be assigned to preside over "this very important investigation." 

After widespread media reports about the charges against Detective Botha, Gerrie Nel, the prosecutor, said at the start of the hearing on Thursday that he had just learned about them. The news only compounded questions about Detective Botha's work on the Pistorius case. Under cross-examination on Wednesday, he was forced to acknowledge several mistakes in the investigation and to concede that he could not rule out Mr. Pistorius's version of events based on the existing evidence.

Why the reelection of the first black president matters even more than his election