The Christian Science Monitor has an update of Justice Thurgood Marshall's 1978 report card on the state of black America. Marshall wrote the report card as part of his dissenting opinion in the Bakke case that outlawed quota-based affirmative action. The updated report card is pretty depressing:
In 1978, the life expectancy of a black child was five years shorter than that of a white child. Today it is six years shorter.
Twenty-five years ago, a black child's mother was three times as likely to die of complications during childbirth as a white mother. Today she is 3-1/2 times as likely to die during childbirth.
The infant mortality rate for blacks was twice that for whites. Today it is slightly more than twice.
In 1978, four times as many black families lived with incomes below the poverty line as white families. Today, that ratio remains unchanged.
For black adults, the unemployment rate was twice that of whites, and for black teens it was three times. Today, both statistics remain unchanged.
The median income of a black family in 1978 was 60 percent of the median income of a white family. Today, it is 66 percent of white-family income.
In 1978, blacks represented 11.5 percent of the population, but they were only 1.2 percent of the lawyers and judges, 2 percent of the physicians, 2.3 percent of the dentists, 1.1 percent of the engineers, and 2.6 percent of college and university professors. Today, blacks represent 12.3 percent of the population, and are 5.1 percent of the lawyers and judges, 5.6 percent of physicians, 4.1 percent of dentists, 5.5 percent of engineers, and 6.1 percent of college and university professors.
The subtext of the story seems to be pro-Marshall, as the updated report card shows that anti-quota arguments claiming that racial equality could be achieved without quotas haven't worked out (though no report card could challenge the additional argument that, effective or not, quotas are morally wrong). But I find that there's an interesting pattern among the items on the report card. The two areas where there has been noticeable progress -- income and representation in selected professions -- are the two areas that affirmative action of any stripe would impact. But progress in those areas has not translated into progress in areas like infant mortality or life expectancy. So failure in those areas does not necessarily say anything about the failure of non-quota strategies for achieving racial equality.
Stentor Danielson, 14:42,
Scott points out The Lemon, a blatant rip-off of The Onion. While The Lemon's first issue sets out to do for the pro-war side what The Onion's latest did for the anti-war side, it does manage to be somewhat more amusing.
Stentor Danielson, 14:11,
"What people fail to realise is that the Cetacea (the group to which whales and dolphins belong) is an extraordinarily diverse group of mammals," Dr Flannery writes. "It includes relatively large-brained hunters like dolphins and killer whales (which have the demonstrable intelligence of land-based hunters such as dogs) and tiny-brained filter feeders such as the blue whale. These leviathans are aquatic vacuum-cleaners, whose need for intellectual power is slight indeed."
Dr Flannery says it is the filter feeders rather than the hunters that the Japanese and Norwegian target. "If these animals are closer in intelligence to the sheep than the dog, is it morally wrong to eat them if they can be harvested sustainably? My view is that at present the anti-whaling lobby is frustrating the attempt to develop a sustainable industry based on these creatures, and is therefore frustrating good management of marine resources."
This seems like an odd argument, because I don't recall whales' intelligence being used as an argument for their preservation. A quick search of a few anti-whaling sites bears this out. At most, whales' intelligence is cited along with their majestic beauty and their age as part of an emotional appeal to win sympathy for the whales. The substantive claims of the anti-whaling movement are 1) whaling has caused whale populations to decrease dramatically (with the implication that the extinction of whales would be bad), and 2) whaling is cruel to the whales. Either of those points could be argued against, by saying that 1) a total ban on whaling is not necessary to maintaining whale populations, and 2) there's nothing morally wrong with causing pain to a non-human creature. But neither of those arguments seem to rest on whales' intelligence. At best, then, his argument is a counter to part of the emotional framing of anti-whalers (though not all of it, as people quite happily identify with brainless trees) with an appeal of his own -- the image of the "aquatic vacuum cleaner."
Stentor Danielson, 02:14,
28.3.03
I'm sometimes surprised to discover that professors here who use a positivist (scientific or quantitative) methodology are politically quite liberal. I'm so used to reading Marxist or postmodernist literature that attacks postivists as complicit with the status quo of global dominating capitalism that I get used to thinking of positivists as being some sort of Jerry Falwell (or at least George Bush) figures.
Stentor Danielson, 18:39,
Consider maps. Does a landscape tell us how it is to be mapped? In one sense, clearly not. Your purposes may dictate that you map on any of many scales, depicting topography, population, rainfall, geology, or many other things. Here you can choose whatever turns out useful. You can stress what you like and be as vague or precise as you like. Sometimes a brief sketch will do, and sometimes only an admiralty chart. Pragmatism and Darwin and multiple perspectives are all in order. There is no competition between a geological map and a rainfall map.
But in another sense the landscape indeed dictates something. It dictates how it is to be mapped, given a set of conventions determining the meanings of the signs and shapes on the map, and the meanings of their presence or absence. That is why, once a set of conventions has been put in place, a map can be correct or incorrect, or in other words, how it can represent the landscape as it is, or represent the landscape as it is not. It can show cliffs where there are none, and fail to show cliffs where they lurk. These platitudes should be distinguished from the ludicrous idea that the only true map would map the landscape an sich, somehow embodying a "final vocabulary" or "nature's own vocabulary" dictating how it is to be mapped, as if human selections and purposes had nothing to do with it.
To make up for my tardiness last week, here's last week's commentary and cartoons online before they appear in the paper Scarlet. Also included is my article from this semester's Different Voices.
Stentor Danielson, 05:31,
26.3.03
We were talking about Foucault's ideas about power yesterday. Jonathan said that, while he liked Foucault in general, he felt that he didn't make a distinction between dominating power and resisting power. He gave the example of a US soldier who's ordered to shoot at some Iraqis. Johnathan said that, in Foucault's conception of power, there's no difference between the dominating power that forces the soldier to shoot, and the power of resistance that the soldier would use to defy the order. Either use of power is as good.
Sarah's response in defense of Foucault (which I tend to agree with) was that he does in fact draw a distinction between domination and resistance in some of his work (in response, I think, to the sort of criticisms that Jonathan made). But I think that response overlooks a more important problem with Jonathan's comment, and of the whole domination and resistance paradigm that's so popular among radicals these days.
Consider a situation in which Tommy Franks gave the order for the military to pack up and get back on the boats. The soldiers would be in a situation of either being dominated by the military, or resisting by staying behind to shoot some more Iraqis. Granting for the sake of argument that in both cases shooting Iraqis is bad, we have quite a different situation. If we grant the moral distinction between domination and resistance promoted by Jonathan and the later Foucault, for the soldiers to resist Franks's order must be valued, even though it clearly undermines the progressive/radical cause. The only way out is to claim that non-progressive resistance is actually domination by a higher anti-progressive power (some sort of godlike world racist-capitalist-patriarchal system), based on the axiom that resistance must always be progressive.
The solution I see is to recognize -- and to a certain degree I believe Foucault does point us in this direction -- that power is an instrument, not a goal. The form power takes is not significant in and of itself; it's the entire suite of its effects that is important.
Stentor Danielson, 14:14,
Russia's foreign minister on Tuesday called on international organizations to help rebuild war-shattered Chechnya following a referendum on a new Moscow-backed constitution in the republic.
...With results counted from 347 of Chechnya's 418 polling stations, 96 percent of the votes were in favor of the constitution and only 2.6 percent against, according to Russia's Central Election Commission web site. The constitution firmly binds Chechnya to the Russian Federation.
I'm surprised at how high support for remaining in the Russian Federation was (assuming the vote was fair, and if there were egregious problems I think they would have been mentioned in the Guardian article), considering that the Russian army hasn't exactly taken pains to minimize the casualties and socioeconomic disruption visited on the Chechen population. No wonder the rebels weren't keen on letting democracy run its course. For now, I'm cautiously optimistic that this referendum will lead to the Russians not making such a mess of the place.
Stentor Danielson, 13:50,
25.3.03
The Onion did such an outstanding job with its first issue after September 11 and its Election 2000 non-verdict issue, so I had high hopes for its first Iraq war issue. Unfortunately, it turned out to be just bitterly anti-war. Not that it's surprising, given some of the stories they've run in the past few months, but I had hoped they'd pull through and make with the funny instead of using the opportunity to take a bunch of political cheap shots. Note that I say this as someone who generally agrees with the sentiments The Onion is trying to express.
Stentor Danielson, 20:55,
Chechnya's voters turned out en masse on Sunday to vote on a contentious new constitution, putting a first stamp of legitimacy on a proposal to bind their republic to Russia forever - and, the Kremlin says, to hasten peace after 3 years of brutal war.
The Chechen separatist leader, Aslan Maskhadov, pledged to disrupt the process. One polling station was apparently destroyed in an attack, a pro-separatist news agency said.
Those Chechen rebels are doing a great job of wining the moral high ground here. If they're determined to disrupt the election, I wonder whether a "yes" outcome would really solve any problems, since Maskhadov doesn't seem inclined to accept such a verdict. It might just give the Russians a stamp of legitimacy for their hardline actions in the region, because they can then claim that stamping out the separatists is in the Chechens' interests as well.
It also appears that British newspapers can vote in Chechnya:
But checks at polling stations appeared almost non-existent. The Guardian was able to cast an illegitimate vote at polling station No 272, with not one official making any objections when a blue ballot paper was dropped into the "yes" vote box. It is unlikely the vote will alter the widely expected endorsement of Kremlin plans.
After considering the possibilities of businessman, governor, senator, general, and agency head, Jane Galt concludes that I'm not sure that any job really prepares you to be president of the US. I generally agree with her assessments of the professions she mentions. So perhaps the US can take a cue from the business world and look into horizontal hiring. Corporations today tend to get their top-level guys by stealing them from similar positions in other companies (which as I understand it is part of the reason executives are paid so much), rather than the old-fashioned system of having people work their way up from mail clerk to vice president. All we'd have to do is get rid of that pesky "natural born citizen" requirement, and we could start electing people who had actual experience as the leader of a nation. I mean, what else are Ehud Barak or Nelson Mandela doing these days? And maybe other countries could do likewise. I can definitely see Jimmy Carter stepping into the presidential palace of Botswana, or Bill Clinton in the Dominican Republic.
Stentor Danielson, 22:22,
Non-aligned Iraqi exiles opposed to American plans to occupy their country are stepping up their efforts to gather support for a UN-supervised interim administration that would pave the way for a new, Iraqi democracy free of American control.
...The group wants a transitional administration that would work "in cooperation with the UN" - not under the US. Pachachi has said he favours a collective leadership to minimise the possibility of ethnic conflict or argument. They call for an immediate lifting of sanctions against Iraq in the post-Saddam period. They also seek the development of an oil policy to help rebuild Iraq and - coordination with other producing countries - "to achieve stability in international oil markets".
This proposal was probably primarily an attempt to avert war (the story is a few weeks old, but I've been behind on reading the IWPR reports). But the rationale that the group gives highlights what is probably the most important reason that UN support was needed for the war. It's not for legalistic procedural reasons; it's because the participation of the UN -- which has far more legitimacy in the eyes of the Arab world than the US does -- could be instrumental in making sure we win the peace.
Stentor Danielson, 19:31,
debitage 
The Christian Science Monitor has an update of Justice Thurgood Marshall's 1978