Why Are They Saying Those Things?

by hilzoy

An addendum to publius’ post: yesterday, I was eating dinner, and flipped on CNN. There was Jeremiah Wright, just starting his speech before the NAACP. I watched it, and thought it was very, very funny, but intellectually sort of vapid, in an unexceptionable kind of way. (Repeated theme: “Different does not mean deficient.” True enough, but not exactly startling.) There was nothing angry about it, except for a couple of little digs at the media, which were more funny than angry anyways.

I hadn’t planned to write about this, since I didn’t think it was all that interesting. But this morning I fired up Memeorandum, and what was at the top? Michelle Malkin, with a post on “Jeremiah Wright, racial phrenologist”. Wtf, I think, and click over: there I learn that Wright is today’s Leonard Jeffries. (Ice people, Sun people; remember that idiocy?) I wonder: Did he make some other speech? Apparently not: the same speech that struck me as blah with humorous bits seems to have sent people on the right round the bend. Ed Morrissey:

“One of the stranger aspects of Jeremiah Wright’s speech came in the supposed neurological explanation of the differences between whites and blacks. Wright claims that the very structure of the brains of Africans differ from that of European-descent brains, which creates differences rooted in physiology and not culture:

““Africans have a different meter, and Africans have a different tonality,” he said. Europeans have seven tones, Africans have five. White people clap differently than black people. “Africans and African-Americans are right-brained, subject-oriented in their learning style,” he said. “They have a different way of learning.” And so on.”

This sounds oddly similar to claims made in The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein, a book that created a firestorm of controversy with claims that race made a difference in IQ scores, among other claims.”

I don’t know what Morrissey is quoting (he doesn’t say), but it’s a reasonably accurate summary of the relevant part of Wright’s speech. Note, though, that it provides precisely no support for Morrissey’s claim that Wright was talking about neurological differences. None. Wright did note that Africans and Europeans have different musical scales, and use different rhythms. This is obviously a claim about their musical traditions, not the structure of their brains; it’s no more a “neurological” claim than noting that Europeans tend to render perspective differently than African artists.

Likewise, Wright claimed that black and white children tend to have different learning styles. I have no idea whether this is true or not, as a generalization, but suppose, for the sake of argument, that it is: it would not begin to imply any differences in brain structure. By the time kids arrive at school (and Wright was talking about school kids), they have, obviously, absorbed a lot from the people around them. In particular, they have gotten used to learning from the people around them in different ways, to paying attention to different sorts of cues, and to different kinds of activities. These are the sorts of things that go into a “learning style”: are you a kid who learns best by silently reading? by talking things through with other people? by trial and error? by putting things in your mouth, taking them apart, turning them over so you can see what you can do with them?

There is no earthly reason to think either (a) that kids from different cultures might not have very different learning styles, or (b) that if they did, this would reflect some sort of neurological difference. None at all. In a culture in which children are taught that they should be seen but not heard, they are probably less likely to learn by talking things through, at least with adults. In a culture in which children are expected to be very quiet and not cause trouble, they are less likely to learn by seeing what they can do with things. This is obvious. And it’s what Rev. Wright was talking about.

I suppose that what sent Ed Morrissey off on this tangent was this: “Africans and African-Americans are right-brained, subject-oriented in their learning style,” he said. “They have a different way of learning.” If you just focus on the adjective “right-brained”, and leave out what that phrase is supposed to modify (“learning style”), I suppose it can sound neurological. But a right-brained learning style doesn’t have to involve any neurological difference; it’s just a learning style that tends to draw more on right-brain capacities than on left-brain ones. There’s no reason that I can see to assume that the reason someone ends up with a given learning style has to be the structure of that person’s brain, as opposed to the ways in which the people around them act. Likewise, I suppose you could call computer programming a left-brain career — linear, symbolic, logical — and architecture a right-brained one — spatial, heavy on seeing things as wholes rather than as collections of parts, etc. But that would be completely different from claiming that what makes someone decide to be a programmer or an architect is the structure of their brain, as opposed to, say, parental pressure, financial reward, getting to know an inspirational person in one or the other profession, etc.

This was a pretty anodyne speech. It had a lot of funny moments, and a few little digs at the media, but nothing that could even remotely be construed as politically controversial.* Or so I thought, before I found out that Michelle Malkin and Captain Ed had decided to construe a relatively minor point about learning styles as a claim about neurological difference, one that (Morrissey) “sounds oddly similar to claims made in The Bell Curve.” Other people take it even further: Sister Toldjah thinks he made “remarks about white brains versus black brains”, and Rachel Lucas says that his point was “that black people and white people are, in fact, genetically different.” (So it’s not just neurological; it’s a neurological difference explained by genetics!)

It’s almost as though they were trying to make him sound strange and scary…

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by hilzoy

This time, it’s Linda Hirschman:

“And there we have one of the most puzzling conundrums of the 2008 Democratic contests. Black voters of all socioeconomic classes are voting for the black candidate. Men are voting for the male candidate regardless of race or class. But even though this is also a year with the first major female presidential candidate, women are split every way they can be. They’re the only voting bloc not voting their bloc.

For the Clinton campaign, this is devastating. A year ago, chief strategist Mark Penn proclaimed that the double-X factor was going to catapult his candidate all the way to the White House. Instead, the women’s vote has fragmented. The only conclusion: American women still aren’t strategic enough to form a meaningful political movement directed at taking power. Will they ever be?

Penn was right about the importance of the women’s vote. About 57 percent of the voters in the Democratic primaries so far have been women. As of Feb. 12, Clinton had a lead of about seven percentage points over Obama among them (24 points among white women). But the Obama campaign reached out to the fair sex, following Clinton’s announcement of women-oriented programs with similar ones within a matter of weeks. I can imagine the strategists for the senator from Illinois thinking, “What’s that song in Verdi’s ‘Rigoletto’?” Women are fickle.

Turns out it’s true.”

As a feminist who supports Obama, I think I can speak to this one. First, am I fickle? No. I would count as fickle only if I had at some point made a commitment to Hillary Clinton, or to something else that implied that I should support her, and had then reneged. Then Mark Penn, or whoever, could legitimately say: we had a deal. If I put up a good female candidate with strong positions on women’s issues, you would vote for her. But you welshed. You are fickle. — I have made no such deal. (See below.) So I don’t accept this characterization.

Second, does the fact that I and other women support Obama mean that “American women still aren’t strategic enough to form a meaningful political movement directed at taking power”? No. The reason is not that we’re not strategic enough. That would be true only if we actually wanted to “form a political movement directed at taking power”, as women, and were dumb enough to think that supporting Obama was the best way to do that. Speaking for myself, I have no such goal.

I am, as I said, a feminist. By that I mean first, that I think that women should be given the same rights and opportunities as men, and should be treated with the same respect; and second, that this is not just something I affirm in the abstract, but that I am committed to trying to work to achieve. This is completely different from “forming a political movement directed at taking power.” I do not want women to exercise power over men per se, or for men to exercise power over women, or anything of that kind. I want everyone to have as rich a set of opportunities as they can possibly have, and for everyone to be treated with equal respect. That is a very, very different thing.

If my main goal in life were to see women exercising power, then I suppose I would have to support any female candidate for any office who had any chance of winning. I might get away with not supporting Lenora Fulani in her hopeless campaigns, but I should certainly have supported Liddy Dole, despite the fact that I disagree with her on most important policy questions. But because getting women — any women — into power is not my main goal in life, the fact that I supported first Bill Bradley and then (after he dropped out) Al Gore does not show that I am fickle or insufficiently strategic.

I do, of course, believe that if women actually had the same opportunities as men, we would have had a female President long ago. I also believe that it would be a wonderful thing if a woman were elected President, both because it would make the idea of having a woman President much more normal, and because it would prove to people (for instance, to girls) that women can and should aim as high as they like. For this reason, given a choice between two candidates who were otherwise basically similar, one of whom was a woman and one of whom was a straight white cisgendered* man, I would vote for the woman. However, it matters that the two candidates be comparable: that one not be significantly better than the other apart from gender. If the straight white man was significantly better, then I would vote for him.

This might be due to straightforwardly feminist concerns. Given a choice between a woman like Liddy Dole, who I thought was unlikely to advance women’s rights in any way other than by being a woman President, and a straight white man who I thought would really work hard to expand the opportunities available to all women, and supposing this to be the most salient difference between them, I would vote for the man, and would do so because I am a feminist. I think that any feminist would have to think that other things equal, it would be great to have a woman President. But being a woman President is not the only thing, or even the most important thing, that a President can do to advance the interests of women. And that means that sometimes a feminist should vote against a female candidate strictly on feminist grounds.

Besides that, though, feminism is not my only serious political commitment. If, for instance, I had to choose between Hillary Clinton and Russ Feingold, I would vote for Feingold because while I trust both Clinton and Feingold to work to advance the opportunities available to women, I trust Feingold’s judgment more on matters of war and peace, civil liberties and open government, and those things matter a lot. Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq War Resolution. Even leaving aside the obvious fact that the war has hardly been a net plus for Iraqi women, is being a feminist supposed to involve not caring about the destruction of a country and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people? Is it supposed to involve not wanting to do everything in my power to make sure that nothing like that happens again? Is it even supposed to involve thinking that avoiding future wars, though important, matters less than electing a woman to the Presidency? I can’t see why.

Finally, I am, as I said, committed to trying to help ensure that everyone has as rich a set of opportunities as possible, and that everyone is treated with equal respect. Sexism is one of the things that stands in the way of that goal, but unfortunately it’s not the only one. That’s why, in my hypothetical examples above, I specified that other things equal, I would vote for a woman over a straight white cisgendered man: because men of color, gay men, and transmen face their own barriers to the Presidency, and those barriers need to be taken down as well.

The idea that feminists (or women) ought to vote for Clinton has always seemed to me to involve serious confusion on this point. It seems to me that if I am a feminist because I think that everyone should have as many opportunities open to them as possible and be treated with full respect, and if I think that for groups who have been historically excluded from high office, seeing one of their own elected President would encourage them to reach for the stars while helping others to regard the idea of members of that group holding high office as completely normal, then I have the same reason to hope that an African American is elected President as I do to hope that a woman is. And that, of course, means that the very same commitments that make me want a woman to be elected President also make me want an African American to be elected President.

Obviously, this means that the commitments that make me a feminist make me think that if either Clinton or Obama is elected President, one set of walls will fall, and that that is a wonderful thing. But they do not give me a reason to prefer seeing a woman beat an African American, or vice versa. They would, of course, if I were committed not to everyone’s enjoying as many opportunities as possible, and to everyone being treated with dignity, but only to securing opportunities and respect for women, or for people like me. But I’m not. And if Linda Hirschman or Mark Penn or Hillary Clinton was mistaken on that point, or thinks that by caring about injustice in all its forms I show myself to be “fickle”, that’s their problem.

I recently got an email from someone who had been to an Obama rally, and who was struck by the number of African American families who had come to that rally with their children. The rally was in the evening. Many of the children were, apparently, quite young, and they were probably up past their bedtimes. But their parents had brought them anyways, so that they could see history being made. My correspondent found the sight of so many black parents bringing their children to see a black man who might become President incredibly moving, and so did I. And the reason I was moved has everything to do with the reasons I’m a feminist.

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by hilzoy

About once a month, I read something that makes me think: this just might be the dumbest thing ever written. Usually, it isn’t, of course. But this piece in today’s Washington Post might be the genuine article:

“”Women ‘Falling for Obama,’ ” the story’s headline read. Elsewhere around the country, women were falling for the presidential candidate literally. Connecticut radio talk show host Jim Vicevich has counted five separate instances in which women fainted at Obama rallies since last September. And I thought such fainting was supposed to be a relic of the sexist past, when patriarchs forced their wives and daughters to lace themselves into corsets that cut off their oxygen.

I can’t help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women — I should say, “we women,” of course — aren’t the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women “are only children of a larger growth,” wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?”

That’s near the beginning. It just gets worse and worse and worse, without the slightest hint of irony, until it reaches its finale:

“I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies. I can’t add 2 and 2 (well, I can, but then what?). I don’t even know how many pairs of shoes I own. I have coasted through life and academia on the basis of an excellent memory and superior verbal skills, two areas where, researchers agree, women consistently outpace men. (An evolutionary just-so story explains this facility of ours: Back in hunter-gatherer days, men were the hunters and needed to calculate spear trajectories, while women were the gatherers and needed to remember where the berries were.) I don’t mind recognizing and accepting that the women in history I admire most — Sappho, Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth I, George Eliot, Margaret Thatcher — were brilliant outliers.

The same goes for female fighter pilots, architects, tax accountants, chemical engineers, Supreme Court justices and brain surgeons. Yes, they can do their jobs and do them well, and I don’t think anyone should put obstacles in their paths. I predict that over the long run, however, even with all the special mentoring and role-modeling the 21st century can provide, the number of women in these fields will always lag behind the number of men, for good reason.

So I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.”

Note to Charlotte Allen: if you find yourself having to argue that you are an idiot in order to make your case, you might consider the possibility that an idiot like yourself is unlikely to get much right about women, or for that matter about anything. You might therefore ask yourself what earthly purpose it serves to have idiots like the one you take yourself to be publishing their thoughts. Is your gig at the Post noticeably different from those game shows in which we get to watch people humiliating themselves on national TV? If so, how?

***

A few more particular points. First, talking about what “we” women (or we liberals/conservatives, or whatever) is almost always just intellectual laziness. Unless the claim is obviously true (e.g., “we human beings are mammals”), the appropriate response is: what do you mean “we”, white man?

Second, romance novels* (update below the fold) are not “books”, as that word is normally used. They are either tools for relaxation or the female equivalent of porn. They should therefore be compared not to War and Peace, but to either Ultimate Sudoku or the Hustler centerfold. Personally, I think they come out fine in either comparison, but that’s probably because I’m just a dumb woman.

Third, the idea that brain size has anything to do with intelligence was disproven ages ago (at least, if we’re talking about the normal variation in human brain size, as opposed to the difference between human and planarian brains.)

Fourth: doesn’t the Post have editors whose job is to prevent this sort of trainwreck? If so, the editor responsible for allowing this column to waste perfectly good space in the Washington Post should be fired.

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by hilzoy

I mean, what other conclusion can you possibly come to after seeing this:

I’ve been to several foreign countries. Not once did it ever occur to me to dress up like a foreigner. I mean, who does that?

Why else was he so eager to avoid serving in the Vietnam war? So he wouldn’t have to kill his comrades! Why did he like what he saw when he looked into Putin’s soul? Because, as this photo reveals for the first time, they are both Vietnamese! No matter how much the wingnuts try to scrub and whitewash, some stains just won’t come clean.

The Viet Cong were patient. They took the long view. They weren’t content to drive us out of their country: they needed to exact a terrible revenge on us, at a time and in a manner of their own choosing. George W. Bush is the instrument of their vengeance.

Suddenly, it all makes sense.

***

UPDATE: TPM tries to track down the source of the “Obama in Muslim garb” story. Here’s what they found.

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by hilzoy

Last night, in the Austin debate, Barack Obama said this:

“I heard from a Army captain, who was the head of a rifle platoon, supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon. Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24, because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq. And as a consequence, they didn’t have enough ammunition; they didn’t have enough humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief. Now that’s a consequence of bad judgment, and you know, the question is on the critical issues that we face right now who’s going to show the judgment to lead.”

A number of bloggers on the right went ballistic. Couldn’t be true. No how. No way. Curt at Flopping Aces: “I’m gonna call shenanigans (codeword for he is lying through his teeth)”. The (cough) Astute Pundit: “Obama at Texas Debate: Liar, Dupe, Or Enemy Propagandist?” (I’ll take ‘Enemy Propagandist’ for five, Alex…)

While this was going on, Jake Tapper (yes, I know) actually spoke to the Captain in question, who confirmed the story. Later, NBC did so as well. And Phil Carter adds:

“In light of my experience in Iraq, Sen. Obama’s comments last night are eminently believable. Sen. Obama is also absolutely right to use this anecdote as a critique of the administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq. It is incontrovertible that the war in Iraq diverted scarce military resources (manpower, equipment, etc.) from Afghanistan to Iraq. The cost for that diversion was paid by America’s sons and daughters, and our Afghan brethren, who continue to fight in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. We owe our troops better.”

In light of this, the best response would seem to be Tom Maguire’s: “As a proud member of the Right Wing Noise Machine (or are we now the Freak Show?) I can only say “Ouch”.” Curiously, Tom hasn’t had a lot of company. Rusty Schackleford’s take is more common among the conservative blogs I’ve read:

“Tapper called the “Captain” and asked him to verify his own story.

How, exactly, is it “verifying” anything by simply asking the same source if his story is true? This isn’t the testimony of one source verifying the testimony of another source. This is two people reporting the testimony of a single source!

No one is accusing Obama of making the story up. We are accusing the “Captain” of making stuff up—or, at the very least, using selective pieces of information in order to lend credence to the bad war/good war theory. Obama then uses an untrue story to further the narrative which he hopes will get him elected.”

Curt at Flopping Aces again:

“Of course with the “Captain” remaining anonymous its hard to come right out and say the man is lying since the Pentagon doesn’t have the particulars such as the dates, units, and other important info. With him remaining in the shadows its easier for Barack and his pal Tapper to just say “believe us” because well, just because.”

To which I can only say: wow. Or, as John Cole put it:

“Now granted, Phil Carter has some military knowledge, so I would take this a grain of salt when you compare it to the vault of information these bloggers have procured over a lifetime of arranging GI Joe dolls while watching betamax copies of Uncommon Valor in the basement apartment they rent from their parents. I know it is a tough call, but I am gonna go with Obama, Tapper, and Phil Carter on this.”

But besides that, consider two things. First, the bloggers I quoted above are accusing this unnamed Captain of lying. It’s not exactly clear why they think the Captain lied, or why he would go on lying to various TV networks, but that’s what Curt, Rusty, and the gang seem to think. And why do they think this? For the most part*, they cite claims like this (from Ace): “Milbloggers say the platoon is the basic organic unit of the army, and troops are never picked out of a platoon to serve elsewhere”, or this (from one of Steve Spruiell’s correspondents): “units as small as platoons are not pulled apart like that.” That is: claims that the sorts of things the Captain described never happen.

I think that any claim of the form “X never, ever happens” are generally dubious when made about an organization as large as the US Army. They are especially dubious when made about the Army in wartime. Sometimes you can dismiss them out of hand. If, for instance, some Captain were to say that when he was in iraq, the troops under his command would turn into little bunny rabbits and scamper away into the shrubbery, skepticism would be in order. But when someone who has served in combat says something like: my platoon was stripped of some of its men, or: we were short of ammunition, that’s really not something you can just assume is a lie in the absence of any further evidence at all.

I have no particular investment in the idea that this soldier is telling the truth. I don’t see any good reason to doubt him, but some people lie, and for all I know, he might be one of them. I do, however, care a lot about the idea that we should not impugn someone’s honor absent a good reason to do so. And that’s what Rusty Shackleford, Ace, et al have done. They are willing to trash someone’s good name because what he says doesn’t fit their political narrative. And that’s despicable.

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