Balkinization: Polar Bears, Bicycles and Race in America

Comments:

As a student of mine said at a Martin Luther King Birthday Speech - if society is color blind then I am invisible.
Best,
Ben

# posted by

Benjamin Davis : 4:19 PM

Please do not muddy this issue with race.

Because they are human beings, our soldiers are much more likely to extend the courtesies extended to prisoners of war if the enemy reciprocates.

For the most part, the Germans (except the SS) extended POW rights to our soldiers. The Japanese, as per their culture, could not understand why we would allow ourselves to be captured alive and treated our captured soldiers horribly. Consequently, our soldiers often declined to take Japanese and SS as prisoners, even when they surrendered.

Given that al Qaeda tortures to death our captured soldiers, I am impressed at the discipline of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan in taking these people prisoner rather than killing them on sight or worse. The only enemy I can remember who treated our captured soldiers as bad was the Apache and that war was pretty much a battle to the death.

# posted by

Bart DePalma : 4:37 PM

Yah, the Japanese example is weak. I have no idea if racial prejudice played a part--I'd bet it did at least at some level. For example, I remember in reading some WW2 history books, that there was a somewhat common perception that the Japanese couldn't make good fighter pilots because of the way they were carried as children. Quite stupid, but it was actually banded about by some.

On the other hand, with the Japanese attitude towards our soldiers who surrendered (without honor), it would very much surprise me if it didn't cause our troops to behave more brutally in response. I can't quantify the degree racism played, but the Japanese treatment of prisoners surely must have played a huge part in American perceptions of and treatments towards the Japanese.

Second, Mr. Graber, lets talk about "what we don't see." How about the relative media blackout over the brutal murder, raping, and mutilation of two Caucasion young adults on a date by a group of five African-American men and women. The national media has almost without exception refused to cover the story. If it had been a group of whites that did the same to a black couple, you can bet everything that there would be a media and national firestorm--and rightfully so. But when the brutality goes the other way, silence . . .

http://www.wate.com/Global/story.asp?S=6023706&nav=menu7_2

# posted by

humblelawstudent : 5:01 PM

We are not "clueless about how to solve racial and urban problems." We could ameliorate them significantly by legalizing drugs. Drug prohibition is the successor to slavery and Jim Crow in this nation's efforts to keep African-American people in their place. By locking up young blacks' parents, we help to ensure that we will be able to lock up the next generation, ad infinitum until we legalize drugs.

# posted by

Henry : 5:15 PM

"African-Americans seem largely absent from Balkinization and a good many of the left-liberal blogs I read."

How do you know?

Without intending to dispute the legitimate issues of race in our society, which do exist and certainly skew participation in the blogosphere--- race is a largely constructed product based on a visual similarity-- were there no visible differences between peoples of different descents, our concept of "race" would be much weaker. On the internet, these signifiers exist only sporadically. Has this, to some extent created a platform with some characteristics of color-blindness? In stripping each-other of faces, do we not also liberate some portion of the issues that come with physical identity?

The old New Yorker cartoon claims "on the internet, no one knows you're a dog"-- how would I really know how if many of the people I read were polar bears?

# posted by

ADamiani : 5:27 PM

"were there no visible differences between peoples of different descents, our concept of 'race' would be much weaker."

Yes, but it brings to mind Mark Twain's _Pudd'nhead Wilson_, which is about a slave who is 1/16 black, and her son, who is 1/32 black (which means that he had a white father). Both the mother and son appear white, but it makes no difference to the slave owner. However, the same day that the son is born, the slave owner's wife gives birth to a boy but then dies, and the slave mother must raise both boys, who look virtually identical. The slave mother, in order to spare her son a life of slavery, switches the names and clothes of the babies, and gets away with it -- except that her son grows up an obnoxious bastard who mistreats her (not knowing that she is his mother) as well as his playmate (who is raised as a slave).

# posted by

Henry : 5:42 PM

This comment has been removed by the author.

# posted by

Joe : 5:59 PM

This reminds me of a recent review of the television version of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee:

"'Everyone felt very strongly that we needed a white character, or a part-white, part-Indian character to carry a contemporary white audience through this project,' Daniel Giat, the writer who adapted the book for HBO films, told a group of television writers earlier this year."

That assumption -- that white folks can't or won't identify with people of color -- is powerful. True or not, it's powerful.

I think this phenomenon goes hand in hand with the torture issue. As long as one can persuasively argue to oneself, "This won't happen to me or people I know," then it is less pressing. And while workplace integration has arguably improved over the last 30 years, residential segregation has not. It's pretty easy to go through life as a white person in my affluent suburb and have little to no substantive interaction with people of color.

As long as white people keep affirming the message that absence of race means default to whiteness, race is going to have to be explicitly mentioned. Thanks for saying it.

# posted by

N/A : 6:03 PM

"Still, may I suggest to my fellow bloggers that we ought to consider bringing race more explicitly into our stories. "

With respect, you might also want to consider bringing race more explicitly into your midst. If African-Americans seem absent from left-liberal blogs, I would suggest that it is no more than a fair representation of the general shortage of African-Americans in the legal academy, the non-legal academy, law firm, upper management at Fortune 500 companies, and most other places that are populated mostly by the highly educated and influential. This is the real problem.

And I do not mean to suggest that white men cannot speak intelligently about race or that they shouldn't try. I also do not mean that African-Americans should be brought in and expected to talk ONLY to talk about race. But in my opinion, we are not going to solve or even make substantial progress in understanding race and the role it plays in society until we have far more equal representation at the highest levels of government, academia and industry.

I would welcome more posts here about race. But I think it would also be helpful if people in positions of influence used some of that influence to pressure human resource departments, hiring committees, admissions committees and all the other gatekeeper groups out there to prioritize diversify so that there were more African-Americans in a position to be sitting around cafes gossiping with Washington insiders and making informed posts on legal blogs.

PS: I wouldn't limit your analysis to African-Americans. Women seem very underrepresented here as well.

# posted by

Unknown : 6:21 PM

Bart DePalma said:

For the most part, the Germans (except the SS) extended POW rights to our soldiers.

As I related in a previous post, I recently had a discussion with a neighbor whose husband was captured by the Germans in WWII. He was rescued from his prison camp, and actually returned to the front and was part of group who was part of the liberation of a concentration camp. His recollection was that the only difference between the POW camp and the concentration camp was the ovens.

That doesn't sound much like POW rights to me.

# posted by

Fraud Guy : 12:41 AM

Another point regarding race and WWII. Our anti-axis propaganda during WWII often depicted the Germans as buffoons (especially Hitler), but the Japanese were more likely to be depicted as animalistic--I recall one poster of an ape-like Japanese soldier carrying off a naked white woman. While both enemies were portrayed as menacing, the depictions of the Japanese were generally less realistic.

# posted by

Fraud Guy : 1:02 AM

Bart DePalma,

Actually, you had several more points I would like to rebut.

IIRC, the majority of "terrorists" that we have captured in Iraq and Afghanistan were turned over to us for bounties. I hope even our soldiers would not stoop to killing a person already a prisoner.

With regards to the Apache (and our actions against almost any other Amerindian tribe), while I do not excuse their behavior, but they were repeatedly abused and defrauded by settlers and the US Government, in addition to pressure to give up their ancestral lands for a reservation. We were the ones to turn that into a fight to the death (theirs).

# posted by

Fraud Guy : 1:14 AM

"a neighbor whose husband was captured by the Germans in WWII .... His recollection was that the only difference between the POW camp and the concentration camp was the ovens."

I'll provide a bit of anecdotal evidence that goes the other way, and involves French prisoners. Olivier Messiaen, the great French composer, was in a POW camp and was given a room in which to compose music. He came up with the great "Quartet for the End of Time," which the Nazis allowed four prisoners (one Jewish) to perform in the camp, for guards and prisoners.

# posted by

Henry : 5:52 AM

HLS:"For example, I remember in reading some WW2 history books, that there was a somewhat common perception that the Japanese couldn't make good fighter pilots because of the way they were carried as children. Quite stupid, but it was actually banded about by some."

You're referring to Gorer's swaddling hypothesis, which claimed that the national personality of Russians was defined to some degree by the long swaddling period they endured as children. This became one of the traits examined in other national character studies, particularly Ruth Benedict's, which were carried out during WWII to give actionable information to the Allies about their opponents.

For its time, the work wasn't that stupid, really--the idea that culture and psychology are linked to child development isn't insane, I would think--and I'm not certain I would call the perception "common," either. Clearly, the conclusions were essentialist and racist, but no more so than Bart's assertion that the "Japanese, as per their culture, could not understand why we would allow ourselves to be captured alive."

# posted by

PMS_CC : 6:10 AM

Fraud Guy said...

As I related in a previous post, I recently had a discussion with a neighbor whose husband was captured by the Germans in WWII... His recollection was that the only difference between the POW camp and the concentration camp was the ovens.

With all due respect to your neighbor, were the Germans starving and working to death the POWs in this camp and regularly executing those who did not perform or merely for sport? I have never read such an account except for an instance where the SS actually sent captured Allied airmen to an actual concentration camp.

IIRC, the majority of "terrorists" that we have captured in Iraq and Afghanistan were turned over to us for bounties. I hope even our soldiers would not stoop to killing a person already a prisoner.

You really need to do some reading on the subject. A large portion of the few hundred captures sent to Gitmo early in the war were captured by our Afghan allies. In comparison, our forces have captured tens of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan.

With regards to the Apache (and our actions against almost any other Amerindian tribe), while I do not excuse their behavior...

The issue is not the right or wrong of the war itself, but the reaction of our soldiers when based on the way an enemy treats our captured troops rather than race as injected by this post.

# posted by

Bart DePalma : 10:14 AM

The Supreme Court should strike down the Seattle Schools' use of race.

It is the parents challenging the use of race in Seattle's schools who are faithful to the text of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not the opponents of colorblindness.

The southern opponents of the 1964 Act opposed colorblindness, they did not support it.

And the Civil Rights Act's text is expressly in favor of colorblindness, rejecting "racial balance" in schools as a goal, in favor of "assignment of students" "without regard to their race."

The 1964 Civil Rights Act (in Title IV, Section 401(b)) declares that:

"'Desegregation' means the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin, but 'desegregation' shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance."

Similarly, the Supreme Court has stated that "racial balance is not to be achieved for its own sake" in Freeman v. Pitts (1992), and that "racial balancing" is "patently unconstitutional" in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003).

The plaintiffs in the Seattle case are seeking the same thing that the plaintiffs sought in the celebrated Brown v. Board of Education case: the right to attend their preferred school without being excluded on the basis of race.

The complaint of Linda Brown, the Topeka elementary-school student who gave the Brown decision its name, was that she was barred from attending her neighborhood school and forced to attend a distant school because of her race.

Ethel Louise Belton, whose case was consolidated with Brown’s, was assigned to a school nine miles away from her home, rather than being allowed to attend a school a short walk from her home, because of her race.

Similarly, the 1971 Swann case, commonly cited in support of race-based busing, actually began when James Swann was not allowed to attend the school closest to his home because of his race.

Desegregation is about being able to attend your neighborhood school without regard to your color, not about being assigned or bussed to a particular school based on your skin color to achieve "racial balance."

As the Brown II decision put it, what Brown v. Board of Education held was that racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional (not that racial discrimination is necessary to promote "diversity" or "racial balance").

Thus, striking down the use of race by the Seattle Schools would be perfectly consistent with Brown v. Board of Education.

# posted by

HFB : 1:33 PM

Mark Graber: Still, may I suggest to my fellow bloggers that we ought to consider bringing race more explicitly into our stories.

Marx notwithstanding (because he was generally the kind of idiot who would gladly divide by zero) there is an argument that the phenomenon of which you speak (alleged absence of "persons of color" here at Balkinization) is causally more class bound than race bound. For instance, if Condi Rice has kids you know they won't be on the front lines in Iraq. And plenty of my white-trash kin will never frequent this blog, more's the pity. Racism and classism are unavoidably entwined, if only because of the aid visible stigma grants to the enforcement of class and caste. As for torture, the first requirement is the demonizing of, dehumanizing of, the victim in the eyes of the villain. If the victim looks different that helps the demonization process. Not so hard to see.

Much harder to know what to do about it. Chanting "WE the people..." helps, with the idea that we're all included in that "we", black, white, brown, red, Moslem, Christian, athiest, etc. Sadly that kind of open love of one's fellow man went out of fashion long, long ago.

$.02

# posted by

Robert Link : 2:23 PM

Bart: The issue is not the right or wrong of the [Apache] war itself...

I suppose that really would be expecting too much of you, you cowardly, lying cheat. Come on, tell us all how we actually held the moral high ground with regards to the prior owners of this continent.

# posted by

Robert Link : 2:34 PM

Garth said...

The sad fact here Bart is that neither one of us was taught anything in our history classes about US treatment of German or Asian POWs.

I was taught nothing on the subject by the government school I attended nevertheless from any fantasy "RW sound machine." I learned my military history in the military or was self taught because I am a history buff.

# posted by

Bart DePalma : 5:13 PM

Bart: I learned my military history in the military...

Hmm. West Point? The Naval Academy? Colorado Springs?

What? Grunt boot camp? Well, certainly that's nothing to be ashamed of. Nor your collection of Barnes-and-Noble's remainder section books on the Civil War. But neither is it exactly a substitute for actually knowing what you are talking about.

And, no, listening to Rush rant about liberals doesn't really qualify as legitimate understanding of opposing views. Sorry.

# posted by

Robert Link : 6:04 PM

Bart equivocates --

"Because they are human beings, our soldiers are much more likely to extend the courtesies extended to prisoners of war if the enemy reciprocates."

And when our soldiers don't do that, it's because their conduct is controlled by the "enemy"?

Correct?

Interesting how you claim to be a lawyer, which suggests you got an actual education in actual US law, yet you presume "these people" -- the "enemy" -- to be guilty without bothering with the "technicality" of adjudicating them one way or the other. The International Red Cross determined that 98 per cent of detainees in Abu Ghraib had committed no crime. But it must be that, in view of the fact that they were detained and imprisoned, they were _ipso facto_ guilty, thus legitimately subject to the war crime of torture. (Torture is a war crime even when the US does it. It cannot be made legal, beyond false appearance, by Congress, the Executive, or both even with the approval of the Judiciary.)

Bart is beyond a reasonable doubt a lawless anti-American and anti-civilization thug who beleives in divine right of Bushit -- so long as the shoe remains on the correct -- Republican -- foot.

# posted by

JNagarya : 9:42 AM

Bart pretends morality in effort to escape identification of those who do exactly as he requests we not do --

"Please do not muddy this issue with race."

And from which end of the political spectrum comes such racist slurs as "rag heads" and the like? Yours, Bart, yours.

Do your homework, beyond the BS claim that you were in the military (and the further lie that your learned something somewhere factual about such issues): US propaganda against both Germans and Japanese was entirely public and overwhelmingly undeniable during WW II. And against Germans during WW I. And against Philippinos during the Spanish-American war, in which US troops included such descriptive term in their letters home as "Nigger".

And before that, in colonial law: the British Crown awarded lands on this continent it did not own to English colonists. Those Englis colonists did not decline the offer of stolen goods; rather, they drove its rightful owners off those goods by force. Their excuse, being savage thugs, was that the rightful owners were savages.

Go ahead, Bart: keep asserting that the US stands for truth, even while you lie against the truth of the US's actions, and call those who refuse to be silenced by your anti-Americanism in these regards "traitors".

We needn't ask, Bart, whether you've stopped beating your wife, because we already know the answer.

# posted by

JNagarya : 9:55 AM

FG:As I related in a previous post, I recently had a discussion with a neighbor whose husband was captured by the Germans in WWII... His recollection was that the only difference between the POW camp and the concentration camp was the ovens.

BD(10:14 AM):<:With all due respect to your neighbor, were the Germans starving and working to death the POWs in this camp and regularly executing those who did not perform or merely for sport? I have never read such an account except for an instance where the SS actually sent captured Allied airmen to an actual concentration camp.

Unfortunatly, Bart, he passed away last year, and I was unable to question him about this. His wife did recount many occasions when he was tormented by his memories of the camp, especially the starvation and exposure. By your logic, even if death by starvation or exposure is bad (but within conventions), then death by execution is worse.

FG:IIRC, the majority of "terrorists" that we have captured in Iraq and Afghanistan were turned over to us for bounties. I hope even our soldiers would not stoop to killing a person already a prisoner.

BD(10:14 AM):You really need to do some reading on the subject. A large portion of the few hundred captures sent to Gitmo early in the war were captured by our Afghan allies. In comparison, our forces have captured tens of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So were they captured in combat, or in their homes and "hideouts"? If so many were captured, what happened to them? Gitmo is only so large, as well as the prisons in Iraq. What is our conviction rate? What is the release rate? Were they captured based on investigative work, or on "tips" from paid informants (or rivals)? For someone who used to work in a prosecutor's office, you seem to have no concern about the effectiveness of the criminal process of these captured terrorists.

FG:With regards to the Apache (and our actions against almost any other Amerindian tribe), while I do not excuse their behavior...

BD:The issue is not the right or wrong of the war itself, but the reaction of our soldiers when based on the way an enemy treats our captured troops rather than race as injected by this post.

So if we have captured and tortured and raped Iraqis (officially or unofficially), and bombed and killed tens of thousands of civilians in our occupation (let alone the indirect deaths and the millions of displaced Iraqis), they may not feel a little anger (I mean, the high 90+% of insurgents who are not tied to Al-Qaeda). So maybe if we kept to the Geneva conventions (which do allow us to prosecute captured war criminals, but require a minimum of standards of treatment) those people might be willing to work with us against the invasive Al-Qaeda element.

Of course, if the attitude for our Army's leaders (especially for the CinC) reflects that during the Indian Wars (Sheridan "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead."), then that will also be reflected in the actions on the ground.

# posted by

Fraud Guy : 2:26 PM

Having posted for a longtime over the internet, I also notice the curious absence of black folks. I think the reason for this is that they cluster on black forums. I have been on them, and there's a lot of people on those forums, like this political debate forum I often go to. I think that black people are by and large excluded by and from white folks. As a result, they don't feel as comfortable around them. I can only suggest that the solution for this would be economic uplift of all poor folks which would disproportionately uplift blacks and therefore reduce the gaps between whites and blacks.

# posted by

independentvoter : 9:48 AM