Author Archives: Sarah Shugars

Double Standards in Coverage and Response?

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My newsfeed is full of stories questioning the role of race in covering the recent incident in Waco, Texas, where a shootout between rival biker gangs left nine people dead, seven hospitalized, and many more wounded.

Some of these memes have been straight up erroneous, arguing that our country’s racial double standard is clearly demonstrated by the fact that nobody was arrested following this shootout. That’s a tough sell, though, since 170 people were arrested and are each being held on $1 million bond.

Other articles question the language used to describe these white perpetrators – people in Baltimore were described as “thugs” why not these gang members?

That’s a really interesting question and I’d love to see more data on the words used to cover different incidents. For me, the absence of the word “thugs” is not enough to see a clear distinction in media coverage.

After all, the mayor of Baltimore apologized for using that word, and frankly, I’m not sure “gang member” is much better – to me it sounds like a thug with a better network.

(Although I do have to question NBC’s decision to use the word “rumble” – what is this, West Side Story?)

All of this is not to say that there aren’t terrible racial inequities in this country. If the news coverage has been biased, than we should think carefully about how all crimes should be covered.

But while news coverage is important, I’m far more interested in a different question – how do institutions treat people differently?

The shootout happened at an event for which a “coalition of motorcycle groups had reserved the outdoor bar area.”

Just right there that sounds different.

These are groups known for illicit activity and violently defending their territory. Yet their freedom to assemble remains impinged.

Frankly, I think that’s good. While it may come with some risk, there’s a reason that right is guaranteed to us in the Constitution.

However, it’s a right that can be easily taken a way by mandatory curfews for an entire city.

Police arrived on the scene in Waco “within 30 to 45 seconds” of the first gunshots. They opened fire on the warring gang members only after “some bikers turned their weapons on law enforcement.”

From what I can tell, police responded swiftly, strongly, and appropriately – none of which were true in Baltimore. In that city, police set up a situation almost destined to turn into a riot, and then didn’t have enough force to shut down what they created.

Baltimore was a hot mess from top to bottom.

It’s hard to tell empirically just what led to the different responses. Baltimore is a city know for its corruption and mismanagement. Texas is…a place where its not surprising that they have no qualms about hosting a gathering of armed criminals.

It’s almost impossible to believe that race wasn’t a factor in this differing response, but I also wonder – are there lessons we can learn more broadly from Texas about institutional support and police response?

That is to say, we shouldn’t just be asking whether media has a double standard. We should be asking that of ourselves and of all our institutions.

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Is Cultural Appropriation Ever Okay?

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This morning I was watching the trailer for that 1998 classic Six String Samurai – a film I rather enjoyed in high school for it’s overly-bizarre story.

At one point, my sister made me a mixed tape which included one of the movie’s great lines: “They say he can kill over two hundred men, and play a mean six-string at the same time.”

That’s pretty great, right?

But now that I am older and wiser, now that I have lived in Japan and seriously studied Japanese culture, I watched the trailer this morning and thought, “man, that’s kind of offensive. Right?”

I mean, you’ve got this super white guy pretending to be a samurai. How is that going to go well?

It certainly qualifies as cultural appropriation, “the adoption of elements of one culture by members of a different cultural group.” And cultural appropriation is, most generally, deeply problematic.

But somehow this felt a bit different.

Almost like the Eel’s cover of Missy Elliot’s Get Ur Freak On or the Dynamite Hack version of Boyz in the Hood.

These are all easily examples of cultural appropriation, but I’m not sure they rise to the same level of offensiveness as, say, the cultural appropriation of the Harlem Shake.

When white people everywhere suddenly discover this “new” “meme” that actually has been happening in Harlem for decades, that seems offensive on many levels.

But I’m not sure all cultural appropriation is the same.

The Eels cover of Get Ur Freak On, for example, sounds exactly like its being sung by a bunch of white guys from California. They’re not trying to be something they’re not. I’m not sure they’re even trying to appropriate the genre of rap.

They are singing a song they love and kind of owning the fact they can’t do it justice.

There’s an element of self-awareness in this, I think. An element of knowing that they are not only borrowing from another artist’s creative works, but that that art belongs within a whole cultural context they don’t understand.

I find a similar sense in Six String Samurai. They’re not trying to be samurai, and I don’t think they’re parodying samurai either. If anything, it’s a parody of white Hollywood’s cultural appropriation of Japanese culture – a subtle reminder that that’s how ridiculous white boys as samurai look.

Obviously I am not in the best position to judge this, being incredible white myself. It’s entirely possible that I’m just making excuses for artists I enjoy and hoping that my liberal sensibilities won’t be offended by the possibility that I like something which is actually problematic.

But I think there might be something to this notion. That cultural appropriation can be used as a subtle social commentary. That with an awareness of one’s own whiteness or one’s own separateness from another culture, appropriation can more properly be an homage, and can even intentionally highlight the problems of appropriation.

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Okinawa

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I recently heard a story that I’ve heard a few times before:

The Battle of Okinawa was one of the bloodiest skirmishes of World War II. The 82-day battle claimed the lives of 14,000 Allied forces and 77,000 Japanese soldiers. Most tragically, somewhere between 100,000 to 150,000 Japanese civilians died.

There’s just one thing: that story is a bit of WWII era political propaganda. Or at best, a misunderstanding of Japanese geopolitics.

The horror of Okinawa was used in part to justify the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

The two bombings claimed at least 129,000 lives – including many civilians in Hiroshima. But ultimately, we are to believe, the act was just. The Battle of Okinawa showed that the Japanese were exactly the monsters our propaganda made them out to be – cold and bloodthirsty. Willing to sacrifice themselves and their civilian population for a cause they foolishly found to be noble.

Using that logic, the bombings were a mercy, really.

Some estimates put the cost of a land war at 400,000 to 800,000 American fatalities and a shocking five to ten million Japanese fatalities.

The atomic bomb may have been a drastic assault, but ultimately it ended the war faster leading to fewer fatalities for Americans and the Japanese alike.

Now let’s back up a minute.

Let’s put aside the fact that its hard to be precise about the number of deaths in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, in part due to the terrible health impacts from radiation exposure.

What exactly did happen in Okinawa?

The number of deaths cited above are about as accurate as war fatality counts are likely to be. Many American’s died, many more in the Japanese army died, and even more civilians died.

But they weren’t Japanese civilians. They were Okinawans . Even amongst the military dead many of those “Japanese” soldiers were Okinawan conscripts.

Why does that distinction matter?

For centuries Okinawa had been an autonomous regime with it’s own distinct culture. The Okinawans faced increasing encroachment from Japanese forces and was officially annexed in 1879 – a mere 66 years before the Battle of Okinawa.

All of that is to say – the Okinawans were not Japanese. They were Okinawan. Culturally distinct and treated as second class citizens or worse by their Japanese oppressors. The Okinawans had no military tradition and “frustrated the Japanese with their indifference to military service.”

Those were the people who died in Okinawa.

Not rabid Japanese nationalists determined to do anything for victory. Simply civilians and civilians dressed up as soldiers. Forced into service for a repressive regime.

Casualties were so high at Okinawa because the Japanese didn’t really care whether the Okinawans lived or died.

We’d be right to judge the Japanese harshly for their disdain for Okinawan life – but we must find ourselves equally wanting. The American government has always cared more for American lives.

Perhaps that is right. And perhaps the nuclear bomb really was the moral thing to do.

But let’s always dig a little deeper, try a little hard to understand a people apart from ourselves. And let us not base our understanding off a caricature or off an outdated piece of propaganda.

And let us remember: Okinawans died here.

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Death for Tsarnaev

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Today, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death for the Boston Marathon bombings of 2013.

I honestly didn’t see this coming.

The death penalty is unconstitutional and highly unpopular in Massachusetts. Victims and their family members have spoken out, asking that Tsarnaev be given life instead. And one juror’s vote against the death penalty is all it would have taken for the sentence to have come back as life in prison.

But Tsarnaev has been sentenced to death.

In the end it is perhaps a greater mercy.

Despite the dreary specter raised by “death” – I imagine a ghastly figure quietly welcomed to suck away Tsarnaev’s cold soul as the the solemn sentence is proclaimed – our system provides numerous protections to safeguard those facing this most monstrous fate.

Safeguards which those only suffering life in a dank, dreary hole don’t enjoy.

Tsarnaev’s case will automatically be appealed.

Lifers get no such privilege.

So perhaps death is a greater mercy.

Had I been a juror in the case, I can’t say what I would have done. Life or death? Death or life?

When you can’t tell which is the greater punishment it is hard to choose.

And this is not all about Tsarnaev. Imagine any trial, any defendant, any case where the crime is great enough to come down to the question: life or death?

Death or life?

When you can’t tell which is the greater punishment, there is something substantially wrong.

How can we choose, for Tsarnaev, for anyone – how can we possibly choose? Life or death. Death or life.

We cannot. Not in good conscious. We cannot know what sentence is right or just when we cannot even tell which sentence is harsh and which sentence is mercy.

We must step back, we must reevaluate the whole system. We must fix this institution which takes the lives and deaths of so many of our fellow citizens.

We can discuss what we hope to accomplish – what outcomes we hope for from punishment or from rehabilitation. We can discuss what is good and what is right, and we can seek to find the best justice we can.

But regardless of your philosophy on the way our criminal justice system ought to work, it seems clear to me that it doesn’t work –

Not when you can’t tell the difference between life and death.

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Civic Studies

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I attended a seminar with some of my colleagues today on the topic of “Civic Studies” – or more specifically, discussing the question “what is Civic Studies?”

Despite my discomfort with definitions, I did try my hand at explaining the term in this January 2014 post. Here’s what I had to say then:

Civic studies is the exploration of how to improve a complex world. Every person should have a voice in shaping the world around them and, indeed, societies are better when they’re shaped by the people within them.

Civic studies envisions societies where all perspective are valued. Where everyone learns from each other and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Societies where institutions encourage and sustain active participation and where education prepares individuals for that active participation.

Knowing that utopia is a long way off (and, perhaps, unobtainable) civic studies asks, what can we do to move towards it? Literally you and I. Not us, not them. You and I.

And the great thing about civic studies is that you and I may disagree on how to move towards it. You and I may even disagree on exactly what “it” is. We each bring different perspectives, different knowledge and experience. But we know our society can be better. And we know the road to getting there is complex.

I hadn’t gone back to read that post before the conversation today, so it is interesting to look back now to reflect on how my thinking has evolved and on how my definition may differ from the definitions others give.

Perhaps the first thing I notice is that my definition is hardly academic. Civic Studies is an academic, intellectual movement. Not necessarily a school or a department, but a distinctive school of thought which can be distinguished in its similarities and differences to other academic disciplines.

But I’m not much of an academic. Not really, anyway. My background is more as a practioner, and my definition tends to be driven by that practice.

I don’t really care how Civic Studies is related to but distinctive from Political Science, Sociology, Philosophy, or other disciplines. I mean, I do care, but those distinctions do little for me as a definition. Definitions placing Civic Studies in the panoply of academia are valuable but don’t help me, personally, understand it.

I want to know what Civic Studies does. I want to know what Civic Studies believes.

I suppose those are unusual questions for academia, but they seem appropriate for a discipline dedicated to integrating theory and practice.

So my definition is more practice oriented. And looking back, I mostly stand by my definition from over a year ago. In fact, I think I raise some of the same points today.

I suppose if I really had to boil it down, I might say something like this:

Civic Studies puts individual agency at the center of its thought, exploring how you and I (literally – you reading this) can affect change. It studies how we can build and sustain institutions that effectively engage all people, and it firmly believes that societies are better when all people are engaged. Finally, it recognizes that we are all different, and that we are bound to disagree on what makes a Good Society and on how to get there. As such, it embraces debate and discussion as critical to the perpetual work of building a better world.

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So Much Potential

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It’s graduation season, and that means that young people around the country will gather to reflect on all they have accomplished and to look forward towards all that is to come.

First at colleges, and then at high schools and even middle schools, solemn celebrations will pass on words of wisdom, providing guidance to young people entering the next phase of their lives.

Pursue your passions, they may be told. Or perhaps, find something you love that can also support you financially.

They will be told of their potential, that they can accomplish more than they might think.

They will be told that perseverance and passion can bring about remarkable outcomes, or perhaps, that pursuing happiness is a worthwhile goal.

It’s a miraculous time. Young minds on the verge of greatness.

You have your whole lives in front of you, they will be told.

But there are too many empty chairs for that to be true.

Graduation is a remarkable accomplishment, one that is worthy of celebration and reflection.

But for too long we’ve said these words and for too long we’ve listened to them, and for too long we have believed them.

In 2014, there were over 1,000 deaths from Heroin and other opioid in Massachusetts alone. The majority of these deaths are among 24-35 year olds. These are my peers.

In 2013, CDC data shows that over 11,000 people age 15-34 committed suicide, making it the second most common cause of death among that age group. Not far behind, over 8,500 people in that age group died in homicides. And that’s to say nothing of the many deaths cited only as “unintentional injury.”

And if that wasn’t enough, homicide is the third most common cause of death for those 1-4, claiming 337 lives in 2013, and suicide is the third most common cause of death for 10-14, claiming 386 lives.

10-14. With razor blades pressed against their skin.

And yet, come May, we look out at those fine graduates – who have accomplished so much, who have achieved so much just by making it as far in life as they have, and we, as society, have the audacity to tell them:

Be happy – you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.

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Decision Making

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Any functional society must have some process for decision making.

That’s not to say it needs to be a hierarchical process – there’s some interesting work on self-organizing networks, for example – but at the end of the day, if something’s going to get done, someone (or someones) needs to decide to do it.

I mention this because it seems this tension is at the heart of democratic work. Creating spaces where all individuals can interact as equals does not easily translate into spaces where things can get done.

The United States, for example, is a representative democracy – average citizens have opportunities to elect their representative, but don’t get to weigh in on every single decision.

And that’s arguably for the best. Even if you assume the general populace is capable of making good governance decisions – a rather deputed claim – the time and effort that would go into reaching general consensus would likely not be worth the cost.

Given the current dysfunction of congress, one might even be inclined to shrink the number of people with decision making power. If 535 people can’t agree on anything, perhaps 5 could.

In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein argues that more than three people can’t make a decision. With the support of a conscious super computer, the book’s three protagonists use that logic to (spoiler alert) covertly reshape the future of their moon, using deception, misdirection, and any other tactics they deem necessary.

It’s an intentionally ironic bent to this libertarian novel – that the heroes who will do anything to be free, who care for an individual’s autonomy above all else, actively replace one managed democracy with another of their own design.

A managed democracy is indeed, as Heinlein says, a wonderful thing… for the managers.

But where does this leave us?

Nowhere good, I’m afraid.

Personally, I’m not prepared to cede my freedom to a group of three who’ve taken it upon themselves to envision the perfect world for me.

For practicality’s sake, I’d gladly cede decision making power on the day to day stuff – but perhaps that’s just what I’ve grown accustomed to.

Perhaps more generally, though, I’m not ready to cede the point that more than three people can’t agree on anything.

Dialogue is hard. Deliberation is hard. But I hardly think the result is unobtainable.

I guess the trick is to not only identify different types of decision making structures, but to determine which structures are appropriate for which situations.

I am comfortable in a hierarchical structure where some decisions out of my hands. Personally, I find such structures both useful and valuable.

But we can’t just cede all our power to such structures, comfortable that all will works itself out in the end. If we do, the agency of the individual would almost certainly degrade, and that would be a tragedy indeed.

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Democrats and Soundbites

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There’s this sort of conventional wisdom that Democrats “suck at soundbites,” in the words of DailyKos.

And perhaps what’s even more interesting than Democrats being terrible at expressing themselves succinctly is the commonly given reason for this shortcoming –

Liberals want you to understand an issue.

That is to say, liberals care too much about understanding an issue to condense it into a soundbite. They’re too precise, to concerned with the details. Conservatives, on the other hand, have a shaky relationship with the truth and therefore have no qualms with hawking their wares through misrepresentation or lies of omission.

Liberals appeal to reason, conservatives appeal to instinct.

Whoa. Now let’s back up a little bit.

I’ve no interest today in starting a fight about liberal and conservative campaign tactics.

But I am interested in this idea – whether it’s true or not – that Democrats are worse at soundbites because they care too much about understanding an issue.

The statement itself implies that Republican tactics – while perhaps more effective – are somehow less moral, less becoming of a free and democratic society.

And yet that’s the line I hear over and over again in postmortems on candidate or issue campaigns. Or at least one ones we lose.

Well of course we lost. We try to actually explain issues and that doesn’t translate well into a sound bite. There’s no chance for the average voter to understand what we’re trying to say.

Now, being wildly liberal myself, I’m in no position to objectively evaluate the truth in that statement, but what’s interesting is – in itself it is a sort of soundbite. A positioning that Democrats and liberals can rally around.

We’re the smart party. We’re the moral party. We’re the ones who are trying to build an informed society.

And almost by default – the other guys aren’t. They’re the used car salesmen willing to say anything to get you to buy a lemon.

It plays into Democrats’ whole mythos of who they are and what they stand for.

Perhaps this mythos isn’t effective beyond the base of the Democratic party, but it does show that Democrats are fully capable of articulating a single, simple idea that can catch on and become a common conventional wisdom.

…Now if only we could do this more.

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The Simple and Subversive Poetry of Piet Hein

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When I was in elementary school someone gave me a big book of quotes on various subjects. One piece that stuck out were the simple lines:

Put up in a place
where it’s easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T. T. T.

When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb,
it’s well to remember that
Things Take Time!

That poem, or more properly, grook, was written by Danish scientist, poet and inventor Piet Hein.

If Hein already sounds like an interesting person, that’s because he was. Born in 1905, he was a creative and gifted thinker in a range of fields.

He began publishing his grooks – or gruks, for ‘GRin & sUK’ (“laugh & sigh”, in Danish) – in the daily newspaper Politiken in 1940. The works were printed under the headline “From day to day” and were taken as “poetic comments on small and great occurrences in everyday life.”

His first grook, for instance, read:

Losing one glove
is certainly painful,
but nothing
compared to the pain,
of losing one,
throwing away the other,
and finding
the first one again.

There’s something simple, playful, and relate-able in those simple lines about losing gloves.

But is that what the poem is really about?

The poem appeared shortly after the beginning of the Nazi occupation, and was interpreted by many – though not the censors – to have a more subversive meaning: When your freedoms is lost, don’t throw away your patriotism and become a collaborator.

Incidentally, Hein initially published under the pseudonym “Kumbel Kumbell,” kumbel being an Old Norse word for tombstone.

Perhaps one of his better known grooks is:

Taking fun
  as simply fun
and earnestness
  in earnest
shows how thoroughly
  thou none
of the two
  discernest.

A scientist by training – Hein worked with Niels Bohr for several years – he was also a dedicated artist, “Art,” he said, “is this: art is the solution of a problem which cannot be expressed explicitly until it is solved.”

In the end, Hein wrote more than 7000 grooks. He wrote in Dutch and English, but had his poems translated into many languages. As his estate puts it:

The small grooks belong to everybody, exactly as was Piet Hein’s original intention.

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Partisanship

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In the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to attend talks by many current and former U.S. Congressmen and Senators.

One topic that comes up time and time again is partisanship. Now that congress has apparently devolved into a shouting match, a snowball fight, or straight up yelling “you lie” during a State of the Union – how do we fix that? How do we go back to a better time when congressman disagreed about issues but still treated each other with respect?

Well first, let’s not sugar coat the past and pretend that our country has never seen a duel between a sitting Vice President and a former Secretary of the Treasury.

But, regardless of the past, I think it’s fair to say that we do have a problem in the present. Congress is more dysfunctional than most family gatherings and it certainly gets less done.

So what do we do about it?

Well, that’s where everyone seems to agree. If we could snap our fingers and reset the rules, here’s what congressmen from both parties have offered as keys to bringing civility back to congress: campaign finance reform and independently drawn districts.

Supreme Court decisions, most popularly Citizens United, helped open the flood gates to essentially unlimited, untracked spending in campaigns. There’s a great moment in West Wing when a character describes the effect of the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo Supreme court decision:

You don’t put “vote Bartlet” in the ad, you can pay for it with unmarked bills from a bank
heist if you want to.

So we should probably do something about that.

The second tactic is about ensuring there are competitive districts. As Nate Silver describes, “In 1992, there were 103 members of the House of Representatives elected from what might be called swing districts: those in which the margin in the presidential race was within five percentage points of the national result.”

But in 2012, there were only 35 such districts remaining.

In other words, “Most members of the House now come from hyperpartisan districts where they face essentially no threat of losing their seat to the other party.”

Representatives from these one-party districts then become polarized as they move away from the center to fight off primary challengers.

Especially since the hardliners of given party are more likely to vote during a primary, one-party districts continually elect representatives who appeal to the extreme of the given party.

The solution, I’m told, is to have independently drawn districts. Reducing gerrymandering and increasing the competitiveness of those districts.

This all sounds very good and rational, but as some point while hearing a congressman describe this need it occurred to me –

I am a party hardliner.

Don’t get me wrong, I wish Congress could get more done. I wish there was less bickering and more action. But let’s be honest: I want to win.

I want the other guys to stop being stupid, and I want my guys to win. I like that my representatives are radical. I like when they use fiery rhetoric and put the other guys in their place. That’s what I love about my representatives.

Of course, I’m fortunate enough to be represented by the likes of Mike Capuano and Elizabeth Warren. But clearly, I’m not the only person who feels this way.

A 2013 study found that only 16% of Americans approved of the job Congress was doing, but 46% approved of their own congress person.

Perhaps that’s just the 46% of party radicals who vote in the primary, but still I question whether a move towards the middle is really the solution we should all hope for.

After all, even that old lion of the liberals, Edward Kennedy, was known for being to work across the isle.

Perhaps we need more moderates, but I certainly don’t want all moderates. Perhaps not even a majority of moderates.

The problem of partisanship, I think, is deeper than that. We see it play out in congress, but the challenge is really to ourselves –

Can we, as opinionated party faithful work across difference to understand perspectives and have civil conversations? Can we accept rational facts as well as emotional rationalizations?

Can we move past that urge to win and find it within ourselves to accept that we all want to make this country better, we all want to make this world better? Can we recognize that we’re going to have to work together to make that happen? That we’re going to have to work together to get anything done?

I don’t know, I’d like to do that.

But let’s be honest – I still want to win.

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