Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 38

English Is a Dialect With an Army

My class at Alliance Française is international. The students come from Italy, Spain, Japan, Korea, Kazakhstan, Portugal, Brazil, Venezuela, Germany, China, Australia and everywhere else. Virtually everyone here is learning their third language--and many are on their fourth. There was a young lady in my class a few weeks ago who spoke Spanish, Catalan and English. All I could think about was how 10 years ago I didn't even know what Catalan was, how I thought that all European countries were united in language. They are white so (unlike us) they must be united, n'est-ce pas?

In his lectures, the historian John Merriman said that as late as 1789, only 50 percent of the people in France spoke "French." In the west along the Atlantic coast, it might have been Breton. In Normandy it might have been a patois. Further north it could have been Flemish. In Alsace or Lorraine, Merriman says you could have asked someone "What are you?" and they might reply "I am French"--in German. These are the sorts of things you miss when you can only picture Europe as a unified unerring mass of white folks. 

I am the only person in the class who speaks only one language. I tell my friends there that I wish more people in America spoke two or three languages. They can't understand. They tell me English is the international language. Why would an American need to know anything else? Their pursuit of language is not abstract intellectualism. A command of English opens job opportunities. 
I am getting some small notion of what it feels like to be white in America. What my classmates are telling me is that the Anglophone world is the international power. It dominates. Thus knowledge is tangibly necessary for them in a way that it is not for me. Of course the flip-side of this calculus is that power enables ignorance. Black people know this well. We live in a white world. We know the ways of white folks because a failure to master them is akin to the failure of my classmates to learn English. Your future dims a little. The good slave will always know the master in ways that the good master can never know the slave. 
I think this is the seed of the "We don't have any white history month!" syndrome. Through conquest the ways of whiteness become the air. That is the whole point of conquest. But once those ways are apprehended by the conquered--as they must be--they are no longer the strict property of the conqueror. On the contrary you find the conquered mixing, cutting, folding, and flipping the ways of the conqueror into something that he barely recognizes and yet finds oddly compelling. And all the while the conquered still enjoys her own private home. She need not be amnesiac, only bilingual. The phrase "code-switching" is overdone, but there is no cultural code from which all white people can "switch" from. It's not even a code. It's just the world. 
The historical upshot of this is that Frederick Douglass necessarily belongs to black people in a way that Benjamin Franklin can never belong to democratic-thinking white people. On similar terms Susan B. Anthony will always belong to women, in a way that Ralph Waldo Emerson can never belong to a democratic-thinking me. We see this in our vocabulary. It is the reason why my friends hear "I'll fight ever nigger here" one way when it comes out of my mouth, and another way coming out of Riley Cooper's. It is the reason why "bitch" sounds one way coming out Samantha Jones' mouth, and another way out of mine. Why "poor white trash" sounds one way coming out of Toby Keith's mouth, and another way out of mine. 
Language without context is babbling. In the context of France, je suis américan. I am an aspect of the great power. There is no "nigger" for me, no private language, no private way of being all my own. And with that comes a great feeling of weakness and shame. I feel exposed. People tell jokes that I can't understand, and I am sure they are laughing at me. They are not. But it doesn't matter. 
My friend Jelani Cobb talks about how the literature of slavemasters is filled with exasperation over their slaves laughing at invisible jokes. So from time to time you will see people come here and say, "Don't you ever write about something other than race?" I do. But that's beside the point. What they're really saying is, "Will you please stop speaking in a language which I must struggle to understand?" 
I know the feeling. English dominates the world. Contrary to popular belief, it does not dominate Paris. The other day I was in our favorite épicerie. A family of Americans came in, enthralled and confused. They were marveling at the breads, at the spices, the wines, the champagnes and the prepared dishes behind the counter. At the same time it was not clear how the family was supposed to get service. Could they touch the breads? Could they reach in and grab a tart? The cases were open. What were the rituals here? The mother, a bit flummoxed walked over to a counter and said to a man working behind it. "DO YOU SPEAK ANY ENGLISH?"  
I have talked to this man before. We always start in French and go to English if there's a problem. I know he speaks a little English. But he looked at this woman, shook his head, and went right back to work.
The woman was being very rude, and I don't fault the man's response. But you must understand the impulse. You are the cultural conqueror. You wield the biggest guns. Somewhere in your home there is button which could erase civilization. And then you come to this place and find yourself disarmed. You see that it has its own culture, its own ages and venerable traditions, that the people do not tremble before you. And then you understand that there is not just intelligent life in outer space, but life so graceful that it shames you into silence. 
       

English Is A Dialect With An Army

My class at Alliance Française is international. The students come from Italy, Spain, Japan, Korea, Kazakhstan, Portugal, Brazil, Venezuela, Germany, China, Australia and everywhere else. Virtually everyone here is learning their third language--and many are on their fourth. There was a young lady in my class a few weeks ago who spoke Spanish, Catalan and English. All I could think about was how ten years ago I didn't even know what Catalan was, how I thought that all European countries were united in language. They are white so (unlike us) they must be united, n'est-ce pas?

In his lectures, the historian John Merriman as late as 1789, only 50 percent of the people in France spoke "French." In the west along the Atlantic coast, it might have been Breton. In Normandy it might have been a patois. Further north it could have been Flemish. In Alsace or Lorraine, Merriman says you could have asked someone "What are you?" and they might reply "I am French"--in German. These are the sorts of things you miss when you can only picture Europe as a unified unerring mass of white folks. 

I believe I am the only person in the class who speaks only one language. I tell my friends there that I wish more people in America spoke two or three languages. They can't understand. They tell me English is the international language. Why would an American need to know anything else? Their pursuit of language is not abstract intellectualism. A command of English opens job opportunities. 
I am getting some small notion of what it feels like to be white in America. What my classmates are telling me is that the Anglophone world is the international power. It dominates. Thus knowledge is tangibly necessary for them in a way that it is not for me. Of course the flip-side of this calculus is that power enables ignorance. Black people know this well. We live in a white world. We know the ways of white folks because a failure to master them, is akin to the failure of my classmates to learn English. Your future dims a little. The good slave will always know the master in ways that the good master can never know the slave. 
I think this is the seed of the "We don't have any white history month!" syndrome. Through conquest the ways of whiteness become the air. That is the whole point of conquest. But once those ways are apprehended by the conquered--as they must be--they are no longer the strict property of the conqueror. On the contrary you find the conquered mixing, cutting, folding and flipping the ways of the conqueror into something that he barely recognizes. And all the while the conquered still enjoys her own private home. She need not be amnesiac, only bilingual. The phrase "code-switching" is overdone, but there is no cultural code for white people to "switch" from. It's not even a code. It's just the world. 
The historical upshot of this is that Frederick Douglass necessarily belongs to black people in a way that Benjamin Franklin can never belong to democratic-thinking white people. On similar terms Susan B. Anthony will always belong to women, in a way that Ralph Waldo Emerson can never belong to a democratic-thinking me. We see this in our vocabulary. It is the reason why my friends hear the word "nigger" one way coming out of my mouth, and another out Riley Cooper. It is the reason why "bitch" sounds one way coming out Kim Catrall's mouth, and another way out of mine. Why "poor white trash" sounds one way coming out of Toby Keith's mouth, and another way out of mine. 
Language without context is babbling. In the context of France, je suis américan. I am an aspect of the great power. There is no "nigger" for me, no private language, no private way of being all my own. And with that comes a great feeling of weakness and shame. I feel exposed. People tell jokes that I can not here, and I am sure they are laughing at me. They are not. But it doesn't matter. From time to time you will see people come here and say, "Don't you ever write about something other than race?" I do. But that's beside the point. What they're really saying is, "Will you please stop speaking in a language which I must struggle to understand?" 
I know the feeling. English dominates the world. Contrary to popular belief, it does not dominate Paris. The other day I was in our favorite épicerie. A family of Americans came in, enthralled and confused. They were marveling at the breads, at the spices, the wines, the champagnes and the prepared dishes behind the counter. 
At the same time it was not clear how the family was supposed to get service. Could they touch the breads? Could they reach in and grab a tart? The cases were open. What were the rituals here? The mother, a bit flummoxed walked over to a counter and said to a man working behind it. "DO YOU SPEAK ANY ENGLISH?"  
This was very rude. But you must understand the impulse. We are the cultural conquerors. And then we come to this place with all its culture, its ages and traditions, and we are humbled. There is not just intelligent life in outer space, but life so graceful that it shames you. 
I have talked to this man before. We always start in French and go to English if there's a problem. I know he speaks a little English. But he looked at this woman, shook his head, and went right back to work.        

The Secret to Learning French

You must sing. Specifically you must sing Claude François. I'd love to know this dude's dancing influences. Lots of Motown going on there. Whatever. This is a great song.  It's got me stumbling around Rue Oberkampf, yelling "C'était l'année! Soixante deux!"

       

The Secret To Learning French

You must sing. Specifically you must sing Claude François. . I'd love to know this dude's dancing influences. Lot of Motown going on there. Whatever. This a great song.  It's got me stumbling stumbling Rue Oberkampf, yelling "C'était l'année! Soixante deux!"

       

'There Are No Fat People in Paris'

Two Saturdays ago, I visited the venerable bookstore Shakespeare and Company. It was a hot day. The store was small and stifling. A woman walked around handing out watermelon. I picked up a copy of Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution and Primo Levi's If This Is A Man. I went upstairs, sat in a room with view of the street and I think even the river. Two things happened while I sat there. First, I fell in love with Primo Levi, an unoriginal event which nevertheless deserves (and shall receive) elaboration. Second, I decided that this room was perfect. 
Paris requires effort. There are stairs everywhere and the stairs are all but mandatory. In America the stairs are off to the side, and the elevator is prominent. Often, it's the reverse here -- the stairs are out front and often beautifully wrought. It almost feels sinful to take an elevator. There's a strong culture of pedestrianism. The streets belong to the people, and that encourages walking. On a normal day, I can end up walking for an hour or more. There's so much to see. And those who don't walk use the public bike share.
There is almost no air conditioning -- not in the homes, not in the offices, not on 99 percent of the subway trains. The windows are actually open on the subways. There's no ice in the water or in any of the drinks and I don't ask for any. Travel isn't colonization. I think that discomfort is life unbound. But because of that discomfort, that constant sheen of sweat, finding a naturally cool place is a divine experience. That day when I stumbled into Shakespeare and Company's reading room, it was like stumbling into an undiscovered oasis, like finding lost treasure.
Despite all the extra effort, I find that I consume less energy. I don't know that I eat any "healthier" in the sense of what "health" tends to mean back home. There are fat and carbs all around me. There's butter in most of the dishes. It's nothing see a Parisian walking the street while inhaling a long baguette. Bread is served with every meal, but oddly enough, without butter, which leads me to believe that they think of butter as something to be put in things, not on them. 
I eat my fries with mayonnaise. I now find ketchup to be too sweet. Without exception I eat dessert -- preferably something with chocolate. I eat a panini or a sandwich every day, but I don't eat any chips. You can find junk-food here, but you have to be looking for it. I don't really order out. I've stopped drinking Diet Coke. In general I eat a lot less, and I drink a lot more -- a half a bottle of wine every night. But I don't think I've been drunk once since I've been here. I feel a lot better--more energy, lighter on my feet, a clearer head.
Before I came here, so many people told me, "There are no fat people in Paris." But I think this misses something more telling. There are "no" stunningly athletic people either. There just doesn't seem to be much gusto for spending two hours in the gym here. The people don't seem very prone to our extremes. And they are not, to my eyes, particularly thin. They look like how I remember people looking in 1983. I suspect they look this way because of some things that strike me -- the constant movement, the diet, the natural discomfort -- are part of their culture.
I don't know how much of this I can take back home with me. My sense is that I am reacting to my context. I am conflicted about all of this. In many ways, America feels like a much "freer" place. There's more choice, and a strong desire to deliver that choice at the lowest cost possible. There's no sense in France that "the customer is always right." This city is very old -- Point Neuf is older than America itself. The Merovingian Clovis who reigned 1500 years ago is buried just outside the city. My home of New York is one of the oldest cities in America, but by the ancient standards of Paris, it is still a baby.
With that age comes a great dose of tradition, and a sense of the conservative. Things are done at a certain way. You don't just roll up on someone and say "Excusez-moi..." and then proceed into your query. You had better start with a "Bonjour" or a "Bonsoir."  The specifics of their language means much more to them then it means to us. I think actually all of this suits me better. I love old things, and I loved old Europe before I ever bore witness. I wanted to study Charlemagne in high school. I didn't really know how. And I am terrorized by choice back home--by the take-out menus, the calorie counts, the organic, the local, the low-fat. By the end of the day, my brain is mush. I can't regulate.
We talk about culture as a way of establishing hierarchies -- as though a hammer could, somehow, be innately better than a hacksaw. I believe that cultures take shape for actual reasons, responding to real environments. If Americans love choice, if we love our air-conditioning, and our ice, if we love our comforts, and our elevators, the question should not be, "How do we change?" for that too is a kind of colonization. Better to ask "Why do we love those things? How do they profit us? What we do we stand to lose should we abandon them?" 
I love the tradition of low architecture here. But I also wonder how that tradition affects the cost of living for actual people. And so this is the other thing about culture. It tends to be an interlocking network, a machine of related gears, pulleys and levers. The thing you find so valuable may well be related to something else which you find utterly objectionable. I suspect that the instinct toward ensuring an abundance of fresh, high-quality food is not so distant from the instinct to ban the hijab burka.There is surely some knowledge to be taken back home. But in thinking about myself and my country, and "cultural" change, I find that I am more reformist than revolutionary. We are who we are. Our unchanging acre is forever our own.

1

       

'There Are No Fat People In Paris'

Two Saturdays ago, I visited the venerable bookstore Shakespeare and Company. It was a hot day. The store was small and stifling. A woman walked around handing out watermelon. I picked up a copy of Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution and Primo Levi's If This Is A Man. I went upstairs sat in a room with view of the street and I think even the river. Two things happened while I sat there. First, I fell in love with Primo Levi, an unoriginal event which nevertheless deserves (and shall receive) elaboration. Second, I decided that this room was perfect. Paris requires effort. There are stairs everywhere and the stairs are all but mandatory. In American the stairs are off to the side, and the elevator is prominent. Often, it's the reverse here----the stairs are out front and often beautifully wrought. It almost feels sinful to take an elevator. There's a strong culture of pedestrianism. The streets belong to the people and that encourages walking. On a normal day, I can end up walking for an hour or more. There's so much to see. And those who don't walk use the public bike share.There is almost no air conditioning--not in the homes, not in the offices, not on 99 percent of the subway trains. The windows are actually open on the subways. There's no ice in the water or in any of the drinks and I don't ask for any. Travel isn't colonization.  I think that discomfort is life unbound. But because of that discomfort, that constant sheen of sweat, finding a naturally cool place is a divine experience. That day when I stumbled into Shakespeare and Company's reading room, it was like stumbling into an undiscovered oasis, like finding lost treasure.Despite all the extra effort, I find that I consume less energy. I don't know that I eat any "healthier" in the sense of what "health" tends to mean back home. There are fat and carbs all around me. There's butter in most of the dishes.  It's nothing see a Parisian walking the street while inhaling a long baguette. Bread is served with every meal, but oddly enough, without butter, which leads me to believe that they think of butter as something to be put in things, not on them. I eat my fries with mayonnaise. I now find ketchup to be too sweet. Without exception I eat desert--preferably something with chocolate. I eat a panini or a sandwich every day, but I don't eat any chips. You can find junk-food here, but you have to be looking for it. I don't really order out. I've stopped drinking diet coke. In general I eat a loss, and I drink a lot more--a half a bottle of wine every night. But I don't think I've been drunk once since I've been here. I feel a lot better--more energy, lighter on my feet, a clearer head. 

1

       

Anthony Weiner and Liberal Morality

Andrew Sullivan offers a defense of Anthony Weiner, who has recently been shown to have continued his online affairs even after he resigned from Congress:

No one outside a marriage can fully know what's in it, or what makes it work. For my part, I favor maximal privacy for all married couples in navigating the shoals of sex and life online and off. Monogamous, monogamish, and open relationships are all up to the couples themselves and all have risks and advantages. But ultimately it is up to the spouse to decide if there has been a transgression or not, and whether to forgive and move forward or not. The truly awful spectacle yesterday was seeing Huma Abedin being forced to undergo another public humiliation as the price for her husband's public career. But she clearly stated she was not abandoning her husband. And for me, as for us, that should close the matter.

And let's be clear, there is no victim here. A flirty, horny 22-year-old who talks a great sex game is not a victim. She's a player - and good for her. This nonsense about her being "immature" and Weiner being "predatory" is belied by the facts. She knew he was married when she sexted him and he returned the favors. The only salient question is whether, having lied in the first place about sexting, Weiner was caught deceiving the public again by claiming he had stopped sexting and re-built his marriage, while the compulsion was clearly not over. That's a question of public trust, and there's little doubt that Weiner has squandered it. On the question of lying, the NYT's harrumph this morning is a valid one. Once a politician has deceived people, he gets a second chance. When he deceives them a second time on the same issue, he loses whatever public trust he might have hoped for.

But I see no reason why that trust should not be tested where it should be: at the ballot box. Weiner should not, er, withdraw prematurely. He should do us all a favor, if his wife agrees, and plow on until we can all smoke a collective cigarette. In this new Internet Age someone has to be the person who makes sexting not an excludable characteristic for public office. If it becomes one, then the range of representatives we can choose from in the future and present will be very, very different in experience and background than the people they are supposed to represent.

There's a lot here that I agree with, but I don't get many opportunities to get to the right of Andrew. In all seriousness, I think there are two separate issues. The first is the idea that there is something wrong with online sex. We can dispatch that fairly easily: There isn't. The second is that the mere act of infidelity makes you unfit for public office. I don't think there's much ground for that argument either.

But the problem that I suspect a lot of people have with Anthony Weiner is not that he had an affair, but that he does not seem particularly good at the job of politics. Part of being good at politics is being good at pitching your arguments. Part of pitching your arguments is your public image. We know this. Those of us who are partisans do not examine "favorable and unfavorable" ratings in our polls simply for amusement. We examine them to see who might make the best pitch for the policies we endorse. The actual reasons why some people are viewed favorably and others are not may not always strike us as intelligent. But they are real. Politicians know this and thus guard their image accordingly.

Anthony Weiner is a politician who relished antagonizing the opposition. His appeal was singular and tribal -- in an age of seemingly vacillating, gun-shy Democrats, Weiner took on whoever may come. You never once got the feeling that he was ashamed to be a liberal. He must have known that this made him a target for conservative activists. A wise man in Weiner's position would be watchful. But Weiner is not a wise man. It is not his desire to get off that offends, it is the thick-wittedness of sending nude selfies on Twitter. It is the incomprehensible silliness of handing your opponents a gun and saying, "Please shoot me." Repeatedly. It is wholly sensible that those of us who believe the liberal project is about more than embarrassing Republicans would not want Anthony Weiner as a pitchman.

There is something else at work here also -- a lack of compassion. Here is where I differ with many of my liberal and libertarian friends. I believe that how you treat people matters. It is folly to embarrass your pregnant wife before an entire nation. To do the same thing again is cruelty. And there is the promise of more to come. One argument holds that what happens between Weiner and his wife is between them. I agree with this argument. But cruelty is not abolished by the phrase "consenting adults." And the fact that the immoral is not, and should not be, illegal does not make morality meaningless. Huma Abedin has one choice. We have another. The choice should be made by voters -- there should be no sense that if not for the powerful editorial pages Weiner would have won. As a city we deserve to see who we are, and what we actually care about.

I don't think it is wrong to care about how people treat each others, which is another way of saying I believe that morality is important. I find the argument for same-sex marriage compelling not in spite of morality, but because of it. I think public office is an honored, and honorable, position. I do not think it is wrong to ask that our officers be compassionate. I do not believe it is wrong to ask that our officers be wise. I do not believe that it is the fate of all men to send dick pics hurtling through cyberspace. And I do not believe that Anthony Weiner is the best we can expect from maledom, to say nothing of New York liberals.

       

Anthony Weiner And Liberal Morality

Andrew Sullivan offers a defense of Anthony Weiner, who was recently shown to have continued his online affairs even after he resigned from Congress:

No one outside a marriage can fully know what's in it, or what makes it work. For my part, I favor maximal privacy for all married couples in navigating the shoals of sex and life online and off. Monogamous, monogamish, and open relationships are all up to the couples themselves and all have risks and advantages. But ultimately it is up to the spouse to decide if there has been a transgression or not, and whether to forgive and move forward or not. The truly awful spectacle yesterday was seeing Huma Abedin being forced to undergo another public humiliation as the price for her husband's public career. But she clearly stated she was not abandoning her husband. And for me, as for us, that should close the matter.

And let's be clear, there is no victim here. A flirty, horny 22-year-old who talks a great sex game is not a victim. She's a player - and good for her. This nonsense about her being "immature" and Weiner being "predatory" is belied by the facts. She knew he was married when she sexted him and he returned the favors. The only salient question is whether, having lied in the first place about sexting, Weiner was caught deceiving the public again by claiming he had stopped sexting and re-built his marriage, while the compulsion was clearly not over. That's a question of public trust, and there's little doubt that Weiner has squandered it. On the question of lying, the NYT's harrumph this morning is a valid one. Once a politician has deceived people, he gets a second chance. When he deceives them a second time on the same issue, he loses whatever public trust he might have hoped for.

But I see no reason why that trust should not be tested where it should be: at the ballot box. Weiner should not, er, withdraw prematurely. He should do us all a favor, if his wife agrees, and plow on until we can all smoke a collective cigarette. In this new Internet Age someone has to be the person who makes sexting not an excludable characteristic for public office. If it becomes one, then the range of representatives we can choose from in the future and present will be very, very different in experience and background than the people they are supposed to represent.

There's a lot here that I agree with, but I don't get many opportunities to get to the right of Andrew. In all seriousness, I think there are two separate issues. The first is the idea that there is something wrong with online sex. We can dispatch that fairly easily, there isn't. The second is that the mere act of infidelity makes you unfit for public office. I don't think there's much ground for that argument either.

But the problem I suspect that a lot of people have with Anthony Weiner is not that he had an affair, but that he is does not seem particularly good at the job of politics. Part of being good at politics is being good at pitching your arguments. Part of pitching your arguments is your public image. We know this. Those of us who are partisans do not examine "favorable and unfavorable" ratings in our polls simply for amusement. We examine them to see who might make the best pitch for the policies we endorse. The actual reasons why some people are viewed favorably and others are not may not always strike us as intelligent. But they are real. Politicians know this and thus guard their image accordingly.

Anthony Weiner is a politician who relished in antagonizing the opposition. His appeal was singular and tribal--in an age of seemingly vacillating, gun-shy Democrats, Weiner took on whoever came may. You never once got the feeling that he was ashamed to be a liberal. He must have known that this made him a target for conservative activists. A wise man in Weiner's position would be watchful. But Weiner is not a wise man. It is not his desire to get off that offends, it is the thick-wittedness of sending nude selfies on Twitter. It is the incomprehensible silliness of handing your opponents a gun and saying, "Please shoot me." Repeatedly. It is wholly sensible that those of us who believe the liberal project is about more than embarrassing Republicans would not want Anthony Weiner as a pitchman.

There is something else at work here also--a lack of compassion. Here is where I differ with many of my liberal and libertarian friends. I believe that how you treat people matters. It is folly to embarrass your pregnant wife before an entire nation. To do the same thing again is cruelty. And there is the promise of more to come. One argument holds that what happens between Weiner and his wife is between them. I agree with this argument. But cruelty is not abolished by the phrase "consenting adults." And the fact that the immoral is not, and should not be, illegal does not make morality meaningless. Huma Abedin has one choice. We have another. The choice should be made by voters--there should be no sense that if not for the powerful editorial pages Weiner would have won. As a city we deserve to see who we are, and what we actually care about.

I don't think it is wrong to care about how people treat each others, which is another way of saying I believe that morality is important. I find the argument for same-sex marriage compelling not in spite of morality, but because of it. I think public office is an honored, and honorable, position. I do not think it is wrong to ask that our officers be compassionate. I do not believe it is wrong to ask that our officers be wise. I do not believe that it is the fate of all men to send dick-pics hurtling through cyberspace. And I do not believe that Anthony Weiner is the best we can expect from maledom, to say nothing of New York liberals.

       

The Search for Life in Outer Space

Hieronymus Bosch, The Adoration of the Magi. (Museo Del Prado.)

Continuing our conversation around learning and understanding, one of my favorite passages on the life of the autodidact comes from the great George L. Ruffin's description of Frederick Douglass's odyssey from downtrodden American slave to premier American intellectual:

His range of reading has been wide and extensive. He has been a hard student. In every sense of the word, he is a self-made man. By dint of hard study he has educated himself, and to-day it may be said he has a well-trained intellect. He has surmounted the disadvantage of not having a university education, by application and well-directed effort.

He seems to have realized the fact, that to one who is anxious to become educated and is really in earnest, it is not positively necessary to go to college, and that information may be had outside of college walks; books may be obtained and read elsewhere. They are not chained to desks in college libraries, as they were in early times at Oxford.

Professors' lectures may be bought already printed, learned doctors may be listened to in the lyceum, and the printing-press has made it easy and cheap to get information on every subject and topic that is discussed and taught in the university. Douglass never made the mistake (a common one) of considering that his education was finished. He has continued to study, he studies now, and is a growing man, and at this present moment he is a stronger man intellectually than ever before.

There is a wonderful, if problematic, tradition in the black community of intellectual pursuit as a "macho" activity. Book learning was something that "they" did not want us to have and in seizing it we were, somehow, claiming our manhood. The tradition is problematic--or perhaps anachronistic--because manhood doesn't have the same meaning today. In fact I am not sure if it has, or ultimately will have, any meaning at all. What happens to categories born out of power after power is dislodged? No one goes around talking about "property-owners" in relation to voting rights today.

In his autobiography, Malcolm X does not claim his manhood through an act of vengeful violence, or by sexual access to white women but through the reclamation of his intellect. Douglass becomes a "man" when he physically subdues the slave-driver Covey, but his mastery of literacy is at least as influential and ultimately more enduring.

I think we can substitute "humanity" for the word "manhood" today and see that this idea of reaching a level of consciousness makes us feel more human, more in touch with the world swirling around us. In becoming intellectually aware, Frederick Douglass began to ask questions and confront problems that never had occurred to him before. It was in following the intellectual questions that slavery and abolition raised about humanity that Douglass found himself to be a "woman's rights man." His last public act, indeed his last thoughts evidently, were not on the boundaries of color, but of gender.

I feel that expansion constantly here--new questions constantly popping up around me. The other day we sat in a very nice restaurant near the Canal St. Martin. I took courage and drank a lot of red wine. Then I ordered a blood sausage--in direct violation of every law of the black nationalist kosher code. It was incredible. It was not so much a sausage as a savory chocolate pudding. There was a party beside us. Within that party there was a woman with blond hair wearing a pink dress. She stared at us for fully half of our meal. When we left I saw the people around us staring. Perhaps it was because I'd said "Bienvenue" when we walked in the door. Or perhaps it was because we were black. I couldn't know. I didn't care.

We walked outside and there were people all along the canal. They were drinking from open bottles and eating dinner. They were seated with their legs dangling over the edge into the water. A young white girl sat on the lap of a black boy. They looked at us and yelled "BON SOIR! BON SOIR! BON SOIR!" And did not stop until I turned and yelled "BON SOIR!"

I have an experience like that at least every day. Something bizarre and incomprehensible hovering at the limits of my dim understanding. The panhandlers here are largely Roma. They sit on the streets with their children, or they humbly approach those holding forth in the outdoor cafes. And every time I see them I am shocked by their whiteness, shocked that one need not be black to be someone's nigger, and that says nothing about them and everything about me.

Are the Roma a "race?" No. I am a prisoner of my own vocabulary and addled understanding. Race is an invention of racism. I know this. I have written this. I know that Europeans interacted with Africans for hundreds of years, and only after the slave trade did they conclude that by dint of our skin, we were dumb, bestial and sexually profligate. I have known this since my days in Howard's history department. Racism without power has no actual history and no discernible meaning. I have always known the facts of this, but I have not always understood it.

It is the manner in which I come to my French class. I can drill myself on the rules of conjugation. I can force myself to remember the difference between tenses of the future and past. But to feel it like instinct, to feel it like religion, to run The French No Huddle, is somewhere beyond "knowing" and closer to understanding. I once used a particular future tense while talking to someone. It was, according to the rules, correct. But the person said to me, "We just wouldn't say it that way, it sounds ugly." That was knowledge beyond the rules; it was understanding.

How do we cultivate this in our children? How do we stress the importance of rules, and the equal importance of their irrelevance? How do we stress the necessity of rote memorization, while at the same time stressing the need to not end there? Many of us "know" geometry, but do we understand how it is actually used? Can we walk down the street and point out its effects? Should we even look to a public education system to teach such things? Or is understanding a private act, something best left to intellectual entrepreneurs, hard students and those who, for whatever reason, burn to know?

I can't call it. But I think about Frederick Douglass a lot these days. And I think that as much as he understood the import of justice, he must have also understood the import of death. Once you get the great effort it takes to go from "knowing" to "understanding" you get how little you will ever truly apprehend. Whole lives surround you. Whole ways are distant from you. Entire streets, ancient cultures , beautiful people are all shooting by. And there is sadness in this because truly we know that there is life in outer space, that there is life in the Parisian streets, that there is life in those West Baltimore streets, that there is life in these worlds around me, life in these blue worlds so close, though light years away.

       

The Dubious Math Behind Stop and Frisk

Chart courtesy of "Stop Question And Frisk Police Practices in New York."

Yesterday Ray Kelly took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to defend NYPD's Stop and Frisk tactics and its indiscriminate spying on Muslim communities:

Since 2002, the New York Police Department has taken tens of thousands of weapons off the street through proactive policing strategies. The effect this has had on the murder rate is staggering. In the 11 years before Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, there were 13,212 murders in New York City. During the 11 years of his administration, there have been 5,849. That's 7,383 lives saved--and if history is a guide, they are largely the lives of young men of color.

So far this year, murders are down 29% from the 50-year low achieved in 2012, and we've seen the fewest shootings in two decades.

To critics, none of this seems to much matter. Sidestepping the fact that these policies work, they continue to allege that massive numbers of minorities are stopped and questioned by police for no reason other than their race.

As one of Ray Kelly's critics, and a citizen of New York, I will say that the declining murder rate matters a great deal. But the question before us isn't "Do we want the murder rate reduced?" The question is "Is Stop and Frisk a moral and effective policy?" We could also start punishing all murderers with public torture and beheading. That too might reduce the murder rate. Or perhaps the murder rate might fall for less conspicuous reasons, and those who endorsed public beheadings can loudly claim the credit anyway. At least we'd have correlation. Presently that is more than you can say for Stop and Frisk. Kelly rightly points out that the murder rate in our great city is falling. But for some reason he neglects to mention that Stop and Frisk numbers are falling too.

Perhaps there is some relationship between the long drop in homicides and Stop and Frisk, but Ray Kelly has never furnished such actual proof. Understanding why crime rises and falls has bedeviled social scientists for decades, so it's not surprising that Kelly would have trouble offering hard evidence. But we can certainly examine Ray Kelly's claim that Stop and Frisk is responsible for large numbers of weapons coming off the street.

During roughly half of all stops in 2008 (54.40% or 293,934 stops), officers reported frisking the suspect. Officers are legally authorized to pat down the outer clothing of a suspect in order to determine if the person is carrying a weapon. As shown in Figure 6, a very small percentage (1.24%) of total stops resulted in the discovery of a weapon of any kind (gun, knife, or other type of weapon). A slightly higher percentage (1.70%) resulted in the discovery of some other kind of contraband. Contraband is any item that is against the law to possess, including illegal drugs.

Given Ray Kelly's claims about saving black and brown lives, it's worth seeing how these numbers correlate to race:

In terms of recovering weapons and other contraband, stops of Whites yielded a slightly greater share, proportionally, of contraband other than weapons (1.98% versus 1.75%). The difference in the recovery of knives and weapons other than guns is greater among Whites as well (1.46% compared to 1.06%). In terms of recovering guns, the situation is reversed: proportionally, stops of Blacks and Hispanics were slightly more likely than stops of Whites to result in the recovery of a gun (0.17% versus 0.07%), but this difference is extremely small - 0.10%.

Finally, we should look at how the seizure of guns correlates to an increase in Stops:

While the total number of stops annually has climbed to more than half a million in just a few years (up from 160,851 in 2003), the number of illegal guns discovered during stops has remained relatively steady and modest in comparison. As Figure 8A shows, the number of guns recovered over this six-year period ranges from a low of 627 (2003) to a high of 824 (2008), averaging 703. It should be noted that over this same period, the number of stops more than tripled, meaning the yield of guns per stop has declined considerably (see Figure 8B).

Any serious proponent of Stop and Frisk must grapple with the fact that gun recoveries during Stops are vanishingly small, that they are vanishingly small regardless of race, and that there is little, if any, correlation between a rise in Stops and a rise in gun seizure.

The deeper and more poignant charge is not simply that Stop and Frisk is a bad tool for recovering guns, but that it amounts to systemic discrimination against black and brown communities. Ray Kelly frequently faults his opponents for measuring the demographics of Stop and Frisk against the demographics of the city. Kelly asserts that in a city where much of the violent crime is committed by black and brown males, it is logical that they would constitute the majority of the stops.

I agree with Kelly that it is not particularly telling to look at census data and extrapolate. It would be much more telling if we could somehow control for the actual commission of crime and then see if there was any bias in Stop and Frisk.

In the period for which we had data, the NYPD's records indicate that they were stopping blacks and Hispanics more often than whites, in comparison to both the populations of these groups and the best estimates of the rate of crimes committed by each group. After controlling for precincts, this pattern still holds. More specifically, for violent crimes and weapons offenses, blacks and Hispanics are stopped about twice as often as whites. In contrast, for the less common stops for property and drug crimes, whites and Hispanics are stopped more often than blacks, in comparison to the arrest rate for each ethnic group.

That was the conclusion of Columbia professor of Law and Public Health Jeffrey Fagan in 2007. Perhaps, since then, Ray Kelly has managed to craft a bias-less policy of Stop and Frisk:

NYPD stops are significantly more frequent for Black and Hispanic citizens than for White citizens, after adjusting stop rates for the precinct crime rates, the racial composition, and other social and economic factors predictive of police activity. These disparities are consistent across a set of alternative tests and assumptions.

That is from Fagan's 2010 study. It's important to understand that this data is widely available to the public. So when you hear Ray Kelly say something like this...

"It makes no sense to use census data, because half the people you stop would be women."

...you should understand that he is not telling bold truths, he is confronting the weakest arguments he can find.

Kelly offers some apparent sympathy, conceding that it is "understandable that someone who has done nothing wrong will be angry if he is stopped." But that category of people stopped who've "done nothing wrong" and are understandably angry are not a small minority, but a large majority of the people being stopped and frisked:

Arrest rates take place in less than six percent of all stops, a "hit rate" that is lower than the rates of arrest and seizures in random check points observed in other court tests of claims similar to the claims in this case.

I am not totally opposed to policies in which individuals surrender some of their rights for the betterment of the whole. The entire State is premised on such a surrendering. But at every stop that surrendering should be questioned and interrogated, to see if it actually will produce the benefits which it claims. In the case of Stop and Frisk you have a policy bearing no evidence of decreasing violence, and bearing great evidence of increasing tension between the police and the community they claim to serve. It is a policy which regularly results in the usage of physical force, but rarely results in the actual recovery of guns. But don't take my word for it. Take Ray Kelly's:

"A large reservoir of good will was under construction when I left the Police Department in 1994,'' Mr. Kelly said. ''It was called community policing. But it was quickly abandoned for tough-sounding rhetoric and dubious stop-and-frisk tactics that sowed new seeds of community mistrust.

That was 13 years ago. Times have changed. The evidence has not.