Oxford University Press's Blog, page 638

Indirect discrimination in US and UK law

The set of (relatively) liberal recent pronouncements from the United States Supreme Court features a judgment in Texas Department of Housing v Inclusive Communities Project (2015). The Court, by a slender majority, held that the Fair Housing Act 1968 prohibited not just disparate treatment (direct discrimination in UK law), but also disparate impact (indirect discrimination) based on race. It did so whilst insisting upon certain strict rules within which disparate impact prohibition must operate in order to avoid ‘constitutional questions’.

Indirect discrimination occurs when an apparently neutral rule or policy has a disproportionate and adverse impact on a protected group, and supposedly neutral policies become suspect unless they can be shown to be necessary for achieving legitimate goals. For example, prohibiting headgear (which would affect Sikhs), imposing a minimum height requirement (which could exclude women), or requiring a graduation degree (in a social context where a particular racial group has very few university graduates). It is a means of rooting out inessential practices and policies that tend to exclude minorities from employment, housing, and other quasi-public sectors. Combating such unnecessary practices has become a very important tool to encourage minority participation in civil society at a time when instances of direct discrimination on most grounds are rare and very difficult to prove in courts.

The US Supreme Court held in Griggs v Duke Power Company (1971) that disparate impact (indirect discrimination) was prohibited in the context of employment discrimination under Civil Rights Act 1964. An employer’s requirement of a graduation degree for a job—whose satisfactory performance bore no relation to one’s being a graduate, but one that had the effect of excluding most black candidates—was deemed unlawful. The concept was imported into the British Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and Race Relations Act 1976 as ‘indirect discrimination’ (Hepple, p 608-9). Since then, the evolution of the concept of ‘discrimination’ has taken divergent routes in the two jurisdictions: US law insists on the importance of discriminator-oriented and reasons-based direct discrimination prohibition, and (just about) tolerates the prohibition of indirect discrimination. British law has come to cast direct discrimination in the image of indirect discrimination, recognising that it is the impact on the victim, and not the reasoning of the discriminator, that is key to either form of discrimination (Khaitan, pp 1-4, ch 6).

The US story:

In 1976, the US Supreme Court refused to extend the logic of Griggs to the constitutional prohibition on discrimination under the 14th Amendment. This provision continues to prohibit only deliberate disparate treatment, but not incidental disparate impact (Washington v Davis). So, disparate impact came to be prohibited by statute, but not the constitution. The next landmark American case was Wards Cove v Antonio (USSC 1989), where the Supreme Court tried to further undermine disparate impact law through a series of procedural and doctrinal innovations. Most of these changes were undone by Congressional statute. But the spark from Washington v Davis was fanned by Justice Scalia’s concurring judgment in Ricci v Destefano (2009). Given that voluntary compliance with disparate impact prohibition usually requires race-conscious action, Scalia wondered whether such prohibition did not therefore violate the 14th Amendment’s prohibition on disparate treatment (undertaken or mandated by the state). In her dissent, Justice Ginsburg argued that while disparate treatment law demanded race-neutrality in form, it did not prohibit race-consciousness of purpose (p 619-20, a distinction defended by Siegel).

Justice Ginsburg argued that while disparate treatment law demanded race-neutrality in form, it did not prohibit race-consciousness of purpose

The majority’s recent decision in Inclusive Communities now affirms what all nine Courts of Appeal had held all along: that the Fair Housing Act, like the Civil Rights Act, prohibits disparate treatment as well as disparate impact. Against the context of Scalia’s threat in Ricci, however, Justice Kennedy held that ‘serious constitutional questions’ can be avoided only if the disparate impact prohibition is subjected to strict limitations: these potentially include requiring a lower justification standard from the defendant. The extent to which these limitations bring the ghost of Wards Cove back to life remains to be seen, but some of the rhetoric suggests this could be a pyrrhic victory for the advocates of disparate impact law. The bottom-line is that US law treats disparate treatment prohibition as the central case of discrimination law, and just about tolerates the prohibition on disparate impact.

The British Trajectory:

In British law, the law has followed a different trajectory. In a string of cases, the House of Lords and then the UK Supreme Court have given primacy to indirect discrimination rather than direct discrimination (see generally, James v Eastleigh Borough Council (1990), R (E) v JFS (2010), Bull v Hall (2013)). Citing Advocate General Sharpston, Lady Hale affirmed in Bull that “I take there to be direct discrimination when the category of those receiving a certain advantage and the category of those suffering a correlative disadvantage coincide exactly with the respective categories of persons distinguished only by applying a prohibited classification” (19). For example, if the effect of an apparently neutral policy is that everyone who benefits is a man and all those who lose out are women, British law would characterise it as directly discriminatory on the ground of sex, its apparent neutrality notwithstanding. This approach discards the viewpoint of the discriminator, even when assessing direct discrimination, and looks only for the impact on the victim. If the coincidence is not exact, but the disadvantage is nonetheless disproportionate on the victim group, the discrimination is indirect rather than direct. In fact, British Equality Act 2010 effectively mandates race-consciousness of sorts for public authorities under the public section equality duty. (For the connection between indirect discrimination and the public sector equality duty, see Fredman.)

At a time when US discrimination law is under serious attack by the political right and a reactionary judiciary, Britain should be relieved that at present there exists a cross-party commitment to key antidiscrimination norms.

This turn from reasons towards effects in British law has been criticised not only by conservatives (Finnis, Law Quarterly Review, 2010), but also some liberals (Gardner, 182). As Professor Colm O’Cinneide put it recently in his address to a conference celebrating 5 years of the UK Equality Act, “At a time when US discrimination law is under serious attack by the political right and a reactionary judiciary, Britain should be relieved that at present there exists a cross-party commitment to key antidiscrimination norms.” But this consensus is fragile and will need intellectual support to survive. Already, there are some signs of backward movement in British indirect discrimination law. In Home Office v Essop (2015), for example, the Court of Appeal has decided that a claimant must not only show disproportionate impact but also the “reason why” such impact is occasioned “because of” a protected ground. It is not enough to show that a policy disproportionately excludes a racial minority; the Court invents an additional requirement, demanding that the claimant must also show why the policy has such an impact. Given that the claimants are not always in a position to provide such an explanation, the practical effect of this new requirement might be that many more indirect discrimination claims would fail in British courts. Unless overturned by the UK Supreme Court soon, this ruling could become the Wards Cove moment for British indirect discrimination law.

Ultimately, the choice between the reasons of the discriminator and the impact on the victim is moral, rather than linguistic. It is a question about whose point of view is key to our understanding of the concept of discrimination: the discriminator’s or the victim’s.

A shorter version of this article first appeared on the Oxford Human Rights Hub Blog.

Featured image: US Supreme Court in Spring with Fountain. © markphariss via iStock.

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William Godwin on debt

William Godwin (1756-1836) did not philosophically address the question of debt obligations, although he often had many. Perhaps this helps to explain the omission. It’s overwhelmingly likely that Godwin would deny that there is such a thing as the obligation to repay debts, and his creditors wouldn’t have liked to hear that.

A debt is a type of promise, and Godwin denies that promises generate obligations. It is not that we should never do as we have promised, of course. Rather, we should always perform what we think to be the right – the most just – action, regardless of whether it is or is not what we have promised to do:

“I ought to be guided by the intrinsic merit of the objects, and not by any external and foreign consideration. No engagements [i.e., promises] of mine can change their intrinsic claims.” (Political Justice, Book 3, Chapter 3).

Later Godwin comes to the question: ‘if promises be not made, or when made be not fulfilled, how can the affairs of the world be carried on?’ He may have in mind Hume’s essay on the obligation of promises in the Treatise of Human Nature.

Hume does not believe that promises naturally give rise to obligations; there needs to be a social convention in place. But without the convention in place ‘the affairs of the world’ are not carried on, at least not in anything like their recognisable form:

“Your corn is ripe to-day; mine will be so tomorrow. It is profitable for us both, that I should labour with you to-day, and that you should aid me to-morrow.” (Treatise of Human Nature, 3.2.5).

Image Credit: ‘Good Debt’, Photo by GotCredit. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

What we typically do in this type of situation is promise. I help you with your harvest today and you promise to help me in return. This is not just a promise; it is a debt. I provide you with a service or good, in exchange for your promise to provide me with the same later. Without this system in place, there we’d be, gaping stupidly in our half-harvested fields. So isn’t a good thing at least for us to think that promises generate obligations, particularly the sort that involve debts?

Not for Godwin, who insists that without promises the affairs of the world would be carried on by ‘rational and intelligent beings acting as if they were rational and intelligent’. He asks: ‘Why should it be supposed that the affairs of the world would not go on sufficiently well, though my neighbour could no farther depend upon my assistance than it appeared rational to grant it?’

This isn’t easy to make sense of until we understand what Godwin means by ‘rational’. ‘To a rational being there can be but one rule of conduct, justice’ (2.6). And: ‘If justice have any meaning, it is just that I should contribute everything in my power to the benefit of the whole’ (2.2). Now we can see why, subject to rationality, I should, in Hume’s example, help you today, and you should also help me tomorrow. Each act contributes to the benefit of the whole; Hume himself says ‘ ‘tis profitable for us both’ that each helps the other. Debts and promises have nothing to do with it.

There is one hint in Godwin’s writing that he is thinking about debt specifically, and not just about promising. It is this example:

“I have promised to bestow a sum of money upon some good and respectable purpose. In the interval between the promise and my fulfilling it, a greater and nobler purpose offers itself, and calls with an imperious voice for my cooperation.”

Image Credit: ‘Bad Debt’, Photo by GotCredit. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

There is no explicit mention of debt, but clearly the most common instance in which one promises money is when one promises it to the creditor from whom one borrowed it. It seems to follow quite directly from Godwin’s reasoning that one should only repay a creditor when, after the promise is made, no nobler purpose comes into view for which the money might be used. In fact one’s obligation is never that of a debtor; it is always that of somebody who possesses money and is bound, however the money was acquired, to make the noblest possible use of it. Likewise in Hume’s example: if you have promised to help me today, but now learn of a neighbour who needs your help more, then there is no question what the just action is.

Of course if you don’t repay your creditors you probably won’t get credit in the future. This reduces your financial power to perform just acts in the future. Would Godwin accept this as justifying the view that people are obliged to pay their debts? Certainly not. The principle that promises ought to be kept is, for him, an inherently unjust idea – ‘a principle founded in prejudice and mistake’. It is wrong to think that anything other than considerations of the benefit of the whole, including prior debt commitments, should govern our actions. Honouring a promise can mean doing what isn’t of most benefit to the whole. You owe money, goods, and services to the people who need them most, not to the people you have promised them to. It would be better, Godwin suggests, if we didn’t promise at all. We should depend on each other’s assistance no farther than it appears rational to grant it.

If this is so, why do we so often take the opposite view proposed to Socrates by Cephalus in the Republic: the view that debts ought, as a matter of justice, to be repaid? Perhaps that view is a pragmatically useful moral illusion for we who are not perfectly rational, tolerable for everyday dealings because it often gets the right result, but dangerously distortionary if treated as anything more than a rough heuristic.

It is, however, a disturbing feature of the way we do things that the people who are in most need of justice are almost always extended credit instead.

This article originally appeared on Origin of Specious, July 2015.

Featured Image Credit: ‘Wheat, Ripe, Harvest, Summer’, Photo by suju, CC0 Public Domain, via Pixabay.

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What’s your story? Calling all oral history bloggers

Over the last few months, we’ve had the pleasure of publishing thoughtful reflections, compelling narratives, and deep engagements with what it means to do oral history. Each post was written by a member of the oral history community who was willing to share his or her thoughts and experiences with all of us. We received an incredible response from our last call for submissions, so we’re coming back again to ask for more. But first, let’s talk about how amazing the posts we’ve published in the last few months have been.

In February, Mark Larson shared some of his multimedia oral histories and explained how his process aims to see the world through the eyes of his interviewee.

Students at Columbia University’s Oral History Master’s Program took to the OHA blog in March to give us a taste of the groundbreaking work they’re doing, both in their research and on their own blog.

Melissa Ziobro opened up in April about some of the difficulties she has had starting a veteran’s oral history project, and asked for input from the community to help it grow.

In May, Hank Greenspan gave a moving account of what can happen as relationships grow and develop between interviewers and interviewees over time.

Two weeks ago, we featured a powerful narrative from Eliza Lambert asking how oral historians can preserve the beauty and value of stories that need to be shared, even when they fall outside of our project’s scope.

So now it’s your turn. Whether you have reflections on fieldwork, thoughts on the field of oral history as a whole, or a compelling narrative that is crying out for an audience, we want to hear from you. We want to use our social media platforms to encourage discussion within the broad community of oral historians, from professional historians to hobbyists. Part of encouraging that discussion is asking you all to contribute your thoughts and experiences.

We are looking for posts between 500-800 words or 15-20 minutes of audio or video. These are rough guidelines, however, so we are open to negotiation in terms of media and format. We should also stress that while we welcome posts that showcase a particular project, we can’t serve as landing page for kickstarter or similar funding sites.

Please direct any questions, pitches, or submissions to the social media coordinator, Andrew Shaffer, at ohreview[at]gmail[dot]com. You can also message us on Twitter or Facebook.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Image Credit: “Mailboxes” by tanakawho. CC BY NC 2.0 via Flickr.

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A different Pioneer Day

On 24 July 1847, Brigham Young, the Mormon prophet, entered the Salt Lake Valley with the first company of Latter-day Saint pioneers. They had endured an arduous trek across the American plains after having been forcibly driven from Nauvoo, Illinois. Entering the Salt Lake Valley, Latter-day Saints expressed both bitterness and joy. “Thus ends this long and tedious journey from the lands of our enemies,” Hosea Stout recorded in his journal, “and I feel free and happy that I have escaped from their midst.”

Contemporary Latter-day Saints who commemorate the 24th of July most often sound less like Stout and more like Thomas Bullock, who simply shouted “Hurra, hurra, hurra,” when he reached Utah. Today is an official state holiday in Utah, and participants in the pioneer-themed parades, demolition derbies, food fests, and fun runs celebrate Utah settlement with patriotism and civic spirit.

Things were different during the Mormons’ tenth anniversary festivities in 1857. Though the nineteenth-century Saints were no less celebratory, wounds from their forced evacuation of Nauvoo (and previous expulsion under threat of “extermination” from Missouri) were still fresh. In addition, since late May, Young had been receiving reports that President James Buchanan would replace him as governor of Utah and possibly send an army to Utah to quell a reported rebellion by the Latter-day Saints.

On 23 June, the Mormons received a batch of mail from the eastern states; according to Young, the newspapers received that day contained the cries, “Blood! blood! blood! Exterminate the Mormons, let us sweep them from the Earth.” Amid the “vast pile of rubbish,” Young received a supportive letter from Thomas L. Kane, a Philadelphia social reformer who had befriended the Saints. A frequent correspondent (he and Young would exchange almost 100 letters), Kane often intervened for the Latter-day Saints with government officials and newspaper editors. To Young, Kane’s letter seemed like an “oasis.”

On 24 July 1857, confirmation of Buchanan’s intentions reached Utah in dramatic fashion with messengers who had hurried across the plains and found Young and other Latter-day Saints celebrating the tenth anniversary of their arrival in the Salt Lake Valley in Big Cottonwood Canyon, east of Salt Lake City. Young announced the news and dictated to a scribe writing his diary, “The feeling of Mobocracy is rife in the ‘States’ the constant cry is kill the Mormons. Let them try it.”

Young and the Saints continued with their celebration, but they were deeply disturbed that the government had settled upon its policy without notifying them. In addition, they feared the worst, believing that the army would expel them from Utah as they had been driven from Missouri and Illinois. Young began issuing directions to Mormons both in Utah and throughout the world to prepare for the defense of Utah and to resist the military expedition.

In September 1857, Young wrote to Kane, portraying his people as aggrieved victims and arguing that Buchanan’s administration had trampled the Constitution. “We have encroached upon the rights of no one,” Young wrote. “Why then in the name of High Heavens, can we not be let alone?” To the Protestants at the center of antebellum American society, Mormon polygamy threatened to unravel the religious rights enshrined in the first amendment that had established the free exercise of religion without defining what constituted religion. In Protestant minds, if a practice like polygamy could be justified by religion, the whole experiment in religious freedom was compromised. By contrast, Young believed that the “Constitution and laws are good enough, we could live, prosper and enjoy the blessings of peace, rights of Conscience and everything that we desire beneath its am[p]le protection if they were administered in righteousness.” Young’s correspondence with Kane records how such convictions about religious freedom consistently animated his resistance to heavy-handed federal authority.

For his part, Kane was motivated to help the Mormons by an understudied strain of nineteenth-century social reform. Unlike the vast network of Protestant reformers working to eradicate sin from American society, Kane was inspired by the French philosopher Auguste Comte’s “religion of humanity” and the Democratic Party’s emphasis on liberty. His model was the “romantic hero” who sought “liberty for the downtrodden.” The “downtrodden” included the poor, slaves, and women, but Kane did more for the Mormons than any other group. Young’s letter expressed hope that Kane would “receive the just recompense of daring to speak, act and feel in behalf of an innocent but much abused people.”

After receiving Young’s letter, Kane approached Buchanan and received an unofficial commission to travel to Utah and mediate the threatened conflict between the federal army and the Latter-day Saints. He reached Salt Lake City in late February 1858 after a harrowing journey. After consulting with Young, he traveled to what is now western Wyoming where the army was camped after failing to reach Salt Lake City the previous fall. Kane helped negotiate a peace and bring an end to the Utah War before it gained momentum. Kane convinced the newly appointed governor to travel to Utah without the army as a gesture of peace and helped negotiate a peace that brought the “war” to an end.

An uneasy peace had been achieved by the time the Mormons celebrated the 24th of July in 1858. Over the ensuing two decades, Kane and Young wrote frequently, attempting to placate a hostile Protestant society and a powerful federal government. While Utahns celebrate a peaceful Pioneer Day today, the Kane-Young correspondence preserves the history of a more precarious 24 July over a century and a half ago.

Image credit: The Mormon pioneers coming off Big Mountain into Mountain dell. Library of Congress. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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On ‘cookbook medicine,’ cookbooks, and gender

It is not a compliment to say that a physician is practicing “cookbook medicine.” Rather, it suggests that the physician is applying “one size fits all,” unreflective, and impersonal clinical methods, and that the patient may suffer as a result of the lack of nuanced, reflective, and humanistic care. The best physicians—just like the best cooks —make use of creativity, intuition, judgment, and even je ne sais quoi. Explicit algorithms of care do not capture these apparently vital skills.

The term “cookbook medicine” was used as early as the 1970s to object to the then-new institution of the medical consensus conference, which brings experts together to make joint recommendations about clinical practice. The term has been used frequently since then, especially in conjunction with the recommendations of evidence-based medicine, which are based on the results of large clinical trials.

“Cookbook medicine” is also seen as “medicine by committee” that can challenge the authority of the individual physician. Individual authority is a cornerstone of professional status, especially in the United States. In sum, the generalizing tendency of practice guidelines—whether based on expert consensus or evidence-based medicine—leads to undesired treatment of both patients and physicians. The term “cookbook medicine” conveys a type of medicine that is beneath the standards and the dignity of professional physicians.

Basic Recipes, c1945, by alsis35, CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr

The type of medicine that is generally preferred has been called “personalized medicine,” suggesting care that is tailored to the particulars of the case as well as care that acknowledges the personhood of the patient. Most recently, the term “precision medicine” has been used to focus on the scientific particulars of the case, whereas “narrative medicine” focuses on the humanistic particulars. The best medical care combines such knowledge of particulars with more the general findings of empirical research.

It is worth reflecting on the connotations—as well as the datedness—of the term “cookbook medicine.” It is also not a compliment to cookbooks to use them as a metaphor in the term “cookbook medicine.” Recall that in the 1970s, Anglophone cuisine was only beginning to go through a culinary revolution and most food preparation was limited to a few standard dishes. Moreover, the term “cookbook medicine” was coined at a time when cookbooks were written for housewives whose work in all domestic spheres was poorly understood and generally trivialized.

In another decade, Alice Waters and Julia Child would become household names, and their personalities and food writing came to be as important for learning to cook as the recipes in their cookbooks. The second wave of feminism took hold, men began to cook in the home, and the rest is history in the rising prestige of cooking (unfortunately not so much other domestic labor)—especially a rise in the publication of cookbooks showing creativity, intuition, judgment, and even je ne sais quoi in their communication of tacit as well as explicit knowledge. (A favorite recent example is Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi.) In another generation, I hope, no-one will understand that “cookbook medicine” meant “women’s work,” nor will they understand why “cookbook medicine” is in any way pejorative.

Image Credit: ‘What’s Cookin’ by sling@flickr. CC by 2.0 via Flickr.

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How are the smallest beasts of the stellar zoo born?

In the same way as a jungle harbours several species of birds and mammals, the stellar (or almost stellar) zoo also offers a variety of objects with different sizes, masses, temperatures, ages, and other physical properties.

On the one hand, there are huge massive stars that easily overshadow one as the Sun. On the other, there are less graceful, but still very interesting inhabitants: small low-mass stars or objects that come out of the stellar classification. These last objects are called ‘brown dwarfs’. Brown dwarfs do not have enough mass (more than 0.075 times the mass of the Sun) to shine by hydrogen burning, thus they differ from ordinary low-mass stars and are halfway between stars and planets. For astronomers, how these ‘failed stars’ are formed still remains as a mystery.

While low-mass stars – such as our Sun – grow up from dense interstellar cores of gas with masses slightly above the final mass of the star, this is less clear for the case of brown dwarfs. This is because brown dwarfs require small low-mass cores of interstellar materials to exist. Such teeny-cores are not predicted by theoretical studies, unless ingredients like turbulence are taken into account.

This problem led astronomers to suggest that brown dwarfs form differently from normal stars, perhaps by dynamical ejection from the parent clump of gas. In this way, dwarfs could remain ‘failed’ before they have completed the more usual course of accretion. Thus, the mystery of brown dwarf formation is left to the final word of the observations.

We have recently seen a new object, named IC348-SMM2E, located in the Perseus molecular cloud , which has been characterized using observations of six different telescopes, covering wavelengths from radio up to optical, and including both ground-based and space telescopes. These observations are not easy because cores of gas surrounding young brown dwarfs are extremely faint. However, the compilation of this large data-set has allowed us to determine the physical properties of the object, such as mass, temperature, and luminosity of the parent dense core. Moreover, researchers detected a bipolar outflow (blue and red contours in the top-right panel of the figure), a well-known fingerprint of young star formation.

Image credit: Palau, Girart, Estalella 2012, Suplement /La Terra a l’Univers/, Història Natural dels Països Catalans, Enciclopèdia Catalana

Among the properties which make IC348-SMM2E a unique object are its extremely young age, its associated bipolar ejection of outflowing gas, and an elongated disk-like rotating structure perpendicular to the outflow, which are all properties typically seen in the youngest stars (and are sketched in the bottom-right panel of the figure).

More quantitatively, the mass outflow rate, the strength of the bipolar outflow, and the luminosity of the protostellar radiation, have correspondingly smaller values compared to the formation of ordinary stars at the earliest phases. Therefore, this work presents important evidence that brown dwarfs form as a scaled-down version of low-mass stars.

In the coming years, interferometric observations with the new instrument ALMA in Chile – observing microwaves – will allow researchers to resolve the morphology of IC348-SMM2E and other young brown dwarfs. We are on the verge of revealing the inner-most parts and the early life of these little stellar beasts.

Featured image: Pair of eclipsing brown dwarfs by NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI). Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. 

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Smuggling for Christ the King

Guns, ammunition, bootlegged liquor, illegal drugs, counterfeit cash—these are the most common objects that generations of smugglers have carried across the US-Mexico border. Historians of the borderlands, as well as residents of the area, know that government agents on both sides of the line have never been able to gain complete control over this type of trafficking, despite their best efforts. And so, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, the borderlands have been portrayed in popular culture as a site of sin and dissolution, contraband and illicit trade.

During the 1920s and 1930s, however, Mexican and American citizens began smuggling an entirely different type of contraband across the frontier. This was religious paraphernalia—scapulars, rosaries, images, and printed materials—largely created in the United States by Catholics from both countries and intended for distribution within Mexico. Among the people who trafficked this material were young Mexican migrants, priests and nuns, members of the Knights of Columbus, and many other otherwise law-abiding citizens. At the same time, large numbers of Mexican citizens began sneaking across the line—not to gain permanent entry to the United States, but simply to attend Catholic Mass, which they could not do at home.

At the root of this clandestine Catholic activity was the Cristero War, a bloody conflict between Catholic militants and the Mexican government that began in 1926 and would not come to an end completely until the late 1930s. The war had begun when Catholic loyalists—called cristeros for their battle cry of ¡Viva Cristo Rey! or “Long live Christ the King!”—took up arms in order to resist a set of anticlerical reforms enacted by the government of Plutarco Elías Calles and his handpicked successors. During its most violent phase, from 1927-1929, the conflict ravaged the Mexican heartland and claimed the lives of an estimated one hundred thousand people. Although the war would formally end in 1929, when Church and state leaders forged a series of compromises known as the arreglos, Cristero militants would continue to launch sporadic uprisings until the late 1930s, when the Mexican government stopped enforcing many of the anticlerical laws.



“Catholic liturgy items used clandestinely during the Cristero War” by AlejandroLinaresGarcia. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Although the war was fought most intensely in the west-central Mexican heartland (including the states of Jalisco, Guanajuato, and Michoacán), the border region was also strongly affected by the religious conflict. There were several reasons for this. First, by the early 1920s, those three west-central states had become the top states sending Mexican migrants to the United States, and so thousands of labor emigrants were arriving in Texas, southern California, and other border states with experience and knowledge of the religious conflict. Second, after the outbreak of the Cristero War, the Mexican government began deporting Catholic clergy (at least 2,500 priests, nuns, and members of religious orders arrived in the United States during the late 1920s). These religious refugees typically resettled in urban areas where there were large and growing Mexican communities, such as Los Angeles, El Paso, and San Antonio. Finally, these religious refugees were joined by lay Catholic political exiles from Mexico.

The conditions of migration during the late 1920s helped to create a diaspora of Mexican Cristero supporters in the United States. This network spanned the borderlands and eventually even extended into the growing Mexican communities of the Midwest. During the 1920s and 1930s, these Catholic partisans organized clubs and associations, sponsored religious processions and other public activities within their neighborhoods, and lobbied politicians on both sides of the border in support of their cause. Many of them also participated in clandestine efforts to help the Cristero efforts from abroad, including raising money, recruiting soldiers from among the young migrant population, and printing leaflets and religious tracts to be sent back to Mexico. A few of them even organized armed religious revolts along the border, and others contributed money for guns and ammunition that could be sent to the Cristero troops on the battlefields in the Mexican heartland.

In participating in these religiously motivated smuggling efforts, the Cristero diaspora found some support from their American Catholic counterparts. In the United States, the loudest voice came from the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization whose leadership launched a fundraising campaign, the Million Dollar Fund, which produced pamphlets in English and Spanish denouncing the anticlerical Mexican government and publicizing the effect of the Cristero War on Mexico’s Catholics. This printed material, along with the literature produced by Mexicans in the United States, was passed so frequently into Mexico during the war years that the Mexican government issued specific warnings about the problem, including a directive for border guards to be on the lookout for nuns and other Catholic women, who were known to bring Catholic propaganda into the country underneath their dresses.

Thus, during the 1920s and 1930s, smuggling along the border took on a distinctly religious character, as Cristero emigrants, exiles, and refugees attempted to support the Catholic cause from across the border. The story of Mexican emigration during the Cristero War adds an additional dimension to common perceptions of the borderlands as a site of clandestine vice and misbehavior. The Cristero partisans of the 1920s and 1930s may have been breaking laws by trafficking in outlawed materials, but they did so not for economic gain, but in order to participate in a cause that they believed was good, moral, and holy. As scholars increasingly turn their attention to the transnational dimensions of religious conflicts, we will surely see other cases—historical and contemporary—where border regions became sites of intense religious activity.

Image Credit: “Priests returning from Los Angeles to Mexico, July 5, 1929.” Author’s collection.

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“It’s an exciting time to be an editor”: Dan Parker on the OUPblog

On the tenth anniversary of OUPblog, we’ve asked past editors and current editors to reflect on their experiences and favorite memories. Today we speak to Dan Parker who has been a UK editor of OUPblog since last summer.

I only joined the OUPblog team in May 2014, so I am still a relative newbie. Before becoming an editor, most of my involvement with the blog was as an avid reader and regular contributor from the PR department. My early contributions ranged from helping readers survive a zombie apocalypse to connecting the worlds of Shakespeare and tennis. I found it very satisfying to either come up with my own original content or work with authors to produce articles for the OUPblog. Therefore, when the chance to become an editor of the OUPblog came up, I jumped at it.

It’s an exciting time to be an editor of the OUPblog. Over the course of the last ten years, the blog has gone from strength to strength and flourished as one of the most widely read academic blogs in the world. In order to help the blog continue to develop, the focus has been on reaching the right communities with the right content. By concentrating on generating content for different disciplines, from American History to Music, and from Medicine to Philosophy, we are aiming to grow our reach and engagement within these communities.

Take the Economics discipline for example. In April 2014, we formed a group with a focus on developing content for and doing outreach in the academic economics community. It has produced weekly blog posts for the OUPblog for the past 15 months. These posts focus on a variety of different economic issues and help grow our (and our authors’) voice within the community. We know we’re reaching the right audience when our blog articles, quizzes, and virtual issues are frequently cross-posted on media sites such as LSE Politics and Policy, PSA Women in Politics, Angry Bear Blog, and even CNN. The range of sites also shows that we are reaching a diverse audience within the economic community: academics, practitioners, educators, and students for example.

One of the most enjoyable things about the OUPblog, both as a reader and as an editor, is the diversity of the content, even within a specific subject area. For instance, within the economics discipline, one week you could be learning about macroeconomics and how this affects global warming, and the very next week you could be discovering ten facts about gender inequality in the labour market. It is an absolute pleasure to work with the blog and learn something completely new each day. I guess that’s one of the reasons the OUPblog has been so successful for the past ten years, and why communities like economics, medicine, psychology, and philosophy have thrived in the past year.

I am delighted to wish the OUPblog a happy tenth birthday, and I can’t wait to work closely with it during its teen years, and maybe even its twenties.

Featured image credit: MacBook Pro, by Patrick Rasenberg. CC-BY-NC-2.0 via Flickr.

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Salsa or tango: which Latin dance is right for you?

Partnered social dancing has enjoyed a steady rise in popularity over the past decade as more and more people recognize its social, physical, and emotional benefits. Because “touch” dancing never fell out of fashion in Latin America, Latin dances have evolved to respond to the sensibilities of their contemporary practitioners without loosing their deep connection to a historical legacy. Two of the most popular Latin dances worldwide are salsa, with roots in the Spanish Caribbean, and the Argentine tango. Vibrant communities of salsa and tango dancers can be found in most major cities of today’s globalized world. Although both are danced to music with Spanish lyrics and stem from courtship rituals in Latin American cultures, their distinct charms appeal to different personalities and social groups. Which dance will trip your light fantastic? Here are some insights to help you decide.

Are you an extrovert or an introvert?

Salsa, which includes periods of solo dancing called “shines” where each partner shows off his or her fanciest footwork, is an extrovert’s dance. It is loud and exciting, and often demands personal expression through visual spectacle. Tango, in contrast, is about internalizing one’s experience of the music. It is a moving meditation, quieter, and more subtle. A tango partnership is more about listening to each other than it is about vying for the limelight.

What’s your idea of fun?

Salsa is a party dance. Expect a room full of people laughing and joking, escaping the stresses of their daily lives through joyful play. Salsa dancers will often remark that milongas (tango dances) feel more like funerals than parties given their somber atmosphere. But “fun” is not necessarily the goal of tango. The kind of satisfaction tanguero/as seek might be better described as deep connection or transcendence—the sharing of one’s loneliness in the arms of another soul who also recognizes the pain of the human condition—which translates to fun (albeit of a different kind) for many tango dancers.

Which makes you squirm: staring someone in the eyes or hugging a stranger?

A tango dance is essentially a three-minute hug. If being very close to strangers (we’re talking chest-to-chest and cheek-to-cheek kind of close) freaks you out, then you might steer clear of tango. On the other hand, a mental health professional might prescribe tango as a means of facing your fears of intimacy. Despite their physical proximity, tango dancers don’t look each other in the eyes and often find the prospect of doing so terrifying. Salsa dancers, however, who might shy away from such extended body contact, stare each other down for minutes at a time.

How much time and money are you willing to invest in learning to dance?

You can be out enjoying dancing salsa after just a few hours of instruction. Of course, additional study can increase your skill and pleasure significantly, but you can expect a rapid return on a relatively low investment of time. In contrast, tango will require several months, if not years, of study before you can expect to enjoy a night out dancing at a milonga. If you can sustain your study and practice, you will likely be rewarded by deep and long-lasting gratification.

Are you motivated by long-term challenges?

Time and again, I have heard people who speak multiple languages and have earned several postgraduate degrees declare that learning tango is by far the most challenging thing they have ever done. The complexity of tango vocabulary and technique often attracts the overeducated, nerdy, and those who get off on debating how many sacadas (thirty-six? seventy-two?) are possible in tango. Even the social custom of dancing a whole tanda (set) of three-four tango songs with the same parson reflects the longer-term commitment required in tango. Commitment in salsa is shorter—a single song with each partner is the norm.

Are you seeking to deeper your connection to a pan-Latino community?

The term “salsa” to refer to Caribbean dance music gained currency in the 1970s as part of a Latino pride movement rising out of New York and spreading throughout Latin America. Salsa is still strongly connected to Latino ethnic pride and enables many Latinos, especially those living away from their homelands, to negotiate between a national and pan-Latino identity. Tango, on the other hand, is so strongly rooted in its Argentine and Uruguayan heritage that it rarely serves as a means of affirming a generalized Latino ethnic identity.

Do you identify as African, African-American, or Black?

Salsa is based on a blend of Afro-Cuban and African-American music, so it has Africa pumping through its history from both roots of its family tree. Salsa dance celebrates Africanist aesthetics in, for example, its bent limbs, grounded movement, playful segmentation of hips and torso, and asymmetry. Afro-descended people around the world are drawn to salsa dance and music, and find an affirmation of their cultural heritage in its communities. In contrast, very few black people dance tango (despite the fact that it also has African roots), perhaps in part because Argentina has such a small population of Afro-Argentines.

Author Juliet McMains enjoying salsa dancing at the Orlando Salsa Congress.

Photo by Irina Gavrilovich.

Maria Morales and Cecil Crawford salsa dancing at Mambo Pica Pica in Seattle.

Photo by Ron Espina

Author Juliet McMains and Milton Azevedo dancing tango at Tango Berretín in Portland.

Photo by Yuriy Dybskiy

Author Juliet McMains in a meditative tango at Seattle Tango Magic Festival.

Photo by Kagan Photography

Are you a European immigrant living in the United States?

Tango was born from the melancholy and longing for a lost homeland experienced by thousands of European immigrants to Argentina in the early twentieth century. Tango in the twenty-first century continues to draw disproportionate numbers of European immigrants living in exile into its fold.

Is being part of queer-identified dance community important to you?

Salsa music was popular at gay clubs long before salsa became a mainstream social activity, and the commercial salsa dance industry now accepts a wide range of gender expressions on the dance floor. But there are very few explicitly queer salsa events. Queer tango, on the other hand, has been steadily growing since the first queer tango festival in Hamburg, Germany in 2000. Many cities throughout the world, including Buenos Aires, regularly host queer milongas and sponsor queer tango festivals.

Do you want your dancing hobby to double as your workout?

If you want to get your cardio on the dance floor, salsa is your dance. Anticipating a deep sweat, many dancers bring a change of shirt (or three) to dances and keep towels in their back pockets to wipe dripping brows. Tango requires refined body control and can be athletic at the high level, but you are not going to burn nearly as many calories at a milonga as you will at a salsa social.

Are you over the age of 35?

Although you can find dancers of all ages enjoying both dances, the median age of dancers at most salsa events is significantly younger than at most tango events. Salsa is usually more athletic and vigorous, attracting youth who have the stamina for its fast turns and acrobatic dips. Tango often takes a more mature practitioner to appreciate its subtlety and fineness.

How would you describe your formal dress preference: elegant or hip?

Tango fashion is elegant—suit jackets, vests, French-cuffed shirts for men, and silky dresses for women. Salsa fashion trends more towards younger chic—designer jeans and pointed leather shoes for men, and tight tops open at the midriff for women. In both dances, women show a lot of skin, although in tango they showcase the back and ankles whereas salsa clothing calls attention to the belly and hips.

Do you have a shoe fetish?

If you answered yes, particularly if you are a woman (or a man who enjoys wearing high heels or admiring women in high heels), then tango is your dance. Most tangueras have a collection of tango heels of various colors, brands, and fabrics that could rival that of Imelda Marcos. On just the first shelf of my tango shoe closet rests: Dalmatian-print Comme Il Fauts with red tips, gold glitter Neo Tangos, coral satin Soy Portenas, gold and white sling back Bandoleras, snake-skin Mr. Tangos (in sensible 6.5 cm heels), green and silver soft leather Alma Tango Shoes, and a turquoise pair of flat Taconeando slippers. Tangueros too have dozens of choices when it comes to flashy tango shoes, 2×4 and Fabio Shoes offering some of the favorite designs for men.

Malbec or Corona?

In general, both salsa and tango dancers consume less alcohol than nightclub dancers. Not only do salsero/as and tanguero/as need to keep their balance and coordination well-tuned, but they get their high from dancing itself, rather than from drugs. However, both tango and salsa dancers will often loosen up with a drink or two. Salsa dancers favor beer since it helps to quench their thirst during vigorous physical activity, and tango dancers enjoy sipping Malbec, another one of Argentina’s most successful exports.

Still uncertain whether tango or salsa is the right dance for you? Sign up for a class in both! Some serious dance addicts split their time between salsa clubs and milongas, unable to resist the seductions each dance has to offer.

Featured Image Credit: Dance. CC0 via Pixabay

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Persecuted Christians in America

Are Christians persecuted in America? For most of us this seems like a preposterous question; a question that could only be asked by someone ginning up anger with ulterior motives. No doubt some leaders do intentionally foster this persecution narrative for their own purposes, and it’s easy to dismiss the rhetoric as hyperbole or demagoguery, yet there are conservative Christians all across the country who genuinely believe they experience such persecution.

Those Christians comprise a core constituency, driving efforts to expand religious exemptions to government policies and civil rights laws (to protect themselves against the perceived persecution), so it may be worth understanding how this narrative functions as part of their identity, as Christians.

We can’t overestimate the central place of persecution and martyrdom in Christianity as a whole. After all, the Savior himself was a martyr. Several of the apostles were martyred; the Old Testament/Hebrew bible tells of numerous prophets who were persecuted for speaking the truth. The New Testament warns repeatedly that those who would follow Jesus would be despised by the rest of the world.

This is, however, a prime example of how you can never understand a religious community by merely looking at its sacred texts as though they exist without interpretative frameworks. In the historic context of those New Testament warnings that all Christians would have crosses to bear, Christians were a counter-cultural minority; a sometimes illegal sect. Being “despised by the world” meant being despised by those in power for challenging their lack of justice; not being despised for trying to hold others to their own standards of morality that focus overwhelmingly on issues of sex and gender. Being despised by the world meant putting oneself at risk for persecution by siding with the persecuted.

Bible chained by Imagens Cristas. CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr.

But religious traditions are not static and the question of which faction(s) can claim to stand in the narrative space of the ‘persecuted’ is a contested matter. For the most part, modernist, mainstream versions of Christianity don’t forefront persecution but for Christians who do, it’s a powerful narrative; powerful in terms of shaping the structure and character of the Christian subculture.

Conservative Christians are committed to the idea that the degree to which they are in conflict with the larger world is a measure of the degree to which they are ‘getting it right’. If there is no persecution they must, ideologically speaking, manufacture it. Moreover, for contemporary American conservative Christians, the persecution narrative exists in the context of a broader commitment to apocalypticism, an emphasis on the culmination of history resulting from a conflict between the forces of good and evil, not as abstractions but as warring factions of human beings arrayed against each other. The combination gives us, effectively, a persecution narrative on steroids.

It seems undeniable that the next front in the culture wars is the issue of ‘conscience causes’ or religious exemptions from otherwise generally applicable laws. There were skirmishes between same-sex couples planning weddings and private business such as photographers and florists, who sought exemption from nondiscrimination laws. Under the argument that conservative Christian opponents of same sex marriage were being “persecuted” for their religion, several states explored constitutionally questionable exemption laws and beefed up religious exemption clauses in existing anti-discrimination laws. North Carolina has now passed a law that allows public officials to refuse to participate in marriages to which they are personally opposed and the Southern Baptist convention is training churches schools and other organizations in ways to maximize the so-called ministerial exemption from civil rights laws.

Conservative Christians often couple the sense that we are seeing the culmination of a conflict between good and evil, embodied as “good guys” and “bad guys,” with anticipation that the “good guys” will be persecuted (indeed, that’s how we will know they are the “good guys”). This is what is behind the escalating rhetoric about a perceived conflict between LGBT rights and “religious freedom.”

Featured image: Cross by Snapographic_com. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay. 

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