Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 277

Violence, racism and democracy in America: a conversation with Susan K. Smith and Bill Moyers

(Credit: AP Photo/John Locher)

Editors Note: Susan K. Smith almost didn’t make it last summer to the Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York — that historic community of adult learning to where outstanding speakers have been holding forth since its founding in l874. Because of cancelled flights she spent a long and sleepless night in an airport, finally arriving at Chautauqua, an hour from Buffalo, just in time to grab some breakfast and less than an hour’s shuteye before addressing an audience of over 2,000 people on the subject, “Grappling with the Myths of Democracy and Monotheism in a World Where Neither Exists.” It was a handful of a topic and a warm day but the audience never strayed as Smith spoke of America’s current turmoil in the context of the documents that guided its founding, in particular the Constitution and the Bible. After she called out “The Religion of Empire” and “The God of the State” the questions came fast but not furious, and lively exchanges followed.

Smith has done a lifetime of homework in American history, culture and religion. She earned her B.A. in literature at Occidental College, her master’s at Yale Divinity School (where she was the first woman president of the student body), and her doctorate at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. She’s been a minister of music and senior pastor, led outreach programs to the poor in Columbus, Ohio, and organized a multi-racial, multi-ethnic social justice organization that was recently instrumental in getting the Ohio legislature to enact a law which prevents pay lenders from charging clients exorbitant interest rates. She’s spoken on tensions between the secular and the sacred — and their sometimes coupling — at venues from Oxford University to…..well, Chautauqua, where we met. I had arranged this interview before the massacre in Las Vegas, a story still unfolding as we talked.

—Bill Moyers

Moyers: Why do you think America nurtures such violence?

Smith: I think there is a tie, a connection between violence and the desire for power. Violence is seen as some type of a badge of strength. If you can be violent physically, or if you can be violent emotionally or if you can be violent spiritually, you’re strong.

Moyers: One reason some people like football is that’s it’s authorized violence. Before the massacre in Las Vegas, I intended to talk to you about the protest of the professional football players, and especially why they took issue with the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem. You’ve done a lot of work on the myths of America — the myths of democracy. Why do you think they took the knee during the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem?

Smith: I think it’s a sign of emotional fatigue and a way to try to get people to listen to them when they say that they are tired of the racial violence that African-Americans specifically go through. You know, kneeling can be a sign of protest, but also a sign of reverence — reverence for the flag, reverence for this country, reverence for the Constitution — but protest as well because these symbols of respect have not brought respect to black people. It’s not like burning the flag. Burning the flag would’ve been a sign of disrespect. This was a sign to say, “Will you who love this country see what we’re talking about? Will you see that our people, too, have died for this country and we are still treated as second-class citizens? We respect the flag but this flag and its tenets do not respect us as a people.” I think that’s at least partly why they did it.

Moyers: You’re saying these athletes were in effect taking a knee to protest the system of racism and white supremacy that has prevailed for so long in this country.

Smith: Absolutely, right. It’s the system. It’s the system. And it was laid down in the beginning.

Moyers: Yes, you’ve said elsewhere that the system has been teaching white people how to think about black people since before the Mayflower landed, that it’s inherent in America’s DNA and therefore when it comes to race, we’ve separated ourselves from reality from the start.

Smith: Yes, it is. It is inherent. It is a culturally inherited social malady. And it goes so far back. This whole belief system of one group of people being better than or superior to another group of people goes so far back. It was written in our founding and foundational documents, sure, but it goes back even further than that — thousands of years. I’m reading a book now by Charles Dew called The Making of a Racist, and he talks about how growing up he was inculcated with the notion that white people were just better than black people just by watching daily life. Black people couldn’t use the front door. You never shook hands with a black person, and so on — of course they were inferior. See?

Moyers: I do. On Saturdays at the movies in my home town, black people had to sit in the balcony — “the crow’s nest.” They couldn’t sit at the drug store counter. Or swim in the municipal pool. Their “inferiority” was demonstrated daily. So you have suggested that white supremacy is like a mental illness — like schizophrenia.

Smith: Because I think that when people under the curse of white supremacy actually begin to believe the lie that some people are superior to others, there is a break with reality. Scientifically, the reality is that people are inherently the same. We have the same capacities, we have the same capabilities — whether or not we use them is one thing, but we have them — but because white supremacists believe white people are better, and that causes a break with reality. Those who adhere to white supremacist beliefs act in ways they would not normally not do if they were connected to the scientific and physiological reality of the basic sameness of human beings, race notwithstanding. When they do that, they do the things that you just mentioned and worse. Now, if you are a clinically diagnosed schizophrenic, you will claim and believe, for example, that you’re Julius Caesar and you’ll act like Julius Caesar. But you are not Julius Caesar. You live in a state of altered reality. If you are a white supremacist and you believe that you are superior, you will create policies and act in ways as though there is really a superior race. That’s a break with reality, in my opinion.

Moyers: You describe it as a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion and behavior — and here’s the payoff — leading to a faulty perception. So that’s one way whites came to a faulty perception of blacks.

Smith: Yes. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. And you see it in different ways and in different situations. For instance, when I was accepted at Yale Divinity School, I was working as a reporter in Texas and I told the managing editor that I was going to resign to go to seminary — and he asked where, and I said Yale. The publisher came up to me — I will never forget this — with a smirk on his face. He said, “You’re going where?” And I said, “I’m going to Yale.” He said “Oh, come on. Well, How did you get to do that? What are your grades like?” And I thought to myself — there it was. There it was right in my face — his belief that I was inferior. He was saying, “You are not good enough to go to Yale!” And the implication was that I could never have gotten in on my own. African-Americans get that all the time. It’s a break with reality. I studied very hard, I got pretty good grades, but the publisher of the paper blew me out right in the middle of the newsroom.

Moyers: Does this help explain why you have spent so much of your adult life grappling with the myths of democracy, as you did in that speech I heard last summer. You are trying to correct the faulty perception of black people by exposing the myths to scrutiny?

Smith: Absolutely. I believe in the power of words. And I said at Chautauqua that I think that America has two guiding sacred texts, the Christian Bible and the US Constitution, and within both those texts are words that should lead us to a place of community and understanding of humanity on pretty much the same level. But the words in those texts have been violated, or perhaps it is that we have ignored them, but whatever the reason, they have not been successful in bringing us to a place where we can use them to destroy racism and sexism. So “all men are created equal” does not mean what we think those words should mean. At their very inception they meant white, male, Christian property owners were created equal. These are powerful words, life-giving words, but at the time they were never meant to apply to African-Americans — or women or Native Americans, for that matter.

By the same token, the words in the Bible, which are also life-giving, are not interpreted the same way by whites and blacks, by people who study the same words but who belong to different races. I don’t remember if it was the late Strom Thurmond or the late Sen. Robert Byrd, but both were religious men and one of them was asked if he knew the Bible, and he said yes, of course. And he was asked, “Do you believe the words that say that you should love your neighbor as yourself?” And the senator answered, “Sure, I know those words, but I get to choose my neighbor.” Well, if we get to make decisions about the validity of those words being something universally applied or not, the words lose their power. The Bible is said to be “holy” but the definition of “holy” seems defined by culture — different cultures in different ways.

So I’ve come to believe we are really a polytheistic society. We have at least two different Gods — the God of the oppressed and the God of the oppressor. The God of the oppressor seems to sanction and agree with the practices of those who oppress others. This God sanctions and supports militarism, sexism, homophobia and capitalism. We also have one Bible — but at least two groups of people who interpret the same words in a radically different way. And when it comes to the Constitution, we have two groups who interpret those words in radically different ways. As for democracy, well, for me there is no such thing as the egalitarian democracy we were told about as children, where the worth of all people is respected and appreciated. That’s a myth. You know, the Pledge of Allegiance thing about “liberty and justice,” or the Declaration on equality. The white supremacist and I worship different Gods. The white supremacist’s God is okay with somebody going out on a Saturday night and lynching somebody else, then going to church on Sunday morning in a three-piece suit and giving communion. The God that my mama taught me, the God that I learned about in my Sunday School lessons, was different than the God that is evident in our society today. That God taught us to love our enemies. When my mama told me that, I would look over at the white folks on the other side and say, “How come they don’t have to do God like I have to do God?

Moyers: Let me ask you about the Declaration of Independence. As we know, it says that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and they’re endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Are those words sacred to you?

Smith: They are very sacred to me. And they’ve been sacred to black people for the longest time. It’s what has helped us to keep our sanity in our tenacious fight for justice and equality in this country. “All men are created equal” — those are words which seem crystal clear. What they say, to me, is what they mean and that’s why they’re sacred.

Moyers: But they were written by slaveholders and adopted into a Constitution also written by slaveholders that set up a government that would deny their fulfillment to black people for over 200 years.

Smith: I know that, but when we learned this stuff in school, it was not stressed that the writers of those words were slaveholders. We got the same lesson as the white kids got and nobody talked about the slavery thing and the belief that black people were inherently inferior and were not considered fully human. I mean, we heard about the 3/5 clause, but we didn’t dwell on it. Those words were given as the “gospel of American democracy,” in my opinion. So as a little girl, I grew up believing that “all men are created equal” — meant just that, that I and all people …were equal according to the Declaration of Independence! I didn’t think about black people being out of the equation or women either, for that matter.

Moyers: Or genocide against Indians.

Smith: Yes, right, right, no attention to that. But I must say, the idea that all people are created equal and we are endowed by God, the one God, the one sovereign God of everybody, with certain inalienable rights — through all the racism and all the hatred and all the horrible things that had been done to people, those words were life-giving. Believing in those words gave African-Americans the tenacity and the drive to keep on pushing for the equality those words described! In this country, where the sacred words did not match the discriminatory and oppressive actions of white Americans, those words kept us going. They were and have been as powerful as the words and stories in the Bible which tell the story of the Israelites getting their freedom from Pharaoh. It’s almost like God stepped in and, through the word in the Constitution and the Bible — in spite of those words being ignored in real life — God stepping in and giving oppressed people hope and life.

Moyers: When you talk about the “romantic idolatry of the concept of democracy” and “idolization of the Christian Bible” in discussing the myths of democracy and Christianity, doesn’t it get you into trouble?

Smith: It does. It does. These are two separate texts and I am criticizing or at least questioning their authenticity. I am talking about our Constitution and our country and our flag and all of them are sacred to Americans. In the same breath, in my work, I are talking about God and the Bible. We hold both these texts as sacred, but in my observations, that sacredness is based on myth. We worship the Bible (bibliolatry, according to the late Rev. Peter Gomes) and we worship the Constitution and the ideas both offer but we ignore them and go our own way — in spite of these texts. I was just reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who talked about how we Christians we say pious words but we don’t mean them. He says we have fallen into “pious secularism” and says that we Christians have separated themselves from God and what God means. We have put God and the words of the Bible on the periphery of our lives. So when I start talking like that about God and about religion and specifically about Christianity, people’s horns go up because they think I am disrespecting God and the Bible, when in fact, by our falling into the trap of pious secularism we have already disrespected God. But Bill, if we don’t talk about all this it and break our hypocrisy and confusion open and see why we are in such a bad state in this country, we are never going to heal. All I heard after the most recent massacre in Las Vegas and after Charlottesville, was that we have to work for reconciliation, but you can’t have reconciliation until you have truth. And the truth of the matter is that we have been mired in myth from the beginning, the Bible and the Constitution notwithstanding.

I mean, the Seventh Amendment says that we Americans are entitled to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed. We’re not supposed to be subject to excessive bail or fines imposed by the government, or “cruel and unusual punishment.” But just look at real life. So this is myth, too.

Moyers: You say that one myths posits “the separation of church and state.” Words first used by the dissenter Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, an early Baptist, back in the first half of the 17th century. You quote a letter from 1644 in which he wrote: “There should be a hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.” But you go on to point out that our Constitution did not advocate such separation and that church and state became inextricably intertwined in the early days of this century, that in effect, they were bedfellows. The church helped the state maintain the status quo and the words of Jesus were manipulated and contorted to that end.

Smith: Absolutely, that’s what I said. From the beginning church and state were intertwined. The Congress held Christian services in the Capitol on Sundays. The Supreme Court building was used to house church services on Sunday. Twelve of the original 14 states required religious tests for those seeking public office. After the Civil War, the First Congregational Church of Washington used the House of Representatives for worship. I think it was Supreme Court Justice David Brewer who said in l892: “This is a Christian nation. (The separation of church and state) was neither conceived of nor carried out.” As Howard Zinn wrote in his history, far from being left to itself, religion was imbedded into every institution of American life.

Wes Howard-Brook wrote this book Empire Baptized, in which he talks about a religion of creation, which is what Jesus would have taught us, and a religion of empire, which came into being with the Roman Empire. And he said that early Christian writers, in the process of establishing the religion of empire, almost inverted the gospel to create a religion totally antithetical to what Jesus taught. Yahweh became the God of the empire. Living in the Roman Empire, you were supposed to be loyal to the empire, to follow the dictates of the empire. Jesus was a Palestinian Jew — I get in trouble for saying that — he was not part of the Roman superior class. His way of practicing religion challenged the state. So when he taught “Our father which art in heaven,” it was in direct opposition to what the empire wanted. The empire needed for people of faith to be in agreement with the rulers, for the sake of power. So this religion that Jesus pushed, which was a religion of community and sharing all that you have and loving your enemies and your neighbor, was antithetical to all of the things that the empire pushed. That means that the merger of the empire and the church started early, even in this country. The notion of “freedom” was defined by the state and confirmed too often by the church. Clerics in the 18th and 19th century would say things like, “Where the scriptures are silent [on slavery], the Church must be silent, too…What the Scriptures have sanctioned, she does not condemn.” You could even hear them say, “If slavery was evil, Christ would have spoken against it. Since he did not, it is presumptuous for man to do so.” Check out Forrest Wood’s The Arrogance of Faith.

Moyers: And this is what you mean by a religion of empire and a god of the state?

Smith: Yes, absolutely, that’s what I’m saying. The god of the state. Now, for instance, we have conservative evangelicals supporting an administration where racial hatred is being [pause] pushed — where instead of protecting individuals rights, doctrines and policies are being put in place which will further denigrate and separate people and deny them lose their rights. All of that is being done with cooperation of many “good” Christians, evangelical and nonevangelical. I think capitalism is in the midst of all of it, so many people wanting profit, seeking profit. Greed has taken over. The state is greedy and these churches are greedy as well. And so the church and the state are working together at the expense of what Jesus called “the least of these.”

Moyers: What do you make of this: Since the violence in Charlottesville, when Trump said there were some fine people among those militant whites, some fine people “on both sides,” including, we can presume, the storm troopers who marched through town threatening Jews, not a single white member of Trump’s council of evangelicals has resigned — all right wing Christians, Ralph Reed, Falwell Jr. others. Not one.

Smith: I think it represents the fact that white people and black people are taught from the beginning to buy into the white supremacist ethos. Maybe underneath we have a veneer of civility and “goodness” but at the heart of what we have all been taught, is the belief that black people are bad and that white people are superior, the very thing that made white pastors say during the civil rights movement, “If you support civil rights, then your very salvation is threatened” — that belief undergirds much of what we still do and say. These people advising Trump think they are in line with Jesus. They think God sanctions Trump and them. And they can remain quiet because they believe that Trump is carrying out, even enforcing, the law of God.

Moyers: 81 percent of evangelical voters last year supported Trump. And he is delivering on his promises to them. This is a man who is clearly bigoted. He spews hate. He hurls racist taunts. He demeans Mexicans and Muslims. He and his family are grifters for whom too much is never enough. He cheats his contractors. He never stops lying. He degrades women. He threatens. The filmmaker Ken Burns asked, “What is it you see in Donald Trump that reminds you of Jesus?” Yet these right-wing evangelicals have become his most ardent advocates.

Smith: That’s because their Jesus is different than the Jesus I’m talking about. Their Jesus is, remember, the same Jesus that would have been okay with white people lynching people on a Saturday night and going to church on a Sunday morning. Their Jesus would be the Jesus that would be okay with ushers meeting people of color at the door of their church and keeping them out. Their Jesus would be the one that would be okay with telling Gandhi that he could not come into their church because he was a brown person. Their Jesus is different than my Jesus, or the Jesus that I write about. That’s why I believe that we are a polytheistic society. In their minds they think they are doing the will of God. So when a white supremacist Christian calls on the Lord Jesus, it always makes me cringe because I know that’s not the Jesus that I was taught. But they think God is okay with that.

Moyers: So we create God in our image?

Smith: Absolutely. That’s exactly what we do. We create God in our image.

Moyers: I imagine you’ve read Carolyn Dupont’s book  Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement. It tells of sermons preached in white churches during the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement back in the 1950s and ‘60s. One pastor is quoted saying, “God Himself established segregation to spare whites from contamination to blacks and any attempts to destroy those God-given distinctions opposes God’s plan.”

Smith: That’s exactly it.

Moyers: Has Donald Trump’s behavior in some paradoxical — even perverse — way finally forced us to bring the historic reality out in the open? Are we stripping the lie from the past? Peeling away the mythology looking at our history without blinking? Trump as the incarnation of all that was denied may be calling out the alternative.

Smith: I think we’re looking at our racist past with honest eyes, even though our truth is ugly. I think that what he has done is gotten right into that, the core of it, and is pulling it to the surface. Before Trump, I could walk around and make myself believe that I was in a pretty safe place to live despite the difference in races around me. But now I walk around and sense the distrust, and I find myself looking at white people and wondering, “Are you one of them? What do you really think about me? “ I’m always testing the danger level. Before it was kind of hidden but now it’s coming more and more up to the surface. In my neighborhood about two months ago, there was a guy driving around — I’d never seen this before in my neighborhood — very slowly with a confederate flag on his truck. And he was just driving and looking and leering at people. It was very frightening. It’s frightening because it feels that we people of color are not even close to having any protection.

Moyers: How much can we attribute this current backlash to the fact that we had for eight years the first black president of the United States? I know many white people reacted with disbelief after he was elected and then re-elected. How much do you think this current savage backlash embodied in Trump is because of Obama’s presidency?

Smith: I think much of it is. I call this the third deconstruction. You know that after the Civil War there was Reconstruction, and then there was the deconstruction of reconstruction, so you had the Jim Crow laws, convict leasing, lynching. White folks were so angry they did everything they could to undo the gains African-Americans had made. They were determined to make sure they stayed in power. There has always been a fight to maintain white male hegemony. They never believed freed black folks were equal to whites and were worthy of freedom. So I think what has happened is, we’re seeing a repeat of this deconstruction after the third reconstruction under Obama. Yes, Barack Obama made it into the White House and for a minute people were saying we had entered a post-racial America. I thought, “How can you be post-racial and you’ve never dealt with the racial pathology of our nation?” But people were thinking that because they had voted for a black man, it was done, it was done. But we have yet to get to the rotted out core of America which is racism. It never went away. So now, it’s OK to be “honest.” Millions of whites are angry. And their anger has been manipulated. It has been exploited so that now masses of them push back against the gains that happened under Obama. They know now they have to work to keep white people in power. By the year 2043 or around that time — I’ve heard different dates — a report said that American whites will no longer be the majority in this country. The first time I read that I thought, “Oh, we’re in trouble.” Now comes the backlash. The backlash says, “You are not equal and you will not be equal and we will make sure that you are not equal.” That’s the message. The sad thing is that poor white people are as much a victim of white supremacy as are black people, and as the economy has changed this has become more and more evident. Yet the Bible is still being pimped by politicians to keep the myth in place and power in the hands of the few.

(To explore these topics further we recommend Myriam Renaud’s “Progressives: To Take Back the White House, Love Your White Evangelical Neighbors” and Richard Rosengarten’s response “Progressives, Evangelicals, and Presidential Politics: What Love Has, and Hasn’t, Got To Do With It.”)

Bronies, the adult male fandom for “My Little Pony,” might be the best male-led nerd group for women

(Credit: Shutterstock/Sertaa)

Bronies. We know them as the perhaps endearing, perhaps extremely creepy adult men who adore the children’s TV show “My Little Pony.” This weekend, they will join families in theaters to watch the newly released “My Little Pony: The Movie,” and among their ranks, there will be women — women who also call themselves “bronies.”

When the documentary “Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony” came out in 2012, it only spotlighted male “My Little Pony” fans (the one main female fan in the movie appeared alongside her boyfriend, whom she met at an MLP fan meetup). Bronies were bros — it’s in the name — but more ladies are joining the brony ranks year over year.

Turns out, this predominantly male realm stands out as the most female-friendly in all of nerd-dom.

“Within our group, I would have to estimate females represent about 10 to 20 percent,” said Bill Crumlic, the 52-year-old media representative for Meetup group Bronies NYC, which has over 1,000 members. (A theater in Hackettstown, NJ even asked Crumlic if he knew any brony groups in its area who might want “a special showing” there.) “As far as why female membership is growing, I would attribute it to the open minds of the membership and the firm belief in equality that is inherent in most people.”

That sounds like a particularly optimistic viewpoint, but a female member of the group echoed the sentiment. “Compar[ed] to other events or conventions I have gone to, bronies are more respectful to females, [e]specially if they are in cosplay [dressed up as a character in the show],” said Janelle Olmeda, a 29-year-old Bronies NYC co-organizer. “Sometimes at anime conventions and such, females get more harassed and hit on because of their outfits.” And we all know what happened to women succeeding in white man’s nerd world during Gamergate.

The difference between bronies and their other nerdy brothers lies in their ethos. Alex Davidson, 27, lives in New York and has been “heavily involved with the [MLP] fandom for over five years.” What he loves about it is its “accepting nature” and the creativity of others in the fandom. “Bronies are an incredibly creative group. I’d say the art and the creativity is what keeps me here year after year.”

Olmeda’s sentiments on the culture are similar. “I consider myself a brony because I enjoy not only the show but what the show brings out in people,” she said. “Bronies definitely give out friendship and kindness . . .  You can go to events and conventions of MLP and find nothing but bronies behaving well, respecting others . . . all while enjoying being together to partake in these events.”

“Lizard,” a 25-year-old man who lives in Indiana and asked me to refer to him by the name he uses in the brony community, said he started to like the show because “cuteness was essentially absent from my life . . . just enjoying something that was totally alien to my demographic was the draw.”

The 2012 brony documentary depicted men who flocked to the show because it served as a venue for them to embrace their “girlier” interests and tendencies. We live in a society with segregated male and female values (slowly in the process of breaking down), where men are meant to be strong and stoic while women value sensitivity and tender friendships. “My Little Pony” acts as an outlet for men who believe in expressing those so-called feminine values.

Of course, concerns are inevitable when it comes to a group of men who idolize animals that look and act like little girls. A progressive mother I spoke to, who has a preteen daughter, was horrified when she learned the meaning of “brony.” Another woman I talked to about bronies, in her mid-20s, said there is good reason for skepticism and horror, revealing a side of brony culture that smacks of pedophilia and bestiality. She explained that among bronies, there were those drawn by sexual fantasy — those who wanted to be with the ponies. A quick internet search on the subject will lead you straight to MLP-style butt plugs, fleshlights and an MLP plush toy with a “hole in her butt that you can stick your penis in.”

Chris*, who used to work in a professional setting with brony clients, countered that the sex-motivated brony represents a “niche group and common misconception.” Turns out, they are a niche group, and those I spoke to are involved in sexual relationships with adult humans. Some enjoy MLP-based erotica; others opt for role-play. Like the overall brony population, they are both men and women. JP, a 33-year-old male fan of the show from Florida, put it simply, in describing the presence of “clop fiction,” aka MLP erotica: “Just look up rule 34.”

“Apple Trainer,” a 28-year-old Indiana man who one identified as a brony, said he knows of people who have purchased MLP-themed sex toys. He has some female brony friends, and they’re “more into it” than he is, including their participation in the kink dichotomy of ponies (“people in the community that enjoy being treated as a pony”) and handlers (“people that take care of, train, clean, etc. the ponies”) — a relationship that resembles that of a submissive and a dominant, involving two consenting adults.

As for Lizard, his route to MLP kink was through his former girlfriend. She was “already into hentai, so as she got into [MLP] we role-played as the characters, and eventually I was looking at the smut same as her.” Lizard also mentioned a masturbation session he indulged in with a plushie.

Female bronies (also known as “pegasisters,” though most seem to prefer the term brony) appear to have a strong standing in all parts of the brony community. “Since the majority is male, female content creators and cosplayers tend to attract followers easier,” explained Lizard. “I’m sure the attention is a positive for some and negative for others.”

Lizard, who has heard women talk of being bothered “while cosplaying at some cons,” said he hasn’t heard about this happening at brony events. Furthermore, he suggested that women are accepted into brony fandoms because their presence can help fight negative brony stereotypes, like those expressed by that concerned mother of a preteen girl.

“As I’m recalling, male bronies get pretty excited that there is a female, because if she’s into this she is cool, more understanding,” said Olmeda. She described feeling equal to men in the community, but noted that female bronies overall are less committed. “A few I’ve known had to stop coming because of work or they got into other things,” she said. “I have to say male bronies are pretty dedicated to this.”

And of course, some bronies are just looking for love. “The straight, male bronies usually are very nice because they look to date me,” said Monica Charles, 28, another Bronies NYC member.

While brony culture outdoes other predominantly male fandoms in its treatment of women, there’s still a ways to go. “We skew toward the nerdy side of things, which generally means that we’re mostly men, but that’s not to say that we don’t welcome women into the group as well,” said Davidson. “It’s something that I’d like to see balance out a bit more in the future.”

*Named changed

Are self-driving cars the future of mobility for disabled people?

FILE - In this May 13, 2015, file photo, Google's new self-driving prototype car is presented during a demonstration at the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif. While self-driving cars of tomorrow already are being tested on public roads, newly released safety data support the cautionary view that the technology has many miles to go. That doesn’t mean relief is decades away. It’s possible that within a few years, mainstream cars will drive themselves reliably - on routes they have mastered, in weather they can handle. And with a person ready to grab the wheel.(AP Photo/Tony Avelar, File) (Credit: AP)

Self-driving cars could revolutionize how disabled people get around their communities and even travel far from home. People who can’t see well or with physical or mental difficulties that prevent them from driving safely often rely on others – or local government or nonprofit agencies – to help them get around.

Autonomous vehicle technology on its own is not enough to help these people become more independent, but simultaneous advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence can enable these vehicles to understand spoken instructions, observe nearby surroundings and communicate with people. Together, these technologies can provide independent mobility with practical assistance that is specialized for each user’s abilities and needs.

A lot of the necessary technology already exists, at least in preliminary forms. Google has asked a blind person to test its autonomous vehicles. And Microsoft recently released an app called “Seeing AI” that helps visually impaired people better sense and understand the world around them. “Seeing AI” uses machine learning, natural language processing and computer vision to understand the world and describe it in words to the user.

In the lab I run at Texas A&M, along with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, we are developing protocols and algorithms for people with and without disabilities and autonomous vehicles to communicate with each other in words, sound and on electronic displays. Our self-driving shuttle has given rides to 124 people, totaling 60 miles of travel. We are finding that this type of service would be more helpful than current transportation options for disabled people.

Paratransit today

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, all public transit agencies must offer transportation services to people with physical handicaps, visual or mental conditions or injuries that prevent them from driving on their own. In most communities, this type of transport, typically called “paratransit,” is sort of like an extra-helpful taxi service run by public transit. Riders make reservations in advance for rides to, say, grocery stores and medical appointments. The vehicles are usually wheelchair-accessible and are driven by trained operators who can help riders board, find seats and get off at the right stop.

Like taxis, paratransit can be costly. A Government Accountability Office report from 2012 provides the only reliable nationwide estimates. Those numbers suggest that per trip, paratransit costs three to four times what mass transit costs. And the costs are increasing, as are the number of people needing to use paratransit. At the same time, federal, state and local funding for transit authorities has stagnated.

In an attempt to meet some of the demand, many communities have reduced the geographic areas where paratransit is available and asked disabled people to use mass transit when possible. Other places have experimented with on-demand ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft. But in many cases the drivers are not trained to help disabled people, and the vehicles are not usually wheelchair-accessible or otherwise suitable for certain riders.

A possible solution

Autonomous shuttles, like the one we’re testing on the Texas A&M campus, can be a solution for these problems of access and funding. We envision a fully integrated system in which users can connect to the dispatching system and create profiles that include information on their disabilities and communications preferences as well as any particular frequent destinations for trips (like a home address or a doctor’s office).

Then, when a rider requests a shuttle, the system would dispatch a vehicle that has any particular equipment the rider needs, like a wheelchair ramp or extra room, for instance, to allow a service dog to travel.

When the shuttle arrives to pick up the rider, it could scan the area with lasers, cameras and radar to create a 3-D map of the area, merging those data with traffic and geographic information from various online sources like Google Maps and Waze. Based on all of those data, it would determine an appropriate boarding spot, identifying curb cuts that let wheelchairs and walkers pass easily as well as noting potential obstacles, like trash cans out for collection. The vehicle could even send a message to the rider’s smartphone to indicate where it’s waiting, and use facial recognition to identify the correct rider before allowing the person to ride.

During boarding, the ride and when the rider reached the destination, the vehicle could communicate any relevant information – such as estimated arrival time or details about detours – by interacting with the rider as appropriate and listening to the responses, or by displaying text on a screen and accepting typed input. That would allow the rider and the shuttle to interact no matter what the passenger’s abilities or limitations might be.

In our lab we are exploring various elements of rider-assistance systems, including automated wheelchair ramps and improved seating arrangements for multiple wheelchair-using passengers. We are also studying elements that affect safety, as well as riders’ trust in the vehicles. For example, we are currently developing machine-learning algorithms that behave like good human drivers do, mimicking how humans respond to unforeseen circumstances.

Self-driving cars present fundamentally new ways to think about transportation and accessibility. They have the potential to change neighborhoods and individuals’ lives – including people who are disabled and often both literally and figuratively left behind. With proper planning and research, autonomous vehicles can provide even more people with significantly more independence in their lives.

What I learned when I became a bureaucrat

(Credit: Getty Images)

It is not a compliment to be called a bureaucrat. The word evokes rigidity, narrow-mindedness, insensitivity, coldness, lack of initiative, and, above all, rule-worship. These attributes are so ingrained in our collective imagination that they have become definitional. According to The New Oxford Dictionary of English, a bureaucrat is not just “an official in a government department” but, more specifically, “one perceived as being concerned with procedural correctness at the expense of people’s needs.”

To the extent that bureaucrats have unflattering characteristics, they inherit them, in large part, from the organizations to which they belong. David Foster Wallace takes himself to be speaking for “most ordinary Americans” when he writes of bureaucracies: “I hated and feared them . . . and basically regarded them as large, grinding, impersonal machines—that is, they seemed rigidly literal and rule-bound the same way machines are, and just about as dumb.” He goes on to describe the individuals who work in such bureaucracies, and who acquire, as if by osmosis, the characteristic traits of the organization: “My primary association with the word bureaucracy was an image of someone expressionless behind a counter, not listening to any of my questions or explanations of circumstance or misunderstanding but merely referring to some manual of impersonal regulations as he stamped my form with a number that meant I was in for some further kind of tedious, frustrating hassle or expense.”

­What brings together most critics of bureaucracy, besides the indignation that they voice, is the standpoint from which they write: that of clients. What these critics typically leave out, however, is the other side of the story—the viewpoint of the bureaucrats around whom the drama also unfolds. We know that clients frequently experience bureaucracies as slow, unresponsive, demeaning, and arbitrary—but what do such bureaucracies look like from within, from the standpoint of those who stand behind the expressionless masks and who are so often reduced to lifeless caricatures?

This question takes us into the world of street-level bureaucrats—the social service workers, police officers, counselors, and educators who effectively serve as the face of the state for ordinary citizens. These bureaucrats are caught in a predicament. The proper implementation of public policy depends on their capacity to act as sensible moral agents who can interpret vague directives, strike compromises between competing values, and prioritize the allocation of scarce resources. And yet, they must operate in a working environment that is particularly challenging and that tends, over time, to erode and truncate their moral sensibilities.

In order to explore the factors that lead to this predicament and the remedies that can be offered to it, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork by volunteering as a receptionist at the Norville Community Development Initiative, an antipoverty agency in a large city in the northeastern United States (I have altered the name of the agency and of the city in which it is located, and I use pseudonyms to protect the confidentiality of staff members). As a publicly funded non-profit, the agency assists low-income clients in applying for a wide range of public services, such as food stamps, public housing, fuel assistance, earned income tax credit, and Head Start.

My experience there offers a portrait of bureaucratic life that is much more fluid, flexible, and open to contingency than one might expect. Take the rule-bound, mechanistic simile that Wallace offers—that of bureaucracy as an orderly collection of moving parts that operate in a cold, repetitive, and unthinking fashion—and contrast it with the impression that emerges from the following account, which draws on my first set of field notes.

* * *

It was my first day on the job at the agency, and the task I had been given sounded simple. I was to assist the main receptionist, DeShawn, by acting as a greeter of sorts. The instructions DeShawn gave me were brief. “Say ‘Good morning, welcome to the Norville Service Center, do you have an appointment?’ If they do, check with whom; ask them to fill an intake form; and escort them inside, to the other waiting room. Then, walk over to the cubicle area, and inform the case manager that his or her clients have arrived. If they do not have an appointment yet, have them speak to me and I’ll schedule something for them.”

At 9 am, the first clients started walking in. I rehearsed my routine, and everything went well. But the first glitch occurred soon enough: a woman came in with a question I couldn’t answer. I attempted to direct her to DeShawn, but he was on the phone with someone else. Before I could decide what to do, two other clients had entered the office and were trying to make eye contact with me. One of them handed me a letter, and said “John told me to come back with this, it’s urgent; I need to speak to him.” The other asked to use the Center’s photocopying machine—“they always let me do that,” he said, pointing to DeShawn, who was still on the phone. Before I knew it, I found myself pacing back and forth between the reception area, the case managers’ offices, and the photocopying machine.

All this time, new clients kept arriving. Several clients at a time; clients with children who refused to acknowledge the invisible boundary between the reception area and the back-office; clients who spoke so loudly on their cell phones that they had to be asked to lower their voice; clients who wanted to use the fax machine; clients who wanted to use the restrooms—all of them, or so I recall, speaking to me at once. Even my co-workers started turning to me: DeShawn asked me to make photocopies and to answer the phone while he was away from his desk, others wanted me to deliver documents to various offices in the building. Somewhere along the line, as I was moving back and forth between the various clients, the phone, the fax machine, and my co-workers, trying to improvise as best as I could, I noticed that I had dropped my smile.

It was around then, too, that I came to understand the significance of a piece of information the Director of the Center had mentioned earlier that day. This was the start of “fuel assistance” season, one of the busiest times of the year, and the office had, as of that morning, stopped accepting walk-ins because case managers were already operating at full capacity. Most clients were unaware of this change, and came in without appointments, expecting to get their paperwork done. For many of them, I would later find out, this involved taking time off from work. This was the kind of day where one did not want to be a greeter.

One after another, I had to break the news to them: “I’m sorry but we can’t help you today, we’re no longer taking walk-ins. Would you like to schedule an appointment for some other day?” As my words sank in, I could see a mixture of deception and contained anger spread across their faces—torn as they were, I imagined, between the urge to vent their frustration, and the thought that, since I stood between them and the fuel they needed to make it through the cold northeastern winter, it might be better not to risk alienating me. One client—a middle-aged white man, with loose jeans covered in paint marks, an oversized jacket, and a scarred face, dragging two screaming children, one in each hand—could not contain himself. He lashed out at me, at the top of his lungs “ARE YOU SERIOUS? YOU’VE GOTTA BE FUCKIN’ KIDDIN’ ME!” I became acutely aware of the physical proximity at which he was standing, and of the absence of any protective boundary between the two of us. And I thought back to my skinny tie—a relic from two years spent working as a management consultant after college—and to how ridiculous I must have looked.

I felt gripped at the time by three competing impulses. The first was a movement of sympathy. I could understand the client’s frustration. But I did not know how to help. And what about all the others who were able to remain composed? Should their needs be ignored simply because they did not raise their voice? My second impulse was exactly opposed to the first. I felt the need to re-establish my authority, and to regain control over the situation. There were several clients in the room, and I could not let our interactions degenerate into a screaming match. Perhaps I should find a way to put the client back in his place? But I rapidly corrected myself. Surely, I thought, my job was not to discipline people.

So I gave in to the third impulse. I convinced myself that there was nothing personal in the client’s anger, and that I should continue working as if nothing had happened. I stared at him blankly, and said, “I’m sorry, but I’m just doing my job,” and moved on to the next task. I remember being shocked at hearing these words roll from my mouth, barely three hours into the job. I consoled myself by thinking that there really was nothing else I could have done.

But this certainty about my powerlessness, and the psychological relief it provided, vanished in the early afternoon. One of the case managers, Paulina, came to see me in the reception area and informed me that one of her clients had not showed up (“It happens all the time,” she explained). She told me that I should feel free to come see her if someone was here without an appointment, and if I thought they needed to meet with a case manager. Maybe she could take care of them.

“If I thought they needed to meet with a case manager”? With this conditional, I was on my way from being a mere operator to being a gatekeeper endowed with circumscribed but very real discretionary power. And I quickly discovered that I could also disguise the boundaries of my discretion by claiming, as I had done earlier in the day, that I was “just doing my job.”

Dear Elon Musk: Your dazzling Mars plan overlooks some big nontechnical hurdles

This image provided by NASA shows the planet Mars. A group of NASA-funded researchers are entering an isolated geodesic dome perched on a remote Hawaii volcano to study human behavior for future long-term space exploration, including future trips to Mars. The six crew members entered a dome structure on the Big Island's Mauna Loa Thursday, Jan. 19, 2017, and will spend eight months together in the research facility without physical contact with any other human beings. (NASA via AP) (Credit: AP)

Elon Musk has a plan, and it’s about as audacious as they come. Not content with living on our pale blue dot, Musk and his company SpaceX want to colonize Mars, fast. They say they’ll send a duo of supply ships to the red planet within five years. By 2024, they’re aiming to send the first humans. From there they have visions of building a space port, a city and, ultimately, a planet they’d like to “geoengineer” to be as welcoming as a second Earth.

If he succeeds, Musk could thoroughly transform our relationship with our solar system, inspiring a new generation of scientists and engineers along the way. But between here and success, Musk and SpaceX will need to traverse an unbelievably complex risk landscape.

Many will be technical. The rocket that’s going to take Musk’s colonizers to Mars (code named the “BFR” — no prizes for guessing what that stands for) hasn’t even been built yet. No one knows what hidden hurdles will emerge as testing begins. Musk does have a habit of successfully solving complex engineering problems though; and despite the mountainous technical challenges SpaceX faces, there’s a fair chance they’ll succeed.

As a scholar of risk innovation, what I’m not sure about is how SpaceX will handle some of the less obvious social and political hurdles they face. To give Elon Musk a bit of a head start, here are some of the obstacles I think he should have on his mission-to-Mars checklist.

Musk typically drives hard toward his goals – in this case, Mars.

AP Photo/Refugio Ruiz

Planetary protection

Imagine there was once life on Mars, but in our haste to set up shop there, we obliterate any trace of its existence. Or imagine that harmful organisms exist on Mars and spacecraft inadvertently bring them back to Earth.

These are scenarios that keep astrobiologists and planetary protection specialists awake at night. They’ve led to unbelievably stringent international policies around what can and cannot be done on government-sponsored space missions.

Yet Musk’s plans threaten to throw the rule book on planetary protection out the window. As a private company SpaceX isn’t directly bound by international planetary protection policies. And while some governments could wrap the company up in space bureaucracy, they’ll find it hard to impose the same levels of hoop-jumping that NASA missions, for instance, currently need to navigate.

It’s conceivable (but extremely unlikely) that a laissez-faire attitude toward interplanetary contamination could lead to Martian bugs invading Earth. The bigger risk is stymying our chances of ever discovering whether life existed on Mars before human beings and their grubby microbiomes get there. And the last thing Musk needs is a whole community of disgruntled astrobiologists baying for his blood as he tramples over their turf and robs them of their dreams.

Ecoterrorism

Musk’s long-term vision is to terraform Mars — reengineer our neighboring planet as “a nice place to be” — and allow humans to become a multi-planetary species. Sounds awesome — but not to everyone. I’d wager there will be some people sufficiently appalled by the idea that they decide to take illegal action to interfere with it.

Ecoterrorists claimed responsibility in 1998 for burning part of a Colorado ski resort they said threatened animal habitats.

Vail Fire Department

The mythology surrounding ecoterrorism makes it hard to pin down how much of it actually happens. But there certainly are individuals and groups like the Earth Liberation Front willing to flout the law in their quest to preserve pristine wildernesses. It’s a fair bet there will be people similarly willing to take extreme action to stop the pristine wilderness of Mars being desecrated by humans.

How this might play out is anyone’s guess, although science fiction novels like Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Mars Trilogy” give an interesting glimpse into what could transpire once we get there. More likely, SpaceX will need to be on the lookout for saboteurs crippling their operations before leaving Earth.

Space politics

Back in the days before private companies were allowed to send rockets into space, international agreements were signed that set out who could do what outside the Earth’s atmosphere. Under the United Nations Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, for instance, states agreed to explore space for the benefit of all humankind, not place weapons of mass destruction on celestial bodies and avoid harmful contamination.

That was back in 1967, four years before Elon Musk was born. With the emergence of ambitious private space companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin and others, though, who’s allowed to do what in the solar system is less clear. It’s good news for companies like SpaceX – at least in the short term. But this uncertainty is eventually going to crystallize into enforceable space policies, laws and regulations that apply to everyone. And when it does, Musk needs to make sure he’s not left out in the cold.

This is of course policy, not politics. But there are powerful players in the global space policy arena. If they’re rubbed the wrong way, it’ll be politics that determines how resulting policies affect SpaceX.

Climate change

Perhaps the biggest danger is that Musk’s vision of colonizing Mars looks too much like a disposable Earth philosophy — we’ve messed up this planet, so time to move on to the next. Of course, this idea may not factor into Musk’s motivation, but in the world of climate change mitigation and adaptation, perceptions matter. The optics of moving to a new planet to escape the mess we’ve made here is not a scenario that’s likely to win too many friends amongst those trying to ensure Earth remains habitable. And these factions wield considerable social and economic power — enough to cause problems for SpaceX if they decide to mobilize over this.

There is another risk here too, thanks to a proposed terrestrial use of SpaceX’s BFR as a hyperfast transport between cities on Earth. Musk has recently titillated tech watchers with plans to use commercial rocket flights to make any city on Earth less than an hour’s travel from any other. This is part of a larger plan to make the BFR profitable, and help cover the costs of planetary exploration. It’s a crazy idea — that just might work. But what about the environmental impact?

Even though the BFR will spew out tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the impacts may not be much greater than current global air travel (depending how many flights end up happening). And there’s always the dream of creating the fuel — methane and oxygen — using solar power and atmospheric gases. The BFR could even conceivably be carbon-neutral one day.

But at a time when humanity should be doing everything in our power to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the optics aren’t great. And this could well lead to a damaging backlash before rocket-commuting even gets off the ground.

When the USSR launched Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, it also launched the space race.

AP Photo

Inspiring — or infuriating?

Sixty years ago, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite – and changed the world. It was the dawn of the space age, forcing nations to rethink their technical education programs and inspiring a generation of scientists and engineers.

We may well be standing at a similar technological tipping point as researchers develop the vision and technologies that could launch humanity into the solar system. But for this to be a new generation’s Sputnik moment, we’ll need to be smart in navigating the many social and political hurdles between where we are now and where we could be.

These nontechnical hurdles come down to whether society writ large grants SpaceX and Elon Musk the freedom to boldly go where no one has gone before. It’s tempting to think of planetary entrepreneurialism as simply getting the technology right and finding a way to pay for it. But if enough people feel SpaceX is threatening what they value (such as the environment — here or there), or disadvantaging them in some way (for example, by allowing rich people to move to another planet and abandoning the rest of us here), they’ll make life difficult for the company.

This is where Musk and SpaceX need to be as socially adept as they are technically talented. Discounting these hidden hurdles could spell disaster for Elon Musk’s Mars in the long run. Engaging with them up front could lead to the first people living and thriving on another planet in my lifetime.

Andrew Maynard, Director, Risk Innovation Lab, Arizona State University

Blade Runner’s chillingly prescient vision of the future

(Credit: Billy Gonzalez)

Can corporations become so powerful that they dictate the way we feel? Can machines get mad – like, really mad – at their makers? Can people learn to love machines?

These are a few of the questions raised by Ridley Scott’s influential sci-fi neo-noir film “Blade Runner” (1982), which imagines a corporation whose product tests the limits of the machine-man divide.

Looking back at the original theatrical release of “Blade Runner” – just as its sequel, “Blade Runner 2049” opens in theaters – I’m struck by the original’s ambivalence about technology and its chillingly prescient vision of corporate attempts to control human feelings.

From machine killer to machine lover

Even though the film was tepidly received at the time of its release, its detractors agreed that its imagining of Los Angeles in 2019 was wonderfully atmospheric and artfully disconcerting. Looming over a dingy, rain-soaked City of Angels is Tyrell Corporation, whose namesake, Dr. Tyrell (Joe Turkel), announces, “Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell. More human than human is our motto.”

Tyrell creates robots called replicants, which are difficult to differentiate from humans. They are designed to be worker-slaves – with designations like “combat model” or “pleasure model” – and to expire after four years.

Batty (Rutger Hauer) and Pris (Darryl Hannah) are two members of a small cohort of rebelling replicants who escape their enslavement and hope to extend their lives beyond the four years allotted them by their makers. These replicant models even possess fake memories, which Tyrell implanted as a way to buffer the machine’s anxieties. Instead, the memories create a longing for an unattainable future. The machines want to be treated like people, too.

Deckard (Harrison Ford), a policeman (and maybe a replicant too), is tasked with eliminating the escaped machines. During his search, he meets a special replicant who lacks the corporate safeguard of a four-year lifespan: the beautiful Rachael (Sean Young), who shoots and kills one of her own in order to save Deckard. This opens the door for Deckard to acknowledge growing feelings towards a machine who has developed the will to live and love beyond the existence imagined for her by Tyrell Corp.

The greatest challenge to Deckard comes from combat model Batty, who has demonstrably more passion for existence than the affectless Deckard.

The film’s climax is a duel to the death between Deckard and Batty, in which Batty ends up not just sparing but saving Deckard. As Deckard watches Batty expire, he envies the replicant’s lust for life at the very moment it escapes him. Batty seems more human than the humans in this world, but Tyrell’s motto is both clue and trap.

The final scene of ‘Blade Runner.’

Deckard’s end-of-film decision to escape with Rachael defies the rules of the corporation and of society. But it’s also an acknowledgment of the successful, seamless integration of machine and human life.

“Blade Runner” imagines a world in which human machines are created to serve people, but Deckard’s interactions with these replicants reveals the thinness of the line: He goes from being on assignment as a machine killer to falling in love with a machine.

A world succumbing to machines

Today, the relationship between corporations, machines and humans defines modern life in ways that Ridley Scott – even in his wildest and most dystopic imagination – couldn’t have forecast in 1982.

In “Blade Runner,” implanted memories are propped up by coveted (but fake) family photos. Yet a world in which memory is fragile and malleable seems all too possible and familiar. Recent studies have shown that people’s memories are increasingly susceptible to being warped by social media misinformation, whether it’s stories of fake terrorist attacks or Muslims celebrating after 9/11. When this misinformation spreads on social media networks, it can create and reinforce false collective memories, fomenting a crisis of reality that can skew election results or whip up small town hysteria.

Meanwhile, Facebook has studied how it can manipulate the way its users feel – and yet over a billion people a day log on to willingly participate in its massive data collection efforts.

Our entrancement with technology might seem less dramatic than the full-blown love affair that Scott imagined, but it’s no less all-consuming. We often prioritize our smartphones over human social interactions, with millennials checking their phones over 150 times a day. In fact, even as people increasingly feel that they cannot live without their smartphones, many say that the devices are ruining their relationships.

And at a time when we’re faced with the likelihood of being unable to differentiate between what’s real and what’s fake – a world of Twitter bots and doctored photographs, trolling and faux-outrage, mechanical pets and plastic surgery – we might be well served by recalling Deckard’s first conversation upon arriving at Tyrell Corp. Spotting an owl, Deckard asks, “It’s artificial?” Rachael replies, not skipping a beat, “Of course it is.”

In “Blade Runner,” reality no longer really matters.

How much longer will it matter to us?

Does modern neuroscience help us understand behavior?

(Credit: Shutterstock/Salon)

Lately, some neuroscientists have been struggling with an identity crisis: what do we believe, and what do we want to achieve? Is it enough to study the brain’s machinery, or are we missing its larger design?

Scholars have pondered the mind since Aristotle, and scientists have studied the nervous system since the mid-1800s, but neuroscience as we recognize it today did not coalesce as a distinct study until the early 1960s. In the first ever Annual Review of Neuroscience, the editors recalled that in the years immediately after World War II, scientists felt a “growing appreciation that few things are more important than understanding how the nervous system controls behavior.” This “growing appreciation” brought together researchers scattered across many well-established fields – anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, psychology, medicine, behavior – and united them in the newly coined discipline of neuroscience.

It was clear to those researchers that studying the nervous system needed knowledge and techniques from many other disciplines. The Neuroscience Research Program at MIT, established in 1962, brought together scientists from multiple universities in an attempt to bridge neuroscience with biology, immunology, genetics, molecular biology, chemistry, and physics. The first ever Department of Neurobiology was established at Harvard in 1966 under the direction of six professors: a physician, two neurophysiologists, two neuroanatomists, and a biochemist. The first meeting of the Society for Neuroscience was held the next year, where scientists from diverse fields met to discuss and debate nervous systems and behavior, using any method they thought relevant or optimal.

These pioneers of neuroscience sought to understand the relationship between the nervous system and behavior. But what exactly is behavior? Does the nervous system actually control behavior? And when can we say that we are really “understanding” anything?

Behavioral questions

It may sound pedantic or philosophical to worry about definitions of “behavior,” “control,” and “understanding.” But for a field as young and diverse as neuroscience, dismissing these foundational discussions can cause a great deal of confusion, which in turn can bog down progress for years, if not decades. Unfortunately for today’s neuroscientists, we rarely talk about the assumptions that underlie our research.

By these definitions, we don’t currently “understand” the brain

“Understanding,” for instance, means different things to different people. For an engineer, to understand something is to be able to build it; for a physicist, to understand something is to be able to create a mathematical model that can predict it. By these definitions, we don’t currently “understand” the brain – and it’s unclear what kind of detective work might solve that mystery.

Many neuroscientists believe that the detective work consists of two main parts: describing in great detail the molecular bits and pieces of the brain, and causing a reliable change in behavior by changing something about those bits and pieces. From this perspective, behavior is an easily observable phenomena – one that can be used as a measurement.

But since the beginning of neuroscience, a vocal and persistent minority has argued that detective work of this kind, no matter how detailed, cannot bring us closer to “understanding” the relationship between the nervous system and behavior. The dominant, granular view of neuroscience contains several problematic assumptions about behavior, the dissenters say, in an argument most recently made earlier this year by John Krakauer, Asif Ghazanfar, Alex Gomez-Marin, Malcolm MacIver, and David Poeppel in a paper called “Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias.”

These authors argue that if we want to understand the relationship between brains and behavior, it would clearly be better to study both: the parts of nervous systems as well as the natural behaviors that shaped its evolution and development – the behaviors that helped make the nervous system in the first place. Most neuroscience today places a premium on extremely detailed recordings of the smaller components of nervous systems, such as tagging proteins on cell membranes to better photograph single neurons, or building tiny assemblies of metal pins to measure the electrical activity in a region of the brain. Unfortunately, as the authors note, much less value has been placed on the rigorous and detailed study of behavior. Why is there so little interest in nurturing the study of behavior, and such intense interest in detailing the nervous system?

The authors suspect a twofold problem: relationships are difficult to study, and technology seems more rewarding in the short term. Understanding the relationship between nervous systems and behavior is undeniably hard. Progress can be slow and challenging to evaluate. On the other hand, exciting advanced technology has made it possible to study the components of brains in unprecedented detail. Technical advances come quickly and with clear, data-based measurements, but their methods often favor simple, data-driven verification questions over knotty, more conceptual questions about behavior.

Individual or even groups of neurons cannot see, feel, think, or behave, and yet neuroscientists often talk about them as if they can

These speedy, seemingly clear rewards have convinced many neuroscientists that studying the properties and interactions of individual cells is the best path towards understanding the nervous system and behavior. But just because certain neurons in a monkey’s brain change their electrical activity when that monkey sees a face doesn’t mean that those neurons can “recognize” a face. They are just one tiny part of the process that the whole monkey uses to recognize faces. In other words, scientists can sometimes forget that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” and that a brain is just part of a human being, not unlike a stomach or a heart. Individual or even groups of neurons cannot see, feel, think, or behave, and yet neuroscientists often talk about them as if they can.

The pull of ‘publish or perish’

The siren call of technology isn’t the only reason why this narrow view of neuroscience seems attractive to researchers. Society, too, creates incentives for researchers to limit their projects. For one, a great deal of money is tied up in developing the technology behind neuroscience tools, and money makes experiments go round. Scientists understandably can’t ignore the politics around money.

Additionally, neuroscience PhD programs have too often become a race to publish as many times as possible, in all the “correct” places and with all the “right” people. In order to survive in academia, neuroscientists often have to pass the particular muster of journal editors, who frequently reject behavioral studies for “not having enough neuro,” as Ghazanfar said in a recent interview, “as if every paper needs to be a methodological decathlon in order to be considered important.”

Addressing these points will require a great deal of change, both in science and in society, and history again provides some clues for how we might be better detectives.

Body as a sensor

In 1973, psychologist and control theory engineer William T. Powers argued that instead of assuming that brains control behavior based on sensory stimuli, it makes more sense to assume that brains adapt behavior to control what stimuli it gets from the world. Put another way, if we consider “the body” (a.k.a. all of our parts that aren’t the nervous system) to be the brain’s sensors, then “the behavior” that we see is the brain moving its sensors so that it can get the input it wants.

For instance, when we wish to cross the street, we turn our head so that our eyes can look for any oncoming traffic; when we’re in a conversation with a quiet talker, we lean our bodies in and direct our ears towards the speaker to better hear their words. In all these situations, we have a goal, and we move our bodies in order to get the sensory input that lets us achieve our goal.

Powers’ framework grants that there can be movements without a purpose, but for a movement to be considered behavior it must have a purpose. Thus if we want to study behavior, we need a way to distinguish between behavior and all possible movements. How can we do this?

A new way forward

This is where the study of animals, moving freely in their ecological niches, becomes crucial to validate any neuroscientific study of behavior. While we can safely assume that one of the goals of every living creature is to not die, we know from our own experience as humans that survival alone is hardly satisfying: we want, in addition to not dying, to feel safe, healthy, productive, fulfilled.

Why do factors as subjective as our preferences matter in the quest to understand the nervous system? Powers emphasized that any theory or model of the nervous system must be consistent with our subjective experience of living with one. Thus, detailed descriptions of these two factors – our subjective life experiences, and the behaviors of free humans and animals – are just as important as detailed descriptions of nervous systems, because they teach us about the goals of the brain under our study, and thus allow us to pick out behaviors from movements.

If we are trying to understand the relationship between thing A (nervous systems) and thing B (behavior), we would do well to study both things with close detail.

Neuroscience isn’t entirely lacking in the kind of detective work that Powers advocates. Neurologist Oliver Sacks’ meticulous notes on his neurological patients’ case histories revealed extraordinary insights into some of the most puzzling aspects of brain function, such as proprioception (knowing where your body parts are without having to look at them), aphasia (the inability to comprehend or express thoughts through language), and blindsight (the ability to respond to visual stimuli without consciously seeing). Many of Sacks’ patients were referred to him after they were deemed too difficult to diagnose by other methods. Another example is zoologist Konrad Lorenz’s extensive use of photography and film to research the evolution of behavior. He used these films not just for analyzing behavior but also to share his observations more fully while teaching or giving talks; if a picture is worth a thousand words, a film can convey things that escape verbal description.

More of this kind of detective work is urgently needed. The stark differences in how different neuroscientists understand behavior causes enormous confusion and frustration, especially among incoming PhD students. In the current training of neuroscientists, most PhD programs do not discuss the history or goals of modern academic neuroscience. But if we are trying to understand the relationship between thing A (nervous systems) and thing B (behavior), we would do well to study both things with close detail. And if we don’t want to be hindered by potentially false assumptions, we need to be clear about proposed relationships, because that very first assumption will decide exactly what we label as “data” versus “noise”.

Lessons from history

The past shows us where neuroscience has been and how we can move forward. We first assumed that nervous systems control behavior, then realized flaws in that framework. If the nervous system is just driving behavior, the way a person can drive a car, then studying the parts of the person won’t explain how the car works, or why the person is driving in a particular direction. This idea also recalls the endlessly regressive homunculus argument, where the hard questions – “how does this behavior happen?” – are delayed by creating one black box inside another, one mystery just beyond the grasp of the one right in front of you.

Perhaps it’s time for neuroscience to try out a new paradigm. Even if there is no doubt that neuroscience needs sophisticated technological tools, we need equally sophisticated models of how the many parts of nervous systems work together to make our movements serve specific goals. Already, we can sometimes become lost in the struggle to interpret the sea of data delivered by our tools. It’s time to turn toward new models of the nervous system based on an adjusted set of assumptions.

Peer Commentary

We asked other neuroscientists to respond with some commentary to this article. In a very small way, this is how peer-review works in scientific journals. We wanted to give you a taste of what scientific discussion looks like! If you want to know more, feel free to contact the scientists directly via Twitter.

Benjamin Bell: This is a really interesting walk through the foundations of neuroscience. But I somewhat disagree with one of the authors’ main assertions, where they claim that researchers focus primarily on the molecular components of the nervous system at the cost of a careful analysis of behavior.

In my experience, much of modern neuroscience actually works off the behavioral model: researchers carefully study a specific behavior in a model animal and then perturb certain regions or components of its brain and observe the effects on behavior. Just for an example, basically the entire field of sleep research is based on this model.

Still, I do agree with the authors that this still takes the shape of a reductionist approach. In order to really understand the relationships between neural mechanisms and behavior, we have to carefully examine only one small aspect of a behavior in the lab. But in nature, this action would be many times more complex and involve much more functionality than we are equipped to measure currently. I fully agree that reductionism in the lab is losing the forest for the trees, but I suspect in order to truly understand the brain, we will need to first break it down into the smallest of cause-effect components possible, and only afterwards we can begin to understand the larger frameworks of the mind.

Kim responds: We’re not saying manipulating the brain is not useful, only that we should know what our assumptions are.

We are concerned with the assumption that changes in behavior are caused by perturbing certain regions/components of the brain, which implies that the brain doesn’t respond and change when an external force perturbs it. This perspective on behavior doesn’t account for what we know about the evolution and development of the nervous system, in particular phenomena such as neuroplasticity.

The current “behavioral” methods try to assign “function” to circuits by assuming those circuits are fixed and rigid, but this is actually a very important difference between nervous systems and computers, our current favorite analogy for the brain. We now know that nervous systems change and adapt their own structure and physiology all the time. If our goal is to understand behavior by manipulating neural circuits, we need to be much more strict about the assumptions underlying our manipulations, because we aren’t the only ones making manipulations — the nervous system is also making manipulations on itself.

I completely agree that if “behavior” means any movement output of the organism, studying behavior in the wild would be entirely intractable. We believe that behaviors are movements that serve a purpose for the organism, and the defining aspect of a behavior is not the specific motor output but the goal.

My wife left me for Italy: Still married, but an ocean apart

(Credit: Salon/Ilana Lidagoster)

My wife has left me. But some of my family and friends probably suspect she’s “left me left me.” As in abandoned. And they’re all mistaken.

Rather, Elvira, my wife of 38 years, has decided to live elsewhere most of the year. Some 4,387 miles away from our apartment in Forest Hills, Queens. In Southern Italy, in fact.

So now ours is a long-distance marriage. We’re each living without the other for the first time since we were both still single. We’d never spent more than about a week apart since our wedding in 1979.

It all started because of our daughter, Caroline, who was pursuing a career as an opera singer. In 2011, she stayed on the island of Ischia, in Italy, to train for three weeks. The next year, she spent three weeks in Rome and Florence to explore opportunities to perform with local opera companies. On both trips, Elvira accompanied her.

The following year, Caroline made up her mind to become a chef instead. Elvira rented an apartment in Florence for two months as Caroline attended culinary school.

With each of those three visits abroad, I was sorrier and sorrier to see Elvira go, and missed her more and more. But I was comforted knowing she would be back home soon.

Except then Caroline decided to live in Italy year-round. She discovered an ancient hillside town, Guardia Sanframondi, about 50 miles north of Naples, and bought herself a house.

And soon Elvira – then, like me, in her early 60s – told me that she, too, wished to relocate there. After living in New York City her entire life, she wanted to slow down. And as a third-generation Italian-American, she already gravitated to everything Italian. Now she expressed her wish to shop for a house in the same town.

It would be, she said, for both of us.

Even so, a certain suspicion dawned on me. Did Elvira intend gradually to part company with me, but without coming right out and saying so? Was I witnessing my wife making a slow-motion getaway? Soon my suspicion hardened into paranoia.

For months I left my concerns unspoken. But on Elvira’s next visit home, I finally spoke up. I asked her the question I’d dreaded asking in case she gave me the answer I dreaded hearing.

“Are you leaving me?” I asked.

“Of course not,” she said.

“But you’re moving to Italy without me.”

“And eventually you’ll join me there. You’ll love it.”

Make no mistake: I’ve never had the least desire to live anywhere but New York City, much less outside the United States. But Elvira kept telling me how much she loved Guardia – the leisurely tempo, the neighborliness, the stars visible in the night sky. She sounded enchanted.

But after living with Elvira for decades, I finally realized just how central she was to my life, how much I needed and depended on her. I saw with sudden clarity that I owed her much more than she would ever owe me, and that her happiness meant everything to me, more than my own.

So I said okay. Our plan was for me to join Elvira in Italy more or less full-time within about five years. My rationale for getting the house was simple: if that’s what she wanted, then that’s what I wanted, too.

Almost two years ago, Elvira found a house she liked, and together we decided to buy it. And last December, I took my first trip to Italy and stayed with her in our house for three weeks.

Will I like this place, I asked myself. Will I ever feel at home here?

Each morning we walked uphill along stone streets to a little café for capuccini and cornetti. Elvira introduced me to the many people she had come to know, natives and expatriates alike. We visited our daughter and her boyfriend. All of us watched Christmas movies together over a homemade dinner. We ushered in the new year sipping prosecco on a terrace as fireworks blazed over a nearby church. In our new house, we looked out from our top floor at dawn, the sun casting a golden radiance over the vineyards and olive fields in the valley below and onto the mountains beyond.

Better still, Elvira and I came together as if never apart. We kidded each other just as much as we always had. We communicated in the code only she and I know. I took every opportunity to hold her hand and nuzzle her neck and tell her how much I loved being there with her. And she told me the same.

And what a town! If anyone ever hurried, I must have missed it. Shopkeepers chatted with us at length. Strangers greeted us on the street in the morning and the evening. I saw Elvira happy there, and how her new community had already made her its own. I saw her enchanted in person.

So, I thought, this is how our life here could be. I could do this. I could definitely do this.

Then I returned to Forest Hills. And after Elvira visited me in the spring for six weeks, I faced eight months before I would see her again, by far our longest absence from each other. And that’s when, for the first time, our new arrangement as husband and wife really hit home for me.

The love of my life, my one and only, was living a new life now, with new friends, in a new town, all on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. She’ll be away on her next birthday and on Thanksgiving. Now that we’re separated, I realize as never before just how inseparable we’ve become – how we’ve done most everything together, living together, working together, creating and raising our children together.

More and more now I miss Elvira. I talk to the photos of her I see come through on Facebook, saying, “Hello, Elvira.” I listen to the voicemail she left me from the airport years ago, just to hear her leaving me a message. As I sleep, I leave the TV on QVC, her favorite shopping channel. I miss everything about her – her face, her voice, the taste of the skin on her neck.

But what I miss most is all the little stuff I always took for granted. Wishing her good morning and good night. Telling her about something that happened five minutes after it happened and getting her immediate reaction. Asking her what she feels like having for dinner, hearing whatever news she cares to share, even our occasional arguments. Such little moments add up to a life lived together.

Without Elvira around I feel incomplete. My loneliness echoes the life I led before we met. It’s vaguely akin to an early stage of grief, except for the single major difference that I know I will see her again. Every once in a while, I feel hurt that she chose to go. Maybe she could have waited until I could go with her.

She’s feeling the same pangs. She tells me how she misses the opportunity to talk with me at random about our kids, and strolling through town with me, hand in hand. She tells me how she wishes I could be there to share experiences with her, joining her for dinner with our daughter and her new husband or riding through a vineyard at night with all the stars out and a hilltop castle looming in the background.

But now five years feels like a really long time to wait. Too long. Being apart is hardly perfect. It’s nowhere near normal. In fact, it’s turned out to be hard, harder than I imagined, and it threatens to get harder still. We stay in touch via phone and email and Facebook. But it’s now a virtual marriage. She’s left me, but without actually leaving me. And so a certain question eats at me. Will we slowly become strangers to each other?

To compensate for her absence, I look to occupy the time I would otherwise spend with her. I have my work, of course, all I can handle. But I also connect more with family, friends, colleagues, clients, neighbors – anyone, really. We go out for lunch or play tennis or talk shop on the phone. Elvira, too, is managing fine, getting together with new friends, trying new restaurants, discovering surrounding towns. But for me, none of those activities mask the ever-crystallizing reality that my wife is no longer here with me nor I there with her.

Then again, living alone offers me a lot I like. Unlimited bathroom access, for example. The opportunity to nap in the living room at will and go unshaven with impunity. I buy only the food I want to eat and watch only what I want on TV.

For that matter, too, Elvira and I are both lucky in having a talent for solitude. She learned growing up as the only child of a single mother to entertain herself for hours on end. I’m much the same, both by nature and by lifelong practice as a writer. Neither of us requires heavy doses of exposure to other people, including each other. We were always good at being alone together.

And because we’ve spent so much time together – I’m 65, she’s 63 – we’re both now better equipped to spend so much time on different continents.

This December I’ll again stay with Elvira in our house in Italy for about three weeks. We’ll look eight months older to each other and maybe act eight months older, too. But starting next year, I’ll try to visit her at least twice a year and she’ll do the same, possibly for longer stretches. For the next five years, we’ll each lead a double life, one together and the other apart. And all the while, I’ll somehow manage to be happy here knowing she’s happy there.

After all, we’re still married, and she’s waiting for me. In due course, I’ll ease out of my current life alone into a new one back with her. Just as she left me gradually, so we’ll reunite gradually. Eventually I’ll be old and she’ll be old. And we’ll stay put in that little Italian town happy with all the time we still have left together.

Why do smart people do foolish things?

Person about to step on banana peel (Credit: Andrei Shumskiy via Shutterstock)

We all probably know someone who is intelligent, but does surprisingly stupid things.  My family delights in pointing out times when I (a professor) make really dumb mistakes.  What does it mean to be smart or intelligent?  Our everyday use of the term is meant to describe someone who is knowledgeable and makes wise decisions, but this definition is at odds with how intelligence is traditionally measured.  The most widely known measure of intelligence is the intelligence quotient, more commonly known as the IQ test, which includes visuospatial puzzles, math problems, pattern recognition, vocabulary questions, and visual searches.

The advantages of being intelligent are undeniable.  Intelligent people are more likely to get better grades and go farther in school. They are more likely to be successful at work. And they are less likely to get into trouble (e.g., commit crimes) as adolescents.  Given all the advantages of intelligence, though, you may be surprised to learn that it does not predict other life outcomes, such as well-being.  You might imagine that doing well in school or at work might lead to greater life satisfaction, but several large scale studies have failed to find evidence that IQ impacts life satisfaction or longevity.  Grossman and his colleagues argue that most intelligence tests fail to capture real-world decision-making and our ability to interact well with others.  This is, in other words, perhaps why “smart” people, do “dumb” things.

The ability to think critically, on the other hand, has been associated with wellness and longevity. Though often confused with intelligence, critical thinking is not intelligence.  Critical thinking is a collection of cognitive skills that allow us to think rationally in a goal-orientated fashion, and a disposition to use those skills when appropriate.  Critical thinkers are amiable skeptics.  They are flexible thinkers who require evidence to support their beliefs and recognize fallacious attempts to persuade them.  Critical thinking means overcoming all sorts of cognitive biases (e.g., hindsight bias, confirmation bias, etc.).

Critical thinking predicts a wide range of life events.  In a series of studies, conducted in the United States and abroad, my colleagues and I have found that critical thinkers experience fewer bad things in life.  We asked people to complete an inventory of life events and take a critical thinking assessment (the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment). The critical thinking assessment measures 5 components of critical thinking skills including verbal reasoning, argument analysis, hypothesis testing, probability and uncertainty, decision-making, and problem-solving.  The inventory of negative life events captures different domains of life such as academic (e.g., I forgot about an exam), health (e.g., I contracted a sexually transmitted infection because I did not wear a condom), legal (e.g., I was arrested for driving under the influence), interpersonal (e.g., I cheated on my romantic partner who I had been with for over a year), financial (e.g., I have over $5000 of credit card debt), etc.  Repeatedly, we found that critical thinkers experience fewer negative life events. This is an important finding because there is plenty of evidence that critical thinking can be taught and improved.

Is it better to be a critical thinker or to be intelligent? My latest researchpitted critical thinking and intelligence against each other to see which was associated with fewer negative life events. People who were strong on either intelligence or critical thinking experienced fewer negative events, but critical thinkers did better.

Intelligence and improving intelligence are hot topics that receive a lot of attention.  It is time for critical thinking to receive a little more of that attention. Keith Stanovich wrote an entire book about What Intelligence Tests Miss.  Reasoning and rationality more closely resemble what we mean when we say a person is smart than spatial skills and math ability. Furthermore, improving intelligence is difficult.  Intelligence is largely determined by genetics. Critical thinking, though, can improve with training and the benefits have been shown to persist over time.  Anyone can improve their critical thinking skills: Doing so, we can say with certainty, is a smart thing to do.

Forget About “Latino” — why I’m all for “Latinx,” and you should be, too

A Gay Pride Parade in Caracas, Venezuela, July 12, 2015. (Credit: Getty/Federico Parra)

I grew up speaking Spanish as my first language. English is my primary language now, but I’m still fluent in Spanish—even if I sometimes mix up what gendered article accompanies inanimate objects.

Don’t judge me; it’s tough. Spanish has no gender-neutral “the” or “a.” I can’t always remember a table is feminine (la mesa) or that a pencil is masculine (el lápiz). I do always remember one usage, though: Masculine is usually the default for people. But should it be?

In response to the male-dominant Spanish language, feminist and queer Spanish speakers of Latin American descent devised a gender-neutral alternative to “Latino,” which is masculine in nature. And that’s “Latinx” (pronounced La-tEEn-ex).

The term is helpful when referring to a group of Latinxs, its plural partner. A group of women are Latinas, but as soon as a man joins them, the group becomes Latinos. Not anymore—thanks to “Latinx.”

A Google Trends search shows that the term has appeared online since at least 2004, the earliest you can explore Google archives. However, “Latinx” didn’t really take off until last year. The trends show the word being used in the United States, Canada, Brazil and our neighbors down under (New Zealand and Australia).

Now, the word can be found sprinkled among academia and more progressive media outlets geared toward Latinxs — like Colorlines, Remezcla and mitú. Even the New York Times couldn’t resist using it (sparingly, of course). It shouldn’t be long until the Associated Press has something to say, too.

But Latinx is more than a middle finger to the patriarchy; it’s a word that demands inclusion, an addition to the lexicon that makes an unfamiliar person ask, “What’s that?” That’s sort of the point, says Roy Pérez, an associate professor of English and American Ethnic Studies at Willamette University in Oregon.

“If nothing else, the term Latinx has revealed gender to be much more complicated than some people would like to think or accept,” he wrote in an email.

You see, Latinx isn’t trying to replace Latino entirely. Men should still refer to themselves that way because it’s correct. Women (like myself) should feel proud to call themselves Latinas. We are one of a kind, after all.

The term is most revolutionary, however, to those who don’t identify as Latino or Latina—people who live outside the gender binary. They might identify as gender nonconforming (or GNC, an umbrella term for people who don’t follow societal norms around the gender they were assigned at birth), non-binary (a term for all genders that aren’t male or female), gender queer (similar to GNC folks who don’t adhere to the male/female binary) or gender fluid (refers to people whose gender changes; they might identify as female today and male or non-binary tomorrow). They’d likely receive the Mx. title in the Times and use they/them pronouns.

That includes people like Araguaney Da Silva, a Venezuelan race and sexuality educator. They’re 29 and have used they/them pronouns for a little less than a decade. But they always knew that’s how they felt; Da Silva just didn’t know genderqueer was a possible identity. Now, they can add Latinx as an identity, too.

Before the word came along, Da Silva’s favored identifier was “Venezuelan,” which doesn’t suggest any gender and is geographically accurate, anyway. Da Silva still uses Venezuelan but can also use Latinx instead of avoiding that identity altogether.

I can understand some hesitance to the term “Latinx.” After all, “x” isn’t a letter widely used in the Spanish language, so it might not feel organic rolling off the tongue. Da Silva understands that, but it is what it is. They now use “Latinx” when they speak and they write. “When I adopted it, it didn’t roll off the tongue for me,” they said, “but it was an intentional alignment with that word because I was like, ‘Oh, cool!’ Because this is a word we’re going to be using to respect gender diversity.”

Pérez doesn’t sympathize much with the pronunciation excuse. He wrote, via email, that that argument is “disingenuous” and even insulting. “We learn to pronounce new things all the time,” Pérez went on. “I think this complaint assumes that ‘Latinx’ came exclusively from English-speaking queers—a claim that isn’t true and just erases Latin American and immigrant queers. It also suggests that the allegedly unpronounceable ‘Latinx’ is being imposed on Spanish-speaking people unwillingly.”

Plus, who knows if Latinx is here to stay. Before its rise, there were other attempts to make the plural “Latinos” more inclusive, including the terms “Latino/a” and “Latin@.” Those are easy to write, but ineffective when spoken. A couple of Swarthmore College students tried to get “Latine” to take off in 2015. (It certainly rolls off the tongue easier.) They compare it to estudiante, the Spanish word for student, which isn’t attached to any gender.

Da Silva doesn’t care what term people use — Latinx, Latine or whatever comes next — just so long as there is a word for them.