Why Wright makes me Proud

I've finally gotten a chance to confront Obama's Wright problem full on and finally understand where Wright is coming from, what he stands for, and why he pisses people off. And I am proud to consider him an ideological ally on two basic grounds: black liberation is absolutely necessary in Wright's form and the perspective he bears on foreign policy cuts through the conservative's naive and selfish self-righteousness to find America's place in the world, not outside or above it.

To sum his ideology up in a sentence: he's a black liberationist preacher which automatically means: liberal, identity politicist, direct descendant and next generation of civil rights. The civil rights movement didn't die in 1968. Some of it went crazy with back to Africa or black separatist sentiments which often took the scars of discrimination to the point of self-exemption (I'm thinking of Farrakhan). The civil rights movement translated ideologically into liberationism, identity politics, diversity politics, etc. On the ground, it held firm in churches, community service organizations, and political advocacy. Jeremiah Wright is a key exemplar of what the civil rights movement has become today.

I stand behind the black liberation movement as a wholesome way to achieve black self-determination, pride, and solidarity without the elitist, exceptionalist, and/or confrontationality of other black power ideologies. The first key tenant, a black-centric point of view whereby events are interpreted through the lens of discrimination towards racialized people, especially blacks, not only subverts the contemporary dynamics of racial subordination, but also helps put a sense of self-worth into focus. Such a point of view doesn't say, "I am black and I get special treatment because you discriminate against me." Rather, it says, "I am black and am just as valuable a person as anyone else. I'm going to respect myself and demand the respect of others that I give to them." The second tenant facing and overcoming racial discrimination too is still necessary and relevant. Discrimination has become diluted since the civil rights era. But it is still salient and saturated, imposed through expectations, intuitions, and embittering realities. There must be a standing up and accounting for discrimination and its effects within and outside of the black community and American society as a whole. Black liberation is the black community standing up to face the effects of discrimination within itself and confronting the larger society with everyone's role in perpetuating and enforcing oppression. The key values underlying this are humanistic: that everyone has value deserving of a sacred human dignity that cannot be taken away. Social justice with this humanism means imposing obligations on the privileged to repay the debts of oppression without demoting the privileged to the level of animals - to acknowledge the crime without bestializing the criminal, something American culture has yet to accomplish.

This extends seamlessly to Wright's foreign policy and the policy of all good liberals - to respect all people and humanistically stop and correct oppressions, privileging, and exceptionalism. The history of US foreign policy is rife with exceptionalism, caretaking, and neocolonialism and Wright is correct to note that this has made us a focus of hatred and vengeance among those we've dominated. We continue to support one of the largest state sponsors of terrorism (Saudi Arabia), imposed a program knowing that it would kill millions of the most vulnerable (the Oil-for-Food program), reject any international legal responsibility, and promote economic growth with callous disregard for labor or environmental welfare. This isn't the Bush Doctrine on foreign policy. This is the American Doctrine since World War II. Kennedy and Johnson orchestrated Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs, Nixon invaded most of South America, Clinton implemented Oil-for-Food, Bush holds thousands of prisoners of war without trial or a plan for release. What do we expect the world to think of us? American has been hawkish and neoliberal in foreign policy since the end of isolationism and it's about time we joined the rest of the civilized world with a liberal foreign policy. We must allow ourselves to be held legally responsible and answerable to the rest of the world by disbanding the security counsel, allowing all of our international operatives to be triable at the Hague, to be sanctioned by the UN for violating international law. What kind of proponents of democracy and humanitarianism can we be if our every action is based on the ability to veto the democratic vote of our fellow nations, to not be beholden to the law that we helped write and hold everyone else responsible for, if we refuse to engage in any discussion with those who have extremely varying views of the world, if we feel we can do whatever we want as a country in the world. We are not the most democratic country in the world. We are its biggest hypocrites. We must commit to a sustainable development plan for the second and third worlds. We must accept environmental responsibility and sign Kyoto. We must break the exclusionary, agenda-setting practices of the G8. This is a liberal foreign policy.

Before I sign off though, I would like to make one strong caution to Wright and those like him attacking Hilary Clinton for her privilege. The last thing we need to come out of this primary contest is a split between women and African Americans ala "we've suffered more" claims. No, Clinton has never been called a "N*****." But, she has, like every other woman, been afraid to walk alone at night, had her feelings trivialized, been judged as too cold and controlling for a woman, etc. The matrices of oppression have not disappeared and they are still very much caught up in one another (infantilizing, compartmentalizing, animalizing, etc.). We cannot create a political split between oppressed groups in this country without confounding the whole liberation movement!

Survey Frustration

Alright, so I've been working with these two data sets from two surveys for about a year and a half now, pulling many, often strange correlations out of them with fairly consistent success. They've been good to me. Recently though, I decided to return to the data for multivariate analysis (looking for relationships between three or more variables) to strengthen the research for submission to a journal and have just been frustrated by inconsistencies between the two surveys.

The Surveys: With the exception of a couple questions added and a few questions reworded, the surveys are textually the same. The big difference is that the first survey group was a sample of students at a community service event while the second was via the internet, advertised on my university's homepage (of sorts). Overall, there were some demographic differences. I got a larger proportion of male respondents at the service event than the general survey (not surprising since I'm studying why men don't volunteer). Of course, the service event survey had a higher number of hours volunteering in college and the previous semester as well. However, I'm not blind to the influence of gender and previous hours because I'm studying exactly those.

Key Differences: Among all of the analyses I'm doing, the most recent and most important are also the most inconsistent. I get one thing for one survey at a certain amount of hours and another thing for the other survey at a different amount of hours. Let me be more specific.

1. In the general survey, women are significantly more likely to do more service if they've already done a lot of service while men don't change. There's no such effect in the service event survey.

2. Organizational Influences: In both surveys, organizational affiliation significantly impacted the likelihood to volunteer in the future. But which organizations and how were completely different. In the Service Event Survey, clubs, greek organizations, and university organizations all had a significant impact on the likelihood to volunteer in the future (clubs and uni orgs positive, greeks negative). Organizational affiliation also significantly impacted women but not men. In the general survey, only community volunteering agencies had a significant general effect. By gender, women in CVAs were more likely to volunteer than those who were not, while they were also significantly more likely to volunteer if they had logged a lot of hours in the last semester and were associated with clubs or religious organizations.

3. Motivations: women with little volunteering experience cite resume building/networking motivations in the service event survey. Men cite the same with mid-range volunteer experience and little recent volunteer experience in the general survey.

These are just a few of the inconsistencies that I'm not sure how to explain. There's something about the groups; whether their environment or some unknown selectivity. I can generalize some explanations, but it's just not clear.

California Allows Gay "Marriage"

I caught the NY Times' Alert on California's supreme court ruling that "marriage" cannot be defined as between merely a man and a woman. The text of the ruling (175 pages) is a bit of a morass and the key statements are on pages 10-12 (final majority rationale), 122-127 (Concurring Opinion), and 154-161 (dissenting opinion). Overall, this story is a bit overblown because California already provides all the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples without the title "marriage." However, it does rely on the weak idea that the government has no interest in preserving a legally ineffective code and/or a harmful code. I argue that the stronger defense is that the government has an interest in eliminating unjust discrimination in its legal code when the law is otherwise non-discriminatory.

Question of Law: The central question is whether the state has an interest in maintaining the titles "domestic partnership" and "marriage" in light of the fact that they are legally coextensive (having the same rights and obligations).

Majority Opinion: The state has no compelling interest in maintaining "marriage" as merely between a man and a woman for four reasons. First, excluding homosexuals from "marriage" does not protect their rights and obligations and will not change the rights and obligations of those who are marriage. I think this is a weak reason because, in reverse, there is no a priori serious interest in removing the domestic partner/marriage distinction for the same reason that both have the same rights and obligations. The other three reasons are where the crucial issues lie.

What's in a Name?: The court argues that separating "domestic partnership" and "marriage" is a separation by name only in the eyes of the legal code. In California, this is absolutely true given their Domestic Partnership Act. In effect however, such a conceptual distinction will, the majority argues, harm homosexuals and their children by maintaining a state-endorsed doubt, otherness, and second-class status on homosexual families. I completely agree with the spirit of this given how tumultuous the fight over homosexual marriage has been. Indeed, the resistance to homosexual marriage is based on a sense of exceptionalness and sanctification of heterosexual relationships that set them beyond what a homosexual relationship can ever be. The question then is whether this differentiation really gives the government an interest in preserving or removing the domestic partnership/marriage distinction.

Public Opinion and State Interests: Public sentiment is a crucial component of legal reasoning when the question at hand deals with social acceptability. In cases surrounding the death penalty and cruel and unusual punishment, there have been a number of arguments surrounding whether or not punishments are morally tasteful in the contemporary culture. Some have argued that we will become more and more humane as we "civilize" pointing to the disuse of drawing and quartering, the electric chair, and torturing. In such cases, the courts should reflect public sentiment in their ruling where constitutional law is too vague or precedent has been based on such sentiment. This reading implies that the domestic partner/marriage distinction should be maintained until American becomes more understanding and accepting of homosexual relationships. On the other hand, in the case of segregation, the courts had to contradict public opinion in the face of blatant constitutional violations. The courts had to lead society rather than vice versa. This reading implies that if the DP/M distinction leads to constitutional violations, then it must be corrected. Let's look at these and see which is the case and what it means for the homosexual marriage debate.

Conundrum in Opinion and Judicial Activism: Public sentiment was not cited as a precedent in either majority or dissenting opinion. The constitution is vague about separate but equal statuses, with the Brown v. Board decision giving us some keys to the logic behind such decisions. At present, whether there are significant illegal discriminations against domestic partners despite their legal status or because of it, is unknown to me. Legal ambiguity gives us reason to look to public opinion. However, public opinion indicates discrimination. So, we're at a crossroads in legal argumentation: the state has an interest in following public opinion given the law's ambiguity but such an opinion is clearly discriminatory. The majority opinion says that such a status will cast doubt on the dignity of such relationships and impose a second-class status on homosexual relationships, giving the state no interest in preserving the DP/M distinction. However, this is a matter of public sentiment that cannot in itself be directly influenced by eliminating the DP/M distinction. Thus, as I stated earlier, the state can have no interest in either maintaining or repealing marriage as only heterosexual. I directly disagree with the majority opinion in this.

Why "Marriage" Should be Open in CA: Where discrimination prevails in public sentiment, the law does have an interest in sanitizing itself from injustice. In the case of the judicial branch, courts have a prerogative to eliminate unjust discrimination to the extent that it does not conflict the legislatively dictated constitution and/or law. In CA, the legislature has created perfectly equal but separate classes based on an unjust popular sentiment discriminating homosexual from heterosexual couples. I say unjust because of the lack of significant empirical evidence for separating heterosexual from homosexual relationships under the law beyond public sentiment itself. As the opinion claims, there is no difference in how heterosexual and homosexual couples execute the rights and responsibilities that constitute the classification of a married couple. The judiciary does have an interest in eliminating the DP/M distinction where both are substantively the same in order to relinquish the discriminatory and defamatory nature of the distinction. In a state which legally equalizes groups in all but name, there is an imperative to unify the nomenclature if it is based on discrimination. This is not true in the case of protected group status where groups are not equal in society and extra measures must be taken to ensure and protect equality. While homosexuals deserve protected group status, such laws have not been applied to marriage as far as I know.