Here’s some of the input that’s been bubbling around my tired brain:
Trent Lott, and the controversy over the GOP’s assumption of the Dixiecrat’s ‘states rights’ strategy.
Acidman Mars great post on his own background and transitions on race.
The discussion of the postmodern analysis of speech quoted below.
And finally, an afternoon and evening spent judging a high school debate tournament where the two topics debated were the balance between national security and individual rights and new federal funding for mental health services.
Let me try these in some rough kind of order.
When I was a kid, I had a bunch of ‘helper parents’; adults who helped take care of me after school and who spent a bunch of energy on the slightly lost, grim young kid that I used to be. A couple of them were African-American men who worked for my father. They were rough rural men, who had come to Los Angeles from the South both for economic opportunity…for the jobs that the factories and construction projects in the booming 1960’s California offered…and for the social opportunity for their children. They told me so.
Each of them had pictures of Bobby Kennedy in their homes; some had pictures of JFK as well. But it was to Bobby that they gave a kind of masculine worship, because it was Bobby who they felt had fought for their rights and lives when the Civil Rights crises of the early 1960’s came to a head.
It was the strong hand of the Federal Government, backed by federal or federalized troops and federal law enforcement, that backed down the Bull Connors’ and that made sure the murders of Schwerner, Goodman and Cheny were an aberration, not a pattern.
This strong hand provoked a substantial response. The response was, as most human things are, driven by a complicated set of causes. One was certainly the desire of those who felt that African Americans needed to be kept segregated…from political, economic, and social equality…and did not want to be told to stop. Another was almost certainly a regional memory of the last clash between the rights of states and the powerful Federal government. And another still was probably a principled belief that the nature of the American political compact was being violated.
But when the GOP adopted the Southern Strategy, and began to wrap itself in the mantle of ‘states rights’, they were consciously appealing to voters on all three of the levels above, including the one about race just as when they ran the ‘Willie Horton’ ad, they were appealing to the fear by suburban white voters of urban black men.
So as far as Lott goes, his various statements and affiliations put him in a place where he has to actively prove he’s not racist as has, I should note, apparently his mentor Strom Thurmond, who it has been noted has black staff members and sent his children to integrated schools. Like Thurmond, Acidman has wrestled with his past beliefs and come out the other side. He can articulate the changes and take responsibility for the positions he took and the hurt he caused.
I haven’t heard anything like that from Lott.
So I’m perfectly comfortable cheering Bobby Kennedy’s memory while also remembering that I worry that the central government has too many powers, and wondering if in fact certain powers shouldn’t be devolved to lower levels of government or even toward individuals. Does this make me a racist? Nope.
Now, as noted below, I’m not uncomfortable with taking positions that are contradictory. I believe that the world is more complex than our speech about it, and that in action (in the sense of political action, or praxis) we need to acknowledge that complexity.
Part of that complexity is about the fact that we are both members of groups, and individuals, and that understanding human behavior requires that you understand behavior in both contexts. There’s a moral, action-oriented dimension to this that I’ll fold in shortly.
One point made in the quote from the post below is:

What we have then are two positions about the nature of speech. The postmodernists say: Speech is a weapon in the conflict between groups that are unequal. And that is diametrically opposed to the liberal view of speech, which says: Speech is a tool of cognition and communication for individuals who are free.

What if both of those are true?
When I was a sprout, I briefly studied physics, and had one great professor. As he tried to teach us the basics of quantum physics, one point sank in, which I’ll restate in my own words: The world is more complex than our representations, which are, by definition simplifications. Some of the simplifications about the same subject are contradictory, so that in one experiment, a photon is a wave, and in another, it is a particle. The reality is that it is something else … we use the word photon … to which we attach various models. The fact that our models are inadequate doesn’t invalidate the behavior of the real thing.
Similarly, the fact that our models of society are inadequate doesn’t invalidate people’s real behavior, and in fact, they both behave like individuals who freely make decision, and like members of groups, who are influenced by the cultural and linguistic frameworks that they operate within.
Empirically, people behave as members of groups. Advertisers use demographics for a reason. Collaborative filtering (like Amazon’s or Netflix’s recommendation engines) works for a reason…because people tend to cluster in their behavior and likes and dislikes. Why is that, if we are all Roarkian individuals who freely choose our way? We aren’t. We’re taught to be who we are, and then as conscious individuals we create ourselves with the material we’ve been given.
That’s the moral dimension. We’re dealt all the cards, and the rules of the game are set, but the hand still has to be played.
Acidman and Thurmond (Bet you never though you’d see those two names together, eh?) played their hands as free individuals and took the conscious, moral responsibility for their choices, in part by acknowledging that they had made choices.
(Haven’t seen anything like that from Lott.)
Yes, people get taught to be who they are. We’ve slacked off as parents in teaching our kids a whole lot of things. But if you want to get refreshed, go judge some high school debate (the schools in your neighborhood are always looking for judges).
I did yesterday, judging a tournament where my son debated (didn’t judge him, nor anyone from his school … that’d be cheating).
The two topics were on balancing national security and individual rights, and on whether the federal government should fund more mental health clinics.
The kids ranged from awesome (I wouldn’t want to argue with them) to struggling, with quotes from Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, and Foucault for good measure.
Listening to them, I was struck by the fact the difference between the good ones and the not-so-good ones was whether when they quoted the books, they understood what they were talking about, had some context in history for it, could tie it into a broader argument.
We’re all doing the same thing (even at the highest levels of debate), because we’re struggling to use our limited understanding and limited ability to express it to communicate with and convince each other about a damn complex and fast-changing world.
With the kids, the process is advancing so fast you can watch it, and it’s fun to watch it emerge, and that was brought home to me watching them.
Like the kids, we’re learning, and our understanding is an evolving thing.