Race and Power at The New York Times
Everyone attending the long wake for high-end newspapers knows about My Times in Black and White: Race and Power at The New York Times, the new memoir-cum-indictment of racism at that paper by the late Gerald Boyd, who was fired as its managing editor in 2003 along with executive editor Howell Raines, partly for their supposed "diversity"-driven coddling of Jayson Blair, a black reporter who'd plagiarized and fabricated elements in many of his news stories.
Boyd left bitterly, protesting that although he'd never mentored Blair, whom others could and should have reined in, he was being blamed only because, as the paper's senior black editor, he embodied a Times "diversity" regimen that was detested by many whites at the paper. (It should also be said that while the Blair scandal was the immediate cause the newsroom rebellion that ousted Boyd and Raines, that rebellion was as much about both men's peremptory management style as about race.)
Let me stipulate that Boyd is right about this part of the story and that racism at the Times has often been ubiquitous and grinding, if sometimes subtle. But let me also stipulate what good journalists are supposed to remember: that there is another side of every story -- and I don't mean the nasty, Glenn Beck side, which often has nothing to do with the story at all.
The "real" other side, in this case, is that the Times' loopy "diversity" regimen of the 1990s sometimes compounded the racism it was supposed to confound. Not only racist whites detested it; so did some non-whites and white left-liberals. (It should also be said that while the Blair scandal was the immediate cause the newsroom rebellion that ousted Boyd and Raines, that rebellion was as much about both men's peremptory management style as about race.)
Acknowledging that both sides of a story's racial dimension can be true -- in this case, that both racism and its 'anti-racist' antidote at the Times could be dangerously wrong -- requires what John Keats called a "negative capability" to hold two incompatible truths in mind at the same time.
Unfortunately, that capability deserts many otherwise formidably intelligent American liberals whenever they consider anything touching on race. They tend, not surprisingly, to be liberals whose own workplaces and social lives are atypically sheltered from diversity regimens and even from black colleagues and friends.
The most absurd diversity protocols tend to be imposed by rich, white liberals such as Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. and by less-rich but penitential white southerners such as Howell Raines.
One name for the consequences is "liberal racism," and I wrote a book with that title in 1997, long before Jayson Blair was at the Times. It has a chapter, "Media Myopia," telling the other side of the story about Boyd, Raines, Sulzberger, and diversity at their paper. (Therefore, Liberal Racism cannot be mentioned by any liberal reviewer of Boyd's book).
In a review for The New York Review of Books, Russell Baker tries to adopt an agnostic, even bemused, stance toward Boyd's charges of racism and others' charges that "diversity" had run amok at his paper. Baker keeps trying to joke about the national media furor over Jayson Blair, invoking for example, "John Kenneth Galbraith's definition of a newspaper columnist as a person obliged to find significance three times a week in events of absolutely no consequence."
Baker has to keep reminding himself and the rest of us that one really can't dismiss the Blair fiasco as easily as he seems to keep wanting to do: "'Diversity' is not a subject for light amusement in America," he intones. "It is a subject that Americans take to the Supreme Court." Yet Baker seems determined to leave it right there, lifting not a finger to assess either old-fashioned racism or liberal racism at Boyd's Times.
You might think that anyone who really cared about racism would want to repair this default a bit, but when I tried to do so in The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism, some liberals, black and white, especially in New York (and especially not in Chicago) became as uncomfortable as the London left was when Orwell tried to tell the whole truth about the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. In New York, only an Orlando Patterson or some other black thinker who is unassailably but un-dogmatically liberal could say exactly what I was saying, and not be accused of lending aid and comfort to racists themselves.
Liberal Racism's chapter on "diversity" at the Times opens with a story Gay Talese told me about Gerald Boyd. It then describes some sad, silly aspects of the Times' diversity regimen. It ends by showing that the diversity obsession sometimes compromised the paper's news coverage of race.
Like this Daily News column about Raines in 1994, the chapter was an Early Warning that something was amiss. But I am white, and, in the minds of people whose negative capability collapses before race, that was that.
When Boyd read my account of the Talese story about him in early galleys of the book, he called me. I'll never forget returning his call from a pay phone at the corner of Astor Place and Broadway and hearing him threaten to summon his attorneys. "Make my day," I replied. He never did.
I've never thought of Gerald Boyd as anything less than what Baker suggests -- a tragic and therefore somewhat noble casualty of racism. But he was a casualty of both the old-fashioned, enduring kind and the liberal kind, which he detested for lowering the bar -- and, with it, whites' estimation of him -- when all he really wanted was the elementary compliment of being judged by the same standards the Times applied to whites.
Liberal racism bedeviled Boyd, as it does millions of other American blacks, until its debilitating over-solicitude became indistinguishable from what it really is: a species of racism itself. No wonder that liberals still can't talk about it.
How can a newspaper that employed Judith Miller and still employs Thomas Friedman "lower the bar" any further?
the idea that it was hard to find people of color who could match up against whites at any standard smells of racism.
The idea that it is hard to find people of color who can cross such a low threshold as set by the Times for white writers is beyond offensive. You can find drunken burglars with more integrity and more to say.
April 7, 2010 6:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, yeah. Tell it to them. But only after you've read this:
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/07/08/who_needs_the_ny_times_you_do_still/
April 7, 2010 7:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
I am just a little confused on the thrust of Jim's argument. It sounds like this. There is something about affirmative action programs that permitted the grifter Jayson Blair to be hired at the NYT. Whites who support this kind of affirmative action (as opposed to those who support affirmative action programs that hire real talent??) are liberal racists. And then he goes on to imply that Boyd was also hired by that same flawed process, and Jim tried to warn the world about this danger in 1997, that this made Boyd upset and Jim can tell us today he told Boyd "to make my day" in some kind of brave stand against liberal racism. But Boyd is also a black victim of this whole process. What is the point of all of this?
April 7, 2010 7:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
No, you've got this so wrong that I'm not even going to try to correct every way you've misread what I wrote. Once you start talking about what I "imply" -- especially when I didn't -- and then draw conclusions from that, you discourage me from even starting. Please just re-read it, slowly and carefully, and ask yourself each time whether you're characterizing what I've actually said or writing something that you feel more at home thinking that I said. The piece is pretty straightforward, and you're reading a lot of things into it that Are. Not. There.
April 7, 2010 7:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
OK I went back and read your piece two more times. It remains confusing. What struck me was your "make my day" statement that, of course, comes from Callahan holding his 357 Magnum to the head of a black felon threatening him with instant death. You quite proudly give us this anecdote on your illustrious career in combating liberal racism. Why Boyd in such inflammatory words.
In addition, I find it a little off putting to see you compare your struggle against affirmative action in the US today with George Orwell's attempts to alert the left against Stalinism in the 1940s. Isn't that just a little grandiose?
April 7, 2010 10:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
But acknowledging that both sides of a story can be true requires what John Keats called a "negative capability" to hold two contradictory truths in mind at once
I don't know exactly what Keats said but that two contradictory statements can both be true could not be it, unless Keats was taking some pretty heavy poetic license. The fundamental law of logic is the law of non contradiction: Nothing can both be and not be a certain way at the same time. So it is impossible for Johnny to both be and not be six foot tall...etc.
Perhaps what Keats meant is that there is a gray area in many cases. For example at what point is a man bald. How many hairs does he have to have to NOT be bald, and if we remove one hair, he becomes bald? This is the problem of sortals, and is dealt with in sortal logic.
Sorry Jim, I could not let that slip by without comment.
April 7, 2010 10:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
A man cannot be six feet tall and not be six feet tall, but he can be big in one context and small in another. And he can experience and perceive a diversity regimen to be just in some of its effects and unjust in others.
Because we live most of our public lives in a tumultuous public sphere, not a courtroom or social-science or philosophy seminar, not everyone one can or will weigh these dimensions in the same way and reach the same conclusion. So there will be deliberation, debate, and controversy about standards of judgment. But if the program or the shoe really starts to pinch, discolor, or otherwise fail a lot of wearers of different sizes and preferences, then the shoe designer's award-winning product will lose its acceptance by wearers and potential purchasers.
April 7, 2010 11:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
I am reminded of something the philosopher Judith Butler said regarding the dynamics of oppressed social classes attempts to undermine their oppression and achieve equality.
A fundamental factor in any oppressive regime is that the oppressor deems itself (to keep it simple) good and the oppressed as bad based on its particular criteria for division (ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc etc). Power is maintain by reinforcing these definitions in such a way that it is accepted even by the oppressed classes as 'just the way things are.'
This brings up the problem that in order for the oppressed social class to rise up and claim equality, they must first conceive that are good and worthy, deserving of this equality based on that identity. But in the process of doing so they reinforce the general view of dualistic categorization that there is indeed an innate difference between the two groups, which is what the oppressing class had maintained in order to justify their racist, sexist, etc viewpoints.
In other words, social equality is not mathematics. I am the same as you, even though I am not the same as you.
April 8, 2010 9:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
I have to ask Mr Sleeper a question: Since you are so concerned about liberal racism, and see it as such a threat to racial equality, I am curious what you think of Clarence Thomas and his visceral hostility to affirmative action? It would seem on the surface, at least, that you and he are in agreement, no?
If so, what are you suggesting when confronted by the overt racism of the tea party, or the current governor of Virginia? If we are to avoid drawing attention to it, what is it that progressives, or liberals, or whatever people are calling themselves these days, should do while living in the "tumultuous public sphere"?
April 8, 2010 10:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think you'll find the answer to your question in this link, from my post above:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1017
If everyone had to make sure that before he could take a position, he would have to look over his shoulder in several directions to make sure that nobody who's "bad" had taken the same position, no one would take a position on anything. That's what has happened in the Senate, where Republicans won't vote even for things they support, if it happens that Obama also supports them. Let's not be like that. It's fine for high school debating (and apparently for the Republican Party), but wrong for serious politics.
As to what progressives should do, they should stop recapitulating the name-calling and finger-pointing and try to find ways to draw more people who hate all that toward more affirmative positions. In some people's minds, doing that would make progressives look too weak, just as, in Malcolm X's view, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shamefully weak -- and, just as, in some progressives' minds, Obama is shamefully weak. The thing is, he won election, and you didn't, partly because he's not as progressive as you, but also partly because he understood that we have to start from where we are and not expect to leap over the barriers with moralistic exhortation alone.
April 8, 2010 11:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you for the link (which I read). But since this liberal racism idea is new for me, I have to ask one more serious question that comes to mind - what should liberals have done once it became clear that tens of thousands of blacks were purged from the voter roles in Florida before the 2000 election? I am not trying to be difficult or condescending - this seems to be a recent real life example of racism perpetrated by elected officials. And of course the consequences were devastating.
It seems to me the problem with focusing on getting beyond race is that we are constantly confronted with run of the mill racism, the ramifications of which reach far beyond the African American community. Another example that comes to mind are the predatory lending practices that were largely targeted toward minorities, which again lead to the recent economic collapse.
In all seriousness, thank you for your willingness to engage.
April 8, 2010 11:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Liberal Racism" concludes with these words about the dangers of burdening our public policies too much or for too long with color-coded, race-specific remedies:
"To watch nonwhite Americans settling down to the ordinary business of running municipalities, military units, media, manufacturing, and money markets is to watch the angels of blackness withdraw along with the demons. It is to surrender condescension along with contempt. For all of us, it is acknowledge that this country's redemption has not and will not come through making race the organizing principle of our polity and civic culture. Liberals must lead struggles against discrimination and abuse. But for those struggles to succeed, in all other endeavors liberals must let race go."
I think that the second-to-last sentence answers your question about the Florida election. If the final sentence is unclear, you'll have to read the book.
April 8, 2010 12:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you again. Perhaps I should read the book. But my sense from this and other comments seems to miss (or understate) the intentional use of racism by one of the two major political parties. There may in fact be liberal racism, but I suspect the regular version that Republicans exploit is far more damaging to our republic. But again, thanks.
April 8, 2010 1:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's from your book's Amazon excerpt, and it's brilliant. In this country, we simply can't base arguments in contemporary reality. We argue based on founding myths, we propose obsolete solutions to long-gone dilemmas, we perpetuate past and even imaginary circumstances because they both confirm our insular perceptions and worldviews, and underscore our moral rectitude. What's good for our egos, after all, must be good for the country.
For instance, one reason the Tea Party movement lacks clarity and definition is that it's diagnosed by way of fairy tales cherished by Left and Right. It's an uprising against socialist big government, it's a petty whining by coddled, privileged bourgeosie. Both camps see their myths confirmed in the phenomenon; both encase it in these limited, dated terms.
As you point out, our addiction to political and social fantasy destroys our ability to confront issues honestly and effectively. As many of the reponses here attest, that's unlikely to change.
April 8, 2010 10:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
OK San Fernando Curt - we are all addicted "to political and social fantasy" - if I grant you that how do reasonable people like you or Sleeper or Obama for that matter, talk to the rest of us in a constructive way? I am personally willing to give up any fantasy you wish. But I do not see how that will help bring any more civility or clarity to the overall political discussion in this country. The tea party can be described in any number of ways, but they are clearly armed and dangerous. And their violence and racism is cheered on by the conservative elite (Republicans). On the other side we have the democrats (supposedly the more "reasonable" or charitable participant in the discussion) who are the lame ass lackies of large corporations. In this environment, what do you suggest?
April 8, 2010 10:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
No, LeftofMarx, you're utterly unwilling to give up any of your political and social fantasies.
April 8, 2010 3:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
So the increase in militias and violence against democrats that voted for health care reform has no relationship to the tea party movement? Really? This is your example of fantasy?
April 8, 2010 3:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
If the Times aspires still to be the nation's paper of record then it can't be written and reported just by one part of the culture. I'm sure we agree there. I think we also agree that ham-handed racial quotas aren't the answer. The Times simply has to do a better job a recruiting the best talent from beyond the usual sources and its editors and owners have to be open minded and patient about it.
I would certainly be frustrated if I were tarred as Jason Blair's mentor just because we have somewhat similar racial backgrounds. And I still have to wonder why the Blair scandal brought the Times' diversity program to such harsh scrutiny when nobody said, after Stephen Glass, "hey, maybe the New Republic shouldn't be open only to well-connected Ivy leaguers who charm Marty Peretz."
The current financial circumstances of media companies is going to make this much worse. The industry, especially at a high level, will be open only to people whose parents can see them through the unpaid internships and the early years of low paying jobs.
April 8, 2010 12:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Once you start unpacking different positions, you get to sort out the details of each and EVALUATE these on their merits. Let us take the oppositional stances of the Libertarian/Liberal.
At a superficial level (say the teabagger level) It seems that Libertarian type teabaggers advocate for so-called "small government--and the reason given often enough to qualify as the "standard reason" is that government is by nature intrusive and Lockean Liberalism (at least according to some interpretations) deems intrusion into a person's life to be a diminishment of that person's natural right to "freedom". The Liberal view on the other hand does not consider intrusion of the state into people's lives inherently contrary to any natural rights, but on the contrary believes that intrusion is necessary in order to maintain a just system. So for example Ralws goes along with Locke for the most part in valuing individual freedom, but demands that inequalities should only be tolerated if they are for the benefit of all: A recipe for a redistributive scheme.
Now Sleeper and all you disparagers of "dualistic thinking" might say “see here is an example of contradictory views both having meritorious points so that they are both True. Dualism is thrown out the window!
Nothing can be further from the truth. It is intellectual laziness that would tempt someone to draw such a conclusion.
To begin with, Libertarians and Liberals have a DIFFERENT views of the Social Contract, the former not envisioning the state to have any right to insure social equality while Liberals have a more robust view of the obligations/rights of the state.
Who is right? Well obviously Libertarians have a point in that blind redistributive practices are unjust inasmuch they infringe on a person’s right to their own property /wealth and also in that it does not countenance that some people who wind up poor do so not because of "bad luck" but because of willful slothfulness so that they certainly do not deserve to benefit from a redistribution scheme.
Liberals have a point in that (as an example) the kid that grew up in a ghetto in a dysfunctional family starts out disadvantaged by no fault of her own and is worthy of help from the government. Nay it is under the Pursuit of Happiness clause that the government has a DUTY to intervene.
So now it seems that what appeared to be a direct contradiction (small government versus more expansive government) is really not a contradiction at all if you bother to unpack the ridiculous oversimplifications that is inherent in the “Small Government/ Nanny State” dichotomy of the teabaggers.
All this to say that the Law of Non Contradiction is NEVER EVER violated in Reality, and anyone who says it is, is (as Aristotle so famously pointed out) contradicting themselves by by the mere uttering of such a thing.
April 8, 2010 2:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Just for you, Andrew, I've changed the word "contradictory" to "incompatible," in order to avoid any...um,... "ambiguity." But perhaps I should have followed Isaiah Berlin and used? "incommensurable? Then again,I think he was talking about principles or values, not truths....
(Under my breath, I'm saying, "Andrew, Give me a break." Keats wrote that a person with negative capability "is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." According to the Wikipedia entry, he believed that "great people (especially poets) have the ability to accept that not everything can be resolved." That's what I'm getting at here. You cannot import logic into reasoning about race.
April 8, 2010 2:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
I was reluctant to comment and my first instinct was to let it go, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that it is an important point especially when we deal in the so-called "social sciences".
G W Bush famously said that some people (I think he meant Liberals) are guilty of "the soft bigotry of low expectations" and I think that that is in the ballpark of what people call Liberal Racism.
That attitude in itself has its own dynamics. For example one could argue that because many African Americans come from disadvantaged backgrounds we should--in some cases--not hold them accountable to the same standards we might apply to a person with a privileged background. That would be a case of Liberal something or other but not Liberal Racism per se.
An argument can be made that from a broader historical perspective it makes sense. We would not expect a teenager who grew up in a terrible environment to be--somehow--miraculously up to speed on all the social nuances that a kid who had her own private tutors as she was growing up has had.
To call it "racism" is really inaccurate. It can be argues that it might be more aptly called a form of realism or maybe “historical accommodationism”.
On the other hand, if we have lower expectations from someone we might be stifling their growth. They might (as is all-too human) take the opportunity to slack off.
The point is that neither point of view has anything to do with racism liberal or otherwise.
Let us reserve the label "racism" as those acts which intentionally aim at putting down or impairing a person of another race from succeeding in life in one way or another.
April 8, 2010 3:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, I don't think we can reduce the definition to cover only intention. I do think there is structural racism -- arrangements within which many well-meaning white people operate without consciously intending or even knowing about the oppression they're perpetuating by acting from what they honestly think are innocent motives and perceptions. That's a longer story.
Yes, "the soft bigotry of low expectations" was a brilliant campaign slogan for Bush, and it does describe a lot of what liberal racism entails. In the Bakke affirmative action case, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that if we ever hope to get beyond racism, we must first take more account of race, not less, meaning that we do have to color-code and calibrate some remedies racially.
For me, though -- and I say this in the intro to Liberal Racism-- the key word in Blackmun's text was "first", which does not mean "forever." Sometimes, it remains important to measure discrimination and enforce remedies against it using race as factor. In other realms, it is no longer necessary and does more harm than good - in admissions at certain colleges where admissions officers fall all over themselves to "up" the number of black and Latino kids by fudging the standards too much, only to doom those kids to the embarrassment and self-segregation that Orlando Patterson describes in the link to his name in my post above.
Sorting out when it's still necessary to lower the bar, and when, on the other hand, it's far more important to pay blacks the elementary compliment of holding them to certain basic standards, is a problem it has taken some liberals quite a few decades even to acknowledge, let alone address.
Like Blackmun, LBJ was right to say --- as you say, too, Andrew -- that it's not enough to take someone who's spent a century in shackles up to the starting line of race, remove the shackles, and then say, "Now you are free to compete on equal terms." That takes time, psychologically, and it requires remediation and other transitional aid. But it doesn't take as much time as the "racism forever" crowd on the identity politics left is invested in thinking it takes, and I wrote the book to say so before some those people could even think of acknowledging it.
April 8, 2010 4:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think when Liberals embrace the Nixonian view that "they will always need our help" they have crossed the line into real racism, yes. And why should we be surprised? Racism transcends political ideology. It is usually consciously suppressed around liberal circles because it goes counter to liberal ideals but it is there nonetheless.
April 8, 2010 9:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
By the way, regarding the "soft bigotry of low expectations," I once had a sad but true encounter with it that I described years later -- at the height of the Blair scandal -- in a column for the Hartford Courant. That column accompanies one from the Daily News that's linked in my post above. It's right there, the second of the two columns on that link. Here it is again:
http://www.jimsleeper.com/articles/signature-pieces/Howell%20Raines,%201994%20and%202003.pdf
April 9, 2010 11:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
You speak of reality. Can you show me this "Social Contract" that you speak of.
Well, of course you can't. It is mental construct, created in and through language, a bunch of signifiers with no signified in which to ground it. There is no ultimate real and true "Social Contract" upon which all individuals contemplate a social contract base their internal understanding.
As such you able to demonstrate in yourself negative capability by contemplating individual freedom to pursue self-interest as a virtue and individual sacrifice for the greater good as a virtue as well.
Once one goes down the path of looking at the power of language to create that which it names, then one can begin to see that race and gender and justice and America and Liberal and Republican and Tea Bag and etc etc are all just mental constructs through which come understand this Reality you speak of. And the one can see that what we're all talking about isn't really Reality, but a bunch of individuals realities, where Reality emerges at that point where the majority finds consensus.
In this way we can get to that place where we are all equal, but some of us are more equal than others.
April 8, 2010 3:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
There is no historical social contract, that's true. But there are contractarian views that people have (have had) and then there is legislation and that gets passed which is informed by those contractarian views.
I'm not one who thinks that views that people have are not real in some weird way. That Jefferson had certain views is part of REALITY. That he codified some of those views in the Declaration of Independence is also part of reality. So I'm not quite sure what you mean when you say views of people are somehow not real.
April 8, 2010 4:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
I can be a little hyper-poststructualist at times, but to understand my point, lets look at that most famous part of the DOI:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
And now we get to the "men." And there were some at at time who thought that this was refering to all of humankind, others only the male of the species, and still others it meant only those who were white men. And still others who saw it refering to only white men who owned property. In other words there was competing realities. (Remembering that Jefferson owned slaves).
It is in this convulence that we were able to get in a later document "free Persons . . . plus three-fifths of all other Persons . . ."
Which meant that there persons who were not free, even though "all men are created equal," so say the Creator (and of course we could spend whole lot of time talking about the various realities if we bring the participants religious views).
So we can take the hardest core white racist view that blacks are less than human, or the Nazi's view of the Jews, or...and say, okay, they weren't seeing Reality. We get everyone to agree to that. And then we can just disregard them with "he is racist," or "he is anti-semitic."
But unfortunately these extreme examples are just extensions of the process by and through which we come to understand the world, come to know it.
Going down another path, the soldier from the battlefield who wakes up in a hospital bed to discover his legs have been amputated, and declares he is no longer a man, because in his world, in his reality, a man is able to walk and fight alongside his buddies, and take care of himself.
It is as Nietzsche said, we are caught in the "prison house of language." If all we did was point out the concrete around us, "tree" "dog" "Declaration of Independence" then it would be one story. But we construe meaning, interpret, conclude, infer, and respond based on what all what sits from what is coming in to our minds, from the image of document on the table to lingering emotions from a confrontation with one's boss the previous day, to a memory (fuzzy and vague) about what one once read about that document some many years ago.
April 8, 2010 5:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Of course, I could of gone with my fav of the DOI "pursuit of Happiness." What is this Happiness, how does one pursue it. I would like to see if Jefferson would be able to say that he, in his view, had the Definitive View of What Happiness Is. And then we get the wonderful moment where your pursuit of Happiness is a barrier to my pursuit of Happiness. Both are God given rights, self-evident. Does God create a Natural Contradiction? Or is it possible that one or both of us are mistaken in what we believe our Happiness is, or what is the proper way to pursue it? But if we are wrong about that part of Reality, then what else could we be wrong with?
April 8, 2010 5:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
We are not doomed by our language as much as you suggest. Language is an organic changing phenomenon. I would be very reluctant to put limits to it a priori.
Sure ultimately meaning is reduced to idiolects and reference (as Quine says) is to some degree inscrutable. But I part way with Quine and his Continental counterparts when it is maintained that our linguistic shortcomings imply some sort of unreality of reality. The very idea that Reality is relative to the observer is absurd. What is it that we are scrutinizing if reality is relative?
April 8, 2010 10:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
It isn't that there is an unreality to reality, but acknowledging our limitations in accessing that reality and our individualization of assessing what is accessed.
If what we are dealing with is just the physical world around us, the differences were in general not be worth discussing. But when we turn our attention to dealing with how we think feel and behave in our social world, these differences are quite significant. And the issue of race and racism highlights this more than anything.
For example, you walk into meeting in a newsroom. The reporters and editors are all setting around a table. One could begin to trace the outline of everything in the room, from the table to the wastepaper basket to the people. We could name everything, and name the parts of everything, name the materials that compose each thing. But would this touch on the totality of the reality in the room?
And as you come into the room every turns to and looks at you, you look into their faces, and some look at each other. What is the reality now? Is it understood the same by everyone? And now imagine they are all white, and you are the first black reporter. What is the reality now. Is it knowable emperically? definitively? Is each individual in that room capable of understanding fully how he or she feels at that moment?
There is definitely a reality there. But it is experienced differently by each person. And it is within that experience that we live, respond feelingly, assess, and understand as to what happened. And it that experience that we carry with us, to the next experience.
April 9, 2010 8:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hey. Sleeper says he's white.
Who knew?
April 8, 2010 11:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
But let me also stipulate what good journalists are supposed to remember: that there is another side of the story.
There are sometimes more than two sides of story.
April 9, 2010 3:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
I read Russell Baker's review. And I'm sorry, Mr. Sleeper, but he seems far less dismissive of what Gerald Boyd claims about racism at The New York Times than you say he is. He seems to me to discuss the issue in the article in the style in which he has been writing, and writing well, for more than half a century--yes, with some bemusement, but also analytically, and perhaps not with the fervor that you want to see. Book reviewers should review the book that was written, not the book they would have written; reviewers of book reviews might take the same position.
April 12, 2010 9:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, please, LVLefty, don't embarrass yourself with these empty pieties. My post isn't written with any more fervor than Baker's, but Baker skates around the issue that Boyd chooses to emphasize in his review. If Baker had meant seriously to review the book that was written, he would not have brought his trademark bemusement to the issue of how Boyd assessed and responded to racism at the New York Times.
You might, while you're at it, read the link to Orlando Patterson in my post.
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