R.O.I.

One of the words that I've read (and heard) over and over again since Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's accusations against Judge Brett Kavanaugh went public is "misogyny." I've heard quite a bit of the term in reference to the recent hearings in the Senate, when Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh directly addressed the accusations made by/against them, respectively.

One of the things that may be driving this is the observation, that I've heard frequently recently, the the Trump Administration, the Republican party and movement Conservatism more broadly do not specifically need Judge Kavanaugh. There are any number of other judges out there who would be considered qualified for an Associate Justice position on the Supreme Court and would agree with the idea that the intent of the authors of the Constitution just happens to neatly dovetail with the exact priorities of modern Conservatism.

While I'm personally dubious that if we were talking about a Dr. Kavanaugh making accusations against Judge Ford, the outcome would be any different, I understand the sentiment. Dr. Ford has accused Judge Kavanaugh of sexual assault against her, and there is a remarkably intense closing of the ranks around someone who is effectively expendable.

And what this points to is the degree to which people in this process appear to be very much invested in the person of Judge Kavanaugh as an individual, rather than a replaceable cog in a machine. This is perhaps due to the fact that the mid-term Congressional elections are quickly approaching, and if the Republicans lose their majority in the Senate, it's unlikely that there will be enough conservative Democrats to allow President Trump to push through another judge as conservative as Kavanaugh.

(In this sense it reminds me of the bit from Matthew 26: "Aware of this, Jesus asked, 'Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful deed to Me. The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have Me. By pouring this perfume on Me, she has prepared My body for burial'." Conservatives may feel that there will always be injustices against women they can stand up for, but the ability to lock in a fifth Conservative seat on the Supreme Court is fleeting.)

In my opinion, Judge Kavanaugh is deemed worth more than Dr. Ford not because their differing sexes, but because of the high level of investment that has been made in Judge Kavanaugh; having him not seated to the bench represents a loss of that investment. As I see it, there is less sexism in throwing women under the bus to protect (over)investments that American society has made in men than there is in the general refusal to similarly invest more in women than society is willing to lose. There is less a general animosity directed at women in play here than there is a lack of confidence that women will repay the investments made in them in the same way that men will.

Which is sexism, pure and simple. But, as a sexism built around a refusal to invest in women to the point where other considerations become secondary is different than one built around animus. Therefore, perhaps the reason the problem still exists is that we haven't been treating the correct symptoms.

Q

Went out with my SLR for the first time in a long while. Indulged in a little found object photography.

Maybe I'm Crazy

At work today, I waded into a discussion of whether the word "Crazy" was, in and of itself, "ableist" and disrespectful to the mentally ill. Not in the sense of calling somebody crazy, but in the connotation of "very," as in "crazy fast" or "crazy busy."

The battle lines quickly formed, and the rhetoric started flying fast and thick. One person noted:

I think when we remember that human beings, feelings, and experiences are at the root of most culture change initiatives, it becomes easier to understand why what can feel like an overwhelming amount of "policing" is in fact a form of showing respect and attempted empathy for a perspective we may never have experienced ourselves.

I find this construction (What can feel like 'X' is in fact 'Y.') interesting, because it implies that the feeling is incorrect. But why can't it be both a form of showing respect and empathy and overwhelming simultaneously? And perhaps this is part of what drives the conflict; the idea that if something feels offensive or belittling to someone, then is should be considered as such, but if the effort to combat it feels overwhelming or exhausting, that's a failure of perspective. And I think that people tend to react poorly to the feeling that they're being asked for something that isn't being reciprocated.

And, perhaps, this is why both sides so often wind up talking past one another. Each posits the benefits to itself to be worth the costs that they are asking the other side to bear, with the understanding that the cost-benefit analysis that they have arrived at is a universal one. People who feel disrespected and "othered" by certain words regard the choice to use a different term as a cheap and simple action with measurable benefits to themselves. People who feel overwhelmed at the need to remember a seemingly arbitrary set of rules regard the choice to not take offense as the same. Each regards their experience as being indicative of an objective truth of how language or human sensitivity works.

Being a Black person in a predominantly White world often left me feeling what is now described as "othered," although the term had yet to enter common usage when the phenomenon was first visited upon me. And for a time, I tried to impress upon the people around me how important it was to me that they spoke and behaved in a way that didn't so clearly remind me that I was different. But in the end, it occurred to me that I wasn't really asking them for respect. Because I didn't know what their respect actually looked like. I'd never bothered to understand how they treated the people they respected. I realized that what I was asking for was obedience. I set requirements for them, and told them that I would feel hurt if they didn't live up to them. And what I had done was, paradoxically, given up control. I'd placed my self-image in their hands and demanded that they care for it. But if I wouldn't, or couldn't, how could they? And so I stopped doing that. Not as a favor to them, but as a service to myself. Because I realized that I had a choice of two tasks. The difficult one of controlling my reactions to the words and behavior of the people around me, or the impossible one of controlling how literally everyone I interacted with dealt with me.

I'm not going to say that I'm happier now that I've released the people around me from that expectation. But I am more at ease around them, because I no longer dread them saying or doing something that will remind me of how different I am. (After all, mirrors have that part covered.) And I do feel better for that. And guess that's what I needed to understand. That letting them off the hook was not something that I was doing for them. Refusing to hold them accountable for my feeling that I didn't belong in the world I inhabited was something that I was doing for me. And it was difficult. And there are still days when I have doubts about whether or not it was the right thing to do. But I feel that I better own my self-image now than I did before. And for that, it was worth it. Can everyone do that? I don't know. I don't know if I can say how I managed it.

Blended

While I disagree with the Just-World Hypothesis (it's the Just-World Fallacy, in my estimation) I don't have anything against it as a matter of course. If people want to understand that the world is a just place, and "people get what they deserve," that's up to them. Likewise, I don't have a problem with the idea of personal responsibility. I, for my part, am a firm proponent of the idea of taking ownership of one's actions and their effects and consequences.

What I do take exception to is the careless blending of the two.

I was talking to man the other day and the subject of Nike and Colin Kaepernick came up. My interlocutor was of the opinion that if Black people objected to being universally regarded as suspect (or suspects) that we needed to take "personal responsibility" to reduce the levels of crime in our neighborhoods. (Never mind the fact that in my specific neighborhood, other Black people are rare.) I pointed out to him that the sort of collective guilt that he was proposing was, in fact, the opposite of personal responsibility. I should not, I noted, need to purchase the ability to be seen as an individual by policing the actions of some number of people who are not me. After a few minutes of amusing (if somewhat strained) mental gymnastics pressed into the service of reconciling collective condemnation with individual responsibility, he settled on accusing me of "twisting" his words, and we parted company.

I was thinking back about the conversation, and that's when it finally occurred to me that the man may have conflated ideas of a just world with an ethos of personal responsibility. The Just-World Hypothesis commonly leads to derogation of people who have undergone some harm or wrong, on the understanding that bad things do not, in really, happen to good people. If something bad happens to a person, then they must have done something "wrong" to cause it to happen. By this logic, prejudice against a group of people doesn't just happen, something must have been done to cause it. Given that it's rare for a person to believe that literally each and every Black person is guilty of some more or less serious crime (beyond the everyday lawlessness of speeding, littering and the like), there must then be something else that we are not doing, as individuals, that creates our problem. A failure to properly police one another for criminality fits the bill nicely. It allows for collective guilt to be seen as a Bad Thing that shouldn't happen to people, and at the time time can't really be countered by the subject. If the only acceptable proof that I have been living up to my responsibility to combat Black crime would be the literal scarcity or non-existence of Black crime, any instance of criminality the comes to mind is sufficient proof that I'm not doing my job, and therefore deserving of being regarded as a possible criminal myself.

In the end, I understand the rationale behind a belief that the world is just, and that personal responsibility can forestall other people's negative choices. It makes the world into a more seemingly predictable place, and allows people to credit themselves for any good fortune that may come their way. But the combination can be a nasty out of actually understanding the way the world works for others. Although I suppose that this may also be a benefit, under the right circumstances.

No Takers

So there was (note the use of the past tense) a discussion about what a sincere apology for having been abusive to women might look like, and one of the participants pondered:

I wonder if there was a hashtag for men to admit they've wronged women in the past if that would be a positive thing, or if it would be seen as an excuse because "every guy has done it."

Well it turns out, we don't have to speculate about that: such a hashtag already exists: It's hashtag IDidThat. There's also hashtag HowIWillChange.

Now, I'm not on Twitter or Facebook, so I don't actually know how this is working out over there. On Google+, while there are a few links to the BBC article on this (the one that I read which clued me into it), most of the uses of the hashtag are people referencing food they made/ate, weight loss/exercise, hairstyles and the occasional silly thing they've done. It didn't come up in the conversation being had, perhaps because the original poster locked comments after a few hours, but it sort of struck me that no-one had heard of this. Granted, I knew because I read the BBC. But perhaps that's the point - it seems to be more of a thing in Europe. Will it catch on here? Part of me says, "I doubt it."

Having a bull's-eye on your forehead is one thing. Painting it there yourself is likely quite another, and while most people don't spend their time worrying about the Internet Mobs, I suspect that they're leery of jumping out into the street and shouting to those "mobs": "Hey! Over here! Come get me!"

When it first occurred to me to search out hashtag IDidThat to see if it was going anywhere, it was a couple of days after the BBC article ran, which was nearly a year ago. When I looked again today, no one had actually used the hashtag to confess to having wronged a woman in their past. And I didn't expect that anyone would have.

Were Men Angels

We have a number of different discussion boards at work, and one of them is dominated by a handful of partisan characters who seem to spend a respectable deal of time posting various items that show their opposition in the worst possible light.

After one such post depicted the relationship between the Republican Party and American Christianity as particularly cynical, a discussion spun up over the idea that a society composed entirely of people of a consistent belief system would have no need for a government, presuming they strictly adhered to their beliefs, since there would be no interpersonal conflict between them that would ever necessitate the intervention of police or military forces, and the legislative functions of governance would be moot.

I am dubious of that interpretation of principle and religions. The world, as I understand it, in its natural state, contains perverse incentives. And while principle and religions often seek to control or ameliorate the effects of perverse incentives, they are unable to alter the world in such a way as to remove them. As an example, there is no ironclad correlation, let alone causality, between work and survival. Some people work extremely hard, yet do not survive, and others survive quite well on minimal, if any, work. The result is that there is an incentive to find ways to survive while minimizing the amount of effort expended. And while this can lead to innovation for greater efficiency, it also leads to cheating and fraud both are effective. This is simply the nature of the beast. From where I stand, the just world is a fallacy.

But I understand the attraction of seeing interpersonal conflict, at any scale, as being due to the perversity of individuals, rather than incentives. It holds out the hope that some form of broad-based unity or education could create a perfect world. It's a nice dream.

Unreversed

I am told that Ijeoma Oluo, who pops up now and again on the local NPR station's "Week In Review" show, defines racism as: "any prejudice against someone because of their race, when those views are reinforced by systems of power." The addition of "when those views are reinforced by systems of power," is somewhat important, because, for many people, it determines whether or not there is actual racism involved when the prejudice against someone is because they're White. Ms. Oluo is a proponent of a school that says since White people have "the power" in American society, a Native American with a prejudice against Whites is not racist. because of their lack of access to systems of power. The more common way of understanding it, at least in American society, is that they would be "reverse racist," working under an idea that racism has a natural direction, flowing from Whites and towards non-Whites.

My personal view simply drops the whole systems of power dynamic, and defines all prejudice against someone because of their race as racism. But still, not all racism is created equally. Where the systems of power come into play is in relevance. Anyone can be a racist, regardless of their access to systems of power. But without that access, no-one cares. Well, almost no-one. The American Right seems to have become just as brittle and hypersensitive to hints of racial animosity as the best of them. And I think that this is, in part, because the small faction of political America that can actually be described as racist and reactionary, has found a home on the Right.

Anti-White racism, whether it's relevant to Whites' life chances or not, plays into a racist fantasy of an uprising of vengeful non-Whites. The risk of such an uprising then becomes an argument for further oppression, since the potential for a bloody settling of scores (the "race war" that's always right around the corner, but never actually reality) must be defended against. And so oppressive institutions and habits can be decried as unwarranted transgressions in the past, but unfortunate necessities in the present. And for the few people who one could describe as genuinely malicious, it creates a "heads-they-win, tails-others-lose" scenario. Passivity and forgiveness in the face of oppression can be taken as acceptance, implicit or explicit; while anger and combativeness become justifications.

There are times when I understand that our current society is driven by a lesson of history that people often think has gone unlearned. If you view the colonization of the Americas as the model of what happens when one group of people moves into an area inhabited by another, persistent xenophobia makes a level of sense. If one presumes that had the Native Americans been as united in their opposition to the coming of Europeans as we understand modern xenophobes wish their groups would be, they would still own the continents and their resources, it may be rational to treat every refugee as a potential fraudster. It males sense to demand that others assimilate if you understand that, especially in North America, that the "New World" only turned out the way it did because the colonists, pioneers and settlers refused to assimilate to the cultures of the people they encountered.

And this seems like the world that we presently live in. One where supposed "systems of power" prompt the people who benefit from them to look to monocultures as less taxing than the alternatives, and therefore richer, especially when they are created by either expelling the undesirable from productive areas or forcing them to contribute more than they are remunerated. And so, perhaps, in anti-White racism, the White racist sees history mirrored back at them, only this time, they're the ones with a boot on their necks. And if the only freedom from oppression is freedom of oppression, the reflection serves their purposes, regardless of how distorted it is.

The only thing that will do in human "tribalism" is selection pressure (and even that is unlikely to be absolute). If, other things being roughly equal, societies made up of diverse members who are all free to share in the community's resources are contribute to its success manage visibly better than the alternatives, then those societies will out-compete and displace their neighbors. "Diversity," in this sense, is an adaptive advantage, rather than an obligation to be borne.

What stands in the way of this, for most societies, is a certain middling affluence. A demographic that can do as well as it feels that it can through oppressing other segments of its community will come to see diversity as a sacrifice, as the pie is not made any larger and the more equitable distribution of pieces means that those who held the largest must now make so with less. And while there are people for whom that appeals to an inner sense of justice, for those who, despite what they have, feel they are just getting by, sharing feels like a dangerous indulgence, especially when imposed on them from outside.

This where a Leftist of race relations enters the picture, in the idea that in a sufficiently wealthy (perhaps even post-scarcity) society, there would be no impulse to racism. And perhaps this is true, although I personally think that while sufficient resources may dampen the rise of racist sentiment, once the ship leave port, no amount of wealth will expunge such sentiments quickly. If the necessity of scarcity makes a virtue of exclusionism; the death of scarcity removes the need for the virtue, but virtues, once established, die hard.

But still, it's a goal worth working for; having enough affluence that success can be the only revenge necessary to exact. This would render moot the racist fantasy of racial warfare with its valiant defense against vengefulness.

Bridge Over Placid Water

Danger, James Madison, Danger!

I asked [Jeffrey] Rosen [president of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia] to imagine what Madison, the main proponent among the Founders of indirect democracy, would have made of Trump, of Trumpism, and of our coarse and frenzied political age. Rosen’s eloquent answer is contained in his essay, “Madison vs. the Mob,” which is an anchor article in this special issue on democracy in peril.
The American Crisis. The Atlantic.

Democracy is in peril, huh? So what?

I understand that this is considered somewhat sacrilegious in modern American society, but honestly, so what? American representative democracy/republicanism was conceived as a means to an end. And that end was, effectively countering some or all of the many problems that the founders of the nation perceived with the constitutional monarchy of Great Britain. And like many means to an end, representative democracy was a tool. now, some 240+ years later, it's possible that the ends have changed, and so the perception of the best tool to meet the new ends may be changing with them. So be it.

For me, the hand-wringing about "democracy in peril" presupposes that democracy has some sort of right to exist, independent of its fitness for purpose. I'm not sure that people actually understand it that way, and so it's possibly more accurate to be concerned with changes in the ends to which government is being put. But... maybe those ends aren't really changing.

There's an assumption, and one that a number of people are very much invested in, that the goal of the United States has always been to live up to the lofty ideals espoused in the Declaration of Independence; the whole "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" deal. But it doesn't take a Ph.D. in political science to understand that what tended to motivate the colonists most was their own material well-being. After all, violations of people's putative rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness were the order of the day right out of the gate. And while most people tend to take that as a reference to slavery, slaveholding was merely one aspect of it; it went far beyond the simple treating of people as property.

Perhaps what's happening, is that there is a class of people (as there has always been) who have understood that the goal of the United States was their personal material well-being. And that lofty goals and high ideals were nice, but good food and fine clothing were better. And the understanding that changes in demographics are going to mean that they cannot count on electoral dominance to privilege their interests forever has lead them to conclude that representative democracy has outlived its usefulness.

As I've noted before, democracy is a poor way of apportioning scarce resources between two mutually antagonistic groups of people. It's even worse for guaranteeing that a minority minority of the population obtains the largest portion, unless they have allies in the scheme. And if democracy is imperiled, it may be due to the fact that it is useful for lending legitimacy to whatever scheme comes after it; one that might do a better job of looking after the interests of those who feel the nation rightfully belongs, and will continue to belong, to them.

Life of Work

A group of us were discussion an old article from The Atlantic, "Rich People Are Great at Spending Money to Make Their Kids Rich, Too." Once we painfully ground past the part where people felt that they were being criticized for disposing of their own money as they saw fit, the debate moved into whether or not money actually made a difference in outcomes. Even while people prided themselves on the money they put into their children, they insisted that society was a meritocracy.

But there's a disconnect there. A society cannot simultaneously be organized around parents being able to purchase or pass along advantages to their children AND the individual merits of those same children.

So, whether there is anything wrong with passing on financial (or merely expensive) benefits or not, I shouldn't claim that "my kid was a harder worker than yours" and therefore deserving of a better outcome when the "work" involved was taking advantages of opportunities that I purchased for them. If life is unfair, then let's own up to the unfairness, or advocate for our own definition of fairness and to deprecate the other. This seems fairly straightforward to me.

But many people in the United States, in their pursuit of "meritocratic fantasies," as one person described them, tend to treat gifted capital as earned capital. And there's nothing wrong with gifting capital. They can gift their money to whomever they want. If they want to give it to their kids, fine. But then they seem reluctant to actually admit that the gift makes a difference.

American society tends to be of two minds about this sort of thing. Parents will work their butts off to provide advantages to their children, and then strenuously deny that those advantages are worth anything, and behave as though if their children had been absolutely deprived, they would have achieved the same things.

And I get it; it seems to me that a lot if it is about protecting parental pride. No one wants to be told that their children had it easy, despite the amount of work they put into making sure their children had it easy.

The United States is not a meritocracy. There is a well-known correlation between the resources a child's parents pass along to them, and where they end up. And that's fine, It's when parents deny that any such correlation exists, so that they can say that their children did it all on their own and that the "extra tutoring, classes, what ever it takes" were all just meaningless expenditures that it becomes ridiculous. People deny that the "head start" they worked so hard to provide actually made a difference, because that breaks the narrative that if one only has the right "values and culture attitude," then literally nothing else matters. And in the end, one winds up with character assassination in the service of a "just world" fallacy.

Or, perhaps one winds up with character assassination in the service of an understanding of one's own character. There's a vestige, I think, of the fabled "Protestant Work Ethic" that despises leisure and idleness, even when it's the reward of years of effort. It can, very easily I think, become a celebration of toil for the sake of toil, even though work is perhaps best understood as a means, rather than and end. And so people don't like to think that they've raised their children to be idle layabouts, even though what's the point of having enough money to last you the rest of your life, if you never take the time to enjoy life? And so people like to see a work ethic reflected in their children, even when it serves little purpose.

Summer's End

Summers in the Puget Sound area seem to come to a very abrupt halt with the end of August. The trees seem to go from brilliant green to losing their leaves very rapidly, some of them, seemingly overnight. Autumn doesn't ease in, in the way I remember it in Chicagoland. Instead, it jumps up out of nowhere.

Tension

Invisible

To begin with, it’s really hard to square humanity’s status as perhaps the only intelligent species in all of time and space with the idea that we are insignificant.
Michael W. Clune "I Don’t Believe in Aliens Anymore" The Atlantic. Wednesday 8 August, 2018

Perhaps this is strange, but I don't find it at all difficult. The Solar System contains some unknown number of what are effectively random rocks and chunks of ice. They orbit around the Sun and the various planets, and most people rarely give them a second thought. But some percentage of these extraterrestrial objects are large enough that, were one to collide with the Earth, our civilization would end in a heartbeat. And within some number of years, there would be no sign that we were ever here. And the Universe would never notice our passing.

But here's the thing it turns out that it's really difficult to pick meaningful signals out the background noise of the Universe. People understand homo sapiens to be "perhaps the only intelligent species in all of time and space," because we haven't been able to verifiably find any trace of another "intelligent" species. But until the invention of radio, anyone farther away than the Moon would have had a very difficult time detecting that humanity was even here. It's been forty-one years to the day since Voyager 1 lifted off from the surface of the Earth, and it isn't even a light-day away yet. Our ability to project the signs of our presence into the cosmos are is limited. To presume that other intelligent life forms would be visible to us, if they were out there, would also be to presume that they're better at projecting their presence than we are. I don't know that I buy that second presumption.

Collision

Penny Arcade Expo, the big computer (mainly) gaming show was in town this weekend, and I spent some time wandering around downtown Saturday morning before the show opened. At Westlake center, I came across this sight - the people from AlienWare (they may high-end gaming PCs, and are part of Dell) setting up for a gaming tournament, while the homeless people who normally stay in the park were getting their final hour or so of rest, shooting up or what have you.

It's an interesting annual collision. There are a couple of big geek events that take place at the Convention Center over holiday weekends, and as they're revving up in the morning, they encounter the homeless population of the area. Actual confrontations seem to be rare, however. The two groups do a remarkable job of ignoring one another.

Honestly Accomplished

I recounted to a friend strange instances where potential employers made offhand comments about how they could “tell” that I was a hard worker. “How would they know?” I remarked, annoyed. “I don’t even work that hard.” My friend, who is black, paused, then said, “That”—the unearned assumption that I’m a hard worker— “sounds like the kind of thing that would get you a job.”

It’s a fair point. Being in the good graces of white people helped me win plum housing deals. It helped bring me pay raises and perhaps even jobs themselves. This isn’t to say that I haven’t come by my accomplishments honestly.
Iris Kuo “The ‘Whitening’ of Asian Americans”

Ms. Kuo’s assertion that she has come by her accomplishments honestly is an interesting one, in that if delves to the heart of what I understand racism, and the accusation of racism, to be about. She goes on to say “But I do not fear for my life when the police are around. No one has ever crossed the street when I’ve approached or followed me around a store. For the most part, I do not believe I am negatively racially profiled by law enforcement, in housing opportunities or at retail stores.” I’ve had, on rare occasions, people cross the street when I’ve approached them. This is, at heart, an indication that they did not believe that I would come by accomplishments honestly; instead, I would seek to rob them of theirs; never mind that it was broad daylight. The same when people follow me around a store. The presumption is that I intend to enrich myself by theft, rather than the honest trade of money for goods. (Interestingly, you can also see a presumption of dishonesty when store clerks studiously ignore my presence. Rather than being there as an honest signal of a desire to purchase something, I am simply window shopping, with every intent on exiting empty-handed.) And while I do not routinely “fear for my life when the police are around,” I understand that they are less likely to see me as honest then they are other people, and that this is what leads to higher rates of violent encounters; the understanding that even an outwardly placid demeanor may hide malicious intent, and therefore it may be better to adopt an aggressive stance, and to shoot first and ask questions later, than to not be around long enough to be concerned with the answers.

On the broader question of policies like Affirmative Action, the assumption of dishonest accomplishment aligns more closely with Ms. Kuo’s. I have, at several points in my academic and professional life, been accused of having come by my accomplishments dishonestly, colluding with white race-traitors to achieve things that rightfully belonged to harder-working White people in exchange for emotional, and in some cases material, remuneration. The seat of the alleged dishonesty varies from person to person, but I tend to see it break down in one of two ways. Either I am capable of doing the hard work that is required for genuine success, and have simply opted for a life of ease through treachery (my own and/or that of others); or I am incapable of attaining honest accomplishment, and rely on theft from the more deserving as my only recourse. In either event, any assertion on my part that I have honestly achieved what I have through merit is usually discounted. Surely, goes the reasoning, if people like me had merit, then we would be more broadly successful.

And this is where racism parts company from simple jackassery. Any jackass can assert that a given individual is fraudulent. Many (but not all) racists assert that a person is fraudulent specifically because they depart from what they insist is true about the race to which that person belongs. (Interestingly, the people who have openly identified themselves in conversation with me as White supremacists were much more likely to concede my personal merit; I became their exception that proved their rules.) So I have been identified as a fraud by people for a failure to admit that I am no different from all of the other Black people they imagine, plagued by a laziness, ineptitude and/or mendacity that is inextricably bound up in the same genes that code for curly black hair and a lack of concern for sunburn. Unwilling to admit to either the existence of outliers or the dubiousness of their stereotypes, they instead cast me as a fake, and therefore unworthy in spite of anything else.

I, for my part, however, tend not to think that I have come by my accomplishments honestly, but rather, fortunately. As a child, I did well in the parenting lottery, something that was driven home to me first when I worked with children and again when my father died and I learned that had the proverbial toss of a coin gone the other way, I would have been the child of a single mother. And while I may have missed a few times when Opportunity knocked, when it kicked in my door and invited itself in, I scrambled to be a gracious host. But this leaves me with the understanding that, fundamentally, my accomplishments are only partly due to my own merit. Opportunities are both a finite resource and distributed unequally; those that were available for me to take advantage of were therefore inaccessible to others who may have been able to do as well or better than I did.

And I believe that the accusation of racism stings in the same way that being its target does, in that it presupposes that one’s accomplishments are fraudulent. While the observation by Ms. Kou’s Black friend that “[The unearned assumption that one is a hard worker] sounds like the kind of thing that would get you a job,” rankles me in that it signals an acceptance that we can only have what other allow us, I find Ms. Kou’s need to state that a plum housing deal, job or raise obtained by being in someone's good graces still counts as an honest accomplishment, rather than simply a gift, to be interesting. It speaks to a need for people to themselves as making their own ways in the world, regardless of the fact that to do so is nearly impossible as a practical matter. People exist in an endless churn of events which have rich existences independently of them. While I believe that I have made contributions to each and every place that I have worked during my career, the fact of the matter remains that none of them would be any different had I never been there. While I have had “honest” accomplishments in my life, all of them were built on foundations that had nothing to do with me, having been laid long before I came on the scene. While it may be true that there was no deceit or guile involved on my part, had I needed to build all of these things from literally the naked Earth, I would have been at a loss.

But this understanding seems rarer than I would expect. Instead the perception seems to be that acknowledging the role of chance and other’s choices on one’s own life outcomes undermines any claim that a person has at merit. Or, perhaps more accurately, any claim that a person has as deserving, by rights, what they have. I do not see myself as the rightful owner of the things that have come to be, only someone who was in the right place at the right time, and was on the ball enough to grab them. To others, I am not the rightful owner, because I have fraudulently dispossessed the person who is. Which does not bother me as much it used to, because I am at peace with the idea that “deserving” is simply a word, and not a genuine quality of reality. But that is the minority view, and its opposite, that breaks down success into only the fairly or fraudulently gained currently holds sway.