Ununified

“Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state,” wrote [Thomas] Jefferson after describing his plan to remove free blacks in the event of emancipation, before answering with a litany of reasons: “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” He simply couldn’t imagine an American democracy that wasn’t fully white.
Jamelle Bouie “Racial Blindness”

This is all true enough. In the end, it's not much different than the idea that "A house divided against itself cannot stand." Where President Jefferson may have had a failure of imagination is in the idea that a multi-racial society is, by it's very nature, a house divided against itself. It's been nearly two hundred years since President Jefferson died. And if you ask me, the "Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained [and] new provocations" that Jefferson spoke of are just as real today as they were in 1818. Whether "the real distinctions which nature has made" are more than skin-deep is open to debate, but since, even at skin-depth, they are prominent enough that they have become very clear dividing lines, that debate may very well be moot. And so, the question becomes this: Why should President Jefferson have imagined a multracial America in the future?

One can argue that the convulsions between the parties have ceased in a way that didn't require the annihilation of either group, but I suspect that one would have to argue it, and in the face of any number of rational arguments to the contrary, one of which would likely be that the bombings in Austin, Texas that feature in Racial Blindness are only perhaps the most recent of an unbroken series of convulsions that has started long before President Jefferson's time. This is not to say that things haven't improved. They're much better than they used to be, even if you only consider the relatively short span of time from when I was in school to the present. But that's different from open, racially motivated violence and unrest to have effectively ended.

The whole point of Racial Blindness is to complain that American media and society treat White murderers more sympathetically than Black victims, and the article is one long list of recollections of other injuries that Black (and other non-White) Americans have sustained. While Mr. Bouie mentions President Jefferson's words as a means of indicting him for not seeing non-Whites as legitimately and properly American, he fails to rebut a single point that President Jefferson has made. There is no indication within the article that any successful effort is being made, by anyone, to heal the division of White and non-White into separate, and at least somewhat mutually antagonistic, parties. In fact:

There are important exceptions, but looking at the broad sweep of American society, to possess whiteness is still to receive, as one of its benefits, recognition as a full person even in the face of criminal behavior.

When we see a police chief defer to the self-spun narrative of a serial bomber or watch news outlets attribute misogynistic violence to lovesickness—while denying the same interiority and full humanity to black victims or offenders—we’re watching this pattern play out.

So... Where was President Jefferson actually wrong? It's been two centuries, and one can use Mr. Bouie's own words to demonstrate that President Jefferson was spot-on. Mr. Bouie argues neither that the convulsions created by prejudice, resentment, continued racism and/or nature show signs of ending anytime soon or these factors need not cause partisan divisions that threaten a broader democracy. Absent are any examples of a functioning multiracial democracy or republic that President Jefferson should or could have known about at the time. Perhaps the worst thing that can be said about Jefferson is that if he were so convinced that representative government in a multiracial society was manifestly impossible, he should have made some provision for a genuinely sovereign state for the Native American population.

Be that as it may, it still seems strange to call President Jefferson out for noting a state of affairs that's lasted for centuries and encompassed his entire life. He would have had no experience with a society in which one race or another was not dominant at the expense of non-members. And Jamelle Bouie's point is that he's never lived in the sort of society he faults President Jefferson for not envisioning, either. Given this, the Liberia project (which, incidentally, created the first modern republic in Africa) makes perfect sense, even if one notes that the repatriated former slaves and free Black people from the United States did unto the locals as Americans had done unto the Natives. (Which would only seem to further reinforce President Jefferson's point...)

In light of all this, it seems that rather than complain about an American President's prophetic words, more progress would be made by finally rendering that prophecy inaccurate.

The Truth of Lies

About a week and a half or so ago. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was being interviewed and along the way, he said the following:

I find that [Holocaust denial] deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong, but I think-

At which point, interviewer Kara Swisher interrupted to say:

In the case of the Holocaust deniers, they might be, but go ahead.

The next day, there was an article, Mark Zuckerberg Is Doubly Wrong About Holocaust Denial, on The Atlantic. In it, Yair Rosenberg says the following:

For one, surely spreading hateful misinformation about the Holocaust—designed to mislead the masses and undermine societal awareness of historic anti-Semitic prejudice—constitutes “trying to organize harm.” Moreover, even if we accept Zuckerberg’s questionable claim that some deny the Holocaust out of ignorance rather than malice, this does not absolve Facebook of responsibility for uncritically hosting and spreading that content.

Both of these appear to be based on an idea that has become so widely held that neither Ms. Swisher or Mr. Rosenberg bother to offer any support of it: That none of the people who promote Holocaust denial on the Web genuinely believe what they are saying. For me, this flies in the face of something that I believe is generally understood to be true: That a lie gains widespread (or even limited, actually) social currency only to the degree that it is inobvious that it is, in fact, a lie.

Given the fact that Mr. Rosenberg specifically describes the act of denying the reality of the Holocaust as "designed to mislead the masses," it might seem odd that he's apparently convinced that no one on Facebook has actually been mislead. But it strikes me that one could understand there to be a phenomenon that I'll call Holocaust Denial Skepticism, and that it has taken on characteristics of other purported conspiracies, such as Birtherism, Trutherism and Climate Skepticism; the understanding that the group of people who are actively involved in promoting the conspiracy and the group of people who are sincerely taken in by the conspiracy are mutually exclusive. It's as if, once someone becomes convinced that the Holocaust is actually a historical hoax, they are informed that no, it actually DID happen. Then, and only then, are they allowed to try to convince others that it was a hoax.

Part of this, I believe, comes from the idea that there is no rational reason to honestly disbelieve the Holocaust. And so all disbelief is really a form of motivated skepticism; someone who is free of any hint of antisemitism would simply realize the truth of the accepted historical narrative, and that would be the end of it. Holocaust denial, therefore, is an invention of the antisemitic mind, and an intentionally malicious one, at that.

But from an epistemological standpoint, that fails to take into account the degree to which most human understanding of the world is matter of faith. It is rarely, if ever, unambiguously obvious that any given event took place to a person who was not there to witness it themselves. It is our general belief in the truthfulness of other people that renders most of human history fact, rather than a random series of assertions that may, or may not, have any relationship to actual events. I am unable to say, with any certainty, that the world I currently inhabit is one that flows directly from the consequences of the events of, and surrounding, the Second World War, and thus, provides irrefutable proof that it happened, because there isn't an accessible parallel world, in which there was no Second World War, to compare it to.

But it's worth noting that this is a stance of epistemological skepticism, and is far from universal. What makes it interesting in this circumstance is how Mr. Zuckerberg's own skepticism concerning the origins of Holocaust denial translates into a kind of compassion for Holocaust deniers, even as it intersects with an important business consideration; namely that Mr. Zuckerberg does not was Facebook to be in the business of being an arbiter and protector of Honesty, given that he doesn't understand either himself or his organization as capable of knowing someone's inner world to a degree that would allow them to effectively police that.

Ms. Swisher and Mr. Rosenberg, on the other hand, inhabit a world in which the link between Holocaust denial and malicious antisemitism (presuming they see any other sort) is clear and present. This allows varying (but high) degrees of certainty of the latter to be deduced from the simple presence of the former.

And in the end, I think that this becomes the issue. There seems to be a consensus, one that Mr Zuckerberg may even share, that it is permissible to banish bad people from the public square. The disagreement comes in how one understands that someone qualifies.

The Renters are Coming

Suspecting what I would find there, I checked out the website, and sure enough, I found this:

This new building will encompass 134 new apartments approximately plus some retail stores. This is a big development (4 stories building) which will have a severe impact in our community as traffic will increase significantly and home value could be negatively impacted.

While it's become popular to blame Amazon and Microsoft for the run-up in housing values, factors like Washington State's Growth Management Act, which restricted the available land for housing, are largely overlook. Also overlooked is the resistance of incumbent homeowners to the large blocks of new housing that are required to keep the supply on par with demand. While this website seems to indicate that it's the size and traffic impacts of the new complex that are the culprits (in language that reads oddly like a non-native speaker of English...) the fact of the matter is that if a shortage of housing is driving prices up, alleviating that shortage is bad for you, if you're a homeowner; especially one who purchased recently.

And this, to me, is the biggest overlooked factor. The hundreds of thousands of households for whom the fact that housing stock is limited becomes a direct infusion of home equity. And not that I necessarily blame them. I know a single mother whose children's college funds are essentially the fact that she can borrow against the high value of her home. If housing prices collapse, one wonders how they'll go to school.

But it is worth keeping in mind that opportunities come at a cost to someone. And sometimes, zero-sum games develop.

Avoided

So was reading a piece about The Black Panther that included the following:

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored.

As much as I understand that I cannot access what so many other people hold so dearly, to call it The Void seems pretentious in the extreme. Mainly because I perceive no such yawning chasm in my life. And while this may be due to an indifference to what would lie on the other side, it also strikes me that many other people live with this same sort of phenomenon without seeing themselves as desperately incomplete.

As I understand the world, The Void is a function of an American (although likely not limited to the United States) concept that centers identity as much, if not more, on prior generations, than the here and now. In other words, people are understood to be not simply the product, but a continuation, of some arbitrary number of prior generations into the past, depending on when they finally lose interest in their genealogy. And while it's true that for many Black people in the United States, the trans-Atlantic slave trade severed their ability to trace their family trees back as far as they might like, we are not the only people in this boat. There are any number of people, whom, for whatever reason, find themselves unable to trace their family trees back as far as they might prefer. And in areas where genealogy is less important to identity, they don't perceive a yawning darkness where their understanding of their selves should be.

In the end, I realize that my own lack of perception of The Void comes from the fact that genealogy wasn't a big deal in my family. The focus was more on the present. My parents never spoke of their grandparents and to this day, I don't know my mother's birth father's name. He may as well have never existed. Being cut off from much closer generations in this way meant that my identity didn't extend much beyond my own parents. And while some people would clearly see this as a loss, I view it as a benefit, if for no other reason than it leaves me unwounded, psychically or culturally, by The Void.

Blanked Out

So I was driving along yesterday afternoon, and I encountered this protest. It was just ginning up when I arrived on the scene, and I quickly found a place to park and hurried over with my camera to find a good place to shoot from. The protesters were mainly on the corner directly across the intersection from me, but were starting to cross the streets to either side.

The fact that the bulk of the party was on the southeast corner of the street meant that they were out in broad daylight. Which had the effect of washing out the text on most of their signs, as you can see in the picture. Granted, the human eye has a better dynamic range than a digital camera, but I wasn't really doing any better at seeing what they were protesting; even when there was enough contrast, a handheld sign isn't very large at any significant distance.

I'm pretty sure that it hadn't occurred to any of the protestors that the Sun would be the enemy of their message; it wouldn't have occurred to me before yesterday. But I did find it to be amusing.