Misuderstanded

The Black English gap, as one might call it, matters: It can affect people’s lives at crucial junctures. In 2007, a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals dissent claimed that when a black woman said, in terror, “He finna shoot me,” she may have been referring to something in the past, when in fact “finna” refers to the immediate future. “Why don’t you just give me a lawyer, dog?” Warren Demesme asked the police when accused of sexual assault in 2017. The statements one makes to law enforcement after requesting a lawyer are inadmissible—but Demesme’s rights were ignored because, it was argued, he’d requested a “lawyer dog,” not an actual attorney.
John McWhorter. "Could Black English Mean a Prison Sentence?"

These don't strike me as mistakes made by people who don't understand Black English. Or, to use it's longer name, African-American Vernacular English; "Ebonics" in the vulgar tongue. And while John McWhorter's broader point, which is that court transcribers who are unfamiliar with how many Black people speak can place into the record distortions of what people actually intended to say is well taken, it's worth separating that from what appear to be cynical attempts to use the fact that many White people find the way Black people talk to be something between bizarre and bastardized as a weapon against them.

Although I'm black myself, I don't speak Black English. Mr. McWhorter's opening example of “He come tell ’bout I’m gonna take the TV,” may as well have been Greek. The fact that “He come tell ’bout,” negates whatever comes after it (presumably, it means "he lied about") was complete news to me. But despite the fact that I haven't lived in a majority Black neighborhood (outside of my freshman dormatory in college) since I was too young to remember, I'm well aware of the fact that “finna” is short for "fixing (as in "preparing") to" and that in Mr. Demesme’s case, "dog" is effectively a synonym for "dude," "guy," "bro," mister," "pal," buddy," "fella" et cetera. These aren't particularly obscure usages. After all, I heard them on television all the time.

People who are tasked with either finding ways to win a person's freedom or place them behind bars don't really care if Black English is deficient or alternate when compared to Standard American English, or any other dialect of the language. What matters to them is that the language is different enough from what likely jurors and or judges are familiar with that nonsensical definitions of “finna” or “dog” will sound plausible.

And in that case, even the best educated and precise court stenographer won't make much of a difference.

Conception

NPR interviewed Miami Times columnist Carl Hiaasen about his decision to write about the killings of five women in a SunTrust bank in Sebring Florida. Mr. Hiaasen's brother, Robert, was one of those killed in the shootings at the Capital Gazette.

At one point, Mr. Hiaasen notes:

And what Rob would have wanted - and I knew he felt because we talked about it after Parkland. We talked about it after Sandy Hook. We talked about it after the Pulse shootings - was that every one of these is a tragedy on almost an inconceivable scale. And you can't rate them or put them in order.

To borrow a line from Star Wars, I don't know... I can conceive quite a bit worse.

And my point isn't to be flippant. I can conceive of tragedies much larger in scale than any given mass shooting in the United States that you care to name. Like the Rwandan Genocide. The estimates of the death toll range from 500,000 to over a million people. And this is in a nation that only had a population of a little over 7 million people in 1990 (and it was steadily declining by the time the genocide actually took place in 1994). So even at the lowest number, the death toll was about 1 in 14 residents of the nation. At the upper end, it's one in seven. That's well above the percentage of Black or White Hispanic people in the United States. So imagine that in the space of now, until the end of May, every Latin person in the United States with a White racial background was murdered. It's a horrific thought. But I, at least can conceive of it. After all, it's happened before.

Now, for the record, this isn't to say that President Trump is likely to ever play the role that Théoneste Bagosora did in Rwanda, or that anti-immigrant sentiment will boil over in a level of bloodshed that would dwarf the Holocaust. Only that a population determined to wipe out a significant portion of itself can do so, and rather quickly. When one considers what the carnage that was inflicted in significant part with "machetes, clubs, blunt objects, and other weapons" it doesn't take much to imagine how much worse things could be in the United States, where guns would likely be a much larger part of the equation. And the United States has had genocides in the past, even if we've largely forgotten about them.

For any of Parland, Sandy Hook, the Pulse nightclub, Thousand Oaks or even Las Vegas to be "a tragedy on almost an inconceivable scale" means not thinking about what people have shown themselves capable of time and again. It's one thing for "another angry, white, male loser who had access to a weapon" to vent their frustrations on even hundreds of people at a time. And yes, those instances are tragic. But are they tragedies on a scale with the willingness of a population to stand by, or even participate, when entire families of their fellow citizens are wiped out for the crime of not having the correct distant ancestors? Maybe they are. Maybe the difference between 5 dead, 50 dead or 500,000 dead is simply some number of zeroes. After all, there are plenty more where those came from, no matter how many die violently. Maybe the deaths of 12 people should lie as far outside of our imaginations as the deaths of 12 million. Maybe the fact that I can so easily picture a large segment of people of United States setting out to murder people they see as unlike themselves is evidence of a darkness that has overtaken me.

Mr. Hiaasen calls on the media to "shine a light on it and write about it and react with some humanity and horror every time it happens." This is, in his view the only way for us to "get better as a society." I don't know that I agree with him on that. In part, because I look askance at the implied questioning of the "humanity" of people who don't respond in the way that he would like. As many times as dehumanizing others, questioning their "humanity" has lead to the very worst of human tragedy, giving people reasons to judge seems counterproductive. And I'm sure of the helpfulness of constantly staring into the abyss, either. There's already a certain normative quality to violence (whether guns are involved or not) in the United States. The news needing to make room for some thirty or so stories of people who have died violently every day would eventually become simply a grim background hum.

Creating a world where a man executing five women in a bank would be universally, genuinely shocking to people is going to take something other than constantly reminding them that violence is part of our everyday lives. It's going to take removing much of the violence from our everyday lives. That's not going to be a function of the media. It's going to take all of us deciding that we have better choices, and choosing to reward one another when people avail themselves of those better choices.

Run Howard Run

Howard Schultz is mulling over a run for President of the United States as an Independent, having come to the conclusion that the current Democratic party has moved too far to the left for his liking. Over on the BBC's website, the blurb for the story trotted out a familiar objection to his not-quite-yet plan...

Democrats say ex-Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz will re-elect Donald Trump if he runs as an independent.
Howard Schultz: Starbucks tycoon roasted over 2020 plan

In other words, Mr. Schultz will prove popular enough that people who want "Anybody but Trump" in the White House come 2021 may see him as a viable choice. And since Mr. Schultz is running to the center, he's more likely to have appeal in the more conservative states, where in order to win a general election, the "Anybody but Trump" vote needs to be unified.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist, or even a particularly astute political strategist, to understand that as an Independent, Mr. Schultz would have no viable path to winning a general election. This is, after all, why Senator Sanders ran as a Democrat, and Donald Trump as a Republican. They may have not cared much for "their" parties as a whole, but outside it them, neither wouldn't have been taken seriously. And it's unlikely that an Independent candidacy by Mr. Schultz would be treated as anything other than a sideshow.

It would allow voters in the center, however (people who the increasingly left-leaning Democratic activists would rather not have to spend much energy on), to vote for someone other than President Trump without needing to vote for whomever the Democrats nominate. To be sure, there will be a non-zero number of "third-party" votes cast. There are usually around five alternatives to the Democratic/Republican duality on the ballot here in Washington state every four years. But most of them don't make it to the status of also-rans. Jill Stien and Gary Johnson were able to garner some lasting attention, but everyone else effectively ceased to exist on election day (and for many people, only barely had any real presence before then). Howard Schultz allows protest votes for someone who doesn't come across as hopeless, a lunatic or both. And it's understandable that the Democrats would rather have people protesting President Trump than themselves.

In order to head that off (assuming that Mr. Schultz does rum as a protest candidate), the Democrats are going to have to find something other than dislike of President Trump to run on. Something that unites both centrists and left-wingers. And that's going to be hard. The Democrats have always come across as a more fragile coalition than the Republicans. Coming up with someone who can appeal to the left, while appealing to the center more than Mr. Schultz does could be difficult. Mainly because anyone who votes Howard Schultz, Independent, for President understands that he's not going to win. And even if he does, he'd be unlikely to be an effective President, given that he wouldn't have much in the way of a consistent Congressional caucus backing him up.

The Democrats have more than eighteen months to come up with something. And if they were smart about it, they've been crafting that message for the past two+ years already, even if they haven't rolled it out yet. Because this isn't anything particularly surprising. The Democrats should have been prepared for the idea that a reasonably popular/charismatic/well known name would enter the race as an Independent. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have been working on their overt appeals to the many and varied unaligned voters recently.

It's fine and good to complain about Mr. Schultz providing another choice in the race, and resenting the added difficulty that such a choice represents. But almost the only votes that he is going to gain will come from people who really don't have a strong opinion about who wins. Democratic energy would be better spend giving those people someone to vote for, rather than attempting to limit them to only one person to vote against.

Failure to Communicate

Box-a-Bye Baby

So I found this story on the BBC about Baby Boxes; boxes designed to keep infants alive so that their mothers can drop them off into the care of professionals without needing to perform a warm handoff to another human being, who might ask uncomfortable questions, know the person involved or cause other complications that the presumably desperate parent is anxious enough to avoid that their efforts to do so may place the child's life in jeopardy. While I'd never heard of the concept before landing at the story online, this is an international phenomenon and one that goes back to the middle ages.

Of course, not everyone is a fan. The BBC doesn't spend much time speaking to people's objections to the concept, but it does take a moment to toss out this mostly throwaway line:

Fathers' rights groups object, saying they allow only one parent to make the decision.

And, me being me, that was the line that caught my attention.

Back when I was a child and youth care worker, and then a foster-care case worker, I'd developed a rather low opinion of the men who were the fathers of the children that I worked with. While I'm not going to claim that they were a representative sample, only one of the children appeared to have a father who cared about them more than their mother did; and the mother in question was a remarkable piece of work, the sort made sterilizing people unless they qualify for a parenting license seem like a good idea. Typically, if a child was only going to have a single parent ever show up for anything, it was going to be the mother. But the idea that nearly the entire gamut of these mostly low-income (if not simply unemployed) men were of the infamous "love 'em and leave 'em" type was uncharitable, and I've mellowed as I've grown old.

So while it's easy to dismiss the concerns of fathers' rights groups as disingenuous or even actively dishonest, I do find myself wondering about the circumstances that prevent men from being more available to the women who bear, but cannot bear to keep, their children. And how many of those circumstances could be prevented if either or both parties had more access to support. To be sure, I understand that men can simply walk away from a responsibility that they don't want. But I wonder how many of them find that they're effectively pushed away.

I'm curious as to what the actual, verbatim, objections of fathers' rights groups to drop-off boxes for infants is, because the irony of "saying they allow only one parent to make the decision," is not lost on me. Back in the day, I worked with a number of single mothers who didn't have a choice in no longer being with their child(ren)'s father. He had simply disappeared, and that was that.

I understand the objections that people have to the boxes. The UN's objection, that nations would do better to address the factors that cause people to give up their infants, is well taken. The boxes are, like any number of other things, a means of making a broken system less damaging, rather than less broken. But I don't think that many people are willing to do what would need to be done to repair that particular system, which I suspect has been damaged by the technological and social progress of the past several decades (or even the last century or so).

And in that respect, the concept is here to stay. Everyone will have to become used to it.