The purpose of a writing class is to develop a meaningful thesis, direct or implied, that will generate a compelling essay. Most importantly, a meaningful thesis will have a strong emotional connection between you and the material. In fact, if you don’t have a “fire in your belly” to write the paper, your essay will be nothing more than a limp document, a perfunctory exercise in futility. A successful thesis will also be intellectually challenging and afford a complexity worthy of college-level writing. Thirdly, the successful thesis will be demonstrable, which means it can be supported by examples and illustrations in a recognizable organizational design.
Other Website: http://herculodge.typepad.com/
Blue Book Exam for Week 16: Two Part, Monday and Wednesday
Addressing at least 2 of the essays on poverty, class, and unemployment, including Linda Tirado's famous blog post, write a 5-paragraph essay that supports or refutes the argument that poverty is not a "lifestyle choice" but a self-perpetuating trap.
Essay #5 Options: Capstone Essay with 5 Sources for Works Cited Due 12/11.
One. Support, refute, or complicate Alfie Kohn’s assertion from “Degrading to De-grading” that grading is an inferior education tool that all conscientious teachers should abandon.
Two. Support, refute, or complicate the inferred lesson from bell hooks’ essay, “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” that upward mobility requires a betrayal of one’s economic class and even family.
Three. In the context of one or more essays we’ve read about standardized testing, support, refute, or complicate the assertion that standardized testing is a money-making canard sodden with incompetence, corruption, and moral bankruptcy, and therefore must be abolished.
Four. Support, refute, or complicate the argument that “Against School” and any other essays we’ve covered persuasively evidence that American education is more about protecting private business interests, maintaining class bias, and asserting mass control than it is about promoting real empowerment such as critical thinking, independence, and freedom.
Five. In the context of John Taylor Gatto’s “Against School,” support, refute, or complicate the argument that that American education is more about protecting private business interests, maintaining class bias, and asserting mass control than it is about promoting real empowerment such as critical thinking, independence, and freedom.
Six. Bell Hooks sees the self-destruction from extreme self-abasement on one hand and extreme privilege on the other. She is on a quest for a healthy middle ground. These components of toxic self-abasement and toxic privilege, and the sick symbiotic relationship between the rich and poor, are evident in Hooks' essay, "Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class" (287). Toxic abasement and the sick symbiotic relationship between the rich and the poor are also evident in "The Consequences--Undoing Sanity" (342), "How the Poor Are Made to Pay for Their Poverty," and Linda Tirado's online essay "Why I Make Terrible Decisions." Develop a thesis that compares the toxic symbiotic relationship between the rich and the poor in the aforementioned essays and show that human redemption is from a sense of healthy, well-balanced privilege that doesn't exclude social conscience. (This prompt has the thesis embedded in it.)
Your guidelines for your Final Research Paper are as follows:
This research paper should present a thesis that is specific, manageable, provable, and contestable—in other words, the thesis should offer a clear position, stand, or opinion that will be proven with research.
You should analyze and prove your thesis using examples and quotes from a variety of sources.
You need to research and cite from at least five sources. You must use at least 3 different types of sources.
At least one source must be from an ECC library database.
At least one source must be a book, anthology or textbook.
At least one source must be from a credible website, appropriate for academic use.
The paper should not over-rely on one main source for most of the information. Rather, it should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in them.
This paper will be approximately 5-7 pages in length, not including the Works Cited page, which is also required. This means at least 5 full pages of text. The Works Cited page does NOT count towards length requirement.
You must use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.
You must integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary.
You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Your paper must be logically organized and focused.
More Simplified Version
Addressing the essays on poverty, class, and unemployment, including Linda Tirado's famous blog post, write a 5-page essay with 5 sources with a thesis that supports or refutes the argument that poverty is not a "lifestyle choice" but a self-perpetuating trap.
Blue Book Exam for Week 16: Two Part, Monday and Wednesday
Addressing at least 2 of the essays on poverty, class, and unemployment, including Linda Tirado's famous blog post, write a 5-paragraph essay that supports or refutes the argument that poverty is not a "lifestyle choice" but a self-perpetuating trap.
You may refer to the following essays from the book:
"The Consequences" by Louis Uchitelle 342
"Fifteen Years on the Bottom Rung" by Anthony DePalma 353
"How the Poor Are Made to Pay for Their Poverty" 380
Linda Tirado's famous blog post "This Is Why Poor People's Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense."
Sample Thesis
Uchitelle and Tirado's essay refute the rhetoric that any person, no matter how poor, can lift herself out of poverty with strong character, determination, and hard work by showing that poverty is a self-reinforcing cycle evidenced by _______________, ______________, _______________, and _____________________.
Thesis That Disagrees with the Above
While Uchitelle and Tirado do a good job of highlighting the risk factors for cycles of poverty, they do little to offer the poor strategies to free themselves from their impoverishment and as such their rigid liberal political agendas do more harm than good because their vision paints the poor as helpless victims who must rely on policy changes before they find relief from their interminable economic hell.
Ehrenreich's claim is that the poor are exploited, treated as an asset to be mined by predators and vultures and are essentially subjected to having salt poured into their wounds.
Ehrenreich's critics would argue that while the poor have remarkable challenges, a message of victimization does nothing to help the poor, it ignores the poor's self-inflicted wounds, and it ignores those poor who have come to America with nothing and risen to the top of the economic ladder.
A counterargument to the above is that even if we concede the points above, those points do not negate the gross injustice of structural inequality in areas of housing, healthcare, and education. Nor do the above points address the psychological afflictions and stigma of poverty. To acknowledge these psychological hardships is to face reality, not to encourage victimization.
Essay Prompt
Bell Hooks sees the self-destruction from extreme self-abasement on one hand and extreme privilege on the other. She is on a quest for a healthy middle ground. These components of toxic self-abasement and toxic privilege, and the sick symbiotic relationship between the rich and poor, are evident in Hooks' essay, "Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class" (287). Toxic abasement and the sick symbiotic relationship between the rich and the poor is also evident in "The Consequences--Undoing Sanity" (342), "How the Poor Are Made to Pay for Their Poverty," and Linda Tirado's online essay "Why I Make Terrible Decisions." Develop a thesis that compares the toxic symbiotic relationship between the rich and the poor in the aforementioned essays and show that human redemption is from a sense of healthy, well-balanced privilege that doesn't exclude social conscience. (This prompt has the thesis embedded in it.)
Sample Essay Response
Barbara Ehrenreich's "How the Poor Are Made to Pay for Their Poverty," Linda Tirado's online essay "Why I Make Terrible Decisions," and Bell Hooks' "Learning in the Shadow of Race and Culture" make a powerful case for the claim that poverty is a deeply ingrained mindset that makes the poor ripe for exploitation evidenced by _______________, ____________, ________________, __________________, and _________________________.
Sample Refutation of the Above
Barbara Ehrenreich, Linda Tirado, and Bell Hooks are misguided Priestesses of Victimization, Determinism, and Defeat. Their pity party for the poor, while clanging some bitter truths about the challenges of poverty, ignore the perils of hyped victimization, exaggerated structural inequality, and dogmatic determinism, which tragically denies the self-empowerment of discipline, character, and free will.
Sample Counterargument of the Above
While I concede that we should not give the poor reason to surrender to victimization, the above claim that Ehrenreich, Tirado, and Hooks are preaching victimization is a dangerous falsehood that twists and misconstrues (Straw Man fallacy) the authors' real message and creates an intellectual environment where no one can even bring up economic injustice without being called a bleeding heart liberal enabler of victims, a shirker of self-responsibility, and a nay-sayer of individual freedom. One can expose and protest economic injustice, as the authors have done, without being a crutch for victimization and learned helplessness.
Study Questions
One. How are the poor robbed?
They are exploited and robbed in thousands of tiny cuts that leave them eviscerated, bereft, and hopeless.
They pay more for cars.
They pay higher interest rates on loans, up to 600%, which is legal in some states.
They pay in terms of stolen wages (employers can program computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck).
They pay in terms of being preyed upon by police for civil forfeiture laws in which police can take money, cars, valuables of any kind, by saying it was money “seized in a drug deal” with no need for evidence, no need for arrest, and no need for any kind of trial.
They have to pay for family members’ incarceration or else be fined and subject to arrest and imprisonment themselves.
The sub-prime market preys upon the poor.
The poor can go to prison if they don’t show up to court to address a debt to a landlord or collections agency.
The government will confiscate the drivers’ licenses of the poor in the event they owe child support (which can’t be paid because they’re, well, poor) and now they can’t drive to work to earn their minimum wage.
If the poor cannot pay their overdue traffic fines in Las Cruces, New Mexico, they will be fined by having their water, gas, and sewage turned off.
Once the poor, who are more likely to get into trouble with the law, have a criminal record, they cannot find work for they now suffer a permanent stigma.
At this point, the poor are more likely to be homeless at which point they may “get busted for an offense like urinating in public or sleeping on a sidewalk.” (I keep thinking of the metaphor “squeezing blood from a turnip.)
Essay Option:
Bell Hooks sees the self-destruction from extreme self-abasement on one hand and extreme privilege on the other. She is on a quest for a healthy middle ground. These components of toxic self-abasement and toxic privilege, and the sick symbiotic relationship between the rich and poor, are evident in Hooks' essay, "Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class" (287). Toxic abasement and the sick symbiotic relationship between the rich and the poor is also evident in "The Consequences--Undoing Sanity" (342), "How the Poor Are Made to Pay for Their Poverty," and Linda Tirado's online essay "Why I Make Terrible Decisions." Develop a thesis that compares the toxic symbiotic relationship between the rich and the poor in the aforementioned essays and show that human redemption is from a sense of healthy, well-balanced privilege that doesn't exclude social conscience. (This prompt has the thesis embedded in it.)
One. How is this essay about class divisions in America?
John Zannikos represents upward mobility: You come to America with hardly anything and you become a somebody. Zannikos is one of the three Greek owners. He came to America in an earlier generation when there was more "meat on the bone" for working class Americans. Now that "meat on the bone" is gone thanks to the Great Recession, Globalization, and the rise of temporary work as the fastest job sector in America.
Today Mexican immigrants who work in the back of the kitchen have a dead end job. Despite Zannikos' efforts to help them, "they risk becoming stuck in a permanent underclass of the poor, the unskilled, and the uneducated."
Some immigrants do make it, but the competition is staggering. Every year 400,000 immigrants arrive in the US to make a living.
Juan Manuel Peralta is one such man. He arrived in America 40 years after Zannikos, and opportunities are more difficult.
"But monumental changes in the economy and in attitudes toward immigrants have made it far less likely that Peralta and his children will experience the same upward mobility as Zannikos and his family."
The biggest obstacle is immigration status. The "illegal" designation shuts many doors to opportunities in jobs and education. Remember, Zannikos arrived in the US 40 years earlier with legal papers. He made it. Now the legal obstacles are higher.
Zannikos, however, is under the belief that today's immigrants have it easier because "today they give you credit cards in the mail."
But la pobreza, the poor, don't receive such mailings, Peralta reminds us. Zannikos is living in a bubble in which he does not see the reality Peralta and other modern workers face.
Today's poor are scared their illegal status will be discovered, so they don't organize their labor; they hide.
Today's poor with illegal status can be exploited by landlords and employers.
We learn that in many Latino cultures, family expects financial help from those who are working in the US. I've heard this first-hand at Puente's Noche de Consejos (Night of Consultation or Advice). "Everyone wants my money. The guilt if I don't give the money will kill me."
Two. Why is legal status so important?
We read that within a few years, incomes rise 20 percent and English speaking skills improve greatly (361).
So we see a business incentive for employers wanting their employees to remain in illegal status: The employers can pay the workers less.
Three. How does poverty affect your long-term goals?
In short, you have no short-term goals. When you're beaten down by unemployment and poverty, you succumb to a provisional, short-term existence with no long-term vision for a happy, meaningful future.
Four. Support, refute, or complicate the argument that “Against School” and any other essays we’ve covered persuasively evidence that American education is more about protecting private business interests, maintaining class bias, and asserting mass control than it is about promoting real empowerment such as critical thinking, independence, and freedom.
Five. In the context of John Taylor Gatto’s “Against School,” support, refute, or complicate the argument that that American education is more about protecting private business interests, maintaining class bias, and asserting mass control than it is about promoting real empowerment such as critical thinking, independence, and freedom.
One. In the essay’s opening, we see that boredom is not a benign condition. Rather, boredom is a malignancy. This becomes clear when we see that boredom is a synonym for all sorts of horrible things. Give a list of things boredom stands for.
Learned helplessness
Resentment or mutual loathing (everyone blames everyone else for the problems at school)
Recurring cycles of futility, which brings up Einstein’s definition of insanity
Monotony
Lethargy, the fatigue and enervation from being mired in a problem with no apparent solution for so long
Lowered expectations
Dysfunction, settling into the idea that “this is how it is” and “nothing can be done,” so I’ll just “ride this out.”
All of us. We are all responsible, according to Gatto’s grandfather, to entertain and amuse ourselves.
We have all been responsible for the apathy and tolerance to brain-dead mediocrity.
Three. For Gatto, what is the difference between education and forced schooling?
He argues that “mass compulsory schooling” is not associated with success if we look at history.
The goals of “mass compulsory schooling” were defined, we read during 1905 and 1915 and they focused on the following:
One. To make good people.
Two. To make good citizens.
Three. To make each person his or her personal best.
For Gatto and H.L. Mencken who Gatto quotes, education is a form of indoctrination in which we brainwash students to fit with the system, be mediocre, and conform into the same type of safe person. This conformity is to the model of the mindless consumer who is obedient to marketing and advertising in order to insure a robust economy.
From Gatto's essay:
Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold: 1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best.
These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. . . . Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States . . . and that is its aim everywhere else.
We further read that schools base their operations on indoctrination, not critical thinking.
Obedience to authority, conformity to norms, learning the “correct” social role, labeling the students according to perceived rank (tag the “unfit”; promote the desirables), pass on elite power to younger generation of the elite and to hell with the rest of them (276).
In contrast, a teacher serves his students well if he gives them critical thinking skills:
Learn how to think for yourself by establishing informed or considered opinions, not habitual or peer-driven ones.
Learn how to read critically.
Learn the difference between causation and correlation.
Identify logical fallacies.
Grow and flourish as you become an adult and independent thinker.
Four. What are the functions of school?
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
A full-bodied red wine compliments the Pasta Pomodoro.
Compliment is a to say something nice about someone. "You look nice in that pumpkin polo shirt. Very nice pumpkin accents."
Complement is to complete or match well with something. "This full-bodied red wine complements the spaghetti."
The BMW salesman excepted my counteroffer of 55K for the sports sedan.
The word should be accepted.
Kryptonite effects Superman in such a way that he loses his powers.
Effect is a noun. Affect is a verb, so it should be the following:
Kryptonite affects Superman in a such a way that he loses his powers.
Confusing their and there
There superpowers were compromised by the Gamma rays.
We need to use the possessive plural pronoun their.
Two. Missing comma after an introductory phrase or clause
Terrified of slimy foods Robert hid behind the restaurant’s dumpster.
In spite of my aversion to rollercoasters I attended the carnival with my family.
Three. Incomplete documentation
Noted dietician and nutritionist Mike Manderlin observes that “Dieting is a mental illness.”
It should read:
Noted dietician and nutritionist Mike Manderlin observes that “Dieting is a mental illness” (277).
Four. Vague Pronoun Reference
Focusing on the pecs during your Monday-Wednesday-Friday workouts is a way of giving you more time to work on your quads and glutes and specializing on the way they’re used in different exercises.
Before Jennifer screamed at Brittany, she came to the conclusion that she was justified in stealing her boyfriend.
Five. Spelling (including homonyms, words that have same spelling but different meanings or same sound but different meanings)
No one came forward to bare witness to the crime.
No one came forward to bear witness to the crime.
Love is a disease. It’s sickness derives from its power to intoxicate and create capricious, short-term infatuation.
Its sickness derives from its power to intoxicate and create capricious, short-term infatuation.
Six. Mechanical error with a quotation
Incorrect
In his best-selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure”.
Correct
In his best selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure.”
Incorrect
In his best selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure.” (18)
Correct
In his best selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure” (18).
Incorrect
“It forever stuns me that people make life decisions based on something as fickle and capricious as love”, Michael Manderlin writes (22).
Correct
“It forever stuns me that people make life decisions based on something as fickle and capricious as love,” Michael Manderlin writes (22).
Seven. Unnecessary comma
I need to workout when at home, and while taking vacations.
You do however use a comma if the comma is between two independent clauses:
I need to workout at home, and when I go on vacations, I bring my yoga mat to hotels.
I need to workout every day, because I’m addicted to the exercise-induced dopamine.
You do however use a comma after a dependent clause beginning with because:
Because I’m addicted to exercise-induced dopamine, I need to workout everyday.
Peaches, that are green, taste hideous.
The above is an example of an independent clause with a essential information or restrictive information. Not all peaches taste hideous, only green ones. The meaning of the entire sentence needs the dependent clause so there are no commas.
However, if the clause is additional information, the clause is called nonessential or nonrestrictive, and we do use commas:
Peaches, which are on sale at Whole Foods, are my favorite fruit.
Mr. Manderlin, who is fond of shopping at the farmer's market on the weekends, had to stay in bed all day nursing a virulent abscess.
Eight. Unnecessary or missing capitalization
Some Traditional Chinese Medicines containing Ephedraremain are legal.
We only use capital letters for proper nouns, proper adjectives, first words of sentences, important words in titles, along with certain words indicating directions and family relationships.
Nine. Missing word
Incorrect
The site foreman discriminated women and promoted men with less experience.
Correct
The site foreman discriminated against women and promoted men with less experience.
Incorrect
Chris’ behavior becomes bizarre that his family asks for help.
Correct
Chris’ behavior becomes so bizarre that his family asks for help.
Ten. Faulty sentence structure
The information which high school athletes are presented with mainly includes information on what credits needed to graduate and thinking about the college which athletes are trying to play for, and apply.
A sentence that starts out with one kind of structure and then changes to another kind can confuse readers. Make sure that each sentence contains a subject and a verb, that subjects and predicates make sense together, and that comparisons have clear meanings. When you join elements (such as subjects or verb phrases) with a coordinating conjunction, make sure that the elements have parallel structures.
Incorrect
The reason I prefer yoga at home to the gym is because I prefer privacy.
Correct
I prefer yoga at home to the gym because I enjoy more privacy at home than in a studio.
Incorrect
In conclusion, it is essential that drug laws be strictly enforced in today’s society to stop criminals in their tracks and put them behind bars not just criminals but every day people who suffer from really bad addictions and who break the law in order to do their bad behavior so that we can live in a safer better society to protect the children and for all people who need to walk the streets without these kind of worries because without these kinds of strict laws our country would be in chaos and our country’s children will be the innocent victims.
The above is impossible to correct because even edited nothing is being said. Faulty sentence structure can only be edited if there is substance or real content. The above is saying nothing.
11. Missing Comma with a Nonrestrictive Element
Marina who was the president of the club was the first to speak.
The clause who was the president of the club does not affect the basic meaning of the sentence: Marina was the first to speak.
A nonrestrictive element gives information not essential to the basic meaning of the sentence. Use commas to set off a nonrestrictive element.
12. Unnecessary Shift in Verb Tense
Priya was watching the great blue heron. Then she slips and falls into the swamp.
Verbs that shift from one tense to another with no clear reason can confuse readers.
13. Missing Comma in a Compound Sentence
Incorrect
Meredith waited for Samir and her sister grew impatient.
Correct
Meredith waited for Samir, and her sister grew impatient.
Without the comma, a reader may think at first that Meredith waited for both Samir and her sister.
A compound sentence consists of two or more parts that could each stand alone as a sentence. When the parts are joined by a coordinating conjunction, use a comma before the conjunction to indicate a pause between the two thoughts.
14. Unnecessary or Missing Apostrophe (including its/it's)
Overambitious parents can be very harmful to a childs well-being.
The car is lying on it's side in the ditch. Its a white 2004 Passat.
To make a noun possessive, add either an apostrophe and an s (Ed's book) or an apostrophe alone (the boys' gym). Do not use an apostrophe in the possessive pronouns ours, yours, and hers. Useits to mean belong to it; use it's only when you mean it is or it has.
15. Fused (run-on) sentence
Klee's paintings seem simple, they are very sophisticated.
She doubted the value of medication she decided to try it once.
A fused sentence (also called a run-on) joins clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence with no punctuation or words to link them. Fused sentences must be either divided into separate sentences or joined by adding words or punctuation.
16. Comma Splice
I was strongly attracted to her, she was beautiful and funny.
We hated the meat loaf, the cafeteria served it every Friday.
A comma splice occurs when only a comma separates clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence. To correct a comma splice, you can insert a semicolon or period, connect the clauses with a word such as and or because, or restructure the sentence.
17. Lack of pronoun/antecedent agreement
Every student must provide their own uniform.
Pronouns must agree with their antecedents in gender (male or female) and in number (singular or plural). Many indefinite pronouns, such as everyone and each, are always singular. When a singular antecedent can refer to a man or woman, either rewrite the sentence to make the antecedent plural or to eliminate the pronoun, or use his or her, he or she, and so on. When antecedents are joined by or or nor, the pronoun must agree with the closer antecedent. A collection noun such as team can be either singular or plural, depending on whether the members are seen as a group or individuals.
18. Poorly Integrated Quotation
A 1970s study of what makes food appetizing "Once it became apparent that the steak was actually blue and the fries were green, some people became ill" (Schlosser 565).
Corrected
In a 1970s study about what makes food appetizing, we read, "Once it became apparent that the steak was actually blue and the fries were green, some people became ill" (Schlosser 565).
Incorrect
"Dumpster diving has serious drawbacks as a way of life" (Eighner 383). Finding edible food is especially tricky.
Corrected
"Dumpster diving has serious drawbacks as a way of life," we read in Eighner's book (383). One of the drawbacks is that finding food can be especially difficult.
Quotations should fit smoothly into the surrounding sentence structure. They should be linked clearly to the writing around them (usually with a signal phrase) rather than dropped abruptly into the writing.
19. Missing or Unnecessary Hyphen
This paper looks at fictional and real life examples.
A compound adjective modifying a noun that follows it requires a hyphen.
Corrected
This paper looks at fictional and real-life examples.
Incorrect (using hyphen for a verb)
The buyers want to fix-up the house and resell it.
A two-word verb should not be hyphenated. A compound adjective that appears before a noun needs a hyphen. However, be careful not to hyphenate two-word verbs or word groups that serve as subject complements.
Corrected
The buyers want to fix up the house and resell it.
20. Sentence Fragment
No subject
Marie Antoinette spent huge sums of money on herself and her favorites. And helped to bring on the French Revolution.
No complete verb
The aluminum boat sitting on its trailer.
Beginning with a subordinating word
We returned to the drugstore. Where we waited for our buddies.
A sentence fragment is part of a sentence that is written as if it were a complete sentence. Reading your draft out loud, backwards, sentence by sentence, will help you spot sentence fragments.
Essay #5 Options: Capstone Essay with 5 Sources for Works Cited Due 12/11.
One. Support, refute, or complicate Alfie Kohn’s assertion from “Degrading to De-grading” that grading is an inferior education tool that all conscientious teachers should abandon.
Two. Support, refute, or complicate the inferred lesson from bell hooks’ essay, “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” that upward mobility requires a betrayal of one’s economic class and even family.
Three. In the context of one or more essays we’ve read about standardized testing, support, refute, or complicate the assertion that standardized testing is a money-making canard sodden with incompetence, corruption, and moral bankruptcy, and therefore must be abolished.
Four. Support, refute, or complicate the argument that “Against School” and any other essays we’ve covered persuasively evidence that American education is more about protecting private business interests, maintaining class bias, and asserting mass control than it is about promoting real empowerment such as critical thinking, independence, and freedom.
Five. In the context of John Taylor Gatto’s “Against School,” support, refute, or complicate the argument that that American education is more about protecting private business interests, maintaining class bias, and asserting mass control than it is about promoting real empowerment such as critical thinking, independence, and freedom.
Six. Bell Hooks sees the self-destruction from extreme self-abasement on one hand and extreme privilege on the other. She is on a quest for a healthy middle ground. These components of toxic self-abasement and toxic privilege, and the sick symbiotic relationship between the rich and poor, are evident in Hooks' essay, "Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class" (287). Toxic abasement and the sick symbiotic relationship between the rich and the poor are also evident in "The Consequences--Undoing Sanity" (342), "How the Poor Are Made to Pay for Their Poverty," and Linda Tirado's online essay "Why I Make Terrible Decisions." Develop a thesis that compares the toxic symbiotic relationship between the rich and the poor in the aforementioned essays and show that human redemption is from a sense of healthy, well-balanced privilege that doesn't exclude social conscience. (This prompt has the thesis embedded in it.)
More Simplified Version
Addressing the essays on poverty, class, and unemployment, including Linda Tirado's famous blog post, write a 5-page essay with 5 sources with a thesis that supports or refutes the argument that poverty is not a "lifestyle choice" but a self-perpetuating trap.
Your guidelines for your Final Research Paper are as follows:
This research paper should present a thesis that is specific, manageable, provable, and contestable—in other words, the thesis should offer a clear position, stand, or opinion that will be proven with research.
You should analyze and prove your thesis using examples and quotes from a variety of sources.
You need to research and cite from at least five sources. You must use at least 3 different types of sources.
At least one source must be from an ECC library database.
At least one source must be a book, anthology or textbook.
At least one source must be from a credible website, appropriate for academic use.
The paper should not over-rely on one main source for most of the information. Rather, it should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in them.
This paper will be approximately 5-7 pages in length, not including the Works Cited page, which is also required. This means at least 5 full pages of text. The Works Cited page does NOT count towards length requirement.
You must use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.
You must integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary.
You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Your paper must be logically organized and focused.
More Simplified Version
Addressing the essays on poverty, class, and unemployment, including Linda Tirado's famous blog post, write a 5-page essay with 5 sources with a thesis that supports or refutes the argument that poverty is not a "lifestyle choice" but a self-perpetuating trap.
Sample Thesis
Uchitelle and Tirado's essay refute the rhetoric that any person, no matter how poor, can lift herself out of poverty with strong character, determination, and hard work by showing that poverty is a self-reinforcing cycle evidenced by _______________, ______________, _______________, and _____________________.
Thesis That Disagrees with the Above
While Uchitelle and Tirado do a good job of highlighting the risk factors for cycles of poverty, they do little to offer the poor strategies to free themselves from their impoverishment and as such their rigid liberal political agendas do more harm than good because their vision paints the poor as helpless victims who must rely on policy changes before they find relief from their interminable economic hell.
Essay Option:
Bell Hooks sees the self-destruction from extreme self-abasement on one hand and extreme privilege on the other. She is on a quest for a healthy middle ground. These components of toxic self-abasement and toxic privilege, and the sick symbiotic relationship between the rich and poor, are evident in Hooks' essay, "Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class" (287). Toxic abasement and the sick symbiotic relationship between the rich and the poor is also evident in "The Consequences--Undoing Sanity" (342), "How the Poor Are Made to Pay for Their Poverty," and Linda Tirado's online essay "Why I Make Terrible Decisions." Develop a thesis that compares the toxic symbiotic relationship between the rich and the poor in the aforementioned essays and show that human redemption is from a sense of healthy, well-balanced privilege that doesn't exclude social conscience. (This prompt has the thesis embedded in it.)
Sample ThesisStatements
Hooks, Uchitelle, and Tirado show that poverty presents self-defeating contradictions that make the poor a resource for the wealthy's pleasure.
Hooks, Uchitelle, and Tirado belong to the bleeding-heart liberal camp whose cries of unfairness and victimization do nothing for the poor but perpetuate their poverty.
Essay Option about Standardized Testing
In the context of one or more essays we’ve read about standardized testing, support, refute, or complicate the assertion that standardized testing is a money-making canard sodden with incompetence, corruption, and moral bankruptcy, and therefore must be abolished.
In the past three years, I interviewed hundreds of students across the nation while reporting my book, Mission High. In schools both urban and suburban, affluent and struggling, students told me that preparing for such tests cut into things that advanced their education—projects, field trips, and electives like music or computer classes.
“Testing felt like such a waste,” Alexia Garcia, a 2013 graduate of Lincoln High in Portland, Oregon, told me. “It felt really irrelevant and disconnected from what we were doing in classes.” As a senior, Garcia became a lead organizer with the Portland Student Union, a coalition with members in 12 area high schools that has been one of the most visible student groups in the national student opt-out movement. Garcia, who is now at Vassar College, told me that this year—thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement—students are also increasingly talking about how standardized testing contributes to inequality and ultimately the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
Joshua Katz, Kiana Hernandez’s math teacher, says he tests his students using a variety of challenges and quizzes, but the only ones that officially count are the fill-in-the-bubble variety. “They tell me I must have data, and they don’t consider tests data unless it comes from multiple-choice,” Katz told me.
Every nine weeks, Katz has to stop whatever his students are doing and make time for the district’s benchmark tests measuring student progress toward the big Common Core exam in the spring. (Proponents of the Common Core standards, now in place in 43 states, promised fewer tests and less of a focus on multiple-choice. But most of the teachers told me there had been no change in the number of standardized assessments. “This year was a circus—16 weeks of testing scheduled at the high school level,” Katz said.)
And University High, whose neighborhood and student population is largely middle class, didn’t bear as heavy a load of tests and drills as its poorer counterparts: One recent study found that urban high school students spend 266 percent more time taking district-level exams than their suburban counterparts. That’s in part because the stakes for these schools are so high: Test scores determine not just how much funding a school will get, but whether it will be allowed to stay open at all. In response, some administrators have been taking desperate measures, including pushing the lowest-performing students out entirely. Suspensions have been growing across the country, especially among African American and Latino students, and many researchers correlate this with pressure to raise scores. And in the 2011-12 school year, the Government Accountability Office reported that officials in 33 states confirmed at least one instance of school staff flat-out cheating.
When it comes to standardized testing, this means that schools that educate low-income students start out at a disadvantage: They are much more likely to have lower-paid and less-qualified teachers; lack college preparatory classes, books, and supplies; and offer fewer arts and sports programs. When their students don’t make it to the same “proficiency” benchmarks on yearly tests as their wealthier counterparts, politicians label them and their teachers as “failing.” And that begins a vicious cycle: Struggling students are pushed into remedial classes that zero in on what’s measured on the tests, further limiting their opportunities to learn the advanced skills they’ll need in college or the workplace.
“What I observed was egregious,” Ceresta Smith, a 26-year veteran teacher in Miami and a cofounder of United Opt Out National, told me about a predominantly African American, low-income school where she worked from 2008 to 2010. Some teachers tried to incorporate writing and intellectually engaging readings, she said, but most resorted to remediation of basic skills. “Students are reading random passages and practice picking the correct multiple-choice. It was very separate and unequal.”
The proponents of testing-based reform like to argue that—while imperfect—the current approach has been working better than any other, leading to rising graduation rates and standardized test scores. But as Stanford researcher Linda Darling-Hammond has pointed out, there’s a bit of circular logic at work here: A system singularly focused on producing better test scores leads to…better test scores. Meanwhile, though, American students’ performance compared to other nations—on tests that measure skills and knowledge more broadly—remained flat or declined between 2000 and 2012.
Most importantly, test-based accountability is failing on its most important mandate—eliminating the achievement gap between different groups of students. While racial gaps have narrowed slightly since 2001, they remain stubbornly large. The gaps in math and reading for African American and Latino students shrank far more dramatically before No Child Left Behind—when policies focused on equalizing funding and school integration, rather than on test scores. In the 1970s and ’80s, the achievement gap between black and white 13-year-olds was cut roughly in half nationwide. In the mid-’70s, the rates at which white, black, and Latino graduates attended college reached parity for the first and only time.
In the decades since, the encouraging news is that the black-white achievement gap has kept slowly shrinking. But at the same time, the gap between students from poor and affluent families has widened into a chasm, growing by 40 percent between 1985 and 2001. Sean Reardon, a Stanford professor who focuses on poverty and inequality in education, says this is not surprising—affluent families can spend more than ever on enrichment activities. He argues it’s up to government to level the playing field, by making sure low-income students get the opportunity to succeed. But in many places, government is instead pulling back from the civil rights era’s focus on educational inequality.
Today, many students of color are once again going to segregated, high-poverty schools that struggle to offer advanced classes and attract teachers and counselors. Some 40 percent of black and Latino students now are in schools at which 90 to 100 percent of the student body are kids of color.
It’s not hard to find a teacher willing to bend your ear about the volume of standardized testing in schools today, and the pressure for “test prep.” But how widespread are such concerns among educators? And what’s the on-the-ground reality they experience?
New survey data suggest these impressions about over-testing and test prep are more than just anecdotal: They are the norm for the majority of public-school teachers.
Eighty-one percent believe their students spend too much time taking tests mandated by their state or district, according to the study by the Center on Education Policy, based at George Washington University.
How much time is too much? On average, students spend 10 days taking district-mandated tests during the school year and nine days taking state-mandated tests, the teachers estimate. But underneath these averages are wide variations, from less than a week (the most popular response in both cases) to more than a month, the survey finds.
When it comes to test prep, 62 percent of teachers say they spend too much time readying students for state-mandated exams. And 51 percent feel that way about district-mandated tests, according to the nationally representative survey conducted in late 2015.
On average, teachers estimate spending 14 days preparing students for state-mandated exams, and 12 days for district-mandated exams.
Of course, not all test prep is created equal. It can mean many things, some good, some not so good. The CEP report defines it as “drilling students on specific content and skills covered on the tests, using practice tests, and/or teaching test-taking skills like time-management and pacing.”
Test prep is especially prevalent in high-poverty and medium-poverty schools, according to the survey. Thirty-six percent of teachers spend at least a month on test prep for state-mandated exams, for example. By contrast, the figure is 23 percent in low-poverty schools.
The report cautions that its line of questioning was not meant to imply that “all test prep activities are an ineffective use of time — if the activities are helping students master the knowledge and skills in the standards they can be useful.”
Meanwhile, this spring the teacher-advocacy group Teach Plus issued a report on test prep, drawing on survey data from educators in the Teach Plus network. It even created a “typology” of 17 common test-prep activities, based on information gathered through focus groups with teachers. Some activities are valued by educators, some not, according to the report.
Among the “highly valued” activities: developing students’ computer skills; workshops to improve students’ writing with evidence; and helping them use dictionaries, calculators, and other tools on assessments.
Activities not finding favor included test-taking strategies, taking students to motivational pep rallies, and administering predictive tests.
As with the CEP report, the Teach Plus survey finds an overall negative tilt toward the amount of time for test prep. Fifty-seven percent of teachers surveyed say they spend “too much” time on test prep, compared with 43 percent who say it is “about right” or “too little.” (The survey is not nationally representative of educators.)
But it also finds that the attitude of teachers is influenced by the conditions they face. For example, teachers are more favorable toward test prep when they have leeway to select the kinds of activities they believe would be most “appropriate and valuable,” and when the tests align with the curriculum.
“Most people think of test prep as one monolithic iceberg of time, not valued by teachers and detrimental to instruction,” the report says. “But teachers use ‘test prep’ to refer to lots of different things.”
Many educators and parents say the tests have forced schools with low scores to focus all their attention on basic reading and math skills, to the detriment of subjects like science and social studies, let alone art. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, schools were rated based on their test scores and those that did not improve could eventually be closed. (The reauthorized law passed last year gives states more leeway in rating schools and handling those that do not meet targets.)
Some also say the tests have led to excessive use of discipline.
“There are schools where you don’t get a class trip until after the test,” said José Luis Vilson, a middle schoolteacher in New York City and the author of “This Is Not a Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education.”
“There are places where students just feel like it’s a jail,” he added. “Testing often exacerbates that, to the point that it doesn’t feel like you’re going to school to learn — you’re just going to take a test.”
In a rap video produced by the Baltimore Algebra Project, the youth advocacy group that organized the student protest this month, one singer lamented: “They really using this test to tell what I’m-a be/They probably want me in jail or probably in the streets.”
Pro-testing educators say they are listening closely to the calls by black and Hispanic parents and students for a richer educational experience, although some point out that the era before standardized testing was hardly better.
“Everything You’ve Heard about Failing Schools Is Wrong” by Kristina Rizga (252)
One. How is Maria denigrated at school?
Classmates call her derogatory names and stigmatize her because of her lack of English skills.
I have a Turkish friend who complained that Americans thought he was stupid because of his accent, as if an accent, or not, is a sign of intelligence.
The real issue isn't intelligence. An accent presses the buttons of the close-minded tribalist who's afraid of Los Otros.
Therefore, a lack of English speaking and writing makes student in the essay an outsider, La Otra. She's not a member of the tribe. The tribalists (people who only accept their "own kind") won't accept her because her lack of English skills suggest she's not a member of the privileged club.
Her math teacher addresses Maria and the other students as dummies.
Nothing like having a teacher who has contempt for her students. This creates a stigma or a permanent dark cloud over the person.
We could argue it is criminal for a math teacher to stigmatize Maria and others because lowered expectations have harmful (deleterious) effects on students.
Patronization
In the administrative office a middle-aged woman who thinks she’s being sympathetic tells Maria that she shouldn’t worry about struggling in high school since “Latinas usually don’t finish high school. . . . They go to work or raise kids.”
Nothing like having a counselor or an administrative official rely on stereotypes for an "analysis" of the student.
We have lowered expectations and racism ushering a girl into the lower economic and social classes, and this degradation is reinforced by standardized tests that cater to the upper classes.
Two. What is the source of Maria’s academic frustration?
She begins to do well in high school; however, her state exams for going to college are too low. These are standardized tests mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act.
NCLB was based on good intentions: to raise expectations for all students, especially disadvantaged ones, but it actually punishes them.
Each state spends over a billion dollars on standardized testing, which comes to about $65 a student. This is a huge money grab for companies who want to be part of the test.
NCLB was supposed to be the savior, offering concrete metrics to measure student performance in the face of wishy-washy bureaucrats, and it was championed in a movie Waiting for Superman. Many have dismissed this film as propaganda for charter schools as we read in The Washington Post.
Three. What is Rizga’s thesis?
Rizga’s thesis or purpose is to criticize NCLB by showing the many ways it has changed instruction for the worse.
Students might know bullet points for NCLB but be ignorant of everything else; in other words, NCLB is too narrow in its instruction objectives.
The overemphasis on test performance has resulted in cheating.
There is class bias in the standardized tests so that the tests are more understood by middle and upper classes than lower classes.
There is a tendency to make the standardized test the be all and end all of education. We’ve turned it into a panacea or a cure-all when in fact its godfather Robert Glaser warns that it’s incomplete and imperfect (260).
In a school where English is the second language, NCLB scores will be lower and this will give an inaccurate metric of the school’s quality.
In the context of one or more essays we’ve read about standardized testing, support, refute, or complicate the assertion that standardized testing is a money-making canard sodden with incompetence, corruption, and moral bankruptcy, and therefore must be abolished.
Paragraph 2: Thesis: Defend or refute the above assertion. 150 words.
Paragraphs: 3-7 Supporting paragraphs, 150 each, 750 and 400 is 1,150 subtotal.
Paragraph 8: Counterargument-rebuttal. 150 for 1,300 subtotal.
Paragraph 9: Conclusion 100-200 words for 1,400-1,500 total.
Developing Your Thesis
A thesis statement is one sentence that articulates the central idea of your essay.
A thesis statement is one sentence that tells readers your position or argument.
A thesis statement often outlines your essay’s body paragraphs with mapping components.
A thesis statement is born out of your assigned topic.
A thesis statement can never be merely a statement of your topic. Rather, it must be the point you are making about your topic.
Example
Topic
Standardized testing is part of the No Child Left Behind program.
Argumentative Thesis Statement
Standardized testing is a sham that we need to replace with more reliable measures of student learning outcomes.
Standardized testing is a sham that we need to replace with more reliable measures of student learning outcomes because the evidence shows that _______________, ___________________, ________________, and _________________.
Topic
In high numbers, upper class educated Anglos are not vaccinating their children from measles and other diseases.
Cause and Effect Thesis Statement
Many upper class educated Anglos are not vaccinating their children because their pride, paranoia, and pseudo-science have intoxicated them into embracing all the myths de jour of the anti-vaccine movement.
Argumentative Thesis Statement
There should be harsh penalties incurred against parents who don’t vaccinate their children because ________________, ________________, _______________, and _______________________.
Topic Is Not a Thesis
Unlike other first-world countries, the United States spends close to 18 percent of its GDP on healthcare while other countries spend closer to 10 percent.
Cause and Effect Thesis Statement
The United States is resigned to spending 18 percent of its GDP on healthcare because __________________, __________________, _________________, and _______________________.
Argumentative Thesis Statement
The United States needs to get its healthcare GDP down to about 10 percent because _______________, _______________, ______________, and ___________________.
Topic
The manner in which John Gatto would respond to teachers committing plagiarism in the classroom is a writing topic.
Definition Thesis
Reading "How We Learn," we see that plagiarism is not all kinds of imitation, but imitation characterized by ____________, _____________, _____________, and _______________.
Cause and Effect Thesis
Reading "How We Learn," we can imagine John Gatto being outraged by the link between teaching hypocrisy and student boredom when we analyze ________________, __________________, ______________, and ___________________.
A strong case can be made that John Gatto, when faced with the hypocrisy mentioned in Toor's essay, would use this hypocrisy as ammunition to support his thesis evidenced by _______________, _______________, ________________, and ___________________.
As The Geography of Bliss teaches us however implicitly, it is imperative that we embrace strong moral cultural norms to create happiness evidenced by _________________, __________________, ________________, and ____________________.
Your Essay Must Have a Thesis Statement That Is the Engine of Your Essay's Body Paragraphs
A thesis statement is an assertion that can be demonstrated with logic, reasoning, and examples.
We read in US & World News Report that, "Among millennials ages 25 to 32, earnings for college-degree holders are $17,500 greater than for those with high school diplomas only, a new study finds."
The above is not a thesis; it is a fact. We could use such a fact or study to support a thesis.
A thesis from the above would look like this:
While college costs are punitive and oppressive, especially to those with modest financial means, going to college for most people is worth its steep investment when we consider gains in lifetime income, networking with diverse populations, developing literacy, and creating a legacy of higher income for future generations.
Thesis statements or claims go under four different categories:
One. Claims about solutions or policies: The claim argues for a certain solution or policy change:
America's War on Drugs should be abolished and replaced with drug rehab.
Two. Claims of cause and effect: These claims argue that a person, thing, policy or event caused another event or thing to occur.
Social media has turned our generation into a bunch of narcissistic solipsists with limited attention spans, an inflated sense of self-importance, and a shrinking degree of empathy.
Three. Claims of value: These claims argue how important something is on the Importance Scale and determine its proportion to other things.
Global warming poses a far greater threat to our safety than does terrorism.
Four. Claims of definition. These claims argue that we must re-define a common and inaccurate assumption.
In America the notion of "self-esteem," so commonly taught in schools, is in reality a cult of narcissism. While real self-esteem teaches self-confidence, discipline, and accountability, the fake American brand of self-esteem is about celebrating the low expectations of mediocrity, and this results in narcissism, vanity, and sloth.
Essay Prompt for John Gatto's "Against School"
In the context of John Taylor Gatto’s “Against School,” support, refute, or complicate the argument that American education is more about protecting private business interests, maintaining class bias, and asserting mass control than it is about promoting real empowerment such as critical thinking, independence, and freedom.
Paragraph 2: Write about an experience in which you felt school betrayed all its promises of critical thinking, independence, and freedom and instead proved to be a controlling business or glorified baby-sitting service. Or if you disagree with Gatto, write about your amazing school experience. 250 words.
Paragraph 3: Your thesis should address the above. 150 words.
Paragraphs 4-7 are your supporting paragraphs. 150 words for 4 paragraphs is 600; 1,150 subtotal.
Paragraph 8: Counterargument-rebuttal. 150 words. 1,300 (two counterargument paragraphs would give you 1,550 words total)
Paragraph 9: Conclusion 100 words for 1,400
Sample Thesis
John Taylor Gatto accurately diagnoses the corruption of school by pointing out that it is not designed to educate us to be our better selves; rather, public education is about indoctrinating us to be malleable slaves to mediocrity and conformity evidenced by _____________, _____________, _____________, and ______________.
One. In the essay’s opening, we see that boredom is not a benign condition. Rather, boredom is a malignancy. This becomes clear when we see that boredom is a synonym for all sorts of horrible things. Give a list of things boredom stands for.
Learned helplessness
Resentment or mutual loathing (everyone blames everyone else for the problems at school)
Recurring cycles of futility, which brings up Einstein’s definition of insanity
Monotony
Lethargy, the fatigue and enervation from being mired in a problem with no apparent solution for so long
Lowered expectations
Dysfunction, settling into the idea that “this is how it is” and “nothing can be done,” so I’ll just “ride this out.”
All of us. We are all responsible, according to Gatto’s grandfather, to entertain and amuse ourselves.
We have all been responsible for the apathy and tolerance to brain-dead mediocrity.
Three. For Gatto, what is the difference between education and forced schooling?
He argues that “mass compulsory schooling” is not associated with success if we look at history.
The goals of “mass compulsory schooling” were defined, we read during 1905 and 1915 and they focused on the following:
One. To make good people.
Two. To make good citizens.
Three. To make each person his or her personal best.
For Gatto and H.L. Mencken who Gatto quotes, education is a form of indoctrination in which we brainwash students to fit with the system, be mediocre, and conform into the same type of safe person. This conformity is to the model of the mindless consumer who is obedient to marketing and advertising in order to insure a robust economy.
From Gatto's essay:
Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold: 1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best.
These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. . . . Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States . . . and that is its aim everywhere else.
We further read that schools base their operations on indoctrination, not critical thinking.
Obedience to authority, conformity to norms, learning the “correct” social role, labeling the students according to perceived rank (tag the “unfit”; promote the desirables), pass on elite power to younger generation of the elite and to hell with the rest of them (276).
In contrast, a teacher serves his students well if he gives them critical thinking skills:
Learn how to think for yourself by establishing informed or considered opinions, not habitual or peer-driven ones.
Learn how to read critically.
Learn the difference between causation and correlation.
Identify logical fallacies.
Grow and flourish as you become an adult and independent thinker.
Four. What are the functions of school?
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
One. Is it enough to say unemployment kills self-esteem?
No, it's not. That's an understatement. Unemployment kills the former self. We become a ghost of our former self. Stacy Brown missed her husband, the one who had a job. The new one was insufferable.
Erin suffers from learned helplessness, the sense that he is trapped in a cycle of futility that compels him to give up on getting a job, himself, his wife, and Life.
Studies show after three years without a job we become unemployable.
We read that for men especially, but women also, "incapacitating illness" takes over the mind and soul.
We further read about a close correlation between unemployment and suicide rates.
Even in the face of being a good person and a good worker, the unemployed take a "blow" that "erodes human capital" and eats away at them like a pernicious, ongoing disease.
You've heard the cliche: "I'll define you not how you fall off the horse, but what you do AFTER you fall off the horse."
But for the unemployed, falling off the horse is easy compared to the shame and self-loathing that follows. How do you get back on the horse again when you're hit with a "blow" to the guts?
Two. What happens to the stay-at-home dad?
Rather than connect with his family, a huge barrier separates him and his family as he withdraws into his world of shame and depression.
We read that men don't communicate their feelings of depression well, so they just suffer a slow rot in isolation.
The American Psychiatric Association has officially declared being laid-off has dangerous to your mental health.
The disease spreads from the laid-off parent to the children who too are overcome by shame, depression, and low self-esteem.
Lexicon
Anhedonia: you reach a state of unhappiness from which there is no return. Once you wear this quality on your sleeve, you become unemployable.
What’s harder on a man, begging for love or work? Work. Humiliation results in anhedonia.
Inertia (resistance to change); paralysis that feeds on itself.
Male vs. female hardwiring and their different effects in the workplace: Women are more adaptable, take more risks, and seek change. In contrast, men like routine, comfort, and stability.
Unemployment is referred to as the “acuteness of the blow." One person in the essay is so traumatized he cannot face the anxieties, the rejection, and the sense of insignificance all over again, so he sabotages future prospects.
The double hit of unemployment: The feeling of being worthless coupled with self-blame. Let's add a third hit: You lose your medical coverage.
“Finessing layoffs”: The attempt to “finesse” a layoff is futile.
The layoff is followed by a breaking of emotional bonds with others; it has a rippling effect. The person withdraws into depression.
Despondence and apathy set in.
Ennui (the cycle: despondence, apathy and inertia, ennui, and then anhedonia)
Husband’s unemployment devastates the wife: She has to carry her soul, and his, up the mountain. She can't do it forever. Eventually, she gives up. Divorce is the common result.
“Going postal”
Unemployment spreads shame through the entire family. We read that the rippling effects spread in unforgiving fashion. Children lose confidence that they can achieve. They fear they will fail like their parents.
Shell-shocked: You become so traumatized that you build a defensive wall that is worse than the problem that made you shell-shocked in the first place. (describe the student with the scowl on her face)
Summary of Unemployment Effects
1. family withdraws from one another
2. children are "emotional sponges" and internalize and absorb their parents' emotional trauma.
3. alcoholism increases
4. divorce increases
5. suicide (murder-suicide in Wilmington)
6. long-term stigma
7. long-term low self-esteem and self-blame
8. long-term physical ailments including hypertension, ulcers, chronic fatigue, etc.
9. women reach out for social support more than men so women tend to fare better.
10. Vicious cycle of unemployment: You become depressed, which makes you less employable, which makes you more depressed, and so on and so on. "Layoffs deplete life."
A full-bodied red wine compliments the Pasta Pomodoro.
Compliment is a to say something nice about someone. "You look nice in that pumpkin polo shirt. Very nice pumpkin accents."
Complement is to complete or match well with something. "This full-bodied red wine complements the spaghetti."
The BMW salesman excepted my counteroffer of 55K for the sports sedan.
The word should be accepted.
Kryptonite effects Superman in such a way that he loses his powers.
Effect is a noun. Affect is a verb, so it should be the following:
Kryptonite affects Superman in a such a way that he loses his powers.
Confusing their and there
There superpowers were compromised by the Gamma rays.
We need to use the possessive plural pronoun their.
Two. Missing comma after an introductory phrase or clause
Terrified of slimy foods Robert hid behind the restaurant’s dumpster.
In spite of my aversion to rollercoasters I attended the carnival with my family.
Three. Incomplete documentation
Noted dietician and nutritionist Mike Manderlin observes that “Dieting is a mental illness.”
It should read:
Noted dietician and nutritionist Mike Manderlin observes that “Dieting is a mental illness” (277).
Four. Vague Pronoun Reference
Focusing on the pecs during your Monday-Wednesday-Friday workouts is a way of giving you more time to work on your quads and glutes and specializing on the way they’re used in different exercises.
Before Jennifer screamed at Brittany, she came to the conclusion that she was justified in stealing her boyfriend.
Five. Spelling (including homonyms, words that have same spelling but different meanings or same sound but different meanings)
No one came forward to bare witness to the crime.
No one came forward to bear witness to the crime.
Love is a disease. It’s sickness derives from its power to intoxicate and create capricious, short-term infatuation.
Its sickness derives from its power to intoxicate and create capricious, short-term infatuation.
Six. Mechanical error with a quotation
Incorrect
In his best-selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure”.
Correct
In his best selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure.”
Incorrect
In his best selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure.” (18)
Correct
In his best selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure” (18).
Incorrect
“It forever stuns me that people make life decisions based on something as fickle and capricious as love”, Michael Manderlin writes (22).
Correct
“It forever stuns me that people make life decisions based on something as fickle and capricious as love,” Michael Manderlin writes (22).
Seven. Unnecessary comma
I need to workout when at home, and while taking vacations.
You do however use a comma if the comma is between two independent clauses:
I need to workout at home, and when I go on vacations, I bring my yoga mat to hotels.
I need to workout every day, because I’m addicted to the exercise-induced dopamine.
You do however use a comma after a dependent clause beginning with because:
Because I’m addicted to exercise-induced dopamine, I need to workout everyday.
Peaches, that are green, taste hideous.
The above is an example of an independent clause with a essential information or restrictive information. Not all peaches taste hideous, only green ones. The meaning of the entire sentence needs the dependent clause so there are no commas.
However, if the clause is additional information, the clause is called nonessential or nonrestrictive, and we do use commas:
Peaches, which are on sale at Whole Foods, are my favorite fruit.
Mr. Manderlin, who is fond of shopping at the farmer's market on the weekends, had to stay in bed all day nursing a virulent abscess.
Eight. Unnecessary or missing capitalization
Some Traditional Chinese Medicines containing Ephedraremain are legal.
We only use capital letters for proper nouns, proper adjectives, first words of sentences, important words in titles, along with certain words indicating directions and family relationships.
Nine. Missing word
Incorrect
The site foreman discriminated women and promoted men with less experience.
Correct
The site foreman discriminated against women and promoted men with less experience.
Incorrect
Chris’ behavior becomes bizarre that his family asks for help.
Correct
Chris’ behavior becomes so bizarre that his family asks for help.
Ten. Faulty sentence structure
The information which high school athletes are presented with mainly includes information on what credits needed to graduate and thinking about the college which athletes are trying to play for, and apply.
A sentence that starts out with one kind of structure and then changes to another kind can confuse readers. Make sure that each sentence contains a subject and a verb, that subjects and predicates make sense together, and that comparisons have clear meanings. When you join elements (such as subjects or verb phrases) with a coordinating conjunction, make sure that the elements have parallel structures.
Incorrect
The reason I prefer yoga at home to the gym is because I prefer privacy.
Correct
I prefer yoga at home to the gym because I enjoy more privacy at home than in a studio.
Incorrect
In conclusion, it is essential that drug laws be strictly enforced in today’s society to stop criminals in their tracks and put them behind bars not just criminals but every day people who suffer from really bad addictions and who break the law in order to do their bad behavior so that we can live in a safer better society to protect the children and for all people who need to walk the streets without these kind of worries because without these kinds of strict laws our country would be in chaos and our country’s children will be the innocent victims.
The above is impossible to correct because even edited nothing is being said. Faulty sentence structure can only be edited if there is substance or real content. The above is saying nothing.
11. Missing Comma with a Nonrestrictive Element
Marina who was the president of the club was the first to speak.
The clause who was the president of the club does not affect the basic meaning of the sentence: Marina was the first to speak.
A nonrestrictive element gives information not essential to the basic meaning of the sentence. Use commas to set off a nonrestrictive element.
12. Unnecessary Shift in Verb Tense
Priya was watching the great blue heron. Then she slips and falls into the swamp.
Verbs that shift from one tense to another with no clear reason can confuse readers.
13. Missing Comma in a Compound Sentence
Incorrect
Meredith waited for Samir and her sister grew impatient.
Correct
Meredith waited for Samir, and her sister grew impatient.
Without the comma, a reader may think at first that Meredith waited for both Samir and her sister.
A compound sentence consists of two or more parts that could each stand alone as a sentence. When the parts are joined by a coordinating conjunction, use a comma before the conjunction to indicate a pause between the two thoughts.
14. Unnecessary or Missing Apostrophe (including its/it's)
Overambitious parents can be very harmful to a childs well-being.
The car is lying on it's side in the ditch. Its a white 2004 Passat.
To make a noun possessive, add either an apostrophe and an s (Ed's book) or an apostrophe alone (the boys' gym). Do not use an apostrophe in the possessive pronouns ours, yours, and hers. Useits to mean belong to it; use it's only when you mean it is or it has.
15. Fused (run-on) sentence
Klee's paintings seem simple, they are very sophisticated.
She doubted the value of medication she decided to try it once.
A fused sentence (also called a run-on) joins clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence with no punctuation or words to link them. Fused sentences must be either divided into separate sentences or joined by adding words or punctuation.
16. Comma Splice
I was strongly attracted to her, she was beautiful and funny.
We hated the meat loaf, the cafeteria served it every Friday.
A comma splice occurs when only a comma separates clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence. To correct a comma splice, you can insert a semicolon or period, connect the clauses with a word such as and or because, or restructure the sentence.
17. Lack of pronoun/antecedent agreement
Every student must provide their own uniform.
Pronouns must agree with their antecedents in gender (male or female) and in number (singular or plural). Many indefinite pronouns, such as everyone and each, are always singular. When a singular antecedent can refer to a man or woman, either rewrite the sentence to make the antecedent plural or to eliminate the pronoun, or use his or her, he or she, and so on. When antecedents are joined by or or nor, the pronoun must agree with the closer antecedent. A collection noun such as team can be either singular or plural, depending on whether the members are seen as a group or individuals.
18. Poorly Integrated Quotation
A 1970s study of what makes food appetizing "Once it became apparent that the steak was actually blue and the fries were green, some people became ill" (Schlosser 565).
Corrected
In a 1970s study about what makes food appetizing, we read, "Once it became apparent that the steak was actually blue and the fries were green, some people became ill" (Schlosser 565).
Incorrect
"Dumpster diving has serious drawbacks as a way of life" (Eighner 383). Finding edible food is especially tricky.
Corrected
"Dumpster diving has serious drawbacks as a way of life," we read in Eighner's book (383). One of the drawbacks is that finding food can be especially difficult.
Quotations should fit smoothly into the surrounding sentence structure. They should be linked clearly to the writing around them (usually with a signal phrase) rather than dropped abruptly into the writing.
19. Missing or Unnecessary Hyphen
This paper looks at fictional and real life examples.
A compound adjective modifying a noun that follows it requires a hyphen.
Corrected
This paper looks at fictional and real-life examples.
Incorrect (using hyphen for a verb)
The buyers want to fix-up the house and resell it.
A two-word verb should not be hyphenated. A compound adjective that appears before a noun needs a hyphen. However, be careful not to hyphenate two-word verbs or word groups that serve as subject complements.
Corrected
The buyers want to fix up the house and resell it.
20. Sentence Fragment
No subject
Marie Antoinette spent huge sums of money on herself and her favorites. And helped to bring on the French Revolution.
No complete verb
The aluminum boat sitting on its trailer.
Beginning with a subordinating word
We returned to the drugstore. Where we waited for our buddies.
A sentence fragment is part of a sentence that is written as if it were a complete sentence. Reading your draft out loud, backwards, sentence by sentence, will help you spot sentence fragments.
Essay #5 Options: Capstone Essay with 5 Sources for Works Cited Due 12/11.
One. Support, refute, or complicate Alfie Kohn’s assertion from “Degrading to De-grading” that grading is an inferior education tool that all conscientious teachers should abandon.
Two. Support, refute, or complicate the inferred lesson from bell hooks’ essay, “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” that upward mobility requires a betrayal of one’s economic class and even family.
Three. In the context of one or more essays we’ve read about standardized testing, support, refute, or complicate the assertion that standardized testing is a money-making canard sodden with incompetence, corruption, and moral bankruptcy, and therefore must be abolished.
Four. Support, refute, or complicate the argument that “Against School” and any other essays we’ve covered persuasively evidence that American education is more about protecting private business interests, maintaining class bias, and asserting mass control than it is about promoting real empowerment such as critical thinking, independence, and freedom.
Five. In the context of John Taylor Gatto’s “Against School,” support, refute, or complicate the argument that that American education is more about protecting private business interests, maintaining class bias, and asserting mass control than it is about promoting real empowerment such as critical thinking, independence, and freedom.
Six. Bell Hooks sees the self-destruction from extreme self-abasement on one hand and extreme privilege on the other. She is on a quest for a healthy middle ground. These components of toxic self-abasement and toxic privilege, and the sick symbiotic relationship between the rich and poor, are evident in Hooks' essay, "Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class" (287). Toxic abasement and the sick symbiotic relationship between the rich and the poor are also evident in "The Consequences--Undoing Sanity" (342), "How the Poor Are Made to Pay for Their Poverty," and Linda Tirado's online essay "Why I Make Terrible Decisions." Develop a thesis that compares the toxic symbiotic relationship between the rich and the poor in the aforementioned essays and show that human redemption is from a sense of healthy, well-balanced privilege that doesn't exclude social conscience. (This prompt has the thesis embedded in it.)
Your guidelines for your Final Research Paper are as follows:
This research paper should present a thesis that is specific, manageable, provable, and contestable—in other words, the thesis should offer a clear position, stand, or opinion that will be proven with research.
You should analyze and prove your thesis using examples and quotes from a variety of sources.
You need to research and cite from at least five sources. You must use at least 3 different types of sources.
At least one source must be from an ECC library database.
At least one source must be a book, anthology or textbook.
At least one source must be from a credible website, appropriate for academic use.
The paper should not over-rely on one main source for most of the information. Rather, it should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in them.
This paper will be approximately 5-7 pages in length, not including the Works Cited page, which is also required. This means at least 5 full pages of text. The Works Cited page does NOT count towards length requirement.
You must use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.
You must integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary.
You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Your paper must be logically organized and focused.
Today's Class: Introduce David Brooks' essay "How We Are Ruining America."
Consider the real reason for educational inequality is not a lack of tests, a smokescreen to the real problem, but the privileges of the top economic tier discussed in David Brooks' essay "How We Are Ruining America."
Sample Outline in a Student Essay That Challenges Bell Hooks
Paragraph 1: Summarize Hooks' essay.
Paragraph 2: Explain how David Brooks and his critics are addressing Hooks' theme of climbing the social class ladder.
Paragraph 3: Your thesis, followed by 4 body paragraphs, a counterargument paragraph, and a conclusion.
Sample Thesis That Challenges Bell Hooks
While Bell Hooks' essay is a sympathetic portrait of a young woman climbing the social ladder in the face of prejudice and economic disadvantage and while McMahon did a good job of championing Bell Hooks' themes, both Hooks and McMahon are guilty of misleading us into a rabbit hole of emotions over facts. Hooks' problem is that her claim that working class students are compelled to "sell out" in order to gain "cultural capital" is a gross distraction--rich in emotion but low on facts--that steers us away from the real causes of economic injustice. Let us stop whining and sobbing over the natural growing pains of leaving one economic class to another one. Let us instead focus on the facts about economic injustice: The high cost of housing, healthcare, and education that excludes 80% of Americans.
Contrary to what McMahon and Hooks would have us believe, conforming to some pretentious middle class persona and selling out one's working class roots is not the issue. The real issue is being excluded from the opportunity to join the middle class in the first place. Middle class language and fashion, the so-called "cultural capital" that McMahon and Hooks are obsessed with, don't talk. Money does.
Hey, McMahon, quit misleading us by saying we're victimized by "informal social barriers," "cultural capital," and fancy language. The real victimization is structural inequality: lacking the resources to move up the ladder in the first place. That Bell Hooks took advantage of scholarships to catapult her to the middle class should be no cause of guilt. Hooks should save her whining and her depression for the 80% of Americans who don't get to enjoy the same advantages she does. Let us not, therefore, look at "selling out" as the issue in college. Let us instead look at structural inequality.
Essay Option Based on Bell Hooks' Assertion About Social Class
Support, refute, or complicate the inferred lesson from bell hooks’ essay, “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” that upward mobility requires a betrayal of one’s economic class and even family.
Six. What does Hooks conclude about the manner in which students must adapt to college?
Hooks writes: "Slowly, I began to understand fully that there was no place in academe for folks from working-class backgrounds who did not wish to leave the past behind. That was the price of the ticket. Poor students would be welcome at the best institutions of higher learning only if they were willing to surrender memory, to forget the past and claim the assimilated present as the only worthwhile and meaningful reality."
In other words to assimilate into the privileged, educated class, we have to embrace their language, attitude, demeanor, characteristics, body language; in other words, we have to die to our former self, disavow our past, and become a new person born in a world of privilege.
This new privilege becomes evident in the way we speak, write, and affect our body language. We develop a certain superciliousness and hauteur (uppity, proud, self-regarding expression that says, "I'm all that").
Hooks is tormented by the above fact not only because it's true, with all of its questionable moral implications, but because Hooks went through the process herself even as she questioned it. She became an "upper class intellectual."
At best when we transform from working class to privileged educated class, she writes, someone like her will suffer contradictions, having a remnant of her past identity and a new identity based on privilege.
Support, refute, or complicate the inferred lesson from bell hooks’ essay, “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” that upward mobility requires a betrayal of one’s economic class and even family.
Sample Outline
Paragraph 1: Write about someone you know who succeeded or failed to ascend one social class to another with the help of higher education. 250 words.
Paragraph 2: Summarize bell hooks' essay. 250 words
Paragraph 3: Thesis: Support or refute the idea that educational and social ascent requires a sort of betrayal of one's working-class roots and give 4 reasons to support your thesis. 150 words. 650 words for subtotal.
Paragraphs 4-7: 150 each for 600 words. 1,250 subtotal.
"Everything You've Heard About Failing Schools Is Wrong" 252
Bell Hooks Review
What does Hooks conclude about the manner in which students must adapt to college?
Hooks writes: "Slowly, I began to understand fully that there was no place in academe for folks from working-class backgrounds who did not wish to leave the past behind. That was the price of the ticket. Poor students would be welcome at the best institutions of higher learning only if they were willing to surrender memory, to forget the past and claim the assimilated present as the only worthwhile and meaningful reality."
In other words to assimilate into the privileged, educated class, we have to embrace their language, attitude, demeanor, characteristics, body language; in other words, we have to die to our former self, disavow our past, and become a new person born in a world of privilege.
This new privilege becomes evident in the way we speak, write, and affect our body language. We develop a certain superciliousness and hauteur (uppity, proud, self-regarding expression that says, "I'm all that").
Hooks is tormented by the above fact not only because it's true, with all of its questionable moral implications, but because Hooks went through the process herself even as she questioned it. She became an "upper class intellectual."
At best when we transform from working class to privileged educated class, she writes, someone like her will suffer contradictions, having a remnant of her past identity and a new identity based on privilege.
Support, refute, or complicate the inferred lesson from bell hooks’ essay, “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” that upward mobility requires a betrayal of one’s economic class and even family.
Sample Thesis
Bell Hooks convincingly shows in her personal narrative that climbing the education ladder entails a sort of betrayal of one's working class roots evidenced by _________________, _________________, ______________, and __________________.
Sample Support of Hooks
What some might call a "betrayal" in Bell Hooks' narrative is no betrayal at all. Rather, Bell Hooks takes on the arduous journey toward reasonable self-preservation and self-interest evidenced by her responsibility to be true to her intellect, her responsibility to nurture a career that matches well with her strengths, and her responsibility to steer away from those who are content with small-town tribalistic stagnation so that she can spread her wings and fly.
Sample Essay Response That Agrees with Bell Hooks
College should be a place that champions the humanitarian spirit, embracing the struggle of those who suffer under the weight of the elites, the privileged class. However, as Bell Hooks convincingly argues, college perpetuates class and sometimes racial elitism, tacitly scorning the working-class while adulating the privileged elites evidenced by the professor’s indoctrination of the students to act and be privileged, the pressures to disown one’s working-class family and community, and the rich students’ contempt for the poorer students.
Sample Essay Response That Disagrees with Bell Hooks
While I sympathize with Bell Hooks and would defend her against anyone, teacher, student, or otherwise, who would discriminate against her on the basis of her race or economic class, I find that her condemnation of the elitism she identifies at college to be misguided. The role of the college should be to teach students to lift themselves up from their lower class and into a more privileged class. That’s the point of going to college, to go from a lower station to a higher station in life. Secondly, having these ambitions doesn’t make us anti-humanitarian or contemptuous of the lower classes. We simply want to work toward a place of more privilege. That’s normal human nature that addresses the Darwinian, often brutal realities we face in this world. Bell Hooks has the luxury as someone who makes hundreds of thousand of dollars a year to decry the privileged class, but she needs to face the fact that she belongs to that privileged class and she worked hard to get there. Finally, Bell Hooks does a disservice if she doesn’t tell students from the working class the hard truth about succeeding at college, which is that to be successful we must disavow ourselves of our tribalistic past, even if it means separating ourselves from our working-class parents and community, even if our abandoning that family and community, as Bell Hooks herself did, gives us shame and guilt, because that separation is essential for becoming reborn as an empowered member of the privileged class who is now in a position to help our family in ways we never were before.
Response That Refutes the Above
The refutation of Bell Hooks under the claim that we must sell our souls to the devil in order to be successful is a grotesque absurdity misinformed by the blind ambition of class privilege, a convenient worship of Darwinian self-centeredness, and a failure to acknowledge that we can enjoy the joining the privileged ranks without disavowing our past identity, family, and community.
Response to the Above Refutation
I never claimed we should sell our soul to the devil and engage in Darwinian self-centeredness. My argument, contrary to the one misconstrued above, is that to embrace the new life of college, its ideas, its knowledge, its new identity, and yes the privileges that come with higher learning, we must go through the excruciating process of dying to our old self, the very self that was raised in our working-class homes and communities and that this process of dying and being reborn again is the very process that Bell Hooks admits to going through in order to become the success she is today.
Sample Outline
Paragraph 1: Write about someone you know who succeeded or failed to ascend one social class to another with the help of higher education. 250 words.
Paragraph 2: Summarize bell hooks' essay. 250 words
Paragraph 3: Thesis: Support or refute the idea that educational and social ascent requires a sort of betrayal of one's working-class roots and give 4 reasons to support your thesis. 150 words. 650 words for subtotal.
Paragraphs 4-7: 150 each for 600 words. 1,250 subtotal.
In the context of John Taylor Gatto’s “Against School,” support, refute, or complicate the argument that American education is more about protecting private business interests, maintaining class bias, and asserting mass control than it is about promoting real empowerment such as critical thinking, independence, and freedom.
Paragraph 2: Write about an experience in which you felt school betrayed all its promises of critical thinking, independence, and freedom and instead proved to be a controlling business or glorified baby-sitting service. Or if you disagree with Gatto, write about your amazing school experience. 250 words.
Paragraph 3: Your thesis should address the above. 150 words.
Paragraphs 4-7 are your supporting paragraphs. 150 words for 4 paragraphs is 600; 1,150 subtotal.
Paragraph 8: Counterargument-rebuttal. 150 words. 1,300 (two counterargument paragraphs would give you 1,550 words total)
Paragraph 9: Conclusion 100 words for 1,400
Sample Thesis
John Taylor Gatto accurately diagnoses the corruption of school by pointing out that it is not designed to educate us to be our better selves; rather, public education is about indoctrinating us to be malleable slaves to mediocrity and conformity evidenced by _____________, _____________, _____________, and ______________.
One. In the essay’s opening, we see that boredom is not a benign condition. Rather, boredom is a malignancy. This becomes clear when we see that boredom is a synonym for all sorts of horrible things. Give a list of things boredom stands for.
Learned helplessness
Resentment or mutual loathing (everyone blames everyone else for the problems at school)
Recurring cycles of futility, which brings up Einstein’s definition of insanity
Monotony
Lethargy, the fatigue and enervation from being mired in a problem with no apparent solution for so long
Lowered expectations
Dysfunction, settling into the idea that “this is how it is” and “nothing can be done,” so I’ll just “ride this out.”
All of us. We are all responsible, according to Gatto’s grandfather, to entertain and amuse ourselves.
We have all been responsible for the apathy and tolerance to brain-dead mediocrity.
Three. For Gatto, what is the difference between education and forced schooling?
He argues that “mass compulsory schooling” is not associated with success if we look at history.
The goals of “mass compulsory schooling” were defined, we read during 1905 and 1915 and they focused on the following:
One. To make good people.
Two. To make good citizens.
Three. To make each person his or her personal best.
For Gatto and H.L. Mencken who Gatto quotes, education is a form of indoctrination in which we brainwash students to fit with the system, be mediocre, and conform into the same type of safe person. This conformity is to the model of the mindless consumer who is obedient to marketing and advertising in order to insure a robust economy.
From Gatto's essay:
Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold: 1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best.
These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. . . . Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States . . . and that is its aim everywhere else.
We further read that schools base their operations on indoctrination, not critical thinking.
Obedience to authority, conformity to norms, learning the “correct” social role, labeling the students according to perceived rank (tag the “unfit”; promote the desirables), pass on elite power to younger generation of the elite and to hell with the rest of them (276).
In contrast, a teacher serves his students well if he gives them critical thinking skills:
Learn how to think for yourself by establishing informed or considered opinions, not habitual or peer-driven ones.
Learn how to read critically.
Learn the difference between causation and correlation.
Identify logical fallacies.
Grow and flourish as you become an adult and independent thinker.
Four. What are the functions of school?
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
Essay Option about Standardized Testing
In the context of one or more essays we’ve read about standardized testing, support, refute, or complicate the assertion that standardized testing is a money-making canard sodden with incompetence, corruption, and moral bankruptcy, and therefore must be abolished.
In the past three years, I interviewed hundreds of students across the nation while reporting my book, Mission High. In schools both urban and suburban, affluent and struggling, students told me that preparing for such tests cut into things that advanced their education—projects, field trips, and electives like music or computer classes.
“Testing felt like such a waste,” Alexia Garcia, a 2013 graduate of Lincoln High in Portland, Oregon, told me. “It felt really irrelevant and disconnected from what we were doing in classes.” As a senior, Garcia became a lead organizer with the Portland Student Union, a coalition with members in 12 area high schools that has been one of the most visible student groups in the national student opt-out movement. Garcia, who is now at Vassar College, told me that this year—thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement—students are also increasingly talking about how standardized testing contributes to inequality and ultimately the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
Joshua Katz, Kiana Hernandez’s math teacher, says he tests his students using a variety of challenges and quizzes, but the only ones that officially count are the fill-in-the-bubble variety. “They tell me I must have data, and they don’t consider tests data unless it comes from multiple-choice,” Katz told me.
Every nine weeks, Katz has to stop whatever his students are doing and make time for the district’s benchmark tests measuring student progress toward the big Common Core exam in the spring. (Proponents of the Common Core standards, now in place in 43 states, promised fewer tests and less of a focus on multiple-choice. But most of the teachers told me there had been no change in the number of standardized assessments. “This year was a circus—16 weeks of testing scheduled at the high school level,” Katz said.)
And University High, whose neighborhood and student population is largely middle class, didn’t bear as heavy a load of tests and drills as its poorer counterparts: One recent study found that urban high school students spend 266 percent more time taking district-level exams than their suburban counterparts. That’s in part because the stakes for these schools are so high: Test scores determine not just how much funding a school will get, but whether it will be allowed to stay open at all. In response, some administrators have been taking desperate measures, including pushing the lowest-performing students out entirely. Suspensions have been growing across the country, especially among African American and Latino students, and many researchers correlate this with pressure to raise scores. And in the 2011-12 school year, the Government Accountability Office reported that officials in 33 states confirmed at least one instance of school staff flat-out cheating.
When it comes to standardized testing, this means that schools that educate low-income students start out at a disadvantage: They are much more likely to have lower-paid and less-qualified teachers; lack college preparatory classes, books, and supplies; and offer fewer arts and sports programs. When their students don’t make it to the same “proficiency” benchmarks on yearly tests as their wealthier counterparts, politicians label them and their teachers as “failing.” And that begins a vicious cycle: Struggling students are pushed into remedial classes that zero in on what’s measured on the tests, further limiting their opportunities to learn the advanced skills they’ll need in college or the workplace.
“What I observed was egregious,” Ceresta Smith, a 26-year veteran teacher in Miami and a cofounder of United Opt Out National, told me about a predominantly African American, low-income school where she worked from 2008 to 2010. Some teachers tried to incorporate writing and intellectually engaging readings, she said, but most resorted to remediation of basic skills. “Students are reading random passages and practice picking the correct multiple-choice. It was very separate and unequal.”
The proponents of testing-based reform like to argue that—while imperfect—the current approach has been working better than any other, leading to rising graduation rates and standardized test scores. But as Stanford researcher Linda Darling-Hammond has pointed out, there’s a bit of circular logic at work here: A system singularly focused on producing better test scores leads to…better test scores. Meanwhile, though, American students’ performance compared to other nations—on tests that measure skills and knowledge more broadly—remained flat or declined between 2000 and 2012.
Most importantly, test-based accountability is failing on its most important mandate—eliminating the achievement gap between different groups of students. While racial gaps have narrowed slightly since 2001, they remain stubbornly large. The gaps in math and reading for African American and Latino students shrank far more dramatically before No Child Left Behind—when policies focused on equalizing funding and school integration, rather than on test scores. In the 1970s and ’80s, the achievement gap between black and white 13-year-olds was cut roughly in half nationwide. In the mid-’70s, the rates at which white, black, and Latino graduates attended college reached parity for the first and only time.
In the decades since, the encouraging news is that the black-white achievement gap has kept slowly shrinking. But at the same time, the gap between students from poor and affluent families has widened into a chasm, growing by 40 percent between 1985 and 2001. Sean Reardon, a Stanford professor who focuses on poverty and inequality in education, says this is not surprising—affluent families can spend more than ever on enrichment activities. He argues it’s up to government to level the playing field, by making sure low-income students get the opportunity to succeed. But in many places, government is instead pulling back from the civil rights era’s focus on educational inequality.
Today, many students of color are once again going to segregated, high-poverty schools that struggle to offer advanced classes and attract teachers and counselors. Some 40 percent of black and Latino students now are in schools at which 90 to 100 percent of the student body are kids of color.
It’s not hard to find a teacher willing to bend your ear about the volume of standardized testing in schools today, and the pressure for “test prep.” But how widespread are such concerns among educators? And what’s the on-the-ground reality they experience?
New survey data suggest these impressions about over-testing and test prep are more than just anecdotal: They are the norm for the majority of public-school teachers.
Eighty-one percent believe their students spend too much time taking tests mandated by their state or district, according to the study by the Center on Education Policy, based at George Washington University.
How much time is too much? On average, students spend 10 days taking district-mandated tests during the school year and nine days taking state-mandated tests, the teachers estimate. But underneath these averages are wide variations, from less than a week (the most popular response in both cases) to more than a month, the survey finds.
When it comes to test prep, 62 percent of teachers say they spend too much time readying students for state-mandated exams. And 51 percent feel that way about district-mandated tests, according to the nationally representative survey conducted in late 2015.
On average, teachers estimate spending 14 days preparing students for state-mandated exams, and 12 days for district-mandated exams.
Of course, not all test prep is created equal. It can mean many things, some good, some not so good. The CEP report defines it as “drilling students on specific content and skills covered on the tests, using practice tests, and/or teaching test-taking skills like time-management and pacing.”
Test prep is especially prevalent in high-poverty and medium-poverty schools, according to the survey. Thirty-six percent of teachers spend at least a month on test prep for state-mandated exams, for example. By contrast, the figure is 23 percent in low-poverty schools.
The report cautions that its line of questioning was not meant to imply that “all test prep activities are an ineffective use of time — if the activities are helping students master the knowledge and skills in the standards they can be useful.”
Meanwhile, this spring the teacher-advocacy group Teach Plus issued a report on test prep, drawing on survey data from educators in the Teach Plus network. It even created a “typology” of 17 common test-prep activities, based on information gathered through focus groups with teachers. Some activities are valued by educators, some not, according to the report.
Among the “highly valued” activities: developing students’ computer skills; workshops to improve students’ writing with evidence; and helping them use dictionaries, calculators, and other tools on assessments.
Activities not finding favor included test-taking strategies, taking students to motivational pep rallies, and administering predictive tests.
As with the CEP report, the Teach Plus survey finds an overall negative tilt toward the amount of time for test prep. Fifty-seven percent of teachers surveyed say they spend “too much” time on test prep, compared with 43 percent who say it is “about right” or “too little.” (The survey is not nationally representative of educators.)
But it also finds that the attitude of teachers is influenced by the conditions they face. For example, teachers are more favorable toward test prep when they have leeway to select the kinds of activities they believe would be most “appropriate and valuable,” and when the tests align with the curriculum.
“Most people think of test prep as one monolithic iceberg of time, not valued by teachers and detrimental to instruction,” the report says. “But teachers use ‘test prep’ to refer to lots of different things.”
Many educators and parents say the tests have forced schools with low scores to focus all their attention on basic reading and math skills, to the detriment of subjects like science and social studies, let alone art. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, schools were rated based on their test scores and those that did not improve could eventually be closed. (The reauthorized law passed last year gives states more leeway in rating schools and handling those that do not meet targets.)
Some also say the tests have led to excessive use of discipline.
“There are schools where you don’t get a class trip until after the test,” said José Luis Vilson, a middle schoolteacher in New York City and the author of “This Is Not a Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education.”
“There are places where students just feel like it’s a jail,” he added. “Testing often exacerbates that, to the point that it doesn’t feel like you’re going to school to learn — you’re just going to take a test.”
In a rap video produced by the Baltimore Algebra Project, the youth advocacy group that organized the student protest this month, one singer lamented: “They really using this test to tell what I’m-a be/They probably want me in jail or probably in the streets.”
Pro-testing educators say they are listening closely to the calls by black and Hispanic parents and students for a richer educational experience, although some point out that the era before standardized testing was hardly better.
“Everything You’ve Heard about Failing Schools Is Wrong” by Kristina Rizga (252)
One. How is Maria denigrated at school?
Classmates call her derogatory names and stigmatize her because of her lack of English skills.
I have a Turkish friend who complained that Americans thought he was stupid because of his accent, as if an accent, or not, is a sign of intelligence.
The real issue isn't intelligence. An accent presses the buttons of the close-minded tribalist who's afraid of Los Otros.
Therefore, a lack of English speaking and writing makes student in the essay an outsider, La Otra. She's not a member of the tribe. The tribalists (people who only accept their "own kind") won't accept her because her lack of English skills suggest she's not a member of the privileged club.
Her math teacher addresses Maria and the other students as dummies.
Nothing like having a teacher who has contempt for her students. This creates a stigma or a permanent dark cloud over the person.
We could argue it is criminal for a math teacher to stigmatize Maria and others because lowered expectations have harmful (deleterious) effects on students.
Patronization
In the administrative office a middle-aged woman who thinks she’s being sympathetic tells Maria that she shouldn’t worry about struggling in high school since “Latinas usually don’t finish high school. . . . They go to work or raise kids.”
Nothing like having a counselor or an administrative official rely on stereotypes for an "analysis" of the student.
We have lowered expectations and racism ushering a girl into the lower economic and social classes, and this degradation is reinforced by standardized tests that cater to the upper classes.
Two. What is the source of Maria’s academic frustration?
She begins to do well in high school; however, her state exams for going to college are too low. These are standardized tests mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act.
NCLB was based on good intentions: to raise expectations for all students, especially disadvantaged ones, but it actually punishes them.
Each state spends over a billion dollars on standardized testing, which comes to about $65 a student. This is a huge money grab for companies who want to be part of the test.
NCLB was supposed to be the savior, offering concrete metrics to measure student performance in the face of wishy-washy bureaucrats, and it was championed in a movie Waiting for Superman. Many have dismissed this film as propaganda for charter schools as we read in The Washington Post.
Three. What is Rizga’s thesis?
Rizga’s thesis or purpose is to criticize NCLB by showing the many ways it has changed instruction for the worse.
Students might know bullet points for NCLB but be ignorant of everything else; in other words, NCLB is too narrow in its instruction objectives.
The overemphasis on test performance has resulted in cheating.
There is class bias in the standardized tests so that the tests are more understood by middle and upper classes than lower classes.
There is a tendency to make the standardized test the be all and end all of education. We’ve turned it into a panacea or a cure-all when in fact its godfather Robert Glaser warns that it’s incomplete and imperfect (260).
In a school where English is the second language, NCLB scores will be lower and this will give an inaccurate metric of the school’s quality.
In the context of one or more essays we’ve read about standardized testing, support, refute, or complicate the assertion that standardized testing is a money-making canard sodden with incompetence, corruption, and moral bankruptcy, and therefore must be abolished.
Paragraph 2: Thesis: Defend or refute the above assertion. 150 words.
Paragraphs: 3-7 Supporting paragraphs, 150 each, 750 and 400 is 1,150 subtotal.
Paragraph 8: Counterargument-rebuttal. 150 for 1,300 subtotal.
Paragraph 9: Conclusion 100-200 words for 1,400-1,500 total.
Developing Your Thesis
A thesis statement is one sentence that articulates the central idea of your essay.
A thesis statement is one sentence that tells readers your position or argument.
A thesis statement often outlines your essay’s body paragraphs with mapping components.
A thesis statement is born out of your assigned topic.
A thesis statement can never be merely a statement of your topic. Rather, it must be the point you are making about your topic.
Example
Topic
Standardized testing is part of the No Child Left Behind program.
Argumentative Thesis Statement
Standardized testing is a sham that we need to replace with more reliable measures of student learning outcomes.
Standardized testing is a sham that we need to replace with more reliable measures of student learning outcomes because the evidence shows that _______________, ___________________, ________________, and _________________.
Topic
In high numbers, upper class educated Anglos are not vaccinating their children from measles and other diseases.
Cause and Effect Thesis Statement
Many upper class educated Anglos are not vaccinating their children because their pride, paranoia, and pseudo-science have intoxicated them into embracing all the myths de jour of the anti-vaccine movement.
Argumentative Thesis Statement
There should be harsh penalties incurred against parents who don’t vaccinate their children because ________________, ________________, _______________, and _______________________.
Topic Is Not a Thesis
Unlike other first-world countries, the United States spends close to 18 percent of its GDP on healthcare while other countries spend closer to 10 percent.
Cause and Effect Thesis Statement
The United States is resigned to spending 18 percent of its GDP on healthcare because __________________, __________________, _________________, and _______________________.
Argumentative Thesis Statement
The United States needs to get its healthcare GDP down to about 10 percent because _______________, _______________, ______________, and ___________________.
Topic
The manner in which John Gatto would respond to teachers committing plagiarism in the classroom is a writing topic.
Definition Thesis
Reading "How We Learn," we see that plagiarism is not all kinds of imitation, but imitation characterized by ____________, _____________, _____________, and _______________.
Cause and Effect Thesis
Reading "How We Learn," we can imagine John Gatto being outraged by the link between teaching hypocrisy and student boredom when we analyze ________________, __________________, ______________, and ___________________.
A strong case can be made that John Gatto, when faced with the hypocrisy mentioned in Toor's essay, would use this hypocrisy as ammunition to support his thesis evidenced by _______________, _______________, ________________, and ___________________.
As The Geography of Bliss teaches us however implicitly, it is imperative that we embrace strong moral cultural norms to create happiness evidenced by _________________, __________________, ________________, and ____________________.
Your Essay Must Have a Thesis Statement That Is the Engine of Your Essay's Body Paragraphs
A thesis statement is an assertion that can be demonstrated with logic, reasoning, and examples.
We read in US & World News Report that, "Among millennials ages 25 to 32, earnings for college-degree holders are $17,500 greater than for those with high school diplomas only, a new study finds."
The above is not a thesis; it is a fact. We could use such a fact or study to support a thesis.
A thesis from the above would look like this:
While college costs are punitive and oppressive, especially to those with modest financial means, going to college for most people is worth its steep investment when we consider gains in lifetime income, networking with diverse populations, developing literacy, and creating a legacy of higher income for future generations.
Thesis statements or claims go under four different categories:
One. Claims about solutions or policies: The claim argues for a certain solution or policy change:
America's War on Drugs should be abolished and replaced with drug rehab.
Two. Claims of cause and effect: These claims argue that a person, thing, policy or event caused another event or thing to occur.
Social media has turned our generation into a bunch of narcissistic solipsists with limited attention spans, an inflated sense of self-importance, and a shrinking degree of empathy.
Three. Claims of value: These claims argue how important something is on the Importance Scale and determine its proportion to other things.
Global warming poses a far greater threat to our safety than does terrorism.
Four. Claims of definition. These claims argue that we must re-define a common and inaccurate assumption.
In America the notion of "self-esteem," so commonly taught in schools, is in reality a cult of narcissism. While real self-esteem teaches self-confidence, discipline, and accountability, the fake American brand of self-esteem is about celebrating the low expectations of mediocrity, and this results in narcissism, vanity, and sloth.
Essay #5 Options: Capstone Essay with 5 Sources for Works Cited Due 12/11.
One. Support, refute, or complicate Alfie Kohn’s assertion from “Degrading to De-grading” that grading is an inferior education tool that all conscientious teachers should abandon.
Two. Support, refute, or complicate the inferred lesson from bell hooks’ essay, “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” that upward mobility requires a betrayal of one’s economic class and even family.
Three. In the context of one or more essays we’ve read about standardized testing, support, refute, or complicate the assertion that standardized testing is a money-making canard sodden with incompetence, corruption, and moral bankruptcy, and therefore must be abolished.
Four. Support, refute, or complicate the argument that “Against School” and any other essays we’ve covered persuasively evidence that American education is more about protecting private business interests, maintaining class bias, and asserting mass control than it is about promoting real empowerment such as critical thinking, independence, and freedom.
Five. In the context of John Taylor Gatto’s “Against School,” support, refute, or complicate the argument that that American education is more about protecting private business interests, maintaining class bias, and asserting mass control than it is about promoting real empowerment such as critical thinking, independence, and freedom.
Six. Bell Hooks sees the self-destruction from extreme self-abasement on one hand and extreme privilege on the other. She is on a quest for a healthy middle ground. These components of toxic self-abasement and toxic privilege, and the sick symbiotic relationship between the rich and poor, are evident in Hooks' essay, "Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class" (287). Toxic abasement and the sick symbiotic relationship between the rich and the poor are also evident in "The Consequences--Undoing Sanity" (342), "How the Poor Are Made to Pay for Their Poverty," and Linda Tirado's online essay "Why I Make Terrible Decisions." Develop a thesis that compares the toxic symbiotic relationship between the rich and the poor in the aforementioned essays and show that human redemption is from a sense of healthy, well-balanced privilege that doesn't exclude social conscience. (This prompt has the thesis embedded in it.)
Your guidelines for your Final Research Paper are as follows:
This research paper should present a thesis that is specific, manageable, provable, and contestable—in other words, the thesis should offer a clear position, stand, or opinion that will be proven with research.
You should analyze and prove your thesis using examples and quotes from a variety of sources.
You need to research and cite from at least five sources. You must use at least 3 different types of sources.
At least one source must be from an ECC library database.
At least one source must be a book, anthology or textbook.
At least one source must be from a credible website, appropriate for academic use.
The paper should not over-rely on one main source for most of the information. Rather, it should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in them.
This paper will be approximately 5-7 pages in length, not including the Works Cited page, which is also required. This means at least 5 full pages of text. The Works Cited page does NOT count towards length requirement.
You must use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.
You must integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary.
You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Your paper must be logically organized and focused.
Writing OptionSimplified
Support, refute, or complicate the inferred lesson from bell hooks’ essay, “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” that upward mobility requires a betrayal of one’s economic class and even family.
This is an essay about class divisions based on language,
money,
aesthetics,
values,
aspirations,
privilege,
conformity,
community and family loyalty,
pretentiousness,
affections,
and notions of authenticity.
This is an essay about the guilt for leaving people, including loved ones, behind.
This is an essay about guilt for "not knowing your place" and dreaming for "more than what you need" and "excess." Of course, these notions are all relative.
This is an essay about guilt for having desires of any kind, for envying what "the other people have."
This is an essay about the guilt for "playing the game" to ascend the education and economic ladder.
One. What did Hook’s mother teacher about desire in the mother’s attempt to quell the appetite for unaffordable things?
Hooks felt belittled and learned to distrust her desires and bury them. The implicit message is that since she is of the lower classes she has to know her place and have no sense of entitlement. She must remain modest. She must be happy in life with life's bare minimum. She must be apologetic about her existence.
To have desires for anything above one's station in life is considered impolite.
We can only imagine what this would do to her psyche.
That would drive me crazy to want something and to develop this reflex to immediately say I don’t actually want it.
Hooks’ save-money mentality followed her into college where money had to be first considered above all else.
To be religious, from her family's point of view, is to be happy with one's lot, is to be modest, and to shun the idolatry of materialism.
Hooks' parents are making a faulty equivalence of materialistic idolatry and making a better life for oneself through higher education.
Anything that branches out of the tribe's rigid ways is looked upon as a threat to the moral order. Going to college is a threat to a lot of families who don't want to disrupt tradition and routine. Tribalistic conformity becomes the key to happiness. This theme is illustrated in a masterpiece short story "The Country of the Blind" by H.G. Wells.
During Hooks’ first year in college, she realizes a lot of her mother’s fears are rooted in class shame, the disgrace of not measuring up in the presence of “real classy people.” Sadly, we live in a society where the lower classes suffer an inferiority complex because they don't "measure up" to the higher classes.
Two. What happens to Bell Hooks in college?
She is isolated by the white girls who look at her in horror and disdain for being black and for being not rich. “Not only are you black; you’re not rich. Stay away from us, you pariah.” She becomes La Otra.
Like her childhood, Hooks was learning to be apologetic about her existence. "Sorry I don't fit in, rich girls. I'll try to stay out of the way."
Her existence becomes one of self-abnegation or self-erasure: “If I want things and if I feel overcome by loneliness, then too bad. I have to suffer. My existence is not worth these considerations. My needs mean nothing compared to these rich white girls.”
Bell Hooks sees the world as binary: The haves and the have-nots. Those who live in glorious gardens with grass and trees and those who live in the scorched weeds.
Bell Hooks connects with one white girl who like Hooks is financially challenged. She is a Czechoslovakian immigrant with modest means. The two of them together become Las Otras.
In 1978 when I was training at the gym, a 300-pound power lifter scrutinized me with piercing eyes and told me "there are only two kinds of people in the world, homeowners and renters." And then he spit behind his back before bench pressing 500 pounds like it was a feather.
Unlike Hooks, though, the Czech girl has contempt and envy for the rich white girls. She desires their riches and resents them for having what she lacks.
In contrast, Hooks’ religious upbringing taught her to be leery of excess, of pride, of loving riches for their own sake.
Three. What finally sets off Hooks’ rage toward the rich white girls?
When they perform their ritual of trashing someone’s room and it ends up being Hooks’ room, Hooks is enraged that these rich narcissists cannot consider that someone with modest finances cannot easily replace all the items that were ruined during the trashing.
The rich girls’ lack of empathy and their failure of imagination stirs Hooks’ deep loathing for them.
Adding to her contempt is Hooks’ refusal to want to be white like them and to aspire to behave like a vain privileged white girl.
Her contempt for these immature white girls compels Hooks to go to a real college, Stanford, which will test her parents’ class anxieties. Her parents will hide behind religion and say that Stanford, which is in California, is sinful.
Four. What does the essay teach us about education?
To succeed in education, we have to break the bonds with our class identity and this can be excruciating if our class identity is tied up with our parental identity.
Time and time again, we read of college students who don’t succeed until they break from their parents’ and communities’ class influences and this break is often seen as a betrayal and it results in guilt. But it is necessary.
Five. What cynical worldview does Hooks observe at Stanford?
Her white roommate, a poor girl from Orange County, believes in the religion of privilege: “Cheating was worth it. She believed the world the privileged had created was all unfair—all one big cheat; to get ahead, one had to play the game. To her, I was truly an innocent, a lamb being led to the slaughter.”
Hooks isn't prepared to play the game because playing the game means selling one's soul to the devil.
For Hooks' roommate however the only devil to worry about is being poor.
Six. What does Hooks conclude about the manner in which students must adapt to college?
Hooks writes: "Slowly, I began to understand fully that there was no place in academe for folks from working-class backgrounds who did not wish to leave the past behind. That was the price of the ticket. Poor students would be welcome at the best institutions of higher learning only if they were willing to surrender memory, to forget the past and claim the assimilated present as the only worthwhile and meaningful reality."
In other words to assimilate into the privileged, educated class, we have to embrace their language, attitude, demeanor, characteristics, body language; in other words, we have to die to our former self, disavow our past, and become a new person born in a world of privilege.
This new privilege becomes evident in the way we speak, write, and affect our body language. We develop a certain superciliousness and hauteur (uppity, proud, self-regarding expression that says, "I'm all that").
Hooks is tormented by the above fact not only because it's true, with all of its questionable moral implications, but because Hooks went through the process herself even as she questioned it. She became an "upper class intellectual."
At best when we transform from working class to privileged educated class, she writes, someone like her will suffer contradictions, having a remnant of her past identity and a new identity based on privilege.
Support, refute, or complicate the inferred lesson from bell hooks’ essay, “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” that upward mobility requires a betrayal of one’s economic class and even family.
Sample Thesis
Bell Hooks convincingly shows in her personal narrative that climbing the education ladder entails a sort of betrayal of one's working class roots evidenced by _________________, _________________, ______________, and __________________.
Sample Support of Hooks
What some might call a "betrayal" in Bell Hooks' narrative is no betrayal at all. Rather, Bell Hooks takes on the arduous journey toward reasonable self-preservation and self-interest evidenced by her responsibility to be true to her intellect, her responsibility to nurture a career that matches well with her strengths, and her responsibility to steer away from those who are content with small-town tribalistic stagnation so that she can spread her wings and fly.
Sample Essay Response That Agrees with Bell Hooks
College should be a place that champions the humanitarian spirit, embracing the struggle of those who suffer under the weight of the elites, the privileged class. However, as Bell Hooks convincingly argues, college perpetuates class and sometimes racial elitism, tacitly scorning the working-class while adulating the privileged elites evidenced by the professor’s indoctrination of the students to act and be privileged, the pressures to disown one’s working-class family and community, and the rich students’ contempt for the poorer students.
Sample Essay Response That Disagrees with Bell Hooks
While I sympathize with Bell Hooks and would defend her against anyone, teacher, student, or otherwise, who would discriminate against her on the basis of her race or economic class, I find that her condemnation of the elitism she identifies at college to be misguided. The role of the college should be to teach students to lift themselves up from their lower class and into a more privileged class. That’s the point of going to college, to go from a lower station to a higher station in life. Secondly, having these ambitions doesn’t make us anti-humanitarian or contemptuous of the lower classes. We simply want to work toward a place of more privilege. That’s normal human nature that addresses the Darwinian, often brutal realities we face in this world. Bell Hooks has the luxury as someone who makes hundreds of thousand of dollars a year to decry the privileged class, but she needs to face the fact that she belongs to that privileged class and she worked hard to get there. Finally, Bell Hooks does a disservice if she doesn’t tell students from the working class the hard truth about succeeding at college, which is that to be successful we must disavow ourselves of our tribalistic past, even if it means separating ourselves from our working-class parents and community, even if our abandoning that family and community, as Bell Hooks herself did, gives us shame and guilt, because that separation is essential for becoming reborn as an empowered member of the privileged class who is now in a position to help our family in ways we never were before.
Response That Refutes the Above
The refutation of Bell Hooks under the claim that we must sell our souls to the devil in order to be successful is a grotesque absurdity misinformed by the blind ambition of class privilege, a convenient worship of Darwinian self-centeredness, and a failure to acknowledge that we can enjoy the joining the privileged ranks without disavowing our past identity, family, and community.
Response to the Above Refutation
I never claimed we should sell our soul to the devil and engage in Darwinian self-centeredness. My argument, contrary to the one misconstrued above, is that to embrace the new life of college, its ideas, its knowledge, its new identity, and yes the privileges that come with higher learning, we must go through the excruciating process of dying to our old self, the very self that was raised in our working-class homes and communities and that this process of dying and being reborn again is the very process that Bell Hooks admits to going through in order to become the success she is today.
Sample Outline
Paragraph 1: Write about someone you know who succeeded or failed to ascend one social class to another with the help of higher education. 250 words.
Paragraph 2: Summarize bell hooks' essay. 250 words
Paragraph 3: Thesis: Support or refute the idea that educational and social ascent requires a sort of betrayal of one's working-class roots and give 4 reasons to support your thesis. 150 words. 650 words for subtotal.
Paragraphs 4-7: 150 each for 600 words. 1,250 subtotal.
In the context of John Taylor Gatto’s “Against School,” support, refute, or complicate the argument that American education is more about protecting private business interests, maintaining class bias, and asserting mass control than it is about promoting real empowerment such as critical thinking, independence, and freedom.
Paragraph 2: Write about an experience in which you felt school betrayed all its promises of critical thinking, independence, and freedom and instead proved to be a controlling business or glorified baby-sitting service. Or if you disagree with Gatto, write about your amazing school experience. 250 words.
Paragraph 3: Your thesis should address the above. 150 words.
Paragraphs 4-7 are your supporting paragraphs. 150 words for 4 paragraphs is 600; 1,150 subtotal.
Paragraph 8: Counterargument-rebuttal. 150 words. 1,300 (two counterargument paragraphs would give you 1,550 words total)
Paragraph 9: Conclusion 100 words for 1,400
Developing Your Thesis
A thesis statement is one sentence that articulates the central idea of your essay.
A thesis statement is one sentence that tells readers your position or argument.
A thesis statement often outlines your essay’s body paragraphs with mapping components.
A thesis statement is born out of your assigned topic.
A thesis statement can never be merely a statement of your topic. Rather, it must be the point you are making about your topic.
Example
Topic
Standardized testing is part of the No Child Left Behind program.
Argumentative Thesis Statement
Standardized testing is a sham that we need to replace with more reliable measures of student learning outcomes.
Standardized testing is a sham that we need to replace with more reliable measures of student learning outcomes because the evidence shows that _______________, ___________________, ________________, and _________________.
Topic
In high numbers, upper class educated Anglos are not vaccinating their children from measles and other diseases.
Cause and Effect Thesis Statement
Many upper class educated Anglos are not vaccinating their children because their pride, paranoia, and pseudo-science have intoxicated them into embracing all the myths de jour of the anti-vaccine movement.
Argumentative Thesis Statement
There should be harsh penalties incurred against parents who don’t vaccinate their children because ________________, ________________, _______________, and _______________________.
Topic Is Not a Thesis
Unlike other first-world countries, the United States spends close to 18 percent of its GDP on healthcare while other countries spend closer to 10 percent.
Cause and Effect Thesis Statement
The United States is resigned to spending 18 percent of its GDP on healthcare because __________________, __________________, _________________, and _______________________.
Argumentative Thesis Statement
The United States needs to get its healthcare GDP down to about 10 percent because _______________, _______________, ______________, and ___________________.
Topic
The manner in which John Gatto would respond to teachers committing plagiarism in the classroom is a writing topic.
Definition Thesis
Reading "How We Learn," we see that plagiarism is not all kinds of imitation, but imitation characterized by ____________, _____________, _____________, and _______________.
Cause and Effect Thesis
Reading "How We Learn," we can imagine John Gatto being outraged by the link between teaching hypocrisy and student boredom when we analyze ________________, __________________, ______________, and ___________________.
A strong case can be made that John Gatto, when faced with the hypocrisy mentioned in Toor's essay, would use this hypocrisy as ammunition to support his thesis evidenced by _______________, _______________, ________________, and ___________________.
As The Geography of Bliss teaches us however implicitly, it is imperative that we embrace strong moral cultural norms to create happiness evidenced by _________________, __________________, ________________, and ____________________.
Your Essay Must Have a Thesis Statement That Is the Engine of Your Essay's Body Paragraphs
A thesis statement is an assertion that can be demonstrated with logic, reasoning, and examples.
We read in US & World News Report that, "Among millennials ages 25 to 32, earnings for college-degree holders are $17,500 greater than for those with high school diplomas only, a new study finds."
The above is not a thesis; it is a fact. We could use such a fact or study to support a thesis.
A thesis from the above would look like this:
While college costs are punitive and oppressive, especially to those with modest financial means, going to college for most people is worth its steep investment when we consider gains in lifetime income, networking with diverse populations, developing literacy, and creating a legacy of higher income for future generations.
Thesis statements or claims go under four different categories:
One. Claims about solutions or policies: The claim argues for a certain solution or policy change:
America's War on Drugs should be abolished and replaced with drug rehab.
Two. Claims of cause and effect: These claims argue that a person, thing, policy or event caused another event or thing to occur.
Social media has turned our generation into a bunch of narcissistic solipsists with limited attention spans, an inflated sense of self-importance, and a shrinking degree of empathy.
Three. Claims of value: These claims argue how important something is on the Importance Scale and determine its proportion to other things.
Global warming poses a far greater threat to our safety than does terrorism.
Four. Claims of definition. These claims argue that we must re-define a common and inaccurate assumption.
In America the notion of "self-esteem," so commonly taught in schools, is in reality a cult of narcissism. While real self-esteem teaches self-confidence, discipline, and accountability, the fake American brand of self-esteem is about celebrating the low expectations of mediocrity, and this results in narcissism, vanity, and sloth.
Sample Thesis
John Taylor Gatto accurately diagnoses the corruption of school by pointing out that it is not designed to educate us to be our better selves; rather, public education is about indoctrinating us to be malleable slaves to mediocrity and conformity evidenced by _____________, _____________, _____________, and ______________.
One. In the essay’s opening, we see that boredom is not a benign condition. Rather, boredom is a malignancy. This becomes clear when we see that boredom is a synonym for all sorts of horrible things. Give a list of things boredom stands for.
Learned helplessness
Resentment or mutual loathing (everyone blames everyone else for the problems at school)
Recurring cycles of futility, which brings up Einstein’s definition of insanity
Monotony
Lethargy, the fatigue and enervation from being mired in a problem with no apparent solution for so long
Lowered expectations
Dysfunction, settling into the idea that “this is how it is” and “nothing can be done,” so I’ll just “ride this out.”
All of us. We are all responsible, according to Gatto’s grandfather, to entertain and amuse ourselves.
We have all been responsible for the apathy and tolerance to brain-dead mediocrity.
Three. For Gatto, what is the difference between education and forced schooling?
He argues that “mass compulsory schooling” is not associated with success if we look at history.
The goals of “mass compulsory schooling” were defined, we read during 1905 and 1915 and they focused on the following:
One. To make good people.
Two. To make good citizens.
Three. To make each person his or her personal best.
For Gatto and H.L. Mencken who Gatto quotes, education is a form of indoctrination in which we brainwash students to fit with the system, be mediocre, and conform into the same type of safe person. This conformity is to the model of the mindless consumer who is obedient to marketing and advertising in order to insure a robust economy.
From Gatto's essay:
Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold: 1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best.
These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. . . . Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States . . . and that is its aim everywhere else.
We further read that schools base their operations on indoctrination, not critical thinking.
Obedience to authority, conformity to norms, learning the “correct” social role, labeling the students according to perceived rank (tag the “unfit”; promote the desirables), pass on elite power to younger generation of the elite and to hell with the rest of them (276).
In contrast, a teacher serves his students well if he gives them critical thinking skills:
Learn how to think for yourself by establishing informed or considered opinions, not habitual or peer-driven ones.
Learn how to read critically.
Learn the difference between causation and correlation.
Identify logical fallacies.
Grow and flourish as you become an adult and independent thinker.
Four. What are the functions of school?
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
Essay #5 Options: Capstone Essay with 5 Sources for Works Cited Due 12/11.
One. Support, refute, or complicate Alfie Kohn’s assertion from “Degrading to De-grading” that grading is an inferior education tool that all conscientious teachers should abandon. In other words, will students benefit from an accountability-free education? Why? Explain.
Two. Support, refute, or complicate the inferred lesson from bell hooks’ essay, “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” that upward mobility requires a betrayal of one’s economic class and even family. To rub shoulders with the privileged, do we have to "sell out," to conform to their snobbish ways, and in doing so, are we betraying our core values and turning our backs on our roots?
Three. In the context of one or more essays we’ve read about standardized testing, support, refute, or complicate the assertion that standardized testing is a money-making canard sodden with incompetence, corruption, and moral bankruptcy, and therefore must be abolished.
Four. Support, refute, or complicate the argument that “Against School” and any other essays we’ve covered persuasively evidence that American education is more about protecting private business interests, maintaining class bias, and asserting mass control than it is about promoting real empowerment such as critical thinking, independence, and freedom.
Five. In the context of John Taylor Gatto’s “Against School,” support, refute, or complicate the argument that that American education is more about protecting private business interests, maintaining class bias, and asserting mass control than it is about promoting real empowerment such as critical thinking, independence, and freedom.
Six. Bell Hooks sees the self-destruction from extreme self-abasement on one hand and extreme privilege on the other. She is on a quest for a healthy middle ground. These components of toxic self-abasement and toxic privilege, and the sick symbiotic relationship between the rich and poor, are evident in Hooks' essay, "Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class" (287). Toxic abasement and the sick symbiotic relationship between the rich and the poor are also evident in "The Consequences--Undoing Sanity" (342), "How the Poor Are Made to Pay for Their Poverty," and Linda Tirado's online essay "Why I Make Terrible Decisions." Develop a thesis that compares the toxic symbiotic relationship between the rich and the poor in the aforementioned essays and show that human redemption is from a sense of healthy, well-balanced privilege that doesn't exclude social conscience. (This prompt has the thesis embedded in it.)
Your guidelines for your Final Research Paper are as follows:
This research paper should present a thesis that is specific, manageable, provable, and contestable—in other words, the thesis should offer a clear position, stand, or opinion that will be proven with research.
You should analyze and prove your thesis using examples and quotes from a variety of sources.
You need to research and cite from at least five sources. You must use at least 3 different types of sources.
At least one source must be from an ECC library database.
At least one source must be a book, anthology or textbook.
At least one source must be from a credible website, appropriate for academic use.
The paper should not over-rely on one main source for most of the information. Rather, it should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in them.
This paper will be approximately 5-7 pages in length, not including the Works Cited page, which is also required. This means at least 5 full pages of text. The Works Cited page does NOT count towards length requirement.
You must use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.
You must integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary.
You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Your paper must be logically organized and focused.
One. Kohn asserts that good teachers de-emphasize grades and that bad teachers, who even lack a conscience, emphasize grades. How compelling is his argument?
Some would accuse him of an over simplification and an either/or fallacy. “Either you drink my Kool-Aid and stop using grades, or you are proving to be a horrible, immoral teacher."
This extreme position, many would say, is an oversimplification and a form of bullying, evidence of a false prophet.
Furthermore, the “three effects of grading” that Kohn refers to could be disputed.
For example, we read, “Grades tend to reduce students’ interest in the learning itself.” What’s the baseline of interest that Kohn assumes will deteriorate if we push grades on students? Is there a baseline? If there is, he doesn't define it in any way.
He also claims that students will shy away from challenging tasks and suffer the reduction of “quality” thinking.
Again, Kohn is throwing an either/or fallacy in our face: Either hold students accountable with grades and suck the creativity out of their learning or cut out grades altogether and inject creativity into their learning. Why can’t there be a balance of both?
Two. What Are Some Possible Refutations of Kohn? (A Defense of Grading)
1. Competition from grading prepares students for real world.
2. Not all students try and perform equally. Those who are superior, as a result of their hard work, should enjoy seeing their hard work rewarded with higher grades.
3. It’s human nature to be motivated by the carrot and the stick. Kohn is living in a candy-coated dream world that ignores the realities of human nature.
4. Grades are not perfect, but they are an important motivational tool.
5. Grades are not perfect, but they do help show the “cream rising to the top,” an important process in any meritocracy. A meritocracy is a society that rewards the people based on merits.
6. It turns out that Kohn also is against homework. Thus, it appears he subscribes to the Cult of Academic Relaxation, a form of “creative laxity,” which I oppose.
7. Kohn's argument contradicts empirical evidence: In my 30 years of teaching, A students tend to be responsible; C and D students tend to be less responsible.
Three. What does Kohn mean when he says grades "spoil relationships with students"?
He uses an anecdote of a teacher whose instruction has been reduced to fanatical grading and that is served as evidence that grading is this monster that takes over teaching. In other words, he uses an extreme example to argue against grading. That's a logical fallacy.
Then there's the argument that a teacher should be less of a grader and more of a friend. Is this a good idea?
What if the student doesn't want to comply with his "friend's" educational goals?
The student might say to the teacher, "Sorry, friend, I don't feel like writing my Works Cited page."
Four. What is the Maternal Fallacy and how does this fallacy apply to Kohn?
The Maternal Fallacy is the emphasis on nurture and protection at the exclusion of discipline and control, qualities associated with the Patriarch or father figure. "Education should be a place of nurture and unconditional acceptance," says this line of thinking. "We don't want to traumatize the students by judging them harshly and hurting their self-esteem."
But in fact coddling students like this makes them weak and helpless in the real world. Creating dysfunctional citizens with no skills for the real world is hardly serving them.
In an affluent society in which the young generation have a foundation of basics in math and writing, some of Kohn's maternal outlets for creative freedom are valid. However, in the absence of these basic skills, grading and basics in education are sometimes necessary.
Five. Would you be more motivated if you did not receive grades? Explain.
Answers may vary.
For me personally, if I had an interest in the class, I might not need to be motivated so much by grades as much as I would be seeking approval from the instructor. But if the class were a requirement outside my sphere of interest, I might not do anything.
Six. Is it fair to compare grading to a polluted city or is this rhetorical demagoguery? Explain.
"Wearing diamonds is equal to killing slave children in Africa," it could be argued, has more of a basis in reality than Kohn's statement above.
More Criticism Against Kohn
We read the following by Daniel Willingham whose link is provided below:
In his book, Punished by Rewards, Kohn claims “Praise, at least as commonly practiced, is a way of using and perpetuating children’s dependence on us. It gets them to conform to our wishes irrespective of what those wishes are.” (p. 104.) Kohn also argues that praise and rewards for good behavior are destructive to motivation. The truth is actually somewhat more complicated. Rewards can reduce motivation, but only when motivation was somewhat high to start with. If the student is unmotivated to perform some task, rewarding him will not hurt his motivation. Praise can be controlling and exact a psychological cost, but its effect on the recipient depends on how it’s construed: does the child think you are offering sincere appreciation for a job well done, or sending the message that future behavior had better be in line with expectations? There is important psychological work showing that the role of praise and reward is complex. Carol Dweck is a leader in this field and her book, Mindset, provides a good overview.
Regarding self-control, Willingham writes:
In a recent piece in the Phi Delta Kappan, Kohn argues that self-discipline has been over-sold, and indeed, that it has a dark side—too much self-control may be associated with anxiety, compulsiveness, and dampened emotional responses. He notes that some researchers put few or no qualifications on their enthusiasm for self-control, essentially arguing that more is always better. But Kohn proceeds from a definition of “self-control” that differs from that used by these researchers (Roy Baumeister,Angela Duckworth, Walter Mischel, and Marty Seligman), and indeed, by virtually all of the important researchers in the field. They define self-control as the ability to marshal your cognitive and emotional resources to help you attain goals that you consider important. Kohn defines self-control as using willpower to accomplish things that are generally regarded as desirable. Thus by Kohn’s definition, a child shows self-discipline when she determinedly (and miserably) slogs towards a goal that she does not value, but that her parents (or others) deem important. Researchers use the former definition when they claim that they find no disadvantages to self-control, and that they observe positive associations with achievement, social adjustment, mental health. Kohn’s point—that authoritarian control leads to negative outcomes—is not very startling and is shared more or less universally by researchers.
Pointing out Kohn's logical fallacies, Willingham point out:
Kohn falls prey to logical fallacies on occasion. In the same Kappan piece on self-discipline, Kohn writes “Learning, after all, depends not on what students do so much as on how they regard and construe what they do. To assume otherwise is to revert to a crude behaviorism long since repudiated by serious scholars.” (p. 170). This is a false dilemma. Kohn offers me the choice of agreeing with his version of a constructivist learning theory or agreeing with a behaviorist theory. Actually, those are not my only choices of learning theories. (I have yet to find a Kohn piece in which behaviorism—a theory whose heyday was fifty years ago, and is now ignored by most learning theorists—did not take a beating.)
Kohn’s work often makes use of misleading vividness, or perhaps better, a variant of that fallacy. His articles are characterized by a long, vehement attack on the target and a brief, subdued qualification of the attack. The pale qualification, though important to an accurate characterization of the literature, is likely forgotten by the reader. For example, the Kappan piece is an attack on three fronts (psychological, philosophical, and political) on the usefulness of self-discipline. Kohn also notes “While I readily admit that persevering at worthwhile tasks is good—and that some students seem to lack this capacity—. . . .” This qualification indicates that an important topic ought to be “when is self-control useful, and when is it destructive?” But the message of the article is unqualified: self-discipline is bad.
Summarize Kohn's Arguments
“Grades tend to reduce students’ interest in the learning itself” (238).
“Grades tend to reduce students’ preference for challenge tasks” (239).
“Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking” (239).
“Grades aren’t valid, reliable, or objective” (240).
“Grades encourage cheating” (241).
“Grades spoil teachers’ relationships with students” (241).
Sample Responses
Student Who Disagrees with Kohn
My experience as a student contradicts everything Kohn tries to say. I’ve walked into classes with absolutely no interest in the subject, but because I had a gun to my head, that is the pressure of grades pointing at my temple, I forced myself to get acquainted with the material. Contrary to Kohn, my being forced to know the material made me respect and like the subject matter far more than a situation in which I knew I would not be graded. Without the pressure of grades, I would remain ignorant of the subject, and that ignorance would perpetuate my lack of interest in the material.
Kohn’s second assertion is that grading will discourage me from embracing challenging tasks. He’s assuming that without grades, I’d be more inclined to take intellectual and creative risks. He is wrong. When I was a college student, I was lazy and was not predisposed to taking on any kind of challenge. The path of least resistance was my work ethic. Grades or not, I was an incurably lazy human being. If anything, I needed grades to prompt me off my butt and to do some actual homework.
Kohn’s third assertion is that grading will compromise my critical thinking skills. Again, I don’t think Kohn knows what he’s talking about. When I was in college, I had no critical thinking skills to lose. Grades were hardly the reason I was so ignorant. My youthful naiveté, my laziness, and my being sheltered in the suburbs had far more to do with my lack of critical thinking skills than any teacher’s grading system.
Kohn’s fourth argument is that grading is not a reliable system because the teachers can be biased, unfair, and use unreliable grading measures. I’ll admit these are possible scenarios, but in my years at high school and college, it seems that over 95% of the time, students did indeed get the grades they deserved. If there is a five percent error, that is hardly sufficient reason for dumping grades.
Kohn goes on to say that grades encourage cheating and spoil students’ relationship with teachers. Of course, a grading system is going compel students to cheat. They want to be up to par with the A students whose A performance has earned them top honors. Any system with a top and a bottom is going to have cheaters. To deny that reality is to try to create a world that does not exist. And that world is the one provided by Alfie Kohn.
Regarding the final point about our relationship with teachers, Kohn is assuming there is this great relationship that is forged without grades and that grades spoils the deal. Again, he is in error. We are not friends with the teachers. They are hired to do what they do because of their presumed expertise and authority in the subject. They are our guides and mentors, and their grading system is their way of showing us how well we are at reaching the benchmarks that are part of each class. Kohn’s assertion that these benchmarks measured by a grading system is a degradation of the student-teacher relationship has no bearing in reality and again shows that he is trying to impose an artificial world on the real one. For all these reasons, I have dismissed Kohn convincingly. Can we move on to a new topic, please? (avoid hubris in the conclusion)
Student Defense of Alfie Kohn
Alfie Kohn is trying to save education from being a terrible place of fear, elitism, and students being helpless pawns before their maniacal teachers who use grades to bully, control, and traumatize their students.
First off, everyone knows that grades are unfair. Teachers don’t really care how well you write. All they care about is that you agree with them, so you spend your time kissing up to them, trying to make your essays reflect what your instructors say in the class.
Secondly, Kohn is right that grades reduce interest. How can you focus on the subject with any interest when you’re always worried about achieving a 4.0 so that you can get into a good university? Interest is irrelevant. It’s all about the grades. And seeing some students get As while others get Cs is traumatizing for the lower students who feel stigmatized and shamed, often wearing these negative emotions for the rest of their lives. How dare we let teachers have so much power over our self-esteem. We should cut their grading power out from under them just as Alfie Kohn says we should.
Third, Kohn is so correct to point out that grading makes us students avoid challenging approaches to the subject matter. We always seek the easiest path to The Land of A. Why take risks by doing something more challenging than we have to?
Finally, what kind of relationship can I have with my teachers when I fear their power over me? Their grade determines my place in the world. One wrong move and my life as a successful banker could be diminished to a milk truck driver. It’s impossible to develop strong relationships with figures that wield so much power. Therefore, I commend Alfie Kohn for telling us to stop the insanity, cut out grades, and bring real education back to the classrooms.
Refutation of the Above Response
While I concede that there are too many teachers who want their students to regurgitate their ideas rather than think critically for themselves, the rest of the student’s defense of Alfie Kohn is a mishmash of egregious fallacies, clichés, and sloppy thinking, all of which serves to highlight Kohn’s dangerous arguments for ending grading systems as we know them.
Perhaps the biggest danger is this idea that we are hurting students’ self-esteem and subjecting them to lifelong traumas by judging them with clear benchmarks to see if they are fulfilling course requirements. The sentiment of preserving self-esteem has everything to do with the fantasy of staying home in the safety of Mother’s House and nothing to do with the reality of competing in the real world. The fantasy of preserving the Big Baby for eternity is typically an upper class one. Narcissistic, well-to-do parents who can’t accept the foibles of their “perfect” Junior want teachers who can only mutter obsequious flattery, and if their grading system in any way is less than flattering, then clearly grading, as Kohn argues, is the enemy of all: self-esteem, creativity, student interest, the buddy-buddy relationship with student and teacher.
Of course, this fantasy bears no resemblance to the real world. Imagine a jiu-jitsu instructor who elevates his students’ self-esteem by giving everyone a black belt. The tournament comes along and that instructor’s students have to spar with real black belts. I think we all know what the outcome will be.
Kohn is the instructor who’d love to give everyone a black belt, which of course is a fantasy, and a dangerous one at that.
Break Down the Assignment into Your Own Words
We're asked in the prompt to explain, perhaps in one sentence, what Kohn means when he says we must move from a grade to a learning orientation. Clearly, a grading orientation for Kohn excludes learning. We have to explain why Kohn believes this and then explain whether or not we agree with him.
Student Refutation of Kohn
Kohn has created a false opposition, between grading and learning, to propel is phony argument that grades are a plague ruining schools and minds. What Kohn and his ilk are afraid of is this big scary thing called judgment. Grades are a form of judgment, and judgments for Kohn are a very scary thing because they take a child’s fragile self-esteem, Kohn’s view, and dismantle it.
I’ve got some scary news for Kohn. Judgment is here to stay. Judgment is everywhere. Judgment is how we survive. Judgment is how we flourish. And judgment is how we measure our educational success. When we choose toothpaste or a cold cereal or a web browser, or a laptop, or a smartphone, or a boyfriend, or a girlfriend, we exercise judgment. When a university picks students from a pool of community college students, the university exercises judgment.
Kohn’s argument is so removed from reality that it seems he must live inside a bubble in which he talks only to himself or his Kool-Aid drinking believers. Grades aren’t going anywhere. Grades are a normal part of the judgment process. And Kohn’s fantasy of taking judgment out of the education process is so lunatic that he is nothing more than a provocateur and a demagogue whose flea-sized arguments will be crushed in the elephantine marketplace of real ideas.
Two. In the context of “The Flip Side of the Internet” and “The Evolution of Shaming,” develop a cause and effect thesis about the frenzy of shame that is evident in the age of social media. How do shame and fame feed each other is a sick symbiotic relationship? Consider envy, desperation for attention, loss of boundaries, and the need to push the envelope in order to "be heard."
Three. Comparing “Faces in the Mirror” and “The Flip Side of the Internet,” develop a thesis that analyzes the confluence of narcissism and celebrity worship. If narcissism is the undeveloped, immature self, as Sherry Turkle suggests, then it makes sense that narcissistic souls hunger to be worshiped on the grand scale of the very celebrities they both adulate and despise out of envy.
Four. In the context of “Unspeakable Conversations,” defend, refute, or complicate Peter Singer’s position that there are moral grounds for infanticide or “mercy killings.”
Five. Develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates Paul Bloom’s assertion that simple-minded notions of empathy are actually dangerous and diminish us as human beings. Here's the link:
Seven. Develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that mass incarceration is “The New Jim Crow.” See Adam Gopnik's "The Caging of America."
Eight. Develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that the United States government is morally compelled to give some African-Americans reparations for the injustices of slavery. See Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay "The Case for Reparations."
Based on Adam Gopnik's essay "The Caging of America," support, refute, or complicate the assertion that mass incarceration is "The New Jim Crow." You can refer to the Netflix documentary 13th, about the New Jim Crow in the aftermath of slavery. Is there enough evidence to support the claim that mass incarceration is a continuation of Jim Crow and therefore is aptly called The New Jim Crow?
A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.
That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.
For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.
William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published, last fall, is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice. He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of post-Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison time; “zero tolerance” policing, which added to the group; mandatory-sentencing laws, which prevented judges from exercising judgment. But his search for the ultimate cause leads deeper, all the way to the Bill of Rights. In a society where Constitution worship is still a requisite on right and left alike, Stuntz startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system—much inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson, he points out, may have helped shape while his protégé Madison was writing ours.
The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” was designed to protect cruel punishments—flogging and branding—that were not at that time unusual.
The obsession with due process and the cult of brutal prisons, the argument goes, share an essential impersonality. The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people. That’s why America is famous both for its process-driven judicial system (“The bastard got off on a technicality,” the cop-show detective fumes) and for the harshness and inhumanity of its prisons. Though all industrialized societies started sending more people to prison and fewer to the gallows in the eighteenth century, it was in Enlightenment-inspired America that the taste for long-term, profoundly depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia—a “model” prison, at the time the most expensive public building ever constructed in the country, where every prisoner was kept in silent, separate confinement—still resonates:
I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.
Not roused up to stay—that was the point. Once the procedure ends, the penalty begins, and, as long as the cruelty is routine, our civil responsibility toward the punished is over. We lock men up and forget about their existence. For Dickens, even the corrupt but communal debtors’ prisons of old London were better than this. “Don’t take it personally!”—that remains the slogan above the gate to the American prison Inferno. Nor is this merely a historian’s vision. Conrad Black, at the high end, has a scary and persuasive picture of how his counsel, the judge, and the prosecutors all merrily congratulated each other on their combined professional excellence just before sending him off to the hoosegow for several years. If a millionaire feels that way, imagine how the ordinary culprit must feel.
In place of abstraction, Stuntz argues for the saving grace of humane discretion. Basically, he thinks, we should go into court with an understanding of what a crime is and what justice is like, and then let common sense and compassion and specific circumstance take over. There’s a lovely scene in “The Castle,” the Australian movie about a family fighting eminent-domain eviction, where its hapless lawyer, asked in court to point to the specific part of the Australian constitution that the eviction violates, says desperately, “It’s . . . just the vibe of the thing.” For Stuntz, justice ought to be just the vibe of the thing—not one procedural error caught or one fact worked around. The criminal law should once again be more like the common law, with judges and juries not merely finding fact but making law on the basis of universal principles of fairness, circumstance, and seriousness, and crafting penalties to the exigencies of the crime.
The other argument—the Southern argument—is that this story puts too bright a face on the truth. The reality of American prisons, this argument runs, has nothing to do with the knots of procedural justice or the perversions of Enlightenment-era ideals. Prisons today operate less in the rehabilitative mode of the Northern reformers “than in a retributive mode that has long been practiced and promoted in the South,” Perkinson, an American-studies professor, writes. “American prisons trace their lineage not only back to Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations.” White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. “The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,” the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of “formal control” (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of “invisible control.” Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander’s grim conclusion: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.”
Northern impersonality and Southern revenge converge on a common American theme: a growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:
Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.
Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.
Yet a spectre haunts all these accounts, North and South, whether process gone mad or penal colony writ large. It is that the epidemic of imprisonment seems to track the dramatic decline in crime over the same period. The more bad guys there are in prison, it appears, the less crime there has been in the streets. The real background to the prison boom, which shows up only sporadically in the prison literature, is the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it.
For those too young to recall the big-citycrime wave of the sixties and seventies, it may seem like mere bogeyman history. For those whose entire childhood and adolescence were set against it, it is the crucial trauma in recent American life and explains much else that happened in the same period. It was the condition of the Upper West Side of Manhattan under liberal rule, far more than what had happened to Eastern Europe under socialism, that made neo-con polemics look persuasive. There really was, as Stuntz himself says, a liberal consensus on crime (“Wherever the line is between a merciful justice system and one that abandons all serious effort at crime control, the nation had crossed it”), and it really did have bad effects.
Yet if, in 1980, someone had predicted that by 2012 New York City would have a crime rate so low that violent crime would have largely disappeared as a subject of conversation, he would have seemed not so much hopeful as crazy. Thirty years ago, crime was supposed to be a permanent feature of the city, produced by an alienated underclass of super-predators; now it isn’t. Something good happened to change it, and you might have supposed that the change would be an opportunity for celebration and optimism. Instead, we mostly content ourselves with grudging and sardonic references to the silly side of gentrification, along with a few all-purpose explanations, like broken-window policing. This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that don’t.
So what is the relation between mass incarceration and the decrease in crime? Certainly, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many experts became persuaded that there was no way to make bad people better; all you could do was warehouse them, for longer or shorter periods. The best research seemed to show, depressingly, that nothing works—that rehabilitation was a ruse. Then, in 1983, inmates at the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois, murdered two guards. Inmates had been (very occasionally) killing guards for a long time, but the timing of the murders, and the fact that they took place in a climate already prepared to believe that even ordinary humanity was wasted on the criminal classes, meant that the entire prison was put on permanent lockdown. A century and a half after absolute solitary first appeared in American prisons, it was reintroduced. Those terrible numbers began to grow.
And then, a decade later, crime started falling: across the country by a standard measure of about forty per cent; in New York City by as much as eighty per cent. By 2010, the crime rate in New York had seen its greatest decline since the Second World War; in 2002, there were fewer murders in Manhattan than there had been in any year since 1900. In social science, a cause sought is usually a muddle found; in life as we experience it, a crisis resolved is causality established. If a pill cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself.
All this ought to make the publication of Franklin E. Zimring’s new book, “The City That Became Safe,” a very big event. Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law, has spent years crunching the numbers of what happened in New York in the context of what happened in the rest of America. One thing he teaches us is how little we know. The forty per cent drop across the continent—indeed, there was a decline throughout the Western world— took place for reasons that are as mysterious in suburban Ottawa as they are in the South Bronx. Zimring shows that the usual explanations—including demographic shifts—simply can’t account for what must be accounted for. This makes the international decline look slightly eerie: blackbirds drop from the sky, plagues slacken and end, and there seems no absolute reason that societies leap from one state to another over time. Trends and fashions and fads and pure contingencies happen in other parts of our social existence; it may be that there are fashions and cycles in criminal behavior, too, for reasons that are just as arbitrary.
But the additional forty per cent drop in crime that seems peculiar to New York finally succumbs to Zimring’s analysis. The change didn’t come from resolving the deep pathologies that the right fixated on—from jailing super predators, driving down the number of unwed mothers, altering welfare culture. Nor were there cures for the underlying causes pointed to by the left: injustice, discrimination, poverty. Nor were there any “Presto!” effects arising from secret patterns of increased abortions or the like. The city didn’t get much richer; it didn’t get much poorer. There was no significant change in the ethnic makeup or the average wealth or educational levels of New Yorkers as violent crime more or less vanished. “Broken windows” or “turnstile jumping” policing, that is, cracking down on small visible offenses in order to create an atmosphere that refused to license crime, seems to have had a negligible effect; there was, Zimring writes, a great difference between the slogans and the substance of the time. (Arrests for “visible” nonviolent crime—e.g., street prostitution and public gambling—mostly went down through the period.)
Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. “The poor pay more and get more” is Zimring’s way of putting it. He believes that a “light” program of stop-and-frisk could be less alienating and just as effective, and that by bringing down urban crime stop-and-frisk had the net effect of greatly reducing the number of poor minority kids in prison for long stretches.
Zimring insists, plausibly, that he is offering a radical and optimistic rewriting of theories of what crime is and where criminals are, not least because it disconnects crime and minorities. “In 1961, twenty six percent of New York City’s population was minority African American or Hispanic. Now, half of New York’s population is—and what that does in an enormously hopeful way is to destroy the rude assumptions of supply side criminology,” he says. By “supply side criminology,” he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals. In truth, criminal activity seems like most other human choices—a question of contingent occasions and opportunity. Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crimes. Close down the open drug market in Washington Square, and it does not automatically migrate to Tompkins Square Park. It just stops, or the dealers go indoors, where dealing goes on but violent crime does not.
And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.
One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.
Social trends deeper and less visible to us may appear as future historians analyze what went on. Something other than policing may explain things—just as the coming of cheap credit cards and state lotteries probably did as much to weaken the Mafia’s Five Families in New York, who had depended on loan sharking and numbers running, as the F.B.I. could. It is at least possible, for instance, that the coming of the mobile phone helped drive drug dealing indoors, in ways that helped drive down crime. It may be that the real value of hot spot and stop-and-frisk was that it provided a single game plan that the police believed in; as military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan. But one thing is sure: social epidemics, of crime or of punishment, can be cured more quickly than we might hope with simpler and more superficial mechanisms than we imagine. Throwing a Band-Aid over a bad wound is actually a decent strategy, if the Band-Aid helps the wound to heal itself.
Which leads, further, to one piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom those sanctions aren’t sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are ever going to be sufficient. Zimring’s research shows clearly that, if crime drops on the street, criminals coming out of prison stop committing crimes. What matters is the incidence of crime in the world, and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some “lesson learned” in prison.
At the same time, the ugly side of stop-and-frisk can be alleviated. To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets—to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent, that the obvious thing to do is not to enforce the law less but to change it now. Dr. Johnson said once that manners make law, and that when manners alter, the law must, too. It’s obvious that marijuana is now an almost universally accepted drug in America: it is not only used casually (which has been true for decades) but also talked about casually on television and in the movies (which has not). One need only watch any stoner movie to see that the perceived risks of smoking dope are not that you’ll get arrested but that you’ll get in trouble with a rival frat or look like an idiot to women. The decriminalization of marijuana would help end the epidemic of imprisonment.
The rate of incarceration in most other rich, free countries, whatever the differences in their histories, is remarkably steady. In countries with Napoleonic justice or common law or some mixture of the two, in countries with adversarial systems and in those with magisterial ones, whether the country once had brutal plantation-style penal colonies, as France did, or was once itself a brutal plantation-style penal colony, like Australia, the natural rate of incarceration seems to hover right around a hundred men per hundred thousand people. (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get lower in rich, homogeneous countries—just that it never gets much higher in countries otherwise like our own.) It seems that one man in every thousand once in a while does a truly bad thing. All other things being equal, the point of a justice system should be to identify that thousandth guy, find a way to keep him from harming other people, and give everyone else a break.
Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime.
“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!” King Lear cries out on the heath in his moment of vision. “Take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” “This” changes; in Shakespeare’s time, it was flat-out peasant poverty that starved some and drove others as mad as poor Tom. In Dickens’s and Hugo’s time, it was the industrial revolution that drove kids to mines. But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life, and in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change it—which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order. In every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away. Prisons are our this.
Two Books of Record on Mass Incarceration
Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow published in 2010
Based on Adam Gopnik's essay "The Caging of America," support, refute, or complicate the assertion that mass incarceration is "The New Jim Crow." You can refer to the Netflix documentary 13th, about the New Jim Crow in the aftermath of slavery. Is there enough evidence to support the claim that mass incarceration is a continuation of Jim Crow and therefore is aptly called The New Jim Crow?
Suggested Outline
In paragraph 1, define and explain "The New Jim Crow" in the context of mass incarceration. 250 words.
In paragraph 2, your thesis, support, defend, or complicate the assertion that the industrial prison complex is a racist system that amounts to the New Jim Crow. 100 words (350).
Paragraphs 3-7 are your supporting paragraphs (5 x 150=750 for subtotal of 1,100).
2 Counterargument-Rebuttal Paragraphs (2x 150=300 for 1,400 total).
Conclusion of 100 words for 1,500 total.
What is the single leading cause of rising incarceration?
Drug offenses, which account for two thirds of the rise and more than half of the rise in state prisoners between 1985 and 2000 (60). There are more people in prisons and jails today for just drug offenses than were incarcerated for all reasons in 1980.
We read on page 60 that most prisoners are first offenders arrested for possession, not selling. In 2005, four out of five were arrested for possession only, not selling.
Another glaring fact: In the 1990s, marijuana was the leading cause for arrest. Marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol. By 2007 one in every 31 adults were behind bars, on probation, or on parole.
What rules, if any, dictate the War on Drugs?
First, the Fourth Amendment, the law against search and seizures, has been eradicated since a cop can say he had “reasonable cause” to do a drug search. This results in police harassment and intimidation in poor communities as the police can do warrantless searches (63).
Second, law enforcement can now use invasive means to do drug surveillance and forced drug tests and use of informants and allow the forfeiture of cash, property, and other belongings (62). So we see a huge economic motive to make these arrests.
Third, consent searches are now police policy and studies show that most people, intimidated by the police, will consent (66). As a result, human rights are being violated under the huge umbrella of "reasonable cause."
Fourth, the police can now rely on a pretext traffic stop (failing to make a turn signal or going 1 MPH over speed limit, to cite 2 examples) and use that stop as an excuse to do a drug search (67). Many people are forced to spread eagle on the ground during these searches. Ninety-nine percent of these people being investigated are innocent but left humiliated. The majority of these people are of color.
How does white drug use differ from black drug use?
We read on page 99, that white students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, and use heroin at seven times the rate of black students. Equal percentages use marijuana.
White drug dealers do their dealing, not on street corners like the poor, but in more discreet settings (100).
Crack cocaine, the major drug in black offenses, creates sentences that bring punishment with one hundred times more severity than offenses involving powder cocaine (the white drug) as we see on page 112. Crack law is unfair since plain cocaine results in far fewer sentences, a ratio of 100:1. Fair sentencing act may change this.
In Jim Crow 2.0, racial language is not used; there is a code that includes the type of drugs that will result in strong convictions. These strong convictions will be exacted on poor people of color, not white people with economic resources.
Why would there be huge resistance to reforming the New Jim Crow and Mass Incarceration?
We read on page 230 that if we got back to the incarceration rates of the 1970s, before the War on Drugs, we’d have release 4 out of 5 prisoners. This would reduce prison jobs and would be met with all-out war from the 700,000 prison guards, administrators, service workers and other prison personnel.
In a report by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Statistics in 2006, the U.S. spent $185 billion for police protection, detention, judicial, and legal activities in 2003. This is a tripling of expenses since 1982.
The justice system employed almost 2.4 million people in 2003. If 4 out of 5 prisoners were released, far more than a million prison employees would lose their jobs.
Private sector also has an investment in prison growth and the mass incarceration of helpless and vulnerable people of color. For example, former vice president Dick Cheney has invested millions in private prisons. His bank account depends on the incarceration of more and more black men (230).
On page 231, the author gives a sample of “prison profiteers” who look for new ways to increase the prison business, with the targets always being the same: poor black men, the people this country has abandoned.
Consider this: On page 237 we read that 75% of all incarceration has no impact on crime, that if between 7 and 8 prisoners out of 10 were released, there’d be no change in crime; however, this 75% generates $200 billion annually. It’s a money-making device.
The moral bankruptcy of the New Jim Crow is that this multi-billion-dollar economy has been built on the backs of poor black men whom America doesn’t give a damn about. There’s an “it ain’t me” mentality that is morally loathsome and detestable.
Adam Gopnik from “The Caging of America”
We give longer sentences for the same crime than all other countries in the world.
Over 400 teen-agers in Texas have life sentences.
6 million Americans are under “correctional supervision.” There are 2.4 Americans in prison.
In 1980, there were 220 Americans in prison for every 100,000 people. In 2010 that number has jumped to 731. No developed country in the world comes close to this.
Here’s some evidence or data for our immoral prison system being part of The New Jim Crow: In two decades prison spending is up 600%. Here’s the warrant, the logic that connects the data to the claim that the modern prison system is part of The New Jim Crow: The money incentive, not smart and moral public policy, is the driving force.
Gopnik: The US prison system is the “moral scandal of American life.” It’s a scandal most Americans are indifferent to because they’re sedated by the blue pill in The Matrix. Reading Gopnik’s essay and Alexander’s book is the equivalent of taking the red pill.
Today’s prison policy is influenced by 19th Century America when prison was seen as a slave plantation.
There is a landmark book that analyzes the corruption of our prison system. It’s Collapse of American Criminal Justice by William J. Stuntz. It reinforces many of the points made in The New Jim Crow.
We see an evil marriage of public policy and private interests: Corrections Corporation of America, a private prison company, enjoys financial growth that is dependent on America’s growing arrest rate (which is 90% people of color). The company’s stockholders want more arrests (not caring about the racial disparities and draconian nature of those arrests for all people) because they want to see their stock grow and grow. To make sure their stockholders are happy, CCA “spends millions lobbying legislators” to serve the purpose of the stockholders. Human rights can be damned as far as they’re concerned. They want their money.
The above example evidences that America is less of a democracy and more of an oligarchy. The word oligarchy is Greek which means the state is ruled by a only a few. In fact the Greek root oligos means “few.” We can conclude—and this would be in my conclusion of my paper when I restated my thesis—that to perpetuate The New Jim Crow is not only about the perpetuation of racism, slavery, and Jim Crow; it’s about a country being degraded into a corrupt oligarchy. I emphasize this because a conclusion should show the wider ramifications of your claim’s message.
Lexicon
One. Racial Caste System:
We had a caste system, based on the creation of race, during the time of slavery and during Jim Crow, but now we have Jim Crow 2.0 and a new racial caste system: a disproportionate number of black men in prison (7 black men for every white man) based on so-called "due process," which targets the poor and people of color. The United States is 5% of the world's population, yet we imprison 25% of all the world's prisoners.
As a country, we have an immoral appetite for putting people, especially poor people of color, in prison.
Two. Jim Crow:
During Reconstruction after the Civil War poor white farmers were angry that their lives were no better than the recently freed black people. White politicians, who needed those poor white votes, exploited the poor farmers' grievances by implementing Jim Crow, a system that separated black Americans into horrible conditions, racism, sub-wage work, failed schools, nonexistent government support, etc.
White politicians catered to the white supremacy religion of the poor white people who, having little, only could cling to their pathetic "religion" of white supremacy.
Three. Black Exceptionalism and the denial of racism in America:
Black Exceptionalism is the idea that since Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan, Oprah, and others have "made it,"; therefore, there can't possibly be racism and that any failure on a black person's part results from an individual failure of will and character.
We read in The Autobiography of Malcolm X that since the beginning of America, white people love to parade black people "who made it" to assuage white guilt for slavery, racism, and Jim Crow.
Four. False Equivalency Argument When Discussing Racism and Slavery:
Now some people will say, "But other people, including people of color, have enslaved others? What do you say to that?"
My response:
Slavery is unique to America because an entire country of white people drank the White Supremacy Kool-Aid to justify an evil that was exacted for over 100 years, perpetuating in ugly forms of Jim Crow to this day.
So when we talk about slavery, we must consider
scale
duration
brainwashing
pervasiveness (an entire country brainwashed or an outlier group of rogue criminal?)
Five. Colorblind Code Language as the New Racist Language: using code words to demonize a race: "thugs, felons, stamp abusers, welfare queens . . ."
Race-Based Social Control (21), various institutions control African Americans; first slavery, then Jim Crow, then the US Prison System, AKA Jim Crow 2.0. Institutions die but "are reborn in new form."
Trifold Narrative of the book: Slavery (born of a religious mass psychosis called White Supremacy), Jim Crow, Jim Crow 2.0
Summary of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow
In the New Jim Crow, or Jim Crow 2.0, we replace offensive racial epithets, now banned, with the term “criminals.”
These "criminals" are mostly poor people of color and they are the new undercaste and they are denied human rights. They can’t vote, get housing, jobs, etc.
The author thought ten years ago it was stupid to compare today’s war on drugs to Jim Crow (post civil war oppression of African Americans), that such a comparison would make people think you’re crazy, but the evidence has shown that indeed such a comparison is compelling.
"Only crackpots would compare the plight of black America today with Jim Crow, or worse, with slavery." The author had these thoughts but her research showed her otherwise. There is a system designed to incarcerate black and brown Americans and this system makes money, a huge prison system. And it gains political points for politicians. Both the prison industry and the politicians, MA will show, make their careers off the blood and backs of brown and black people.
Here are some key features of the New Jim Crow, AKA, The War on Drugs:
The War on Drugs started in 1982 and picked up momentum in 1985 when the black community was demonized as a Crack Den. These demonized images saturated TV news and gave a very thin slice of African Americans, not the whole picture.
The Drug War started when crime and drug use was on decline and the author suggests that it started as a form of social control.
In thirty years, the number of US prisoners increased from 300,000 to over 2 million.This number has gone unquestioned
The US has the highest incarceration rate of any industrialized country. Such a fact speaks volumes about our freedom and our democracy and our morality.
In Germany, 93 out of 100,000 adults are incarcerated; in the US, the number is 8 times that amount or 750 out of 100,000.
Between 1960 and 1990 crime rates in Finland, Germany, and US were the same but during that time the US incarceration rate quadrupled, the Finnish rate decreased 60 percent, and the German rate remained unchanged. The author seems to suggest we have unsavory motives for our high incarceration rate.
Indeed, a New Yorker essay "The Caging of America" traces the moral bankruptcy that informs the US prison system.
The majority of US prisoners are black and brown men. Black men outnumber white men 7 to 1 yet are only 13 percent of the population. We call this disparity the "racial caste system."
Black and brown men are, in spite of similar rates of drug activity to whites, imprisoned 20-50 times greater than whites.
In Washington D.C. 3 out of 4 black men will be in prison.
In major cities throughout the US, 80% of black men have criminal records.
But illegal drug activity is not greater among blacks. Illegal drug activity happens in similar numbers among the different races.
The growth of US prisons is the largest form of race-based social control in world history.
Experts agree that prisons make more crime; they don’t reduce crime, yet there is an incentive to grow the prison industry: It makes billions of dollars (and employs about 2.5 million people) and as long as this money is made on the backs of black and brown men, the media and the public remain indifferent.
Racial caste system is hard to fight.
Because it is largely invisible and insidious with code words but evidence for its existence is overwhelming as we can see from the statistics above.
And because we throw people in prison under "due process," from the Bill of Rights, which we worship like some kind of God. We get so caught up with "due process," that we become blind to the results of this "due process."
Continuum of the racial caste system
Slavery, Jim Crow, and Jim Crow 2.0, AKA The War on Drugs, is “a stigmatized racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom.” The new laws and customs put black and brown men into mass incarceration at disproportionate rates when their drug activity is not higher than other people’s.
This incarceration makes black and brown men members of the undercaste or second-class citizens based on prison label or criminal label, not prison time. Once labeled, they are denied citizen rights to vote, to serve jury duty, to work, etc.
On page 21, we see that when one type of racial oppression dies, a new one takes its place, what Reva Siegel has called “preservation through transformation.”
We no longer use racist language; we call people of color criminals or felons. Prison is the new form of control.
In American history, we see control over people of color has been largely to appease lower-class whites, who feel trapped at the bottom of society. The privileged whites throw the poor whites a dog bone: “Even though you’re poor, we’ll make people of color even more poor and even less privileged than you.”
We read further that Jim Crow was a reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation, the abolishment of slavery and it is the author’s contention that Mass Incarceration is the reaction to the Civil Rights Movement. See page 22.
Some claim to bathe in the glory of colorblindness and black exceptionalism (the idea that great blacks such Obama, Oprah, Bill Cosby, etc., and say these black celebrities are proof that blacks can climb the American ladder. However, according to Alexander, these arguments actually provide the essential tools for Jim Crow 2.0.
On page 14 we read, and this point will be developed later in the book, that they make us feel good for not having bigotry and hostility toward people of color while we have something far worse: indifference. Indifference to what? To quote the author, “A human rights nightmare is occurring on our watch” (15).
The privileged whites had to appease poor whites. See the case of Nathaniel Bacon’s Rebellion on page 24. By appeasing Bacon, rich whites broke up the alliance between poor whites and blacks.
Tragedy of racism and slavery
During America’s Colonial period, there was no such thing as race. People of light and dark skin color worked side by side oblivious of race. The idea of race didn’t become prominent until European imperialism and American slavery a few hundred years ago. To kill and exploit people with justification, the term “savages” was created to replace human beings.
During slavery, white supremacy became a religion that “served to alleviate the white conscience and reconcile the tension between slavery and the democratic ideals espoused by whites . . .” (26). This religion endured beyond slavery.
American government is founded on property ownership and privilege over equal rights.
We see on page 25 that James Madison said the nation ought to be constituted “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”
We read further that the Constitution “was designed so the federal government would be weak” in relation to private property and the “states to conduct their own affairs.”
Economic incentives created Jim Crow in the aftermath of slavery’s abolishment.
Southern regions depended on the labor of former slaves or those economies “would surely collapse.”
The attributes of Jim Crow:
Backlash and hostility against blacks in the face of the Reconstruction Era, a period of poor white resentment
Stereotypes of black males and predators and lazy ne’er-do-wells.
Strict unemployment laws against blacks and job discrimination, a disastrous combination.
No interracial relationships, seating, eating, hotels, rooms, etc. In other words, complete segregation. These laws kept a rift between poor whites and blacks and prevented them from forming an alliance.
KKK interference with black voting.
KKK lynchings of black men with no arrests.
An overall “terrorist campaign” against blacks (31)
Tens of thousands of blacks were “arbitrarily arrested” for “mischief” and “insulting gestures” (31).
Let's be clear: Mischief and insulting gestures are terms open to wide interpretation.
Black prison convicts had no human rights; they were as good as dead (31)
A new form of slavery emerged: black labor from prison (32)
Civil Rights foreshadowed the Birth of Mass Incarceration, AKA Jim Crow 2.0:
The Civil Rights Movement merged with the Poor People’s Movement and this alliance between poor whites and blacks threatened to challenge the distribution of wealth. A new racial control, splitting whites and blacks again (see 47-49), had to be established. See pages 39 and 40. Whites had to see blacks as “criminals” and pay taxes to erect a multi-billion-dollar prison system that employs over 2.5 million people.
President Reagan and other conservatives demonized the Civil Rights Movement:
We see on page 48 that the helping of the poor became “enabling welfare queens and criminal predators,” and in essence was ballooning this huge criminal underclass, which had to be controlled with The War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration.
In this Jim Crow 2.0 there was no explicit racist language. Instead a new language was created based on words like criminality, welfare bums, food stamp abusers and these terms became codes for poor black people, the “undeserving others” (49).
The Effects of the War on Drugs and Criminals:
On page 49 we read that “overnight the budgets of federal law enforcement agencies soared. Between 1980 and 1984, FBI anti-drug funding increased from $8 million to $95 million.”
Department of Defense antidrug allocations increased from $33 million in 1981 to $1,042 million in 1991.
Antidrug spending grew from $38 to $181 million.
Agencies for drug treatment, prevention, and education were dramatically reduced.
The budget for National Institute on Drug Abuse was reduced from $274 to $57 million from 1981 to 1984.
Department of Education suffered cuts from $14 million to $3 million.
All of these cuts and the demonization of the black inner cities as crack dens happened during huge economic collapse, a time when poor blacks were most vulnerable. We read, for example, that in the big cities black employment for blue-collar jobs went from 70% of all blacks working, in the late 1970s, to 28% by 1987.
During this time manufacturing jobs moved to the white suburbs and only 28% of black fathers had access to an automobile so they could drive from the cities to the suburbs.
These job losses were accompanied by increased incentives to sell drugs. “Crack hit the streets in 1985” (51).
Crack did indeed eviscerate the black community. But the government response was wrong. The correct response can be seen in Portugal. During a period of high drug use, Portugal decriminalized drugs and invested in treatment, prevention, and education and in ten years addiction and drug-related crime plummeted (51). But conservatives decided to wage a war against the “enemy.” And the media got into the act with images of “crack whores,” “crack babies,” and “gangbangers.” See page 52.
The Portugal study speaks to America's motives. Do we choose a solution, prison, that makes more criminals or do we choose a solution, decriminalization, which reduces drug use? Why would we choose the wrong path? If a parent learns that education disciplines a child more than spanking, why would the parent stick to spanking?
In 1988, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act with a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for possession of cocaine base with no evidence of intent to sell. And this law applied to first-time offenders.
The American people, 64%, supported this new drug war and they imprisoned huge numbers of black men but could feel colorblind and non-racist, because in their minds this was not about race; it was about criminality and drug use. But white drug users weren’t going to prison in the same numbers. A new racial caste system through mass incarceration was born (55).
Democrats didn’t want to appear soft on crime, so Clinton more than any other president did more to create the racial undercaste with a variety of bills (57).
Under Clinton, felons could not get public housing and other benefits. They lost all rights as human beings and lived under the shadow of oppression, just like in the days of Jim Crow (57).
By 1996, the penal budget doubled while food stamps and other benefits were slashed.
Ninety percent of those admitted in prison for drugs were black or Latino and yet the War on Drugs used race-neutral language. Jim Crow 2.0 was born.
Single leading cause of rising incarceration:
Drug offenses, which account for two thirds of the rise and more than half of the rise in state prisoners between 1985 and 2000 (60). There are more people in prisons and jails today for just drug offenses than were incarcerated for all reasons in 1980.
We read on page 60 that most prisoners are first offenders arrested for possession, not selling. In 2005, four out of five were arrested for possession only, not selling.
Another glaring fact: In the 1990s, marijuana was the leading cause for arrest. Marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol. By 2007 one in every 31 adults were behind bars, on probation, or on parole.
"Reasonable Cause" and War on Drugs:
First, the Fourth Amendment, the law against search and seizures, has been eradicated since a cop can say he had “reasonable cause” to do a drug search. This results in police harassment and intimidation in poor communities as the police can do warrantless searches (63).
Second, law enforcement can now use invasive means to do drug surveillance and forced drug tests and use of informants and allow the forfeiture of cash, property, and other belongings (62). So we see a huge economic motive to make these arrests.
Third, consent searches are now police policy and studies show that most people, intimidated by the police, will consent (66). As a result, human rights are being violated under the huge umbrella of "reasonable cause."
Fourth, the police can now rely on a pretext traffic stop (failing to make a turn signal or going 1 MPH over speed limit, to cite 2 examples) and use that stop as an excuse to do a drug search (67). Many people are forced to spread eagle on the ground during these searches. Ninety-nine percent of these people being investigated are innocent but left humiliated. The majority of these people are of color.
The author asks why would the police choose to arrest such an astonishing percentage of the American public for minor drug crimes (between 1980 and 2005 drug arrests more than tripled)?
Especially since drug use was in decline when the War on Drugs began in the early 1980s.
Here we get to the crux of the matter: The system’s design was control with tangible and intangible benefits. And these benefits were a “massive bribe” offered to state and local law enforcement. Millions of dollars are given to local law enforcement. The military gives weapons, including bazookas, helicopters, night-vision goggles (74).
SWAT raid inappropriate for the War on Drugs:
Trauma, disproportion, and financial incentives. Each drug arrest brought $153 in funding, so the more arrests, the more money. See page 78.
Other dramatic changes took place under the Reagan Administration during the War on Drugs:
On page 78, we see that the police now had the right to seize and keep everything for themselves, including cash and other assets. State and local police could keep up to 80 percent of assets’ value. This in turn increased police budgets. So not only was the prison industry expanding into a multi-billion-dollar business, police departments were getting richer with the incentive to make more arrests. Between 1988 and 1992 alone, this forfeiture law amassed over a billion dollars in assets.
And the targets of these arrests were poor because they lack the means to hire an attorney and defend themselves. And since the poor represent easy cash, the police are encouraged to engage in illegal shakedowns, searches, and threats in search of forfeitable cash (80).
The big drug kingpins, the ones presumably targeted by the Drug War, go free because they can afford attorneys. It’s the little man who gets put in jail, so the War on Drugs fails on that level as well (79). For example, an investigation showed that when a person arrested can pay 50,000 dollars from drug profits seized would earn 6.3 year sentence reduction and agreements of $10,000 reduced trafficking charges by three-fourths (80).
After a poor person is arrested his chances of being free from the legal system are forever thin:
On page 84 we see that thousands of defendants are escorted through the courts with no legal counsel at all. Eighty percent of the defendants cannot hire a lawyer. In Lake Charles, Louisiana, we read that the defender office had only two investigators for the 2,500 new felony cases and 4,000 misdemeanor cases each year (85). We further read that defendants often plead guilty, even when innocent, without understanding their legal rights or what is occurring (86).
In most cases there is not trial because there is a plea bargain which results in a reduced sentence but carries with it a lifetime of stripped human rights: he can’t get government benefits or get a job. He’ll be under constant surveillance. The condition is called by Loic Wacquant a “closed circuit of perpetual marginality” (95).
We currently have 2.3 million in the prisons and another 5.1 million on probation or parole (94).
According to Human Rights Watch, 80-90% of all drug offenders sent to prison are African American (98).
Violent crimes are at historically low levels yet mass incarceration is on the rise (101).
Of the 7.3 million under correctional control, only 1.6 million are in prison (101).
The prison system encourages criminality so that 68% of those released from prisons are back in 3 years (94). And only a small minority for violent crimes.
The poor were targeted by the media at the onset of the Drug War as pathological and created an “us vs. them” mentality (105).
“Drug criminals” became a code word for black and this makes sense when we consider that about 90% of those arrested are poor black males (105).
November 13 Online essays about reparations debate
November 15 Online essays about mass incarceration and “The New Jim Crow,” including “The Caging of America” (include your New Jim Crow lecture from recent 1C) and include essays on romance of Civil War and lady who worked at a Civil War camp.
Essay #4 Options with 3 Sources for Works Cited Due 11-20
Two. In the context of “The Flip Side of the Internet” and “The Evolution of Shaming,” develop a cause and effect thesis about the frenzy of shame that is evident in the age of social media. How do shame and fame feed each other is a sick symbiotic relationship? Consider envy, desperation for attention, loss of boundaries, and the need to push the envelope in order to "be heard."
Three. Comparing “Faces in the Mirror” and “The Flip Side of the Internet,” develop a thesis that analyzes the confluence of narcissism and celebrity worship. If narcissism is the undeveloped, immature self, as Sherry Turkle suggests, then it makes sense that narcissistic souls hunger to be worshiped on the grand scale of the very celebrities they both adulate and despise out of envy.
Four. In the context of “Unspeakable Conversations,” defend, refute, or complicate Peter Singer’s position that there are moral grounds for infanticide or “mercy killings.”
Five. Develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates Paul Bloom’s assertion that simple-minded notions of empathy are actually dangerous and diminish us as human beings. Here's the link:
Seven. Develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that mass incarceration is “The New Jim Crow.” See Adam Gopnik's "The Caging of America."
Eight. Develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that the United States government is morally compelled to give some African-Americans reparations for the injustices of slavery. See Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay "The Case for Reparations." One of the reasons is to correct history as evidenced by the romance of Confederacy.
Almond’s claim that watching NFL is immoral is supported by the following:
One. We glorify violence.
Two. We live vicariously through the violence of others, using the players as proxies or substitutes for our own vicious impulses but put all the risk on them for head trauma, paralysis, broken limbs, life-long crippling, etc.
Three. We sponsor brutality with our cash dollars making us complicit in the life-long injuries and premature death suffered by NFL players. Studies show that on average NFL players live from mid to late fifties, about twenty years less than average lifespan.
Four. We are complicit in the abuse and ill regard of women, misogyny when we consider that football encourages male aggression, overpowering others through sheer will and strength, entitlement, and a lack of accountability (we close our eyes to misbehavior because we want our “stars” to show up and help us conquer our enemies on game day).
This link between NFL aggression and misogyny is evident in the high rates of domestic assault.
The culture that glorifies football players as their warriors free to do as they please, including violence against women, is sometimes called the jockitocracy.
Five. Some defend the NFL by citing new safety rules, but these new rules are, to use an effective analogy, lipstick on a pig. The fundamental violent nature of football remains unchanged.
Six. Some defend the NFL by saying players choose to play at their own risk, but this assertion is countered by the fact that many players are poor and lack viable options.
Seven. The NFL doesn’t want the truth about brain trauma to be exposed because the trauma is prevalent and severe, resulting in dementia, brain damage, violence, suicide, and other pathologies.
Eight. More and more parents won’t let their sons play football at any level because of the reports of permanent head trauma.
Nine. NFL legend Mike Ditka says he wouldn’t let his children play football if he knew then what he knows now.
Ten. NFL uses tax loopholes and other forms of trickery to parasite off US taxpayers to fund its stadiums in spite of its astronomical profits.
Thesis Review
A good thesis is a complete sentence that defines your argument.
A good thesis addresses your opponents’ views in a concession clause.
A good thesis often has mapping components or mapping statements that outline your body paragraphs.
A good thesis avoids the obvious and instead struggles to grapple with difficult and complex ideas.
A good thesis embraces complexity and sophistication but is expressed with clarity.
Thesis That Supports Steve Almond
While I am a lifelong football fan who has enjoyed the suspense of close games over the years, I am convinced after reading Steve Almond’s anti-football manifesto that I can no longer patronize the game I once loved because it is morally and intellectually bankrupt evidenced by its bloodthirsty violence, misogyny-fueled domestic abuse, parasitic taxpayer trickery, exploitation of the underclass, high risk of permanent brain trauma, and narcissism-inducing jockitocracy.
Thesis That Opposes the Above
While I concede that the NFL has its fair share of pathologies as cited in the above thesis, the author makes a weak case for boycotting the NFL because he relies on focusing exclusively on the lowest common denominator of NFL behavior; he ignores the countless examples of NFL good works throughout the land, including charities and other social service programs; he ignores the fact that risk of danger exists in many vocations that are not held in such condemnation; and he ignores that the NFL provides opportunities for the economically disadvantaged.
Thesis That Opposes the Above Refutation
While I concede that the NFL is not Evil Incarnate and is capable of doing good works and providing good jobs, its abominations far outweigh its virtues evidenced by its refusal to compensate or even acknowledge the widespread head trauma, its dependence on the underclass to feed into its pool of exploited labor, and its recalcitrant record on domestic abuse.
Develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that the United States government is morally compelled to give some African-Americans reparations for the injustices of slavery. See Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay "The Case for Reparations." One of the reasons is to correct history as evidenced by the romance of Confederacy.
Suggested Outline:
In paragraphs 1 and 2, explain what reparations are, what precedents we have in America for giving reparations to aggrieved parties, and the pros and cons of reparations for African Americans.
Paragraph: 3 Thesis with 4 mapping components
Paragraphs 4-7 support your mapping components
Paragraphs 8 and 9: counterargument and rebuttal
Paragraph 10: conclusion, a restatement of your thesis
Reparations Cons:
One. Bernie Saunders argues there are more effective ways to help African Americans such as increasing high-paying jobs and investing in infrastructure.
Two. Bernie Saunders argues reparations will be "divisive."
Three. Saunders argues that getting reparations has a chance of "nil," but so does getting investments in jobs and infrastructure.
Four. Reparations addresses "racial injustice" when it should address "class injustice."
Five. Slippery slope argument. "If we give reparations to black Americans, where do we stop? What about Latinos, American Indians, and others?"
Six. "No amount is enough. One trillion dollars would give roughly every African American 20K. Is that enough? That's an insult."
Seven. "Distant injuries don't affect black Americans today. Slavery and Jim Crow are over, so we need to move forward."
Eight. Trying to decide who is eligible is impossible and too complicated to be practical.
Nine. Reparations are a disincentive for work and will have other unintended consequences.
Ten. While many black people are poor and might benefit from reparations, some black Americans are too wealthy to need them.
Reparations Pros
One. America quickly became the wealthiest country in the world because of slavery and justice requires that this wealth be given back to those harmed and still harmed by American racism.
Two. We need reparations not just to find justice for the past, but to address the ongoing present: mass incarceration, blacks having only one-seventh the wealth of whites, police brutality, food deserts, zero infrastructure, zero medical care, zero jobs, zero hope. We need to put something into play to stop America's ongoing kleptocracy (stealing) of black Americans.
Three. To say reparations is "too ambitious" does not take away its necessity for social justice, a moral reckoning, and a spiritual atonement.
Four. Reparations provides a corrective to the distorted history that makes the Confederacy a glorious thing that creates myths of "family honor" when in fact it is an ugly symbol of racism. In other words, reparations draws a line in the sand and says our society did a grave wrong and we must atone--even if the amount cannot possibly pay back for the losses, even if the amount is a mere symbol and gesture of repentance.
Five. Reparations are not limited to a single cash payment. There may be more useful, creative ways to create reparations: ongoing health care, housing, and education would be a good place to start. For starters, reparations could entail getting rid of all Confederate iconography: flags, statues, street names, banners, etc.
To underscore his point that the kleptocracy, the systematic stealing from the lives of African-Americans, compels us to consider reparations, Coates quotes Yale historian David W. Blight: “In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together.”
Coates writes, “The vending of the black body and the sundering of the black family became an economy unto themselves, estimated to have brought in tens of millions of dollars to antebellum America. In 1860 there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country.”
This wealth was built on crimes against humanity, specifically crimes against black people. As we read:
When the wife and children of Henry Brown, a slave in Richmond, Virginia, were to be sold away, Brown searched for a white master who might buy his wife and children to keep the family together. He failed:
The next day, I stationed myself by the side of the road, along which the slaves, amounting to three hundred and fifty, were to pass. The purchaser of my wife was a Methodist minister, who was about starting for North Carolina. Pretty soon five waggon-loads of little children passed, and looking at the foremost one, what should I see but a little child, pointing its tiny hand towards me, exclaiming, “There’s my father; I knew he would come and bid me good-bye.” It was my eldest child! Soon the gang approached in which my wife was chained. I looked, and beheld her familiar face; but O, reader, that glance of agony! may God spare me ever again enduring the excruciating horror of that moment! She passed, and came near to where I stood. I seized hold of her hand, intending to bid her farewell; but words failed me; the gift of utterance had fled, and I remained speechless. I followed her for some distance, with her hand grasped in mine, as if to save her from her fate, but I could not speak, and I was obliged to turn away in silence.
In a time when telecommunications were primitive and blacks lacked freedom of movement, the parting of black families was a kind of murder. Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. The labor strife that seeded Bacon’s rebellion was suppressed. America’s indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values. Assessing antebellum democracy in Virginia, a visitor from England observed that the state’s natives “can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves.”
One. How were black slaves equated with property?
Coates writes:
The consequences of 250 years of enslavement, of war upon black families and black people, were profound. Like homeownership today, slave ownership was aspirational, attracting not just those who owned slaves but those who wished to. Much as homeowners today might discuss the addition of a patio or the painting of a living room, slaveholders traded tips on the best methods for breeding workers, exacting labor, and doling out punishment. Just as a homeowner today might subscribe to a magazine like This Old House, slaveholders had journals such as De Bow’s Review, which recommended the best practices for wringing profits from slaves. By the dawn of the Civil War, the enslavement of black America was thought to be so foundational to the country that those who sought to end it were branded heretics worthy of death. Imagine what would happen if a president today came out in favor of taking all American homes from their owners: the reaction might well be violent.
We see to this day, especially in the South but not limited there, that there are sympathizers of the Confederacy who erect the Confederate flag and talk about “state rights” and “Northern aggression” in the context of slavery. For them, their white identity rests on the “right” to have slavery. For them “state rights” really means the right to own slaves. To discuss this topic in front of these sympathizers to this day is to endanger one’s own life.
Two. How did terrorism afflict black Americans?
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Radical Republicans attempted to reconstruct the country upon something resembling universal equality—but they were beaten back by a campaign of “Redemption,” led by White Liners, Red Shirts, and Klansmen bent on upholding a society “formed for the white, not for the black man.” A wave of terrorism roiled the South. In his massive history Reconstruction, Eric Foner recounts incidents of black people being attacked for not removing their hats; for refusing to hand over a whiskey flask; for disobeying church procedures; for “using insolent language”; for disputing labor contracts; for refusing to be “tied like a slave. . . . “
Terrorism carried the day. Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political violence was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted out toward black people of ambition. Black schools and churches were burned to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who attempted to rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered. At the end of World War I, black veterans returning to their homes were assaulted for daring to wear the American uniform. The demobilization of soldiers after the war, which put white and black veterans into competition for scarce jobs, produced the Red Summer of 1919: a succession of racist pogroms against dozens of cities ranging from Longview, Texas, to Chicago to Washington, D.C. Organized white violence against blacks continued into the 1920s—in 1921 a white mob leveled Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” and in 1923 another one razed the black town of Rosewood, Florida—and virtually no one was punished.
Three. What was the racist practice of redlining?
We read:
Whereas shortly before the New Deal, a typical mortgage required a large down payment and full repayment within about 10 years, the creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1933 and then the Federal Housing Administration the following year allowed banks to offer loans requiring no more than 10 percent down, amortized over 20 to 30 years. “Without federal intervention in the housing market, massive suburbanization would have been impossible,” writes Thomas J. Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. “In 1930, only 30 percent of Americans owned their own homes; by 1960, more than 60 percent were home owners. Home ownership became an emblem of American citizenship.”
That emblem was not to be awarded to blacks. The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters—and “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.”
The federal government concurred. It was the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant—a clause in the deed forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods.
Four. How has the plunder of black Americans continued after slavery?
We read:
The federal government is premised on equal fealty from all its citizens, who in return are to receive equal treatment. But as late as the mid-20th century, this bargain was not granted to black people, who repeatedly paid a higher price for citizenship and received less in return. Plunder had been the essential feature of slavery, of the society described by Calhoun. But practically a full century after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the plunder—quiet, systemic, submerged—continued even amidst the aims and achievements of New Deal liberals.
Other examples of the plunder, in addition to predatory lending, are the profits made from mass incarceration, and the criminalizing of poverty, which leads to municipal violations.
This plundering of blacks is not perceived correctly by liberals. As we read:
Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long tradition of this country actively punishing black success—and the elevation of that punishment, in the mid-20th century, to federal policy. President Lyndon Johnson may have noted in his historic civil-rights speech at Howard University in 1965 that “Negro poverty is not white poverty.” But his advisers and their successors were, and still are, loath to craft any policy that recognizes the difference.
Five. How does Coates counter argue the notion that “fatherhood is the great antidote” to problems in the black community?
Coates writes:
From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship—homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross’s back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for “the thrill of the chase and the kill.” Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.
Six. Why does Coates argue that reparations are a superior means for exacting justice to affirmative action?
Coates writes:
The urge to use the moral force of the black struggle to address broader inequalities originates in both compassion and pragmatism. But it makes for ambiguous policy. Affirmative action’s precise aims, for instance, have always proved elusive. Is it meant to make amends for the crimes heaped upon black people? Not according to the Supreme Court. In its 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court rejected “societal discrimination” as “an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past.” Is affirmative action meant to increase “diversity”? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people—the problem of what America has taken from them over several centuries.
This confusion about affirmative action’s aims, along with our inability to face up to the particular history of white-imposed black disadvantage, dates back to the policy’s origins. “There is no fixed and firm definition of affirmative action,” an appointee in Johnson’s Department of Labor declared. “Affirmative action is anything that you have to do to get results. But this does not necessarily include preferential treatment.”
Yet America was built on the preferential treatment of white people—395 years of it. Vaguely endorsing a cuddly, feel-good diversity does very little to redress this.
Seven. According to Coates, what is the foundation of America that has been swept under the carpet as America wallows in its Myth of Fairness and Innocence?
Coates writes:
To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the fact that closing the “achievement gap” will do nothing to close the “injury gap,” in which black college graduates still suffer higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal records.
Eight. What are the two main reasons Coates champions reparations?
The first is lost money. As we read:
Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built. In the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued in The Case for Black Reparations that a rough price tag for reparations could be determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the population by the difference in white and black per capita income. That number—$34 billion in 1973, when Bittker wrote his book—could be added to a reparations program each year for a decade or two. Today Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.
To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.
Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same.
**
The second reason is intangible: The much needed history lesson to correct the Myth of American Innocence. As we read:
Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40 proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world.
Coates continues to discuss the basics of this unjust American history:
The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer.
And this destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its bounty. These laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the federal government—through housing policies—engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we picture colored only signs, but we should picture pirate flags.
On some level, we have always grasped this.
Coates continues:
We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.
And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.
Nine. How does Coates refute the notion that reparations will divide us?
Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.
What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.
Ten. Why does Coates bring up the reparations debate in Germany?
Coates writes:
We are not the first to be summoned to such a challenge.
In 1952, when West Germany began the process of making amends for the Holocaust, it did so under conditions that should be instructive to us. Resistance was violent. Very few Germans believed that Jews were entitled to anything. Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29 percent believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people.
“The rest,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, Postwar, “were divided between those (some two-fifths of respondents) who thought that only people ‘who really committed something’ were responsible and should pay, and those (21 percent) who thought ‘that the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich.’ ”
Germany’s unwillingness to squarely face its history went beyond polls. Movies that suggested a societal responsibility for the Holocaust beyond Hitler were banned. “The German soldier fought bravely and honorably for his homeland,” claimed President Eisenhower, endorsing the Teutonic national myth. Judt wrote, “Throughout the fifties West German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and properly punished.”
Konrad Adenauer, the postwar German chancellor, was in favor of reparations, but his own party was divided, and he was able to get an agreement passed only with the votes of the Social Democratic opposition.
Coates continues:
The reparations conversation set off a wave of bomb attempts by Israeli militants. One was aimed at the foreign ministry in Tel Aviv. Another was aimed at Chancellor Adenauer himself. And one was aimed at the port of Haifa, where the goods bought with reparations money were arriving. West Germany ultimately agreed to pay Israel 3.45 billion deutsche marks, or more than $7 billion in today’s dollars. Individual reparations claims followed—for psychological trauma, for offense to Jewish honor, for halting law careers, for life insurance, for time spent in concentration camps. Seventeen percent of funds went toward purchasing ships. “By the end of 1961, these reparations vessels constituted two-thirds of the Israeli merchant fleet,” writes the Israeli historian Tom Segev in his book The Seventh Million. “From 1953 to 1963, the reparations money funded about a third of the total investment in Israel’s electrical system, which tripled its capacity, and nearly half the total investment in the railways.”
Israel’s GNP tripled during the 12 years of the agreement. The Bank of Israel attributed 15 percent of this growth, along with 45,000 jobs, to investments made with reparations money. But Segev argues that the impact went far beyond that. Reparations “had indisputable psychological and political importance,” he writes.
Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name.
Assessing the reparations agreement, David Ben-Gurion said:
For the first time in the history of relations between people, a precedent has been created by which a great State, as a result of moral pressure alone, takes it upon itself to pay compensation to the victims of the government that preceded it. For the first time in the history of a people that has been persecuted, oppressed, plundered and despoiled for hundreds of years in the countries of Europe, a persecutor and despoiler has been obliged to return part of his spoils and has even undertaken to make collective reparation as partial compensation for material losses.
Something more than moral pressure calls America to reparations. We cannot escape our history. All of our solutions to the great problems of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are troubled by what must go unspoken. “The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now,” Clyde Ross told me. “It’s because of then.” In the early 2000s, Charles Ogletree went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to meet with the survivors of the 1921 race riot that had devastated “Black Wall Street.” The past was not the past to them. “It was amazing seeing these black women and men who were crippled, blind, in wheelchairs,” Ogletree told me. “I had no idea who they were and why they wanted to see me. They said, ‘We want you to represent us in this lawsuit.’ ”
Eleven. Can we put a price tag on these reparations?
Coates writes:
Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.
Summary of Coates' Reasons for Supporting Reparations
One. Predatory, discriminatory housing laws plundered African-Americans’ money in the past and present for lining the coffers of white people.
Two. Black lives—including the very body—were plundered as part of America’s Kleptocracy in which white slave owners and business people became millionaires at a rate faster than in any part of the world.
Three. Reparations are not a radical, fringe idea but have historical precedent in mainstream thought from the Colonial period in America, to post WWII Germany, and to post WWII America (we gave reparations to Japanese Americans who suffered in the internment camps in 1988).
Four. Centuries of racial discrimination and Jim Crow laws have created “ecologically distinct” poverty communities that perpetuate poverty. These communities are deserts of opportunity, nutrition, jobs, education, health care, etc., and no one in their right mind would want to live in these places. They are hell on earth, places long abandoned and ignored by the rest of America.
Five. Four hundred years of racial discrimination have created a social stigma in which blacks are perceived as being the lowest on the totem pole. It is difficult to measure the psychological effects of this demonization and social stigma. It is difficult to measure the plunder of identity of a people taken here on ships and told for centuries that they are subhuman and mere pieces of property to be bartered and sold like cattle. In contrast, African blacks who immigrate to America navigate the American Dream in the absence of this incomprehensible psychological baggage.
Six. The powerhouse of the American economy that made it a dominant economy in the world before the Civil War and made whites in the South the richest people in the world was built on the blood of slavery.
Seven. The plunder of African-Americans continues centuries after slavery. They are demonized, left in the inner city opportunity deserts, and plucked off the streets into the Industrial Prison Complex, part of a privatized multi-billion-dollar business that employs over 2.5 million Americans and has created an immoral economy on the backs of people of color.
Eight. Reparations are superior to Affirmative Action whose aims remain vague and wishy-washy. In contrast, reparations have a clear objective: To recompense African-Americans for money lost and to correct the Myth of American Innocence.
Nine. Reparations are a corrective to America’s Great Lie: Its Myth of Innocence and Equality. Destroying this Myth is an essential part of a moral reckoning and spiritual awakening.
This Great Lie is so deep that millions of white Americans, especially in the South, still worship the lie of White Supremacy and believe they have the “right” to own slaves and that slave ownership is essential to their “white identity” and the “legacy of honoring their white ancestors.” These white people engage in all sorts of mythologies, erecting statues of white Confederate generals in front of government buildings, waving Confederate flags, and re-enacting the Civil War in which the Confederate Army is venerated of a noble mission. All of these romantic mythologies sweep the evils of slavery under the carpet and are therefore a lie and a moral abomination.
Opposition to Coates
Opposition #1: We should help people based on economic class, not race.
This is the “class first” approach, originating in the myth that racism and socialism are necessarily incompatible. But raising the minimum wage doesn’t really address the fact that black men without criminal records have about the same shot at low-wage work as white men with them; nor can making college free address the wage gap between black and white graduates. Housing discrimination, historical and present, may well be the fulcrum of white supremacy. Affirmative action is one of the most disputed issues of the day. Neither are addressed in the “racial justice” section of Sanders platform.
Sanders’s anti-racist moderation points to a candidate who is not merely against reparations, but one who doesn’t actually understand the argument. To briefly restate it, from 1619 until at least the late 1960s, American institutions, businesses, associations, and governments—federal, state, and local—repeatedly plundered black communities. Their methods included everything from land-theft, to red-lining, to disenfranchisement, to convict-lease labor, to lynching, to enslavement, to the vending of children. So large was this plunder that America, as we know it today, is simply unimaginable without it. Its great universities were founded on it. Its early economy was built by it. Its suburbs were financed by it. Its deadliest war was the result of it.
One can’t evade these facts by changing the subject. Some months ago, black radicals in the Black Lives Matters movement protested Sanders. They were, in the main, jeered by the white left for their efforts. But judged by his platform, Sanders should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy. Jim Crow and its legacy were not merely problems of disproportionate poverty. Why should black voters support a candidate who does not recognize this?
Opposition #2: A trillion-dollar payment would result in $20,000 for every African-American. This would make a symbolic statement, but not be enough to make a significant difference in changing the power hierarchy. Not even a 3 trillion dollar payment would make a real difference.
We could concede that the above is true; however 20K could help someone go to college and make a small dent in helping that person. That is better than nothing.
But overall, the sad truth is that even a trillion-dollar payment is a "drop in the bucket" and that "The Man" will still be the "shot caller."
Opposition #3: "Distant harm from centuries ago does not affect African-Americans today."
We could counter argue that segregation still exists, environmental deserts still exist, the wealth gap still exists, and mass incarceration, a form of profit for the government and big business built on mostly people of color flourishes today.
Opposition #4: If we give reparations to African-Americans, where does all this reparations business end? What about migrant workers who are exploited in the fields and forced to work for a subhuman wage? What about the stolen wages from immigrants in the restaurant business? Is it fair to give reparations to one disadvantaged group but not another?
We should give reparations to ALL people. Coates' argument is not to give reparations to one group at the exclusion of another. To say so is to commit a Straw Man fallacy.
Opposition #5: As Shelby Steele contends, the reparations movement encourages victimization, dependence, and infantilization in the black community, traits that contradict the heroism and warriorhood of great Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King.
But the above could said to be a Straw Man Fallacy. Some might counter by observing that too many whites are playing "victims" to "reverse racism," too many whites show an unhealthy dependence on their white privilege, and too many whites are "infants" in their refusal to accept responsibility for America's original sin: a country whose wealth and identity were built on racism, slavery, and Jim Crow.
Opposition #6: Kevin Williamson observes that Coates' argument isn't really for reparations but for America to expose the truth about the depths of racism in American history. We read from Williamson's refutation essay:
Mr. Coates does not make the case so much for reparations as for a South Africa–style truth-and-reconciliation commission. “The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.” The purpose of a debate on a reparations bill of the sort being offered by John Conyers Jr. is not so much to construct a program of economic compensation as it is to have another verse of that Democratic hymn, an honest conversation about race. (As though we ever talked about anything else.) And this gets to the real defect in Mr. Coates’s approach. The purpose of public policy in this area can be one of two things. The first is a program focused on trying to improve in real terms the lives of those who are poorly off and those born into circumstances that are likely to lead to their being poorly off adults, proceeding with the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that such programs will disproportionately benefit black Americans, as they should. The second option is a symbolic political process designed to confer a degree of psychic satisfaction on relatively well-off men and women such as Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Opposition #7: Williamson charges that Coates' reparations arguments encourages tribalism, which is anti-liberal and anti-democratic:
Once that fact is acknowledged, then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress. Mr. Coates also, I think, miscalculates what the real-world effects of converting our liberal conception of justice into a system of racial appropriation might mean. There are still, after all, an awful lot of white people, and though many of them might be inclined to make amends under some sort of racial truce following the process Mr. Coates imagines, many of them might simply be inclined to prevail. The fact is that the situation of African Americans in the United States has improved precisely to the extent that whites have begun to forgo tribalism and to genuinely commit themselves to the principles of liberalism, the long march toward a more perfect Union. The alternative — a system of exclusive interests in which black and white operate effectively in opposition — is not only morally repugnant, but likely to undermine the genuine political and economic interests of African Americans.
Review: Opposition to Coates
Opposition #1: We should help people based on economic class, not race.
This is the “class first” approach, originating in the myth that racism and socialism are necessarily incompatible. But raising the minimum wage doesn’t really address the fact that black men without criminal records have about the same shot at low-wage work as white men with them; nor can making college free address the wage gap between black and white graduates. Housing discrimination, historical and present, may well be the fulcrum of white supremacy. Affirmative action is one of the most disputed issues of the day. Neither are addressed in the “racial justice” section of Sanders platform.
Sanders’s anti-racist moderation points to a candidate who is not merely against reparations, but one who doesn’t actually understand the argument. To briefly restate it, from 1619 until at least the late 1960s, American institutions, businesses, associations, and governments—federal, state, and local—repeatedly plundered black communities. Their methods included everything from land-theft, to red-lining, to disenfranchisement, to convict-lease labor, to lynching, to enslavement, to the vending of children. So large was this plunder that America, as we know it today, is simply unimaginable without it. Its great universities were founded on it. Its early economy was built by it. Its suburbs were financed by it. Its deadliest war was the result of it.
One can’t evade these facts by changing the subject. Some months ago, black radicals in the Black Lives Matters movement protested Sanders. They were, in the main, jeered by the white left for their efforts. But judged by his platform, Sanders should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy. Jim Crow and its legacy were not merely problems of disproportionate poverty. Why should black voters support a candidate who does not recognize this?
Opposition #2: A trillion-dollar payment would result in $20,000 for every African-American. This would make a symbolic statement, but not be enough to make a significant difference in changing the power hierarchy. Not even a 3 trillion dollar payment would make a real difference.
We could concede that the above is true; however 20K could help someone go to college and make a small dent in helping that person. That is better than nothing.
But overall, the sad truth is that even a trillion-dollar payment is a "drop in the bucket" and that "The Man" will still be the "shot caller."
Opposition #3: "Distant harm from centuries ago does not affect African-Americans today."
We could counter argue that segregation still exists, environmental deserts still exist, the wealth gap still exists, and mass incarceration, a form of profit for the government and big business built on mostly people of color flourishes today.
Opposition #4: If we give reparations to African-Americans, where does all this reparations business end? What about migrant workers who are exploited in the fields and forced to work for a subhuman wage? What about the stolen wages from immigrants in the restaurant business? Is it fair to give reparations to one disadvantaged group but not another?
We should give reparations to ALL people. Coates' argument is not to give reparations to one group at the exclusion of another. To say so is to commit a Straw Man fallacy.
Opposition #5: As Shelby Steele contends, the reparations movement encourages victimization, dependence, and infantilization in the black community, traits that contradict the heroism and warriorhood of great Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King.
But the above could said to be a Straw Man Fallacy. Some might counter by observing that too many whites are playing "victims" to "reverse racism," too many whites show an unhealthy dependence on their white privilege, and too many whites are "infants" in their refusal to accept responsibility for America's original sin: a country whose wealth and identity were built on racism, slavery, and Jim Crow.
Opposition #6: Kevin Williamson observes that Coates' argument isn't really for reparations but for America to expose the truth about the depths of racism in American history. We read from Williamson's refutation essay:
Mr. Coates does not make the case so much for reparations as for a South Africa–style truth-and-reconciliation commission. “The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.” The purpose of a debate on a reparations bill of the sort being offered by John Conyers Jr. is not so much to construct a program of economic compensation as it is to have another verse of that Democratic hymn, an honest conversation about race. (As though we ever talked about anything else.) And this gets to the real defect in Mr. Coates’s approach. The purpose of public policy in this area can be one of two things. The first is a program focused on trying to improve in real terms the lives of those who are poorly off and those born into circumstances that are likely to lead to their being poorly off adults, proceeding with the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that such programs will disproportionately benefit black Americans, as they should. The second option is a symbolic political process designed to confer a degree of psychic satisfaction on relatively well-off men and women such as Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Opposition #7: Williamson charges that Coates' reparations arguments encourages tribalism, which is anti-liberal and anti-democratic:
Once that fact is acknowledged, then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress. Mr. Coates also, I think, miscalculates what the real-world effects of converting our liberal conception of justice into a system of racial appropriation might mean. There are still, after all, an awful lot of white people, and though many of them might be inclined to make amends under some sort of racial truce following the process Mr. Coates imagines, many of them might simply be inclined to prevail. The fact is that the situation of African Americans in the United States has improved precisely to the extent that whites have begun to forgo tribalism and to genuinely commit themselves to the principles of liberalism, the long march toward a more perfect Union. The alternative — a system of exclusive interests in which black and white operate effectively in opposition — is not only morally repugnant, but likely to undermine the genuine political and economic interests of African Americans.
Coates' Rebuttals to Williamson
Rebutal #1: Williams charges that reparations are a form of racial apportionment, but according to Coates reparations are not about racial apportionment; they are about injury apportionment. As Coates argues:
Williamson says he is opposed to "converting the liberal Anglo-American tradition of justice into a system of racial apportionment." He then observes that, in fact, that tradition, itself, has always been deeply concerned with "racial apportionment." Thus within the second paragraph, Williamson is undermining his own thesis—if the Anglo-American tradition is what he concedes it to be, no "converting" is required. We reverse polarity for a time, and then we all live happily ever after.
Or probably not. That is because Williamson's entire framing is wrong. Reparations are not due because black people are black, but because black people have been injured. And the Anglo-American tradition has never been a system of "racial apportionment," but of racist apportionment. Like most writers and public intellectuals (liberal and conservative) Williamson's reply is rooted in the idea of "race" as constant—i.e. there is a "black race" that can be traced back to Africa, and a "white race" that can be traced back to Europe. There certainly is such a thing as African and European ancestry, and that ancestry is not entirely irrelevant to our world. But ancestry is tangential, and sometimes wholly unrelated, to racism, injury, and reparations.
We know this because there is no constant idea of "black" or "white" across time or space. We know this because Charlie Patton fathered the blues, andAlessandro de Medici ruled in Venice. Black in America is not black in Brazil, and black in modern America is not even black in 18th-century Louisiana. Nor are people we consider "white" today any sort of constant. Throughout American history it has been common to speak of an "Italian race," an "Irish race," a "Frankish race," a "Jewish race" even a "Southern race." One might take a hard look at Williamson's agreeable portrait, for instance, and note the problem of assigning anyone to a race. "Race," writes the imminent historian Nell Irvin Painter, "is an idea, not a fact."
In this country, at this moment, "African-Americans" are an ethnic group comprised of individuals of varying degrees of direct African ancestry. Nothing about this fact necessitated plunder or injury, and it is the injury—through red-lining, black codes, slaves codes, lynching, ghettoization, fraud, rape, and murder—with which reparations concerns itself. The point is not "racial apportionment," which is to say giving people things because they are black. It is injury apportionment, which is to say restoring things to people who have been plundered.
Rebuttal #2: Williamson and others point out that reparations money won't make a difference in the distribution of wealth. Coates' reply is this:
Racism, and its progeny white supremacy, is concerned with dividing human beings, on the basis of ancestry (which is very real) and slotting them into a hierarchy (which is an invention). "Race" is that hierarchy—and any study of the word across history bears out its relationship to assigning value and scale across humanity. In polite society we've moved past overtly hierarchal ideas about "race," but the problem of imprecise naming remains with us. Let us bypass that imprecision—the Anglo-American tradition which Williamson extolls has, as he concedes, sought to erect and uphold a racist hierarchy. Reparations seeks its total and complete destruction.
**
Here is perhaps a weakness in Coates' essay: If we agree with Coates that, "Reparations seek its [racial hierarchy's] total and complete destruction," we did not see such a plan in Coates' essay. He needs to explain how reparations, the kind he wants, will achieve this.
Rebuttal #3: To Williamson's point that not all African-Americans should get reparations because not all African-Americans have been victimized by racism, Coates rebuts:
Williamson believes that reparations must either boil down to a "symbolic political process" or a series of polices that helps America's poor and disproportionately aids African-Americans. How, Williamson asks, can one make a claim on behalf of Sasha and Malia Obama, in a world of poor whites? In much the same way that a factory which pumps toxins into a poor neighborhood is not indemnified because a plaintiff rises to become a millionaire. Taking Williamson's argument to its logical conclusion, a businessman brutalized by the police should never sue the city because, well, homelessness.
People who are injured sometimes achieve great things—this does not obviate the fact of their injury, nor their claim to recompense. Warren Moon achieved more than the vast majority of white quarterbacks. Had racism not forced him into the CFL for the first five crucial years of his career, he might have had more success than any quarterback to ever play the game. Satchel Paige enjoys an honor which the vast majority of white baseball players shall never glimpse—induction in the Hall of Fame. What might Paige achieved had he not been injured by white supremacy for the vast majority of his career? Mr. Clyde Ross is a homeowner, and considerably better off than many of his North Lawndale neighbors. To achieve this he worked three jobs and lost time that he should have been able to invest in his children. What might Mr. Ross have been had he not endured racist plunder from Clarksdale to Chicago?
Rebuttal #4: Williamson says that economic injustice should address poverty, not race, but Coates counters:
The problem of racism is not synonymous with the problem of the poverty line. Indeed, it is often in the fate of the most conventionally successful African-Americans that we see the full horror of a corrupt social contract. The injury of racism means many things, virtually all of them bad. It means making $100,000 a year but living in neighborhoods equivalent to white people who make $30,000 a year. It means belonging to a class whose men comprise some eight percent of the world's entire prison population. It means, if you do go to college, still enjoying lesser employment prospects than white college graduates. It means living in a family with roughly a 20th of the wealth of those who do not suffer your particular ailment. In short, it means quite a bit—and these effects do not merely haunt the poor. My heart bleeds for the white child injured by the departure of parents. But God forbid the injury of racism be added to the burden.
The pervasive effects of the injury should not surprise—the injuring and exploitation of black people regardless of economic class has been one of the dominant themes of American history. It is only the obviation, or ignorance, of history that allows us to escape this. The result must be an especially tortured specimen of reasoning:
Some blacks are born into college-educated, well-off households, and some whites are born to heroin-addicted single mothers, and even the totality of racial crimes throughout American history does not mean that one of these things matters and one does not. Once that fact is acknowledged, then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism.
Williamson's "fact" can not be acknowledged because, even by Williamson's crude measures, it is artifice. There are—at most—1.5 million people who use heroin in this country. The ranks of the African-American poor are roughly eight times that.
Rebuttal #5: Reparations are not "anti-white," or intended to divide the country racially. As Coates explains:
More importantly, the claim of reparations does not hinge on every individual white person everywhere being wealthy. That is because reparations is not a claim against white Americans, anymore than reparations paid to interned Japanese-Americans was a claim against non-Japanese-Americans. The claim was brought before the multi-ethnic United States of America.
Rebuttal #6: It doesn't make sense to make current whites who didn't enforce slavery pay black Americans who weren't slaves. To this point, Coates counters:
There seems to be great confusion on this point. The governments of the United States of America—local, state and federal—are deeply implicated in enslavement, Jim Crow, redlining, New Deal racism, terrorism, ghettoization, housing segregation. The fact that one's ancestors were not slave-traders or that one arrived here in 1980 is irrelevant. I did not live in New York when the city railroaded the Central Park Five. But my tax dollars will pay for the settlement. That is because a state is more than the natural lives, or occupancy, of its citizens. People who object to reparations for African-Americans because they, individually, did nothing should also object to reparations to Japanese-Americans, but they should not stop there. They should object to the Fourth of July, since they, individually, did nothing to aid the American Revolution. They should object to the payment of pensions for the Spanish-American War, a war fought before they were alive. Indeed they should object to government and society itself, because its existence depends on outliving its individual citizens.
Rebuttal #7: Reparations are useless since black Americans are doomed to be economically behind whites, even in a world without racism. Coates' replies:
Williamson then posits that black people would still be poor because they'd be far behind the native white population. Williamson never considers that the two groups might intermarry—because he believes in "race," which is to say creationism. For that same reason he ignores the fact there was no "New World" with "native whites" to come to without the labor of African-Americans. Europeans did not purchase enslaved Africans because they disliked the cut of their jib. They did it because they had taken a great deal of land and needed bonded labor to extract resources from it. Africans—aliens to society, existing beyond the protections of the crown—fit the bill.
"The people to whom reparations were owed," Williamson concludes. "Are long dead." Only because we need them to be. Mr. Clyde Ross is very much alive—as are many of the victims of redlining. And it is not hard to identify them. We know where redlining took place and where it didn't. We have the maps. We know who lived there and who didn't.
This was American policy. We have never accounted for it, and it is unlikely that we ever will. That is not because of any African-American's life-span but because of a powerful desire to run out the clock. Reparations claims were made within the natural lifetimes of emancipated African-Americans. They were unsuccessful. They were not unsuccessful because they lacked merit. They were unsuccessful because their country lacked the courage to dispense with creationism.
So it goes.
One. In the Jim Crow South, we read that black families lived under a kleptocracy. Define this term.
Whites stole “all facets of society” from blacks: the right to vote, protection from the law, the right to work for a fair wage, an education, and anything that would point to their humanity.
Perhaps the worst state was Mississippi. “Between 1882 and 1968 more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state.” A lot of these lynchings occurred the night before an election to keep black-hostile politicians in power.
Financial oppression afflicted blacks in the South through debt peonage (also called debt slavery), a form of profiteering and exploitation of black farmers by setting unfair prices to put these farmers in eternal debt and to suck the life out of them.
Mississippi denied education to blacks and exploited their illiteracy by claiming certain individuals, like Clyde Ross’s father, owed back taxes. Someone unable to read was in no position to refute such a claim, often handed out in obscure legalize. This happened in 1923.
The result of a bogus claim, was repossessing all of the family’s property and treasure. This happened all the time. We read that black property was stolen and turned into a white country club.
Could the son Clyde Ross escape the poverty of his exploited parents and get a good education? No. While his white counterparts took the bus to the distant school, Clyde was denied the bus ride because of his skin color.
We read that Clyde sees America for what it really is: “It was in these early years that Ross began to understand himself as an American—he did not live under the blind decree of justice, but under the heel of a regime that elevated armed robbery to a governing principle.”
During Jim Crow, masses of blacks fled Mississippi, which for them was hell on earth.
Clyde Ross joins the Army and while stationed in California he sees he’s treated differently than in the South. He can shop, walk the streets without being harassed, go to restaurants. California is a completely different world than the Jim Crow South, which is kleptocracy.
Even when Clyde Ross moves to Chicago and isn’t oppressed by overt racism, he is victimized by predatory lending and homeownership discrimination that sucks the money out of him.
Kleptocracy
Coates has brilliantly added a third dimension to the reparations debate: The Kleptocracy, the systematic thievery against black lives and resources that started with slavery and continues today.
Two. Why does Coates bring up the fact that Clyde Ross joined the Contract Buyer’s League?
The Contract Buyer’s League, a collection of black homeowners from North Lawndale, Illinois, fought against the predatory lending, dishonest, and outright theft that white capitalists performed against the black community.
The CBL went into these white speculators’ neighborhoods and informed the communities of the deceit and greed they committed, shaming them.
Most importantly, the CBL demanded recompense or compensation with interest for the money that was stolen from them.
In other words, this black organization in the year 1968 demanded reparations, though in 1976 they were denied those reparations in a jury trial.
Coates is bringing up this reparation to show that the black community is still being victimized by predators and deserves, like the CBL, reparations.
In law, we call this precedent, a rule or principle established in a previous case.
Coates wants to show us that we have precedent for black community’s legal struggle to fight for reparations for crimes committed against them.
Coates brings us back to freed slave Belinda Royall who was granted a reparation all the way back to 1783. Coates writes, “At the time, black people in America had endured more than 150 years of enslavement, and the idea that they might be owed something in return was, if not the national consensus, at least not outrageous.”
Three. How is North Lawndale faring today?
The city, which is 92% black, is in shambles with infant mortality being double the national average.
Forty-three percent of the people live below the poverty line, double Chicago’s overall rate.
Forty-five percent of all residents are on food stamps.
The incarceration rate is 40 times higher than the community with the highest white incarceration rate.
Four. What is the difference between the term “low economic status” and “ecologically distinct”?
To be “ecologically distinct” means to live in a desert of finance, jobs, nutrition, education, and family. Everyone is in jail, and there is nothing in this ecosystem to sustain or nourish an individual. It is a wasteland. These long forgotten wastelands have huge murder and incarceration rates, which the rest of society ignores. The only time these wastelands become relevant media stories is when there is a riot and civic unrest threatens America’s comforting notion of living in a stable society.
In these wastelands we see that though Jim Crow overt racism is gone, there is still the crisis of economic stagnation. The income gap between black and white households is the same today as it was in 1970.
In terms of money, nothing has changed.
Worse, we read that “whites born into affluent neighborhoods tended to remain in affluent neighborhoods, blacks tended to fall out of them.”
In other words, blacks are at a higher risk of falling into poverty.
To show the staggering disparity of wealth between white and black families, we must turn to the Pew Research Center, which estimates that white households are worth 20 times as much as black households.
There are other disparities as well: For example, “black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000.”
As we all know, richer communities have higher educational standards, so this speaks to the economic prospects of the children.
According to Coates, these poor neighborhoods are traps. He writes, “As a rule, poor black people do not work their way out of the ghetto—and those who do often face the horror of watching their children and grandchildren tumble back.”
These traps are racially isolating as well. Coates cites the Manhattan Institute that points out that while segregation has declined since the 1960s, African Americans remain the most segregated of all groups.
This segregation reinforces poverty. As Coates writes, “With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin. The resulting conflagration [spreading or blazing fire] has been devastating.”
Five. What counterargument (to Coates’ claim that America is morally compelled to give African Americans reparations) does Coates address in Part II of his essay?
Some will argue that the problems African-Americans face are not rooted in money but in values, morality, and “individual grit.”
Coates quotes Philadelphia Major Michael Nutter: “Too many men making too many babies they don’t want to take care of, and then we end up dealing with your children.”
This is the narrative you’ll hear on Fox News and elsewhere.
Coates rejects this narrative. He writes, “The kind of trenchant [deeply rooted] racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. The essence of American racism is disrespect. And in the wake of the grim numbers, we see the grim inheritance.”
My international students will sometimes disagree with Coates on this point. They will say they have come here with little or no financial resources, but because of the values of their family they find a way to be successful in America. Their narrative conflicts with Coates’.
How can we defend Coates here?
We can say that international students don’t come from neighborhoods bearing the marks of slavery, racism, and Jim Crow. We can say that the disadvantages inside an American inner city or ghetto do not make for a fair comparison with the disadvantages people suffer in other countries.
Coates actually addressed a relevant question about black immigrants faring better than African Americans in a 2009 essay written for The Atlantic titled “Why Do Black Immigrants Do Better Than Native Blacks?” Here is the essay:
This argument pops up from time to time, but it's been coming up a lot lately. It always seemed to me that the question answers itself--an immigrant is someone who's specifically come to this country to capitalize and exploit opportunity. Comparing any immigrant group to virtually any native-born group is like comparing the most ambitious members of one team with the entirety of another team. This is to say nothing of whatever skills, education and wealth a particular immigrant group may bring to bear.
I think a natural--but ultimately cheap--reaction is to appeal to the Myth Of The Black Immigrant. If we can prove that other black people come here and do well, than it must mean that our ideals and our execution of them have, indeed, been righteous. It's just that the American blacks are too lazy and self-pitying to see this.
I think the best grappling I've seen with this was by Malcolm Gladwell, himself an immigrant black of West Indian descent. He rather brilliantly combines his own first person experience, his family's views, and some actual social science to show that, as he says it, someone must always be the villain. Forgive me for quoting at length. The piece is quite lovely:
I grew up in Canada, in a little farming town an hour and a half outside of Toronto. My father teaches mathematics at a nearby university, and my mother is a therapist. For many years, she was the only black person in town, but I cannot remember wondering or worrying, or even thinking, about this fact. Back then, color meant only good things. It meant my cousins in Jamaica. It meant the graduate students from Africa and India my father would bring home from the university...
But things changed when I left for Toronto to attend college. This was during the early nineteen-eighties, when West Indians were immigrating to Canada in droves, and Toronto had become second only to New York as the Jamaican expatriates' capital in North America. At school, in the dining hall, I was served by Jamaicans. The infamous Jane-Finch projects, in northern Toronto, were considered the Jamaican projects. The drug trade then taking off was said to be the Jamaican drug trade. In the popular imagination, Jamaicans were--and are--welfare queens and gun-toting gangsters and dissolute youths. In Ontario, blacks accused of crimes are released by the police eighteen per cent of the time; whites are released twenty-nine per cent of the time. In drug-trafficking and importing cases, blacks are twenty-seven times as likely as whites to be jailed before their trial takes place, and twenty times as likely to be imprisoned on drug-possession charges.
After I had moved to the United States, I puzzled over this seeming contradiction--how West Indians celebrated in New York for their industry and drive could represent, just five hundred miles northwest, crime and dissipation. Didn't Torontonians see what was special and different in West Indian culture? But that was a naïve question. The West Indians were the first significant brush with blackness that white, smug, comfortable Torontonians had ever had. They had no bad blacks to contrast with the newcomers, no African-Americans to serve as a safety valve for their prejudices, no way to perform America's crude racial triage.
Not long ago, I sat in a coffee shop with someone I knew vaguely from college, who, like me, had moved to New York from Toronto. He began to speak of the threat that he felt Toronto now faced. It was the Jamaicans, he said. They were a bad seed. He was, of course, oblivious of my background. I said nothing, though, and he launched into a long explanation of how, in slave times, Jamaica was the island where all the most troublesome and obstreperous slaves were sent, and how that accounted for their particularly nasty disposition today.
I have told that story many times since, usually as a joke, because it was funny in an appalling way--particularly when I informed him much, much later that my mother was Jamaican. I tell the story that way because otherwise it is too painful. There must be people in Toronto just like Rosie and Noel, with the same attitudes and aspirations, who want to live in a neighborhood as nice as Argyle Avenue, who want to build a new garage and renovate their basement and set up their own business downstairs. But it is not completely up to them, is it? What has happened to Jamaicans in Toronto is proof that what has happened to Jamaicans here is not the end of racism, or even the beginning of the end of racism, but an accident of history and geography. In America, there is someone else to despise. In Canada, there is not. In the new racism, as in the old, somebody always has to be the nigger.
Read the whole thing. It's wonderful.
Here is an essay by Larry Davis, “Why Can’t African-Americans be as Successful as Immigrants?”
Other immigrant groups have come to America and worked their way out of poverty and into the mainstream. Why haven’t blacks followed the example of these other groups?
There are a number of reasons why black Americans are unlike immigrants. First, blacks are not only ethnically different from white immigrant groups but racially different as well. Even at a distance, they are visibly distinguishable from European immigrants due to their dark skin color. European ethnicities have become much less relevant to most white people, but skin color remains a salient feature in our society. And, although most European immigrants did face hostility and discrimination upon their arrival here, it soon dissipated along with their “foreign accents” as they assimilated as whites into American culture.
For people of African descent the notion of America being an ethnic melting pot largely failed to become a reality. Blacks have never been able to blend in and become part of the larger American group even though, as a people, they have really tried.
They have tried to work alongside whites, live in neighborhoods with whites, go to school with whites, volunteer to fight wars with whites, learn to speak like whites and even engaged in such ridiculous behaviors as employing skin whiteners to look more like whites. Despite all this, white Americans on the whole have not been capable of seeing beyond their differences in skin color. Hence, for African-Americans, race and color differences have never ceased to be a road block to their integration into larger society.
Psychologists have long known that the perception of a difference has a powerful impact on how we feel about people and interact with them. The greater the perceived visual difference, the greater the believed difference in another’s underlying attributes. Even blacks who are white in every other respect except skin color — for example, in how they talk and dress, who their friends are, who they vote for, or pray to, and even how they think about other blacks — are still at the end of the day perceived as being different and therefore not really one of the majority group.
A second reason blacks differ from immigrants is that the vast majority are not immigrants but [have ancestors who] came to this country as slaves. They spent 246 years in slavery: that’s 10 generations in bondage, with no control over their labor or livelihoods and, of course, without civil or legal rights of any kind.
Imagine the impact this would have on any group of people. In most instances, this group had no cognizance of a common history or shared cultural identity to sustain it. It is fair to say that these individuals were largely defined by who they were not, rather than who they were.
Suppose for a minute that we took all the white ethnic groups — Germans, Italians, Jews, Swedes, Irish, etc. — and forced them all into one group so that they had no sense of ethnic group identity, culture, language or history to sustain them after they arrived in this country. What a tremendous disadvantage this would have been to their group development and progress in America.
While it is true that blacks have been here for centuries, it was not until the 1960s that many black people had the legal rights and privileges given to most white ethnics immediately upon their arrival to America. This is a fact of major importance when attempting to compare blacks to any other ethnic or racial group in America, but one which many Americans overlook, dismiss and sometimes choose to deny.
The topic of slavery and its very real and lasting damage to black people is something that Americans have not yet been capable of addressing. The indignities of slavery were followed by 100 years of Jim Crow during which blacks were legally denied access to good educations, adequate housing, equal public facilities and fair working opportunities. Both the GI Bill and Social Security were largely denied to them. These and other disenfranchisements are the foundation for today’s enormous black-white wealth gap. In short, blacks have been denied access to much of what made America the land of opportunity.
So, some would ask, what about immigrants of color, such as Asians, Latinos and even other people of African descent? Why can they come to America and often do better than indigenous poor blacks?
Clearly, some groups come to America better prepared to take advantage of the opportunity that does exist. Immigrants – including black immigrants – frequently come to this country with empty pockets but rarely with empty heads. Human capital has been and continues to be a major contributor to the success of many newly arriving immigrants.
They often come from countries where they were artisans, bakers, pipe fitters, tailors, farmers, chefs, managers and entrepreneurs. In contrast, many American blacks never had the chance to acquire significant levels of human capital. Whatever skills and talents they had when they arrived were quickly devalued in favor of agricultural slave labor, and many have never had the opportunity to learn or acquire even the most basic skills needed for success in an increasingly industrialized society.
Third, immigrants are often the most talented and well-to-do among their own racial and or ethnic groups. It is not uncommon to see physicians, scientists or professionals from Third World countries and assume they are representative of individuals from those countries; they are not. Frequently, they are from the most privileged families and classes within their respective countries. Although perhaps not rich, some come with sufficient financial capital to launch and support the start of small businesses or to back relatives who want to start a business. Their immigration here is an example of what is referred to as the “brain drain,” that is, the best trained and educated of other countries leave their countries to achieve greater benefits in the country to which they immigrate.
Fourth, immigrants as a group are exceptionally motivated. Almost daily, we learn about individuals who are willing to risk their lives for an opportunity at a better economic life. They are willing to board unseaworthy rafts and boats to cross an ocean, while armed with the knowledge that many others before them have died attempting such a voyage. Some will climb border fences, swim rivers and even risk encountering right-wing border militias in search of better economic opportunities. It has probably always been the case that those who were willing to leave the country, or the farm, or the village and come to the “promised land” of opportunity have been more ambitious and motivated than their counterparts who elected to stay behind.
Finally, some contend that blacks should compare themselves to the poor in other countries, such as those in Africa or Asia. Comments like “blacks should be thankful for not being as poor as people in Africa” are common.
The problem with asking blacks to compare themselves to people in other countries is that blacks are Americans. Most were born in this country, they pay taxes in this country and they fight and die in all of its wars.
It is true that black Americans feel that America owes them something, and that is to be treated like white Americans. Expecting them to compare their standards of living to noncitizens is not only insulting to them as people who have helped to build this country, but is also unfair to them as American citizens.
In large part, blacks have been segregated not just from most other racial and ethnic groups, but also from the American immigrant experience and the gradual opening of opportunities that have characteristically come with it.
Here is “An Open Letter to Black African Immigrants” from Nadege Seppou:
Dear Black African immigrant,
The America you dreamt of is an America you never conceived of.
You are officially black. In your country you were just you, no color attached to your identity, but now you are black. Stop saying I am Nigerian, I am Zimbabwean, or I am Kenyan. America doesn’t care about any of that, in America you are simply black. You will try to fight, deny, and resist every time someone calls you black. You resist your newly prescribed blackness because a ladder of racial hierarchy exists in America.
Sooner than later, you will realize your blackness puts you at the bottom of this ladder irrespective of the educational or financial status you acquire. Every rejection of your new found blackness will be an attempt to move away from the bottom of this ladder, to resist the label that the color of your skin has subjected you to. It takes some time getting used to, you know, this whole race and being black thing, but sooner that later you will understand America’s tribalism and you will learn to navigate through it.
People will hold stereotypes about you. Some might ask if you’ve lived on trees and or jungles and others won’t even ask, they’ll assume you did. Others will think your entire existence has been defined by hunger and poverty. In case you haven’t noticed you sound different, you do. And people will not fail to remind you of the obvious, your accent. Some may laugh and others will make you repeat words and sentences over and over again because they are unable to “understand.” You will be very confused and will think to yourself, “But I speak better English than you.” Despite all these, do not be ashamed of your identity. Don’t allow people’s ignorance harden your heart towards them. As much as you possibly can, dismantle these stereotypes by telling the other stories they haven’t been exposed to.
White Americans will say you are better than American blacks, but please do not fall for this trap. You will be told you behave better, work harder, and are more educated than American blacks. You will be tempted to agree and will sometimes want to shout, “YES, I’M NOT LIKE THEM, WE AFRICANS ARE DIFFERENT!” Just don’t...don’t even think it.
The praise of your acquired characteristic and culture becomes a justification for white Americans to perpetuate discriminatory treatments towards American blacks. These statements of praise have an underlying message of, “If Africans can do so well then surely racism has nothing to do with anything, therefore, American Blacks are to be blamed for their condition in America”. This problematic line of reasoning sustains cultural racism. I beg of you, refrain from nodding in agreement when you receive such faulty praise.
Navigating through America’s complex social construct is a process. The sooner you become conscious of the nuances involved, the better for Black America as a whole.
With love, Another Black African immigrant
Six. Were reparations considered radical at the beginning of America’s history?
We read that the ideas about reparations were mainstream. Coates lists many slave-owners and nonslave-owners alike who recompensed former slaves.
All the while, Coates points out, there has been a counter sentiment toward reparations. As Coates quotes from a Chicago Tribune editorial from 1891 as to why black Americans should be grateful for being enslaved here and should not ask for reparations: “They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex-slaves.”
Is the account square? Were blacks brought over from Africa lavished with the moral purity, virtues and glories of Christianity?
Coates will have none of this. He makes the case that not only have African-Americans been systematically used and exploited, kept down by the man, as it were, but that their exploitation has fueled wealth and privilege for whites. The economic powerhouse that dominated the world was the result of slavery and this evil institution rested on the fallacious religion, not of Christianity, but of White Supremacy.
Seven. What is the history of democracy in America?
Democracy is white democracy, and this white democracy could not flourish without “black plunder.” As Coates writes in the beginning of Part IV., “America begins in black plunder and white democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary.”
White Supremacy, accompanied by a fear, hatred, and dehumanization of blacks, had not grown into the evil monster it was at its peak during the Civil war. As Coates points out, “When enslaved Africans, plundered of their bodies, plundered of their families, and plundered of their labor, were brought to the colony of Virginia in 1619, they did not initially endure the naked racism that would engulf their progeny. Some of them were freed. Some of them intermarried. Still others escaped with the white indentured servants who had suffered as they had.”
Sadly, Coates observes, 100 years later any kind of alliance between poor whites and blacks would be impossible because the lies of White Supremacy had taken hold of white people like a malignant cancer.
The law supported this vile racism. As Coates writes, “For the next 250 years, American law worked to reduce black people to a class of untouchables and raise all white men to the level of citizens.”
From the beginning of American history, the great divide was not the rich and the poor but the white and the black.
The white wealth was built on slavery. As we read, “Nearly one-fourth of all white Southerners owned slaves, and upon their backs the economic basis of America—and much of the Atlantic world—was erected. In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white income was derived from slavery. By 1840, cotton produced by slave labor constituted 59 percent of the country’s exports.”
What were slaves worth as an asset?
To underscore his point, Coates quotes Yale historian David W. Blight: “In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together.”
Coates writes, “The vending of the black body and the sundering of the black family became an economy unto themselves, estimated to have brought in tens of millions of dollars to antebellum America. In 1860 there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country.”
This wealth was built on crimes against humanity, specifically crimes against black people. As we read:
When the wife and children of Henry Brown, a slave in Richmond, Virginia, were to be sold away, Brown searched for a white master who might buy his wife and children to keep the family together. He failed:
The next day, I stationed myself by the side of the road, along which the slaves, amounting to three hundred and fifty, were to pass. The purchaser of my wife was a Methodist minister, who was about starting for North Carolina. Pretty soon five waggon-loads of little children passed, and looking at the foremost one, what should I see but a little child, pointing its tiny hand towards me, exclaiming, “There’s my father; I knew he would come and bid me good-bye.” It was my eldest child! Soon the gang approached in which my wife was chained. I looked, and beheld her familiar face; but O, reader, that glance of agony! may God spare me ever again enduring the excruciating horror of that moment! She passed, and came near to where I stood. I seized hold of her hand, intending to bid her farewell; but words failed me; the gift of utterance had fled, and I remained speechless. I followed her for some distance, with her hand grasped in mine, as if to save her from her fate, but I could not speak, and I was obliged to turn away in silence.
In a time when telecommunications were primitive and blacks lacked freedom of movement, the parting of black families was a kind of murder. Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. The labor strife that seeded Bacon’s rebellion was suppressed. America’s indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values. Assessing antebellum democracy in Virginia, a visitor from England observed that the state’s natives “can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves.”
One. How were black slaves equated with property?
Coates writes:
The consequences of 250 years of enslavement, of war upon black families and black people, were profound. Like homeownership today, slave ownership was aspirational, attracting not just those who owned slaves but those who wished to. Much as homeowners today might discuss the addition of a patio or the painting of a living room, slaveholders traded tips on the best methods for breeding workers, exacting labor, and doling out punishment. Just as a homeowner today might subscribe to a magazine like This Old House, slaveholders had journals such as De Bow’s Review, which recommended the best practices for wringing profits from slaves. By the dawn of the Civil War, the enslavement of black America was thought to be so foundational to the country that those who sought to end it were branded heretics worthy of death. Imagine what would happen if a president today came out in favor of taking all American homes from their owners: the reaction might well be violent.
We see to this day, especially in the South but not limited there, that there are sympathizers of the Confederacy who erect the Confederate flag and talk about “state rights” and “Northern aggression” in the context of slavery. For them, their white identity rests on the “right” to have slavery. For them “state rights” really means the right to own slaves. To discuss this topic in front of these sympathizers to this day is to endanger one’s own life.
Two. How did terrorism afflict black Americans?
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Radical Republicans attempted to reconstruct the country upon something resembling universal equality—but they were beaten back by a campaign of “Redemption,” led by White Liners, Red Shirts, and Klansmen bent on upholding a society “formed for the white, not for the black man.” A wave of terrorism roiled the South. In his massive history Reconstruction, Eric Foner recounts incidents of black people being attacked for not removing their hats; for refusing to hand over a whiskey flask; for disobeying church procedures; for “using insolent language”; for disputing labor contracts; for refusing to be “tied like a slave. . . . “
Terrorism carried the day. Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political violence was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted out toward black people of ambition. Black schools and churches were burned to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who attempted to rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered. At the end of World War I, black veterans returning to their homes were assaulted for daring to wear the American uniform. The demobilization of soldiers after the war, which put white and black veterans into competition for scarce jobs, produced the Red Summer of 1919: a succession of racist pogroms against dozens of cities ranging from Longview, Texas, to Chicago to Washington, D.C. Organized white violence against blacks continued into the 1920s—in 1921 a white mob leveled Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” and in 1923 another one razed the black town of Rosewood, Florida—and virtually no one was punished.
Three. What was the racist practice of redlining?
We read:
Whereas shortly before the New Deal, a typical mortgage required a large down payment and full repayment within about 10 years, the creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1933 and then the Federal Housing Administration the following year allowed banks to offer loans requiring no more than 10 percent down, amortized over 20 to 30 years. “Without federal intervention in the housing market, massive suburbanization would have been impossible,” writes Thomas J. Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. “In 1930, only 30 percent of Americans owned their own homes; by 1960, more than 60 percent were home owners. Home ownership became an emblem of American citizenship.”
That emblem was not to be awarded to blacks. The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters—and “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.”
The federal government concurred. It was the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant—a clause in the deed forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods.
Four. How has the plunder of black Americans continued after slavery?
We read:
The federal government is premised on equal fealty from all its citizens, who in return are to receive equal treatment. But as late as the mid-20th century, this bargain was not granted to black people, who repeatedly paid a higher price for citizenship and received less in return. Plunder had been the essential feature of slavery, of the society described by Calhoun. But practically a full century after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the plunder—quiet, systemic, submerged—continued even amidst the aims and achievements of New Deal liberals.
Other examples of the plunder, in addition to predatory lending, are the profits made from mass incarceration, and the criminalizing of poverty, which leads to municipal violations.
This plundering of blacks is not perceived correctly by liberals. As we read:
Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long tradition of this country actively punishing black success—and the elevation of that punishment, in the mid-20th century, to federal policy. President Lyndon Johnson may have noted in his historic civil-rights speech at Howard University in 1965 that “Negro poverty is not white poverty.” But his advisers and their successors were, and still are, loath to craft any policy that recognizes the difference.
Five. How does Coates counter argue the notion that “fatherhood is the great antidote” to problems in the black community?
Coates writes:
From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship—homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross’s back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for “the thrill of the chase and the kill.” Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.
Six. Why does Coates argue that reparations are a superior means for exacting justice to affirmative action?
Coates writes:
The urge to use the moral force of the black struggle to address broader inequalities originates in both compassion and pragmatism. But it makes for ambiguous policy. Affirmative action’s precise aims, for instance, have always proved elusive. Is it meant to make amends for the crimes heaped upon black people? Not according to the Supreme Court. In its 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court rejected “societal discrimination” as “an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past.” Is affirmative action meant to increase “diversity”? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people—the problem of what America has taken from them over several centuries.
This confusion about affirmative action’s aims, along with our inability to face up to the particular history of white-imposed black disadvantage, dates back to the policy’s origins. “There is no fixed and firm definition of affirmative action,” an appointee in Johnson’s Department of Labor declared. “Affirmative action is anything that you have to do to get results. But this does not necessarily include preferential treatment.”
Yet America was built on the preferential treatment of white people—395 years of it. Vaguely endorsing a cuddly, feel-good diversity does very little to redress this.
Seven. According to Coates, what is the foundation of America that has been swept under the carpet as America wallows in its Myth of Fairness and Innocence?
Coates writes:
To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the fact that closing the “achievement gap” will do nothing to close the “injury gap,” in which black college graduates still suffer higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal records.
Eight. What are the two main reasons Coates champions reparations?
The first is lost money. As we read:
Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built. In the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued in The Case for Black Reparations that a rough price tag for reparations could be determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the population by the difference in white and black per capita income. That number—$34 billion in 1973, when Bittker wrote his book—could be added to a reparations program each year for a decade or two. Today Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.
To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.
Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same.
**
The second reason is intangible: The much needed history lesson to correct the Myth of American Innocence. As we read:
Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40 proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world.
Coates continues to discuss the basics of this unjust American history:
The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer.
And this destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its bounty. These laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the federal government—through housing policies—engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we picture colored only signs, but we should picture pirate flags.
On some level, we have always grasped this.
Coates continues:
We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.
And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.
Nine. How does Coates refute the notion that reparations will divide us?
Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.
What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.
Ten. Why does Coates bring up the reparations debate in Germany?
Coates writes:
We are not the first to be summoned to such a challenge.
In 1952, when West Germany began the process of making amends for the Holocaust, it did so under conditions that should be instructive to us. Resistance was violent. Very few Germans believed that Jews were entitled to anything. Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29 percent believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people.
“The rest,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, Postwar, “were divided between those (some two-fifths of respondents) who thought that only people ‘who really committed something’ were responsible and should pay, and those (21 percent) who thought ‘that the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich.’ ”
Germany’s unwillingness to squarely face its history went beyond polls. Movies that suggested a societal responsibility for the Holocaust beyond Hitler were banned. “The German soldier fought bravely and honorably for his homeland,” claimed President Eisenhower, endorsing the Teutonic national myth. Judt wrote, “Throughout the fifties West German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and properly punished.”
Konrad Adenauer, the postwar German chancellor, was in favor of reparations, but his own party was divided, and he was able to get an agreement passed only with the votes of the Social Democratic opposition.
Coates continues:
The reparations conversation set off a wave of bomb attempts by Israeli militants. One was aimed at the foreign ministry in Tel Aviv. Another was aimed at Chancellor Adenauer himself. And one was aimed at the port of Haifa, where the goods bought with reparations money were arriving. West Germany ultimately agreed to pay Israel 3.45 billion deutsche marks, or more than $7 billion in today’s dollars. Individual reparations claims followed—for psychological trauma, for offense to Jewish honor, for halting law careers, for life insurance, for time spent in concentration camps. Seventeen percent of funds went toward purchasing ships. “By the end of 1961, these reparations vessels constituted two-thirds of the Israeli merchant fleet,” writes the Israeli historian Tom Segev in his book The Seventh Million. “From 1953 to 1963, the reparations money funded about a third of the total investment in Israel’s electrical system, which tripled its capacity, and nearly half the total investment in the railways.”
Israel’s GNP tripled during the 12 years of the agreement. The Bank of Israel attributed 15 percent of this growth, along with 45,000 jobs, to investments made with reparations money. But Segev argues that the impact went far beyond that. Reparations “had indisputable psychological and political importance,” he writes.
Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name.
Assessing the reparations agreement, David Ben-Gurion said:
For the first time in the history of relations between people, a precedent has been created by which a great State, as a result of moral pressure alone, takes it upon itself to pay compensation to the victims of the government that preceded it. For the first time in the history of a people that has been persecuted, oppressed, plundered and despoiled for hundreds of years in the countries of Europe, a persecutor and despoiler has been obliged to return part of his spoils and has even undertaken to make collective reparation as partial compensation for material losses.
Something more than moral pressure calls America to reparations. We cannot escape our history. All of our solutions to the great problems of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are troubled by what must go unspoken. “The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now,” Clyde Ross told me. “It’s because of then.” In the early 2000s, Charles Ogletree went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to meet with the survivors of the 1921 race riot that had devastated “Black Wall Street.” The past was not the past to them. “It was amazing seeing these black women and men who were crippled, blind, in wheelchairs,” Ogletree told me. “I had no idea who they were and why they wanted to see me. They said, ‘We want you to represent us in this lawsuit.’ ”
Eleven. Can we put a price tag on these reparations?
Coates writes:
Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.
Summary of Coates' Reasons for Supporting Reparations
One. Predatory, discriminatory housing laws plundered African-Americans’ money in the past and present for lining the coffers of white people.
Two. Black lives—including the very body—were plundered as part of America’s Kleptocracy in which white slave owners and business people became millionaires at a rate faster than in any part of the world.
Three. Reparations are not a radical, fringe idea but have historical precedent in mainstream thought from the Colonial period in America, to post WWII Germany, and to post WWII America (we gave reparations to Japanese Americans who suffered in the internment camps in 1988).
Four. Centuries of racial discrimination and Jim Crow laws have created “ecologically distinct” poverty communities that perpetuate poverty. These communities are deserts of opportunity, nutrition, jobs, education, health care, etc., and no one in their right mind would want to live in these places. They are hell on earth, places long abandoned and ignored by the rest of America.
Five. Four hundred years of racial discrimination have created a social stigma in which blacks are perceived as being the lowest on the totem pole. It is difficult to measure the psychological effects of this demonization and social stigma. It is difficult to measure the plunder of identity of a people taken here on ships and told for centuries that they are subhuman and mere pieces of property to be bartered and sold like cattle. In contrast, African blacks who immigrate to America navigate the American Dream in the absence of this incomprehensible psychological baggage.
Six. The powerhouse of the American economy that made it a dominant economy in the world before the Civil War and made whites in the South the richest people in the world was built on the blood of slavery.
Seven. The plunder of African-Americans continues centuries after slavery. They are demonized, left in the inner city opportunity deserts, and plucked off the streets into the Industrial Prison Complex, part of a privatized multi-billion-dollar business that employs over 2.5 million Americans and has created an immoral economy on the backs of people of color.
Eight. Reparations are superior to Affirmative Action whose aims remain vague and wishy-washy. In contrast, reparations have a clear objective: To recompense African-Americans for money lost and to correct the Myth of American Innocence.
Nine. Reparations are a corrective to America’s Great Lie: Its Myth of Innocence and Equality. Destroying this Myth is an essential part of a moral reckoning and spiritual awakening.
This Great Lie is so deep that millions of white Americans, especially in the South, still worship the lie of White Supremacy and believe they have the “right” to own slaves and that slave ownership is essential to their “white identity” and the “legacy of honoring their white ancestors.” These white people engage in all sorts of mythologies, erecting statues of white Confederate generals in front of government buildings, waving Confederate flags, and re-enacting the Civil War in which the Confederate Army is venerated of a noble mission. All of these romantic mythologies sweep the evils of slavery under the carpet and are therefore a lie and a moral abomination.
Opposition to Coates
Opposition #1: We should help people based on economic class, not race.
This is the “class first” approach, originating in the myth that racism and socialism are necessarily incompatible. But raising the minimum wage doesn’t really address the fact that black men without criminal records have about the same shot at low-wage work as white men with them; nor can making college free address the wage gap between black and white graduates. Housing discrimination, historical and present, may well be the fulcrum of white supremacy. Affirmative action is one of the most disputed issues of the day. Neither are addressed in the “racial justice” section of Sanders platform.
Sanders’s anti-racist moderation points to a candidate who is not merely against reparations, but one who doesn’t actually understand the argument. To briefly restate it, from 1619 until at least the late 1960s, American institutions, businesses, associations, and governments—federal, state, and local—repeatedly plundered black communities. Their methods included everything from land-theft, to red-lining, to disenfranchisement, to convict-lease labor, to lynching, to enslavement, to the vending of children. So large was this plunder that America, as we know it today, is simply unimaginable without it. Its great universities were founded on it. Its early economy was built by it. Its suburbs were financed by it. Its deadliest war was the result of it.
One can’t evade these facts by changing the subject. Some months ago, black radicals in the Black Lives Matters movement protested Sanders. They were, in the main, jeered by the white left for their efforts. But judged by his platform, Sanders should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy. Jim Crow and its legacy were not merely problems of disproportionate poverty. Why should black voters support a candidate who does not recognize this?
Opposition #2: A trillion-dollar payment would result in $20,000 for every African-American. This would make a symbolic statement, but not be enough to make a significant difference in changing the power hierarchy. Not even a 3 trillion dollar payment would make a real difference.
We could concede that the above is true; however 20K could help someone go to college and make a small dent in helping that person. That is better than nothing.
But overall, the sad truth is that even a trillion-dollar payment is a "drop in the bucket" and that "The Man" will still be the "shot caller."
Opposition #3: "Distant harm from centuries ago does not affect African-Americans today."
We could counter argue that segregation still exists, environmental deserts still exist, the wealth gap still exists, and mass incarceration, a form of profit for the government and big business built on mostly people of color flourishes today.
Opposition #4: If we give reparations to African-Americans, where does all this reparations business end? What about migrant workers who are exploited in the fields and forced to work for a subhuman wage? What about the stolen wages from immigrants in the restaurant business? Is it fair to give reparations to one disadvantaged group but not another?
We should give reparations to ALL people. Coates' argument is not to give reparations to one group at the exclusion of another. To say so is to commit a Straw Man fallacy.
Opposition #5: As Shelby Steele contends, the reparations movement encourages victimization, dependence, and infantilization in the black community, traits that contradict the heroism and warriorhood of great Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King.
But the above could said to be a Straw Man Fallacy. Some might counter by observing that too many whites are playing "victims" to "reverse racism," too many whites show an unhealthy dependence on their white privilege, and too many whites are "infants" in their refusal to accept responsibility for America's original sin: a country whose wealth and identity were built on racism, slavery, and Jim Crow.
Opposition #6: Kevin Williamson observes that Coates' argument isn't really for reparations but for America to expose the truth about the depths of racism in American history. We read from Williamson's refutation essay:
Mr. Coates does not make the case so much for reparations as for a South Africa–style truth-and-reconciliation commission. “The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.” The purpose of a debate on a reparations bill of the sort being offered by John Conyers Jr. is not so much to construct a program of economic compensation as it is to have another verse of that Democratic hymn, an honest conversation about race. (As though we ever talked about anything else.) And this gets to the real defect in Mr. Coates’s approach. The purpose of public policy in this area can be one of two things. The first is a program focused on trying to improve in real terms the lives of those who are poorly off and those born into circumstances that are likely to lead to their being poorly off adults, proceeding with the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that such programs will disproportionately benefit black Americans, as they should. The second option is a symbolic political process designed to confer a degree of psychic satisfaction on relatively well-off men and women such as Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Opposition #7: Williamson charges that Coates' reparations arguments encourages tribalism, which is anti-liberal and anti-democratic:
Once that fact is acknowledged, then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress. Mr. Coates also, I think, miscalculates what the real-world effects of converting our liberal conception of justice into a system of racial appropriation might mean. There are still, after all, an awful lot of white people, and though many of them might be inclined to make amends under some sort of racial truce following the process Mr. Coates imagines, many of them might simply be inclined to prevail. The fact is that the situation of African Americans in the United States has improved precisely to the extent that whites have begun to forgo tribalism and to genuinely commit themselves to the principles of liberalism, the long march toward a more perfect Union. The alternative — a system of exclusive interests in which black and white operate effectively in opposition — is not only morally repugnant, but likely to undermine the genuine political and economic interests of African Americans.
Review: Opposition to Coates
Opposition #1: We should help people based on economic class, not race.
This is the “class first” approach, originating in the myth that racism and socialism are necessarily incompatible. But raising the minimum wage doesn’t really address the fact that black men without criminal records have about the same shot at low-wage work as white men with them; nor can making college free address the wage gap between black and white graduates. Housing discrimination, historical and present, may well be the fulcrum of white supremacy. Affirmative action is one of the most disputed issues of the day. Neither are addressed in the “racial justice” section of Sanders platform.
Sanders’s anti-racist moderation points to a candidate who is not merely against reparations, but one who doesn’t actually understand the argument. To briefly restate it, from 1619 until at least the late 1960s, American institutions, businesses, associations, and governments—federal, state, and local—repeatedly plundered black communities. Their methods included everything from land-theft, to red-lining, to disenfranchisement, to convict-lease labor, to lynching, to enslavement, to the vending of children. So large was this plunder that America, as we know it today, is simply unimaginable without it. Its great universities were founded on it. Its early economy was built by it. Its suburbs were financed by it. Its deadliest war was the result of it.
One can’t evade these facts by changing the subject. Some months ago, black radicals in the Black Lives Matters movement protested Sanders. They were, in the main, jeered by the white left for their efforts. But judged by his platform, Sanders should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy. Jim Crow and its legacy were not merely problems of disproportionate poverty. Why should black voters support a candidate who does not recognize this?
Opposition #2: A trillion-dollar payment would result in $20,000 for every African-American. This would make a symbolic statement, but not be enough to make a significant difference in changing the power hierarchy. Not even a 3 trillion dollar payment would make a real difference.
We could concede that the above is true; however 20K could help someone go to college and make a small dent in helping that person. That is better than nothing.
But overall, the sad truth is that even a trillion-dollar payment is a "drop in the bucket" and that "The Man" will still be the "shot caller."
Opposition #3: "Distant harm from centuries ago does not affect African-Americans today."
We could counter argue that segregation still exists, environmental deserts still exist, the wealth gap still exists, and mass incarceration, a form of profit for the government and big business built on mostly people of color flourishes today.
Opposition #4: If we give reparations to African-Americans, where does all this reparations business end? What about migrant workers who are exploited in the fields and forced to work for a subhuman wage? What about the stolen wages from immigrants in the restaurant business? Is it fair to give reparations to one disadvantaged group but not another?
We should give reparations to ALL people. Coates' argument is not to give reparations to one group at the exclusion of another. To say so is to commit a Straw Man fallacy.
Opposition #5: As Shelby Steele contends, the reparations movement encourages victimization, dependence, and infantilization in the black community, traits that contradict the heroism and warriorhood of great Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King.
But the above could said to be a Straw Man Fallacy. Some might counter by observing that too many whites are playing "victims" to "reverse racism," too many whites show an unhealthy dependence on their white privilege, and too many whites are "infants" in their refusal to accept responsibility for America's original sin: a country whose wealth and identity were built on racism, slavery, and Jim Crow.
Opposition #6: Kevin Williamson observes that Coates' argument isn't really for reparations but for America to expose the truth about the depths of racism in American history. We read from Williamson's refutation essay:
Mr. Coates does not make the case so much for reparations as for a South Africa–style truth-and-reconciliation commission. “The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.” The purpose of a debate on a reparations bill of the sort being offered by John Conyers Jr. is not so much to construct a program of economic compensation as it is to have another verse of that Democratic hymn, an honest conversation about race. (As though we ever talked about anything else.) And this gets to the real defect in Mr. Coates’s approach. The purpose of public policy in this area can be one of two things. The first is a program focused on trying to improve in real terms the lives of those who are poorly off and those born into circumstances that are likely to lead to their being poorly off adults, proceeding with the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that such programs will disproportionately benefit black Americans, as they should. The second option is a symbolic political process designed to confer a degree of psychic satisfaction on relatively well-off men and women such as Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Opposition #7: Williamson charges that Coates' reparations arguments encourages tribalism, which is anti-liberal and anti-democratic:
Once that fact is acknowledged, then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress. Mr. Coates also, I think, miscalculates what the real-world effects of converting our liberal conception of justice into a system of racial appropriation might mean. There are still, after all, an awful lot of white people, and though many of them might be inclined to make amends under some sort of racial truce following the process Mr. Coates imagines, many of them might simply be inclined to prevail. The fact is that the situation of African Americans in the United States has improved precisely to the extent that whites have begun to forgo tribalism and to genuinely commit themselves to the principles of liberalism, the long march toward a more perfect Union. The alternative — a system of exclusive interests in which black and white operate effectively in opposition — is not only morally repugnant, but likely to undermine the genuine political and economic interests of African Americans.
Coates' Rebuttals to Williamson
Rebutal #1: Williams charges that reparations are a form of racial apportionment, but according to Coates reparations are not about racial apportionment; they are about injury apportionment. As Coates argues:
Williamson says he is opposed to "converting the liberal Anglo-American tradition of justice into a system of racial apportionment." He then observes that, in fact, that tradition, itself, has always been deeply concerned with "racial apportionment." Thus within the second paragraph, Williamson is undermining his own thesis—if the Anglo-American tradition is what he concedes it to be, no "converting" is required. We reverse polarity for a time, and then we all live happily ever after.
Or probably not. That is because Williamson's entire framing is wrong. Reparations are not due because black people are black, but because black people have been injured. And the Anglo-American tradition has never been a system of "racial apportionment," but of racist apportionment. Like most writers and public intellectuals (liberal and conservative) Williamson's reply is rooted in the idea of "race" as constant—i.e. there is a "black race" that can be traced back to Africa, and a "white race" that can be traced back to Europe. There certainly is such a thing as African and European ancestry, and that ancestry is not entirely irrelevant to our world. But ancestry is tangential, and sometimes wholly unrelated, to racism, injury, and reparations.
We know this because there is no constant idea of "black" or "white" across time or space. We know this because Charlie Patton fathered the blues, andAlessandro de Medici ruled in Venice. Black in America is not black in Brazil, and black in modern America is not even black in 18th-century Louisiana. Nor are people we consider "white" today any sort of constant. Throughout American history it has been common to speak of an "Italian race," an "Irish race," a "Frankish race," a "Jewish race" even a "Southern race." One might take a hard look at Williamson's agreeable portrait, for instance, and note the problem of assigning anyone to a race. "Race," writes the imminent historian Nell Irvin Painter, "is an idea, not a fact."
In this country, at this moment, "African-Americans" are an ethnic group comprised of individuals of varying degrees of direct African ancestry. Nothing about this fact necessitated plunder or injury, and it is the injury—through red-lining, black codes, slaves codes, lynching, ghettoization, fraud, rape, and murder—with which reparations concerns itself. The point is not "racial apportionment," which is to say giving people things because they are black. It is injury apportionment, which is to say restoring things to people who have been plundered.
Rebuttal #2: Williamson and others point out that reparations money won't make a difference in the distribution of wealth. Coates' reply is this:
Racism, and its progeny white supremacy, is concerned with dividing human beings, on the basis of ancestry (which is very real) and slotting them into a hierarchy (which is an invention). "Race" is that hierarchy—and any study of the word across history bears out its relationship to assigning value and scale across humanity. In polite society we've moved past overtly hierarchal ideas about "race," but the problem of imprecise naming remains with us. Let us bypass that imprecision—the Anglo-American tradition which Williamson extolls has, as he concedes, sought to erect and uphold a racist hierarchy. Reparations seeks its total and complete destruction.
**
Here is perhaps a weakness in Coates' essay: If we agree with Coates that, "Reparations seek its [racial hierarchy's] total and complete destruction," we did not see such a plan in Coates' essay. He needs to explain how reparations, the kind he wants, will achieve this.
Rebuttal #3: To Williamson's point that not all African-Americans should get reparations because not all African-Americans have been victimized by racism, Coates rebuts:
Williamson believes that reparations must either boil down to a "symbolic political process" or a series of polices that helps America's poor and disproportionately aids African-Americans. How, Williamson asks, can one make a claim on behalf of Sasha and Malia Obama, in a world of poor whites? In much the same way that a factory which pumps toxins into a poor neighborhood is not indemnified because a plaintiff rises to become a millionaire. Taking Williamson's argument to its logical conclusion, a businessman brutalized by the police should never sue the city because, well, homelessness.
People who are injured sometimes achieve great things—this does not obviate the fact of their injury, nor their claim to recompense. Warren Moon achieved more than the vast majority of white quarterbacks. Had racism not forced him into the CFL for the first five crucial years of his career, he might have had more success than any quarterback to ever play the game. Satchel Paige enjoys an honor which the vast majority of white baseball players shall never glimpse—induction in the Hall of Fame. What might Paige achieved had he not been injured by white supremacy for the vast majority of his career? Mr. Clyde Ross is a homeowner, and considerably better off than many of his North Lawndale neighbors. To achieve this he worked three jobs and lost time that he should have been able to invest in his children. What might Mr. Ross have been had he not endured racist plunder from Clarksdale to Chicago?
Rebuttal #4: Williamson says that economic injustice should address poverty, not race, but Coates counters:
The problem of racism is not synonymous with the problem of the poverty line. Indeed, it is often in the fate of the most conventionally successful African-Americans that we see the full horror of a corrupt social contract. The injury of racism means many things, virtually all of them bad. It means making $100,000 a year but living in neighborhoods equivalent to white people who make $30,000 a year. It means belonging to a class whose men comprise some eight percent of the world's entire prison population. It means, if you do go to college, still enjoying lesser employment prospects than white college graduates. It means living in a family with roughly a 20th of the wealth of those who do not suffer your particular ailment. In short, it means quite a bit—and these effects do not merely haunt the poor. My heart bleeds for the white child injured by the departure of parents. But God forbid the injury of racism be added to the burden.
The pervasive effects of the injury should not surprise—the injuring and exploitation of black people regardless of economic class has been one of the dominant themes of American history. It is only the obviation, or ignorance, of history that allows us to escape this. The result must be an especially tortured specimen of reasoning:
Some blacks are born into college-educated, well-off households, and some whites are born to heroin-addicted single mothers, and even the totality of racial crimes throughout American history does not mean that one of these things matters and one does not. Once that fact is acknowledged, then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism.
Williamson's "fact" can not be acknowledged because, even by Williamson's crude measures, it is artifice. There are—at most—1.5 million people who use heroin in this country. The ranks of the African-American poor are roughly eight times that.
Rebuttal #5: Reparations are not "anti-white," or intended to divide the country racially. As Coates explains:
More importantly, the claim of reparations does not hinge on every individual white person everywhere being wealthy. That is because reparations is not a claim against white Americans, anymore than reparations paid to interned Japanese-Americans was a claim against non-Japanese-Americans. The claim was brought before the multi-ethnic United States of America.
Rebuttal #6: It doesn't make sense to make current whites who didn't enforce slavery pay black Americans who weren't slaves. To this point, Coates counters:
There seems to be great confusion on this point. The governments of the United States of America—local, state and federal—are deeply implicated in enslavement, Jim Crow, redlining, New Deal racism, terrorism, ghettoization, housing segregation. The fact that one's ancestors were not slave-traders or that one arrived here in 1980 is irrelevant. I did not live in New York when the city railroaded the Central Park Five. But my tax dollars will pay for the settlement. That is because a state is more than the natural lives, or occupancy, of its citizens. People who object to reparations for African-Americans because they, individually, did nothing should also object to reparations to Japanese-Americans, but they should not stop there. They should object to the Fourth of July, since they, individually, did nothing to aid the American Revolution. They should object to the payment of pensions for the Spanish-American War, a war fought before they were alive. Indeed they should object to government and society itself, because its existence depends on outliving its individual citizens.
Rebuttal #7: Reparations are useless since black Americans are doomed to be economically behind whites, even in a world without racism. Coates' replies:
Williamson then posits that black people would still be poor because they'd be far behind the native white population. Williamson never considers that the two groups might intermarry—because he believes in "race," which is to say creationism. For that same reason he ignores the fact there was no "New World" with "native whites" to come to without the labor of African-Americans. Europeans did not purchase enslaved Africans because they disliked the cut of their jib. They did it because they had taken a great deal of land and needed bonded labor to extract resources from it. Africans—aliens to society, existing beyond the protections of the crown—fit the bill.
"The people to whom reparations were owed," Williamson concludes. "Are long dead." Only because we need them to be. Mr. Clyde Ross is very much alive—as are many of the victims of redlining. And it is not hard to identify them. We know where redlining took place and where it didn't. We have the maps. We know who lived there and who didn't.
This was American policy. We have never accounted for it, and it is unlikely that we ever will. That is not because of any African-American's life-span but because of a powerful desire to run out the clock. Reparations claims were made within the natural lifetimes of emancipated African-Americans. They were unsuccessful. They were not unsuccessful because they lacked merit. They were unsuccessful because their country lacked the courage to dispense with creationism.
One. In the Jim Crow South, we read that black families lived under a kleptocracy. Define this term.
Whites stole “all facets of society” from blacks: the right to vote, protection from the law, the right to work for a fair wage, an education, and anything that would point to their humanity.
Perhaps the worst state was Mississippi. “Between 1882 and 1968 more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state.” A lot of these lynchings occurred the night before an election to keep black-hostile politicians in power.
Financial oppression afflicted blacks in the South through debt peonage (also called debt slavery), a form of profiteering and exploitation of black farmers by setting unfair prices to put these farmers in eternal debt and to suck the life out of them.
Mississippi denied education to blacks and exploited their illiteracy by claiming certain individuals, like Clyde Ross’s father, owed back taxes. Someone unable to read was in no position to refute such a claim, often handed out in obscure legalize. This happened in 1923.
The result of a bogus claim, was repossessing all of the family’s property and treasure. This happened all the time. We read that black property was stolen and turned into a white country club.
Could the son Clyde Ross escape the poverty of his exploited parents and get a good education? No. While his white counterparts took the bus to the distant school, Clyde was denied the bus ride because of his skin color.
We read that Clyde sees America for what it really is: “It was in these early years that Ross began to understand himself as an American—he did not live under the blind decree of justice, but under the heel of a regime that elevated armed robbery to a governing principle.”
During Jim Crow, masses of blacks fled Mississippi, which for them was hell on earth.
Clyde Ross joins the Army and while stationed in California he sees he’s treated differently than in the South. He can shop, walk the streets without being harassed, go to restaurants. California is a completely different world than the Jim Crow South, which is kleptocracy.
Even when Clyde Ross moves to Chicago and isn’t oppressed by overt racism, he is victimized by predatory lending and homeownership discrimination that sucks the money out of him.
Two. Why does Coates bring up the fact that Clyde Ross joined the Contract Buyer’s League?
The Contract Buyer’s League, a collection of black homeowners from North Lawndale, Illinois, fought against the predatory lending, dishonest, and outright theft that white capitalists performed against the black community.
The CBL went into these white speculators’ neighborhoods and informed the communities of the deceit and greed they committed, shaming them.
Most importantly, the CBL demanded recompense or compensation with interest for the money that was stolen from them.
In other words, this black organization in the year 1968 demanded reparations, though in 1976 they were denied those reparations in a jury trial.
Coates is bringing up this reparation to show that the black community is still being victimized by predators and deserves, like the CBL, reparations.
In law, we call this precedent, a rule or principle established in a previous case.
Coates wants to show us that we have precedent for black community’s legal struggle to fight for reparations for crimes committed against them.
Coates brings us back to freed slave Belinda Royall who was granted a reparation all the way back to 1783. Coates writes, “At the time, black people in America had endured more than 150 years of enslavement, and the idea that they might be owed something in return was, if not the national consensus, at least not outrageous.”
Three. How is North Lawndale faring today?
The city, which is 92% black, is in shambles with infant mortality being double the national average.
Forty-three percent of the people live below the poverty line, double Chicago’s overall rate.
Forty-five percent of all residents are on food stamps.
The incarceration rate is 40 times higher than the community with the highest white incarceration rate.
Four. What is the difference between the term “low economic status” and “ecologically distinct”?
To be “ecologically distinct” means to live in a desert of finance, jobs, nutrition, education, and family. Everyone is in jail, and there is nothing in this ecosystem to sustain or nourish an individual. It is a wasteland. These long forgotten wastelands have huge murder and incarceration rates, which the rest of society ignores. The only time these wastelands become relevant media stories is when there is a riot and civic unrest threatens America’s comforting notion of living in a stable society.
In these wastelands we see that though Jim Crow overt racism is gone, there is still the crisis of economic stagnation. The income gap between black and white households is the same today as it was in 1970.
In terms of money, nothing has changed.
Worse, we read that “whites born into affluent neighborhoods tended to remain in affluent neighborhoods, blacks tended to fall out of them.”
In other words, blacks are at a higher risk of falling into poverty.
To show the staggering disparity of wealth between white and black families, we must turn to the Pew Research Center, which estimates that white households are worth 20 times as much as black households.
There are other disparities as well: For example, “black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000.”
As we all know, richer communities have higher educational standards, so this speaks to the economic prospects of the children.
According to Coates, these poor neighborhoods are traps. He writes, “As a rule, poor black people do not work their way out of the ghetto—and those who do often face the horror of watching their children and grandchildren tumble back.”
These traps are racially isolating as well. Coates cites the Manhattan Institute that points out that while segregation has declined since the 1960s, African Americans remain the most segregated of all groups.
This segregation reinforces poverty. As Coates writes, “With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin. The resulting conflagration [spreading or blazing fire] has been devastating.”
Five. What counterargument (to Coates’ claim that America is morally compelled to give African Americans reparations) does Coates address in Part II of his essay?
Some will argue that the problems African-Americans face are not rooted in money but in values, morality, and “individual grit.”
Coates quotes Philadelphia Major Michael Nutter: “Too many men making too many babies they don’t want to take care of, and then we end up dealing with your children.”
This is the narrative you’ll hear on Fox News and elsewhere.
Coates rejects this narrative. He writes, “The kind of trenchant [deeply rooted] racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. The essence of American racism is disrespect. And in the wake of the grim numbers, we see the grim inheritance.”
My international students will sometimes disagree with Coates on this point. They will say they have come here with little or no financial resources, but because of the values of their family they find a way to be successful in America. Their narrative conflicts with Coates’.
How can we defend Coates here?
We can say that international students don’t come from neighborhoods bearing the marks of slavery, racism, and Jim Crow. We can say that the disadvantages inside an American inner city or ghetto do not make for a fair comparison with the disadvantages people suffer in other countries.
Coates actually addressed a relevant question about black immigrants faring better than African Americans in a 2009 essay written for The Atlantic titled “Why Do Black Immigrants Do Better Than Native Blacks?” Here is the essay:
This argument pops up from time to time, but it's been coming up a lot lately. It always seemed to me that the question answers itself--an immigrant is someone who's specifically come to this country to capitalize and exploit opportunity. Comparing any immigrant group to virtually any native-born group is like comparing the most ambitious members of one team with the entirety of another team. This is to say nothing of whatever skills, education and wealth a particular immigrant group may bring to bear.
I think a natural--but ultimately cheap--reaction is to appeal to the Myth Of The Black Immigrant. If we can prove that other black people come here and do well, than it must mean that our ideals and our execution of them have, indeed, been righteous. It's just that the American blacks are too lazy and self-pitying to see this.
I think the best grappling I've seen with this was by Malcolm Gladwell, himself an immigrant black of West Indian descent. He rather brilliantly combines his own first person experience, his family's views, and some actual social science to show that, as he says it, someone must always be the villain. Forgive me for quoting at length. The piece is quite lovely:
I grew up in Canada, in a little farming town an hour and a half outside of Toronto. My father teaches mathematics at a nearby university, and my mother is a therapist. For many years, she was the only black person in town, but I cannot remember wondering or worrying, or even thinking, about this fact. Back then, color meant only good things. It meant my cousins in Jamaica. It meant the graduate students from Africa and India my father would bring home from the university...
But things changed when I left for Toronto to attend college. This was during the early nineteen-eighties, when West Indians were immigrating to Canada in droves, and Toronto had become second only to New York as the Jamaican expatriates' capital in North America. At school, in the dining hall, I was served by Jamaicans. The infamous Jane-Finch projects, in northern Toronto, were considered the Jamaican projects. The drug trade then taking off was said to be the Jamaican drug trade. In the popular imagination, Jamaicans were--and are--welfare queens and gun-toting gangsters and dissolute youths. In Ontario, blacks accused of crimes are released by the police eighteen per cent of the time; whites are released twenty-nine per cent of the time. In drug-trafficking and importing cases, blacks are twenty-seven times as likely as whites to be jailed before their trial takes place, and twenty times as likely to be imprisoned on drug-possession charges.
After I had moved to the United States, I puzzled over this seeming contradiction--how West Indians celebrated in New York for their industry and drive could represent, just five hundred miles northwest, crime and dissipation. Didn't Torontonians see what was special and different in West Indian culture? But that was a naïve question. The West Indians were the first significant brush with blackness that white, smug, comfortable Torontonians had ever had. They had no bad blacks to contrast with the newcomers, no African-Americans to serve as a safety valve for their prejudices, no way to perform America's crude racial triage.
Not long ago, I sat in a coffee shop with someone I knew vaguely from college, who, like me, had moved to New York from Toronto. He began to speak of the threat that he felt Toronto now faced. It was the Jamaicans, he said. They were a bad seed. He was, of course, oblivious of my background. I said nothing, though, and he launched into a long explanation of how, in slave times, Jamaica was the island where all the most troublesome and obstreperous slaves were sent, and how that accounted for their particularly nasty disposition today.
I have told that story many times since, usually as a joke, because it was funny in an appalling way--particularly when I informed him much, much later that my mother was Jamaican. I tell the story that way because otherwise it is too painful. There must be people in Toronto just like Rosie and Noel, with the same attitudes and aspirations, who want to live in a neighborhood as nice as Argyle Avenue, who want to build a new garage and renovate their basement and set up their own business downstairs. But it is not completely up to them, is it? What has happened to Jamaicans in Toronto is proof that what has happened to Jamaicans here is not the end of racism, or even the beginning of the end of racism, but an accident of history and geography. In America, there is someone else to despise. In Canada, there is not. In the new racism, as in the old, somebody always has to be the nigger.
Read the whole thing. It's wonderful.
Here is an essay by Larry Davis, “Why Can’t African-Americans be as Successful as Immigrants?”
Other immigrant groups have come to America and worked their way out of poverty and into the mainstream. Why haven’t blacks followed the example of these other groups?
There are a number of reasons why black Americans are unlike immigrants. First, blacks are not only ethnically different from white immigrant groups but racially different as well. Even at a distance, they are visibly distinguishable from European immigrants due to their dark skin color. European ethnicities have become much less relevant to most white people, but skin color remains a salient feature in our society. And, although most European immigrants did face hostility and discrimination upon their arrival here, it soon dissipated along with their “foreign accents” as they assimilated as whites into American culture.
For people of African descent the notion of America being an ethnic melting pot largely failed to become a reality. Blacks have never been able to blend in and become part of the larger American group even though, as a people, they have really tried.
They have tried to work alongside whites, live in neighborhoods with whites, go to school with whites, volunteer to fight wars with whites, learn to speak like whites and even engaged in such ridiculous behaviors as employing skin whiteners to look more like whites. Despite all this, white Americans on the whole have not been capable of seeing beyond their differences in skin color. Hence, for African-Americans, race and color differences have never ceased to be a road block to their integration into larger society.
Psychologists have long known that the perception of a difference has a powerful impact on how we feel about people and interact with them. The greater the perceived visual difference, the greater the believed difference in another’s underlying attributes. Even blacks who are white in every other respect except skin color — for example, in how they talk and dress, who their friends are, who they vote for, or pray to, and even how they think about other blacks — are still at the end of the day perceived as being different and therefore not really one of the majority group.
A second reason blacks differ from immigrants is that the vast majority are not immigrants but [have ancestors who] came to this country as slaves. They spent 246 years in slavery: that’s 10 generations in bondage, with no control over their labor or livelihoods and, of course, without civil or legal rights of any kind.
Imagine the impact this would have on any group of people. In most instances, this group had no cognizance of a common history or shared cultural identity to sustain it. It is fair to say that these individuals were largely defined by who they were not, rather than who they were.
Suppose for a minute that we took all the white ethnic groups — Germans, Italians, Jews, Swedes, Irish, etc. — and forced them all into one group so that they had no sense of ethnic group identity, culture, language or history to sustain them after they arrived in this country. What a tremendous disadvantage this would have been to their group development and progress in America.
While it is true that blacks have been here for centuries, it was not until the 1960s that many black people had the legal rights and privileges given to most white ethnics immediately upon their arrival to America. This is a fact of major importance when attempting to compare blacks to any other ethnic or racial group in America, but one which many Americans overlook, dismiss and sometimes choose to deny.
The topic of slavery and its very real and lasting damage to black people is something that Americans have not yet been capable of addressing. The indignities of slavery were followed by 100 years of Jim Crow during which blacks were legally denied access to good educations, adequate housing, equal public facilities and fair working opportunities. Both the GI Bill and Social Security were largely denied to them. These and other disenfranchisements are the foundation for today’s enormous black-white wealth gap. In short, blacks have been denied access to much of what made America the land of opportunity.
So, some would ask, what about immigrants of color, such as Asians, Latinos and even other people of African descent? Why can they come to America and often do better than indigenous poor blacks?
Clearly, some groups come to America better prepared to take advantage of the opportunity that does exist. Immigrants – including black immigrants – frequently come to this country with empty pockets but rarely with empty heads. Human capital has been and continues to be a major contributor to the success of many newly arriving immigrants.
They often come from countries where they were artisans, bakers, pipe fitters, tailors, farmers, chefs, managers and entrepreneurs. In contrast, many American blacks never had the chance to acquire significant levels of human capital. Whatever skills and talents they had when they arrived were quickly devalued in favor of agricultural slave labor, and many have never had the opportunity to learn or acquire even the most basic skills needed for success in an increasingly industrialized society.
Third, immigrants are often the most talented and well-to-do among their own racial and or ethnic groups. It is not uncommon to see physicians, scientists or professionals from Third World countries and assume they are representative of individuals from those countries; they are not. Frequently, they are from the most privileged families and classes within their respective countries. Although perhaps not rich, some come with sufficient financial capital to launch and support the start of small businesses or to back relatives who want to start a business. Their immigration here is an example of what is referred to as the “brain drain,” that is, the best trained and educated of other countries leave their countries to achieve greater benefits in the country to which they immigrate.
Fourth, immigrants as a group are exceptionally motivated. Almost daily, we learn about individuals who are willing to risk their lives for an opportunity at a better economic life. They are willing to board unseaworthy rafts and boats to cross an ocean, while armed with the knowledge that many others before them have died attempting such a voyage. Some will climb border fences, swim rivers and even risk encountering right-wing border militias in search of better economic opportunities. It has probably always been the case that those who were willing to leave the country, or the farm, or the village and come to the “promised land” of opportunity have been more ambitious and motivated than their counterparts who elected to stay behind.
Finally, some contend that blacks should compare themselves to the poor in other countries, such as those in Africa or Asia. Comments like “blacks should be thankful for not being as poor as people in Africa” are common.
The problem with asking blacks to compare themselves to people in other countries is that blacks are Americans. Most were born in this country, they pay taxes in this country and they fight and die in all of its wars.
It is true that black Americans feel that America owes them something, and that is to be treated like white Americans. Expecting them to compare their standards of living to noncitizens is not only insulting to them as people who have helped to build this country, but is also unfair to them as American citizens.
In large part, blacks have been segregated not just from most other racial and ethnic groups, but also from the American immigrant experience and the gradual opening of opportunities that have characteristically come with it.
Here is “An Open Letter to Black African Immigrants” from Nadege Seppou:
Dear Black African immigrant,
The America you dreamt of is an America you never conceived of.
You are officially black. In your country you were just you, no color attached to your identity, but now you are black. Stop saying I am Nigerian, I am Zimbabwean, or I am Kenyan. America doesn’t care about any of that, in America you are simply black. You will try to fight, deny, and resist every time someone calls you black. You resist your newly prescribed blackness because a ladder of racial hierarchy exists in America.
Sooner than later, you will realize your blackness puts you at the bottom of this ladder irrespective of the educational or financial status you acquire. Every rejection of your new found blackness will be an attempt to move away from the bottom of this ladder, to resist the label that the color of your skin has subjected you to. It takes some time getting used to, you know, this whole race and being black thing, but sooner that later you will understand America’s tribalism and you will learn to navigate through it.
People will hold stereotypes about you. Some might ask if you’ve lived on trees and or jungles and others won’t even ask, they’ll assume you did. Others will think your entire existence has been defined by hunger and poverty. In case you haven’t noticed you sound different, you do. And people will not fail to remind you of the obvious, your accent. Some may laugh and others will make you repeat words and sentences over and over again because they are unable to “understand.” You will be very confused and will think to yourself, “But I speak better English than you.” Despite all these, do not be ashamed of your identity. Don’t allow people’s ignorance harden your heart towards them. As much as you possibly can, dismantle these stereotypes by telling the other stories they haven’t been exposed to.
White Americans will say you are better than American blacks, but please do not fall for this trap. You will be told you behave better, work harder, and are more educated than American blacks. You will be tempted to agree and will sometimes want to shout, “YES, I’M NOT LIKE THEM, WE AFRICANS ARE DIFFERENT!” Just don’t...don’t even think it.
The praise of your acquired characteristic and culture becomes a justification for white Americans to perpetuate discriminatory treatments towards American blacks. These statements of praise have an underlying message of, “If Africans can do so well then surely racism has nothing to do with anything, therefore, American Blacks are to be blamed for their condition in America”. This problematic line of reasoning sustains cultural racism. I beg of you, refrain from nodding in agreement when you receive such faulty praise.
Navigating through America’s complex social construct is a process. The sooner you become conscious of the nuances involved, the better for Black America as a whole.
With love, Another Black African immigrant
Ways to Improve Your Critical Reading and Assess the Quality of Your Sources
Do a background check of the author to see if he or she has a hidden agenda or any other kind of background information that speaks to the author’s credibility.
Check the place of publication to see what kind of agenda, if any, the publishing house has. Know how esteemed the publishing house is among peers of the subject you’re reading about.
Learn how to find the thesis. In other words, know what the author’s purpose, explicit or implicit, is.
Annotate more than underline. Your memory will be better served, according to research, by annotating than underlining. You can scribble your own code in the margins as long as you can understand your writing when you come back to it later. Annotating is a way of starting a dialogue about the reading and writing process. It is a form of pre-writing. Forms of annotation that I use are “yes,” (great point) “no,” (wrong, illogical, BS) and “?” (confusing). When I find the thesis, I’ll also write that in the margins. Or I’ll write down an essay or book title that the passage reminds me of. Or maybe even an idea for a story or a novel.
When faced with a difficult text, you will have to slow down and use the principles of summarizing and paraphrasing. With summary, you concisely identify the main points in one or two sentences. With paraphrase, you re-word the text in your own words.
When reading an argument, see if the writer addresses possible objections to his or her argument. Ask yourself, of all the objections, did the writer choose the most compelling ones? The more compelling the objections addressed, the more rigorous and credible the author’s writing.
November 1 “The Faces in the Mirror” (31), “The Flip Side of Internet Fame” (90)
November 6 “Unspeakable Conversations” (96)
November 8 Online essays about empathy and boycotting the NFL
November 13 Online essays about reparations debate
November 15 Online essays about mass incarceration and “The New Jim Crow,” including “The Caging of America” (include your New Jim Crow lecture from recent 1C) and include essays on romance of Civil War and lady who worked at a Civil War camp.
Essay #4 Options with 3 Sources for Works Cited Due 11-20
Two. In the context of “The Flip Side of the Internet” and “The Evolution of Shaming,” develop a cause and effect thesis about the frenzy of shame that is evident in the age of social media. How do shame and fame feed each other is a sick symbiotic relationship? Consider envy, desperation for attention, loss of boundaries, and the need to push the envelope in order to "be heard."
Three. Comparing “Faces in the Mirror” and “The Flip Side of the Internet,” develop a thesis that analyzes the confluence of narcissism and celebrity worship. If narcissism is the undeveloped, immature self, as Sherry Turkle suggests, then it makes sense that narcissistic souls hunger to be worshiped on the grand scale of the very celebrities they both adulate and despise out of envy.
Four. In the context of “Unspeakable Conversations,” defend, refute, or complicate Peter Singer’s position that there are moral grounds for infanticide or “mercy killings.”
Five. Develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates Paul Bloom’s assertion that simple-minded notions of empathy are actually dangerous and diminish us as human beings. Here's the link:
Seven. Develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that mass incarceration is “The New Jim Crow.” See Adam Gopnik's "The Caging of America."
Eight. Develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that the United States government is morally compelled to give some African-Americans reparations for the injustices of slavery. See Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay "The Case for Reparations." One of the reasons is to correct history as evidenced by the romance of Confederacy.
Empathy Assignment
Defend, refute, or complicate Bloom's assertion in "Against Empathy" that empathy, contrary to popular opinion, is not a virtue in the face of evidence that empathy is a form of "irrational compassion" that can be destructive and inimical to human affairs.
So-What Fallacy
To make an obvious statement, argument, or observation and expect people to make a big deal about it when there is no big deal because the person is simply stating the obvious. For example, extreme emotions are bad for us. So what?
Red Herring Fallacy
When people present a fake topic or non-issue that serves to distract us from the real and very important issues. Is too much empathy really a problem, as Paul Bloom argues? And what does this fake problem distract us from?
Reductio Ad Absurdum
Reduction Ad Absurdum Fallacy occurs when people try to disprove something by showing how this something inevitably leads to ridiculous, extreme, or absurd conclusion. In other words, this fallacy shows an extreme case and asks that this extreme be looked at as the natural state of affairs when it is not.
Reductio ad absurdum is neither intrinsically valid or fallacious. It depends on how it’s used.
Here are some McMahon examples of reduction ad absurdum:
Surely, diet books don’t work. If a diet book worked, we’d all read that diet book, and diet books wouldn’t have to be written anymore.
Clearly, psychotherapy is dangerous. We’ve had psychotherapy now for over 100 years, and human beings are crazier than ever.
Eating popcorn at night will make you thirsty.
Being thirsty will compel you to drink copious amounts of liquids before you go to bed.
As a result, you’ll be up all night going to the bathroom.
As a result, you will get a horrible night’s sleep.
As a result, you will be tired all day at work.
As a result, your work performance will be substandard and you will be fired.
As a result of losing your job, you won’t be able to pay your bills, and you will be homeless.
Therefore, we can conclude that eating popcorn will make you homeless.
A mother, concerned that her thirty-year-old son, who is still in college and spends much of his time in the mother’s basement wearing a robe while eating Hot Pockets at his computer and has never been on a date, has this exchange with her son.
“Honey, have you ever tried going out on a date?”
“I can’t date, Mother. I’m getting my Master’s. Dating will provide too much drama, which will compromise my academic performance.”
“But, honey, you’ve been going to college for over twelve years now.”
“Precisely. All the more reason I shouldn’t be dating. Now leave me alone. I’m doing research.”
Straw Man Fallacy
Straw Man Fallacy occurs when people distort a position and then argue against the distorted position. They don't argue against the real position because they have no argument against truth. They can only look convincing when they argue against something they know not to be true.
The Straw Man is intellectually dishonest.
The Straw Man is a fake way to get attention for oneself.
The Straw Man is a sneaky way to appear to be relevant one when is not.
Empathy Assignment
Defend, refute, or complicate Bloom's assertion in "Against Empathy" that empathy, contrary to popular opinion, is not a virtue in the face of evidence that empathy is a form of "irrational compassion" that can be destructive and inimical to human affairs.
Paul Bloom's essay "Against Empathy"
When asked what I am working on, I often say I am writing a book about empathy. People tend to smile and nod, and then I add, “I’m against it.” This usually gets an uncomfortable laugh.
This reaction surprised me at first, but I’ve come to realize that taking a position against empathy is like announcing that you hate kittens—a statement so outlandish it can only be a joke. And so I’ve learned to clarify, to explain that I am not against morality, compassion, kindness, love, being a good neighbor, doing the right thing, and making the world a better place. My claim is actually the opposite: if you want to be good and do good, empathy is a poor guide.
The word “empathy” is used in many ways, but here I am adopting its most common meaning, which corresponds to what eighteenth-century philosophers such as Adam Smith called “sympathy.” It refers to the process of experiencing the world as others do, or at least as you think they do. To empathize with someone is to put yourself in her shoes, to feel her pain. Some researchers also use the term to encompass the more coldblooded process of assessing what other people are thinking, their motivations, their plans, what they believe. This is sometimes called “cognitive,” as opposed to “emotional,” empathy. I will follow this convention here, but we should keep in mind that the two are distinct—they emerge from different brain processes; you can have a lot of one and a little of the other—and that most of the discussion of the moral implications of empathy focuses on its emotional side.
Some degree of emotional empathy is bred in the bone. The sight and sound of another’s suffering is unpleasant for babies and, as soon as they are mobile enough, they try to help, patting and soothing others in distress. This is not uniquely human: the primatologist Frans de Waal notes that chimps will often put their arms around the victim of an attack and pat her or groom her.
Empathy can occur automatically, even involuntarily. Smith describes how “persons of delicate fibres” who notice a beggar’s sores and ulcers “are apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in the correspondent part of their own bodies.” John Updike writes, “My grandmother would have choking fits at the kitchen table, and my own throat would feel narrow in sympathy.”
And empathy can be extended through the imagination. In a speech before he became president, Barack Obama stressed how important it is
to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us—the child who’s hungry, the steelworker who’s been laid off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town. . . . When you think like this—when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers—it becomes harder not to act, harder not to help.
Obama is right about this last part; there is considerable support for what the psychologist C. Daniel Batson calls “the empathy-altruism hypothesis”: when you empathize with others, you are more likely to help them. In general, empathy serves to dissolve the boundaries between one person and another; it is a force against selfishness and indifference.
It is easy to see, then, how empathy can be a moral good, and it has many champions. Obama talks frequently about empathy; witness his recent claim, after his first meeting with Pope Francis, that “it’s the lack of empathy that makes it very easy for us to plunge into wars. It’s the lack of empathy that allows us to ignore the homeless on the streets.” In The Empathetic Civilization (2009) Jeremy Rifkin argues that the only way our species will survive war, environmental degradation, and economic collapse is through the enhancement of “global empathy.” This past June, Bill and Melinda Gates concluded their Stanford commencement address by asking students to nurture and expand their empathetic powers, essential for a better world.
Most people see the benefits of empathy as akin to the evils of racism: too obvious to require justification. I think this is a mistake. I have argued elsewhere that certain features of empathy make it a poor guide to social policy. Empathy is biased; we are more prone to feel empathy for attractive people and for those who look like us or share our ethnic or national background. And empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data. As Mother Teresa put it, “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” Laboratory studies find that we really do care more about the one than about the mass, so long as we have personal information about the one.
In light of these features, our public decisions will be fairer and more moral once we put empathy aside. Our policies are improved when we appreciate that a hundred deaths are worse than one, even if we know the name of the one, and when we acknowledge that the life of someone in a faraway country is worth as much as the life a neighbor, even if our emotions pull us in a different direction. Without empathy, we are better able to grasp the importance of vaccinating children and responding to climate change. These acts impose costs on real people in the here and now for the sake of abstract future benefits, so tackling them may require overriding empathetic responses that favor the comfort and well being of individuals today. We can rethink humanitarian aid and the criminal justice system, choosing to draw on a reasoned, even counter-empathetic, analysis of moral obligation and likely consequences.
But even if you accept this argument, there is a lot more to life than public policy. Consider our everyday interactions with our parents and children, with our partners and friends. Consider also certain special relationships, such as that between doctor and patient or therapist and client. Empathy might not scale up to the policy level, but it seems an unalloyed good when it comes to these intimate relationships—the more the better.
I used to believe this, but I am no longer sure.
• • •
One of empathy’s most thoughtful defenders is the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen. In his 2011 book The Science of Evil, he draws upon psychology and neuroscience to argue that the notion of evil should be replaced with “empathy erosion” and that a high degree of empathy is what makes for good people and good societies.
Individuals differ in their disposition to feel empathy, and Baron-Cohen posits an empathy curve that runs from Level 0, where there is no empathy at all, to Level 6, where one is “continually focused on other people’s feelings . . . . in a constant state of hyperarousal, such that other people are never off their radar.” He sketches one such Level 6 individual:
Hannah is a psychotherapist who has a natural gift for tuning into how others are feeling. As soon as you walk into her living room, she is already reading your face, your gait, your posture. The first thing she asks you is ‘How are you?’ but this is no perfunctory platitude. Her intonation—even before you have taken off your coat—suggests an invitation to confide, to disclose, to share. Even if you just answer with a short phrase, your tone of voice reveals to her your inner emotional state, and she quickly follows up your answer with ‘You sound a bit sad. What’s happened to upset you?’
Before you know it, you are opening up to this wonderful listener, who interjects only to offer sounds of comfort and concern, to mirror how you feel, occasionally offering soothing words to boost you and make you feel valued. Hannah is not doing this because it is her job to do so. She is like this with her clients, her friends, and even people she has only just met. Hannah’s friends feel cared for by her, and her friendships are built around sharing confidences and offering mutual support. She has an unstoppable drive to empathize.
It is easy to see what Baron-Cohen finds so impressive here. Hannah sounds like a good therapist, and it seems as if she would also be a good mother to young children.
But consider what it must be like to be her. Hannah’s concern for other people doesn’t derive from particular appreciation or respect for them; her concern is indiscriminate and applies to strangers as well as friends. She also does not endorse a guiding principle based on compassion and kindness. Rather, Hannah is compelled by hyperarousal—her drive is unstoppable. Her experience is the opposite of selfishness but just as extreme. A selfish person might go through life indifferent to the pleasure and pain of others—ninety-nine for him and one for everyone else—while in Hannah’s case, the feelings of others are always in her head—ninety-nine for everyone else and one for her.
It is no accident that Baron-Cohen chose a woman as his example. In a series of empirical and theoretical articles, psychologists Vicki Helgeson and Heidi Fritz have explored why women are twice as likely as men to experience depression. Their results suggest that this divergence is explained in part by a sex difference in the propensity for “unmitigated communion,” defined as “an excessive concern with others and placing others’ needs before one’s own.” Helgeson and Fritz developed a simple nine-item questionnaire, which asks respondents to indicate whether they agree with statements such as, “For me to be happy, I need others to be happy,” “I can’t say no when someone asks me for help,” and “I often worry about others’ problems.” Women typically score higher than men on this scale; Hannah would, I bet, score high indeed.
Strong inclination toward empathy comes with costs. Individuals scoring high in unmitigated communion report asymmetrical relationships, where they support others but don’t get support themselves. They also are more prone to suffer depression and anxiety. Working from a different literature on “pathological altruism,” Barbara Oakley notes in Cold-Blooded Kindness (2011), “It’s surprising how many diseases and syndromes commonly seen in women seem to be related to women’s generally stronger empathy for and focus on others.”
The problems that arise here have to do with emotional empathy—feeling another’s pain. This leads to what psychologists call empathetic distress. We can contrast this with non-empathetic compassion—a more distanced love and kindness and concern for others. Such compassion is a psychological plus. Putting aside the obvious point that some degree of caring for others is morally right, kindness and altruism are associated with all sorts of positive physical and psychological outcomes, including a boost in both short-term mood and long-term happiness. If you want to get happy, helping others is an excellent way to do so.
It is worth expanding on the difference between empathy and compassion, because some of empathy’s biggest fans are confused on this point and think that the only force that can motivate kindness is empathetic arousal. But this is mistaken. Imagine that the child of a close friend has drowned. A highly empathetic response would be to feel what your friend feels, to experience, as much as you can, the terrible sorrow and pain. In contrast, compassion involves concern and love for your friend, and the desire and motivation to help, but it need not involve mirroring your friend’s anguish.
Or consider long-distance charity. It is conceivable, I suppose, that someone who hears about the plight of starving children might actually go through the empathetic exercise of imagining what it is like to starve to death. But this empathetic distress surely isn’t necessary for charitable giving. A compassionate person might value others’ lives in the abstract, and, recognizing the misery caused by starvation, be motivated to act accordingly.
Summing up, compassionate helping is good for you and for others. But empathetic distress is destructive of the individual in the long run.
It might also be of little help to other people because experiencing others’ pain is exhausting and leads to burnout. This issue is explored in the Buddhist literature on morality. Consider the life of a bodhisattva, an enlightened person who vows not to pass into Nirvana, choosing instead to stay in the normal cycle of life and death to help the masses. How is a bodhisattva to live? In Consequences of Compassion (2009) Charles Goodman notes the distinction in Buddhists texts between “sentimental compassion,” which corresponds to empathy, and “great compassion,” which involves love for others without empathetic attachment or distress. Sentimental compassion is to be avoided, as it “exhausts the bodhisattva.” Goodman defends great compassion, which is more distanced and reserved and can be sustained indefinitely.
This distinction has some support in the collaborative work of Tania Singer, a psychologist and neuroscientist, and Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk, meditation expert, and former scientist. In a series of studies using fMRI brain scanning, Ricard was asked to engage in various types of compassion meditation directed toward people who are suffering. To the surprise of the investigators, these meditative states did not activate parts of the brain that are normally activated by non-meditators when they think about others’ pain. Ricard described his meditative experience as “a warm positive state associated with a strong prosocial motivation.”
He was then asked to put himself in an empathetic state and was scanned while doing so. Now the appropriate circuits associated with empathetic distress were activated. “The empathic sharing,” Ricard said, “very quickly became intolerable to me and I felt emotionally exhausted, very similar to being burned out.”
One sees a similar contrast in ongoing experiments led by Singer and her colleagues in which people are either given empathy training, which focuses on the capacity to experience the suffering of others, or compassion training, in which subjects are trained to respond to suffering with feelings of warmth and care. According to Singer’s results, among test subjects who underwent empathy training, “negative affect was increased in response to both people in distress and even to people in everyday life situations. . . . these findings underline the belief that engaging in empathic resonance is a highly aversive experience and, as such, can be a risk factor for burnout.” Compassion training—which doesn’t involve empathetic arousal to the perceived distress of others—was more effective, leading to both increased positive emotions and increased altruism.
This brings us to the targets of empathy. As I write this, an older relative of mine who has cancer is going back and forth to hospitals and rehabilitation centers. I’ve watched him interact with doctors and learned what he thinks of them. He values doctors who take the time to listen to him and develop an understanding of his situation; he benefits from this sort of cognitive empathy. But emotional empathy is more complicated. He gets the most from doctors who don’t feel as he does, who are calm when he is anxious, confident when he is uncertain. And he particularly appreciates certain virtues that have little directly to do with empathy, virtues such as competence, honesty, professionalism, and respect.
Leslie Jamison makes a similar point in her new essay collection The Empathy Exams. Jamison was at one time a medical actor—she would fake symptoms for medical students, who would diagnose her as part of their training. She also rated them on their skills. The most important entry on her checklist was number thirty-one: “Voiced empathy for my situation/problem.” But when she discusses her real experiences with doctors, her assessment of empathy is mixed. She met with one doctor who was cold and unsympathetic to her concerns, which caused her pain. But she is grateful to another who kept a reassuring distance and objectivity: “I didn’t need him to be my mother—even for a day—I only needed him to know what he was doing,” she writes. “His calmness didn’t make me feel abandoned, it made me feel secure. . . . I needed to look at him and see the opposite of my fear, not its echo.”
Or consider friendship and love. Hannah’s “soothing words,” her “sounds of comfort and concern” and mirroring of others’ feelings describe how a certain type of therapist treats a client or how a certain type of parent treats an anxious toddler. But this isn’t how friendship usually works. Friendship is rooted in symmetry and equality, shared projects, teasing and jokes and gossip, all of which are absent from a therapeutic relationship. While I might benefit from a friend’s therapy if I were feeling deeply anxious or depressed, I don’t, on the whole, want my friends to treat me like a suffering patient, softly murmuring reassurances when they detect that I’m out of sorts. Hannah’s “You sound a bit sad. What’s happened to upset you?” exemplifies what Jamison means when she says, “Empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion.”
Putting aside the extremes, do more empathetic people make better friends and partners? To my knowledge, this has never been studied. Certainly we want our friends to understand us and to care about us. It would be unnerving if someone I love never flinched in the face of my suffering or lit up at my joy. But this is not because I want them to mirror my feelings; rather, it is because if they love me, they should worry about my misfortunes and be pleased when I do well. From a purely selfish standpoint, I might not want their empathetic resonance, particularly when I am feeling down. I would prefer that they greet my panic with calm and my sadness with good cheer. As Cicero said about friendship—but he could just as well have been talking about close relationships in general—it “improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.”
• • •
When we think about individuals on the other extreme, what Baron-Cohen would describe as empathy Level 0, we naturally think about psychopaths, sociopaths, or antisocial/psychopathic personality types (the terms typically are used synonymously). Psychopaths are identified in poplar culture as the embodiment of evil. The term describes everyone from predatory CEOs to callous politicians to cannibal-killers such as Jeffrey Dahmer and the fictional Hannibal Lecter.
There is a standard test for psychopathy developed by the psychologist Robert Hare. It is used to make legal decisions about criminal offenders, including whether they should be incarcerated for life, and used as well by experimental psychologists who give the test to undergraduates to explore how their scores relate to, for instance, attitudes toward sexual violence and their style of moral reasoning. If you like this sort of thing, you can take the test online, rating yourself on traits such as “glibness/superficial charm,” “lack of remorse or guilt,” and “promiscuous sexual behavior.”
The most important item for many people is “callous/lack of empathy.” Many popular treatments of psychopathy, such as Jon Ronson’s 2011 bestseller The Psychopath Test, see a lack of empathy as the core deficit in psychopathy. It is here that cognitive and emotional empathy come apart, because many people diagnosed with psychopathy are excellent at reading others’ minds. This is what enables them to be such masterful manipulators, con men, and seducers. But the emotional part is thought to be absent—they cannot feel other people’s pain—and this is why psychopaths are such terrible people.
This might be the popular picture, but the truth is more complicated. For one thing, as philosopher Jesse Prinz points out, psychopaths suffer from dulling of just about all emotional responses, not just empathy. This overall blunting of feeling—or “shallow affect”—is one of the criteria on the checklist. It was observed by Harvey Cleckley in The Mask of Sanity, his 1941 book that provided the first clinical description of psychopathy:
Vexation, spite, quick and labile flashes of quasi-affection, peevish resentment, shallow moods of self-pity, puerile attitudes of vanity, and absurd and showy poses of indignation are all within his emotional scale and are freely sounded as the circumstances of life play upon him. But mature, wholehearted anger, true or consistent indignation, honest, solid grief, sustaining pride, deep joy, and genuine despair are reactions not likely to be found within this scale.
It is unclear, then, whether an empathy deficit is at the core of psychopathy, or whether it is just one facet of a more general problem. One can explore this by looking at how well scores on the callous/lack of empathy item and certain related items are correlated with future bad behavior. In an extensive review of the literature, psychologist Jennifer Skeem and her colleagues note that these items are weak predictors of violence and criminality. The reason why the psychopath test has any predictive power at all is that it assesses pastbad behavior—juvenile delinquency, criminal versatility, parasitic lifestyle, and so on—as well as factors such as lack of inhibition and poor impulse control. To put it another way, you can remove the empathy question from the scale, and it would be about as good at picking out psychopaths.
What about aggressive behavior more generally? Are more aggressive people less empathetic? Even I, a skeptic, would imagine there is some substantive relationship between empathy and aggression, since presumably someone with a great deal of empathy would find it unpleasant to cause pain in others. But a recent review summarizing data from all available studies of the relationship between empathy and aggression reaches a different conclusion. The authors of “The (non)relation between empathy and aggression: Surprising results from a meta-analysis” report that only 1 percent of the variation in aggression is accounted for by empathy. This means that if you want to predict how aggressive a person is, and you have access to an enormous amount of information about that person, including psychiatric interviews, pen-and-paper tests, criminal records, and brain scans, the last thing you would bother to look at would be measures of the person’s empathy.
Finally, one decisive test of the low-empathy-makes-bad-people theory would be to study a group of people who lack empathy but also lack the other traits associated with psychopathy. Such individuals do exist. Baron-Cohen notes that people with Asperger syndrome and autism typically have low cognitive empathy—they struggle to understand the minds of others—and have low emotional empathy as well. (As with psychopaths, there is some controversy about whether they are incapable of empathy or choose not to deploy it.) Despite their empathy deficit, such people show no propensity for exploitation and violence. Indeed, they often have strong moral codes and are more likely to be victims of cruelty than perpetrators.
Am I saying that empathy is irrelevant or a corrosive influence on how we treat those around us? This would be too strong a conclusion. There are many studies that look at individual differences in empathy levels and correlate these levels with real-world behavior, such as willingness to help someone in need. Many of these studies are poorly done. They often measure empathy through self-report, so you don’t know whether you are assessing actual empathy as opposed to the degree to which people see themselves, or want to be seen, as empathetic. Furthermore, people who help others more may assume that they are empathetic, since people often make judgments about themselves by drawing conclusions from their own behavior.
Nonetheless, there is some evidence that being more empathetic influences how likely one is to help in certain circumstances. The relationship is often weak, and not all studies find it. Still, given laboratory findings showing that inducing empathy increases the likelihood of altruistic behaviors, it would be wrong to dismiss empathy’s role in our moral lives.
But we know that a high level of empathy does not make one a good person and that a low level does not make one a bad person. Being a good person likely is more related to distanced feelings of compassion and kindness, along with intelligence, self-control, and a sense of justice. Being a bad person has more to do with a lack of regard for others and an inability to control one’s appetites.
So how much empathy do we really want in ourselves, our children, our friends, and our society? If you want to answer that question, it helps to think about a quite different emotional response—anger.
Empathy and anger share a lot. Both emerge in early childhood and exist in every human culture. Both are present in other primates such as chimpanzees. Both are social. Unlike emotions such as fear and disgust, which are often elicited by experiences and inanimate beings, empathy and anger are mainly geared toward other people. And they are both moral. The identification that comes with empathy can motivate kind behavior toward others; anger is often a response to perceived unfairness, cruelty, and other immoral acts.
Buddhist texts are even more skeptical about anger than they are about empathy. They see it as destructive of the individual and the world at large. This is a valid concern. But if I could determine the emotional life of my child, I wouldn’t leave out the capacity for anger. The emotional force of anger can protect us and those we are close to from exploitation and predation. Someone who could never get angry would be the perfect victim. Anger can also be a prod to moral behavior more generally; many great moral heroes—Martin Luther King, Jr., for instance—have been individuals who let themselves get angry at situations that others were indifferent to.
But I would worry about the irrational, arbitrary, and self-destructive aspects of anger, so I wouldn’t wish that my child possess too much of it. And I would make sure to add plenty of intelligence, concern for others, and self-control. I would want to ensure that anger is modified, shaped, and directed by rational deliberation. It would occasionally spur action, but it would be subservient to the capacities for rationality and compassion. If we were all constituted in this way, if we could all put anger in its place, ours would be a kinder and better world.
Two. He accuses PB of wanting us to feel others' pain less: Straw Man Fallacy.
Three. He accuses PB of saying one thing and doing another: Semantic and Splitting Hairs Fallacy.
Four. He accuses PB of wanting to be "more significant than he is." False Motivation Fallacy.
Five. Complexity Fallacy. If the argument isn't simple enough, accuse the writer of being unclear and dishonest.
Six. "Fudging and circumlocution": Wordy Refutation Fallacy: Hide behind big words to sound convincing.
Seven. "He provokes audience and makes a bold statement" and then he is "hedging and qualifying": Stipulation Fallacy. Essayists use stipulations all the time. They are part of sophisticated analysis, not trickery.
Eight. "fundamental human belief": Tradition and Emotional Fallacy.
Nine. We need more, not less, empathy: More Is Better Fallacy.
Ten. "No one said a doctor needs to feel depressed": Red Herring Fallacy.
Eleven. "He sets himself up as a tough-minded truth teller." False Representation Fallacy.
Suggested Essay Outline
Paragraph 1 is your introduction, a summary of Bloom's opponents and defenders.
Paragraph 2 is your agreement or disagreement with Bloom, your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Almond’s claim that watching NFL is immoral is supported by the following:
One. We glorify violence.
Two. We live vicariously through the violence of others, using the players as proxies or substitutes for our own vicious impulses but put all the risk on them for head trauma, paralysis, broken limbs, life-long crippling, etc.
Three. We sponsor brutality with our cash dollars making us complicit in the life-long injuries and premature death suffered by NFL players. Studies show that on average NFL players live from mid to late fifties, about twenty years less than average lifespan.
Four. We are complicit in the abuse and ill regard of women, misogyny when we consider that football encourages male aggression, overpowering others through sheer will and strength, entitlement, and a lack of accountability (we close our eyes to misbehavior because we want our “stars” to show up and help us conquer our enemies on game day).
This link between NFL aggression and misogyny is evident in the high rates of domestic assault.
The culture that glorifies football players as their warriors free to do as they please, including violence against women, is sometimes called the jockitocracy.
Five. Some defend the NFL by citing new safety rules, but these new rules are, to use an effective analogy, lipstick on a pig. The fundamental violent nature of football remains unchanged.
Six. Some defend the NFL by saying players choose to play at their own risk, but this assertion is countered by the fact that many players are poor and lack viable options.
Seven. The NFL doesn’t want the truth about brain trauma to be exposed because the trauma is prevalent and severe, resulting in dementia, brain damage, violence, suicide, and other pathologies.
Eight. More and more parents won’t let their sons play football at any level because of the reports of permanent head trauma.
Nine. NFL legend Mike Ditka says he wouldn’t let his children play football if he knew then what he knows now.
Ten. NFL uses tax loopholes and other forms of trickery to parasite off US taxpayers to fund its stadiums in spite of its astronomical profits.
Thesis Review
A good thesis is a complete sentence that defines your argument.
A good thesis addresses your opponents’ views in a concession clause.
A good thesis often has mapping components or mapping statements that outline your body paragraphs.
A good thesis avoids the obvious and instead struggles to grapple with difficult and complex ideas.
A good thesis embraces complexity and sophistication but is expressed with clarity.
Thesis That Supports Steve Almond
While I am a lifelong football fan who has enjoyed the suspense of close games over the years, I am convinced after reading Steve Almond’s anti-football manifesto that I can no longer patronize the game I once loved because it is morally and intellectually bankrupt evidenced by its bloodthirsty violence, misogyny-fueled domestic abuse, parasitic taxpayer trickery, exploitation of the underclass, high risk of permanent brain trauma, and narcissism-inducing jockitocracy.
Thesis That Opposes the Above
While I concede that the NFL has its fair share of pathologies as cited in the above thesis, the author makes a weak case for boycotting the NFL because he relies on focusing exclusively on the lowest common denominator of NFL behavior; he ignores the countless examples of NFL good works throughout the land, including charities and other social service programs; he ignores the fact that risk of danger exists in many vocations that are not held in such condemnation; and he ignores that the NFL provides opportunities for the economically disadvantaged.
Thesis That Opposes the Above Refutation
While I concede that the NFL is not Evil Incarnate and is capable of doing good works and providing good jobs, its abominations far outweigh its virtues evidenced by its refusal to compensate or even acknowledge the widespread head trauma, its dependence on the underclass to feed into its pool of exploited labor, and its recalcitrant record on domestic abuse.
Two. In the context of “The Flip Side of the Internet” and “The Evolution of Shaming,” develop a cause and effect thesis about the frenzy of shame that is evident in the age of social media. How do shame and fame feed each other is a sick symbiotic relationship? Consider envy, desperation for attention, loss of boundaries, and the need to push the envelope in order to "be heard."
Three. Comparing “Faces in the Mirror” and “The Flip Side of the Internet,” develop a thesis that analyzes the confluence of narcissism and celebrity worship. If narcissism is the undeveloped, immature self, as Sherry Turkle suggests, then it makes sense that narcissistic souls hunger to be worshiped on the grand scale of the very celebrities they both adulate and despise out of envy.
Four. In the context of “Unspeakable Conversations,” defend, refute, or complicate Peter Singer’s position that there are moral grounds for infanticide or “mercy killings.”
Five. Develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates Paul Bloom’s assertion that simple-minded notions of empathy are actually dangerous and diminish us as human beings. Here's the link:
Seven. Develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that mass incarceration is “The New Jim Crow.” See Adam Gopnik's "The Caging of America."
Eight. Develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that the United States government is morally compelled to give some African-Americans reparations for the injustices of slavery. See Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay "The Case for Reparations."
Do convey the sources' ideas fully and accurately.
Do use your own words and phrasing.
Do convey the emphasis of the original.
Do put any words borrowed from the source in quotation marks.
Do include documentation.
Do not use the exact words or phrasing of your source.
Do not include your analysis or opinions.
Do not argue with or contradict your source.
Do not wander from the topic of the source.
(modified from Practical Argument by Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen r. Mandell)
From Purdue Owl:
A paraphrase is...
your own rendition of essential information and ideas expressed by someone else, presented in a new form.
one legitimate way (when accompanied by accurate documentation) to borrow from a source.
a more detailed restatement than a summary, which focuses concisely on a single main idea.
Paraphrasing is a valuable skill because...
it is better than quoting information from an undistinguished passage.
it helps you control the temptation to quote too much.
the mental process required for successful paraphrasing helps you to grasp the full meaning of the original.
6 Steps to Effective Paraphrasing
Reread the original passage until you understand its full meaning.
Set the original aside, and write your paraphrase on a note card.
Jot down a few words below your paraphrase to remind you later how you envision using this material. At the top of the note card, write a key word or phrase to indicate the subject of your paraphrase.
Check your rendition with the original to make sure that your version accurately expresses all the essential information in a new form.
Use quotation marks to identify any unique term or phraseology you have borrowed exactly from the source.
Record the source (including the page) on your note card so that you can credit it easily if you decide to incorporate the material into your paper.
Some examples to compare
The original passage:
Students frequently overuse direct quotation in taking notes, and as a result they overuse quotations in the final [research] paper. Probably only about 10% of your final manuscript should appear as directly quoted matter. Therefore, you should strive to limit the amount of exact transcribing of source materials while taking notes. Lester, James D. Writing Research Papers. 2nd ed. (1976): 46-47.
A legitimate paraphrase:
In research papers students often quote excessively, failing to keep quoted material down to a desirable level. Since the problem usually originates during note taking, it is essential to minimize the material recorded verbatim (Lester 46-47).
An acceptable summary:
Students should take just a few notes in direct quotation from sources to help minimize the amount of quoted material in a research paper (Lester 46-47).
A plagiarized version:
Students often use too many direct quotations when they take notes, resulting in too many of them in the final research paper. In fact, probably only about 10% of the final copy should consist of directly quoted material. So it is important to limit the amount of source material copied while taking notes.
Essay Option:
In the context of “Unspeakable Conversations,” defend, refute, or complicate Peter Singer’s position that there are moral grounds for infanticide or “mercy killings.”
From The Conversation website, an overview of Peter Singer's debate with Anthony Fischer.
Singer spoke first and his argument was relatively straightforward. The audience was asked:
Why do we consider killing an innocent person to be wrong?
The answer is twofold. First, killing someone is a violation of their autonomy. But in the case of voluntary euthanasia, a person’s autonomy is not taken away but supported.
Second, killing an innocent person deprives them of the good things in life they would have otherwise experienced. At this juncture, Singer makes an important qualification. He is not an “absolutist” about autonomy. If a healthy young person is lovesick or depressed, they may temporarily feel that life is not worth living. However, there is much reason to suspect these feelings will pass.
Singer endorses the Canadian Supreme Court’s recent ruling that allows euthanasia only for people with:
… grievous and irremediable medical conditions.
Fisher drew on the movie The Water Diviner, where a young Australian soldier agrees to kill his mortally wounded brother rather than let him slowly and painfully bleed to death. The question put to the audience was:
Is it better to kill someone than let them suffer?
Fisher asserted that comforting people through their suffering requires more from us, but it also places more value on humanity and endorses the intrinsic value of life.
Fisher’s main argument was concerned with bracket creep. If we accept some people who suffer should be able to end their lives, what about others who suffer? Rather than respect for all life, euthanasia would lead to two classes of existence. The terminally sick could soon be joined by the mentally ill, clinically depressed, severely disabled, the elderly and unwanted babies in a growing group considered better off dead.
Singer strongly rejected this claim. He argued that there was no evidence of a slippery slope towards euthanasia becoming a widespread practice to remove undesirable people for financial or other motives. He pointed to the US state of Oregon, where only 105 people took advantage of the Death with Dignity Act in 2014.
Fisher insisted that the example of the Netherlands where, he said, euthanasia has rapidly increased proves that bracket creep is real. Once you accept some people are better off dead a moral line is crossed.
The questions from the audience hinted at its makeup. Of the 12 questions asked, ten were openly hostile to Singer or supportive of Fisher. Singer was asked if he supported the killing of babies with severe disabilities or elderly people with dementia. He became increasingly impatient and regularly reminded the audience he was only advocating voluntary euthanasia – which automatically excludes babies and those unable to consent.
One questioner was even ejected by the moderator for trying to start an infanticide debate stemming from Singer’s 1979 book, Practical Ethics.
So who won the debate? No-one really. Had there been a show of hands, Fisher would have been the likely victor but that would only have reflected the Catholic Society’s strong presence.
For much of the debate, the two did not address the other’s arguments. Singer kept a small target, advocating voluntary euthanasia only for competent adults with a terminal illness.
Fisher, and the questioners, wanted a broader discussion on the sanctity of life. As one questioner demanded to much applause:
Mr Singer, who are you to decide that some lives are worth more than others?
Singer responded, also to applause, that he could not see the connection between the question and what he had advocated. It summed up the night; arguments flew in both directions but rarely met.
With the debate finished, supporters of each man formed an excited line to buy a signed book and take the obligatory selfie. As with the debates about the existence of God made so popular by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the goal was never to change anyone’s mind but to speak to an existing base. Both camps left the majestic building satisfied that they had won.
“Unspeakable Conversations” by Harriet McBryde Johnson
One. How does Johnson effectively get our attention in her essay’s introduction?
“He insists he doesn’t want to kill me.”
This is very generous coming from the world's most prestigious philosopher, a man who believes in euthanasia, the "mercy killing" of people with certain handicaps similar to HBs.
Two. What kind of hubris (excessive pride) and arrogance inform Singer’s philosophy to kill deformed babies?
He seems to know that the “suffering” disabled babies go through, and the parents’ suffering, justifies killing them.
Imagine the pride it requires to "know" the following:
How happy one can or cannot be.
How much suffering one has to suffer and if suffering for a parent can reach such a level that this suffering justifies the killing of a child.
Imagine how subjective notions of happiness and suffering are.
Imagine how ill equipped a philosopher is to make any kind of objective measure of happiness or suffering.
Is there were a definitive suffering scale, and even if there were, would such a scale justify the killing of certain kinds of babies?
Additionally, Singer argues that “individuals with cognitive impairments so severe that he doesn’t consider them persons” should not live.
How does such a philosopher become a moral paradigm, the author of definitive books on charity, kindness to animals, and ethics.
Again, how do we definitively measure such perceived impairments, and even if such a measurement were available, could we justify this practice of killing people?
Singer's "Worse Off" Theory:
For Singer, a disabled baby is “worse off” than a healthy baby so the disabled baby should be killed. But what does it mean to say someone is “worse off”? What about a healthy baby who as a toddler proves that he is a sociopath who tortures cats and dogs? He gets to live?
At another point of debate, Singer says healthy children can have fun at the beach but disabled children cannot and therefore they should be put to death.
Does this make sense? “You, child, are unable to have fun. Now die.”
I’m less shocked by the stupidity and evil of the argument (because there will always be madmen spewing made theories) than by the fact that Singer is a venerated philosopher who is a hired professor at Princeton.
Three. How does HMJ's appearance present challenges, some of which are for her insufferable?
People assume she needs pity.
They assume her life is horrible.
They assume she is in immense pain.
They assume she needs to be treated like a child or patronized like a slow person.
They don’t see her. They see stereotypes based on her appearance.
There is a depth to HMJ's character that defies Singer's definition of her as being somehow less than human.
His abstract philosophy fails in the face of specific instances.
Philosophy is too often the application of a general principle to a specific.
In life, a one-size-fits-all philosophical theory falls flat on its face.
Lexicon of Terms Pertinent to Peter Singer’s Moral Philosophy.
One. Utilitarianism, the philosophy that we should sacrifice the individual for the greater good of the collective whole.
Two. “quality of life” argument: human life is only valuable if a certain “quality” can be achieved; otherwise life is better off destroyed.
Three. “normal children”: They can achieve a “quality of life” and should take priority over “abnormal children” who should be euthanized.
Four. “infants are replaceable”: we should replace abnormal infants with normal ones for the “greater good.” The moral imperative is that we are reducing suffering and adding more productive citizens to society as opposed to citizens who put a burden on society.
Five. Eugenicist, one who defends the idea that we should select what humans are desirable based on genetics and which ones should be replaced, that is euthanized, for the betterment of society. The eugenicist also develops the criteria for making these choices.
Six. Peter Singer's nebulous definition of “personhood.” The ability to imagine the future. What does that mean?
Seven. Intrinsic value of human life, called the sanctity of life vs. conditional value of human life based on “quality of life.”
Eight. Apologist for eugenics. An apologist takes controversial or unpopular ideas and makes them appealing by defending their validity and showing why those views are correct.
Nine. Peter Singer is an advocate for genetic re-engineering.
Ten. Market-driven and peer-pressure-driven forces for genetic re-engineering. The result will be a loss of diversity. Most women will like Salma Hayek and Beyonce while most men will look like Will Smith and Brad Pitt. See the New Eugenics.
Peter Singer’s Major Arguments
One. Peter Singer’s quality of life argument for infanticide:
His stated reason, rather, is that such children have diminished prospects of eventually enjoying an adequate "quality of life," in his words, and to allow them to live would take away resources from what Singer calls "normal" children. He therefore advocates killing "disabled" infants, if the parents so choose, and replacing them with "normal" ones. The terminology of "replacement" is Singer's own; his philosophy "treats infants as replaceable", in his words (Practical Ethics p. 186).
Why, then, does Singer argue that infants born with this condition can justly be killed? Because they are "abnormal" and do not have "good prospects" (Rethinking p. 214).
This notion of "prospects" runs like a mantra through Singer's discussion of Down syndrome children: "the future prospects of life may be so bleak" (211), "the prospects are clouded" (213), and so forth. But what sort of prospects does he have in mind? On p. 213 of Rethinking he lists several activities which a person with Down syndrome will supposedly never be capable of: "to play the guitar, to develop an appreciation of science fiction, to learn a foreign language, to chat with us about the latest Woody Allen movie, or to be a respectable athlete, basketball player or tennis player."
This list reads like a parody of bourgeois myths of achievement, success, and respectability. To Singer, however, these are legitimate reasons for killing a newborn. After all, if you can't do your own financial planning, why should you be allowed to live?
Two. Peter Singer’s utilitarian argument for infanticide:
What counts as a "severe disability" for Singer? He intentionally leaves the term vague to allow for a broad range of parental discretion, but he has discussed a number of specific examples, both hypothetical as well as actual cases.
The conditions he has explicitly named as sufficient justification for active infanticide include Down syndrome, spina bifida, and hemophilia. Here is Singer's reasoning on the latter condition, taken from his popular textbook Practical Ethics (P. 186): "Suppose a woman planning to have two children has one normal child, then gives birth to a haemophiliac child. The burden of caring for that child may make it impossible for her to cope with a third child; but if the disabled child were to die, she would have another. . . . When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him."
Three. Peter Singer’s definition of a “person” or someone who is worthy of the label “personhood”:
a conscious being, a creature who has the capacity to imagine the future. This definition can apply to humans, animals, and creatures. A “person” should not be killed, but a human baby suffering severe retardation or some other handicap is not a “person.”
Four. Utilitarian Slippery Slope:
If we agree that we should aim for the greatest good for the greatest amount of people and that handicapped people burden the “greatest good,” at what point do we stop at defining who constitutes a “burden”? Smokers, the obese, criminals, the handicapped, the autistic? Where do we stop?
Five. Peter Singer’s “Worse Off” Argument:
Disability makes a person worse off and therefore that person should be killed. And Peter Singer is comfortable judging who’s “worse off” and who’s not, a very subjective condition. See page 97 and page 106 top.
Six. Peter Singer’s Eugenicist Position:
The eugenicist position endorses selection according to desirable and undesirable genetic traits, and favors the elimination of the latter. Singer's argument sorts people into two categories, "normal" and "abnormal", and declares the ostensibly abnormal ones fair game at birth. He doesn't even bother to try to provide "objective" grounds on which to classify some human physical or mental conditions as "defective" (a term he used in earlier editions of Practical Ethics) and contrast them with "healthy" ones. Instead he simply welcomes whatever arbitrary social norms happen to prevail, thus turning his argument into a vehicle for prejudice. But of course there is no perfect, flawless version of the human form against which putatively "inferior" specimens could be measured.
Seven. Harriet McBryde Johnson’s quality of life argument:
Studies show that the public underestimates the quality of life for most handicapped people based on stereotypes.
Essay Option:
In the context of “Unspeakable Conversations,” defend, refute, or complicate Peter Singer’s position that there are moral grounds for infanticide or “mercy killings.”
Paragraph 1: In a page, explain Peter Singer’s philosophy and the methods he uses to defend it. 250 words.
Paragraph 2: Develop a thesis paragraph that defends or refutes Singer. 150 words.
Paragraphs 3-7 are your supporting paragraphs. 750 words; 1,150 subtotal.
Paragraphs 8 and 9: Counterargument-rebuttal paragraphs: 300 words. 1,450 words.
Paragraph 10: Conclusion: 100 words. 1,550 total.
You must use a Works Cited page that has no fewer than 3 sources.
Refutation of Peter Singer: Thesis One:
While Singer’s argument for infanticide is consistent with his utilitarian worldview, his position collapses under the close eye of scrutiny in which we detect huge holes or flaws in his reasoning. These flaws include __________________________, ___________________________, ____________________________, and __________________________.
Refutation of Peter Singer: Thesis Two:
If we accept Peter Singer's utilitarian argument as a just rationale for infanticide, then we are paving the way for genetic re-engineering as a tool to create a Super Baby that all parents will be forced to breed. This forced breeding of the Super Baby will result from ______________________, __________________________, ______________________, and ____________________________________.
Defense of Peter Singer: Thesis Three:
McMahon has treated Peter Singer’s infanticide argument with gross unfairness. While McMahon is correct that Singer needs to tidy up some of his vague definitions, Singer’s general argument can be ethically defended as actually helping the human race when we consider _________________________, _______________________, ___________________________, and _______________________________.
Some Salient Titles
Must I Conform to Peter Singer's Definition of Happiness So I Can Live?
Be Happy Singer's Way . . . Or Die
Let Go of the Stale Past and Become New and Improved, Peter Singer Style
We Limit Ourselves By Dismissing Peter Singer So Quickly
McMahon Commentary on “Unspeakable Conversations”
Peter Singer’s theories of “selective infanticide” insulate him from the reality of flesh and blood:
His theories are abstractions and as he percolates his ideas behind the university walls, he loses touch with reality. Specifically, Singer does not see the human face of “disability” and this human face is Harriet McBryde Johnson. According to Singer’s theory of eugenics, HMJ’s parents had the right to kill her since someone with her disabilities could not lead a “quality of life” and as such she doesn’t deserve the title of “person.” Nor does she possess, to use Singer’s term, “personhood.”
To the contrary, HMJ has a lot of richness in her life that defies the stereotypes too many people have about people with disabilities. Part of HMJ’s gifted life is her intellect, which allows her to see the “bone-chilling” theories of Peter Singer for what they are: monstrous. For example, Singer believes in “selective infanticide” under the guise of “preference utilitarianism” (96), which states that disabled babies are disposable and that is preferable to replace them with healthy babies who have a better change for a flourishing existence.
One of the horrifying qualities of Peter Singer is that during his debate with HMJ he remains affable, lucid, and logical. We can infer that Singer has succumbed to his abstractions so fully that he has lost his humanity and his sanity. He is clearly an congenial monster, polite on the outside, roiling with his murder doctrine on the inside.
One of the striking inadequacies of Singer’s theory, we read on page 97, is his belief that someone like HMJ is “worse off” (106) as he projects condescending pity for the disabled based on his ignorance and stereotypical beliefs (104).
Introduction to Logical Fallacies
"If we're arguing and, intimidated and flummoxed, you straw-man me followed by a cheap ad hominem, I'll exit the room and you'll never see me again."
Begging the Question
Begging the question assumes that a statement is self-evident when it actually requires proof.
Major Premise: Fulfilling all my major desires is the only way I can be happy.
Minor Premise: I can’t afford when of my greatest desires in life, a Lexus GS350.
Conclusion: Therefore, I can never be happy.
Circular Reasoning
Circular reasoning occurs when we support a statement by restating it in different terms.
Stealing is wrong because it is illegal.
Admitting women into the men’s club is wrong because it’s an invalid policy.
Your essay is woeful because of its egregious construction.
Your boyfriend is hideous because of his heinous characteristics.
I have to sell my car because I’m ready to sell it.
I can’t spend time with my kids because it’s too time-consuming.
I need to spend more money on my presents than my family’s presents because I need bigger and better presents.
I’m a great father because I’m the best father my children have ever had.
Weak Analogy or Faulty Comparison
Analogies are never perfect but they can be powerful. The question is do they have a degree of validity to make them worth the effort.
A toxic relationship is like cancer that gets worse and worse (fine).
Sugar is high-octane fuel to use before your workout (weak because there is nothing high-octane about a substance that causes you to crash and converts into fat and creates other problems)
Free education is a great flame and the masses are moths flying into the flames of destruction. (horribly false analogy)
Ad Hominem Fallacy (Personal Attack)
“Who are you to be a marriage counselor? You’ve been divorced six times?”
A lot of people give great advice and present sound arguments even if they don’t apply their principles to their lives, so we should focus on the argument, not a personal attack.
“So you believe in universal health care, do you? I suppose you’re a communist and you hate America as well.”
Making someone you disagree with an American-hating communist is invalid and doesn’t address the actual argument.
“What do you mean you don’t believe in marriage? What are you, a crazed nihilist, an unrepentant anarchist, an immoral misanthrope, a craven miscreant?”
Straw Man Fallacy
You twist and misconstrue your opponent’s argument to make it look weaker than it is when you refute it. Instead of attacking the real issue, you aim for a weaker issue based on your deliberate misinterpretation of your opponent’s argument.
“Those who are against universal health care are heartless. They obviously don’t care if innocent children die.”
Hasty Generalization (Jumping to a Conclusion)
“I’ve had three English instructors who are middle-aged bald men. Therefore, all English instructors are middle-aged bald men.”
“I’ve met three Americans with false British accents and they were all annoying. Therefore, all Americans, such as Madonna, who contrive British accents are annoying.” Perhaps some Americans do so ironically and as a result are more funny than annoying.
Either/Or Fallacy
There are only two choices to an issue is an over simplification and an either/or fallacy.
“Either you be my girlfriend or you don’t like real men.”
“Either you be my boyfriend or you’re not a real American.”
“Either you play football for me or you’re not a real man.”
“Either you’re for us or against us.” (The enemy of our enemy is our friend is everyday foreign policy.)
“Either you agree with me about increasing the minimum wage, or you’re okay with letting children starve to death.”
“Either you get a 4.0 and get admitted into USC, or you’re only half a man.”
Equivocation
Equivocation occurs when you deliberately twist the meaning of something in order to justify your position.
“You told me the used car you just sold me was in ‘good working condition.’”
“I said ‘good,’ not perfect.”
The seller is equivocating.
“I told you to be in bed by ten.”
“I thought you meant to be home by ten.”
“You told me you were going to pay me the money you owe me on Friday.”
“I didn’t know you meant the whole sum.”
“You told me you were going to take me out on my birthday.”
“Technically speaking, the picnic I made for us in the backyard was a form of ‘going out.’”
Red Herring Fallacy
This fallacy is to throw a distraction in your opponent’s face because you know a distraction may help you win the argument.
“Barack Obama wants us to support him but his father was a Muslim. How can we trust the President on the war against terrorism when he has terrorist ties?”
“You said you were going to pay me my thousand dollars today. Where is it?”
“Dear friend, I’ve been diagnosed with a very serious medical condition. Can we talk about our money issue some other time?”
Slippery Slope Fallacy
We go down a rabbit hole of exaggerated consequences to make our point sound convincing.
“If we allow gay marriage, we’ll have to allow people to marry gorillas.”
“If we allow gay marriage, my marriage to my wife will be disrespected and dishonored.”
Appeal to Authority
Using a celebrity to promote an energy drink doesn’t make this drink effective in increasing performance.
Listening to an actor play a doctor on TV doesn’t make the pharmaceutical he’s promoting safe or effective.
Tradition Fallacy
“We’ve never allowed women into our country club. Why should we start now?”
“Women have always served men. That’s the way it’s been and that’s the way it always should be.”
Misuse of Statistics
Using stats to show causality when it’s a condition of correlation or omitting other facts.
“Ninety-nine percent of people who take this remedy see their cold go away in ten days.” (Colds go away on their own).
“Violent crime from home intruders goes down twenty percent in a home equipped with guns.” (more people in those homes die of accidental shootings or suicides)
Post Hoc, Confusing Causality with Correlation
Taking cold medicine makes your cold go away. Really?
The rooster crows and makes the sun go up. Really?
You drink on a Thursday night and on Friday morning you get an A on your calculus exam. Really?
You stop drinking milk and you feel stronger. Really? (or is it a placebo effect?)
Non Sequitur (It Does Not Follow)
The conclusion in an argument is not relevant to the premises.
Megan drives a BMW, so she must be rich.
McMahon understands the difference between a phrase and a dependent clause; therefore, he must be a genius.
Whenever I eat chocolate cake, I feel good. Therefore, chocolate cake must be good for me.
Bandwagon Fallacy
Because everyone believes something, it must be right.
“You can steal a little at work. Everyone else does.”
“In Paris, ninety-nine percent of all husbands have a secret mistress. Therefore adultery is not immoral.”
A full-bodied red wine compliments the Pasta Pomodoro.
Compliment is a to say something nice about someone. "You look nice in that pumpkin polo shirt. Very nice pumpkin accents."
Complement is to complete or match well with something. "This full-bodied red wine complements the spaghetti."
The BMW salesman excepted my counteroffer of 55K for the sports sedan.
The word should be accepted.
Kryptonite effects Superman in such a way that he loses his powers.
Effect is a noun. Affect is a verb, so it should be the following:
Kryptonite affects Superman in a such a way that he loses his powers.
Confusing their and there
There superpowers were compromised by the Gamma rays.
We need to use the possessive plural pronoun their.
Two. Missing comma after an introductory phrase or clause
Terrified of slimy foods, Robert hid behind the restaurant’s dumpster.
In spite of my aversion to rollercoasters, I attended the carnival with my family.
Three. Incomplete documentation
Noted dietician and nutritionist Mike Manderlin observes that, “Dieting is a mental illness.”
It should read:
Noted dietician and nutritionist Mike Manderlin observes that, “Dieting is a mental illness” (277).
Four. Vague Pronoun Reference
Focusing on the pecs during your Monday-Wednesday-Friday workouts is a way of giving you more time to work on your quads and glutes and specializing on the way they’re used in different exercises.
Before Jennifer screamed at Brittany, she came to the conclusion that she was justified in stealing her boyfriend.
Five. Spelling (including homonyms, words that have same spelling but different meanings)
No one came forward to bare witness to the crime.
No one came forward to bear witness to the crime.
Every where we went, we saw fast food restaurants.
Everywhere we went, we saw fast food restaurants.
Love is a disease. It’s sickness derives from its power to intoxicate and create capricious, short-term infatuation.
Its sickness derives from its power to intoxicate and create capricious, short-term infatuation.
Six. Mechanical error with a quotation
In his best-selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that, “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure”.
In his best selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that, “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure.”
In his best selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that, “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure” (18).
“It forever stuns me that people make life decisions based on something as fickle and capricious as love”, Michael Manderlin writes (22).
“It forever stuns me that people make life decisions based on something as fickle and capricious as love,” Michael Manderlin writes (22).
Seven. Unnecessary comma
I need to workout when at home, and while taking vacations.
You do however use a comma if the comma is between two independent clauses:
I need to workout at home, and when I go on vacations, I bring my yoga mat to hotels.
I need to workout every day, because I’m addicted to the exercise-induced dopamine.
You do however use a comma after a dependent clause beginning with because:
Because I’m addicted to exercise-induced dopamine, I need to workout everyday.
Peaches, that are green, taste hideous.
The above is an example of an independent clause with a essential information or restrictive information. Not all peaches taste hideous, only green ones. The meaning of the entire sentence needs the dependent clause so there are no commas.
However, if the clause is additional information, the clause is called nonessential or nonrestrictive, and we do use commas:
Peaches, which are on sale at Whole Foods, are my favorite fruit.
Eight. Unnecessary or missing capitalization
Some Traditional Chinese Medicines containing Ephedraremain legal.
We only use capital letters for proper nouns, proper adjectives, first words of sentences, important words in titles, along with certain words indicating directions and family relationships.
Nine. Missing word
The site foreman discriminated women and promoted men with less experience.
The site foreman discriminated against women and promoted men with less experience.
Chris’ behavior becomes bizarre that his family asks for help.
Chris’ behavior becomes so bizarre that his family asks for help.
Ten. Faulty sentence structure
The information which high school athletes are presented with mainly includes information on what credits needed to graduate and thinking about the college which athletes are trying to play for, and apply.
A sentence that starts out with one kind of structure and then changes to another kind can confuse readers. Make sure that each sentence contains a subject and a verb, that subjects and predicates make sense together, and that comparisons have clear meanings. When you join elements (such as subjects or verb phrases) with a coordinating conjunction, make sure that the elements have parallel structures.
The reason I prefer yoga at home to the gym is because I prefer privacy.
I prefer yoga at home to the gym because of privacy.
11. Missing Comma with a Nonrestrictive Element
Marina who was the president of the club was the first to speak.
The clause who was the president of the club does not affect the basic meaning of the sentence: Marina was the first to speak.
A nonrestrictive element gives information not essential to the basic meaning of the sentence. Use commas to set off a nonrestrictive element.
12. Unnecessary Shift in Verb Tense
Priya was watching the great blue heron. Then she slips and falls into the swamp.
Verbs that shift from one tense to another with no clear reason can confuse readers.
13. Missing Comma in a Compound Sentence
Meredith waited for Samir and her sister grew impatient.
Without the comma, a reader may think at first that Meredith waited for both Samir and her sister.
A compound sentence consists of two or more parts that could each stand alone as a sentence. When the parts are joined by a coordinating conjunction, use a comma before the conjunction to indicate a pause between the two thoughts.
14. Unnecessary or Missing Apostrophe (including its/it's)
Overambitious parents can be very harmful to a childs well-being.
The car is lying on it's side in the ditch. Its a white 2004 Passat.
To make a noun possessive, add either an apostrophe and an s (Ed's book) or an apostrophe alone (the boys' gym). Do not use an apostrophe in the possessive pronouns ours, yours, and hers. Useits to mean belong to it; use it's only when you mean it is or it has.
15. Fused (run-on) sentence
Klee's paintings seem simple, they are very sophisticated.
She doubted the value of medication she decided to try it once.
A fused sentence (also called a run-on) joins clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence with no punctuation or words to link them. Fused sentences must be either divided into separate sentences or joined by adding words or punctuation.
16. Comma Splice
I was strongly attracted to her, she was beautiful and funny.
We hated the meat loaf, the cafeteria served it every Friday.
A comma splice occurs when only a comma separates clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence. To correct a comma splice, you can insert a semicolon or period, connect the clauses with a word such as and or because, or restructure the sentence.
17. Lack of pronoun/antecedent agreement
Every student must provide their own uniform.
Pronouns must agree with their antecedents in gender (male or female) and in number (singular or plural). Many indefinite pronouns, such as everyone and each, are always singular. When a singular antecedent can refer to a man or woman, either rewrite the sentence to make the antecedent plural or to eliminate the pronoun, or use his or her, he or she, and so on. When antecedents are joined by or or nor, the pronoun must agree with the closer antecedent. A collection noun such as team can be either singular or plural, depending on whether the members are seen as a group or individuals.
18. Poorly Integrated Quotation
A 1970s study of what makes food appetizing "Once it became apparent that the steak was actually blue and the fries were green, some people became ill" (Schlosser 565).
Corrected
In a 1970s study about what makes food appetizing, we read, "Once it became apparent that the steak was actually blue and the fries were green, some people became ill" (Schlosser 565).
"Dumpster diving has serious drawbacks as a way of life" (Eighner 383). Finding edible food is especially tricky.
Corrected
"Dumpster diving has serious drawbacks as a way of life," we read in Eighner's book (383). One of the drawbacks is that finding food can be especially difficult.
Quotations should fit smoothly into the surrounding sentence structure. They should be linked clearly to the writing around them (usually with a signal phrase) rather than dropped abruptly into the writing.
19. Missing or Unnecessary Hyphen
This paper looks at fictional and real life examples.
A compound adjective modifying a noun that follows it requires a hyphen.
The buyers want to fix-up the house and resell it.
A two-word verb should not be hyphenated. A compound adjective that appears before a noun needs a hyphen. However, be careful not to hyphenate two-word verbs or word groups that serve as subject complements.
20. Sentence Fragment
No subject
Marie Antoinette spent huge sums of money on herself and her favorites. And helped to bring on the French Revolution.
No complete verb
The aluminum boat sitting on its trailer.
Beginning with a subordinating word
We returned to the drugstore. Where we waited for our buddies.
A sentence fragment is part of a sentence that is written as if it were a complete sentence. Reading your draft out loud, backwards, sentence by sentence, will help you spot sentence fragments.
