Ryan McFayden, the Duke Lacrosse player who wrote a vile email fantasizing about what a turn-on it would be to murder and skin a stripper, apparently attended “Take Back The Night,” an annual feminist rally against rape, just a few days after writing the email.

…McFadyen reportedly was one of about 500 people who attended a Take Back the Night march during Sexual Assault Awareness Week at Duke.

“I completely support this event and this entire week,” McFadyen told The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper. “It’s just sad that the allegations we are accused of happened to fall when they did.”

Yeah, that’s the sad thing.

Saying you’re against rape doesn’t mean you are against rape. Saying you’re against woman-hating doesn’t mean you don’t loathe women.

This thread is open to feminist, pro-feminist and feminist-friendly posters only. If you don’t think you fall into Amp’s definition of “feminist, pro-feminist and feminist-friendly,” and you wish to make a comment, you may do so at the cross-post on Creative Destruction.

Jill and Piny both have good posts at Feministe regarding Anorexia Nervosa. My favorite quote is from Jill’s post:

And as for denial, on a most basic level, fuck that. Sorry, but why are the values of self-sacrifice only brought up when we’re talking about women’s bodies? We’re supposed to deny ourselves food in order to stay thin so that someone else (always male) will enjoy looking at us; we’re supposed to deny ourselves sex so that the virginity fetishists can have an all-access pass once we’re married; and even then we’re supposed to sacrifice all of our own wants and needs for our children and our husband, and still deny sex if we don’t want any more babies. I call bullshit. I’ve had enough of the cult of female martyrdom, and I feel no need to let other people tell me that I should feel guilty for enjoying pleasures like food and sex. I own a vibrator, I use birth control, and I make myself steak au poivre and drink good red wine every Friday night. These things bring me far more pleasure than skinny thighs or blood on my wedding-night bedsheets. And if that makes me an over-indulgent pig, then so be it.

Sing it, sister!

But the main reason I’m posting is because of this quote, from a post on the blog “Cosmic Tap”:

My personal offhand estimate had been that we might lose about 100 Americans annually to anorexia. My research this morning showed that I was not far off ““ a 2001 study by the University of British Columbia’s Department of Psychology of every American death for the most recently available five year period showed only 724 people with anorexia as a causal factor - 145 per year. Christina Hoff-Sommers, in her research for the book Who Stole Feminism, came up with a number below half that. In a presentation to the International Congress of Psychology, one expert (Dr. Paul Hewitt) estimated a death rate for anorexia of 6.6 per 100,000 deaths. Even if you assume that sufferers outnumber deaths by a few orders of magnitude, it would still seem that all objective evidence shows the health impact on Americans from anorexia is statistically nil. Now, I know that doesn’t make for very good shock journalism, but it doesn’t change the uncomfortable fact that it’s true.

Hoff-Sommers claimed that between 50 and a hundred Americans a year die from anorexia - but her claim was based on an appalling misunderstanding of mortality statistics. She’s right that only a tiny number of Americans have “anorexia” credited as their cause of death, but that’s not the relevant question.

According to the NIMH, anorexics typically die due to “complications of the disorder, such as cardiac arrest or electrolyte imbalance,” not anorexia itself. Hoff-Sommers might as well have claimed that because so few people have “cigarettes” written on their death certificate, smoking hardly ever causes any deaths.

So what’s the real number? There are about 19 million American women between ages 15 and 24; of those, somewhere between 190,000 and 380,000 have anorexia (it’s estimated that 1-2% of young women suffer from anorexia). About 0.56% - somewhere between one and two thousand - of those die of anorexia-related causes each year. (This is a conservative estimate, both because some studies have found a much higher long-term mortality rate, and because not everyone with anorexia is a young woman age 15-24).

Hoff-Sommers used the mistaken “100 deaths” statistic to refute an also-mistaken number some feminists used in the early 1990s. She was right to correct the feminists - but, unlike Hoff-Sommers, the feminists were willing to retract their mistaken statistic. Hoff-Sommers has never corrected or retracted her false “100 deaths from anorexia” figure.

* * *

Anthony at The Cosmic Tap complains that concern for anorexia is a “moral panic” - but it’s clear that he’s uncritically bought into a far more pervasive and popular moral panic, fat-hating. He complains that two-thirds of Americans are “overweight” and jumps from this to all the usual cliches about Americans stuffing their faces and so forth. But there’s no evidence that fat people eat significantly more than thin people.

Anthony also doesn’t mention that the “two-thirds” statistic defines anyone with a BMI (body mass index) over 25 as “overweight.” But by that standard, merely being muscular can make someone “overweight” (Brad Pitt is a famous example - what a porker!).

More substantively, as a JAMA study published last year showed, “overweight” Americans with BMIs of 25-30 actually live longer than Americans who aren’t overweight. The panic over weight has very little to do with health. It is instead a true moral panic - a reflection of the fear that Americans are over-indulgent and pleasure-driven. As Elkins wrote, “Eating is the new sex. Anti-fat hysteria is the new Puritanism.”

It’s a rare day in Mudville that I agree with Wendy McElroy…

The toddler wandered from her nursery school, Ready Teddy Go, through a door left open. A bricklayer named Clive Peachey drove past her in his truck. At the inquest, he stated, “I kept thinking I should go back. The reason I didn’t was because I thought people might think I was trying to abduct her.”

Instead, he assured himself that the parents must be “driving around” and would find her.

A few minutes thereafter, Abby fatally fell into an algae-covered pond.

There’s no doubt that child molestation is a real problem, and increased awareness is a good thing. But as Abby’s story horribly illustrates, societies in which adults don’t feel free to approach or help strange children, are not child-safe.

McElroy, uncharacteristically, doesn’t comment on how this effects men in particular. But I think men are more likely to be seen as sexual predators, with the result that innocent men are more likely to worry about their actions being misconstrued than innocent women. (I’ve posted in the past about the extra suspicion some male child care workers have to deal with).

Curtsy: The Argument Clinic.

UPDATE: Abyss2hope has a different take.

From Feministe I learned that the New York Times reads: “Massachusetts is poised to become the first state to provide nearly universal health care coverage.”

Nearly universal health care? You mean almost everyone won’t die because they don’t have enough money. That’s just swell. Massachusetts must be so proud of itself.

Why on earth is nearly universal coverage an accomplishment? Why is the possibility that anyone could be without medical care OK in one of the richest countries in the world? Why is it OK to make money from other people’s illness

I don’t understand American politics (although it’s possible, just possible that the fact that both parties take money from health insurers has something to do with this).

Interesting-sounding panel discussion of women’s rights in the Mid East. I thought this point - about the attraction of patriarchy in dictatorships - was well-made:

Darwish placed the blame on the patriarchy of the Middle East.

“In the Middle East, men struggle with little freedoms because they, too, are oppressed by the dictatorship,” she said. “Women are the one aspect of control in their life, so inside the home, the men rule.”

Narrowing the discussion to Muslim women, Darwish said, “A woman in the Middle East must answer to everyone, and her honor and purity is the business of her family, her neighbors, and sometimes, even the virtue police.”

At the same time, I’m not sure if I entirely agreed with this:

Darwish said the solution to human rights abuses toward women in the Middle East is democratization and that it will be impossible to improve women’s stations without proper democratic institutions.

Do “democratic institutions” include things like a civic commitment to equal treatment of the sexes, protections for minorities against dictatorship by the majority, and a safe civil society for dissent? It seems to me that these freedoms may be more essential than mere Democracy - and may be preconditions for a successful liberal democracy. Women in Iraq and Afghanistan have the vote (in theory), but in many areas can’t walk the streets with bare faces without fear of violent reprisal; freedom to vote doesn’t guarantee freedom in any substantive sense. Democracy is one element of freedom, but it’s not the only element, and maybe not even the most essential element.

The conflict between democracy and women’s fundamental human rights is a topic I’ve blogged on several times already, generally in the context of Iraq (1 2 3 4 5 ). Women’s liberty in Iraq, already in decline under Hussain, have sharply plummeted since the U.S. invasion. The ability to vote for religious fanatics who are determined to end women’s freedoms is not freedom in any meaningful sense, and ought not be celebrated as freedom.

Unusually for panels with this subject matter, Israel wasn’t ignored:

Panelist and NYU politics professor Hani Zubida discussed Israeli women’s rights from a socio-political perspective.

“The notion of equality [in Israel] is a double-edged sword … women can no longer say that they are being discriminated against, because they were given this equality with suffrage and ability to join the army,” Zubida said. “However, there is disenfranchisement of Israeli women through the mechanism of the army … the military as a social construct does not accept women as equal.”

I’m glad they didn’t ignore Israel, although there’s no doubt that Israeli women are far better situated than most (all?) of their counterparts in the Mid-East. Zubida’s point - that formal legal equality can be used to dismiss other legitimate concerns (”you’ve got the vote, so what are you complaining about?”) - is one that in theory I agree with. But I wish the article had given more detail about Zubida’s argument; the quote from her really isn’t enough to know what specific problems she’s talking about.

The question of liberty versus democracy is relevant to Palestine, as well. I favor independence for the occupied territories as an independent Palestine, but I do so without much enthusiasm, largely because I suspect that a Palestinian state, while democratic, would nonetheless be hugely oppressive to Palestinian women and Palestinian queers. From the BBC:

A number of gay Palestinian men are risking their lives to cross the border into Israel, claiming they feel safer among Israelis than their own people. [...]

In practice, Palestinian gays end up being placed under virtual house arrest because of the fear that they may be potential suicide bombers. [...] However, many Palestinian gays say they would still rather live under house arrest in Israel, where homosexuality is not considered a crime, than at home.

In a way, U.S. leftists regarding Palestine are in a similar position as U.S. right-wingers regarding Iraq; in both cases, the Americans are advocating the creation of a new government that will virtually certainly be brutally oppressive to both women and queers. And both groups tend to sweep this fact under the rug.

(Incidentally, gaymiddleeast.com seems to be a good source of news stories about queer rights throughout the middle east).

Today was a big day for updates in the Duke case. The lacrosse coach has resigned and the University has suspended the entire season for the team.

Here is a quote from the Raleigh News Observer:

“Coach Pressler offered me his resignation earlier this afternoon, and I accepted it,” Duke athletics director Joe Alleva said in a statement released at 4:36 p.m. “I fully support President Broadhead’s decision to cancel the remainder of the season as well as his outrage at the latest developments involving the men’s lacrosse program. I believe this is in the best interests of the program, the department of athletics and the university.”

However, the most important update comes from the newly released affidavit for the second search warrant. The Smokinggun has a copy of the search warrant here. While the search warrant reveals more details from the case, the biggest news is the following email message sent by one of the players just after the victim reported being assaulted. The email sent by Ryan McFayden says,

To whom it may concern
tommrrow night, after tomights show, ive decidedto have some strippers over to edens 2c. all are welcome..there will be no nudity. i plan on killing the bitches as soon as the walk and proceding to cut their skin off while cumming in my Duke issue spandex.. all in besides arch and tack please respond
41

Well the young man who wrote this email has been suspended from Duke University. His lawyer says for his own safety–it’s rather hard for me to buy this one, but this is his lawyer. The email was anonymously sent to the police (looks like somebody is cooperating behind the scenes).

A close read of the affidavit, insinuates possible premeditation because the men intentionally used the wrong names and said they were part of the Duke baseball or track teams. She also noted that the man who called himself Adam, was called Dan by people at the party. However, I would need a little more evidence to definitively say it was premeditated.

The email alone is enough to make me sick. It doesn’t prove he raped someone, but it sure shows he has depraved fantasies.

The email above is clear evidence of the lack of character (my edit: depravity) of at least one of these young men.

Also posted at Rachel’s Tavern.

Remember, feel free to leave links to whatever you’d like in the comments, or anything else you feel like bringing up.

This Ain’t Livin’: Second Big Fat Carnival

Blac(k)ademic: Third Radical Women of Color Carnival

The First Carnival of Empty Cages
Veganism isn’t my bag, but if it’s yours, you’ll find a lot of interest here.

Femivist: April 18th is Blog To Increase Awareness About Sexual Violence Day
Follow the link to sign up.

New To The Blogroll: Women’s Space/The Margins
A new blog by Heart - aka Cheryl - and her associates (”Alas” readers are familiar with Heart from her occasional participation in the comments here). I’m really excited about this blog; despite our disagreements, Heart’s been one of my favorite internet writers for years.

New To The Blogroll: Abyss2home: A Rape Survivor’s Zigzag Journey Into The Open
Thoughtful and well-written analysis of rape-related issues from a rape survivor.

New To The Blogroll: The Headpiece Of The Staff Of Ra
Smart and sensible posts from a philosopher/feminist/computer gamer.

New To The Blogroll: On The Whole
Kick-ass fat acceptance blog, with an emphasis on skeptical looks at how the media deals with fat.

New To The Blogroll: Real Men Are Not
“A blog that examines the destructive social construction of masculinity and what “real men” are.” It’s like someone went and invented exactly the blog I want to read.

Blackprof: If you had a billion dollars to spend to combat racial disparities, how would you spend it?

Definition: On “Political Correctness” and Privilege

When you say “I’m sick of being PC”, what you’re saying is “I’m sick of treating others as equals”. When you say “It’s so much trouble to make sure I’m not offending someone” what you’re saying is “It’s too much trouble to be kind”. (And when you say “I hate that everyone’s trying so hard to be ‘fair’ to every group out there”, you’re not only being totally horrible, but obviously living in a delusional alternate universe, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Climacteric Clambake: Strength Comes From Refusing To Be Shamed
To quote Jill, “a must-read narrative on the author’s experience with sexual assualt.”

Woman of Color Blog: Brownfemipower on Western Feminists Ham-Handed Use of Burka Images
This is what intelligent intra-feminist critique looks like. Make sure to read Brownfemipower’s followup post, as well.

Alternet: Wilcox and Nock “Working Wives Are Unhappy” Study An Outlier

Over the past 15 years, some 20 studies have looked at the association between women’s employment and earnings and their marital happiness. [...] They all tell the same story: Employed women are as happy (and perhaps happier) in their marriages as non-employed women and having an income generally improves a woman’s marital happiness. (Curtsy: Freedom Rider).

The Guardian: Is Feminist Blogging a Useful Activist Tool or Plaything of the Privileged?

Objectivist v. Constructivist: Debating The Status Of Women In The U.S.
That Constructivist can get pretty darn sarcastic. Curtsy: Ilyka Damen.

Obsidian Wings: Bush Cancer Diagnosis “Cuts” Will Kill People And Cost Taxpayers More

“You don’t save money by not diagnosing cancer early. You end up spending more money because anyone who develops cancer will get into the health care system and they will be treated. And the cost at that point will be a lot more. The logic here is very simple: the later you diagnose cancer of the breast or cervix, the more expensive it is to the country.”

I don’t comprehend how anyone, even a Republican, could think this is good policy. Curtsy: F-Words.

Feministe: Feminism, Trans, and Boundaries
Piny uses some of his and Spit’s exchange on this “Alas” thread as a springboard for further discussion.

Overheard In Law School
I love this sort of thing - a blog by countless law students, consisting of funny things they or their professors have said.

Women’s Space/The Margins: Feminist Alliances

If kindness, generosity, acceptance, friendship, patience with, appreciation of, a woman equals my endorsement of all of her politics, my stamp of approval on everything she says and does, I’ll have to kick 99 percent of the feminist women in my life to the curb.

La Queen Sucia: On Idiotic Media Coverage of Immigration

Women’s Space/The Margins: Husband On Strike

I think it’s entirely typical that a man who would create that particular list of demands also would assume his past as a sex offender should be irrelevant.

Abyss2hope: Ethical Interrogations and The Rape Victim
Marcella discusses how abusive interrogation techniques can harm rape victims.

Bitch|Lab: What Should White People Do?

MoJo Blog: Immigration and Wages

Paul Krugman, in an op-ed that was surprisingly negative on immigration yesterday, pointed out that unskilled immigration drives down wages for low-income workers here in America. Well, sure, that’s true, but that’s an argument for living wages, policies to promote full employment, and the expansion of basic rights to organize. Immigrants who can participate in and strengthen the labor movement in this country will help all workers, native or otherwise. Under the current regime, corporations can use immigration and “guest worker” policies to import a captive labor force, underpay them, and then drive down wages, which accounts for a good deal of the effect Krugman worries about.

The Bipolar View: I Love Andrea Dworkin, Part 1
I can’t wait for part 2. Curtsy: Sinister Girl.

The Y Files: Cathy Young on Islamophobia

Pandagon: The Gang Rape Is The Essential Scene Of Patriarchy
My favorite post I’ve read in the last week; spot-on analysis from Amanda. Ginmar’s post commenting on Amanda’s is excellent, also.

Fastlad: The Witch’s Hammer

The urge to tell gay men how to behave comes in many, many forms. Historically, it often comes by proxy too, implicit in the critique of women, women’s sexuality and the belittling of femininity in general: witness Nancy boys, Girly Men, Pansy, Mary, Sissy, Mama’s Boy, Mollycoddle.

Fetch Me My Axe: Dorothy Allison on “Sex-Positive” Feminism

Abyss2hope: Duke Rape Case and “Innocent Until Proven Guilty”

Rapists become rapists when they rape not when they are convicted of rape. A not-guilty verdict doesn’t magically erase what really happened.

I have a wordperfect file I’d like to open, but I don’t have Wordperfect and Word isn’t doing a good job of reading the file. If any “Alas” reader has Wordperfect and wouldn’t mind openimg the file and emailing it back to me in either MS Word or rtf format, please let me know!

UPDATE: File converted. Thanks to everyone who offered advice and help, and extra-special thanks to “Alas” reader Aimee!

My early college years really marked a shift in my thinking about race. After teaching college students for the past several years I realize that I am certainly not alone. For many young people this is the first time they are really forced to confront racism and actually engage in conversations across race. I had purposely chosen to attend a college that was racially mixed and was in a predominantly Black neighborhood, and I thought that I would be able to learn and put much of the racism behind me. Of course, I was 18, and I was wrong. However, most young adults are different from me. My experience is that they would prefer to go on living a largely segregated life just as long as there is no one else there to remind them of it. This is the difficulty teaching about racism in the colorblind era. Many students believe racism is over, or they believe that it is confined to Neo-Nazis, the KKK, or “Hicks.” I would say the vast majority of my White students and at least half of my students of color think racism is not a problem and it is something they have no experience with. One of the reasons they think this way is because they do not have an understanding of institutionalized racism.

One of the problems is that prior to college, students learn almost nothing about racism. Many students learn about diversity and multiculturalism, but not racism. This distinction is significant because the terms diversity and multiculturalism, have become synonymous with the notion that “we are all a little different, but we should all like each other.” The problem with this way of teaching is that it ignores the fact that racism is not about how different we are or who we “love or hate.” The primary manifestation of racism is structural, which means that our social and economic opportunities are profoundly connected to race. If we all love each other and know that we are different, we will still have racism. People can love people and truly be racist towards them; moreover, racism isn’t just something located in individuals. Some times the rules themselves and their outcomes are racist. Take the education system as an example. Even the most nonracist teacher must contend with the fact that school districts are generally drawn based on town lines, and towns are often racially segregated. Certainly, racial attitudes shape neighborhood segregation, but these institutional arrangements take on a life of their own. Many of my students will say they don’t have many friends from different backgrounds because there were no people from different background in their neighborhoods. When I say that racism causes this, the immediate reaction is…”I’m not racist. I just didn’t have the opportunity to meet people from other races.” Whether that individual person is racist or not doesn’t matter from my way of thinking. Racism has an impact because of the structure, and the individual person doesn’t much matter regardless of whether or not he or she is racist. I know this sounds defeatist, but it doesn’t have to be.

In my own experience the hardest thing to teach students about racism is that it exists in individuals, groups, and institutions. At the individual level, racism is about a particular persons attitudes and behaviors. At the group level racism is about collective attitudes and behaviors, and at the structural level racism is about the fundamental organization of society. One very good example of structural racism would be the electoral college. Superficially, the electoral college is a raceless policy, but in the end White votes for president count more because of it (not to mention the wholesale disenfranchisement of predominantly Black Washington, DC.). Bob Wing, former editor of Colorlines magazine details a few of the ways this works. He says:

The good news is that the influence of liberal and progressive voters of color is increasingly being felt in certain states. They have become decisive in the most populous states, all of which went to Gore except Ohio, Texas, and (maybe?) Florida. In California an optimist might even envision a rebirth of Democratic liberalism a couple of elections down the road, based largely on votes of people of color.
The bad news is that the two-party, winner-take-all, Electoral College system of this country ensures, even requires, that voters of color be marginalized or totally ignored.

“The two-party, Electoral College system ensures that almost half of voters of color are marginalized or totally ignored.”

The Electoral College negates the votes of almost half of all people of color. For example, 53 percent of all blacks live in the Southern states, where this year, as usual, they voted over 90 percent Democratic. However, white Republicans out-voted them in every Southern state (and every border state except Maryland). As a result, every single Southern Electoral College vote was awarded to Bush. While nationally, whites voted 54-42 for Bush, Southern whites, as usual, gave over 70 percent of their votes to him. They thus completely erased the massive Southern black (and Latino and Native American) vote for Gore in that region.
Since Electoral College votes go entirely to whichever candidate wins the plurality in each state, whether that plurality be by one vote or one million votes, the result was the same as if blacks and other people of color in the South had not voted at all. Similarly negated were the votes of the millions of Native Americans and Latino voters who live in overwhelmingly white Republican states like Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, Utah, the Dakotas, Montana, and Texas. The tyranny of the white majority prevails.

Wing goes on to detail how racism shaped the development of the electoral college,

The Constitution provided that slaves be counted as three-fifths of a person (but given no citizenship rights) for purposes of determining how many members each state would be granted in the House of Representatives. This provision vastly increased the representation of the slave states in Congress.
At the demand of James Madison and other Virginia slaveholders, this pro-slavery allocation of Congresspersons also became the basis for allocation of votes in the Electoral College. It is a dirty little secret that the Electoral College was rigged up for the express purpose of translating the disproportionate Congressional power of the slaveholders into undue influence over the election of the presidency. Virginia slaveholders proceeded to hold the presidency for 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years.

Since slavery was abolished, the new justification for the Electoral College is that it allows smaller states to retain some impact on elections. And so it does–to the benefit of conservative white Republican states. As Harvard law professor Lani Guinier reports, in Wyoming, one Electoral College vote corresponds to 71,000 voters, while in large-population states (where the votes of people of color are more numerous) the ratio is one electoral vote to over 200,000 voters. So much for one person, one vote.

This year the Electoral College will apparently enable the winner of the conservative white states to prevail over the winner of the national popular vote–a tyranny of the minority.

This election system continues until today, in spite of how open minded modern politicians, political parties, or racial groups may or may not be.

To some extent when people learn about institutional racism, it can be very defeating because institutional racism is much more difficult to challenge. But there are also advantages. One major advantage is that it removes some of the guilt students (especially White students) have about racism. Once young people realize racism is less about blaming individuals (not that there isn’t some blame to go around) and more about strucutral organization; their defensiveness goes down a little. However, discussions of structural racism must also include examples of how strucutral racism can be challenged. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950-1960s provides such an example.

Because racism is pervasive and institutional, it needs to be attacked at the individual, group, and structural levels. I think this is highly relevant when we discuss the legacy of Martin Luther King because Dr. King always understood the institutional nature of racism, particularly at the end of his career. People often forget that when he was assassinated in Memphis, he was trying to help low income predominantly African American workers organize. Certainly, we can work on changes our individual attitudes, but in order to challenge racism today we cannot forget the important of social movements as a means of changing the social structure. A movement to end the electoral college, DC disenfranchisement, and the structure of the criminal justice system would be a few areas where we can begin a modern Civil Rights Movement.

This post can also be found at Rachels Tavern.

I’ve really enjoyed the posts on how people became feminists, and since I haven’t yet got the energy to write a real post I thought I’d post something I wrote towards the end of last year.

In some ways I was extremely precocious feminist. I still have my copy of the Railway Children which says “Happy 7th Birthday on the inside” and in which I had writeen RUBBISH in black felt tip pen over the paragraph near the end when the Doctor tells Peter that he must be nice to girls because they’re soft and weak. I grew up in the 1980s and really believed Girls Can Do Anything, and was prepared to fight for it.

But something happened in my teens, my feminism faded. I know why, and I know I’m not alone. To middle-class girls in all-girls schools sexism and misogyny often seem far away. I was taught by some of the coolest feminists I’ve ever known. My school had a quilt hung in the hall that said “Me aro koe ki te hä o Hine-ahu-one. Pay heed to the dignity of Women”. But it was an all women world and so feminism seemed unnecessary.

It was ridiculous, because sexism and misogyny were all around us, all the time. We didn’t recognise them mostly because we were too busy using them to try and destroy each other.

So all through high school, and into my first year of university I didn’t call myself a feminist. I was 18 when this changed, and I remember the change as a revelation. It wasn’t of course, I must have forgotten all the small thing.

I was babysitting, I’d put the kids to bed and settled down to do the readings for one of my tutorials. I was reading women’s accounts of growing up in Germany towards the end of the 19th Century. One woman was from the aristocracy, one was middle class, and the other were all working class women.

Most of the women had become involved in left-wing politics later in their life and their stories were amazing. The best of the fathers in the narratives were completely hopeless, most weren’t that useful, but they survived, and fought for their brothers and sisters. I was blown away by those women and their strength. They had all fought so hard for things that I saw as so basic.

But it was still school work, so as soon as I was finished being blown away I watched a movie the kids’ parents had left behind. It was called The Heidi Chronicles and I remember almost nothing about it except that it was about a woman who was involved in women’s liberation, and it showed how much she’d gained but how hard it was, and how it had cost her.

My response to the stories of women’s lives, both fictional and real was: “I have to call myself a feminist, I owe it to all these women who went before me, who fought so hard and gained so much to become part of that struggle.”

And that was the beginning.

From Slate editor Jacob Weisberg’s slam of the latest Kevin Phillips book:

…While Karl Rove’s pander-to-the base strategy got Bush narrowly re-elected, the entente hasn’t truly served Bush or the religious right. The appearance of extremism on issues of church-state separation and stem-cell research has helped dig a deep hole for the president and his party, alienating secular and libertarian Republicans uncomfortable with the revival-tent atmosphere. And evangelical power appears to have peaked. Since the Terri Schiavo debacle, the religious right has mainly embarrassed itself by battling evolutionary theory.

Oh, is that all the religious right has done? Silly me. I thought they were pushing for dozens of new anti-queer laws, many of which will pass (have already passed); and attacking reproductive rights throughout the country with a degree of success never before seen; not to mention vetting the President’s Supreme Court choices.

Queers and women really are invisible to many liberal guys, aren’t they? It’s like a superpower or something. I bet a pregnant lesbian could walk right into Weisberg’s home, while he was home, open up his wallet and take all the cash and cards while he was standing right there, and he wouldn’t see a blessed thing.

This Ain’t Livin’ presents the Second Edition of the Big Fat Carnival! It’s chock full of fatty goodness - go check it out!

(And we’re a young, upstart carnival just gettin’ started, so if you have a blog, please consider linking to it!)

Oh, and speaking of carnivals, the Third Radical Women of Color Carnival is out at Blac(k)ademic!

A relative of Louise Nicholas left this comment. I replied with this

I would take these posts down if there was any chance it could make things worse for Louise Nicholas, or anyone else who was trying to get justice.

I now believe there is a possibility that this might be the case, so I have taken the comments down.

It’s not a decision I made easily, and I don’t regret publishing it. I remain incredibly angry about this trial, and the result.

I should be able to collect my thoughts more coherently soon.

Probably no piece of medical advice is so frequently given, and with so little rational basis, as the pressure on fat people to lose weight.

1. For The Vast Majority Of Fat People, Weight Loss Dieting Doesn’t Work

When I say a weight loss diet (or “diet,” as I’ll refer to WLDs for the rest of this post) doesn’t work, I mean two things. First of all, I mean that for most, the amount of weight lost isn’t enough to turn a fat person into a non-fat person. Second of all, I mean that for most, the weight loss cannot be sustained over the long term (say, five years).

Here’s a remarkable fact: There isn’t a single peer-reviewed controlled clinical study of any weight-loss diet that shows success in losing a significant amount of weight over the long term. Not one.

Isn’t that amazing? It’s not as if Weight Watchers, Slim-Fast, diet clinics, Jenny Craig, and the thousands of other companies making billions of dollars from promises of weight loss haven’t been trying. If anyone could reliably make fat people thin, they’d soon have more money than Microsoft and Haliburton combined.

From a review of empirical tests of weight-loss plans by Wayne Miller, an exercise science specialist at George Washington University:

No commercial program, clinical program, or research model has been able to demonstrate significant long-term weight loss for more than a small fraction of the participants. Given the potential dangers of weight cycling and repeated failure, it is unscientific and unethical to support the continued use of dieting as an intervention for obesity.

Let’s closely examine a study cited as proof that weight loss diets work (I examined this study in a previous post): “Behavioural correlates of successful weight reduction over 3y,” from The International Journal of Obesity (2004, volume 28, pages 334-335).

First of all, let’s notice that the definition of “successful weight reduction” is extremely forgiving: According to the study, “weight loss of 5% or more from baseline to 3 y FU [three year follow up] was defined as successful weight reduction.”

So if a 400 pound man becomes a 380 pound man over the course of three years, according to this study that is “success.” But there isn’t any evidence that a 400 pound man who loses 20 pounds will be any healthier, or have a longer life expectancy, than a 400 pound man who maintains a steady weight. (In fact, as we’ll see, the opposite is true - the 400 pound man who never lost weight will probably live longer). Nor is there any evidence that it’s healthier to be 190 pounds than 200 pounds.

And keep in mind, the amount of weight loss drops steeply over time - so when a study like this defines “success” as weight loss at three years, the effect is to unrealistically exaggerate the success of the diet plan being studied. If “success” was described as taking the weight off and keeping it off for a lifetime, the success rate of these studies would be barely above nonexistent.

Still, three years is relatively good methodology - many diet studies measure patients at 3 or 6 months and that’s all. Unfortunately, this study’s methodology is terrible in another way: the 77% drop-out rate. This means that the researchers have no idea how many people followed their instructions, found that they weren’t losing weight, and so quite reasonably dropped out.

So - of the 23% of subjects who didn’t drop out altogether - how many actually succeeded in maintaining a 5% weight loss over the course of three years? 48%. Put another way, of the 23% minority who stuck with this study’s plan, most weren’t able to lose even 5% of their weight over three years.

But what about the most successful group of dieters - those who managed to obey the seven separate diet restrictions this study called for, for all three years? (That’s a grand total of 198 dieters out of the initial group of 6,857, or 2.8%). Of this tiny, select group, 40% failed to meet this study’s extremely forgiving standard of “successful weight loss.”

Now, the above study is one that weight-loss advocates themselves cite as proof that weight loss is practical and possible. Is there anything there to convince a 300 pound person that becoming thin is a practical and likely effect of weight-loss dieting?

One possible factor making it difficult to lose weight permanently is that our bodies may adjust to situations of reduced food intake by lowering metabolic rate and increasing the proportion of food stored on the body as fat. (Some studies support the existence of this effect, but it’s not proven beyond all doubt.) The evolutionary benefit of this is obvious; humans who lower their metabolic rate and store more fat in conditions of famine are more likely to survive and reproduce. But as a result, the more you diet, the harder losing weight becomes over the long term, and the harder your body will fight to retain fat.

2. Losing Weight Makes It More Likely You’ll Die Sooner

Most of the time, people on weight loss diets gain back the weight they lose. But that doesn’t mean they’re back where they started, healthwise. Many studies have found that losing weight - even if the weight is regained - is associated with higher mortality rates. From David Garner’s and Susan Wooley’s review article “Confronting the Failure of Behavior and Dietary Treatments for Obesity”:

There are few studies in the medical literature that indicate that mortality risk is actually reduced by weight loss, and there are some that suggest that weight loss increases the risk of death. In an American Cancer Society prospective survey of over 1 million people, individuals indicating that they had lost weight in the past 5 years were more likely to die from cardiovascular disease than those whose weight was table. In a 10 year follow-up of men who were asked their weight at age 25, Rhoads and Kagen reported that heavy respondents who had later lost weight had almost twice as high a death rate as those who maintained a high but stable weight. Moreover, those with a high but stable weight had the same or lower death rate as thinner men. [...] Although weight change was unrelated to mortality for women in the Wilkosky et al. study, the odds ratio… for men indicated that each 10% loss of weight was associated with a 14% increase in all-causes mortality and a 27% increase in cancer mortality.

Finally, in a study of mortality risks among 16,936 Harvard alumni, Paffenbager at al. not only found that the highest mortality occurred in those with the lowest body mass index (below 32), but also that those who had gained weight since college had a significantly lower mortality risk compared to those who had minimal weight gain since college. According to the authors, “alumni with the lowest net gain since college had a 29% higher risk of death than their classmates that had gained the most.” Thus, even if one accepted the premise that obesity is a dangerous condition and weight reduction a realistic goal, it is an unproven hypothesis that weight reduction actually translates into increased longevity.

When you read that, you probably had the same reaction I first did, which is to wonder if the higher death rates associated with weight loss might be caused by unintentional weight loss among already sick people. Glenn Gaesser’s book reviews several studies that distinguished between unintentional and intentional weight loss. One study found that for overweight women with pre-existing health conditions (such as high blood pressure), even a very small weight loss - just a couple of pounds - decreased mortality. (There was no increased benefit in losing 20 or 30 pounds instead of just 2 or 3). A similar effect existed for diabetic men. For virtually all other groups, however, intentional weight loss either had no effect or led to increased mortality.

Among the two-thirds of the study participants who were healthy to begin with, intentional weight loss was anything but good. For example, compared with healthy, overweight women who remained weight stable, women who intentionally lost between one and nineteen pounds over a period of a year or more had premature death ates from cancer, cardiovascular disease, and all causes that were increase by as much as 40 to 70 percent. Unintentional weight gain, on the other hand, had no adverse effects on premature death rates for these nonsmoking, “overweight” women. These findings suggest that if you are overweight and have no health problems, you are probably better off staying at that weight (and not worrying if you gain a few pounds) rather than dieting to conform to some height-weight table “ideal.”

It’s worth noting that the negative effects of weight loss seem to exist regardless of if the weight is regained or not.

I would be remiss not to mention the dangers associated with yo-yo dieting. Too many Americans - especially fat Americans - will lose weight a few times in their lifetime, and then regain. This is referred to as “yo-yo” dieting, and it’s both common and dangerous. (Many yo-yo dieters may not think of themselves as yo-yo dieters, since there may be years between each cycle of loss and gain.) According to Case Western Reserve University’s Paul Ernsberger:

Obese humans typically show repeated loss and regain of large amounts of weight. Men with large fluctuations in weight between the ages of 20 and 40 have increase systolic and diastolic blood pressure and cholesterol. these yo-yo dieters are two times more likely to die of coronary heart disease, even after adjustment for known risk factors, than are men with stable or steadily increasing weight. Fluctuations in body weight have been shown in many other major epidemiological studies to have deleterious cardiovascular effects resulting in increased mortality.

If you’d like to maximize your longevity, probably the best thing you can do is a program of moderate exercise. This may not cause any weight loss - but no matter what your weight, even moderate exercise is likely to increase your lifespan.

3. The Idea Of “Normalizing” Eating Habits Is A Myth

The case for weight loss dieting typically assumes that fat people are fat because they eat more and exercise less than thin people; that thin people, if they ate as much as fat people, would also be fat; and that if fat people only “normalized” their eating habits, they would be thin.

Under this model, fat people eat like fat people, and so need to “modify their lifestyle” to eat “normally,” after which they’ll lose weight.

But evidence indicates that all these assumptions may be false.

First, do fat people eat more than thin people? Study after study has attempted to show that fat people eat more calories, without success. It’s true that many fat people have lousy diets with too much fatty food - but the same is true of many thin people. And, anecdotally, I’ve met fat people who were extremely healthy eaters, and fat vegans. It doesn’t appear that fat people are “eating like fat people,” compared to how non-fat people eat, in any measurable way. From Garner and Wooley:

…[A] tremendous body of research employing a great variety of methodologies… has failed to yield any meaningful or replicable differences in the caloric intake or eating patterns of the obese compared to the nonobese…

[In a study of children], Rolland-Cachera and Bellisle found that food intake was about 500 calories greater and obesity about four times more common in the lowest versus the highest socioeconomic groups studied; however, within each socioeconomic group, there were comparable levels of caloric intake among lean, average weight, and obese children. [...]

…It may be concluded that nature and nurture both exert influences on body weight and that the eventual expression of obesity is a complicated matter…. Regardless of these factors, the myth of overeating by the obese is sustained for the casual observer by selective attention. Each time that a fat person is observed to have a “healthy appetite” or an affinity for sweets or other high calorie foods, a stereotypic leap into causality is made. The same behaviors in a thin person attract little or no attention….

…The major premise of dietary treatments of obesity, that the obese overeat with respect to population norms, must be regarded as unproven.

What happens when naturally thin people eat the way fat people allegedly eat? In the 1960s, before ethical rules prevented this sort of study, scientists tested this question on prisoners, doubling their calorie intake in an attempt to make them gain 20-40 pounds. From Garner and Wooley:

Most of the men gained the initial few pounds with ease but quickly became hypermetabolic and resisted further weight gain despite continued overfeeding. One prisoner stopped gaining weight even though he was consuming close to 10,000 calories per day. With return to normal amounts of food, most of the men returned to the weight levels that they had maintained prior to the experiment.

Do fat people who lose weight, do so by taking on “normal” eating habits? Some studies indicate that a high proportion of the few fat people who keep weight off, do so not by “normalizing” their eating habits, but by becoming effectively anorexic. From Garner and Wooley:

Geissler et al. found that previously obese women who had maintained their target weights for an average of 2.5 years had a metabolic rate about 15% less and ate significantly less (1298 vs 1945 calories) than lean controls. Liebel and Hirsch have reported that the reduced metabolic requirements endure in obese patients who have maintained a reduced body weight for 4-6 years. Thus, successful weight loss and maintenance is not accomplished by “normalizing eating patterns” as has been implied in may treatment programs but rather by sustained caloric restriction. This raises questions about the few individuals who are able to sustain their weight loss over years. In some instances, their eating patterns are much more like those of individuals who would earn a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa than like those with truly “normal” eating patterns.

Too many diet advocates still believe in the above myths - and that weight is a simple matter of input and output. But real human bodies are far more complex systems. From the New England Journal of Medicine (emphasis added):

Many people cannot lose much weight no matter how hard they try, and promptly regain whatever they do lose….

Why is it that people cannot seem to lose weight, despite the social pressures, the urging of their doctors, and the investment of staggering amounts of time, energy, and money? The old view that body weight is a function of only two variables - the intake of calories and the expenditure of energy - has given way to a much more complex formulation involving a fairly stable set point for a person’s weight that is resistant over short periods to either gain or loss, but that may move with age. …Of course, the set point can be overridden and large losses can be induced by severe caloric restriction in conjunction with vigorous, sustained exercise, but when these extreme measures are discontinued, body weight generally returns to its preexisting level.

4. So To Sum Up….

1) No weight-loss diet has every been scientifically shown to produce substantial long-term weight loss in any but a tiny minority of dieters.

2) Whether or not a weight-loss diet “works,” people who go on weight-loss diets are likely to die sooner than those who maintain a steady weight or who slowly gain weight.

3) For fat people (or anyone else) concerned with their health, the best option is probably moderate exercise and eating fruits and veggies, without concern for waistlines. In other words, Health At Every Size (HAES).

4) The model on which most weight-loss diets are based - in which fat people eat like fat people and must learn to eat like non-fat people - is probably a myth.

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Citations

Anderson JW, Konz EC, Frederich RC, Wood CL (2001), “Long-term weight-loss maintenance: a meta-analysis of US studies,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, vol 74, p 579-584

Blair, S.N., Kohl, Paffenbarger, Clark, Cooper, and Gibbons (1989). “Physical Fitness and All Cause Mortality, A Prospective Study of Healthy Men and Women,” Journal of the American Medical Association, vol 262 p. 2395-2401.

Ernsberger, Paul and Koletsky, Richard (1999), “Biomedical Rationale for a Wellness Approach to Obesity,”Journal of Social Issues, vol 55, p. 221-260.

Gaesser, Glenn (2002), Big Fat Lies: The Truth About Your Weight And Your Health, Updated Edition, Gurze Books, Carlsbad, CA..

Garner, David and Wooley, Susan (1991), “Confronting the Failure of Behavior and Dietary Treatments for Obesity,” Clinical Psychology Review, vol 11, p 729-780.

Kassierer, Jerome and Angell, Marcia (1998), “Losing Weight - An Ill-Fated New Year’s Resolution,” New England Journal of Medicine, vol 338(1), p 52-54.

Miller, Wayne (1999). “How effective are traditional dietary and exercise interventions for weight loss?,” Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, vol 31 no 8 p. 1129-1134

Westenhoefer J, von Falck B, Stellfeldt A, and Fintelmann S (2004). “Behavioural correlates of successful weight reduction over 3y. Results from the Lean Habits Study,” International Journal of Obesity, vol 28 (2), p 334-335

Sometimes, like last week, I have a really neat idea for a baby blogging theme.

And sometimes I don’t have any ideas, so I just stick up some cute photos of Maddox lying on a quilt or something.

Guess which kind of week this is? More pics below the fold.
Read the rest of this entry »

A great number of posts have criticized me and other folks for forming an opinion about the Duke rape case before a jury has weighed in. Steve of “A Republic, Madam” writes:

Liberals, stick to your guns! The accused deserve the benefit of the doubt up to a certain point, and that point has not been crossed. Do cries of rape trump civil liberties and criminal protections? I sure hope not. … My support of the lacrosse players, at least in lieu of more evidence, is grounded in liberal, not conservative, thought.

I believe very much in “innocent until proven guilty.” If and when the police make arrests in this case, I want the accused rapists (whoever they turn out to be) to have their day in court, to be able to present a defense aided by legal council, and to be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. Then, and only then, should they be sent to prison for what I hope is a long miserable stay.

But “innocent until proven guilty” is a courtroom standard. My opinion is not the same as a courtroom, and blog posts don’t put anyone in prison. Nothing about the American system of justice requires ordinary citizens to refrain from having opinions; and it’s not inconsistent to want Courts to adhere to “beyond any reasonable doubt” while holding my personal opinions to a less stringent standard.

Furthermore, there’s a difference between being morally guilty and legally guilty. As Jeff puts it in comments:

Admonishing one side to “leave it up to the courts” (and it is only one side; I’ve never heard anybody told they shouldn’t assert an accused rapist’s innocence because the jury hadn’t rendered a verdict) equates a legal standard with a moral one, and sends the message that it’s not really rape if they can get away with it.

At this time, unless new evidence completely changes this case, it seems clear that a brutal pack rape happened. That deserves our moral outrage, even without a court’s verdict.

Jeralyn Merrit - who has discussed this case on mainstream TV news - writes:

Rape is a serious charge. It is easy to make and difficult to defend.

I’d love to bury this centuries-old sausage. (It goes back to the mid-17th century at least, when Matthew Hale called rape “an accusation easy to be made, hard to be proved, but harder to be defended by the party accused, though innocent”). I’d like to remind Jeralyn of the OC pack rape case - in which the victim, Jane Doe, has endured (and continues to endure) years of her character being trashed in public. Her friends were recruited by the defense to tell lies about her, and private detectives chased her from school to school, because she dared to press charges against her pack rapists. It took two trials to obtain a conviction, even though the rapists videotaped the rape.

Was that charge easy for Jane Doe to make? Was the rejection and abuse from the community around her easy? Was the defense’s burden - in which even a videotape of the rape taking place almost wasn’t enough for a conviction - too heavy?

Jane Doe’s experience was extreme, but hardly unique. The defense strategy of attacking rape victims goes back decades (centuries?), and guarantees that rape is not a charge easily made. In particular, when a working-class black stripper accuses wealthy whites of rape, it’s all but guaranteed that if it comes to a trial the defense will put her through hell. To call this accusation “easy to make” shows an appalling blindness to how our court system often puts rape victims on trial.

Jeralyn then sums up the case - but in her effort to spread confusion and create reasonable doubt, she gets her facts wrong. Here, she discusses the 911 call so many people have gone on about:

The women leave the party. One goes back in. She leaves again and meets up with the second woman. At some point, the second woman calls 911 to complain about racial epithets hurled at her by one or more males at the house. (listen to the call here.)Within two minutes police arrive, there is no sign of the woman.

But in fact, according to the News & Observer, “Police said they don’t know who made the 911 call to report the racial slurs.” So why does Jeralyn believe she knows something the police don’t?

(And why does it matter? Jeralyn doesn’t explain how this call - no matter who made it - is evidence that no rape took place.)

Jeralyn also quotes from “Inside Lacrosse,” which according to her has “the best coverage of the story”:

Of note are two phone calls received by the Durham Police that night, the first made by a woman who said she was driving by the house at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd., about an hour before the alleged rape took place, at which point, according to transcripts of the conversation, she was met with racial slurs.

About an hour before the alleged rape took place? That would be a blow to the accusation of rape, if true - because the police showed up a few minutes afterward the first 911 call, and found the house quiet and seemingly empty (although filled with the detritus of party). But according to this time line of events (which Jeralyn herself linked to), the next-door neighbor saw the women enter the house at about midnight and drive away between 12:45 and 1 a.m. - so if the rape occured, it occured in that time range. But the first 911 call was made at 12:53 a.m. So it’s extremely sloppy of the “best coverage of the story” to claim the call was made an hour before the rape.

That wasn’t Jeralyn’s point; I just commented on it because the bad fact-checking was so blatant. Jeralyn’s point, I think, is that the first 911 caller’s story had inconsistent details - was she walking or driving? How many men used racial epithets? But these inconsistencies don’t prove anything. First of all, there’s no evidence that the first 911 call is connected to the rape victim. Second, people who call 911 can’t fairly be expected to present a well-organized story, without any stumbles or misspeaking; on the contrary, from the recordings I’ve heard, 911 callers are often flustered and confused.

So how does a 911 caller, who may or may not have ever seen the (alleged) rape victim in her life, mixing up “walking” and “driving” prove that no rape happened that night? Jeralyn doesn’t say.

Then there’s this:

In an article filed by the Herald-Sun on March 29, Angel Altmon, the security guard who made a 911 call at 1:22 a.m. on March 14 [...] claimed the driver of the car said she was not at the party with the alleged victim. [...]

But in an article in the Duke Chronicle the following day, Kammie Michael, public information officer for the Durham Police Department, told the Chronicle the woman who drove the alleged victim to the grocery store was in fact the second dancer at the party.

Well, that certainly proves there was no rape!

Uh, wait. How does it prove anything? Explanation of relevance, Jeralyn?

Maybe Altmon misheard. Or maybe not all strippers are eager to tell total strangers what they do for a living. There are a lot of reasons this sort of very minor discrepancy can happen; you need more than “there were minor discrepancies in the 911 calls” to put together a plausible case for false rape accusation.

(You can read the transcripts of the two 911 calls here).

Jerelyn then quotes a forensic pathologist:

Usually, a physician can’t tell consensual from non-consensual. They can tell whether there’s been intercourse or not intercourse, but not whether it’s consensual because one can have bruises and certain injuries from consensual sex and one can have no injuries from non-consensual sex.

What Jerelyn doesn’t mention (and perhaps doesn’t know) is that the girl was beaten up. As the girl’s father told a TV news reporter:

The man described what his daughter looked like when she was released from a hospital. “Her face was all swollen up, her jaw. She couldn’t half walk. One of her legs was hurt.”

To me, that kind of injury doesn’t sound like the result of consensual sex for anyone but an extreme BDSMer. It sounds particularly unlikely for a stripper, who depends on her looks to feed herself and her children. (Maybe the father was lying - but it would be a very stupid lie, since the police would have taken photographs.)

Why do I think this story is true?

1) The victim’s story seems both plausible and similar to other pack-rape cases I’ve read about.

2) Both the medical exam and her father’s comments about her injuries are consistent with her story of being violently attacked and raped.

3) The police, when they searched the house where she claims she was raped, found her makeup bag and five of her torn-off fingernails. Again, consistent with her story.

4) Elements of her story are supported by the testimony of the next-door neighbor, Jason Bissey (see the timeline).

Do I think that’s absolute proof? No. It’s possible that further evidence could come along which would change the way things look entirely. (Always a possibility, with any crime.)

But at this moment, the evidence that a rape took place is pretty straightforward and convincing, whereas the evidence that a false accusation took place is… I’m not even sure what it is. “A couple of 911 calls were not perfectly consistent, therefore a false accusation has taken place!” seems to be the gist of it. That’s not convincing. That’s not anything.

* * *

P.S. Jeralyn links to this awful Findlaw article, which proposes that anyone who makes a rape accusation should be put on trial without an attorney or the chance to present a defense. Here’s my comments on that proposal from the last time Jeralyn linked it, in 2003.

This is an essay on racism in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I took it out of the archive, but it is also fitting to talk about the desire to ignore racism. I have been hearing the same argument in the Duke rape case, and any other cases where race is clearly an issue.

A few days back, I wrote about the differences between race and class. I think it is very appropriate to talk about this because many people are debating about why so many people were left in New Orleans for days without being rescued. The fact that the people impacted in the city of New Orleans were overwhelmingly Black, and mostly likely poor, has not been lost on the mainstream news media and many bloggers. But the debate that always emerges in these situations is the “Race vs. Class” debate. The key question here is: were people left because they were poor or because they were Black? However, as a sociologist who studies racism, I see this clearly for the false debate that it is. It doesn’t have to be one or the other, in reality it is both race and class that matter. But unfortunately, very few people want to talk about race; it is much easier for Americans to talk about class because of the political climate I mentioned in the link above.

What is somewhat depressing is how many commentators and bloggers have mentioned race only to follow it up with comments like…”there were poor Whites there too,” “now is not the time to talk about race; we need to rescue people.” (Could you imagine people after 9/11 saying now is not the time to talk about terrorism? We need to rescue people.) The reality is that this is a great time to talk about race; the effects of racism have never been clearer. The institutionalized racism that has denied the African Americans of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama educational and economic opportunities over the last few hundred years is one of the biggest reasons that so many African Americans were unable to get out. Sure they were poor, but it is racism that has lead to the disproportionate poverty among African Americans and other people of color.

Racism also played a factor in the media coverage and the perceptions of the media coverage in New Orleans. Numerous reports were made of looting and violence especially at the Civic Center and the Superdome. The TV anchors at the news desk kept repeating this, giving the impression that these areas were too violent to enter, but I noticed something very different from many of the reporters who actually made it into these areas. Tony Zumbado and Carl Quintanilla from NBC both were at the Civic Center and they reported that the people were not violent, as did several other reporters (including Fox News’ Shepard Smith). Even Harry Connick, Jr. entered the Civic Center and came out saying the people were desperate but not violent. This is not say that there were not acts of violence, but in spite of evidence to the contrary, people refused to believe that the vast majority of the people in New Orleans were not violent.

The violence stereotype of African Americans is very powerful. In the 2000 General Social Survey Americans were asked to rank African Americans on a scale of 1-7, with 7 being the least violent and 1 being the most violent. 47% of Americans (and there is little difference between Blacks and Whites) ranked Blacks 1-3, while only 15% say Blacks are not violent prone, and the other 37.% camped out in the politically correct middle category. Given the number of people who think Blacks are prone to violence, it is not surprising that people refused to believe the reporters actually at the Civic Center. I think this is much more about race than it is about class. Even though many think poor people are violent, the media and the public very explicitly racialized this violence. The media did so by showing countless pictures African Americans and describing them as looters before acknowledging that fact that they had no food, no water, no diapers, and no way to get money (What were they suppose to do let their children dehydrate until the ATM worked again?).

Numerous message boards, such as New York Craigslist were full of blatantly racist messages further promoting the racist angle on this. Here are a few quotes. In a post entitled “The Hurrican shows us the animal world of blacks” this poster said,

“The Hurricane struck the mostly white towns of Mississippi even worse than New Orleans. But there was no looting, there were no rapes. People helped each other. But in New Orleans, once again, we see the lowlife nigger world. Once again, fat black mammys on welfare clutching bastard kids (the future muggers of America) screaming that no one is doing for them.”

In another post,

“The more Kanye no talent, Al Sharpton, and the biggest racist of them all jesse jackson keep talking, the more we realize that those criminals are not worth saving. Apparently, welfare checks and government cheese arent enough. Now we have to relocate a bunch of boderline homeless each with a dozen kids. The superdome was like a maximum security prison with children for these thugs to rape and murder. I challenge anyone to show me a news clip or article that shows those animals banding together to try and help themselves.”

These are just 2 quotes out of hundreds I have seen on message boards echoing similar sentiments. If race didn’t matter and if this was just about class, people wouldn’t be saying these things.

This is not an argument that class doesn’t matter. I think this is a big factor, but we can’t ignore the racism this exposes. It is not impolite to discuss race in a time like this. It is unconscionable not to talk about race. Many of these people are poor because of the racism that continues to plague our society, and rather than being mad at the messengers, we should be mad at the message. Then we should do something about it.

This is an oldy but goody from the Rachel’s Tavern archive. I thought it was fitting to talk about the tendency for people to avoid talking about race in an honest and direct manner, especially since many people have admonished me not to talk about race in this case. What do you think about the general avoidance of frank discussions of race?