Hilzoy has written a great post responding to Ferraro’s latest, racist op-ed. Go check it out.

Hilzoy also points to this article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in Slate:

There is peculiar bit of jujitsu that white public figures have employed recently whenever they’re called to account for saying something stupid about black people. When the hard questions start flying, said figure deflects them by claiming that any critical interrogation is tantamount to calling them a racist, which they most assuredly are not.

[List of various racist statements by public figures, who then said it was just crazy to use the "R" word, snipped.]

It gives me no joy to report that Geraldine Ferraro has now applied to join the ranks of the obviously nonracist. I was 8 when she ran for vice president and vaguely aware that a party that would promote a woman for an executive office might be a party that would one day give a kid like me a fair shake. Thus I’ve retched while watching Ferraro beeline to any television studio that would have her, flaunting her rainbow bona fides, and claiming that she’s being attacked “because she’s white” and demonized as a racist. [...]

The bar for racism has been raised so high that one need be a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party to qualify. Had John McCain said that Hillary Clinton was only competitive in the presidential race because she was a woman, there’d be no dispute over whether the comment was sexist. And yet when the equivalent is said about a black person, it’s not only not racist, but any criticism of the statement is interpreted as an act of character assassination.

Aaargh!

Ta-Nehisi is one of my must-read bloggers, and the point about the raising of the bar for “racism” is right on target. It’s sucks that he detracted from his article with a single sentence of needless oppression olympics - especially since on his own blog, he’s frequently argued against such comparisons.

He continues:

In some measure, the narrowing of racism is an unfortunate relic of the civil rights movement, when activists got mileage out of dehumanizing racists and portraying them as ultra-violent Southern troglodytes. Whites may have been horrified by the fire hoses and police dogs turned on children, but they could rest easy knowing that neither they nor anyone they’d ever met would do such a thing. But most racism—indeed, the worst racism—is quaint and banal. There’s nothing sensationalistic about redlining or job discrimination.

This is something I’ve seen more often than I can count. People’s logic goes like this:

1) Racists are monsters in their hearts.

2) I know that in my heart, I’m not a monster.

3) Therefore, I can’t be racist.

4) How dare you call me a racist!

You can pretty much replace “racist” with “sexist” or “homophobe” or any sort of bigot, and the above “logic” will continue to be played out in thousands of conversations every day.

For example, I recently read this painful exchange between two great Canadian cartoonists, Dave Sim and Chester Brown. I say it was painful because Sim was at one time an important role model for me. Since then, he’s become a belligerent misogynist, who argues (among other things) that women are intellectually inferior to men.

Brown — a Toronto cartoonist and friend of Sim’s who has stood by Sim for years — argued, as nicely as he possibly could, that Sim’s views meet “the common usage definition” of misogyny. Sim responded:

In other words you think I’m the gender equivalent of a racist. This is what I’ve come to realize: that people genuinely believe that I’m the worst imaginable thing (literally: a non-person, a sub-human) in our society. That being the case the only honorable thing is to withdraw from society completely and limit my contact with society to necessities (my rep at Diamond, people I buy food from). Would you associate with anyone who thought you were a subhuman? [...]

RE: Visits to Toronto…Would you associate with anyone you thought were a subhuman?

Hard to imagine a clearer-cut case of “I can’t be a bigot, because I’m not a monster” logic.

[This guest post is written by David Schraub, reprinted with permission from The Debate Link.]

Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins is one of the most important sex discrimination cases in recent history. Ann Hopkins was denied partnership with the Price Waterhouse accounting firm. Testimony established that she was caught in a double-bind: while the general culture of PW demanded a sort of hyper-masculinity to succeed, when Hopkins attempted to emulate this norm, she was castigated for being insufficiently feminine. It was ruled that this bind constituted actionable sex discrimination. This situation exists in broader culture as well: society articulates the routes to success in male terms, but when women attempt to follow them they find that traditional gender norms are strictly held against them. While everyone is to some degree boxed in by social conventions, women have a far smaller box to play in than men do.

I was reminded of Price Waterhouse and the more general ailment it signifies when reading this editorial by Margaret M. Russell and Stephanie M. Wildman. They are answering the charge that women supporting Obama represents a sort of betrayal of the sisterhood, and point out some reason why women might legitimately prefer Obama over Clinton. One passage stuck out at me, though:

We value his explicit and repeated emphasis on the language of diplomacy to solve problems, including his own; conversely, Clinton’s threat to “totally obliterate” Iran, as well as her metaphors of Rocky Balboa and boxing gloves, leave us cold.

I find this distressing, because it seems clear to me that Clinton has been pressured into adopting these tropes specifically because she’s female. Certainly, the “man card” form of identity politics is nothing new in American elections, but there’s a reason that Clinton is not the one challenging it, just as there’s a reason Nixon was the one to go to China and not LBJ. I’d love to push political deliberation beyond the current “who can down more shots at the bar” standard, but Clinton can’t press the issue too much because she’s a woman — she’s ultimately the target that these patriarchal norms are designed to suppress. A male candidate might be able to effectively critique these norms from the inside, because his success would performatively indicate that men can still succeed under the new regime. A female critique directly threatens the male privilege these norms are supposed to protect, making backlash inevitable. Hence, women trying to succeed in a patriarchal world often times are forced to prove they are “one of the guys”, rather than demonstrate that things can go just as well even if she remains proudly a gal.

In such a world, criticizing Clinton for adapting the classical male tropes that we typically demand our politicians adhere to represents one of the key enforcement mechanisms of sexism. It’s like when Barack Obama was being indicted for not being enough of a “fighter” — he has to adopt the soaring, conciliatory posture that he does because if he shows the slightest bit of passion he immediately will be cast as the “angry Black man.” At that point, criticizing him for being not-John-Edwards enough totally misses how racism operates in public context. Likewise with Clinton. That patriarchal structure forces her into postures that are not to our preference is not a fair indictment of her — it blames the victim for the crimes of the perpetrator.

If you have an LJ, consider voting in the elections for the advisory board.

Livejournal is electing, via popular vote of LJ members, an LJ user to serve on their advisory board. Is this a significant position? Probably not. However, one of the leading candidates — jameth — is a troll whose recent bad behavior includes anti-semitic screeds, harrassing Ginmar, and adding to the harrassment of the Wiscon attendees. So, go vote against him.

Here, you can find an expanded and more informed version of what I just said.

In order to help your ant-jerk vote count for the most it can, p-zeitgeist recommends voting for the following advisor candidates: legomymalfoy, vichan, and rm.

Keep anti-semitism out of LJ. Or at least off its advisory board. Go vote against a jerk.

(Note: only vote once, and if you own multiple LJ accounts, only vote with one of them. Otherwise, your vote will be discounted.)

I’ll be attending MoCCA, at the Cartoonists With Attitude table, selling copies of “Hereville.” If you’re there, please come say hi! I attended MoCCA last year and was favorably impressed; it’s a very fun convention, much better (and more alternative-comics-friendly) than most comic book conventions.

MoCCA is in the Puck Building, 295 Lafayette Street in Soho. I’ll be at table A54, on the first floor.

Click on the cartoon to see a larger version.

You can also read this cartoon on the Dollars and Sense website, where they have an accompanying short article by Jason Son about how inflation tends to wipe out the gains of the minimum wage, because it’s not indexed to inflation. They also have more good articles on the minimum wage here and here. Please do click through — I think they feel paying me for my cartoons is more worthwhile if they get some traffic. :-)

This Crooked Timber post about the minimum wage by Kathy (who usually blogs at “The G Spot,” which is an excellent blog) pretty much explains the state of research on the effects of the minimum wage:

In response, Krueger and Card did another study that looked at the impact of that same minimum wage increase on employment in fast food establishments in New Jersey. To counter the previous criticisms from economists like Kevin Murphy who said that their data was problematic and that they’d got the timing wrong, this time they used a more reliable data source (employer data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) and looked at the data over a longer time period. And guess what? This new analysis confirmed their original findings: the increase in the minimum wage did not lead to a decrease in employment.

There are a number of other reliable scholarly studies on the minimum wage that report similar results—such as this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one, for example. There are also quite a few very good studies that show the opposite—that an increase in the minimum wage does indeed bring about a decrease in employment. A fair characterization of the literature is that the minimum wage’s impact on employment is ambiguous. But the fact that the findings are mixed is fairly compelling evidence that there must be something wrong with the standard perfect competition model of employment. [...]

Krueger and Card have written a paper that provides strong evidence that “specification searching and publication bias” have led to an overrepresentation of studies that find that the minimum wage has a statistically significant disemployment effect. The ideological character of much of the economics profession in the United States suggests that there are rewards for producing scholarship that confirms the idea that the minimum wage causes unemployment, and punishment for scholarship that finds otherwise.

It’s worth mentioning that even those peer-reviewed studies that find negative effects of the minimum wage, usually find very small effects.

From the mailbag:

Dear mods,

I really enjoy your blog, and while I’m not sure this is something any of your bloggers would be willing to post about/link to, I wanted to let you know about our project and see if you might have any suggestions as we wander around the Internet looking for pro-choice folks to get the word out.

I’m the Medicaid Organizer at the Emma Goldman Clinic in Iowa City, IA, and I’m working on a project to increase financial access to abortion in this state. Part of the project involves seeking out low-income women or anyone who had an abortion in Iowa and experienced financial difficulties in the process to share their stories. You can see our call for help at the web address below. If you would be willing to post the link, or have any advice about who might be, I’d appreciate it!

http://www.emmagoldman.com/news/medicaid.htm

Mandolin pointed this out to me: Rachel Moss, who attended Wiscon this weekend, posted a mean-spirited con report on the Something Awful forums. Moss’ con report consisted of photos of fat, female attendees, their faces covered by crude frowny-faces that Moss had drawn in, and text mocking the attendees.¹

Moss has since posted an apology on her livejournal, and convinced the Something Awful administrators to remove her post. Rumor has it that Wiscon is considering banning Moss from attending future Wiscons. (Wiscon is an exceptionally fat-friendly convention.)

Although Moss’ post is no longer on Something Awful, the first half of her post was posted without her permission on “The Something Awful Sycophant Squad” forums - don’t click that link if you’re easily triggered by fat mocking. It’s not just Moss’ original post that’s bad; the people at the SASS forum searched flckr for more photos of female Wiscon attendees to make fun of. It goes on for four pages (and growing?).

Three things I take away from this:

1) It’s all about keeping deviant bodies in line.

Although the primary focus of Moss’ post is anti-fat bigotry, she seamlessly transitions into anti-trans bigotry, writing about a trans speaker on a panel:

“He” is a non-op transgendered person…a person who looks like a woman, talks like a woman, likes men, but says that I AM A MALE AND YOU WILL REFER TO ME AS SUCH. It’d be easier if he/she just drew on a beard or something. Geez. Try harder. [...] The transgendered she-he says that she-he brightens her day by walking through the park, sticking her-his fingers into flowers to use to pollinate other flowers that she-he likes.

Then, later in the SASS thread, the SASS posters mock photos of a disabled Wiscon attendee.

Why do these things go so smoothly together, like peanut butter and chocolate in a Reese’s commercial? I think that anti-fat bigotry, anti-trans bigotry, and ablism overlap in that all three bigotries are a sort of body fascism. Those who have what society considers the “default body” — by being thin, by being ablebodied, or by being born with genitals that match one’s gender identity — are considered superior to those without the default body, and have the right to mock inferior people with non-default bodies.

And, of course, men also have the “default body,” and women do not. So it’s not surprising that the anti-fat, anti-trans, anti-disabled bigotry in the SASS thread is also shot through and through with misogyny.

2) The anti-fat, anti-trans fairy strikes!

Rachel Moss’ apology, while apparently heartfelt, reminds me a little bit of Michael Richards and the racism fairy. Moss writes:

I was upset about completely different things which were completely unrelated, and my expression of that was DISGUSTING.

I find Moss’ formulation odd, because she views her post as an expression of “completely different things which were completely unrelated.” I don’t doubt that she was upset about unrelated events, but what she posted was, in fact, an expression of sneering, ugly bigotry. No matter how heartfelt Moss’ apology, it isn’t worth much to me as a fat person, or as someone with trans friends, unless Moss acknowledges that what she did was anti-fat, anti-trans bigotry.

3) This kind of shit does real harm.

Speaking from my own experience,² Moss’ kind of anti-fat bigotry does real harm.

A while back, Sadly, No! posted a photo of a right-wing science fiction writer tabling at a con, making fun of how fat he is. Like that right-winger, I table at conventions, and that Sadly, No! thread - and thousands of similar lame clichéd jokes³ - have invaded my consciousness. Although I’d prefer not to, I know some people will sneer at me just for appearing in public. I feel I can’t wear casual t-shirts to cons (even though that’s what most of my friends wear), because fat people are so easily seen as “slobs.”⁴

This is an additional barrier that fat people have to overcome. Some fat people sail blithely through it, and damn I envy those fatties. For some fat people, it’s a problem that keeps them from appearing in public, leading them to give up social contacts and important career networking. Most, like me, are somewhere between. Every time someone mocks fat people - and mocking the fat people at science fiction and comic book conventions is commonplace - it’s another data point telling fat people yeah, maybe they should stay home; yeah, they don’t dare dress like their friends because horrid, unruly fat bodies must be covered; yeah, it’s true, they are deviants. And it’s wrong.

UPDATE: Since I wrote this post, Kate Moss has removed her apology and issued a statement of non-apology. She also released a “I’m not sorry” statement, but she’s now removed that, as well.

UPDATE 2: Tempest writes:

I was scrolling through the thread and looking at the pictures and, instead of being ashamed that I associate myself with such people (horrors!), I couldn’t help but think of how beautiful all those images are. They are pictures of beautiful women of all sizes smiling, having fun, loving where they are and what they’re doing. These are the poeple I go to WisCon to be around. And nothing those half-brained monkeys on that forum say can make me feel any different. You wanna call me out as a fat loser? You go right ahead. But it’s plainly evident that I not only have more class than you, I also have a better life and better friends. All the evidence I need to support that statement is my lack of time spent on the internet trolling for pictures of people I don’t know in order to make fun of them for arbitrary reasons.

MORE UPDATES!

Lesley at Fatshionista responds beautifully. Here’s a sample:

Take my picture, and post it online, in as many high-traffic spaces as you can muster. Identify me if you want. By name, by location, by employer. Surround that picture with vitriolic commentary about my body, my femininity or lack thereof, my perceived sexual habits, my self esteem. Laugh, and laugh, and laugh, that gut-rattling laughter of unmitigated cruelty, that laughter that comes from laughing at people who don’t know you’re laughing at them, who were going about their lives and made a target simply for not falling, unseen, unremarkably, into culturally acceptable slots - people who are targets simply for failing to be invisible. [...]

I am still fat, and I am still not sorry. And nothing you can say, nothing you can post, nothing you can do will change that. No matter how many times you try to humiliate me. No matter how much you want me to hate myself. Because it’s my fucking body. And I don’t owe you a damn thing.

And a wonderful response from “Purplefrog26,” who is one of the people whose picture Moss posted. It’s got a great photo of her, too.

And BadgerBag, whose photos appeared in the SASS thread, tries to find a way towards solidarity with Moss. Which I think is damned impressive of her to try — although Moss certainly isn’t making it easy.

1. Although Moss obscured faces, she didn’t white out the people’s name badges. (back)
2. Although I’m fairly certain that many disabled and trans folks have similar stories to tell. (back)
3. See: “The Simpsons,” Comic Book Guy. (back)
4. Actually, I am a slob. But that’s not because I’m fat. Woody Allen once said something like “It’s true I’m a Jew. And it’s true I hate myself. But the two aren’t related.” (back)

It’s obvious¹ that laws that allow only opposite-sex couples to marry are sex discrimination. If an employer refuses to hire Mary, but is willing to hire equally-qualified Bob, that’s sex discrimination; if a state refuses to marry Mary to Lucy, but is willing to marry Bob to Lucy, that is likewise sex discrimination.

I’ve been disappointed that this argument hasn’t had more traction in the debate over same-sex marraige, either in popular discussion or in the courts.

Andrew Koppelman writes:

It remains puzzling why the California Supreme Court, in its recent same-sex marriage decision, rejected the most formally powerful argument for its result: the argument that denying licenses to same-sex couples is sex discrimination. The weakness is made clear in this recent column by Steve Chapman, who writes: “while the California Constitution forbids discrimination on the basis of ‘sex, race, creed, color, or national or ethnic origin,’ it does not forbid discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The justices somehow found something in the document that the authors thought they omitted.” As I’ve explained earlier, the Court had to work very hard to reject the sex discrimination argument, using tired old arguments that had been used long ago to defend miscegenation laws: since both blacks and whites [both men and women] are equally burdened, there’s no discrimination. [...]

I don’t understand the resistance to the idea that the homosexuality taboo is about sexism. Homosexuality and deviation from gender norms (which, of course, are relentlessly hierarchical) are so tightly connected with each other in popular culture that each is normally and easily taken as a marker for the other. A “faggot” or a “dyke” is a person who fails to conform to normal gender norms; the term is routinely applied to people without regard to their sexual behavior.

The court’s reluctance is, I think, evidence that Jack Balkin is right about the dependence of the law on the wider culture in order to determine the crucial question of which arguments are within or outside the bounds of legitimate argumentation. The sex discrimination argument is unfamiliar to people. A few of us have made it in academic journals, but it hasn’t been trumpeted much in the popular culture, and so judges, who one might have expected to be influenced primarily by the soundness of legal argumentation as such, shy away from it. It’s not enough to craft good arguments. You need to be out there, working the media and making these claims repeatedly, thereby making them familiar.

1. Obvious to me, at any rate. (back)

The second printing of Hereville will be delivered on Thursday!

So just a reminder — you can order them here, either for $15 for an unsketched copy, or $30 for a copy with an original sketch on the title page. Here’s an example of one with a sketch:

You can also buy an electronic copy for $5.

Interesting,

To what extent does the US’s lack of density just indicate that we’ve got so much damned space?

It’s curious, as well, how very spread out Africa is in the statistics, compared to all the other areas.

Via Ezra, who writes “The problem for folks worried about global warming is that our energy intensive lifestyle had a very long time to evolve, but a more conservatory approach has to be implemented pretty quickly.”

In comments, there’s been discussion of Clinton’s recent citing of Bobby Kennedy’s death.

“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it.”

(Huffpost has the video).

I don’t think Clinton was implying that she should stay in the race in case Obama gets assassinated. I think she was saying that there’s nothing especially unusual about a democratic primary lasting until June, and it doesn’t prevent Democrats from winning the general election.

So it was a gaffe — an unusually tactless gaffe, one which Clinton has made more than once. (I’m sure Clinton supporters who said, after “bittergate,” that a bad gaffe shows a candidate is unready to be President will stick by that position this week.) But it wasn’t Clinton hoping that Obama will be shot.

Ta-Nehsi agrees that it was a gaffe, but adds:

This is why it’s foolish to compare racism and sexism. Hillary and some [of] her blind-ass feminist supporters have asserted that there has been no racism in this campaign, or none when compared to racism. But Barack Obama had to get Secret Service protection before any candidate in history. I wonder if that has to do with racism. Part of this is our fault as we’ve allowed the definition of racism to devolve into the spectacular–the Rodney King tape or a Don Imus rant.

But the ugliest aspects are the things you don’t see, or don’t care to see. There is no American tradition of assassination in the feminist community. The sort of violence that consistently hung over Civil Rights workers, and ultimately got Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, never hung over Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan. Again I think Hillary simply made a mistake. But I also think were she from my side of the tracks, a place where the assassination of black public figures has altered whole lives, she wouldn’t have said something that stupid. Ditto for Steinem, who if she’d ever spent any significant time around black folks, would know that there are forces which are just as restricting as gender. I still don’t think Clinton realizes what she said–she apologized to the Kennedy’s, but not to Obama. The blindness is strong in that one.

If you’re like me, your back may have reflexively gone up at the comment about “some blind-ass feminist supporters,” but frankly he’s right, as long as you remember that he said “some,” not “all.”

On Shakesville, one of my favorite blogs,¹ a few of the writers have been arguing that Clinton has faced much more bigotry than Obama, but now things are evening out. For instance, in comments Kate (who, I want to emphasize, I’m a total fanboy of) wrote:

…Now that everyone in the media has agreed Clinton has zero shot at the nomination, it’s safe to start running the anti-Obama crap they’ve been sitting on. They didn’t want to risk accidentally tanking him and letting the nom tip to her, but now that they’re sure he’s got it, they can let loose. (Never mind that he doesn’t actually have it yet.)

As I said at Shakesville, they haven’t been sitting on anti-Obama crap. The hundreds of times Farrakhan has been mentioned in the media is racist anti-Obama crap. The Wright story was racist anti-Obama crap. The “but how would he do among WHITE voters” concern trolling — with its implication both that Appalachian voters are all White voters, and the implication that black voters somehow don’t count (hence no need to worry about Clinton’s complete tanking among Black voters) is racist anti-Obama crap. The constant positioning of Obama as a scary, non-American “other,” from the flag pin “issue” to last week’s Washington Post editorial claiming that Obama lacks the “blood” and “heritage” to be President, is racist anti-Obama crap.

(And I didn’t even mention bowling.)

With all due respect, Kate, racism against Obama hasn’t just suddenly popped up in the last week or two. Like misogyny against Clinton, it’s been going on all along.

* * *

To be fair, I’ve occasionally seen Obama supporters claim that anti-Obama racism has been a bigger problem than anti-Clinton sexism — most famously when Reverend Wright said that Clinton has never been called “nigger,” to imply she hasn’t faced bigotry. (How often has Obama been called “cunt“?) But, at least in what I’ve read, Clinton supporters have made this claim much more often — and unfortunately, Clinton herself has made the same claim.

(See also — on the general topic, not at all directed at Kate — No More Mister Nice Blog’s “The fact that you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there.”)

1. And a blog that has consistently posted anti-racist commentary about the election. (back)

The Clinton campaign is, in effect, proposing that Michigan should have a two-stage voting system.

Stage one: Voters of all races are allowed to vote. But only Clinton’s Michigan supporters (who are overwhelmingly white) get to vote for their candidate. The candidate who the overwhelming majority of blacks support is not be on the ballot, but somehow Clinton supporters don’t think this makes election results illegitimate.

Fortunately, everyone — even Hilary Clinton — agrees that these votes will never count for anything. It’s a purely symbolic election. So no one bothers getting in a big fight over it.

Stage two: Remember when everyone agreed that the votes in stage one were symbolic, and wouldn’t count for anything? Those votes should now be used to determine how the majority of Michigan delegates vote, according to Clinton.

The remaining minority of delegates will be “uncommitted.” This means that both candidates get to compete for these delegates — even though 100% of the voters who voted for “uncommitted” chose to vote for no one at all rather than voting for Clinton.

How is it fair for Clinton to have two bites at the apple, while Obama gets only one? How is it fair for Clinton to get even a single “uncommitted” vote, when the one thing most clearly intended by an “uncommitted” vote was “not Hilary Clinton”?

More importantly, the effects of this are racist. About 25% of Michigan’s Democratic voters are Black — and about 70% of those voters chose to vote for “uncommitted.” In effect, the candidate preferred by white voters is given two bites; the candidate preferred by Black voters is given only one bite. In effect, Black votes in Michigan are worth less than white votes in Michigan.

And yet, that is the solution preferred by Jeralyn, and Zuzu, and the Clinton campaign. I’m not saying these folks have racist intentions; but lack of racist intentions doesn’t make a racist outcome acceptable.

The majority of “uncommitted” delegates should be assigned to Obama. This isn’t as good a system as a fair election — but a fair election is no longer an option. (It’s worth noting that Clinton was opposed to holding a new, fair election.) And it’s not as unfair as assigning 100% of committed delegates to Clinton is.