People Tell Me I Don't Look Good With Long Hair

So the other day I was googling my own name. For a specific reason, not just for the novelty of it (specifically, I was working on google-bombing my department website profile to be the first response to my name. It was for work!). But although I had an actual purpose in doing this, it's hard not to get sucked down the rabbit hole of what little bits of ephemera about me have ended up on the ol' interwebs (not to mention the fun of seeing who else has my less-than-conventional name out there in the world).

Clicking around, I eventually ended up on the image results for my name. Why I chose to click on a particular picture of me I have no recollection, but the one I did click on took me to this…uh…unique blog discussing some sort of metaphysical connection between hermaphrodites and…noses? I guess? It's pretty confusing and I didn't really bother reading most of it.

The whole thing is, again, quite odd, but the funniest part is when the author gets to a discussion of President Clinton, and specifically his daughter Chelsea. At that point, the author of this particular post feels it necessary to include a picture of Chelsea, so there's this photo and caption:

Eagle-eyed readers will note that does not appear to be Chelsea Clinton. Readers who know me personally will note that is actually me. I mean, sure, my hair was pretty long when this picture was taken, but do I really look that much like the daughter of our 42nd president? Now that I look at it, I guess maybe? Maybe a little bit?

Like so many things on the internet, this just raises so many questions for me. The biggest of which is: I don't really look that much like Chelsea Clinton do I? I mean, other than the hair, I feel like we don't look that much alike. 

No, actually the biggest question is how whomever wrote that blog got this picture. I've tried to reverse engineer the process by doing an image search for the young Clinton, and as far as I can see, no picture of me ever comes up. So whomever found this had to have been looking through some other source, and then found this picture of me and figured I look close enough to work. But that just raises so many more questions: where and how did they find this particular picture? And then how did they make the leap to thinking it was Chelsea Clinton despite it presumably not being identified as a picture of her, and also presumably being in a context that has nothing to do with the Clintons?

And seriously, I don't look like Chelsea Clinton, do I?

Racial Disparities Are Not Racial Profiling

Teaching criminology courses, and especially police courses, the topic of "racial profiling" comes up a lot. It often surprises my students to hear me, Johnny Long Hair Hippie Professor, say that racial profiling basically doesn't exist. Sure, there are unfortunately plenty of examples of law enforcement who clearly set out to harass people of color. But fortunately, those folks are very much in the minority (pun most definitely not intended).

The real problem is that police are human beings. And like all human beings, they are subject to the social forces that all people are. So in trying to understand why there are huge racial disparities in our criminal justice system (despite there not being huge disparities in who is committing crimes) does not come from a bunch of racist police, prosecutors, judges, etc. setting about to harass and imprison people of color. Rather, it comes from the fact that we live in a racist society, and becoming a criminal justice official doesn't magically make on immune to social forces.

Take this recent study that gave law firm partners identical copies of a memo that contained 22 objective errors in spelling, grammar, and fact. The only difference in the study was that some of the partners were told the memo was written by a white person and some were told the memo was written by a Black person.

Well, as anyone even remotely familiar with American society could have guessed, those who thought they were reviewing the writing of a Black person were far more likely to find more mistakes than those who thought they were reviewing the writing of a white person. On a  subjective scale of how well the partners thought the memo was written, the "Black" memo received an average rating (on a 5-point scale) of 3.2 while the "white" memo averaged 4.1 But more telling, amongst the objective errors (misspelled words and claims that were factually wrong), the reviewers found on average 2.9 mistakes in the "white" memos and 5.8 mistakes in the "Black" memos.

Again, these memos were the exact same thing. The only variable changed was whether the reviewer thought the memo was written by a white or Black person. Then even in things that are objectively either right or wrong, like spelling, the reviewers were much more likely to notice the mistakes in the "Black" memo. This is in line with many previous audit-style studies that have found things such as with identical resumes submitted for a job application, those with white-sounding names are significantly more likely to receive a call back/job offer than those with black-sounding names.

The point of such studies is to demonstrate that even in completely objective areas, the (perceived) race of the person being evaluated still makes a significant difference. These studies do a good job destroying the "well, if Black people didn't want [x bad thing happening], they shouldn't do [y thing]." But as the writing sample studies shows, Black people would have to be roughly twice as good with spelling as their white counterparts just to be viewed as equal.

So what does this have to do with racial profiling? Because we're all criminals. This is a point I make to my students constantly -- there are so many laws on the books at just the federal level alone that no one actually knows how many laws exist. The most conservative estimates put it at roughly 10,000 laws at the federal level alone. If you actually dig into all the laws on the books, you'll find that you're breaking multiple laws per day without probably even knowing it. For example, in nearly every state it is illegal to have anything hanging from the rear-view mirror of your car, or to have any stickers on any window of your car that were not issues by the state. And yet I know dozens of people who do exactly that.

This becomes a problem for equal enforcement -- if basically everyone is breaking the law at all times, how do you chose who to stop and who to let go? After all, police can neither practically nor politically detain every citizen every time they break the law, or we would all be in jail right now.

So instead, like all human beings, police use context clues to help them distinguish between who to investigate and who to ignore. When you combine that with a society that has an incredibly strong connection between dark skin and the suspicion of criminality, it's not surprising that so many officers would, again not intentionally, end up making people of color their main focus. And since we're all pretty much constantly breaking the law, they will more often than not find people of color doing something illegal, thus justifying their suspicions. Of course, were they to pay the same amount of attention to white citizens they would find the same amount of crime, but that counter-factual rarely enters into most people's thinking.

I really like studies like the writing study up top, because they demonstrate so forcefully how even in rather inconsequential areas of life race is an incredibly strong factor in how people are perceived. Of course in writing samples it may not be the biggest deal in the world, but when such disparities in perception move into the realm of criminal justice, hopefully I don't have to explain why they become much more significant. But more than anything else, they completely destroy the regressive, simplistic, and ultimately racist argument of "Well, if Black people don't want to be arrested so much, they should quite committing so much crime." Because as these studies (and dozens others like them) prove, the real formula there would be "Well, if Black people don't want to be arrested so much, they should quit being Black in public."

Crime, Memory, and Rape Culture

At last summer's meetings of the American Sociological Association I ended up at a talk discussing a methodological development for getting accurate data regarding people's movements (how or why I was there I don't recall, and I'm too lazy to dig up last year's program and remember who was doing the presenting). The relevant point is that this group of researchers, who if I remember correctly were interested in the daily routines and activities of young people, were trying to get around a classic problem of social research: people don't necessarily have particularly good recall about what has happened to them. It's simply a function of how memory works; there are scores of psychological and sociological studies on how the brain operates, how memory operates, how our brain often fills in missing details with what we think should have happened, etc.

So to get around this problem, they issued every participant in their study a GPS-enabled smart phone that they were to keep on themselves at all times. To show how much more effective and accurate this method was compared to self-reporting, the presenter showed several examples of the GPS-generated maps of people's movements against their self-reported activities.

It turns out the two were often quite different. I remember one example in particular in which someone's self report simply read that they came home from school, then a couple of hours later went to the museum with a friend, and then went home again. But the GPS map showed they ad actually stopped at a corner store on the way home, rode their bike around aimlessly for awhile, went to their friends house before going to the museum, and a few other little trips around the neighborhood.

The point of these examples were to demonstrate how faulty human memory is about most things we do and experience, even events that happened the previous day (think about it yourself: try to list everything you did yesterday. I'm pretty confident you'll find there are rather sizable chunks of time you can't fully account for). And it wasn't like these study participants were intentionally lying; not only was there no discernible motivation for lying about, say, riding your bike around, but when presented with the discrepancies, most participants immediately remembered the events they had forgotten and even apologized to the researchers for their forgetting.

It's important to remember these omissions happened during normal days in which nothing extraordinary happened to these folks. So what does this have to do with crime and rape culture? Well, I was reading a piece the other day on the on-going, mistake-filled investigation of sexual assault charges against Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston. For those of you not familiar, it appears by all accounts to be a classic case of multiple levels of university and public officials looking the other way when a famous athlete has been charged with rape (as the article linked to points out, at this point the only options are that the University and local PD had either intentionally covered this up/dragged their feet on the investigation OR they are so incompetent as to force the question of why any of them are still employed).

But Winston's defenders, who are quick to flood the comments section of any article on the subject, continually point to the fact that the victim's story has changed some from when it was first reported to the police. Granted, these people are pretty clearly folks who already don't believe Winston's accuser  and are working backwards to find socially acceptable reasons as to why (most such comments I've read go on to accuse the woman of being a gold-digger, which is not only patently offensive on it's own, but makes zero sense. In all my years studying the criminal justice system, I've never once heard of someone being ordered to pay financial restitution to a person they are convicted of sexually assaulting).

But as the research above (and a giant line of research before it) makes painfully clear is that human memory doesn't work like that. After all, if people have difficulty remembering what happened to them on a normal day, it's not too big of a stretch to say people who have just experienced a traumatic event in which they were possibly drugged would have an even harder time.

But a rational human being who doesn't start from the position that all women are jezebel whores who deserve whatever happens to them doesn't even need the piles and piles of empirical evidence proving human memory does not work like that. Because again, you can try it yourself: the next time you have a night out at the bar, wake yourself up at 4 a.m. and then immediately state every detail of the previous night. Unless you have a photographic memory, I guarantee you will not be able to account for every minute of the evening. And then I further guarantee that if you were to come back to that account a few days later, you will probably have had time to remember some other things that happened, or forget details of things you previously remembered. Now imagine reporting that story to an officer that openly lets you know they don't believe you and being fully aware that any small mistake you make will result in thousands of shit heads calling you a gold-digging whore online and in real life...

#CancelColbert, Offense, and Proper Reactions

Late last week, Stephen Colbert had a bit mocking Daniel Snyder, owner of the Washington professional football team (you know, the one with a racial slur for a team name). As you may have heard, Snyder has established the Original Americans Foundation, one of the most blatant PR moves in history, in which he's supplied some coats and the portion of the cost of one backhoe, to a few tribal groups in order to try to paper over the fact his team is named a racial slur (note: the charity is not named the Redskins Foundation, almost as if Snyder understands it's not a word one should be using).

In his patented way, Colbert mocked this by doing his own faux-racist schtick, claiming to start the Ching Chong Ding Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever (go watch the clip for why this makes sense in context -- in fact, the context is extremely, extremely important).

The bit was classic Colbert -- taking a ridiculous position and pushing it only slightly further to demonstrate how incredibly stupid that position is. Having watched the clip as it first aired, it could not have been more obvious the butt of the joke was Snyder and his hypocritical cashing in on a racist slur while trying to buy his way out of it. It was similarly obvious that Asian people were not being made fun of, but merely serving as a contrast to show how we wouldn't accept Snyder's racist shenanigans with any other ethnic group (why we accept it against natives is an entirely different post).

The problem came when the show's official twitter feed (not run by Colbert or anyone working on the show) tweeted out the name of the satirical foundation completely out of context. And out of context, it does seem pretty damn offensive. This led noted twitter activist Suey Park to call for the cancellation of the Colbert Report and made the hashtag #cancelcolbert trend.

And that, as this excellent commentary notes, is when the shit hit the fan. Especially as a number of people who had no idea of the context of the joke hopped on the bandwagon.

And here's where things get thorny for me. I'm very much of the school that holds it's condescending and basically an asshole move to tell someone they have no right to be offended by something (especially when you add the layer of race in, as a white dude I have no place telling a person of color something isn't racist and they should't be offended by it). This is both because a) emotions themselves are never "wrong," it's how you react to them, but more importantly 2) the thornier issues of status and privilege and all that.

Though while I'm never comfortable telling someone they should not be offended, I also have a problem with the blanket assumption that one's offense trumps all else (again, I'm typically on board with that position, just not as an absolute). Because this situation reminds me a great deal of a time I was googling around to see if there were any fun, short readings from popular media about the police subculture for a class I was teaching. There ended up being a link for a policeone message board, which are always humorous, so I decided to check it out (policeone is a news and quasi-social media site for law enforcement).

Anyway, someone had posted a message asking if anyone on there had good info on the police subculture for a continuing ed course they were taking. Another poster took extreme offense to this, writing something to the effect of "How dare you say the police are a subculture? We're not sub anything! Why don't you take your hatred of law enforcement elsewhere!"

So obviously that person was offended, but this starts to veer into the territory where they were empirically wrong to be offended. Because for the two of you out there who don't know the term, "subculture" is not a term that implies any judgement (positive or negative). It simply refers to a smaller culture that exists within a larger culture. Not only does the "sub" mean "smaller than" not "lesser than," but it's also a pretty widespread term that any American adult should have heard of and know. So while we may not be able to say that person was wrong to be offended, it's also pretty clear that person was in the wrong -- not only was no offensive thing actually written, but even a cursory google search for the meaning of the term would have let that person know what they were interpreting as offensive was actually a completely value-free term applied to widely disparate groups.

Where it gets tricky is that exact last point -- what responsibility does the offended party have? To bring it back to the Colbert example (which is admittedly much thornier than someone not knowing what the word subculture means), Park mentioned in her initial tweet that she was a fan of Colbert. Which means she has to be aware that his whole schtick is playing a clueless right-wing extremist in the mold of the Limbaughs and O'Reillys of the world. So seeing that (admittedly much more offensive out of context) tweet, she could have easily surmised that rather than Colbert suddenly turning unapologetically racist, maybe there was some context to what was going on (as if the "or whatever" at the end of it didn't indicate this was satire). And if you actually do watch the clip in context, it was so clear the butt of the joke is Snyder and the racism of the team name that they may as well have been running a disclaimer at the bottom of the screen reading "WARNING: this is satire. Obviously no one here believes these derogatory stereotypes of Asians. They are being deployed to illustrate how unacceptable racism against Natives is." But obviously Park (nor the many others making the hashtag trend) bothered to check in on that context. Context which completely changes the joke.

But this just brings us back to the beginning and how hard these things are to weigh -- is it me being a clueless white guy saying "no, person of color, you don't get to be offended by what the white guy said," or is it an example of someone almost willfully ignoring the context of what was said, taking offense at something clearly not doing what they claim it to be (that is, mocking Asian people)? Or can it be both?

To quote the authors of the commentary linked to above (who, like Park, both happen to be Americans of Korean descent), Park's reading of this "flattens out all meaning and pretends, in effect, that there is no ironic distance between Jonathan Swift's satire and actual cannibalism." I like that comparison quite a bit -- obviously Swift was not at all advocating the eating of Irish babies. But not being Irish myself, were I to happen upon an Irish person who found Swift incredibly offensive for suggesting such a ghastly act, would/could/should I point out it really seems they're really misinterpreting the story?

Because You Need This

From our friends at Slate, here is every hairstyle Prince has had from 1978 to 2013.

This, my friends, is why the internet exists.

Dog Whistle Racism Explained By An Insider

On the heels of writing about racial coding and dog whistle racism in America, I happened to read this article about Paul Ryan trying to backtrack from his assertion that all poverty stems from Black people being lazy (or something like that, it's kind of hard to follow his logic).

But more to the point, the piece uses a fantastic quote I'd been trying to dig up for a while from Alexander P. Lamis' book "The Two-Party South." At the time the book was published (1984) the quote was simply from an anonymous source identified as a Reagan confident, but is now known to be famed conservative operative Lee Atwater. It's especially important because often people who discuss racial coding are accused of reading too much into the words used, or projecting their own ideas on to the speaker.

But this quote from Atwater is not someone interpreting his words, or projecting words on to him, it's just him straight-up explaining exactly how Republicans have intentionally used racially coded language to make racist appeals to their white, Souther voting base while maintaining the plausible deniability of supposedly not talking about race.

But enough with the set up, here's Atwater in his own words:

"You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N—-r, n—-r, n—-r.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n—-r’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘N—-r, n—-r.'"

So no, when Ryan and his ilk talk of "inner city laziness" and the need to stop "fostering dependance on government assistance," social scientists are not "reading too much into it" when we note that these are obviously racist statements designed to rile up racist white voters. All we're doing is saying in public what Atwater was more than comfortable admitting behind closed doors...

I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means

I often joke that you can tell when a conservative is discussing the Middle East, because they suddenly turn into radical feminists. Sure, they hate abortion, pass restrictive legislation limiting access to birth control, underfund women's health initiatives, mock rape victims, and generally believe women to be sub-human baby incubators. But when discussion turns to anywhere the people are brown, all of a sudden we Have to Save the Women™!

Of course, they don't care about Middle Eastern women (or men or children), but it's become unacceptable to publicly say they're a worthless people and we can kill them and take over their nations anytime we like. So instead, suddenly these folks are really concerned about women's rights (but only over there).

A corollary to that joke is that anytime a conservative invokes Freedom of Speech™, it is a very safe bet some prominent conservative has just been fired for saying something incredibly racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.

Which brings me to this picture currently floating around the interwebs:

It's a picture of a bunch of supposed historical re-enactors, dressed up like Nazis, having a dinner party in a private room of Minneapolis restaurant Gasthof zur Gemutlichkeit, complete with Nazi banners and other regalia strewn about (on MLK day, for an added bonus).

I'm not even going to touch how idiotic that is, as any functioning human adult can immediately understand why this is a terrible idea. Rather, I want to focus on the comments of the owner of the restaurant (which have been echoed by several of the Nazis in the photo) aimed at the people criticizing him for hosting the event:

"We live in a free country...but from the comments I see, a lot of people they don’t see what freedom is."

Except…no. The constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech specifically prevents the government (or more specifically, anyone acting on behalf of the government) to censor one's speech or activities without compelling reason. Since not a single one of the people in this photo, in the group, or employed by the restaurant has been subject to any government action as a result of this, it means their freedoms are perfectly intact.

So repeat it with me kids: freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.

So while no one has the right to prevent you from being the kind of fucking moron who thinks dressing up and playing Nazi is a fun thing to do, everyone has the complete right to tell you you're a fucking jackass for doing so. That's not them imposing limits on your freedom of speech, that's them exercising their freedom of speech.

A violation of your free speech would be if the police had prevented the dinner in the first place, or arrested them all afterward. And if that happened, as much as I loathe these people, I'd be first in line to defend them. But that didn't happen; they are all currently walking about freely with no chance of criminal conviction stemming from this. That is why I'm also happy to be right in line to tell them they are horrible people who need to seriously re-evaluate their life choices.

But whether it be dressing up like Nazis, or telling a national publication that Black people were happier under segregation and gay people are an abomination, conservatives seem to believe that any criticism of their words or actions is automatically illegal censorship (quite ironic given their love for censorship in every other arena, but that's another topic for another day). Apparently, to them, freedom of speech means everyone not only has to let you speak, they have to listen to you speak, and have to then agree with whatever you said.

But that's not how it works. You've got your freedom of speech to dress up like the people who slaughtered at least 6 million human beings and have a grand ol' time being a giant asshole. But everyone else has the freedom to tell you you're a giant asshole.

I'll let the last word go to Dr. Degrasse Tyson. While it's on a different subject, the general principle remains the same:

Spring Break! Whooo!

Don't forget to pound those shots and find a tasteful font for your wedding invites

)

How Racism Works in the 21st Century

A problem in discussing racism (or most any social problem) is that most people's understanding of what it is and how it works is woefully outdated. For instance, I wrote awhile back on this very blog about the incredibly racist reaction to Adrian Peterson finding out he had a son he didn't know about when the child was tragically murdered. Someone (my favorite stalker?) commented that since race was never directly mentioned in the the discussion of AP, I was obviously inventing what I wanted to see. This is actually a pretty common criticism from people who understand nothing about how race works, somewhat like I imagine it must have been trying to convince people the earth rotated around the sun and not the other way around (after all, I see the sun come up every morning and go down every night!!! This is just another example of librul, PC fascists trying to jam their heliocentric world view down our God-fearing throats!).

But as always, it doesn't take long for the next perfect example of this process to come along. You may have already heard about Minnesota State House of Representatives member Pat Garofalo (Rep) tweeting: "Let's be honest, 70% of teams in NBA could fold tomorrow + nobody would notice a difference w/ possible exception of increase in street crime" (not included, the implied hashtags of #Imnotaracisbut and #Ihaveblackfriends).

This is a classic example of what we social scientists call "racially coded" language (or in layman's terms, dog whistle politics). Such coded language is used because of the strides we have made as a society in addressing racism; it's no longer at all acceptable publicly to say that Black people commit all crime (at least not in most places). But there's clearly a lot of people who still believe that (factually inaccurate as it may be), but know they can't say that. So they have to find a way to say it to each to each other, but in a way with plausible deniability built in. So they use codes they understand but which on their face are not controversial or racist.

"States rights" is a great example of this. In an entirely apocryphal justification for the civil war (invented decades after the actual war was fought), those defending slavery have invented this alternate explanation for why the Confederacy was right to do what they did. Because again, while plenty of people still clearly don't view Black Americans as anywhere near their equals, they know that publicly praising slavery is a faux pas. But saying they believe the federal government has too much power and they believe states should be able to set their own laws isn't racist, it's just a preference in governance. Never mind this hatred for federal intervention stems from the federal government intervening to say they can't own other human beings, that's just a coincidence. Just like the Confederacy didn't secede because of slavery (though someone should tell that to the Confederates themselves, given how often they spoke about defending the institution of slavery); no, apparently the Confederacy seceded and engaged in the bloodiest war in our nation's history because they were concerned about the proper balance of power between intra-governmental bodies. Because if there's one thing that inspires millions of people to revolt, it's matters of bureaucratic jurisdiction!

So how does this relate to an idiot state Congressman's racist tweet? Well, as Kyle Wagner points out over at Regressing, the tweet doesn't make sense if you take it at it's supposedly non-racist face. Wagner goes into a lot more detail in the article, but his half-assed graph here does the best job telling the story while giving that idiotic argument as much respect as it deserves:

So as you can see, NBA players actually commit crime at a much lower level than the A) the general public, B) the general public of Minnesota (where Garofalo unfortunately serves), and C) comparable men in their age group. In fact, there were only a single-digit number of arrests of NBA players last year. Now, of course, arrest data is far from a perfect measure of criminal activity, but it's the only one we've got here. Besides, the number of crimes committed by NBA players is so low, that even if you assume they're somehow getting away with 2 or 3 times as many crimes, they're still not committing much crime compared to the general public, and definitely not nearly as much crime as other men their age.

So again, the tweet makes no sense viewed from reality. But it makes a ton of sense when viewed racially: the NBA is by far the "blackest" sports league in America (the only majority African-American sport). What Rep. Garofalo meant was not that NBA players commit a lot of crime (because they empirically don't), but that black people commit a lot of crime (even though, empirically-speaking, they don't either). So instead of saying "black people are responsible for most crimes" (which would be obviously racist), he says "NBA players commit the most crime" (which he can then try to explain away as not racist with an explanation that makes even less sense than the tweet). In fact, even his walking it back shows the racism underlying the tweet -- when contacted about how he was wrong re: the arrest rates, Garofalo claimed it was somehow about the NBA having the most lax pro sports policy toward marijuana (which again, it turns out, is factually incorrect).

This is why "seeing" the racism in this tweet and other such communications is not "reading too much into it," because there's no other way to read it. If you take it at face value, it means this state rep does not have the intellectual capacities of a child. So either he is monumentally stupid, or as Occam's razor would have it, he knew exactly what he was saying.

Or to put it in a way Rep. Garofalo can understand, he seems like he's lost a lot of weight lately. I just read that people who get addicted to meth and turn to prostitution to fund their drug habits tend to lose a lot of weight quickly. But I said nothing about Rep. Garofalo being a meth-addicted prostitute...

Busy Week

No time to blog what with all the work I need to get done. But I'm still here for you -- check out this sweet virtual theramin.

There, I've just filled your entire afternoon...

Monday's Good News: Keep Rocking Out

I've had ear problems more-or-less since birth, but they were undoubtedly greatly exacerbated by spending most of college in dingy garages listening to hardcore bands. While amazingly never perishing in a fire in a wooden structure with way too many extension cords being used and far too many people inside a place with only one exit that opened inward, I did manage to shred my eardrums pretty well.

Despite being fully aware that such repeated exposure to loud noises in a confined space is basically begging for non-reversible hearing damage, I didn't care due to a combination of the complete lack of caring about the future particular to the college-aged and of course the fact that hardcore garage shows are super cool and I was far from super cool, so I certainly wasn't going to stop doing the one cool thing I could do.

And although I've long since accepted the fact that I'll be functionally deaf by 50, it turns out all hope may not be lost, as a team of neuroscientists have successfully reversed hearing loss in rats. The short version is that loud noises damage the sensory hair cells of the inner ear, which are among the bodily maladies our sacks of meat and blood can't fix on their own. But through suppressing a specific protein, this team has been able to allow stem cells to regenerate said sensory hairs.

Of course, any breakthrough in rats is a long way away from an application fit for humans, but it's a hell of a first step. But hey, human application can't be more than a decade or so away, right? Which is good, because I've recently discovered BABYMETAL and have been listening to their delightfully absurd mix of J-Pop and sludgy riff-metal at top volume for days…

When The Rules Suck So Bad, Maybe It's Time To Stop Playing the Game (Or "A Call To Arms: Why You Don't Need To Be Elite")

Recently a lot of my academic friends have been posting this piece from the Jacobin about the increasing pressures placed on academics (like everyone else) to produce more and more work for no more pay (essentially…there's obviously a lot more covered int he article). It has a significant number of echoes to the recent popular piece about how the mantra of "do what you love" devalues work and hurts workers. And of course, these are just two recent examples of an opinion that's being articulated in a large number of venues, but these two specifically speak at great length about the pressures faced by young faculty, of which I am one, so I've been thinking about this issue a lot. And while I agree with the general premise (like all workers, academics are being squeezed for more labor without being compensated for it) something about these articles doesn't sit right with me, and I think I've finally figured out why.

The Jacobin piece especially speaks of the incessant demands placed on academics to promote themselves, making their work and themselves into a "brand" they must relentlessly sell (or in the words of the article, "become an entrepreneur of themselves").  It's true that these pressures exists and that young academics are feeling them, but…

But the problem I have with this type of analysis (as much as I, again, generally agree with the premises) is that these pressures exist if you want a position at a top university. I'd like to humbly suggest that, well, that's a dumb thing to want. Ok, that's a bit too harsh -- people can want whatever they want and work toward it. But when people pen long missives about the incredibly bullshit they have to do to secure such a job, I can't help but ask the question they don't seem to consider: why do you want a job that makes you jump through so many hoops? Why not, you know, just not play those stupid games?

One reason is because we as academics are conditioned to believe those top positions are the only ones worth wanting. Not to mention the idea that what you're supposed to want in life is a good job, not say, happiness, fulfillment, or any number of non-work related things. I know the author of the Jacobin piece linked to above (not well -- we attended the same grad program, but were several years apart), which I point out only because I understand the message she's receiving, as it's the same one I got: pour all of yourself into your research, think about your research at all times, and be constantly networking and promoting your research to everyone you meet. Furthermore, while you might collaborate on research, for the most part you are to live an atomistic life -- do what furthers your career and research agenda, and be wary of helping others out, as that will be time not spent on your all important research. After all, your job should be your entire life, they not so subtly imply, so if you're not at all times pouring everything into your job, then you're not living your life to the fullest extent.

But another factor to consider is where this message is coming from -- faculty who graduated from the very top programs in our field and now work at a near-top department. In other words, the overachievers of our field; the department we both attended has several "name" scholars (as in, the ones everyone in the field knows) and more than a few rising stars who will likely get to that point. And they're trying to do what all academics do; that is, completely reproduce themselves in their students. So they pass along the same ideology they received, and which has clearly served them well. But…

But that's not the only way to do things. I completely loved my mentors and other faculty in my grad program, but it didn't take me very long to realize I did not want their lives. I saw many faculty who worked 60-80 hour weeks, who had very little time for their families, outside interests, or basically anything else. Which is a fine way to live if that's what you're in to, but it's not for me. They had all internalized the branding message, too, and were all pretty great at networking; I'd dutifully follow them around at conferences and try to schmooze at their level, but it always made me feel weird and more than a little gross.

So basically, I spent most of my grad career realizing all of the messages I was receiving (as the authors of the pieces linked above were also clearly receiving) were not for me. I've never been one to be "on" at all times with my work, and I loathe networking and glad-handing at conferences to a degree I can't really even put into words. I've also my entire life viewed work as a means to an end, not an end in itself. In other words, even in a field like academia which is supposed to be so wonderful and personally fulfilling, I work so that I have the resources to do the things I actually want to do (that is, after all, why they have to pay us to show up). So I share the disdain these authors have for the increasing pressure to commodify ourselves.

So I don't do that.

I know there are few things more annoying than simply dismissing complex social situations with the wave of a hand like that, but I do so just to point out that it's quite possible. I've never done anything resembling networking and my online presence is limited to the faculty profile I wrote a year ago and never updated. When in grad school, I didn't tweet, my blog had absolutely nothing to do with my work, and I had published exactly one paper in a very low-tier journal by the time I was applying for jobs.

And yet I got a job. Not an elite job, not the kind that will make people at prominent media outlets impressed by my credentials (there's a reason this is being published on a tiny blog no one reads and not a think piece being shared around social media), and definitely not the kind of job someone who graduated from a program like mine is supposed to be happy with. But it is a job in which I'm happy, have plenty of time to do the research I want, have plenty of time to be not working, and am surrounded by colleagues who don't care that I don't have a great "brand" nor that I'm not constantly networking said (nonexistent) brand. And I did it without playing any of these games.

Though, of course, full disclosure: I am a white man in a culture that values white men over all others. I realize it's not this simple for everyone. But the point is not that there's suddenly a cornucopia of job opportunities if you don't jump through all these absurd hoops, but instead that the jobs requiring these ridiculous expenditures of effort and energy are pretty much only the top jobs. If you want to work at Berkley or Madison, then yeah, you best be branding yourself, and have a flashy website, and be pumping out research like there's no tomorrow. But to repeat myself, why do you want that? Why not instead go for jobs at regional state schools or even (gasp! the horror!) community colleges? Because I can guarantee that these institutions don't care about your brand (or at least the vast majority don't).

Obviously the neo-liberal pressures from all sides faced by universities require a fight on multiple levels. But one of the simplest and most within grasp is to stop participating in these ridiculous games ourselves. The crazy beauty of academia is that we're one of the very few professions which for the most part sets its own standards; what is required to be considered a good sociologist is generally established by sociologists, what makes a good physicist is set by physicists, etc. As such, we collectively control the means to make this process stop (or at least dampen it to a considerable degree).

Granted, we have little control over university policies and the like, but it's not like university administrators were ever going to listen to us anyway. What we do have, though, is what is always available to workers -- solidarity.

Because for the most part, the ridiculous hoops these articles point out that academics have to leap through are created, maintained, and advanced by academics. It's not university presidents that are making hiring decisions, it's academics (yes, in the very narrow sense university admins have final say on such things, but every academic knows the actual decision is made in the department by the scholars who will be the colleague of whomever is hired). So the problems of academics in getting jobs are not really like pretty much any other field -- it's not bosses who do not do our jobs (and therefore can easily insulate themselves from understanding the demands and pressures of it) hiring new academics, it's academics hiring new academics.

In other words, we're doing this to ourselves. While the pressures of fewer tenure lines and less funding and all that are clearly imposed from the outside, the result of requiring increasing numbers of publications, vast professional networks, self-branding and the like are far from inevitable outcomes. And not only are they not inevitable, these are burdens academics have placed on themselves.

No matter how many articles I see on this subject, I've yet to see one that acknowledges our own role in this, and none have even hinted at the possibility that we might, you know, do something about it. That bad news is that it will be difficult to do, but the good news is that it's rather simple to start: we, as academics, need to stop expecting this from people. And us young academics have to stop playing this game. Instead of turning on each other like crabs in a barrel and fighting to increase our "brands" and "visibility" enough to beat out the next person for the best job, we should be acting together to demand adequate university funding, to demand reasonable workloads and support, to demand reasonable class sizes, etc.

But we don't do that. Instead we write missives about how much this sucks, but just keep on participating. So…let's stop that. I wish I could come up with a more profound or erudite way to put it, but that's pretty much the point I'm getting at. We didn't create these conditions, but we did create our response to them. And our current response sucks, as we pretty much all agree. And while the work to fix it is long and complex, the first step seems pretty simple: let's just quit playing these stupid games.

Saying Goodbye to the Dome

It's weird to feel nostalgia at the demolition of a building. I mean, it's not like the building and I were ever friends, nor can I say I spent particularly that much time there, relatively speaking. But seeing this video of the Dome collapsing (insert Vikings joke here) made me feel all sorts of complex emotions:


No word on whether Gary Anderson personally detonated the collapse

To dispense with the obvious: the dome was a terrible venue. Spartan barely begins to describe it, watching a baseball game often required contorting yourself into all sorts of odd positions since the seats were designed to watch a football field, not baseball. It was cramped, the concessions sucked, and it was pretty much an eye sore.

But it was a lovable eyesore. In fact, I'd argue there are few things more quintesentially Minnesotan -- sure, it was an eyesore designed far more for practicality than any thought of comfort or aesthetics, but that describes most of Minnesota.

It was also a building that was almost Soviet, in both appearance and function. Who needs fancy architecture when we can just build a big oval out of cinder block? Not to mention it has to be by far the most adaptable, multi-use stadium ever used in professional sports. At one point in time, it housed a mind-boggling three (!) separate professional franchises, as well as multiple college teams, something probably only achievable in a place like Minnesota that places much more of a premium on function over form (and something which will never happen again).

It also housed some spectacular moments. The '91 World Series (arguably the greatest series of all time, inarguably one of the top 5), the soul-crushing 98 NFC championship, the return of pro basketball to Minnesota. It also retains the title as the only building to house the World Series, Super Bowl, and NCAA Final Four in one year.

But for me, as I imagine most people who have any memory of the place, it's less about those moments than about the million small moments that bring people to love sports in the first place. Growing up in the middle of nowhere, heading to Minneapolis to see the Twins was always a highlight of summer. Coming up the highway and seeing the giant multicolored apartment complexes across the street, wandering through Dome Plus souvenirs and free baseball museum, being part of thousands of people attempting to blow the roof off of the homer dome…these are the kinds of things that will stick with me pretty much forever.

Things progress as they always do, and now that the Vikings have their official exodus planned, all teams that once called the Dome home now officially have shiny new stadiums (or at least a new stadium in the works) and the Dome should be completely gone by the time summer rolls around. And sure, all of these new stadiums are significantly better by pretty much every objective measure, but I hardly think I'm alone in feeling a twinge of sadness at seeing the giant grey bowl with its teflon roof and garbage bag for a right field fence finally crumbling into nothingness...

Thursday Racism Round Up

As we enter the waning days of Black history month, it's somehow inexplicably necessary to point out racism still very much exists. Apparently extensive historical research has turned up the fact that MLK didn't magically end all racial prejudice which, I know, is pretty damn shocking.

As Louis CK points out far more eloquently than I (or pretty much anyone else alive) could, even educated white people often downplay the historical horrors of American slavery and especially its impact on contemporary America. One of the best points he makes in that bit is that slavery was, historically speaking, not that long ago (and as he astutely follows up that observation, it takes a little while to get past major historical crimes).

How not long ago? Again, as Louis points out, it's about two 70 year old people living back to back. A long time to you or I, but historically speaking, just a little blip. In fact, such a small blip that we still have a significant number of artifacts and records from the era. Sometimes even incredibly horrifying artifacts.

The article linked to in the previous sentence is about a Texas man, Shun Mullins, whose mother died after fire fighters on the scene refused to give her CPR because she was Black (and I guess they thought they'd catch Blackness if they touched her?). So doing what any normal human being would do, he went to file a complaint about the trained emergency responders who watched his mother die rather than help her (which, to clarify, would be the exact purpose of their job -- helping people in emergency situations).

But instead of receiving his complaint with embarrassment and a promise to look into as any normal human being would, the state investigator, William Sewell, instead told Mullins a story about how he owns a knife-sharpening crop made from the skin of a Black man his grandfather had lynched.

Let me just re-state that really quickly: the state investigator owns a strop made of the skin of a man who was lynched, a gory trophy passed down to him by his grand father. For even closer (historically speaking) than slavery is a time in which it was still entirely legal to murder someone in cold blood, tear their flesh from their dead body, turn that human flesh into a household tool, and then pass down the household tool made of the human flesh of a person you murdered as if it's a fucking family heirloom.

And not only is Sewell not, say, mortified of this, he instead thought it to be a peachy-keen story to bring up to a man whose mother just died because of racist inaction.

And again, because it bears some repetition: the object in question is made from the human flesh of a murder victim. But, don't worry, Sewell is already on the media beat apologizing. Whoops! Just kidding! He's actually claiming to be the victim of the whole ordeal because he was made to feel like maybe he shouldn't be proud of owning the flesh of a human being who was murdered.

Oh, and while all of this was going down, a Florida man murdered an unarmed Black teenager and was not convicted of murder. But hey, at least he didn't then rip the flesh from the dead kid's body and keep it as a family heirloom. This is surely a sign of progress...

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook

Welcome To My New Big Boy Blog

As you may have noticed, this space has been quiet for some time now. I assume your world came screeching to a halt upon not seeing my posts for so long, and I wanted to let you all know that you may resume your lives as normal.

The pause started because I was incredibly busy, but as it dragged on, I pondered the future of the blog and whether I should keep it going or just give up the ghost. On the one hand, I love the outlet for free-writing longer pieces I would otherwise just think about when in the shower or whatever. And I've been keeping this blog running somewhat steadily for nigh unto 10 years now. On the other hand, it's some work to keep up and it doesn't serve much of a purpose other than to record my scattered and meaningless thoughts. On the mystical third hand only true believers can see, I'm now in a grown adult job and may be judged both personally and (much more important) professionally by colleagues who may read this.

In the end, I've decided to keep it going, but with a bit more focus and in a style that won't embarrass me when a journal editor googles my name.

So what you're seeing now is the new redesign: I've cleaned out some of the older posts that were meaningless diatribes about dating and other minute of my life -- fun for me to go back to and read, assumedly incredibly meaningless and boring to anyone who is not me.  Also, I changed the name. I never meant for the previous moniker to be the actual name, it was an inside joke with an improv troupe I was part of when I began the blog and then I was too lazy to change it. But a big boy blog deserves a name that at least wouldn't make me cringe should I be speaking about it to other adults.

So...here it is. I'll be back to posting 3-4 times a week, so stop by regularly. Or don't.