A Little Musing about Race & Class

This post on pink science equipment for girls at Love Isn't Enough (formerly the Anti-Racist Parents blog) touches on the intersection of race and class, and the way that racial segregation is at least partly class-based segregation as well. It reminds me that I was thinking the other day about a book I read a few months ago, Paula Penn-Nasbrit's book Morning by Morning: How we Homeschooled Our African-American Sons to the Ivy League.

Penn-Nasbrit's book was fascinating to me because her family suffers from racism but has a great deal of class privilege. She and her husband both attended Ivy League schools after secondary education at elite prep schools; she comes from at least three generations of professors, lawyers, and doctors--one of her uncles was one of the lawyers who argued Brown v. The Board of Education before the Supreme Court. So when she talks about homeschooling her kids into Ivy League schools, she's not talking about someone like me doing that, someone who went to a highly-ranked state college but was only the second in the family to earn a bachelor's degree (dad was the first) and who would be in many ways culturally out of place at an Ivy League school. She and her husband grew up and lived in that environment; she was wanting to find places for her children in an educational culture she was already very familiar with.

On the other hand, it was primarily issues of racism at the private prep school her kids were attending that led her and her husband to decide to homeschool. The local public schools were not a good place for black children, and when they decided they could no longer stay with the private school, they didn't see other options.

Examples of the kinds of things they experienced included her being called on the rug for organizing a Back-to-School picnic for African-American families at the school; problems with her sons being blamed for problems they didn't create, or being held to higher standards of behavior than white students; and an administrator asking her what she was doing to provide "male role models" for her sons. She was taken aback; what did he mean? Turns out he assumed, because she was black, that she was a single mother.

She was concerned about how these assumptions and expectations would damage her boys and hold them back. So she decided to homeschool.

I wished Penn-Nasbrit had talked more about the complex intersection of class and race in her family's life; she didn't really tackle it in depth at all, and seemed in some ways as oblivious to her class privilege as she was sensitive to the careless racism of white people at the school. On the other hand, though, she describes her family's commitment, over several generations, to not just good education but the best education as a direct response to American racism, a deliberate decision made somewhere along the line not to settle for less than the very best.

Penn-Nasbrit's book was hard for me to read because as a parent and a homeschooler my values, my goals for my kids, and my expectations, are so different from hers--I would never push my kids academically, against their will, as hard as she did, and it was hard to read sometimes about the steps she took to get them to comply with her educational plan. At the same time, I think my willingness to be on the very relaxed end of the homeschooling continuum is partly an expression of how confident I feel of my place in middle-class culture--as was my own approach to college, which was very intellectual and liberal-education focused.

My dad, on the other hand, tends to see college as a really good vocational school where you can educate yourself into a good job that won't break your back and ruin your health, and my mom saw his college education as a means to being able to buy her kids shoes that fit and get their teeth fixed. Their very pragmatic approach to college reflects their own upbringings, and my dad's early adult years working as an auto mechanic and seeing the toll that work took on men's bodies as they aged.

So, even as I found Penn-Nasbrit's values and approach somewhat distasteful, I thought I understood something about why she was making the choices she did. If I were raising black boys, I think the insecurity of their position in American culture would be on my mind too--especially if I'd already seen them treated as if they were likely to explode into misbehavior if not carefully watched and tightly regulated.

Penn-Nasbrit also gave me a gift in one of those small, unexpected passages that opens things up. She was called to the school to talk about a problem with two of her sons, who were (I think) two years apart in age. It seems that the two of them were seeking each other out during recess, and when one was sent to the principal's office, the other went with him. She was told that her boys needed to seek friends outside their own family.

"Nonsense," she replied. "In a Black family, there is no such thing as siblings who are too close."

This was a fascinating tidbit for me. I have at times fretted over how close Eric and Carl are, even as I celebrate it, because I have this nagging notion that it is more "healthy" to socialize outside the family. I don't mean to suggest that I think the kids need no outside friends, but her matter-of-fact statement in favor of siblings being friends to each other reminded me of how culturally-bound my assumptions still are.

But a Bonnet Would Cover Up My Shaved Head

Got up this morning, played a little Animal Crossing in bed with the boys, and then made up my daunting to-do list for today and tomorrow. Extra-daunting because what I have really been wanting since I got back from my trip a week and a half ago is a day off, and there's no prospect of one until...well, until Yehva is a teenager, really. But in the current-world sense of "day off," until at the very earliest March 13. March 20 if David and I follow through on a casual plan to take the kids to Brickworld Indy.

So, having made the daunting list, I have decided to ignore it for the moment and write a blog post that has been taking shape in my mind for a few days.

I was poking around the links at QuakerQuaker the other day, and found my way to Quaker Jane's blog. She is a Quaker who wears plain dress, and I've read her before, but looking through her blog again reminded me of my own thinking about plain dress over the years.

I have been drawn to plain dress from time to time in the years I've been a Quaker. I know several men who wear, or have worn, plain dress. Not in my local meeting, but through my yearly meeting or from bumping into each other at FGC Gathering or FLGBTQC events. I don't personally know any women who wear plain dress.

Religious witness is one reason I've been attracted to the idea--being more visible in the world as a Quaker. I have really struggled over the years about how be present and visible as an individual Quaker with a religious conviction. That Quakers could and should be more visible in the world is not something I question much; I was once in a college classroom where the professor told the class that there were no more Quakers. Clearly our public relations arm has fallen down on the job.

I have also been drawn to plain dress as a clear statement that I have stepped outside mainstream fashion. Quaker Jane says--and I can't re-find the quote this morning but will slot it in if I come across it later--that when she wears plain dress to, say, her husband's business functions, people seem to understand that she is not "underdressed," but that she has stepped outside the whole system, and they seem to accept that.

In some sense, I do dress "plainly." I used to dress a little funky, but as I've gotten older and had kids, I find that I have even less time and patience for thinking about, buying, and maintaining a wardrobe than I had in my youth--and I never had much. So my closet tends to have a few pairs of pants in black and navy blue (and in the summer, lighter blue and maybe light khaki) pants, and about twice that many solid-colored shirts. I like bright colors, so I have a lot of purple, red, and bright blue, and one or two single-color tie-dyes that I'm very happy with.

But that's just "style," however non-stylish. I certainly couldn't show up at, say, my brother's wedding in my black pants and dirty sneakers and a blue t-shirt and have anyone think I was anything but underdressed and possibly rude. Nobody would see that as a religious witness (though they might, if I did it at enough family weddings over enough years, come to accept it as my own eccentricity).

When I have tried to imagine what plain dress would look like for me, I have been stymied. Quaker Jane has chosen plain dresses, and a traditional shawl and bonnet. I find that a darn cute look, but can't see it on me. And, given that in my early child-rearing years I have drifted away from skirts, which I used to wear all the time, I can't see myself coping with the impracticalities.

But I am definitely female, and not much gender queer, and adopting something like men's plain dress--dark pants, light collarless shirt, suspenders, hat--just also feels wrong. (Besides, it would look terrible on me. I know, part of the point is supposed to be stepping outside that system--but I'm not out yet, am I?)

At least one woman I know has chosen to "cover"--wear a cap--with whatever other clothes she happens to be wearing. This works I think on the set-apart, religious-witness level, but for me, covering was always the part of plain dress I was least drawn to, as having a very specific connotation about women's role relative to men, and their place in the church.

(I like Quaker Jane's description, though, of "giving someone the bonnet"--turning her face just enough that the deep side of her bonnet blocks them from her view. Like the Quaker version of "the hand.")

Then, too, plain dress like Quaker Jane's doesn't just say "religious witness." It says, "Conservative Christian religious witness." Quaker Jane took up plain dress as part of a leading that included conservative Christian Quakerism. It's a path I can respect, but not one I can walk down.

And ultimately, that's the answer there: Quaker Jane adopted plain dress because she was led to. I never adopted plain dress in any way because I was never led to. I had an interest in it, and have had off-and-on--but then, I'm interested in everything! If I did everything I was interested in enough to try it once, or read up on it and think about it, I'd be a sky-diving geologist/linguist who does financial planning on the side when not teaching math to fifth graders. Or a quilt-making economist who consults with schools on collaborative problem-solving when not baking birthday cakes for friends and loved ones. Or a newspaper columnist who manages political campaigns, and vacations by kayaking down remote wilderness rivers with my 14 foster children.

I guess God does not need me in plain dress. God prefers me as a frumpy middle-aged mom. Probably the world has some very specific need for a frumpy middle-aged mom, and I'm meeting that need in ways I can't see. (Or God just doesn't care, because whether I am in plain dress or not doesn't matter to my wholeness.<==note to self: future blog post on answers and non-answers to questions asked of God.)

On the other hand, though, I have found in shaving my head some of what I thought I might find in plain dress: a sign that I have stepped away from questions of fashion, just removed myself from it for now. I have been interested to find that, although my shaved head clearly draws attention, it has removed a huge piece of my self-consciousness. I have become so unself-conscious since shaving my head that when I catch people staring at me in public, I check for "toilet paper stuck to shoe," "food in teeth," "something on face," "forgot to wear bra," and so on, before it occurs to me they might be staring because of my head.

Shaving my head has, for whatever reason, largely freed me from thinking about my appearance. Since thinking about appearance can be a huge burden for women in our culture--both those who measure up, and those like me who mostly don't--you can imagine what a relief this is. I suppose plain dress also brings this kind of peace to some people. It certainly did for Quaker Jane--but I have drifted to talking about a kind of worldly peace, and while she certainly experiences that (she enjoys not having to get haircuts or worry about how her hair looks on any given day) the peace she experiences from plain dress is also, and most importantly, the peace that comes from being in harmony with God's will as you understand it.

So Far, So Good

At the Friends for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Concerns Midwinter Gathering last weekend, I got to talk briefly with two friends who are also white parents of black children, though both of them have children much older than mine. One thing we talked about was the reaction of black people in public places to our having black children.

This is something I've heard a lot of stories about, about strange black people saying negative things to white parents. All three of us had heard the stories. But none of us had experienced it.

In my experience, black people either ignore us, or, if they're baby-lovers, admire and chat with Yehva without necessarily saying much to me, maybe tossing a "she's cute!" or "have a good day!" at me as they move on. This is comparable to how white people treat us in public.

Once in a restaurant, two black women took a picture of baby Yehva because they thought their mother would want to see how cute she was.

I've never had a black person comment on how well--or poorly--I've done Yehva's hair.

I got the most direct commentary from black women at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival last year. One woman spent most of a shuttle ride giving me unsolicited advice about how to care for Yehva's hair; I knew most of it already because there are a lot of resources for adoptive parents these days, including my favorite e-book, Her Special Hair, written by a black woman specifically for white parents who might not have experience with black hair at all.

At the same time, I appreciated this woman taking the time to talk to me about hair care, especially since she did it in a very friendly and non-judgmental way. My friend Ahavia was saying that there just weren't the resources available when she first took custody of her daughter, or when she was doing foster care. She didn't even know what "ashy" meant, she said, or how to plait hair! A bus ride with a friendly, informative black woman would probably have been very welcome to her.

This same woman ended our shuttle ride by taking me aside for a big squeezy hug and saying, "Thank you for loving her." Which is a crazy thing to be thanked for. "As if I could help myself," I said back, but I know she didn't just mean love. She meant care for, I think, in all the meanings of that phrase.

She hadn't asked me anything about how Yehva came to us, and didn't know any of the story or the situation of Yehva's birthparents. So I know she wasn't judging our specific situation relative to where Yehva would have been if her birthmother hadn't placed her for adoption. But it also seemed to me that she thought of Yehva as belonging in part to her; this is why she could thank me for my love of Yehva, because her own concern and caring for a little black girl made her grateful to see that girl being loved. She felt she had a stake in Yehva's well-being (and in the condition of her hair).

That hug meant a lot to me. I think that, even if I sometimes get negative reactions from some black people, that hug will help me deal with them more lovingly. Because I think the negative reactions and the hug come from the same place: the concern that black people have for the community's children, and for the well-being of the whole community; the hope that they have for strength, wholeness, happy lives.

If one black person looks at us and says, "Thank God that little girl found her way to a loving mother in a healthy family," and another one looks at us and says, "That is an example of how the black community is weakened by the adoptions of children of color by white families," they're both expressing the same care and concern, for Yehva, for all black children, for black communities.

And, you know, I think they're both right. I am glad Yehva found her way to us, both for her sake and ours. But I would be glad to see the black community in Chicago--where Yehva was born--so strong and functional that every child born there was already in a loving, healthy family.

A Quaker Thinks about Lent

I am a liberal unprogrammed Friend (Quaker), and we don't do holidays. We don't have a liturgical year (though there's an old joke about the Quaker high holy days being Martin Luther King, Jr's birthday and Hiroshima Day). We don't celebrate the sacraments of baptism or communion. We don't all join together in celebration or mourning or atonement at set times.

We do trust that, at our best, communion with the divine will come to us, that we will find ourselves together in celebration or mourning. In my meeting, we recently experienced the death of a valued Friend; this spring we will celebrate together the wedding of a beloved couple, and anticipation is already building. My meeting tends to get giddy at the birth or adoption of a child, and I was astonished and comforted by how deeply people in the meeting shared our terrible months of uncertainty during our custody dispute with Yehva's birthfather.

So, it's not that we're not in there together as we pass through the inevitable joys and sorrows of life.

But we don't, for instance, celebrate the birth of Christ together at a certain time, or join together in repentance. For good and ill, we believe all days are equally holy, and if that sometimes means we forget to treat any of them as holy, well, that's one of our challenges as modern Friends. But sometimes I catch a glimpse of what we're missing. I think modern Quakers tend to focus on the happier aspects of our faith: "We celebrate That of God in everyone!" we chirp. We don't wrestle with that which is not of God the way early Quakers did. We think of the Light in which we walk as something warm and full of love. We forget it's also a searchlight, a firebrand, something that sears when it shines so brightly we can no longer pretend not to see our failings. We like to quote Margaret Fell, convicted by the preaching of George Fox, pulled to her feet in church to cry, "We are all thieves!" But I'm not sure any of us wants to experience what she did. We are thieves, too--we let her experience the pain and regret of empty ritual and false religion for us.

I could comfortably not think about these things, except that among my dearest friends are a Jewish family, and a Lutheran pastor. So these little hints come my way: my kids have Hannukah gift boxes their friend Noah gave them, that I'm pretty sure still have some gelt in them; a few weeks ago, I asked my friend Carla what she was planning for the next day, and she said, "Well, it's Tu B'Shevat, so we're going to spend some time outside with the trees." And every 10 Tishrei, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, invites Jews to fast and repent of their sins.

On the Christian end of my ecumenical spectrum of friends (for whom I thank God quite sincerely), Pastor Julie has been talking about Lent on her blog. On Facebook, she linked to a friend's blog post about Lent that I found very interesting, even if it was aimed at Lutherans.

What I have been hearing in this talk about Lent is less about the usual trite notions of self-denial ("should I give up chocolate or coffee?") than about bigger notions that resonate with me as a Quaker. Julie titled her post, "Lent is a journey toward unconditional love," and her friend wrote, "Lent is one of the penitential seasons of the Church year, meaning that it's a time where we get real with God and ourselves about what things keep us from a fuller relationship with God and with others, and try to make Godward changes." In other words, it's about toning down the warm full-spectrum Light of God we bask in, and turning up the searchlight a little bit.

On her blog, Julie wrote, "Lent is an opportunity to work on relationships." In her work as a pastor, she has resolved to increase her visitation during Lent, to take her presence and her cute little traveling communion kit and the word of God and her bubbling joy-filled personality and her "laugh you can hear in the next county" and her willingness to let her own failings be visible, and be with people.

Julie is a searchlight, darn her. Because I have been out of right relationship with my Monthly Meeting since last May, when I got a clear message from God in worship that said, "you don't need to be here for awhile," after a couple of years of struggle with the things that are hard for me about being in that meeting with those people, things that have to do with social class and with my being a quirky outlier in my notions about how children should be treated and with my wish for a more religious religion.

I heard "you don't need to be here" as a gift of rest, a respite from struggle. But I heard "for awhile" just as clearly, and I left feeling sure I'd be back. But the "while" has lasted longer than I expected it to, and it has been hard to trust that, as we Quakers say, way will open in good time.

I experienced an opening last weekend at the Friends for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgenger and Queer Concerns Midwinter Gathering. At a panel during which a transwoman, a gay man, and a lesbian spoke about their monthly meetings' responses to and support, or lack of support, for their relationships, I was powerfully reminded of times when my monthly meeting has gotten it right. A few years ago, for instance, when a lesbian couple sought clearness for marriage, and the straight people on their clearness committee were so distressed to learn about how little legal support there would be for their relationship, or for the non-biological mother's relationship to any children they might have, that they brought a concern to the monthly meeting about what we could do as a body to support families that do not have full legal recognition.

Straight people! Bringing a concern for the well-being of gay and lesbian families! One reason why I do love my meeting so very much.

I came home from the midwinter gathering thoughtful, prayerful, deliberate, still not sure whether that was enough of an opening for me to return to worship with my meeting.

And then Julie writing about Lent reminded me that sometimes claiming to be thoughtful, prayerful, and deliberate is a code for "dithering." That "waiting for Way to open" can be code for "I can't be bothered to get off the couch, but if the answer falls into my lap, so be it." That not every door is an automatic one; sometimes you have push on it.

If Lent is an opportunity to work on relationships, perhaps attending Meeting for Worship could be a Lenten discipline for me. Do I feel sure about that? No. Do I feel nudged? Yes. Am I afraid of failing? Oh, you bet--just four or five days ago I sat in my seat in a terrible popcorn meeting at the midwinter gathering, literally praying to God for the patience to make it to the end--and I failed. I got up and left with ten minutes left. So I'm not making any promises just now, not to God and not to you. But I'm doing my best to face the question squarely.

More Charles Murray: Real Education

After The Bell Curve, I didn't think of Murray as an author I would seek out again. I just didn't pay any attention to what he was up to. Then someone mentioned his book Real Education on a website I hang out at, saying that they were surprised by it after expecting to hate it. Since I have a reflex that causes me to seek out and read any book a person mentions in my hearing (this could be exploited to great humorous effect by loved ones, it occurs to me), I put it on my list and eventually got a copy from the library.

I also didn't expect to write more about Murray after yesterday's post on The Bell Curve, but I find myself thinking about it this morning, and the only way to get that out of my brain is to write it down.

Real Education is Murray's attempt to outline the solution to our educational problems. His subtitle is "Four Simple Truths For Bringing American's Schools Back to Reality," and his four simple truths are that children have different abilities; that half of all children are below average; that too many young people go to college, and that our future depends on the gifted.

Under the rubric of the first three of those, he takes progressive education to task for its naive belief that all children, under the right circumstances, can achieve in a certain way, academically. He draws on Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, identifies the ones that best correlate with academic success, and says that our academic system attempts to force all kids to achieve in the ways that kids with that particular academic bent can do. This is a waste of resources, and it is self-esteem destroying for children who spent 13 years being pounded into a square hole.

He includes what was, for me, a very striking image: he asks his readers who were not good at gym class to remember what it was like to be in a class where you were constantly asked to do things you couldn't do, at least not well; to know that you couldn't do them and be expected to do them anyway; to receive low grades even though you were achieving at your best level.

OK, he says, that sucked for you. But gym class was never held up as the class that defined your school success. Once you suffered through the required credit hours, you were free to fill your schedule with classes that were a better fit.

But imagine you are a child for whom the standard ways of teaching and learning in schools are just as bad a fit. You're not only trapped in a great many more classes that are the psychic equivalent of that horrible gym class, and for a lot more years, but you're told that your future success in life depends on you being good in these classes; that you could succeed in them if you just applied yourself; and so on. He wants these kids, who are smart and able but just not necessarily smart and able in that particular way, to get a better deal.

He wants educators to let go of an idealized vision where all children are above average, where all children just need the right supports to succeed academically, where a four-year college degree is the path to success for everyone. I don't think he's necessarily wrong about that. (I don't have the energy to go into his alternative vision for post-secondary education, which would allow for multiple paths, more two or three-year programs, more credentialling exams, rather than forcing everyone through a four-year baccalaureate model that was only ever a good fit for a certain small subset of people, but I found it intriguing).

On the other hand, this is a much smaller, more focused book than The Bell Curve, and so it's easier to see what Murray decides to overlook. When he talks about multiple educational models for different kids, and an educational setting where one model isn't exalted over another, where the kid being excellently prepared for the skilled trade he's gifted at is not stigmatized versus the kid on the AP college fast track, you can almost see him holding his hands up beside his face like blinders chanting "La la la tracking I don't see it; la la la social class doesn't exist."

This great leap over the realities of how social class plays out both in our current system and in his idealized replacement system was especially glaring to me because at about the same time I read Literacy With an Attitude: Educating Working-Class Children in their Own Self-Interest, which describes the ways that education can be different for kids of different social classes even in the same classroom, with the same teacher.

One thing that stuck out to me from that book was its discussion of different styles of speech, and different ways of relating to adults and authority, which kids have adopted even before entering school. Researchers observing first-grade classrooms were able to observe how these different styles led, as time passed, to, for instance, reading-group assignments that tracked closely to children's social class, and in which teachers related to children differently, and sent them very different non-verbal messages about their place in the classroom and their abilities.

For instance, in the "A" reading group, children were allowed to group loosely, outside the teacher's reach, and given simple verbal instructions like "Get your book and open it to page 7." The group at the other end of the spectrum were often physically led to their reading group; books were placed in their hands and opened for them; they were seated so that the teacher was within physical reach of every child; much more of the teacher's speech during the group was about behavior than with the higher-level groups. Teachers, if they even noticed they were doing this, would have said they were responding to the reality of each group's abilities. But by halfway through the year, middle-class kids who had ended up in lower groups had been moved up, and working-class kids who started in higher groups had been moved down. Middle-class kids learned to read; they also learned that they were allowed a certain level of autonomy, that they could be trusted, that what they had to say was of interest to adults. The working-class kids learned--from the very same teacher--that they needed to be guided to do certain tasks, that behaving a certain way was more important than the content of the lesson, and so on.

Murray doesn't seem to want to really wrestle with these kinds of issues in Real Education, perhaps because he believes that, by and large, by being sorted into social classes children have already been sorted by intelligence. But I reject that notion.

I am sympathetic with some of his criticisms. I grew up with a brother, for instance, whom nobody could think was anything but very very smart, but for whom academics was a bad fit. Gary might say something different about this, but from my view, his transition to young adulthood was much harder than it had to be in part because of the assumption that a four-year academic degree was the only path to take. I would embrace a system that could have better identified my brother's enormous strengths and gifts, and without stigma, helped guide him to make the most of them. (While at the same time doing a better job of not putting very academically gifted kids like me on such a pedestal that it was, for me at least, damaging in a different way.)

But I don't think Murray's solutions, especially at the K-12 level, wrestle sufficiently with these realities.

And don't even get me started on Reality #4, which basically says that we should do a better job of identifying those who have certain kinds of gifts, and instead of neglecting them as we do now, intensively train them for leadership. Here, he invokes reality: he says that our leaders always have, and always will, come from the highest tiers of whatever it is that is measured by IQ, and we should recognize this and do a better job of preparing them for their leadership roles.

OK, maybe, because that might include the old-fashioned notions of stewardship, servant leadership, ethics, which our leaders certainly seem to lack.

On the other hand, this was, for me, Murray at his most distasteful. Philosopher-Kings, hello? I wanted to hold the book at arms length and say "ewwww." I'm pretty sure I skimmed, and tossed the book into my library bag to be returned with perhaps more than usual vehemence.

I like Murray's questions: How do we recognize the different abilities of different children? How do we nurture and guide them to the best use of those abilities? How do we de-stigmatize the less academic gifts, so that spending 13 years in our school systems doesn't leave so many kids feeling like failures?

I like his willingness to take progressive educators to task for naivete and utopianism.

But I am more interested in other people's solutions to these problems.

Finally Found What I've Been Looking For: on The Bell Curve

I like to think that I am the only anti-racist liberal in America who has actually read The Bell Curve, and that this gives me a certain cachet. I read it four or five years ago, when I came across yet another dismissal of it as "a racist screed," and became curious to know what it really said.

I found it fascinating. Charles Murray and his co-author were interested in questions of how a modern culture like ours deals with the fact that some people are not as smart as other people; how you measure intelligence; what can be done with the information. (Murray does this again in his book Real Education, in which one of his "four simple truths" is that "half of all children are below average.").

I did not find The Bell Curve to be a racist screed; I found it to be a carefully and thoughtfully written book that attempted to wrestle with hard questions. At the same time, after reading it, I wanted to read intelligent critiques of it to help me better evaluate it.

I couldn't find them. All the responses I found were accusatory, defensive, ad hominem attacks that equated the authors to early 20th-century eugenicists. "Did we read the same book?" I found myself wondering--and also found myself still at a loss to intelligently evaluate the book's claims and evidence.

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with my friend Carla about Real Education. We moved on to The Bell Curve, and I lamented my failure to find non-hysterical responses to it. Carla is a social psychologist, and she said, "Oh, you should look up Richard Nisbett, he has done a lot of work on that book."

So I did. And my looking led me to a book called The Bell Curve Wars, which is a series of articles about the book, including one by Nisbett, most of them measured and useful. For instance, Jeffrey Rosen and Charles Lane evaluate the sources used, and find that much of the research on IQ that Murray and Hernnstein drew on was conducted by conservative foundations and think tanks; they point out that M & H do a poor job of tackling the question of rising IQs in the 20th century, which argues for the mutability of IQ, and that they ignore fairly extensive research on, for instance, black children adopted into white families, whose IQs tend to resemble those of their new families more than those of the communities they came from. Helpful!

At the same time, I find myself disagreeing with some commentators. For instance, Howard Gardner says that the authors are trying to "set up an us-vs-them dichotomy that eventually culminates in as us-against-them opposition" (p. 33). He says, "At literally dozens of points in the book, [the authors] seek to stress the extent to which they and the readers resemble one another and differ from those unfortunate souls who cause our society's problems" (p. 33--and the last bit of that sentence, from "unfortunate souls" on, is an good example of a writer attributing an attitude to Hernnstein and Murray that I did not find in the book, and distorting their ideas in the process).

As an example, Gardner cites this:

You--meaning the self-selected person who has read this far into this book--live in a world which probably looks nothing like the figure. In all likelihood, almost all your friends and professional associates belong to that top Class I slice. your friends and associates who you consider to be unusually slow are probably somewhere in Class II.

I cannot argue with the idea that Murray loves this little rhetorical trick. He does it again in Real Education, where he argues that most readers of the book likely have a certain kind of academic smarts which is shared by their family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances. In Real Education, he argues that he, his readers, and people like you and me, don't actually have much notion of what a person of "average" intelligence is like, how they think, or what they're capable of--because we probably don't know any. Professionals and college professors who are asked to describe what they think a person of average intelligence can do with literacy, numeracy, critical thinking, logical thinking, and so on, tend to overestimate. (In Real Education, he argues that this leads to a utopian progressive educational notion that all children can succeed at a certain kind of academics which, culturally, we value).

I have a very different take on why Murray does this than Gardner does, though. As I read it, he is trying to remind his readers that they live in a certain slice of the world, and don't know as much about the rest of it as they think they do. That what they know about people and children and what they're capable of and what their strengths and weaknesses are does not necessarily generalize outside their cohort. To my mind, that's not divisive so much as giving affluent highly-educated people a much-needed reality check.

My favorite essay in The Bell Curve Wars is Thomas Sowell's "Ethnicity and IQ." Sowell is respectful of the book, and does a better job saying what I've been trying to say than I have. His essay begins:

The Bell Curve is a very sober, very thorough, and very honest book--on a subject where sobriety, thoroughness, and honesty are only likely to provoke cries of outrage. Its authors...must have known that writing about differences in intelligence would provoke shrill denunciation from some quarters. But they may not have expected quite so many, quite so loudly, and/or quite so venomously, and from such a wide spectrum of people who should know better.

The great danger in this emotional atmosphere is that there will develop a two-tier set of reactions --violent public outcries against the message of The Bell Curve by some and uncritical private acceptance of it by many others, who hear no rational arguments being used against it. Both reactions are unwarranted, but not unprecedented, in the over-heated environment surrounding so many touchy social issues today. (70)

So well said--particularly his understanding of exactly the problem I had finding rational responses to the book to help me think about its ideas.

Sowell goes on to take the authors to task for problems such as failing to adequately deal with the mutability of IQ, and relying on correlations without dealing sufficiently with confounding factors. At the same time, he has no trouble respecting them for their balance: "Even where the authors clearly come down on one side of a given issue, they usually present the case for believing otherwise. In such candor, as well as in the clarity with which technical issues are discussed without needless jargon, this book is a model that others might well emulate" (70).

Sowell--a conservative writer, by the way, whom I have come to respect a great deal after going beyond his newspaper columns and reading some of his books--has pretty much written the essay on The Bell Curve I would like to have written, had I been a bit more able to grapple with this huge book's complexity. He admires The Bell Curve where it is admirable (which it is in many ways, compared to so much writing on social issues), yet is not blind to its flaws, and he takes its critics to task for their own failures and distortions. I'll end with the conclusion of his essay:

In one sense, the issues are too important to ignore. In another sense the differences between what Hernnstein and Murray said and what others believe is much smaller than the latter seem to think. The notion that "genes are destiny" is one found among some of the more shrill critics but not in The Bell Curve itself. Nor do Hernnstein and Murray treat race as some kind of intellectual glass ceiling for individuals. As the authors say on page 278: "It should be no surprise to see (as one does every day) blacks functioning at high levels in every intellectually challenging field."

Critics who insist on arguing as if we are talking about an intellectual glass ceiling should recognize that this is their own straw man, not something from The Bell Curve. And if they refuse to recognize it, then we should recognize these critics as demagogues in the business of scavenging for grievances. The Bell Curve deserved critical attention, not public smearing and uncritical private acceptance. (78-9)

=============

Side note: I challenge my liberal friends to read one book by a conservative this year (and vice versa, but since I only have one friend who identifies as conservative--at least openly--and she's a big reader, I'm not sure she needs to take the challenge). Let it be someone thoughtful and measured, not a frothing, name-calling lunatic who is easy to dismiss. That is, no Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter, but, say, Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals, or Andrew Sullivan's The Conservative Soul, which helped me understand the lofty ideals that drive conservatism as much as liberalism. I'll add that reading liberal responses to The Bell Curve, which so often seemed dishonest and in bad faith about the content of the book, was one of the points over the last 10 years or so at which I lost faith in liberals and began to distance myself from them--very much the way Andrew Sullivan has lost faith in conservatives. Read his book!

Quick Pissed-Off Rant

I was just chatting with David about my breast reduction surgery, and realized that twice in the last two years a doctor has told me I couldn't have a certain treatment because I was fat, I have pushed and had the treatment, and the result has been a complete or dramatic reduction in pain: first knee surgery that completely eliminated my knee pain, which my (now former) doctor didn't want to refer me for because of my weight--although the surgeon, when I spoke to him about it, felt confident the surgery would be efficacious for me, and it was. And then my breast reduction, which the surgeon initially told me he wouldn't do unless I lost 70 pounds first, and which has almost eliminated a 15-year headache. How many people are suffering because they believe doctors who tell them treatment won't be effective for them, or that they don't deserve it? I'm lucky I'm a pushy bitch.

And you know what? If I had listened to my doctor and not insisted on being referred to a surgeon for my knee (after months of ineffective physical therapy), I'd still be in a lot of pain, my mobility would be increasingly restricted, and they'd say it was because I'm fat.

/end rant