debitage

2.7.07

I Think You're Supposed To Do This On Friday, But I'm Late

I'm going to be like all the cool kids and post some YouTube videos.

Yothu Yindi, Djäpanna

The Whitlams sing about their namesake (note the Australia-shaped guitar in one segment -- if I ever learn to play guitar, I totally want one shaped like Australia):

And for something non-Australian, here's Värttinä singing "Riena." (Unfortunately there's no video of my favorite song from the album, "Synti," in which they warn the people calling the narrator a slut that they'll be cursed with lizard foetuses.)

Stentor Danielson, 19:39, |

Racist If You Do, Racist If You Don't

Here's a thought experiment for my white readers: say somebody came up to you and said they could turn you into a black person. How much money would you ask for as compensation?

Got your answer? Well, it turns out that by answering that amount that you did -- whatever it was -- we can see that you're racist. I say this because I've recently seen this experiment cited as evidence for white racism in two mutually contradictory ways.

The first place I heard about this -- I unfortunately can't remember the source -- said this experiment showed racism because white people asked for too much compensation. After all, the author reasoned, if you truly think there's nothing wrong with being black, you shouldn't need much money to be a fair compensation for switching races (though I think this author underestimated the importance of transition costs -- imagine going to the DMV and asking for a new driver's license because your race changed).

But I just read a post by Amanda Marcotte in which she cites other authors claiming that the participants in a similar experiment are racist because they demand too little money. The logic here is that black people suffer a lot of oppression, so giving up the privileges of being white ought to be worth quite a bit of money, so lowballing your demand shows you underestimate the degree of racial oppression that exists. (Here I question how well the experimenters' and participants' definitions matched up with respect tp the line between the effects of being a new race and the "everything else" that's held constant, since so many things are partially shaped by race and partially shaped by other things. So it wouldn't be unreasonable for a participant to assume that the researchers meant for him or her to hold their economic status, at least up until the point of the change, constant, even though the researchers were factoring in racial disparities in income to calculate the real non-racist cost of switching.)

The point is that given two plausible but contradictory interpretations of the experiment, it becomes difficult to assume the experiment participants were thinking in just one of those ways and therefore to draw one conclusion. We'll have to find different ways of demonstrating how racist white people are.

Stentor Danielson, 10:07, |

1.7.07

Confessions Of An Independent Partisan

I've been a registered independent ever since I was old enough to vote. But in every election I've voted in (2000, 2004, 2005, 2006), I've voted for Democrats in every state or federal level race.

To some people, this makes me somehow dishonest or not a real independent. If the Democrats and the Republicans represent the only two choices, "independent" is conflated with "swing voter," someone who has not settled on one side or the other because their views are nebulous, hybrid, or centrist. A "real" independent is therefore someone who is in some way between the two parties. This shared betweenness makes it possible to talk about "independents" as a homogeneous group equivalent in some way to "Democrats" or "Republicans." Commenting on a recent Washington Post story about what independents think, Matt Yglesias declares that "Many independents are actually partisans." But I don't think it's inconsistent to be both.

To understand why, it's important to distinguish two forms of partisanship: ideological and institutional. Ideological partisanship means that your political views are consistently either liberal or consistently conservative. Institutional partisanship means loyalty to a political organization or party. The conventional analysis of independents conflates the two, assuming that if you're ideologically partisan, you should be institutionally partisan, since after all the parties exist to promote their respective ideologies, and when you go in the voting booth you have to advance your ideology by picking between parties. This tends to breed a sense of entitlement on the part of people who are partisan in both senses (visible most clearly in the incoherent rage directed against Ralph Nader and his supporters, and which is now brewing against Mike Bloomberg*).

But ideological and institutional partisanship are different things, because there's a lot more to politics than voting in elections and expressing ideological positions. It's been darkly hilarious to read blogs like Daily Kos this year, watching their former paeans to the virtues of the filibuster evaporate now that the Dems are on the recieving end**.

Being a registered independent is strictly an institutional matter. It allows me to maintain a pragmatic support for the Democratic Party at the ballot box while refusing to commit myself to any institutional loyalty to the party's goings-on. Since I'm not inclined to get involved in electoral campaign organizing, and I live in a state with a partially open primary, I gain nothing from joining a party.

*Lest I be misinterpreted, let me be clear that I never considered voting for Nader or Bloomberg.

**Yes, I'm sure they can surely come up with all kinds of rationalizations as to why the details of the two situations make them somehow totally different.

Stentor Danielson, 12:04, |