One Hundred Years

One hundred years.

Reflection on the Week: Immigration

In an effort to be more disciplined about writing this blog regularly, I've decided to develop some regular "features" upon which I hope to focus my efforts.  Friday I plan to examine an issue in the news that might benefit from historical context.  Some of these will be more reflective than others.  I hesitated to start with immigration because the issue is so fraught and controversy is so rife -- and I admit I am not huge on controversy.  Thoughtful people disagree about the best way to address this issue, but I can't escape the conclusion that context is the most serious omission in this debate.  So, here goes.  

Our current immigration crisis defies easy conclusions or straightforward solutions.  No one avenue will "solve" this problem -- but I'd posit that greater regard for history would, at minimum, add important perspective to this debate.

We need to understand why children are fleeing Central America in such large numbers.  Can you imagine sending your child off on his or her own, across hundreds or even thousands of miles of territory, in hopes of keeping him or her safe?  This is a tremendous sacrifice for all concerned.  These people are not opportunists.  They love their children, and these children love their parents.  

The sad reality is that these kids are fleeing dangerous gang violence, extreme poverty, and governmental failure caused in part by the decisions people in the United States have made over the years.  We have chosen to consume illegal drugs and therefore provide a marketplace in which these criminal gangs can thrive.  Our government followed a policy of "ABC" -- "anything but Communism" -- that allowed governmental corruption to flourish and prevented reformist leadership from taking hold.  We protected American corporations that sought to preserve overwhelmingly favorable land, taxation, and labor policies instead of encouraging the development of strong institutions in Central America.    

Illuminating these conditions does not exonerate Central American countries of responsibility.  We all remain responsible for our decisions, even within imperfect circumstances -- and yes, most of us face imperfect circumstances.  Our role in all this, however, is to recognize the myriad barriers we have placed in the path of effective government, strong societal institutions, and healthy economic development in this part of the world.  This isn't a liberal or conservative, Republican or Democratic issue.  Administrations from both major parties and individuals of varying political stripes have contributed to this legacy.  When we pay proper regard to the historical antecedents of our contemporary crisis, we gain the ability to more effectively evaluate policy solutions.  Border security is important -- but how might we help Central American countries address endemic gang violence?  Deportation may well be necessary, but how might we 1) reunite families and 2) help these countries develop institutions that can support effective government and economic development?  

In short, we should be focusing not upon our own problems, but upon Central American concerns.  We've played a historical role in the development of this region's crises, but developing thoughtful policies to help address them now will reap benefits far beyond the borders of Honduras or El Salvador.  If we don't want Central American gang activity in the United States, we should help Hondurans and Salvadorans fight it in their own countries -- and we should continue to examine the logs in our own eye regarding U.S. drug consumption and tolerance of human trafficking.  If we don't want the costs of additional fences and of detention centers, we might consider investing in the future of these countries.  Money spent now will save millions later.

Finally, a moment for humanity.  As regards the current influx of minors, these are children.  Thoughtful people can and will disagree about the course of action that should be taken in dealing with this problem.  The specter of grown people screaming in protest against the presence of children in their communities -- children fleeing violence and deprivation in a quest for safety -- shames our country.  There are better ways to handle this.  

Coates on "The Case for Reparations"

Every now and then I come across an article that I wish I could assign as required reading for everyone in the United States.  This Atlantic article by Ta-Nehisi Coates, "The Case for Reparations," is one of them:

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

Well-argued, well-documented, and profoundly insightful.  And disturbing.  We need to know these things.  We need to understand.  The head-in-sand mentality that denies the full breadth and depth of racism in America hobbles us as a nation and will continue to do so until we deal with our past -- and our present.

Link and comment: Fancy degree? Most Americans say it's not required to be president

Fancy degree? Most Americans say it's not required to be president

Interesting results from the Pew Research Center regarding Americans' perceptions of candidates with elite university credentials.  I was heartened to note that "There’s no group in which more would have a negative than positive reaction to a candidate with an elite education, including Republicans and leaners who agree with the Tea Party." (Among Tea Party members, arguably the most vociferous anti-elitists in the contemporary political sphere, 10 percent would be more likely to support a candidate with a prestigious university degree while another 10 percent were less likely.)  We should want to elect educated people.  Critical thinking is found across all sectors of society, and a university education is no guarantor of analytical skills.  Even so, higher education, done well, plays a vital role in developing public servants with the capacity to reason carefully and govern responsibly.  

That said: what do we mean by "elite" or "prestigious," and who has access to these institutions?  Questions of race and class surge to the fore, but I'd posit a third factor, as well: geography.  As the article points out, since 1988 every president has had an undergraduate or graduate degree (or both) from an Ivy League institution.  While Americans enjoy remarkable geographic mobility, there's no getting away from the fact that New England is a long, long way from the states beyond the Continental Divide.  Equating "prestigious" with "East Coast" sacrifices the interests, abilities, and unique regional attributes of large swathes of the country.  The American West is more than cowboys and recalcitrant ranchers, Hollywood and Portlandia.  Education is important -- even, perhaps, paramount.  But I'd suggest that an education from Oregon State or Pacific Lutheran, UC Davis or the University of Seattle, might develop critical thinking and regional identity in ways that will benefit the nation as a whole.  Perhaps the most important question we could ask is not "where did you go to school?" but "what did you learn while you were there?"

Nostalgia and Continuity

"Nostalgia is a selective sentiment.  It is Williamsburg in the 1750s without the mud, the outhouses, and the flies.  It is Laramie in the 1880s without the heat, the cold, the vomit, and the bedbugs.  It is the New England colonial town without the censoriousness and the intolerance.

And yet the gentle glow of nostalgia does shed light on institutions and values that are worth preserving or adapting if we can.  It reminds us that continuity is a satisfaction if not a duty.  The very selectivity, moreover, which nostalgia brings to the past encourages rejection of the shoddy and meretricious in the present.  And if it is true that we cannot have it both ways, we can at least make more intelligent compromises between the compulsions of change and the attractions of continuity if the tug of the latter is strong."

-- Elliot Richardson, The Creative Balance (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), p. 271

Skin

The other day I finished a novel called Longbourn, by Jo Baker, that follows the lives of the servants in the Bennet household -- the central characters in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.  I didn't receive a complimentary copy or anything, but I did want to give a shout out to the author for addressing one of those glaring inaccuracies that characterizes so much historical fiction, whether in books or on film.  Longbourn opens on a washday, and the central theme of this opening scene is upon hands -- working hands, scalded hands, chilblain-afflicted hands, and the goose grease the maids of Longbourn rubbed into their cracked, bleeding hands at the end of the day to restore range of movement, if not comfort.  This theme continues throughout the book, whether contrasted with the soft, pale, even flaccid hands of the gentlefolk for whom the servants work or in passing comments that remind us these same cracked, blistered digits also touched (and tried to avoid bleeding upon) dainty gowns and fine veils.

Physical comfort on such a prosaic level is one of those things we tend to elide from our perusal of the past.  We might attend to the vital themes of hunger, oppression, violence, or lack of shelter, but seldom do we consider such basic and ubiquitous privations.  Take a look at the hands of the servants on Downton Abbey.  Historical accuracy might extend as far as Daisy's worn dresses, but I suspect cracked and blistered hands would take accuracy a bit too far for contemporary viewers.  Seldom have I found a written story that addresses this reality, either.

For lotion and mild soap, modern household appliances and cleaning products, give thanks.  And remember, those refinements of the upper classes came not just at the expense of servants' labor, but of their very skins.  What of modern labor?  An interesting question to ponder.  Working conditions mattered then -- a lot.  They still do.  Chemicals and practices, rules and regulations, matter.  The environment includes humans, and industry continues to involve skin, whether directly through the workplace or indirectly through the ways in which the products of industry are diffused.

Great articles on civil rights... and beards

Penn State University doctoral candidate Sean Trainor published a fascinating piece January 20 in The Atlantic titled "The Racially Fraught History of the American Beard."  Take a look here.

Historian Michael Kazin reflected January 20 upon the potential drawbacks to Hollywood's recent focus on interpreting the history of slavery.  Read it here.  I'm inclined to agree with Kazin's reasoning.  Telling the history of slavery is tremendously important, but we do run the risk of eliding the struggles African Americans have faced since emancipation if we cut off our history at 1865.  This is part of a larger struggle I face when viewing popular interpretations of civil rights history.  My 7-year-old brought home a "Weekly Reader" folio the other day about Martin Luther King, Jr.  While I realize historical interpretation for second grade readers is necessarily going to require some elimination of nuance, I was troubled by the main article's statement that because of King's work, people of all races now get along and live/work together.  Then = bad; King = the hinge upon which societal transformation swung; now = good.

Hmm.  Much as I wish this were the case, the story just isn't that simple.  The frustrating, difficult truth is that King was assassinated as a result of his work -- a work made even more dangerous when he started to challenge deeply ingrained "de facto" discrimination throughout the United States and not just the "de jure" segregation of the American South.  The frustrating, difficult truth is that the myriad problems of race continue to bedevil our society, despite the unarguable progress the brave activists of the 1950s and 1960s -- and before and after those decades -- have made.  We need to remember these truths.  We need to educate the next generation to realize how far we have come.  If we fail, however, to acknowledge the distance left to travel (and the many struggles and reverses along the way) we run a serious risk of encouraging a smug complacency that dismisses the real structural problems of American society as somebody else's personal problem -- or, in the case of those caught up in the midst of structural inequities, the enervating despair of hopelessness.

I want my child to celebrate the justice of emancipation.  I want her to value the brave, difficult work undertaken by King and others.  I want her to recognize the important distance American society has traveled.  Too, though, I want her to recognize that she needs to take up the baton; the race is far from over.