Revealing glimpses of true attitudes have a way of popping up at unexpected moments.
When Tiger Woods played the British Open at St. Andrews, he was asked, apropos the controversy over the ban on women members at the ultra-exclusive Augusta, Georgia, Golf and Country Club, whether he thought it wrong for St. Andrews also to ban women as members.
Apparently trying to steer clear of taking sides in a social and political controversy (at present he's a busy professional golfer, not the studied spokesman for social movements) Mr. Woods responded to the question by saying, essentially, that while he sympathized with women's aspirations towards equal treatment, he understood that private individuals have a right to choose their friends and to associate together in private clubs.
A Britisher, commenting on the same controversy, had an entirely different take on the matter.
How is it, he wondered, that there are people who will presume to stick their noses into the affairs of others and tell them with whom they must associate in their private clubs?
Tiger, a Cablinasian, as he has described himself, benefits from having multiple layers of culture and ethnicity: Caucasian, Black, Indian (Native American), and Thai.
In sum, he is the quintessential American. He is quintuple cultured. His bride is Swedish, rounding out the picture of a World Couple.
Some day when he gets tired of golf, I expect to see this Stanford product elected to the Senate or better, as did basketball great (Princeton, N.Y. Knicks) and former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley. See John McPhee's A Sense of Where You Are (1965).
Woods, an intelligent, sensitive, young American, is well-aware of the goal of equality for people who are fighting against traditional discrimination, women in this case. He recognized implicitly their right to press their case.
The Brit, by contrast, seems to have drawn a line along the order of "How dare they even ask!"
His attitude reminded me of the incident in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, where the hungry orphan, upholding his empty porridge bowl, pathetically asked the orphan keeper, "More, sir. Please, some more," which was not forthcoming.
America distanced itself from monarchical attitudes which placed king and queen at the top of the heap, politically, economically, socially, and psychologically, in the minds of participants in the vicious system of class consciousness that was Britain, where a person is branded on his tongue, as the saying goes. The powerful are educated in universities where the artificial Received Pronunciation is the only way to speak, with allowances for higher refinements denoting even "more" class, wealth, power, and prestige.
Anyone speaking a different brand of English is immediately known for his lesser place in society, and will be put in his place if he should betray an effort to 'be better than he is.'
This, of course, is the point of "My Fair Lady," the Lerner and Lowe Broadway musical which featured Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle. "Oh, Why Cahn't the English, Learn...To...Speak?!"
We saw this class attitude carried to its near-extreme (Hitler Germany's attitude towards the Jews, Gypsies, Communists, and Gays was the extreme; of course he had learned from us) in this country during slavery and Jim Crow when Negroes who attempted to better their condition often paid with their lives.
"Uppity," they were called. Survival for Negroes meant slavish subservience, removing the cap, "Y'suh," "Yes, Boss," "No'm," and clearing the sidewalk for whites, and after Emancipation, near-slave subservience to whites, which was insisted upon at all times on pain of thrashing or worse. People were shot dead on the street for lapses. Black people.
Negroes were not called by the names they gave themselves, but by their master's first name.
Pullman car porters, according to a new book being reported on, were among the first blacks able to hold jobs, post-Reconstruction (which ended with the compromised election of Hayes over Tilden in 1875, the Bush v. Gore of yesteryear), that didn't tie them to one spot on earth.
They traveled, saw the world, worked for, spoke with, and learned from wealthy, traveling whites who called them a name they hated: "George." Because the railway sleeping-car magnate for whom they worked, was named George Pullman.
The sleeping-car porters, not incidentally, became the first effective civil rights leaders among blacks, make that American blacks, after Wilberforce who promoted the end of the slave-trade as to Britain (he'd been a slave-ship captain who saw the light), the abolitionists of the North, and Lincoln, that is.
The Union of Sleeping Car Porters threatened the first Million-Man March on Washington shortly after Pearl Harbor, upon seeing that 'war-work,' jobs, that is, was going to whites, not blacks, who were being shut out.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a politician, not a civil-libertarian, unlike his wife Eleanor, who wasn't running for office, deemed it wiser to open war work to blacks than the little Southern town of Washington.
Much of the black population of the West Coast and the San Francisco Bay Area was attracted to the Kaiser shipyards in Oakland and Richmond and Bethlehem Steel and the Navy Yard in San Francisco. Hunters Point and the Bayview District, largely black population centers, ghettos, in some respects, surround these now all but defunct shipyards.
The past isn't dead, it isn't even past. It's all around you, and the only new thing under the sun is the history you don't yet know, which will bite the unwary.
Speaking of naming conventions, Clarence Page was speaking on National Public Radio yesterday on all of the different names pasted to him over the years. He's a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
When I started out, Page began, I was a Negro. And then I was Colored. Then the Rev. Jesse Jackson said we were African-Americans, and I liked that, Page said.
Remember the Afro hair-do? Popularized by Huey P. Newton's Black Panthers? (I understand from a graduate that Newton attended SFLS for a time." I watched him testify in a PC 148 - Resisting Arrest trial in Richmond, CA, as to how he pulled out a copy of the penal code to read to a police officer trying to arrest a black on the street. Newton described himself as the Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party. I was witnessing the early stage of a revolution, or near revolution.
The odd thing about revolutions is that they seem clearer in retrospect than at the time. I was just sitting in a courtroom, watching a trial, while the world was changing around me. Unless you see people hanging from lamp posts, or heads rolling in the street, as in Paris, you may not realize what a revolution is when you see it.
Then, Page said, we were People of Color.
I went from being a Colored Person to a Person of Color inside of one generation, Page observed, and that's progress.
Why is this, I wondered, this need to rename.
At first I though it simply a means of discarding the unfortunate baggage that becomes associated with any label if worn long enough. Then I read Stephen L. Carter's "Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby" (Perseus Books/Bantam, 1991). Carter, a Stanford Law School graduate, Yale Law School professor, and novelist, cites the need each of us has to identify the group in which we see ourselves as a legitimate, belonging member. That includes a need to name ourselves, not have someone else stick their label on us and expecting us to like it.
How do we usually name ourselves and each other? Isolated groups simply called themselves a word meaning "the people." When other groups came into view, they would be called by the language they spoke.
To the Greeks, everyone else was a 'barbarian,' because, according to the story handed down, it sounded like they spoke "bar-bar-bar."
Latin labeled the Romans, out of whose conquests came the Romance languages of the French, the Spanish, etc.
After language came religion as the big distinguisher, Catholics, Protestants and Jews, for me as a boy, and now Muslims and everyone else in this country and the West in general.
Skin color. We pick up on this right away.
Foods. You are what you eat: Frogs, beans, rice, potatoes, sauerkraut. And drink: vodka, Scotch, wine, beer.
If it wasn't one of these, we'd invent something else.
We're great at making distinctions. It's how we tell friend from foe. It keeps us alive, this ability to discriminate between safety and danger.
By discriminating, we see the tiger in the grass.
Overdoing it, we've given discrimination a bad name, so now we have to distinguish between good discriminating and bad.
The latter is called, in Con-Law terms, "invidious."
If a statute makes an invidious distinction, say on the basis of race without an exceedingly powerful (not to say good) reason, as in Korematsu, the Japanese Internment case shortly after Pearl Harbor, it is doomed to be held unconstitutional.
On the subject of calling names, see William Kennedy's "Nigger." Kennedy is a Harvard Law professor who may have decided that this word, or name, was entirely too big for its britches. He did what law professors do, a legal analysis of cases and literature in which the word had figured,
"Nigger," the Nuclear bomb of American insults, with its capacity as dehumanizer, hence wounder, is called, for that reason, in recent decades at least, "the N-word." Officialdom avoided the term.
I recall watching a New York cop testify years ago when I was attending law school that he had exerted himself considerably in chasing a suspect over fence and through backyard following a residential burglary, after which he arrested "the Negro gentleman," who is, in fact, seated right there at counsel table,
Kennedy explores the cases in which the dreaded "N-word" plays a role either as a provocation to violence, a crime or a tort, efforts to eradicate its use, legally, thus raising first amendment issues, etc.
A recurring controversy of which Kennedy treats is over the reading of Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn," the story of a white boy, Huck, in the South, who finds himself on a raft on the Mississippi River with a fleeing slave, Nigger Jim, his best friend.
When a boatfull of slave catchers pulls close out of the fog, hunting for Jim, barefoot Huck has a moral choice to make when the men demand to know whether he has seen the escaped slave.
Huck calls out that he hasn't seen him at all, a big fat lie that goes against almost all of the attitudes with which he had been imbued as a boy of the South, but not as an American. He lies like a dog, to save his friend.
We all know that lying is bad, right?
"All right, I'll GO to hell," Huck says to himself.
There were those bad people who lied to save Anne Frank and her family from the Gestapo, and those truth tellers who killed her.
Twain dramatizes these choices for us, forcing us to confront our own inconvenient attitudes. He forces us to grow. The price is that we have to deal with that word. Maybe it's time it was deflated in importance. Perhaps its continued reinforcement as the WORST of the worst of epithets, insults, makes it worse than it should be.
Twain uses 'nigger' almost the way we use 'black.' That's the way the people in his story spoke. The story wouldn't ring true if the slavers were looking for that "Negro gentleman." Jim, or perhaps, "Mr. James."
But we don't use 'black' to put people in their place. Just the opposite. We avoid using words that have a tendency to put people in their place. This is one reason for abandoning the use of words that have taken on that role. It accounts for Page's litany.
Now the N-word has become especially taboo, politically incorrect, verboten, except to an almost surprising group of people: young blacks. Listen to the rap music. Or the loud talking in the corridors of the Hall of Justice.
Folks who would just as soon shoot you for 'disrespecting' them call each other, not nigger, never that, but 'ni'gah,' or something that sounds more like 'ne'ah.'
The fastest way for a young black male to die, second to being found seated in a car near a drug corner, is by dissing another young black male.
As in "Why'dju shoot him?"
"Because he dissted me."
There's a dissertation waiting to be written here, I believe, but not by me.
When the Black Panthers, with their black jackets, black berets, black Afros, and black guns were busy frightening whites even more into the opposite camp, the Panthers called the (mostly all white) police, "Pigs," as in "Off da M-F'ing Pigs."
What did the cops do?
They began buying belt buckles, neckties, lapel pins, necktie bars, Christmas cards, T-shirts, jackets, and anything else they could dream up, flaunting the insignia of a big fat pink pig, and wearing it, proudly. To work, to court, and to the picnic. This was a brazen, in your face gesture to Panthers, to anybody, having the temerity to call a cop a pig. Sticks and stones, for when nightsticks and badges are inadequate. There's a million dollar idea in here, and I want my cut.
When 'pig' became passe, "fuzz" came in. Every year now the police charity holds a "Buzz the Fuzz" fund-raiser down at the HOJ. The cop or DA who raises the most funds gets his head shaved, and wears his bare scalp proudly to court for the next few months.
The expression in the black community for using racial pejoratives is "calling me down on my name."
As in "If some narrow minded person calls me down on my name, that's THEIR problem, not mine."
We usually don't speak of such things, do we?
Rarely across racial lines, anyway.
Racial lines? What are they?
Why don't we?
Too risky.
Too hurtful in case of misunderstanding. There's always a misunderstanding.
Probably because we don't talk about issues of race.
We PROCLAIM about race from time to time, but we don't converse about it back and forth very much.
Maybe 'misunderstanding' is the wrong word.
Maybe we understand all too well.
"I don't mean this to sound racist, but... Do you see that black guy in the back of the store, the one with the large coat pockets...?"
Our Crazy Aunt in the Basement is still down there, being fed daily, isn't she.
I know you're going to find this hard to believe, but now I'm going to describe what got me into all this.
In London, a former maid of Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, named Elaine Day, is suing for wrongful termination.
She was fired as Charles's maid after complaining that a 'royal aide' had made sexual advances to her. I know, "That's news, royalty skirt-chasing in a palace?" But that's not the point of the story.
The point of the story is that Ms. Day turned up with a memorandum in the Prince of Wales's own handwriting stating:
What is wrong with people these days?
Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far above their capabilities?
This is all to do with the learning culture in the schools.
It is a consequence of child-centered education system in which admits no failure.
People seem to think they can all be pop stars, high court judges or brilliant TV presenters or infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the necessary work or having the natural ability.
Ms. Day, the maid, commented that the culture in the Prince of Wales's household extends from him on down in a structured, Edwardian fashion. "Everybody knows their place and if you ever forget it the system will punish you."
Don't get uppity in upper-crust England, in other words.
Charles, for his part, admits to being "fiendishly old-fashioned" in some of his views but his spokesman claims he's being bum-rapped, although that wasn't the way he actually put it, perhaps.
But the British Minister of Education was having none of Prince Charles.
To be quite frank I think he is very old-fashioned and out of time and he doesn't understand what is going on in the British education system at the moment. We can't all be born to be a king but we can all have a position where we can really aspire for ourselves and for our families to do the very best they possibly can.
The Prince's spokesman said that Charles had really been pleading for individual rights in education, the giving of everyone a chance to make the best of those talents in their own way. Right.
President Jacques Chirac, of France, that other bastion of liberty, head-rolling, French names at birth only, merci, and no Muslim head scarves in school, happened to be visiting when this controversy arose.
The French president was clever enough not to take the bait. Perhaps he was returning the British courtesy in renaming the Waterloo room, named after Wellington's defeat of Napoleon, for the evening of the state dinner, and not serving grenouille.
If everything that I wrote on a memo in a moment of exasperation was given widespread publicity, I might make a few headlines myself. I'm staying out of this one, Chirac said.
From a report by Alan Cowell dated Nov. 18, 2004
This has something to do with Constitutional law, right?
Right.
Here 'tis.
The word republican with a small R, while it derives from the Latin res publica meaning a thing (res) of the public, or public matter or business, came to mean, at the time of our blessed revolution from the George III's and Prince Charles's of the world, to mean anti-monarchy and anti- the monarchical attitudes that came with it, particularly the class structure handed down from medieval times of lord and serf.
The most august of our presidents knows that it is better, politically, to have been born in a log cabin than to own a skyscraper.
The common man, Lincoln the rail-splitter, Reagan the wood-chopper in Santa Barbara, George W. Bush clearing his ranch of weed trees with a chain saw, wearing work boots. One of us. Just another working stiff on his day off. None of this rising above our station. Just president for awhile. I'm really a weed-chopper just like you.
This is what it means to be a small 'r' republican. No class system. Nobody is better than you or me just because he's sitting on a higher rung on the ladder. Bill Gates is still really just a nerd. John Kerry is just a wind-surfer, too. Forget the yachts and the Sun Valley home next to Warren Buffett. That's his wife's anyway. Just a poor boy who made good. Or almost made good. Pass the ketchup. Even that's good.
Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson proclaimed republican virtue, meaning anti-monarchy. Jefferson feared, hell, he KNEW, that Hamilton and John Adams were monarchists at heart. When Andrew Jackson, general and president, became too powerful to suit some, he was dubbed King Andrew. The opposition party that formed against King Andrew called themselves the "Whigs," after the party in England that beheaded the king, Charles II, and overthrew the legal power of the Crown, in favor of Parliament. The Whigs faded, supplanted by the Republican Party that put Abraham Lincoln into office in 1860, the GOP, although you'd hardly recognize it today, considering its dismal stance on human and civil rights since Emancipation.
Jefferson's party was also called "Republican," Democratic-Republican. It gets confusing. That's why I'm explaining it. To untwist it. Jefferson and Madison made a political intelligence trip to New York. Made an alliance with Hamilton's adversary, and later killer, at the famous duel in Weehawken, Aaron Burr (Jonathan Edwards, the Last Puritan's grandson; you can read about him right here on this site). This alliance grew into today's Democratic Party.
Both parties were thus called "republican."
When Republican Vice President Tricky Dick Nixon got in trouble over accepting gifts including, it was alleged, a vicuna coat, more expensive than mink or chinchilla, he saved himself by pointing out that his wife, Pat, wore only a "good Republican cloth coat."
Just a man of the people.
Some people you just gotta watch out for.
And words, they're pretty powerful, too.
We use 'em a lot in Con-Law.
Very heavy on the words is Con-Law.
Gonna havta cut some of 'em out.
Which ones, though?
That's where I'm having the problem, figuring that out.