Author Archives: Peter Levine

this blog is five

I wrote my first post on January 8, 2003 and have posted almost every weekday since then–the biggest gap being last month. This is post number 1,261. When I started, most of my friends didn’t know what a blog was, and I remember a huge room of people at a national conference scratching their heads when someone (not I) used the word. Now everyone seems to have a blog, and even I realize that hip people have shifted to other formats.

I began with something like an online diary, recording what I was up to. Gradually, I settled into a habit of writing mini-essays and deliberately trying to rotate my posts among political commentary, news about civic renewal, applications of moral/political philosophy to current issues, and cultural criticism. I have often used this space as a notebook. Much of my most recent book, The Future of Democracy, appeared here, one paragraph at a time. I allow myself to be self-referential about once a year, near the blog’s birthday, when I write about my own blogging.

I keep up with other explicitly civic blogs and I’m delighted to have their company. For the most part, the political blogs I read are now the ones that have been formally incorporated into magazines such as The Atlantic and The American Prospect. I don’t know whether this short list reflects laziness on my part or an inevitable winnowing-out process that has made the blogosphere more professional.

Obama and race

Shortly before the Iowa caucuses, a senior political scientist said to me: “When you met me, you first saw a Black man. What do you see when you see Obama?” This colleague was trying to understand how my white-person’s race-meter was responding to the Illinois Senator.

I believe that all Americans respond reflexively to the race of the people they encounter. And I believe that mostly negative stereotypes are triggered when we see someone as African American. The strength of these stereotypes varies, as does our ability to override them; but they almost always lurk beneath (even when the beholder is Black).

Thus we can presume that Senator Obama triggers racist stereotypes. But things are a little more complicated. First of all, I don’t think that it’s only the color of skin that moves Americans’ inner race-meters. We also respond to signifiers of culture and class, such as accent. That’s no less bad than responding to color, but it is a fact about the way we think. While Black Americans speak in every imaginable way, African American culture is marked by a set of accents that have a family resemblance to each other. Most African American accents are rooted in the American South. Senator Obama does not have such an accent, so he is less likely to trigger racist stereotypes.

Further, all kinds of subtle signs mark the Senator as upper-middle-class. Although African Americans belong to all social classes, stereotypes associate Blacks with the working class. Senator Obama thus evades some of the standard triggers of racial identity.

Finally, we don’t meet the Senator the way I met my political science colleague: face-to-face and with a handshake. We meet the Senator on TV. It’s a mediated relationship, the kind we also have with Oprah, Will Smith, Colin Powell, and many other African Americans. I don’t know the relevant psychological literature, but I suspect that mediation reduces the impact of stereotypes that are deeply connected to motives like fear.

So what will it mean if Senator Obama wins the Democratic primary and the general election?

Not that everyone is willing to vote for a Black man, because most people won’t vote at all, and many will vote for other candidates (reasonably enough, given their views on a range of issues). Adam Nossiter found plenty of examples of white voters for whom “mention of Mr. Obama merely provoked discomfort.” Even if he wins the election, most people may fall into that category.

Not that we have achieved racial justice, because race will still be a major determinant of the quality of schools, public safety, health care, and employment opportunities that one receives. And …

Not that the Obama voters have left racism behind, because they might not vote for a Black candidate who has a stereotypically Black accent or a working-class culture.

But it may mean that a governing coalition of Americans have shed racism sufficiently that they can overcome their reflex negative responses to dark skin–and that would be something.

greatest poems

Years ago, I heard Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler speak at the Library of Congress. Their assignment was to read and reflect on their ten favorite poems. Vendler read some not-very-famous work by poets she knew, as well as some important poems that mattered to her for biographical reasons. Bloom then said something like this (in his stentorian voice, with his eyelids batting madly): “I like Helen, and I admire her criticism, but those were not the ten greatest poems in the English language. Here are the ten greatest poems in the English language.” He proceeded to recite ten lyric poems about the self in a hostile world. I don’t remember the list, but I recall that it began with Tom O’Bedlam’s song:

From the hagg and hungrie goblin

That into raggs would rend ye,

And the spirit that stands by the naked man

In the Book of Moones – defend ye!

[….]

I simply don’t read enough poetry to have a worthwhile top-ten list of my own, but I could cite some English lyric verse that has struck me as particularly magnificent over the years: Thomas Wyatt, “They Flee from Me that Sometime Did Me Seek” (chosen, I admit, because I am moved to hear a voice from so long ago); Shakespeare, the song from The Tempest (“Full fathom five, &c,” because it is so abstract that it exemplifies lyric); Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”; Arnold, “Dover Beach”; Browning, “The Bishop Orders his Tomb” or another of his great dramatic monologues; Yeats, “Among School-Children”; Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Eliot, “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (on which Vendler is a superb guide). These authors are all dead white Englishmen, which simply reflects the limits of my reading.

to Tampa

If this page is going to remain a blog, I need to return sooner or later to daily posting. Right now, I’m heading to Tampa, Florida, where the Hillsborough County Schools are launching a major initiative to teach students about democracy and citizenship. They won a highly competitive $2 million federal grant for that purpose. I’m going to participate in a televised discussion at 10:30 tomorrow morning with the Mayor, Pam Iorio, who is planning to create a youth commission. Then I’m having lunch at the University of South Florida with an interdisciplinary group of professors who are active in community service and research. At 5 pm, I’m giving a keynote speech at Freedom High School to help kick off the county’s program.