oral history of desegregation

I spent most of the morning advising a potential applicant for the Rhodes

Scholarship—something that I do on the side because I feel that Maryland

students need coaching. (We haven’t won since the mid-1970s.)

In the afternoon, our class at Northwestern

High School interviewed two people for our oral history project

on the desegregation of Prince George’s County schools. One interviewee

was the first African American student at the school. (He was still the

only one when he graduated three years later). He said: "Initially

I was actually hoping that it wouldn’t work. My parents had said that

if there was a lot of violence, we would back up. … Instead of violence,

there were three years of hostility." His main motivation was to

be "part of something bigger," the Civil Rights Movement. He

later became a successful chemical engineer. I found him enormously appealing—and

easily understood what he meant in his understated way, but the kids took

his reticence about his own emotions as evasiveness.

The second interviewee was a current member of the County Council, a

white man who was formerly a civil rights lawyer. He had sued to force

bussing in the county schools and then arranged the settlement that ended

bussing. He moved to the County in 1971, and his family was the only White

one in the local community. At a community meeting, "I said I was

a civil rights lawyer and I wanted to be active in the community."

A community leader said, "Man, you are a phenomenon. Most white people

are trying to move out of here." In the 1970s, roughly 100,000 African

Americans relocated to Prince George’s County (mostly from Washington),

and roughly 100,000 White people left—a pattern that continued for

the next 20 years. "Those folks who moved in the seventies were running

from black folks … In the eighties and nineties, it had more to do

with the aging of the population and the changing of circumstance."

People left for upper income housing and better schools.

"My dream in the early eighties was that this is the place where

we would make it work. This is the place where we would demonstrate to

America that it can work like it says in social studies books. Today I

would say that we are still working on that."

relationship mapping

In the midst of a hectic and bleary day, I participated in a conference

call for members of the steering

committee. I proposed an idea that seemed to get a lot of support. Sociologists

sometimes survey individuals or organizations, asking them with whom they

interact most. They create a database showing all the individuals and

their mutual relations. They then use

"relationship-mapping" software to spit out maps that cluster

all the most closely related individuals together and use lines to show

how they are linked. If we did this to all the groups involved in the

field of deliberative democracy, then we could see which ones work together,

which ones are completely separate, and which organizations serve as bridges

between clusters of groups. This is the kind of analysis that political

organizers have always used; software can help to do it more easily and

thoroughly.

earned and unearned income

The President’s surprise proposal to abolish dividend taxes is big news.

There are many ways to evaluate the idea, including consideration of the

effects on short- and long-term economic growth, equity, and the federal

budget. The Administration also emphasizes that a dividend tax is unfair,

since the income that was used to buy the shares was already taxed once.

(The response from commentators like Paul Krugman is that there are many

double taxes, including all sales taxes.) Another consideration seems

to be overlooked. I believe we should retain a distinction between earned

and unearned income, and we should be less hesitant to tax the latter.

There is nothing wrong with investment income. But work—purposeful

human effort—is much more closely linked to human dignity and value.

As Pope John Paul II wrote in Laborem Exercens (1981), "Work is a

good thing for man-a good thing for his humanity-because through work

man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also

achieves fulfillment as a human being and indeed in a sense becomes ‘more

a human being.’"

Robert Nozick, the great libertarian philosopher, denied that there was

any moral difference between work and other activities (such as investing)

that produce value. He was reacting to the old leftist idea that labor

alone creates value, and therefore laborers deserve the full price of

their products. It is a scandal of capitalism that some of the reward

goes instead to capitalists, who do not work. In the words of Ralph Chaplin’s

old Wobbly anthem, "Solidarity Forever" (1915):

It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they

trade;

Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid

* * *

All the world that’s owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.

We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.

It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.

This song implies that we should recoup the money that capitalists have

taken from the workers who really made everything. Dividend taxes would

then be a good idea, and the higher the better. Unfortunately, the song

is pretty clearly wrong: investors, managers, and inventors create value,

just as workers do. However, we can still understand labor as morally

different from other economic activities. Compare two people, one of whom

makes a living by digging ditches, while the other profits from inherited

stocks even though she is comatose after an accident. The first labors;

the second does not. An intermediate case is someone who actively invests,

mixing knowledge, intellectual labor, and accumulated capital to generate

wealth. I think that the work aspect of wealth-creation is virtuous, onerous,

and not sufficiently rewarded by the market. This is an argument for policies

(such as dividends taxes) that favor work.

(All this is "auto-plagiarized" from a law

review article I wrote some time ago.

My wife and I went to an event at my 3-year-old’s nursery school today.

She saw me still in my pajamas just before she left for the day, and said

"Daddy, you will get dressed before you come to my school, won’t

you?" This is the beginning of at least 18 years of her worrying

about whether I am about to embarrass her in public.

the Civic Mission of Schools

This was a fairly short work day, because I was helping at home in the

morning and then took a 2-hour lunch to discuss with colleagues the final

grades for last semester’s graduate course. (Three of us taught something

called "The

Proseminar in Politics, Philosophy, and Public Policy," a graduate-level

introduction to the basic tools you need to analyze fundamental social

and moral questions.)

The big thing that is going on at CIRCLE

is our soon-to-be completed joint report with the Carnegie

Corporation, entitled "The Civic Mission of Schools." We

worked all fall to hold meetings and email discussions for about 55 people

who are contributors to, and potential endorsers of, the report. The final

draft is now with these people for their last comments, and they are to

decide whether to endorse. Monday is the deadline. Some participants want

changes; the big debate is about whether it is necessary to run schools

in a more democratic manner. For some of our participants, this is the

key to reform. For others, it is risky and unsupported by research evidence.

We are working to develop compromise language that is meaningful advice

to schools. I remain confident that we will have a solid report with 50

signatories. (Meanwhile, I’m spending a lot of my time on practical details

like layout, copy-editing, scheduling the launch, etc.)