'Nother Solent

Fecklessness and power.

John Weidner, Betsy Newmark and Eugene Volokh have all posted about the following definition of "Cultural Racism" put out by the Seattle public schools administration:

Cultural Racism:

Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as “other”, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers...

Following media attention this definition has been removed and replaced by less obviously offensive blather.

The policy decision that "emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology" constituted racism came to my ear like a little echo of the draft European Constitution: an attempt to build in a left-wing position without going to the trouble of arguing for it. Under this definition pretty any student daring to defend Republican ideas could have been accused of racism. And that was the idea. It was all about power.

The idea that "having a future time orientation" constituted racism was a little more interesting. The stereotype of blacks as being feckless goes back to the era of slavery. I would guess that the slaves probably did tend to fecklessness, as a rule, although not as much as the masters thought they did. This relative lack of a future time orientation among the slaves was not because they had black skin but because they had no power. There is less point in making plans for your old age when you know that when your strength starts to fade you can be literally "sold down the river" . There is less point making plans for your children when you know they may be taken from you as soon as they are old enough to work. Even for those slaves who were allowed to earn and save those savings were insecure. Defenders of slavery made another point, which remains true despite the source: that a slave did not have to worry about where his next meal was coming from or where he would sleep that night. It was all organised for him.

Slaves did make plans, of course, but they tended to be secret. Plans of escape and rebellion were secret for obvious reasons. But most slaves did not escape and did not rebel. Their plans had to be secret because they involved manipulation of their masters, cajoling them, bringing them round - and people do not like to be manipulated. To some extent I would imagine that the slaves kept their plans secret even from themselves, "compartmentalized" as we would say now: it is human nature to pretend to oneself that one does not dream of a better future when the chances of the dream coming to pass are low.

Naturally, the white slaveowners preferred to think of their slaves as childlike creatures, living for the moment, incapable of making decisions for themselves. I dare say that there were social penalties imposed on any white who talked too long about instances of thrift or self-discipline he might have observed among the blacks.

And there still are, in Seattle schools. How odd.

ADDED LATER: When writing the last line above, I slightly misread - or understood at the wrong angle - the Seattle "anti-racism" policy. I was thinking of it as narrower than it is; as saying that it was racist for whites to favour having a future time orientation (in blacks or whites, presumably) when in fact it says that simply having a "future time orientation" is, in itself, racism. (It says elsewhere in the policy that only whites can be racist.)

I doubt if the slaveowners liked to see evidence of determined long term planning on the part of their chattels. The parallel may seem extreme, but I'm not the only one to make it.

ADDED LATER YET: I really shouldn't've had that beer. These days I seem to have the alcohol capacity of, well, a pint glass. I keep getting that parallel slightly wrong. The desire on the part of those in authority to punish those under authority for making long term plans does indeed suggest that they wish to train them to be less than fully independent citizens. But in this case the victims were white, not black, so bringing Mason Weaver's book into it, as I did in the link, wasn't as relevant as I thought it was. Then again, we're all human beings, and I bet these guys find ways to infantilize blacks as well. The very obscurity of these speech codes is part of their power: you can never be sure you aren't breaking some rule you've never heard of.

I always said that radical chic needed to be put down the toilet of history.

The new Nintendo games console formerly known as the "Revolution", giving rise to a million headlines saying "The revolution is coming", is now to be known as the...

Wii.

Wi? We don't know. All we know is that somebody must have spent a pretty penny coming up with that one.

This Wikipedia entry is rather muted in describing the reaction to the new name. My children think it's the most sublime name since Atari's Pong.

Incidentally, the French name for Noddy is Oui-oui and it is a myth that the Vauxhall Nova didn't sell in Spanish-speaking countries because no va means "it doesn't go". If I had more time I would have found a better way of integrating these interesting but tenuosly connected facts into the rest of the post, but right now I have to go and make revolution.

I am delighted

that Ken Loach has won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his film lauding the IRA of the '20s, which he himself says is to be read as a parallel to the British in Iraq today. You may recall that Michael Moore won the Palme d'Or last year with Farenheit 9/11.

Let all three of them, Loach, Moore and the Palme d'Or itself, drag each other's reputations down. I hope that the judges in future years continue to make it obvious that the award is given for having the right opinions to play well with the luvvie crowd. Eventually having won the Palme d'Or will bestow about as much credit as having won the Lenin Prize for Literature. Don't worry about Loach, in his case that is probably quite a lot of credit. It's tough on winners from earlier years who may have had different political opinions or none, but one cannot allow the sufferings of individuals to stand in the way of advancing the cause of art.

Loach himself certainly didn't. Until two days ago I had never heard this:

In Kes, probably Loach's best-known film, which tells the tale of a boy who befriends a falcon, the actor playing the boy believed the bird used in the filming had been killed for the final scene in which he discovers its death. In fact, a dead kestrel had been substituted for the live bird.

It's not the croquet I object to, it's the lawn it was being played on.

JEM says of Mr Prescott,

While we're quoting from the Sermon on the Mount, here's one for John Prescott, old salt as he was, to contemplate when he next plays croquet...

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

I must get out the old croquet set again. Splendid game. Personally, I have no objection to him playing it. Surely nothing so superficial could dilute the uncrushable proletarian might of John Prescott's class identity - after all, being deputy ruler of the country and living in a grace-and-favour mansion didn't.

Ah, I see the mansion has been relinquished. Never mind, he can always come round my place for a game, properly chaperoned. And he still has his other grace-and-favour home and his ministerial salary. Of course "salary" isn't quite the right word at the moment. "Unearned income" might describe it better.

Haditha - like you care.

Several US marines are being investigated by the Naval Criminal Investigation Service and are likely to be charged with a massacre of 24 people, including women and children, in the Iraqi town of Haditha.

If these allegations are correct then the guilty men should be punished, and not with the disgracefully lenient punishment meted out to Lt Calley, the officer who led those guily of the massacre of Vietnamese villagers at My Lai. Personally I don't lose any sleep when child-murderers are executed.

As it happens I found the particular Washington Post article linked to above on one of my occasional visits to the website of the Stop the War Coalition. They profess to be horrified by the slaughter of civilians, they who said:

"The StWC reaffirms its call for an end to the occupation, the return of all British troops in Iraq to this country and recognises once more the legitimacy of the struggle of Iraqis, by whatever means they find necessary, to secure such ends."

I wouldn't have thought it of Johann Hari.

I would have thought it of the Independent though. Hari slagged off Bjorn Lomborg in its pages - fair enough, that's what freedom of speech is for. In the course of his slagging off, though, he made several clear errors of fact. Lomborg himself and Scott Burgess drew these errors to the attention of the paper. Result? Nothing. No response. All that high-toned stuff about the Readers' Editor doesn't seem to be for anything.

One is sometimes curious

to discover what people one knows by email look like in the flesh. I had never really thought of discovering what they taste like in the flesh. Iain Murray, however...