Three Books on Race

White Fragility: Why it's so hard for white people to talk about racism

Robin Diangelo (Beacon Press, 2018)

 

You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories about Racism

Amber Ruffin & Lacey Lamar (Grand Central Publishing, 2021)

 

Don't Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body

Savala Nolan (Simon & Schuster, 2021)

 

I'm reviewing three books this month, just for the Goldilocks fun of it.

Robin Diangelo is, among other things, a diversity trainer. That is, she goes into workplaces to educate people–white people– about racism; and she almost always meets resistance. White Fragility is about what that resistance is made of. Consider:

(1) You are a terrible person because you're a racist.

(2) You were socialized in a pervasive and pernicious social system that benefits you as a white person, and that system is invisible to you.

Again and again, Diangelo has spoken with people who hear (2) and react as though she had said (1). Nobody wants to be guilty of racism, and we guard ourselves against overtly demonstrating it; but not using openly racist language is much too low a bar. If we get to the point of acknowledging that the system has been helping us all our lives, what are we supposed to do about it? We can't go back and make FDR include people of color in the New Deal, even if the Southern senators of the day would have let him. What's really possible? For one thing, we can educate ourselves; and for another, we can work on letting go of the fragility that makes any possible feedback feel like a direct attack on our character.

On the whole, though, I don't recommend White Fragility as a reading experience, unless you are already accustomed to the way sociologists write. Diangelo has good reason for speaking in generalizations, but as a consequence, her writing doesn't offer enough personal stories to make enjoyable reading. It's Too Hard.

By contrast, Amber Ruffin and her older sister, Lacey Lamar, have gone all the way Soft. This book would actually be a pretty good place to start the study suggested by White Fragility. Ruffin has a successful career writing comedy, notably on Late Night with Seth Meyers, where she occasionally appears alongside the host. Her position as the only Black woman in the room has yielded her a whole lot of material, but in this book, she's focused on her sister's life in Omaha, where they grew up. It's true, you'll never believe what happens to Lacey.

Lacey asks the price of some luxury good, and is told, not the price, but "You can't afford it." Clothing, furniture, a watch, it doesn't matter: she's Black, so she's automatically poor. She attends a seminar or a fund-raiser: the door-keeper argues with her instead of finding her name on the list. As a teen, she gets harassed by JC Penney security so often, she knows their secret knock. They once tried to pick her up when she hadn't even been in their store. Amber wants us to know this: "When you hear these stories and think, None of these stories are okay, you are right. And when you hear these stories and think, Dang, that's hilarious, you are right. They're both."

Savala Nolan writes essays from the in-between spaces of race, economic circumstance, and body composition. She's a light-skinned Black woman with a law degree, descended from both enslaved people and enslavers; she's gained and lost large amounts of weight all her life.

Let me give Don't Let It Get You Down the last word: "Black is as ingenious, resourceful, dexterous, and inventive as a double agent. Black people of all hues, geographies, dispositions, and beliefs can see each other, can switch codes, can perform and improv, and, just as women know something about gender that is often a mystery to men, Black people know more about whiteness–its inner workings; its underbelly; its face without makeup, tabloid style; the wrappers and trinkets at the bottom of its purse; its longings and emptiness–than whiteness may ever know about itself."

Just Right. 

 

 

Any Good Books, September 2022

 

If Then

If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

Jill Lepore (Liveright, 2020)

The Simulmatics Corporation existed for only eleven years, from 1959 to 1970; it absorbed large amounts of money from the Democratic Party and the Defense Department, but at the end, its 'automatic simulation' business went abruptly out of fashion, and it dissolved in bankruptcy. Yet this shoestring operation was involved, or implicated, in several of the most significant developments of the decade. "It's as if Simulmatics had left behind not a narrative of the decade but a box of punch cards waiting to be decoded, a cryptic chronicle of the unmaking of American politics."

The computer image is perfectly apt, because the first big project the corporation undertook was to build a computer model of the American electorate, for purposes of testing out Democratic positions for the 1960 election. Using Gallup and Roper polls from the preceding decade, they sorted the voters into 480 types, by gender, race, religion, party, and economic circumstance; these types could then be correlated with voting results from the same years. They made their first report to the Adlai Stevenson campaign, emphasizing the importance of black voters in the election, and suggesting that the party "could succeed in winning back black voters who'd defected to the GOP only by taking a stronger position on civil rights. It might not have seemed to require a team of behavioral scientists, an IBM 704, and $65,000 to make this case, but, arguably, it had."

The Democrats were in transition from the age of Adlai Stevenson, a reluctant candidate who could be nominated only in a party convention, to the age of Kennedy, whose advantage came from aggressive campaigning in the primaries. When Kennedy took the nomination, Simulmatics followed. They "recommended that Kennedy confront the religious issue head-on, not to avert criticism but to incite it." By making the issue salient, Kennedy could draw the sympathy of other religious minorities. Again, you might not have needed a simulation to see this, and there's no way to know what difference it really made.

It is hard to remember what a novelty this use of computers was. (Simulmatics didn't actually own a computer yet; they rented time on one of the few big IBM machines in New York City.) Was it cheating, in some way? Unethical, or just too clever by half? But from that day to this, the capacity to predict, and target, voter behavior has increased at the same dizzying rate as computer speed itself.

The Simulmatics Corporation was actually a group of men with widely varying personal assets: Ed Greenfield was an advertising man, handsome and charming–"and like all ad men, he sold nothing so well as himself." Eugene Burdick was a political theorist, with a successful career in fiction on the side; Ithiel de Sola Pool was a quantitative behavioral scientist who had worked in the Pentagon. There was a computer wizard, Alex Berstein, and a mathematical genius called Wild Bill McPhee. Lepore lets us into their backgrounds, their marriages, and the other places their work took them.

For Ithiel de Sola Pool, that was Vietnam. The Pentagon hired Simulmatics to try to quantify the winning of hearts and minds. Pool was a dedicated anti-communist, but the project was farcical from the start. The behavioral scientists were asking the wrong questions, by means of bewildered translators, of people who had no reason to trust them. Seldom has 'garbage in, garbage out' been a more appropriate image.

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and General William Westmoreland, assisted by the RAND corporation, had established a way of thinking based on numbers and more numbers. "Vietnam would be the test of McNamara's policy, and of RAND and Simulmatics' behavioral science: decision by numbers, knowledge without humanity, the future in figures. It would fail. It would also endure. In the twenty-first century, it would organize daily life, politics, war, commerce. Everything."

This book is not comforting, but it sure does explain a lot. It's bad news, but good information.