Mosque Controversy

I have not really waded into the NYC mosque controversy because I don't really know all the facts. It does seem like there are a couple of potential critical thinking problems with the reasoning of those opposed to the mosque (This is not say that the other side is not making some of its own errors).

First, it seems like that many commentators and people are equating Al Queda with all Muslims. While Al Queda claims to be a Muslim group, a very small percentage (less than a percent) of Muslims are connected with Al Queda. In a related vein, many are confusing the fact that some (again a very small percentage) Muslims advocate for a version of Jihad that is defined by political and violent confrontations with the idea that ALL Muslims hold similar values. The Imam in the center of this controversy is a Sufi. I don't claim to know everything about this form of Islam but I do know that it is distinct from the Sunni, Shiite, and Wahabism. It seems like critics of the mosque out to demonstrate some familiarity with the immense variety of versions of Islam.

Second, it seems like many folks who oppose the mosque do so on the grounds that it is an affront to "American" values and the memory of the victims. From what I have read, 10% of those who died in the WTC disaster were Muslim. For some reason, their memory does not seem to part of this discussion. Also, it seems like somehow people are forgetting that Muslims can be "Americans." Again from what I have read somewhere between 2.5 and 8 million Muslims are live and are citizens of the U.S. On its face, it seems contradictory to somehow suggest that these folks do not possess "American" values.

Third, just because an individual - in this case Al Queda terrorists - does something, it does not necessarily follow that they did so for religious reasons. For example, just because Christians or Jews regularly commit murders, rapes, and thefts in the U.S., it does not follow that these individuals did so out of religious reasons. While Al Queda frequently relies on religious symbols and rhetoric, Al Queda is much more of a political organization than a religious one. Its leaders are not called imams because they are not really focused on religious per se but pursuing a particular political projecte (albeit a very dangerous and violent one).

Fourth, as the picture above notes, there are many other potentially more demeaning buildings and businesses around the WTC than this mosque. I am not sure how pubs, strip clubs, fast-food joints, and lingerie shops help memorize the victims of this tragedy. It seems a bit idiosyncratic to attack this mosque if you are not going at these other businesses as well.

Fifth, I keep hearing that the Imam has potential radical ties with and/or has not been critical enough of certain groups (e.g. Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood). After doing some web searching, I cannot imagine someone who has a greater history of inter-faith dialogue and a geniune connection to Lower Manhattan. Given his extensive political ties to both parties, he seems like precisely the kind of Islamic leader than many politicians have been asking for! I believe I read that he has led services for something like 20 years in that area. This is not some "fly by night" operation, nor does he appear to use this space to be anti-American or to some denigrate the memories of the WTC bombings. Things are not adding up for me here as I would think that some folks would like that "moderate Islam" is trying to challenge "radical Islam" and present a model for how to be good "Islamic Americans."

While there might be a debate about its location (Are four or ten blocks a better "buffer"than 2?), I guess I am having hard time to see any nuanced argument why a pretty moderate Muslim group shouldn't be able to build a community center in Lower Manhattan. The arguments against the mosque don't seem to add up, especially when I consider that much of this criticism has come from folks who tend to want the United States to endorse or support religion more frequently. Frankly,I would think most Americans would prefer a community center/house of worship there - no matter the religion - more than the New York Dolls Strip Club or an Off-Track Betting Site. (BTW, I believe there was a Dunkin' Donuts across the street or within 2 blocks from the Holocaust memorial in Berlin in 2006!)

I also think that the fact this Imam has held services there before and after the WTC attack - with little fanfare or controversy - leads me to believe that this controversy is probably more manufactured than anything else and more an artifact of other partisan debates in American culture than anything else.

Politics and the Commodification of Hip-Hop

In his 1993 essay "Rap, Race, and Politics," Clarence Lusane argues:

On the one hand, rap is the voice of alienated, frustrated and rebellious black youth, who recognize their vulnerabiliy and marginality in post-industrial America. On the other hand, rap is the packaging and marketing of social discontent by some of the most skilled ad agencies and largest record producers in the world (351)

While Lusane made this observation nearly twenty years ago in the last days of Hip-Hop's golden age, it still seems remarkably accurate for today. The growth of the "underground" clearly reveals the latent tension between corporate hip-hop and independent record companies. Ironically, it is frequently the artists signed on the most major label who appear the most authentic and connected to the street, while independent label rappers can seem more intellectual and political but not really grounded in contemporary urban realities.

While there is a lot of desire for hip-hop to be political, I wonder if that hope places a greater burden on hip-hop than other musical forms. (E.g. When was the last time someone criticized country or classical for lacking political consciousness or not representing the interests of its listeners?)

Certainly, African American musical history is filled with musicians and songs that carried strong political messages inside their music. The sorrow songs and 1950s-1960s jazz certainly qualify as overtly political forms of music, but what about other greats, such as Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Lester Young, or Charlie Parker? Some of these musicians possessed considerable personal criticisms of how racism in American culture, yet that is not the primary way how they are remembered today.

This has left me wondering whether having a healthy dynamic or debate between socially conscious musicians and those who are more commercial is enough. Or should we ask more of our musicians and, in turn, their corporate sponsors? While I tend to listen mostly to the underground and socially conscious rappers and would love for them to get greater distribution and radio-play, I guess I am skeptical that the major record labels would be successful in putting out socially conscious rap. In addition, I somehow think that it is precisely the marginal status of many underground rappers that give their music power. What troubles me about these very tentative conclusions is that it dooms socially conscious rap to a more marginal place. But, perhaps that is just how culture works: those working for social reform and change become part of the status quo once they gain access to dominant institutions (in this case, the major labels).



(You can find the Lusane essay in That's the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004), edited by Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal and published by Routledge.)

Intellectual Bashing

Russell Jacoby just reviewed Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society at http://chronicle.com/article/Skewering-Intellectuals/64113/. The review and the comments it elicited aroused my curiosity, so I read the first chapter on amazon.com to see how he sets up his argument.

While I can't quite endorse Jacoby's review based on this limited reading, Sowell's analysis appears to suffer from a number of potential critical thinking errors.

First, he defines intellectuals in a curious way. He argues that intellectuals is an occupational career for people whose career requires them to deal with ideas (Sowell 2). Then, in a footnote, he observes that many intellectuals do not earn their living from selling their ideas. This is strange because you have an economist defining an occupation in terms that do not include compensation for the work they do. Nor do intellectuals receive ownership interests in their ideas either (as an entrepreneur would who opens a business). So, they don't economically benefit if they are right, nor do they loose money if they are wrong. What they can do is benefit from their copyrights, trademarks and/or patents!

There must be some reason for this odd occupational definition of being an intellectual and this leads us to the second difficulty. By page five, Sowell wants to examine "Ideas and their Accountability." And this is where the critical thinking errors begin to multiply. In this section, Sowell wants to create a system for evaluating the quality of the ideas generated by these intellectuals and make judge intellectuals whether there ideas are "right."

And this is where Sowell has made his greatest analytical error (This may not shoot down his general critique of intellectuals but his methodology for doing so). By most accounts, the measure of an intellectual is his or her effect, not whether he or she is correct. This is even more true by the kinds of economic analyses Sowell tends to favor and employ. Intellectuals, even the most Marxist of intellectuals, do not own their ideas but they do write books and essays, make films, give lectures, and teach classes. From what I understand of traditional market economics, economics ought to frame intellectuals as in the business of selling the material products that result from their ideas, much like Walmart is in the business of selling low-cost goods. While Sowell wants to define them as non-market actors (hence his strange definition based in the language of occupation), most if not all market intellectuals are selling a brand. Books by Foucault, Derrida, and even his beloved Milton Friedman mostly sell because of the brand these guys (or their admirers) have created, not because of their truth. One would think that a free marketer like Sowell would understand this!

What I find ironic here is economists are typically not all that bothered by mistaken judgments as they are part of the market mechanisms. If a company errs in their understanding of the market and plans to sell a product at too high of a price, free marketers don't mind if they go out of business. Or conversely, if a business misunderstands what the public wants, they ought to go out of business even if there product is good. Consider the case of the mom-and-pop hardware store getting run out of business by a big box store, like Home Depot. Free marketers will argue that customers merely preferred lower prices to personal customer service or something like that.

The issue that really appears to be bothering Sowell is that intellectuals, particularly left intellectuals continue to make movies, write books, and give lectures even if many of their central arguments turn out to be wrong. He seems to be suggesting that the market is wrong and should not be purchasing their books. But how can markets be wrong? If you are a free market economist, they are not. Perhaps the market values the moral outrage, the theoretical language, and hearing tales of corporate greed and injustice.

In response to this apparent failure of the market to act rationally, Sowell trots out the truth standard as some sort of verification mechanism. The problem with this methodology (like much economic analysis) is you cannot evaluate a prediction about the future until the future arrives and you know all the contextual data. By then, it is too late to change course. (Consider how many economists -right or left- predicted it in its full misery). It is this point that Jacoby really grabs onto. What Jacoby and Sowell seem to miss is that intellectuals do a lot more than offer predictions about the future. Sowell appears to reduce intellectuals to mere political pundits. Most intellectuals ideas are way too nuanced to get fully enacted even if they can provide some of the general scaffolding for government action. So, what do intellectuals do best? Intellectuals ask provocative questions and examine our moral responsibility. I think many intellectuals leave the question of verification and experimentation to others (whom Sowell does not define as intellectuals).

Now, I am not disagreeing with Sowell's observation that intellectuals have been wrong a lot and those errors probably have social consequences. He is probably correct about this and, who knows, he might even be correct that left intellectuals are wrong more frequently than right intellectuals. However, this cannot save the form of his argument. Intellectuals are both market actors and interested in generating more ideas and in evaluating the morality of our current habits and social structures. We cannot merely evaluate them as intellectuals based on their predictions about the future (especially if you promote free market economics like Sowell).

As for Jacoby, I think he too readily takes the bait and tries to refute Sowell's attack on past left positions. For a supposed leftist, I also thought he missed an obvious opportunity to explain why someone like Antonio Gramsci relied on the figure of the intellectual as an antidote to the rise of modern capitalism and totalitarian dictatorships. I have not read his Prison Notebooks in a long time, but I always thought this metaphor was to remind workers that they were not mere cogs but human beings with minds and morality.

Sowell's form of economic thinking seems to find wisdom and morality in markets but not individuals, certainly not "experts or intellectuals". As a result, he appears to want to severely curtail the rhetoric of wisdom and morality in political discussions of markets and/or government action. I would think that Jacoby would have been more effective if he stayed focused on this disagreement with Sowell (are markets or individuals the locus of moral insight and wisdom?) and would have identified the real consequences in Sowell's efforts to rely on his brand of economic thought to evaluate the work of intellectuals.

Hip-Hop Scholars?

My "Hip-Hop Nation" class begins this week (Hooray!) One issue that really jumped out at me in the readings (from Know What I Mean and That's the Joint! especially) is the real anxiety that surrounds the whole concept of academic scholarship about hip-hop. On the hand, the very of act of having a scholarly discourse about hip-hop legitimates it and helps increase the cultural capital of participants. For these reasons, many folks support the increasing academic popularity of and interest in hip-hop. On the other hand, this increase in scholarship has the potential to undermine the authority of participants in hip-hop culture. Another downside has been that many academic folks with limited or partial knowledge about hip-hop have been able to voice their criticism and praise for hip-hop. Frequently, both popular and academic publications have accepted these scholarly pronouncements without carefully evaluating the data or scholarship upon which that commentary rested! I think that much recent work in hip-hop studies is pretty much eradicating this interloper problem.

I look forward to posing this question to students to see how they respond to the whole situation. In most academic fields, the debate about the relative authority of participants and observers is pretty settled. I am curious whether students will draw on analogies from other things that they have studied, such as history, literature, social science, art, or even biology and apply them here. What complicates this whole question is that race, class, and gender possess a much greater presence in this debate about the relation between the scholar and his/her subject-matter than in other fields. I don't have the answers but I really want to hear what students have to say about all this. I wonder if how students pre-existing knowledge about hip-hop will shape how they approach this debate!

My own take about this question is shaped by my own entry into hip-hop studies via being a lawyer. I came to hip-hop studies because lawyers and judges (mostly white) were making all sorts of judgments about sampling and the meaning of hip-hop culture vis-a-vis criminal law in the early to mid-1990s. Few of those judges, attorneys, legislators, or police officers had a detailed knowledge of hip-hop, but their views shaped how hip-hop has developed and been regulated by the state. For this reason, I have always been somewhat skeptical of the claim that ONLY hip-hop participants can and should discuss and analyze hip-hop. The challenge I have always struggled with is how to balance the two very different forms of knowledge being developed about hip-hop.

As I think about all this, my mind keeps coming back to the debate within American studies (the field where I received my Ph.D.) between those who viewed American culture as unique and exceptional and those who viewed American culture as following similar rules (regarding class, gender, ethnicity, capitalism, democracy, etc) as other countries. While the critics of American exceptionalism tend to rule the current day in the study of American culture, it appears that the exceptionalists tend to hold the dominant position in hip-hop studies. In other words, it seems that the consensus is that hip-hop is so unique that we cannot apply existing theories to understand it and we would be better off emphasizing the view of the actual participants. I am not confident enough to want to defend this position yet, but I am hoping my students will help me figure out if this analogy holds or if it simply an interesting but failed idea.

Corporate Free Speech?

As will probably be featured in newspapers and television news over the next 24-48 hours, the United States Supreme Court decided Citizens United vs. FEC http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf. The decision is pretty complicated, largely because elections law is pretty complicated, and relies a lot of legislative interpretation and some analysis of existing case law. In spite of all that, the headlines will probably read something like "Court upholds Free Speech for Corporations." In large part, this is a correct interpretation and one that the court clearly wanted to endorse as the court engaged in a whole lot of interpretative gymnastics to clear away all sorts ways to sidestep the case.

Because this blog is focused on critical thinking, I don't want to review the decision in toto or evaluate its strengths or weaknesses. Rather, I want to focus on an underlying assumption that is pretty settled within law: corporations have or should have constitutional rights.

While I don't think this assumption will change in law anytime soon, it still is something worth considering and evaluating.

As I understand rights, their purpose is to protect individuals and/or people against intrusions from the state. Most justifications of rights hinge on the sanctity and/or moral worth of human beings. It is not uncommon for folks to frame most "rights talk" in the language of human rights. So the jump to corporate rights does not have a clear philosophical foundation. As a historical matter, while corporations existed when the United States was founded, the founders did not really think that they ought to possess rights.

Corporations (or unions and PACS) are legal fictions, not real persons. The move toward a legal recognition of their rights underlines the precarious nature of "rights" talk in the United States. So, for example, actual people, such as felons, illegal immigrants, and in some cases children, lack many "rights" while legal fictions such as Citibank, NBC or Ford posses them.

One consequence of applying rights talk to corporations, is that we view them as moral actors (and this is a good thing). But another consequence of this application is that it completes the shift from the recognition of human rights to something more akin to citizen rights. In other words, rights seem to follow from the social recognition of belonging and participation than concrete being. This, to me, seems like a very slippery slope in which folks or entities gain rights because society recognizes them as rights bearers. Conversely, those without rights lack them because they are not recognized as legitimate rights bearers. I think this is pretty circular and it seems to leave those without social recognition with little recourse.

Another consequence of these linguistic and conceptual shifts is that it requires us to create analogies from corporal existence to fictional entities. I know how to identify when a human being speaks or writes but I am much less certain how to identify when a corporation speaks or writes. At least in contemporary first amendments and election jurisprudence, speech gets transformed into the ability to spend money on advertisements and other things. As a result of all these translations and analogies, we have moved pretty far from the initial formulation and purpose of rights. So, please take the moment of this Supreme Court decision to ponder the current meaning and usage of rights and rights talk!

In Honor of MLK

I just returned from our local MLK celebration. It was great to see so many folks out. I am sure the nice weather helped!

To help honor of MLK, I have created a top ten list of things we should remember today:

1. Millions of people and thousands of leaders shaped the Civil Rights movement. While MLK was incredibly important and influential, he was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
2. The Civil Rights movement focused on changing ordinary things, such as access to pools, schools, and restaurants. Sometimes, you get the impression the movement was mostly philosophy or theory.
3. Per James Hal Cone's scholarship, King's success is linked to the popularity of Malcolm X. King's fame is as much related to who he wasn't as to who he was.
4. King's career did not end in 1963 with his "I Have a Dream" speech.
5. King was assassinated while helping sanitation workers improve their negotiating position during a strike.
6. King (and the rest of the civil rights movment)was much more successful in changing social institutions in the South and attitudes in the North than he was at changing social institutions in the North and attitudes in the South.
7. The Civil Rights movement was primarily a religious movement.
8. The Civil Rights movement relied on music (both gospel and soul music) and art to bring people together.
9. The NAACP litigation strategy and lawyers (including people like Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley) were a significant element to the Civil Rights movement.
10. The Civil Rights movement was as much about property and power as it was abstract rights. Consequently, we should not be satisfied with the rights revolution. We should look to the distribution of power and property to determine how much racial progress has been made.

The Harry Reid Controversy

As is probably well-known, Harry Reid privately told two journalists in 2008 that Obama was more electable because he's "light-skinned" and lacked a "Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." (This description is based on the story posted at the Root: http://www.theroot.com/views/was-harry-reid-right). Since that has been revealed by the journalists, there has been considerable discussion about Reid's comments and whether he should resign his position as Senate Majority Leader.

I am not going to address whether he should resign, but I do want to try to clarify (a key critical thinking step) about the issues swirling around his comments. It seems like there are a number of key points here:

1. Reid used an extremely dated term to refer to African Americans.
2. Reid identified that race mattered in the election of Obama
3. Reid identified that intra-racial differences matter and they can affect interracial communication and perception.
4. Reid identified that cultural practices, specifically language patterns, can change depending on the audience.
5. Reid noted that shifting and controlling one's linguistic patterns can affect people's perceptions (and in turn affect electoral success).

I think that we should hold our political leaders accountable for their language. While perhaps it is understandable that Reid might employ a racial term frequently used in his youth, Reid clearly made an error in his language usage. Again, I leave it to others about what the consequence of this should be, but he definitely should have apologized for that error.

As for the remaining issues, I think the distinction that needs to be made is whether Reid is making descriptive statements or prescriptive ones. From what has been reported, he appears to be describing reality, not promoting his wish for how things ought to be. Based on my assumptions as a professor, telling the truth or trying to tell the truth is not in itself of objectionable. If his descriptions are wrong, bring evidence that they are wrong. (I am happy to see that some folks, like those at the Root, are doing precisely this!)

While he may be wrong in his descriptions of contemporary reality, it seems like the outrage, especially from conservative media, over his comments has stifled a discussion about his observations about contemporary America. I think the controversy reveals, among other things, that white America is still so obsessed with colorblindness as the only strategy to approach race that any reference or discussion of race makes folks cringe. It seems like some of the uproar results from the fact that a white person appears to be acknowledging that race and culture matter.