Half Changed World

This week, I’m writing about Jonathan Kozol’s latest book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.  I guess I should begin by saying that I agree with probably 90 percent of what Kozol says in this book.  I agree that the inadequate education offered to the vast majority of inner-city students is a national embarassment and should be a source of outrage to all Americans, not just those whose kids are stuck attending those schools.  I think it is absurd to take the kids who come to school with the least family resources, put them in overcrowded underfunded classrooms with the least experienced teachers, and then blame them for their failure to pass standardized tests.   I share Kozol’s deep skepticism about the "scripted" teaching programs that are being offered as panaceas to lift up those test scores. 

And yet, I found myself repeatedly arguing with Kozol as I read the book.  He pushes his argument to such extremes that I couldn’t follow him all the way.  Yes, it’s terrible that kids are attending schools with asbestos coming out of the walls and stopped up toilets.  But Kozol seems to be equally outraged over kids going to classes in trailer classrooms — which aren’t ideal, but aren’t terrible, and are common in a good number of solidly middle class school districts too.  He talks about the beautiful and expensive new building provided for Stuyvesant High School in New York, while other schools in the city were falling apart, and points out that only about 3 percent of the students at Stuyvesant are black or Hispanic.  But he doesn’t acknowledge, even in passing, that about half of Stuyvesant students are Asian, many from low-income families.

I was also frustrated that Kozol never made a clear case for why he thinks that it’s so important for black and Hispanic students to have white classmates.  He devotes a lot of effort to proving how segregated many urban classrooms are — most notably, observing that if you want to find a segregated school in America, you should look for one named after Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King.  But is the problem that the schools are (largely) segregated, or that they’re lousy schools?  Is integration worth fighting for in its own right, or only as a means to improving schools for poor minority kids?  Kozol clearly believes the former, but he doesn’t provide an argument for it that will convince anyone who doesn’t already share his views.

I’m actually scared that Shame of the Nation will set back Kozol’s goal of integration.  If you want to convince middle-class parents to send their kids to integrated schools, publicizing the worst case scenarios of dreadful inner-city schools isn’t the way to do it.  I’m not saying we should give up on Brown v Board of Education, but if we somehow managed to provide truly excellent public schools to all students, I think a good bit of educational and residential segregation would fade away without a massive government intervention. 

Today’s book is "It’s a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons," a collection of essays edited by Andi Buchanan, author of Mother Shock.

This is part of her blog book tour, in which different bloggers have been writing about the book each day this month.  It’s been great fun seeing everyone’s different perspectives on the book, from Tertia writing about parenting boy-girl twins to Dawn, who asked Andi some good questions about balancing writing and parenting.  (Go to Andi’s blog for links to everyone who is participating.)

I’m going to start by stealing a question from Shannon, of Peter’s Cross Station, who asked "When I first heard about the project, it sounded like yet another opportunity to make stereotyped claims about gender in children. How have you been able to avoid falling into that old rut?"  Andi replied:

"Well, as I said in my original call for submissions, my whole idea with this book was to refute the gender stereotypes about boys and girls, and to explore whether or not those stereotypes really exist in actual boys and girls through essays by thoughtful writers. For the BOY book, I was specifically looking for pieces that questioned the cultural assumptions we have about boys — whether the essayists ultimately embraced the stereotypes or rejected them was not as important to me as whether or not the writers wrestled with them in the first place. So the BOY book has pieces about a mother being surprised by a son’s love, since what she experienced with her son ran counter to her expectations of what a boy would be like; about a transsexual mother grappling with how to raise her son in the face of everyone’s attitude that her mere presence tips the scale in the direction of him being gay; about a woman nurturing her son’s desire for soft, pretty things, even though a part of her wants to protect him from the harsh, messy world that will surely not be so kind; about boys who defy stereotypes, boys who fit them, and the way mothers adjust their expectations to fit the reality of who their sons are."

There was much in these essays that found me nodding my head in recognition.  I think my favorite essay was "Becoming a Boy"  in which Robin Bradford writes about how her son led her to discover the joy of "boyish" things that she had never done as a girl or woman.  Somewhat to my surprise, the essay that left me looking sheepishly around the metro rubbing tears from my eyes was "The Day He Was Taller" by Jacquelyn Mitchard, which is about her son outgrowing all his clothes and buying himself a suit.

The book is organized into four thematic sections, and I’m afraid I found the first one, about what Andi calls "boy shock" or "prenatal gender apprehension," the hardest to relate to. In response to a question from Sandra, Andi writes:

"[T]he concerns of writers in It’s a Boy were about the otherness of the male gender: What the heck do you do with a boy? Some of the writers in It’s a Girl ask a similar question about raising their daughters, but what prompts that question is not the fear of an unknown gender, but of knowing it all too well."

When I was pregnant with D, we didn’t find out what gender the baby would be until he was born, and I truly didn’t have a preference.  I was under no illusion that I would understand a girl any better than a boy, or be able to provide any more guidance through the treacherous shoals of junior high school.  I may not be able to provide useful advice on whether to report a bully to the teacher or to fight back, but I can’t help with ingratiating oneself with the popular clique of girls either. I sucked at being a teenage girl when I was one; I’m pretty sure I’d suck at being one now if I were pulled back a la Peggy Sue.

It somewhat bothered me that so many of the authors were ambivalent about having sons, and none of them were univocally happy about it.  I asked Andi if she thought this might be because the project was about "women writers on raising sons," and she answered;

"I did worry that perhaps the book would be tilted too much towards the "overly articulate feminist intellectual pondering gender" because it would be written by, well, overly articulate feminist intellectuals who were concerned about issues of gender. But that’s kind of who I wanted exploring the subject — women writers….  And I think even the pieces about being apprehensive about the prospect of having a boy are ultimately about the writers coming to see how their own expectations are flawed, and how they love their child, regardless of gender…  I definitely don’t think writers value boys less. It’s about questioning the cultural assumptions we have about boys and girls and men and women. And questioning things, teasing them apart to find some kind of personal truth, is what writers do."

Given that, I was suprised to read in Andi’s own essay, "It’s a Boy!" this statement:

"We want our daughters to do everything our sons do, yet as mothers ourselves, we know the difficulties and the hard choices they will have to make when they grow up and choose to mother– the career options that dwindle; the daily balancing act that exhausts; the kinds of things our sons will never face, even as they become parents ourselves."

I wish those difficulties on my sons, because the alternative isn’t easy choices, but no choices.  Society has done a much better job of giving both girls and women the option of following either traditionally masculine or traditionally feminine paths than it has as opening up choices for boys and men.

Today’s book is The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage and My Family, by Dan Savage, of Savage Love [decidedly not work-safe] fame.  It’s the story of his and his boyfriend’s discussions about whether to get matching tattoos, wrapped in various digressions about the marital choices of the rest of his family and the weirdness of the institution of marriage in general. 

It’s a quick read, funny in places, but without the emotional intensity of The Kid, in which Savage wrote about their decision to adopt a child, and the adoption process.  The heart of the book is the personal stories, which put a face on the gay marriage debate.  But fundamentally, I don’t see this book changing many people’s minds; the only ones who are likely to read it are already on Savage’s side.

Savage makes some interesting points about how people hold gays who want to get married to a higher standard than they do to heterosexual couples.  (That is, if they want to get married to their same-sex partners — Savage points out that if he wants to enter into a sham marriage with a woman he has no plans to live with, the state will happily bestow its authority on it.)   He argues in favor of commitment, especially when children are involved, but against enforced monogamy as an essential part of such commitments.  And, in a passage that is both funny and biting, he argues against the perverse logic that says that "only a marriage that ends with someone in the cooler down at Maloney’s [funeral home] is a success."

This morning, before showering, I decided to peak at a couple of my favorite blogs, and immediately learned that Rosa Parks had died.  I love this quote from her biography (quoted in the Washington Post):

"People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

Until I heard about Parks, I had been planning on blogging about the book I just finished, Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys.  I thought about skipping my weekly book review, but then saw a connection between the two.  Because Gaiman claims that Anansi stories — stories about the trickster Spider (or about Coyote, or Br’er Rabbit, or whatever name you choose)  — were what taught humans that there are ways to get what you wanted without resorting to violence and that brains can be as effective as sharp knives.  Those are certainly lessons of the Civil Rights Movement.  Anansi stories also teach that making your enemy look foolish is sometimes better than scaring him.  And the Civil Rights Movement suceeded in part because it made segregationists look foolish and backwards.

I don’t want to give away the plot of Anansi Boys, but I will say that I enjoyed the book and stayed up later than I should have to finish it.  Most of the reviews seem to describe it as a sequel to American Gods, but I thought it had more in common with Gaiman’s Neverwhere.  It’s a fable, set in the present day, about someone who thinks he’s quite ordinary (even super-ordinary) and turns out not to be.

One detail that I really liked is the way that Gaiman handles race in this book. Almost all of the main characters are of African or Afro-Carribean descent, but that’s never explicitly stated; a few characters are identified as "white."  It made me realize how many books I’ve read where characters are assumed to be white unless stated otherwise.

On a related note, I took out from the library Anansi and the Moss Covered Rock by Eric Kimmel, which is on the list of 100 Picture Books Everyone Should Know that Jody at Raising WEG found.  I think I liked Anansi Goes Fishing, by the same author, a bit better, but they’re both good.

Do you remember the song from A Chorus Line, "Dance 10, Looks 3"?  Today’s book, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, by Glenn Loury, gets a rating of "Content 9, Writing 3."  Loury makes some very important arguments, but they’re buried in some of the most inpenetrable writing I’ve ever encountered.  And it’s especially frustrating since I’ve read some essays by Loury that I found both lucid and eloquent.

Loury uses the language and mathematics of classical economics to address the question of why racial disparities aren’t fading away in American society now that formal discrimination ("discrimination in contract") has largely been eliminated.  (Paul Krugman writes that there was a MIT joke that Loury’s thesis began: "This dissertation is concerned with the economics of racism. I define racism as a single-valued, continuous mapping…") Specifically, Loury argues that even if you begin with the assumptions that race is a social convention with no underlying biological reality, and that there are not overall differences in the innate capacities of the different races, it can still be rational for people to treat members of different races differently. 

An example Loury offers is of the cabbie who must decide whether to pick up a potential fare.  Loury suggests the following scenario:

• Criminals are distributed equally often among members of two groups.
• Criminals are less sensitive to how long they have to wait for a cab than law-abiding citizens (who can turn to alternatives like taking the bus or asking a friend for a lift — these are not good substitutes for someone planning a holdup).
• Cabbies believe that members of group A are more likely to be criminal than members of group B, and therefore are less likely to stop for them.
• Therefore, members of group A have to wait longer for cabs that members of group B.
• Therefore, the law-abiding members of group A are less likely to take cabs.
• Therefore, the subpopulation of group A who takes cabs is in fact more likely to be criminal than the subpopulation of group B.

Loury argues that similar logic could apply to various other scenarios, such as hiring workers. He then offers the question: "If the association between payoff-irrelevant markers [such as race] and payoff-relevant traits [such as criminality or work ethic] is not intrinsic, but is engendered by the nature of agent-subject interaction, then shouldn’t somebody learn what is going on and intervene to short-circuit the feedback loop producing this inequality?"  (And yes, the whole book is in this sort of awkward language.)

Loury’s answer is yes, somebody should figure out what is going on, especially governments and other large entities.  (He writes: "Consider a traffic cop sitting in a $50,000 cruiser, who has received $100,000 worth of training, is backed by a big bureaucracy, and has a computer at his fingertips that allows him, by simply reading a license plate, to instantly generate reams of information.  This is an observer with no excuse for allowing his behavior to be driven by racial generalizations.")

So why *don’t* we study these sorts of interaction more closely and figure out the intervention points that could break the cycle?  Loury argues that it’s because of persistent racial stigma.  He claims that when girls are laggging behind boys in school, people think "something must be wrong with the schools" but when blacks are lagging behind whites, people think "something must be wrong with the blacks." 

Loury is a somewhat controversial figure.  In the 1980s, he was considered a prominent black conservative, known for opposing affirmative action and arguing that self-destructive behavior was responsible for many of the problems of the black underclass.  He’s moved away from his former allies on the right, but is still far from a classical liberal — in this book he argues that the self-destructive behavior is in part a result of the distorted incentives and limited opportunities offered by a racially unequal society.  I think his ideas are worth grappling with, but the dense language of this book makes it hard to get a grip on them.

Today’s book is The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining The American Dream, by Sheryll Cashin.  (I had actually requested it from the library, but not started it, when Bitch PhD wrote about it.  Dorcasina is also reading it.)  It’s a very interesting book, but ultimately one that left me somewhat frustrated.

The first section of the book simply reviews the facts about residential segregation in the United States.  Little of this section is new research, but Cashin lays out the facts in a readable conversational tone.  She points out that much of what we consider "integration" consists of small number of well-off minorities living in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, as well as of neighborhoods that are in transition.    Very few whites — and even fewer whites with children — choose to live in neighborhoods that have a significant black presence, let alone that are majority black, even when such neighborhoods are less expensive than comparable majority-white neighborhoods.  (Cashin mostly discusses race in terms of black and white, although she notes that one type of stable integrated neighborhood is the multi-ethnic urban center.)  Cashin also notes that a significant number of blacks who could now afford to live in majority-white neighborhoods have chosen to live in majority-black communities where they are "more comfortable."

In the second section, Cashin makes a case that most of society is worse off because of the persistence of race and class segregation.  The ways in which poor urban minorities suffer have been well documented.  Cashin argues that middle-class whites also suffer because they have to spend more than they can afford and/or put up with horrible commutes in order to guarantee safe neighborhoods and decent schools for their kids.  (These sections echo some of the arguments from Perfect Madness and The Two-Income Trap.)  And for me, the most novel part of the book was Cashin’s discussion of how the problems of urban areas follow middle-class blacks into majority-black suburbs.  She spends a lot of time discussing Prince George’s County, MD, and why it still has mediocre schools and few retail shops, even though it is the most affluent majority-black county in the country. 

I found the third part of the book, in which Cashin discusses her hopes for the future, the weakest.  Cashin doesn’t really have much of a solution to offer to the problems she’s identified.  She calls for better enforcement of housing anti-discrimination laws, which I agree is a necessary, but not sufficient first step.  She supports school choice in the form of charter schools, but not vouchers, and talks approvingly of Raleigh’s busing scheme, but doesn’t directly address the issue that busing was a significant factor in pushing white families out of urban school districts.    She bewails our polarized political environment and the focus on suburban swing voters, but doesn’t discuss how gerrymandering penalizes communities that are geographically scattered. 

I like where Cashin’s aiming at; I just don’t see how we get from here to there.

Update: I really want to encourage anyone who is reading this in a feedreader to click over to the comments on this post and the next one.  If you’re only reading my posts, you’re missing out.

Yes, that’s my book review in the new Brain, Child.  My hard copy arrived yesterday, and I keep fondling it.

I’ve blogged here about most of the books that I discussed, but it was fun to put them all together.  It was also a lot of hard work; I’m sure I earned less than the minimum wage, even if I don’t count the time I spent reading the books in the first place.  The experience simultaneously reminded me of why being a writer was a childhood dream, and made me grateful that I’m not depending on my writing to support my family.

For those of you who are just arriving here via my "author’s note," welcome.  This is a blog, a frequently updated website, with the most recent postings appearing on this pages.  Older posts can be found either chronologically, or by subject, as listed in the sidebar to the right.  I write about a book I’ve recently read almost every Tuesday.  I write a lot about work/family issues and politics and gender.  And, yes, sometimes I write about my kids.

Comments, questions, suggestions?

Today’s book is The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and "Women’s Work," by Kathleen Norris.  It’s a small book, 4" x 7", with only about 90 pages, and is the text of a lecture that Norris gave, the 1998 Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality.  Based on the list of previous title in the series, it appears the lectures always focus on women and spirituality.

I requested the book because I read about it (can’t remember where, sorry), and the title intriged me.  And I often feel overwhelmed by the everyday (which is what both "quotidian" and "mundane" mean), so I thought it might be helpful. 

Overall, I can’t say I found the book illuminating.  Norris waxes enthusiastic about the possibility of finding spirituality in the midst of ordinary chaos, and praises "those who manage to find God in a life filled with noise, the demands of other people and relentless daily duties that can consume the self" but fails to provide any guidance for how to do so. (Except for a nagging suggestion that "young parents juggling child-rearing and making a living" should, "if they are wise,… treasure the rare moments of solitude and silence that come their way, and use them not to escape, to distract themselves with television and the like.")

Norris writes that she knew "since high school, that whatever I was destined for, it was not motherhood."  And she is best known for her book about life as an oblate in a monastery.  I found her cheerleading for the joys of the quotidian a little bit like someone who hikes unencumbered up a mountain while I am carrying a huge pack.  When I trip in the mud and beg for help, she tells me, oh no, my journey will be so much more impressive than hers for having carried the pack.  Perhaps, but I’m not sure I’m going to make it at all. 

Norris is at her best when she shares her enthusiasm for laundry (especially when hung on a line) and daily liturgies, and how she uses them to bring herself out of terrible blue funks (although she uses the archaic word "acedia" instead of admitting to depression.).   And I’m happy to have read the book if only for her discussion of collecting manna as the prototypical daily chore.  (As you may remember, the Torah says that God provided manna each day and the Israelites had to collect it each morning.  There was no point in collecting extra so you wouldn’t have to do it the next day, because except for the double portion provided for Shabbat, it all went bad overnight.)

In a comment on my last post on gender differences in children, Darleen urged me to read As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, by John Colapinto.  I had heard good things about the book before, but I hadn’t read it, so I added it to my list.

The book is about David Reimer, the man who was one of the most famous medical "cases" ever, a touchstone in the debates about gender identity and the roles of biology and culture.  As an 8-month-old baby boy, his penis was totally destroyed in a freak circumcision accident.  (Lesson one of the book: don’t let anyone circumcise your kids with an electrocautery machine.)  Following the advice of Dr. John Money, a respected psychologist, the Reimers had the baby castrated and a rudimentary vagina created surgically and raised her as a girl, "Brenda."  Brenda would have been a subject of scientific interest in any case, but the fact that she had an identical twin brother, Brian, turned her into close to the holy grail for researchers, an experimental case with a control.  Dr. Money featured her in dozens of articles, arguing that her successful transformation into a normal girl was proof that nurture, not nature, was the dominant factor in determining gender identity.

Unfortunately for Dr. Money’s argument, John Colapinto shows that Brenda was a desperately unhappy little girl who rejected all traditionally girl-ish pursuits, in spite of her parents’ frantic efforts to make her conform to her new gender identity.  She resisted all attempts to convince her to have the plastic surgery needed to complete her genital transformation, and as soon as she learned her true story, insisted on changing her name and living as a boy. He eventually had surgery to recreate male genitals, as well as a double mastectomy to remove the breasts that he had grown from taking female hormones.  While David had a period of deep depression as a young man, today at the time the book was written, he is appeared to be content in his life, happily married and a father through adoption.  [Edited to reflect the fact that he later committed suicide, as Fred informed me in his comment.]

The other major strand in the book is Colapinto’s damning portrait of Dr. Money.  He makes a convincing case that Money consistently ignored the growing evidence that Brenda’s sex transformation was a disaster, because it was contradictory to his theory, continuing to cite the case as a success long past the point when such a claim was reasonable.  Moreover, he suggests that Money’s treatment of Brenda was essentially sexual abuse, as he pushed the young girl to discuss her fantasies and even role play sexual situations with her brother.  (Because Money totally refused to cooperate with the writing of the book, there is no attempt to portray his side of the story.)

So, it’s a fascinating human-interest story, and Colapinto does a good journalistic job of laying it out for the reader.  But where does it leave us in the endless nature-nurture debate?  While I enjoyed reading the book, at times I yearned for a more acute scientific guide, someone who would probe further into the contradictions of what we mean by gender, who didn’t take Brenda’s willingness to throw a punch and her desire to pee standing up as proof positive that she was meant to be male. 

The one piece of solid scientific ground is that Money’s pure nurturist hypothesis seems to have been pretty much totally discredited, in part because of the case of David Reimer.  The more we learn about fetal brain development and its sensitivity to a variety of environmental influences, the less reasonable it becomes to think that powerful hormones like estrogen and testosterone would have such fundamental effects on other aspects of fetal development, but none on the brain.

But I think it’s fair to say that we simply don’t have a theory of gender identity that really makes sense of — and listens to with respect — the experiences of both David Reimer and biologically normal transsexuals like Jennifer Boylan.  We don’t even have a language to talk about gender identity that doesn’t fall back on such caricatures as ascribing all concern about appearance and relationships to femininity and all interest in mechanics and competition to masculinity.  And without such a language, we spend a lot of time talking past each other.

On Monday, Philip Klinkner at PolySigh posted a graph of labor force participation rates by race and gender for the past 50 years.

I was generally aware of the overall trends, but was surprised at how low the labor force participation rates were for black women in the 1950s.  Yes, they were a lot higher than for white women, but I’ve often heard comments to the effect of "black women have always worked; they didn’t have the privilege of being stay-at-home mothers even in the 1950s.

That’s certainly the impression that I got from reading The Street.  We returned the book to the library yesterday, so I can’t post a direct quote, but Lutie Johnson (and presumably Ann Petry) lays the blame for most of the ills of black people on the fact that whites wouldn’t give black men jobs, but would hire the women as domestic servants.  So the men felt emasculated and sought to prove themselves by fighting and sleeping around.  And the children were left unsupervised in dangerous neighborhoods, and got sucked in by the attractive menace of the Street.

Petry also suggests that at least some of the huge increase in single-mother households over the past 50 years is illusory.  Almost all of the women in The Street are technically still married, but living on their own or with men other than their husbands.  They’re only married because they can’t afford to jump through all the hoops required to get a legal divorce at the time.