Sentiment and, and vs. Morality: In Praise of the Triage Nurse

WORKING

            If you have to have your dissertation topic “anticipated,” it’s nice if it’s done by a really classic old essay; maybe not so nice if it’s anticipated rather casually as a kind of side-chapter in a book in, mostly, another field. In any event, my original topic for a dissertation in English was on “The Fool in King Lear,” which is more or less the title of a chapter in a classic work on Fools generally, by the major scholar, Enid Welsford, in 1935.

            Still, the Fool in Lear remained the heart of my dissertation, and the upshot of my reading of Lear was that it’s a rigorously, almost militantly logical play coming to the sentimental conclusion that human morality and ethics rest in compassion, in suffering — if necessary — with other people, in learning to see the world “feelingly.” 

            So I argued in 1970-71, so I still believe about King Lear and about the real world. If God is dead or never existed or doesn’t get involved much in human affairs; or if God is a hard-ass Christian God who’ll damn you to eternal Hell for getting your theology wrong — and definitely if you're a heathen like all the people in the play — or a Calvinist God who’ll save or damn you as He damn well pleases. Or if “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods./ They kill us for their sport”. If Nature is not a compassionate Mother Goddess but indifferent, or favoring as fittest the strongest and most cruel; if social ranks and law and rules and customs, if respect for old age and condemnation of cruelty are just human conventions and unreliable — If the world is pretty much as a naturalistic, materialistic, thoroughly modern vision sees it; then pity exists if people feel it; morality, too, exists only if its restraints are felt.

            That’s not very respectable philosophy — it’s “Intuitionism” or something equally disreputable — but that sort of stress on feeling (with) is one logical reaction if you want to drop a moral God and maintain a modern but moral approach to life. It’s a position, though, that nowadays, must be balanced.

            The first Age of Sentiment in the West was roughly 18^thcentury, between the Enlightenment and the Romantics; we live in a second one. «Trust your feelings, Luke» does not actually occur in the STAR WARS saga, at least not that I can find on line, but it’s a good statement of the “ethos” of the movies, and of our era.

            I’m suspicious of the idea, starting with me and some of my feelings but going on to more general and ultimately appalling possibilities: “The devout,” Eric Hoffer asserted in 1951, “are always urged to seek the absolute truth with their hearts and not their minds. […]Rudolph Hess, when swearing in the entire Nazi party in 1934, exhorted his hearers: ‘Do not seek Adolph Hitler with your brains; all of you will find him with the strength of your hearts’” (The True Believer §57). And closer to home and far less sensationally, Barry Goldwater campaigned in 1964 on the slogan "In your heart, you know he's right" — and Goldwater scared me enough that I worked on the local campaign for Lyndon Johnson, a man I didn’t really trust. 

 (Take away his crudeness, and you can get a tragic figure out of LBJ: serial mass murder can go with a tragedy — Macbeth — but not, the folklore has it, humiliating high-ranking underlings by making them confer with him while he took a shit, or showing his penis and asking if Ho Chi Minh had a dick like that.)

            Now an emergency-room nurse once told me to fill out a form when I was in there for what turned out to be bilateral corneal abrasion — the top layer of cells ripped off of my corneas by my contact lenses — and couldn’t open my eyes without severe pain (the cops had given me a lift to the hospital); so I know this can go too far. Still, my most-excellent introduction to an ethical imperative to suppress feelings was when I regularly stopped by the emergency room at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago.

            In college, I was a summer worker at Reese in the Microbiology Department, and being low-person in seniority I got the job of walking a route in the hospital first thing in the morning and collecting blood-agar plates from various other departments, including my first stop, the ER.

            There had to be some exceptions, but there was remarkable consistency: Every Monday, there’d be a trail of blood leading to the ER, and most days there was a cop car in front. And I’d walk in, and wait while the receptionist-nurse talked to a couple of parents trying to suppress hysteria and getting “Father’s Name / Mother’s Name / Address …” and with barely looking up and not missing a beat motioning with her head at the keys hung behind her. I’d get the keys and unlock the small refrigerator where they kept the narcotics and the petri dishes, and I’d pick up whatever needed to be picked up and drop off new plates as needed.

            And I’d go out, and replace the keys, with the receptionist still not missing any beats, watching me to be sure I replaced the keys and hadn't stolen any narcotics, and nodding at me her thanks. 

            She did that every day, and the folklore was that ER nurses got terminally bored with just about every other job at the hospital. Anyway, I got to watch the receptionist carefully and every day got glimpses of the work of the rest of the staff and later in life learned more.

            In I and Thou, Martin Buber celebrates the “encounter” and the I-You relationship; but our usual interaction with the world and our fellow beings is I-It. And part of my take-away from the book is that it is the potential for an I-Thou relationship that is crucial and not to get too hung up if most of my interactions with people are just, well, interactions, transactional. Later this got clarified when my relationship with bank clerks got usually replaced by my relationship with ATMs. Earlier, and relevant here, was coming to understand that for the ER personnel especially, but many medical people, the I-Thou potential was indeed crucial, but more immediately important was the ability to tamp down feeling and deal with injured people, often people in great distress, dispassionately: I-It. 

            This is very clear with the Triage nurse and what we can call “Triage situations” — which you should do your best to avoid and to try to prevent. However, in a Triage situation, there’s an ethical imperative to perform Triage: roughly, to establish priorities of treatment by dividing the incoming wounded, injured or whatever into those likely to die no matter what care they receive; those likely to live even if not treated or barely treated; and “Those for whom immediate care might make a positive difference in outcome” (to lift a phrase from the linked Wikipedia article). If resources are limited, this is definitely not “Women and children first” or any other sentimental association: a strong man who might live with treatment gets preference over a child whose injuries could break your heart, but are going to be soon fatal. If you’ve got morphine or something more modern, you shoot the kid up and move on.

            A “Triage situation” burned into my memory just reading a report years ago concerned a UNESCO or similar group responding to a famine and having to deal with a starving village. The relief workers were doing “Women and children first” until the young men of the village confronted them and told them to give the food to them and to young women: they’d make more babies later. Some self-preservation was involved here for the relief workers (many of the young men were armed), but they decided to give the food to the strongest of the young and to the strongest of the skilled elders and village leaders. In that desperate situation, the best they could do was to save the village as a functioning social unit, and the young children could indeed be replaced. 

            As I said, Lesson One: Try to prevent “Triage situations.” When in one, however, the ethical duty is to choose the least evil and maybe least downright horrific choice, while recognizing that choosing the lesser of two or least of several evils is still evil — and that failure to choose or refusal to choose is also a choice.

            And in such extreme contexts, «Trust your feelings, Luke» or «Following your heart» could lead to terrible, immoral choices.

            Sometimes also in less extreme situations. 

            I’m confident if you’ve gotten this far in the blog, you’re way ahead of me on this: The ideal, maybe of course, is someone like the character Cordelia in Shakespeare’s King Lear, who is compassionate and strong and rational for as long as reason can work. 

            On the way to such an ideal, though, we need to first keep in mind that King Lear is a play, make-believe, and relevant for my point here reconsider the soft spot in the American heart and head for the person of correct feelings.

            So look, when a great politician like Bill Clinton says, “I feel your pain,” tell him, thanks for the effort, but if you felt all of our pain it would destroy you, and that now that he’s considered our pain enough to throw out a properly sensitive comment what does he intend to do for us? 

            Or consider this thought experiment on sensitivity and feelings’ variation: attitudes. Politician Boll Weevil tells you that he don’t (sic) much like Colored folk, but his family owned a number and he and the rest of White America have inherited wealth stolen from slaves. “Guilt ain’t inherited,” he says, “but the loot is; and we who are recipients of stolen goods have to discuss how we’re going to make restitution.” He doesn’t much like African-Americans, but he wants to discuss what would be the most rational and ethical way to do the honorable thing and pay reparations. Politician Tear Duct — and as a male writer I’ll make both my stereotypes male — politician Tear Duct just loves members of the African Diaspora, and loves and likes and respects them/you so much he won’t insult you with re-establishing condescending, dependent, subordinate, subaltern relationships … and no way is he going to discuss reparations.

            Most of us have problems dealing with snobs who dislike us, but if Boll Weevil’s sense of family and national — hell, even racial — honor gets him to start negotiating reparations, support him and vote for him even if he’s not feeling your pain and has no intention of having a beer with you, ever. 

            Boll Weevil is not trusting his feelings, and if you dislike him, feel that, treasure your dislike, and deal with him if, when, and as long as it’s to your advantage to do so.

            Ursula K. Le Guin has a political saying on a planet nicknamed Winter that would translate into our terms as “You don’t have to be lovers to haul a sled together.” And sometimes you — I, we — can form effective coalitions with people you dislike and who may really dislike you. 

            So have feelings, Luke, and consider them and be capable of caring relationships. Be compassionate and sensitive. But get into the habit of critical thinking and hard-headed, sometimes hard-hearted ethics. That paradoxical injunction by the Prophet Micah (6.8) — that ethical parallel to the paradox of “Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!”: it’s like that. “Do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly”: combine logic with compassion and have the humility to understand that you’re dealing with contradictions much of the time, and there’s really no right answer here.

            But in our time, another age of passion, let’s stress that reason and logic. 

Black Lives Matter: Some Connections (Re)Viewed from that Jagged Orbit

First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

— Pastor Martin Niemöller (one poetic version)

            

My cousin Joy was active in the Peoria Holocaust Memorial Button Project, so even living far from it, I'm familiar with their approach to helping people, especially young Midwestern Americans, imagine the Hitlerian massacres by collecting and then piling together in five large transparent containers one everyday item — a button — for each of the eleven million people murdered. Relevant here is that best-estimate figure of eleven million: some five to six million murdered Jews and five to six million other "enemies of the state."

            The larger number is important, as is Hannah Arendt's project in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) to put into historical, sociological, political, and ethical context what many of my fellow Jews passionately believe must be seen as the Holocaust, the Shoah — the destruction of the Jews seen as in its essence unique. That is, the Hitlerian attempted genocide of Jews was not unique as all historical events are necessarily unique but unique in the deepest sense of sui generis: literally one of a kind.

            Whatever the ultimate Truth is about the Hitlerian Holocaust, there are two practical (pragmatic, political) problems with seeing it as the Holocaust, sui generis, absolutely unique.

            First, if the Shoah is literally unique there is little to be learned from it. The deaths of some six million Jews in "The Final Solution to the Jewish Question" would be a relatively recent reminder of the dangers of anti-Semitism and the human potential for atrocities, but that is the end of their lessons. On the other hand, if the Shoah fits into larger patterns, there is much to be learned from it about racism, colonial theory and policies, bureaucracy, human psychology — well, and so forth in a variety of areas of far more than mere academic interest.

            Second, if the Holocaust is literally unique, a Calamity for the Jews, why should non-Jews care?

            That is not a rhetorical question.

            Clearly non-Jews should care on ethical grounds: a great evil had been done, and … well, and that is of ethical significance. And then we can go on to consider how decent people should care about great evils and try to do something about them, maybe learn about them and have their consciousness raised and show empathy and compassion.

            And that will pretty much be the end of the matter, which is fine for individuals and of political significance: Compassion and empathy are central to the moral life and ethical politics.

            Looking at those eleven million buttons, though, thinking of the mass murder of eleven million people is a reminder that once a figurative death machine like the Holocaust gets into action — whoever it was designed for initially — it's going to stuff into its maw all sorts of people.

            Which is why various forms of Martin Niemöller's prose-poem keep getting quoted, and why Paul Julian and Les Goldman's animation THE HANGMAN (1964) — from the anti-McCarthyite poem by Maurice Ogden (1951/54) — is one of the more important works of the middle of the twentieth century.

            Indeed, "Black Lives Matter," and more to the immediate point in the autumn of 2015, so do Black deaths. That point must be made and made again and then repeated. Soon, though, the "Black Lives Matter" truth must be complemented by the hard-nose pragmatic political doctrine that effective, long-term politics are coalition politics, and coalitions need at least one thick root in perceived self-interest and/or the interests of one's immediate group. For Jews such consideration should motivate political as well as ethical reasons to commemorate some eleven million deaths in the Hitlerian Holocaust. For American Blacks …

            Well, it's arrogant to give advice, but I have some additional stories to upload into cyberspace, one or two of which may be of use to Black Americans.

            The first story is the oldest memory I have with words. My family had just moved to Chicago — a bit before 1950 — and I heard a new and apparently powerful word on the schoolyard and came home and asked my mother about it. The word was "nigger." My mother paused and said very carefully, "For now, let it go with this: If the first word out of a man's mouth is 'nigger,' the second word will be 'kike', so don't use it." I have no memory of when I learned the word "kike," but "kike" I knew, and in that knowledge and my mother's words I could understand that "nigger" was a word I shouldn't use and that those who used it were a danger to me.

            The Blacks, my parents' generation would say, were the Jews' Kapore in America: the "sacrificial substitute," the scapegoat that for once we didn't have to be. Except, as my mother knew, that wasn't exactly right. Among Whites in America who took race most seriously — like the neo-Nazis and the Klan — Blacks were first on the list by a great distance, but, oh, indeed there were others on their lists.

            "First they came for the Blacks …," and US Blacks by a similar great extent are the ones most at risk to be killed or abused by US police; but as we can tell you here out West, Blacks have potential allies with activists in the American Indian Movement and Mexican-American communities — and elsewhere.

            "The enemy of my enemy is" not necessarily "my friend," but s/he could be a co-belligerent; and the groups next in line to get shot by the police are definitely potential allies for Black Lives Matter. 

*

            A quick story from the University of Illinois, the main campus at Urbana-Champaign, on a lighter subject than homicide.

            In the late 1960s, UIUC introduced a program to admit five hundred Black students as affirmative action. It was tokenism — it turned out to be five hundred admissions total over four years, not 2000 — but it was a start. The Black students were put into temporary housing before getting dorm assignments, and they sat-in and protested, arguing that White frosh wouldn't have to put up with such shit. Actually, White frosh did: temporary housing awaiting dorm assignments had been Standard Operating Procedure for as long as anyone could remember. Among the other good things that came of this affirmative action program, was that the UIUC student housing authorities came up with faster ways to get new students into their permanent dorm rooms.

            There's a lesson here, one driven home by more serious considerations with school integration.

            Part of the idea of integration was that integrated schools would be better schools in part because the White establishment wouldn't fuck over White students and parents the way they would Black people, and, to the degree they tried, White parents and students wouldn't put up with it.

            Integration supporters overestimated White folk, underestimating the degree of "White flight" and the degree to which White establishments would be willing to fuck over most of those who remained in integrated school systems and the degree to which the poor who remained would have little choice but to "take it," and/or were willing to put up with a fair amount of school-house shit. (Education is valued highly enough to justify high risk and sacrifice in some cultures and subcultures, but not in all.)

            What should make poor Whites, Muslims, and others nervous about emphasis on Black equality is that part of the move toward equality could be treating larger groups of people equally badly.

            And to some extent, treating all Americans equally badly makes sense from the point of view of police: The assumption that every suspect is armed and dangerous and to be treated as a threat isn't irrational given the gun laws — and sheer number of guns — in much of the United States. There is a fair chance that a lot of people out on the American street are armed, untrained, nervous, short-tempered, and (hence) dangerous to the public and to themselves — and to police.

            Moreover, if it's a "War on Crime," it's to a great extent a counter-insurgency and guerilla war, where it's hard to tell who the civilians might be, and where civilian deaths can count as "acceptable collateral damage" if necessary to protect the lives of "our troops."

            Who those troops might be can get complicated.

            In Vietnam and Iraq, the US military did not leave US racism totally behind them, as indicated by my Chinese-American friend who said one of his more important jobs as an Army officer in Vietnam was as neutral mediator between Black and White soldiers (and the strongest racism he encountered was from Vietnamese who saw him, as he put it, not as an American officer there to protect them but as a "Chink"). And in US warfare in Vietnam and Iraq and elsewhere, the figure of speech Indian or Injun Country speaks volumes.

            Currently, the main "Indian Country" in the US is poor Black neighborhoods, but there is also "Indian Country" in the parts of actual Indian Country not policed by tribal forces — and maybe in some places where tribal police do have authority — and in barrios and in other ghettoized areas. In a "war on crime" with crime treated as a kind of insurgency to be met with militarized police, Black communities become the indigenous populations in which the guerillas hide.

            However, it is not just Black communities, and the whole "War on Crime," and the associated "War on Drugs" are dangerous policies not just for minorities but also for an American Republic seen as an antithesis of a police state.

*

            Even if racial issues magically disappeared, we'd still have problems. I was intrigued by some informal surveys I did in classes where we studied Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) and I asked my students to estimate screen time of various acts of violence in the film. Significantly, many of my students did not consider State violence against the elegant thug anti-hero to be violence. Said anti-hero, Alex, was a Brit teenager played by a young Malcolm McDowell, a kid who was fairly well cultured, if not well-socialized, a speaker of an interesting variety of London English, more or less my students' age in appearance, and emphatically White.

            A joke among collegiate dissidents in the late 1960s had members of The Great Silent Majority of Nixon-loving Americans breaking their silence with the line, "Them goddamn violent protesters should all be taken out and shot!" And when nine people were wounded and four killed at Kent State University in Ohio on 4 May 1970, at least one reaction a friend of mine heard from a co-worker, was "They should have shot them all." Rumors at the time and after had it that Governor James Rhodes — running for the US Senate — had wanted a confrontation, having noted that the police riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 had increased the popularity of Mayor Richard J. Daley. Rhodes lost the Republican primary election to the popular Robert Taft Jr., in a vote two days after the killings, woundings, and at least one maiming (of White folk) in Kent, Ohio — but the vote was very close.

            On 13 May 1970, a half-minute fusillade of some 460 rounds — far more than fired at Kent State — left two dead and fifteen wounded young Black people at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi, without the photographs as there were at Kent State and with a racially charged cover-up.

            My point here isn't to give a "Mort Sahl Memorial Grimmy Award" for who's suffered worst — Black wins — but to note that the US faces issues not just in Black and White, not even adding Brown, Red, and Yellow, but also figuratively blue (sometimes brown or tan or khaki). None of the cops at Jackson State went to jail for a deadly shooting spree, nor National Guardsmen at Jackson State. And so forth. The State claims "a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence"; fine, but there is a problem whenever people fail to see State violence as violence and just don't get the sick joke of "them violent people should be taken out and shot!"

            Black Lives Matter and so do cops' lives — but it won't be much progress if we just get more minority and women cops and they get socialized into a cop culture of "Us (cops)" vs. "civilians," if a more diverse population of cops gets integrated into a system where agents of the State can get away with murder both figuratively and literally. If Black lives and Black deaths by police are to not just matter but get significantly reduced, we need political coalitions that can get non-cop citizen review boards monitoring police use of force, plus changes in the laws and procedures that allow police to use force that can be deadly if police officers just feel threatened. We need coalition political action to get laws and policies that ensure reasonable and equitable surveillance of police behavior: recognizing legitimate privacy concerns for police and for the victims of crime and their families. (The capital "P" People have a right to see and judge the actions of those who are supposed to serve us and protect us; TV stations don't have the right to show shooting or beating videos over and over as a kind of violence pornography passing as news.)

*

            Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers (1959) is a nicely contradictory and contrarian combination of economic libertarianism with a paean to fascistic and militaristic authoritarianism in most things generally and all things military; Paul Verhoeven's film STARSHIP TROOPERS (1997) is a dystopian satiric sendup of the novel's politics. In Heinlein's intended eutopia, major crimes that we see and hear of are punished by hanging and minor ones by flogging. One flogging we see.

            As becomes pretty obvious in a YouTube search, Verhoeven's film makes clear the S&M aspect of the flogging scene, and the macho masochism. Relevant here, for 1959, Heinlein is excellent on race issues. Heinlein's hero is Filipino, and in the good liberal SF fashion of the period, when humankind's potential hegemony if not survival is threatened by giant pseudo-arachnid aliens ("Bugs"), any remaining racism becomes just silly and dangerous. Put these together, and you get in Verhoeven's movie an important switch. Verhoeven's hero is not "Juan 'Johnnie' Rico" from a rich family in the Philippines as in Heinlein's novel, but "John D. 'Johnny' Rico," incandescent White rich kid from Buenos Aires, and when he gets flogged the noncom wielding the whip is Black.

            Earth without racism is progress. Still —

            "Race Matters," but there are other ways to create caste systems besides race; the idea of race is somewhat fluid; and racism is by definition an ideology, and ideology can be both rigid and highly malleable.

            The system of authority and hierarchy in Starship Troopers as both novel and film does not require our ideas of race: it's fascism without racism. In such a fascistic society, a Black man can flog a White man: so long as someone holds the whip, whips the people ordered to be whipped — and the rest of the troops obediently "stand by to witness punishment" — that long the system holds, and it's still fascistic.

*

            In the USA and most of the world in 2015, we are far from post-racial, and it is necessary to assert "Black Lives," and Black Deaths, "Matter." Having made that assertion, however, even having made it come true, there is still work to be done. After making fairer who gets to whip (or club or shoot) whom, we need to greatly reduce the literal and figurative whippings and the all-too-literal clubbing and shooting.

            We need a world where a rich Black American gets the same deference as a rich White, and then work on flattening the distances between rich and poor.

            The importance of greater economic equality and opportunity is driven home by part of the backlash to Black Lives Matter: the argument summarized in the headline, "Police fear 'YouTube effect [is] affecting [their] work, contributing to violent crime," as the Washington Times puts it.

            Going into Leftist-historical mode, I'd ask us to take very seriously the possibility that police body cameras or even just the prevalence of cell phones might reduce violent crime — reducing beatings and shootings by cops — and also reduce the ability of police to do a significant part of their work.

            For much of human history there have been few good jobs and even fewer genteel statuses where one can be free or mostly free from work — and most people had drudgework jobs, many as serfs or slaves. For all of human history, many people have been motivated by a desire for status, to be better than their neighbors even, it has been alleged — alleged by among other Thomas More at the end of Utopia and Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth in The Space Merchants — even, it has been alleged, people want to feel superior even if that superiority is bought at the cost of a lower standard of living than might be possible with greater equality.

            Things are better nowadays than they were under slavery and serfdom, but there's no reason to believe that with globalization, automation, and old-fashioned greed and pride we will reach a point even in America where most people have good jobs.

            With good jobs at a premium and membership in the leisure class even rarer, it is handy for those with power to cut down competition with various kinds of caste systems: patriarchy as the most basic, with many of the goodies reserved for older males, but other systems in other places — in the USA in many places caste systems anchored in race. To repeat an oversimplified but still useful cliché, for much of colonial and than US history, White solidarity kept poor Whites allied with their more aristocratic "betters" and kept those poor Whites in their place(s), which was tolerable for them as long as they were better off than Blacks.

            Usually, this was straightforward: "keeping the niggers down" in part with crude terror — as with the KKK from Reconstruction to our own time — but more importantly through law. From the early 17^th century on, there were the more or less savage slave codes in the England's American colonies and then the USA and, after emancipation, "Jim Crow" in the sense of segregation but also use of the criminal law, and with the terror tactics of crimes by cops: KKK and local police were not necessarily mutually exclusive categories.

            Nowadays, the system is more systematic and systemic, as analyzed by Ta-Nehisi Coates in "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration" (The Atlantic, October 2015) and — if I understand the argument of a book I've read about but not yet listened to — more specifically by Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New Press, 2010).

            So Bernie Sanders has reason to listen to Black Lives Matter activists and apply a racial analysis to police violence. A multi-edged bitter joke in the 1960s — told by racists and anti-racists — had it that Ralph Bunch held a doctorate in political science from Harvard University, became the UN chief mediator in the first Arab-Israeli conflict, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, and received the US Medal of Freedom in 1963. The joke then went on to ask what the form of address was for  Dr. Bunch — an African-American — in a recent appearance in Mississippi, with the answer ... "Nigger." For racists it didn't matter at that time and matters little now how well a Black person does: race in racist theories is at the heart of what people are, regardless of action and achievements. Anti-racists used the jokes to mock racist attitudes; racist used the joke to reinforce them. Part of the reason people want money and position for is to get respect; race will matter for the foreseeable future because racism denies US Blacks respect however far they climb up the class and status ladder.

            On the other hand, Black Lives Matter activists should listen to Bernie Sanders because raising income and getting some wealth to poor people will help the class status of Blacks; and most Americans aren't fanatical racists and will show respect to middleclass and richer Blacks that they'll deny to the poor generally and Black poor very specifically.

            Insofar as the State uses violence to keep people in their place, the true "essence" is whether you're among the haves or the have-nots.  A non-racist and anti-racist populist coalition to reduce poverty — as Martin Luther King hoped — will make Black Lives Matter more, and reduce Black Deaths from cops, and from less sensational causes.

The Universe of Power is Lumpy, and Identity Is Complex (4 Feb. 2014)

 In academic jargon from the late 20^th century, I can put the Basic point here fairly succinctly: Outside of the simplest societies, and in ways highly sensitive to context, human beings are multiply and complexly situated, with different status- and power-positions in a number of hierarchies of class, caste, age, profession, etc. — in modern times (say 1500 CE-present) often including race.
            Coming down out of high abstraction, this means that if you're Oprah Winfried, you could be refused a close look at a $38,000 purse at the Trois Pommes boutique in Zurich, Switzerland, because you are Black; and it may've taken you longer to become a billionaire than if you were a man — but you can find yourself at a boutique for the upper .01% in Zurich, and you can conceive of a handbag running $38,000. It means that if you're Carlos Estavez visiting Oxnard, California, from the Santa Barbara Film Festival, you're less likely to be shot or beaten by our local cops than if you weren't also Charlie Sheen.
            Putting the matter in terms of my personal experience, this —
            One winter holiday season a couple decades back, I was happily surprised to find a card in my mailbox from my editor at Miami University student newspaper, The Miami Student. "Happy Holidays!" the card company wished me, and my editor added a few lines of her own. "Hope all goes well, blah blah. So happy to have had your column for The Student. I'm dropping your column." And then she ended with a sentence or two that I shouldn't worry about the newspaper because she'd found another member of the faculty to replace me, and he was, as I well knew, just a great guy, an incredibly popular teacher in my department, and, she was sure, a most excellent writer.
            Over the next couple of days, I showed the card around, and one of my colleagues joked that she'd probably ask me for a letter of recommendation, and I said I just might write one for her since she showed the tact and sensitivity I'd come to associate with editors. (Like many authors, I saved and occasionally savored the more notable of the rejection letters I'd received. The most memorable is still the one I got at the very start of my scholarly career: the editor of PMLA was kind enough to include some comments from the first, and only, reader of a long essay I submitted, a comment that began, "Very interesting opening paragraph, before the whole thing falls flat.")
            As you've probably anticipated, I soon received another letter from the editor of The Miami Student — a note, anyway — requesting a letter of recommendation.
            I was at my office typewriter, I think (it may've been a computer keyboard), composing my response to her, when she stopped at my door, put her head in, and asked me in person for the letter; and I told her to come all the way in and repeated to her what had been the joke that I just might write the letter.
            She was somewhat taken aback, and we get to the point of this story for my point here. "Oh," she replied. "It didn't occur to me I could hurt the feelings of a" (White male?) "professor."
            So I explained to her, in nonfigurative terms, how rejection hurts coming from just about anyone, but that "The universe of power is lumpy" and in this context she was the editor, I was — had been — a staff writer, and she the person with power.
            The upshot, if you're interested, is that I think I did write a brief "RecLet" and (I'm almost positive) she got whatever the RecLet recommended her for. The colleague whose column replaced mine was indeed a hotshot, and sufficiently one that he soon stopped submitting columns to The Student and then moved on to a better job.
            In a similar line, as English Department Student Mediator — i.e., the guy who handled complaints from students — I had to deal with a couple of young women teaching assistants brought up feminist in the era stressing the all-pervasive power of patriarchy. And they couldn't believe that they could hurt, or mess over, a male student. Whether or not they had done so is something I wouldn't reveal if I remembered, and I certainly don't remember. And it's irrelevant. "The universe of power is lumpy," and in their classrooms, most immediately embedded in the student/teacher relationship — most especially as in grades — they held the upper hand.
            Furthermore, at that place and time if their students had threatened them outside the classroom, relying upon the students' status as Whites and males and large and (in one case) a jock, the full police powers of the University and State would have enforced the power of the TA's. However much the cops and coaches might have held them in contempt as women and "civilians," academics and intellectuals, their status in the classroom would have trumped other concerns: the Establishment protects the Establishment, and as Miami U teachers they were part of the local Establishment.
            Centrally, though, were the grades, which were assigned by "The Instructor of Record," which — short of some very fancy and difficult-to-execute bureaucratic footwork — even a lowly Teaching Assistant was. And, once assigned, the grade was the grade, and only the instructor of record or a court order could change it.
            While explaining that they were the power-holders here, I could identify with these young women. I hadn't believed it my first couple semesters as a TA: it took me a while to realize The Power of the Grade.
            As a new teacher in my twenties, my previous experience dealing with freshman had been in my fraternity, where we kept the pledges somewhat uninformed on just who could do what to them — and most of them suspected that I, as a chapter officer, could have them "racked out": with a "rack-out" an extended periods of late-night strenuous Physical Training of the sort Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket would immortally formalize as, "I will PT you all until you fucking die! I'll PT you until your assholes are sucking buttermilk!" Additionally, some suspected — as I learned from a really drunken pledge who pleaded with me not to — some thought we might paddle them. Actually, we didn't paddle pledges, and I personally lacked authority to order a rackout, although I probably could have arranged one if I worked at it, and I certainly could have had a pledge put on one of our nastier work assignments. ("There is more than one way to skin a cat; none of which are pleasant for the cat" — and the grease trap in a large kitchen often needs cleaning.)
            My previous experience dealing with frosh was with guys who thought I could punish them, possibly significantly, and that is what counts: they showed me respect, or at least took care to be deferential outside of ritualized "Saturnalian" pledge entertainments, where they were invited to insult actives. What I had never encountered from pledges in the fraternity was servility, and when I encountered servility in the classroom, it disturbed me.
            I finally said to a class, "Look, I'm maybe five, six years older than most of you; I look younger than half of you; I'm 5'2" tall and 135 pounds, and most of you can beat me up — why the servility?!?" And they reminded me about my giving them grades.
            And I told them that I was an ethical person and really wanted them to argue with me and did actually grade "blind," not looking at the names of the students who'd written the essays and I respected integrity … and, yeah, I gave the grades.
            "The universe of power is lumpy" and a little Jew who got asked to show multiple ID's in bars that sold my students beer without question — I had to work to keep a fair number of students from high-power, hydraulic sucking up.
            Later on in my career, when linguistic "morÄ“s" loosened, I had my students consider the implications of expressions like "to brown-nose" and "suck up to" and consider the fact that if they prostituted their ideas for a grade that made me (figuratively) a professorial "john." But that was later, about the time of my "mediation" service at Miami U and having to explain to a new generation of teachers, especially young women, the variation on the theme by Stan Lee that even with a little bit of power comes responsibility, starting with the responsibility of admitting that in some contexts even members of otherwise oppressed groups can have power.
            Larger issues are involved, though, with that lumpy universe of power, some of them depressing.
            At my fraternity, some wise-ass (who might've been me) illustrated the principle of seniority and hierarchy with a posted drawing of a multi-storey outhouse, imaging the bureaucratic and more generally sociological meaning of the adage "Shit flows down hill."
            That principle can move into the horrific in contexts like the Jewish Police and community councils in too many cases during the Hitlerian Holocaust, or the problems slave women would have found looking for sisterly solidarity from the wives of their masters or even their widowed mistresses. Or with gang leaders in ghettos and barrios having tremendous local power, even if they might have trouble hailing a cab (if their armored Humvee is in the shop) and probably won't apply for membership in "The City Club" — although their children or grandchildren might well be asked to join.
            And here I will stop on that line of thought since it leads back to European ghettos and those Jewish police, death camp Kapos, and tales of survival and complicity I can only think about briefly. So I'm going to tone down the emotional stress and put things a bit more positively —

            If not all, then at least most effective politics is coalition politics, and in an era of "identity" politics effective coalition building is helped by reminding people that their identities are complex and that identity itself is malleable and contextual.
            My personal personal story here is a quick one, from a time I had been about a week in Tokyo and caught myself looking for Black people. Why was I looking for Black people? Well, as an American in Tokyo, I was definitely gaijin, a foreigner, and I found myself feeling like a foreigner and looking for other gaijin, and for sure a Black person would (1) stand out in a crowd, (2) be gaijin, and (3) likely be American. I wasn't the only one feeling that way. A South Korean businessman sort of picked me up and bought me dinner. He was interesting to talk to, but I wondered what the agenda here might be. It was simple; he'd been in Japan for several months was not just gaijin but Korean gaijin, and he just wanted to talk to a fellow foreigner and someone who wouldn't view him with just a touch of something hard to pin down. The people he'd dealt with hadn't been racists, exactly, nor xenophobes nor jingoistic; it was just that for them there were Japanese and gaijin, and Koreans were definitely gaijin, and that was that. Random Blacks on the street, this South Korean businessman, and I were in the same group.
            Another story is less personal, but still low-key and small-scale.
            There was a radio interview I can't cite but recall well in which a young feminist scholar studied a Black church where young women were trying to change things and were running into resistance from their elders, women as well as men. Why would the older women side with the men and oppose an attempt to democratize the church in ways that would give women an equal voice in running the church? Why would the old women reject a voice in hiring ministers and establishing the liturgy and, well, moving the church into the future?
            Why wouldn't these old women join with the young ones to gain power to innovate, or just to do things?
            If you've ever dealt with a group of organized old women, you have guessed by now that they knew exactly what they were doing.
            The reforms that would've given church-women in general more power would have given the old ladies of the "amen corner" less, more exactly, less where it mattered to them. They liked the church the way it was, thank you, and didn't want changes. They lacked the power to innovate, but they had the power to block: a near-absolute power to veto. They couldn't hire the minister — or get a female one — but they sure as hell could get a minister fired, and the one after him and the one after him until they got a leadership that knew not to cross them.
            Increased democratic power for women in that church generally would've meant less of the power for the old women particularly.
            On the other hand, moving from a memory of a sociological story to a memory of a fictional one — there's a minor but important theme in Suzy McKee Charnas's searing feminist dystopia Walk to the End of the World (1974). The book shows a world ruled by men in which women are enslaved. That's literally enslaved and brutally enslaved. Still, Walk reminds us that patriarchy isn't rule by men, as such, but rule by some men, the patriarchs: older men with power. It's inferable in the world of Walk that the majority of men would find it in their interest to ally with the enslaved women to depose the patriarchs and democratize their world.
            That ain't gonna happen in Walk to the End of the World. Even as poor Whites and poor Blacks in the real-world USA rarely allied to resist the plantation owners and other power elites, the oppressed young men and the women we see in Walk aren't going to ally. "The universe of power is lumpy" implies that those with power who stay in power keep themselves united and keep opponents or just serious competitors from getting together: divide et impera as they used to say in Latin, "Divide and rule"; if you're already ruling, break up every threatening concentration of power as it forms, preventing competing "lumps."
            More exactly, if you are ruling and wish to continue doing so, you prevent concentration of power that might compete with you. The ideal is to maintain your big lump of power while those below you form groups that you get competing with each other: slashing up and grinding down each other.
            And powerful groups will continue to divide, conquer, and rule so long as so many people, even highly educated and politicized teaching assistants, are unconscious of most of the game.
            So, MORAL to all this: power clumps in weird ways and anyone sufficiently privileged to be literate and reading an essay belongs to some groups who have power and other groups that don't. Ethical political behavior is largely using one's positions of power to help get power and the goodies it brings distributed more equitably. The beginning of such ethical behavior is understanding that the universe of power is lumpy and figuring out where in it one is privileged to be in an empowered lump.

            Next comes a "Basic" not worth an essay, but the one thing I ever said liked by an ethicist colleague of mine: "A lot of morality is learning to direct your aggression up the hierarchy, not down it" — with, I'll add, occasional angled and lateral shots going for appropriate "lumps."