RacISM-1: Hard-Core Racism (and We Still Need the Term)

On my mind, as often: words. In this case "racism," recently discussed on my time-line on Facebook in a meme I can no longer locate. Anyway, re: RACISM:
I informally edit for a big-time scholar who had to use the same word in different senses and finally resorted to assigning a number to each different meaning. Elegant that was not, but it recognized a problem and, down and dirty, dealt with it.
There's clearly a need — several needs — to talk about structural racism and racism woven into the history, culture, folkways, political unconscious and figurative psyche and "DNA" of the United States and other countries and cultures involved in the slave trade, Early-Modern and Modern colonialism, and other exploitation. 
But we also need to talk about Racism-1: a necessarily conscious ideology (an "-ism") that races exist, that they are in competition for limited resources and (necessarily) in conflict; that some races are better than others, and that (of course) one's own race is best and had damn well better destroy or keep down the others, rightfully functioning as Master Race in order for that Master Race to survive and for the fully-human species to prosper.
Bigotry and prejudice are more insidious than racism, and deserve their own definitions and condemnations.
Arguably, we can get pogroms and lynchings with bigotry and prejudice but for full-scale modern slavery or genocide one needs racism. BIGOTRY AND PREJUDICE CAN STILL PRODUCE POGROMS AND LYNCHINGS, and those are bad enough. And maybe the phrase "institutionalized racism" will serve for subtler horrors.

Usage Note: "Bigotry," "Racism" ... and Cave 76

But when we come to sin upon reason and upon

discourse, upon meditation and upon plot, this is […]

to become the man of sin, to surrender […] reason

and understanding to the service of sin. When we come to

sin wisely and learnedly, to sin logically, by a quia [because]

and an ergo [therefore …]. — John Donne, Sermon 138

            The repeat on my 11 AM trash-TV watching today was a Cleveland Show episode on Black History Month, and then I noted a draft for this note on my iMac desktop. So apropos of little, but unfortunately usually relevantly, here's a word or two on a term it's unlikely you know, plus some loaded common usages.

Bigotry, Xenophobia: The Amity-Enmity Complex and "Cave 76"

            Like a fair amount of anthropology from the first part of the 20^th century, the idea of "the amity-enmity complex" has some problematic, rather gamy associations. Think of it, then, as a fancy way of characterizing what Mel Brooks's 2000 Year Old Man was getting at with the first national anthem: "Let 'em all go to hell, / Except Cave Seventy-Six!" Or we could note that the injunction in Leviticus (19.18) to "Love your neighbor as yourself" got quoted in the Gospels of Mark (12.30-31) and Matthew (22.39) and gets a whole lot of play, while the near-by injunctions to love foreigners, "the stranger," as yourself (Leviticus 19.34) — although part of the point of the Parable of the Good Samaritan — is much less known.

            Generally, we tend to feel amity toward members of our in-groups — the folks of our family and figurative Cave 76 — and sense "stranger danger" with out-groups. What varies is our sense of who's "In" and who's "Out," who's "like us" and who is, "Well, different."

            The amity-enmity complex may have roots deep enough to reach into parts of our biological inheritance as social animals. It doesn't much matter: the tendency is long-standing, a given of our nature, and a trait that makes sense in terms of the evolution of reproducing groups and some sense of "The Selfish Gene."

            Bigotry, xenophobia, fear of the Other, the often-misplaced idea of "Stranger Danger"  — these are relatively "natural" to people, and we have to work to balance them with our curiosity, reason, compassion, and ethics. Biblical teachings get contradictory here, but the Holiness Code in Leviticus says God said to love the stranger (foreigner, alien) as ourselves, "For you were strangers in the land of Egypt," and some of us may be — indeed, some of us at some time will be — strangers again, refugees ourselves. And statistics can tell us (middle-class, White?) American kids are in more danger from people they know than from random people they don't.

Racism

            Race-ISM is an ideology stating that there are certain large groups that form biological races, that those races differ significantly from one another, and that those differences create a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority. Until fairly recently, "race" could be applied to groups that were relatively small, nonbiological, and pretty parochial: note Winston Churchill's (sometimes perverse) comments about "the British race" or the English despising Irish and vice versa on the basis of "race" — back when the world in a sense was smaller, and "country" was another way to say "county." Nowadays, that wouldn't be RACE-ism, because most of us most of the time work on the color-coded big races: White, Black/Brown, Red, Yellow, although manners may have us using non-color terms. (Personally, I like the color-coding because it's so obviously wrong and silly: e.g., the truly Yellow race is the Simpsons.) And the color-coding/biological idea didn't get firmed up until the Early Modern period, which can be documented in a work like Thomas Rymer's attack on Othello, and Rymer's dumb-ass countryfolk — in Rymer's early-adopter racist view —who really liked Othello because into the late 17th century a lot of even sophisticated city-bred Brits hadn't learned that "Blackamoors" were inferior. "A for instance is not a proof," but Rymer's Short View of Tragedy (1693) is useful for dating when specifically racist ideology — in our sense of "race" — started coming in among the English.

And the date makes sense.

            In his "General Introduction" to The Norton Shakespeare (2000), Stephen Greenblatt has an admirable quotation attributed to Elizabeth I referring to Her Majesty's Loyal Pirate, Sir John Hawkins and his first slaving voyage, where he transported "some three hundred blacks from the Guinea coast to Hispaniola." She "is reported to have said of this venture that it was 'detestable and would call down the Vengeance of Heaven upon the Undertakers.'" Elizabeth was Head of the Church of England and knew a wicked act when she learned of one. However, Hawkins's venture grossed £10,000 — a huge sum during the period — and so "she invested in Hawkins's subsequent voyages and lent him ships" (23); business is business.

            John Hawkins et al. a century before Thomas Rymer didn't need ideology to kill some people, kidnap others, and sell them into slavery: Hawkins and crew were goddamn licensed pirates, and highly profitable organized crime is what they did. It's when the loot went to respectable heirs and assigns and new investors that there was a need for ideological rationalization; and ta-da!: theft, repression, murder, greed — and bigotry — got packaged together and theorized, and we got modern RACE-ISM. Injure first, theorize later, then get to injure more, with a relatively clear conscience; and repeat ....

             We're doing better since the 17th c. — even counting two World Wars and other assorted recent atrocities — but it's a long slog.

            The "slog" will be helped if we're careful with our language.

            Since the 17^th century and modern, Western, race-based slavery, we've built into what became American society racial/racialist components, intimately intertwined with class exploitation and other nastiness. What is called "systemic racism," however, is systemic, part of a system, and not something individual, or, frequently visible to those within the system and profiting from it. It shares with prejudice and bigotry the sort of problem pointed at with the mostly-rhetorical question, "Does a fish know it's in water?" All of these are the more insidious insofar as they are semiconscious or even unconscious. But they are not racism, which is an ideology, conscious by definition.

            The distinction is important because bigotry will lay the basis for pogroms and lynchings and other relatively short-term, usually mob-based horrors. Racism, can work in a vicious cycle of long-term, systematized, bureaucratize, theorized, legally-rationalized horrors: US slavery into the mid-19^th century, Jim Crow, final solutions to various ethnic "problems."

            It's hard to argue with a bigot, but they can learn from experience and — in a hypothetically pure form of bigotry — have no ideology to renounce. Racists can be argued with, but, well, good luck with that. Bigotry is like unto the fleshly sins, racism is a more serious, intellectual sin. It comes from twisting reason, and is difficult to reason people out of. Still, if you're dealing with an otherwise decent racist, say of the Huck Finn variety, someone brought up in the system, experience can teach and logic can reach.

            Sometimes.

            It happened with some religious Southerners of my generation, one I knew personally.

            It is our duty, o decent, ethical reader, to help make it happen. To start on that project we need to know the problem and label it carefully.

Old-Fashioned Conservatives and New-Right Radicals (1 Sept. 2013)

            I think it was some time in the 1970s, and I was in Oxford, Ohio, early in my career as a teacher at Miami University. In any event, there was a strike in Hamilton, Ohio, and some College Republicans from Miami U were driven over to Hamilton in an armored truck and worked as strike breakers. According to an interview in The Miami Student, the student newspapers, the College Repubs mostly saw their ride and their work as fun, something of a lark.

            I mentioned this story to a conservative colleague in my department, and he said something like, "Miami students scabbed … for entertainment?" I said that I didn't think they needed money, so, yeah, for entertainment and to make an ideological point.

            He kind of shuddered and said, "You don't do that …. I mean, maybe if you have to put food on the table, but you don't scab for kicks or to make a point. It's not decent."

            Indeed.

            My colleague was an old-fashioned kind of conservative, with a strong sense of decency, a working-class background, and — whatever his complaints about unions — "scab" and "to scab" as part of his active vocabulary. Our larking, strikebreaking, scabbing students were something neither he nor I had encountered before.

            Later in my career, I was a senior faculty representative to Miami U's Student Affairs Council and kind of an informal parliamentarian. One new student member of Council moved and his buddy seconded a motion to reconstitute Council's membership. They moved to replace in the student delegation the Vice President for Minority Affairs of Associated Student Government with the Vice President for Communication. They thought it would make a neater organizational chart having the ASG liaison officer on SAC rather than the ASG VP for Minority Affairs.

            The Chairman of Council was the highly effective — as in "iron-fisted" — University "Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students," and Consigliere for Enforcement (my formulation) for the University President. The Chair turned to me and said, "Can we do that?" I thought for a moment and replied, "Well, Student Affairs Council lacks power to actually do very much, so we'd be advising the Trustees to impose on Student Government a change in the ASG constitution and by-laws. We can advise that; it's just that the Trustees as a matter of principle don't have the authority to order such a change — no outsiders can change a group's constitution or by-laws — and as a matter of politics, it would be, let's say, imprudent." Whoo, boy, would it have been imprudent! They'd have looked tyrannical over a relative trifle, and racist, since the word "minority" at Miami University meant Black, and we were notorious for having very, very few minority students. "So, yes, we can advise the Trustees to act inappropriately, but they will probably politely ignore us or send the recommendation back with a rebuke."

            The Chair turned to the President of ASG and unofficial head of the student delegation. "Does ASG want us to make this change?" he asked. The Student Body President said "No!" very emphatically, adding that the proposal had come to ASG from the two movers, and ASG had voted it down. Indeed, the idea had received just about no support except from these two guys and some allies from a group that had sprung up on campus recently, and with a lot of money. (A reporter for The Miami Student was convinced the student group was shilling for some rich big-wigs in Ohio politics, but he couldn't prove it and get the story published. The reporter thought the highly traditional Miami Student was about to get challenged by the Midwestern foreshadowing of The Dartmouth Review.)

            The two young men repeated that replacing the student VP for Minority Affairs with the VP for Communication would be logical and make for a cleaner ASG table of organization and a more coherent student delegation.

            And then, significantly, one of my older colleagues spoke up: an Asian-American Christian conservative from the Department of History.

            Assuming but not calling attention to the irony, this historian pointed out that his two younger colleagues on Council had a point about the abstract logic of tables of organization but left out a crucial factor, or at least a crucial factor for conservatives. Whatever the soundness of their arguments in terms of abstract logic, their predecessors in Associated Student Government hadn't been stupid, and there were historical reasons why ASG had as part of their delegation their VP for Minority Affairs, historical reasons that were still valid. As a principle of parliamentary procedure, the burden of proof lies with those wishing to change things, and as a principle of traditional conservatism, "Unless it's necessary to change things, it is necessary not to change things."

            These two guys from the Right of the College Republicans — remnants of the YAFers and precursors of Tea Party Youth — were engaging in the sort of abstract, historically ignorant — and proud of it!— futzing around with organization that drives traditional conservatives up the wall. They were engaging in this exercise not to actually get something done but to stir up racial issues and to appeal to some outside audience. This pissed off pretty much everyone else on Council, including our energetically authoritarian Chair.

            The motion had been made and seconded, and received in its favor the votes of the mover and seconder and failed, miserably ....

            Except, of course, the motion undoubtedly succeeded with its intended audience, who were not the Miami University people who would vote on it. The reporter for The Miami Student never did identify the sponsors of our New Right activists, but the circumstantial evidence is that they were alive and powerful in places like Cincinnati, Canton, and the Ohio General Assembly.

            My historian colleague was respectable Old-Old-Right Conservative, in the tradition of Edmund Burke; the two punks on Council were the new version, and what we are seeing more of today: wise-ass theorists, with impressive financial backing, guys who don't care much about tradition or history or, in a lot of cases, morality, decency, or just plain manners. These were the Miami U version of what Randy Newman identified (let's say through a synecdoche and the imperatives of rime), as "college men from LSU / Went in dumb — came out dumb too": far too refined to be "rednecks / […] keeping the niggers down," but willing to earn brownie points, and money, by trying to ensure that minority students wouldn't be guaranteed a voice on a Council, in a seat open to, and sometimes taken by, straight WASP or WASC males.

            (As a priest explained to me, there was no contradiction that Miami University, like many public universities, has a plurality of Catholics and is still WASPish: many MU students were WASCs, White Catholics, sufficiently assimilated and homogenized that for all practical purposes, they're WASPs.)

            I envy the energy and cockiness of these New Right students, especially the ones who'd risk getting their asses kicked as scabs. I envy their certainty. But these folk are cocky and certain mostly, I suspect, because they're privileged, because they've never encountered a problem Mom and Dad and family connections and wealth couldn't get them out of. And they have their theories (God, do they have their theories!) often enough — like, for a while, Miami alum Paul Ryan — out of Ayn Rand.

            So let us praise old conservatives, such as my two colleagues, and let us be very, very suspicious about the new varieties passing themselves off as conservatives. The New Right punks, female as well as male, have their theories and their rich supporters, and they want to push things around — and willing to push people around; they call themselves conservatives, but in their actions they repeat the worst mistakes and habits of radicals. 

Government Dysfunction and The Federated Nations of America (28 Dec. 2013)

 Both difference and similarity are in the eye of the beholder;

it depends only on how long and how deep he cares to look. 

— Rich Erlich .ca. 1963

      In Ursula K. Le Guin's ambiguous utopia The Dispossessed (1974; ch. 6) and in her 1994 story "Solitude," we get the idea that "a planet looks smooth," to the naked eye "from orbit," and elegantly simple. The closer you get, though, the rougher the surface appears, and more complex. There's a similar idea in Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851), where we have various views of different levels of the ocean. Looking down from the ship's deck at the ocean surface, you might see "vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat" (ch. 58). If you contemplate the ocean from the masthead, however, and go into a Transcendental reverie and fall into the water, you'll drown (ch. 35), or if you fall in from the deck while looking down at a whale carcass, you might not have a chance to drown but get more gorily dead, torn apart by sharks (ch. 66). Or if you become a "Castaway" and look into the depths long enough and deeply enough, you might see "God's foot upon the treadle of the loom" and speak it, and be called — and be — mad (ch. 93)>. Or, in the deepest depths, you might see whales making love, or "the nursing mothers of the whales" (ch. 87).

      The point is not that planets are really smooth or rough, or that the nature of the ocean, or universe, is beautiful or malign. One crucial point for both Le Guin and Melville (among other points) isn't that any of these views are wrong but that all are incomplete.
      I've been thinking about such matters listening again to Colin Woodard's 2012 American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, or at least the US, Canadian, and northern Mexican parts of North America (minus the southern tip of Florida, the figurative foreskin of North America, which is "Part of the Spanish Caribbean").

      From some place between the Moon and Mars, Earth to the naked human eye would look like one round ball, maybe a little flattened but smooth and unified and uniform. To the figurative eyes of a visitor from somewhere well beyond Mars, human culture might look like "Terran culture": a culture for all the humans on Earth. As I've joked, to a silicon-based life-form with a sensorium totally alien from ours, all us carbon-based creatures might _______ alike (where you fill in a word impossible for us to pronounce that designates a set of sense of which we cannot conceive) — and he/she/it, a truly alien Alien, might need a lot of practice to tell a human from a horse or hibiscus.

      Colin Woodard doesn't take a really close-up view of North American cultures, since really fine-grain analysis would show differences county to county in the USA — hell, differences among neighborhoods where I grew up! — nor does he back off so much that it might make sense to talk of "American Culture" or "Euro-American culture," much less "Terran."

      He is, however, working from a well-chosen distance, and one that yields results I find believable and, in a time of continuing culture conflict and governmental dysfunction, highly important and useful.

      I grew up in the Lake View District of Chicago and went to college in Champaign County in central Illinois, except for a year in upstate, quite rural New York State. I currently live in Ventura County, California, an area between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.

      Chicago is a border city according to Woodard, in "Yankeedom" but just north of "The Midlands": i.e., on the border between the now secularized successors to the New England Calvinist Puritan Yankees and what you'll recognize as "Middle America." Going to the University of Illinois, I passed from very much the Land of Lincoln and mildly Leftist Democrats through modern moderate Republicans — not the postmodern radical variety — and into "Greater Appalachia": the University of Illinois was and remains a Yankee/Midlands enclave in the Bible Belt.

      At Cornell U in Ithaca, New York, I lived in a fraternity house with a number of Jews from New York City, with "the City," as New Yorkers called it, the heart of the geographically very small nation Woodard calls "New Netherland": a diverse, tolerant, and very commercial kind of place. Ithaca, New York, is another enclave, in Yankeedom, perhaps, but bordering on The Midlands and with a lot of big-city folk at the University. All around Ithaca and Cornell, though, is an area somewhat-local boy Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, summed up with a quote from one of his grammar school friends who'd shot a squirrel: "It had fur; I had a gun; end of story." Campaign County, Illinois, is farming country; Tomkins County, New York (home of Cornell U), though, is country country: really rural and in some places proudly redneck.

      When I returned to the U of I from Cornell, driving my new (for me) highly-used used car I bought from a Cornellian from the City, I had to get those — sorry, them — New York plates off fast, and when I went for car repairs I had to drop my Chicago accent and speak the way we did "Right cheer in Champaign cahnty" (and the spellings there are phonetically correct, or at least close).

      There are indeed three main North American subcultures in Illinois (Woodard's "nations"), and three or four in New York State, and I had to learn to move among them.

      In Ventura County, CA, things are equally complex.

      In California terms, I live in "south-central-coastal California," and that thoroughly pedantic phrase is necessary. Woodard has my area as part of "El Norte," which is northern Mexico and the southern tiers of California and Arizona, and, reasonably enough, much of New Mexico and Texas — with a substantial salient into Colorado. If I get on Amtrak's Coast Starlight and head north by train to see relatives in San José and friends in the Bay area, Greater Portland, and on up to Vancouver, BC — which I've done — I've hit and traveled through "The Left Coast," which needs no explanation. If I get in the car and head east from the Pacific coast, I'm very soon in "The Far West": Barry Goldwater territory for you older readers, cowboy country for everyone.

      Woodard's count may be wrong, and some of his borders may be off, but he's working from a useful "distance" in viewing the Federated Nations of America, USA division, and our neighbors and fellow-nationals in Canada and Mexico. (Hey, I feel more at home in Toronto, Ontario, part of "The Midlands" and a Great-Lakes City like Chicago, than I do in Charleston, South Carolina, part of the Deep South). And what Woodard and his predecessors in this field have to tell us is important.

      We are not "one nation under God" to start with because we are not a nation at all — not in the way Japan or Norway are nations — and also because saying that we are or are not exceptionally chosen by God is likely to start an argument among your fellow Americans.

      The United Kingdom has managed to muddle along for a good while now confederating at least three nations, four if count Northern Ireland — though where I grew up we most certainly did not — and there's no reason to think the American Federation will break up any time soon. The unpleasantness of the 1860's is not something most Americans want to repeat, however much some Deep South folk (and others) regret the Lost of Cause in resisting "The War of Northern Aggression" and might welcome a re-match: In The Great Big Book of Horrible Things (2012), Matthew White gives the death toll of the Civil War as 620,000 military and 75,000 civilians (p. [299]), so a second go-round seems like bad policy.

      Short of a break-up, the American nations necessarily will need to live together, and such "peaceful coexistence" may require a convoluted strategy of Double Think where most of the time we pretend that we don't have a confrontation of subcultures working from very different world-views, assumptions, and premises — while at other times we acknowledge that many of our practical, mundane disagreements stem from serious differences, differences with deep roots in our histories, ethnographies, ideologies, and values.

      If the English, Scots, and Welsh can go a couple centuries without murdering one another in large numbers — and if the various varieties of French have long refrained from slitting each others' throats — we, too, we various American nations, may muddle through. Meanwhile, let's get moving again on significant reductions in nuclear armaments: much of the US military is Deep South and Appalachian, and if we're moving toward Civil War II, I'd prefer they didn't have nukes. 

Frat Boys, Jocks, and Deprecation (23 Oct. 2014 [19 March 2015])

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            Fraternities are/were very much in the news with my reposting this blog — I was one of the bloggers "orphaned" when OpenSalon closed in mid-March 2015 — but the immediate occasion for the original post wasn't immediate at all, but an old memory coming back from early in my teaching career, a memory that sent me down a thread of others.
            I have no idea what we were discussing, but it was probably a class in College Composition (I taught a lot of classes in College Composition), and a student said something about jocks, and I picked up the term — and was interrupted by a student who usually didn't say much with, "That's 'student athletes'. The word 'jock' is usually preceded by 'dumb', and I don't like people just assuming I'm stupid." Or something like that: it was a comment that was articulate, to the point, and heartfelt, by a guy who was quiet but definitely not dumb.
            Seizing a teaching moment when it came along — and responding to a legitimate rebuke — I said that when and where I came from, we could use "jock" neutrally and talk about "math jocks" and "chem jocks" as well as "sports jocks."
            The class said that, nah, their usage usually implied "dumb" with "jock," and we went on from there. I think I had the sense to keep that discussion brief and on-task and end with repeating the basic lesson. "Okay, unless you intend an insult, use 'athletes', and if you do intend the insult, be prepared to defend it, and maybe yourself."
            I got thinking of the "jock" comment again when teaching Michael Moffatt's excellent, Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture (1989). Coming of Age is a popular report by a professional anthropologist about campus life at Rutgers in the 1970s and 1980s (minus use of illegal drugs and details on illegal use by minors of legal ethyl alcohol: Moffatt refused to narc out his subjects — and people he lived with). Even in a book for a general audience, Moffatt tries to be professional and admits to failure —explicitly admits to it — in noting that he just couldn't keep up anthropological cultural relativity in dealing with Rutgers's fraternities and the inhabitants thereof: he classified many fraternity members among the "Neanderthals" in sexual attitudes (apologizing to the literal hominid species of Neanderthals) and anti-intellectual.
            Systematic headhunting in New Guinea, and occasional headhunting elsewhere: "Different strokes / For different folks"; fraternity culture in New Jersey: too close to home, too atavistic among academics, and something anthropologist Moffatt was prepared to judge and condemn.
            Moffatt has some data and some indirect personal experience, but this is not always the case for his negative attitude.
            I recall one instance, if only one, when, as an undergraduate fraternity member, I kind of anticipated my student-athlete student by telling someone, "We prefer 'fraternity men' to 'frat boys'," maybe or maybe not knowing at the time to add, "'Boy' is an insult." I later learned that some guys in the dorms — "residence halls" hadn't come in as the PC usage (nor the term "PC") — I later learned that some of the guys in the dorms had strong feelings about fraternities, and negative ones.
            This was interesting.
            At the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in the early 1960s, a young bachelor underclassman had four possibilities for housing: (1) living with his parents and commuting, (2) living in a University men's dorm — it was perhaps 1970 before a private, luxury dorm got built — (3) living in "independent men's housing," or (4) living in a fraternity. And that was living in a fraternity for underclassmen: from pledge semester until senior year or so (when an upperclassman could move into an apartment), one lived in, and mostly at, "the house."
            UIUC was definitely a residential campus at the time, with few commuters, so that meant basically dorms, independent houses, and Greek life (fraternity houses and sorority houses).
            The tripartite division, though, got a little blurred, as I had to explain to this nice guy, poor schmuck of a Sociology grad student who couldn't get a study to work.
            The investigator was doing some sort of work on consensus-building in small groups and was looking at how you get consensus among opponents, with two locally-available ones frat-rats and indies.
            So he brought in guys from fraternities and guys from independent men's housing — University-approved private houses for maybe five to fifteen guys — broke us into groups, and set us some issue to find consensus on.
            Which we did, quickly and easily, undercutting his hopes of getting data to get the fucking dissertation done already and get the hell out!
            (I was to go on to write a dissertation, and I'm pretty certain of how he felt.)
            Pitying the grad student, a couple of us stayed after the session and asked, "You thought 'Indies' and 'Greeks' are opposed, didn't you?" And he said "Yeah," and we said he misunderstood.
            First, guys who lived in fraternities and independent houses agreed on most things, starting with not wanting to live in the dorms. Second, neither group thought all that much about classifying people by where they lived, with the frat rats' — initially a pejorative, but one we'd adopted — with frat rats' lack of interest possibly stemming from a bit of snobbery.
            At that time and place, the disagreement among males would be between dormies and frat rats, with the guys in independent housing usually seeing themselves as the true Independents and above such trivial oppositions.
            And the disagreement got emotional tinge mostly from the dorm side.
            Among those of us who thought about it at all, most frat rats wanted the social life and relative community of a fraternity over the impersonality of the University's dorm complexes. Among those of us who'd been raised political, there was also the issue of not wanting the Big U as our landlord. Even back then, the Big U was big and a pretty total institution, supplying not only education (for those interested in such things) and credentialing, but police, fire department, health services, many of the streets and much of the lighting — and, optionally, public housing. Especially since living in a fraternity could be cheaper than living in a dorm (if you "worked a meal job"), fraternity life could be attractive to a nice liberal, at the time, from a big city and — certainly, with what they called at Cornell ca. 1965, "the White houses" — to political Neanderthals.
            ("White" in that context meant WASP: no Jews, just maybe a Catholic or two. Blacks weren't an issue, since — outside of the chapter of my fraternity, at Cornell at the time — the fraternities were at least de facto segregated: all White, plus the one to three Black fraternities.)
            Anyway, to those who cared about such things at the U of IL in the mid-1960s, the key category was "frat rat," and it was not a friendly act of categorizing.
            This attitude has continued, and I think it colors and "inflects" a fair portion of current debates about campus life, in which there is an unhealthy degree of semi-prurient interest to start with. For example, it's significant that a respectable anthropologist like Mike Moffatt had just about nothing in Coming of Age on religion or sports — two areas usually of interest to students of culture — but two chapters on sex. Less sensationally, in MAD Magazine years before even Moffatt's research, Ricky Nelson (renamed something like "Rickety") came home from school and lamented all the extra parties and mixers and other social events he had to attend. A neighbor asks his mother about Ricky's classes, to which his mother, replies, "Oh, Ricky doesn't go to classes; he goes to college." As the sweatshirt on John "Bluto" Blutarsky implies: COLLEGE has been what has interested most people, not, say, college classes and the frequent failure thereof to mean much to products of US education K-12.
            Fraternities offer community, relative democracy, and a good deal of freedom from what Mike Moffatt called "adult authority" — which I saw as mostly advantages at 18, and still see as such; but these aspects are problematic to those suspicious (with some good reasons) of fairly traditional communities, and of democratic decision-making among those who will often choose wrong.
            The current complaints against fraternities center on sexual assaults, and here, as in many places, I'd like to see (1) the numbers, (2) larger contexts, and (3) fairer and more effective law enforcement across the board, emphatically including better dealing with sexual assault, but with less concentration on — occasionally near-obsession with — sex and safety on campuses: as places go, university campuses, like most schools, are safe places.
            On numbers, I'll note that the instances of rape and/or child molestation that have touched my life involved as perpetrators two Black men and a father from a family fairly new to the US, from a non-WASP background. One of the Black men was a student athlete, and serial rapist, and his choice of crime sites tended to apartments, not fraternity houses. The other Black man raped before I met her a woman I came to love; as she told me the story, the rape — a "stranger rape" — resulted in pregnancy and her attempting suicide. I have no direct evidence of the pregnancy, but her left wrist was scarred vertically, so I infer a serious suicide attempt. With the father, I have only the daughter's version, but assume it to be true, as her husband did, on more evidence; I never pressed for details, but I assume the father had emigrated to the US, or was first generation American-born.
            That background is going to "inflect," minimally, my view of rapists, and is a reason why I need the reality check of looking at the numbers. "A 'for instance' is no proof," as the saying goes, and N = 3 proves nothing. I need the numbers, and so — obviously — does everyone else who grew up in cultures and societies with deep currents of racism and xenophobia.
            And if we need the numbers and larger contexts for Black felons and football players and non-Nordic child abusers, we need the numbers and serious sociological discussion for incandescent White lacrosse players, and jocks and frat rats of all hues and levels of privilege.
            I can use the term "jock" as neutrally as I use "frat rat"; but I try to remember my student's objection and not use the term to reinforce a stereotype of "dumb jocks" as a kind of formula — even if we have the concept, as I do, and can contrast it with "serious student athlete."
            Some jocks are dumb, and there are colleges and universities where "student athlete" is a coincidence or a joke: where the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics brings in semi-pro jocks, for whom academic pursuits may be career-endangering distractions. And some jocks and frat rats are rats (with apologies to the admirably resilient rodent): macho assholes (with apologies to the anus).
            Athletics can be good for people, especially athletics that bring together fathers and daughters and those that give big quiet guys a place to assert themselves — especially those organized by participating athletes and not run top-down like a corporation or military unit. And fraternities can be good places to live, and certainly good given most of the alternatives.
            People can argue otherwise, and there are strong arguments to be made: but those should be fact-based arguments, not casual dismissals with "jock" or "frat boy." They should be rational arguments with sound comparative statistics and a sense of proportion: anthropologists who can be open-minded about headhunters can show a little more tolerance for frat rats and at least consider the possibility that intramural athletics may not be as big a part of life in a dorm as sex, but are there.