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Sonia Sotomayor hearings

Today, Jon Cornyn basically asked Sonia Sotomayor why she did not consider the "hardships" of the firefighters in the Ricci case. Hey GOP, I thought empathy on the court was supposed to be a bad thing. I guess not when white dudes are "suffering."

Dealing with Racism in Children's Books

Nice article from Antiracistparent.com:

ANTIRACISTPARENT.COM:

Pa in Blackface: Confronting racism in our children’s books


written by Anti-Racist Parenting columnist Dawn Friedman

I’m a fan of the Little House books and have been since my mom gave me the yellow cardboard box set when I was seven so I was thrilled when my friend set up her Beyond Little House group blog. Amassing a team of Little House experts, the blog highlights tales from the real Laura Ingalls Wilder that give insight to the fictionalized stories of her life.

Recently one of the bloggers brought up the racism in Little Town on the Prairie when Pa dons blackface to play a “darky” to entertain the town. The chapter is accompanied by a Garth Williams illustration depicting Pa in his grease paint with his whiskers tucked into his collar.

Then up the center aisle came marching five black-faced men in raggedy-taggedy uniforms. White circles were around their eyes and their mouths were wide and red. Up onto the platform they marched, then facing forward in a row, suddenly they all advanced, singing.
…
The man in the middle was clog dancing. Back against the wall stood the four raggedy black-faced men.

… The cheering started; it couldn’t be stopped. Feet could not be kept still. The whole crowd was carried away by the pounding music, the grinning white-eyed faces, the wild dancing.

There was no time to think. When the dancing stopped, the jokes began. The white-circled eyes rolled, the big red mouths blabbed questions and answers that were the funniest every heard. Then there was music again, and even wilder dancing.

So how’s a concerned parent to handle it? Well, in her post, the author tentatively ventures that maybe it’s best to ignore it:

But if I’m going to prepare her, what should I say? This is where I get stuck. Until now, whenever I’ve been faced with educating my daughter on various aspects of How The World Is, no matter how much hemming and hawing I do or how cleverly I try to craft words in my head, ultimately I’ve decided to do and say nothing until she does. Kids don’t know that injustice exists until it affects them or it’s pointed out to them. Kids who are different from her — the overweight kid in fourth grade, her African-American classmate, the two kids in her school on permanent crutches — are simply part of her life. If she asks questions, I answer. But basically she doesn’t notice or compare or judge. It’s simply How Things Are. There is going to be a time where she hears or sees something that doesn’t square with this ideal. And that’s when we’ll have a discussion. I’m willing to wait.

I figured I’d chime in with my thoughts over here and kick the trackback to the blog entry.

I’d venture to say that the classmates mentioned here – the classmates different from the poster’s apparently majority child – are having an entirely different experience and their experience is part of that school’s (and her child’s) collective experience and it’s worth exploring critically even at six. One wonders if the aforementioned African-American classmate would have the same no-reaction reaction to Pa’s minstrel show or if this is part of the poster’s daughter’s privilege.

Although her daughter is missing the racism, the racism is still there and it still matters and it needs to be part of what should be an ongoing family discussion. Ignoring racism doesn’t make it disappear – even from our favorite books and stories.

It’s not easy to see our heroes fall. It’s confusing and painful and I can see why parents might want to avoid it. But there’s a difference between stomping on Pa’s legend with both feet (damning him and the books) and opening up a discussion (where the books help foster vital dialogue).

My son isn’t really a fan of the Little House books but he’s had his own heroes fall. A couple of summers past he became a fan of Mickey Rooney after catching TCM showings of Little Lord Fauntleroy and Captains Courageous. Eventually his movie roaming led us to Babes in Arms, which includes a rollicking number featuring Rooney crooning in blackface. Well, heavy discussion ensued, (including mention of Rooney’s yellow face routine in Breakfast at Tiffany’s).

Was it fun? No. Was it easy to answer his questions and witness his dismay? No. Did we both learn a lot? Hell yeah.

I know it’s easy for us white people to pretend like this racism doesn’t matter in the context of the times. You know, the old “but that’s just what they DID back then” justification. But really what we need to do is confront the context and ask our children to think critically about our heroes so that they are able to denounce racism wherever they find it.

We can ask our kids:
1. Do you think this kind of racism was ok back then even if it isn’t now?
2. Is it ok to act racist if your intentions are good? (Pa was just entertaining the townfolk after all.)
3. Can someone still be a good person if they are a racist? (Should we judge Pa on his best actions or his worst?)
4. If we are not the targets of the historical racism, we can ask ourselves how we might feel if we were. (Do you think an Asian person might feel differently about Rooney’s portrayal? Do you think a black child might be more upset reading about Pa’s minstrel show?)
5. What do you think about banning these kinds of images? There are some people who think people shouldn’t read the Little House books because of the racism. Is this a good idea or not?

There isn’t one right answer to these questions and where a family takes them will depend on the family’s perspective and values. But they’re important questions to ask and the dialogue is one that should happen sooner instead of waiting for the child to initiate it.

Ignoring the racism in Pa’s behavior (and in Laura’s pleasure in the performance) means missing a valuable opportunity to educate our children about our history and the complexity of our country’s continuing racial struggles (note that blackface isn’t just a part of our past). Our kids need our help as they learn how to critically examine their heroes; avoiding the issue doesn’t serve them as well as they deserve.

Other resources for parents:

■Here’s a short (very short) film about blackface from over at TCM.
■Wikipedia page on blackface
■The Legacy of Blackface from Tavis Smiley on NPR
■History of Minstrel Shows
Dawn Friedman is a writer and mother to two children. Her articles have appeared in Salon.com, Yoga Journal, Brain Child and the Greater Good and she is the op-ed editor at Literary Mama. She is also the founder of OpenAdoptionSupport.com and since the adoption of her daughter in 2004 has become passionate about the need for adoption reform. She blogs at this woman’s work.

Conservative lies

From The American Prospect:

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis

Did Liberals Cause the Sub-Prime Crisis?

Conservatives blame the housing crisis on a 1977 law that helps-low income people get mortgages. It's a useful story for them, but it isn't true.

Robert Gordon | April 7, 2008 | web only


The idea started on the outer precincts of the right. Thomas DiLorenzo, an economist who calls Ron Paul "the Jefferson of our time," wrote in September that the housing crisis is "the direct result of thirty years of government policy that has forced banks to make bad loans to un-creditworthy borrowers." The policy DiLorenzo decries is the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to lend throughout the communities they serve.

The Blame-CRA theme bounced around the right-wing Freerepublic.com. In January it figured in a Washington Times column. In February, a Cato Institute affiliate named Stan Liebowitz picked up the critique in a New York Post op-ed headlined "The Real Scandal: How the Feds Invented the Mortgage Mess." On The National Review's blog, The Corner, John Derbyshire channeled Liebowitz: "The folk losing their homes? are victims not of 'predatory lenders,' but of government-sponsored -- in fact government-mandated -- political correctness."

Last week, a more careful expression of the idea hit The Washington Post, in an article on former Sen. Phil Gramm's influence over John McCain. While two progressive economists were quoted criticizing Gramm's insistent opposition to government regulation, the Brookings Institution's Robert Litan offered an opposing perspective. Litan suggested that the 1990s enhancement of CRA, which was achieved over Gramm's fierce opposition, may have contributed to the current crisis. "If the CRA had not been so aggressively pushed," Litan said, "it is conceivable things would not be quite as bad. People have to be honest about that."

This is classic rhetoric of conservative reaction. (For fans of welfare policy, it is Charles Murray meets the mortgage mess.) Most analysts see the sub-prime crisis as a market failure. Believing the bubble would never pop, lenders approved risky adjustable-rate mortgages, often without considering whether borrowers could afford them; families took on those loans; investors bought them in securitized form; and, all the while, regulators sat on their hands.

The revisionists say the problem wasn't too little regulation; but too much, via CRA. The law was enacted in response to both intentional redlining and structural barriers to credit for low-income communities. CRA applies only to banks and thrifts that are federally insured; it's conceived as a quid pro quo for that privilege, among others. This means the law doesn't apply to independent mortgage companies (or payday lenders, check-cashers, etc.)

The law imposes on the covered depositories an affirmative duty to lend throughout the areas from which they take deposits, including poor neighborhoods. The law has teeth because regulators' ratings of banks' CRA performance become public and inform important decisions, notably merger approvals. Studies by the Federal Reserve and Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, among others, have shown that CRA increased lending and homeownership in poor communities without undermining banks' profitability.

But CRA has always had critics, and they now suggest that the law went too far in encouraging banks to lend in struggling communities. Rhetoric aside, the argument turns on a simple question: In the current mortgage meltdown, did lenders approve bad loans to comply with CRA, or to make money?

The evidence strongly suggests the latter. First, consider timing. CRA was enacted in 1977. The sub-prime lending at the heart of the current crisis exploded a full quarter century later. In the mid-1990s, new CRA regulations and a wave of mergers led to a flurry of CRA activity, but, as noted by the New America Foundation's Ellen Seidman (and by Harvard's Joint Center), that activity "largely came to an end by 2001." In late 2004, the Bush administration announced plans to sharply weaken CRA regulations, pulling small and mid-sized banks out from under the law's toughest standards. Yet sub-prime lending continued, and even intensified -- at the very time when activity under CRA had slowed and the law had weakened.

Second, it is hard to blame CRA for the mortgage meltdown when CRA doesn't even apply to most of the loans that are behind it. As the University of Michigan's Michael Barr points out, half of sub-prime loans came from those mortgage companies beyond the reach of CRA. A further 25 to 30 percent came from bank subsidiaries and affiliates, which come under CRA to varying degrees but not as fully as banks themselves. (With affiliates, banks can choose whether to count the loans.) Perhaps one in four sub-prime loans were made by the institutions fully governed by CRA.

Most important, the lenders subject to CRA have engaged in less, not more, of the most dangerous lending. Janet Yellen, president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, offers the killer statistic: Independent mortgage companies, which are not covered by CRA, made high-priced loans at more than twice the rate of the banks and thrifts. With this in mind, Yellen specifically rejects the "tendency to conflate the current problems in the sub-prime market with CRA-motivated lending.? CRA, Yellen says, "has increased the volume of responsible lending to low- and moderate-income households."

Yellen is hardly alone in concluding that the real problems came from the institutions beyond the reach of CRA. One of the only regulators who long ago saw the current crisis coming was the late Ned Gramlich, a former Fed governor. While Alan Greenspan was cheering the sub-prime boom, Gramlich warned of its risks and unsuccessfully pushed for greater supervision of bank affiliates. But Gramlich praised CRA, saying last year, "banks have made many low- and moderate-income mortgages to fulfill their CRA obligations, they have found default rates pleasantly low, and they generally charge low mortgages rates. Thirty years later, CRA has become very good business."

It's telling that, amid all the recent recriminations, even lenders have not fingered CRA. That's because CRA didn't bring about the reckless lending at the heart of the crisis. Just as sub-prime lending was exploding, CRA was losing force and relevance. And the worst offenders, the independent mortgage companies, were never subject to CRA -- or any federal regulator. Law didn't make them lend. The profit motive did.

And that is not political correctness. It is correctness.