“Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.”

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

Thrice in the last two weeks I’ve been required–by my workplace, by my mindfulness meditation teacher training–to participate in a public conversation with colleagues about race. “Required” is perhaps the wrong word; no one’s forcing me to attend, and once I attend, it’s not always mandatory to speak. But given Ibram X. Kendi‘s much-quoted exhortation that you can either be racist or antiracist, it doesn’t feel like there’s much of a choice. Moreover, twice I’ve now been called on by name to speak, and in the upcoming meeting we will all be expected to chime in.

If you’ve read this blog before, you probably know how much I care about social change; working on these issues in the criminal justice field is what I’ve done all my adult life. I’ve “done the work,” as my younger friends like to say, many times, not only when waves of racial horror, police killings, or a new horrifying statistic about economic or health outcomes penetrates the collective consciousness and brings about a wave of white contrition and performance. I’ve been through many iterations of the all-too-familiar dynamic Tre Johnson describes in his Washington Post op-ed (he falls into his own trap, but at least he sees the trap.) You, gentle reader, might have navigated these waters at least as often, as a white person or as a person of color (or anything in between), or you may be new to this. It feels dangerous to offer any heresy, but I hope I’m old enough and have earned enough cred in the social justice milieu that I can be transparent: I have serious reservations about the utility of these public conversations, which puts me in a conflicted position about how to responsibly participate.

 First, I’ve now experienced several settings in which people from other countries were required to participate in a conversation that has a quintessentially USian flavor–the themes, the materials used, the examples, the jargon. I’m a naturalized American citizen and have lived here for twenty years–I went to UC Berkeley, for Heaven’s sake–and even I don’t feel fully at home in these conversations. When I use this vocabulary, this inflection, I don’t sound sincere to myself–I sound like I’m ventriloquizing an American, rather than being one. Moreover, I can see how people who come from totalitarian countries might experience these group conversations, which are earnest and kindly meant in America, as echoing the thought-control confessionals and struggle sessions from their home countries (they certainly feel like that to me sometimes, and I didn’t grow up during the Chinese cultural revolution or in a Siberian gulag.) I also worry about the tendency to lump non-U.S. cultures into our bins of “white people” versus “people of color” for the purpose of forming racial affinity groups, which is an oft-recommended practice in books about race. Many people I like and respect get a lot out of participating in such affinity groups, but people who are outsiders to American culture might not feel like they have much more in common with white Americans than with black Americans (and before you tell me it’s about how someone is perceived, or what privileges they get, let me remind you that, as an American, you actually have no idea how people are or are not perceived in their home countries.) Because of these problems, the common exhortation “talk to your fellow white people!” always puzzles me and many non-US-born people I know. Whenever I encounter these discourses and techniques foisted on people who don’t share the context for them I cringe: how can the people who plan and facilitate these sessions bend over backwards to be culturally sensitive in one way while displaying, at the same time, breathtaking obtuseness in another?

Second, the emphasis on rooting racist thought patterns–and on publicly talking about rooting them–leaves me feeling a bit queasy, because ultimately I don’t believe that the serious problems of racial discrimination and white supremacy in America can be cured through the purge of our internal bigotries. In partnering with community organizations fighting for criminal justice reform, and just in writing about this stuff for as long as I have, I have done significant work to dig out the ways that bigotries and biases which support injustices play a part in my thinking. I believe that this work is never finished, and requires lifelong diligence and, yes, mindfulness. But racism is not a personal feature; it is systemic and pervasive. The authors of the recent crop of antiracist literature often agree with this, but their prescriptions for these conversations, and the way the conversations are carried, suggest otherwise. Too often, these sessions look like confessionals in which people discharge their obligations to do the day-to-day work of donating, voting, organizing, and the like, and feel good about themselves simply by talking the right talk while exhibiting their superiority over others who didn’t get the memo. I’ll take a person who quietly donates to the ACLU, supports a candidate of color for a job, but does not proclaim their enlightenment from the hilltops over a self-proclaimed “antiracist” who beats themselves publicly over for their “white privilege” and does nothing else for the cause of racial equality any day. 

Which brings me to my final point: It is deeply important to live an examined life, but this examination, at least for me, loses 100% of its value when it is performed to an audience (see here.) I don’t doubt the good intentions and sincerity of many of my colleagues and friends who have participated in these public conversations, and I’m willing to accept that some may find value in sharing their internal tribulations with others. But I’ll be ruthlessly honest: for me, the minute a ritual of contrition is performed in this public manner, it acquires an unpleasant aftertaste of self-congratulation (and, worse, condemnation of others) that empty it of meaning. Whenever I feel this aftertaste in my own experience, I get suspicious about the authenticity of my perspective, and of my clear alignment with what I’m professing to support. That there are social rewards to reap makes it even worse. My time reckoning for the systemic injustices all around me is far better spent preparing an amicus brief, organizing a press conference, or writing an op-ed, than congratulating myself for my goodness in front of others (and yes, I’m well aware that this can be taken to be another move of moral superiority–“I do, you just talk”–but that’s exactly the point: there’s no end to this if it’s all about a competition of goodness. It’s turtles all the way down.)

This is, by the way, is another way in which the public racial conversation, especially among white progressives, is distinctly American. When I wrote Yesterday’s Monsters, I was struck by the way parole hearings adhered to the formula of a confessional. When people said at their hearings that their way to atone for the murders were to just be as good a person as they could, the Board rejected this; what they wanted was psychic excavation, not pragmatic steps. This was especially poignant in the cases of parole hopefuls who were born-again Christians: the ritual was natural and appropriate for them, but the Board said it was not enough, they needed more. Confession is integral to Catholicism as a vehicle for promoting prosocial behavior–just think of how central Saint Augustine’s confessions of his sinful life were to the demonstration of his profound change. A very similar dynamic is present in Protestant and Evangelical circles. Friends from these worlds, with whom I consulted when working on that part of the book, iterated the rhetorical tendency to up-talk past bad behavior to highlight one’s present transformation (one notable example is George W. Bush, when speaking of his “young and irresponsible” phase before becoming born-again.) This is how a deeply, fundamentally Christian nation–in which just the thought of an atheist President, or one who is not Christian, is still an anathema–performs exercises of moral improvement: You publicly proclaim your sins and someone else tells you it’s not enough. It’s a quintessentially American version of The Pilgrim’s Progress.

I have friends who worked tirelessly for racial equality in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. They are so happy to see new generations wake up and cry out against the horrors of police abuses of force, violent vigilantes, you name it, but they are puzzled by the rituals and processes we’ve come up with. To hear them talk about it, things were much simpler way back when: they marched hand in hand, they helped, and the deeper self examinations of identity stuff were simply not in the mix–either because the language for them did not exist, or because people perceived the existential threats they were battling as so urgent that grappling with their mental hygiene was simply not a priority. I don’t think things were simpler. Reading Bayard Rustin, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, and of course W.E.B. DuBois, is a solid reminder that the complicated knots of identity have always been there. I know the people who attended the consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s struggled with the same knots and performed the same confessions. This country’s identity is as inexorably bound in racial domination as, say, South Africa’s inexorable entanglement with its apartheid past, and no one who lives here can extricate themselves from the tentacles of this legacy. But the simplification, self-congratulation, and jockeying for position in the goodness scale, all that stuff doesn’t feel like the right place to put our energy, and I wish we could find a way to let go of that and do what needs to be done without our various selves getting in the way to the extent that they obscure the path ahead.

Distressing news from Santa Rita Jail: The Mercury News reports:

At least 40 inmates have tested positive for the coronavirus within nearly a 24-hour period, the jail’s largest outbreak since the pandemic began.

The inmates that tested positive are mostly workers in Santa Rita Jail’s kitchen, or laundry services. When asked if the sheriff’s department was worried the virus could have spread to other parts of the jail through the food, Alameda County Sheriff spokesman Sgt. Ray Kelly said the department is looking into it.

“That definitely would be a concern, wouldn’t it?” Kelly said Thursday.

Kelly said jail officials are conducting “contact tracing” to determine where the exposure could have originated. Evidence so far points to the cluster within the same housing unit, 25, which typically holds minimum-security workers.

Angela Ruggiero, Record number of coronavirus cases reported at Santa Rita Jail, San Jose Mercury News, July 16, 2020

This distressing report is the latest addition to a series of newspaper exposés about outbreaks in other CA county jails. As I explained in previous posts, as well as in our open letter to the Governor, save for a handful of reporting jails, reports about infections in jails have been sporadic, with no guiding hand or uniform style. It is astonishing that we’ve had to wait four months for the BSCC to take action, but it’s gratifying that it is finally stepping up and will begin data collection now. The Sac Bee reports:

California’s jail oversight board on Wednesday said it would collect and publish data about COVID-19 cases in county facilities, a response to months of public criticism and an apparently faltering effort to get similar information from the state’s health department.

Jason Pohl, Five months after outbreak, California to publish COVID-19 data on local jails, Sacramento Bee, July 15, 2020

In her letter to CA sheriffs, Linda Penner, Chair of the BSCC, asked them to collaborate in two ways:

Beginning July 20, 2020, we are urgently requesting that each Sheriff and Chief Probation Officer provide facility-level COVID-19 data directly to the BSCC. The data request will include the number of new positive COVID-19 tests for both residents and staff (reported separately), and deaths at each facility each week. We will also make a one-time request for your facilities’ cumulative COVID-19 case information and deaths to date.

In addition, we are requesting that you ensure that your facility health care providers are immediately reporting detailed case-level COVID-19 data to your county public health agency. (Health & Saf. Code, § 120130 & Cal. Code Regs, tit. 17, § 2500.) Every facility administrator should work with their health care providers to ensure that data are being reported timely and completely to your county public health department. We will begin requesting data from each agency on July 20, 2020, and the target date for launching the BSCC COVID-19 dashboard is July 31, 2020.

BSCC Letter to Sheriffs, July 15, 2020

Note that the instructions to sheriffs only include positive tests and deaths. In order to get a sense of what is being done in counties to curb the virus, we must have additional information about the total number of tests, as well as about the methods of social distancing within the facilities (i.e., use of isolation). It is also essential to know information about hospitalizations vs. in-situ healthcare.

Most importantly, this data is essential because, every day, judges make decisions about pretrial detention. As I explained yesterday on ABC7, the pandemic has raised all sorts of due process questions that require tradeoffs, such as whether, for example, the confrontation clause is better served via in-person masked testimony or via an unmasked Zoom appearance. But the most important factor, I think, is that judges must take COVID-19 infection risks into account when deciding bail. With growing concerns in jails, everyone (the public AND the defendant) will be considerably safer if house arrests are prioritized over pretrial detention at a facility that could be a Petri dish for the virus. Moreover, even jails with no infections could quickly become outbreak epicenters if an asymptomatic carrier is sentenced to pretrial detention without proper testing or quarantine. And holding someone in solitary for 14 days for everyone’s safety while they are still, legally, presumed innocent, sounds disproportionately harsh.

Like many of us, I’ll be eagerly awaiting the BSCC tracking tool, and I hope it’ll also contribute to the UCLA COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project database, which is trying to lift a fog off the data nationwide. But most importantly, I want to urge judges to look at the tracking tool and make public health their top bail consideration.

The Trump Administration’s erratic response to the coronavirus has mindlessly pivoted between posing as if the virus does not exist, is a hoax, etc., and taking absurd measures against a variety of undesirable populations in the guise of pandemic prevention policy. After the flop of Trump’s Tulsa rally, this morning ushers new xenophobic measures: limitations on temporary work visas, which have infuriated tech companies. Thankfully, the news are less dire for international students: colleges, employers, and even some Republican Congress members successfully lobbied to remove Trump’s planned restriction of the OPT visa program, which allows students to work in a job related to their field for at least one year after graduation (three in some science and technology fields.)

My professional and social circles feature many non-U.S. folks working in highly skilled jobs in the U.S., and everyone’s stress and relief were palpable. Even those unaffected by the news were rattled by the prospect of having one’s education halted. I get it, viscerally–I was an international student in the U.S. between 2001 and 2005, first on a J-1 visa sponsored by Fulbright and then on a F-1 visa sponsored by UC Berkeley.

My grad school experience was considerably colored by the events of 9/11, which happened just a few weeks after I arrived in the U.S. At first I struggled to grasp the immensity of the catastrophe, as my psyche was desensitized by decades of suicide bombings back home. But it soon became clear that many political, social, and economical assumptions were to be upended by this tragedy. Embroiled in one new war, then another, amidst conspiracies and factual obfuscations, the US transformed its international relations as well as important aspects of its domestic life.

I was at Berkeley; all around me were friends, colleagues, and professors who were vehemently opposed to the war. For the life of me, I could not fathom who had voted for Bush. It was hard to reconcile my distaste for unwinnable, sticky warfare and the massive destruction it would bring with my sense as an Israeli during the Gulf War of 1991 that the Americans had a duty to protect “us”.

It quickly became apparent that the landscape for foreigners in the United States was going to be different. My trips in and out of the U.S. became stressful events involving long lines, paperwork, multiple identification methods and interrogations. In 2003 I flew to Israel to conduct fieldwork for my dissertation. While there, my J-1 visa sponsorship ended (Fulbright sponsored me for two years) and I had to undergo a process to transfer the sponsorship to Berkeley and change the visa type to F-1. My application got bogged down in the general 9/11 paperwork brouhaha and my departure back to school was delayed by months (extremely stressful at the time but, in hindsight, a blessing in disguise, as I was able to conduct a lot more field observations, including two full criminal trials for conscientious objectors.) My return trip in 2003 was unforgettable. At JFK, my passport was taken away from me and I was diverted from the normal immigration line to the secondary room, where we had no access to washrooms and were forbidden the use of our phones. Not a single person in the room, which was full of crying babies and frightened adults and children, held a passport hailing from the global North. It was one of many experiences I had as an international traveler getting a peek (for someone usually carrying considerable social advantage because of my appearance and language fluency) into the lives of people from countries that the U.S. deems “suspect.” After two hours, fearful that I would miss my connecting flight, I obsequiously stammered to the person at the counter. Within a few moments, my passport was returned to me and I left the room, running, leaving behind dozens of equally fearful and timid fellow passengers.

The remainder of my involvement with the U.S. government until I received my citizenship in 2015 was characterized by the dialectic between two conflicting messages. My academic community, including my school, my workplace, and my professional associations, usually (but not always) communicated appreciation for diversity, happiness to have me and other foreigners in the U.S. research world, and a sense of value for my outsider perspective on American criminal justice (a handful of people were dismissive and patronizing, even after decades of living here, but most were great.) All my interactions with the U.S. government, on the other hand, communicated the message that I was an upstart interloper out to steal a job from an American citizen. I remember the hesitation and fear to bring up visa process and funding with potential employers as I was flying to job interviews in America, jetlagged and exhausted. I vividly remember being in a bind when I had to return to the U.S. to take the job at Hastings, with just a few days left to complete my two-years-in-my-home-country Fulbright requirement; they counted every day, including the brief vacation my partner and I took in Istanbul. That the missing days would be spent in Israel during the academic summer vacation, while I would miss the actual semester in the U.S., did not matter. When I found one visa category that would enable me to bypass this problem, the O-1 visas for “extraordinary aliens”, my visa sponsor at Fulbright asked me with a voice full of disdain whether I deigned to think I was extraordinary.

My fear of the government did not subside during the O-1 years, nor did it disappear when I was granted my Green Card in 2009. Any silly, mundane conflict, including a noise complaint to our landlord by our downstairs neighbors, ushered in unreasonable fears of deportation. I steered clear of any environment in which even a whiff of marijuana could be detected, including asking friends (who thought I was paranoid, and probably rightly so) not to keep the stuff in their house while I was there. Before, and especially after, the Snowden revelations, I communicated with all my friends and colleagues under the assumption that every word I uttered or wrote was monitored. Even now, having been an American citizen for five years, my fear has not completely evaporated; I know the Trump administration revokes naturalized citizenships and, living under this unlikely but not impossible cloud, I will never be a 100% inalienable member of my new country.

Keep in mind that this narrative comes to you from a standpoint of considerable social advantage. I did not come to the U.S. from the global South or from a Muslim country, but rather from a country occupying a role in the U.S. cosmology somewhere between petulant child, exotic suspect, and privileged protégé; I am a highly educated professional with a comfortable salary working at a public institution in a blue state. Multiply the fears and entanglements manyfold and you’ll get a sense of how many immigrants and nonimmigrant students and workers experience their interactions with the government. Moreover, consider that I became a citizen during the Obama years, welcomed to America at a lavishly decorated venue in which we received warm speeches about the value of diversity we bring to the country, and invited to stand up when our country-of-origin’s name was called out with everyone cheering us. As soon as we exited, smiling, cheerful people welcomed us to booths where we could immediately apply for a passport and register to vote. A friend who naturalized in 2018 reported very different sentiments; by contrast to the beautifully written letter I received from President Obama in 2015, addressing me as his “fellow American”, he received nothing from Trump, and the cold, unpleasant ceremony emphasized themes of assimilation and erasure.

All of which is to say–these developments, ostensibly for pandemic response reasons but truly a continuation of this administration’s xenophobic persecution project, frighten and upset me. My heart goes out to the people whose world is shaky and uncertain today and to the hundreds of thousands of people who do not even have the privilege to experience this shakiness because their entire experience of living here is rife with the peril of discovery and removal. And most of all–the heart goes out to the children. The poor, frightened children, separated from their parents, and held in concentration camps, neglected, abused, sobbing, dying, growing up in fear and trauma. May we all do the right thing this coming November. This nightmare must come to an end.

The last few days have seen numerous stories discrediting Tara Reade, the woman who accused Joe Biden of rape, to the point that convictions based on her testimony could be overturned.

After reading these stories, I sat with my emotions, realizing I predominantly felt relief. Now I could vote for Biden, which I was going to do anyway, *and* not feel like a person tainted with badness and dishonesty. I am not the hated, unprincipled centrist! I am not a traitor to the feminist cause! I can be utilitarian and good at the same time! Looking around progressive social media, I could read the same sentiment between the lines of all commentators rushing to malign Reade. We are vindicated as Good People (TM) and can go ahead and do the right thing with our virtue unsullied.

This sense of relief told me something important–something that I had been talking around for years, even as I wrote about the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and about progressive punitivism in general. Regular readers know that the progressive tendency to fiercely advocate for due process and abolitionism and all that jazz, only as long as it’s not someone we (the collective “we”) hate, has irritated me for years. In my article about progressive punitivism I ascribed this tendency to the overall prevalence of punitivism as the go-to tool to approach any social malaise. Americans of all stripes and political persuasions, I said, have been so steeped in the idea that the only tool they have is the criminal justice hammer that now everything looks like a nail to them.

I’m beginning to think I’ve let progressives off the hook too easily. As I recently said, I’m realizing that, even in the most supposedly benign, nonpunitive, restorative, transformative, call-it-whatever-fancy-name-you-like process, the bottom line–even when wrapped in do-gooder jargon, everything boils down to the underlying question: What happened? Is the victim telling the truth? Is the offender telling the truth? Who should we believe?

My colleagues at the Cultural Cognition Project have conducted a robust series of experiments, using factorial vignette surveys, which have proven again and again that people’s world views, particularly whether they are authoritarian or communitarian (read–roughly equivalent to the stereotypical American right-vs.-left-winger), significantly shape the way they not only form opinions, but perceive facts. Every year I rely on their excellent experiment involving Scott v. Harris, in which their conservative and progressive respondents differed on their perception of the same car chase video–the former believing that the driver risked the public and the police to the point that the police was right to run him off the road, the latter believing that the police was at least partially, if not wholly, to blame for the outcome. This was not a high school debate; the respondents all viewed, with their own eyes, a grainy but informative six-minute black-and-white video of the chase. But what they viewed and what they saw were two different things, with the latter strongly shaped by their life experiences and values.

No one is immune to these distortions; if biases and heuristics didn’t cloud our rationality, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work would not have won the Nobel prize. But from the people who present themselves as the party of truth, the antidote to the Trumpian web of lies and fantasies, one expects better.

The issue of false allegations and #believewomen is a classic example. There is factual disagreement, which maps neatly unto political dividing lines, on what percentage of complaints about sexual harassment/assault/abuse are false. The actual percentage is obviously unknown, so our life experiences and values fill it in. Thing is, the progressive side of the map has wrapped its beliefs about this in an issue of virtue. The groupthink is so powerful not just because this is what we believe, but also because anyone who believes otherwise is a bad person. Progressive ideology props itself up by the self righteousness of its devotees. To be deemed a bad person, a person without virtue, is destructive in this milieu. To minimize the very real and understandable distress that people feel at being discredited morally, publicly, via social media as some sort of expression of liberal-centrist privilege or “white tears” is to miss out completely on how oppressive this thought control machine has become, and how even questioning the bon ton can discredit and destroy people’s careers, relationships, and reputations.

There are many harms stemming from this equivalence between factual perceptions and moral virtue. As some have pointed out apropos the Tara Reade business, every false complaint harms the credibility of true complainants. But this story has also brought into crystalline focus the discomfort people feel when they have to backtrack from one of these #believewomen situations that turn out to be unmerited. We already know the truth doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is that now there is plenty out there, circulating around social media and people’s minds, about Joe Biden and rape. What matters is that people with valuable information who might question or discredit unproven allegations have hesitated–and will continue to hesitate–to come forward out of fear of appearing to be bad people, with all the professional and personal implications of lack of virtue that are all too real for progressives. What matters is that our feet are glued into the sticky cesspool of virtue, like flies caught in molasses, and it keeps us from coming to every situation we encounter, particularly those with very high stakes, with a beginner’s mind, ask ourselves, “is it true?” and answer, “I don’t know.”

Today I gave a book talk at Denver’s legendary bookstore Tattered Cover and very much enjoyed discussing Yesterday’s Monsters with the wonderful Mikaley Osley. Here’s the video of the event.

Buy Yesterday’s Monsters on the UC Press website or at Tattered Cover.