Obsidian Wings

The Color of the Country: Demographic History of the US Black Population

by Doctor Science

I stayed up waaaaaaay too late Monday night because I got caught up in Science. Or rather, Research. As so often happens on the Internet, I started with one small question and hopped link to link until I found myself in a World of Mystery, or maybe Discovery.

Along the way, I created a graph of the growth of the US population by race -- because, astonishingly enough, I couldn't readily find one online already. If you happen to know that I'm just looking in the wrong place, please say so -- I'm not proud.

Winter Landscape by John Wesley Hardrick, African-American painter from Indianapolis.

This all started because of Newsweek's Oscar Roundtable, at which Viola Davis said some pretty forthright things about how difficult Hollywood is for a black actress. This was linked at discussed at a bunch of places, including by Allison Samuels at the Daily Beast.

In the comments to Samuels' article, Justsaan said

I love watching the Classic B&W movies. How many black, asian or any other race were represented? If I didn't know any better I would have thought that the world was only white, and for anyone not to acknowledge that this is very simply ODD and just STRANGE; how the actors lived and worked with what looked like ease and no sense of something being wrong with the representation

Commenter MeesterTaco replied,

If you look at the ethnic breakdown of the US, those who identify themselves as African-American are less that 9% (2000 census data) and far less during the time these 'classics' were made.

Say what?! says I. In the first place, I was pretty sure that the proportion of blacks in the population now is higher than that, more like 12%. In the second place, I recalled that the first census (1790) showed blacks, free and slave, as maybe 18-19% of the population then. So I figured the "proportion black" of the US population had dropped pretty steadily over the centuries, as whites were allowed to immigrate in and blacks were not.

So I figured, "I'll go look it up. It should only take a couple of minutes to find a graph of the change in the racial makeup of the US over time."

Hours later, I made my own:

The full dataset is here. I was supposed to be able to embed it as an interactive graph, but the scripts don't seem to be working. Do any of you understand GoogleDocs Spreadsheets?.

I present the data as separate bars, even though they all add up to 100%, so you can more easily see the patterns for "White", "Black", and "Other". "Other" is found by subtracting White and Black from 100%. Sources: 1790-1990; 2000-2010.

What we see is that the proportion of the US population classed as "Black" was indeed highest in 1790, at 19.3%, and then gradually declined until the period between WWI and WWII, when it was under 10%. Since then, the proportion has risen slightly, to just over 12%. I'm actually surprised it isn't higher recently, because for the first time since the 18th century a significant number of black people have immigrated to the US in recent decades, especially from the Caribbean. It's not clear to me whether native-born black Americans are continuing to decline as a total proportion of the population or not -- that would depend on whether black immigrants are mostly counted as "black" or as "other" (black Hispanic, mixed race, etc.).

I also looked at the actual numbers, not just percentages:

but since we're talking about populations it makes more sense to put them on a log scale, where we can more easily see the rates of change:

Poking at this that led me to yet more research and more discoveries, which I'll talk about tomorrow.

Tab Dump: January Thaw

by Doctor Science

Not that we had much of a January freeze, mind you.

Sir Thomas More, by Hans Holbein. Because he has such great links.

• Hardiness Zone Changes -- good tool to show how the USDA has re-calibrated the hardiness zones used by farmers and gardeners. My town has moved from 6b to 7a since 1990, which is a pretty serious change. Detailed USDA map here.
• Swiss "Verdingkinder" and American "orphan trains" -- which took poor children who weren't necessarily orphans from cities to live with farm families as extra workers.
• Piracy is part of the digital ecosystem -- excellent graphs
• Francis Fukuyama on the Financial Crisis, plus his recommended reading
• Google Is Facebook Is AOL: What Happens When a Good Google Goes Bad: or, Every Sufficiently Large Web Company Wants to Become the Internet. And they always do it badly.
• Language Log » The “dance of the p’s and b’s”: truth or noise? -- Stanley Fish disparages the digital humanities, while defining olde-skool criticism in an eminently mockable way.
• Elsevier-funded NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research
• Discussion of what a lot of young, attractive women encounter every time they appear in public. You only get the full flavor by reading the comments, too:
  • On Being an Object, and then Not Being an Object
  • Rookie » First Encounters With the Male Gaze
  • Street Harassment Discussion Bingo Card
• Fanworks of general interest:
  • As I Always Say -- one of the highlights of Yuletide 2011, starring Ms. Frizzle, Time Lord.
  • Outside the Box, a Maru the Box-Loving Cat vid from Festivids. Embedded below.

There is no barrel bottom to scrape Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

I'm not trying to get a rise out of anyone, but in the thread that turned into a copyright discussion, one person (and I'm not going to go back and check who it is, cause it's not really important) posited a situation where iirc a plumber breaks into your house and fixes your pipes. What should pop up but this article, with a story that about some horologists breaking into a place and fixing a clock. The story awaits below the fold

Friends Don't Let Friends

by Doctor Science

... publish in Elsevier journals.

Two years ago, Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber decided that he would no longer referee for, or publish in, journals published by Elsevier. Now Fields Medal-winning mathematician Tim Gowers has reached the end of his patience. He took the no-Elsevier pledge, and there is now a website collecting pledges from other academics. The signers -- over 500 so far -- pledge to not referee, do editorial work, or publish with Elsevier journals "unless they radically change how they operate".

What do they mean by that? As was discussed in the comments to my post last summer about the scandal of academic publishing, Elsevier has a long-established reputation for rapacity. As The Cost of Knowledge states:

1. They charge exorbitantly high prices for their journals.
2. They sell journals in huge "bundles," so libraries must buy a large set with many unwanted journals, or none at all. Elsevier thus makes huge profits by exploiting their essential titles, at the expense of other journals.
3. They support measures such as SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act, that aim to restrict the free exchange of information.

Many of the Cost of Knowledge signatories have links to statements, blog posts, etc., about the state of academic publishing, which should probably be put in this wiki -- there doesn't seem to be anyone acting as "archivist of the revolution", as we say in fandom.

Érik Desmazières, La Salle des planètes, from his series of illustrations for Jorge Luis Borges's story 'The Library of Babel'. Found via Freeman Dyson's NY Review of Books review of The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, by James Gleick

Baltasar Garzón and the tension between national and international laws

by liberal japonicus

This Guardian piece and the accompanying video is well worth your attention. Garzón was the judge who issued an international arrest warrant for Augusto Pinochet for his role in torturing and executing Spanish citizenship, followed by obtaining pursuing two Argentinian generals for the crime of genocide during the Argentinian dictatorship. No slap on the wrist either, one of the generals was sentenced to 640 years in prison. Garzón was also reported to be pursuing Gonzales, Yoo, Feith, Bybee, Haynes and Addington for charges and this New Yorker article gives some of the background on that.

In April, Garzón opened an investigation into killings during the Franco regime and was suspended in May for abuse of power, specifically for ignoring the amnesty law related to that regime, and now, he is on trial in three prosecutions. One, which hasn't come to trial, concerning connections with a bank, and the second concerning Garzón ordering the recording of conversations between defense lawyers and prisoners in a goverment corruption case, seem to me to be incidental to the questions involved, but the third is much more related . It is a private prosecution brought by a rightwing trade union, dealing with the same point for which Garzón was suspended in May, that he ignored the amnesty laws to bring about these prosecutions. These amnesty laws came into force in 1977 as Spain was transitioning to democracy and I think it is important to note that even after the passage of these amnesty laws, there were two attempted coups, in 1981 and 1982, the first averted when King Carlos appeared on TV to denounce the conspirators. In checking references and dates for this, I see that a book about the first coup called Anatomy of A Moment has just been translated. The title refers to

...the moment ... when Tejero, just after storming into Parliament, screams at the MPs to get down on the floor. His Civil Guards let off a burst of gun-fire. Everyone flings themselves under the benches, except three people, who remain in their seats while bullets whirr past – Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez, Santiago Carrillo, leader of the Communist Party, and General Gutiérrez Mellado, the Deputy Prime Minister, who had courageously advanced on Tejero and ordered him to lay down his arms.

I'm a big fan of Faulkner's comment that 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' and I think the case of Garzon is reflective of those bargains made when Spain went from Franco to democracy.  

Breaking News: Equality in NJ

by Doctor Science

N.J. Senate committee advances gay marriage bill. Sprog the Elder and I did *not* make it down to Trenton, as we had hoped, but despite the lack of testimony from me the bill advanced out of committee on an 8-4 party line vote.

If I had gotten my head and act together, I would have said that I support same-sex marriage because things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. Traditional marriage is between legally unequal persons, man and wife. My heterosexual marriage will be only *proven* to be between equals if there are other marriages around between people who are patently, obviously, legal equals. Until then, my civil, egalitarian, heterosexual marriage is under threat from those who think marriage is necessarily religious, traditional, and unequal, and that I'm just pretending to be otherwise.

Chris Christie has said he will veto the bill ... probably ... and that it should be put to a referendum. The latest polling shows 52% of NJ voters support marriage equality. In other words, the Republicans don't want to have to choose between what their national party wants and what NJ voters want.

I don't know what the schedule on the next step is, but I hope we can get ourselves in gear this time to make a public stand. At least the NJ Democratic Party has made equal marriage a priority issue: the bill in question is S1 for this session.

Justly Married: photo © Derek Powazek, showing the San Francisco City Hall steps, February 14, 2004. Do it now, NJ.

Something Strange on the Way to Writing this Post

--by Sebastian

You may or may not have been aware that the US government was pushing the Supreme Court to allow warrantless placement of GPS tracking devices with unlimited monitoring.  But it was.  United States v. Antoine Jones

The Supreme Court was about to hand down the decision so I was gearing up to write something scathing about an out of touch institution with idiot conservative justices who mistrust government power unless the police have it, and liberal justices who only recognize privacy when it has to do with sexual functions or artistic renderings of sexual functions.

But then something strange happened.  The Supreme Court UNANIMOUSLY ruled that use of a device to monitor movements counted as a search, and then Alito wrote a scathing concurrence (no that really is possible) saying that the court should have gone further and ruled on similar devices such as cell phones.  That concurrence was joined by Ginsburg, Breyer and Kagan.  Sotomayor also wrote a separate concurrence suggesting that the Court did not go far enough. 

Every now and then, when I think the politics of the country is so mired in idiot minutia that we can't get anything right, I get pleasantly surprised. 

I could get used to being wrong like this!

Primary Document Update:  the actual opinion is linked above at "UNANIMOUSLY"

Look away, Dixieland

by liberal japonicus

Haley Barbour, the outgoing governor of the state I used to call home, (who apparently had seriously entertained pursuing a presidential campaign but thought better of it) decided to distribute some of that compassionate conservatism that I keep hearing about, and pardoned 221 as he was out the door.  Not precisely sure about how it breaks down, but some observe that certain crimes seem to draw more compassion than others. It was apparently a particularly ham handed move, hitting the 67% constituency (the percentage of Mississippians who voted to keep the Confederate battle flag as part of the state flag) rather hard and poorly executed, because a number of the prisoners did not post public notice of their pardon requests, a state requirement, leading a judge to halt some of the releases. Whoops. And surprise, surprise, the process seems to demonstrate some racial disparaties. Who'da thunk it?

So, when Count-me-in and Russell both mentioned Louis CK in the copyright thread, this (definitely not safe for work) riff of his came to mind.

It Takes Two to Tango

by Doctor Science

The current issue of Christian Century has several articles about dating, sex, and relationships. One is about College chaplains on the hookup culture, with commentary by six chaplains from across the spectrum of American colleges: state schools, Ivy League, Christian, small, and large.

Vermeer's Girl with a Wineglass. Her face is certainly rather odd, but the expression to me looksmost like she's smiling because she's expected to, when actually she has no real idea what's going on. Dating in college can feel like that.

What really astounded me was how resolutely all the ministers ignore men. Some of them mentioned the attitudes or difficulties of male students, but only in passing. *All* of the anecdotes about particular students they have counseled involve women. They talk about the problems "hookup culture", promiscuity, or objectification makes for *women*, but as far as men are concerned their ministry seems to be "boys will be boys".

TRIGGER WARNING: discussion of rape and rape culture in post and comments.

What should have been your Friday open thread, dude

by liberal japonicus

This should have been your friday open thread, but the blog gods blinded me to it until just a little bit ago. 

Eagle-eyed watchers spotted a marijuana leaf on Yu Darvish's t-shirt as he landed in Dallas today for his official introduction with the Texas Rangers. 

The "explanation," at least in the city's local news, was that the shirt (pictured right) showed a Japanese maple leaf.

Nonsense. It's weed. But, it doesn't necessarily mean that Darvish may be your next smoking buddy.

In Japan, the marijuana leaf is a popular symbol without any real smoking context. Plenty of native Japanese have leafy t-shirts, or necklaces, or air fresheners in their cars, and don't really know that they're symbolizing a drug.

Yu Darvish is a pretty interesting figure. His father is Iranian, his mother is Japanese, and they met while both were attending university in Florida and there are some things to take away from that, but the pot leaf thing was one of those things that I wanted to share. Japanese really don't associate the symbol with drugs, and hemp appears in lots of places because it has a 'fresh nature' feel. Maybe this is unwarranted, but it tells me a lot more about the US than about Japan that you've got a pack of sportswriters tittering over it like 6th graders making fart jokes. 

Much More Restricted In Europe

--by Sebastian

I was recently having a discussion with a friend, and she wondered why abortion remained such a big deal in politics in the United States while its political valence in Europe was nearly zero.  It seemed to me that it was because European restrictions on abortion tend to be much more restrictive than those in the US, and thus much more in line with most people's intuitions about a fetus having a protectable interest as it became close to becoming a separate child.  She thought that was crazy because she thought that abortion laws were much more permissive in Europe than in the United States.

It isn't true.  A very large number of European states (and most of the large ones) have much more restrictive abortions laws than even the very most restrictive states in the US.  I think most left leaning people in the US imagine that you can't have a progressive state with dramatically tighter abortion restrictions.  Here is evidence to the contrary.  (Largely though not entirely culled from here)  Significant abortion restrictions in the States do not kick in until week 24 (if at all). 

Sweden

Gestational limit: 18 weeks

Conditions: Between 12 and 18 weeks of gestation, the women must discuss the procedure with a social worker. After 18 weeks, permission must be obtained from the National Board of Health and Welfare.

France

Generally available only in the first 12 weeks.  After that, two physicians must separately certify that the abortion will be done to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman; a risk to the life of the pregnant woman; or that the child will suffer from a particularly severe illness recognized as incurable. A multi-disciplinary diagnostic center is required to certify if relying on the birth defect exemption.[more beyond the fold]

Music in the air

by Doctor Science

Wednesday evening we did something I haven't done for decades: listened to world-class live music with no electronic component, not even microphones. Music was in the air, and only in the air.
 
YouTube link.

The Hamburg Symphony Orchestra is touring the US, and the Sprogs and I went to see them at the NJ State Theatre. We only thought to go because one of our closest friends has a brother-in-law in the orchestra, so there was a group expedition.

Your moodle Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

It's the time in the school year when I'm finished classes and trying to make sure that the students who have fallen behind catch up and start to think about what to do in my classes next year to avoid this predicament. (university education in Japan is akin to grape-nuts, in that it isn't university and it isn't education. ba-doom boom!)

I'm creating a Moodle adjunct to my writing course to provide extra support for students retaking the course. A number of folks here in Japan (known as moodlers) are convinced that moodle is the answer to the world's problems. Or something like that. I tend to be a bit sceptical, but there are some things that it may be able to do that are quite neat. If anything, I like this, which is a Japanese company that deals with Moodle installations, calling itself Cup Moodle. Get it?

Kind of a narrow topic for an open thread, so how about talking about any interactions you have with online stuff. Or, failing that, telling these damn kids to get their damn online packages off your lawn.

Is This Corruption?

While browsing the interwebs today, I noticed that a wide variety of companies and websites are engaged in a protest regarding the atrocious Stop Online Piracy Act.  The most elegant one is Google's:

The recent campaign against the SOPA strikes me as both good and necessary.  But I immediately wondered how it fit with recent discussions about corporations and political advertising (see here  by way of example).  Putting up a politically charged message on Google's home search screen is much more valuable than almost any ad buy.  Many of the protests appear to be on corporate websites.  These efforts involve the use of corporate resources to attempt to directly influence Congressional opinion.  Beyond the corporate agitation, these efforts involve pooling resources among lots of people in an attempt to raise public awareness which no individual voice would likely get on their own.

If the politicians were allowed to shut this kind of thing down, they absolutely would.  There must be ways to attack corruption in politics without attacking free speech.