Obsidian Wings

I Almost Forgot!

by hilzoy

It's National Poetry Month! So for the two minutes that are left of today:

The Builders

ALL are architects of Fate,
Working in these walls of Time;
Some with massive deeds and great,
Some with ornaments of rhyme.

Nothing useless is, or low;
Each thing in its place is best;
And what seems but idle show
Strengthens and supports the rest.

For the structure that we raise,
Time is with materials filled;
Our to-days and yesterdays
Are the blocks with which we build.

Truly shape and fashion these;
Leave no yawning gaps between;
Think not, because no man sees,
Such things will remain unseen.

In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For the Gods see everywhere.

Let us do our work as well,
Both the unseen and the seen;
Make the house, where Gods may dwell,
Beautiful, entire, and clean.

Else our lives are incomplete,
Standing in these walls of Time,
Broken stairways, where the feet
Stumble as they seek to climb.

Build to-day, then, strong and sure,
With a firm and ample base;
And ascending and secure
Shall to-morrow find its place.

Thus alone can we attain
To those turrets, where the eye
Sees the world as one vast plain,
And one boundless reach of sky.

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A David Of Armies

by von

IN MY MEANDERING post below (since updated), I made the following comment:

GLENN REYNOLDS is back at InstaPundit, and it's a bit sad:  InstaPundit always improves a bit when Reynolds takes a vacation and lets others fill in.  This is not a slam on Reynolds -- though he has become predictable of late -- but rather a recognition of the difficulty of solo blogging.  Providing both quantity and quality is a tough gig, which may be why the best solo bloggers tend to be journalists (e.g., your Sullivans, Kauses, and Yglesiases) and the high-traffic nonprofessionals (e.g., Reynolds and Charles Johnson) are mostly link aggregators.   You'll find exceptions, of course.   But not many.

Professor Reynolds took issue with the main point of my post, and I've responded.  So enough of that.  But Reynolds also took issue with this opening tangent and, since I have twenty seconds to waste, it's worth twenty more seconds of thought.  This is how Reynolds restates my comment above:

Really, people who even admit that they're "nitpicking" [me] ought to at least follow the links before picking nits, especially in the process of offering a theory about the inherent inferiority of solo blogs. . . . .

I'll leave to the reader whether Reynolds has accurately characterized my position. I didn't think that I was offering a theory on the "inherent inferiority of solo blogs" -- nor do I think that I could have been understood that way -- but I have an obvious bias.  (In favor of me, natch.)

In fact, there's nothing "inherently inferior" about solo blogs.  What is true -- and I think indisputably so -- is that there's a high level of difficulty and a lot of work in producing a popular solo blog.  It's not easy churning out "both quantity and quality"; it's a tough gig.  So, I posit that most high-traffic solo bloggers will tend to be members of the media.  This is not because, word-for-word, a member of the media is a naturally better blogger; although many are quite good.  This is because members of the media have experience writing for the general public, have ready access to sources, and sometimes are even given time to blog. 

A nonprofessional with a serious day job has a lot of trouble competing with that.  So, Reynolds (a law professor) mostly aggregates links, saving time by citing the work of others; Charles Johnson (a web designer) does the same; Professors Bainbridge and Muller (more law professors) write less frequently; Publius joins us; John Cole takes on a co-blogger; the Volokhs start a conspiracy; Jeralyn Merritt (an attorney) also takes on cobloggers; etc.  As I mentioned below, you will find exceptions -- Captain Ed somehow continues to churn out high-quality product (although today he has a guest blogger) -- but not many. 

I don't think that's all too controversial a point:  the blogosphere isn't so much an "Army of Davids" as a bunch of David-bits that can assemble, Voltron-style, to slay a media Goliath.  On occasion.  Most of the time, however, the different bits don't fit together, ignore one another, are actively at war -- or they are too busy writing navel-gazing posts like this one.  With a few notable exceptions (Reynolds may be one of them), we're individually empowered to the precise extent that a member of a crowd is empowered:  Not very much.  But, man, together we can do some serious smashing.

But then, I've always been a bit gloomy about human nature.  And certainly, I'm distrustful of claims regarding transformations via superior ideology or technology.  Despite the big new idea, most folks continue to be their nasty and brutish selves.  Thus, change comes slower and less predictably than one would like. 

Or, more succinctly:  Twenty-plus years on, the internet is still mostly for porno.

This is an open thread.

UPDATE:  There's a nuance I don't want missed in one of my comments above.  I write:  "With a few notable exceptions (Reynolds may be one of them), we're individually empowered to the precise extent that a member of a crowd is empowered:  Not very much."  Note what's implied there:  a member of a crowd does not have a great deal of individual power, but he does have more power than someone not in the crowd -- your prototypical guy who instead lurks in his lerkim, cold under the roof.*  The crowd member does have a say in the direction of a crowd:  she can calm it, lead it, or shout fire.  If enough folks hear her and agree, she might even change its direction.  That's the nature of being in a crowd.

The blogosphere has created a virtual crowd where none existed before.  Reynolds is right in his book "An Army of Davids" to recognize the small, but real, shift in power therefrom.  Unclear -- and I think quite disputed -- is the degree of the shift.  Or, indeed, where it has shifted us.  A crowd, after all, is not always an army.  Sometimes it's a mob, and a vicious one at that.  And sometimes it's simply a crowd.

*Of course, such a lurkim lurker does get to make his own clothes out of miff-muffered moof -- so that's an plus, I guess.

p.s. For those concerned that I've abandoned my spat with Kevin Drum and Eric Martin over our intervention in Somalia -- a category that may include only me -- I intend to have a follow-up later this week.  I'd follow-up faster, but I have a day job that's quite consuming ....

In which we anticipate St. Patrick's day: An Open Thread

by von

ALTHOUGH I AM currently consumed by a massive court filing, I do want to say (1) I've always understood the phrase "black Irish" in the Megan McArdle sense; (2) calling the Scotch-Irish "black Irish" makes no sense at all given that their color-at-hand is Orange*; and (3) since my ancestors nonetheless qualify under the Worstall definition, I perform the ritual sacrifies. 

This is an open thread.

*Or maybe that is the distinction:  the "real" Protestant Irish are black Irish, but not the Scotch-Irish interlopers.

UPDATE:  Tim Worstall reports in comments:  "I did say it was in my family argot.... I'm told that we've corrupted "Black Protestant" meaning Presbyterian into Black Irish."

UPDATE 2 (because sometimes we need a subject):  Glenn Greenwald -- someone I don't generally link to (he gets more love from my leftier cobloggers) -- discovers that Charles Johnson presides over a cesspool. 

Let's be clear, however:  Johnson is not a conservative.  Nor is he a libertarian (or classic liberal).  He gets used by conservatives from time to time when he's got something useful, in the same way that partisans on the left might check the Democratic Underground for the latest scuttlebut.  It's a pitiable position to be in, because he gets lots of traffic but little respect.  Part of this is because Johnson adheres to no discernable morality or political theory:  he's merely a reactionary, in the dull sense of the word.  Things offend him; things are wrong and evil; things must be defeated.  But, at bottom, he stands only in opposition; he stands for nothing.  And his curious mix of rage and stupidity got him a well-deserved award from me.   

All of this is worth remembering from time to time.

It Was My Understanding There Would Be No Math

by Andrew

Responding to hilzoy's post on discrimination, in which I end up making a case quite different to what I expected.

For those who don't recall, the study hilzoy referenced sent virtually identical candidates to interview for jobs, the one variable being ethnicity: each job was applied for by white, hispanic, and black applicants. The results could hardly be called surprising: white applicants received callbacks more often than hispanics, who received more than blacks. More depressing was the discovery that white felons received offers more often than blacks with no criminal record; I can't pretend to be surprised that discrimination still exists in hiring, but that it exists to such a degree that people would rather hire a white criminal than a law-abiding black applicant is rather distressing. It is one thing to discover that, given three equal candidates, whites do better. It's quite another to learn that discrimination remains so strong it can overcome something as significant as a felony. (Although it should be noted that the study points out that the differences between black and white responses are not statistically significant. On the other hand, that's not a big help, either: that means a white felon is only discriminated against the same as a law-abiding black applicant.) In response to this, hilzoy notes that this "makes affirmative action of some sort an obvious remedy."

If that doesn't illustrate the difference in temperament between liberals and conservatives perfectly, I can't imagine what would. Hilzoy and I are in tune when it comes to our emotional reaction to this news: we're appalled and depressed. Yet where my mind immediately leapt to the question 'what can we do to address this,' hilzoy's mind went immediately to affirmative action, calling it an obvious remedy. Well, obvious to her, at least. Given what affirmative action does, I'm a little less sanguine about the odds it will resolve this problem than hilzoy.

Affirmative action is basically a quota system. It's not intended to be one, but it is, because quotas are the only way to protect a business against charges of discrimination. Unlike the study that sparked this discussion, real companies are rarely presented with applicants who are identical save for their ethnicity. In as big a system as the American economy, a normal distribution will mean that we could expect that, in the absence of discrimination, we could expect to see some companies with non-whites overrepresented and underrepresented to a significant degree. But no company can afford to base its defense against charges of discrimination on being at the tail end of the normal distribution. If I'm not mistaken, (and we have more than enough lawyers to correct me where I'm wrong here)[Update: I am incorrect, see here for a helpful precis on the law], discrimination law already allows plantiffs to use disparate results as proof of discrimination. In other words, it doesn't matter if your hiring process is completely color blind; if you don't have a work force with appropriate percentages of non-whites, you're guilty. There is no other choice for businesses but to make sure that they hire a certain minimum of candidates from the right ethnicities to forestall costly legislation litigation.

Now we sail into touchy waters. The problem that a quota system creates is it may be that the number of non-white candidates who are equally qualified for jobs as white candidates may not be proportional to their representation in the general population. In other words, let's say that if the perfect candidate is a 100, and acceptable candidates are scored at 85 or above, the ethnicity of those who score 85 or higher is probably disproportionately white. Doubtless that comment will get me tarred as a racist, but for those who can set aside such reactions, please bear with me. Non-whites graduate from high school and college at lower rates than whites (a Manhattan Institute study showed than 78% of whites received normal high school diplomas in the class of 2002, as opposed to 56% of blacks and 52% of hispanics). That means that businesses would be faced with a difficult choice: hire less-qualified candidates to ensure hiring numbers don't draw lawsuits, or hire the best candidates and accept the risk of lawsuits.

Those options aren't as simple as they sound, either. This study, and general experience, tend to suggest that non-whites face a lot of discrimination that people aren't even necessarily aware of. I'll wager that, if confronted with their disparate reactions to similar candidates based on ethnicity, a lot of employers would be surprised to learn they're discriminating in such a manner. I'll bet we all internalize discrimination a lot more than we realize. Without a quota system that forces businesses to hire a minimum number of non-whites, we end up with a nominally color-blind process that, in fact, is discriminating against non-whites. This is why I think there's so much enthusiasm for affirmative action. I don't know how much actual good many affirmative action programs do; shifting the burden from non-whites to whites may be a net gain given the advantages whites possess in American society, but try explaining that to the people who end up not getting jobs because a business needed to hire a non-white in order to meet its quota. Conversely, how often does this really happen?

If we were to take the 2002 graduation rates and the 2000 census results, let's look at the numbers. In 2000, the population was 64.3% white, 10.6% black, 12.5% hispanic and 12.6% other (these numbers are a SWAG, as the data count is designed so you can be white or black and hispanic. I pulled the hispanic numbers out of the black and white population proportionately, which is a fudge.) So out of every 100 job applicants, we could expect to see 64 whites, 11 blacks, 13 hispanics, and 12 others. (All numbers are rounded to the nearest whole number.) We'll throw out the others since they weren't included in the study. So out of every 100 white/black/hispanic job applicants, we could expect to see 74 white applicants, 12 black applicants, and 14 hispanic applicants. Out of those, 58 white applicants would have high school diplomas, seven blacks would, and seven hispanics would.

Assuming the business was attempting to maintain a workforce that was as close as possible to 74% white, 12% black, and 14% hispanic, how often would a more qualified white applicant be turned away in favor of a less-qualified non-white, using a high school diploma as our definition of qualified? 74% of the time, the business would hire the white over the black or hispanic. The other 26% of the time, the business would hire a black (12%) or hispanic (14%) over a white (assuming a proportional number of applicants). All told, using our methods, we end up with a work force that is 71.7% qualified and 28.3% unqualified, with 5.3% of the unqualified workers being black, 6.7% being hispanic, and 16.3% being white. When a black is hired, there is a 44% chance the applicant is unqualified, against a 22% chance the white applicant is unqualified. So, the 12% of the time this business hires a black, 5.3 of the hires are unqualifed. Had whites been hired instead of blacks, 2.6 of the applicants would have been unqualified, so assuming everyone lines up evenly, we end up hiring an unqualified black over a qualified white 2.7 times. So the odds of a white being passed over for a less-qualified black in this scenario is less than one in 33. For hispanics the numbers are a little higher, 3.6 times the qualified white is passed over for a less-qualified hispanic, which is still less than one in 25. Summing the two, we end up with a 6.3% chance of a white applicant being passed over for a less-qualified non-white.

In the real world, things aren't so simple. If a business knows it needs to make sure that 12% of its hires are black, they are going to take reasonable precautions to make sure that it hires the best available, because to do otherwise is to hurt the business. (Which, ironically, it appears is already happening if a white felon is as likely to be hired as a law-abiding black. Not to tar felons unfairly, but I suspect that businesses staffed by non-felons are, on average, more successful than those staffed by felons.) That doesn't mean that the occasional white won't end up being shown the door in favor of a less-qualified non-white, simply because of the relative dearth of qualified non-whites, but I have enough faith in business to act in its own interests to believe that the number is less than the 6.3% figure I just arrived at, so let's say, for sake of argument, that the 6.3% figure is accurate. When you apply that to the 26% of the time a non-white will be hired, you end up with 1.6%, or less than one time in fifty a white applicant is turned away for a less-qualified non-white.

Given that this study is showing that an equally-qualified black applicant has only 56.5% as much success as a white applicant, the numbers seem to favor affirmative action. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we create a business that is supposed to only hire qualified applicants, so we throw out the unqualified pool and focus on the qualified pool. Our qualified pool is now 80.6% white, 9.7% black, and 9.7% hispanic. So we should expect that our fictional business will hire a white 81% of the time, a black 9% of the time, and a hispanic 10% of the time. Using current hiring practices, however, out of every 100 applicants, we will have a workforce that is 86.2% white, 5.5% black, and 8.3% hispanic. In other words, a black applicant can expect that almost half the time a less-qualified white will be hired, and a hispanic applicant will lose out about one time in five. All told, a non-white applicant can expect to lose out to a less-qualified candidate 26.8% of the time, or about one time in four. Applying that to the 80.6% of the time we should expect a white to be hired, that's 21.6% of the time non-whites lose out due to ethnicity under the current system, as opposed to 1.6% of the time whites lose out under affirmative action. There is a lot more to the world than math, and my figures are extremely rough in any case, but that's an awfully powerful argument for affirmative action. This is not the first time that I've made a case other than the one I expected to when I started, but that's part of what makes blogging interesting.

I still have reservations about affirmative action. My biggest concern is that it doesn't address the underlying problems. This study demonstrates that there's a lot more racism out there than most Americans realize, for example, and forcing businesses to hire proportionate to the local population isn't going to make racism go away; it may even exacerbate it by giving whites a (generally unjustified) sense of losing out because of their race. Affirmative action will do nothing to fix problems like blacks trailing whites by 22 points in high school graduations. Affirmative action strikes me as a means of reducing total injustice, but perhaps at the cost of setting aside other pressing problems that require far more complex solutions.

I don't have an answer for how to fix those problems. Would that I did. It does seem, however, that hilzoy has a pretty strong argument in favor of reducing total injustice via affirmative action. There are other arguments to be made against such programs, particularly depending on how they are implemented, but I think she's got the better of this particular aspect.

Cross-posted at Andrew Olmsted.

What do Conservatives and Liberals Do in a Society?

--By Sebastian

As sometimes happens, a post on one thing changes into a discussion about very different things after a few dozen comments.  In this case the discussion turned to what conservatives and liberals offer society and/or politics.  Lily suggested that pretty much every good change could be traced to a liberal mindset and that resistance to those good changes was always conservative.  I think the problem is that analysis is true for most bad changes too--from the French Revolution, to Marxism, to Maoism many of the horrific changes in human political history have been guided by ideals which sound good in theory and which haven't turned out so well in practice.  Resistance to those changes tend to be conservative. 

Liberal_Japonicus asks for a thread on conservative/liberal philosophy, so here it is.  But I don't think that is the fruitful question.  What makes a philosophy liberal or conservative isn't an inherent property of the philosophy so far as I can tell.  If the philosophy is ascendant, its proponents are conservative.  If it is not ascendant, its proponents are liberal.  I don't really think that analyzing it from as if they were separate philosophies is very useful.  I think it would be much more useful to analyze it from the idea that they are different temperaments.  As such I'm not sure they easily map onto what we talk about when we talk about conservatives and liberals politically.   

I'm using the word temperament here to talk about the initial reaction a person has toward change.  I'm definitely a conservative in temperament.  I tend to be comfortable where I am.  My initial reaction to a proposed change tends to be skepticism.  I've lived in the same place for 13 years.  I'm only now considering moving, and only because I've decided that having two bathrooms could be useful with a roommate.  But does that mean I won't change?  No.  It just takes a lot of convincing.  I'm friends with some extreme temperamental liberals.  They make changes in their life just because they can, or because they want to try out something new to see if it better.  Normally I enjoy their stories and they do what they want.  Sometimes I see that the change just can't be for the better, and I say so.  They don't always listen, but sometimes it helps.  Sometimes they see that my lack of change isn't good, and make a good argument for something I need to do differently.  I don't always listen, but sometimes it helps.

I don't think that either political side has a monopoly on either temperament.  The conservative temperament is better represented by Republicans and the liberal temperament is better represented by Democrats, but the division isn't really so neat.  I'm very conservative in temperament, but I'm for gay marriage and skeptical of police power. 

The Iraq war is a great example of how the lines don't fall along political party.  As formulated by the administration, Bush's invasion was a revolutionary and non-skeptical leap toward something (exactly what has been subject to debate and revision).  Many of the arguments against it were decidedly conservative in temperament:  Does this policy really lead to that desired aim?  What about side consequences X, Y and Z?  Is this a wise allocation of resources when we could try to deal with important issues A, B, and C with a greater chance of success?   

In a well functioning system temperamental liberals will dream and move for change while temperamental conservatives will let them do so, but only after making sure that the changes don't kill off other important things or cause more damage than the alleged benefit. For good progress you really do need both types of people.  Many bad changes have been made by temperamental liberals leaping toward an ideal without examining what was happening on the path they thought (hoped) led there.  Many bad programs hang on much longer than they should because they have 'good' aims.  Many good systems ossify because temperamentally conservative people fail to adapt--this is one of the key reasons why many companies fail to make a good transition from their founder to the people who lead after him. 

Now we don't have a very well functioning system here in that respect. The currently powerful political conservatives don't respect what I see as important in conservative thinking, and liberals like lily have pretty much never understood what conservatives add to the mix. So it is no wonder that things get messy.

Literary History

by hilzoy

Apparently, Frank J. at IMAO wrote a tongue-in-cheek post saying, satirically, that we should kill all Arab kids. Then Vilmar at Right Wing Howler quoted it (Google cache here), with further commentary:

"Makes sense to me. After all, if Muslims are raising their little crumb-snatching, curtain climbing, ankle biting rug rats to strap on bombs in order to kill us, it is logically correct to assume that in order to stop that from happening we need to kill all Muslim kids. Starting now."

Then CAIR protested to Vilmar's web host, and asked them to shut down his web site on the grounds that this post, along with others, violated the company's Terms of Service, which (if CAIR is quoting accurately) prohibits hate sites and threatening material. The company complied, leading Captain Ed to write:

"So the people at CAIR have no sense of humor and apparently no knowledge of satire. Jonathan Swift once wrote a powerful political satire titled "A Modest Proposal", in which he suggested that the English eat Irish children to improve the lives of their parents. While Frank J's satire might not appeal to all tastes, it's hardly a serious call to genocide. And as far as a second passage that CAIR quotes from Vilmar's site, readers can easily surmise that Vilmar meant that war was coming to Americans and that they should prepare themselves.

CAIR, which has joined the effort to intimidate airlines into ignoring provocations from Musims, now wants to intimidate the blogosphere into silence. We can blame CAIR for this action, and it certainly reveals them as humorless and autocratic twits, but the real culprit here is HostGator. One would expect a service that hosts blogs to take the First Amendment rights of their clients a little more seriously than this."

Okeydokey. First, IMAO's piece is, of course a joke. More about this later. Second, IMAO wasn't shut down; the site that quoted it was, and it's not at all clear that they were kidding. (And now, of course, we can't check.) Third, as Captain Ed acknowledges, the hosting service does have the right to do this: they're a private company and can set their own rules. The First Amendment is not, in fact, implicated in this case. Fourth, they did set rules, and while it's no longer possible to read through Vilmar's site, I think there's a pretty serious case that the blog qualifies both as threatening and as a hate site. (Example: "Someone explain to me again why these vermin should not be exterminated?" I found that by checking out this Google cache, which has enough posts to give a pretty clear indication of the sort of site we're talking about.)

One of the many, many reasons I have not gone into the web hosting business is because I honestly don't know what I'd do if I were the web server. On the one hand, I'm a Skokie liberal: that is, enough of a First Amendment nut to think that Nazis should be allowed to march through a town with a sizable number of Holocaust survivors. I don't like restrictions on speech, period. On the other hand, I really don't think that anyone ought to be obliged to print anyone else's speech, however vile, unless there's a serious argument that that person couldn't be heard in any other way (e.g., if some one person controlled all the media outlets in the US), or the publisher has made some sort of agreement, implicit or implicit, that restrictions on content would violate. Personally, I'd rather be creating content of my own than trying to decide what to do about hosting a loathsome site like that.

However, one thing about all this is clear, namely: Captain Ed really, really needs to read this post by Amanda before he mentions Jonathan Swift again. In fact, anyone who so much as contemplates comparing anything to Swift's Modest Proposal should read it. You don't get to make those comparisons unless you know at least this much about Swift:

"Jonathan Swift was a f*cking Irishman, you dolts, and he did not want anyone to kill Irish children. This is not difficult. In order for a piece about killing Muslim children to be comparable, the author would have to be a Muslim, and he would have to be writing the piece in protest of the war, and he would have to widely respected in the United States. I can’t think of anyone that would even be in the position to write such a thing right now, but mostly because there’s basically no respect for writers in the halls of power in D.C. right now.

In objective reality terms, lMAO is a site that already supports “pre-emptive” violence against at least some Muslims—the ones in Iraq—who presented no real threat to America. So the weak joke is that they’re just expanding their size of the targeted group of innocent Muslims to kill. Not much of a joke there, of course, but I suppose anyone who thinks the humor in “A Modest Proposal” comes from Swift’s brave willingness to kill children, well, they don’t have much of a sense of humor to begin with and can’t really be expected to generate Teh Funny all on their own."

IMAO's piece is not like Swift at all. It's not funny. It's not really satire. Frank J. is not poking fun at all those silly people who hate Muslims, using their own rhetoric against them to point out where it really leads. He's just pushing his own views a bit farther than (I assume) they actually go. He's like Ann Coulter (on a charitable reading of Coulter): creating a deliberately outrageous and excessive version of himself pour épater les bourgeois, et pour amuser les gens dont le sens de l'humour à été tout perdu dans un accident tragique. Christopher Hitchens, peut-être. Not Jonathan Swift.

Please.

And if Captain Ed intends a comparison between Right Wing Howler -- which is, you know, the site that was actually shut down -- and A Modest Proposal, I'd be all ears. From where I sit, it's just a hate site, and a pretty vile one at that.

Segregating Fiction

by Andrew

One of the A1 stories in today's Wall Street Journal takes a look at how black authors are treated by the book industry. I don't spend a lot of time in book stores, tending to get my books via Amazon instead, but I've been in them often enough to notice the various ethnic sections. I always assumed, however, that those sections were intended for books focused on that general area. For example, if I were looking for a book on the black experience in America, I'd go to African-American. If I were looking for fiction, I would just go to the appropriate section (mystery, horror, etc.) and look for the book there. Apparently, if I were to do that in Borders or Waldenbooks, I'd walk away thinking that the book I was looking for wasn't available, because those chains (among others) put all books by black authors in a single section regardless of subject.

My first reaction to this was strongly negative. I know that questions of race are far from settled in the U.S., but this kind of thing strikes me as doing little to help that problem and perhaps something to harm it. In addition to encouraging people to read only authors who are ethnically similar to them, this seems to hurt the authors in question, since it's a lot harder for them to get their work in front of a larger audience if it's tucked away in 'African-American' or some other side shelf instead of with other comparable works. With a very few exceptions, I can't tell you the ethnicity of the fiction authors I read, nor do I particularly see why I should care. A good book is a good book. I hate the thought of missing out on good authors because I'm only looking in the fiction section while the store has segregated ethnic authors in their own section.

Conversely, I can see how this policy can help struggling authors. Readers often prefer characters they can relate to, and that means that many black readers probably get frustrated from time-to-time with fiction written from a perspective wholly alien from their own. It may be a relief for them to know that by going to the African-American section they can find fiction that is more likely to speak to them. And that also provides a more focused audience for less-well known authors, probably leading to greater sales. But it's also that much harder to those authors to break out to a more general audience, so that's a two-edged sword.

I find all this interesting in no small part because it throws a highlight on a facet of America that I don't get much contact with. The dominance of whites in America for so long created a society where things tend to be oriented to us to such a degree that we don't really notice it. From 'flesh' colored crayons to the predominance of white faces in entertainment, we're surrounded by little (and sometimes not-so-little) things that we often don't even notice. I don't believe I've ever even bothered to check out an African-American section of a bookstore, because it's not an area that particularly interested me. Now that the question is brought up, however, it highlights some difficult questions about how to address problems of integration in American society.

During the first half of the 20th century, for example, there were almost two separate economies in American cities. There were black newspapers, black hotels, black restaurants, the Negro Leagues, and much more. When segregation began to break down in the 1950s and 1960s (and earlier for the Negro Leagues), those institutions tended to disappear. While the erosion of segregation was a great moral good, I'm not sure that desegregation was all that great for blacks in an economic sense; with black businesses no longer necessary, that meant an awful lot of mangerial and owner positions for blacks disappeared as well, a problem that is still reflected in American business today. I can see a similar problem with the elimination of African-American sections in bookstores: the top tier of black authors will probably benefit, as their works suddenly find a larger audience, but I suspect we may also see a number of lesser black authors suddenly on the outside of the business looking in as their niche market vanishes.

That's a lot of words without much resolution. I'm curious what my readers think, however. Would we be better or worse off with the desegregation of our bookstores, both as a society and as individuals? Are the costs to individuals worth it? I'm not sure how to answer that question.

Cross-posted at Andrew Olmsted.

Galacticablogging Live

That's right, I'll be working without a net this evening and liveblogging tonight's episode of BSG, "Collaborators." Naturally, to prevent any spoilers from escaping, I will perform in the hermetically-sealed environs of the extended post. Other BSG fans are invited to jump in via the comments.

BSG Blogging: Exodus, Part II

To avoid spoilers, I'll just say that Moore and company are going to have a tough time topping last night's episode. I think "Exodus, Part II" may have been the best episode I've seen since "33".

Public Service Announcement

by hilzoy

And unlike my last public service announcement, this one is not about bras. -- One of the most moving things I ever saw on TV was PBS' series Eyes On The Prize, about the civil rights movement. It was everything you'd ever want TV to be: informative, complicated, heartbreaking, inspiring -- I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Stupidly, I didn't videotape it at the time; I checked at various points over the years, since I really wanted to see it again, and it wasn't even available for sale anywhere, which is crazy.

Anyways: PBS is rerunning it. The first two hours show tomorrow on my PBS channel; you can find your local listings via the web page I linked to earlier. I strongly recommend it, especially for those of you who weren't around for the civil rights movement itself. It's really, really good.