Charles Murray on Obama's Speech

Charles Murray himself, co-author of The Bell Curve, fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, hero to right-wing "race realists" like Steve Sailer and Half Sigma, had this to say about Obama's speech:

I read the various posts here on "The Corner," mostly pretty ho-hum or critical about Obama's speech. Then I figured I'd better read the text (I tried to find a video of it, but couldn't). I've just finished. Has any other major American politician ever made a speech on race that comes even close to this one? As far as I'm concerned, it is just plain flat out brilliant—rhetorically, but also in capturing a lot of nuance about race in America. It is so far above the standard we're used to from our pols.... But you know me. Starry-eyed Obama groupie.

More on the Duke Debacle

Via Radley Balco, Defense Needs DNA, Too.

Excerpt:

But these Duke athletes aren't the first people to be wrongly accused, nor are they the first victims of a politically motivated prosecutor. Their ordeal demonstrates that we need to make forensic-science services, including DNA testing, available to defense and prosecution teams equally.

In March 2006, Durham County District Attorney Michael Nifong charged three members of the Duke lacrosse team with rape. Then, Nifong and Brian Meehan, director of the private DNA lab Nifong used, agreed to withhold the potentially exculpatory evidence in the alleged victim's rape kit; it contained DNA from more than one unidentified man, but not from any of the Duke students.

The life-altering injustices suffered by the affluent white defendants in this case are precisely the sort of injustices suffered regularly by many of America's less privileged citizens.

DNA is no magic bullet of truth when the testers are aligned unambiguously with the prosecution. During the testimony in which it was revealed that Nifong and Meehan had agreed to hide the DNA evidence, Meehan referred to Nifong as "my client." Instead of serving the truth, Meehan's forensics lab was helping its "client," the prosecutor.

When forensic scientists work exclusively for the prosecution, we should expect errors and abuse. Using post-conviction DNA evidence, the Innocence Project has helped exonerate nearly 200 people wrongly convicted of crimes. A study of the first 86 such cases, published in the journal Science, found faulty forensics played a role in almost two-thirds of those convictions.

The time has come to free forensic science from the pressures of prosecutorial bias. To that end, crime labs should become independent of police and prosecutors, and public defenders should be given greater access to forensic advice and testing. Crime labs should be independent, operating under the supervision of an officer of the court, who would be responsible for assigning forensic evidence to laboratories and ensuring that all crime labs in the system are following proper scientific procedures.

We should react to the Duke case by ensuring it will never happen again, to white people or to minorities, to the rich or the poor. I'm sure Sean Hannity and company will get right on that.

Linguistic Snobbery

Pet peeve: language prescriptivists.

Language prescriptivism is an interesting form of elitism which allows people to feel themselves not only better, but smarter than others. Whether it's liberals making fun of Bush's pronunciation of nuclear, whites' mocking of black speech patterns, or simply bloggers attacking their opponents' grammar or spelling rather than their arguments, they are misguided about what language is and how it works.

If language is confusing, it's a problem. If language has "bad" style (for example if it's boring or cloying) is a subjective issue, but fair to note. Language is almost never, though, wrong.

"Damn, he dumb."
"Can everyone take out their books, please?"
"I don't feel good."
"Will all y'all shut the hell up?"

All of those sentences are perfectly understandable but often derided. What they generally reveal, though, is not stupidity, but the speaker's region and/or social group. There are undeniable advantages to certain styles in certain situations, for example speaking "standard" English at job interviews, "redneck" if you're Larry the Cable Guy, or "ebonics" if you're an inner-city black kid who doesn't want to be called an "oreo" by your peers.

Then there are the even snootier complaints made about the following kinds of sentences and phrases:

"To boldly go where no man has gone before."
"The train will be moving momentarily."
"Who did you go with?"
"Which begs the question of..."

Only the second and fourth can arguably be described as unclear, but they are so common, it's almost always snobbery rather than confusion that spurs complaints. The first and third are "wrong" only in the sense that some people have arbitrarily declared them as "wrong," in exactly the same way that one might argue that placing the fork on the right side of the plate is "wrong."

Sally Thompson at Language Log quotes an interesting comment about the nature of prescriptivists from linguist Lauren Squires, which I will reproduce in part:

Sociolinguistics is concerned with the question not only of how people speak, but of how they think about how they and others speak. You thus have people studying language attitudes, seeking to identify and understand what people think about linguistic variation: Why do Michiganders think they speak the most "correct" form of English in the United States? Why do people judge speakers with certain non-English-accented English as less socially desirable, less intelligent, or less agreeable than speakers without a discernible accent? How many Detroiters fail to recognize "Canadian" phonological features within their own speech community? (For excellent references on this topic, see Harold Schiffman's page of bibliographies on Language Attitudes.)

Then there's the language ideologies work, which goes beyond what people think about language to ask what social processes underlie the attitudes, often by appealing to political systems, historical influences, socioeconomic structure, and semiotic processes that turn language into a carrier of social meaning in various ways. Language ideologies are often defined as sets of ideas, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that influence how people use language (by imposing some sort of schema about what is "right," "appropriate," or whatever), and they also serve as speakers' means of rationalizing or otherwise explaining the language that they or someone else uses.

In the case of the United States, one can make a pretty good argument that our dominant language ideologies include ideas about there being one standard style that is considered "correct," that language can be something subject to judgments of "correctness" to begin with, and that nation-states are best off when their citizens speak one unified language. Studies on standardization, and particularly with regard to English, point out that in literate societies, ideas of "standard" become even more salient and powerful because of the tendency of print to "freeze" language or at least impose stratification on its use, elevating some formal or allegedly generic style above more colloquial or regional ones.

You can also argue that the written form serves as a trigger for linguistic awareness, on which there seems to be less research but which is of no less importance (if you ask me!). In order to make a usage gripe, you have to be aware of the linguistic feature you're griping about. You may be more aware because you were taught something about it, or you may notice it because it varies a lot among your acquaintances, or there may be something that makes it especially salient because of the kind of linguistic thing it is (phoneme, morpheme, word, spelling, etc.). You may also be more aware of it because it's been culturally packaged: invoking a term from Dennis Preston's work, a linguistic feature or language variety can become a folk linguistic artifact that circulates through the culture, picking up different social connotations along the way. Standard English is most certainly one of these, and so are "Ebonics," "Spanglish," "Southern drawl," and "Netspeak."

In public discourse (and educational settings), these are framed as distinct varieties to be either aspired to or avoided, having either high or low mainstream social prestige. We can pinpoint some contents of the artifacts, too, in media reports: about change in language as language decay, about linguistic "revolution" as socially harmful, about how no one sends thank-you notes any more, about how multilingualism is a threat to the health of English and Americans, about how emoticons are rampant in school essays, about how you'd better understand your teenagers' online lingo fast, before it's too late and they're pregnant or in rehab or, worse, cavorting with a sexual predator.

So, the gripers. You have people who believe that there's a correct way of speaking and writing, and who impose that belief on others. For them, what they are doing is fighting for the truth, tradition, and the Natural Order of Language. While lots of them may have some interest in language and its inner workings, for most, language is simply a material/symbolic system that gets roped into social Othering. Language is accessible, convenient, and flexible for use in doing so: it's always there, it's always changing, and it's always going to be socially differentiated. With linguistic variation, it seems that the grass is always greener on the other side, if you're talking about a usage associated with an appealing group of people (swoon those Aussies with their exotic diphthongs!), or it's greener on your side, if you're talking about a usage associated with a somehow undesirable group (shakes fist those Mexicans/teens/rednecks and their bad English!).

When you give gripers an outlet for their opinions, they're going to feel validated, and they're going to enjoy the feeling that their comments are helping to preserve the Natural Order. Maybe they see it as their duty, or maybe it's just a playful pastime. Either way, it's not (entirely) their fault, and it reflects issues beyond what people are taught about language. It's the reality of the social divisions we are constantly reproducing — every day, all the time, each of us. While I agree that it would be nice to get some teachable moments out of the gripes, I'm not certain that it would ultimately change anything until some deeper cultural issues were addressed.

Language Hat is another great blog that often touches on some of these issues. I also enjoy Mixing Memory.

Why Doesn't the Right Want Obama to be Black?

For a couple weeks now, I've been wondering why people on the right appear to be obsessed with the fact that Obama is only half-black.

Rush Limbaugh:

Hey, Barack Obama has picked up another endorsement: Halfrican American actress Halle Berry. "As a Halfrican American, I am honored to have Ms. Berry's support, as well as the support of other Halfrican Americans," Obama said.

He didn't say it, but -- anyway, there are those out there -- greetings.

And then, more recently:

Okay, back to our Barack Obama Audio Sound Bite Marathon. What are we up to now? Let’s see. Oh, yeah. Obama just said he wasn’t sure that he decided he was black, that if you look African-American in this society, you’re treated as an African-American, and when you’re a child in particular that’s how you begin to identify yourself. If you don’t like it, you can switch. Well, that’s the way I see it. He’s got 50-50 in there. Say, “No, I’m white.”

After discussing this online in various forums with people on the right, I think I've figured it out. Because they're blinded by partisanship, they don't get Obama's mystique. They latch on to the one thing they can think of that makes him unique and think he's popular because he's black. If they can take his blackness away, they think he'll just be some ordinary one-term Senator and the press will shut up about him and nobody will care.

They're wrong, though. Obama's a political rock star. He's a young Kennedy or Bill Clinton, combining a first-rate intellect with uncommon charisma. (Reagan had the charisma too, if not the intellect.) Kennedy wasn't a great candidate because he had been a Congressman and Senator and it wasn't Clinton's experience as governor of Arkansas that made people sit up and pay attention to him. Ronald Reagan didn't make it because of his acting ability or even experience as governor. Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton simply had what it takes to make people love them. So does Obama.

Obama's blackness makes for a great story, of course, and the press is bound to get caught up in that. But even if he were white, he'd be a major player in the Democratic primaries.

The only difference is we wouldn't have to worry about whether America is ready to elect a black man.