Obama’s latest flap about McCain’s intention to remind voters that he does not look like all the other presidents on the dollar bill is something he’s repeated a few times to audiences. A few weeks back I posted about Obama having to worry about having a grievance frame attached to him. Apparently the “dollar bill” thing is being framed in terms of grievance. Rassmussen found that 53% of voters thought that Obama’s dollar bill comment was racist. Obama has done a heroic job traversing the racial minefield in the campaign thus far, but he has to be wary of the road ahead. Especially as quotes from his book begin to appear out of context in 527 ads or as Jeremiah Wright makes his re-emergence onto the public stage.

As an ardent Obama supporter, I find it depressing that he seems to be tying himself up in knots rhetorically over issues of race. Having just read Dreams From my Father, I marvel at the depth and sophistication with which he reflects on his own identity and race in America more generally. Of course I’m a latte liberal whose supposed to be gushing over the book. How predictable!!!

Fun filled day and night driving through Minnesota and Iowa and getting to explore Decorah, Iowa, and Luther College. I gave a presentation on “Diversity in the Cloud” and received some great feedback from a crowd of about 80 faculty and staff from the 28 colleges and universities affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Here are the slides that accompanied the talk for those interested.

I won’t go too much into the talk other than to say that it presented utopian and dystopian views of how the web changes inter-group relations. I was struck by how many faculty are grappling with the larger question of whether the web is friend of foe or both. One interesting assignment that came up during the Q and A was from a Religion professor at an ELCA college who requires his students to unplug from the web for 48 hours. He reports that students are frustrated by the assignment initially but are ultimately grateful for the chance to reconnect with their inner selves. It’s an interesting assignment worth doing myself, let alone assigning it to students.

Greetings from Denver International Airport. I’ve spent the last two hours reading the first 100 pages of Barack Obama’s Dreams From my Father. As a political scientist (and junkie), I was reading the book picturing the bio pic they will run during the Democratic Convention. I’m obviously not the first person this has occurred to, but this is one heck of a life story to have to contend with. The McCain people are going to have quite a time putting him in the traditional democratic boxes that worked so well against Al Gore and John Kerry. This current democratic candidate has spend a lifetime moving in and out of boxes. This is why he can speak to conservatives and progressives alike and seem so compelling. He’s had a lot of practice.

This is also why the attacks heretofore have been so muddled and strange. The “Obama is a celebrity theme” is not only a strange attack, but one that I think the Republicans might look back on in regret. It reinforces the idea of Obama as extraordinary, almost mythic. The arc of his story is going to make for an interesting convention Thursday (The grasping Kansas grandfather, boxing with his Indonesian stepfather, a Christmas rebuke from his absent Kenyan grandfater, etc.). Why the Republicans want to reinforce this is beyond me.

Update: I’m starting to think the mocking celebrity approach might be having an effect. Perhaps it is a riff on the Daily Show style of skewering politicians that has become normalized. The gap is closing in the campaign, so maybe these attacks aren’t so muddled after all.

Black Political Analysis links to an Ebony article that asks whether there are still “Two Americas?” It looks like the article is only in the print edition, but this isn’t the first “Two America’s discussion we’ve had in this country. Thanks to the 1968 Kerner Commission report that popularized this concept.

While the idea of “two Americas” was salient in 1968, I wonder of what use it has today. While it does reinforce the still significant “barriers to entry” for African-Americans when compared to other ethnic groups in American society, it has the distinct disadvantage of further “othering” Black America. While this “othering” makes sense of some cultural and political levels, it reinforces the idea of a “black culture” that downplays the cultural diversity within the black experience. Black Political Analysis makes the valid point that racial and ethnic groups choose to lead separate lives:

I’m talking about are the number of blacks and whites who prefer racial/ethnic homogeneity. Think about the school lunch cafeteria, the bus, parks, movie theater, etc….blacks with blacks, whites with whites, Asians with Asians. As long as Americans choose this, there will always be separate Americas.

This is undeniable, but I am inclined to believe that group affinity is not the same as group exclusiveness. The end of “separate Americas” will come when individuals from different racial and ethnic groups become more adept at cultural switching, or the ability to engage with a wide range of people in their own contextual contexts. What props up this “two Americas” idea is the distinct lack of empathy people have for those who are not like them. It’s particularly startling to see the number of Whites who think that racism is a thing of the past. The recent Gallup poll is startling in this regard. To me, that’s not an issue of Whites wanting to be with other Whites, it’s an issue of an unwillingness to want to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. You don’t have to give up the feelings of closeness and affinity one has to their own reference group to understand that others are of worth.

Mayjel Verkuyten has an interesting review of the social psychology literature on multicutluralism in the Oct 2007 edition of Social and Personality Psychology Compass. Exposure to multicultural framings increases the majority group’s opinion of minority groups but also downplays intergroup differences and provides challenges for people who are low identifiers with their ethnic groups. Here’s the key quote in his piece:

a focus on groups and group differences is understandable and, to a certain extent, useful, for example, for improving intergroup relations. It can, however, also lead to a situation in which these identities become overwhelming or unidimensional and society, out-groups and in-groups oblige people to place this particular identity in the forefront of their minds and make it central in their behaviour.

Personally mose of my students, being good neo-liberals, love the idea of an “identity free for all” and have little tolerance for the idea of focusing on group identity. This isn’t surprising since majority students have little to worry about in terms of the loss of cultural identity. A pedagogical challenge is to get them to focus on group difference to begin with.

I’m giving a talk this Friday to the annual Vocation of a Lutheran conference in Decorah, Iowa. The title of the talk is Diversity 2.0. The talk will explore the changing nature of diversity in an increasingly “wired” society. I’ll post the presentation slides in the next day or two.

The talk will look at diversity and how it relates to Aristotle’s three forms of knowledge. The crux of the talk is that we’re moving from a primary rationale for diversity based on episteme (epistemological knowledge) or techne (technical knowledge) to one based on prhonesis or wisdom, for lack of a better term. This is so because as the network society evolves, access to epistemological and technical knowledge can be acquired on-line but wisdom still requires the face-to-face interactions with diverse others. More soon 🙂

According to this Los Angeles Times article, hate crimes are up in the city of Los Angeles for nearly all identity groups. The Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission found that hate crimes in the city rose 28% over the past year to 763 incidents. The majority of these crimes is minority-to-minority (Latino on Black or Black on Latino) rather than majority on minority:

What we’re seeing is the democratization of hate crimes,” said Brian Levin, who directs the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino. “We’re not only seeing a diversification of victims but also increased diversification of offenders.

On its face, this is more evidence for people with nationalist impulses to advocate for reducing immigration. Los Angeles is perhaps the world’s most global city. this vast melding of culture and peoples is destined to create tensions. But the bulk of these incidents appear to be gang related. It seems that many of the Latino on Black hate crimes reported are associated with an increased collaboration with White Supremacist gangs in prisons. How much of this is related to class issues and battles over turf and how much is really driven by racial animus?

Howard Rheingold points to an blog post on Google’s Knol , an ad-driven Wikipedia where posters get a cut of the advertising revenue on the site. Google touts the knol as an “authoritative article about a specific topic” but where is the authority going to come from? If it’s from the number of hits acquired, then isn’t that popularity rather than authority? Their site allows you to “provide credentials” but its legitimacy seems to depend on an honor system. It’s an interesting idea, but the charm of Wikipedia is is non-hierarchical framework. What happens to the wisdom of the crowds when there’s a profit motive involved? And how can I get paid for writing about the median voter theorem?

So much for the idea of a un-mendable black-brown rift in the American polity. The newly released 2008 National Survey of Latinos has Obama besting Mccain by 66% to 23% among Latino voters. This is far better than Kerry did in 2000.

The study goes on to find that the Latino party ID gap between Democrats and Republicans has grown to 39% (65% Democrat to 26% Republican). This widening gap along with favorable conditions for Democrats makes the increasing closeness of this race even more puzzling. At this point in their elections, Bill Clinton and Michael Dukakis had double digit leads. I guess this is the black tax writ large!

It appears that if Obama does lose this election it won’t be because of any “black-brown tensions,” which means my Google reader won’t be filled with superficial analyses of Obama’s “Latino problem.” That alone calls for a Mariachi!

or for those Latinos from the East Coast:

One of the more interesting aspects of Carr’s Atlantic article and the responses in edge.org and britannica.com is the effect this has on inter-group, inter-cultural relations. This is Carr’s main point

What the Net may be doing, I argue, is rewiring the neural circuitry of our brains in a way that diminishes our capacity for concentration, reflection, and contemplation.

Carr is suggesting this is happening mechanistically as if the irresistable draw of the web leaves us no choice in the matter. There are global driving forces which make us want to be insatiable Netizens. As we proceed through what Mauel Castells calls a “network society” we fear being excluded from its nodes. In a response to Carr, W. Daniel Hills attributes our desire for connectedness to globalization:

Fast communication, powerful media and superficial skimming are all creations of our insatiable demand for information. We don’t just want more, we need more. While we complain about the overload, we sign up for faster internet service, in-pocket email, unlimited talk-time and premium cable. In the mist of the flood, we are turning on all the taps.

We are now trying to comprehend the global village with minds that were designed to handle a patch of savanna and a close circle of friends. Our problem is not so much that we are stupider, but rather that the world is demanding that we become smarter.

I think this is a better way of thinking about our relationship to information. Our desire to know the world around us is being outstripped by the increasing ease with which we can know it. The response to this is not an inability to reflect, but a desire to respond in real time to a rapidly evolving network of places, events and relationships.

This need to be “in the network” leads us towards what Douglass Rushkoff in his edge.org entry calls “thin-slicing” information. I admit to being a thin slicer, scanning headlines and RSS feeds to pull out nuggets of wisdom that I believe make me not only smarter, but a better global citizen. But does knowing superficially about what’s going on in Rangoon, Geneva and Buenos Aires make me a better person? Am I really engaging with these “others” in a meaningful way? Larry Sanger says no:

To be limited to Twitter-sized discourse ultimately means that we will never really understand each other, because all of our minds are complex and in that way “cathedral-like.” It is extremely difficult to understand other people, unless you take a long time to study what they say. If we do not understand each other in our full and deep individual complexity, we will be invisible to each other, and ultimately incapable of real human society.

Carr suggests that Google’s business model is dependent upon my believing that a “thin slicing” approach to the web is leaving me better off.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

My great concern is that this is how we begin to view diversity, as a collection of disconnected experiences that define our consumer selves. In other places, I’ve called this “menagerie diversity” or a diversity built upon an “appreciation of the other” rather than based upon actual engagement and collaborative work with the other. The great irony is that, as Hills points out, we are closer to each other than ever before, but at the same time we’ve never been further.