The Cronut of The Summer of The August. Of Racism

by Belle Waring on August 13, 2013

Do you know how I would describe the actions of a powerful black woman against a defenseless fraulein, if I were, like, not racist at all? CANNIBALIZATION. *[I am wrong here–please read the ETA for why.] Buh–huhh? What now? WTF? Cannibalization, are you out of your ever-lovin’, blue-eyed, mind; this is part of your defense against people thinking you’re racist? Probably that’s just from laying down with the Daily Mail and getting up with pubic lice, as the venerable British saying goes. Oh, what’s this you say, over here? The original article in German? “Sie ist so mächtig, und ich bin bloss eine Verkäuferin. Ich habe niemandem etwas zuleide getan. [Sniffles audible–ed.] Ich verstehe auch nicht, weshalb sie das so gross im TV ausschlachten muss.” My German is rusty, so first I thought, that’s just some form of ausschlagen and the Daily Mail are being a bag of racist dicks per the uge’, but–naw, this is–oh, no, I can’t eve–God, why? For real, cannibalize! Apparently Swiss people are so racist, this is how you can explain you’re not racist! Also, by explaining that you can’t be racist because you’re Italian! [Raises hand, tentatively, ‘excuse me, I–] And, erm, this explanation works great for British people, apparently. And American Gawker readers eat this shit up with a spoon! OMG! Racism is the Cronut for the summer of this August you guys! CANNIBALIZE. No, for real. Cannibal.

I started writing the other day because I wanted to talk about how John’s question, “when did it stop being acceptable to say mind-bogglingly racist things in public?” is half a good question and half a misleading one. In politer society certain awful things were never acceptable to say. As time has passed the band of “can say ‘x’ and retain future political career” has been getting narrower, and higher, and that’s a good thing. But on the other hand, people who were racist never really stopped much being racist, or saying and doing stupid racist stuff. One thing that remained true was that certain words and phrases continued to be considered low-class and redneck even as many other whites remained very racist indeed. Thus we have the continual problem of rural whites doing something obviously racist (like the MO rodeo clown show (I am pretty certain this applies to their state legislature but have not done the research)) and then they are stuck simulaneously saying ‘that wasn’t racist’ and ‘you’re the real racists, playing the race card,” and “AIDS is thinning the herd in Africa and among blacks here in America–I call it natural selection for our country–no racism.” [Promise for real quote which I have cleaned up and can’t be bothered to find among 4,000 new ones on the rodeo article.]

Everybody on the internet is dissecting this thing 12 ways to Sunday and why? Why? Because they’re sexist and racist, I’m so flattered that y’all even asked! No, but a boringly obvious thing happened: A store attendant in Zurich didn’t recognize her (fine), so she treated Oprah like crap because she was racist. Yes, racially prejudiced against black people, is where I’m going with this. R-A-C-I-S-T. OMG, and yet an Italian person! Totally unbelievable, right, be… Later, Oprah was asked in an interview about the last time she experienced racism or racial prejudice. She said that because of her current social position it’s rare, but that when she’s the only minority and the only woman in a huge boardroom she still can tell they think she doesn’t belong. Then she told this story and that it had happened in Zurich, while she was out sans entourage or fake lashes but with [gestures to face] “my full Oprah on.” She did not name the boutique (this detail was ferreted out by gossip site TMZ) or the shop assistant (who is still anonymous.) THE END. CANNIBALS.

Please, please, go read the comments on the Daily Mail, and at Gawker, and elsewhere, and think, ‘these are my people over here. This is who I’m all about identifying with in this situation.’ Y’all know to whom these comments are directed, ye “I’m Richard Dawkins, except about all of left politics, fnarf! Sucks to be you, women and most non-white people, unless you’re willing to take part in the matinée, evening and sometimes midnight showings of the ‘Richard Dawkins is Right About Everything Finger Puppet Theatre'”-types. You begin to cease to interest me.

In conclusion, CANNIBALIZE.

*ETA: My German being, as I said, not the greatest, I trusted my dictionary for this one word and got only “cannibalize,” but I didn’t read carefully enough and get examples. I assumed the Daily Mail was just completely making things up, and my shock at seeing them (apparently) be right overrode my lexical caution. I was wrong. Commenter js suggests and commenter David Woodruff pretty well confirms, that this is “cannibalize” in the “we cannibalized the three crashed planes for enough parts to get the fourth off the ground” sense and not the “we stood around with bones in our hair saying ‘ooga booga’ while stirring a huge cast-iron pot with a skinny Italian woman inside, and we had it on a nice simmer, with some celery and carrots and onion and bay leaves in there” sense. So, we can continue to marvel at the racial cluelessness of a woman who argues that she cannot possibly be racist because she is Italian, and you should read the Daily Mail article carefully to see why her story is implausible in every detail, but I was wrong in my central accusation that she was calling Oprah a cannibal.

Nonetheless you all should continue to read the comments on the article, at, perhaps most surprisingly, Gawker, where the “cannibalize” quote is taken for granted and yet most everyone, every, everyone takes the shop assistant’s side. What reason does Oprah have to lie? How many reasons does this other woman have to lie?

{ 203 comments }

1

Rich Puchalsky 08.13.13 at 5:48 am

I wrote a long comment about this on the end of an older thread. I’ll link to it so instead it can be the first on this one.

2

js. 08.13.13 at 6:04 am

The ‘ausschlachten’ thing might be a bit unfair, actually (and I stress ‘might’ genuinely). Reading through, it was the one word I didn’t recognize, so I looked it up in my Duden. And you’re totally right that the first, literal meaning is to cannibalize. But it seems, according to Herr Doktor Duden anyway, that something like “make political hay out of” is a pretty standard figurative way to use it.

None of this in any way to minimize the shit/trolling, and shit trolling too, on the last few threads. Thanks for these posts—they’re awesome!

3

David Woodruff 08.13.13 at 6:05 am

I think the sense of ausschlachten here is ‘to exploit’, and that this word means cannibalize only in the sense of using a machine for spare parts. Consider:

ausschlachten aus+schlach•ten vt sep
a [Tier, Beute] to gut, to dress
b (fig) [Fahrzeuge, Maschinen etc] (vehicles, machines, etc.) to cannibalize
c (fig)
inf (=ausnutzen) [Skandal, Ereignis] (scandal, experience) to exploit
[Buch, Werk etc] to get everything out of

4

Peter T 08.13.13 at 6:16 am

Could it be possible that both Oprah and the sales assistant are right? I can’t claim a personal history of oppression or discrimination, but I have spent extended time where I was often treated in terms of a stereotype. One becomes very aware of a certain set of behaviours, but these behaviours were not always the whole – or even a significant part – of the other person’s attitude, or signified something else as well. So I sometimes felt that I had myself stereotyped people as stereotyping me. Then there were the smooth operators who played with my discomfort at stereotyping people to gull me into behaving as they wanted (in accordance with my stereotype of their stereotype). Guess I’m saying that I was confused often enough to grant others may be too.

5

Belle Waring 08.13.13 at 6:18 am

But Rich, where’s your nickel in trying to understand this mysteeeerious phenomenon? Sure, people interpret various events based on their own varying life history. This isn’t a good reason to pretend to be confused when really obvious sexist or racist happens, or to construct a hundred counter-factuals in which the same events occur but because it’s on Vulcan they aren’t racist. That’s what libertarian crypto-racists are for–they’re enough of them on the internet! Your UU friends should have smiled at the guy if he crossed their line of sight on his way to get coffee, and otherwise not looked at him, because anyone with any sense knows it might make him feel unwelcome. Then they could offer to get him a cup while they get their next one. Then maybe at a second meeting they could ask him to grab a cup for them while he’s up please if he wouldn’t mind (in that order, obviously). I don’t see what the “everyone’s perspective is different’ is really doing for us here.

6

Mao Cheng Ji 08.13.13 at 7:08 am

“A store attendant in Zurich didn’t recognize her (fine), so she treated Oprah like crap because she was racist.”

The store attendant treated her like she treats every day dozens of those who can’t afford the thing. Those she correctly identifies as not being able to afford.

That’s, in essence, the common theme in many of these stories: there is a group of people who are routinely perceived to be of a lower social status than the really are.

7

fgw 08.13.13 at 7:10 am

David @ 4 is correct. Ausschlachten just does not refer to cannibalize in the English sense, in this context, even remotely. And she even has a point. It means “make hay out of the situation”. Is a millionaire celebrity being denied the purchase of a luxury handbag really such a great teachable moment about everyday racism? But you are right that the trumped up aggrieved white backlash, which is using racism to make a buck and reinforce itself – a twofer, is making the hay. So great rant nevertheless.

8

Britta 08.13.13 at 7:29 am

I lived in Australia during the ‘blackface on TV’ incident, and was repeatedly told that, while the act might be racist in America, it wasn’t racist in Australia, because Australians weren’t racist.

In a similar vein of logic, I suppose the immigration official who joked that he was as a formality required to ask me about terrorist activities, but obviously I wasn’t a terrorist, unless maybe I’d “left my turban at home” (wink wink), and then pointed at the waiting room mostly full of non-white people behind me and said, “God, why don’t they all go back home,” and complained that working cut into his Friday afternoon drinking time also wasn’t racist.

9

Belle Waring 08.13.13 at 7:50 am

Again, Peter T, are you a white, able-bodied, straight man who was born a boy and have always identified as male? Conceivably a white gay man could get that question off with something that approximated ‘good intentions,’ but, and I don’t wish to be unpleasant here, not really anybody much else. If you were a POC, or a woman, or a trans person, or disabled, or even extremely overweight, I don’t think you’d feel any need to try to construct an alternate universe that is almost exactly like our own, except in that completely non-racist acts, words and gestures, intermesh with impressions made upon Ms. Winfrey of intentionally racist acts, words and gestures, in part due to Ms. Winfrey’s history as an African-American woman. The other part may be due to a of prank of the universe, in which this perfect toothing of the gears of racial animus is a natural wonder, like the Amazon River, or an indigo bunting, or the death of a 12-year-old girl in childbirth in Afghanistan.

I don’t direct this only at you, Peter T.; rather, this is a larger frustration. Why is this so hard? Why do we have to make up a story in which the black woman is totally incapable of discerning when someone is treating her poorly because that person is racist? Why is every white man on the internet the Mycroft Fucking Holmes of Race Studies all of a sudden, and you just need poor Oprah to narrate the events briefly and–presto! You extract the details she herself, not being a genius, was unable to weight properly, and you immediately know how both she and the saleswoman are telling the truth despite what seem–to the layperson–radical inconsistencies! Are women really so often hysterical liars who make up stories about oppression just to gain attention? Is it just when they pretend to be discriminated against on the basis of race, or does it happen often when they claim to have been raped, too? Hey–don’t get touchy! I’m just askin’ questions.

10

Niall McAuley 08.13.13 at 8:16 am

The saleswoman’s story in the Daily Mail contradicts itself:

Far above there was the 35,000 Swiss franc crocodile leather bag. I simply told her that it was like the one I held in my hand, only much more expensive, and that I could show her similar bags.

This is precisely what Oprah claimed she said. Later:

If someone asks me whether he or she can see an article, I always present these. Because that person is a potential buyer. And my job is to sell it.

This is precisely what she did not do for Oprah. I wonder why?

11

Peter Hollo 08.13.13 at 8:53 am

Look, I’m not a racist (I’m Australian after all), but… America???? CRONUTS? What is this? America, please.

12

ali 08.13.13 at 9:00 am

1. As has been mentioned several times before “Canabalize” has very different connotations from the commonly used “Ausschlachten”.

2. It is even possible that this is not the word the woman used as it is likely that the interview was done in Swiss-German dialect and then “translated” in to what the Swiss call “Written German”.

3. First a disclaimer: I think that there is a lot of racism and Xenophobia in Switzerland and even worse that it is socially accepted. I criticise this regularly and I find it embarrassing and disturbing (and the “but I am Italian” defence fits well into that as many Swiss think they are incapable of racism). However, I cannot help to have doubts about this particular story. To consider a black person poor as a prejudice appears to be so much more a typical US racism narrative. I think it is unlikely that in an up-scale shop a Swiss shop assistant would make this connection (e.g. if someone would have suspected her of drug dealing in the vicinity of a train station, I would immediately believe it. That would be a Swiss racist cliché). Also in my experience in this kind of shop typically money trumps any kind of prejudice. They might actually be the only places in Switzerland where you will get a decent service independently of your appearance.

Of course we will never know for sure what happened. Knowing Switzerland very well, this just does not seem to be a Swiss racism story and the “misunderstanding” appears to be a more plausible explanation.

There is a lot of everyday racism going on in Switzerland that is much more outrageous than incidents about 30’000$ handbags. The Oprah story is once more a celebrity distraction from a very serious problem that without doubt, exists.

13

Harald K 08.13.13 at 9:04 am

It’s a bad sign when I have to go read the Daily Mail to find out what the hell Belle Waring is talking about.

Yeah, sure, there’s a lot of potential for discrimination for being black. Maybe that was why Oprah was treated poorly. Maybe it even was because she was a black woman specifically, although I somehow doubt a black man would be more welcome in an expensive handbag shop.

But there’s a third dimension besides sex and race here: wealth. And Oprah Winfrey isn’t disadvantaged on that one – not remotely. Discrimination based on wealth is the reason expensive handbag stores exist in the first place. It’s where you go to signal that you are rich. I think it’s plausible that wealth discrimination was the explanation here: when her wealth was invisible due to the shopkeeper not recognizing her, Oprah Winfrey was treated much worse than she expected in such a context.

When race is a privilege that can make you blind, why shouldn’t wealth be? It’s been a long time since Oprah Winfrey wasn’t wealthy, so she would presumably be less inclined to interpret the treatment in terms of wealth. Or do anyone think that because she’s black and a woman, she automatically sees the perspective of the less privileged in other areas? I think that’s about as preposterous as saying Swiss Italians can’t be racists.

A tertiary thing, don’t know if it’s worth mentioning, but in Germany at least, shop assistants are a lot less friendly to customers than non-Germans are used to – presumably it’s that way for the Swiss too. The explanation I’ve heard is that Germans value being taken seriously more than being liked, but whatever the explanation is, it’s pretty undeniable in regular stores. I had read about it, but I still was somewhat shocked by it during my first visit to Germany.

14

yabonn 08.13.13 at 9:25 am

Why is every white man on the internet the Mycroft Fucking Holmes of Race Studies

Because the real experts are White Not Racists North Americans. Desegregation was, after all, a coming of age story for them, making them better, and better able to discern the very real racism hidden in sweatpants or cannibalism.

15

Tim Worstall 08.13.13 at 9:41 am

I’ve no idea whether this explanation is true or not but to those of us who have sold things for a living it is at least believable.

http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2013/08/oprah-winfrey-victim-of-racism-or-marketing.html

But there is another explanation. On Facebook, Margaret Shenton – a friend of a friend – offered a Zambian perspective. I don’t know Margaret, but she allowed me to share her reactions:

It is a con…. They play this trick all the time hoping that you are a purse-proud Arab, Congolese, Nigerian, Rwandese with largesse who will throw up a tantrum saying, “Do you know who I am and how much money I have, I can buy you and your entire shop.” Good that Oprah didn’t rise to the bait.

Racism? Maybe. Profiling? Definitely. I would guess that, statistically speaking, a very well-dressed black woman coming into an exclusive Zurich shop is not unlikely to be a wealthy African.

From a game theoretic point of view, then, the shop assistant’s strategy is not stupid. If the customer is, in fact, too poor to afford the purse, then she has lost nothing. If the customer is rich enough to afford the purse, and insists upon buying it to demonstrate that fact – well, the assistant might have offended someone, but she’s still sold a purse worth tens of thousands of dollars.

16

Peter T 08.13.13 at 9:42 am

I’m mostly liberal, and we can famously see both sides of the case for our own execution. If once is happenstance, and three times is enemy action, then sure, it’s enemy action to Oprah, ’cause this shit has happened to her every day since she was born. But maybe it’s happenstance to the salesperson? If this stuff was easy all the time, then maybe we would have solved it a while back? Often, as with clowns at rodeos, and with the anecdotes Belle has shared, it is easy. And sometimes, as with me finding out that this time it was not yet another Indian scam artist or that you don’t choose your own fruit in a British shop (or you didn’t back then) in the 80s), it’s not easy at all.

17

bill benzon 08.13.13 at 10:00 am

It’s a mystery. But probably not a deep one. We just don’t know.

Some three decades ago I consulted a book, Dress for Success. For what it was, and still is, I presume, it was pretty good. If you want to get ahead in bizness, this is how to dress for New York investment bankers, this is how to dress for Houston oil executives, etc. Somewhere in there Molloy said something to the effect that an astute executive told him that the basic hire/no-hire decision happens within 30 seconds after the candidate walks through the door and into the interview. Everything after that serves to confirm whatever that initial gut reaction was.

Is that the kind of think that happened in that store?

Years ago I was living in Baltimore, where I went to school at Johns Hopkins. Baltimore more was then, as it is today, a majority black city. But of course, it was also racially segregated. The arts & sciences campus (but not the hospital & medical school) was in a mostly white area, comfortable and wealthy whites to the north, otherwise middle and working class.

Sunday afternoons I’d go listen to jazz at the Left Bank Jazz Society. Concerts were held three floors up in the Famous Ballroom. One of the best venues for live jazz I’ve ever experienced. The audiences was mostly black, say a 2/3rds majority. It was a very comfortable and copacetic situation.

Then I went to an outdoor jazz concert (Dizzy Gillespie). That was my first time in a situation where I was surrounded by black people. This wasn’t the 2/3rds situation in the Famous Ballroom. Here there were 10,000 people gathered for the concert. 9,990 of them were black. Three of the ten white people were up on the stage. Three of the others were with me.

When me and my friends turned the corner and walked into the park my lizard brain went into overdrive and I felt the fear. It took me a minute or so to get the old lizard calmed down. I don’t know what kind of vibe I was giving off in the minute or so. But I’ll bet my pupils dilated.

I don’t know what happened in that shop. At this point no one does, not even Oprah and the cleck.

18

Belle Waring 08.13.13 at 10:23 am

Tim Worstall: I, too, am among the noble class of those “who have sold things for a living” because I…sell things for a living. I sell vintage and industrial furniture here in Singapore with a Singaporean business partner. Let us be parsimonious. What is the third thing the customer may do, aside from ‘buy the item to prove their wealth to a racist shit’ or ‘walk out because they can’t afford it.’ Oprah’s own reported behavior. She said, in essence, ‘I thought about throwing down the [AmEx] black card and buying right then, but I thought, they don’t deserve my business, and she probably works on commission.’ Compelling, isn’t it? Singapore is a hub for wealthy people from all over Asia–someone who looks like a scrawny college kid in an Arctic Monkeys shirt and talks shit about your 60s bar cabinet may turn out to be part of the Royal Family of Brunei. We have never discussed having a ‘gratuitously insult the customer by implying he or she is unable to purchase the merchandise due to his or her likely national origin, race, or religion’ policy. Game-theoretically, would you advise I do so, in all honesty? Or does that just seem like the stupidest fucking thing you have ever read?
Harald: it’s just that it’s currently one of the top 10 stories on the US-based English-language internet generally, and on TV to a huge extent. I also tend to assume Crooked Timber readers who wish to post comments, read the comments to other, related posts, in which case you might have noted the unpleasantly vehement 50-odd comments over the last two threads. But I’ll try to make sure you don’t need to click on a link again.
People Generally: I’m just going to go back to trolling Kotaku commenters about sexism in classic videogames in a minute here. Do any women comment here anymore? Seriously, is our blog truly FUBAR now?

19

pedant 08.13.13 at 10:59 am

I guess this wouldn’t be a good time to bring up my dislike of bay leaves?

Basically, Belle, I’m as baffled as you are. The context is simple: interviewer asks OW if she has been treated differently because of her race (yes), asks when it happened most recently. OW recounts most recent case.

White world explodes in disbelief and uh-uh no ways.

I find it all baffling. Not only because OW is certainly right, but also because the question was equivalent to “so tell me about the nth occurrence of this frequent occurrence.” So, white world, if you really want to dig in your heels about the details of the nth case, what are you going to say about the n-1th case? What if OW had forgotten about the hand-bag saleswoman, and instead mentioned the taxi-driver who didn’t stop for her? I suppose you’d dispute that one. How about the n-2th case, the couple in the elevator? No, you wouldn’t have believed that one either. How about the n-ith case, that time with the loan officer? You’ve got a story already to explain that one away, with a scoop of righteous indignation on top.

Do you really think you’re going to be able to disprove the existence of systematic racism, by nibbling away at cases? Just give up.

20

Emma in Sydney 08.13.13 at 11:19 am

Belle, please don’t go away. I’m a woman commenting here right now. The blog isn’t FUBAR. Lots of people like your posts, but maybe, like me, don’t have time to comment, especially during the week.

21

Belle Waring 08.13.13 at 11:27 am

Yay Emma! OK. Pedant, everyone except you likes bay leaves. Do you also dislike Bay Rum aftershave? I favor Dominica. My dad uses it; very nice.

22

Random Lurker 08.13.13 at 11:41 am

Some points in no particular order:

– I strongly agree with Peter T interpretation at 4.

– I think the “I’m italian so I can’t be racist ” thing should be read as “I’m a migrant too, why should I discriminate against foreigners” since in Europe racism is strongly linked to anti-immigration stance. This is a preposterous defence, but at least has a logic (for those who do not know, Switzerland is not part of the EU so european citiziens need a permit to live and work there, and the Swiss are getting stingier with those permits because of the recession).

– I can’t read german, I see that the clerk’s story is described as contradictory, what are the contradictions?

– Some commenters here seem to think that those of us who believe to a certain degree to the clerk’s story try to negate the existence of racism. I’m quite sure that racism exists, I had a conversation with a family friend were she held rather racist views just three days ago. But, this is not a good reason to just assume racism in other people, because this undermines the case against racism in general.

23

yabonn 08.13.13 at 11:44 am

“Racistus Prime, yabonn here, Racistus Prime, do you hear me?”

“Yes, yes. But things are going bad here. Our efforts to disprove the existence of systematic racism by nibbling it at the cases have been thwarted.”

“Yes, comments at Crooked Timber…”
…**#~….!
“… Again, yes, I know.”

“But we lost it! The stronghold in Zürich is lost! Years of slighting black millionaires are lost!”
… … ..
“Fall back to the Hermes shop, hold that position. Roger.”

“… Raci-P, you still got the letter for my wife, right?”

“Adieu, then.”
…:/…

I’m not goofing. I’m goofing _back_.

24

Harald K 08.13.13 at 11:49 am

Do you really think you’re going to be able to disprove the existence of systematic racism, by nibbling away at cases?

Do you really think that’s what we’re trying? Or I was trying? It’s just that there are more possible explanations, you know. I’m all for identifying and eliminating racism, but not hanging out a (probably not very wealthy) Swiss shop assistant based only on the perception of a very wealthy African American woman. To her credit, it does not look like that was Oprah’s intention at all, but rather some sleazy celebrity mag.

I forget who said it, but it’s a good one: “I always think I’m right, but I don’t think I’m always right”. Show me twenty cases where you think you’re the victim of systemic discrimination, and I might well doubt you on each individually. But even if I do, I’m open to the possibility that I might be wrong on some of them. It just won’t do to use that argument against any case in particular – individually, I must still judge based on what I see. What I see in this case is a lot of uncritical jumping to conclusions – and not changing those conclusions when what they were based on (OMG did she call Oprah a cannibal?) was wildly wrong.

25

Barry 08.13.13 at 11:58 am

“while stirring a huge cast-iron pot with a skinny Italian woman inside, and we had it on a nice simmer, with some celery and carrots and onion and bay leaves in there” ”

You’re cooking Italian with no oregano, garlic, or olive oil? Not to mention rosemany, thyme and sage.

I’ll bet that that woman was steamed. :)

26

pedant 08.13.13 at 11:59 am

I dislike Bay Rum, Michael Bay, Bay Buchanan, the Bey of Algiers, and Raffi’s biggest hit for kids. All of them. Make me want to howl at the moon, and no, I won’t accept any synonyms.

Do people think that the point here is to convict one individual Italian woman of racism? Who cares about her? It’s a system, it’s an ideology.

If OW had cited this interaction in order to say something about the capitalist system, would it really be on point to say, “But that Italian woman–she’s no capitalist! She doesn’t even own the means of production, and she’s probably never read a syllable of Hayek! Why, she probably harbours hidden Marxist sympathies!”

All entirely beside the point. It’s not about the clerk, it’s about the system. If I thought the game here was “let’s persecute some random shop-clerk” then I would find it repellent. And if I had thought OW was trying to do that, I would find her attempt repellent.

The point is: see the racism inherent in the system. Is that so hard?

27

Trader Joe 08.13.13 at 12:11 pm

I have no doubt OW believed she was discriminated against – maybe that’s all that matters.

I’m not sure if I think the shop keeper did so intentionally, subconsiously or accidentally. It seems like many of the “defenses” or at least diagnoses of her actions amount to trying to peel that onion and inevitably thats where our own biases creep in. I might like to think it was accidentaly or subconsious since that might help excuse those times where I behaved as such without realizing it. I like to imagine I’m not intentionally racist, but since I’m not a minority I have a hard time always seeing my actions through their eyes.

I found Rich’s post @1 (in the link) very interesting. Many times I’ve set out a collection cup for coffee or other items and my primary thought in doing so is “how can I recover a little cost on this social hour so we can continue to do them” not who will feel comfortable or not comfortable putting in. I don’t watch who puts in. I don’t care who puts in – I ususally just hope there’s at least $X in there at the end cause that’s why I set it out, not to run a sociology quiz.

If not thinking about how various classes or races will react to a donation cup makes me a classist or a racist then I guess I’m guilty. If the minority person feels racism because of that action than the guilt is certain, even if not intended. I would like to have thought that not thinking about everything I do in terms of race/class is what makes me non-racist – it seems sometimes the opposite is the case.

The particular poignancy of the donation cup is – now that this has been called to my attention, this Thursday when we hold the next after meeting social, do I put out the cup out or not? Now I know or see how it can make people uncomfortable – then again if I don’t I’ll eventually need to figure out how to pay for all coffee and cookies everyone enjoys. My gut says I’ll put it out anyway, but will do so with an incremental level of guilt (maybe I can assuage it by tossing in a little extra….)

28

stostosto 08.13.13 at 12:13 pm

I second Random Lurker @#21 regarding his/her reading of the “I am an Italian” remark.

From the Blick interview:

“Sie sind also keine Rassistin?”

“Sicher nicht! Ich bin Italienerin. Warum sollte gerade ich jemanden wegen seiner Herkunft diskriminieren? Das macht doch keinen Sinn!”

My understanding is along the lines of “Why would someone like me discriminate anyone on account of their origin?”, implying that she herself belongs to a minority in Switzerland who are frowned upon. (Which I wouldn’t know whether is true or not).

But it is true that the debate in Europe tends to conflate immigration and race issues.

29

Ronan(rf) 08.13.13 at 12:19 pm

Virtually no one is arguing that there isn’t systemic racism in Europe. Or that European countries aren’t deeply racist in a whole lot of ways, and there are *a lot* of ways to make this argument. But OW didn’t make an argument against systemic racism *in* Switzerland (in fact she said that apart from this situation Zurich was a lovely place, even though right at the minute there’s an (apparently) pretty nasty bout of racially tinged anti immigrant rhetoric going on) and she did so by pointing at an individual, not a system, not even an industry, not an ideology, just one racist

I really don’t see how US progressivism ever deals with actual systemic racism, rather than just morality plays
But I’m leaving it there.

“The saleswoman’s story in the Daily Mail contradicts itself:”

No it doesn’t. She said she showed her a few bags to begin with, OW wanted to look at another bag, she said these are basically the same but cheaper, but never refused to sell OW the bag

30

Random Lurker 08.13.13 at 12:22 pm

@Pedant

But to see the racism inherent to the system, I have to assume that the clerk did actually discriminate because of race.

Now, as I said n times but it’s worth repeating, I see a lot of racism around me, but I think there is a very big chance that racism is not involved in this specific event.
So, why using this specific event as an example of systemic racism?

31

Peter Hollo 08.13.13 at 12:41 pm

Belle, FWIW I’ve been really glad to read your posts here recently and have learnt a lot, so please do stay. And sorry for contributing nothing but a throw-away joke comment.

32

Mao Cheng Ji 08.13.13 at 12:50 pm

25, pedant “The point is: see the racism inherent in the system.”

Indeed. So, what’s the point to keep complaining about profiling? As long as some are walking around carrying purses worth a couple of Toyotas and others beg on the streets, this is inevitable. And profiling is hardly the most insufferable symptom of it.

33

Sam Dodsworth 08.13.13 at 12:51 pm

Pedant@18 Do you really think you’re going to be able to disprove the existence of systematic racism, by nibbling away at cases?

I think the comments on this thread show that it’s not so much about disproving racism as shutting down discussion that makes people uncomfortable. As long as the specific examples are always somehow invalid it means no one has to acknowledge the extent of the problem, or the ways in which we’re complicit. (See also: male responses to complaints of sexual harassment.)

34

Witt 08.13.13 at 12:52 pm

Just quickly because I have to go to work: Those of you who reflexively and repeatedly take the side of “How do we know it was racism?” in these discussions please consider two things:

1. If what you like is Arguing on the Internet (no shame in that, I do too), try arguing the other side for a change. Just for the intellectual experience of it. Like debate team, you know?

2. If you see this as Arguing on the Internet because it seems like an abstract issue please think long and hard about the fact for millions of people it actually has immediate and daily repercussions, some of which can be severe.

And speaking just for myself — when you repeatedly and reflexively take the side of of the status quo, it’s noticeable. And it leads me to conclude that this is a lousy space to talk about some of the most significant factors at work in our society today.

Maybe that’s your goal. Maybe this is just about bullying, and getting to set the terms of what is acceptable to discuss.

But if it’s not, then you may want to think long and hard about the messages that your Arguing on the Internet is actually sending.

35

Random Lurker 08.13.13 at 1:07 pm

Since at least one commenter agrees on my reading of the “I’m italian ” line (hi stosto, I’m a he! ) , I’ll elaborate a bit on this.
In Europe, racism is always mixed with xenophobia. This happens because it is a long time since we had sizable minorities inside european states, wich weren’t composed by recent immigrants.

For example blacks in Italy are usually assumed to be immigrants, so that racism against them is also xenophobia. This is IMHO different from racism in the USA, where blacks are not supposed to be foreigners.

Since I’ve never been in the USA I can’t know for sure, but I think that european racism (including racism against blacks) is more similar to USA islamiphobia, or racism against recent latino immigrants (or “illegals”).

36

ajay 08.13.13 at 1:19 pm

I assumed the Daily Mail was just completely making things up, and my shock at seeing them (apparently) be right overrode my lexical caution.

1. The Daily Mail always makes things up.
2. If you suspect you are reading something in the Daily Mail that isn’t made up, see 1.

It’s just a bitterly unpleasant and dishonest newspaper. The only way to treat it is zero-weighting; reading a report of X in the Mail should have no effect on your prior estimation of p(X).
Or just not to read it.

37

ajay 08.13.13 at 1:22 pm

Incidentally, has CT just shut down for the summer and outsourced the blogging to the Far East, or what? Not that I’m complaining, I’m just wondering where everyone else is.

38

Mario 08.13.13 at 1:46 pm

She doesn’t really contradict herself and boiling her Italian phrase down to “How can I be a racist, I’m Italian” is cheap style (see Random Lurker for her real meaning).

AND: “This one’s the same and much cheaper” is quite a normal answer in Swiss stores. I get it all the time. Even a second time after I insisted on seeing another article. I don’t know about shopping cultures in other countries as I haven’t traveled a lot but believe me, this is THE standard sentence in Switzerland as we are all so thrifty. I think the shop assistant didn’t realize she was offensive, OW really thought the shop assistant was racist, that most people commenting on this affair don’t know batcrap about Switzerland and Zurich and that this whole debate is flipping stupid edging on the pathetic because we cannot know for sure what happened in that shop (see, I didn’t write “who told the truth” because I truly think both believe they do).

BTW: the same answer happening to me wasn’t a racist thing, because, although I have an Italian name, both my parents are Swiss and were born here. It’s just kinda Swiss mentality to show how well-meaning you are by not beggaring your client (and yessss you could construct that as contradicting her statement about being happy to sell such an expansive bag, but come on, serious?).

And now please: I’m steaming for some days now about that really racist story and hoped for a CT post about it, especially because of the many racism posts during the last weeks. And then you bring that tabloid crap. Eek. Shame on you!

Belle, I really love your posts. Even that one. So please keep it!

39

Tim Worstall 08.13.13 at 1:51 pm

@17.

“We have never discussed having a ‘gratuitously insult the customer by implying he or she is unable to purchase the merchandise due to his or her likely national origin, race, or religion’ policy. ”

Nor is that quote from Worthwhile Canadian (please note, everything under the URL is from them, not me) suggesting that anyone should have one.

Rather, that it is possible to upsell to some people by affronting their pride.

40

William Timberman 08.13.13 at 1:54 pm

I’ve followed all of Belle’s posts and the comments on them so far, mostly with a growing horror at the tangles we get ourselves into, and warning myself not to stick my two cents in where they couldn’t possibly do anyone any good, most especially not me. Since I’m obviously the kind of person who can’t help commenting on blogs, though, there was never much of a chance that in the end I’d heed my own warning.

So, my credentials first of all…. I’m white, grew up mostly in the South during the last decade of Jim Crow. My father was from rural Tennessee, my mother from urban New Jersey. Add all that together, and I have a few stories of my own to tell, most of which have been told better already by everyone from Frederick Douglass to William Faulkner, so there’s no point re-telling them here except to say that Belle is right about how those stories add up. Absolutely right.

Also…. Oprah, having played white American society’s ugly game and won it — to the extent that any black person can win it — she’s entitled to her view of who is and isn’t a racist. And frankly, if I had to lay money on it, I’d go with her view. Of course modern, up-to-date racism is structural, but in my opinion, that doesn’t exonerate even its most unconscious practitioners. We’re supposed to consult the better angels of our nature from time to time. Even Southern Baptists. Even Italians in Switzerland. That’s how the structure gets restructured.

And yes, 30,000 Franc handbags are an obscenity, but winking at obscenities is how we divide the powerful from the powerless, which most of us, when we aren’t on our soapboxes, have, like it or not, been forced to accept as at least a quasi-necessary distinction. That’s how we score the ugly game, after all.

We need a better world. Arguing about what went down in the Swiss boutique was an example of racism on the salesperson’s part or class pretension on Oprah’s isn’t going to get us one, fascinating as the argument has been.

41

engels 08.13.13 at 1:56 pm

The only way to treat it is zero-weighting; reading a report of X in the Mail should have no effect on your prior estimation of p(X).

I disagree. Your prior valuation of p(X) is going to have been influenced by currents of public opinion, currents in which the Daily Mail is more than likely to have already defecated, whether or not you have personally had the misfortunane to read it. (cf. the experience of reading the Mail and thinking to oneself ‘so that’s where they got it from…’) Hence, the rational course is to assign it a negative weighting…

42

Mario 08.13.13 at 1:57 pm

@Random Lurker #34, right on spot!

In Switzerland racism is usually targeted at the most recent immigrants. 1960s/70s even 80s it was Italians, 90s people from ex-Yugoslavia (still some of that left now), now it’s the supposed drug dealers from Nigeria. And the Germans. Racism is really more a form of xenophobia, that’s why she made the not-so-smart “I’m Italian”-comment.

My last post should have ended “So please keep it UP!” The missing “up” makes it look like I was afraid you would delete this post.

43

bianca steele 08.13.13 at 2:03 pm

@36
Weren’t you paying attention to that anonymous commenter on the other thread? Belle and John run CT now. (Actually, I read that quickly on my phone and thought it meant Belle and I run CT now. I suppose that only makes sense if you actually remember the comment.)

I was, however, wondering at one point if Belle and John could write each other’s posts without anyone noticing.

44

NM 08.13.13 at 2:12 pm

“I simply told her that it was like the one I held in my hand, only much more expensive, and that I could show her similar bags. She looked around the store again but didn’t say anything else. Then she went with her companion to the lower floor”

If that summary of the shop girl-OW exchange is accurate, then I’m not convinced that was racism at all — as opposed to standard Swiss/German shop-assistant behaviour. I’m a white, middle-class, usually well-dressed, German male, and I get “treated” like that by shop assistants all the time in Germany, and Italy and Switzerland (though I spend less time in the latter place). I’m not complaining — it is just the way things are done round here. German (and in my experience Italian and I’m pretty sure Swiss, too, though I have less experience of them) shop assistants tend to be much less helpful and sometimes polite (though another word that springs to mind is, less servile. Think about that.) than shop assistants in America. An exchange along the following lines is totally normal, in my German and Italian shopping experience:

Me (handling one article and pointing to another): Could I see that other article?

Assistant: Oh, that one is far more expensive than the one you’re currently looking at, but in fact just the same, except for the price (Makes no move at all to give me the other article)

Me: I’d like to see it nonetheless. Please bring it me.

Assistant: Sure. (Goes to get the article from shelf.)

For a shop assistant not to give me something that I’ve asked for (while providing me a reason for not doing so) is quite normal. Still not getting the thing on second asking would be very unusual (and indeed possibly suggestive of some form of discrimination), but note that OW apparently did not ask a second time.

45

Ragweed 08.13.13 at 2:13 pm

I can sorta buy the “insult the dark skinned gal in the hopes it will insult their pride and get them to throw more cash down in response” as what was going on. What I don’t get is why people would think this is somehow less racist than assuming dark-skinned = can’t afford it. So by this version the store clerk deliberately treats people different on account of their skin color in the hopes of bilking more money out of the darker skinned ones. It’s deliberate racism as opposed to the unintentional kind.

46

bianca steele 08.13.13 at 2:16 pm

me and Belle . . . and Bérubé, obviously

47

Belle Waring 08.13.13 at 2:18 pm

Ronan(rf): yes she contradicted herself. Ms. Winfrey claims that when she requested a certain bag, the saleswoman offered her smaller, less expensive bags. The saleswoman absolutely backs this up. The excuse given was that there was no need to bring down the bag Oprah requested because both it and the cheaper ones were made of black alligator. That’s moronic. Any number of dresses in a store might be made from silk brocade, but it would hardly be reasonable to show me a cheaper dress on the grounds that it also, like the one I asked for, was made of brocade. Then at the end of the article, the woman claims that she never says no to customers who wish to see things and always shows them the goods in the store, because she wants to make sales. Given this blanket policy, Ms. Winfrey was not allowed to see the expensive bag because…? The two claims are flatly contradictory.

ajay, the way CT works is, some people post for a while, and then they flake out, and other people say, ack! there are no posts!, so they post, usw. I just happened to feel like writing posts rather than arguing with truly irredeemable morons in the service of enriching Nick Denton. Your heuristic about the Daily Mail is quite fair; it was only my utter shock, after looking at the (unknown to me) word in the dictionary that had me confused. Go prod Dsquared with a stick and make him write something, he’s nearby.

Finally, no one is claiming this is the greatest racial injustice since the lynching of Emmett Till! This salesperson can and should perfectly well stay anonymous. Oprah didn’t even disclose the store’s name, much less “go after” the woman working there. She hasn’t demanded an apology or a firing or any single thing except for people to believe she understands what is happening to her in her own life. I am simply saying, yes, racism against black people is not by any means limited to the United States, and there is genuinely no amount of money and fame a black woman can achieve and still not be subject to the stings and slights of racial prejudice. She saw a black person on TV one day when she was little and living in terrible poverty, and she realized that was a possibility, and she created a life for herself and an influential role in the US that no black girl would ever have dreamed of. But in some terrible way, it can never be enough. Any goddamn day some racist waiter or police officer or whoever can still hurt her heart like this. If you claim to be part of the political left, and you can’t see why that’s deeply wrong and something that needs changing, you have lost the fucking plot. This isn’t about helping billionaires get better expensive handbags. It’s about trusting women, and it’s about believing people of color when they tell you about discrimination, instead of working overtime to explain it away. Get your shit together y’all.

48

Rich Puchalsky 08.13.13 at 2:20 pm

“I don’t see what the ‘everyone’s perspective is different’ is really doing for us here.”

It was intended to illustrate how Oprah wasn’t “making an argument about systematic racism” (as in ronan’s#28) but was instead encountering it, as people who are black do. And how people can agree that it was a racist interaction in that Oprah understood for good reason that it was without necessarily agreeing on what happened.

If you make the agreement contingent on agreeing on what happened, then of course people won’t agree. It wasn’t an incident as obvious as the rodeo clown one, and there’s a clash of privileges there, which is what the classism-not-racism people were largely saying in the first place. Here’s an example:

Your UU friends should have smiled at the guy if he crossed their line of sight on his way to get coffee, and otherwise not looked at him, because anyone with any sense knows it might make him feel unwelcome. Then they could offer to get him a cup while they get their next one. Then maybe at a second meeting they could ask him to grab a cup for them while he’s up please if he wouldn’t mind (in that order, obviously). I don’t see what the “everyone’s perspective is different’ is really doing for us here.

Some people in the church, as I mentioned, were really poor. This doesn’t work for them. They end up spending too many 50 cent cups of coffee on interactions that are never reciprocated, because most visitors visit once. Attempts to tell some people they don’t have to pay founder on the same issues of pride / condescension that the first person in the story objected to when he thought people were telling him he didn’t have to pay. And it’s pretty much impossible to get everyone to not watch what’s going on with the donation jar when it’s actually important to some people.

The solution (I think) was to socialize the coffee pot — to say that it clearly was a central feature of the social life of the church, and to pay for everyone’s coffee out of general church funds which the well-off people in the church wouldn’t really notice. Even though in effect you still have richer people paying for poorer people, it’s being done on average and no one is being singled out. Once the donation jar is taken away entirely, the focus of conflict is gone, and people can go back to just being hospitable on behalf of the church without having to worry about their personal situation.

49

Andrew F. 08.13.13 at 2:21 pm

In such a situation, when a behavior has multiple explanations, each plausible, and one’s selection of explanation has no bearing on one’s security, then one should probably not select the explanation that ascribes a malicious motive born of a pernicious and hateful ignorance.

Instead, one should either hold belief in abeyance (I don’t really know why the clerk acted that way…) or incline towards alternatives that are less reliant on malicious motivation. This does not mean that we should deny that racism exists, or deny that, out of x hundred salespeople, a significant y percent will be racist.

What I dislike is the quick conclusion that the saleswoman had the worst possible motivation for her actions, when that is not at all clear.

An inclination towards ascribing the worst of possible motives to others will usually only harm the person so inclined, as it will frequently stimulate negative feelings and thoughts without need or justification.

We will always encounter people in our lives who do not treat us as we wish to be treated; people who treat us rudely, insensitively, callously, or carelessly. To be sure, sometimes that treatment will be due to bigotry; and in some environments, it will often be due to bigotry. But outside those environments, it’s far better to assume some less pernicious cause.

Oprah may or may not be right about what happened in that store. I don’t know. She doesn’t know. What I do know is that her choice to believe racism to be the cause is an understandable choice, but also a poor and self-defeating choice, one fair neither to her nor to the saleswoman.

50

Niall McAuley 08.13.13 at 2:22 pm

Ronan(rf): I quoted the Daily Mail article, ostensibly a translation of what the saleswoman said:

Far above there was the 35,000 Swiss franc crocodile leather bag. I simply told her that it was like the one I held in my hand, only much more expensive, and that I could show her similar bags.

Now if I ask a saleswoman to see Bag A, and she says it’s like this one only much more expensive and I can show you other similar bags, I’m going to conclude, like Oprah, that she isn’t showing it to me because she thinks I won’t buy it.

In my case, as a white guy, the reason I get that would be because I’m in jeans and a tee shirt and haven’t shaved, but Oprah notes that she was in “full Oprah”, dressed like a billionaire. So what could it have been?

51

Anderson 08.13.13 at 2:23 pm

Well, maybe after we’re done liberating Oprah, we can turn to the crippling of the Voting Rights Act and how that’s playing in North Carolina, Texas, etc.

52

Ronan(rf) 08.13.13 at 2:37 pm

Belle

Okay, fair enough, I take your point. I think Ill take Witts advice above and sit this out from now on as, tbh, I don’t know what’s driving my hostility to the OW story
(Anyway, to echo some others above, fwiw, Ive really enjoyed your last few posts, losing my s**t over OW notwithstanding)

53

Billikin 08.13.13 at 2:37 pm

Well, when I read about what happened here, it sounded to me like normal human memory: faulty. When I read that the saleswoman said this, “‘I simply told her that it was like the one I held in my hand, only much more expensive, and that I could show her similar bags,” it sounded about right, and figured that the woman did not realize the racism behind not showing her customer the bag that she wanted to see.

But then I watched the Oprah video. Sorry, if I were on a jury I would not believe her. The story is too good, too elaborate, to embellished. Perhaps that is how Oprah remembered it at the time of the taping, perhaps that is how she remembers it now, but if so I think that it is a false memory, corrupted by Oprah’s multiple retellings.

54

NM 08.13.13 at 2:42 pm

Niall McAuley;
” ‘Far above there was the 35,000 Swiss franc crocodile leather bag. I simply told her that it was like the one I held in my hand, only much more expensive, and that I could show her similar bags.’

Now if I ask a saleswoman to see Bag A, and she says it’s like this one only much more expensive and I can show you other similar bags, I’m going to conclude, like Oprah, that she isn’t showing it to me because she thinks I won’t buy it.

In my case, as a white guy, the reason I get that would be because I’m in jeans and a tee shirt and haven’t shaved, but Oprah notes that she was in “full Oprah”, dressed like a billionaire. So what could it have been?”

And I, as a white, German, middle-class male, would simply conclude (from much experience) that that is standard German and Italian shop assistant behaviour, and that if I really want to see that bag I will have to repeat my request. (See my post above.) No discrimination involved. (IF after a second request I still don’t get to see the bag, then I would suspect there might be some discrimination.)

55

Rmj 08.13.13 at 2:44 pm

This isn’t about helping billionaires get better expensive handbags. It’s about trusting women, and it’s about believing people of color when they tell you about discrimination, instead of working overtime to explain it away. Get your shit together y’all.

Is this one of those “someone on the Internet is WRONG!!!!!” stories, then?

I’m trying hard to understand why I care how Oprah was treated in a store. I mean that in both directions; I don’t care if she was treated as a “black person” rather than a human being, or if there was some kind of cultural mistranslation and she mistook the salesclerk’s attitude for something more venal.

Apparently the intertubes have exploded over this? Quelle surprise (and I’ve probably misspelled that, my high school French was long ago and far away). What don’t the intertubes explode over, and generally the more trivial, the better? Yes, “In politer society certain awful things were never acceptable to say. ” I made precisely that point on the thread about what is and isn’t socially acceptable about racism. Making it subtler doesn’t make it less racist.

The question really isn’t: what did Oprah do, and what did the clerk do? The question really is: “What is racism, and who gets to decide?” Frankly, I’ve heard this argument over and over again for decades: “That was racism towards me!” “No, it wasn’t; I’m not a racist!” “Are too!” “Am not!”

Enough. Or, rather: can we find a more effective way to process this information, and sort out this issue?

56

Ben Alpers 08.13.13 at 2:47 pm

Random Lurker @34:

This is IMHO different from racism in the USA, where blacks are not supposed to be foreigners.

Indeed. Nobody in this country would ever accuse, say, a black President of the U.S. of actually being a foreign national.

(I don’t mean to deny that racism manifests itself differently in different social contexts, but it’s hardly a rational form of thought and the trope that African Americans, unlike European Americans, are somehow foreign to America is an old and deep one among US racists.)

57

bianca steele 08.13.13 at 2:51 pm

re. Rich P.’s story:
Wasn’t the obvious thing to do to put up a sign and make it explicit? Isn’t asking visitors to recognize unstated rules a little strange, and wouldn’t it make people tend to wonder whether they really wanted to be there? (If I felt like I had time to go on and on defending a proposition I’m not wedded to, I might suggest that it implies some hostility to outsiders that might be difficult to distinguish from racism. And presumably most of the congregation was white, or the black visitors wouldn’t have felt the same way. Or am I reading too much into a simple matter of how much people should be expected to give out, in relation to their means.)

@NM
I don’t know what German or Swiss sales clerks are like (I don’t know where the idea that all American clerks are deferential and excessively helpful comes from, though–certainly nothing like the way I was treated in a fancy Seoul department store, not even dressed especially nicely, though the exchange rate was favorable at the time, and maybe I could have afforded what they were selling) but okay, you ask a second time. You’re confident you have the right to do that. In another situation, another person, might be perceived as pushy. Maybe she’d get to look at the item, but the clerk would resent having to do it. Maybe every prejudice she ticks off would result in her needing to ask one additional time–black, female–ask three times instead of one. Maybe the clerk would comply but this would affect how the customer was treated in subsequent interactions. I don’t know (neither do you).

58

nnyhav 08.13.13 at 2:51 pm

59

pedant 08.13.13 at 2:59 pm

Isn’t it striking that the people who insist that racism is the worst thing ever, the most pernicious, hateful, and ignorant motivation one could possibly have, are also frequently the ones who deny that any actual racism exists anymore? And get into a high dudgeon at particular observations of racist behavior?

Whereas people who actually deal with racism on a daily basis are far more likely to see it as one of the many failings that humans are prey to, something they themselves may fall prey to on occasion in relation to their own race or others. And to think that there are lots of kind of evil in the world, and that thinking bad thoughts is bad, but maybe not the worst kind, e.g. not as bad as acting on them.

Nope: the simple-minded types heard tell once that racism is bad, and decided to construe that as “racism is the most pernicious, hateful, ignorant, and bad thing evar”. So if they can prove that Lincoln had racist attitudes, then that means that he’s just as bad as Jeff Davis! Awesome!

Now we can just ignore the fact that one of them was opposed to slavery and one of them was in favor of it; that one of them gradually overcame his own racism while the other one reveled in it; that one of them was responsible for the freedom of millions of people where the other committed himself to their enslavement. Doesn’t matter! If we can pretend that racist attitudes, all by themselves, are the worst thing ever, then it’s a tie!

But by the same token–man, you’d better not accuse any real live person of racism, because that’s just as bad as saying that they’re the love-child of Hitler and Stalin by way of Pol-Pot. The *racist* love-child of Hitler and Stalin! How can you accuse someone of that? What’s your evidence, you horrible accusing accuser? How can you say such a horrible thing about someone, you horrible horrible person?

It’s a great con–pretend to maximum outrage at your fantasies of racism, and then practice maximum forgiveness for every particular case of it.

60

Mario 08.13.13 at 3:00 pm

Belle #46

No, the saleswoman does not “absolutely back this up”, read it again. According to her, she was already showing OW another, cheaper bag, which was, according to the saleswoman, a similar bag except for the price (not smaller as OW claims). She doesn’t say anywhere in that interview that she offered her a cheaper and smaller bag only after OW asked for the expensive one. Please stick to the facts, this debate’s emotional enough as it is.

I just watched the video of Oprah a second time. Really, this is too embellished, she even uses a strange accent when imitating the shop assistant.

Also NM at #43 is right, I think OW just doesn’t shop that much in Switzerland/Germany etc. and interpreted normal saleswoman behaviour as racist. And didn’t

61

Belle Waring 08.13.13 at 3:00 pm

Billikin: you do realize that that was an interview on an entertainment show, which was taped one week after the incident? And was the first time Oprah ever related to story in public? That she chose to leave the shop unnamed rather than expose them to the world? And that, as to being “too good,” it does chance to be so good that the saleswoman agrees in almost every particular with what occurred? Namely that Oprah entered the store leaving a friend or bodyguard outside. Then she asked to see that dang expensive handbag. The woman instead–per her own account!–did not do so but rather showed her some other, smaller, cheaper handbags. Her excuse is that the purses were made from the same type of leather, so there was no need to see either what the leather looked like on that particularly special and expensive purse, or how much it could hold, or was it heavy, or could you get it over your shoulder, and generally everything one wishes to know before making such an expensive purchase. That is an implausible excuse. Oprah claims to have asked three times, while the saleswoman admits to only once. Minor divergence! The saleswoman adduces as further proof that she was not motivated by racism, the fact that she is Italian. I understand she’s saying, “hey, Swiss people are dicks to me!” but that doesn’t change the fact that if you think being Italian is proof you’re not racist, you have painted yourself into a corner of racism. (Or maybe it’s a fresco.) Then at the end of the article she says, ‘we never discriminate, we always show all the merchandise to customers, we want them to buy!’ Which does cause one to ask why Oprah was not shown the bag? If I were on the defense in a murder trial, I’d use one of my preëmptive strikes against you, Billikin, because you leap to wild conclusions and believe you can tell when a woman is lying when she narrates an event from her life all too well. And has spent the last 25 years on a daily talk show.

62

stostosto 08.13.13 at 3:03 pm

Is it possible that if you have been exposed to racist attitudes all your life you may sometimes assume racism even if it isn’t there? Might navigating different continents with different cultures and customs and through a blur of imperfect language be conducive to such an instance? I think so.

63

Main Street Muse 08.13.13 at 3:04 pm

As the one who first introduced Oprah into the Crooked Timber stream a few posts ago, I am amazed at the Rorschach test she is.

First, Swiss Tourism board has apologized to Oprah for this incident. The COUNTRY sees an issue with how this played out. This has been reported by media in multiple countries. The power of Oprah is really incredible (so incredible that her name passes the spell-check here!)

Second, in retail, the customer is always right. The Italian retail clerk in the interview posted above shows she’s in agreement with Oprah about what happened – a customer wanted to see a bag; the clerk decided the customer should not see the bag. Why would a clerk do that? It’s really bad business for the store! And yes, I’ll bet she lost a rather hefty commission for being stupid. They disagree about whether or not it was racism. The clerk, obviously, says it wasn’t racism. She was “helping Oprah” not spend too much money. And now she’s being “cannibalized” by Oprah. Yes – but not by Oprah – she’s really being eaten up by the media. That’s what happens when you diss a media star. But let’s blame Oprah.

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Jerry Vinokurov 08.13.13 at 3:08 pm

I don’t care if she was treated as a “black person” rather than a human being,

Then you’re part of the problem!

The question really isn’t: what did Oprah do, and what did the clerk do? The question really is: “What is racism, and who gets to decide?” Frankly, I’ve heard this argument over and over again for decades: “That was racism towards me!” “No, it wasn’t; I’m not a racist!” “Are too!” “Am not!”

Perhaps we could begin by taking seriously the stories of those who are negatively impacted by racist attitudes. What a concept!

65

Main Street Muse 08.13.13 at 3:09 pm

One more thing – for all those who feel Oprah’s tussle over a $38K handbag is stupid – she’s stupid for bringing it up – her wealth somehow makes it inappropriate for her to speak of racism – please note that she ONLY brought it up when asked by the interviewer in an interview that seem focused on racism (Paula Dean, in which she seems to let Paula off the hook a bit, use/non-use of “n” word in various circles, racism in upscale Swiss purse store.) Watch an abbreviated clip of the interview – http://bit.ly/1cxtaz6.

For those commenters who resent Oprah for her wealth – and yes, there are commenters in previous posts here on Crooked Timber who definitely resent her wealth – do you resent Warren Buffet for his wealth? Steve Jobs for his wealth? Bill Gates for his wealth? Lloyd Blankfein for his wealth? I never ever hear anyone offering disdain or irritation or anger about the kazillions these men have acquired. Lloyd Blankfein, when the global economy was melting down, and $GS was milking the US Treasury department for all it was worth (thank you former $GS CEO Henry Paulson!), told his well-remunerated bankers to tone down the spending, wouldn’t look good, etc. http://cbsn.ws/1a1Ppvo.

Do we resent all the wealthy for being wealthy? Or just Oprah? Or do we resent the idea that she thinks a retail clerk who doesn’t want to show her an expensive purse is racist? Because clearly, to assume a black person cannot afford and expensive purse is never, ever done with racist intentions?

For those of you who hate Oprah, please remember – Oprah revitalized the near west side of Chicago. She – Oprah Winfrey, the brand – was an economic dynamo for a number of different sectors. For nearly a quarter of a century, Harpo Productions was a big employer in the area. She paid her staff very well. Shops, restaurants sprung up in an area that – before Harpo – was filled with prostitutes, pimps and drug dealers. Oprah built that. She built a media empire smack-dab in the middle of the flyover zone. How’d that happen?

She did it with extraordinary business savvy. She did it in a city that was/is extraordinarily racist and segregated. She had a product people wanted and she delivered, five days a week for years. Books she promoted in her book club saw huge increases in sales. Her billions – she earned them. And like any wealthy person, she has the right to spend them as she sees fit. Unless a retail clerk in a Swiss store wants to save her from spending her money. For no reason other than she’s being kind to the black lady who really doesn’t need to spend money on an overpriced purse.

66

Theophylact 08.13.13 at 3:10 pm

Being Italian a defense against a charge of racism? Bullshit.

67

NM 08.13.13 at 3:17 pm

“I never ever hear anyone offering disdain or irritation or anger about the kazillions [Buffet, Jobs, Gates, Blankfein] have acquired. ”

Please do tell us more about your five-year sojourn on Mars. Since when have you been back on Planet Earth?

68

Anderson 08.13.13 at 3:18 pm

She was “helping Oprah” not spend too much money.

If I’m the store owner, this is just as good a reason to fire the clerk as if she’s racist. Possibly even better.

Do we know whether the clerk did in fact work on commission? If I’m a clerk selling absurd luxury items to the absurdly rich, on commission, it’s deeply implausible that I’m looking out for their bank balance.

69

Mario 08.13.13 at 3:19 pm

Ben Alpers @55

That’s not really relevant to Lurker’s argument. Or do you deny that blacks here in Europe very often are recent immigrants (especially in countries without a colonial history) while there are few recent black immigrants in the US? Racism is different in Europe than in the US and this specific form of racism – denying a black person to see an expensinve article because she probably cannot pay for it – is perhaps something you encounter quite often in the US, where unfortunately being black is associated with being poor. That’s not the case in Switzerland (in France it is I guess), because there just aren’t that many black people here.

I’m not saying the saleswoman wasn’t racist. I’m just saying that the whole argument of her assumption that “black=poor=not a buyer” for me sounds like something happening in the US or France with bigger black communities who live there for some generations.

And I’m definitely not saying Switzerland is less racist. Go here to check: http://www.ein.org.uk/news/switzerland-introduces-segregation-asylum-seekers

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bob mcmanus 08.13.13 at 3:19 pm

For those commenters who resent Oprah for her wealth – and yes, there are commenters in previous posts here on Crooked Timber who definitely resent her wealth – do you resent Warren Buffet for his wealth? Steve Jobs for his wealth? Bill Gates for his wealth? Lloyd Blankfein for his wealth?

Oh, hell yes. Although it isn’t at all personal, I simply resent oppose wealth in itself. My line is probably somewhere around a quarter million. 65% or Americans have net wealth under 100k. I care about them, not OW of Jobs.

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pedant 08.13.13 at 3:19 pm

“Do we resent all the wealthy for being wealthy? Or just Oprah?”

Not just Oprah, at all. Martha Stewart, too.

As soon as Martha Stewart got too uppity with her millions, the Feds were ready to take her down for trivial offenses such as the Blankfeins and Buffetts commit on a daily basis. And they sent her to jail, just to teach her a lesson.

Oprah’s just extra lucky for being both female and black, that’s why she gets extra heapings of resentment.

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Mario 08.13.13 at 3:22 pm

Belle, you again state falsely that the saleswoman’s story is the same os OW’s.

But you already mentioned that your German isn’t that good. Please believe me, the stories differ in this important part.

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Rmj 08.13.13 at 3:27 pm

Perhaps we could begin by taking seriously the stories of those who are negatively impacted by racist attitudes. What a concept!

We could; if we didn’t end up going ’round in circles about whether or not the clerk was a racist, and whether or not some people hate Oprah because she’s rich; or whether or not the whole incident is even an example of racism.

This isn’t progress, it’s a merry-go-round.

74

NM 08.13.13 at 3:28 pm

“I’m an Italian in Switzerland, so how can I be racist?”

Well, Italians immigrants in Switzerland probably have some potential claim to be a discriminated minority, esp. low-income ones. (They definitely do in Germany.) Indeed, southern Italians in Northern Italy, certainly have a claim to be discriminated against, esp. if they are low-income and have a strong regional accent.

Stating “I’m [non-white] so I can’t be racist” doesn’t make much logical sense ultimately, but it is something one does hear every so often. Given that it is something people come out with quite often, maybe this unfortunate shop assistant should receive a little less mockery? Her main training, apparently, lies in selling hand bags, not formulating logically-sound arguments.

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Rich Puchalsky 08.13.13 at 3:30 pm

bianca steele: “Wasn’t the obvious thing to do to put up a sign and make it explicit?”

A sizable number of people in the church being procedural-liberal types (including me), this is exactly what we first set out to do. And of course it became comedy very quickly. Visitors don’t have to pay, but then who is a visitor exactly — after how many times visiting the church do they become a more or less unofficial church member? Do you have to pay for yourself if you’re getting a cup of coffee for yourself at the same time as you’re getting a friendly one for a visitor? Can there be discounts based on ability to pay? Can you run a tab on the coffee pot once you’re no longer a visitor however defined? The proposed sign just got bigger and bigger.

Similarly, I don’t think that it’s possible to make rules for clerk-to-customer interactions that would spell everything out so that you could clearly tell when there’s a racist infringement of the rules. Unless the clerk says “We don’t serve black people here”, there are too many unwritten rules and it’s some sort of social fallacy to think that you can codify them all. I trust a person in a minority group’s own sense of detection, honed over a lifetime of encounters, to tell them what’s going on. After all, the important part of what’s going on in a less-obvious case is how they understood what happened. It’s not like punishment is being meted out and we need to understand what happened to legal standards etc.

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Jerry Vinokurov 08.13.13 at 3:31 pm

We could; if we didn’t end up going ’round in circles about whether or not the clerk was a racist, and whether or not some people hate Oprah because she’s rich; or whether or not the whole incident is even an example of racism.

Your causal chain is backwards. The first thing you do is take Oprah’s story seriously, and then the “problems” you’re so concerned about resolve themselves.

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Rmj 08.13.13 at 3:32 pm

Then you’re part of the problem!

Um, okay. I guess this advances the project, huh?

Perhaps the fault is mine, and I should clarify my remark: I don’t care if the story is about Oprah qua Oprah, or about Oprah qua a female African-American. Either way, the focus on Oprah is a distraction, as we’re relentlessly dissecting the particulars of this event to get at the nugget of truth which isn’t there (the only information we have to rely on are news accounts, and since when did they arise to the level of tablets from the mountaintop?), rather than examining the questions of racism in the world.

But please, proceed; apparently I’m just part of the problem, and should abase myself in sackcloth and ashes.

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Rmj 08.13.13 at 3:36 pm

Your causal chain is backwards. The first thing you do is take Oprah’s story seriously, and then the “problems” you’re so concerned about resolve themselves.

Causal chain? You mean once I agree with your set of facts, I’m right? And if I don’t, then I’ve got the causal chain running in reverse? So now the issue is who caused the racism in the first place? Or is it who caused it to be analyzed as racism? Or is it who cause whom to discern racism?

Causal chain?

How about if I just set Oprah’s story aside as a distraction, and try to find the issue worth discussing? Since nobody wants to discuss that, and everybody seems to want to decide what really happened to Oprah?

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Main Street Muse 08.13.13 at 3:37 pm

Since Anderson #48 wants to talk about Voters Rights, North Carolina, etc., I’ll segue this to North Carolina’s appalling education budget.

June Atkinson, state superintendent of NC public schools, was commenting in the News & Observer about significant changes to come in K-12 education, thanks to Tea Party education budget. These changes include less money for public schools (when factoring in inflation) – more money for private schools who don’t have same accountability as public schools – no raises for teachers, leaving NC ranking near the bottom of the US for teacher pay.

GOP majority leader of the state house had this to say: “she should stick to her own knitting.” http://bit.ly/1d3rsmW

I truly hope NC is not the bellwether for things to come, but Tea Party seems to be coming on strong in this country.

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pedant 08.13.13 at 3:37 pm

I’m sorry, you couldn’t possibly afford that sackcloth; I’ll show you something cheaper. And please don’t abase yourself at all, if that involves some kind of prolonged immersion in bay-leaves. I can’t stand bay-leaves. A bas, lauriers!

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Jerry Vinokurov 08.13.13 at 3:38 pm

How about if I just set Oprah’s story aside as a distraction, and try to find the issue worth discussing? Since nobody wants to discuss that, and everybody seems to want to decide what really happened to Oprah?

The fact that you don’t realize that this is the fucking problem if actually part of the fucking problem. Go read what Belle wrote, carefully; twice if you have to.

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Belle Waring 08.13.13 at 3:38 pm

O NO SEXISM IS BRAKING THE IMPOTANT THREAD ABOUT PROBLEMS THAT NEVER AFFECT MALE REEDERS!
I am going to bed. I, for one, am completely baffled as to why the discussion of a rich black woman should become such a total shitstorm, or why male commenters should feel violently opposed to Oprah for reasons they themselves do not understand.

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Jerry Vinokurov 08.13.13 at 3:38 pm

if = is, obvs

84

Rmj 08.13.13 at 3:39 pm

The fact that you don’t realize that this is the fucking problem if actually part of the fucking problem. Go read what Belle wrote, carefully; twice if you have to.

The first problem seems to be discerning what the problem is, and if it really happened.

And really, if you have to resort to adjectives like “fucking” to express your frustration that I don’t agree with you, you need to examine your analysis; not mine.

85

Barry Freed 08.13.13 at 3:42 pm

Look, Oprah has apologized for the incident so we can all move on now.

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Jerry Vinokurov 08.13.13 at 3:43 pm

And really, if you have to resort to adjectives like “fucking” to express your frustration that I don’t agree with you, you need to examine your analysis; not mine.

I didn’t realize you were the fucking CT civility police.

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William Timberman 08.13.13 at 3:46 pm

Forgive me, but I also can’t resist responding to the cannibal(ization) thing. Ausschlachten, meaning to dismantle something and repurpose the parts, quite reasonably employs the basic concept of butchering, rather than the one of consuming one’s own kind employed in English. For the multilingual contributors and commenters here — and there seem to be many of them — this is no big deal. In America, for obvious reasons, it’s more novel, amounting at times to a kind of Saul-On-The-Road-To-Damascus epiphany.

One of the delights for me of following Ta-Nehisi Coates’ public account of his struggles with French is his acknowledgment that becoming proficient in a second language is in a sense to become a different person, or perhaps more accurately, to think with a different mind. I remember very vividly my own first encounter with this revelation — that etymology and metaphor are destiny, so to speak — and how it’s altered pretty much everything I’ve thought about cultural conflicts ever since. If only every non-immigrant in the U.S. were required to become fluent in a language other than English, I often think, a lot of the really bad stuff would go away. (Proof, I suppose, that I’ve never completely outgrown the silly liberal me of many years ago.)

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bob mcmanus 08.13.13 at 3:46 pm

Privilege and White Dudes …Adam Kotsko, not long

The goal is not, however, to make white dudes feel less prickly and defensive, because as I said, prickly defensiveness is one of the core pillars of white dude identity. The way to deal with white dudes is to figure out a way to make them a different type of person than a white dude, and that can’t happen through strong arguments or carefully calibrated rhetoric — it’s a matter of figuring out how to jar them out of their subject-position, not “convincing” them to accept some kind of opinion in an extrinsic way. Provoking prickly defensiveness in certain white dudes may actually be helpful here, in that it might shock white dudes with the potential to become something better into realizing how obnoxious white dudes really are. This is a tough thing for liberal activists to come to terms with, I know, because one wants to believe that open, honest dialogue can change everything, but the sad truth is that it can’t.

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Martin 08.13.13 at 3:54 pm

For what it’s worth, I second the less dramatic reading of the word “ausschlachten”. Especially with regard to media, it’s really standard usage in the context of a story that is exploited beyond a point where it is interesting or necessary. The interpretation that English apparently (though I can’t say) allows is simply impossible in this context in German.

I’d also note that the clerk rather obviously meant that the accusation of racism is absurd because she is a foreigner, not because of her being Italian in an of itself.

That said, it is interesting – even if granted neutrality until a verifiable account surfaces blah, blah – how many bend over backwards to absolve the clerk of any charges and accept her version without further ado (implicitly accusing Oprah for lying, of course, no problem there). This collective feeling of relief:”See, it wasn’t racism! Gosh, would I have been SURPRISED that such an incident could actually happen!”

I can’t help, but it somehow reminds me of an incidence where I grew up involving a local police officer: once, he was brought to a hospital because he inserted a flashlight into his rectum and couldn’t get it out any more. The interesting thing is how everybody accepted – or pretended to accept – his version of the story how he just, you know, sat down, and there was this fleshlight on the couch, and accidentally… Now, there is a difference: I fully defend everybody’s right to insert whatever they deem necessary wherever into their bodily apertures. The parallel here is rather how many people are ready to believe really anything except what seems to be a perfectly reasonable reading of events as soon as this reading shakes our self-image of society as we have decided to see it (“we” being the ones not adversely affected). It shows how racism really is a taboo more in the literal sense that we do not talk about it than one that we do not let happen. And so it comes that there are several things deemed bad (racism, antisemitism, rape, misogyny… name it) that somehow, miaraculously never actually materialize in the form of real incidences, or so we pretend. As soon as somone comes up with another interpretation, however silly, we go along with it.

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pedant 08.13.13 at 3:57 pm

81–in some dialects of American, the term “to part out” means what ausschlachten means, with reference to machines (esp. cars). You give up on fixing the truck, but you pull the engine to put in another truck, and you take off the bed to make into a trailer, and the tires and wheels can be put on something else, etc.

I bring it up only because the “out” in “to part out” corresponds nicely to the “aus-“.

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JanieM 08.13.13 at 4:02 pm

If only every non-immigrant in the U.S. were required to become fluent in a language other than English, I often think, a lot of the really bad stuff would go away.

Yes! Yes, and yes again. And definitely not all of us learning the same other-than-English language.

I have thought about this for ages. As an added bonus, I would like to pair up families: native American English speakers with non-native-etc. Let us all help each other with our language struggles. :)

/off-topic

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bob mcmanus 08.13.13 at 4:09 pm

Vivek Chibber

So for the universalizing drive of capital to be real, Guha says, it must be experienced as the emergence of a capitalist class that constructs a consensual, liberal order. This order replaces the ancien régime, and is universalizing in that it expresses the interests of capitalists as universal interests. Capital, as Guha says, achieves the ability to speak for all of society: it is not only dominant as a class, but also hegemonic in that it doesn’t need to use coercion to maintain its power.

The universalizing drive, Treyvon Martin, Emmitt Till = same thing; OW dissed while buying 38k handbag, Rosa Parks sent to back of bus = same damn thing…this is how liberal capitalism maintains it structures of oppression. It is.

I am not running to the barricades to help some woman make partner in a white shoe DC law firm.

All instances of sexism or racism are not the same or follow the same rules, are not of equal importance or deserving of equivalent outrage.

OW may have encountered racism. I really don’t care.

93

Nick 08.13.13 at 4:10 pm

For cripes sake, can we have some more posts about Jack Vance instead of Oprah and the Racist Swiss Clerk?

94

Nick 08.13.13 at 4:20 pm

Hey, can we all just talk about Jack Vance again?

95

Nick 08.13.13 at 4:20 pm

My apologies, I had to do something and thought I’d erased my first comment.

96

Billikin 08.13.13 at 4:23 pm

Belle Waring: “you do realize that that was an interview on an entertainment show, which was taped one week after the incident? And was the first time Oprah ever related to story in public?”

Memory can be contaminated quite easily. Public retelling has no known effect different from retelling in private.

Belle Waring: “That she chose to leave the shop unnamed rather than expose them to the world?”

Doing so also gives a certain license to embellish, both because it diminishes the possibility of harming someone else in doing so, and because it diminishes the possibility of being disputed.

Belle Waring: “And that, as to being “too good,” it does chance to be so good that the saleswoman agrees in almost every particular with what occurred? Namely that Oprah entered the store leaving a friend or bodyguard outside. Then she asked to see that dang expensive handbag. The woman instead–per her own account!–did not do so but rather showed her some other, smaller, cheaper handbags.”

So far, so good. :)

Belle Waring: {snip}

“Oprah claims to have asked three times, while the saleswoman admits to only once. Minor divergence!”

Hardly. The embellishment of details that makes a good story. Ignoring a request once might just be snottiness, but saying “Nonono!” and having a confrontation with the obviously rich customer goes beyond mere snottiness, and invites the listener to infer another explanation. Besides, three is a magic number in storytelling. ;)

Belle Waring: “The saleswoman adduces as further proof that she was not motivated by racism, the fact that she is Italian.”

Please note that I said that I “figured that the woman did not realize the racism behind not showing her customer the bag that she wanted to see.” That is according to the woman’s own account, not Oprah’s.

Belle Waring: {snip}

“If I were on the defense in a murder trial, I’d use one of my preëmptive strikes against you, Billikin, because you leap to wild conclusions and believe you can tell when a woman is lying when she narrates an event from her life all too well. And has spent the last 25 years on a daily talk show.”

Well, Southerners like us do not always let the truth get in the way of a good story. I did not jump to the conclusion that Oprah was lying, because, as we know, memory is reconstructed. I simply did not jump to the conclusion that she was telling the truth, and I noted problems with her retelling, based in part on having grown up among good storytellers.

As for a preemptive strike in a murder trial, the prosecutor would probably have beaten you to it. After all, it is his story that I would have to believe.

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Anderson 08.13.13 at 4:25 pm

GOP majority leader of the state house had this to say: “she should stick to her own knitting.”

Winning the state for Hillary, one sexist Republican ad-lib at a time.

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William Timberman 08.13.13 at 4:26 pm

bob mcmanus @ 86

Yes, but…. The sublimities of Marxist analysis, filtered through Gramsci, or Marcuse, have their merits, ain’t no doubt about that. On the other hand, meditating exclusively on the wheel of Karma, while dissing the motives of individuals caught up in it, devalues us — not just as individuals, but collectively, as a motive force.

If we abandon the idea that the collective can be influenced by individual action, that a feedback loop is not only possible, but worthy of respect, then we’re stuck. I don’t think that Marx himself ever intended to abandon that idea. Turning Hegel on his head was only step one of a many step process. So…not to care about Oprah is a historically valid sentiment, or perhaps better, ressentiment, but it also begs the question….

99

js. 08.13.13 at 4:30 pm

Either way, the focus on Oprah is a distraction, as we’re relentlessly dissecting the particulars of this event to get at the nugget of truth which isn’t there (the only information we have to rely on are news accounts, and since when did they arise to the level of tablets from the mountaintop?), rather than examining the questions of racism in the world.

In fact, though, what we have to go on is the first-person testimony of someone who can very reasonably be expected to have something like expert competence* on the matter she’s talking about. I mean, I’m going to make the relatively safe bet that Oprah Winfrey has been at the receiving end of more racist attitudes than, say, you.

So, the question is: why is it so hard for so many people—including it seems, you—to simply defer to the expert first-person testimony. Note that such deferring is something we do all the fucking time. Like so often and without even thinking about it that civilizations would collapse and we would all probably die if we stopped doing it. (And that is not an exaggeration.) But, somehow impossible in this case—why? If you can figure out the answer to this question (in figuring which out you might even find BW’s posts to be extremely helpful!), you might make the rather wonderful discovery that we’ve been “examining the question of racism in the world” all along!

Failing which, you (and Anderson, et al.) could start up a blog that’s all VRA all the time? I mean, why waste your precious time here?

*This phrase may not mean exactly what you think it means.

100

Ragweed 08.13.13 at 4:33 pm

“For those commenters who resent Oprah for her wealth – and yes, there are commenters in previous posts here on Crooked Timber who definitely resent her wealth – do you resent Warren Buffet for his wealth? Steve Jobs for his wealth? Bill Gates for his wealth? Lloyd Blankfein for his wealth?”

For the record, yes to all above. If anything Oprah gets a bit of a pass because she had to bust through some big ceilings to get there. But you do her a great disservice for painting her with the same brush as a snake like Blankfein. I mean, all CEOs are part sociopath – its part of the job description – but the CEO of the vampire squid is a whole other level of evil.

There should not be billionaires, period. That does not justify being racist and sexist towards a billionaire.

101

Substance McGravitas 08.13.13 at 4:35 pm

I had to do something and thought I’d erased my first comment.

If there was an erasure option in comments how much shorter would threads be? Speaking as a white male this is an important question that needs addressing. What keeps our CT hosts quiet on this? My mote is a direct result of their beam.

102

Anderson 08.13.13 at 4:43 pm

Failing which, you (and Anderson, et al.) could start up a blog that’s all VRA all the time?

As my participation in both threads should indicate, I was half teasing.

103

fgw 08.13.13 at 4:45 pm

Re your update: you’re still wrong on the German. From Duden
1 die Eingeweide von geschlachtetem Vieh herausnehmen
2 (umgangssprachlich) die noch brauchbaren Teile aus etwas ausbauen
3 (umgangssprachlich abwertend) bedenkenlos für seine Zwecke ausnutzen

So it never means cannibalize except in the sense of reusing parts (#2 and colloquial), but the original meaning is to take out the innards of a butchered animal (# 1). These are of course in Germany then used for all sorts of sausage stuffing and the like, which leads to meaning #3, used by the assistant which is to take something and repurpose it, without remorse, to your own advantage. This is meant derogatorily in the sense that the Republicans used the Lewinsky affair, in the example Duden gives “a scandal politisch ausschlachten”. So in that sense maybe you were right in the first place, literally she is accusing Oprah of publicly disemboweling her and using the mess for political profit in a way that has nothing to do with her inner (or in this case innard) sensibilities, about which Oprah couldn’t care less.

104

Ragweed 08.13.13 at 4:54 pm

I have been wondering why the Oprah story does bring so much heat, and why there does seem to be so much bile directed at Oprah. Yes, she is a Black woman in a position of power that particularly upsets peoples notions of what a proper race and sex hierarchy should be. But I also get the feeling that she gets more heat than had it been, say, Ursula Burns (CEO of Xerox).

Cause Oprah started in an “appropriate” role for Black women as an entertainer (it was OK for Black folks to get on stage and entertain white folks even back in the Jim Crow era), and particularly an entertainer that talked about personal stuff – feelings and relationships and cheating and all of that talk-show stuff. But she had the audacity to actually own the show, rather than just be part of the staff – which is really disturbing to some people.

I can’t help but feel that some of the antipathy is that she got to be a billionaire with “chick stuff”.

105

pedant 08.13.13 at 4:55 pm

“literally she is accusing Oprah of publicly disemboweling her and using the mess for political profit in a way that has nothing to do with her inner (or in this case innard) sensibilities”

I defer to your greater linguistic knowledge, but wouldn’t your construal require

“weshalb sie *mich* so gross im TV ausschlachten muss”

instead of what she actually said, i.e.

“weshalb sie *das* so gross im TV ausschlachten muss”?

The clerk did not say that *she* had been the direct object of Oprah’s butchery, but rather that *it* had been, i.e. the whole affair.

106

Martin 08.13.13 at 5:10 pm

@ fgw

I strongly disagree. There is no way to use “ausschlachten” with regard to a person without it being used in its original meaning. “Ausschlachten” in the figurative sense used in the interview is possible only with regard to topics. That’s why the clerk says:”Ich verstehe auch nicht, weshalb sie das so gross im TV ausschlachten muss.” She is talking about “das”, i.e. about the incident, not about herself. If one used “ausschlachten” with regard to a person, one would butcher and disembowel her/him. So when you write “literally she is accusing Oprah of publicly disemboweling her”, “her” is exactly (and quotably) not what she is referring to, nor would it be possible if you use “ausschlachten” figuratively.

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bianca steele 08.13.13 at 5:23 pm

procedural-liberal types (including me)

Not words I ever thought I’d hear from Rich Puchalsky’s keyboard, believe it or not.

I didn’t suggest codifying everything that might come up. A sign saying “50 cents for church members, free for others with our compliments” or something is fairly normal–I’m not even sure a wish to add codicils is necessarily a sign of procedural liberalism, even. Nobody suggested codifying the sales clerk’s behavior either. Her boss says to her, why did you show that bag to that person, or that customer complained about you, don’t do that again . . . or maybe she behaves in a way she realizes isn’t right and her conscience bothers her and she can’t sleep . . . and she modifies her behavior, in some way that makes sense to her.

But I’m not sure why you even brought up your church story. In the story you told, the people weren’t racist, or even a little clueless about how their actions affected people who weren’t like them in all respects. Some black people perceived racism, and you’re going to “listen” to them, even though it was mostly in their heads and they hadn’t been around long enough to know how things were done in that group–maybe you’re making some ‘structural” argument where it was real even though the people didn’t mean to be racist, but I can’t tell that from what you’ve said. And the white people weren’t racist so they fixed the problem–by doing something that has nearly nothing to do with race or with how they treat outsiders or with the kind of situation mentioned in the OP (which is a bit different in essential ways).

And since you’re the one who brought up a church . . . in the US all religious groups are “minorities.” Are you suggesting we behave the same towards the person who says their religion prohibits them from (an example that I think has come up before) elevating a woman above a man, or an atheist above a church member . . . that we acknowledge their feeling that they’re discriminated against in an illegitimate way?

108

Haftime 08.13.13 at 5:24 pm

Cannot believe there’s a discussion on the internet about racism in luxury stores without Kanye West being mentioned. What kind of internet is this?
E.g.
‘You see it’s broke nigga racism
That’s that “Don’t touch anything in the store”
And this rich nigga racism
That’s that “Come in, please buy more”
“What you want, a Bentley? Fur coat? A diamond chain?
All you blacks want all the same things”
Used to only be niggas, now everybody playing
Spending everything on Alexander Wang’

Though it sounds like the racist store clerk hasn’t been listening either to what kind of racism she should be sporting.

109

Random Lurker 08.13.13 at 5:47 pm

I strongly endorse NM’s comments at 41 and 51, and at this point I think that this is the misunderstanding at the root of the whole affair .

The reason I think this is the correct explanation is that I (italian ) didn’t see any contradiction in the clerk’s account, where many anglophone commenters see a very obvious contradiction. For this reason I think that this cultural misunderstanding is very likely.

A minor point that pisses me of:
Some people say that if I believe to the clerk, implicitly rejecting OW’s account, I’m racially prejudiced. This, I can understand, even if I disagree.
But, how can I be also sexist for rejecting a woman’s opinion in favour of another woman’s opinion? Should I say that those who disbelieve the clerk are sexist because the clerk is a woman?

110

Bloix 08.13.13 at 6:49 pm

The German “ausschlachten” is a compound: aus meaning out or from, and schlachten, which is a cognate of the English “slaughter.” (English gh corresponds to German ch -you can see the pairing in Scots English loch, which retains the Germanic original, and Irish English lough, which has been Anglicized.)

So auschlachten means something like to butcher out – to gut or dress, in the hunting sense, and in a metaphorical sense, to use the parts of something while killing, destroying or dismembering it to do so.

You can salvage one machine for usable parts for another, and that sense has no pejorative connotation, or you can metaphorically dismember a person or event or enterprise for some sort of exploitative publicity use, and that does have a pejorative connotation.

But whatever the meaning, it’s got nothing to do with eating people.

111

Nine 08.13.13 at 7:13 pm

NM@41 – “German (and in my experience Italian and I’m pretty sure Swiss, too, though I have less experience of them) shop assistants tend to be much less helpful and sometimes polite (though another word that springs to mind is, less servile. Think about that.”

Crappy salesmanship = working-class(*) assertiveness in Germany, really ? After thinking it thru’, I am still skeptical.

*If high end shop assistants qualify as working-class.

112

Suzanne 08.13.13 at 7:17 pm

I’m reminded of a well-known anecdote about Condoleezza Rice, as recounted by Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker and elsewhere:
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/condi-nuclear-article-1.235364

‘In another story, Rice is shopping for jewelry at the Stanford Shopping Center with an academic colleague and close friend named Coit (Chip) Blacker. The clerk pulls out the costume jewelry. She and Rice trade hostile remarks. Then, as Blacker told the story to Dale Russakoff, of the Washington Post, Condi said, “Let’s one thing straight. You’re behind the counter because you have to work for six dollars an hour. I’m on this side asking to see the good jewelry because I make considerably more.”‘
As I remember, Lemann described this as Rice “confronting racism.” While I understood Rice’s annoyance, it seemed more like an example of taking it out on the help.

Very possibly a degree of racism was involved in both cases. I am still unable to work up much indignation on behalf of rich and powerful people who have a sad when the lower orders don’t treat them with sufficient deference. I expect Winfrey, like Rice, will somehow manage to rise above this consumer trauma and carry on with life, and shopping.

113

yabonn 08.13.13 at 7:28 pm

Billikin at 90

This. But it’s not a case of simply making a better story. It’s making a better story not caring about crapping all over someones life. You wouldn’t want your sniffles to be quoted for comic effect on Crooked Timber, would you?

stostosto at 58

Is it possible that if you have been exposed to racist attitudes all your life you may sometimes assume racism even if it isn’t there?

It’s more than that. Quite a few Revealing Southern Anecdotes in this thread and the other, to prove the clerk’s racism. So we have on one hand the work being done – what was racism in the US, the importance, signification, specificity of it. And in the next paragraph the undoing of the work : “which bring us to Zürich, because it is a little bit the same.”

How about no? How about you were describing that specificity two paragraphs ago? How about describing that specificity was the point, and you’re fucking it up? How about no, you don’t know racism in Zürich because you know it in South Podunk?

Everything about this is fractal wrong.

114

Martin 08.13.13 at 7:32 pm

@ Bloix

Again, I dispute that one can use “ausschlachten” with regard to a person while maintaining the figurative meaning we are talking about here. If you say “Sie haben mich/ihn/sie/diese Person/etc. ausgeschlachtet”, this would be absurd, save that’s literally what they did: slaughter and disembowel someone.

It’s a bit odd that this comes up so often here. Already the wording in the interview does not allow such an interpretation: the clerk is explicitely referring to the incident that is “cannibalized” (i.e. ausgeschlachtet). There is zero room to relate that word in the interview to any person, e.g. the clerk herself – even IF “ausschlachten” in the figurative sense could relate to a person.

I am really sure that I have this one right, and I’d ask everybody who sorta-kinda thinks that – apart from the fact that the object to be cannibalized in the interview is clearly not a person, it’s “das”, i.e. the incident – “ausschlachten” can refer to a person without it meaning that one literally butcher her, to cite one single example where the word has been used in this way. Duden does not provide one (it refers to a “case” (Fall) and to a “Skandal” (scandal) in the examples, and I found no other German or German-English dictionary where the word refers to a person). One can “ausschlachten” an incident, a story, a mistake, whatever, one cannot “ausschlachten” a human being, except one actually kills her. But even if one could, the object in the interview was the incident, the Daily Mail has translated that wrongly with “cannibalized me” where “cannibalize it” would have been appropriate. If on purpose, I cannot say, but this reading is simply not possible in the original.

115

MPAVictoria 08.13.13 at 7:48 pm

““Let’s one thing straight. You’re behind the counter because you have to work for six dollars an hour. I’m on this side asking to see the good jewelry because I make considerably more.”‘”

I hope a waiter spits in her soup.

116

Bloix 08.13.13 at 7:52 pm

Martin, I think was trying to agree with you. I would say that the problem with the Mail translation is not primarily me vs. it but “cannibalize.” Your translation “cannibalize it” is not merely non-idiomatic, it’s not correct, because English doesn’t have the metaphorical meaning the shop clerk is using. An adequate translation would be “exploit it.” But “cannibalize” is a wrong translation.

117

NM 08.13.13 at 7:54 pm

Nine@104
My point was not really about working-class assertiveness, but mainly about the fact (in my long local experience) that a shop assistant responding to my request “can I see that article, please” with “it’s just like the article you’re currently looking at, just [less good in some way]” is really quite a common occurrence in Germany and Italy. (Cf. also Random Lurker@102).

Yes, since people thought it very strange that a shop assistant might appear to discourage you from purchasing extremely expensive items, it has happened to me, in Germany and in Italy, not very frequently, but not very rarely either, that I’ve been told by an assistants, “that article is no better than this one, just more expensive”.

And yes again, shop assistants in high end boutiques who are not owner-operators are working class.

118

Bloix 08.13.13 at 8:01 pm

“I hope a waiter spits in her soup.”

There is a touching belief that being subject to racism makes one a better person. A corollary is the belief that a subject of racism who is not a good person is for that reason deserving of being subject to racism.

119

MPAVictoria 08.13.13 at 8:10 pm

“A corollary is the belief that a subject of racism who is not a good person is for that reason deserving of being subject to racism.”

You misunderstand me Bloix. I do not hope a waiter spits in her soup because she is black. I hope a waiter spits in her soup because of her obvious disdain for working people. Of course she is a Republican so I guess I should be at all surprised.

120

GiT 08.13.13 at 8:25 pm

I view the claim that all it takes to be a feminist is to support “equal rights” as about as persuasive as the claim that all it takes to be anti-racist is to be “post-racial”. When Colbert says he “doesn’t see race,” it’s a joke. It would remain a joke if he were to say, “I don’t see gender.” Formal equality tends to be a decent way to perpetuate substantive inequality, though not ideal for racists and sexists.

121

Bloix 08.13.13 at 8:27 pm

MPAVictoria, the Rice story is this: A white woman behind the counter condescends to a black woman in front of the counter. Infuriated, the black woman responds by condescending to the white woman.

Perhaps you think she should have said, “Sister, you mistake me, I can truly afford this fine jewelry that you sell with such diligent skill. As you wait upon me, I am sure that you will feel the mystic bonds of our shared gender and common humanity.”

And if she had, she would have been a good person. But she had no obligation to be a good person in order to have the right to be free from racism.

122

Cian 08.13.13 at 8:32 pm

So the Condoleezaa Rice story proves that the way to fight racism is by being unpleasantly snobbish?

I think the problem a lot of people have with Oprah Winfrey is that she is an entertainer who runs a pretty cheesy entertainment empire, and who has a tendency to say stupid things on a range of fairly unimportant topics (e.g. ‘The Secret’).

I personally have a pretty low opinion of Jay Leno – not sure what that proves.

123

Cian 08.13.13 at 8:41 pm

Couple of things with the Oprah story.
1) Why are the people who are saying this is racism so sure that this isn’t simply cultural misunderstandings/differences. I’m not German, or Italian, but my limited experiences with stores in Germany/Italy/Switzerland have been similar to NMs.

2) When did Oprah become the expert on the experience of racism in Zurich? I mean are people really arguing that racist experiences cross all cultures/languages/countries? That there’s a single racist experience that all black Americans can somehow tap into? I mean it’s possible, but it seems unlikely.

If this had happened in the US, then yeah, I’d buy it was racist. If the person telling the story was Swiss (or had spent a lot of time there), then yeah I’d buy that. But when a tourist tells you about their mildly crappy experience in a foreign country – then no, I need a wee bit more evidence.

Racism, it’s a thing. In Europe, just as in the US (though it’s very different in the US, due to the lack of slave ships/segregation). But maybe this isn’t the best example of that?

124

Mao Cheng Ji 08.13.13 at 8:52 pm

The Condoleezza Rice story, as it’s quoted here (I didn’t click the link), doesn’t even allege any racism. Does it really belong here? I’ve seen, a number of times, white people exchanging hostile remarks with white store clerks.

125

Fu Ko 08.13.13 at 9:23 pm

Does being black make you an expert on knowing when people are treating you poorly because of race?

Perhaps somewhat, but again I cite Erving Goffman: we should expect stigmatized individuals to be hypersensitive to gestures of exclusion since, after all, these things can be quite subtle and so they will have to be attuned to minor signals in order to function.

In any case, I would never “defer to expertise” on a matter where the expert has personal involvement or a direct stake in the matter.

126

Suzanne 08.13.13 at 9:35 pm

@122: The anecdote has been described (more than once, I believe) as an incident in which Rice “confronted racism.”

127

MPAVictoria 08.13.13 at 9:58 pm

“And if she had, she would have been a good person. But she had no obligation to be a good person in order to have the right to be free from racism.”

And where in my post did I claim she didn’t have the right to be free of racism? Seriously, this woman is a member of a party that pisses on working people everyday and she revealed her imagine superiority with her own words.

I hope a waiters spits in her soup, a mechanic puts sugar in her gas tank and that her dry cleaner ruins her favourite dress.

128

hix 08.13.13 at 10:35 pm

Switzerland=very low context communication; US higher context. Pretty clear miscommunication due to cultural barriers. Opherah did construct context into words that had no context. Ok so far it happens. Less fun when a billionaire celebrity takes such unreflected thaughts into public without confirmation. Kind of fun when the define all stereotyping as racist (which does to actual racism the same as the call all government action socialism move does to the term socialism) people fail due to their own Switzerland stereotyping. Not the first time a black person goes with the stereotypical racism explanation in German speaking countries to explain behaviour shown towards everyone.

(I most certainly do resent Gates and Blankfein a lot more for their wealth considering the source…, Buffett has a pretty good record, but he still should be capped at maybe 100 million like everyone else – e.g. of not spending money on 35k bags)

129

PGD 08.13.13 at 10:54 pm

there is genuinely no amount of money and fame a black woman can achieve and still not be subject to the stings and slights of racial prejudice.

Seriously? Not be shown the $50,000 handbag the very first time you ask is a ‘sting and slight of racial prejudice’? Astounded that anyone is spending any time on this. This is really the kind of complaint that the mega-rich should have the good taste not to share with the rest of us. God forbid a service employee doesn’t hop to it instantly when you ask to see a handbag that costs more than what the typical American makes in a year.

130

Witt 08.13.13 at 11:03 pm

In any case, I would never “defer to expertise” on a matter where the expert has personal involvement or a direct stake in the matter.

Lucky there are so many white people around who don’t have any direct stake in the matter, then. /snark

131

Nine 08.14.13 at 12:03 am

NM@115 – “My point was not really about working-class assertiveness,”

Your original comment linked any appropriate degree of solicitude toward a customer with “servility” – as if the opposite was some great blow for the cause of revolution or something. And you suggested that people “Think about that”. I gave it some thought and remain unconvinced.

132

godoggo 08.14.13 at 12:07 am

I just want to say sincerely that I was quite enjoying the Scarlett O’Hara stuff, so my vote goes for more of that.

133

godoggo 08.14.13 at 12:15 am

I’m so sorry.

134

Jacob McM 08.14.13 at 12:16 am

According to a recent study, intelligent white people are just as racist as the less intelligent, only better at concealing it (or at least contradicting themselves):

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130811005342.htm

“High-ability whites are less likely to report prejudiced attitudes and more likely to say they support racial integration in principle,” said Geoffrey Wodtke, a doctoral candidate in sociology. “But they are no more likely than lower-ability whites to support open housing laws and are less likely to support school busing and affirmative action programs.”
Wodtke will present his findings at the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. The National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the National Institutes of Health, supported his research.
He analyzed data on the racial attitudes of more than 20,000 white respondents from the nationally representative General Social Survey. He examined how their cognitive ability, as measured by a widely used test of verbal intelligence, was linked with their attitudes about African-Americans, and about different policies designed to redress racial segregation and discrimination.
Respondents were about 47 years old at the time of the interview, on average, and had completed 12.9 years of education. They correctly answered an average of about six of the 10 cognitive ability test questions.
Among Wodtke’s findings:
–High-ability whites were more likely than low-ability whites to reject residential segregation and to support school integration in principle, and they were more likely to acknowledge racial discrimination in the workplace. But there were only trivial differences across cognitive ability levels in support for policies designed to realize racial equality in practice.
–In some cases, more intelligent whites were actually less likely to support remedial policies for racial inequality. For example, about 27 percent of the least intelligent whites supported school busing programs, compared with 23 percent of the most intelligent whites.
“The principle-policy paradox is much more pronounced among high-ability whites than among low-ability whites,” said Wodtke, who is also affiliated with the Population Studies Center at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “There’s a disconnect between the attitudes intelligent whites support in principle and their attitudes toward policies designed to realize racial equality in practice.
“Intelligent whites give more enlightened responses than less intelligent whites to questions about their attitudes, but their responses to questions about actual policies aimed at redressing racial discrimination are far less enlightened. For example, although nearly all whites with advanced cognitive abilities say that ‘whites have no right to segregate their neighborhoods,’ nearly half of this group remains content to allow prejudicial real estate practices to continue unencumbered by open housing laws.”
According to Wodtke, the broader implication of this study is that racism and prejudice don’t simply come about as a result of low mental capacities or deficiencies in socialization. Rather, they result from the need of dominant groups to legitimize and protect their privileged social position within an intergroup conflict over resources.
“More intelligent members of the dominant group are just better at legitimizing and protecting their privileged position than less intelligent members,” he said. “In modern America, where blacks are mobilized to challenge racial inequality, this means that intelligent whites say — and may in fact truly believe — all the right things about racial equality in principle, but they just don’t actually do anything that would eliminate the privileges to which they have become accustomed.

135

politicalfootball 08.14.13 at 2:55 am

Not be shown the $50,000 handbag the very first time you ask is a ‘sting and slight of racial prejudice’?

Well of course it is.* As best as I can reckon, Oprah’s only point was that black people are treated differently than white people, and that (even for her) that stings. Why should this be surprising? Or controversial?

You wouldn’t think this would be worth all of this debate – except it clearly is, since people keep wanting to dispute the obvious.

*And that’s if you accept two layers of dubious reporting: First, as others have noted, the sales clerk’s story is internally contradictory. But also, the Daily Mail’s account of that story is – entirely independently of the problem’s with the clerk’s purported story – internally contradictory**.

**As I pointed out in the other thread: The Daily Mail headline: ‘Oprah’s a liar’ is presented as a quote from the salesperson. Yet nobody appears to have actually said that, except the Daily Mail. And yet, that’s the quote that’s getting widespread distribution.

136

politicalfootball 08.14.13 at 3:00 am

This is really the kind of complaint that the mega-rich should have the good taste not to share with the rest of us.

It wasn’t Oprah who chose to share that story here. Belle found it interesting for some reason. I wonder why?

137

js. 08.14.13 at 3:48 am

So, I went and scanned some of the Gawker threads. And, they’re actually not that bad! Like, maybe better than here? Maybe this is what Belle meant—I originally took it that they were horrible but now not so sure.

Unrelatedly, comments are disabled on the KC Star story about the rodeo clown. If any were posted, they seem to have disappeared. Which is an amazing simultaneous demonstration of the “unacceptability” of racism and its really quite widespread existence.

138

Rich Puchalsky 08.14.13 at 4:45 am

bianca steele: “But I’m not sure why you even brought up your church story. In the story you told, the people weren’t racist, […]”

No, actually I have no way of knowing that. I can pretty confidently say that the church as a whole wasn’t overtly racist, based on current membership and pride in integrated history and so on, and also I’m pretty sure that no one said something overtly racist at the coffee pot. But some people glancing preferentially at black visitors to see whether they paid for coffee? Pretty undetectable unless you were there monitoring the coffee pot all the time, or unless you were a black visitor. Also, lots of people in the U.S. are racist at that level, so it’s not that unlikely that some people might do it.

I don’t really understand why you don’t understand why I told this story, but it’s not a binary choice of 1) “There was no racism, and it was all a perfectly innocent misunderstanding” or 2) “Racist people hassled the visitor”. There’s also 3) “Someone who we wanted to feel welcomed instead said he was being racially profiled. We’d better change things so that’s less likely to happen.” You don’t really need to decide whether it was really racist motivation / action or not, and in this kind of case there’s no forensic way to do so anyways. His perception was really all that was important.

And it’s a perception that’s shaped by a social system in which both blatant and not-so-blatant racist encounters happen all the time. It’s kind of a jerk move to say “Hey, you’re wrong this time, you’re being hypersensitive!” Who cares. Settle for 3) above. Settling for 2) leads to things like accepting the Daily Mall’s mistranslation of “cannibalize”, and misses out on other things like Oprah is really also a billionaire and the clerk really is a worker and maybe saying the clerk is a horrible racist on evidence like this isn’t the best thing to do when you’re concerned about how relatively powerless people are treated in general.

Also, the people who are all surprised that America likes to address social issues through celebrities? Don’t know why you’re surprised. “Let’s look at the real racism” is a category error.

139

Meredith 08.14.13 at 5:16 am

In the summer of 1972 I took my first trip to Italy, and my partner was an American who happened to have been raised in Italy. I can’t remember where exactly this happened, but when we were getting some bread and cheese and salami for lunch and the guy tried to cheat us on the weighing, my partner caught him out. Okay, not pleasant, but not too unpleasant. As we’re leaving the shop, we run into four African-Americans just entering, so we try to advise them: be careful, they may try to cheat you here. We two whites are feeling solidarity with these African-Americans as fellow American tourists. Truly, a time when I didn’t think race at all but only fellow Americanness. But they hardly deign to look at us, much less listen to us. (That hurt a little, but especially in those days, it didn’t take much to understand where they were coming from — they’d come here to get away from us.)
Same trip, in a rather large pensione (I’m pretty sure in Florence — a very different city then, if I may say), the people who do the laundry (sheets and towels — of major importance for a pensione, after all) have staged one of those famous Italian work-stoppages. A bunch of scruffy American white “hippies” in our pensione do the laundry! (May I say I remember them as sort of fresh-faced county fair types, despite their long and scraggly hair?) The man running the pensione (who had assigned us a room with single beds because we weren’t married) was delighted, in the nicest way, by the help of these American “hippies.” A Daisy Miller moment. Were these American young people scabs? No, not in any meaningful way, though they probably could be criticized for not considering that angle.
Just thinking how Europe can function as a kind of playground for American issues.

140

Britta 08.14.13 at 6:35 am

Or, maybe, actually, there really is racism in Europe, and Oprah is not crazy for thinking that, in a country where minarets and kosher butchering are banned and your neighbors get to vote on whether you deserve citizenship based on the color of your skin, she might encounter a racist microaggression from a woman who comes from a country where black people get bananas thrown at them on a not irregular basis.

141

Random Lurker 08.14.13 at 8:33 am

@Britta
Nobody says that OW is crazy, I just think that, in the specific case, she is wrong.

I would like to point out that, in the very first comment I made on the Oprah story, I spoke of Cecile Kyenge (the politician victim of the banana throwing) as an example of Italian racism:
https://crookedtimber.org/2013/08/09/awkward-conversations-we-have-had/#comment-477551

Also: “routinely” throw bananas is a bit of an exaggeration.

142

bill benzon 08.14.13 at 8:57 am

politicalfootball #133: “You wouldn’t think this would be worth all of this debate – except it clearly is, since people keep wanting to dispute the obvious.”

Yes.

I’m white and, as far as I can tell, I’m without racial prejudice. But note that word, “prejudice,” meaning a judgement in advance (“pre”) of experience. Note also that, as I pointed out in #16 above, the first time I found myself in a situation where I was totally surrounded by black people, my lizard brain went into quick-unthinking-judgment mode and set off alert signals in my brain–which I was, with relatively little effort, able to calm down.

Sometime long ago I may well have, in a conventional way, thought of myself as “color blind.” But I don’t think so now. I’m acutely conscious of color, of ethnicity. It’s the only way I can keep myself sane and decent in a world with the history our world has.

For the last two-and-a-half years I’ve lived in the Lafayette neighborhood of Jersey City, which is predominantly black and brown. I volunteer on community projects with my black and brown and white (I’m by no means the only one) neighbors. A week after Hurricaine Sandy had blown through the neighborhood, flooding some of the streets and killing the power for anywhere between four+ days and two weeks, I went to the church down the street to be with my neighbors. I’m comfortable in this neighborhood among these people, as comfortable as I’ve ever been in a neighborhood.

I have no idea about the ethnic mix of the clientele for that shop in Zurich. Mostly white I’d think. Probably some Arabs, more likely in Western than traditional Arab dress. Some Asians. And perhaps some Africans and African-Americans. Oprah was probably not the first black woman in the shop, but how many black women go to that shop? Not many. How much experience did that shop keeper have with black customers? Could she have been responding to the mere rarity of a having a black customer?

If so, then regardless of what she consciously thought, then and after, the lizard brain probably sent out alert signals. They were likely relatively weak as such things go–the shop was, after all, a safe environment and there was nothing suddenly dramatic going on–but they would have been there. So the shop keeper may have been giving out a vibe. And Oprah picked up on that vibe and conceptually “anchored” it to what, on evidence given here and there in this thread, is normal European sales assistant behavior.

And now that vibe is the talk of the internets.

143

novakant 08.14.13 at 8:59 am

Of course there is racism in Europe – just like everywhere else in the world. And that’s terrible, but I don’t know why we need an Oprah publicity stunt to be made aware of this.

144

Mao Cheng Ji 08.14.13 at 9:41 am

bill benzon, very good, so would you classify your panic attack at that Gillespie concert as ‘racism’, or at least as a ‘racist impulse’ that you quickly subdued? Or do you feel it’s not a part of the concept of ‘racism’?

145

Fu Ko 08.14.13 at 11:40 am

Witt, I think you must have misunderstood. I did not mean to say that under the assumption that every black person has a direct stake in what happens to Oprah; in fact I find that ridiculous.

146

Cian 08.14.13 at 11:56 am

#138
In the same country where minarets and kosher butchering is banned, wealthy Arabs are regular visitors to the upscale shops of Zurich. It’s also where the looters and dictators of Africa like to shop. Maybe things are a little different for the rich.

she might encounter a racist microaggression from a woman who comes from a country where black people get bananas thrown at them on a not irregular basis.

[sarcasm]Because every Italian is a member of the Northern League[/sarcasm]

But I’m pleased to discover that the way to fight racism is by making ridiculous, over-generalized, stereotypes of whole cultures.

147

Cian 08.14.13 at 12:02 pm

To demonstrate that this is a racist incident we need to know:
a) Oprah was treated differently from any other customer. There are good reasons to believe this may not have been the case, given that Italian/German shop assistants behave differently to American ones. Hard to wrap one’s head around I know, but there you have it. The shop may simply try to discourage customers from touching the really pricey merchandise.

b) That she was treated differently due to her ethnicity. Rather than due to snobbery about the way she dressed, her weight, or Americans (hey, it’s Switzerland).

Meanwhile, out there in the world of non-billionaire Afro-Americans some pretty terrible shit is happening. And in the world of non-‘European’ Europeans, some pretty terrible crap is also happening to persons who are not Afro-American. But hey, focus on the publicity seeking billionaire…

148

Cian 08.14.13 at 12:03 pm

Or to put it a different way. What does the treatment of an Afro-American billionaire in a swanky Zurich boutique tell us about the typical Afro-American experience in the USA today?

149

Trader Joe 08.14.13 at 12:31 pm

@145
“To demonstrate that this is a racist incident we need to know”: blah, blah, blah

No, we don’t actually need to demonstrate anything of the kind. OW said she felt discrimination….that’s all that’s needed. The vote is 1-0, unanimous.

You may take issue with her definition or may have a view on what we as society should be doing, but you can’t invalidate her view of discrimination with your definitions. How one feels about something isn’t a democracy.

150

politicalfootball 08.14.13 at 1:12 pm

I don’t know why we need an Oprah publicity stunt to be made aware of this.

I do.

151

Ronan(rf) 08.14.13 at 1:32 pm

“But I’m pleased to discover that the way to fight racism is by making ridiculous, over-generalized, stereotypes of whole cultures.”

This is a strain in US progressivism, it appears. Everyone does what everyone does, b/c of X

152

Ronan(rf) 08.14.13 at 1:35 pm

Although Meredith’s 137 is bloody marvellous

153

Random Lurker 08.14.13 at 2:06 pm

@Trader Joe 147

I feel very discriminated by your comment, as a vegetarian and manga fan.

And, mybe you don’t think that you discriminated me because I’m a vegetarian and a manga fan, but, this is not something that society can judge, if I feel discriminated I’m discriminated, it’s a 1-0 vote.
[/sarcasm]

Now, I don’t say that OW didn’t FEEL discriminated, nor did I say that she had no real reason to perceive things that way.

But the fact that she FELT discriminated is not the same thing that she WAS discriminated, you can’t base your judgment on this only on the basis of Oprah’s personal interpretation.

For example, see Meredith’s story at 137.
A clerk tried to cheat on prices against her and her partner (both whites).
Later a group of black americans entered the same shop; we cannot know what happened, but maybe the clerk tried to cheat them also, and they found out too.
Would those black have reason to think that they are discriminated as black? From their point of view they certainly have, but we could know that they aren’t discriminated as blacks (though maybe they’re discriminated as Americans or as “gullible tourists”).

154

Rich Puchalsky 08.14.13 at 2:32 pm

“And, mybe you don’t think that you discriminated me because I’m a vegetarian and a manga fan”

So you think that some people not liking vegetarians and manga fans is like the result of America’s history of oppression of black people. That someone who has grown up all of their life confronting the most pervasive and extreme form of prejudice that we have to offer is comparable to anti-vegetarianism or manga dislike.

In both cases, someone saying “I was discriminated against” is saying someone about both themselves and society. In the case of racist discrimination, it’s a statement about an important part of what our society is and how our society sees them, whether they want to be seen that way or not. In the case of the person trying to not understand by making foolish comparisons to vegetarianism and manga, it’s also really a statement about racism, in this context. I wonder what that statement is?

155

Fu Ko 08.14.13 at 2:35 pm

Rich @152, way to miss the point.

156

Trader Joe 08.14.13 at 2:35 pm

@151
In that case, I’m sorry you felt that way. I’ll eat a carrot at lunch. : )

“But the fact that she FELT discriminated is not the same thing that she WAS discriminated, you can’t base your judgment on this only on the basis of Oprah’s personal interpretation.”

The question to which she was responding was to indicate a recent example of a time where she felt discriminated against. The question didn’t involve a time when society at large or people in Switzerland or guys who like manga think she was discriminated against, only a time when she thought that. She only, 1-0.

If I asked you to tell me a recent time you really loved something and you tell me “I had this awesome tofu casserole for dinner last night it was seasoned perfectly and really hit the spot”

I could say no, actually it was a little dry and they should have used pepper instead of corriander and actually I’m a trained chef so you should defer to my view on this……if I said that, would you still have enjoyed the casserole? Even if I brought in 1000 experts from every vegitarian club in the world, it still tasted good to you right?

Discrimination, like taste, is a matter of perception and while everyone is entitled to an opinion, only one person has a vote.

Meridith’s story was quite good and matches experiences I’ve had. Whether the shop keep is focused on Americans, blacks or tourists in general is unknown. We know he cheated people and maybe cheats all people (even locals, we don’t know that either)….but each person walking out of the store unquesitonably would have a view on why they were cheated and that would be the answer to your question. Emmit Till’s murderers were murders and discriminators. If they killed a white guy too, they’d still be both.

157

Fu Ko 08.14.13 at 2:41 pm

Trader Joe, what on earth are you talking about? “Discrimination, like taste, is a matter of perception”?? Considering we have laws against discrimination (in certain contexts), it damn well better not be.

158

Trader Joe 08.14.13 at 2:50 pm

@155
OW wasn’t asked to describe an incident that would hold up in a court of law. She wasn’t opining on hiring practices, red-lining, admissions quotas or anything of the sort. No one, even under the harshest interpretation is suggesting the incident described something illegal.

– she was explaining an example of day to day racism, which, as covered on several recent strands, there are millions of examples. Some examples nearly everyone agrees on, some examples only a few seem to agree upon, but if you think that they “aren’t good enough” as examples or somehow remotely invalidate the premise that there millions of daily examples – I’d have to ask you what on earth are you talking about.

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yabonn 08.14.13 at 2:51 pm

So you think that some people not liking vegetarians and manga fans is like the result of America’s history of oppression of black people

Nonono. You don’t want that. You don’t want to tie the “doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense” rule to _America_’s history of oppressing black people. It’s in Zürich, remember?

Or at least you must qualify with something like “… a little bit like in Switzerland…”, or “… and America being immanent, this goes for Switzerland too…” or “… and as the world around Her Bioluminescence bends to reach the shape of America, history of oppressing black people included, this goes for the shopthingy incident too”, or “… the clerk deserving it, if not for this reason then for another…” or “but, tut tut Switzerland, whatever we have in the US…” or “… CANNIBALIZE!”.

Something.

160

Rich Puchalsky 08.14.13 at 2:59 pm

No one is filing an anti-discrimination suit, Fu Ko. How many times can I write that this isn’t an event for which anyone is getting evidence suitable for a court case? That we aren’t a jury on one? You’re going to have to decide what you think about this without ever getting evidence suitable for legal action.

Whenever I’ve written a comment about it, I’ve tried to qualify what I’m writing by referring to more blatant and less blatant racism, or writing about a case like this one as opposed to a case like the rodeo clown one (in which the stereotypically racist imagery was there for everyone to see). If you want to treat them all the same way, that’s an interesting choice.

161

Britta 08.14.13 at 3:19 pm

Let me sum up this conversation:

“It wasn’t racism, you stupid Americans, because it was in Switzerland”
“Um, there is racism in Switzerland. And Italy too, for that matter.”
“God, way to stereotype an entire nation, you racist.”

162

Britta 08.14.13 at 3:30 pm

BTW, saying that if you’re not in the Northern League, you’re not racist is like claiming not to be racist if you’re not a KKK member, a Le Pen supporter, or BNP member. It’s a way to dismiss anything less the the most extreme acts or attitudes as a way of minimizing pervasive, societal and structural racism. One doesn’t have to commit a hate crime or even actively spout racist views to behave in a racist manner.

163

Fu Ko 08.14.13 at 3:31 pm

Rich, whether or not there is a lawsuit, the point is that this is a serious allegation and not a matter of personal “taste” or an expression of subjective feelings.

164

Ronan(rf) 08.14.13 at 3:33 pm

Yes, we know Britta. Problem is your

“Or, maybe, actually, there really is racism in Europe..”

Is a strawman, as it has been acknowledged and accepted throughout the thread

165

bill benzon 08.14.13 at 3:36 pm

@ Mao Cheng Ji 08.14.13 at 9:41 am

bill benzon, very good, so would you classify your panic attack at that Gillespie concert as ‘racism’, or at least as a ‘racist impulse’ that you quickly subdued? Or do you feel it’s not a part of the concept of ‘racism’?

Well, the concept of racism is rather fuzzy and expansive, especially as it gets discussed in the webtubes. So, on one of those fuzzy and expansive versions, sure it’s racism. But not in any deep and meaningful way. It was an impulse following from a situation I’d never been in before. The impulse passed.

166

Rich Puchalsky 08.14.13 at 3:58 pm

“Rich, whether or not there is a lawsuit, the point is that this is a serious allegation and not a matter of personal “taste” or an expression of subjective feelings.”

It’s possible to trust someone’s perception — in that “If a black person raised poor in America sees racism, then let’s treat it as racism” — and to treat their statement as a serious allegation, without therefore insisting that we know what’s happened in legal terms.

On the contrary, I think that all of the arguments here for why the clerk must have been a real racist come down to a mixture of classism and being misled by right-wing propaganda. The Daily Mail and the Wall Street Journal want to cast everything in those terms. They purposefully do the racist-sneering thing, because they want to reinforce the idea that you’re either with the regular people, the working class, or you’re with the cosmopolitan multicultural elite. I don’t know what this is called in the UK, but in the U.S. this is an old as the Southern Strategy. The people who read the Daily Mail article and say “Look at the internal inconsistencies in the woman’s story” are not reading a trustworthy source.

And I know that Oprah didn’t name the woman or the shop, and had no intention of having them found. But they were actually found. And at this point if you can only support Oprah-as-black-person by saying that a known clerk with a known name was a real racist based on no evidence suitable for a court case, there’s something wrong with what you’re doing.

167

Ronan(rf) 08.14.13 at 4:06 pm

On the Dail Mail and ‘PCgonemadism!’

http://www.boreme.com/posting.php?id=31400

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Fu Ko 08.14.13 at 4:14 pm

Rich, I’m not saying anything about “knowing what happened in legal terms.” I’m talking about the idea you describe:

“If a black person raised poor in America sees racism, then let’s treat it as racism”

Well, no, that’s not good enough. Why should it be? Being black doesn’t mean you’re automatically right about such things. There is obviously a scope for error. Everyone makes this kind of error at times, and for that reason, arguments about and dissections of interpretations of behavior are quite common. If we were dealing with an analogous situation where race was not involved, I think we would all recognize the presence of ambiguity and uncertainty, and not say we should just defer to the aggrieved party’s interpretation of events.

(Calling it a matter of describing subjective experience, I suppose, does make the aggrieved automatically right; but that kind of being right is worthless. In other words, it’s being right about the wrong matter entirely.)

169

Random Lurker 08.14.13 at 4:21 pm

@Rich and Trader

I understand that your view of the matter is centered on OW’s feelings. For that matter, I think that her reading of the situation was perfectly rational given her point of view, her personal history, history of racism in general etc.
[side note – I have no personal opinion about Oprah Winfrey, since she is not that famous in Italy and the only things I know about her is what I read here on CT]

However, once a news story is out, everybody speaks on it from his/her vantage point. It seems that it is/has been an important story in Switzerland, where (as in the rest of Europe) the themes of race and immigration (that are very closely knit in Europe) are very very relevant today.
Maybe from the point of view of the clerk it is important to estabilish wether she acted in a racist way or not; maybe it is important also from the point of view of others (say, her employer, or the Italian-Swiss community).

For this reason I don’t think It is a good idea to see the story only in light of OW’s personal interpretation of it.

And Rich, I’m sure you understand what I meant by my “vegetarian” example.

170

seastar 08.14.13 at 4:34 pm

Why not a post about Oprah’s Tv shows and the basic mechanism where they sensationalize a problem and then sell a ‘solution’ through some self help book. That virtually nothing is ever discussed on Oprah, Dr Phil, or Dr Oz without simultaneously hocking the latest product or trend. Let’s have that discussion, and whether someone like Oprah should be trusted at all.

171

Trader Joe 08.14.13 at 5:03 pm

@167
I agree with you that there are two sides to the story and the clerk has her side as well. I don’t particularly dispute her take that she believes she didn’t behave in a discriminatory or racism manner.

That said, if you ask people “Name a recent example where you behaved in a discriminatory or racist manner?” Most people would quickly respond with something to the effect that “I never do that, there are no examples.”

Rich gave an example @1 involving a collection cup at a church social. I also commented on that example @26. I think both Rich and I would say, before it was pointed out to us, that we didn’t see the racism in a collection cup, it had been set out with an entirely different agenda. Just like in the Swiss clerk example at hand, one party felt discrimination, the other party hadn’t intended it.

One can debate whether the “aggrevied” is too sensitive or the “perpetrator” too insensitive – that seems to be a lot of the discussion with different labels and reasoning attached ranging from cultural and class differences to black line definitions of discriminatory actions.

The thing is though, as long as everyone dismisses every single incident because each individual case seems “not discriminatory enough” on some individual technicality or interpretation, no one ever expends the tiniest effort to address the fact that there are racist behaviours going on all the time and no one speaks of them and no one does anything about them.

If we all spent as much time truly trying to improve our actions as we spend on this blog I’m certain the world would be an incrementally better place. The problem is most people pound away on this board and think they can see right or wrong and then go out in the world and keeping acting the same way they always have.

I’ll bet you a bent Euro – somewhere out there is some shop-clerk, whether Swiss or Italian or German, who’s a little quicker pulling down the damn bag as a result of this.

172

Random Lurker 08.14.13 at 5:03 pm

A personal anecdote:

Ten years ago, I was at the Bologna railway station, in a queue to buy my ticket.
The queue, as often happens in Italy, was extremely chaotic, so that from the outside it wasn’t so obvious who was behind and who was before.

Some meters behind me, there were two groups: a couple of pakistani (I think) woman and a couple of italian men (whites). The italian men did actually join the queue for first, however, as the queue was very chaotic, the two couples were placed basically side by side.
At some point, the two pakistani women stepped forward in a way that it was obvious they were leaving the two italians back.
The two Italians were very angered by this action and started comlaining (loudly) to the two Pakistani.
The two pakistani (in perfect good faith as far as I could tell) were very offended by the accusation and assumed that the two men were trying to skip them, and that they were acting racistly (in that the Pakistani women assumed that all bystanders would have been prejudiced in favour of the two men, and that the two men were exploiting this advantage consciously).The two men were obviously ultra-offended by this accusation.
At this point I reached the ticket office and went away, so I don’t know the result of the epic battle.

My point is: both couples were clearly in good faith and regardless of the final result, both, I suppose, went away with a bitter flavour in their mouths.
The Pakistani women certainly belived they were victims of racism (with good reason, because, as Britta gently reminds us, racism in Italy is very real, and after a while the two men began with “go back were you are from” arguments), but the two italians certainly believed they were victims of “reverse racism”.
Those two guys, most likely, became a tad more racist after this incident, and this also is a problem.

Now suppose you tell them: well I don’t know what happened, but I know that racism in general is real, and I trust these two girls to know wether they are discriminated or not”. What will those two guys think? Will they become more or less racist because of the incident? I think that they would become more racist.

So, even if we know that, in general, racism is a real phenomenon, I don’t think it is a good idea to not worry too much about what exactly happened in one particular circumstance.

173

Random Lurker 08.14.13 at 5:26 pm

For political balance, I note that I have also annecdotes of black women actually discriminated, I pointed out the case in wich this didn’t happen just to make my point.

For example, in a train, a group of black women chatting loudly (but not extremely loudly, nothing beyond italian standards) and a white guy ordering (in rather authoritarian way) them to speak less loudly. When they (justly) ignored him, he went on with rather strong insults (like: when you are in our country, you should act cvilely).
I’m quite sure the guy would never have used the same tone for a group of italian (or simply white) women.

174

Trader Joe 08.14.13 at 5:29 pm

@169RL

Your example is a good one and I’m sure telling them as you describe would fail. Idealistically, you’d like people to recognize that people are people and everyone just wants to go home- but that thinking will have you be last on every train you take. The daily dilemma is a real one.

In my view, there isn’t a “tell others and compel them with your logic answer”. Its a personal decision to behave in a way that does by others as you’d have them do by you As per your example, those lines aren’t always clearly drawn….there’s a spectrum of behaviour ranging from absolute pacifism to overt KKK style racism and everyone is somewhere on it. Most agree that too far to the right on that spectrum is bad, evil etc.

So the question becomes, how racist/discriminatory would you like to be today? Just a little, only inadvertent, maybe only in a crowd like at the rodeo? My choice, which works for me and only me, is to try to be as little as possible and then appologize/have regrets from there when I realize otherwise. I can’t say before the fact I wouldn’t have behaved as the men in your example, I’d like to think I wouldn’t, but the moment is the moment. If I did, for me, I’d regret it….I’d realize I was wrong and work to improve.

Actual choice may vary – if OW can define her own discrimination, each of us are free to define our own antidote to it.

Since I have you, I’ll ask – Is there an Italian word for queue? (meant in good humor)
I’ve been in the queue/scrum you describe.

Thanks for the thoughtful anecdotes.

175

Ronan(rf) 08.14.13 at 5:36 pm

” (with good reason, because, as Britta gently reminds us, racism in Italy is very real, and after a while the two men began with “go back were you are from” arguments) ”

If this came up even later in the conversation, I think it’s fair enough to assume that xenophobia was involved on some level (would be my take)

176

Ronan(rf) 08.14.13 at 6:04 pm

Sorry for the terse nature of the comment, was just starting it when I had to run off for a second. It does seem it was influencing their behaviour though, (even a little) from your telling (and was it obvious they were in fact foreigners?) Which isnt to take a holier than thou attitude, ive done it before in some form or another

177

Wolf 08.14.13 at 9:07 pm

Well, this seems to be just a very bad example of racism. The sales person’s story doesn’t appear too far fetched. A woman comes into a store with a male companion, apparently a body guard. Sales person says “it’s much more expensive” sounds a lot more likely than “you can’t afford it” (which is how it was reported elsewhere). I would think OW could have insisted “oh, yes, I can afford it/want to see it”.
There is real racism in a lot of places (and yes, in Switzerland). This seems more about a 0.0001% person getting a taste of what life is like for the rest of the 1%. I meant to say “welcome to our life”, but sales person would not have been too helpful to this German white guy.

178

Random Lurker 08.15.13 at 12:06 am

@Trader Joe
I understand your point of view, and I think it’s morally very good, but still I think that an act, to be discriminatory, has to be objectively so, at least at some level. (The italian for queue is “coda”, that literally means “tail”).

@Ronan
Yes they were clearly dressed in a non european way. It is possible (in fact very likely IMHO) that the two guys were prejudiced from the beginning , but still it was the two women who were factually at fault, even though they didn’t realise it.

179

Rich Puchalsky 08.15.13 at 1:35 am

Fu Ko: “Well, no, that’s not good enough. Why should it be? Being black doesn’t mean you’re automatically right about such things. There is obviously a scope for error. Everyone makes this kind of error at times, and for that reason, arguments about and dissections of interpretations of behavior are quite common. If we were dealing with an analogous situation where race was not involved, I think we would all recognize the presence of ambiguity and uncertainty, and not say we should just defer to the aggrieved party’s interpretation of events.”

This incident, and similar ones, are never going to get any less ambiguous and uncertain. So if we’re not going to defer to one party’s version of events, then what? Investigating further is not really a possible choice. And going ahead with a presumption that if one party sees racism then the other has to be guilty of committing racist acts runs into a presumption that people are innocent until proven guilty. Essentially, the combination of “we need to figure out who’s right” and “if it was racism, then the racist is guilty” always leads to a judgement that this wasn’t racism except for the really obvious cases.

“(Calling it a matter of describing subjective experience, I suppose, does make the aggrieved automatically right; but that kind of being right is worthless. In other words, it’s being right about the wrong matter entirely.)”

Why is it worthless? There is nothing here but subjective experience. Oprah did not really miss out on a chance to buy a bag, and have that be the harm involved. She had the subjective experience of being racially discriminated against. That’s a very bad subjective experience. How is being right about that not being right about essentially the whole incident?

Does the store and / or clerk not care about whether they cause that subjective experience in their customers? Then guess what — they are racist.

180

engels 08.15.13 at 1:41 am

Sorry but I think this ‘racism is something that happens in the mind of the victim’ line is one of the craziest things I ever heard, and really not a helpful position for anti-racists to adopt. (Just my two cents.)

181

Rich Puchalsky 08.15.13 at 1:59 am

I guess that I have to put the same bit about how I’m not talking about blatant, high-evidence cases of racism in every one of my comments or people just won’t be able to resist pointing that out.

182

JW Mason 08.15.13 at 3:03 am

Would you guys mind if I change the topic?

Here is an interesting piece on the evidence behind the ruling striking down New York’s stop-and-frisk policy. The key point, for our purposes, is that the city no longer claims that disproportionate stops of blacks and latinos are just the result of targeting high-crime areas. They admit that black and Latino men are more likely to be stopped even in low-crime, mostly white neighborhoods. In other words, it is now officially acknowledged that New York police had a policy of targeting non-white men, the vast majority of whom (over 90% of those stopped, again not disputed by the city) have done nothing wrong.

So if the question is, Is racism still a thing?, that could be interesting to talk about too. Just, you know, as a break from Oprah.

183

Rich Puchalsky 08.15.13 at 3:56 am

Well, I don’t mind changing the topic, but I’m not going to feel like there’s anything wrong about talking about Oprah in a thread that’s all about the Oprah-handbag incident.

I thought it was interesting that the judge wrote “And given the fact that most of them aren’t criminals, or people who fit the description of criminals, stop-and-frisk amounted to unconstitutional “racial profiling based on local criminal data.”” That was in response to a contention that it was OK for the police to be disproportionately stop-and-frisking black and Latino men because criminal suspects were disproportionately black and Latino men, and the police were stop-and-frisking those people who matched the suspect class.

Note where the racism is being located in that statement. It’s not a formal intention of the policy — the stop-and-frisk regs didn’t say “stop and frisk black and Latino men because they’re suspicious.” It’s not presupposed to be overt police racism at the individual level — i.e. it’s not that a proportion of the police are stopping black and Latino men because those police are racist, and it’s showing up in the stats. (Although of course it doesn’t rule that out either.) It’s “racial profiling based on [presumably correct] local criminal data.”

This is the point at which I’m thrown off by my own belief that stopping and frisking anyone who there’s no good reason to believe has committed a crime is just an inherently bad thing to do, racist or not. But assuming that you think that it’s inherently OK to stop-and-frisk, this is a classic case of something that people say that they do (and may even believe that they do) for non-racist reasons that has a tremendously racist effect. In order for stop-and-frisk to be stopped as a racist policy, it’s not necessary to say that the police are racists. In fact, it can be counterproductive, because then you get into questions of motive that are harder to prove statistically.

I don’t think it’s crazy to focus on the effect happening rather than the motives of the people doing the actions.

184

JW Mason 08.15.13 at 4:54 am

I don’t know, Rich, I think maybe you are over-complicating things. The city has now conceded that black and Latino men are stopped solely because of their race. (Previous they had claimed that the disproportion was because stops were focused in high-crime areas, which happen to be mostly non-white.) It seems to me that if there is (as there is!) a policy of singling out black men for a humiliating exercise of state power simply because they are black, then that is racism, full stop. It really doesn’t matter what’s in anyone’s head.

185

JW Mason 08.15.13 at 4:57 am

But I do agree with you that stop and frisk would be wrong even if it were not also a clear case of racism.

186

Rich Puchalsky 08.15.13 at 5:47 am

“It seems to me that if there is (as there is!) a policy of singling out black men for a humiliating exercise of state power simply because they are black, then that is racism, full stop. It really doesn’t matter what’s in anyone’s head.”

I think that we’re basically in agreement — I’ve been saying that effect rather than intention (“what’s in [the person doing the racist action’s] head”) is what’s important.

But I think that you’re under-complicating it a little. The city isn’t contending that they’re singling out black men “simply because they are black” (which would be straightforward racism), they’re saying that they’re singling out black men because they’re looking for suspects, and the averaged criminal suspect profile once you do a statistical study of everyone who they’re stopping happens to be mostly non-white. I don’t see a great difference between this and the high-crime area justification. The judge is overruling them not because they just admitted that they’re targeting black men because they’re black, but because they’re (ostensibly) doing something non-racist that has a racist effect anyways.

This article might be useful. It writes about how police are still allowed to use skin color in suspect descriptions, but people that they stop now have to fit more specific descriptions. If it’s true that the majority of suspects that they’re looking for are black and Latino men, then black and Latino men are still going to be the majority of people stopped. The difference is that stop-and-frisk allows them to stop a lot more people, for vaguer reasons that can just come down to skin color — but in both cases of stop-and-frisk and of stopping people who match specific descriptions, they can present the policy as non-racist in intention.

187

Mao Cheng Ji 08.15.13 at 7:12 am

“It really doesn’t matter what’s in anyone’s head”

IMO, that’s the only thing that does matter, if we are talking about racism. Because racism is the belief that one’s race determines one’s character. And so the idea that one’s race correlates with some characteristic (which is what profiling is all about) is a different idea. It might be harmful and completely unacceptable, it can be the most terrible belief in the world, but it is something else.

188

Rich Puchalsky 08.15.13 at 1:53 pm

“IMO, that’s the only thing that does matter, if we are talking about racism. ”

Well, so much for statistical studies of disparate effect, then — they don’t tell you what’s in anyone’s head. But I don’t see the need for a new word for what you call this “different idea”. When blank and Latino men get stopped and frisked routinely and white men hardly at all, then we’re in a deeply racist society even if none of the police officers or law enforcement policy-makers believe that they are racist, or hold what you describe as racist beliefs.

189

Rich Puchalsky 08.15.13 at 2:26 pm

Here’s what I think is a relevant part of the judge’s decision (sorry, I haven’t read the whole thing):

Based on the evidence summarized below, I find that the NYPD’s policy of targeting “the right people” encourages the disproportionate stopping of the members of any racial group that is heavily represented in the NYPD’s crime suspect data. This is an indirect form of racial profiling. In practice, it leads NYPD officers to stop blacks and Hispanics who would not have been stopped if they were white. There is no question that a person’s race, like a person’s height or weight, is a permissible is a permissible consideration where a stop is based on a specific description of a suspect. But it is equally clear that it is impermissible to subject all members of a racially defined group to heightened police enforcement because some members of that group appear more frequently in criminal complaints. The Equal Protection Clause does not permit race-based suspicion.

190

Bruce Wilder 08.15.13 at 2:51 pm

Racism was once an organizing assumption of a society, which implemented a program of white supremacy, in part, by heaping humiliations on members of one race. Now, racism is a taboo, and people ritually claim to never have a racist thought.

Stop-and-frisk is a policy of humiliation — to be stopped, questioned, and frisked is a humiliation. And, the police, who implement that policy, know perfectly well that they are the sharp stick of that humiliation, and, I suppose, often act accordingly, that is, with an authoritarian aggression and disrespectfulness. There’s really no way that a policy of stop-and-frisk can be implemented on the ground, with respect for the autonomy of the citizenry; it is fundamentally, an authoritarian assault on personal autonomy.

That a claim of racism is necessary or sufficient to effective political opposition to this authoritarianism is a tribute to the power of racism as an established taboo. And, the power of the taboo is further proven by the efforts made to deny racism, as well as the stridency of tribal shunning of those, to whom racism is attributed as a political motivation. But, it is also a concession that authoritarianism is uncritically accepted on its “merits”. And, that’s worrisome.

I do not think it is entirely accidental that the extremely authoritarian Obama is black, and his race gives him a degree of political immunity, which facilitates his ratification and implementation of authoritarian and economically extractive policies.

Moral righteousness is powerful stuff, and absolutely necessary to some very desirable political projects, building institutions that serve a genuinely public purpose. Focused, it comes with its own selective blindness; its light illuminates, but also shadows.

Very delicately, we need to step away from the moral power of claims of racism, long enough and far enough, to see in its own light, the wrong of the increasing authoritarianism of a government run by and for the mega-rich. We once had a taboo against torture, too. Privacy was a powerful concept, which gained us reproductive freedom and sexual liberation. Habeas corpus, the Great Writ, protected us against arbitrary detention. The holy writ of the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights mandated constraints on police and Presidents, alike.

The argument for stop-and-frisk is pragmatic: the claim is that it is “effective” in “keeping people safe”. And, there’s a facially plausible case, under an assumption of good police intentions cum omniscience. The same case that’s being pressed to legitimate pervasive surveillance, and a high rate of incarceration and a foreign policy of war crimes and subversion and handing all power in society to financial institutions.

Racism is still a potent claim, a potent taboo, but it is wearing out, from overuse, as taboos are prone to do. Meanwhile, . . .

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Mao Cheng Ji 08.15.13 at 3:01 pm

We are in a society that practice racial profiling. The society is deeply unequal in such a way that your skin color strongly correlates with your social status. That’s a fact. And so this statistical characteristic is utilized, officially and unofficially.

Note that racial profiling is only controversial, – unlike racism, which is absolutely unacceptable. You are trying to end the controversy by equating profiling with racism, but that only causes liberalism to be ridiculed. You could instead admit that profiling has benefits, and argue that the harm far outweigh those benefits. Why not do it this way? It seems like a more rational approach.

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Rich Puchalsky 08.15.13 at 3:28 pm

“That a claim of racism is necessary or sufficient to effective political opposition to this authoritarianism is a tribute to the power of racism as an established taboo.”

The judge isn’t working off of the power of a taboo — she’s citing the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The judge also found the city liable for violating 4th Amendment rights, which are supposed to cover the authoritarian aspect more generally. I agree that anti-authoritarianism should have been enough to stop stop-and-frisk by itself. (And note that the judge didn’t really stop it, just modified it.) And I generally agree with a lot of what you wrote in this comment. But there’s nothing about tribal shunning or moral righteousness that makes this particular decision enforceable.

My opinion about effects is not what the judge is working off of here, and in that sense JW Mason is right that I’m over-complicating something that’s supposed to be working off a simpler basis. Here’s another quote:

<blockquoteThe Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees to every person the equal protection of the laws. It prohibits intentional discrimination based on race. Intentional discrimination can be proved in several ways, two of which are relevant here. A plaintiff can show: (1) that a facially neutral law or policy has been applied in an intentionally discriminatory manner; or (2) that a law or policy expressly classifies persons on the basis of race, and that the classification does not survive strict scrutiny. Because there is rarely direct proof of discriminatory intent, circumstantial evidence of such intent is permitted. “The impact of the official action — whether it bears more heavily on one race than another — may provide an important starting point.”

So the law requires intentionality, although because direct proof is so hard to get, it allows circumstantial evidence of intentionality. And “intentional discrimination” is not necessarily classic racism as Mao describes.

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Mao Cheng Ji 08.15.13 at 3:47 pm

…incidentally, while police profiling only considers race as one characteristic among several, I’m pretty sure there are affirmative action programs that take into account the race only. Which is really the same approach, only more conspicuous. So, I have to assume that your argument here is not based on the desire for color-blindness, but on a cost/benefit analysis. Which is how it needs to be structured.

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Rmj 08.15.13 at 4:00 pm

The holy writ of the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights mandated constraints on police and Presidents, alike.

Um, actually: only recently, and then only for a few years.

Until the 14th Amendment, there was no attempt to enforce the “Bill of Rights” against the states. It mandated no constraints on police whatsoever (and there were no “federal police.” At least, not until J. Edgar Hoover came along.). Only after the 14th Amendment was read as making the Bill of Rights (which is the most applicable part of the Constitution to the states) apply to the states. The legal doctrine of “incorporation” slowly but surely lead to applying the first ten amendments (although mostly 1, 4, 5, and 6) to the states and restricting what they could do. And most of the rulings restraining police came out in the ’60’s, so they aren’t really all that old.

Restraints, of course, are only as good as the enforcement of them, and several (such as the war making power) have been ceded to the President de facto if not de jure. Sort of like racism; at least, according to your argument. But I think racism is still more honored in the keeping than in the breach. What is “taboo” is recognizing it, not practicing it. Indeed, racism is so taboo the mere mention of it is rejected by the powerful (like Mayor Bloomberg) out of hand, and it provides no constraint on his exercise of power because he doesn’t acknowledge it.

But it is also so taboo that it is immediately exercised against a (at one time) nameless rodeo clown with a bad sense of humor and even poorer sense of taste and decency.

The question, ultimately, is not about the taboo, but about whom it gets used against, and who gets to evade its censure. It’s still a question of power, in other words; and that issue isn’t going to wear out anytime soon.

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Andrew F. 08.15.13 at 5:39 pm

JW Mason, imho you misunderstand the City’s argument.

The City argues that NYPD really are stopping on the basis of reasonable suspicion and are NOT using racial profiling. The claim is that – and here is the crucial part for Scheindlin – assuming that the population of persons that could be reasonably suspected of criminal activity is correlated with the population of persons actually engaging in criminal activity, it is unsurprising that NYPD stops reflect certain racial disparities.

In other words, the City claims that the racial composition of the population of criminals will predict the racial composition of persons-who-could-do/exhibit-something-that-would-justify-a-stop. It’s absolutely not a claim that racial profiling is used.

Scheindlin rejects that part of the argument, and concludes instead that the racial composition of persons-who-could-do/exhibit-something-that-would-justify-a-stop will simply reflect the racial composition of persons in the area (police precincts were the defined areas). So if the racial composition of persons stopped does not reflect the racial composition of persons in the area, then NYPD is not acting in a racially neutral way.

Personally I don’t find myself persuaded by either the City’s argument or Scheindlin’s argument. The problem is that the data on stops simply isn’t very good.

As to whether a stop necessarily constitutes a “humiliation” and an “assault on personal autonomy,” that’s a bit ridiculous. A stop can consist of a police officer simply saying “hold on, I need to ask you a few questions.” In itself that isn’t necessarily humiliating, still less an assault on one’s autonomy. A policy that deliberately targets persons of a given race for repeated stops, however, certainly can be. It’s the latter that is unconstitutional. Constitutional stops, as well as constitutional frisks that may or may not accompany the stop, are perfectly fine.

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Rmj 08.15.13 at 6:13 pm

Constitutional stops, as well as constitutional frisks that may or may not accompany the stop, are perfectly fine.

Aye, but there’s the rub, because what is constitutional depends on circumstances.

First, the police officer must have a “reasonable suspicion.” NYPD has already gone back and educated it’s officers again in what constitutes “Reasonable suspicion.” It doesn’t include, obviously, walking while black. Neither does it include walking in certain neighborhoods at certain times of day, or making “furtive” movements. As the judge found, blacks were apparently more likely to be “furtive” than whites.

I’m not sure what the fault with the data is. Data from NYPD, which is as good as its going to get, showed that they stopped more blacks than the known population of blacks in NYC. It also showed there was a higher likelihood of finding a gun on a white than on a black or an Asian (and yes, I’m using “black” because I’m too lazy to type out something longer); yet significantly more blacks were stopped than whites. That, too, is a finding of the court.

You can, I suppose, argue the data the court found reliable isn’t, for some reason; but the argument really is moot at this point, at least as far as the court case is concerned. Mayor Bloomberg may want to challenge that evidence, too; but they didn’t challenge much of it in the courtroom, and didn’t try to present the Police Commissioner for testimony or to rebut his statements about blacks being stopped more because they commit more crimes (a self-fulfilling statement. If we just stopped everybody on the street, we’d find a lot of them are criminals in one sense or another).

The data, in other words, has been found as far as the court is concerned; and it’s highly unlikely the appellate court will find for the city based on evidence not now in the record, unless the data is found to be unreliable as a matter of law.

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Rich Puchalsky 08.15.13 at 6:15 pm

Oh, it’s Andrew F.! Andrew, I know that this is off-thread, but I’ve been meaning to ask you how your thoughts on NSA spying have been going. You may remember that in the first discussions of Snowden happened here, you claimed that a) it would only rarely happen that e.g. the head of NSA would blatantly lie to Congress, because that would get them in trouble, b) that the fact sheet that the NSA released to the public couldn’t be dismissed as “all lies” as I did, because they wouldn’t do that, c) that it was crankery to say that of course the NSA databases would be used for ordinary crime and indeed on anyone who anyone powerful wanted to look up. Since then, it’s been revealed that the head of the NSA did indeed blatantly lie to a direct question, and he hasn’t been punished. The fact sheet that you cited as a source has been withdrawn / disappeared when it was proven to contain all lies. And programs that — of course — use NSA monitoring of everything to create drug interdiction cases have been discovered in routine use, complete with instructions on how to conceal their use to avoid the legal doctrine about fruit of the poisoned tree. Together with uncovered additional requests from law enforcement to use the data for e.g. copyright violation cases.

Has any of this changed your opinions at all? Are you capable of admitting that your entire worldview is wrong? Or even any small part of it?

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Bruce Wilder 08.16.13 at 12:48 am

Andrew F:

As to whether a stop necessarily constitutes a “humiliation” and an “assault on personal autonomy,” that’s a bit ridiculous. A stop can consist of a police officer simply saying “hold on, I need to ask you a few questions.” In itself that isn’t necessarily humiliating, still less an assault on one’s autonomy.

Separate but equal might not seem necessarily unequal, either, but, in practice, it tended to be. I think any good lawyer would advise, absolutely, never ever answering a policeman’s questions, concerning your own conduct. After you advisedly refuse to answer the policeman’s questions — as is your undoubted Constitutional right — how do you think that encounter is going to evolve? Will the policeman politely acknowledge the right against self-incrimination, which he, a moment ago, sought to violate? Apologize for detaining you? If people detained or searched under “stop-and-frisk” were free to refuse to be stopped, questioned or frisked, it wouldn’t be much a policy, would it?

The police are being required, by the mayoral administration, under this policy, to do something, which most of them, with the best training in the world, are humanly incapable of doing respectfully. To stop people, with a genuine suspicion that those people are up to no good, is an inherently aggressive thing to do. The policeman has to be a little afraid, as he initiates what is an aggressive confrontation. And, the person stopped has to be afraid, because the policeman is confronting them, and doing so with a suspicion of criminal conduct, and the power of a policeman to arrest and jail the subject on his own mere motion. The policeman must act aggressively to ensure control of the suspect (and the stopped person is a suspect, as soon that person is stopped); it will not be a pleasant encounter.

To do such stops, when they are genuinely required by manifest criminal activity, is stressful enough for the police and for the community, which may well feel caught in what may a cross-fire, literally as well as figuratively. To make a policy out of multiplying such confrontations into a police routine, displacing other important interactions between police and the public, changes the character of the police and the community, in ugly ways.

Race, and racial prejudice and animus, is exacerbated by mandating police conduct of this kind as a daily routine procedure. You are asking people — police — who may be inclined to authoritarian attitudes as part of class background, as well as serving in a uniformed hierarchy, with authorized violence, to do something, which will make a tendency, which might otherwise be controlled by professional training and norms, manifest as the face of urban policing. I’m not talking about profiling or statistics. I’m talking about how someone, who has to be aggressive, gets nasty, and rationalizes, after the fact, aggressive behavior toward people. One reasonable hypothesis would be that police will tend to pick people they view as “other” for such confrontations. Another ugly feedback loop.

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Andrew F. 08.16.13 at 6:18 pm

Rmj,

The data derives from a database of UF-250 forms that NYPD officers fill out whenever they effect a stop on the basis of reasonable suspicion (these forms are not necessarily filled out when an officer is directly making an arrest, e.g. after witnessing the arrestee committing a crime).

For anyone interested, you can obtain NYPD’s data on stops going back to 2003, by year, at NYC’s website.

These forms are not designed to indicate whether the stop meets the threshold of reasonable suspicion. Instead they’re used partly for investigative purposes, and partly to track the “productivity” of an officer or unit (this latter use is probably their primary use – NYPD keeps amazingly close track of metrics like this, and uses them and other metrics to provide fast, blunt, performance feedback while shifting resources to different areas depending on need – by all accounts it is a grueling system).

These forms consist primarily of checkboxes, such as “Carrying Objects in Plain View Used in Commission of Crime,” “Fits Description”, “Actions Indicating Drug Transaction” etc. The checkboxes do not enable us to determine whether the stop was in fact constitutional, a fact that Scheindlin readily states in her opinion.

So we immediately have a problem in using these forms to determine whether there are widespread violations of 4th Amendment rights. The plaintiffs’ expert places 6% of stops as “apparently unjustified” based on certain combinations of checkboxes; Scheindlin suggests that this underestimates the actual number because some of the checkbox categories (such as Furtive Movement or High Crime Area) can be wrongly applied. Of course she is correct that they can be wrongly applied; these are very general categories used on a checkbox form, and are not intended to capture fully the facts surrounding a stop.

We also have a problem using these forms to determine whether racial profiling is being used. This is largely because of the absence of pertinent details from the UF-250 forms, and (perhaps equally) because of the problem of determining a good benchmark. On the latter issue, I already described the differences between Scheindlin and the City in my last comment. (simplifying) Scheindlin wants to use racial proportions in the overall population as the benchmark, and the City thinks that racial proportions in the population of descriptions of criminal suspects is the better benchmark. The benchmark issue is particularly difficult, as ideally one would want to look at the population of persons exposed to police patrols, i.e. all persons observed by NYPD patrols, and that’s a difficult number to determine.

As to NYC’s chances or strategy on appeal, I haven’t looked closely enough to have an opinion on the subject.

Rich,

Actually I think the facts have largely confirmed my views on the NSA’s programs. Your example of the NSA lying to Congress is off the mark, because in the case you offer the Committee knew the full answer before the question was asked publicly, i.e. the facts were properly and fully disclosed to the Committee. Clapper’s answer was evasive with respect to the public – though technically not inaccurate – but did not constitute an attempt to deceive the Committee or Congress. Access to the metadata database has been, as I predicted, extremely limited and well audited. Access to data drawn from international sources has been tracked to determine where that access might draw upon US citizens or persons within the US, analyzed, and corrected – a process of improvement that I would guess continues today. I’m not sure what you’re referencing regarding drug interdiction – happy to take a look at it, though, if you have a link.

Bruce,

A cop doesn’t violate your right to not incriminate yourself by asking you a question. He’s free to ask; you’re free to not answer. This applies regardless of whether the cop has actually effected a stop to ask you questions, or whether the cop has NOT effected a stop but has approached you to ask questions.

But does a stop necessarily have to be humiliating or an assault on your autonomy? It’s the “necessarily” part of your original comment that caught my attention. And my answer remains no – this depends on other factors (the way the stop is effected, the questions asked, the purpose of the stop, etc). A stop may be quite jarring, or it may consist of little more than “can I please see some identification? Okay, thanks.” As I said, though, a policy of repeatedly targeting persons because of their race would certainly be both humiliating and unconstitutional.

I think where you and I disagree is on the question of what a policy of permitting constitutional stops will likely develop into. In practice, you seem to think that it would lead inevitably(? – you may think training could prevent this though) to a vicious, self-amplifying cycle of abuse. With proper training and supervising, I don’t think that’s the case. Without it, I think some of the factors you mention could lead to lots of bad behavior – on that point, we agree.

As to the background of the NYPD, off the top of my head, the class that graduated from NYC’s police academy last month derived from somewhere around 48 different countries, and spoke 40 different languages (and these are the officers who will be used, I believe, to flood high crime areas as they occur). The antagonism that develops between the police and some communities remains a problem, I agree, but I think this is due to factors other than the background of police officers.

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Fu Ko 08.17.13 at 3:10 am

“He’s free to ask; you’re free to not answer.”

Oh hogwash. Often the police will violate some minor legal right of yours, just to demonstrate to you that they will not allow your legal rights to get in the way. What do you do after that? Your calculus cannot be informed by an assumption of protection under the law, unless there is a third party witness with a camera. And the police habitually make sure to it that there is not.

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Mao Cheng Ji 08.17.13 at 11:23 am

Yes cops are bastards. And anybody with authority, really, like your parents when you are 16. Otoh, life in a poor neighborhood in a city can be so rough that you might prefer the cops do their thing.

An intellectual living in a nice neighborhood sees it one way, and the mayor might see it in a completely different way.

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Mao Cheng Ji 08.17.13 at 2:12 pm

It occurs to me that this could be a good illustration of what I was talking about earlier: racism vs profiling. If you live in a poor crime-ridden area, and the cops are acting in a racist manner: harassing the ‘uppity’ and ignoring crime – you’ll hate it, obviously. Otoh, if the cops are professional crime-fighters who employ profiling, so that there is a huge statistical disparity between stops in your area and upper east side – you’ll probably love it. And when new mayor JW Mason insists on redeploying half of them elsewhere to keep the white/black stop&search ratio under control, you might even consider that racist. make sense?

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Fu Ko 08.17.13 at 9:23 pm

One thing I never heard my parents shout when I was 16 is “He has a camera! Get him!”

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