Let’s be clear: no woman asks to live in a rape culture: we all want it over, yesterday. Mixed signals about female autonomy won’t help bring it down, and neither will asking nicely. Nothing changes until truly powerful offenders start to fall.
The #MeToo movement, Kingsolver argues, must not be muted by backlash, especially one that focuses on tone. This commentary coincides with what appears to be a never-ending unmasking of open secrets, recently including Sherman Alexie and Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket).
While the backlash and perverse charges of “witch hunt” are valid elements to investigate and reject, just as discussions of race and racism are often derailed by arguments that our problems are really about social class, the #MeToo confrontation of the open secret about sexual harassment and assault tends to skirt the larger culture that allows the secret to fester—capitalism.
Consider David Perry’s Sherman Alexie and Daniel Handler that includes a very important point that can be linked to Kingsolver’s “truly powerful offenders”:
In my Daniel Handler story, I referenced a series of anonymous comments accusing Alexie. I received a little pushback on that, but felt confident in the appropriateness of citing it. I brought it up because of this twitter thread from Allie Jane Bruce, one of the women who talked about Handler….
Bruce writes, “What you will hear, if you listen, is two cis men who speak the language of liberalism, progressivism, and feminism *perfectly* and are capitalizing on it. Using it to promote themselves and their books.” [1]
The #MeToo movement has been a powerful force for exposing toxic masculinity and rape culture, but we must also come to understand that toxic masculinity and rape culture flourish within an even larger culture targeted by Bruce, capitalizing.
The open secret phenomenon is fueled by, made possible because enough people are somehow profiting from the monsters perpetrating sexual harassment and assault.
This helps more fully explain nearly all of these high-profile predatory men from Trump to the newest revelations about Alexie and Handler.
Gender, race, and social class imbalances of power are created and perpetuated by capitalism (a twisted lottery effect that coerces people to tolerate and hide monstrous behavior because they may profit—even when those chances are slim to none), and as a consequence, open secrets persist because sexual harassment and assault are underreported; for example, as Alexie’s non-apology statement confirms, women sexually harassed and assaulted often remain silent, and silenced:
The majority of sexual assaults, an estimated 63 percent, are never reported to the police (Rennison, 2002). The prevalence of false reporting cases of sexual violence is low (Lisak, Gardinier, Nicksa, & Cote, 2010), yet when survivors come forward, many face scrutiny or encounter barriers. For example, when an assault is reported, survivors may feel that their victimization has been redefined and even distorted by those who investigate, process, and categorize cases. (Research on false reporting)
As Kingsolver implores, #MeToo voices need to press forward, women supported by men as allies. The unmasking by #MeToo can unravel toxic masculinity and rape culture, but even as that important work builds momentum, I think we must not be distracted from the equally toxic influence of capitalism, the allure of profit, that also provides cover for the monsters walking among us.
The powerful preying on the powerless is a terrible curse on humanity; supporting and listening to the voices of victims can serve to restore some of that humanity lost as we must once again admit that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”
It’s amazing the amount confidence those outside of writing studies have in their wisdom about how writing works, as though no one has thought about or studied these things before, or there isn’t an entire body of research and theory already at work in the field.
My response was something like “Welcome to my world!” since educators, practitioners and scholars, have worked through the high-stakes accountability era under that exact environment: Politicians, the public, and pundits holding forth on teaching and learning as if no practice or research has ever existed, and then, policy being adopted that seems at times purposefully endorsing what practice and research explicitly reject.
For just one glimpse into “my world,” consider that a couple years ago a journalist at a newspaper reached out to me through social media. When we talked by phone, the journalist immediately confessed that they had taken the education reporter position to get in the door; the journalist has no background in education, or even in covering education as a journalist.
This is a routine fact I witness constantly—journalists have training in journalism (itself a serious problem, as I have confronted often) and then are expected to navigate topics and fields simply by seeking out both sides of the issue, despite having no expertise for determining the credibility of any claims about the topic.
The result is that most media coverage of education is at best misleading, and often in ways that contribute to flawed public perceptions and decades of misguided policy.
Concurrent to Warner’s confronting naive experts—who pose far greater threats to our democracy than fake news—one of the poster boys for the arrogance of public commentary absent any real expertise or experience in the field, Jonathan Chait, held forth about the Obama education legacy, arguing that this legacy is positive but ignored.
Chait suffers from the Columbus effect—”Look! I found this thing!”—and appears completely clueless that throughout the Obama administration, scholars and educators mostly rejected Obama’s education reform agenda that was almost indistinguishable from the equally flawed education agenda under George W. Bush (see this edited volume and my essay).
While Chait benefits from his bully pulpit as a christened public intellectual, most people will fail to read the far more credible and evidence-based responses from Peter Greene and Jersey Jazzman.
Greene dismantles Chait through a series of 9 powerful points, and I want to note that #5 (“Chait doesn’t know what the “sides” are”) serves as an excellent entry point into my own post from 2013 that frames the education reform “sides” in ways that Chait cannot fathom. Chait is trapped in making everything about partisan politics, instead of having experience and expertise in education, which would help him see that ideology is more powerful than crass partisan politics.
Jersey Jazzman builds on Greene’s post and offers a very important framing; naive experts fumble fields in which they have no credibility, but scholars in one discipline often tread into other disciplines in the same sort of ham-fisted ways [1]:
Chait’s piece here is an excellent example of this problem [“naive expert”]. So allow me to take a pointed stick and poke it into the econometric beehive; here are some things everyone should understand about recent research on things like charter schools and teacher evaluation that too many economists never seem to get around to mentioning.
And while Warner laments the damage done to teaching writing, and I have fretted for decades about how naive experts have caused us never to fulfill the promise of universal public education, a far more troubling example of this threat is now playing out in the U.S. where we are in a perpetual state of moving past the most recent mass or school shooting.
From school safety to gun control debates, most in the media are allowing commentary based on the person’s status, and almost no media are requiring an evidence-based discussion. Just as mainstream media have been complicit in the failures of education reform since the early 1980s, mainstream media are complicit in the political and public paralysis that continues to allow mass and school shootings in the U.S.
While politicians and the media toss around “the marketplace of ideas” to justify the “both sides” and “all voices matter” approaches for public discourse, failing to address the credibility of voices ultimately fails that marketplace.
Expertise and experience matter, in fact, in ways that naive experts fail miserably.
So let me end by returning to Columbus, mentioned briefly above.
The Columbus myth—that he discovered America—endured and continues to endure because of the Columbus effect, those without real and nuanced historical knowledge or sensitivity to native people both created and then perpetuated a provably false narrative about Columbus and his often inhumane as well as incompetent reign as a so-called explorer.
Even as historians unpacked the Columbus myth, however, the punditry and public have continued to frame the facts of history as political correctness or some sort of misguided social justice over-reach (see also the chasm between historical facts about and the myth of the Founding Fathers).
The naive position combined with power, like Columbus, works in ways that harm everyone.
Expertise and experience are not perfect, but they do offer the better opportunity for creating a more perfect union.
Yes, let’s discredit fake news, but let’s also admit that the naive expert punditry poses the greatest threat to our democracy and humanity.
The findings of the Safe School Initiative suggest that there are productive actions that educators, law enforcement officials and others can pursue in response to the problem of targeted school violence. Specifically, Initiative findings suggest that these officials may wish to consider focusing their efforts to formulate strategies for preventing these attacks in two principal areas:
developing the capacity to pick up on and evaluate available or knowable information that might indicate that there is a risk of a targeted school attack; and,
employing the results of these risk evaluations or “threat assessments” in developing strategies to prevent potential school attacks from occurring.
Support for these suggestions is found in 10 key findings of the Safe School Initiative study. These findings are as follows:
Incidents of targeted violence at school rarely were sudden, impulsive acts.
Prior to most incidents, other people knew about the attacker’s idea and/or plan to attack.
Most attackers did not threaten their targets directly prior to advancing the attack.
There is no accurate or useful “profile” of students who engaged in targeted school violence.
Most attackers engaged in some behavior prior to the incident that caused others concern or indicated a need for help.
Most attackers had difficulty coping with significant losses or personal failures. Moreover, many had considered or attempted suicide.
Many attackers felt bullied, persecuted or injured by others prior to the attack.
Most attackers had access to and had used weapons prior to the attack.
In many cases, other students were involved in some capacity.
Despite prompt law enforcement responses, most shooting incidents were stopped by means other than law enforcement intervention.
If anything, the response of the Kentucky lawmakers represents what has been called the “target-hardening” approach to school shootings. This approach attempts to fortify schools against gun violence through increased security measures. These measures may include metal detectors, lock-down policies, “run, hide, fight” training and surveillance cameras.
While some of these measures seem sensible, overall there is little empirical evidence that such security measures decrease the likelihood of school shootings. Surveillance cameras were powerless to stop the carnage in Columbine and school lock-down policies did not save the children at Sandy Hook.
The tragedies at Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, and Sandy Hook Elementary School catapulted concern about school shootings into the national spotlight. Calls for something to be done to protect our students, faculty, and staff became a salient concern for school administrators, with many schools hiring armed security officers, restricting access to campus buildings, installing metal detectors, and training individuals how to respond when a shooter enters school grounds. However, many of these security measures were implemented with little to no consultation of the empirical literature. This failure to enact evidence-based responses has had fiscal and latent consequences that are only now being discovered. This essay seeks to fill that void by examining the empirical evidence surrounding common security measures enacted in response to well-publicized school shootings and calling for the use of an evidence-based approach to school safety.
There is no clear evidence that the use of metal detectors, security cameras, or guards in schools is effective in preventing school violence, 8,9,10,11 and little is known about the potential for unintended consequences that may accompany their adoption.12
There has not been sufficient research to determine if the presence of metal detectors in schools reduces the risk of violent behavior among students. 13
Some researchers have expressed concern about the widespread use of guards, cameras, and other security technologies, given that so little is known about their effectiveness. 14,15
Research has found security strategies, such as the use of security guards and metal detectors, to be consistently ineffective in protecting students16 and to be associated with more incidents of school crime and disruption17 and higher levels of disorder in schools. 18
Evidence from a school–police partnership implemented in New York City reveals that students in these schools continue to experience higher than average problems linked directly to future criminality, compared to students in other New York City schools not involved in the partnership. 19
Surveillance cameras in schools may have the effect of simply moving misbehavior to places in schools or outside of schools that lack surveillance. Even more troubling, it’s possible that cameras may function as enticement to large-scale violence, such as in the case of the Virginia Tech shooter who mailed video images of himself to news outlets.20
Research suggests that the presence of security guards and metal detectors in schools may actually increase levels of violence in schools by strengthening the influence of youth “street” culture with its emphasis on self-protection.21
More than 30 peer-reviewed studies, focusing on individuals as well as populations, have been published that confirm what Kellermann’s studies suggested: that guns are associated with an increased risk for violence and homicide. “There is really uniform data to support the statement that access to firearms is associated with an increased risk of firearm-related death and injury,” Wintemute concludes. Gun advocates argue the causes are reversed: surges in violent crime lead people to buy guns, and weapons do not create the surge. But if that were true, gun purchases would increase in tandem with all kinds of violence. In reality, they do not.
In the wake of high-profile incidents of school violence, school officials have increased their reliance on a host of surveillance measures to maintain order and control in their schools. Paradoxically, such practices can foster hostile environments that may lead to even more disorder and dysfunction. These practices may also contribute to the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline” by pushing more students out of school and into the juvenile justice system. However, not all students experience the same level of surveillance. This Article presents data on school surveillance practices, including an original empirical analysis of restricted data recently released by the U.S. Department of Education after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Paralleling other disturbing trends of inequality in our public school system, these results and other empirical analyses reveal that schools serving primarily students of color are more likely to rely on more intense surveillance measures than other schools. Further, the empirical evidence suggests that these racial disparities may not be justified by legitimate safety concerns. This Article then turns to a discussion of the role that implicit racial bias may have in school officials’ decisions to rely on intense surveillance methods. Finally, it proposes legislation and strategies that federal lawmakers, state lawmakers, and school officials should adopt to counteract the effect of implicit racial bias on school officials’ decisions to implement strict security measures (and other decisions school officials make). Implementing these recommendations will help create better learning environments that benefit students of all races.
Using a nationally representative sample of approximately 3,500 public schools, this study builds on and extends our knowledge of how ‘‘minority threat’’ manifests within schools. We test whether various disciplinary policies and practices are mobilized in accordance with Latino/a student composition, presumably the result of a group response to perceptions that white racial dominance is jeopardized. We gauge how schools’ Latino/a student populations are associated with the availability and use of several specific types of discipline. We further explore possible moderating influences of school crime and economic disadvantage on punishment. We find that schools with larger percentages of Latino/a students are more likely to favor certain punitive responses and less likely to favor certain mild responses, as predicted by minority threat. The percentage of Latino/a students is also related to greater use of certain disciplinary responses in schools with less crime.
The supposed link between mental illness and violence is so ingrained in our culture that stories like the above need only suggest that the perpetrator was depressed to satisfy a need for an explanation. Research reveals a far different story, however. People with mental illnesses are actually far more likely to be victims rather than perpetrators of violence (Appleby et. al., 2001). Those with severe mental illnesses (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, psychosis) are actually 2.5 times more likely to be victims of a violent crime than the general population (Hiday, 2006). A 2011 study found that to prevent one violent homicide by a person with schizophrenia, 35,000 patients deemed to be at a high risk of violence would need to be detained (Large et. al., 2011). And yet the link persists. A 2013 survey conducted after the Newtown shooting found that 46 percent of Americans believe that persons with a serious mental illness are “far more dangerous than the general population” (Barry et. al., 2013).
The lessons to be learned from the MacArthur Study are those that we have identified in our various publications. Among the more salient findings, violence risk attributed to people with mental disorders vastly exceeds the actual risk presented. Indeed, for people who do not abuse alcohol and drugs, there is no reason to anticipate that they present greater risk than their neighbors. The predictors of violence by people with mental disorders are more similar to than different from the predictors for the population as a whole, including alcohol and drug abuse. Violence in this population only rarely results in serious injury or death and generally does not involve the use of weapons. People with mental disorders are less likely than people without such disorders to assault strangers and to commit assaults in public places. Although there is suggestive evidence that remaining in treatment may reduce rates of violence among some persons with mental disorders, better data are needed; it is unlikely that treatment alone will eliminate violence risk.
Most Mass Shooters Are Not Mentally Ill, Carmela Epright
A great deal of commentary attempts to tie mass shootings to a single issue. Often, that seems like the easiest way to make sense of atrocities. That’s why we get sound bites that lean on mental health (when shooters are white), terrorist ties and affiliations (when shooters are brown), gang violence and “urban decay” (when shooters are black), bullying (when it happens in a school), and overwork (when it happens in a workplace).
The truth cannot be boiled down to any single issue. As sociologists, we can look to the bigger picture, point out patterns, and identify common denominators. Our research suggests that gun control is, indeed, an important piece of the problem. But in order to understand the factors behind America’s mass shootings, it is also critical to consider the relationship between masculinity and violence.
Scholars who study masculinity and mass shootings have consistently drawn attention to the fact that mass shootings are not only a uniquely American social problem; they are a problem with American men. We’ve argued before that there are two questions that require explanation related to gender and mass shootings. First, why is it that men commit virtually all mass shootings? And second, why do American men commit mass shootings more than men anywhere else in the world?
Studies of whether active-shooter drills actually prevent harm are all but impossible. Case studies are difficult to parse. In Parkland, for example, the site of the recent shooting, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, had an active-shooter drill just last month. The shooter had been through such drills. Purposely countering them may have been a reason that, as he was beginning his rampage, the shooter pulled a fire alarm.
In any case, preparedness drills always change the baseline level of risk that people perceive. This heightening can manifest as stress and anxiety, not to mention changing the way kids understand how people treat one another—to even consider violence an option, not in some abstract way.
Colleen Derkatch, an associate professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, studies how we assess risk when it comes to our health. “The more prepared we are, the more heightened our sense of risk,” she told me. “And one potential effect we haven’t considered is how these kinds of preparedness activities affect kids psychologically, and could increase a sense of feeling at risk. They really expand the ways in which we feel increasingly under siege.”
The National LGBTQ Task Force is a progressive social justice organization that works toward a society that values and respects the diversity of human expression and identity, and achieves equity for all. As the progressive voice of the LGBTQ movement, the Task Force approaches gun violence prevention from an intersectional framework conscious of issues such as racial justice, disability justice, and reproductive justice. These policy recommendations are meant to provide a guide for policy makers and advocates alike on advocacy for gun violence prevention from a progressive, intersectional perspective. In this policy brief, we have identified 10 recommendations for addressing our nation’s gun violence epidemic.
[NOTE: This was submitted to and rejected by The State. I find that the articles and commentaries on gun control and school safety are mainly absent evidence/research, and too often the media allows unsupported claims to some because of status, not credibility. See this horrible commentary, for example.]
Political and public responses to the school shooting in Parkland, Florida are poised to make the same mistakes we have witnessed concerning school reform for four decades: focusing on in-school policies and practices only while ignoring the social impact on schools as well as the research base on those policies and practices.
My recommendations are all achievable and avoid the most controversial ideas, so that they have a chance of happening…:Install metal detectors, restrict campus and building access and connect 360-degree interior and exterior video monitoring for every public school.
And a letter to editor a couple days later suggested: “The only answer is to secure the schools like other government buildings. The shooters know schools are largely gun-free zones that have no immediate defense.”
However, the research base on security measures offers chilling facts about these solutions:
There is no clear evidence that the use of metal detectors, security cameras, or guards in schools is effective in preventing school violence, and little is known about the potential for unintended consequences that may accompany their adoption.
In fact,
Research has found security strategies, such as the use of security guards and metal detectors, to be consistently ineffective in protecting students and to be associated with more incidents of school crime and disruption and higher levels of disorder in schools.
For example,
Surveillance cameras in schools may have the effect of simply moving misbehavior to places in schools or outside of schools that lack surveillance. Even more troubling, it’s possible that cameras may function as enticement to large-scale violence, such as in the case of the Virginia Tech shooter who mailed video images of himself to news outlets.
While adding security measures is a compelling emotional (and politically effective) argument, those measures may create a false sense of security and even increase the likelihood of violence. This parallels the abundance of evidence that more guns do not make us safe, but create more gun violence.
Equally important but often unmentioned, increased school security measures are typically racially biased and unfairly target black and Latinx students, even when these populations are not more violent.
We once again face the harsh reality that, yes, the amount of guns and easy gun access are at the source of why mass and school shootings have become common place in our country, but not in other countries.
Consider that other countries have mental illness and all the complications associated with formal schooling, suggesting that these factors cannot be blamed for our gun violence. Notably, people with mental illness are less violent than the rest of the population but are far more prone to being victims of violence.
Yet, mass shootings and school shootings have more than guns in common; most of these tragedies can also be linked to angry white males who feel a sense of privilege, once combined with easy access to guns results in the loss of innocent lives.
The Parkland, Florida shooter’s violent outburst also confronts us with a truly disturbing message since the shooter himself had gone through active shooter training and knew better how to stalk his victims. Again, implementing safety measures are unlikely to make students safer and can even put them in worse danger.
Ultimately, we must resist the fatalism that gun control will not work, or that there is nothing we can do. I cannot stress enough that other countries have effectively curbed gun violence and school shootings.
As Bryan Warnick, Benjamin A. Johnson, and Sam Rocha conclude, “instead of trying to find solutions to school shootings in the dubious arms of security technologies, or even solely through more promising public policy, society should ask deeper questions about the nature of education and schooling in American society.”
More guns mean more violence, in society and schools. Gun-free zones are one approach worth considering for in-school solutions, but that simply will not be enough.
Each mass and school shooting in the US is a damning lesson we seem to refuse to learn, and as long as we focus on school policies and practices while ignoring the cancer of our larger gun culture as well as the research on what works and what doesn’t, we are doomed to mourning more needlessly lost lives.
Political, public, and media negligence is complicit in those tragedies.
Over a couple of days, I interacted with two journalists considering or working on articles about education (one about arming teachers and the other about a major charter chain in the Midwest).
One journalist was soliciting through Facebook teachers’ opinions on arming teachers, asking specifically for both teachers for and against*. The other journalist arranged a phone interview with me about “no excuses” approaches to discipline in schools, a conversation that ended with requesting if I knew other scholars/professors who were for “no excuses” practices (since I had spoken conclusive against).
In my course on scholarly reading and writing in education, students are applying critical discourse analysis to how media cover key education issues, and then framing that against the high-quality research base on those issues. Two of the concerns we are confronting about media include “both sides” journalism [1] (providing both sides of an issue as a foundational approach to all issues) and crossing the Bigfoot line [2] (reporting on the fact of something being claimed—as in writing a story about someone claiming to see Bigfoot—with no context of whether the claim is credible).
If an article on arming teachers flatly states that arming teachers is currently a debate (which crosses the Bigfoot line) and then includes 2-3 teachers for and 2-3 teachers against, most readers will conclude that the debate is a simple for/against issue with both sides equally credible and equally supported by teachers.
John Warner, however, confronts that simplistic approach:
Obviously, Trump will never issue an actual proposal to arm teachers because it is an absurd idea which shouldn’t even be considered. But because of the structural biases of how the media treats the “presidency” he can get away with launching a non-debate “debate.”
The gravity of the position of president contributes to the media crossing the Bigfoot line and shirking their critical obligations by, as Warner notes, promoting a non-debate debate.
When the other journalist inquired about scholars/professors supporting “no excuses” practices, I warned about the need to consider the credibility of those scholars (since the ones I could identify have clear conflicts of interest because of the funding for their endowed chairs and department).
“Both sides” journalism and crossing the Bigfoot line, then, fail public discourse and likely public policy because they misrepresent the proportion of support for issues (some issues are fairly equally supported, but many issues are well established on one side and have almost no credibility on the so-called “other” side—think Holocaust denial) and fail to address the credibility of that support**.
Here, we also confront the problem with polling. Polls after the Parkland, Florida school shooting show the general public supports gun control and are about split on arming teachers:
Nearly two-thirds of Americans support stricter laws on gun sales, including an increasing number of Republicans, but the public divides on the idea of allowing more teachers and school officials to carry guns. Arming teachers draws partisan splits, with Republicans in favor and Democrats opposed, a CBS News poll reveals.
Therefore, crossing the Bigfoot line illustrates that reporting the fact of this data fails to address whether or not those opinions are informed.
A “both sides” media are not making the critical step of investigating if public opinion matches research and evidence.
That people think something is accurate is dangerous if those beliefs aren’t supported by evidence—and if the democratic process allows public belief to drive public policy.
A critical media would frame that calling for arming teachers is deeply flawed and not supported by evidence on guns, active shooter events, and research on safety policies for schools—regardless of political and public support.
A country with school shootings, mass shootings, and gun violence as common place tragedies cannot afford a misinformed political leadership and public, and without a critical media, we have little chance of rising above and then moving beyond being a negligent country that fiddles while children die regularly in a spray of gunfire.
In a recent class, as we discussed my exchanges with journalists and the problems with “both sides” journalism, one student asked what journalists should do, specifically raising concerns about not including alternative viewpoints.
This critical and important question leads to recognizing that “both sides” journalism ultimately is overly simplistic and that covering issues is far more complex—requiring journalists to evaluate the topic and the credibility of viewpoints before deciding how to present the topic in a way that reflects the proportion and credibility of so-called “sides.”
Once we acknowledge that we make this choice all the time—for example, media covering domestic abuse never seek out those who endorse hitting spouses/women—we then can seek media standards that are critical and informative instead of striking a faux and harmful pose of neutrality.
That neutrality is always a lie since covering a topic, crossing the Bigfoot line, is a political act in itself and one that does far more harm than good—especially in moments of great violence and the urgency required to make better choices as a free people.
THREAD: UK Parliament launching an inquiry into the effect of smartphones on young people: here is why this is fiasco for science and science communication (1/16)https://t.co/1QFMkuu9PJ
Although I am sure more people have blocked me on social media, I remain aware of and concerned about two of those—both women, one black and one white.
The reason for my concern is that I would count them both members of the communities I support, ideologically and practically. Also, since I am blocked, I remain mostly uncertain of why, although with one I did have an exchange on an email forum about her perceptions of me (what I view as unwarranted assumptions).
Being blocked, I recognize however, was the result of both these women functioning in much narrower margins than I do because of my privileges of gender, race, and economics. In other words, regardless of my good intentions, regardless of whether or not I behaved in any way that warranted being blocked, these women do not have the margins to risk examining whether I am part of the toxic masculinity, toxic whiteness, or toxic affluence that threatens them moment by moment.
Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir in their Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much label the margins of economic privilege and disadvantage as “slack” (privilege and thus huge margins) and “scarcity” (disadvantage and thus very thin margins). I think those terms apply equally as well to gender and race.
In retrospect, I am reminded of a moment from my teaching high school English when a white boy brushed a copy of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” from his desk when I handed them out, announcing that he wasn’t reading that “[racial slur].” The student was adamant that King was an adulterer, having a pamphlet that excoriated King; the pamphlet, if one bothered to look carefully, had been created by the KKK, which had a vibrant following in the small town just south of the high school.
The margins (scarcity) for MLK—using “adultery” as a veneer for racism—must be placed against, for example, the social slack afforded John F. Kennedy, who is allowed his claimed accomplishments despite his personal indiscretions, unlike how any small failure by MLK is used to discredit all of his work.
More recently, the US has witnessed eight years of unrelenting discrediting of Barack Obama as president through unfounded claims about his birthplace; Obama as the first black president had to be perfect or completely discredited.
Immediately succeeding Obama is Donald Trump, who survived video/audio evidence of language and attitudes toward women most people would not tolerate in children; in other words, Trump’s gender, race, and economic privilege (slack) is so powerful, he appears nearly capable of doing anything with impunity.
Trump himself declared this himself during his campaign:
This is the most vivid and gross example of the power of slack grounded in race, gender, and economic privilege.
Black Film/ White Film: More on Slack and Scarcity
Since I am a comic book advocate, having collected Marvel comics throughout the 1970s and more recently published scholarship on the intersections of race and gender in superhero comics, I have watched and listened carefully to the public responses to Black Panther, the most recent Marvel Universe film.
While I have not yet seen the film, I have followed the sputtering path of the character Black Panther since he was introduced in the 1960s; as a teenager collecting comics, I was a fan of Black Panther as well as The Falcon, who was cover-billed along with Captain America throughout much of the 1970s.
I lacked critical discernment as a teen, but can recognize that these two characters laid a foundation for my discovering black authors and thinkers in college as I struggled to cast off the worst aspects of my upbringing in the racist and intolerant South.
Most have responded to Black Panther the film with enthusiasm and even glee, and the box office has reflected some powerfully positive messages about black films and actors. But a few have begun to unpack problems with nationalism and the white savior trope in the narrative.
Here we may be inclined to argue that the highest form of equity, the absence of racism, would require that the film receive something akin to objective analyses—not unduly criticized (veneers for racism) and not sheltered from criticism as a sort of inverse racism.
There, however, this claim is not as simple as it may seem—especially if we ground how we respond to the film in terms of slack and scarcity, in terms of the King/Kennedy inequity.
Certainly, the film cannot be above credible criticism, but in that pursuit, we must guard against the perfection bar often manifested as scarcity when applied to disadvantages associated with race, class, and gender.
White films, for example, are not called “white,” but simply films. Adam Sandler and Kevin James, for example, have long resumes of films that certainly have been allowed an incredible amount of slack—forgiven the nearly unforgivable (think Trump) for hopes of some glimmer of humor nestled among the truly cliche, offensive, and just plain lazy.
Black Panther, even in the praise, is rendered into scarcity as a black film, and by implication must carry the weight of all black films, all black actors, all black writers (although the character was spawned by white creators in a very white, often racist industry).
Since Kevin James was allowed Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, just how close to perfect does Black Panther need to be?
The truest test of equity may be that all films have the same degree of slack.
School Safety: Slack and Scarcity as a Matter of Life and Death
While many in the US are reveling in the pop culture frenzy around Black Panther, the ugliest aspects of American culture once again expose how our on-screen violences pale against our gun culture and the ever-present threat of mass shootings, especially at the expense of students in school.
Although most mass shooters are white men, gun violence tends to prompt concerns about gangs and black-on-black crime, yet another demonstration of inequitable margins: White male mass shooters never prompt outcries about all white men (since the shooters are often framed as mentally ill) even though simply the threat of terrorism evokes blanket narratives and even policies about Muslims.
The paradox of gun violence and mass shootings in the US is that Americans have experienced increasingly less crime over the past four or so decades, even as the rate of mass shootings and gun violence remains disturbingly high when compared to other countries.
Debates about gun violence become yet more evidence of slack and scarcity linked to race.
Why has the country responded so positively to the teens speaking out after the shooting in Parkland, Florida but tended to reject or ignore the outcries from teens surrounding the all-to-frequent police shootings of young blacks, the #BlackLivesMatter movement?
Simply stated, when anything appears to encroach on the huge slack whites perceive (safety in this case), mainstream responses flair, but the margins for safety are so thin for blacks, for example, that to live in danger as a black person has become normalized beneath the implication that blacks themselves are the ones perpetuating violence.*
Whites as victims (slack), and blacks as violent (scarcity).
Taking care about whether or not we criticize Black Panther holds some important symbolic value, but in terms of how we respond to a school shootings, we are now making decisions that are life and death.
Responses to the Parkland, Florida shooting have focused on how to make schools safer—in part, to avoid the larger gun control debate that is muted by the NRA.
Arming teachers is one extreme, but in an Op-Ed for The State (Columbia, SC), Will Britt argues:
My recommendations are all achievable and avoid the most controversial ideas, so that they have a chance of happening. Still, they will require unified and emphatic parental endorsement:Install metal detectors, restrict campus and building access and connect 360-degree interior and exterior video monitoring for every public school.
This is a compelling argument to those living in the slack of race privilege, but is a red flag to those living in slack, in very thin margins.
There is no clear evidence that the use of metal detectors, security cameras, or guards in schools is effective in preventing school violence, 8,9,10,11 and little is known about the potential for unintended consequences that may accompany their adoption.12
There has not been sufficient research to determine if the presence of metal detectors in schools reduces the risk of violent behavior among students. 13
Some researchers have expressed concern about the widespread use of guards, cameras, and other security technologies, given that so little is known about their effectiveness. 14,15
Research has found security strategies, such as the use of security guards and metal detectors, to be consistently ineffective in protecting students16 and to be associated with more incidents of school crime and disruption17 and higher levels of disorder in schools. 18
Evidence from a school–police partnership implemented in New York City reveals that students in these schools continue to experience higher than average problems linked directly to future criminality, compared to students in other New York City schools not involved in the partnership. 19
Surveillance cameras in schools may have the effect of simply moving misbehavior to places in schools or outside of schools that lack surveillance. Even more troubling, it’s possible that cameras may function as enticement to large-scale violence, such as in the case of the Virginia Tech shooter who mailed video images of himself to news outlets.20
Research suggests that the presence of security guards and metal detectors in schools may actually increase levels of violence in schools by strengthening the influence of youth “street” culture with its emphasis on self-protection.21
If these measures do not work, why are they compelling?
White slack dictates that white safety must be protected at all costs; black/brown scarcity dictates that there is no margin of error for protecting against black/brown violence.
American culture is today awash in a triumphant celebration of Black Panther jammed against a national scramble to confront our daily violences in the form of guns.
Turning our schools into fortresses if not prisons, and even arming teachers, presents those with race, gender, and economic slack a much different picture (more safety) than those with race, gender, and economic scarcity (more violence).
Margins still define us, and margins left unchecked are apt to destroy us in the end.
* The mainstream media and political focus on black-on-black crime allows whites to ignore that all crime is mostly same-race since white-on-white crime rates are nearly identical to black-on-black crime rates.
Research excerpt sources:
8 Garcia, C. A. (2003). School safety technology in America: Current use and perceived effectiveness. Criminal Justice Policy Review, 14, 30-54.
9 Addington, L. A. (2009). Cops and cameras: Public school security as a policy response to Columbine. American Behavioral Scientist, 52, 1424-1446.
10 Borum, R., Cornell, D. G., Modzeleski, W., & Jimerson, S. R. (2010). What can be done about school shootings? A review of the evidence. Educational Researcher, 39, 27-37.
11 Casella, R. (2006). Selling us the fortress: The promotion of techno-security equipment in schools. New York: Routledge.
12 Addington, L. A. (2009). Cops and cameras: Public school security as a policy response to Columbine. American Behavioral Scientist, 52, 1424-1446.
13 Hankin, A., Hertz, M., & Simon, T. (2011). Impacts of metal detector use in schools: Insights from 15 years of research. Journal of School Health, 81, 100-106.
14 Birkland, T. A., & Lawrence, R. G. (2009). Media framing and policy change after Columbine. American Behavioral Scientist, 52, 1405-1425.
15 Green, M. B. (2005). Reducing violence and aggression in schools. Trauma, Violence and Abuse, 6, 236-253.
16 Schreck, C. J., & Miller, J. M., & Gibson, C. L. (2003). Trouble in the school yard: A study of the risk factors of victimization at school. Crime & Delinquency, 49, 460-484.
17 Nickerson, A. B., & Martens, M. R. (2008). School violence: Associations with control, security/enforcement, educational/therapeutic approaches, and demographic factors. School Psychology Review, 37, 228-243.
18 Mayer, M. J., & Leaone, P. E. (1999). A structural analysis of school violence and disruption: Implications for creating safer schools. Education and Treatment of Children, 22, 333-356.
19 Brady, K. P., Balmer, S., & Phenix, D. (2007). School-police partnership effectiveness in urban schools: An analysis of New York City’s Impact Schools Initiative. Education and Urban Society, 39, 455-478.
20 Warnick, B. R. (2007). Surveillance cameras in schools: An ethical analysis. Harvard Educational Review, 77, 317- 343.
21 Phaneuf, S. W. (2009). Security in schools: Its effect on students. El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC.
I have used Pinker’s work in linguistics for many years, especially as I teach future English teachers and try to combat prescriptive approaches to grammar, mechanics, and usage.
Among my colleagues and friends in linguistics and English, however, we are apt to use Pinker’s theories of language—framing language as biological and building on the work of Noam Chomsky—as a point of debate. In other words, even though Pinker is regarded as a leading figure in his primary field, many credible arguments remain about his claims.
Steven Pinker is at it again. Several years ago, the Harvard-based cognitive psychologist took time off regular duties to offer some gratuitous advice to humanities scholars about how to “fix” their discipline….
The Enlightenment may seem an ambitious topic for a cognitive psychologist to take up from scratch. Numerous historians have dedicated entire careers to it, and there remains a considerable diversity of opinion about what it was and what its impact has been. But from this and previous work we get intimations of why Pinker thinks he is the person for the job. Historians have laboured under the misapprehension that the key figures of the Enlightenment were mostly philosophers of one stripe or another. Pinker has made the anachronistic determination that, in fact, they were all really scientists – indeed, “cognitive neuroscientists” and “evolutionary psychologists.”
In short, he thinks that they are people like him and that he is thus possessed of privileged insights into their thought denied to mere historians. The latter must resort to careful reading and fraught interpretation in lieu of being able directly to channel what Enlightenment thinkers really thought.
Despite his recognized brilliance and accomplishments, Pinker—like a cognitive scientist and psychologist writing entire books on teaching reading—has fallen victim to reaching beyond ones area of expertise and treating an entire field as if those experts do not exist. Further, as the review unpacks, Pinker appears to suffer from a narcissism that spurs projection: I am great, therefore, let me find myself in the greatness that has come before me.
Pinker, then, represents a serious problem that confronts all of us: How to stop living by what you think and start living by what you know.
From the White House to the New York Times Opinion page to friends on Facebook, we are under constant assault by stuff people think are facts, although too often they are ultimately false.
In some cases, sharing and then living by misinformation are mostly just annoying, but the gun debate represents how this tension has real life-and-death consequences—too often for children, who have almost no political power.
For example, we must consider how fearmongering has kept the US focused on only one type of the slippery-slope argument—gun control = all guns will be taken away—while forcing us to live in another unexpressed slippery-slope reality—gun culture = inordinate mass shootings and perpetual gun violence.
My primary areas of expertise—in terms of my educational background, teaching experiences, and scholarship—are literacy, poverty, and race, the latter two mostly as related to education; although, much of that expertise has come from intense study built on my formal degrees. Since mass shootings have been all-too-common in schools, I have spent some of my scholarly and public work addressing gun control—recognizing that I, like Pinker, am stepping outside my field in some respects.
The shooting in Parkland, Florida has spurred another round of my public work calling for evidence-based approaches to ending our self-defeating gun culture in the US.
Debating gun control for me is doubly dangerous because it is outside my field and I am very passionate about the topic.
Since I engage in the gun debate on social media, I have been confronted by some very frustrating pro-gun or anti-gun control arguments that simply are not credible: pointing a finger at mental illness, arguing that gangs and black-on-black crime explain the gun violence problem in the U.S., imposing the mainstream slippery-slope argument that gun control means taking away all guns from everyone, refusing to acknowledge international comparisons that highlight the unique problems with guns and gun violence in the US, invoking the lack of God in school or society, blaming violence on violent pop culture (movies, video games, music), etc.
Although I am aware that evidence is not as effective as I would hope when debating topics with people who are more committed to what they think (and believe) than to what they know, I work diligently (and like a scholar, seeking bodies of research) to find the argument and evidence that will help others move to informed positions.
I want to share here just one part of that journey recently for me, a moment when I really could have made a serious mistake if I hadn’t checked myself when I had an idea, checked myself by realizing, well, it’s complicated.
Most arguments about violence are lazy and rushed, typically overstating the amount and threat of violence in the now of the debate, lacking as many debates do some historical context (a real go-to for me).
To combat the “violence today” arguments (violent pop culture, gangs, black-on-black crime, lack of God), I considered making a Wild West analogy, which on its surface seemed very compelling and obvious in terms of how violent I assumed the Wild West to have been.
The irony about how badly Hollywood misrepresents the Wild West is that characters popularized by Clint Eastwood may in fact give us insight into the tragic relationship between guns and toxic masculinity.
Until I checked myself with “well, it’s complicated.”
Luckily, I first did a quick google search and found a 2014 article by Glenn Kessler on Rick Santorum bumbling, yep, a Wild West analogy:
The Hollywood version of the Wild West is at the core of this exchange on Face the Nation, so perhaps it’s time for a history lesson. One-time presidential candidate Rick Santorum asserted that gun crimes were low back then because people had the right to carry guns. But he actually has the story backward.
The Wild West as a matter of history doesn’t square with the Wild West of Hollywood:
“Carrying of guns within the city limits of a frontier town was generally prohibited. Laws barring people from carrying weapons were commonplace, from Dodge City to Tombstone,” said Adam Winkler, a professor at UCLA’s School of Law and author ofGunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. “When Dodge City residents first formed their municipal government, one of the very first laws enacted was a ban on concealed carry. The ban was soon after expanded to open carry, too. The Hollywood image of the gunslinger marching through town with two Colts on his hips is just that — a Hollywood image, created for its dramatic effect.”
And just how violent the Wild West was, it turns out, is much like the debates my colleagues and I have about Pinker’s linguistics; it’s complicated, as Kessler explains in the Santorum article:
…“Gun homicides were far more rare than Americans have been led to believe,” [UCLA School of Law professor, Winkler] said. “Most frontier towns had fewer than two homicides a year during the heyday of the Old West. Yet that is not inconsistent with Roth’s research. The homicide rate was high in these towns because the population was very small. Even one murder in a town with only a few dozen residents leads to a high homicide rate. These towns were violent, but not nearly as violent as some imagine.”
In other words, no matter how one looks at the research, Santorum has his history incorrect. People did not walk around town carrying guns—but the homicide rate was unusually high.
When we take our time and consider the history of gun violence and gun control, we discover, well, it’s complicated.
What I discovered is not a new or powerful analogy* (thanks to Santorum’s very public bumbling), but a way to check ourselves when we are not sure if we are debating or living by what we think instead of what we know.
The amount of guns and access to guns in the U.S. are essential elements in why the U.S. sits below average for crime rates but is a extreme outlier in gun homicides and violence (see #2 here).
A great deal of commentary attempts to tie mass shootings to a single issue. Often, that seems like the easiest way to make sense of atrocities. That’s why we get sound bites that lean on mental health (when shooters are white), terrorist ties and affiliations (when shooters are brown), gang violence and “urban decay” (when shooters are black), bullying (when it happens in a school), and overwork (when it happens in a workplace).
The truth cannot be boiled down to any single issue. As sociologists, we can look to the bigger picture, point out patterns, and identify common denominators. Our research suggests that gun control is, indeed, an important piece of the problem. But in order to understand the factors behind America’s mass shootings, it is also critical to consider the relationship between masculinity and violence.
And thus:
Scholars who study masculinity and mass shootings have consistently drawn attention to the fact that mass shootings are not only a uniquely American social problem; they are a problem with American men. We’ve argued before that there are two questions that require explanation related to gender and mass shootings. First, why is it that men commit virtually all mass shootings? And second, why do American men commit mass shootings more than men anywhere else in the world?
In many of these mass shootings, the desire to kill seems to be driven by a catastrophic sense of male entitlement. In some cases, the perpetrators seemed to feel that if people did not give them precisely what they wanted, then those people did not deserve to live. The only just world, in their minds, was a world they were the center of….
A great many mass murderers have a history of domestic violence. They range from Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub shooting, whose ex-wife claimed he took her paychecks, forbade her from leaving the house and beat her if she did not live up to what he perceived as being her duties; to Robert Lewis Dear, who killed three people at a Planned Parenthood Clinic and had been accused of domestic violence by two of his three ex-wives.
With a historical, and checked, perspective, and a bit more care than most public and political debate allow, then, we can begin to construct a vivid and accurate picture of why the U.S. suffers so much gun violence and so many mass shootings.
And while, well, it’s complicated, we can safely say that the amount of guns, access to guns, a climate of toxic masculinity, and identifiable behaviors such as domestic violence provide a nearly complete puzzle that can provide a context for not only a productive debate, but also actions that a free people can take in the name of human safety.
The gun debate itself is complicated, but that sits against the simple fact that children slaughtered at school or dozens mowed down at an outdoor concert is not complicated but inexcusable in a free society.
The gun debate and innocent lives implore us to stop living by what we think and start living by what we know.
There are several challenging, and therefore uncomfortable, scenes in Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later (2007); however, when I show this documentary in my courses, few students recognize those scenes as either challenging or uncomfortable.
At one point, several black men from the Little Rock, Arkansas community are gathered outside the school, and they speak directly about the need for blacks to take care of their own, clean up their own communities. These men directly mention the damage of black-on-black crime (which is about the same as white-on-white crime, although the latter is almost never mentioned).
Throughout the documentary, as well, a number of black students confront how hard they work and how some of their fellow black students simply do not try—echoing a rugged individualism and personal responsibility narrative that a white teacher/coach and her white golf team members express.
I use these scenes as teachable moments about the negative impact of respectability politics on marginalized groups:
What started as a philosophy promulgated by black elites to “uplift the race” by correcting the “bad” traits of the black poor has now evolved into one of the hallmarks of black politics in the age of Obama, a governing philosophy that centers on managing the behavior of black people left behind in a society touted as being full of opportunity. In an era marked by rising inequality and declining economic mobility for most Americans—but particularly for black Americans—the twenty-first-century version of the politics of respectability works to accommodate neoliberalism. The virtues of self-care and self-correction are framed as strategies to lift the black poor out of their condition by preparing them for the market economy.
…Today’s politics of respectability, however, commands blacks left behind in post–civil rights America to “lift up thyself.” Moreover, the ideology of respectability, like most other strategies for black progress articulated within the spaces where blacks discussed the best courses of action for black freedom, once lurked for the most part beneath the gaze of white America. But now that black elites are part of the mainstream elite in media, entertainment, politics, and the academy, respectability talk operates within the official sphere, shaping the opinions, debates, and policy perspectives on what should—and should not—be done on the behalf of the black poor.
Respectability politics works in conjunction with seemingly innocuous narratives (rugged individualism, lifting yourself by your bootstraps, personal responsibility) to keep the accusatory gaze on individuals and away from systemic inequity. In other words, political and economic elites are more secure if the majority of people believe all success and failure are primarily determined by individual traits and not by privilege and disadvantage beyond most people’s control.
This semester that discussion has coincided with Laura Ingraham attempting to publicly shame LeBron James to “shut up and dribble,” a not-so-clever self-promotion for one of Ingraham’s vapid books.
Along with Kevin Durant’s heated response, James (see video in the link above) stressed, “We will definitely not shut up and dribble.”
Watching James, however, and listening carefully present us with the dangers of his “defeating the odds” motivation (listen to about minutes 1:50-2:15), his own powerful and impressive rise to being King James.
I am not criticizing James, however, and fully support his response, refusing to shut up and dribble.
But a message that suggests anyone can or should be able to achieve what an outlier, James, has achieved is ultimately harmful, speaking through and to the most corrosive aspects of respectability politics.
This call to teach children to beat the odds, in fact, is shared all along the political spectrum from right to left.
The ultimate flaw in a beat-the-odds mentality is, again, that it suggests success and failure lie mostly or solely in the individual, a matter of choice and effort—like having “grit,” a growth mindset, or a positive attitude (all ways to fix inadequate children).
LeBron James, I believe, is right about his importance as a role model, as a stellar example of what black success looks like despite the odds being unfairly against him in the form of racism and economic inequity.
And as long as we as a society choose to ignore the odds, choose to allow racism, sexism, and classism to exist, I suppose we should find humane and supportive ways to encourage children to work so that a few of them may hit the life lottery and beat the odds.
But to be blunt, that’s a pretty shitty cop-out for the adults who could, in fact, change the odds so that no child has to overcome them.
It is ultimately a heartless and ugly thing to see children as lacking the drive to beat odds that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
It is political cowardice and public negligence to remain fatalistic about the odds as we watch those odds destroy the hopes and dreams of our children.
If anyone should shut up, that would be Ingraham and her entire cadre of right-wing know-nothings who shovel the very worst narratives that help guarantee those odds will remain in their favor.
And as we listen to James instead, let’s resist demanding that he or any so-called racial minorities somehow erase racism and then begin to demand that those who benefit the most from the odds use those privileges to dismantle those odds.
That, I know, is a powerful ask, but it is one that certainly holds more credence than asking children to be superhuman because we have James dribbling across our flatscreen TVs.
My foundations of education class and I discussed the Parkland, Florida shooting a few days after the tragedy. My students tended to echo some of the most common and least credible arguments about the issue of mass shootings and gun violence. However, they were both willing to share and then eager to discuss and look at evidence.
One student, for example, noted that he is a hunter and gun control makes him uncomfortable. Others mentioned mental illness and made analogies such as access to alcohol.
So during the discussion we reached some key points I think are valuable to avoid the effort by the NRA and politicians to derail a reasonable discussion and real action:
Other countries have mental illness, and the US sits about in the middle of comparable countries in terms of crime rates (we are not an extreme country in terms of crime). But the US is an extreme outlier in terms of fatal crime and gun violence.
Other countries with almost no mass shootings and very little gun violence have people who hunt and people who have handguns in their home to protect their personal property. Making a country more safe with gun control is not about taking away all guns. That is a straw man argument.
The US is an extreme outlier in police fatally shooting and killing citizens (see the US compared to Germany for example). Our gun culture impacts every aspect of our society, even law enforcement.
Gun possession does in fact make people less safe, and the mostly wild-west approach to guns in the US is the biggest part of the gun violence problem.
Monitoring dangerous products is common in many aspects of our culture. That monitoring and care are not about taking away freedom, and we must keep in mind that freedom is not license. In other words, human freedom includes accountability for that freedom.
That people under 21 can buy assault-style weapons but not alcohol, or marijuana, is a serious commentary on a people with priorities out of line.
The best way to protect children in schools and US citizens in their daily lives is to end our gun culture—not to increase security; that is addressing the symptoms and refusing to cure the disease.
The larger point here is that everyone lives with irrational and uninformed beliefs, often living in ways that contradict what we embrace as our foundational ideals as individuals and as a society.
In order to check those contradictions, we must step back and begin again with evidence. I tend to be more cynical than even skeptical, but this discussion with my students confronted me with possibility that people can and will listen even in contexts that are difficult.
As I urged my students, I want no one to take the claims above as fact simply because I posted them here. The key is to study, investigate, explore our own assumptions and biases. And thus, start with some of these links below that reinforce the points above:
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 