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  • There Are Racist Emblems, but Chief Wahoo Isn’t One of Them

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

     

    “Everything about the Indians is awesome except their very racist logo ,” proclaimed a USA Today headline last Monday. Cleveland’s baseball team was at that point 18 victories into an amazing winning streak that would stretch to 22 — an American League record and the longest winning streak in major league baseball in more than a century. But baseball writer Ted Berg devoted only a few sentences to the Indians’ brilliant performance before moving to his main subject: “the extremely racist logo they insist on wearing on their caps.”

    On any list of knee-jerk PC verities, the “obvious” racism of Chief Wahoo — the cartoon character that has been the Indians logo for seven decades — would be near the top. I get why people make that claim, but I’m going to argue that they’re wrong. Chief Wahoo is not in any way an emblem of bigotry or racial contempt. And those who censoriously insist it is are unwittingly downplaying the ugliness of genuinely racist images.

    Origins of the Image

    Chief Wahoo was created in 1946 at the request of Bill Veeck, the legendary baseball impresario who was then the Indians’ owner. Veeck hired a designer to come up with an emblem that “would convey a spirit of pure joy and unbridled enthusiasm.” (A few months later, Veeck would make a far more famous hire: He acquired Larry Doby, a star centerfielder from the Negro Leagues, bringing him to the Indians as the first black player in the American League.)

    During the decades when the Indians were one of the worst-performing teams in baseball — decades that included my Cleveland childhood in the 1960s and 1970s — Chief Wahoo was pretty much the only thing about the Tribe that conveyed “pure joy and unbridled enthusiasm.” On the few occasions when I went to games at the old Cleveland Municipal Stadium, the vast downtown arena where the Indians used to play, I loved seeing the 28-foot-tall likeness of Chief Wahoo at bat, illuminated at night and towering over Gate D.

    For decades, Chief Wahoo has been reviled as (to cite just a few headlines) “ ridiculous and offensive,” “ the most offensive image in sports,” “the grinning face of racism,” and “a national embarrassment .” On the culture-war battlefield nowadays, few activities are more popular than taking offense and playing the race card, so it isn’t surprising that bashing Chief Wahoo is almost as trendy as trashing the name of the NFL’s Washington Redskins.
    On the “Redskins” controversy, I’m happy to stand with the 90% of Native Americans who, in a 2016 Washington Post poll, said that the team’s name doesn’t bother them. They doubtless recognized what anyone not pumped up on racial indignation recognizes: No sports team adopts a name or symbol in order to bring contempt upon itself. Apart from handles that are merely whimsical (Red Sox, Jazz, Mighty Ducks) or geographical (76ers, Maple Leafs, Rockies), team names typically suggest traits associated with heroes and winners: the speed of jets, the ferocity of bears, the aggressiveness of predators, the tenacity of cowboys.

    That explains the abundance of Indian-themed team names in American sports at every level. Braves, Warriors, Blackhawks, Redskins, Indians — they are nods to a common view of native tribes as brave, tough, noble, and intimidating. If that’s a stereotype, it is a flattering one. It may not be historically accurate, but it could hardly be less of an example of invidious racism.

    Looking for a Reason to Be Angry

    But Chief Wahoo doesn’t even reflect a stereotype. It doesn’t symbolize any view of American Indians. Nothing about the Cleveland team’s logo pigeonholes or defines Native Americans: It evokes no shibboleth or hackneyed prejudice, it plays into no popular notion or misimpression about Indians, good, bad, or neutral.

    And that’s just the point that the Chief-Wahoo-is-racist crowd consistently and passionately get wrong.

    Screeds against the Indians’ logo are frequently accompanied by this 2001 advertisement from the National Congress of American Indians:

    The ad’s message is harshly unforgiving: Of course the logo of Chief Wahoo, with its toothy grin and feather, is racist, it says: as racist as a caricature of a buck-toothed, squinting Chinese man, or of a hook-nosed, bearded Jew.
    But those comparisons are fallacious. Images of near-sighted, smirking Chinese and of devious Jews with huge noses are all-too-familiar slurs — nasty tropes of anti-Asian and anti-Semitic mockery, just as the image of a grinning, watermelon-chomping Sambo is a trope of anti-black mockery. But there is no negative stereotype of wide-eyed, laughing Indians. Chief Wahoo doesn’t reflect contempt for Indians any more than Bugs Bunny reflects contempt for rabbits or than the Boston Celtics logo reflects contempt for the Irish.

    Chief Wahoo is not and never has been the “grinning face of racism.” Like Fred Flintstone, Dudley Do-Right, or the bat-swinging, tonsured monk of the San Diego Padres, he is a cheerful, playful cartoon character, nothing more. The Chief Wahoo logo doesn’t hint at any bigoted subtext. Demonizing it as a racist emblem may feel good to those who enjoy parading their liberal sensitivity, but it does nothing to combat actual bigotry or promote tolerance.

    Baseball is only a game. In the greater scheme of things, it makes little difference whether the Indians (who clinched the AL Central Division championship on Sunday) win or lose. But it makes a lot of difference to our culture and public discourse whether false accusations of racism are promoted or resisted. Chief Wahoo is innocent and harmless. Critics should save their ire for something that matters.


    Jeff Jacoby

    Jeff Jacoby has been a columnist for The Boston Globe since 1994. He has degrees from George Washington University and from Boston University Law School. Before entering journalism, he (briefly) practiced law at the prominent firm of Baker & Hostetler, worked on several political campaigns in Massachusetts, and was an assistant to Dr. John Silber, the president of Boston University. In 1999, Jeff became the first recipient of the Breindel Prize, a major award for excellence in opinion journalism. In 2014, he was included in the “Forward 50,” a list of the most influential American Jews.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • Progressives Must Confront Their Racist Roots

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    Progressives Must Confront Their Racist Roots

    Until recently, Princeton University’s devotion to Woodrow Wilson was so pervasive and worshipful that visitors to campus might easily have mistaken the modernist parthenon housing the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs for a literal temple.

    The progressives believed, first and foremost, in the importance of science and scientific experts in guiding the economy, government, and society.

    If nothing else, the black students demanding that my alma mater strip the segregationist president’s name from its public-policy school and Wilson College residential complex have accomplished one amazing thing. They’ve forced Princeton to acknowledge that its 13th president, and the nation’s 28th, was not the most nearly perfect human ever to inhabit New Jersey.

    As the university debated the protesters’ demands, a new work of intellectual history coincidentally published by Princeton University Press and written by a Princeton faculty member offered a compelling — though implicit — case that Wilson’s name is ideally suited for the public-policy school but deeply ironic for the residential college.

    Along the way, “Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era,” by Thomas C. Leonard, reveals the largely forgotten intellectual origins of many current controversies, including disputes over tightening voter identification laws, raising the minimum wage and restricting immigration.

    The book isn’t about Wilson per se. It’s about the progressive intellectual movement in which he played a major role as scholar, university administrator, and politician. Early 20th-century progressives transformed American institutions, and the movement’s premises continue to inform thinking and policy across the political spectrum. “It was the progressives who fashioned the new sciences of society, founded the modern American university, invented the think tank, and created the American administrative state, institutions still defined by the progressive values that formed and instructed them,” writes Leonard, a research scholar at Princeton’s Council of the Humanities.

    The progressives believed, first and foremost, in the importance of science and scientific experts in guiding the economy, government, and society. Against the selfishness, disorder, corruption, ignorance, conflict and wastefulness of free markets or mass democracy, they advanced the ideal of disinterested, public-spirited social control by well-educated elites. The progressives were technocrats who, Leonard observes, “agreed that expert public administrators do not merely serve the common good, they also identify the common good.” Schools of public administration, including the one that since 1948 has borne Woodrow Wilson’s name, still enshrine that conviction.

    Leonard also brings to light an embarrassing truth: In the early 20th century, the progressive definition of the common good was thoroughly infused with scientific racism. Harvard economist William Z. Ripley, for example, was a recognized expert on both railroad regulation and the classification of European races by coloring, stature and “cephalic index,” or head shape. At the University of Wisconsin, the red-hot center of progressive thought, leading social scientists turned out economic-reform proposals along with works parsing the racial characteristics — and supposed natural inferiority — of blacks, Chinese, and non-Teutonic European immigrants. (Present-day progressives somehow didn’t highlight this heritage when they were defending “the Wisconsin Idea” against the depredations of Republican Governor Scott Walker.)

    Eugenics and “Race Science”

    “The ‘race suicide’ of the American or colonial stock should be regarded as the most fundamental of our social problems,” the Wisconsin economist John R. Commons wrote in 1920. His colleague Edward A. Ross, who popularized the terms “social control” and “race suicide,” called interest in eugenics “a perfect index of one’s breadth of outlook and unselfish concern for the future of our race.”

    Fewer voters among the lower classes was not a cost, it was a benefit of reform.

    In the early 20th century, most progressives viewed as cutting-edge science what today looks like simple bigotry. “Eugenics and race science were not pseudosciences in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” Leonard emphasizes. “They were sciences,” supported by research laboratories and scholarly journals and promoted by professors at the country’s most prestigious universities.

    While some socialists and conservatives also embraced them, Leonard argues, eugenics and scientific racism fit particularly well with progressive thought: “Eugenics was anti-individualistic; it promised efficiency; it required expertise, and it was founded on the authority of science.” Equally important, “biological ideas,” Leonard writes, gave progressive reformers “a conceptual scheme capable of accommodating the great contradiction at the heart of Progressive Era reform — its view of the poor as victims deserving state uplift and as threats requiring state restraint.” They could feel sorry for impoverished Americans while trying to restrict their influence and limit their numbers.

    Take political participation. Nowadays, people argue about whether stricter voter identification laws are good-government protections against fraud or discriminatory attempts to deter minority and low-income voters. A century ago, leading progressives happily embraced both goals. “Fewer voters among the lower classes was not a cost, it was a benefit of reform,” Leonard writes. After progressive reforms, including Jim Crow restrictions sold in part as anti-corruption measures, voter participation plummeted. In New York State, turnout dropped from 88 percent in 1900 to 55 percent in 1920, while national turnout fell from 80 percent in 1896 to 50 percent in 1924.

    Minimum Wages and Immigration Restrictions

    Advocates similarly didn’t deny that imposing a minimum wage might throw some people out of work. That wasn’t a bug; it was a feature — a way to deter undesirable workers and keep them out of the marketplace and ideally out of the country. Progressives feared that, faced with competition from blacks, Jews, Chinese, or other immigrants, native-stock workingmen would try to keep up living standards by having fewer kids and sending their wives to work. Voilà: “race suicide.” Better to let a minimum wage identify inferior workers, who might be shunted into institutions and sterilized, thereby improving the breed in future generations.

    One progressive economist did offer an alternative view. John Bates Clark, whose work avoided the racist assumptions of his peers, argued that a job’s wage would — and, he believed, should — equal the productivity of the marginal, or incremental, worker in that position. Rather than facing an inevitable race to the bottom, more productive workers in more productive enterprises could therefore command higher wages, a position compatible with labor leader Samuel Gompers’s preference for collective bargaining over technocratic wage arbitration.

    Restricting immigration was as central to the progressive agenda as regulating railroads.

    Clark’s theory is now a foundation of mainstream labor economics. In his day, however, it was highly unpopular. “A key element of resistance,” writes Leonard, “was that many progressives were reluctant to treat wages as a price,” rather than a right of citizenship and social standing. Informed by their beliefs in scientific racism, most progressives preferred wages to favor some groups over others: men over women, whites over blacks, and most prominently, native stock over immigrants.

    Although they generally assumed black inferiority, progressives outside the South didn’t worry much about the “Negro question.” They were instead obsessed with the racial, economic, and social threats posed by immigrants. MIT president Francis Amasa Walker called for “protecting the American rate of wages, the American standard of living, and the quality of American citizenship from degradation through the tumultuous access of vast throngs of ignorant and brutalized peasantry from the countries of eastern and southern Europe,” whom he described in Darwinian language as “representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.”

    So restricting immigration was as central to the progressive agenda as regulating railroads. Indeed, in his five-volume History of the American People, Wilson lumped together in one long paragraph the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act as “the first fruits of radical economic changes and the rapid developments of trade, industry, and transportation” — equal harbingers of the modern administrative state. With a literacy test and ban on most other Asian immigrants enacted in 1917 and national quotas established in 1924, the progressives bequeathed to America the concept of illegal immigration.

    Getting those restrictions enacted required decades of campaigning, however, allowing millions of “beaten men from beaten races” (Walker’s term) to continue to pour in.  Their children and grandchildren didn’t in fact run the country into the ground and by the middle of the 20th century, they started to show up in the halls once controlled by those who scorned them. In the years around 1960, some were among the Princeton students who established a more intellectual and egalitarian alternative to the selective private eating clubs. Knowing Wilson had wanted to replace the clubs with university dining halls, they named it for Woodrow Wilson.

    “Ironic, isn’t it?” said Harvey Silverglate, an early Woodrow Wilson Society member and a scholarship student whose father hadn’t graduated from high school. “An eating facility named after Woodrow Wilson that was composed of those not suitable for the clubs — blacks, Jews, gays, poor kids, kids from non-prestigious ‘finishing’ schools.”

    A version of this article was first published at Bloomberg.


    Virginia Postrel

    Virginia Postrel is an American political and cultural writer of broadly libertarian, or classical liberal, views.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.



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  • The Dangerous Implications of Upholding Racial Preferences at UT

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    This week’s Supreme Court decision upholding racial preferences in admissions at the University of Texas (UT) has potentially far-reaching implications. It might well license extensive racial discrimination in college admissions policies. But its impact may be limited by hedging in the majority opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy.

    When Fisher v. University of Texas first reached the Supreme Court in 2013, the Court chose not to issue a definitive ruling on the constitutionality of the Texas admissions system. An unusually large 7-1 majority reiterated the principle that universities can sometimes use racial preferences in order to promote the educational benefits of “diversity,” but also broke new ground by emphasizing that courts should apply “strict scrutiny” to such programs without giving any deference at all to the judgment of university officials.

    When the case was remanded back to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the lower court again upheld the University of Texas program, and failed to apply the kind of nondeferential scrutiny the Supreme Court required. The Supreme Court chose to review the case again. After the oral argument in December, most experts, myself included, expected that the Court would apply strict scrutiny and strike down the Texas plan. However, that did not happen, possibly because of the unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia, who would almost certainly have voted to invalidate Texas’ program.

    Instead, the program was upheld by a narrow 4-3 majority (Justice Elena Kagan was recused from the case). Justice Anthony Kennedy cast the decisive swing vote, and wrote the majority opinion, which seems at odds with the sort of rigorous strict scrutiny he has long advocated in previous affirmative action cases, including his majority opinion in Fisher I.

    The result is all the more surprising because this is the first time Kennedy has ever voted to uphold any type of racial preference in education.

    I. The Court’s Nebulous Theory of Educational “Diversity”

    Kennedy starts by reiterating the principles of Fisher I, including the requirement that the use of racial preferences must be subject to “strict scrutiny,” and that “no deference is owed [to university officials] when determining whether the use of race is narrowly tailored to achieve the university’s permissible goals,” including the educational benefits of diversity.

    But the force of this principle is undermined by Kennedy’s failure to require the university to specify its objectives with any precision. He is satisfied with what he calls the “concrete and precise goals” outlined by UT:

    On the first page of its 2004 “Proposal to Consider Race and Ethnicity in Admissions,” the University identifies the educational values it seeks to realize through its admissions process: the destruction of stereotypes, the “‘promot[ion of] cross-racial understanding,’” the preparation of a student body “‘for an increasingly diverse workforce and society,’” and the “‘cultivat[ion of] a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry.’” …

     

    Later in the proposal, the University explains that it strives to provide an “academic environment” that offers a “robust exchange of ideas, exposure to differing cultures, preparation for the challenges of an increasingly diverse workforce, and acquisition of competencies required of future leaders.”

    These objectives are so vague that they can justify racial preferences for virtually any racial, ethnic, or religious group, especially if the university is not required to provide proof that doing so really will achieve measurable progress towards those objectives.

    For example, increasing the number of Swedes, Bulgarians, or Mormons from Utah at UT could potentially break down stereotypes about those groups, and help prepare students “for an increasingly diverse workforce and society.” If applied consistently, the Court’s reasoning could even justify discrimination against minorities and in favor of whites, at least in some cases. For example, if officials conclude that the leadership class will have more “legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry” if it is more dominated by the majority racial or ethnic group, then that might justify discriminating against blacks or Jews.

    Similarly, if officials conclude that having “too many” blacks, Jews, or Asian-Americans might stimulate a backlash against them by white gentiles, that might justify restricting the numbers of these minorities, so as not to undermine “cross-racial understanding.” Such theories were in fact used to justify imposing quotas limiting the presence of minority groups at various universities in the early twentieth century.

    I highly doubt that the Supreme Court majority actually meant to endorse these sorts of rationales for racial discrimination. But their reasoning does not preclude them, which a strong sign that the reasoning is flawed.

    More generally, the goals endorsed by the Court are so vague as to make meaningful judicial scrutiny almost impossible. As Justice Samuel Alito points out in his dissent:

    These are laudable goals, but they are not concrete or precise, and they offer no limiting principle for the use of racial preferences. For instance, how will a court ever be able to determine whether stereotypes have been adequately destroyed? Or whether cross-racial understanding has been adequately achieved? If a university can justify racial discrimination simply by having a few employees opine that racial preferences are necessary to accomplish these nebulous goals, see [majority opinion], at 12–13 (citing only self-serving statements from UT officials), then the narrow tailoring inquiry is meaningless.

    The majority opinion also endorses UT’s claim that racial preferences can be used to ensure that there are two or more African-Americans or Hispanics in a large proportion of individual classes, thereby ensuring that each class is sufficiently “diverse.” If this is true for those groups, why not also for Koreans, Swedes, Russians, and virtually every other group? Here too, the majority’s logic seems to justify almost unlimited racial and ethnic discrimination in favor of pretty much any group favored by university officials, so long as there is some substantial number of classes where the group in question has few or no representatives. For example, I was the only Russian Jew in nearly all my law school classes and most of my undergraduate classes, as well. Ensuring that most classes had two more members of this group would have required a massive increase in our numbers, thereby potentially justifying large-scale ethnic preferences at both institutions.

    II. Deciding which Groups to Prefer

    Justice Kennedy also ignored the University’s failure to provide a coherent explanation for why they extended preferences to some groups, but not others who were less numerous in the student body to begin with. This omission is particularly glaring in the case of Asian-Americans, who end up getting disfavored by the UT policy. As Justice Alito puts it:

    While both the majority and the Fifth Circuit rely on UT’s classroom study… they completely ignore its finding that Hispanics are better represented than Asian-Americans in UT class¬ rooms. In fact, they act almost as if Asian-American students do not exist….

    [S]tudents labeled “Asian American,” seemingly include “individuals of Chinese, Jap¬anese, Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, Indianand other backgrounds comprising roughly 60% of the world’s population….” It would be ludicrous to suggest that all of these students have similar backgrounds and similar ideas and experiences to share. So why has UT lumped them to¬gether and concluded that it is appropriate to discriminate against Asian-American students because they are “overrepresented” in the UT student body? UT has no good answer. And UT makes no effort to ensure that it has a critical mass of, say, “Filipino Americans” or “Cambodian Americans.”

    The treatment of Asian-Americans in the UT policy (and similar policies at other universities) should be an embarrassment to defenders of these programs, because Asian-American groups both make a major contribution to “diversity” and have often been victims of state-sponsored oppression throughout much of American history. From a “diversity” standpoint, it also makes little sense to treat, say, Italians, Russian immigrants, and WASPs, as an undifferentiated mass of “whites.”

    I do not mean to suggest that the Court should categorically forbid the use of racial preferences in all cases. To the contrary, I have long argued that strictly limited preferences might be justified in cases where they are necessary to overcome large-scale historic injustices. I also think they might defensible in a few other scenarios, including ensuring that the armed forces and law enforcement agencies have a modicum of minority officers.

    But that is a far cry from the Court’s endorsement of the nebulous diversity rationale, which can justify a wide range of extremely dubious preferences for almost any group.

    III. Possible Limits on the Reach of the Court’s Decision

    Despite the sweeping nature of some of the Court’s reasoning, the majority opinion also includes some limitations on its reach. Justice Kennedy emphasizes that the UT program is a unique, “sui generis” case, because the University’s racial preferences occurred against the background of the Texas Top Ten Percent Plan, which guarantees a spot at UT to Texas students who ranked in top ten percent of their high school classes. Because the vast majority of UT’s admissions decisions were dictated by this program, explicit racial preferences affected only a relatively small minority of applicants. Kennedy implies that a more extensive program of preferences would be subject to tougher scrutiny.

    He also notes that there is more data available on the effects of the UT program now than at the start of the Fisher litigation, and that “[t]he University must continue to use this data to scrutinize the fairness of its admissions program; to assess whether changing demographics have undermined the need for a race-conscious policy; and to identify the effects, both positive and negative, of the affirmative-action measures it deems necessary.”

    But it is difficult to say whether this stricture will impose any meaningful constraints on the future use of racial preferences at UT, especially if the “scrutiny” in question need only connect preferences with the sorts of vague educational benefits that turned out to be sufficient in this case.

    Elsewhere, I have argued that the Ten Percent Plan is itself unconstitutional racial discrimination because it was enacted for racial purposes, and that it is in some ways more pernicious than conventional affirmative action. Kennedy properly emphasizes, however, that Abigail Fisher did not challenge the constitutionality of the Ten Percent Plan, as a result of which, “throughout this litigation, the Top Ten Percent Plan has been taken, somewhat artificially, as a given premise.” At some points in the opinion, Kennedy seems to go out of his way to emphasize that the Court is not endorsing the constitutionality of the Ten Percent Plan. That may open the door to future legal challenges to the plan, and similar policies in other states.

    Despite these constraints, Fisher II is a significant victory for supporters of affirmative action. They have good reason to celebrate. But even they may also have reason to question the way the Court justified its holding. If vague, poorly specified educational benefits are enough to authorize racial discrimination against whites and Asian-Americans, they can also potentially justify discrimination against other groups, as well.

    Source: The Dangerous Implications of Upholding Racial Preferences at UT | Foundation for Economic Education


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