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What's the difference between a bag of cat food and a bag of basmati rice in similar shiny packaging? Turns out, our cats didn't sense any, leading to some early morning guerilla bag opening and a need for new rice storage.
Erin Austin Dwyer, Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States: 19th-century US slavery with a focus on emotional meanings: ways in which enslaved people were punished for having negative emotions and slavery was justified by claiming that Black people didn’t feel pain the same way white people did; ways in which enslavers were supposed to be in control and ways in which they used their emotions to dominate, or attempted to dominate; etc. Because emotion is so central to all human behavior, this is another lens rather than an account that really introduces new material.
Jordan Ellenberg, Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else: Ellenberg’s paean to geometry. Sadly, I didn’t like it as much as his first popular book; he tells you that eigenvalues can do important things, but doesn’t quite explain what they are. Still, it’s amusingly written: “If you’re finding it hard to imagine what a fourteen-dimensional landscape looks like, I recommend following the advice of Geoffrey Hinton, one of the founders of the modern theory of neural nets: ‘Visualize a 3-space and say “fourteen” to yourself very loudly. Everyone does it.’” Ellenberg loves geometry because it offers real answers—not necessarily important ones, but indisputable ones. Geometry can also offer insights for things like gerrymandering; he excoriates the Supreme Court’s willful misunderstanding of what anti-gerrymandering advocates seek (not equal representation—that would actually be weird—but representation that doesn’t reflect extreme partisan bias in drawing boundaries). As he explains about states like Wisconsin, “where Republicans get a majority of the statewide vote, the gerrymander doesn’t have much effect; those are elections where the GOP would get an assembly majority anyway. It’s only in Democratic-leaning environments that the gerrymander really kicks in, acting as a firewall.”
Daniel Greene, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope: Really interesting study of how public institutions have adopted “startup” models of innovation, trying to turn the citizens they serve into well-trained entrepreneurs who can fend for themselves in the new economy, and the severe limits baked into that model. While the startup model provides real benefits—it seems to be one of the few ways to get some investment out of legislatures; it reframes poverty as a manageable problem of skill mismatch; and it provides the professionals who staff libraries and schools with a coherent framework for understanding their jobs and thinking they’re doing good—it also has fundamental flaws for institutions that can’t and shouldn’t pivot to new customers if the current ones aren’t good enough, or go bankrupt without harming the citizenry at large. His informants include homeless people queueing to use the public computers at the main DC library, who are generally relatively smartphone-savvy; they don’t lack digital skills but safe places to sleep. (They have to wait to use the public computers in part because only entrepreneurs are allowed into the special incubator area for startups with more tech.)
There’s a great example of the conflicts here where the official ideology was that using the computers for porn was “doing the library wrong,” as opposed to submitting job applications. But it was also “clear that porn was a positive example of the sort of service librarians believed they should provide: giving people the space and the materials they could not get elsewhere.” So the librarians felt conflicted because the institution was supposed to be, but also could not be, both “a public service library that welcomed all comers and a bootstrapping library that trained digital professionals.” He tells similar stories about teachers at charter schools who struggled with students’ use of technology in unapproved ways; if the students didn’t perform, the school might not survive, not to mention that the consequences for students of not getting an educational credential could be dire, so the administration shifted to more test-driven and directive measures over time despite their ideological resistance to punishment. Ultimately, “places like schools and libraries cannot help but fail in their duties, but, “because those duties are so important to their survival and that of the people they serve, they will inevitably keep trying. Even if the people served are further marginalized in the process.”
Adam Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked: Pre-pandemic attack on the designers of addictive tech, especially our phones. Makes much of the fact that many Silicon Valley parents don’t let their kids use devices: “Can you imagine the outcry if religious leaders refused to let their children practice religion?” The core point is that individual willpower isn’t very helpful when there are thousands of entities whose success depends on breaking down individual willpower; the deck is very much stacked against the individual.
The particular behavioral addiction of being glued to our devices may be harming our—and our kids’—attention spans and empathy. (Although as someone who has never liked eye contact, I found the attack on not making consistent eye contact/criticism of how webcams deter direct gaze a bit ableist.) Alter considers online social interaction to be not “the real thing” (e.g., gamers “build simulated friendships that almost look and feel like the real thing”), which my experience of fandom suggests is far from the whole story, but he is not very interested in whether you can have the good of online connection without having the bad. I don’t disagree that there are a lot of ills that online interactions can make worse, but consider the contradictions in this account: He discusses a center that treats so-called gaming/online-induced “intimacy disorders,” the result of which is that men “don’t have the skills to bring sexuality and intimacy together.” But: The center no longer admits women because “we had to revise our policy after a number of patients ignored the ‘no physical intimacy’ rule.” So, you know, it was intimacy but not real intimacy, not the right kind of intimacy.
And for real get off my lawn energy: “Kids of the 1990s and earlier stored dozens of phone numbers in their heads; they interacted with each other rather than with devices; and they made their own fun instead of extracting manufactured fun from ninety-nine cent apps.” I have my issues with Clay Shirky, but I remember growing up in the 1980s and his response to this argument is perfect: “Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and they don’t? I saw that one a lot when I was growing up.” Our current situation seems to me genuinely catastrophic, but Fox News has at least as much if not more to do with that in the US, and Alter seems uninterested in making distinctions in evidence. For example, he treats one expert’s recommendation that kids “should be allowed to watch passive TV till they reach elementary school—around age seven—when they should be introduced to interactive media, like iPads” as “agree[ing]” with the American Academy of Pediatrics that “Television and other entertainment media should be avoided for infants and children under age 2,” which is not the same thing. Interestingly, Alter is much more ambivalent about gamification (making tasks more like games), which he concludes is not inherently good or bad, but depends on what else is going on.
But if you really want to change your online habits, he does collate what seems like useful information for making a behavior change into a real habit.
Thomas J. Tobin & Kirsten T. Behling, Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Presents the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework as particularly useful for mobile learners. Students who need to keep the noise down so the kids won’t wake up can benefit from captions, for example, or listen to audio versions of study guides as they drive. But it’s relatively easy to present material in different modalities; they argue that it’s both harder and more important to give students opportunities to show their understanding in different modalities, not just written—a video or audio submission should also satisfy requirements in many cases. I’m sympathetic, but the point that testing biology in a written, closed-book exam is also testing “short-term and working memory, organization and time management, attention, and the ability to work under pressure,” and that it should be reconfigured to focus on testing biology principles, only makes sense if you really do just want to test biology understanding. But I think I am testing organization and time management/ability to work under pressure in my open-book midterms and exams; those are things that clients and employers value and that are in fact integrated with substantive knowledge in practice. Even so, I thought the emphasis on defining what success looked like as specifically as possible was helpful, and they do acknowledge that format can be part of what you’re trying to teach.
Cyndi Kernahan, Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Classroom: Hard to believe, but I read this a couple of months ago, before “critical race theory” was the latest scareword for conservatives. Makes a fascinating distinction between teaching (which strives to enable students to be able to understand and apply concepts) and behavior change (which teaching often can’t produce and arguably shouldn’t try for). Because of their different goals, employee diversity training and teaching about race may need to do different things, even if they rely on the same knowledge base about racism. Argues against spending time debunking myths like colorblindness in favor of emphasizing a counterstory about structural racism, since debunking can often just reinforce myths. Also suggests affirming students’ own identities (while not accepting views that contradict reality) as a way of making them more willing to think about structural bias, including by having them think about an axis on which they are disadvantaged. A “growth mindset” also helps counter the shame and guilt that white students often feel, which can, if not overcome, induce them to stop learning to protect their self-concepts.
Stephen D. Brookfield and Associates, Teaching Race: How to Help Students Unmask and Challenge Racism: Focuses on the college classroom. Some of the chapters have specific suggestions about getting students to open up, focusing on creating productive tension and discomfort rather than meaningless “safety.” (So weird to revisit these notes in the context of the current conservative moral panic.) Journaling and other reflective writing exercises are popular. Most chapters emphasize the importance of the instructor’s own vulnerability/acknowledgement of internalized racism and error, while still setting expectations about learning and conversations. Many suggested that getting white students to think about ways in which they have a disfavored characteristic (including gender, sexuality, and disability) could transition them into acknowledging racism and intersectionality.
Stacey Abrams, Lead from the Outside: How to Build Your Future and Make Real Change: Fairly self-help-y about owning your power etc., which means I have to update my opinion about the advice because clearly she knows what she’s talking about. One pull quote: “I have never heard of a student refusing admission to an Ivy League college because her father is why she got into the top-rated school. Likewise, we ‘others’ must be bold in our acceptance of quotas as a way to advance.” Abrams also breaks down the different types of people who can serve mentor-like roles, including peers, and suggests strategies for maximizing their assistance to you, including being clear about what you want from them because most people who want to help you want you to help them help you.
Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: How anticolonial consciousness grew in China, Japan, Iran, Afghanistan, and other Asian/Middle Eastern areas both before and after WWI.
Camila Townsend, Fifth Sun: A history of the people now commonly known as the Aztec Empire, with the arrival of Cortez treated as a big shock but not as the end or beginning of the story, using whenever possible the records they left of themselves—which are relatively extensive given that they had written pictograph records before Cortez and quickly adopted an alphabetical system.
Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans--And How We Can Fix It: American tax law’s marriage bonus for couples filing jointly always helped single-income households more than dual-income households, which meant that it disproportionately helped whites (and, Brown says, was adopted into federal tax law in order to discourage more states from converting to community property states for all marital purposes, which would have benefited women). As marital income rises, more white wives don’t work and more Black ones do, so the divergence persists and even increases. And, she incisively points out, one $100,000/year job is likely to have better health and retirement benefits than two $50,000/year jobs, along with freeing up one person’s labor for the home/raising children, so the single-income, more-likely-to-be-white family is even more relatively advantaged. Mathematically there’s either a marriage penalty or a marriage bonus, but which it is is unequally racially distributed (and the penalty is large if you’re eligible for the EITC, to add injury to injury). This is a key reason that getting married increases white wealth by $75,000 but Black wealth by nothing. And that’s just chapter one; real estate taxes/deductions, student loan debt/nonprofit schools versus for-profit higher ed that is more likely to enroll Black students and leave them with debt even if without a degree, employment, retirement plans, stock ownership, and inherited wealth all come in for their contributions to inequality via the tax system in particular. These advantages reinforce each other, so that, for example, whites whose grandparents weren’t homeowners are now more likely to own their homes than Black people whose grandparents were homeowners. Brown has some proposed changes, including ending joint filing, which is apparently unusual internationally. Her key point: “Increasing access to a system designed to build white wealth will ultimately not work to build black wealth.”
Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, & Sheila Heen, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most: Conflict management advice: Working out how to listen with curiosity to others’ perspectives by finding their story of how and why the conflict occurred; how to disentangle character/intent from impact (yours and theirs); how to recognize the importance of the parties’ feelings while not treating them as attributions of “who is really to blame”; and so on. Seems quite useful and quite difficult to commit to. Key principles: In a conflict, everyone makes a contribution, which is not the same as everyone being to blame, equally or otherwise. Resolving a conflict requires understanding the parties’ contribution, but does not require judging, especially by the parties themselves. But the key thing here is that avoiding blame does not mean avoiding your feelings about the conflict. There are example conversations of how to reframe away from blame to understanding, even in the face of a partner who wants to win instead.
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous: WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. This is a long and fascinating book with tons of references to interesting research that I could only gesture vaguely at even in a long review. Basically, Henrich argues that a society’s organization can change individual brains, which then can change the society further. These changes mean that memory works differently for different groups, as does visual processing and facial recognition, and he argues that they can also explain big differences in moral reasoning, such as the relative importance of guilt v. shame in controlling behavior. Westerners are more likely than non-Westerners to participate in punishing someone who has broken norms but not personally harmed them, and less likely to seek revenge against someone who has personally harmed them. Also, fundamental attribution error—attributing behavior to character rather than circumstance—turns out to be fundamental only to the WEIRD; non-Westerners are more likely to explain behavior by pointing to an individual’s circumstances. We are more subject to the endowment effect (valuing things more because we deem them ours), we value having choices more, and we overestimate our own talents more.
Why? The book argues that the West, for whatever reason (Henrich doesn’t speculate), largely adopted a particular kind of monotheism that promoted monogamy; discouraged concentration of power in kin groups because they stood as counterweights to Church power; enforced monogamy so that powerful men couldn’t have multiple wives; and ultimately promoted individualism, which led to things like literacy and non-kin affinity networks such as coreligionists and political parties. “How many people do you personally know who married their cousins? If you know none, that’s WEIRD, since 1 in 10 marriages around the world today is to a cousin or other relative.” (A country’s rate of cousin marriage turns out to correlate with a lot of these other things, like generalized trust, rate of blood donations, and even how many parking tickets a UN delegation gets.) Less kin-based societies developed other mechanisms of social control, focusing on individual behavior and punishing defectors without getting into revenge cycles.
As a result, Westerners became psychologically distinct from other groups. Among other things, we are more likely than non-Westerners to be trusting of strangers, to favor testifying truthfully that our friends committed a crime over lying to protect them, and otherwise to favor large structures over close kin groups. There are similar differences within Western society, so areas that became Protestant early on are even more WEIRD in these ways than areas that were or stayed Catholic, and so too with immigrants’ children; “people in North Dakota and New Hampshire are the most trusting, with around 60 percent of people generally trusting others; meanwhile, at the other end, only about 20 percent of people are generally trusting in Alabama and Mississippi.” This dynamic isn’t unique to Christianity; Heinrich argues that similar patterns can be discerned in groups from India and China which developed in more or less kin-oriented directions.
There is a lot of fascinating stuff, including the effect of individualism on walking speed in crowded cities. What there is not is much discussion of the meaning of percentages and proportions. So, Westerners are a lot more likely than non-Westerners to trust strangers … but that means that there are a lot of untrusting Westerners and trusting non-Westerners. (Likewise: Peer pressure is powerful, and studies show that when an experimenter’s confederates give obviously wrong answers to objective questions, a number of people often go with the majority despite being unhappy and uncomfortable doing so—from 20% in highly individualistic societies to 40-50% in highly communal societies—which is a big change, but not a complete one.) This complexity also extends to the race/class/gender differences washed away in much of this discussion—Western trust is often limited to those who match the right profile, which is a very different thing from generalized trust although also a very different thing from “I only trust my close kin.” Because Henrich is interested in dynamic processes, he argues that there is an inherent pressure to trust (etc.) larger and larger groups once the process of leaving kin behind begins, so that’s how you get people who agree that all human people have valid moral claims on one another. But how we get there, and how far we are from there, matters, especially given that it seems that trust is declining in the West and that many people are willing to prey economically and politically on the (often racialized) trust that exists.
I’m not even getting into his discussions of the varying effects of testosterone depending on society/the presence of polygamy; the variances in behavior of WEIRD and non-WEIRD people competing within a group versus competing among groups; the psychological effects of war (which 18th century Europe experienced pretty constantly). He is not a genetic determinist. For creativity, for example, he argues that exposure to different sources of knowledge drives innovation far more than anything we could call “natural” intelligence. And in the key centuries, he argues, European cities were pretty much deathtraps requiring a constant inflow of rural migrants, meaning that natural selection is not a good explanation for WEIRD psychology.
Andrew L. Whitehead & Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States: Argues that Christian nationalism is a distinct entity from religiosity in the US. So, for example, Christian nationalists see serving in the military as important to being “a good person,” while being devoutly religious decreases the likelihood that a person endorses this view. “As Americans show greater agreement with Christian nationalism, they are more likely to view Muslim refugees as terrorist threats, agree that citizens should be made to show respect for America’s traditions, and oppose stricter gun control laws. But as Americans become more religious in terms of attendance, prayer, and Scripture reading, they move in the opposite direction on these issues.” Devotional religiousity is associated with ideas of caring for the vulnerable, while Christian nationalism is “unrelated” to taking care of the sick and needy, and Christian nationalists are less likely to believe that actively seeking social and economic justice is important to being a good person. In their view, it is fundamentally a political orientation, not a religious one.
Although the authors conclude that Christian nationalism “allows those who embrace it to express a racialized identity without resorting to racialized terms,” they hold (less persuasively) that it’s not reducible to racism. The reasoning: there is a noticeable percentage of US-minority groups that hold “certain” Christian nationalist views (like endorsing militarism, teaching the Bible in schools, the special role of the US in God’s plan, and traditional gender roles) but also have a strong racial justice orientation, “the exact opposite of what we see in white Americans.” By their data, 65% of Blacks support Christian nationalism, the largest proportion of any racial group (though support is not necessarily full endorsement).
James Dommek Jr., Midnight Son: Not-very-resolved nonfiction/podcast type thing about a Native Alaskan who went from aspiring movie star to convicted attempted murderer, who claimed to have encountered/been stalked by people out of myth. Interesting Alaskan color, but listen for the characters and not the story.
Erin Austin Dwyer, Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States: 19th-century US slavery with a focus on emotional meanings: ways in which enslaved people were punished for having negative emotions and slavery was justified by claiming that Black people didn’t feel pain the same way white people did; ways in which enslavers were supposed to be in control and ways in which they used their emotions to dominate, or attempted to dominate; etc. Because emotion is so central to all human behavior, this is another lens rather than an account that really introduces new material.
Jordan Ellenberg, Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else: Ellenberg’s paean to geometry. Sadly, I didn’t like it as much as his first popular book; he tells you that eigenvalues can do important things, but doesn’t quite explain what they are. Still, it’s amusingly written: “If you’re finding it hard to imagine what a fourteen-dimensional landscape looks like, I recommend following the advice of Geoffrey Hinton, one of the founders of the modern theory of neural nets: ‘Visualize a 3-space and say “fourteen” to yourself very loudly. Everyone does it.’” Ellenberg loves geometry because it offers real answers—not necessarily important ones, but indisputable ones. Geometry can also offer insights for things like gerrymandering; he excoriates the Supreme Court’s willful misunderstanding of what anti-gerrymandering advocates seek (not equal representation—that would actually be weird—but representation that doesn’t reflect extreme partisan bias in drawing boundaries). As he explains about states like Wisconsin, “where Republicans get a majority of the statewide vote, the gerrymander doesn’t have much effect; those are elections where the GOP would get an assembly majority anyway. It’s only in Democratic-leaning environments that the gerrymander really kicks in, acting as a firewall.”
Daniel Greene, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope: Really interesting study of how public institutions have adopted “startup” models of innovation, trying to turn the citizens they serve into well-trained entrepreneurs who can fend for themselves in the new economy, and the severe limits baked into that model. While the startup model provides real benefits—it seems to be one of the few ways to get some investment out of legislatures; it reframes poverty as a manageable problem of skill mismatch; and it provides the professionals who staff libraries and schools with a coherent framework for understanding their jobs and thinking they’re doing good—it also has fundamental flaws for institutions that can’t and shouldn’t pivot to new customers if the current ones aren’t good enough, or go bankrupt without harming the citizenry at large. His informants include homeless people queueing to use the public computers at the main DC library, who are generally relatively smartphone-savvy; they don’t lack digital skills but safe places to sleep. (They have to wait to use the public computers in part because only entrepreneurs are allowed into the special incubator area for startups with more tech.)
There’s a great example of the conflicts here where the official ideology was that using the computers for porn was “doing the library wrong,” as opposed to submitting job applications. But it was also “clear that porn was a positive example of the sort of service librarians believed they should provide: giving people the space and the materials they could not get elsewhere.” So the librarians felt conflicted because the institution was supposed to be, but also could not be, both “a public service library that welcomed all comers and a bootstrapping library that trained digital professionals.” He tells similar stories about teachers at charter schools who struggled with students’ use of technology in unapproved ways; if the students didn’t perform, the school might not survive, not to mention that the consequences for students of not getting an educational credential could be dire, so the administration shifted to more test-driven and directive measures over time despite their ideological resistance to punishment. Ultimately, “places like schools and libraries cannot help but fail in their duties, but, “because those duties are so important to their survival and that of the people they serve, they will inevitably keep trying. Even if the people served are further marginalized in the process.”
Adam Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked: Pre-pandemic attack on the designers of addictive tech, especially our phones. Makes much of the fact that many Silicon Valley parents don’t let their kids use devices: “Can you imagine the outcry if religious leaders refused to let their children practice religion?” The core point is that individual willpower isn’t very helpful when there are thousands of entities whose success depends on breaking down individual willpower; the deck is very much stacked against the individual.
The particular behavioral addiction of being glued to our devices may be harming our—and our kids’—attention spans and empathy. (Although as someone who has never liked eye contact, I found the attack on not making consistent eye contact/criticism of how webcams deter direct gaze a bit ableist.) Alter considers online social interaction to be not “the real thing” (e.g., gamers “build simulated friendships that almost look and feel like the real thing”), which my experience of fandom suggests is far from the whole story, but he is not very interested in whether you can have the good of online connection without having the bad. I don’t disagree that there are a lot of ills that online interactions can make worse, but consider the contradictions in this account: He discusses a center that treats so-called gaming/online-induced “intimacy disorders,” the result of which is that men “don’t have the skills to bring sexuality and intimacy together.” But: The center no longer admits women because “we had to revise our policy after a number of patients ignored the ‘no physical intimacy’ rule.” So, you know, it was intimacy but not real intimacy, not the right kind of intimacy.
And for real get off my lawn energy: “Kids of the 1990s and earlier stored dozens of phone numbers in their heads; they interacted with each other rather than with devices; and they made their own fun instead of extracting manufactured fun from ninety-nine cent apps.” I have my issues with Clay Shirky, but I remember growing up in the 1980s and his response to this argument is perfect: “Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and they don’t? I saw that one a lot when I was growing up.” Our current situation seems to me genuinely catastrophic, but Fox News has at least as much if not more to do with that in the US, and Alter seems uninterested in making distinctions in evidence. For example, he treats one expert’s recommendation that kids “should be allowed to watch passive TV till they reach elementary school—around age seven—when they should be introduced to interactive media, like iPads” as “agree[ing]” with the American Academy of Pediatrics that “Television and other entertainment media should be avoided for infants and children under age 2,” which is not the same thing. Interestingly, Alter is much more ambivalent about gamification (making tasks more like games), which he concludes is not inherently good or bad, but depends on what else is going on.
But if you really want to change your online habits, he does collate what seems like useful information for making a behavior change into a real habit.
Thomas J. Tobin & Kirsten T. Behling, Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Presents the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework as particularly useful for mobile learners. Students who need to keep the noise down so the kids won’t wake up can benefit from captions, for example, or listen to audio versions of study guides as they drive. But it’s relatively easy to present material in different modalities; they argue that it’s both harder and more important to give students opportunities to show their understanding in different modalities, not just written—a video or audio submission should also satisfy requirements in many cases. I’m sympathetic, but the point that testing biology in a written, closed-book exam is also testing “short-term and working memory, organization and time management, attention, and the ability to work under pressure,” and that it should be reconfigured to focus on testing biology principles, only makes sense if you really do just want to test biology understanding. But I think I am testing organization and time management/ability to work under pressure in my open-book midterms and exams; those are things that clients and employers value and that are in fact integrated with substantive knowledge in practice. Even so, I thought the emphasis on defining what success looked like as specifically as possible was helpful, and they do acknowledge that format can be part of what you’re trying to teach.
Cyndi Kernahan, Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Classroom: Hard to believe, but I read this a couple of months ago, before “critical race theory” was the latest scareword for conservatives. Makes a fascinating distinction between teaching (which strives to enable students to be able to understand and apply concepts) and behavior change (which teaching often can’t produce and arguably shouldn’t try for). Because of their different goals, employee diversity training and teaching about race may need to do different things, even if they rely on the same knowledge base about racism. Argues against spending time debunking myths like colorblindness in favor of emphasizing a counterstory about structural racism, since debunking can often just reinforce myths. Also suggests affirming students’ own identities (while not accepting views that contradict reality) as a way of making them more willing to think about structural bias, including by having them think about an axis on which they are disadvantaged. A “growth mindset” also helps counter the shame and guilt that white students often feel, which can, if not overcome, induce them to stop learning to protect their self-concepts.
Stephen D. Brookfield and Associates, Teaching Race: How to Help Students Unmask and Challenge Racism: Focuses on the college classroom. Some of the chapters have specific suggestions about getting students to open up, focusing on creating productive tension and discomfort rather than meaningless “safety.” (So weird to revisit these notes in the context of the current conservative moral panic.) Journaling and other reflective writing exercises are popular. Most chapters emphasize the importance of the instructor’s own vulnerability/acknowledgement of internalized racism and error, while still setting expectations about learning and conversations. Many suggested that getting white students to think about ways in which they have a disfavored characteristic (including gender, sexuality, and disability) could transition them into acknowledging racism and intersectionality.
Stacey Abrams, Lead from the Outside: How to Build Your Future and Make Real Change: Fairly self-help-y about owning your power etc., which means I have to update my opinion about the advice because clearly she knows what she’s talking about. One pull quote: “I have never heard of a student refusing admission to an Ivy League college because her father is why she got into the top-rated school. Likewise, we ‘others’ must be bold in our acceptance of quotas as a way to advance.” Abrams also breaks down the different types of people who can serve mentor-like roles, including peers, and suggests strategies for maximizing their assistance to you, including being clear about what you want from them because most people who want to help you want you to help them help you.
Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: How anticolonial consciousness grew in China, Japan, Iran, Afghanistan, and other Asian/Middle Eastern areas both before and after WWI.
Camila Townsend, Fifth Sun: A history of the people now commonly known as the Aztec Empire, with the arrival of Cortez treated as a big shock but not as the end or beginning of the story, using whenever possible the records they left of themselves—which are relatively extensive given that they had written pictograph records before Cortez and quickly adopted an alphabetical system.
Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans--And How We Can Fix It: American tax law’s marriage bonus for couples filing jointly always helped single-income households more than dual-income households, which meant that it disproportionately helped whites (and, Brown says, was adopted into federal tax law in order to discourage more states from converting to community property states for all marital purposes, which would have benefited women). As marital income rises, more white wives don’t work and more Black ones do, so the divergence persists and even increases. And, she incisively points out, one $100,000/year job is likely to have better health and retirement benefits than two $50,000/year jobs, along with freeing up one person’s labor for the home/raising children, so the single-income, more-likely-to-be-white family is even more relatively advantaged. Mathematically there’s either a marriage penalty or a marriage bonus, but which it is is unequally racially distributed (and the penalty is large if you’re eligible for the EITC, to add injury to injury). This is a key reason that getting married increases white wealth by $75,000 but Black wealth by nothing. And that’s just chapter one; real estate taxes/deductions, student loan debt/nonprofit schools versus for-profit higher ed that is more likely to enroll Black students and leave them with debt even if without a degree, employment, retirement plans, stock ownership, and inherited wealth all come in for their contributions to inequality via the tax system in particular. These advantages reinforce each other, so that, for example, whites whose grandparents weren’t homeowners are now more likely to own their homes than Black people whose grandparents were homeowners. Brown has some proposed changes, including ending joint filing, which is apparently unusual internationally. Her key point: “Increasing access to a system designed to build white wealth will ultimately not work to build black wealth.”
Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, & Sheila Heen, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most: Conflict management advice: Working out how to listen with curiosity to others’ perspectives by finding their story of how and why the conflict occurred; how to disentangle character/intent from impact (yours and theirs); how to recognize the importance of the parties’ feelings while not treating them as attributions of “who is really to blame”; and so on. Seems quite useful and quite difficult to commit to. Key principles: In a conflict, everyone makes a contribution, which is not the same as everyone being to blame, equally or otherwise. Resolving a conflict requires understanding the parties’ contribution, but does not require judging, especially by the parties themselves. But the key thing here is that avoiding blame does not mean avoiding your feelings about the conflict. There are example conversations of how to reframe away from blame to understanding, even in the face of a partner who wants to win instead.
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous: WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. This is a long and fascinating book with tons of references to interesting research that I could only gesture vaguely at even in a long review. Basically, Henrich argues that a society’s organization can change individual brains, which then can change the society further. These changes mean that memory works differently for different groups, as does visual processing and facial recognition, and he argues that they can also explain big differences in moral reasoning, such as the relative importance of guilt v. shame in controlling behavior. Westerners are more likely than non-Westerners to participate in punishing someone who has broken norms but not personally harmed them, and less likely to seek revenge against someone who has personally harmed them. Also, fundamental attribution error—attributing behavior to character rather than circumstance—turns out to be fundamental only to the WEIRD; non-Westerners are more likely to explain behavior by pointing to an individual’s circumstances. We are more subject to the endowment effect (valuing things more because we deem them ours), we value having choices more, and we overestimate our own talents more.
Why? The book argues that the West, for whatever reason (Henrich doesn’t speculate), largely adopted a particular kind of monotheism that promoted monogamy; discouraged concentration of power in kin groups because they stood as counterweights to Church power; enforced monogamy so that powerful men couldn’t have multiple wives; and ultimately promoted individualism, which led to things like literacy and non-kin affinity networks such as coreligionists and political parties. “How many people do you personally know who married their cousins? If you know none, that’s WEIRD, since 1 in 10 marriages around the world today is to a cousin or other relative.” (A country’s rate of cousin marriage turns out to correlate with a lot of these other things, like generalized trust, rate of blood donations, and even how many parking tickets a UN delegation gets.) Less kin-based societies developed other mechanisms of social control, focusing on individual behavior and punishing defectors without getting into revenge cycles.
As a result, Westerners became psychologically distinct from other groups. Among other things, we are more likely than non-Westerners to be trusting of strangers, to favor testifying truthfully that our friends committed a crime over lying to protect them, and otherwise to favor large structures over close kin groups. There are similar differences within Western society, so areas that became Protestant early on are even more WEIRD in these ways than areas that were or stayed Catholic, and so too with immigrants’ children; “people in North Dakota and New Hampshire are the most trusting, with around 60 percent of people generally trusting others; meanwhile, at the other end, only about 20 percent of people are generally trusting in Alabama and Mississippi.” This dynamic isn’t unique to Christianity; Heinrich argues that similar patterns can be discerned in groups from India and China which developed in more or less kin-oriented directions.
There is a lot of fascinating stuff, including the effect of individualism on walking speed in crowded cities. What there is not is much discussion of the meaning of percentages and proportions. So, Westerners are a lot more likely than non-Westerners to trust strangers … but that means that there are a lot of untrusting Westerners and trusting non-Westerners. (Likewise: Peer pressure is powerful, and studies show that when an experimenter’s confederates give obviously wrong answers to objective questions, a number of people often go with the majority despite being unhappy and uncomfortable doing so—from 20% in highly individualistic societies to 40-50% in highly communal societies—which is a big change, but not a complete one.) This complexity also extends to the race/class/gender differences washed away in much of this discussion—Western trust is often limited to those who match the right profile, which is a very different thing from generalized trust although also a very different thing from “I only trust my close kin.” Because Henrich is interested in dynamic processes, he argues that there is an inherent pressure to trust (etc.) larger and larger groups once the process of leaving kin behind begins, so that’s how you get people who agree that all human people have valid moral claims on one another. But how we get there, and how far we are from there, matters, especially given that it seems that trust is declining in the West and that many people are willing to prey economically and politically on the (often racialized) trust that exists.
I’m not even getting into his discussions of the varying effects of testosterone depending on society/the presence of polygamy; the variances in behavior of WEIRD and non-WEIRD people competing within a group versus competing among groups; the psychological effects of war (which 18th century Europe experienced pretty constantly). He is not a genetic determinist. For creativity, for example, he argues that exposure to different sources of knowledge drives innovation far more than anything we could call “natural” intelligence. And in the key centuries, he argues, European cities were pretty much deathtraps requiring a constant inflow of rural migrants, meaning that natural selection is not a good explanation for WEIRD psychology.
Andrew L. Whitehead & Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States: Argues that Christian nationalism is a distinct entity from religiosity in the US. So, for example, Christian nationalists see serving in the military as important to being “a good person,” while being devoutly religious decreases the likelihood that a person endorses this view. “As Americans show greater agreement with Christian nationalism, they are more likely to view Muslim refugees as terrorist threats, agree that citizens should be made to show respect for America’s traditions, and oppose stricter gun control laws. But as Americans become more religious in terms of attendance, prayer, and Scripture reading, they move in the opposite direction on these issues.” Devotional religiousity is associated with ideas of caring for the vulnerable, while Christian nationalism is “unrelated” to taking care of the sick and needy, and Christian nationalists are less likely to believe that actively seeking social and economic justice is important to being a good person. In their view, it is fundamentally a political orientation, not a religious one.
Although the authors conclude that Christian nationalism “allows those who embrace it to express a racialized identity without resorting to racialized terms,” they hold (less persuasively) that it’s not reducible to racism. The reasoning: there is a noticeable percentage of US-minority groups that hold “certain” Christian nationalist views (like endorsing militarism, teaching the Bible in schools, the special role of the US in God’s plan, and traditional gender roles) but also have a strong racial justice orientation, “the exact opposite of what we see in white Americans.” By their data, 65% of Blacks support Christian nationalism, the largest proportion of any racial group (though support is not necessarily full endorsement).
James Dommek Jr., Midnight Son: Not-very-resolved nonfiction/podcast type thing about a Native Alaskan who went from aspiring movie star to convicted attempted murderer, who claimed to have encountered/been stalked by people out of myth. Interesting Alaskan color, but listen for the characters and not the story.