Hey, guys, I’m blogging again, over at farwent.net. Come check it out.

Perhaps the most insane part of talking about race right now in America is how many people — almost always white and right-leaning, to sweepingly generalize, but of course, that’s who it almost always is* — act just incredulous when confronted with the idea that racism might still be going on here today. Like, it’s never, “Well, yes, I agree we have systemic problems as a society regarding how we treat people with different-colored skin, but in this particular case I don’t think those problems were as important a factor as [something else] and here’s why.” It always seems to be flat-out, shaking-their-head disbelief at the mere suggestion that racism might still exist in this country and have real effects. At best (“best”), I guess they think that racism does happen, but that it’s exactly that: something that “happens” in isolated incidents, like Paula Deen or Donald Sterling or Michael Richards using the n-word. Honestly, I suspect there are a lot of people who think using the n-word is the definition of racism, and like the only definition of racism. And since black rappers use the n-word all the time, too, they conclude that racism can’t be that big of a deal. (Also, black people are allowed to use the same water fountains as white people now, and Martin Luther King Jr. happened, so, to these people, I guess, racism is over, and now it’s just a matter of lazy black people getting their shit together and taking advantage of the bounteous opportunities we have laid out before them.)

I’m guessing here, but I’m not guessing that hard, because I was born in a mostly white place and have spent most of my life with mostly white people, and regardless of what I might consciously think or write, I still feel these ways of thinking lurking in the basement of my brain. It’s not even that I grew up with racially insensitive white people — I didn’t! I think we were all pretty good. It’s just that we were still an in-group, and in-groups have prevailing mind-sets, mind-sets you’re barely aware of. We were taught that racism was a thing of the past, that the civil-rights movement had conquered it. And we were taught that the n-word was bad, an artifact of those benighted times before MLK stepped forth to lead us to the promised land. And that was about it.

Well. If there’s one useful takeaway from our present obsession with fantasy stories, maybe it’s that evil never dies that easily, really never dies at all. At best maybe it mostly goes away for a while, and then comes back morphed into a different form. But in this case, the case of American racism, it never even went away.

Listen: People are still alive today who can remember segregation, remember separate water fountains, remember Rosa Parks. (Just think of that, by the way: Sixty years ago, a woman not moving from her bus seat catalyzed a nationwide movement; now kids are getting killed, and we seem to be on the fence about if we need to do something.) Lots of people are still alive today who can remember all that.

So: Why the incredulousness when anyone suggests that racism might still be a potent negative force in our culture? Why does anyone even think it probably went away? We had a society where — decades after slavery and the Civil War — it was commonplace to explicitly, legally treat black people differently from white people. It wasn’t just accepted by many people, it had the force of law behind it. That wasn’t very long ago. Is it somehow crazy to think that the attitudes that allowed those things to happen weren’t eradicated? Maybe a class of behavior that caused one whole group of people to treat a whole other group of people like crap — publicly, institutionally — maybe that’s not something that just magically disappears.

People act like MLK won. Uh, he got killed. He’d literally just told us about the mountaintop, and then he got killed. Don’t act like we all got there, too.

*Note that “All the people who act this way seem to be white and right-leaning” is different from saying “All white and right-leaning people act this way.” I shouldn’t have to say that, but we live in stupid times.

Good post here on the most typical trollish responses you’ll get from people on the Mike Brown shooting and Ferguson. I’ve seen at least three of these in discussions I’ve been involved with: the “Wait for Evidence” Troll, the “Mike Brown Shouldn’t Have [insert human action here]” Troll, and the “But What About Black on Black Crime!” Troll. In connection with the last one, I also got “Stop robbing black people of their agency as responsible citizens in society” from someone. His point, as best I could read it, was that there’s so much crime in black communities that police can’t be blamed for taking aggressive measures; that it was black people’s job to fix that; and that suggesting that racism frequently played a role in police’s treatment of black people was paternalistic, because it gave black communities an excuse to fall back on instead of forcing them to confront the problems they needed to deal with.

Of course, this whole line of argument falls apart under the barest scrutiny, because anyone with the internet (which I know this fellow has, because we were arguing on it) can see that many, many black people ARE exercising their agency, have been for years, and what they’ve concluded is: This problem is about way, way, WAY more than just how black people behave.

Black communities have been taking steps to deal with black crime for decades. They’ve been trying to deal with a host of other problems, too. And what they’ve kept running up against is a set of institutions that consistently treat black people poorly and prevailing mind-sets that consistently lead to poor outcomes for black people.

And so they’ve responded in the most sensible way: They’ve called us on it. Over and over again. We are aware of our problems, black leaders say. But our biggest problem is a racist culture.

So you can have it one of two ways: You can operate on the assumption that the many, many smart black people who’ve been working on this shit for years might be worth listening to. Or you can believe that they’re all, every single one of them who has reached the same conclusion, lazy whiners and liars with no self-respect. But don’t come with this “Stop denying black people their agency!” bullshit on one hand, and then deny everything that so many black people have been actively saying for so long. You’re not respecting anybody’s agency then. You’re just looking for an excuse not to change.

Jon, I’m sorry I didn’t respond earlier to your text about whether I’d heard the new Sinéad O’Connor song. I’m sorry I didn’t respond to the four texts you sent after that, either. I should have; I know I’m a bad friend. But we’re pretty close, you and I, so I need to address a topic for you and everyone else who cares about keeping in touch with me. And that topic is: Please never text me.

I have a terrible, shitty smartphone. I know, I know, I should get a new one. Do you know how terrible and shitty my smartphone is? If I had even a half-decent smartphone, I would have been able to take screenshots of your texts for this post, instead of taking a picture of the whole phone in my hand using my computer. I don’t have a half-decent smartphone, though; I have a terribly, shitty phone. I’m not even comfortable calling it a smartphone, except for pure taxonomical purposes.

So I hate having a conversation on it. It takes for-fucking-ever just for the keyboard to come up sometimes, and also my reception is worse at my house than anywhere else in Madison, so even after the keyboard comes up, it also sometimes takes for-fucking-ever for the message to actually send.

But you know, even back when I had a half-decent smartphone, I hated text conversations. Because I have to pick up an entirely separate device (i.e., my phone) to have them. I spent nearly all day in front of my computer. It’s sad, it’s really sad. But it’s true. And I often work from home, so sometimes I don’t even bring my phone into my kitchen/office when I’m working; I just leave it in the bedroom, plugged in. If someone really needs me, they can email or use my beloved landline, which I prefer for phone calls because of (1) the reception thing and (2) its ergonomical superiority.

I miss texts all the goddamn time. I mean, I eventually see them, but sometimes it’s already the next day. I didn’t see your text for hours, Jon. And I’m not going to change. I’m already chained to one piece of digital machinery. I will not be darting back and forth between two. Especially when one is shitty and terrible.

If you need to get in touch with me outside of purely practical information (addresses, phone numbers, what time you’ll be somewhere, you need my underwear size because you’re buying me bespoke underwear), please, Jon — and everyone else, too — please just email me. Please never text.

I enjoyed the Sinéad O’Connor song. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. I hope you and Stephanie and the cat and your prospective child are doing well.

Your friend,
Josh

My favorite thing in the world right now is probably Twitter. I mean, also my kid, but Twitter has never woken me up at 4am and not gone back to bed, and Twitter has never ratted me out to his mother after I said “shit” one morning when we were late for preschool. No, I love him more than words can bear, but if I’m honest about it, I look forward to being on Twitter more. I have never abruptly stopped masturbating just because I wanted to see what was going on with him.

Facebook is pretty good, too — better than people give it credit for. But Facebook and Twitter are totally different. (OK, not totally different, but they’re pretty different.) For starters, unless you’re George Takei, most of the people you communicate with on Facebook are gonna be people you know. Facebook is family; Twitter is friends. And Facebook is “I had English with you sophomore year,” whereas Twitter is “You’ve read the same books as me.”

Twitter is more than that, too, though. Are you aware of Black Twitter, which is just black people on Twitter? It’s called Black Twitter because it really does feel separate from the Twitter of white people, which is just called Twitter. People act like online life is super different from offline life, but actually, our online communities mirror our offline, “real-life” communities to a great extent. The white people mostly hang out with white people. The black people mostly hang out with black people. I think the cats on Twitter probably mostly hang out with the white people, too.

Anyway, I’m not really qualified to speak about Black Twitter — I just follow a handful of accounts, and it’s only been for a few months. It’s just wonderful, though. I’m not exactly suffering from a surplus of black or other minority voices in my life, either talking directly about minority issues and their experiences with racism, or just, you know being people. Twitter is worthwhile to me because it delivers both those things: philosophical engagement and a sense of the beauty and mundanity of other people’s lives. You can just sit back and listen. You learn so much.

It’s also very funny. Twitter is class clown paradise. Plain Twitter is funny, Black Twitter is funny, Feminist Twitter is so funny that for anyone who follows it, the stereotype of feminists as humorless has been forever obliterated. I have a feeling even Republican Twitter is funny, and that is saying something, because those guys have historically had trouble with that.

The popular line on Twitter is that it’s inane, that it’s people telling you what they had for lunch or lazy laptop activists who think you can save the world with clicks. There’s some of that. But what it’s been for me is a window into other people’s perspectives, both the quotidian and the momentous. There’s a roundedness there, far more than you get from reading a weekly newspaper column by a professional journalist. It’s much more like getting to know an author over the course of many books — you get a sense of their interests, their big concerns, their beliefs, how seriously they take things, how seriously they take themselves. And of course, though many people on Twitter have tremendous facility with the language (it’s a natural home for poets), most people posting aren’t professional writers.

More thoughts on Twitter to come. But I want to go on the record as saying that I think it’s going to prove to be pretty important; and it wouldn’t surprise if we saw a competitor pop up in the next few years. It wouldn’t have to be an American company, either.

Not sure why I started paying attention, but I’ve been a little shocked to realize just how many links I share or retweet without first reading them in full to determine if I really agree with them. I know that sounds really stupid — it is really stupid — but it’s true. But I suspect I’m not alone.

I am baffled by Americans who are moved to show their support for Officer Darren Wilson in the wake of his shooting of Michael Brown. I can understand not having an opinion, and I can sort of understand an unwillingness to align yourself with the protesters on Michael Brown’s side until more facts are known — but then, the police in Ferguson themselves have been actively standing in the way of the public’s access to facts, so even there, it’s kind of like, Aren’t you unhappy with their conduct just because it’s impeding your ability to judge for yourself?

Police misconduct is a real and dangerous thing in America — at least according to a couple of Madison police chiefs, it is. I helped former Chief David Couper with this book, not long after I profiled Sergeant Mike Koval, who is now chief of the department here, for our alt-weekly Isthmus. (That story, by the way, features the absolute best lead I’ve ever written.) Both have extensive thoughts about the ongoing militarization of American police, the quickness with which police turn to violence in situations that call for conflict management, and the problem of police not mirroring the communities they serve, from a demographic perspective. I’m less familiar with the work of Radley Balko, who has done extensive coverage of how police routinely fail to respect citizens’ civil liberties, but he gets a great deal of praise from people whose work I do know and respect, even those who largely disagree with him politically. Worth your time.

I just don’t understand Americans whose immediate instinct is to trust the police. “I believe he did what he had to do,” said a man in the story linked to above, who of course wasn’t present for the shooting. “No officer is going to go further [than] they need to.” There’s so much evidence not to believe that. Even outside of other issues with police, just the way police in Ferguson have comported themselves is deeply suspicious. As plenty of people have noted, if we read about it happening in another country — peaceful protests being monitored with military-grade weapons, curfews being ordered, journalists being arrested or their movements restricted — we’d thank our stars we live in a free country. And I guess some of us do, since we’ve got the money and the right color skin. But if we don’t do something soon, we won’t for long.

I’m trying to figure out how exactly I want to handle comments here. For a blog like this, I’m leaning toward the mind-set that there are better ways to do smart, thoughtful discussion than a comment section on every post. Anyway, it’s a work in progress, but I wanted to post this to let you know that if you have a comment hanging out in Moderation Limbo here right now, I am not ignoring it. And if you have thoughts about how to do comments properly, by all means please share them using the form below.

In connection with the discussion that spurred yesterday’s post about how society thinks about porn stars and sex workers, I was thinking about how we look at Jesus’s relationship with Mary Magdalene and his disciples. The popular notion that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute “redeemed” by Jesus has largely been discredited by historians today, but, based on the average layperson’s familiarity with historical scholarship, I’m going to guess that a lot of Christians still believe it.

And I suspect that, in believing it, their thought process goes something like: Mary Magdalene was a fallen woman who was made better again when the Lord took an interest in her. I would guess this is also how, to a lesser extent, many Christians think about the poor, low disciples — the fishermen like Peter and Andrew, Levi the tax collector. They were bad/rough/low people, but then they met Jesus and he made them better.

This attitude is evident even among those who know that Mary probably wasn’t a sex worker. From the entry about her on Bible Gateway:

the idea developed that Mary was a prostitute, but there is not an iota of genuine evidence to suggest such a bad reputation. Those theologians who describe her as a profligate do her an injustice, just as calling institutions for the care of fallen women “Magdalen Homes” does. One writer defines Magdalen as “the inmate of a female penitentiary,” but the Bible depicts Mary as a pure, though deeply afflicted woman before she met Jesus. To suggest that she was dissolute because she was possessed by seven devils, is to affirm that every insane person is depraved. There is no word whatever in the writings of the Christian Fathers, whose authority stands next to the apostles, as to Mary having a foul reputation.

Boldface mine. I love how it says, essentially: “Mary might have been possessed by devils, might have been insane, but she wasn’t — yuck — a hooker.”

I’m not a Bible scholar, and I’d like to assume that those who are haven’t been prejudiced in their investigations, haven’t been motivated to fudge evidence to demonstrate that Mary Magdalene was not a sex worker. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt, but it’s tough, knowing the bias that’s in play.

Anyway, the point of this Sunday post is to suggest that maybe, uh, based on our reading of the Gospels and understanding of Jesus’s basic message, we need to reconsider how we think about Mary Magdalene and the disciples, regardless of who they actually were. Maybe instead of believing that Jesus did them a favor by essentially lowering himself to associate with them, maybe instead of unconsciously assuming that they were elevated by his presence in their midst — maybe we need to understand that he didn’t think in those terms. That he wasn’t looking to elevate anyone or “fix” anyone, at least as regards their social status, so much as he just loved them and enjoyed their company. Maybe he thought their concerns were a lot more relevant to how to live a long-term, sustainably holy life than those of a monied middle and upper class. (The association of poverty with intellectual inferiority is a habit we really need to break ourselves of. You only need to spend a little time in the service industry to quickly realize that knowing how to deploy the Oxford comma and a well-cultivated bookshelf have almost nothing to do with intelligence.)

I say this because I think probably one of the major obstacles to building a workable, genuinely helpful Christian movement is the persistent, unspoken sense that there are certain people who need to be saved. I mean, in the Christian sense, we all need to be saved, and I don’t know how you’d go about measuring whether anyone needs it more than anyone else, though I would submit that if you’re sure someone else needs it more than you, you’ve likely got it exactly backwards. It’s not our job to “save” each other — that would be God’s, if He exists. It’s our job to love and accept each other, to listen to each other, to treat each other well even when we disagree. Don’t worry about whether someone is profligate, dissolute, depraved. Worry about whether those labels are impeding your ability to see their humanity. And don’t think of them as a project in need of improving. You have your own project. It’s called you.

I will just say that this is a pretty stupid essay, and that Wired publishing it is sorta ironic, given that early on Marshall McLuhan was the publication’s patron saint, not that I really ever thought anyone there understood him very well.