Ferguson, Missouri and Leaving Academia

This is a piece that has waited nearly two years to be written, and even as I write it, I partially regret it, but it feels prophetic--a voice in the wilderness that needs to be heard.

 I'm a police officer. I'm also a teacher. I've had a foot in each of these identities my entire adult life. I wanted to teach at a university from the time I first arrived at university (before that, I wanted to teach high school). But after a year working as a professional actor, I decided that I did not want to teach theatre and that I would need a "real job" if I wanted to re-tool in graduate school. So I took the only other job I had ever wanted to do, and I became a police officer in the same medium-large city as my father. While I worked as an officer full time at night, I also earned a Master of Arts degree in English, worked two years toward a PhD in English Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy, and taught either as an adjunct or a graduate student for eight years. Two years ago, I took on more responsibility on my police department (and, full disclosure, a requisite increase in pay) and stepped away from the PhD, uncertain as to whether or not I would finish it, but certain that I would continue teaching. This August, the third academic year in which I have not taught will begin, and I will still not be teaching. What happened? Ferguson, Missouri.

A couple months after I stepped away from my PhD program, Michael Brown was shot and killed by Ferguson, MO police officer Darren Wilson. A version of events told by his friend held that Brown had been trying to surrender to Wilson, holding his hands in the air, when Officer Wilson murdered him in cold blood. This was aired in a television interview and immediately became the official version of events in the national media.

Around the same time, a hispanic man in a neighboring jurisdiction died after a video-taped confrontation with police, in which no weapons were involved. Two years later, two more high profile cases have again brought the issues that these incidents laid bare back into the public conversation. At the time I was asked often by friends, people at church, and my academy colleagues what I thought about these cases. I would say simply that I wasn't there; I'm not part of the investigation, and so it would be inappropriate and irresponsible for me to give an opinion at that time.

This is an attitude that, in large part, I held as an important academic habit. In fact, I saw this as an ethic that academics hold dear. My own discipline of Composition and Rhetoric preaches a thorough and sober approach to evidence. We have even coined a term for this: "negative capability," or a rhetor's ability to withhold judgement until she has examined all the evidence, weighed it against other evidence and context, questioned assumptions, biases, and motives of those providing the evidence and indeed the rhetor himself, and taken time to consider what all these mean.

Yet what I saw among many of my academic friends and colleagues was very much the opposite. It is not surprising to me that my colleagues would hold particular views on race and its role in structures like policing. After all, many academics in the humanities, myself included, hold fairly progressive ideas with respect to social issues. My own research involved the ways in which elements of the built environment act as signifiers of inclusion/exclusion (in other words, how the way we build stuff, the signs we post etc. are read by people to they belong in a place or whether they don't). What did surprise me was their extraordinary rush to believe and act on a version of events from a spurious source given long before any other evidence was even available. Incidentally, in the two years since Ferguson, I have read both DOJ investigations (Darren Wilson and the Ferguson Police Department were investigated separately), and I am convinced that 1) Wilson was legally justified in shooting Brown and that 2) the people of Ferguson were absolutely reasonable in believing Brown's friend instead of "their" horribly malfunctioning police department. I do not extend this priviledge to professional academics whose job it is to wait for, then carefully weigh evidence (two years later, this is the first time I've given a public opinion on the incident).

I saw from my colleagues in academe countless critiques against the police, accusations that American police are racist and violent, part of abhorrent system of control, out of control themselves, and so on. I saw none of the things I had come to expect of my own field of Rhetoric. I saw no discussion of the mediators involved in video evidence--the role of camera angle, the role of the videographer and her decisions about when to start and stop filming, of what to include in the frame and exclude out of it, the role of the news editor in determining where to cut the video and whether or not to include sound, and whose commentary will be included, whether that commentary will come before or after the video, etc. I saw no attempt to interrogate the market system at play in media coverage of the event-- no question as to whether or not wealthy white owners of cable news networks may have something to gain through editorial choices that posit middle class, white police officers as murderers of poor black youths. Instead, I saw shouting in university courtyards, vicious name-calling, rushes to judgement, and a complete lack of respect for actual evidence. Certainly, as is the case in examining any community, it would not be fair to lump all academics into one box. There were people, usually close friends, who would ask me about my perspective as a police officer and had tremendous respect for whatever insights I had (evasive and tentative as they often were). There were probably many others whose prudence kept them out of the public conversation all together and so I never knew about them. But I didn't see them, not even to urge calm and deliberation, which is what I always felt we were supposed to do.

After the in-custody death in our neighboring jurisdiction, while the investigation was still on-going, a community literacy center with whom I had worked for several months held a writing workshop for the family and friends of the subject (I don't mind calling him victim) to write about what the experience was like for them. On the same day that my former colleagues were posting pictures of themselves with smiling members of the victim's family, we were assigning officers to sit on the home of one of the involved officers who lived in our jurisdiction, because he was receiving death threats serious enough that we deemed it necessary to post a guard on his house, something that usually only happens in the movies. That officer was, supposedly, under an open investigation and thus enjoyed, supposedly, the legal presumption of innocence. I am not aware that any writing workshop was ever considered for the officer, his coworkers, or his family (maybe there was and I never knew, but  I would have been the natural person to contact to facilitate it, so I feel safe in assuming there was none). No one ever gave him the opportunity to write about what it was like to go from being afraid he was going to die, to being afraid he was going to be prosecuted, to being afraid he was going to die again. No one gave his wife and children an opportunity to write about what it was like to have their father vilified in the public forum--to hear that he should go to prison forever, that he should be killed. No one asked them to describe what it's like not to be allowed to go outside to play because there have been threats against your family. There was no attempt by my colleagues at the writing center, that I know of, to understand a fuller picture of those effected, or even acknowledge, despite having worked with me for months, that there was one. Instead, that officer, a husband, father, and public servant, was relegated to the position of robot-police machine, inhuman and inhumane instrument of a racist and evil system, that which all right-minded, socially progressive academics must stand against, then publish research about.

I had always seen my field as a last vestige of hope in a society that rewards rushing to the extremes (take, for instance, the people we've chosen as our presidential nominees). As teachers in universities, we were perhaps American society's last best hope to finally learn slow and respectful discourse on important topics--topics that involve the lives of police officers and of minorities, topics which deserve serious and deliberative discourse. Yet the speech and activities of my colleagues after Ferguson made me question if we had ever actually believed any of the things we had been teaching our students all along. Maybe we never actually meant it.

Policing is very imperfect. If not carefully managed, it can have dehumanizing effects, both on officers and the people with whom they interact. Officers, if they are not careful, can easily develop very myopic views of the the world, views which they fully believe are the only "real" world that only they are in a position to see. Police officers can fall prey easily to black and white views of their communities: us and them, good people and bad people, criminals and victims, and yes, even sometimes, black and white. These tendencies must be examined and we have the obligation to determine what role these tendencies play in incidents like those in Ferguson (and these similar incidents since), and what we can do about them. But the profession of policing is dominated by people who truly believe in and orient their professional lives toward service. As problematic as this type of dualistic thinking can be, police officers overwhelmingly believe that good people need to be protected from bad people, and that this mission is worth risking our own lives. This is evident in the personal and professional sacrifices police officers make every day.

My wife and children are without me every night that I work, so that my wife and I have slept in the same bed at the same time less than half the days we've been married. I am 37 years old and I have arthritis in my right hip, where my gun presses into my side. I know what it's like to be bitten by a human and spend the next year having routine blood tests for blood borne pathogens. I know what human brain matter looks like on a popcorn ceiling. I know what it's like to tell an African American man, a father like me, that his 17 year old daughter was killed by a stray bullet at a New Year's party, while at the same time a 30 year old Syracuse PhD candidate is publishing a paper claiming that I can't empathize with that man because I don't live in his neighborhood (a real paper, by the way, given at CCCC, 2014).

We keep doing it despite these sacrifices and despite the inherent danger not because we were picked on in high school and we want to get back at the world, or because we want to subjugate minorities and trap them in their lower class neighborhoods, or because we just like the power trip, or any of the other things we are accused of every day. We do it because we believe in it. Imperfect as we are, we believe deeply in the perfection of our cause.

I'm left to wonder now what we, as academics believe. How did our reaction to Ferguson and similar incidents seem to betray the habits that I thought we most valued, the ethics that drew me to the field in the first place. Perhaps I am being too critical of academe. Perhaps it is well-meaning enough. Maybe we already knew what we believed, and so we thought we must speak out quickly because the value of human life trumps the academic, theoretical value of "negative capability." Maybe we made the very human error of failing to question our own biases when reacting to Ferguson, even as we teach students to carefully examine their own. Maybe we have such firm beliefs about systems in general that we failed to examine the particulars of these individual cases, instead prematurely assuming that the individual case was simply one more example of the problem of the system as a whole. Maybe we still hold our academic values firmly, we just forgot them a little in the heat of the very important moment.

But as any recently disillusioned person, I can't help but see something more insidious. Maybe, when Ferguson happened, what we saw was a bandwagon. Aboard that bandwagon we saw ready-made kairotic research questions, publishing opportunities, entryways for our literacy centers into communities usually reluctant to trust egg-heads with clipboards. Maybe it was nothing more than  careerism, and completely unreflective exploitation of my life as an officer and the lives of the minorities in the communities I serve.

I love the university. I love teaching, and I miss it often. And I hesitated to write these words for nearly two years because I wish to reserve the right to change my mind, but at the moment I cannot see myself returning to the classroom. Ferguson, Missouri forced me to confront these two roles I play: as an academic and as a police officer. I'm not the kind of person who feels an obligation to "choose sides." I am deeply suspicious of anything that feels like "us versus them," but my experiences watching, talking to, arguing with these two separate communities in which I'm wholly a member has forced me to confront what I believe.

I believe that, despite deep imperfections, perhaps even tragic ones, in American policing, the men and women I serve alongside do it because we believe in what we're trying to do. We hold these beliefs strongly enough to risk our lives for them.

As an academic, I'm not entirely sure we actually believe anything.

Are you sure you want to be a Christian Nation?

This time of year, many of us will likely hear from our Christian pulpits pseudo-patriotic sermons about how important it is that we get back to being a Christian Nation, as we were when we were founded. Many of us have grown accustomed to hearing a similar statement from the prayers of those who open our services. Especially in this part of the country, where Christianity has oddly become connected to conservative politics, we have heard more and more often prayers that we will "return to the Christian principles upon which we were founded." I am always uncomfortable when I hear such prayers for many reasons. Furthermore, and this is what I will address here, anytime I hear this prayer, I wonder if the person speaking the prayer really understands what he is asking for. When he asks that we "return" to the Christian principles upon which we were founded, does he have a good understanding of what those principles were?

I suspect that he assumes that the Christianity of his founding fathers was similar to his own, and what he is asking for is that his particular understanding of Christianity would influence and in fact guide the policy of our government. But of course, it is usually not the case. Though it is indeed the case that our founding documents professed to be founded upon Christian principles (a claim worth critiquing in it's own right, though this is not the purpose here), what these principles were are not necessarily consistent with the modern Christian principles of many of the people I hear making these prayers. The fact is, the Christianity of our nation's founders looked quite a bit different than our own. Here, I am using these differences in order to challenge this contemporary desire to "restore" Christianity to our government, in order to question whether or not this really is what we want.

I wish to foreground this discussion by pointing out that, whether for right or wrong, our concepts of Christianity are intimately connected to our own cultural milieu. Here is an example. In our Sunday morning class, we are currently studying the letters of John. In his first letter, John seems to address a specific popular early heresy that held that Jesus could not have actually been human, but had been spirit all along. He, according to this teaching, only appeared to be human. In order to understand how such an heresy is possible, it is helpful to understand the cosmology of ancient Greek philosophy, which was dominant in the Hellenized first century Roman world. The Greek view divides existence into three planes. An Ideal plane exists in which the perfect version of everything lives. This plane is a bit of an abstraction, but think of it as heaven, where everything we know is present, but in its perfect form. There is then the physical plane, where we and everything we experience exists. Finally, there is artifice--things that humans make. These are copies of the physical world, which is itself a copy of the Ideal. The important thing to know here is that things degenerate as they move down the level of existence. Physical things are imperfect versions of the Ideal. Built things (art in particular, according to Plato) are the lowest form of existence, because these things are copies of copies. The heresy John addresses is made possible because, for people enmeshed in this cosmology, it is unthinkable that God (who exists in a perfect plane) could possibly be manifested in the physical (imperfect) realm. Since God is perfect, he cannot exist in imperfection, therefore, he could have only appeared to be physical.

The point here is to show that we extrinsically link our understandings of scripture with our understanding of the world. Most of the time, we do not even know that this is what we are doing. After explaining this concept in class, I drew parallels between this and Christian thought in the modern western world, which borrows much of our thinking from the Greeks. We still imagine a similar separation between a spiritual realm and a physical one--a spiritual existence and a physical one.  For this reason, we see our spirit and our physical bodies as being somehow distinct. We don't recognize, and most of the time we don't even know, that this view of things comes as much from Plato as it does from the Bible (much of the Old Testament defies such a separation of spirit and body, and sees the separation of the spirit from the body at death a decidedly bad thing [Ecc 9:10]), but we nevertheless infuse our interpretations of scripture with this way of viewing the world. This view of things influences, to some extent, our understanding of spiritual warfare, and baptism (which is either a necessary outward expression of an inward change or an unnecessary work), and is evident in phrases like "heart issue" (as if the heart can feel one way while the body behaves in another).

The purpose here is to show how our view of the way things work, views which often come from places other than the Bible, influences how we interpret the Bible and, thus, what it means to be a Christian. So now I intend to turn my attention to how our founding fathers saw the world, how that seems to have influenced their Christianity, and whether or not this type of Christianity is what we want to return to (By the way, it is in no way settled what it means to call the founders "Christian" at all. Some of them clearly were; some of them clearly were not. For most, such discussions rely on arguments of definition).

The drafters of our founding documents were incredibly educated (and fabulously wealthy) men, steeped in the European philosophies of Enlightenment. Just as the Platonic philosophies discussed above assumed a particular cosmology which influenced the early Christians' understanding of the gospel, so did the Enlightenment philosophies that influenced our founders. The Enlightenment view of created order is often explained as a Chain of Being (a concept that actually comes from the Middle Ages), in which created things exist in a chain from most complex to least. Things low on the chain were the least complex and least meaningful. Things high on the chain were the most complex, the most intelligent, and held the most agency--that is control over their own lives and destinies. Human beings, who are created in the image of God, are of course the highest thing in the physical realm of the chain of being. They are the pinnacle of creation, little gods in their own right, since they were, of course, created to rule over the earth. The have more agency, in other words, than anything except God himself.

This understanding of created order existing on a chain is and was metaphorical. The actual implication of this cosmology was that, to the thinking of educated men in the eighteenth century, things were very carefully created in order to function in a certain way. This philosophy assumes a value laden creation in which things work in an orderly fashion, unbroken by the "fallen" condition of man. The eighteenth century colonial view of God was a far cry from the one presented in Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." The logical outcrop of such understanding is that God can be, and was, lasses faire in his involvement with creation. The optimistic eighteenth-century view of God was as a benign but mostly uninvolved creator. He certainly intervened in human affairs in important moments (and, of course, our Revolution would often be presented as just such a moment), but he mostly stayed out of the way. This is because he had created man to be innately logical. He was endowed with Reason (capital R). Man could, therefore, take care of himself. For political thinkers, social problems like crime and poverty were caused by intrusions from a corrupt and oppressive governments. A man stripped of his "God given" ability to take care of himself would naturally rebel in order to restore his proper position on the Chain, where God created him to be. If the government would just get out of the way, man would use Reason to deliver himself.

This thinking is all over our founding documents. Indeed, the founding documents of the United States are perhaps the pinnacle of Enlightenment philosophy in action. They are works of genius, to be sure. They are not, however, particularly sound pieces of Christian doctrine. The supposedly divine rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (likely a purposeful misquote of Locke's "life, liberty, and estate") are in no way guaranteed in the New Testament. In fact, the Declaration's assertion that it is a natural right of man to "alter and abolish" any government destructive to these natural rights and "to institute a new government" seems a remarkable departure from the teaching of Paul in Romans 13 that we are to "to be subject to governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted from God." Jefferson was able to make such claims because his culture had, just as the hellenized church of the first century to whom John wrote, and just as we do today, inserted the philosophies of his own cultural context into his understanding of the nature of God. His ideas that these rights are natural, that authority comes from the people and not from God (as Paul claimed), and that it is a natural right to throw off a government comes as much from Locke, Hume, and Rousseau as it does from his reading of the New Testament. They hinge, once again, on an understanding of God as a distant creator, leaving mankind, who he has endowed with Reason, to his own devices.

While I'm actually kind of comfortable with the implications of this cosmology (though I don't think it's particularly correct), because it requires man to take responsibility for his own actions and control of his own destiny, I have often been under the impression that most of those I've heard asking God to return us to our founding principles would not be at all comfortable with such cosmology/theology. Instead, most of the people I hear repeating such prayers are from southern evangelical denominations who tend to believe in a God who is actively involved, not just in the large scale affairs of man through major but infrequent interventions (like the American Revolution), but in the day to day affairs of individual Christians. We (and by "we" I don't mean "me.") believe that we are called to certain professions, that there is a person chosen to be our spouse, that we can pray for God to open or close this or that door in order to guide our decisions. I happen to believe that reality splits the difference between these two extremes, and that God is intimately concerned with individuals and will, on occasion, intervene in our lives especially when we ask him to, but who is also content to be on an adventure with us. He gives me as much agency as he claims for himself. These three views of God are not the same and, in some ways, even compete, since living according to each may lead to very different behaviors.

So the question is, when we ask that God "return us to our Christian principles," which of these three competing Christianities are we asking for? If we are asking that we truly return to our Nation's founding principles, then we are asking for a view of God which posits him as a good, but distant sovereign who is content to let us live as we see fit. I don't think that this is what most of the people speaking this prayer have in mind. Instead, I suspect that they desire that God would intercede in the day to day operations of governments in order to guide our laws. This is absolutely not what our founders had in mind. Whenever one of us asks for a Christian Nation, I suspect that each of us is asking according to our own understanding of God and his proper relationship with the governance of a nation. And this is where such a prayer becomes problematic.

These different understandings of Christianity (which are, again, influenced by philosophy and cosmology), may not seem that different, but that is because they do not have the effect of civil law. What happens when we begin to base a system of law on one of them.  What happens to forms of Christianity that are not majority forms? That majority forms don't even consider Christianity. What happens when Methodists control government and outlaw the teaching of Baptism for the remission of sins? What happens to The LDS church when Baptists (who consider them a cult) take office? For that matter, what if we really did establish a "Christian" nation which, we should assume would mean that we based our laws on the teachings of Christ. Would we enshrine in law that citizens must sell all their possessions and give them to the poor? Would we, instead if imprisoning thieves, give them our coats instead? Although, for reasons not established here, this sounds pretty good to me, most of the people who speak such prayers would likely call this communism and say "the difference between Christianity and communism is that Christianity is a choice." But, of course, when Jesus spoke these things, he spoke them as commands. So which version of Christianity to we enshrine in our laws?

Such concerns are why our founders were genius enough to decree that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercising thereof," which is commonly understood as the separation of church and state. They understood that their understanding of the relationship between God and man (which, as we have seen, have little resemblance to the actual teachings of Christ, though it shares Christ's respect for individual people) is a great way to frame a nation, but not a particularly good way to run it.

Finally, I think it's completely appropriate that we pray for revival in our nation (and indeed in our world). I think we should pray that God will move in our communities, and that God will inspire and protect our leaders. Perhaps more importantly, we should not then stop at prayer, but we should go out and begin to produce change; we should do the work of revival. I think that, to a certain extent, our desire for a Christian Nation is a way to pass the buck. We make it the responsibility of the government to institute laws rather than taking on ourselves to teach a higher law. We desire prayer in schools while we fail to pray at home, and we wish for Bibles in schools while ours collect dust from Monday to Saturday. We want the ten commandments in front of our courthouses but not in our lives. We support political parties that protect the unborn but which also protect corporate greed, and when that party is installed, we somehow think that we have taken a step toward restoring our Christian roots.  So then, if we look around and we see that out culture is sick (it is) and dying (it is), it is not that our government has failed to retain its Christian roots; it is that we have. After all, our kingdom, which is not of this world, precedes and far exceeds the American Constitution.

I don't want pray for God to return our nation to its Christian roots, since they were never particularly Christian to start with. Instead, I pray that God will fully and firmly establish His own kingdom in his earth and that we His people will be his instruments.

Electoral Maps and Visual Rhetoric

Maps were very important Tuesday night. A ubiquitous feature of network coverage of elections is the large digital map, coded with the now definitive red and blue. As networks reported races and results, they invariably used touch screen maps to zoom in on states to look at county by county results. As the evening started shaping up, analysts used maps to explain scenarios that would get each candidate to the magical 270. So, as important as maps have become in these discussions, it is smart to examine these maps. They are, despite seeming to be object graphs of voter behavior, discursive in nature, and thus worthy of analysis.

The rhetorical nature of these maps is evident in the fact that, in the morning after the election, my Facebook news feed was full of this map:

This map seems to be an objective graph of how each county voted. Surely, there's no way to spin this map; it simply is what it is. Yet, it's not surprising that this map was being shared by my Republican friends, rather than my Democrat friends. The attractiveness of this map to my Republican friends is simple to explain: it contains a lot of red. The implicit argument, then, is that a huge section of this country is conservative, or at least Republican, and last night's results are a product of those slightly-less-American coasts. I had one friend even make the comment that "ninety percent of the country is red." But of course, square miles don't get to vote: people do. In this way, this map, as a graphic representation of the electorate, is a bit misleading.

Here is a different picture of the country:

This Rorschach Test looking map is a map of the United States, distorted to account for population. It is a county map, like the one above, except that the sized of the counties is adjusted so that they reflect population rather than land area. The colors on this map reflect the election results, by county, of the 2004 election (here is the county map from 2004. It looks nearly identical to 2012). This map is topical rather than topological.

On this map, the red isn't near so overwhelming. And, obviously, the blue is much more prominent. As one of my students said of this map, "this map is a lot more magenta." The highly divided nature of the country is much more evident in this map, and it is easy to see that the population centers of the country  are solidly blue.

The point here is that no piece of information, even a seemingly objective map, is devoid of rhetorical construction. The way that a map as a graphic representation is constructed, presented, and passed around must be interpreted. These two maps contain different assumptions about the information they present, and thus imply different arguments about the political picture of the United States. Understanding these may greatly inform our understanding of the nature of the electorate and last night's results.

Here's one more, just for fun. What are the [barely] implicit arguments imbedded in this graphic?

Digital Divide and Public Outcry

This photo by Rusty Costanza appeared on the front page of the Times-Picayune on July 17th, accompanying an article about a hotel implosion and concerns by residents of the nearby Iberville housing project that particulate dust from the implosion might be hazardous. Interestingly, when readers called and e-mailed author Katy Reckdahl to complain, it wasn't about the implosion itself, but about the photograph. Readers were outraged that the eight year old child in this photograph was playing with an iPad, an expensive "luxury" item. The response was enough that Times columnist Jarvis DeBerry wrote about the outcry days later. His column sparked more debate on the issue, as commenters and commentators began to argue about what people on government assistance should be allowed to possess, presumably on the public dime. His column, as I write this, has 451 online comments in addition to the phone calls and e-mails that spurred the column in the first place. The issue has also gained the attention of more serious writers, academics, and think tanks.

The predominant debate has been whether or not people who are poor deserve to have things that are not necessities (an issue handled quite well by Jane Devin, whose blog led me to this story in the first place). While I think that, at the heart of this debate, is the feeling that many in the middle class seem to hold that, because they they foot the bill for those on subsidized food/housing, they exert a "sense of ownership" (Baker) over them, or at least over their activities. After all, if it's my money that they are using, I should have a say in how they spend it. Of course, as Devin points out, this sense of ownership and control seems only to extend to poor beneficiaries of government assistance but not the wealthy (if I buy a Chevy tonight, I still expect to pay for it, despite the fact that "my" tax dollars saved the company). Many in the middle class, then, seem to have what Devin calls "a kind of backwards jealousy," toward the poor. Though they may live in 800 square foot apartments in often dangerous and neglected housing projects, they didn't have to pay [much] for them. Meanwhile, I've had to pay for every bit of my 1700 square foot house. (That is to say, I'm slowly paying back a mortgage company who trusted me enough to buy a house for me, in no small part because I have a job, for which I am qualified by way of an expensive education paid for by federally subsidized loans, offered to me because Sallie Mae trusted the co-signature of my solidly middle class hard working parents.) Certainly, I shouldn't see these people "playing" with "luxury" items bought with "my" money.

But of course, we're not talking about "fancy rims," or "gold teeth," or "Air Jordans," (DeBerry). Instead, the luxury item held by a child (who, I guess, we think is supposed to be working to earn it) is a powerful literacy tool. As DeBerry explains:

The sight of a kid in public housing with an iPad doesn't offend me. Actually it gives me hope. So many poor people have no access to the digital world. They fall behind in school because of it. They miss the opportunity to apply for certain jobs. Yes an iPad is an expensive gadget, but we can't deny its usefulness. As computers go, an iPad comes cheaper than most laptops and desktops.

Most of us in the middle class would not, even for a moment, consider the digital divices in our own lives to be unnecessary luxuries. After all, we balance our checking account online, and pay bills online. our cell phones have replaced our landlines and are thus our basic tool of communication. We use our household computers, laptops, or tablets for work, for school, and for important social interactions.
 
In my household, which consists of two adults and two toddlers, we have four laptop computers (only one of which is currently functioning), two smart phones (each of which is more powerful than my family's first DOS based 286), and an e-reader. And that's not even all. I have two jobs, one with city government and one with a private university. Each of these employers has issued me a laptop computer, and provides me with access to desktop computers in several locations.
 
It is, therefore, not a stretch to say that computers are, in fact, an indispensable part of modern life. Certainly, computer technology and the literacies attached to it, are necessary for anyone who is to compete for good jobs--the kind of jobs that allow for upward mobility-- in Information Age America. Beyond this, Palfrey and Gasser (and many others) have stressed the importance of digital communities to those born after about 1980. Indeed, for this generation, computer mediated communication is an important part of identity formation. In other words, with regard to both our professional and personal lives, computer technology is extremely important.
 
With this in mind, arguments that the poor do not deserve and should not have access to what are, for the rest of us, indispensable technologies are especially insidious. In an age when many of our most important and influential literacy tools have shifted to digital media, such an argument is like claiming that children in underperforming inner-city schools ought not have access to books.
 
The assumptions behind such a claim are frightening. If I'm giving the people who make such an argument the benefit of the doubt, I will suspect that they are not thinking of the iPad as a powerful literacy tool, but are probably assuming that it is being used primarily as a gaming device, or social networking tool (which may in fact say much their own habits). These arguers may simply be ignorant about issues of literacy and digital access. Cartainly, many people have not accepted that anything beyond what they got in the golden age of their education is necessary for learning (we didn't have all that in my day, and I turned out okay). They may not purposefully be saying that poor children shouldn't have the opportunities that their own children have.
 
On the other hand, Sam Fulwood, a senior fellow at the American Center for Progress argues that:

Anyone alarmed by the sight of that photo surely must believe the poor aren’t deserving of anything save the barest of survival necessities—if that much. What else could explain their anger at the sight of an 8-year-old black boy learning about a world beyond his immediate community with an iPad in his hands?

Certainly, these arguments seem to involve the assumption that those living off of government assistance deserve only the bare minimum: tattered books in inner-city schools, limited and timed access via computers in public libraries, and absolutely no frivolous computer games or social media use. If these are indeed the assumptions of these arguments, then as Courtney Baker suggests "This thinking. . .mistakes education and technology as solely the domain of the entitled."

Certainly, there is a whole history of literacy education that suggests that those in privileged positions (often those who are only tenuously in these positions) tend to block the access of those in classes below them from literacy tools. It is as if there is an instinct among the middle classes to protect itself from those that would be their competition if they were afforded the same educational opportunities.

For me, this idea opens up new research questions: To what extent might this actually be happening today? Are there those who, whether knowingly or not, actively work to maintain the digital divide? Certainly, there are many who benefit from this access gap. These beneficiaries without a doubt have an interest in maintaining the status quo. So, to what extent, if any, does public policy reflect a desire of the middle class (which makes up the bulk of the voting public) to maintain and benefit from the digital divide?

This Thanksgiving, Are We Celebrating Cooperation or Genocide

Anyone at least my age remembers participating in Thanksgiving Day pageants in elementary school. In these pageants, some of us would dress like pilgrims, some like Indians (always an inaccurate term, now a distasteful one too), and some would even dress as turkeys. We would sing songs and perform little skits which all designed reinforce the American mythos of a cooperative relationship between Native Americans and early settlers of the "New World." Though the holiday (which was made an official by Abraham Lincoln, undoubtedly for political purposes) had been intended to celebrate the cooperation between the Plymouth Colony and the Wapanoag tribe, the holiday was often connected to Christopher Columbus who we were always taught had "discovered" the New World. In fact, in Canada, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the same day the U.S. celebrated Columbus Day.

Of course, this myth has come under fire in the past couple decades as well meaning folks have asked whether or not we ought to be celebrating the fact that an imperialist European force crossed an ocean and subdued a continent full of people. For this reason, I was surprised to see my sons come home from day care the other day with construction paper headdresses rather like the ones I remember making for our Thanksgiving pageants. Of course, I also noticed that the headdresses were altered from those that I remember, as if they were hiding what they were. Instead of cutouts of feathers, the headdresses were adorned with cutouts of hand prints in yellow, green, and blue. They combined feathers with our old technique of drawing turkeys.

These, along with the general spirit of the season got me thinking. How should well meaning people view Thanksgiving? How should we view our early history as a nation? Were we heroes in search of religious freedom, or wicked imperialists bent to grabbing as much land as we could, at the expense of those who already lived here? Is either of these views accurate or fair?

Certainly, the myths of my childhood are inadequate. It will not do for me to celebrate Columbus (since we have connected these events in our perception of cultural history) for discovering a "New World." How can this be when millions of people already lived here. To do so requires that we take a decidedly Euro-centric view of history. Only Europeans matter, and only their exploits are worthy of history.

But might the other extreme be lacking as well? Should I refuse to celebrate the crimes against humanity perpetrated by those Imperialist Europeans from whom I descended and who are ultimately responsible for my being here? I would argue that this view also involves assumptions that are both Euro-centric and inaccurate.

This view, in most of its forms, seems to assume a benevolent population of Native Americans who were bewildered by a European understanding of land ownership and who were ultimately overcome by superior force. This view positions European settlers as pirates (Vonnegut used this term explicitly) but it also seems to position Native Americans as romantically naive, almost childish people who lived off the land, to which they believed they belonged.

This view is every bit as racist as the first. It ignores the richly complex sociopolitical milieu of the Native American tribes living on the east coast in the seventeenth century. It ignores the complex relationship and the history of the relationship between early settlers and Native Americans, particularly the Wapanoags, the tribe if the "first" Thanksgiving.

A well nuanced explanation of the history of early settlers and their relationship to those people already living in the Massachusetts Bay area can be found in Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower. His book provides wonderful historical insight as to how the events we talk about at Thanksgiving actually occurred, who the people involved were, and what their relationship was like. Through this book, we gain a better sense of what we ought to regret, and what we ought to celebrate.

The first generations of settlers at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were far from being conquistadors looking for cities of gold. Instead, they were half-inept sailors sick and weary from a long voyage. They might have resembled illegal immigrants who have just crossed the Arizona desert more than a well armed force of confident Europeans. For their part, the Native Americans living in New England were certainly not romantic nomads quietly living off the land. Instead, they were farmers in permanent settlements. They lived on close proximity to other tribes and were thus politically savvy, engaging in land disputes and forging treaties, much like those is crowded Europe.

When colonists first arrived on Massachusetts Bay, they were hardly conquerors ready to subdue a bunch of disorganized natives. In fact, it seems likely that, had the Wapanoags wanted to, they could have pushed the settlers back into the sea. When fighting did begin to break out, it was localized. The first (and most important) major conflict came with King Philip's war, decades after the settling of Plymouth. Philbrick describes the ultimate cause of the war in this way:

By the midpoint of the seventeenth century. . .the attitudes of of many of the Indians and English had begun to change [from that of a spirit of cooperation and cohabitation]. . .Both sides had begun to envision a future that did not include the other.

This first war was much more evenly matched that one might assume. By this point, Native Americans had been able to acquire the same weapons as the settlers, and King Philip (the English name adopted by Metacomet, sachem of the Pokanokets) was well educated and often dressed in expensive clothing he bought in Boston. On the other side, one of the chief agitators (perhaps accidentally) of the war was a Harvard educated Native American Christian named John Sassamon.

The point is, The breakdown of diplomacy between early settlers and Native Americans was hardly a one sided affair, and it is hardly accurate to think of early settlers as marauding invaders sacking the villages of unsuspecting natives. Instead, two groups who had one lived in cooperation had begun to want to push the other out. So, with a more nuanced view of how things really were, how are we to think about and celebrate Thanksgiving?

Without a doubt, the policies of the young United States toward Native Americans was deplorable. The evils of the White Man's Burden, western expansion, and so on should not be minimized, and certainly should not be celebrated. And it may be impossible to separate entirely these travesties from our early history as settlers. But the spirit of cooperation between Native Americans and settlers which allowed Plymouth to survive can and should be remembered and celebrated. As Philbrick points out:

For a nation that that has come to recognize that one of its greatest strengths is its diversity, the first fifty years of Plymouth Colony stand as a model of what America might have been from the very beginning.

Without a doubt, much of the history that follows these first years is tragic and shameful. As greed and hatred are common to all mankind, tragedy and shame mar all of human history, not just that of this country. But this first generation of settlers shared with us the dream of a cooperative utopia, and though they were sick and poor, that dream was very nearly realized because two groups who did not know each other, could not speak the same language, and had no reason to trust one another nevertheless shared with one another. Thanksgiving, then, may and should still be celebrated as a picture of what could have been--a picture of what still may be.

The Hands-in-Pocket Revolution

Last night, Charissa and I sent our boys off to their grandparents' for the weekend, so we spent a night on the town. We went downtown for chocolates and coffee then decided to take a stroll to see the OKC National Memorial because Charissa had never seen it at night. On the way, we were surprised to see a large group of people in a downtown park, which is usually home to a number of homeless. But this looked like a rally. Complete with a News 9 van. So seeing some Bricktown police officers I know, we went and asked what was going on.

Turns out, the Occupy Wall Street movement had come to Oklahoma City. So, in front of me were a group of well meaning revolutionaries wanting to voice their concern that the wealth of this country was in the hands of a very small percentage of the population.

This is a obviously not a new complaint, and it's a concern that I should be careful to note here that I share. I think it's appropriate to ask whether or not a democracy where so much power is held by so few can be a democracy at all. When small groups of people hold the money, and therefore the power to make their voices heard, the rest must either agree with them or be silenced. This is obviously a huge problem in a democracy, and one that I think is a political reality in our country. I think it's fair to ask if our democracy isn't something more like an oligarchy.

I also sympathize with the complaint that wealth is not spread more equitably. So few have so much, while so many have so little. This is and always has been a reality in our world. But the problem seems somehow more insidious in a country in which hard work is supposed to be the key to success, where our own national mythos holds that if one simply works as hard as one can, one can and will rise. Of course, for many, this is simply untrue. For the uneducated, the poor, the handicapped, and many others is positions of disadvantage, it is awfully hard in this country to rise much above one's stature no matter how hard one works. After all, if you go from being a fry cook to a shift leader, you haven't really gone so far after all. This is a sad and awful reality. One that compromises our democratic ideals. One that, perhaps, calls for revolution.

But what I saw in the park last night was not a revolution. It was not revolutionary. It was not even in touch with the real problem. The fact is, the whole "I am the 99%" line is a sham. I did not see the poor, the stricken, the underprivileged, the oppressed. I saw no minorities (though I did see one African American woman on the News 9 story), and in an interesting irony, I saw not one homeless person in a park where homeless people sleep every night. What I did see were a lot of upper-middle-class white people, many college students (one even carrying a sign with an OU logo printed on it), wearing interesting and expensive body art and piercings, taking pictures of each other with smart phones, and all-in-all having a jolly time.

Obviously, there's nothing wrong with upper-middle-class white people noticing and speaking out about social inequities (I am, after all, all of these things). But as I listened to their speeches and watched their interviews, I became more and more aware that the people I was listening to didn't have a clue, and in fact had no compulsion to enact anything like the kind of social revolution that would change this country.

I found that I wanted to get up and speak myself (I didn't). I wanted to ask for a show of hands in answer to these questions: How many of you know what is at 800 W. California? What about 1335 W. Sheridan? How may of you have ever been to SW 8th and Rockwood? SW 15th and Westwood? NE 28th and Kelley?

These addresses describe the City Rescue Mission and the Jesus House. SW 8th and Rockwood is an intersection less than a mile from the opulence of the new Devon Building. The street at this intersection and for a few blocks on either side of it is in such disrepair that it is not even paved. Meanwhile the city that says it doesn't have money in the budget to fix the street is re-doing the Myriad Gardens--the front yard of the Devon building. These other intersections are the locations of large public housing projects in the inner city.

Then I wanted to ask them how many of them had been to Bricktown? To a Thunder game? To an OU-Texas party?

What I saw last night was not a collection of people dedicated to bringing about change. Instead, I saw a collection of college students who wanted to take part in something and leftovers from the 60's wanting to relive their own college years. Occupy OKC may as well have been a flash mob.

For those of us in the upper middle class, real change must begin with our admission that we are not victims in some class struggle between millionaires and thousandaires. We are suspects. We are people who demand to be heard but who blithely ignore the problems of people much less fortunate than ourselves--people who really are oppressed and poverty stricken. We complain that our student loan rates are unfair considering our sorry job prospects while we ignore the man working six days a week sweeping the street up after our protests. We don't even know that when we're sleeping in after a Saturday full of college football games and fun nights in the Paseo, he'll be getting up at 4:00 and walking to Labor Ready so he can be in line before all the good jobs are gone. We don't know about. We don't care about him. Yet we demand that something be done about him.

So, my complaint in this blog is against pretend revolutionaries. My exhortation, though, is for real ones--would be revolutionaries who don't know what to do. It's as simple as this:

Do Something!

Realize that standing in a park under the Sandridge building hoping Tom Ward will throw some money down does nothing to change the status quo. Get out of the park and into the community. I've often half-joked that I want a revolution led by Jesus Christ and Kurt Vonnegut. That's because these men both realized that change happens by getting among people and helping, eating with them, hearing their problems, being a voice for them. And doing these things (as Paulo Freire has suggested) not as patronizing liberators but as neighbors.

Sure, both these men took to the streets as protesters (Jesus was after all killed for the things he said), but they both understood that this in not where the real work is done. The real work is done by being kind to people. By living among them.

You want to see wealth redistributed? Start with your own. Feed and clothe people, even if it costs you your smart phone. Care for the sick, even if it costs you a semester or two of college. Go into foreign countries or even poor neighborhoods in your own country, even if you're uncomfortable. Use the privilege of your education to understand and voice the concerns of people who need an advocate. Put down your sign and pick up your shovel.

Bin Laden's Death and the Discursive Use of Scripture in Social Media

One of the interesting things about being both a Christian and an academic, particularly one whose interests lie in digital rhetoric, is getting to watch the interesting discursive practices of lay Christians as they navigate life. For this reason, the conversations in response to the death of Osama Bin Laden have been particularly interesting to me. So, here, in the midst of the moment, I'm dropping in to make some notes about this rhetorical event even as it unfolds.

Because social media sites allow such instantaneous, unreflective, and unrevised communication, it's a prime site for watching the ways in which people react to and discuss events, like the death of our current greatest enemy. For this reason, I've been watching facebook posts from my Christian (and a few former-Christian) friends.

I've seen three different threads running my friend's facebook posts. They are:

1) God does not delight in death, even of evil men, so celebrating Bin Laden's death is inappropriate (Ez 18:23, for example).

2) In this, I'm including variations on one theme: God is just and therefore it is right that the evil should die, and the emotions attached to retributive justice are human and natural and therefore cannot be judged (Psalm 137:8-9)

3) People shouldn't be using the scripture to make these arguments, since we must, by definition, argue these scriptures out of context.

I'll address the first two by critiquing the third. The view that we should not be using scripture to back our thinking on this issue seems to rely on a couple of assumptions. First, that the authors of the status updates falling into the first two categories intend to use scripture as evidence that their view point is the correct view. And, second, that they shouldn't do so.

This first assumption may very well be correct. Certainly, I've been watching a lot of arguments and implications that the author sees his or her view as the correct one and that others must get on board. The authors of the first category seem to be the bigger offenders in this regard. Some (by no means all, and probably not even most) of these authors wish to prove that those who rejoice in Bin Laden's death do not show the love of Jesus, and that rejoicing over death, even of a man as evil as Bin Laden, is therefore sinful. Implicit in such arguments is the suggestion that because I do have this kind of love, my Christianity is superior to your's. Certainly, I understand the critique of this type of argument. Such presentations of Christian thought make us look narrow, and completely out of touch with human experience/emotion.

Authors of the second category often seem instantly defensive, expecting or responding to the arguments of the first category. I can likewise understand the objection to this category. Such presentations of ourselves may make us seem unrepentant, showing a lack of understanding for how bad people become bad, and perhaps downright hypocritical (I'm supposed to love my enemies after all).

So I understand the objections to people using scripture to justify their own feelings on what is an extremely important national event. But I do not share it. This is because I question assumption number two.

One colleague of mine noted that this is evidence of why people ought not use the Bible as evidence in an argument. She says this from the perspective of a composition teacher in the Bible belt, where we are constantly trying to convince our students that there are very few academic arguments that benefit from citing scripture. That's just not the way academic writing works.

Indeed, the Bible is not written in such a way that it can work for arguments of scientific (social or natural) proof. Instead, the Bible is about the stuff of life. This is why I critique authors in category three. Writers in this category understand that the the Bible cannot be used to decide which side is right and thus they argue that it should not be.

I, however, think that this is exactly what scripture is for. Scripture is not helpful in arguing objective truth; it is, however, designed to help us navigate the subjective experience of human life.

The reason writers in both categories are able to find scripture that seems to back up their own feelings is because the Bible does in fact support both views. Jesus was the prince of peace, but he also came to bring division. As one friend of mine wrote "The Bible says not to get drunk. It also says God makes wine to make the heart glad. The Bible says God hates divorce and also says God divorced Israel. Go Figure." The Bible contains such contradictions (and they are contradictions) because life itself is contradictory. The Bible is complex because people are complex.

The purpose of these scriptures, then, is to help us make sense of and discuss the often contradictory emotions we experience in these events. My colleague mentioned to me that half the posts she saw used the Bible to support the idea that we should rejoice and the other half were used to support the idea that we shouldn't. My response was that this is because both were correct.

This is why I applaud the open conversations taking place on this issue. By discussing these events, and by struggling with our experiences and with how scripture relates to them, we gain a picture of the complexity of life and the complexity of God. Some in category three have expressed that these types of public debates are dangerous because they make Christians seem divided. But I have often though that the church's role in a post-modern culture ought to be to show the world that we too are complex and disintegrated subjects. That we too struggle with how we ought to feel and act. That there is room for other people to struggle with us.

We ought to embrace our own multiplicities and wrestle with them. In this way we, like Jacob, wrestle with God.

Public Broadcasting, Democracy, and Market Economy

Since Plato, our belief has been that a well ordered democracy requires a well-educated public. Part of the project of ensuring one in modern America has been public broadcasting. However, on Wednesday, House Republicans proposed a budget that would end funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which receives a tiny .0001% of the federal budget. When I posted a link on facebook to an online petition against the upcoming cut, I aroused the well-meaning and respectful ire of some of my conservative friends who believe that public broadcasting ought to be left to market forces. Their argument is, to wit: if people want the educational programming offered on PBS and NPR, advertisers will pay for it. Therefore, let the market bear it out.

The problem with such a view is that broadcasting paid for by advertising (thus, "the market") inevitably follows the ideological perspectives of the advertisers. Thus, large advertisers with lots of money quickly hold a monopoly of information.

To find evidence of the problems with this, I need look no further than my home in Oklahoma City. During the debate surrounding a recent tax extension the state's largest newspaper, according to a local republican campaign strategist, refused to report stories which held the tax proposal in a negative light because it's largest advertiser (the Chamber of Commerce) was in favor of the proposal. The most interesting thing about this situation is that the newspaper is unabashedly conservative. So, a conservative newspaper refused to publish arguments against a tax because its advertisers wanted it. In this way, the market was able to make a newspaper violate its own ideology, and effectively quash dissenting views. Thus, the supposedly fair and democratic marketplace, which was controlled by a powerful few, effectively censored the press. Public Broadcasting, which hands money to LOCAL stations, allows the stations to base their programming on what it's local viewers and producers feel is valuable, free from the pressure of the large advertiser who may not have the best interest of democracy at heart. (See this blog by Rep. Earl Blumenauer)

What's also true is that what the market wants and what the people need are not always the same thing. The public WANTS American Idol. So American Idol is what the market will bear, but it's hardly what is necessary to ensure a citizenry capable of voting on something other than which seventeen year old singer is the most dreamy.

The assumption that the "market" will always allow what's best to win out (which has oddly become the central tenant of the modern Republican party) is naive at best. This is because the market has constantly shown that it will, if it must, sacrifice the good of democracy for the strength of the bottom line. Though we insist on a system of checks and balances in the federal government, no such system is inherent in the market.

An extraordinary amount of our legislation exists to act as a check to this power. It has often been argued that the consumer serves as the check to the power of industry by choosing what to buy and what not to buy, but this is only partially true. Indeed, a very large percentage of my income is spent on things that I need. I have no choice but to buy them. I must put gas in my car to get home, and the industry that produces that product is controlled by a small handful of people who can and do exert extraordinary control. This is the power that comes with controlling a necessary commodity. So, though in theory, the market polices itself, in practice things happen differently. After all, if a handful of businessmen can do, on a national level, what the Chamber of Commerce did in OKC, what results is known as an oligarchy. Thus, a capitalist market has the same potential to become tyrannical as it does to remain democratic. This is why we write legislation to control business--to provide a check on the power of industry, just as congress checks the power of the president.

Public Broadcasting is a part of that tradition. It ensures that the people with the most money don't get to own information.

Finally, I find the connection between free market and democracy implicit in these arguments a little problematic. Capitalism is a market system; not a system of government. As I hope my earlier syllogistic demonstration of how capitalism can in fact promote tyranny and the anecdotal evidence of the OKC tax debate have shown, democracy and capitalism are not the same thing.

That being said, the institutions that are designed to protect democracy need not and ought not be judged according to their market value, but in their importance in promoting and supporting democracy (Can you imagine if we subjected the US military to market forces? It hasn't turned a profit since WWII). I think people probably assume that the public school system exists to prepare students for the workforce. However, the pioneers of the public school movement (most notably John Dewey) never connected schooling with the market--such a connection is actually a much more recent phenomenon. Instead, they saw education as necessary in a vital democracy. Thus, the public school system is designed for no other purpose than to ensure an educated voter pool. Public Broadcasting was developed as a modern extension of that same project. Public schools exist to foster preparation for democracy through education; public broadcasting exists to foster participation in democracy through education. And if eduation is indeed vital to democracy, it must be protected and supported regardless of its market value.

This debate ultimately stems from the notion that to be "conservative" means that one supports saving tax payer money while prodding the market. But the word itself suggests that to be conservative is to hold on to our past ideals, one of the oldest and most important of which is that a well-educated people can govern itself. Public broadcasting is part of that tradition. It exists to educate those who would self-govern and it thus helps to protect democracy. And I happen to think that protecting democracy is a much more conservative ideal than protecting the market.

Brown in Oklahoma: the Frightening Social Statement of the 2010 Elections

With this year's election having ended, it is time for the post-mortem to begin. I have little doubt that some who read this post will take it as evidence that I have finally slipped to the left. I will be especially pleased when one of you accuses me of pulling the "race card." I have been extremely vocal about the state questions and political platforms in this year's campaigns that I see as obtusely closed-minded and transparently racist. And to my chagrin, though not to my surprise, I have seen all of these measures and people win. So, in this post I will look at these measures, what they mean, and what this election should teach us about who we are as a people and as a state.

SQ 751: English-Only

This is the question that, as a Composition and Rhetoric student with a devout interest in literacy, I have been most interested in and vocal about. State Question 751, which passed by a margin of basically 75% to 25%, makes English the official language for state business transactions. By law all state documents will now be printed only in English.

It's important here to note that I spend four days a week surrounded by language experts - English experts at that. And yet, I do not know of one of us who thinks that anything like SQ 751 is a good idea. Of course, no one thought to ask the experts about this. If they had, we could have told them all about the practical dangers of such a law. As literacy experts, we could have explained to them that speaking a language and writing a language are distinctly separate, even if related, processes. Doing one does not guarantee the ability to do the other. What this means from a practical standpoint is that legal immigrants with perfectly sufficient spoken English may not be able to read it a bit. So SQ 751 has put legal and tax-paying Oklahoma residents in a situation in which they may not be able to fill out Oklahoma Student Loan Authority forms, Sooner Care forms and applications, Driver's license tests and other state documents. Thus, we've blocked access to opportunities and services that spur the upward mobility that we pretend to privilege in what we mythologize as an open and free society.

We could have told them these things, but they never asked us. That's because the actual issue of language was never the point anyway. Instead, this has been yet another example of what John Trimbur has called the discourse of literacy crisis. This is the populist belief that the English language is in crisis and that the result, if not remedied, will be cultural dissolution as well. As a recent case in point, News 9 broadcaster Kelly Ogle, in his consistently asinine segment "My Two Cents" asserts that, "the English language is the common thread that will keep this country from fragmenting into competing ethnic communities" (Ogle). I should add here that he is responding (and disagreeing with) a woman who is angry that her child should learn the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish. . .in a Spanish class.

Of course, such an argument assumes that 1) we're not currently fragmented into ethnic communities, and 2) that English- only legislation has anything whatsoever to do with cultural unity. Both of these are highly dubious claims. The persistent narrative that allowing a multiplicity of languages will lead to linguistic chaos, which will lead to cultural and political chaos is, rather than an actual realizable fear, according to Trimbur a displacement of real fears about middle class loss of status. In her article "When I close my Eyes, I like to Hear English" Amy Dayton-Wood, citing linguist Jane Hill points out that the "lack of specific, technical features of language. . .reaffirms the view that language itself does not motivate these crises." Instead, as Trimbur says, "the threat is not that of linguistic chaos but of blurring the lines between 'us' and 'them'" (Trimbur 279). So these crises and the policies that grow out of them re-assert a cultural hegemony that privileges those of us safely in the middle class at the expense of those who came here believing in our cultural myth of America as "Land of Opportunity." It instead becomes the Land-of-Opportunity for those of us who already possess the right language. And so SQ 751, and policies like it are really about protecting "us" by shutting "them" out.

Arizona Law as Oklahoma Platform

If SQ 751 had the unstated goal of shutting "them" out, this goal became explicit among politicians who campaigned by expressing their support of the Arizona Immigration Law. On the surface, it may seem odd that Oklahoma politicians should take a public stand on an Arizona issue, until one realizes that the implication is that, if elected, these politicians would enact similar legislation here in Oklahoma.

I'm a bit more sympathetic to those who place importance on protecting standing immigration laws than I am to SQ 751. Despite thinking that our immigration laws are bad laws in need of liberalization, I can appreciate the view that these laws are still the law of the land, and should therefore be enforced. However, the way some politicians handled this issue is troubling and telling.

One radio ad in particular, funded by the Senate Majority Fund invokes highly charged language, asserting that "Oklahoma is being invaded," and is "endangered by an outside force," dangerous criminals who are "threatening our citizens” (SMF). Such rhetorical moves function by characterizing immigrants as an invading army. They treat an issue of law enforcement as one of war. Thus, the impoverished itinerate farmers, seasonal roofers, and service employees who cross our border are spoken of as if they were enemy combatants - clever Athenians who may build our houses only to hide in the attic waiting for us to fall asleep.

An Aside in 755

It may seem like a digression that at this point I will bring up SQ 755 which, by a 70-30 margin made it illegal for state courts to consider Sharia law or international law in state court decisions, but I will bring it around to make my final conclusions. Kurt Hochenauer, on the online version of the Oklahoma Gazette's opinion section rightfully criticized this law as being "pointless." This is because it is a basic legal principal in our legal system that court decisions are based on state law and the jurisprudence of past court decisions. Neither if these would allow consideration for Sharia law. Justification for the need for this law was the Great Britian has, in some instances, considered Sharia law and international law when prosecuting Islamic prisoners. Of course, since we broke ties with the UK's legal system more that 230 years ago (and 141 years before Oklahoma became a state), what they've done in their courts is totally irrelevant to Oklahoma state law. SQ 755 is a non-law that did nothing except to re-affirm that we don't like Muslims or their law and we don't want to be pushed around by the U.N.

Conclusion: Hatred in the "Bible Belt"

The common thread in these laws is that in effect (and, I would argue, in design) they delineate the state's official stance on who we dislike: Mexicans, Arabs, and Outsiders.

I find it sadly ironic that in the states most proud of their religiosity there also exist laws so specifically designed to express hate. Of course, we justify these laws with arguments about practicality. We simply can't allow this flood of immigrants; how can we support them all? I've also lately seen a lot of the common false claims that immigrants are bankrupting our society by taking advantage of free schools, and hospitals, and that illegal immigrants are receiving welfare, all claims that the National Center for Policy Analysis soundly disproves. The common line of reasoning, especially among people who begin their sentences with platitudes like “I’m all for legal immigration,” or “some of my best friends are Mexicans but. . .) is that "we would love to have an open society, we just can't afford to." Thus, we close ourselves off, we refuse to fulfill the promise of our nation, and we say "you're just not welcome here," despite our founding as a free and open society that would say “send us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. And worse than our failure to live up to our founding principles is that we do so even as we drive around in brand new extremely expensive cars with "Visit Church this Month" bumper stickers pasted to the back.

Cited:

Dayton-Wood, Amy. “When I Close My Eyes, I Like to Hear English: English Only and the Discourse of Crisis.” Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. 10 Aug 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2010.

Hochenauer, Kurt. “What’s the Point.” OKGazette.com. Oklahoma Gazette. 6 Oct 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2010.

“Immigrants, Welfare, and Work.” NCPA. National Center for Policy Awareness. 24 Jun 2002. Web. 3 Nov 2010.

Ogle, Kelly. “My 2 Cents: Mother Angry Over Spanish Pledge of Allegiance Assignment.” News9.com. KWTV, 28 Oct 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2010

“Senate Majority Fund.” YouTube.com. 26 Oct 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2010.

Trimbur, John. “Literacy and the Discourse of Crisis.” The Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary. Ed John Trimbur and Richard Bullock. Portsmith, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1996.