The myth of upward mobility

The idea of upward mobility—that anyone who works hard, obeys the law, and saves his money can get ahead—is deeply engrained. From Horatio Alger stories to current Hollywood productions and TV programs, America pays homage to the tale of the hard working, upward striving youth who starts out poor but overcomes obstacles, opens a business, invents a machine, marries well, and ends up in a social class many stations higher than the one in which he or she began

Shooting The Messenger

This essay reviews Ward Churchill’s On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality (2003). One of the most talked about — but least read — books of recent years, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens documents a long history of U.S. wars, invasions, and violations of international law on the way to concluding that when the terrible events of 9/11 took place, the U.S. deserved and should have expected retribution. In popular language, we had it coming. As the reader may recall, when Hamilton College rescinded Churchill’s invitation to speak in the winter of 2004, it set in motion a cascade of events including further such cancellations, efforts in Colorado to dismiss him from his tenured position, and nightly discussion on Fox News. The review evaluates Churchill’s argument that the U.S. is an outlaw nation, as well as his little Eichmanns corollary that the investment bankers and stockbrokers who perished in the conflagration were complicit with the U.S. war machine and thus legitimate targets of the Muslim suicide bombers. It breaks his argument down into its component parts or premises, shows which ones are moral and which ones factual, and evaluates each one’s plausibility and cogency. The review also addressed the author’s treatment at the hands of Colorado authorities and the implications of that treatment for academic freedom

You Are Living in a Gold Rush

This article argues that our times, characterized as they are by dreams of vast wealth, environmental destruction, and growing social inequality, resemble nothing so much as earlier get-rich-quick periods like the Gilded Age and the California gold rush. I put forward a number of parallels between those earlier periods and now and suggest that the current fever is likely to end soon. This will come as a relief to those of you who, like me, deplore the regressive social policies, bellicose foreign relations, and coarsening of public taste that we have been living through—even if some of our more libertarian friends found the times invigorating

The Current Landscape of Race: Old Targets, New Opportunities

It is difficult enough identifying areas within a current field of scholarship that are underdeveloped and in need of further attention. In science, one thinks of missing elements in the periodic table or planets in a solar system that our calculations tell us must be there but that our telescopes have not yet spotted. In civil-rights law, one thinks of such areas as women\u27s sports or the problems of intersectional groups, such as women of color or gay black men. One also thinks of issues that current events are constantly thrusting forward, such as discrimination against Arabs or execution of children or the mentally retarded. What of challenges that do not come readily to mind because they lie outside the current paradigm-problems that we do not readily think of as civil-rights issues at all, or that are so radically unlike those we do recognize that they require a leap of the imagination to see them as such? Here, we lack a template-a periodic table. We cannot easily make the link between the familiar and the unknown. The new issue does not lie on the same plane as those we know, so that mental extrapolation and interpolation do not readily lead us to it. Issues of this kind require us to expand our conceptual repertory and learn to think in different ways. They require us to listen for the dog that doesn\u27t bark -to flip a structure such as conventional civil-rights law and look at it sideways. They require us to look at that structure as a whole and consider what might be missing

Metamorphosis: A Minority Professor\u27s Life

This article is a dark semiautobiographical takeoff on a famous novel by Franz Kafka I use the predicament of Gregor the central character in The Metamorphosis as a thematic metaphor to explain a series of events in the life of an outwardly successful man of color teaching law It proceeds in a series of 37 short vignettes told in the course of a bedside conversation in which my young firebrand Rodrigo turns tables on his usual foil and straight man the Professor and asks him a few questions about his life and career Until now the two had focused on the young man\u27s ideas and prospects In an expansive mood with nothing better to do the Professor spills the beans What emerges is a tragicomic description of a middleaged academic who has come to realize with a shock that he is undergoing a jawdropping transformation brbrFor the analytically inclined the story\u27s prime lesson is that just as race is a social construction the selfconcept and even the soma of a person of color are functions of thousands of racially inflected interactions with fellow humans beginning at an early age The arrow of social construction in other words works both ways not one Literature shows this as well Second minorities who succeed by the standards of their profession face increasing pressure to revert to their rightful places on the evolutionary scale Kafka\u27s book shows how this can happen and the Professor\u27s tale does so as well in a modern settingbrbr The moral for minorities is that the struggle to preserve one\u27s personhood and selfregard must be valiant and unceasing For wellmeaning white allies the effort on our behalf needs to be so as wellb