Message From Beyond The Fourth Dimension

by tristero

In tomorrow’s NY Times Magazine (no link yet), Yale Law professor Kenji Yoshino has a fascinating, provocative and nevertheless profoundly weird article about changes in discriminatory behavior.

The law, Professor Yoshino argues, has effectively eliminated discrimination by group membership; it is illegal to fire someone simply because she is black, for example. However, discrimination continues through the legal suppression (“covering”) of any expression of minority group membership. So an African-American flight attendant can be fired simply for wearing cornrows, as a company regulation prohibits all braided hairdos. Professor Yoshino argues that while the law can address a small part of this kind of discrimination, the best way to fight against this obsession with minimizing differences is in other cultural arenas. After all, even two seconds of thought makes it quite clear that an important question to ask about the flight attendant case is why there is a company regulation prohibiting cornrows in the first place. And the more one thinks about it, the more it seems like something that couldn’t possibly matter at all in the flight attendant’s workplace except to prohibit any hint of diverse cultural expression. And that is discrimination, argues Professor Yoshino.

Now, I got some problems with the details of his argumentation here, but I am on the good Professor’s side; he’s got a point. A very important point. He’s identified quite clearly an important, little noticed pattern of unfair discrimination. So the next step is for those of us who care about discriminatory practices to argue out the problems in Yoshino’s thesis and find ways, both little and small, to bring them to bear on American culture.

And it is at this point, it becomes distressingly clear how truly weird Professor Yoshino’s article was.

Although he says he teaches at Yale, which is in New Haven, Connecticut in the United States, I honestly don’t know what country Professor Yoshino is living in. As it happens, I too live in a country called the United States, where coinicidentally there also is a New Haven and a Yale Law School about 2 hours or so away from where I live. But in the country in which I live, initiatives to broaden and extend the cultural definition of discrimination are unimaginable. In my country right now, we are trying to find a way to rebuild an entire city that was predominantly African American until they were flooded out of their homes and whose awful plight has been met with foot-dragging, racist indifference by the national government. “Extend” civil liberties? How about, you know, simply making sure that one’s skin color doesn’t determine the speed with which one’s home is cleaned of raw sewage?

In my country, we are seeing, as David Neiwert documents so painfully over at Orcinus, a resurgence in the crudest form of elimationism rhetoric, “mainstream” think tanks and “respected” pundits rationalizing the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II as well as the murder, torture, and rape of prisoners today. Non-whites buying cellphones in bulk is deemed reasonable cause for fear of terrorism. To make matters worse, the very same people obsessed with excusing this kind of behavior seem all but indifferent to the crimes and terrorism being planned and committed by all white militia gorups.

In Professor Yoshino’s America, the citizens care about eliminating racism and discrimination because, apparently, they believe that by doing so they will develop a stronger America whose diversity will give it the flexibility and mental suppleness needed to confront 21st century problems. But here in my America, we’re arguing whether the Ku Klux Klan really was a racist organization or a legitimate expression of an aggrieved ethnic group.

Now the latest, hippest theories in physics tell us that there very well may be parallel universes, identical to ours but with different values for the natural laws. If that is so and Professor Yoshino’s paper is a communique from an alternate reality, does anyone know how that paper could have ended up in THIS universe? And more importantly, does anyone know how I can leave this reality and enter his? Like today?

However, if, by some slim chance, the latest theories of multiverses are wrong, and Professor Yoshino and I are in fact citizens of the same country on the same planet and are presumably experiencing the same reality, then one of us (at least) is talking pie-in-the-sky nonsense. Because nothing close to Professor Yoshino’s aspirations for increased civil liberties are conceivable in this America until Bushism collapses and the Enlightenment values which informed this country’s founders are once more affirmed and practiced. And frankly, I don’t see a chance of that happening anytime soon.

{Update: Added the Malkin Terrorist Cellphone Caper.}