diversity

Finally There’s Name For The Conduct I’ve Been Calling Unethical For Years…Now Let’s Agree To Stop It

/ Jack Marshall / 98 Comments

eclipse

That name is “partyism.”

From Harvard Professor Cass Sunstein:

“…party prejudice in the U.S. has jumped, infecting not only politics but also decisions about dating, marriage and hiring. By some measures, “partyism” now exceeds racial prejudice — which helps explain the intensity of some midterm election campaigns. In 1960, 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said that they would feel “displeased” if their son or daughter married outside their political party. By 2010, those numbers had reached 49 percent and 33 percent. Republicans have been found to like Democrats less than they like people on welfare or gays and lesbians. Democrats dislike Republicans more than they dislike big business.”

Based on what I’ve seen, the fact that Republicans/conservatives  are nearly twice as likely to be “partyists”  as their hated enemies to the left on the political spectrum doesn’t surprise me. Most of the manifestations of the bigotry I’ve seen out in the open and written about here—restaurants that give discounts to praying customers and bars that claim that they will only serve “red voters”—have come from that sector, but 33 percent isn’t anything for liberals to be proud of, either. Over all, the trend is horrible for the country. As I wrote regarding “Mary’s,” the restaurant that favored its religious customers…

“I detest this kind of thing, and so should you, because it is ethically indefensible and un-American to the core….splitting the world into them and us, good guys and bad guys, the virtuous and the reviled. All of “Mary’s” customers are human beings, and that is the only thing that should matter in the United States of America.”

I confess that since I have been observing this phenomenon, I am preconditioned to think the Stanford research that purported to measure it as has validity. Most social science research, especially involving politics, is so skewed by researcher bias and agendas that it is inherently dubious, and perhaps this example is too: I wouldn’t rely on the percentages. Also 1960 would have to be the absolute low water mark in U.S. political passions, after the remarkably non-partisan, unifying two terms of Dwight Eisenhower while the public felt united against a common enemy in the Cold War. I’m guessing the numbers in, say, 1860 would show a sharper divide.

I do think that the intensity of emotion, rising to bigotry, distrust and hate, in the nation’s political polarization is growing, is very alarming, and dangerous to our health and future. I’d like to know more about where it resides. Is the bulk of the bigotry coming from the low-information voter, who uncritically absorbs every campaign smear, bumper sticker insult and Facebook meme as fact—you know, morons? Or are the individuals who would rather die than see their daughters marry men who oppose the family’s favorite party the narrow-minded political junkies who watch only Fox News and listen to Rush, or who cheer Al, Chris, Rachel and the 24-7 conservative-bashers on MSNBC? I’d like to know.

Naturally theories will abound regarding the reasons for this new bigotry. In a general sense, it is pure cognitive dissonance, and can be explained by people today caring more about politics and ideology than they have for quite a while. People care about something when they sense that it matters to their lives, health and welfare, as well as those around them: if political views were regarded as no more important than what baseball team one rooted for, there is no way substantive bigotry would attach to them. With foreign threats looming, the economy weak, nobody certain of the right policies in so many crucial areas and the pettiness, corruption and ineptitude of parties in and out of power, trust has plummeted. When we can’t trust those whom we have given the job of looking out for our welfare, we become worried and scared, as well we should. Then it makes sense to care more about politics. If we care more, and feel strongly about what should be done either out of a lack of sophistication and gullibility (the morons) or from unbalanced self-education (the zealots), then those who proclaim opposing views seem more obnoxious and more threatening, prompting active discrimination. The Stanford study found that “discrimination against the out-group is based more on out-group animus than in-group favoritism.” That figures. But for a nation, it is suicidal.

This nation of ideals gleaned from a diverse population must value trust and belief in what all citizens share more than it embraces passion and anger over what we disagree over. If we cherish the basic principles of democracy, then we must accept, encourage and respect dissent, frank speech, the shocking opinion and the minority view.  We must always keep our minds open to new ideas, different solutions to old problems, and the possibility that we, or the public officials, scholars and pundits we favor, may be wrong on any one topic or issue. If we can’t do that, we doom ourselves and our culture to self-righteousness, doctrine, cant  and rigidity, which block out enlightenment like an eclipse blocks sunlight. Continue reading →

Why The Winooski Bacon Controversy Matters

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

bacon signLast week, Sneakers Bistro and Cafe in Winooski, Vermont removed a sign reading “Yield for Sneakers Bacon” from a garden at the Winooski Rotary after a woman who described herself as “a vegan and a member of a Muslim household” called the sign offensive in an online post.

“Given the large number of Muslim families in Winooski, as well as many others who do not eat pork for a variety of reasons, it seems unnecessary for this insensitive business sign to be at the city’s main crosswalk,” she wrote. Sneakers, obeying the growing U.S. cultural mandate that any individual has a veto over words and conduct that he or she finds offensive regardless of 1) whether it is offensive to anyone else and 2) whether the alleged offense is certifiably bats, apologized, and took the sign down.

I am happy to support that this decision did not play well, even in ultra-liberal Vermont, and under a barrage of criticism on the web and elsewhere, the Sneakers’ management posted the following message on its Facebook page, thus making their situation worse:

“We are here to serve people BREAKFAST, not politics. We removed the sign that was located on public property as a gesture of respect for our diverse community. There were also concerns raised about safety. Removing it was not a difficult decision. We still love bacon. We still love eggs. Please have the political conversation elsewhere.”

That idiotic statement was the disaster anyone conscious should have been able to predict it would be. And let’s be thankful this is still true. Tomorrow, Sneakers’ response may be standard operation procedure, even if ISIS doesn’t take over the country while the President is breaking par. Continue reading →

Michael Sam Flunks Trailblazer Ethics, And Many Will Suffer Because Of It

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

Sam kiss

The most charitable explanation for Michael Sam’s disastrous performance in the wake of the NFL draft is that he’s a young man who got terrible advice. A less charitable theory is that he’s an idiot. The worst theory of all is that Michael Sam is less interested in being the first openly gay pro-football player who blazes a clear path for those who follow him, and more concerned about becoming a gay icon, or worse, a martyr. Whatever the reason, Sam accepted the massive responsibility of being a cultural trailblazer, and fumbled the ball.

Sam wasn’t the best player in the NFL draft, but everyone knew, including Sam, that he would be the most closely watched. He had “come out” as gay soon after the college football season, and in light of his prominence and recognition as a stand-out athlete, his honesty and openness about his sexual orientation was hailed as a cultural turning point, an advance for gay Americans, and a test for the macho NFL. Would he be drafted? If he wasn’t (or was?), would it be because he was gay? ESPN’s cameras were in the Missouri defensive end’s home Saturday as the drafts neared its final stages with Sam name still uncalled. When St. Louis Rams coach Jeff Fisher called Sam at his agent’s house in San Diego to tell the former University of Missouri defensive lineman that they had selected him in the seventh and last round of the draft, it was instant drama.

There was more drama, in fact, than ESPN and viewers probably expected. Sam burst into tears while receiving the call, and then received an emotional, mouth-t0-mouth kiss from his boyfriend, Vito Cammisano.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Actually, there is; several, in fact. To begin with, Sam had violated the Second Niggardly Principle, which states,

“When an individual or group can accomplish its legitimate objectives without engaging in speech or conduct that will offend individuals whose basis for the supposed offense is emotional, mistaken or ignorant, but is not malicious and is based on well-established impulses of human nature, it is unethical to intentionally engage in such speech or conduct.”

A clearer example of the SNP would be hard to find. No doubt about it, most heterosexual Americans, which means most of the public, are not used to seeing adult men kissing each other on the lips. There is no question that Sam knows this: of course he does. Even now, popular culture uses the image for shock value; it was only the 90’s when an impulsive lip-lock from Kramer on Jerry drove the studio audience to screams of laughter. No, there’s nothing “wrong” with two men kissing each other, but an awful lot of people were raised to think it is unnatural, and it is wrong to intentionally or negligently offend or upset them gratuitously. It is the flip side of tolerance: consideration and etiquette. Causing discomfort just because you can, or because your targets “deserve” or “need” to feel uncomfortable is just trouble-making for the hell of it. “Deal with it!” is confrontational and aimed at creating rancor, not comity. Continue reading →

Not Diversity, But Bigotry

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

No whites

It has troubled me for decades, troubles me still, and I know it troubles others. How can the double standard of  prejudice and discrimination so often embraced by various minority groups in the United States continue to be respected and tolerated? To me, this not only seems self-evidently wrong, but also inevitably destructive. You may not gain my support by cautioning me against favoring members of groups that I belong to, and yet openly discriminate against those same groups on behalf of your own.

I raised this issue back in 2011, when Christiane Amanpour, then the host of ABC’s Sunday morning public issues show, brazenly led three male-bashing female guest commentators in a discussion of how much better the world would work with more female leaders who were not addled by all that testosterone. I wrote, and none too happily,

“An all-male panel smugly talking about how “Estrogen really is a problem” and how decisions made in the throes of PMS are inherently untrustworthy would guarantee a feminist march on ABC headquarters, blogger and op-ed fury, NOW declarations of war and the rolling of network heads.When he was president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers was run out of his job by faculty and feminist fury when he suggested that it was possible that differences between the genders might be part of the explanation for the under-representation of women in the worlds of science and mathematics. Yet I just watched the host of a mainstream news program aggressively participate in a stacked and rigged discussion that began with the unchallenged presumption that men—not just Weiner, or Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or some men, or many men, but men as a monolithic, homogenous, stereotyped group—-are fatally handicapped by their hormones and brain-wiring when it comes to leadership and management.”

You know what? I don’t like groups that stereotype and discriminate against me.

But this was hardly the most egregious example, nor the most recent. Consider:

Case study #1: Pro-Gay Bigotry In D.C. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Jerry Seinfeld

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

One wonderful thing about extreme success combined with middle age is that you can, if you have the integrity, speak unpopular truths without caring who objects. Thus it was the Jerry Seinfeld correctly dismissed as irrelevant and misguided the suggestion that seeking racial and gender balance should be an objective in his comedy shows. In response to a question challenging his Web series, “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee“as too white and male, the comedian said:

“People think it’s the census or something, it’s gotta represent the actual pie chart of America. Who cares? Funny is the world that I live in. You’re funny, I’m interested. You’re not funny, I’m not interested. I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that, but everyone else is, kind of with their little calculating, “Is this the exact right mix?” To me, it’s anti-comedy.  It’s more about PC nonsense than ‘are you making us laugh or not’.”

Exactly. Not that the race and gender bean counters will let Seinfeld escape with an explanation of such obvious common sense. Here’s Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher playing his full hand of gender, race, guilt and quota cards: Continue reading →

College Admissions Diversity Deception, Student Ethics Corruption

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

shabazz_Wisconsin

See that young black man in the photo above, gracing the cover of the University of Wisconsin admissions brochure? The one apparently cheering for the Badgers at a Wisconsin football game? His name is Diallo Shabazz, and as a student at the school in 2000 had never been to a game in his life when someone photoshopped his head into a crowd shot to let potential applicants know how diverse the University of Wisconsin was. This infamous incident, which Jon Stewart had a ball with in the day (is the Daily Show really that old?), is apparently more the norm that we thought at the time.

Tim Pippert is a sociologist at Augsburg College in Minnesota. He and his researchers looked at more than 10,000 images from college brochures to compare the racial composition of students in the pictures to the colleges’ actual demographics. They discovered that diversity, as depicted in the brochures, was over-represented. “When we looked at African-Americans in those schools that were predominantly white, the actual percentage in those campuses was only about 5 percent of the student body,” Pippert told NPR. “They were photographed at 14.5 percent.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: “Saturday Night Live” Cast Member Jay Pharoah

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments
Maya Rudolph being Oprah, being funny, and nothing else should matter.

Maya Rudolph being Oprah, being funny, and nothing else should matter.

In a spontaneous call for more black cast members to be added to NBC’s long-running late-night satire show, “Saturday Night Live,”  veteran cast member Jay Pharoah told an entertainment reporter that he wanted the producers to add actress Darmira Brunson. “Why do I think she should be on the show? Because she’s black first of all, and she’s really talented,” Pharoah said. “She’s amazing. She needs to be on ‘SNL.'”

By logic, rights and justice, Pharoah should be fired for such a statement. He is pushing his show, and therefore his producers and his bosses, into a controversy that they neither want, need, nor deserve. Sure enough, his comments have already ignited debate and commentary in major dailies and in the blogosphere. He can’t be fired, of course—no producer in Hollywood would dare fire a black performer for advocating politically correct causes like diversity and affirmative action, no matter how inappropriate and unfair his comments were—and Pharoah knows that. Breaking reasonable rules of the workplace—criticizing your own boss in public and causing trouble for your employer are pretty basic taboos—because you know you’re immune from punishment doesn’t make the conduct any better.

He’s not the producer, and casting isn’t part of his job. To announce his own candidate for a hire is as outrageous and out-of-bounds as for a Pentagon general to tell reporters who President Obama should appoint as his Secretary of Defense.

Then there is the  statement itself, which in the context of entertainment and show business, is an endorsement of racial bias and discrimination, even more than with most workplace diversity and affirmative action advocacy. “Because she’s black first of all?” First of all must only be “because she’s funny, and the funniest female comic available.” Saturday Night Live’s goal, which it fitfully achieves, is to make its audience laugh. If Brunson is the best performer to accomplish that, then it makes sense to hire her. Her skin color is irrelevant, except to the extent that it opens up comic opportunities for the show. Otherwise, Brunson is pressuring his employers to hire Brunson over  superior white, Hispanic or Asian performers because of some theoretical diversity formula.

The resulting media focus on the imaginary problem to which Pharoah’s comments alluded is full of reflections, names and statistics, but the basic facts are these:

  • Professional performance comedy is completely utilitarian: if a cast entirely made up of black performers of any gender mix could be shown to be the optimum way to get laughs, ratings and make money for the network and SNL’s producers, that’s what we would have.
  • A funny, talented, improvisational skilled black actress has obvious benefits for a weekly satire show, as the reign of Maya Rudolph amply demonstrated.  There is no reason to presume that the producers would not immediately hire such a performer if one was available.
  • The pool of top-rate improvisational comic actors in general isn’t large (if it were, SNL would be funny more often), the pool of such performers who are African-American is much smaller, and the number of female black improvisational comics is tiny. When the African-American Wayans brothers wrote and produced their own satire show (Jim Carrey was the token white), they included only one full-time black female in the cast, and she was their sister (also the weak link in the cast.)

We can argue about the general principle of affirmative action at another time and place, but applying them to entertainment, sports or any field that must be a pure meritocracy is irresponsible and unfair. Saturday Night Live “needs” funny, talented performers who its audience finds funny…like, say, Eddie Murray. It does not need any black performer, male or female, just to have more black performers, and to take away performing and career opportunities from superior performers whose sole deficit is skin color or ethnicity while simultaneously getting fewer laughs and lower ratings.

Oddly, nobody has ever argued that Saturday Night Live discriminates against improvisational comic actors over the age of 35. Only once has it cast an actor of that age—Randy Quaid, in 1985. 1985 was also the most disastrous and unpopular season in the show’s history. Why no middle age or senior cast hires?  The reasons are legion: 1) Improv comedy is demanding physically and psychologically. Few older performers practice it, or are capable of doing it on a regular basis. 2) SNL’s audience is very young (as well as very male and white). Comedy is generational. 3) Older performers are seldom “new faces.” The ensemble’s called the “Not Ready For Prime Time Players” for a reason. 4) Young actors playing older real life figures and comic characters can be funny; old actors playing younger celebrities or characters is seldom funny, and often creepy. Age diversity, in brief, would not improve Saturday Night Live. Diversity is only an asset to the extent that it allows more comic opportunities. The U.S. does not require, not should ikt ask for, a contemporary satire TV show that “looks like America.” What  it needs is a show that is good.

All of which makes Pharoah’s comments irresponsible, unfair, disloyal, and racially offensive.

And not funny.

______________________________________

Sources: Washington Post, Policy Mic

Graphic: Hello Giggles

Logo Ethics: How Insane Is Campus Political Correctness? A Quiz

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

Here are four logos from U.S. institutions of learning.  Each was or  is under attack by groups of students or administrators as being “offensive,” and in each case, the school’s administration either spent or is spending time and money to comply with the concerns. You have to guess the reason for the offense in each case.

Ready? Here’s number #1, from Brooklyn College:

Logo1

Give up? Well, back in 2009, we have recently learned, Karen L. Gould, who had just taken over as the first woman president of Brooklyn College, raised $107,000 to replace the old logo (the silhouette of the school’s landmark La Guardia Hall clock tower), because she thought it looked like a giant penis. [An earlier version of the post surmised that she therefore believed the logo was sexist. There is no evidence of that; it was my surmise and my error.]

She would not be happy living in Washington, D.C., clearly.

Ready for the next one? Here’s #2, from the University of Connecticut: Continue reading →

Fire Deandre Poole

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments
Florida Atlantic University, where bullies and incompetents mold tomorrow's leaders!

Florida Atlantic University, where bullies and incompetents mold tomorrow’s leaders!

There are a wide variety of offenses that ought to lead to a college professor’s dismissal. Incompetence, for example. Our young minds should not be shaped by fools. A university should not tolerate discrimination and bias,  either. Every occupant of a classroom should  feel that he or she is equally welcome regardless of race, color, gender…well, you know the list. Abuse of power by a teacher shows  a lack of trustworthiness; that kind of conduct, as well as its close relative, bullying, must be strictly forbidden on campus. Then there are an assortment of character traits and professional deficits that must lead to severance from a teaching position when they are in evidence, traits like laziness, ignorance, lack of respect for core American rights, and stupidity, which, neatly enough, brings us back to incompetence.

This also brings us to the case of Dr. Deandre Poole, the Florida Atlantic University professor who ordered her class to write “Jesus” on a piece of paper and then to stomp on it. When one student, a devout Mormon, refused, and was clearly upset about it, he took steps to have the student punished for that old favorite, violation of the student Code of Conduct. Dr. Poole, through his participation in this ridiculous incident, has shown himself guilty of all the forms of unacceptable conduct listed above: Continue reading →

Not Jackie Robinson, Not Even Shannon Faukner: Lauren Silberman Flunks The Traiblazer Test

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments
"Okay, now I kick this funny-shaped brown thingee where, again?"

“Okay, now I kick this funny-shaped brown thingee where, again?”

Call it the trailblazer’s duty. If your objective is to be a trailblazer and break through the obstacle of prejudice in an elite field, your efforts, even if not successful, had better not make the obstacle greater. The epitome of trailblazing excellence is Jackie Robinson, shattering major league baseball’s apartheid  by simultaneously becoming the game’s first black player in decades, and also one of its greatest players of all time. The bottom of the barrel in the trailblazing pantheon is probably Shannon Faulkner, who waged a high-profile legal battle to become the first female cadet at the Citadel, only to enter the school physically and mentally unprepared for the challenge, resulting in an embarrassing failure and rapid withdrawal.

Lauren Silberman, the first female to try out for the National Football League made Faulkner look good. Continue reading →