Technocrats, Journalists, and Statistical Orgies

25 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, High Rise Buildings, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Black-White Wealth Gap, Closing the Achievement Gap, Culture of Poverty, Journalists, Michael A. Fletcher, Misery Statistics, Objectivity, Orgy, Poverty, Prince George's County, Racial Disparities, Racism, Rich-Poor Wealth Gap, Statistical Orgy, Statistics, Technocrats, The Washington Post

Front page of The Washington Post, January 25, 2015. (http://newseum.org).

There are times when I wonder if exposing racial and socioeconomic disparities is really an eye-opening and life-changing exercise. Or, does the exposure merely serve to confirm the racial and socioeconomic stereotypes that Americans hold against each other? In today’s Washington Post, on the front page and above the fold, there’s an article titled “A Shattered Foundation,” with the smaller type “African Americans who bought homes in Prince George’s [County] have watched their wealth vanish.”

Above the title and subtitle are a series of charts and statistics noting the national chasm of a gap in total wealth accumulation between Black families ($95,300) and White families ($678,800). The theme here is that since the housing bust and subsequent Great Recession, the burgeoning Black middle class of PG County has fallen on desperate times, as home equity — their main means for accumulating wealth — for tens of thousands of these families caved in on them.

Michael A. Fletcher’s article is pretty even-handed. But this is kind of tangential to my larger point. In any given three-month period of my life, for nearly as long as the forty years and two months I’ve known how to read in full sentences, I could’ve scanned at least one article or book about the cruelties of structural racism and capitalism. Even if I’d never grown up in poverty or experienced racial discrimination, there have been enough articles, op-eds, books, book chapters, poems, short stories, plays, letters to the editor and scripts written about disparities to cover the US a mile deep in paper. The fact is, no statistics on growing wealth gaps and persistent racial gaps in wealth and education have led to lasting changes in policies, politics or institutional structures substantial enough to end poverty or ameliorate the most vicious forms of racism in this country.

Hand reaches out from big heap of crumpled papers, January 25, 2015. (http://galleryhip.com).

Then again, there are some folks whose business depends on mantras like the “growing wealth gap” or “closing the achievement gap…as the civil rights issue of our time.” Technocrats in corporate education reform, social scientists in the world of conservative and “libertarian” think-tanks, neoliberals and so-called American liberals in search of compromises to strengthen the American middle class. They all turn to these statistics to tell their stories, to sell their experiments and their research, to promote their politics. It’s as if the statistics on racial and socioeconomic gaps in wealth and education provided a high, like crystal meth or a speedball. In some ways, for these groups, a five-story brothel in which they practiced S&M would be more appropriate for their use of misery statistics.

I am hardly suggesting The Washington Post‘s Fletcher or I or any other journalist, academician or writer should cease making their points with statistics about racial and socioeconomic disparities. But America’s poor and poor people of color or falling-through-the-cracks middle class are far more than “statistics on a government chart” (to quote The Police’s “Invisible Sun“). These are real people with families and lives, people who represent generations of lives in which this construct of racial capitalism has limited their choices and their opportunities, whether they believe in fate or not. So-called objectivity has never been sufficient, and neither have been statistics. What we need is a revolution in thought and in action, quiet or otherwise.

The Make-Believe Media

17 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Movies, music, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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"Both Sides Do It", "Dirty Laundry" (1982), Anchors, Columnists, Commentators, Jay Rosen, Journalism, Journalists, Liberal Bias, Mainstream Media, Make-Believe Journalism, Media, News Media, Objectivity, Print Journalism, Pundits, What Are Journalists For? (1999)

What media can get wrong (Election 1948, SCOTUS Obamacare Decision), November 3, 1948 and June 28, 2012 [October 17, 2012].

I get so tired of so many “journalists,” commentators and columnists saying the same thing over and over again. About the 2012 Presidential Election, about education, about race relations, about crime, about virtually anything anyone with a working brain cares to think about.

For more than four decades, our media has become like the color commentators for an old World Wrestling Federation (now WWE) event between “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and Hulk Hogan. Where the mere appearance of journalism and fairness has become more important than any actual substance. Where pitching fake debates about actual facts about real events and trends is normal business. Overall, the news industry — TV, print, radio and Internet — is about as professional an operation as a hole-in-the-wall bar attempting to become a strip club.

“If it bleeds, it leads,” whether it’s Ruth Chris Steakhouse or the mainstream media, October 17, 2012. (http://sanfrancisco.com).

Jay Rosen’s ’99 book What Are Journalists For? and Don Henley’s ’82 hit “Dirty Laundry” have plenty in common. They both unmask the news business as just that, a business. All of these ideas about objectivity, access and coverage for mainstream journalism in all its forms are just that, ideas. In actuality, news has grown into another form of entertainment, sometimes in the most literal sense (read The Onion and watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as but three examples).

Perhaps the most glaring falsehood of all is that the media is a mere reflection of society, and that journalism’s role is to be the mirror that stands apart, reflecting both the light and the darkness of our world. Both Rosen (in a scholarly tone) and Henley (with sarcasm-dripping lyrics) call bull crap on this idea.

There are too many lies that the media tells itself for me to go through all of them in one blog post, but there are particularly pernicious ones that I need to address here:

1. The built-in “liberal media bias:” This one is about as true as “dolphins fly” and “parrots live at sea” (thank you, Stevie Wonder). Fact is, the news media, with the exceptions of FOX News, represents a centrist view of the US and the world. Period. When’s the last time anyone has heard CNN discuss creating a single-track Pre-K to twelfth grade college and work preparation school system? Since when does the New York Times recommend the legalization of marijuana or the decriminalization of heroin and cocaine? Has the Washington Post ever suggested that America’s imperialist foreign and economic policies were the ultimate reasons for 9/11? These are all liberal positions, and yet, they get next to no play except maybe on non-mainstream TV and rags, liberal talk radio and progressive blogs.

2. The media’s goal is “objectivity:” Are we really that daft? Scholarly objectively went out the window in the humanities and social sciences in the ’80s, because it was obvious that scholars are actually, well, people. Last I checked, journalists, commentators, editors, columnists, anchors and talk show hosts are, too. Their collective main goal – to sell a story to the public (or, in many cases, to others in the media world), and overall, to make money for their newspaper, radio station, news channel or website. For if the business makes money, folks in the media get to keep their jobs and their prestige.

Gold bars and the earth on a set of brass scales (inspired by An Inconvenient Truth [2006]), August 2, 2011. (http://drpinna.com).

3. The “both sides do it” argument: The fact that the media has turned into about five different monopolies has led to this idea that there are two equal and opposite sides to everystory. It’s been true of the mainstream coverage of this election, but it’s applicable to everything they show the public. Climate change, some say “yes” (as in 99.8 percent of all scientists) and some (scientists paid off by Scaife, Olin, and the Heritage Foundation) say “no.” Trayvon Martin, was he a victim or a thug? Look, we all know that life has much more gray than the media is capable of capturing, but most rags and news outlets have long given up trying to provide a full story. All in the name of selling more newspapers, driving up ad sells and pushing up Nielsen ratings.

Megyn Kelly, FOX News, September 27, 2011. (http://huffingtonpost.com).

4. People in the media world are intelligent and sophisticated: This one is a keeper. To be sure, there are plenty of brilliant folk associated with CNN, MSNBC, The Huffington Post, and the New York Times. But most journalists aren’t as smart as we tend to assume. Fact is, journalists are good at two or three things: asking lots of questions, looking professional in front of a camera and writing in middle school sentences. I could’ve done two of these three by the time I finished sixth grade. Since most folks in news spend most of their time talking with each other, their brilliance is self-evident. They certainly don’t need to check in with us for our approval.

I’m sure that the likes of Megyn Kelly, Soledad O’Brien and Tom Friedman won’t be reading my blog to see what I’ve said about their business. After all, they have the pen and the mic, and I’m just an aspiring writer and professor with a blog. But I know something they don’t. You can’t live in the world of make-believe forever.

The “Invisible” Poor & The Middle Class Mythology

19 Thursday Jul 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, race, Work, Youth

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American Dream, Aspirations, Chris Hayes, Creflo Dollar, Economic Inequality, Gospel of Prosperity, Journalists, Media, Media Coverage, Middle Class, Mitt Romney, MSNBC, Political Optics, poor, Poverty, President Barack Obama, President Obama, Social Castes, social mobility, Up with Chris Hayes, Uppers, Wealthy

Transparent (or invisible) Woman (cropped), July 19, 2012. (http://cgtrader.com).

This past weekend, I found myself drawn into the discussion of the middle class and middle class aspirations on MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes (otherwise known as “Uppers”). It was a good and yet wholly unsatisfying discussion of technical definitions of what middle class is and of the political optics of only discussing the middle class as a socioeconomic category. Chris Hayes and his guests justified this with an all-too-common refrain. “If you’re poor, you’re aspiring to be middle class,” Hayes said on Saturday. With that, Hayes and his guests rendered America’s poor invisible, and failed to see beyond the politics of invisibility in the process.

There are two issues here, and many layers within them, about America’s poor, working, on welfare, or otherwise. One issue is that journalists, commentators, political operatives and most politicians treat the poor as if they are an unknowable group of people. It’s as if they all think the same way, as if there are all Black or of color, and a complete drag on the American economy and the federal budget. And that’s on a day in which the media and politics deem America’s poor as discussable. Most of the time, America’s poor are invisible, shoved into the middle class category by commentators and politicians at every turn.

Yes, America’s middle class is struggling too, fighting tooth and nail to not slip into the class of the invisible working poor, treading water to avoid food banks and food stamps. But they have something to struggle with — and for — at least. Their homes, their cars, a retirement account, their families’ net worth, all accoutrements of being middle class in America. America’s poor don’t possess anything to struggle with or for.

Chris Hayes on a train in Switzerland, November 10, 2008. (Matthew Yglesias via Wikimedia Commons/Flickr.com). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Except, maybe, with their vote, if they care to vote at all. Yet no mainstream commentator nor presidential candidate has truly spoken to their needs, their plight, to how their situation is completely interconnected with the struggles of the American middle class, not their aspirations. Not Chris Hayes, nor his weekend compadre, Melissa Harris-Perry, not President Barack Obama, and definitely not the presumptive GOP nominee, Mitt Romney.

It’s a story I’m all too familiar with, as someone who grew up in poverty in Mount Vernon, New York. Not to mention as someone who had to go to college and graduate school and then struggled for two years at part-time work before finding a job with a Ph.D. in ’99 (see my “The Five Senses of Poverty” post from July ’10). I was thirty years old by the time I earned a middle class income. Yet in all of that time, the only mainstream politician who spent time on the issues of the American poor as if these were real people was President Jimmy Carter, and we know what happened with him. Outside of my degrees and my publications, I was invisible until the fall of ’99.

Otherwise, it’s been four decades of Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Clinton concerned with “welfare queens,” “pink Cadillacs,” and “mend it, don’t end it” welfare policies, and the media following suit. It’s like being kicked hard by someone as one is laying on the ground with broken ribs and internal hemorrhaging, as if they want to poor to die, painfully.

But it’s not just the ones with microphones and word processing programs that kill America’s poor by rendering them invisible. Despite the general notion that the media and politicians nurture — that everyone not rich aspires to be firmly entrenched in the middle class — most Americans middle class and poor aspire to be rich, wealthy, well-off.

Creflo Dollar, pastor, World Changers Church International, November 1, 2010. (Zwicky Institut via Flickr.com). In public domain.

This is the other neglected issue, whether inadvertent like with Chris Hayes and his guests on Uppers, or deliberate on the part of President Obama and Romney. Why so? Because they don’t acknowledge that it’s hard to be truly middle class in America these days. To be in the middle class, one must borrow, borrow, borrow, beg and sometimes steal while struggling to pay student loans, car notes, a mortgage and child care costs.

This wasn’t the case even thirty years ago, before the severe double-dip recession, high interest rates and inflation and Reagan Revolution took full hold. Then, a high school diploma and raw initiative was all most folks needed to find a job at a GM plant or to get an administrative job in government or with a large corporation (although, typing at 90 words per minute enhanced a woman’s chances, at least). Now, two years of college or postsecondary technical training, some experience in a specialized field, and a personal connection is the floor for a living wage — not exactly middle class. Of course, no one wants to be in the basement with nearly one in five Americans, 50 million in all, working just to be poor.

Stacks of money, April 13, 2008. (Allureme via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution 3.0 License.

America’s poor and fledgling middle class both aspire to be rich (or die tryin’), and not just middle class. The rise of fundamentalist Christianity, mega-churches and the cult of prosperity as these pastors reimagine the New Testament. The endless lines for Powerball and Mega Millions whenever the pot is more than $100 million. The fascination with reality shows about the well-off or about competing to be well-off. All of this is the manifestation of the warping of the American Dream since the early 1970s, where the pursuit of riches has led to debt slavery for millions.

The old American Dream has become myth, and the old American middle class is but the story of Camelot, Timbuktu and Shangri-La. In our new world, “the poor will be with us always” has been made a plain and unyielding truth by those in power, reinforced by those with a media platform.