racism

Sunday Contemplation — Race Matters — Scalia’s Shameful Invocation of Racial Inferiority in 2015

To start out the year 2016 I’ve decided to write about something that has stuck in my craw since the issue first came about.  I find it galling, really, to have to write about something of this sort in the new year of 2016 but it is there nonetheless and I cannot in good conscience not write about it.

The topic at hand is the questioning by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia during oral arguments in the affirmative action case, Fisher vs. University of Texas at Austin.  His comments are well documented but they are worth recounting, only because this line of thinking is shared by a significant proportion of the population.  Below is the full exchange begun by Gregory Garre, the attorney for UT.

Garre:  “If this Court rules that the University of Texas can’t consider race, or if it rules that universities that consider race have to die a death of a thousand cuts for doing so, we know exactly what’s going to happen…Experience tells us that.” (When the use of race has been dropped elsewhere) “diversity plummeted.”

Scalia:  “There are those who contend that it does not benefit African­-Americans to — ­ to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less­-advanced school, a less ­—­ a slower­-track school where they do well. One of ­­— one of the briefs pointed out that ­­— that most of the — ­­most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas. They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re ­­— that they’re being pushed ahead in ­—­ in classes that are too ­­— too fast for them. I’m just not impressed by the fact that —­­ that the University of Texas may have fewer (black students). Maybe it ought to have fewer.”

Garre:  “This court heard and rejected that argument, with respect, Justice Scalia….frankly, I don’t think the solution to the problems with student body diversity can be to set up a system in which not only are minorities going to separate schools, they’re going to inferior schools.”

I want to get back to Scalia’s comments, but first it is useful to go over the facts of this case, which seem to barely warrant a review by the Supreme Court.  UT admits the overwhelming majority of its students based on the Top Ten Program, that is, if you graduated from a Texas high school within the top 10% of your class, you were admitted if you applied.  In the year that Fisher applied, 92% of the entering class gained admission on that basis.  For the other 8% of seats that were open, as Vox explained, other factors were taken into consideration including based on a “holistic” process.  Two scores were given from this process: one for essays, leadership activities, and background, which included race; and the other based on grades and test scores.  The overwhelming majority of students accepted for admission under this process were white.  Given that the inclusion of race as a factor was not a discriminatory quota, there is little here except to assert, in general, that any consideration of race is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

The majority of legal analysis of the Fisher case itself has centered on Grutter vs. Bollinger, mostly because it is the Supreme Court’s latest statement on the issue of affirmative action.  In this case, the Court ruled that University of Michigan Law School did not discriminate when taking race into account among a number of other factors in order to ensure a diverse student body, especially in including previously disenfranchised and excluded minorities, as long as there was a compelling interest in doing so and it passed the definition of “strict scrutiny.”

Given that the Court attempts to maintain continuity and precedent (known by the Latin term stare decisis), the wellspring for this decision was really based on the case of University of California Regents v. Bakke from 1978.  There are two competing constitutional interests at play according to the majority opinion written by Justice Lewis Powell.  One is to ensure that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment apply not only to protect the interests of African-Americans in “dialing back the clock to 1868” in a United States that no longer resembles the one when the amendment was passed, but to all persons.  The other is under the academic freedom afforded schools and colleges under the First Amendment known as the “four essential freedoms.”

Forgetting in his argument that Justice Powell was a good constitutional judge but a poor historian, this other interest may come as a surprise to those not familiar with these competing interests.  This is not surprising given the partisan–and many racist–arguments against affirmative action.  Powell invokes two previous cases in outlining the four essential freedoms.  He writes:

“Mr. Justice Frankfurter summarized the “four essential freedoms” that constitute academic freedom:

“`It is the business of a university to provide that atmosphere which is most conductive to speculation, experiment and creation. It is an atmosphere in which there prevail “the four essential freedoms” of a university—to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.'”  Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U. S. 234, 263 (1957) (concurring in result).

Our national commitment to the safeguarding of these freedoms within university communities was emphasized in Keyshian v. Board of Regents, 385 U.S. 589, 603 (1967):

“Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment . . . . The Nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth `out of a multitude of tongues, [rather] than through any kind of authoritative selection.’  United States v. Associated Press, 523 F. Supp. 362, 372.”

What Powell indicated was that, given these conflicting rights (given that no right is absolute), that when the university takes racial factors into account into admissions that there needs to be both a substantial state interest in ensuring diversity, and that strict scrutiny must be applied to such racial or ethnic factoring.  The first time around, when the Supreme Court remanded the Fisher case back to the appellate court in 2013, the majority indicated that while not a quota–and hence not an outright violation of the Equal Protection Clause–that the court had not applied strict scrutiny in determining whether UT had established a substantial state interest.  Or, at least, that’s what it seemed given that the logic which comes down by the Roberts Court is oftentimes sophomoric.

It is important to note that the UT Top Ten Program has increased diversity.  The reason is that the top ten percent, regardless of school, qualify for the program.  This effect is rooted in discrimination in housing patterns that extend back to the late 19th century when, first, Jim Crow laws were passed in the southern states (such as Texas) to essentially re-enslave and disenfranchise the freedmen.  Many people will be surprised to know that these laws continued in force well into the 1960s, the last case being brought to overturn the last vestiges of the race laws in the mid-1970s.  Then in the north beginning in the 1920s, first, local ordinance, and then, when those were struck down, restrictive covenants were applied to keep African Americans and other minority and ethnic groups out of white, Anglo-Saxon protestant neighborhoods.  When restrictive covenants were eventually overturned, real estate brokers and bankers applied the process of “redlining.”  That is, home loans and mortgages were made harder to qualify for or denied to certain racial and ethnic groups.  The map was lined in red to keep people in their “place.”  Ostensibly, this practice was outlawed with the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, but the practice has continued to this day.  Furthermore, for most of our history African Americans have had to pay a premium for better housing that otherwise would have gone for a lower market price.  It was racial fear and manipulation that caused white flight in giving the impression of falling real estate value when African-Americans were allowed to move into a predominately white community.  The sordid history behind this phenomena are amply documented in the National Book Award winning history, Arc of Justice by historian Kevin Boyle.

When one hears political and opinion leaders assert that the housing crisis was caused by diversity targets in sub-prime loans they are not only stating a counterfactual and providing bad economic analysis, but are also engaged in race baiting.  It is redlining that caused minorities to be most vulnerable when the bubble burst because they tended to pay usurious interest rates–or were funneled into subprime balloon mortgages–in order to derive the same benefits of home ownership as other groups, who were afforded more reasonable financing.  Given that most of these are working people living paycheck to paycheck, it takes no great insight to know that they will be the first to default during an unusually severe economic downturn.

Thus, when one considers that most public school funding is derived from real estate property taxes and that the average homeowner based on a 2013 survey stays in their home 13 years (with the historical average varying between 10 and 16 years since 1997), the effects of previously discriminatory practices–and school funding, as well as socio-economic and racial composition–depending the rate of turnover in any particular neighborhood, can last a generation or more.  Despite political arguments to the contrary, monies spent on schools plays a significant role in student achievement.  It would have been appropriate for Justice Powell in Bakke to have at least acknowledged this history as well as the history of new immigrants and minorities that he invoked in his decision in expressing his concern about turning back the clock.

It is important to state clearly that there is no doubt things have improved despite Bakke, and that it was probably a largely well-conceived adjudication.  Despite claims to the contrary, the Great Society and Civil Rights reforms of the 1960s have eliminated the worst de jure and de facto day-to-day indignities, fear of violence, discrimination, and denial of human rights that African-Americans lived under well into the late 20th century.  Opportunities have opened up and it is amazing that over the last 50 years that we can find young African-Americans who have never suffered the indignity of bias or discrimination due to the color of their skin.  But as with the recent problems in policing, criminal justice, and the subtle racism that exists in job selection and opportunities, among other issues, it is apparent that we still have work to do for us to fully overcome our history of slavery, Jim Crow, racism, discrimination, and racial terrorism.  For when one looks back, the fact of the matter is that much of this country–and the basis of its wealth–was built on the backs of African American slavery and oppression.  Without the African-American experience, American culture is indecipherable.  New immigrants, when taking advantage of the inherited advantages of being American also, unknowing to them, inherit the history that made those advantages possible.

But now back to Justice Scalia’s remarks.  Had Scalia restricted himself to the constitutional issues addressed by Powell in Bakke, there would be no concern.  But this is not what the members of this SCOTUS are about.  In the case of Scalia, his remarks would have been at home in the post-Reconstruction south in the late 19th and early 20th century, along with Spencer’s Social Darwinism and eugenics.  This was the period that endorsed separate but “equal” facilities for African-Americans.  Scalia seems to be suggesting a modern version of it in higher education.  But we have seen these ideas invoked fairly recently elsewhere, particularly in the discredited work of Herrnstein and Murray in publishing their work The Bell Curve.  His comments are what is called “Begging the Question.”  Scalia “begs the question” in assuming in his remarks that African-Americans are not qualified generally for UT, and that they do not possess the mental or educational skills to succeed there.  His remarks also reveal someone who thinks in terms of hierarchy and aristocracy, that there are levels of human fitness and superiority, which also underlies such concepts as “makers” and “takers.”

Apologists in academia and elsewhere have attempted to temper the justice’s words by invoking the concept of mismatch in college admissions.  It is often referred to as a “theory” but that would elevate it to have an authority that it does not possess.  It is Cargo Cult Social Science based on loosely correlated statistics that provides a veneer of respectability to those who still seek to explain inequality in a society that claims fancifully to be meritocratic, or egalitarian, or a land of opportunity, but which is not really any of these.  But that is not the underlying assumption in Scalia’s remarks.  He begins with calling out African Americans (and restricts himself to African Americans among minorities) and then goes from there.  Further studies on mismatch (link below) show that it is a common phenomenon which affects all racial and ethnic groups.  No system is perfect, and especially not one conceived by society or academia.

But even putting aside the racist assumptions of Justice Scalia, does the mismatch concept even pass the “so-what?” test?  What if one is thrown into a situation for which they are poorly prepared?  In real life we call this “sink or swim.”  Does it really do harm?  There are all kinds of casuistry put forth but, despite assertions to the contrary, the facts are not conclusive.

To give but one famous historical example that undermines this bit of sophistry, the fact that General Lee graduated second in his West Point class and U.S. Grant graduated in the bottom half no doubt influenced them later in life.  Lee was able to defeat with great skill generals who were unused to defeat and disappointment, and routed them from the field.  But his supreme confidence in his abilities caused his utter failure at Gettysburg.  Grant, on the other hand, who experienced failure both as a civilian and on the battlefield, grew unafraid of it and succeeded in the end.  The fact that someone experiences a setback or must work hard in order to succeed is not such a bad thing.  It is how the individual reacts in the face of disappointment or long odds that we call character.  It is the standard means of training Naval officers at sea and why mentoring is so important.  (Only puffed up college professors don’t feel that their job is teaching).  Yes, the world is a big place; yes, there are things you don’t know, but absent a severe learning or emotional disability you can learn them.

But seeing this self-evident insight would assume rational thought and evidence.  For example, many of the characteristics attributed to African-Americans in The Bell Curve have since been overcome, such as significantly rising math and reading scores on standardized tests that are closing the gap with white achievement.  If these were innate or unsolvable deficiencies how was it possible that public policy is alleviating the gap?  Does it harm African-Americans to be challenged to do so?  Given the disreputable history of race in America what is more likely: that African-Americans are innately less likely to succeed at UT (and increasing numbers entered under the Top Ten Program), or that the history of unequal educational opportunity deserves to be addressed in the most equitable and constitutional manner?  Or that unequal treatment and the socio-economic effects of economic discrimination, which still exist, have a great effect on minorities that require a reasoned assessment of the individual in taking into account mitigating circumstances, including racial or ethnic background, in college admissions for those on the fence?

That a Supreme Court justice can voice such stupidity and bias in the year 2015 is evidence enough that there is something wrong with our judicial system.  I beg to differ with the proposition voiced by the late Senator Roman Hruska in defending Nixon’s appointment of G. Harold Carswell to the Supreme Court (which was rejected), that mediocrity deserves representation on the court.  While we can’t always find a Brandeis, Cardozo, or Frankfurter (or a Holmes, Brennan, Black, Story, or Warren), we can at least attempt to do so.  Unfortunately we are stuck with a Scalia and his ilk.

Finding Wisdom — Stephen Jay Gould in “The Mismeasure of Man”

Stephen Jay Gould

Perhaps no modern thinker among the modern scientific community from the late 1970s into the new century pushed the boundaries of interpretation and thought regarding evolutionary biology and paleontology more significantly than Stephen Jay Gould.  An eminent scholar himself–among evolutionary biologists his technical work Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977) is considered one of the most significant works in the field and he is considered to be among the most important historians of science in the late 20th century–he was the foremost popularizer of science during his generation (with the possible exception of Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan) who used his position to advance scientific knowledge, critical thinking, and to attack pseudoscientific, racist, and magical thinking which misused and misrepresented scientific knowledge and methods.

His concepts of punctuated equilibrium, spandrels, and the Panglossian Paradigm pushed other evolutionary biologists in the field to rise to new heights in considering and defending their own applications of neo-Darwinian theory, prompting (sometimes heated) debate.  These ideas continue to be controversial in the evolutionary community with, it seems, most of the objections being based on the fear that they will be misused by non-scientists against evolution itself, and it is true that creationists and other pseudoscientists–aided and abetted by the scientifically illiterate popular press–misrepresented the so-called “Darwin Wars” as being more significant than they really were.  But many of his ideas were reconciled and resolved into a new synthesis within the science of evolution.  Thus, his insights, based as they were in the scientific method and within proven theory, epitomized the very subject that he popularized–that nothing is ever completely settled in science, that all areas of human understanding are open to inquiry and–perhaps–revision, even if slight.

Having established himself as a preeminent science historian, science popularizer, scholar in several fields, and occasional iconoclast, Gould focused his attention on an area that well into the late 20th century was rife with ideology, prejudice, and pseudoscience–the issue of human intelligence and its measurement.  As Darwin learned over a hundred years before, it is one thing to propose that natural selection is the agent of evolution, it is another to then demonstrate that the human species descended from other primate ancestors, and the manner in which sexual selection plays a role in human evolution: for some well entrenched societal interests and specialists it is one step too far.  Gould’s work was attacked, but it has withstood these attacks and criticisms, and stands as a shining example of using critical thinking and analytical skills in striking down an artifact of popular culture and bad social science.

In The Mismeasure of Man, Gould begins his work by surveying the first scientific efforts at understanding human intelligence by researchers such as Louis Agassiz and Paul Broca, among others, who studied human capabilities through the now-defunct science of craniometry.  I was reminded, when I first picked up the book, of Carl Sagan’s collection of writings in the 1979 book, Broca’s Brain, in which some of the same observations are made.  What Gould demonstrates is that the racial and sexual selection bias of the archetypes chosen by the researchers, in particular Samuel George Morton (1799-1851), provided them with the answers they wanted to find–that their methodology was biased, and therefore, invalid from the start.  In particular, the differences in the skulls of Caucasians (of a particular portion of Europe), Black people (without differentiating ethnic or geographical differences), and Mongolians (Asian peoples without differentiation) in identifying different human “species” lacked rigor and was biased in its definitions from the outset.

In order to be fair, a peer-reviewed paper challenged Gould’s assertion that Morton may have fudged his findings on cranial measurements, since the researcher used bird seed (or iron pellets depending on the source) as the basis for measurement, and found, in a sample of some of the same skulls, (combined with a survey from 1988) that Morton was largely accurate in his measures.  The research, however, was unable to undermine the remainder of Gould’s thesis while attempting to resurrect the integrity of Morton in light of his own, largely pre-scientific time.  I can understand the point made by Gould’s critics regarding Morton that it is not necessarily constructive to apply modern methodological methods–or imply dishonesty–to those early pioneers whose works has led to modern scientific understanding.  But as an historian I also understand that when reading Gibbon on the Roman Empire that we learn a great deal about the prejudices of 18th century British society–perhaps more than we learn of the Romans.  Gibbon and Morton, as with most people, were not consciously aware of their own biases–or that they were biases.  This is the reason for modern research and methodological standards in academic fields–and why human understanding is always “revisionist” to use a supposed pejorative that I heard used by one particularly ignorant individual several years ago.  Gibbon showed the way of approaching and writing about history.  His work would not pass editorial review today, but the reason why he is so valued is that he is right in many of his observations and theses.  The same cannot be said for Morton, who seemed motivated by the politics of justifying black slavery, which is why Gould treats him so roughly, particularly given that some of Morton’s ideas still find comfort in many places in our own time.  In light of subsequent research, especially the human genome project, Gould proves out right which, after all, is the measure that counts.

But that is just the appetizer.  Gould then takes on the basis of IQ (intelligence quotient), g factor (the general intelligence factor), and the heritability of intelligence to imply human determinism, especially generalized among groups.  He traces the original application of IQ tests developed by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon to the introduction of universal education in France and the need to identify children with learning disabilities and those who required remediation by grade and age group.  He then surveys how psychologist Lewis Terman of Stanford modified the test and transformed its purpose in order to attempt to find an objective basis for determining human intelligence.  In critiquing this transformation Gould provides examples of the more obviously (to modern eyes) biased questions on the test, and then effectively destroys the statistical basis for the correlations of the test in being able to determine any objective measure of g.  He demonstrates that the correlations established by the psychological profession to establish “g” are both statistically and logically questionable and that they commit the logical fallacy of reification–that is, they take an abstract measure and imbue it with a significance that it cannot possess as if it were an actual physical entity or “thing.”

Gould demonstrates that the variability of the measurements within groups, the clustering of results within the tests that identify distinct aptitudes, and the variability of results across time for the same individuals given changes in circumstances of material condition, education, and emotional maturity, renders “g” an insignificant measure.  The coup de grace in the original edition–a trope still often pulled out as the last resort by defenders of human determinism and IQ–is in Gould’s analysis of the work of Cyril Burt, the oft-cited researcher of twin studies, who published fraudulent works that asserted that IQ was highly heritable and not affected by environment.  That we still hear endless pontificating on “nature vs. nurture” debates, and that Stanford-Binet and other tests are still used as a basis for determining a measure of “intelligence” owes more to societal bias, and the still pseudo-scientific methodologies of much of the psychological profession, than scientific and intellectual honesty.

The core of Gould’s critique is to effectively discredit the concept of biological determinism which he defines as “the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness, invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups—races, classes, or sexes—are innately inferior and deserve their status.”

What Stephen Jay Gould demonstrates in The Mismeasure of Man most significantly then, I think, is that human beings–particularly those with wealth, power, and influence, or who are part of a societally favored group–demonstrate an overwhelming desire to differentiate themselves from others and will go to great lengths to do so to their own advantage.  This desire includes the misuse of science, whatever the cost to truth or integrity, in order to demonstrate that there is an organic or heritable basis for their favored position relative to others in society when, in reality, there are more complex–and perhaps more base and remedial–reasons.  Gould shows how public policy, educational focus, and discriminatory practices were influenced by the tests of immigrant and minority groups to deny them access to many of the benefits of the economic system and society.  Ideology was the driving factor in the application of these standardized tests, which served the purposes of societal and economic elites to convince disenfranchised groups that they deserved their inferior status.  The label of “science” provided these tainted judgments with just the right tinge of respectability that they needed to overcome skepticism and opposition.

A few years after the publication of Gould’s work a new example of the last phenomenon described above emerged with the publication of the notorious The Bell Curve (1994) by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray–the poster child of the tradition harking back to Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics of elites funding self-serving pseudo-science and–another word will not do–bullshit.  While Spencer could be forgiven his errors given his time and scientific limitations, Herrnstein and Murray, who have little excuse, used often contradictory and poorly correlated (and causative) statistical methods to argue for a race-based argument of biological determinism.  Once again, Gould in the 1996 revision to his original work, dealt with these fallacies directly, demonstrating in detail the methodological errors in their work and the overreach inherit in their enterprise–another sad example of bias misusing knowledge as the intellectual basis to oppress other people and, perhaps more egregiously, to abandon coming to terms with the disastrous actions that American society has had on one specific group of people because of the trivial difference of skin color.

With the yeoman work of Stephen Jay Gould to discredit pseudo-scientific ideas and the misuse of statistical methodology to pigeonhole and classify people–to misuse socio-biology and advance self-serving theories of human determinism–the world has been provided the example that even the best financed and well entrenched elites cannot stop the advance of knowledge and information.  They will try–using more sophisticated methods of disinformation and advertising–but over time those efforts will be defeated.  It will happen because scientific projects like the Human Genome Project have already demonstrated that there is only one race–the human race–and that we are all tied together by common ancestors.  The advantages that we realize over each other at any point in time is ephemeral.  The knowledge regarding variability in the human species acknowledges differences in the heritable characteristics in individuals, but that knowledge implies nothing about our relative worth to one another, nor is it a moral judgment rendered from higher authority that justifies derision, stigma, ridicule, discrimination, or reduced circumstances.  It will happen because in our new age information, once transmitted, cannot be retracted–it is out there forever.  There is much wisdom here.  It is up to each of us to recognize it, and inform our actions as a result of it.

Finding Wisdom — Four novels by Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer passed away this year on July 14, 2014.  Rarely is there an opportunity for a gifted writer to be both brave and essential.  She was both of these throughout her 90 years.  Gordimer, of course, was a South African novelist and short story writer.  Her fiction dealt with the issues regarding race and the racial apartheid that defined South African society during a time when writing and openly speaking about such issues was forbidden.  She addressed these issues when similar regimes of apartheid, white supremacy, and racial segregation were in force elsewhere, most notably in the American South and in Rhodesia, thus her words spoke to millions beyond the borders of her native country, where many of her books were banned.  But she went beyond just writing, placing herself in jeopardy by joining the African National Congress (ANC) in support of overturning apartheid during a time when membership in that organization was illegal, participating in anti-apartheid demonstrations, and hiding ANC members in her home from the police who were sought for arrest.  She was close friends with the attorneys of Nelson Mandela’s defense team during his trial, helping him prepare his “I Am Prepared to Die” speech, which he gave during his defense in 1964.  Years later, after his release from prison, Gordimer was one of the first people Mandela sought out.

Gordimer’s fiction explores the society around her in a progression of discovery that I suspect very much traces her own intellectual and emotional progression.  She had begun writing when she was 15 years old, a largely isolated only-child of nurturing and protective parents.  By the time she was married for the first time and had her first child in her mid-twenties, she submitted one of her stories to The New Yorker and was published there for the first time in 1951.  Additional stories–which she continued to believe was the most essential fictional form for her time–and novels ensued; quite a number of them.

In her first novel, The Lying Days, which she published in 1953, we follow the growing awareness of a twenty-four year old woman by the name of Helen Shaw to the realities of both apartheid and the small town life–with its other prejudices and taboos–in which she lives.  It is in this novel that Gordmer’s keen eye for the essential truth of a matter and her ability to communicate it in her fiction was first revealed.  The vultures of South Africa hover everywhere, she wrote, over both the veld and the cities, and in doing so they look down on all of the people of the plain and the cities, both the rich and the poor.  In the city of Johannesburg and its outskirts where poverty tends to collect, as in all cities, there is that thing called charity.  But, she wrote, ”in South Africa there is one difference, a difference so great that the whole conception of charity must be changed.  The people…were not the normal human wastage of a big industrial city but…the entire black-skinned population on whose labor the city rested…too poor to maintain themselves decently because no matter what their energy, their skill, their labor was not allowed value above subsistence level.”  But if this were her only insight it would be slight indeed, but Gordimer plumbs the society around her with a keen eye for detail: the brute labor and hopelessness in working in the local mine, the Jewish boy who dare not talk of his identity or declare his love for Helen, the black girl with whom Helen befriends in university who cannot come to Helen’s home, and who would be turned away in any event by Helen’s parents.  Helen’s lover as young woman, Paul, works to provide some measure of human kindness to the poor of the city and is frustrated at every turn.  Through the eyes of Helen and the other characters in the novel we see a panorama of the conflicts and frustration that makes up South African society under its strictures and oppressive taboos regarding race, ethnicity, and religion.  From the outside–and now with the benefit of history–we can see that this is a regime that cannot hold.  But beyond a novel of ideas, the greatest sin that Gordimer committed as a member of that society in this first novel is what is essential to making a great writer, it is in humanizing her characters and bringing them forth as three dimensional, communicating to the reader that these people in their interactions have an internal life like our own, regardless of their skin color or their background.  To those conservatives and defenders of the social order in her own time, this was just the first of many sins should would commit.

In the story Occasion for Loving, which was published in 1963, is told by the observant third party.  In this novel Jessie and Tom Stilwell are part of the liberal intellectual class of South Africa, leading a comfortable suburban existence.  It is through Jessie that the story is told.  The Stilwells supplement their income by renting out extra space and in this case it is to newly married Ann and Boaz Davis.  Boaz is a composer but he has been suffering writer’s block and so is busy collecting and transcribing the native tribal music of Africa before it disappears.  He is also Jewish in a land hostile to Jews.  Ann, for her part, is open to experience and challenges convention at every turn.  She is a young English woman used to getting her way.  Into the picture enters Gideon Shibalo, a talented and passionate young African man who has received a fellowship to study painting in Rome, but who is denied a passport by the South African authorities.  The Stilwells and Davises feel for Gideon’s injustice.  The Stilwells, in particular, given their status live in a world where normal social convention doesn’t seem to touch them. They travel to the townships at will and have contact with the Africans in defiance of the authorities, supporting organizations to overturn apartheid.  Along the way Ann falls in with Gideon.  But this is not some esoteric societal transgression.  The relationship between Ann and Gideon is a political crime with serious consequences if they are found out.  It is hard to tell Ann’s motivation when she and her lover decide to run away together, whether her personal “occasion for loving” is due to her true feelings or some other high minded motivation to save the young man’s dreams.  And so it is with all of the characters and the tragedy which this story becomes.  They try to insulate themselves from their actions through intellectualizing their actions, refusing to see that “…Every contact with whites was touched with intimacy; for even the most casual belonged by definition to the conspiracy against keeping apart.”  In the end Ann is convinced by Jessie, who faces her own conflicts regarding her former first marriage, the child from that marriage, and her three children with Tom, to end the affair and return to Boaz.  In the end she is a realist regarding the difference between familial love and sexual love.  But Ms. Gordimer is not going to let her characters off the hook that easily, lest the book become another trivial potboiler.  She uses this form to explore the other aspects of the characters, the affair, and the larger context in which they occur.  Jesse may be a realist in matters of the heart, but can she really understand the motivation for the basic freedoms that Gideon is denied?  In the story’s “occasion for loving,” how complicit are the Stilwells and Davises, for all of their liberalism and moderation, in the oppressive and racist system that was South Africa?

A Guest of Honour published in 1970 garnered her the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, which was her first major literary award.  It tells the story of a British colonial administrator by the name of Evelyn James Bray.  Mr. Bray is a pariah among the white settlers of the colony that he serves because of his activism in favor of the black freedom movement, and is forced to flee as a result.  A while after these events, however, the colony is granted its independence and Mr. Bray is invited back to the new republic by its chosen president.  The president is Adamson Mwete, a popular and gregarious man who lives in poverty one day only to be propelled to the head of a new country the next.  His closest friend and advisor has been Edward Shinza, both an intellectual man and one who can turn thought into action.  The two men–Mwete and Shinza–completed one another, were opposite sides of the same coin, but when Bray returns he notices that Shinza has fled to the bush.  Bray, who initially takes a passive role in celebrating the newly independent state, is pulled into the events that now take on a life of their own.  For the differing visions of Mwete and Shinza play out across the country in real time.  Mwete believes that the state first and foremost must benefit in order for everyone to benefit, while Shinza sees the benefits of freedom needing to play out in practicality, changing the lives of the people for the better.  Mwete is the more adept politician and so overwhelms his old friend and ally.  In implementing his program, he outsources the country’s mines to foreign interests, with the state sharing in the profits.  The hitch is that the workers must accept lower wages and poor working conditions.  The unions are thus co-opted to enforce the will of the state, as is the former independence party apparatus.  The workers, who had been the vanguard of the independence movement, are suppressed.  As popular discontent grows Mwete enforces ever increasingly oppressive measures, creating a police state not so different from the one that existed prior to independence, tying himself closer to the empire from which the country fled.  Foreign interests are invited in to bolster the regime and the rich are allowed to keep their fortunes and rule over the wage earners, subsistence farmers, and the poor; tied as they are to the largesse of the state and foreign economic interests.  Soon the old revolution returns, the president flees to England, and foreign troops arrive to restore order.  The storyline in A Guest of Honour seems all too familiar today with the benefit of 44 years hindsight since its publication; similar stories having been played out across Africa and Asia.  It is the story of a revolution gone bad, of ideals betrayed to expediency, of greed, of human stupidity and ignorance borne of the desire to do good but without the tools or the knowledge to know how to go about it.  It is an indictment of paternalism, of colonialism, of economic imperialism, and the savage cruelty of the strong over the weak.  For Gordimer writing from the perspective of 1970, it is a warning–a cautionary tale–of how things could turn out in the wake of apartheid’s removal.  But it is not simply a didactic exploration of philosophies or politics or consequences.  The characters live and breath and–all too frequently–err, as those in all great literature do.

Gordimer’s 1974 novel The Conservationist won her the Booker Prize, the most prestigious literary award in England, the equivalent to the National Book Award in this country.  To many it is considered her masterpiece, though there are many candidates for that title.  The novel’s lyrical telling is much like an impressionist painting, allowing the reader to see details that are only faintly described, the colors and overall effect communicating more than the misleading simplicity of the subject matter.  The main character is a wealthy white industrialist from Johannesburg by the name of Mehring, and it is through his perspective that the story is told.  He buys a 400 acre farm less than an hour from his work as a meeting place for his mistress, Antonia, and because the losses from the farm’s operations is a tax write-off.  In his mind he loves the land, but treats it as any other investment, viewing the productiveness of the cattle and cornfields as the ultimate measure of his stewardship while, at the same time, dismissing the concerns and well-being of the Zulu caretakers who run the farm.  The same can be said for all of the people in his life–he is disconnected from them and sees them only in terms of his holdings or what they offer him, in particular the need for young women to feed his sexual appetite.  The farm’s foreman, Jacobus, finds a dead body on the farm.  The police are called but the deceased man is black, and so the circumstances of his death are of little official concern.  The police bury the body where it is found.  This knowledge haunts Mehring throughout the novel.  The story, of course, is allegory, but one that contains a great deal of psychological wisdom and human insight.  It deals with the immediate issue of apartheid but it reveals much about human nature.  In the mind of Mehring we find a man whose self-image is driven by wanting to be seen as doing the “right” thing, of being a “proper” human being (one cannot characterize the self-interest he seeks and which is his central defining characteristic as “good”), at least in his mind’s eye.  That the language and perceptions of a racist and materialist worldview color his perspectives does not in the least come to mind.  For all of his wealth and internal drive there is little self-reflection or self-awareness.  It is only when the body of the unidentified black man is exhumed by a flood and he witnesses the black farm hands burying the man as if a relative that he feels his own isolation.  But that is the condition of all who would be rulers of a kingdom, even the petty ones of our own times.

In her overall body of work, for which she received the Nobel Prize in 1991, Nadine Gordimer challenged in her writing not only apartheid but all forms of oppression.  Her books are both cleared-eyed and brutally honest.  The wisdom to be learned from her body of work sits not in the polemics of freedom, but into the insights of how people come to terms with a great evil.

There are other works that I could have chose aside from these four.  There are her works that were famously banned in her native country:   A World of Strangers (1958), which tells the story of a white South African man who witnesses the brutality of apartheid and is force by conscience to join an organization like the ANC.  The novella, The Late Bourgeois World (1966), which was banned for a decade, directly attacks the privileged white suburban life upon which the slavery and repression of the black majority is based.  Burger’s Daughter (1979) about the daughter of a Communist activist in South Africa in the wake of her father’s death.  July’s People (1981) banned during the apartheid and post-apartheid period, in which she imagines a black revolution turned oppressive against white people, an upside down apartheid.

There are also the more recent novels.  A Sport of Nature (1987) about an angry young woman without a cause who is caught up in the politics of South Africa without being emotionally touched by them,  The House Gun (1998) explores the psychology of seemingly reasonable people who are forced to face the reality of their lives from a single act of violence.  The Pickup (2001), about the challenges of two lovers from different cultures without a country.  No Time Like the Present (2012), which chronicles the struggle of life in South Africa after the struggle.

In all of Ms. Gordimer’s works there are connections that tie people together even under a system of forced separation, though the psychological barriers of separation are just as real.  In the end, no matter what kind of justifications are built to separate people or that people use to insulate themselves or their tribe or their identify, the fact is that we are all connected in some way for what happens in the world around us.  Her writing attacks prejudice wherever it tries to hide, whether it be in others or in ourselves.

In thinking about the significant body of work left by Nadine Gordimer–for the short stories and short story collections, which I haven’t addressed here, are significant–I am struck by the fact that the American South never produced an author of the same stature in dealing with the defining evils of segregated southern society.  Certainly no one that combined Gordimer’s bravery, conviction, and writing talent.  Instead, we are left with only the alcohol-infused paternalist voice of William Faulkner, who dealt with issues of “miscegenation” early, but the oppression he witnessed is chronicled only obliquely, writing directly about what went on as a matter of course only once:  in his excellent Intruder in the Dust.  There are fairy tale stories and domestic concerns of Eudora Welty, the southern gothic of Carson McCullers, and the apologists like Robert Penn Warren (later reformed),  and Elizabeth Spencer.  Harper Lee, a southern expatriate, gave us To Kill a Mockingbird and nothing else.

This is not an indictment, necessarily, of American southern literature.  Certainly the effects of Jim Crow and the Black Codes have been told by African American authors (James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and others) and the occasional works of white southerners (such as William Styron) to great effect–and there are certainly other aspects of living in the American south.  But I find it interesting that the one voice during a significant period in our own history that consistently spoke against racial prejudice and oppression and the blind spot that societies construct to mask its effects and beneficiaries–and which appeared regularly in publications like The New Yorker–came from a South African author.  For this we owe a great deal of thanks to Nadine Gordimer.