The mess that is Iraq-2: How could it have happened?

There is no question in the minds of any but the most diehard supporters of George Bush that what has happened in Iraq can only be described as a debacle. The only serious debates that are occurring now center around two issues: (1) How could this mess have happened? and (2) What is to be done now.

As is usually the case when a policy starts to go seriously wrong, people involved in it start to divulge previously confidential information in a way that seeks to deflect blame from themselves and put it on others. Current and former administration officials are currently leaking information all over the place, a sure sign that insiders have acknowledged that the policy is a failure and that the only thing remaining is to determine who gets saddled with the blame. It is usually in the swirl of charges and countercharges that ensue from such attempts at blame avoidance that one can try to piece together the truth from the debris. While doing this truth reconstruction, one has to be aware that all the people speaking out now have an element of self-interest in revealing what they want you to know.
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The mess that is Iraq

One of these days, the number of US soldiers killed will reach a milestone of 2,000. The media will take solemn note of this event. Of course, the very fact that the focus is only on US troop deaths is a measure of how insular the media coverage is. The 2,000 mark of non-Iraqi coalition forces (mainly US and UK) deaths passed 2000 sometime ago with no fanfare and is now approaching 2,200. (See here for current totals.) And, of course, the total deaths of the fledgling Iraqi security forces, presumably allies of the coalition forces, are not usually reported (although you can see the current number which is about 3,500 here), nor are the huge number of civilians killed by the ongoing war. Estimates of the last category currently lie between 26,000 and 30,000. And when one adds the injured to all these totals, one gets a sense of the immense cost of this war.

At a meeting last month, part of the Cindy Sheehan Camp Casey cross-country bus tour, at which I spoke, I showed a graph similar to this of the rate of non-Iraqi coalition casualties of the war, on which were marked so-called landmark events, things that were signaled by the US government as significant turning points in the war. The latest political move in this sequence, not shown on the graph, was the referendum on the new constitution in Iraq, another touted ‘landmark on the road to democracy in Iraq’, which occurred just this month. (Graph is from The Intelligence Squad Reports, where you can see the original graph.)

What was significant was that the graph is a straight line, showing that none of these events had caused any significant shift in the intensity of the attacks on the US occupation.

This struck me as significant because as many of you may have noticed, the deaths of US troops in Iraq has ceased to be a national news story in the media. It is now mainly a local story and is reported in the local media when a hometown soldier or marine is killed. Since this is a rare event in any given community, this may have led many to think that the violence in Iraq is abating and that all the political maneuvers that are so exhaustively reported are having a calming effect.

The website that tracks coalition forces deaths shows that far from abating, the rate of deaths goes on, a steady drumbeat of violence. In fact, the present month seems to have the highest rate of coalition forces deaths since January of this year.

Patrick Cockburn, longtime observer of Iraq and a correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent has a long report in the October 1-15, 2005 issue of the CounterPunch newsletter that paints a dismal picture of the state of affairs in Iraq and suggests that despite the determined efforts by the US and UK governments to paint all these political developments as significant improvements, they may only be making things worse. He writes:

A deep crisis is turning into a potential catastrophe because President George W. Bush and Tony Blair pretend that the situation in Iraq is improving. To prove to their own publics that progress is being made they imposed on Iraq a series of artificial milestones, which have been achieved but have done nothing to end the ever-deepening violence. The latest milestone was the referendum on the new constitution – the rules of the game by which Iraq is to be governed – on which Iraq voted on October 15. The document was rushed through with the U.S. and British ambassadors sitting in on the negotiations. The influential Brussels-based think tank, the International Conflict Group, warns in a very sensible report that because the five million Sunni Arabs see the constitution as legitimizing the break up of the country the referendum will insure that “Iraq will slide towards full-scale civil war.”

Cockburn continues with a sobering and devastating assessment:

The need for the White House to produce a fantasy picture of Iraq is because it dare not admit that it has engineered one of the greatest disasters in American history. It is worse than Vietnam because the enemy is punier and the original ambitions greater. At the time of the invasion in 2003 the USA believed it could act alone and win.
…
It is a defeat more serious than Vietnam because it is self-inflicted like the British invasion of Egypt to overthrow Nasser in 1956…A better analogy is the Boer War, at the height of British imperial power, when the inability of its forces to defeat a few thousand Boer farmers damagingly exposed Britain’s real lack of military strength and diplomatic isolation. (my emphasis)

I will write more about Cockburn’s analysis of Iraq. It is not pleasant reading.

Debating tricks and defenses in the IDC debate

In the postings this week, I have been looking at the way that IDC people have been using language to blur crucial distinctions and to hide their true agenda.

In order to combat this, the scientific people have to be very careful and adopt two strategies. The first is to not let the IDC people control the vocabulary of the debate. The second is to constantly expose the long-term agenda of the IDC people.

In the first case, we should not let the IDC people pretend they are not talking about god when they refer to an ‘intelligent designer.’ If they claim that what they are proposing is science, we should demand that they, like any scientist who invents a new concept, produce an operational definition for their concept of ‘intelligent designer.’ Then we can compare their operational definition with that of an operational definition of god to see if we are talking about two different things or the same thing. For a definition of god we can tentatively propose (following the Oxford English Dictionary definition) “A superhuman person….who is worshipped as having power over nature and the fortunes of mankind.” But is this operational? An operational definition of god might be “an entity who cannot be detected by measuring instruments but is yet capable of influencing events in the natural world.” Of course, this definition does not rule out other entities like the devil and other spirits, so it needs to be fine-tuned. I am open to suggestions for improvement.
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Blurring distinctions as part of the ‘Wedge Strategy’

As I said in a previous posting, there is nothing mysterious about the practice of methodological naturalism. It is what we expect people to use in everyday life and anyone who did not do so and saw god’s hand behind commonplace daily events would be viewed as some kind of religious nut, even by otherwise religious people.

So given the fact that methodological naturalism is just a fancy name for something that people use in their everyday lives without even thinking about it, how do you set about discrediting it? How do you make it appear to be some weird and esoteric principle that is used by a scientific cabal to keep contrary ideas out?
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Methodological naturalism

If our car developed a strange and disturbing noise, we would take it to a mechanic to diagnose the problem. If, after trying out just one or two ideas and failing, the mechanic threw up her hands and said that she gave up because the cause must be something mysterious and inexplicable, we would very likely switch to another mechanic.

We would do the same thing with a plumber who gave up on trying to find the source of a leak or a doctor who gave up trying to find the cause of an acute pain after merely ruling out gas and muscle pulls.

We want each of these people to keep investigating, to try and find the reason for the problem and not give up until they have solved it. If any one of them told us that the cause was some supernatural power, we would quickly dump that person and find a new one, even if we were ourselves were religious and we preferred to have religious people as our doctors and plumbers and mechanics.
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The name game

When I first started getting interested in the so-called ‘intelligent design creationist’ (IDC) movement, I noticed that they were very careful about terminology and insisted on using specific terms.

For example, IDC people would divide science up into two categories that they called ’empirical science’ and ‘origins science.’ Empirical science was defined by them as the kind of science where you could do experiments in laboratories or in the field. Origins science dealt with subjects that dealt with the origins of things and which had happened long ago. So theories of cosmology, astronomy and, most importantly (for them), evolution of life came under the heading of ‘origins’ science.

They were also very insistent on avoiding the use of the terms ‘creationist’ and ‘God’ and pushed for the use of the term ‘design’ which they used to mean things that were not randomly created. ‘Intelligent design’ was used by them to denote design by a human-like intelligence and not by (say) a computer program.

Since I came from the scientific world where what something is called is not what is important and it is the operational definition that matters, I was initially willing to go along with their terminology. The problem was that I discovered that rather than the names being used just as a harmless label for the underlying operational definition, as is the case in science, in the case of intelligent design, no operational definition was forthcoming. Instead, the names themselves became used as arguments, so that conceding to them the choice of names meant conceding a substantial portion of the argument.

Let me illustrate with some examples. Since they did not use the name God in their literature, they could proffer the claim that theirs was not a religious theory (“See, nowhere do we use ‘God’ in our work”). Also, since they did not use the name ‘creationist,’ they could dissociate themselves from the young-Earth creationist (YEC) movement and the old-earth creationist (OEC) movement, both of which explicitly mentioned god in their literature and had already been struck down by the courts as being religious in nature and thus inappropriate for inclusion in science classes. Also, the YEC and OEC were embarrassing to the IDC people in that they interpreted the Bible literally (to differing degrees) and thus alienated a lot of potential allies.

This attention to words and language has been part of a careful thought-out strategy. In testimony in the Dover, PA case, it was shown that in the book Of Pandas and People which the students were explicitly told to read as an ‘antidote’ to evolution, early drafts of the book used the words creationism but later replaced it with intelligent design. This enables the intelligent design people to claim that their theory does not involve god because they avoided providing an operational definition for intelligent design or an intelligent designer. If they did so, it would be hard to see how that operational definition was not functionally equivalent to an operational definition of god.

Robert T. Pennock in his book Tower of Babel points out that all these theories are variations of creationism, and he creates a classification scheme that lists them as YEC, OEC, and IDC (for intelligent design creationism). This is the terminology that I have adopted and will use henceforth so that the relationship of intelligent design to creationism is kept explicit, and IDC people cannot hide their creationist links.

The use of the empirical/origins science distinction is another example of this verbal sleight of hand. By dividing science in this way, and by putting evolution into the origins science category, they then try to imply that evolution is not an empirical theory! Since the word ’empirical’ implies data-driven and subject to the normal rules of scientific investigation, casting evolution as ‘origins science’ is part of an attempt by IDC people drive a wedge between evolution and other theories of science and make it seem less ‘scientific.’.

The IDC people also assert that the way we evaluate theories is different for the two categories. They assert that ’empirical science’ can be tested experimentally but that ‘origins science’ cannot.’ This assertion allows them to claim that how competing theories of ‘origins science’ should be evaluated is by seeing which theory ‘explains’ things better.

I have already shown that using ‘better’ explanations as a yardstick for measuring the quality of theories leads one down a bizarre path where the ‘best’ explanation could well be the Raelian theory (or ET-IDC using Pennock’s classification scheme). But it is important to see that the reason that the IDC people can even make such a claim is because of their artful attempt to divide science into ’empirical’ and ‘origins.’

The fact is that all science is empirical. All scientific theories ultimately relate to data and predictions. If one wants to make distinctions, one can say that there are historical sciences (evolution, cosmology, astronomy) that deal with one-time events, and non-historical sciences where controlled experiments can be done in laboratories. But both are empirical. It is just that in the historical sciences, the data already exists and we have to look for it rather than create it.

But IDC people don’t like to concede that all science as empirical since that would mean that they would have to provide data and make predictions for their own theory just like any other empirical theory, and they have been unable to do so. This is why it is important that the scientific community not concede them the right to categorize the different kinds of science in the way they wish, because it enables them to use words to avoid the hard questions.

The different use of terminology in scientific and political debates

I would like to revisit the question addressed earlier of why scientists are at a disadvantage when they try to debate in political forums, like those involving so-called intelligent design creationism. This time it deals with how terminology is introduced and used.

Scientists often need to introduce new terms into the vocabulary to accommodate a new concept, or seek to use a familiar everyday term or phrase with a more precise technical meaning.

The scientists who introduces the new concept usually has the freedom to name it and most of the time the community of scientists will go along with the name. The reasons for the name vary and can sometimes have whimsical origins. The physics term ‘quark’ for subnuclear particles for instance was named from the line “three quarks for Muster Mark” from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, and was invoked because it was thought at the time that there were only three subnuclear particles that made up the proton and the neutron. The proton consisted of two ‘up’ quarks and one ‘down’ quark, while the neutron consisted of one ‘up’ quark and two ‘down’ quarks. But then other particles were discovered which had unusual properties and these were dubbed to be ‘strange’ particles and so a third type of quark, the ‘strange’ quark, was postulated to explain their properties.

Later a fourth type of quark was required and this was called the ‘charm’ quark. Not all terminology sticks, however. When a fifth and a sixth type of quark came into being, initial attempts to name them ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ seemed to most physicists to have crossed the line of acceptable whimsicality, and the names of those two quarks settled to the more mundane ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ quarks.

Although there are a variety of reasons for the names scientists select for new concepts, the success or failure of the ideas that are associated with the concept does not hinge on the choice of the name. This is because science concepts are more than names, they also have ‘operational definitions,’ and it is these definitions that are important. Many non-scientists do not understand the importance that scientists attach to operational definitions.

For example, if you ask a non-physicist to define ‘mass’, you will usually get some variation of ‘it is the amount of matter present in an object.’ This intuitive definition of mass may give a serviceable understanding of the concept that is adequate for general use but it is too vague for scientific purposes. It could, after all, just as well serve as a definition of volume. A definition that is so flexible that it can apply to two distinct concepts has no scientific value.

But an operational definition of mass is much more precise and usually involves describing a series of operations that enable one to measure the quantity. For mass, it might be involve something like: “Take an equal arm balance and balance the arms with nothing on the pans. Then place the object on one pan and place standardized units of mass on the other pan until balance is achieved again. The number of standardized units required for this purpose is the mass of the object on the other pan.”

For volume, the operational definition might be: “Take a calibrated measuring cylinder with water up to a certain level and note the level. Then immerse the object in the water and measure the new level of the water. The difference in the two level readings is the volume of the object.” We thus see that, unlike the case with intuitive definitions, there is a clear difference between the operational definitions of mass and volume.

It is possible for a concept to have more than one operational definition. For example, the mass of an object could also be defined operationally as placing something on a triple beam balance, moving the weights around until balance is achieved, and then taking the reading.

It does not matter if a concept has more than one operational definition. In fact that is usually the case. The point is that consistent operational definitions of mass would enable one to show that the different definitions are functionally equivalent, so that you can use any one of these mutually consistent operational definitions. If you actually want the mass of an object, all the various operational definitions would result in the same numerical value, so that mass is an unambiguous physical concept.

Such operational definitions enable scientists to avoid confusion and quickly agree on what names like mass and volume mean. The names themselves tend to be value neutral and by themselves do not advance an argument. Scientists tend to not challenge the ways things get named because it is the underlying operational definition that is crucial to scientific arguments. Scientists are quite content to go along with whatever names others give to concepts, because they rightly see the name as irrelevant to the merits of the debate.

This is quite different from what goes on in the political arena. There what you call something can be a crucial factor in whether the argument is won or lost. Take for example, what was known as the ‘estate tax.’ This is a tax on the estates of very wealthy people who become deceased. It affects only a tiny minority of people and was very uncontroversial for a long time. The term ‘estate tax’ is fairly descriptive because we associate the word ‘estate’ with the wealth passed on by rich people.

But there were interest groups who wanted to repeal this tax and one of the ways they achieved this goal was by renaming the tax as a ‘death tax,’ which seemed to imply that you were being taxed for dying. By getting this new terminology accepted in the debate to replace the old term, they have succeeded in getting quite considerable popular support for the removal of a very egalitarian tax, even though few of the people supporting the repeal would have estates large enough to worry about paying the tax.

Similarly the Bush administration at one time tried to get the media to use the term ‘homicide bombers’ instead of ‘suicide bombers,’ Perhaps they were thinking that ‘suicide bomber’ would remind people that the people doing this were making a great personal sacrifice and that raised awkward questions about their level of determination to remove US troops from their country and the reasons behind the determination. But that effort at renaming went nowhere because the old name was an accurate description of the person, while the new name was seen as being redundant and conveying less information.

In political battles, winning the name game is half the battle because accepting the name preferred by your opponent often means tacitly conceding the high ground of the argument and playing defense. So the habit of scientists to concede the name and to work with whatever name others come up with is not a good strategy when they enter the political arena. But it is not clear that all scientists have realized this and know when to shift gears.

In the next posting, I will examine how IDC advocates have used this casual approach to names to get an edge in the public relations wars, and how scientists should fight back.

The struggle against stereotypes and prejudices – part 5

(For earlier installments in this series, see part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.)

It is quite possible for someone who has a seemingly spotless record on matters of race, who has said all the correct things, who associates freely with people of other groups, to take political actions that have a disproportionately harmful effect on other races. And often such people’s actions are not closely scrutinized because they are seen as not being racist.

For example, take former President Clinton. Because he seemed so at ease with black people, he was welcomed by many black leaders, even being occasionally referred to as ‘America’s first black president.’ He seemed quite at home in black churches and showed no awkwardness at all in interacting with black people. I am quite willing to accept that he is not a racist. And yet he was the architect of a so-called welfare reform program that had a huge and negative impact on the lives of poor people, disproportionately black. But because he was perceived as not being personally “anti-black,” he was able to enact these policies and escape the kind of criticism that would have erupted had the same thing been done by someone like George Bush, whose bona fides on race are more suspect.

Another example is that of former Education Secretary William Bennett. On his radio show, in response to a caller, said: “[Y]ou could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” It was clear that he was making a hypothetical case and not advocating this as policy because he immediately followed this by saying that such an action “would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do.” But his statement created an uproar, with charges that Bennett is a racist and should be taken off the air, and he and his supporters vehemently denying it.

Is Bennett a racist? I don’t know and frankly, I don’t think that that is an important question. It is the policies that he advocates and implements that concern me. And there is evidence that have nothing to do with his private beliefs about race that he was exactly the wrong person for the job of Education Secretary. Reed Hundt, the former head of the Federal Communication Commission recently recounted the following story about Bennett:

When I was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (1993-97), I asked Bill Bennett to visit my office so that I could ask him for help in seeking legislation that would pay for internet access in all classrooms and libraries in the country. Eventually Senators Olympia Snowe and Jay Rockefeller, with the White House leadership of President Clinton and Vice President Gore, put that provision in the Telecommunications Law of 1996, and today nearly 90% of all classrooms and libraries do have such access. The schools covered were public and private. So far the federal funding (actually collected from everyone as part of the phone bill) has been matched more or less equally with school district funding to total about $20 billion over the last seven years. More than 90% of all teachers praise the impact of such technology on their work. At any rate, since Mr. Bennett had been Secretary of Education I asked him to support the bill in the crucial stage when we needed Republican allies. He told me he would not help, because he did not want public schools to obtain new funding, new capability, new tools for success. He wanted them, he said, to fail so that they could be replaced with vouchers, charter schools, religious schools, and other forms of private education.

To me, this story is a far more damning indictment of Bennett’s suitability for public office, especially that of Education Secretary, than his speculations about the relationship between race and abortion and crime. It is truly appalling that he so badly wants public schools to fail that he is willing to withhold important resources from them. If public schools are to be deprived of resources and pushed along the road to failure, this has a huge and disproportionately negative effect on poor and black children. So his actions in this case, his unwillingness to support this measure and the reasons for doing so, are a much better measure of his suitability for public office than whether he hangs out with black friends in the evening. And yet, this particular story from Reed Hundt has attracted next to no attention, while everyone looks for clues to see whether Bennett is ‘really’ a racist or not.

Conversely, during the last presidential election, there was a minor fuss made about the fact that Howard Dean had few black people in his cabinet when he was governor of Vermont. The attempt was made, and was marginally successful, to use this to portray him as somehow unfriendly to black people. But on the other hand, as governor he had instituted health care reforms that opened up access health care to almost all the population of his state. This meant that the poor, who are disproportionately black, had more access to health care than before. To my mind, those are the measures that are important, rather than appointments to cabinet offices, which can be symbolic and not substantive.

It is hard for us to get rid of the prejudices we have. One of the things that my many years of teaching have taught me is that the beliefs that students bring with them into the classroom are the most powerful beliefs of all, and have a far stronger hold on their minds than the new things they learn from their teachers in their formal classes. This is because the things we learn informally are based on our life experiences and are what our minds have worked out for themselves, even if not done consciously. Our stereotypes and prejudices have been constructed over many years, starting when we were very young. They are a kind of theoretical model based on bits of actual data, things we were told by the peers and adults in our lives, conversations we have had, books we have read, and films and TV that we have watched. Our minds have taken all these things and created a network of ideas. And it is precisely because we have created this mental structure ourselves that it is so powerful. We cannot simply will them away. As the economist John Maynard Keynes said: “The difficulty lies not in new ideas but in escaping from old ones.” (The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936)

Stereotypes and prejudices are part of our own constructed knowledge structure and we may never be able to get rid of them completely however much we wish to. But rather than trying to hide their existence, we need to bring our prejudices out of the subconscious and unconscious where they usually exist so that we can more effectively deal with them. Then we can let our intellectual commitment to deal with people fairly do battle with our instincts.

The battle between our intellect and our instincts will always be an ongoing one. Race is a very sensitive topic and people shy away from it. What I have written this week on the topic may have caused discomfort and even offense to some and if so, I apologize.

But if the battle is fought in the arena of our conscious minds, and in open dialogue with others, we are more likely to be able to defeat racism. Can we ever have such a frank discussion about race? I don’t know. The real question is whether we can afford not to try.

POST SCRIPT: Some Friday video fun

See this video where people are interviewed about which country they think should be invaded next in the “war on terror.” One person even suggests Sri Lanka.

JibJab also has a new video where they take on Walmart. Take a look.

The struggle against stereotypes and prejudices – part 4

(For earlier installments in this series, see part 1, part 2, and part 3.)

In order to begin an honest discussion about race, it might be good to start by accepting certain things. The first is that all of us harbor stereotypes, and have prejudices based on them. These come about despite our best intentions. People should be able to concede this without fear of being labeled racist.

The second is that people who have been the victims of prejudicial actions by others are not immune from thinking and acting prejudicially against others. Being a victim of racial prejudice is not some kind of vaccine that inoculates you against carrying the disease yourself. It is very easy, when one or one’s group has been the victim of prejudice, to convince oneself that one’s own actions towards others must be beyond reproach. This kind of hubris can lead to appalling injustices perpetrated by one discriminated group against another.

The third is that just because one believes in stereotypes and has prejudices based upon them, does not automatically imply that one cannot be fair in one’s actions. It is perfectly true that some people may not like people of another color/ethnicity/religion, etc. They may dislike the thought of having such people as neighbors or marrying into their family. But such people might also be opposed to taking any steps to restrict the rights of the groups they dislike, to prevent them from living where they wish and marrying whom they want. In other words, they may well want the very people they are uncomfortable to be around to be treated fairly.

For example, during the time of slavery, there were many white people who felt that having slaves was wrong. Often they aided the escape of slaves and, as jurors, often refused to convict others who had provided such aid. It is quite possible (even likely given the times they lived in) that the people who did these good things may not have actually liked black people or wanted them as guests in their homes. But many people respond to the higher call of justice, and an appeal to it can produce good results that appeals to other qualities cannot. As I have often said in the past, people have an intuitive sense of justice. You can’t force people to like other people, but you can expect people to act justly. It is the one quality that seems to have universal appeal.

I believe that it is easier to deal with a person who does not wish to associate with people of different color/race/religion but who also believes in justice and fairness than to deal with someone who may think that they are free of prejudice, and says all the right things, but cannot see that they may be acting is subtle ways that are harmful to other groups.

The relationship of private beliefs and public actions becomes more important when it enters the public political sphere. Some of you may be aware that following the inept response of the federal government in response to hurricane Katrina, singer Kanye West said on live TV during a fundraising event that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” This naturally stirred up a storm of controversy, as any public statement about race always does, and people looked for evidence that either supported or undermined his assertion. As usual, what was looked at was whether Bush had close friends and associates and advisors who were black, whether he appointed black people to positions of authority, and whether his statements could be analyzed to see what he really felt about race, etc.

I have seen these kinds of discussion many times before. In Sri Lanka, which has had a long history of ethnic strife between the Sinhala majority and the Tamil minority, the government has always been in the hands of the majority community and when it comes to ethnic matters there is always a close examination of the head of state to try and discern what that person’s private feelings about the minority community are, using the same measures that are being used to gauge George Bush’s ‘true’ feeling towards blacks following Kanye West’s allegation. So people try and look closely into the leader’s life to see if they can find clues as to whether they are “anti-Tamil” (as they say in Sri Lanka) or whether he treats the Tamil people around him well.

It has been my view that such analyses are largely a waste of time. It really does not matter what Bush thinks privately, or even what his actions are in relationship to the people in his immediate world. It is what he does publicly and politically and have a large-scale impact that matters. Someone (I wish I could remember who, because the words had a strong impact on me) wisely said something along the lines of “It is very difficult to determine the private beliefs of public figures, and even if, after much trouble, one is able to do so, it is not clear that the knowledge gained is worth the effort.”

To be continued tomorrow…

The struggle against stereotypes and prejudices – part 3

(For earlier installments in this series, see part 1 and part 2)

The problem with fighting prejudice is that we think that conceding that we have any prejudices at all is in itself shameful. So to avoid being thought badly of, we deny that we have them or avoid conversations that run any risk that we might unwittingly reveal our prejudices. This is why it is so hard to have an honest discussion about race in America (or most places for that matter). Any discussion that does take place either ends up with people holding hands and singing “We shall overcome” or “Kumbaya” or uttering platitudes about everyone being the same or being guarded and defensive.

It always amazes me, for example, when I hear people say that they do not see the ‘color’ of people. For example, I have done a lot of work with the public education system in urban areas in and around Cleveland. There are immediate color issues that arise in schools because the majority of teachers are white and many of the students are black. This imbalance carries with the ever-present danger that any teacher-student conflict will be interpreted in race terms. Teachers often try to preempt this by saying that they do not ‘see’ their students in terms of their color. But I often wonder if that is really possible or if they are just trying to fool themselves.

I think that they say this to imply that they are not prejudiced. But I find it hard to accept that people literally do not see color, when people’s skin color is such an important factor in our lives. I remember someone once trying to help me identify someone else who had attended a meeting by describing that person. I was given various pieces of information but at one point I asked “Was she black?” And the person said “yes.” If I had been given that piece of obviously useful information right at the beginning, I could have identified the person much earlier. I think the reason that my friend had not volunteered this important identifying marker right up front was due to the fear that if he had said so, that meant that the person’s color had been noted by him and thus he was prejudiced.

But this is raising the bar for evidence of lack of prejudice to an absurd and unreachable level. Of course we register the color of the people we meet. How can we not when skin color is such a major part of our political and social dialogue? When I go into a roomful of people, I immediately register people on the basis of their skin color and gender and age and size (height/weight) because these are the major identifying categories that I use. Interestingly, I find that I do not register hair or eye color, although many other people do. When someone asks me if so-and-so has blue eyes or brown hair, I find that I cannot recall this kind of detail at all. This may be because in Sri Lanka, everyone has black hair and dark brown eyes so we never use hair and eye color as identifying markers, and I have not acquired that habit. But although we are all brown skinned, there was a wide range of shades and skin color is an important feature.

If we really want to have honest discussions about race we need to start by acknowledging that it is natural to believe in stereotypes and to have prejudices. By natural, I do not mean that it is admirable (it is not) or that we can do nothing about it (we can). We can and should strive to eliminate such thinking. But at this stage of our social development, both individually and as a society, we have stereotypes and prejudices and it is not use denying them. It may be more helpful to simply concede that we have them and think about how we can prevent ourselves from taking actions based on them.

Fortunately in my own case, I have been lucky to have worked with people with whom I can discuss issues of race honestly, and am able to ask them questions about customs, practices, and behavior that increase my awareness of the culture of other communities. This has enabled me to increase my personal store of information about others that I hope will slowly eat away at the false knowledge structures that were built on inadequate data. But it is foolish to think that this has enabled me to eliminate all my prejudices. At best, it has helped me to remove some of my major misapprehensions.

To be continued tomorrow…